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| Tom Cullberg's Local Noise |
‘Have a glass,” bellows Howard Bilton,
pulling a bottle of white wine from an ice bucket. We are sitting under the VIP
tent (it’s more modest than it sounds) at the Pavilion, the venue for this year’s
Cape Town Art Fair (CTAF). “It’s one of mine,” he says, pointing to the label
on the bottle that reads: Howard’s Folly. I reluctantly agree to a glass; I
have a faint headache reminding me of the Strauss & Co dinner-party at the
Queen Victoria from the night before and have a dinner at Brundyn+ before the
final art party at the Manila Bar to get through. Bilton looks like he has
battled through his fare share of art parties attached to the Cape Town Art
Fair too, though as an avid collector and buyer of art, he is no stranger to
the behind-the-scenes hobnobbing that these kind of art events seem to
generate, sorting out who is really part of the “scene” and who isn’t. With his
own wine label, a sponsor of the CTAF, and a self-confessed penchant for art
collecting, this Hong-Kong-based chairman of the Sovereign Group, a company
that basically manages people’s wealth, is undeniably part of the inner VIP
circle at this fair, and presumably all the others he attends around the
world.
Bilton’s expansive art collection
encompasses 350 artworks. Of local artists’ works, he has most recently
acquired pieces from Athi Patra Ruga’s recent show at Whatiftheworld.
With performances at last year’s Venice Biennale, Public Intimacy at San
Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, and rave reviews of his solo exhibition at
Whatiftheworld last year, buying Ruga now is a no-brainer – one dealer at the
CTAF cheekily tried to flog one of his older smaller tapestry works for R250
000. The price tag made art consultant Kim Stern smirk.
Stern, like Bilton and much of the
peripatetic coterie that swirls around art fairs, lives between places. She
calls Cape Town and New York home, when she isn’t hot on the art fair trail.
She never misses Frieze London, Frieze New York, Armoury (also in New York) and
Art Basel and aspires to get to Miami Basel but tends to be too exhausted by
the time that fair rolls around at the end of each year.
Stern has the enviable position of shopping
for art and building collections for other people, who know much less about art
than she does. This makes her one of the most cut-throat collectors on the
floor of the CTAF; she is discerning and knows what the work is worth.
Not that the CTAF appears to be a vicious
trading floor. It is “cute and sweet”, as Bilton suggests. With soft lighting
this circular edifice adjacent to the V&A Waterfront is a much less severe
environment than say the setting for the Joburg Art Fair (Jaf), which is held
in the Sandton Convention Centre under supermarket fluorescent lighting.
Predictably it is a lot more chilled than
Jaf, even on the opening night; there are fewer people – in its second year it
has perhaps yet to become the social event that it is at Jaf – but most
importantly, the orientation of the building segments, the stands, and the
displays are less salon-style; walls aren’t packed with artworks that keep
changing every day – or hour.
This gives you the room to spend time with
artworks, take them in one by one as you might do at a museum or gallery,
without feeling overwhelmed or bombarded.
“It’s the vibe we were going for,” explains
Louise Cashmore, the director of the CTAF. Cashmore is new to the game of art,
but is experienced in lifestyle fairs, such as the Good Food and Wine fair, and
recognises luxury fairs must create an experience for visitors that surpasses a
mall or conventional trade fair.
The spatial orientation of the fair and the
sparse displays allow me to revel in Zander Blom’s new body of paintings at the
Stevenson stand that may well be the best the artist has produced since he
first hit the scene with dark modernist-inspired paintings on the ceiling of
his Brixton house. There is a virtuosity and energy in the brushstrokes and
compositions that resonates at a primal level. Blom’s series and in particular
1.583 Untitled hails a breakthrough in his postmodern, new-modernist mode of
abstraction – could the atomised pieces of historical abstraction expressionism
that he has been working with have fallen into place?
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| Jody Paulsen's Inner Poise |
I also connect with a much less sophisticated
work; a large chunky impasto by Kerry Chaloner at the Blank Projects stand that
is a sumptuous, textural encounter with, er, oil paint – in line with this
trend that sees artists luxuriating in the materiality of their chosen mediums.
The work probably is a little on the vacuous side, but the Brundyn+ stand on
the other side of the wall offers some happiness with a satisfying interplay
between depth and surface in the form of Tom Cullberg’s Local Noise and Jody
Paulsen’s Inner Poise and Metropolitan City Man. Cullberg and Paulsen’s works
could not be more different; Paulsen works with felt cut-outs of famous brands
that are collaged together to form a sort of garish label-orgasm, while using a
traditional medium Cullberg presents a painting depicting book and magazine
covers.
Cullberg is exploiting familiar titles,
names or images that are touchstones for a larger canon, or perhaps discursive
universes linked to local art or literature such as a copy of Chimurenga’s
Chronic, a Moshekwa Langa monograph and a catalogue raisonné by Zander Blom.
Cullberg and Paulsen’s works are united by the fact that their subject-matter
is absent. In Inner Poise Paulsen evokes brands and labels from designer
clothing, Celine, the Chanel logo, and Weight Watchers, that are collaged with
stubbed-out cigarettes which posit this smorgasbord of pleasure, desire, pain,
greed and atonement as a sort of ashtray of the cycle of consumption. The
actual things that are desired or undesired (designer clothing versus obesity)
are not represented. In this instance it highlights the emptiness of the
pursuit to attain the clothing, the body but also how contemporary existence
can be summarised via labels – a life lived through brands.
