Incorrigible Corrigall

Diane Victor does death - and life - so well

2012-01-30T21:50:00.000-08:00

When Diane Victor first started making smoke drawings, it was to direct attention to victims of violent crime. The medium was ideal for this purpose; the transparent brown residue the smoke imprinted on the paper articulated the spectral presence of the disembodied heads of deceased victims. The burning candles which she used to scorch the paper’s surface evoked rituals to remember the dead.

More pragmatic concerns may have also informed her use of this unconventional medium. In 2006 she was a finalist for the now-defunct Sasol Wax Art Awards, which demanded that artists use wax in creating art for the competition exhibition. Working with wax may have been a crippling limitation for most of the artists, but it seems to have set Victor’s aesthetic on a new path.

It is easy to see why someone so concerned with mark-making was attracted to using smoke; it leaves such a compelling mark, or stain – “stain” best describes the kind of imprint this ephemeral tool creates. Stains also summon the residue left by something that is no longer present, which articulates the loss and traceability of human life. The “stains” that the smoke creates, particularly in the hands of Victor, also capture the three-dimensionality, not only of a physical being, but the various states of minds and conditions that make the human subject so mercurial.

Because definitive marks or lines are impossible with smoke, there is a subtlety to them that is very compelling. It’s as if they have arrived on the page independently of the hand of the artist – that the artist has simply guided an invisible organic presence like someone guiding a séance. That burning candles are part of that ritual probably contributes to this notion.

But what is most remarkable about this medium is the way it captures the multiplicity of the live subject, which, inherently, denies a single, definitive view. This challenge has always concerned artists. Victor may have stumbled on a solution with smoke drawing. Because the flame is in constant motion the marks are bubbled, appear to glide and overlap in ways that deny any kind of static representation of a subject. So ironically, while the medium once ably expressed the absence/presence of the deceased, it also, in the hands of Victor, ably evokes the living or at least this quality of aliveness.

This really comes quite strongly into focus in this latest exhibition, titled Ashes to Ashes and Smoke to Dust, which presents a number of works in which the textural and sensory attributes of the subjects makes them feel quite lifelike. Naturally, Victor doesn’t simply leave it up to the smoke stains to create marks, she draws with charcoal over the smoke, accentuating areas and adding detail where necessary. Her “interventions” are more or less seamless and the results are persuasive. The flesh of her subjects appears velvety and translucent, accentuating the vulnerability of it – and its impermanence.

In this way the medium is able to fix her subjects in a liminal state between life and death. This is particularly pertinent to a series of drawings dubbed “the offerings”. The subjects mostly consist of sheep and a young girl. Their disembodied heads hover in the frame before they presumably meet their death.

The smoke captures this sense that they are in between life and death but it also amplifies their innocence: they aren’t weighted by a profusion of dark lines, which Victor often uses not only to evoke age, but historical and emotional baggage. This is the case with the perpetrators of atrocities that feature in a work dubbed A Butcher’s Altar, which includes a rendition of the late Muammar Gaddafi.

As always Victor’s work is concerned with political subject matter. She is not interested in the subtleties of political policies or rhetoric: it is the effects, the senseless suffering caused by corrupt bigots that compels her to make art. As a reviewer once remarked: “Victor is an angry artist.”

There is an intelligence to her portrayal of suffering; the sacrificial lambs in “the offerings” are unaware of their fate; there is no fear in the eyes of the sheep or the girl. But it is this lack of awareness that deepens the evil of the act performed on them. The Old Maids presents three ageing domestic workers sitting on a street. These women are weighed down by the knowledge of their fate; the legislative policies that once dictated their lives have changed but it is too late for them to live their lives over.

In rendering this powerful image, Victor uses ash and charcoal. The medium here is significant in terms of how it evokes this anguished, though everyday, scene. The ash, which refers to the remains of something that has been destroyed, implies that renewal is out of reach. A phoenix does not emerge from these ashes. The fire that has given birth to them did not cleanse them of the past, rather it seems to have distilled its essence, which now scattered anew gives life to a corrupted form. - published in The Sunday Independent, January 15, 2012

My top ten cultural highlights of 2011

2012-01-15T22:55:00.000-08:00

1. New Adventures by Jacques Coetzer (Goethe Institut in Joburg) Coetzer might have proved that goats do not make ideal audience members for a guitar solo, and amused viewers with images of himself dressed up as Elvis while strumming a guitar on a beach in Zanzibar, but this flippant and self-deprecating exhibition parodying the status of the artist (and art) was extraordinary for the fact that it made the act of art-making transparent.
It was not the process of making a material object or documentation of a performance that he presented but rather, via a narrative which plotted the mental associations he explored as he clicked links on web pages, he revealed how the internet has impacted on creative thought patterns, leading to absurd results. Because his filmed performances were amusing diversions, he redirected attention to the formation of ideas, though he showed that the realisation of them lacked any monumentality. In this way the exhibition was both entertaining and provocative.

2. More, More, More Future choreographed by Faustin Linyekula (Dance Factory. Part of New Dance 2011 and über(W)unden: Art in Troubled Times)
Watching this work was like slipping into the back of a nightclub in downtown Kinshasa and viewing the revellers who seek an escape in these darkened and debauched havens only to discover that in these sorts of liminal spaces they are confronted with the true weight of their existence.
Each frenzied movement of their dancing read as an attempt to shake off the burdens of reality, but gradually and quite seamlessly their gestures evolved into a contemporary dance vocabulary that mined the fundamentals of identity rather than just functioning as an expression of identity – as is the case with conventional dancing in a nightclub. Famous guitarist Flamme Kapaya’s performance, the rocker-cum-seventies-glam outfits, the bond between the musicians and the dancers, the reference to Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Gods, and the sense that the audience and the players were locked into a never-ending performance, made this production a multilayered, multimedia orgy of sound, philosophy and movement.

3. Palace of Bones, written and directed by Claire Angelique (premiered National Arts Festival)
This daring filmmaker turns the culture of self-documentation on itself in this unique feature film which plots a documenter’s attempt to discover the truth about a young woman she has filmed who was alleged to have killed a number of people.
In essence, the film is a retrospective view of footage re-edited by its creator, an amateur who hides behind the lens of a camera. She is an invisible witness who despite her scrutinising gaze was unable to really come to grips with the action she captured, the truth. In this way the apparatus she was using to see was the impediment to seeing. Palace of Bones is a sophisticated and layered indie whodunit that probes a debased and immoral society, where drug dealers marvel at the corruptible nature of the police. A remarkable film.

4. State of the Nation by Kudzanai Chuirai (a warehouse in Newtown and Goodman Gallery Projects at Arts on Main)
This Zimbabwean artist took Joburg by storm with an impressive solo exhibition that spanned two galleries, included a substantial body of painting, photography, a few film works and two performances.
The opening was a social event, but under the bright lights of an empty gallery the work had substance. Most memorable was his Revelations series, a collection of staged photographs that mirrored scenes from the western art canon to images of Chinese Communist posters transplanted in a generic and contrived African setting. Chuirai therefore reconstructed an idealised past through an African lens. He presented a comical and subversive rereading not only of Western and Eastern visual and ideological rhetoric but of pivotal moments in African history. This collection is conceptually strong and intriguing, and matched by its visual impact. In certain respects this exhibition builds on the work of Michael MacGarry and the staged photography that local artists have been embracing from Tracey Rose to Mary Sibande. It’s always thrilling to observe a shift in an established discourse.

5. State of Violence, written and directed by Khalo Matabane.
The title of this film and Chuirai’s exhibition both refer to a desire to analyse and probe the “state of things”, suggesting that cultural producers are engaged in assessing the current predicaments facing our country (and Africa – from Chuirai’s point of view).
In this highly-emotive film, Matabane attempts to tackle one of the most disturbing and prominent features of contemporary life in this country: violence. The “cycle of violence” is a ubiquitous phrase, but in the context of the film it is given further meaning as Matabane demonstrates the conditions that perpetuate the cycle. His tale pivots on a wealthy mining magnate who used his struggle credentials to secure an affluent lifestyle. Following the murder of his wife he becomes bent on revenge, though her murder was also an act of revenge for an unspeakable act of violence that he had committed during the struggle years. In this way a murder leads to another, to another. Matabane suggests that this chain can only be broken when a perpetrator admits wrongdoing and seeks absolution, even if any act he has committed was done in the name of freedom. To this end, Matabane shows how the culture of violence in this country isn’t simply a symptom of a history of conflict but a pervasive sense of denial that has permeated the consciousness of the new black elite.

6. As Terras do Fim do Mundo by Jo Ractliffe (Stevenson Gallery, Joburg) How do you confront a violent history when physical evidence of it no longer exists? This is the question that Ractliffe presents in a nuanced photographic study of the routes of the border war fought by SA in Angola during the 1970s and 1980s. Her attempt to photograph this politically-loaded site in the present is futile: there is nothing left to see. Hence she maps the edges, the boundaries where the visible is passing into invisibility. Like a gravestone that is gradually being concealed by overgrowth. In this rural setting, it is nature that is overwriting and concealing history. Though Ractliffe attempts to suppress the inherent natural beauty of these bucolic settings by shooting in black and white, the simple splendour of the location functions as a powerful foil for the twisted narratives and memories that haunt a society that has chosen to bury the past.

7. Somewhere on the Border, written by Anthony Akerman, directed by André Odendaal (premier National Arts Festival)
Akerman’s play may be dated – it was written in the eighties – but the restaging of it proved to be one of the hits of the 2011 National Arts Festival.
Importantly, it filled in the silences and gaps that have come to define a burgeoning new discourse on the Border War that has been evolving in the visual arts, through exhibitions like Ractliffe’s, Christo Doherty’s exhibition Bos, David Brits’s Victor, Victor and through a new literary canon, which includes Clive Holt’s At Thy Call We Did Not Falter (2005), Tim Ramsden’s Border-Line Insanity: A national serviceman’s story (2009) and James Clelland’s recent Deeper than Colour.
This gripping play demonstrates that while whites were beneficiaries of apartheid, they, too, were victims of this oppressive political system. Above and beyond the political, social and gender commentary that Somewhere on the Border supplies, it is a well-written layered and nuanced text, which serves as a grim reminder of a standard of play-writing that is a rarity today – often attributed to the lack of funding for artistic programmes by the government.

8. Refuse the Hour (a festival centred on William Kentridge’s work at the Market Theatre)
Anything that Kentridge turns his hand to is almost always declared a success. This is partly due to his international stature. For this reason, within certain art circles, it has almost become unfashionable to be impressed by his work. Despite this, few could stay away from this diverse festival which showcased the breadth of his work and the interdisciplinary nature of it – its connection to film, music, literature and, of course, given the setting, bringing into focus his historical relationship with theatre. This was particularly obvious in I am not Me the Horse is Not Mine, a performance-art-cum-theatrical-one-hander, in which Kentridge attempted to play himself, the artist, while exploring his split identity as both creator and subject. For much of his early career, Kentridge’s creative identity appeared to be split between art and theatre, and while his art has often referenced the theatre, it was during this festival that his art was rooted in theatre. In some instances, such as in Dancing with Dada, another highlight of the festival, which was the result of collaboration with dancer Dada Masilo, some of the characteristic motifs from his animations such as the mournful cortege were translated on to the stage, bringing to life his signature aesthetic while reflexively engaging with the notion of the live performance.

9. Inhabitant (choreographed by Sello Pesa at Goethe-on-Main. Part of Dance Umbrella 2011)
It is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to forget watching Pesa rolling across the tarmac on a busy artery outside the Arts on Main building. Viewers winced as this performer/choreographer’s body dodged taxis and cars hurtling down this downtown Joburg city street. It wasn’t simply Pesa’s commitment to performing this death-defying act that impressed, but the statement that this work made that secured its value.
By setting his performance on the pavements and the centre of an urban street, Pesa cleverly directed attention away from the Arts on Main building (where the performance was supposed to have been held) and towards contested, though overlooked, sorts of non-spaces in the city. It is on the roads that ownership of space, a staple theme in political rhetoric, is best articulated, for it is in these contexts that it is most transitory and is in the process of constant renegotiation.

10. Representation by Simon Gush (Stevenson Gallery, Joburg)
Artists in SA are only beginning to really exploit the characteristics of film. For years they have used it as a medium to create video artworks, but few have manipulated the qualities specific to it.
Paul Emmanuel’s celebrated Transitions and Michael MacGarry’s Will of Power are recent examples of artworks in which this has been done. Simon Gush thoughtfully appropriated narrative filmmaking in this exhibition, which consisted of three interrelated short films probing shifts in faith – or in the third film, faithlessness.
The works were centred on protagonists whose faith was challenged and/or reinforced. Faith in a political ideology, not a religious one, was under focus here, though Gush suggested that the two were not too dissimilar. In fact this is the ideological basis of this extraordinary exhibition, which isn't just testament to a constructive use of film but an understated and philosophical engagement with the mechanics that have, and continue, to define our political terrain. - published in The Sunday Independent newspaper, January 8, 2012.

Thomas Pringle Award for Reviews

2011-11-28T03:54:00.000-08:00

The English Academy of Southern Africa announced this week that the 2011 Thomas Pringle Award for Reviews goes to me for a portfolio of reviews I published in the paper during this year. The Thomas Pringle Awards recognise writers who have demonstrated extraordinary insights in their work. It is an annual award for work published in newspapers, periodicals and journals. They are awarded on a rotation basis for: a book, play, film or TV review; a literary article or substantial book review; an article on English education; a short story or one-act play; one or more poems.

The adjudicators of the award noted the following about my work:

“In reading Corrigall's reviews, one is struck by one outstanding quality - her acuity. Whether she is reading words on a page or looking at shapes and colours at an art or photography exhibition, Corrigall has a particularly rare capacity to see things sharply and keenly. Quite apart from Corrigall's sharpness of perception, however, there is also a pleasing lucidity in the way she writes about the different media she focuses on. Her reviews are commendable, therefore, not only for their insights, but also for the crisp and energetic manner in which these insights are expressed.”

This is the second time that I have won the award. In 2009 I was awarded for a body of reviews published in 2008. So few journalistic or arts awards recognise excellence in art criticism or writing, though everyone acknowledges that quality writing in this sphere must be sustained. For that reason this award is important - it shows that our work is valued!

Kudzanai Chuirai's State of the Nation

2011-11-21T06:33:00.000-08:00

It is not unexpected that Kudzanai Chiurai’s exhibition is showing at two locales in Joburg’s inner city – one a makeshift gallery in a warehouse in Newtown, the other the Goodman Gallery’s Project Space at Arts on Main. His work has often exuded a gritty, downtown persona. Mostly it’s the graffiti-style vocabulary that has engendered this notion that his work is “of the streets”. In fact, his ties to street culture are so blatant one reviewer suggested that his art appeared incongruent in a conventional gallery setting.

His work’s connection to the urban environment, however, goes much deeper than superficial links with a pseudo-Jean-Michel Basquiat-like graffiti style. The composition of his paintings and photographs at State of the Nation reflect the palimpsest of an urban African environment populated by diverse signs and iconographies, which reflect the multitude of cultures, traditions and histories that all converge in these modern conurbations. They are places where first and third, African, European and, now, Chinese cultures collide and meld. The signs that populate Chiurai’s paintings – and photographs – should be in conflict with each other. In a painting titled Corinthians (2011) the word “Hollywood” is scrawled across a canvas on which also appears a naked female cadaver, the shadow of a plant, a skull balanced on a stick, a disused tyre and the phrase “time picture for your digital use”.

Despite the fact that these signs, phrases, names, appear mismatched and disjointed from their origins, they now exist as part of the fabric of the African urban experience both virtual and real. The skyline of a city is depicted in the background of Corinthians, alluding to the built environment but it is this incongruent mix of signs that root the painting in the urban African setting. In many ways his work evokes Jean Baudrilliard’s observation about modern reality consisting of simulated signs representing reality, such as a Hollywood sign serving as a shorthand for a place.

Chiurai’s work therefore serves as description of a African urbanity. The signifiers of place are always clichéd; the Hollywood sign alludes to American imperialism and a leopard-shaped sofa evokes a generic symbol of Africa. Everything in his pictorial planes have been reduced to overstated forms – consequently what he presents is not the gritty reality of street life but a symbolic shorthand evoking a contested African identity that is expressed in the façades of the continent’s cities.

He presents troubled spaces; death and violence are predominant motifs. This multilayered urban palimpsest is an unpredictable territory. The titles refer to parts of the Bible but there is also a sense that the worlds that Chiurai presents are rooted in biblical times; not that they are modern replicas per se; rather he aims to chronicle lost societies without a moral compass to guide them. A dog gnaws a human arm. A skeleton treads over the bones of his ancestors. Words or phrases such as “Nursery School” and “Education for Success”, which appear in a painting are ironic, meaningless: there is no innocence or transcendence. As the title of one work implies: the children in this place have no mothers. In White Picket, an idealistic domestic environment is violated by an angry man with a knife in his hand. This is a world that has been turned upside down; the natural order has been reversed. The world that Chiurai paints – quite literally as this chaos is best illustrated in his paintings – is one in need of a “saviour”, who can steer this sick society on a new path.

But can such a society produce such a man – or woman? It is through a series of extraordinary photographs that Chiurai explores the ideological systems, forces and “saviours” that can deliver this morally corrupt society from a pervasive malevolence. These photographs are staged re-enactments of dated photographs of significant political occurrences or famous paintings. The most striking is a rendition of the Last Supper, which features the figure of a composed female “Jesus” (evoking Dan Brown’s theory in The Da Vinci Code) presiding over a group of miscreants that include a warlord and a witchdoctor who is said to be burning human flesh.

This Jesus figure is a rendition of Patrice Lumumba, the former prime|minister of the Congo. Though Chiurai uses a woman to pose as him, we know it is him because a separate portrait (Revelations XII) recalls a well-known photograph of the Congolese leader. Most of the photographs are re-enactments of historical images, others are renditions of Chinese communist posters. Though some relate to actual events, they have been fictionalised via stylisation and parody.

The backgrounds, the contexts of these images are homogeneous, a collage, consisting of rose patterned wallpapers and West African fabrics. An old fan with horses printed on adds to the retro-kitsch pastiche. The theatrical tales of terror, violence and redemption all take place in this standardised collaged setting, a bricolage, defined by diverse cultural influences that also define his paintings and which evoke intricately layered African conurbations.

Chiurai creates the impression that a cross-cultural clash is embedded in the environment – or are these settings a product of such conflicts? Undoubtedly, the players – soldiers, victims, political leaders, foreign dignitaries and witchdoctors – are products of these jumbled realms, where power, control and survival aren’t discreetly negotiated but manifest in dramatic battles. Ultimately, it is the theatrics and visual rhetoric of this burdened existence that Chiurai so artfully articulates. - published in The Sunday Independent, November 20, 2011.

Embracing Disorder: Clive Van den Berg

2011-11-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

The best point of entry into Clive van den Berg’s new exhibition is an oil painting called Man Flails with Maps II (2011). It features the figure of a naked man clutching what appears to be a large map. It is scrunched and he is shaking it so hard that the lines and colours on it are falling off into the air and on to the ground. This painting offers a vital clue to a collection of bold abstract paintings defined by a cacophony of colour and lines that seem quite meaningless – in fact, they are meaningless… but more of that later.

The man shaking the maps could be seen as Van den Berg, who, through a series of the abstract paintings, presents deconstructed maps. In these paintings the lines have been pulled apart and haphazardly arranged to engender incoherent landscapes. Van den Berg is not just deconstructing an object but a visual vocabulary rooted in a pseudo-scientific paradigm. Deconstructing and “decomposing” (a word Rosalind Morris uses in the catalogue), however, don’t quite sufficiently describe what Van den Berg is attempting here, as both terms allude to a methodical act motivated by a desire to understand (and challenge) the mechanics of a construct.

Van den Berg isn’t striving towards understanding but the opposite; he wants to unknow what he knows – and by proxy what we know about the land. To achieve this he needs to jettison the tools of understanding and ordering it.

He subverts the function of the map; instead of guiding the reader/viewer around a territory, these incoherent paintings ensure that we cannot find our way. We are paralysed by the languages that are meant to order space. You could argue, of course, that this is precisely what occurs with maps: that they separate us from the land – the language of map-making becomes a more reliable marker of space than the space itself. Put another way: the land misleads us and maps tell the truth.

Naturally, it isn’t only the language of map-making that Van den Berg attempts to misuse but the traditional vocabulary of landscape painting that also has been used to map the land, though in quite a different way. The interrelationship between the two comes into focus in two watercolours dubbed Johannesburg II and III, where crude lines evoking the language of a mapping link up with brightly coloured quasi-impressionist renderings of a natural landscape. That one language aspires to accuracy and the other a subjective and idealistic interpretations of the land isn’t of importance; they are both politically and historically loaded. However, there is a sense with these paintings that the vocabulary associated with maps describes subterranean territory – the unseen parts of the land.

Van den Berg is reaching towards reimaging our reading of the land, its representation thereof. He wants to escape a system of plotting the external world but he cannot escape the visual syntaxes that define it, even if he discards the structure, so to speak. There appears to be nothing beneath these sign systems: there is nothing to see but the lines and amorphous shapes of these deconstructed vocabularies. In this way this disassembled language evokes the ambiguity of the landscape; the seen and unseen layers which cannot be reconciled. Van den Berg allows the land to exist in this disordered state. This makes his paintings slightly frustrating to view; you feel trapped, though the possibilities of what they might signify appear endless – the shapes and lines appear to extend beyond the edges of the canvas.

This tension and our desire for ordering the landscape while marvelling in its disorder is most obvious in Scarecrow I and II, featuring a wiry female figure wearing a dress with a print of maps. It is unclear whether she is trying to separate the lines from her garment, to be free from them, or whether she is disseminating them on the ground below. It seems that the act of letting go is no different from re-inscribing this system of ordering. These lines and forms don’t simply function as spatial markers, they contain (and define) memory. In this way they are not simply an external sign system, they describe an intangible internal territory, too. As such, through his abstract paintings, Van den Berg tangles and scrambles inner and outer territories.

He illustrates the connection between the body and the land quite obviously – such as in works where parts of the land appear to flow from the body. Like Man Flails with Maps II, these kinds of works illustrate his ideas and explain his abstract works. Granted, the abstract works are inaccessible – they are intended to express inaccessibility and incoherence, and perhaps need to be contextualised – but in such an overstated manner? Perhaps the most important aspect of this new collection of works is the rupture it articulates. Not just a break in an aesthetic language for the artist, but the state of crisis and possible condition of renewal it promises.

It seems as if Van den Berg wants to get beyond our history. There is also a sense that existing languages are incompatible with our society at present and have brought about an inevitable breakdown. An imagined future appears to be impossible to access with these outmoded, historically-loaded vocabularies. - published in The Sunday Independent, October 23, 2011.

Keeping the Faith: Simon Gush

2011-10-23T23:27:00.000-07:00

Unwavering devotion to political entities in the face of burgeoning evidence of misuse of power and incompetence can be attributed to a kind of deep-seated faith that is akin to religious fanaticism, intimates Simon Gush in his exhibition Representation. Of course, there are many explanations for this phenomenon – not least the absence of an attractive opposition party. However, Gush’s analogy is powerful and goes some way to explaining how, in the face of overwhelming negative factual evidence, masses of people maintain an unwavering allegiance to a political or social institution.

At the heart of inculcating this level of unquestioning devotion are obviously convincing and ethically robust ideologies that advance social or political transformation. In this way change is always imminent and a reprieve from the status quo appears on the horizon. So no matter how awful the current conditions – in fact, they should be dire – they are seen to be temporary.

Gush doesn’t unpack the mechanics of political rhetoric, nor does he shine a spotlight on the ruling party’s false promises. He is more interested in one of its alliances, Cosatu. Through a series of subtle short films, dubbed Analogues, (written by James Cairns, the Cape Town-based playwright and actor), he maps the moment in which belief is suspended and perhaps reaffirmed. Certainly these narrative filmic works create the impression that faith isn’t an undisrupted state but is rather continuously renegotiated and reaffirmed in the face of evidence that disputes it – hence the adage, “keeping the faith”, which expresses the work required in maintaining it.

The moments of suspension or renegotiation of faith in each short film are easy to detect; they usually occur towards the end and are accompanied by a tense musical phrase on a violin as the camera pans across each setting before settling on the individual who pauses and questions the reality which they have accepted.

In Vacancy, two men are seen arriving at a building where they both apply for a job. Though we never know what kind of job it is, it appears to be a low-level job involving driving a truck. For this reason, the interview process involves two parts; a discussion and then a driving test in a yard outside.

One man merrily goes through the motions of both while the other, who seems to observe the details of the setting much closer, noticing a battered door handle and a dented pillow on a sofa, pauses in the stairwell before taking the driving test. He quietly exits. It’s a subtle rejection of an ambiguous set of circumstances.

Based on a variety of physical and non-verbal clues, the man comes to believe the job is not for him. His rejection is therefore based on instinct, so perhaps his moment of suspension is really the moment in which he embraces another belief about what work should entail. This decision or insight occurs in a split second, creating this sense that it is a temporary state. Perhaps he arrives home and regrets walking out.

These films look at shifting beliefs around work and, given that the current work ethic and the sense that our identity and self-importance is tied to work are derived from Christian teachings and others, it lends credibility to the link between faith and work.

It is not only religious fanatics or card-carrying political party members whose world view is shaped by belief systems but every individual’s outlook is influenced by a type of paradigm. Even being a non-believer is to believe in something. The man’s decision to skip out on the interview maps the moment when one set of ideas is replaced by another. The switch is activated by empirical information but also something quite intangible, mystical even, articulated in the haunting notes of the music, because isn’t faith about transcending the physical realm?

Gush roots us in the environments and spatial dynamics of each setting via close-ups. In this way he presents a textural and sensory encounter for viewers that establishes the seductive pull of reality and how it thwarts, challenges transcendence, though it also creates the conditions that inspire it.

When a young woman, who we presume has been the victim of sexual harassment or some other distasteful event in the workplace, gazes out of a window of a conference centre after a Cosatu meeting, she is transported outside that context and sees her predicament from an external perspective.

It is in this moment we surmise that she realises that she can no longer be a supporter of Cosatu, who she works for. But this may only be a temporary pause; she will have to work hard to restablish her faith in the organisation, a skill her superior has perfected.

It is interesting that Distance, which is set in a bland hotel setting, is meant to articulate an absence of belief, according to the press release. That the characters are all white also speaks volumes and implies that their inability to embrace populist beliefs situates them in some kind of liminal territory – an in-between, transient space.

Above the beds in the hotel suite is one of those mass-produced artworks depicting what could be a wagon, evoking the laager and mining motifs – though, of course, its stylisation speaks of the commodification and disintegration of binding belief systems. The wheel with its multiple spokes also evokes the Cosatu logo, which Gush reworks and deconstructs through a series of drawings and murals outside the gallery.

In the murals Gush reimagines the Cosatu logo by infusing it with religious slogans and motifs, thereby conflating two worldviews. As artists know only too well, it is in the representation – to use the title of the exhibition – of religious and political symbols that belief is|concretised for, as the films establish, it is through visual, non-verbal signs that faith can be altered. - published in The Sunday Independent, October 16, 2011.

The big Horse shebang at Everard Read/Circa

2011-09-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

Ricky Burnett emerges from the cool and dark concrete gallery on the ground level of the Circa Gallery. He has just finished a discussion with James Sey, one of the 60 artists showing on the gargantuan Horse exhibition that colonises this imposing circular gallery on Jan Smuts Avenue in Rosebank and the adjacent Everard Read gallery.

He seems slightly distracted and flustered when we begin to chat; it’s a day before the grand opening, which has been billed as one of the social events of the year. Artworks are still being installed and labelled. It’s the end of a demanding process, in which Burnett interacted with each artist who was commissioned to produce a work around the equine theme. The days preceding the exhibition have been the hardest, he has had to negotiate an unknown quantity; though he had a sense what each artist had planned on producing, he couldn’t predict what they would deliver.
“Those who I thought would submit a sculpture, gave us a painting. Those who said they would give us one painting brought a series of 10. Others who promised a triptych delivered only one artwork. I really didn’t know what I would be getting.”

This is not a conventional approach to curating. Not that Burnett is known for adhering to conventions: he made history with his landmark Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art, an exhibition held in 1985 where black artists showed alongside white artists for the first time under the contemporary rubric. This time round Burnett is not pioneering a new take on curating: a different brand of curating seems to have already taken hold in the local art scene.

Instead of appropriating existing artworks for a themed display, several curators have been commissioning work for exhibitions. In essence, artworks are being tailor-made for themed shows. In this way the art is made in response to a theme, rather than an artwork being ideologically repositioned to fit in with a specific curatorial brief. The differences between these two approaches may sound subtle, but they have a far-reaching impact for art production. In establishing the theme for an artwork before its conception, curators are de facto having a greater hand in the end result, though of course, as Burnett underscores, the final product remains unpredictable. So this shift might just be about affecting a different kind of control.

For Water: The delicate thread of Life at the Standard Bank Gallery, curator Marion Dixon commissioned Karel Nel, Willem Boschoff and Marcus Neustetter to make works that would supplement an extensive collection where water was depicted. Katrin Lewinsky preferred not to think of her role as curator for an exhibition titled Basic Reality, which opened a few weeks ago at the Goodman Gallery Projects at Arts on Main. The rather broad theme of this show presented itself to Lewinsky during a long process of interaction between art graduates and students. Lewinsky’s laissez-faire approach wasn’t as hands-off as it appeared; after commissioning the artists, she still made selections that obviously coincided with her concept of the theme and through engagement with the artists, she must have had a subtle hand in the final product. Similarly, Burnett prefers to think of himself as a “provoker”, who created the context in which artists would be “provoked” to make work relating to an equine theme.

Lewinsky and Burnett’s rejection of the term curator implies they are consciously trying to redetermine the role of the curator. But it might take more than another term to undercut the burgeoning attitude that curators are the new artists. Certainly their approaches enhance their role as architects of artistic expression. Interestingly, both Lewinsky and Burnett imply that their approach has engendered greater artistic freedom for artists.

For Burnett, negotiating with artists presented an opportunity for him to become reacquainted with the South African art scene after a seven-year hiatus in the US, where he says he had little success. Upon returning he struggled to come to grips with the contemporary art scene here, which he says is dominated by identity-based art. It’s an observation that suggests he has quite an oversimplified view of contemporary practice in the country. Given this one can appreciate how the horse theme, suggested by Mark Read, one of the owners of the Everard and Circa galleries, appealed to Burnett.

With this seemingly non-politicised theme, he could sidestep any current discourses and provide a veritable tabula rasa on which artists could project their ideas via their idiosyncratic visual signatures. And in this respect he succeeded to a certain degree; each artist responded in their characteristic approaches. Walter Oltmann produced an intricate wire sculpture of a horse with protruding spikes. Bronwyn Lace suspended the bones of a horse with fish-gut before manipulating them into different configurations, which shifted the anatomy of the animal, evoking other creatures, both mythical and imagined. And Noria Mabasa presented a series of small sculptures in which the horses’ dimensions were compacted in a way that underplayed their physical prowess.

With this exhibition Burnett didn’t want to rewrite history as he had done before – he wanted to avoid it altogether. This time he opted for creating a grand visual spectacle that was also a commercial venture – Everard Read’s clients apparently favour depictions of horses. Who could resist an exhibition by 60 local artists centred on a single visual motif? The huge turn-out on the opening night suggested few could. The only problem was this singular visual motif that was imprinted on everyone’s art. There was no escaping the figure of the horse, except in a few cases such as Stephen Hobbs’s contribution, which involved small-scale models of horse jumps and a large-scale scaffolding construction, evoking an oversized one. Despite its vast dimensions and location, between the galleries, it blended in with the environment by appearing like a tentative construction for a bridge.

Overly simplistic themes centred on particular subject-matter rather than an idea tend to pave the way for quite whimsical art. Beyond the thrill of observing how each artist represents it, there is very little else to enjoy. Such exhibitions are hugely appealing to the public: this is contemporary art that they can immediately “access”. This is important for Burnett; he confesses to an abhorrence for art theorising and catalogues, which he says he barely understands. He hankers for a somewhat romanticised notion of art as that which “speaks to the heart and soul”.

His playful show – centred on animal that no longer has social relevance, except to an affluent minority – opened in the same week as the Goethe-Institut’s über(W)unden – Art in Troubled Times conference, where artists such as Zanele Muholi spoke of human rights abuses and injustices in the country. “We can’t pretend as if we don’t see (it),” she urged. While panellists discussed whether they revictimised audiences by exposing them to representations of violence, in the neighbouring suburb Burnett was putting finishing touches to his Horse exhibition as haystacks were being placed on the pavement to set the scene. Perhaps this kind of rural fantasy is another response to trauma or just pure whimsy. Either way there seems to be space for both in our cultural landscape.- published in The Sunday Independent, September 18, 2011.

Nathaniel Stern's Compressionism

2011-09-16T00:24:00.000-07:00

Impressionism has become so unsexy in the last couple of decades. Well, in art circles, that is. Mostly it’s because this once avant-garde French movement has been embraced with such gusto by the masses. For this reason many overseas public galleries wishing to up the foot traffic in their institutions and assert their relevance to society stage themed shows from this period, or exhibitions by artists connected to it.

The frequency of these impressionism blockbusters has rendered the art from that movement blasé. So it is surprising to find a multi-media artist who embraces what is termed “contemporary practice” to be so captured by the art of Claude Monet and in particular his artwork Water Lilies (1914-1926). As the title suggests they are paintings of the most banal of still life subject matter: tranquil ponds dotted with lilies Monet spied in his garden in Giverny, France.

For Nathaniel Stern the radicalism of the impressionist vocabulary hasn’t quite worn off. He returns to it anew with an eye for reinventing it for the digitised era. Like many viewers who have stood in front of Monet’s large scale paintings in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Stern was seduced by the romantic, hazy lens through which Monet depicted this bucolic scene. In his version of Monet’s Water Lilies he has retained the large scale in his triptych Giverny of the Midwest – the pond he studied was in Indiana. Stern was aware scale played an important role in creating an immersive experience for viewers. He deconstructs and then reconstructs Monet’s approach, but this activity is not in service of demystifying, or satirising it, but re-enacting a moment in art history using digital media.

“Immersion” and “deconstruction” inform this body of work and Stern’s mode of documenting reality, which involves an HP scanner harnessed around his neck as he wades through the pond. Put plainly, he scans his subject matter. Because he does not remain static while doing this he generates images that appear life-like, but distorted. Not too unlike the kind of distortion reality undergoes under Monet’s heightened gaze, which amplifies the physical and sensual properties of his interest.

Just as Monet realised a purely figurative rendering of organic life doesn’t quite relay the physical experience or weight of reality, so does Stern recognise a straight life-like scan won’t do so either. Stern’s proximity to his subject matter facilitates a level of abstraction before he has even begun his process of “decompression”, which involves undoing the compression of the image. He is so close to his subject matter he doesn’t necessarily observe it, but is immersed in it. Because of this the view is distorted. It is a bit like putting the lens of a camera right up against that which is to be photographed.

Physical distance is a prerequisite for representation. Stern’s approach challenges this idea for not only is he immersed in his subject matter, but ironically he equips himself with a gadget that has no view-finder so he is unable to see the images he is capturing. As a result he records while not being trapped by, or implicated in, the act of recording. Thus representation is separated from seeing, it becomes an intuitive act of another kind.
si Stern. Giverny of the Midwest (detail 2)

This, of course, is the antithesis of the effect digital mediums have had on a society which has become more consumed with the act of documenting life that reality is viewed through a lens. In this way Stern succeeds in achieving what Monet never could: he is able to exist in a moment without the burden of reconstructing it. For this reason he is a participant rather than a detached observer. Stern is able to produce images that relay so much detail, like a insect caught in a petal or the veins of a leaf. These details might have evaded his detection despite his proximity and immersion. This suggests he was unable to fully appreciate the scene in its totality. In this way the full weight of reality is always withheld.

It is only in the processing of his scanned images, in which he stretches them out, that another encounter with his subject matter becomes possible. This encounter is obviously subject to his manipulation; he heightens the colours and decompresses the images to such a point that they are abstracted.

Stern doesn’t present one cohesive view of the pond, but a plethora of cropped details of it. The images are pieced together to form three larger “canvases”. They need to be scrutinised up close, where you can spy traces of the submersion of his physical being in the work – denoted by finger prints.

These works are excessively beautiful and compel immersion. Viewing them is a time-demanding exercise, which defies our usual consumption of imagery. This is exacerbated by the number of small canvases one must view, which appear like pieces of a puzzle even though they do not fit together to create a complete image. These are fragments of reality. Stern suggests a scene cannot be relayed in its entirety, so despite his reverence he challenges Monet’s work. Stern doesn’t order the visual world; he casts his garden pond scene as an indeterminate one that exists beyond the boundaries of any frame. - published in The Sunday Independent, August 22, 2011

Beneath the Surface: Gary Schneider

2011-08-17T23:23:00.000-07:00

Gary Schneider’s mode of photography is highly unconventional. His subjects lie in the dark for hours while he traces their bodies with a pencil torch, illuminating their flesh in front of a camera lens positioned above them. One would expect the result to be a disjointed, if not incomplete, long-exposure photograph in which areas of the body might be left concealed by the dark.

Nevertheless, these studies – such a long-winded and obsessive process could only be deemed a study – appear fairly conventional – aside from the dark patches that fall strategically on parts of their bodies. These shaded areas aren’t accidental; they are all calculated to create depth and visual interest. The interplay between dark and light is particular to photography, but this curious type of photographic approach evokes not only a painterly quality but a painterly mode, which is also rooted in negotiating the balance between darkness and lightness.

In effect, Schneider paints with light; his strokes, if you will, are visible on the naked flesh of his subjects. In this way his invisible gaze leaves a trace. Like a painter he conjures his subjects from the darkness or nothingness – although, obviously in this context they are fully formed before he encounters them. Nevertheless, painters are also bound to their models and their idiosyncratic features that must be rendered authentically in order for their act of mimesis to be convincing. Schneider might be restricted to his subjects, but he has freedom to decide what parts of their bodies to enhance through his choice of what to illuminate and what to leave cloaked in darkness. Consequently, he gives life to subjects in a manner that defies traditional notions of photography.

Photographers are generally slaves to reality, but Schneider subverts this law by choosing what will be seen and how to treat it. It’s quite a radical departure, though obviously this actuality underpins all photography to a certain extent, though in a much more subtle manner. Schneider simply sets up a context in which he can manipulate this condition in quite an extreme way, though the results may obscure this radical subversion.

He is said to have borrowed this approach from a Victorian photographer called Julia Margaret Cameron, who also forced her sitters to pose for hours while she took long-exposure photographs. Like Cameron’s portraits, Schneider’s also bear subtle traces of the longevity of the process, such as blurred areas on the body where the sitter has twitched or moved. This brings to mind Francis Bacon’s portraits, where certain features of his sitters are blurred, or slightly distorted, or even Cubist portraiture which aspired to capture a multitude of perspectives of a sitter within a single painting.

His mode of portraiture and the long period he spends with his subjects are a tacit acknowledgement that a subject cannot be captured in a split-second, as is the case, or presumption, with a conventional photograph. Certainly, Schneider’s process engenders a level of intimacy with his subjects that is unprecedented in photography – or for that matter in painting. This intense scrutiny borders on violation, it is suggested in the catalogue. Certainly, he is forced to consume and map every area of their naked bodies in order to complete their portrait.

Vincent (2002) and Jeannne (2004), the two naked portraits on display at this exhibition, Skin, might not be fully aware of the “violence”, as they lie inert in the dark. The consumption of their naked frames by the eye of the viewer isn’t obviously realised. Nevertheless their awkward and stiff postures suggest they are not at ease, but locked into an emotionally and physically loaded exchange with Schneider.

From this point of view, the artwork is not simply the photograph which Schneider presents, but plays out in a performance that occurs between him and his subjects in the process of producing the image. It is a performance in which the boundaries and the relationship between the photographer and his subject are enhanced and tested to the extreme. It is for this reason that his subjects are unclothed and positioned in a decontextualised space – the black background. He does not want to disrupt the ambivalent relational dynamic with a discourse on their individual identity.

In other words, these portraits aren’t about the sitters per se, but the protracted encounter with Schneider and his probing ray of light. So while his process suggests an almost pathological hunger to know their bodies, it is similarly marked by a procedure to unknow them, to completely disentangle them from any cultural or identity links. Schneider’s brand of portraiture is defined by a process of pushing them into a realm of unrecognition. The interplay between light and darkness, illumination and concealment, which visually underpins this project, also functions on a metaphorical level, explaining the subtle dynamic between sitter and viewer, which is predicated on a kind of cat-and-mouse game where the viewer attempts to retrieve information about the sitter, which he or she wishes to conceal.

By ridding his images of the signs which would help us identify his subjects, he indirectly hints at the idea that their identity resides within, beneath their skin. His probing light is presumably meant to illuminate the information concealed beneath this fragile but also impenetrable layer. It is such an interesting subversion not only of photographic practice but the act of portraiture.- published in The Sunday Independent, August 2011

How effective is activism in a gallery setting?

2011-08-09T09:35:00.000-07:00

IT’S Ironic that Lulu Xingwana’s highly published disapproval of Zanele Muholi’s now landmark photograph of two black naked lesbians spooning brought her cause into the public domain in 2009. Before that, her photographs of this marginalised and stigmatised group had largely been confined to regular gallery visitors, who tend to have liberal views about sexuality. She was preaching to the converted. As a result her documentation of black lesbians in gallery contexts evokes a sense of futility, or at least to some degree dilutes the activist impulse driving the work. Her work’s commercial, aesthetic and art historical values are more significant in this setting.

Xingwana’s reaction underscored the value of Muholi’s photographic study: if an individual from the high echelons of our society harboured such narrow attitudes, it was proof that prejudice against gay people ran deep. Press coverage of the debacle no doubt inspired Muholi to make a documentary, Difficult Lives, which is part of this new exhibition, Inkanyiso. The documentary gave Muholi a chance to contextualise her work and challenge her critics. It is pitched at the man/woman in the street, and its educational nature makes it feel like a clumsy appendage in the Stevenson gallery. It is not a video artwork and ultimately its circulation in more public contexts might have more impact than her photographs.

Muholi is not unaware of the power of film: this exhibition includes a short video work in which a transgender man explains how he has been the target of abuse since he was a child because of his ambiguous status. Muholi probably wished to bring into focus that which was silenced in the photographs: the impact of repetitive abuse on an individual. Certainly, it is hard to believe that behind the beautiful female façade lurks a frightened and harassed person. In some ways the mask is part of his victory over his persecutors, though it also is a convincing camouflage.

It is not a terribly successful work; it’s overly didactic and at times it plays like a Carte Blanche insert. Because Muholi has such an explicit objective, sometimes the message eclipses the work or subjugates it, particularly in this case. One senses that with the use of video she is trying to extend her practice beyond photography and undoubtedly her followers are eager to see a shift in her strategy.

Inkanyiso presents two series of photographic works; those of transgender men in contemporary and traditional women’s clothing, thus challenging the notion that homosexuality is “un-African”, and a wall of uniform-sized images of lesbians, which is an effective displayin terms of affirming the existence of a community. Muholi’s treatment of these two distinct groups differs. The former are shot in colour and often from afar, accomodating their bodies in a manner that recalls traditional representations of the female form in Western art. The poses they strike and the emphasis on their bare flesh evokes this stereotypical representation.

One photograph, Senny Mzolo I, Observatory (2011), looks like a glossy magazine image, with Mzolo beautifully made up and posing in lingerie. Muholi’s treatment counters the visual culture generated by magazines and artworks that reinforce and perpetuate heterosexuality as the dominant norm. However, Muholi indirectly affirms stereotypes about femininity. The feminine subject, whether male or female, must offer her/his body up to the gaze of the (male) viewer. The portraits of gay women are rendered quite differently. They are all tightly cropped so that their bodies are almost obscured. The emphasis is on their penetrative stares and solid stances, which evoke a sense of individual power.

Consequently, the men and women who pose for Muholi don’t seem to have escaped gender stereotyping, they have simply swopped one stereotype for another. In other words the gay women mostly appear to adopt a male persona, thus conforming not only to a notion of masculinity but creating a fixed identity for gay women.

Muholi can’t be held accountable for this phenomenon but in her treatment of her pseudo male and female subjects, she draws a perceivable boundary between the sexes, even though the genders are reversed. These stereotypical gender “uniforms” allow her subjects to claim a social territory and certainly she solidifies and reinforces their presence through her documentation of them. But you can’t help feeling that this kind of activism would carry more weight in a more public arena. - published in The Sunday Independent, 2011

Zwelethu Mthethwa: Power to the Poor

2011-06-29T04:36:00.000-07:00

ZWELETHU Mthethwa only enforces one rule on his sitters: they must not smile. It’s the antithesis of what one would expect a photographer to demand. This idea is founded in Mthethwa’s belief that smiles are rarely genuine. They’re a knee-jerk response to awkwardness, he suggests.
“I see the smile as a façade, as a mask. When we are not sure what to do, we smile. So for me as an artist smiling becomes some kind of a blockage.”

This ethos has contributed towards an extensive oeuvre of portraiture offering authentic views into the lives of marginalised South Africans. Though he has painted too, it’s his photographs that have caught the world’s attention – he regularly exhibits on international exhibitions and a new monograph was published by the Aperture Foundation last year.

You could argue that his images of impoverished subjects satiates stereotypical notions of Africa. Undoubtedly the fact that they don’tsmile might underscore their dejection. However, Mthethwa employs a number of devices to foreground the inventive ways in which they respond to difficult circumstances. In fact Mthethwa likens the subjects to artists, and is challenged and inspired by their tenaciousness.

Mthethwa is relieved to be talking about his work; he has a new exhibition on at Cape Town’s iArt Gallery, and has grown weary of discussing his involvement in South Africa’s stand at the Venice Biennale. There has been much controversy around South Africa’s participation in this exhibition because of the manner in which the Department of Arts and Culture failed to follow proper protocol and appointed a commercial dealer, Monna Mokoena, as commissioner.

Mthethwa laughs nervously when I raise the issue. I explain that at this juncture it’s a prerequisite to any conversation with him but suggest he could use the opportunity to clear up any misconceptions. It seems there is one. It was widely reported that Mthethwa refused to participate because of the circumstances around Mokoena’s appointment, but as he explains the back-and-forth negotiations between them, it becomes clear that his withdrawal from what must be the biggest and most important internationalart exhibitions, had to do with a lack transparency and disorganisation.
“No one seemed to know what the budget was. I print my photographs in New York so I needed advance warning.”
When Mthethwa finally received a contract from Mokoena, it was too late and the budget was far too meagre.
“There was not enough time to reproduce the work. I pulled out because I didn’t want to appear to be a clown.”

Dignity is an important quality to this artist, particularly that of his unsmiling subjects. Though most of his photographic essays are centred on people living on the margins – stock subject matter for the documentary photographer – he rallies against the way subjects have historically been positioned through that genre of photography. Choosing to shoot in colour and conceiving of himself as “the other”, rather than his subjects are just a few of the ways he has tried to renegotiate this brand of portraiture.

From 1995 to 2005 he photographed shack dwellers in the township of Crossroads in Cape Town. With a focus on subjects inside their makeshift homes, the series was dubbed Interiors. It featured a range of people pictured in the most intimate place in their homes, their bedrooms, which often doubled as kitchens. These neat, ordered and colourful settings, most often decorated with bold advertising leaflets, implied that these individuals had found ways of transcending their poverty, which is associated with chaos and filth. In one room a wall is adorned with a slogan or newspaper headline that reads “Battle of the mind”, pointing to the psychological games these impoverished subjects must negotiate to survive.

A 2003 series features lonely sugar cane labourers who are pictured in barren fields battling nature with nothing more than pangas. Like the sitters in Interiors they too wear these stoic expressions. Had they been smiling, the viewers’ response would be quite different; perhaps they would feel less pathos. Mthethwa aims to evoke empathy, not pity. His intention is to give these subjects a voice and allow them to claim ownership of their subjectivity, a condition that photojournalists and historical ethnographic studies often denied them.
“There is a kind of a soberness (about the photographs). In almost all the portraiture I have done, the people are aware of me. I ask them to look at the camera. It is like they are looking at the audience. It is kind of like they are returning the gaze of the onlooker in a gallery or museum. I do that on purpose as it includes some baggage with the history of photography, especially in South Africa.”

It is in response to this “baggage” that Mthethwa has embraced colour photography. He doesn’t just associate black and white photography with a journalistic mode, but with a far more loaded kind of photograph: that of the ID book or “dompass” (passbook) – the one occasion when black subjects were encouraged to gaze at the camera.
“They are uncomfortable but they look at the camera. Most of those photographs were really horrible and people were forced to live with those photographs because they were in their ID books or dompass.”

Haunted by this brand of imagery, which subtly reinforced each subjects’ status within the apartheid system, Mthethwa has developed a brand of photography engineered to counter it. Not only does he shoot in colour, but he will go to any lengths to put his subject at ease. He doesn’t use artificial light and, most importantly, he goes to them.
“The moment I come into your house and photograph in your house, it is me who comes from the outside. I am unfamiliar with your turf. But if I bring you to the studio it is my turf and you will be uncomfortable. I would rather it be me that is uncomfortable. I stick out as a sore thumb. I am actually the Other.”

Mthethwa’s new series, Brave Ones, features portraits of subjects, which are difficult to place. They are young male followers of the Shembe Church, but they wear unconventional ensembles that scramble gender and cultural codes. Frilly blouses with old-fashioned bow ties are teamed with Scottish kilts and some wear pith helmets, evoking colonial dress of a bygone era. For some time now many South Africa artists have been mining identity-based themes. This has manifested in a brand of art in which the artists figure themselves in photographic images, where they are adorned in outfits that confuse and deflect their identity. What makes Mthethwa’s Brave One’s series so interesting is that he has encountered individuals who have quite unselfconsciously assumed ensembles that achieve the same objective. In this case this eclectic dress is designed for a New Year’s Day ritual. They are photographed in a lush rural KwaZulu-Natal setting, which evokes idealistic images of the English landscape, further disconnecting them from any perceivable reality.

For Mthethwa the landscapes in the background of his images are as important as his subjects. In the Sugar Cane series the picturesque sugar cane fields which dominate the visual plane are in stark opposition to his subjects, the labourers, who are attired in tattered grey outfits. He attributes his fascination for the rural landscape to an obsession with spaghetti westerns and Japanese samurai movies during his youth. Dress was important in those types of films and it piqued his interest in the interplay between clothing and identity, which has culminated in the Brave Ones series.
“Both of those (filmic) genres are about costume. Second, they are genres concerned with the landscape. When I looked at those young men it felt like a follow-up to the sugar cane cutters. The skirts they wear remind me of the samurai warrior. But this (the outfits of the Shembe worshippers) is a little bit complicated because they also wear sports socks and workmen’s shoes... I was fascinated by this.”

Mthethwa’s interest in the informal and spontaneous uniforms that emerge from particular groups of people underpinned the Sugar Cane and Brick Ladies series, portraits of women who reclaim disused bricks. Each photographic series he undertakes features individuals in similar circumstances, and most often they are manual labourers. Mthethwa is particularly interested how communities form and adapt to particular conditions – it’s an unselfconscious form of expression.
“Whether it is in the sugar cane fields or in the mines, they are people who come from quite different backgrounds and they are forced to make a culture, where they have to make sense of what they are doing.”

Transformation and adaptation intrigue Mthethwa. How mineworkers adapt to living in hostels informed his Empty Bed and End of an Era series. The latter is part of his current exhibition.
“People (living) on the margin are great artists. They are very creative and resourceful. If you look at the Interiors series they have very little resources but they make their homes liveable and warm.
“And if they go to the (mine) hostels, they manage to live with each other. When they go back home some of the men have families, they are well respected in the villages, some are indunas.”
“When they come to the hostels they have to reinvent themselves and adapt to that way of life. That transformation fascinates me. They have taught me to be very comfortable with the many identities I have.”

Though it appears that Mthethwa’s subjects have surrendered their individuality to form part of a cohesive group, subtle differences between them imply there is still room for them to assert their uniqueness. Nevertheless he denies their individuality in the sense that he doesn’t title any of his images or parade the names of his subjects. It’s a device to underscore their status within a community, he says.
“I was reading an article by Duma Ndlovu (the playwright) and he said he was comfortable to go back to Bergville where his family comes from because when he gets there he is seen as son of so and so: he is not seen as Duma, the man who has achieved this and that.
“He ceases to be an individual and becomes a member of the clan. This is the point I am trying to talk to when I don’t give my subjects names.”
Mthethwa can spend up to four years on a series. “I don’t have any expectations. I let the project dictate to me how I move. I am very fluid in the way that I work.”
I ask him how he knows when a series is complete. “It’s like when you are drinking and you know you have had enough drink.” - published in The Sunday Independent, 2011

Roger Ballen's Dorps: book review

2011-06-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

Nostalgia is a recurring theme in Roger Ballen’s photography. Mementoes from the past, such as threadbare teddy bears, aged family photographs and other disused items from bygone eras have become common motifs in his inimitable brand of photography, which evokes a haunting liminal territory suspended not only between fact and fiction but in time too. His fascination for items that have been degraded by time is linked to his desire to retrieve a lost sense of innocence that one senses has always been sullied or corrupt.

In Dorps: Small Towns in South Africa, which was first published in 1986, one is able to trace the beginnings of Ballen’s fixation with the abandoned, the obsolete. It is an interest which manifests in a photographic study of small towns, dorps, where dilapidated Victorian buildings, empty streets and wall displays of dated imagery conjure up a lost culture. The black and white photographs of these overlooked and unpopulated rural towns, mostly taken in the mid-1980s, have an almost post-apocalyptic quality in the sense that they are caught in what appears to be a spiral of degeneration. Windows are cracked or broken, paint has chipped off the exteriors, signs are faded and corrugated iron roofs have rusted and buckled. The numerous vacant streets and abandoned buildings that feature in this photographic essay hint at a defunct society that has been exterminated. Of course, this offers a politicised reading, which posits these ghost towns as metaphors for a conservative white community that is on the decline.

But this is an oversimplified purview, particularly if one considers this early body of work in relation to his more recent oeuvres, which suggest that Ballen’s interest in entropy is part of an aesthetic designed to challenge the temporal character of photography.Ballen has always tried to undermine the properties of photography. Consequently, while the photographs in this glossy book appear to be the documentation of a society or culture in South Africa circa the mid-1980s, they in fact are quite detached from that era. The architecture, inhabitants’ dress and shop displays hark from a variety of epochs. In this way Ballen presents us with a world in which time has collapsed. Much of the architecture evokes a pseudo-European culture. This connection and the other stylistic throwbacks are motivated by an aspiration which Ballen describes as a “yearning for magnificence”.

This yearning largely manifests in the architecture of these towns; in the ersatz Victorian embellishments and the neo-classical façades. These stylistic gestures obviously evoke a desire to maintain a link to the perceived “magnificence” of European culture. These images of entropy suggest, however, that it was a failed project. It simply couldn’t be sustained. This notion is most succinctly expressed in a photograph titled Close-Up of Pillar and Wall, Hopetown 1985. Surrounding the pillar are boards of weathered and chipped wooden slats. A deep crack snakes along the join between the column and the wall, suggesting that a subtle but irreversible rupture has occurred. A lick of paint could possibly disguise the break but it would only be palliative.
Within this context it becomes clear that Ballen is interested in unpacking the mechanics of nostalgia, which he presents in these photographs as a gesture towards retrieving an imaginary ideal.

This interest also manifests in the photographs of interiors such as one of a pensioner in Volksrust (1984), which shows an old man posing in his bedroom.
Plastered on the wall behind him is an old family photograph – perhaps of him in his youth – and cut-outs of semi-naked women from magazines. These images quite obviously express his desire to connect with his youth, a time when his sexual virility was at its peak. On the table beside him is a pair of glasses, which one presumes he has taken off for the purpose of the photograph – another gesture towards retrieving the potency he has lost. He too is clinging to a sense of “magnificence”.

Of course, this is the function of photography: photographic documents create the illusion that the past is within our grasp. In this way Dorps marks the beginning of Ballen’s ongoing conversation about photography, which has seen his work evolve into quite an abstract form. Dorps provides a historical context or a factual foundation for his more recent works, in which the fictional and factual elements have been conflated, creating a disturbing macabre tableaux. The photographs in Dorps appear more like straight documentary, which might account for the demand for this book – it is more accessible. Aficionados will enjoy observing the origin of his aesthetic and the architectural study, which contrasts with his later emphasis on interiors and interiority.
In his introduction, Ballen suggests that dorps evoked a presence that existed beyond their visual characteristics. He infers that the march of globalisation, which has installed bland, generic modern buildings, has eroded this local flavour. In this way Ballen has to some degree become a victim of a kind of nostalgia that he perceives in his subjects.

Perhaps the difference is that Ballen celebrates the failure to reclaim the past. - published in The Sunday Independent, May 29, 2011

'Edgy Watercolour Paintings' Should be an Oxymoron

2011-06-03T00:28:00.000-07:00

Watercolour paintings are rarely described as complex. It is not the translucency of the medium that has contributed to this, but the fact that it has long been associated with hobbyist painters.Of course, this is a generalisation: several professional artists have exploited watercolour to great effect, most notably Marlene Dumas and Durant Sihlali.But certainly watercolour landscapes have become the fare of shopping mall art galleries and Sunday art markets.

Perhaps this is why the late Alan Crump’s watercolours come as such a surprise.They are edgy, ironic and intricate and leave you distinctly uneasy, which seems almost incongruent with the medium. We expect watercolour landscapes to orientate and order the natural world in a pleasing manner, highlighting its beauty. The composition of Crump’s landscapes, in particular the series of aerial paintings of mines, is dense and claustrophobic. Every inch of the paper is covered in a dark palette. There is no white space, no reprieve, no lightness. Crump depicts everyday scenes, but there is an implicit violence lurking. Under Crump’s hand the world appears chaotic and in disarray. The angles of his subjects, the absence of focal points, and the multidirectional patterns all work towards drawing you into a dark and frenzied world.

Open Cast Coal Mines, Newcastle, 1994, best illustrates Crump’s modus operandi. In this striking work he presents what appears to be an atomised object. It’s as if the ground has exploded and its insides have been scattered on the surface of the landscape. It’s a crude description of mining, a recurring motif in Crump’s art. His palette is always muted, except for the use of red, such as in Red Giant (1994), a painting of a large building excavation site, or in Earthworks (1997), which presents a tunnel inside the mine. Red streaks line the inside of the shaft before scattering in the interior like pools of blood in the wake of an attack. As Karin Skawran observes in the catalogue, Crump depicts the landscape like a human body. Undoubtedly in Red Giant the red earth reads like bruised and exposed flesh. It is not just Crump’s keen awareness of the environment and its vulnerability that compels this metaphor, but the history of exploitation and domination in this country, which most obviously manifested through the mining industry.

The mining motif has become a shorthand for abuse and corruption for many artists – think William Kentridge – but few have translated this leitmotif via watercolour, which seems to work well in imparting a sense of movement, demonstrating the way the landscape is constantly being altered. This sense of fluctuation is quite prominent in East Rand Property Mine (1993), where multidirectional patterns create this sense that the ground is flowing. It is not just the watercolours that bring this into focus, but Crump’s semi-abstract rendering. Though one can more or less make out the objects in his paintings they are semi-figurative; there is no definition or clarity, which adds to the sense of disorder. In this way he keeps reality just beyond our grasp.

He does this for two reasons. First, it is only via this abstract language that he is able foreground violence and disruption. Second, it is his way |of challenging the well-established canon of (colonial) landscape painting that haunts South African visual culture.In his Kitchen Series he embraces a similar approach. If it wasn’t for the titles, which shed light on the objects of these unconventional still lifes, you wouldn’t quite be able to distinguish the subject of each work. Once again, Crump uses unconventional angles, which almost disconnects these ordinary domestic settings from reality. In this way he de-familiarises these ordinary foodstuffs. In some instances this approach makes them grotesque. The Kitchen Series is linked to the landscape mine paintings. Given that he mostly represents meat, he directs our attention to another form of exploitation of natural resources. The plates of meat, which evoke affluence, are the victor’s spoils.

Crump was a celebrated writer, academic, arts administrator and teacher, but this tribute exhibition sheds light on his deft skill as a watercolourist and conceptual artist. In the catalogue it is suggested that all those other activities left little time for him to develop his art. Undoubtedly, there seems to be an empty gap between the work he produced in the 1970s and 1990s.

The exhibition has been well curated by Frederico Freschi, who has created several discrete narratives through the placement of works, but unfortunately there is little critical engagement with his art in the catalogue. Perhaps this is to be expected given that the exhibition is a tribute to Crump’s activities outside of art-making. Nevertheless, Freschi brings Crump’s artistic trajectory full circle by juxtaposing his early 1970s work with the fine minimalist studies of Camphor Trees, where Crump once again exploits watercolour, allowing its translucency to express the way time can be traced or observed in these aged trees. In a way his paintings serve a similar purpose: they hold the intangible traces of an alert intelligence that no longer exists. - published in The Sunday Independent, May 29, 2011.

Jozi Art Roundup: Goodman, Marx, Kurgan and Rosengarten

2011-05-23T23:27:00.000-07:00

It was set to be the art world’s most talked about non-wedding – or anti-wedding – of the year. Though not quite a Middleton and Windsor affair, there was much buzz in Joburg as invitations bearing gold-embossed fonts arrived in the postboxes of art fundis, patrons, critics and fashionistas with an appetite for sartorial spectacles. The invitation conjured a lavish betrothal, despite the fact it was entreating visitors to attend Frances Goodman’s wedding-themed exhibition, Til Death Us Do Part. With a performance rumoured to be in the offing, it was not going to be an ordinary exhibition opening.

And in the weeks preceding the event, the Goodman Gallery’s staff fielded numerous telephone calls and e-mails enquiring whether it was a bona fide catered affair and whether RSVPs were thus imperative. The gallery had underestimated the popularity of anti-weddings: over 250 people flocked to the modest Jan Smuts gallery in anticipation of Goodman’s subversive wedding act. There was no question that it would be anything other than subversive; artists have a tendency to upturn tradition. There was also talk that Goodman’s exhibition might be the final manifestation of an acrimonious break-up.

The performance as such had no beginning or end but simply consisted of a bevy of women parading in their old wedding dresses. Notably, there was not a groom in sight, underscoring the exhibition’s gender bias. Audio recordings of women articulating their vexed relationship with marriage and the burden it placed on their identity emanated from a pole wrapped in fabric supporting a makeshift wedding party tent. Fashioned from blocks of richly embroidered ivory satins, silks and taffeta, the tent evoked the most prominent attraction at weddings: the wedding dress. Undoubtedly the bulk of the billion or so viewers of Kate and William’s televised union were most interested in her dress, as if it would somehow be an astounding revelation. Undoubtedly her future relationship to Britain’s aristocracy was encoded in the conservative white lacy number that evoked princesses of the past.

Goodman’s fabric installation created the illusion of stepping underneath or inside a large wedding dress.Goodman clearly wanted to bring the unspoken sentiments and debates that belie weddings to the surface. Consequently blocks of wedding fabric were adorned with statements by a variety of young women, alluding to the nitty-gritty realities these huge social occasions seem to silence. In this way the work is, de facto, created by the variety of female respondents that Goodman interviewed. As such there was little ambiguity. The work and the statements were ordinary and predictable. Based on many of them, it seemed that women remain victims of this social practice, even when they choose it. The artworks, mostly framed pieces of fabric or car bumpers emblazoned with bitter statements, offered little substance beyond the surface. But perhaps that was the point: weddings are such stylised rituals that the unions are overshadowed by exaggerated theatrics. Consequently, the only way Goodman was able to insert a dissident voice was to literally embroider it onto the surface among the flower and butterfly motifs. However, by so doing, these gestures were simply co-opted by the system they assumed to rally against. There is no escape, implied Goodman.

The exhibition’s most striking work was an installation at the back of the gallery, set in a room configured to resemble a dance floor. A disco ball reflected bright specks of light onto a floor covered in confetti with the word “forever” punched into it. Upon closer inspection, it became obvious that the piles of “forever” confetti weren’t authentic – thin piles of confetti were supported by props covered in white fabric to create the illusion that there were large mounds. This installation didn’t just evoke hypocrisy and betrayal but ultimately the impossibility of quantifying “forever”. So even if a bride or groom profess to love each other forever, they have no tangible notion of that concept.

With the artworks Weather I and Weather II, Gerhard Marx also made an attempt at quantifying the immeasurable: clouds. Given they are so amorphous, this is an impossible feat. Of course, Marx was aiming at a representation, but as this semi-sculptural work is fashioned from rulers, it hints at a desire to arrive at a precise measurement.
It was only when you were standing close to the work, displayed in the viewing room of the Goodman Gallery, that you were able to see it was made from hundreds of black rulers layered over each other. From afar, these dark clouds were highly stylised renderings, like a 3D cartoon drawing. Consequently they almost mocked the incalculability of the objects they represented.

The relationship between an object and subject and its representation drives Terry Kurgan’s and Ruth Rosengarten’s Still, Life exhibition at Art On Paper, which consists of hand drawings of photographs (the objects). In other words, these are representations of representations, sort of hyper-mediated products, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at Kurgan’s figurative hand-drawings, which evoke a live model, particularly in the sensitivity of their execution.

Predictably, I kept wondering about the source – not the teenager in Kurgan’s portraits, but the photographs of her. Or, at least, I pondered the insufficiency of photography, which no doubt must have compelled Kurgan to reconstitute and reconfigure the images. Undoubtedly Kurgan’s obvious enjoyment of texture would have been thwarted by the glossy veneer of the photographic image. Kurgan pays as much attention to the surface of the paper as the drawings.

The rabbit glue she uses to prime the surface not only has an impact on the drawing, allowing her to retrace lines, but establishes a soft veneer, like a screen, drawing attention to our observer status. Kurgan further draws attention to the screen by mixing the glue with a pale pink gouache, which appears like condensation. Red oxide and wax is applied to the surface of some drawings, instilling other tones and textural qualities into the artworks. In other words, the work has a distinctively tactile quality, implying a field of sensation and experience beyond photography.

Photography’s fixed nature might have also frustrated Kurgan, or at least encouraged her to translate photographic images in a more tentative realm. The black smudges that bleed from her charcoal lines hint at the numerous alterations that have occurred. Drawing is a tentative medium – particularly the charcoal line which can be erased and redrawn. Consequently, you are always aware that the profile portraits of the teen girl (her daughter Jessie) are provisional and transitional.

Transition is a recurring motif in each of Kurgan’s portraits. Though they are untitled, subtitles which appear in parenthesis evoke a series of consecutive actions, from “waiting” to “floating” or from “holds” to “spreads”.
These actions refer both to the fluctuations in the art-making process as well as the physical and emotional states of the sitter. In the artwork dubbed “spreads”, for example, red oxide extends across the paper, almost completely obscuring the silhouette of the sitter. Undoubtedly, these works summon a game of control. By priming her paper with rabbit glue, Kurgan has altered the conditions of drawing so that the line isn’t always within her control – or at least she must push harder to make it.

This ensures that she remains self-conscious of the act of drawing and representation.
The application of oxide and wax appears slightly haphazard, engendering the notion that it is accidentally placed and then worked into a drawing, such as in Untitled (red edge), which shows her subject seated on an invisible chair, suggested via a smear of red oxide. But the work isn’t simply about manipulating various tools in the act of representation and allowing for the unexpected, it is about coming to terms with both the subject (the girl) and the object (the photograph). Always pictured in profile, the teenager remains aloof and her position within the work ambiguous; is she just an object of a formal experiment? Is she really present as a subject?

The randomness and impulsiveness that Kurgan’s medium affords her, and her struggle to manipulate it, expresses the frustration of pinning down a fluctuating subject (and an intangible object). Rosengarten’s illustrative renditions of a series of dated family snapshots provide an interesting counterpoint to Turgan’s more contemplative work.
While Kurgan appears to be interested in retrieving lost information or investing photographic images with new information, Rosengarten flattens or divests her source images of data. Her subjects aren’t rooted in any context and her illustrative rendering nullifies the details of their physical appearance. As a result they function as generic family images, a sort of abstract expression of family connections and how snapshots cultivate and even distort those links.

For many, family photographs are often the only tangible record of family heritage. By flattening the kind of information that makes them powerful indexes of history, Rosengarten emphasises their function as substitutions for the real, disconnected as they are from the present – an articulation of loss and absence. Interestingly, a collection of the reverse side of photographs is even more evocative of the past. The stained, yellowed surfaces that are typically marked with handwritten information about the photograph, such as the date, yield a stronger connection. Here Rosengarten draws our attention to the photograph’s object status and how properties beyond the image are rich sources of information.

This series of images returns your focus to Kurgan’s images, which bear the stains of her process. The red oxide smudges or pink gouache washes that bubble like water at the surface don’t simply evoke a self-conscious engagement with art making, but are discreet markers of time. They age her canvas and steep it in a history while she tries to negotiate representing a subject suspended in another time. - published in The Sunday Independent, May 15, 2011

Unit for Measure III: Testing the boundaries between art criticism and production

2011-05-04T23:28:00.000-07:00

What happens when the formal boundary between an art critic and artists is dismantled? Are there new ways of (re)conceiving the relationship between art production and art criticism?

Artists Bronwyn Lace, Vaughn Sadie and myself decided to find out with an experimental project dubbed Unit for Measure III. We took an existing art project, Unit for Measure, which I had already written about. As my written response to the work shaped its second incarnation at the Durban Art Gallery, so it made sense to discover what would occur if I was brought into the process from its inception. I wasn’t simply a co-conceptualiser; I was involved at every stage, even in the making of the work – a rarity for a critic. I was de facto an artist.

It has been a fascinating process, which will not only help me reconceive of new functions for art criticism but will feed into my other side project: the establishment of an arts writers and critics association (read about it here), which I have founded with the express desire to renew the relevance of criticism and push the boundaries between artmaking and criticism.

The results of this experiment will be on show this coming Monday at the FADA Gallery at the University of Johannesburg as part of the Collaborations/Articulations group exhibition, curated by Brenden Gray.

It is a three-part artwork, which consists of visual, aural and textual elements. Unit for Measure III is the result of a dialogue between us three collaborators in an effort to not only discover the interrelationship between texts and images but to steer an existing collaborative project centred on spatial dynamics, dubbed Unit for Measure, into new territory.

With a focus on the lasting residue of artworks, we present a trace of an art object. Thus the artwork per se is removed from the gallery and the residue or trace of its physical existence becomes the focus of the artwork, echoing the function and privileging of text and research in art historical discourses.

Unit for Measure III will show at the FADA Gallery, Bunting Road Campus, Auckland Park, the University of Johannesburg until May 24.

I will reflect further on the process and result of this experimental project at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown on July 4th at a panel discussion at Think!Fest entitled From Criticism, to Critique to Criticality: Developing Performatory and Participatory Forms of Criticism. Sean O’Toole and Leon de Kok will be joining me for that discussion.

Playing dress-up: Tracey Rose's Waiting for God at JAG

2011-04-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

A collection of wigs, shoes, and garish necklaces beckoned from one side of the room. Strewn across a group of tables, it looked as if visitors were invited to play dress-up. Adjacent to this was a group of low tables where books were on display, so upon first glance it appeared as if a children’s education initiative to shed some light on Tracey Rose’s mid-career retrospective had been established in the gallery. It seemed incongruent; Rose’s art is a bit risqué for children, though I noticed a number of them transfixed by a video work attached to the Lucie’s Fur series (2003/4). They were giggling as Rose dismounted from a small donkey and plodded around a manicured garden like a mechanical soldier. With her face covered in black paint, a large papier-mâché penis hat on her head and a target sign attached to her back and breasts, she appeared like a caricature of an African female, a cartoon character.

This is typical of Rose’s modus operandi: she cannibalises popular cultural products, refashioning them into surrealistic mise-en-scènes that appear irrational and disjointed. The kind of dress-up game that Rose plays is less about preparing for roles in the adult world, as per the children’s version, and more about unlearning those roles, illuminating their constructed nature but also reconstructing them and recasting them in new narratives of her making. Hence on closer inspection the educational display is intended for adults
This approach might sound like a common strategy, given the likes of Athi-Patra Ruga, Lawrence Lemaoana, Mary Sibande, Nandipha Mntambo and more recently Gabrielle Goliath, who have all made a living in the art world by playing dress-up for the camera.

But it was Rose who first appropriated this brand of performance. It is one that evokes Cindy Sherman’s practice – the American artist who many regard as the genesis of this local identity-based art.
In the hands of Rose this kind of critical subversive strategy (or adult dress-up game, if you will) is given quite a different twist. While Sherman mostly inserts herself into real-life roles and scenarios Rose takes on the guise of famous female figures that have been conferred with a mythological status, such as Lucy, the “African Eve” in Lucie’s Fur, or Saartjie Baartman in the Ciao Bella series (2001). Sometimes the characters simply embody a psychological compulsion, a concept or phenomenon, such as the LovemeFuckme (2001) character, a female boxer who beats herself up, articulating a supposedly female predilection for self-destructive relationships.

What really sets her work apart from Sherman’s is the manner in which she weaves all these characters together into surreal tableaux. Such as in the send-up of the Last Supper in the Ciao Bella series, where a host of female characters pictured in a photographic series are assembled in a video artwork that plays on a large LED screen surrounded by a decorative gilded frame. By bringing all these characters into one setting, Rose implies that these archetypal female characters are part of the same inner world, not just a social or cultural realm but a psychic one. So while some characters she plays are the antithesis of each other, such as Regina Coeli, the nun, and Cicciolina, the porn star ex-wife of the artist Jeff Koons, they are able to occupy the same territory.

Rose suggests that women carry all these contradictory multiple female personas within them, thus they are both virgins and whores, childlike, greedy and learned (embodied in the prim school principal character). Obviously, this implies that a struggle for domination will ensue, which it does. Female sexuality thus remains a heavily contested arena in which cancelling out one stereotype seems to simply involve replacing it with another.
As the title of this mid-career retrospective, Waiting for God, wryly implies, Rose has been preoccupied with upturning religious dogma. This is obviously linked to her desire to explore female sexuality. Certainly the binary coupling of the virgin and the whore, which has dominated female sexuality, is derived from the Bible. In order to liberate women from this pervasive script, Rose reaches back to its origin, the story that maps the moment at which men and women become separate entities – the story of Adam and Eve.

Rose names her subversive rewriting of this mythological tale Lucie’s Fur – referring to Lucifer, the devil, and Lucy, the remains of a female hominid discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 that presented challenges to the creation myth. Like the Ciao Bella series, this comprises of a number of photographic pieces and a video artwork. Rose seemed to abandon this sort of practice, choosing rather to create video artworks which exist independently of photographs, as seen with works such as The Cockpit (2008) and San Pedro V – The Hope I Hope (2005).
Those are strong works but they simply aren’t as interesting as the kind of multilayered multimedia works that evoke an interplay between photography and film.

This mode suited Lucie’s Fur for in order to successfully counter the origin myth Rose had to create a new mythical world, with its own cast of characters. Like the “angel”, an androgynous being whose skin is stained with the colours of the rainbow. This non-racial, non-gender being is the antithesis of the stereotypical characters that star in Ciao Bella, thus in this work Rose attempts to configure a utopian model in which female sexuality is ambigious and not subject to prescriptive racial or gender roles. In so doing she takes a swipe at the western art canon too, which is responsible for perpetuating Biblical mythology and fixing female sexuality.

Lucie’s Fur is a fascinating series of works and once you become absorbed in them you easily forget that some are poorly executed (the Fucking Flowers (2004) photograph is a bad reproduction) and clumsily hung. Certainly, Rose’s film products are slicker, particularly The Wailers (2003), which depicts a group of Hasidic Jews playing a game of basketball under water at a location that is meant to operate as the Wailing Wall. So while Rose might assume to rewrite the beginning of humankind and weigh in on other politically contested subject matter, her practice is defined by an underlying sense of playfulness and humour. Her world is one in which everything is open to derision, even her art – a game of dress-up that while flippant, offers fleeting insights into the politicized world of female sexuality. - published in The Sunday Independent, April 10, 2011.

Out of Sight: Jo Ractliffe

2011-03-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

It is as if nature has overwritten history. A concrete grave is cracked and partially obscured by grass and other vegetation, which has penetrated its hard surface. In time this grave will be completely overgrown and its existence will be obscured from sight. The surfaces of buildings have disintegrated and the iconography that once adorned them has faded. Nothing lasts. Not even the traces of a violent war. The natural landscape might exude a sense of permanence but it is constantly shifting, erasing history.

So, superficially, it seems as if Ractliffe’s attempt to document sites along the routes of the border war fought by South Africa in Angola during the 1970s and 1980s is futile. There is nothing left to see. Hence she maps the edges, the boundary where the visible is passing into invisibility. Like the grave stone that is gradually being concealed.

The landscape’s inability to keep a record of the violent and abhorrent events that have taken place on it has preoccupied a number of South African artists. Driving it is a frustrated compulsion to reconcile with a past that cannot be fully accessed. Without visual or physical markers to substantiate and navigate history, the past becomes indiscernible, ambiguous, and slips into the abstract territory of myth. Thus the landscape’s inability to speak evokes a psychological form of erasure and paralysis – until the past has been recovered it cannot be transcended.
In William Kentridge’s animated films such as Felix in Exile (1994), he inserts bright orange lines into his monochromatic palette to draw attention to the places on the landscape where dead bodies once lay. This sense of nature conspiring to erase the past pervades Ractliffe’s exhibition.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that she has aimed her lens at a site of trauma. In the Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (Drive-by Shooting) works the absence of any visual residue of the awful atrocities which were committed at this counter-insurgency unit is glaring. By documenting “the border” Ractliffe once again attempts to confront viewers with the reality of a politically charged site, that is both known and documented but is also paradoxically unknown – most are familiar with what “the border” represented but few are acquainted with its physical appearance.
The images of the place deemed “the border”, that Ractliffe presents to us, do not live up to our expectations. It’s a natural environment that was temporarily inhabited for the purposes of warfare. There are only a few disintegrated physical traces that vaguely hint at what has occurred here.

The soldiers attempted to blend in with the environment to avoid detection so their interventions are subtle: natural materials were employed in makeshift constructions. The contrast between man-made traces and nature is further flattened by Ractliffe’s choice to shoot in black and white, allowing contrasting objects to exist on the same colour plane. The monochrome scheme also nullifies the beauty of the natural environment, which would obviously counter the trauma that occurred here. As with the Vlakplaas photographs, Ractliffe allows her subjective reading to filter into her (re)construction of the site. In this way she demonstrates how the present is read through the lens of the past.

In this context small signs, no matter how insignificant, take on great importance. As such, in On the Road to Cuito Cuanavale IV, a pole with disused tins attached to it is conferred with a level of significance that seems incongruous to its arbitrariness. These items aren’t quite the conduits to another time in the manner of artefacts in museums. Mostly they only substantiate a human presence, thus they amplify the silences left behind.
A menacing air infuses the images. It’s not just the black-andwhite treatment but the angle and treatment of the natural scenery. Trees are photographed at night so that their white bark contrasts against the ink-black sky, engendering an eerie mood. A cornfield with a flaccid scarecrow situated between the dead crop summons a similar tone. The scarecrow’s white frame conjures a ghostly presence, that seems to evade detection.

Though Ractliffe attempts to suppress the inherent beauty of the natural landscape she can’t resist aestheticising it too, particularly in the densely forested areas, where she takes pleasing close-ups. But an underlying motive drives the rendering of these areas. The dense bush, or a heavy mist pictured in other images, frustrates sight, articulating the impenetrable veil that seems to separate the present from the past. Belying these natural vistas is a hidden menace: hundreds of landmines, a concrete trace of the war. That they are hidden and cannot be handled reiterates the theme of inaccessibility. Just as some of the mines will evade detection so too will some of the truths attached to this site remain buried. - published in The Sunday Independent, March 20, 2011

Barking up the wrong tree

2011-03-07T23:09:00.000-08:00

It seems rather extraordinary in this day and age for so much attention to be paid to an artist’s bohemian lifestyle. Not only has the stereotypical expectation that an artist should match his iconoclastic stance on the world with a non-conformist life been shattered but in the wake of the “death of the author”, which has shifted attention to how artworks are shaped by society and received by audiences, rather than the quirky traits of the creator, it seems so outdated to be foregrounding an artist’s social habits as if they are testament to his supposed genius.

Nevertheless, such has been the case with Wayne Barker’s retrospective, which is wryly titled Super Boring. During the opening speeches the emphasis seemed to be on his excessive lifestyle and drinking exploits rather than the nature of his art. This brand of machismo back-slapping, which plays out in the catalogue too, no doubt left some guests feeling as if they had stumbled into some sort of American frat-party.

Andrew Lamprecht, the curator and author of the catalogue, does, however, find a way of embedding Barker’s lifestyle within his art practice. It is implied via various quotes from people in the art world that some of his antics were evidence of his artistic sensibility. That Barker is believed to have embellished and fictionalised many of his life’s experiences is thought to substantiate the manner in which he has utilised his life as art. It is an interesting proposition. But you can’t help feeling, given that his art doesn’t embrace any kind of performative aspect – perhaps barring some appalling photographs of black naked women posing in ethnic dress – that this theory doesn’t quite stand up to his art. In other words, his artworks seem quite distinct from him. He is not present in his work – his life cannot be traced through it.

His supposed non-conformist streak is palpable in his mode of art-making in the sense that he developed an aesthetic that could be described as the confluence of painting and installation, which sees a variety of objects attached to a painted canvas. But perhaps the most interesting facet of his work is that he appears to reject painting, while simultaneously finding himself unable to dispense with it. This is best illustrated by his perpetual urge to “deface” the paintings he creates, or replicas of other paintings by famous South African artists, most notably Pierneef. In the Rock n Roll series, for example, the canvas operates almost as a punching bag as he afflicts it with layers and layers of paint. The effect is such that these kinds of artworks appear like a public entity that has been vandalised by a stream of people over the years, who all enact their own rebellion on it.

In a way this encapsulates the history of art, which occupies a place in the public domain and is subject to additions by each new generation of artists. Given South Africa’s troubled history this recurring|feature also refers to the layers of history. The Pierneef motifs are just visible in a number of works, implying that the imperialist gaze and its concomitant ideology cannot be fully erased: it continues to haunt our society, despite our rejection of it. The angry and random brushstrokes that Barker uses to obscure these historical images are thus evidence of his frustration that this history cannot ever be transcended.

That this idea is enacted in canvas over canvas seems to imply that this condition not only has ramifications for the South African psyche but the artist’s imagination: Barker’s artistic impulses are held prisoner by history.
Barker appears to have also become enslaved by his aesthetic – the arrangement of seemingly incongruent objects on the painted canvas with neon tube writing – which, based on this retrospective, has not altered much in two decades.

This is why the beaded artworks – Golden Girl (2009) – stand out: they chart a break from this mode, though the parallel between the consumption of the naked female form and possession of land is trite and patronising.
The work he created in the mid-1990s is his most satisfying. In particular works such as Blue Label (1995) and Black Label (1995), which are good examples of his irreverence and the manner in which political authorities subtly maintain their dominance through pervasive iconography.There is a sense, particularly with his more recent oeuvre, that his mode of expression has become outdated; his new work feels old. Has he become caught in a time-warp? Perhaps that is every artist’s fate. - published in The Sunday Independent, March 6, 2011.

Jacques Coetzer reflects on the futility of art

2011-02-23T23:03:00.000-08:00

An infectious sense of naive playfulness infuses Jacques Coetzer’s latest exhibition. As the title New Adventures implies, the artist has allowed his fervent sense of curiosity to drive his art-making or escapades, which are inseparable from each other here. For Coetzer, art is about adventure. He perceives it as a zone of endless play in which any idea can be explored, unravelled or upturned. The results of these activities are propelled by a purpose – Coetzer clearly plots out the reasons driving each adventure – while similarly it is implied that they serve no actual function – they do not shift anything. Consequently, his adventures are both significant and futile. This paradoxical notion of art underpins the central work of this exhibition, a video artwork, which contains footage of performances (for want of a better description) that Coetzer enacts in different destinations around the world.

These performances or vignettes are preceded by text and are related to one another only by the fact that they are compelled by the same kind of compulsion: to enact a fantasy of sorts. For all the acts that Coetzer performs are fantasies: dressing up like Elvis and playing on a beach or arranging for a musician to play drums on a concrete island on a busy highway – though they are not quite as whimsical as they appear. Playing music is a recurring action; not only does it allow him to mock the guitar-hero status, but it also introduces another vocabulary, which allows him to summon an abstract and sentimental quality. It also conjures that staple form of popular culture: the music video, which is most typically used to elevate the artist’s status.

Because each scenario reads as quite pathetic and pointless – the man who plays the drums in traffic doesn’t draw attention, the cars pass at the same high pace – this stylised form of expression is subverted or shown to be irrelevant. This is best illustrated via a vignette titled Playing Guitar for Goats, where Coetzer strums his guitar in the company of goats. Obviously goats do not make ideal audience members. Coetzer suggests that the significance of any act is inextricably tied not only to a witness to substantiate it, but also to one’s ability to transform that audience – if only temporarily. This idea is addressed in Long Live the Pacifists and the Activists, where Coetzer plays guitar in different locations around Barcelona – the home of the guitar. Significantly, Barcelona is also the city where Don Quixote’s journey concluded.

A parallel exists between Coetzer and Don Quixote, the central protagonist of Cervantes’s eponymous novel, in that they model themselves on idealised notions of fictional heroes. Coetzer, like Quixote, is a caricature of himself. Their momentous adventures are banal. They do not change or save the world.So in a sense, they are activists doomed to live out a pacifist’s existence.

Coetzer implies that this is the fate of the present-day artist. That while he or she may be able to carve out a place for themselves and tailor-make seemingly monumental activities, ultimately these acts serve no wider purpose. Though on one level Coetzer is, perhaps, disappointed with this condition, he is more resentful of the fact that he has been set up to fail; that such deeply ingrained notions about art and the artist/hero have forced him to strive towards an unattainable goal.

The text that accompanies each performance/vignette is substantial, conferring a narrative quality to the video artwork/film. The text not only contextualises each performance, but also tells the story behind each “adventure”.
What is particularly interesting about these narratives are the paths of associations that they plot; the coincidental ideological connections that bring him to perform each act. They are typically guided by mental and virtual free association – via Google and Wikipedia. And so it is that a whim to pack an Elvis suit to wear in Zanzibar is connected to Nietszche’s line of enquiry in Sprach Zarathustra. In this way, the footage of him on the beach playing the guitar dressed in an Elvis suit is the physical result of a series of virtual actions.
Thus he comments on the role of the internet and the predetermined path of associations that websites such as Wikipedia allow for and how this shapes our worldviews.

This kind of virtual free association also mirrors the artists’ process; how an idea evolves from being a visceral compulsion to a fully formed theory that is rooted in paradigms that have preceded it – such as with Nietszche.
Consequently Coetzer’s process of art-making is made transparent – the text maps the process and the image is the result. That the results are purposively laughable underscores the friction between Coetzer’s childlike curiosity and his acknowledgement of the acts’ pointlessness.

This is an outstanding show that is both humorous and tragic. Though the conclusions that he draws might appear bleak – apropos the futility of art – the novel form of expression he embraces presents new ways of conceiving of the art product. Coetzer’s refreshing approach, engagement with the epistemological impact of the internet and the relationship between text, ideas and imagery make this exhibition an invigorating experience. - published in The Sunday Indepedent, February 24, 2011

Life at a Subterranean Level

2011-02-09T23:03:00.000-08:00

Peculiar things happen in nightclubs. It is in these dark spaces that social boundaries are challenged and temporarily dismantled and where individuals explore and advertise their sexuality. It is perhaps for all of these reasons that photographers gravitate towards them. Certainly photographers find more amenable subjects in these places; or at least the barriers have partially collapsed.

This might explain why within the past three years this exhibition of Billy Monk photographs taken at a club in Cape Town called Les Catacombs in the late 1960s is the third collection of photographs to document a club scene. Liam Lynch recorded the antics of his peers cavorting in trendy nightclubs in A Claude Glass, which showed at the Rooke Gallery in 2008, and last year at the Afronova gallery Musa Nxumalo exhibited photographs of the so-called “alternative kidz” – a young black subculture that embraces alternative rock music. Interestingly, as with Monk, who was a bouncer at Les Catacombs, both of these photographers were “insiders” – part of the scene they chose to document.

Thus there is a sense that these bodies of works are not only motivated by a need to record the fleeting comings and goings of these transient communities they belong to, but they are personally invested in claiming a place within society for these subcultures. It is quite extraordinary really that communities form in nightclubs; perusing Monk’s photographs one is immediately struck by the fact that they are quite dysfunctional spaces. Certainly the environment of Les Catacombs doesn’t at all appear to be conducive to any kind of socialising: the walls are dirty, stained and chipped, the floors are laden with rubbish and disused bottles. Even the sparse furnishings – mostly rudimentary chairs, of the sort you would expect to find in an impoverished public school classroom – are uninviting. These filthy and dilapidated areas of this club recall the backdrops of Roger Ballen’s images of maladjusted whites locked in their own psychological hell.

Undoubtedly the conditions in this club fit in with its name, which refers to subterranean cemeteries or passageways, and certainly there is a sense that the very dysfunctionality of this environment and the one that exists outside is what binds the young people who cavort in Les Catacombs. Of course, these interiors aren’t completely alienating – a faux fountain and plastic screens bearing stereotypical renditions of old-world Italian or European cities adorn some areas. But the artificiality of the decorations aren’t disguised; the fountain looks lopsided and flimsy and the pseudo-Italian cityscapes are badly rendered and the sheen of the plastic interferes with the look of the images. Nevertheless, these visual cues are part of a strategy to situate this environment within the realm of fantasy. Nightclubs are supposed to provide an escape from reality. The fountain and the bare floors all work towards situating this place as an “outside” location, engendering the notion that this is a parallel world, a sort of mini-city within a city. It is a city of the inhabitants’ own making and one where they do not have to conform to social conventions.

The most obvious acts of challenging convention are evidenced in a number of images of women showing their naked breasts. But do these acts constitute liberation? In one of the photos a man is squeezing a woman’s bare breast, consequently it is implied that this act is performed to satisfy the men and is just an exaggerated form of behaviour that takes place outside the club. Most of the women sport the fashions of the 1960s: beehives and thick eyeliner. And while one can tell them apart there is a kind of sameness about them that suggests that even within this setting, few genuinely pursue individuality. Instead they are all chasing some ideal that seems just slightly out of their grasp.

Some of the couplings Monk documents appear inappropriate and clumsy; large women with small men, or a young woman with a much older man. But one is always left with a sense that these couplings are transitory – they clutch each other so closely and with such a sense of urgency that one is left to conclude they are exploiting the moment for all that it can offer before it has passed.

So what had Monk intended with these photographs? Given that he was a bouncer at the club he might have simply taken them with the aim of preserving this fleeting night scene for posterity. It seems unlikely he was making an ethnographic study of the curious vicissitudes of the human condition, though that is precisely what they offer us today. And while these photographs evoke a particular time and place, they also exude a kind of universality; in some ways the subjects are not different to those who appear in Nxumalo’s or Lynch’s images, who also engage in what seems to be a futile effort to be liberated from societal chains. - published in The Sunday Independent, January, 2010

Gimberg Nerf have expired!!

2011-02-02T22:39:00.000-08:00

It seems that Gimberg Nerf have been resurrected simply for the announcement of their demise. I found this in The Star newspaper yesterday. Before any of you surrender to a false sense of grief, though I do believe they would appreciate it, this announcement in The Star does not refer to their physical demise. Physically they have never existed; they are a virtual entity that were endowed with a (virtual) corporeal presence on Facebook recently. So, of course, when they left Facebook, they no longer had a visual sign that referred to their presence, barring their signature, which they do seem to leave on all sorts of peculiar objects.

Who would have thought that they would have turned to an almost outmoded form of communication (the classifieds) to announce their inactivity? I think many artists will take comfort in the notion that inactivity is worth declaring. For those like me who have been following the curious behaviour of this hybrid artistic persona, they will note that once again Gimberg Nerf’s appearance has shifted somewhat. Gimberg Nerf certainly is a slippery chap. The black rimmed glasses – a characteristic that could be ascribed to a number of folk in the art world – are still in place but he has a fresher, younger appearance. This must be Gimberg Nerf’s late summer/autumn 2011 look. I do like it.

Top 10 Cultural Highlights of 2010

2011-01-29T01:12:00.000-08:00

A bit belated nevertheless here it is, in no particular order:

1. Paintings by Nicholas Hlobo at Brodie-Stevenson Gallery:
Hlobo is the country’s rising art star. Since showing solo exhibitions at the prestigious ICA in Boston, Massachusetts, and at the Tate Gallery in London in 2008, he has secured an enviable international profile, which has been further cemented since scooping the Rolex Visual Arts Protégé for 2010/11, which will see Anish Kapoor mentoring him.
But it is not these achievements that garnered him a place on this list: it’s the extraordinary so-called “paintings” - a collection of canvases boasting intricate three-dimensional embroidery - he exhibited in 2010.
In them he upturns the notion of the painted canvas, transforming the traditional western art medium into a sculptural form that straddles the realm of craft.
So far the artist has focused on the exterior embellishments that conceal human forms but, in this remarkable series, he attempts to peel back the surface layers as he explores interiority and the interplay between the two.
This presents an interesting shift for the artist and one that suggests that the fixation with identity that has gripped visual arts production in this country is moving in a new direction.

2. Foreplay, written and directed by Mpumelelo-Paul Grootboom at the Market Theatre:
This was the second run of this play, an adaptation of Arthur Reitzinger’s Der Reigen (The Circle). Grootboom is an uncompromising playwright who is unwilling to pander to commercial concerns or bourgeois sensibilities. In this play he offers uncensored views into the darkest parts of the South African consciousness by probing sexual desire, utilising it |as a metaphor for an insatiable hunger for power and dominance, the two driving forces that have defined our history and have set the conditions for the current political climate.
This idea crystallises in a long, drawn-out rape scene where the perpetrator is a top government official. Though many audience members found the scene unbearable, part of Grootboom’s talent as a theatre-maker is his ability to force audiences to confront the harsh realities of a society that has lost its moral compass.
In Foreplay he softens these truths by infusing humour, music and stylisation in such a way that the pain and horror is aesthetisised, though it remains palatable and haunting.

3. Time of the Berries by Peter Van Heerden and Sello Pesa: the 2010 Dance Umbrella:
Ever interested in dismantling the boundaries between performers and audiences, Van Heerden and Pesa created a performance in which the spaces these two occupy were almost completely blurred.
Not just physically but ideologically too, as they appealed to the audience to engage in a political discussion. They also achieved this by making it unclear when they were performing and when they weren’t.
Though these strategies and objectives are nothing new – particularly within the world of performance art – they exploited these ideas in the creation of a work which aimed to challenge not just the passivity of the |audience but to probe the politics of passivity, particularly in a racially charged environment where acts of violence and abuse continue to play out. They related this idea to the Reitz Four by enacting scenes from this case, where four young white men abused black cleaners at the University of the Free State.

4. Fools Gold by Stephen Hobbs at David Krut:
After decades of producing art, this was Hobbs’s first exhibition since committing to a formal relationship with a commercial dealer. It was expected to constrain his work, particularly given that Hobbs has a penchant for ephemeral work, installations and public performance. Nevertheless, the limitations of the gallery context were the catalyst for a well-conceived show that played with the notion of scale and practical constraints, particularly in the realm of architecture – a sphere of production that Hobbs has been concerned with for some time. Hobbs’s solution to the physical limitations was to present small replicas of larger grand-scale works that could never actually materialise as they involved remodelling famous American skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building. This exhibition was very much centred on translating ideas into objects and the politics and realities that shaped the final products. Ultimately Hobbs implied that the objects he presented were a residue of ideas and that the purest artistic visions could only ever be intangible.

5. Asymptote, choreographed and created by Vincent Truter: the 2010 Dance Umbrella:
This was a truly interdisciplinary affair with the same level of attention paid to the animation, costume, and music all designed to complement a Butoh dance, an avant garde Japanese dance form.
Performed by Frauke (Caroline Lundblad), a Swedish Butoh practitioner, the performance was a multisensory experience which set new standards for dance by demonstrating how contemporary dancers/choreographers can exploit every dimension of performance.
Butoh is a mesmerising form of dance characterised by subtle and nuanced kinetics.
The slow movements and inertness of the postures is almost the antithesis of what we expect of dance.
Nevertheless, the level of stillness and the obvious control required to enact these gestures brought into focus the power of inactivity and the way in which dance can allow for the letting go of the self through increased awareness of the body.
It’s a fascinating form of dance and this presence of it on local stages can only invigorate contemporary practice here, where the focus has been centred on concepts rather than forms.

6. Girl in the Yellow Dress: written by Craig Higginson and directed by Malcolm Purkey – Baxter and Market theatres: This tightly written play revolved on the dynamics between perpetrators/victims, whites/blacks, Africans/Europeans – a staple South African trope. However, Higginson transposed it to a European context so that this theme was posited as a universal one. This impulse very much chimes with shifts in all spheres of the arts where there has been a move away from navel gazing, or at least finding ways in which self-reflection could play out in less obvious ways.
By setting the conflict between an African and a European on European soil, Higginson also creates an objective distance from which South Africans are able to observe the set patterns of relationships.
Ultimately Higginson’s play mapped an encounter between the self and other during a time at which those roles have become totally muddled: who is the self, who is the other?
Higginson suggested that not only do we need to look beyond stereotypes, but that we have to stop being complicit in adopting them in order to meet others expectations.

7. X-Homes, curated by Christopher Gurk and funded by the Goethe Institute at Hillbrow/|Kliptown:
Site-specific performance is nothing new to Joburgers. In particular artists such as Hobbs, Marcus Neustetter and Anthea Moys have created work for sites around the city, which have served as pertinent settings to address issues tied to this divided urban landscape governed by invisible boundaries.
However, what made this particular project unique was the manner in which it used a multi-prong approach to unpacking the politics of no-go areas in the city.
Not only were audiences – which were made up of very small groups – treated to a number of different performances that related to a different aspect of the setting but because the acts played out in the intimate settings of people’s homes, they were able to come to grips with other people’s realities.
Travelling between these homes also offered rich insights into either the township setting (Kliptown) or Hillbrow. The types of performance works were quite diverse too; from musical, to theatrical, to performance art and certainly the boundaries between these disciplines was quite blurred as was the relationship between fact and fiction.
It was an enthralling artistic project that has advanced new possibilities for presenting work.

8. AZA Architecture Biennale 2010:
Though the hefty registration fee kept most of Joburg’s creative intelligentsia away from this conference, this architectural themed biennale was jam-packed with a fascinating array of talks centred mostly on Joburg.
Though most of the speakers were local, luminaries in the architectural fraternity such as the theorist Michael Sorkin contributed to the discussions. Interestingly the debates weren’t centred on unpacking the marvels of grand sophisticated edifices that typically mark the achievements of this discipline but rather the interdisciplinary slant that informed the conference directed attention towards engaging with overlooked architectural and social oddities that form part of Joburg’s diverse urban landscape. Photographers, musicians, artists, art historians and writers participated, all using tools specific to their craft to engage with the politics of urbanisation in a shifting socio-political context.

9. 1910-2010: Pierneef to Gugulective, curated by Riason Naidoo at the Iziko South African National Gallery:
Naidoo had just taken over as director of the gallery, and usurping funds designated for a football-themed exhibition to tie in with the World Cup, he curated a mega-exhibition that charted the narrative of South African art over a century. The idea was to give tourists an overview of not only the history of art in this country but its political history – given that the two are not mutually exclusive. Because the exhibition covered such diverse periods, Naidoo resisted presenting it under the banner of a single theme, choosing rather to allow many different (and sometimes opposing) discrete narratives and tropes to emerge from the positioning of the eclectic range of artworks. Though the exhibition was chronologically arranged Naidoo inserted a few irreverent contemporary works that engaged with history or juxtaposed famous works with works by little-known artists that engendered new readings or broadened the scope of particular periods.

10. THIS IS YOUR WORLD IN WHICH WE GROW, AND WE WILL GROW TO HATE YOU by Michael MacGarry at Brodie-Stevenson Gallery:
This exhibition of work by the Standard Bank Visual Artist for 2010 presented his strongest work to date.
South Africa has a long history of artists engaging with the political conditions of their time but typically they embrace either a didactic stance or probe the more abstract and psychological consequences.
MacGarry is concerned with the mechanics of power, the systems that maintain it. With this show he settled on a visual language that addressed the ideological and economic systems that underpin political machinations.
MacGarry didn’t proffer glib or predictable insights into our political landscape; after engaging in extensive research and taking inspiration from Moeletsi Mbeki’s 2009 book Architects of Poverty: Why Africa’s Capitalism needs Changing, he exposed instances of neo-colonialism, showing how African governments are perpetuating the plunder of natural resources in the manner of their colonial predecessors.
MacGarry didn’t simply illustrate his findings but produced a series of haunting sculptures that evoked the vocabulary of traditional African material culture while hitting at the heart of a contemporary phenomenon.
This was a sophisticated exhibition that boasted some unforgettable visual statements. - published in The Sunday Independent, January 2, 2011.

Déjà vu: Pieter Hugo's precursor

2011-01-10T23:37:00.000-08:00

This might appear like a photograph from Pieter Hugo’s recent exhibition at Brodie/Stevenson called Permanent Error but it is not. It is a photograph taken by Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo from Burkino Faso. For some the most pertinent fact is that Ouedraogo took this photograph and others at, the now famous, Agbogbloshie Market in Accra, Ghana in 2008 – before Hugo. An anonymous commentator on my blog drew my attention to this photograph and others by Ouedraogo, which were nominated for the Prix Pictet photographic award, view the link here.

The anonymous commentator asks whether Hugo had seen this image (and presumably the others) before he had taken his own photographs. I would like to think that he had, as I believe he built on the potential that this photograph promised. I also have an inkling that Ouedraogo wasn’t the first person to photograph this site and the extraordinary phenomenon that exists there: it is such an evocative location that it is easy to imagine that photographers make a pilgrimage to it.

The post of my review of Hugo’s exhibition attracted a number of comments by people who felt compelled to demonstrate his ‘unoriginality’ by listing a number of potential predecessors (who were all deemed more superior). I found this particularly interesting but also a futile activity as every artist has a slew of precursors - even those rare individuals deemed to have set art on a completely new course. I am not defending Hugo’s work – but the principles at stake here. I suppose because photography and its potential within the art realm is only just being explored in this country, there is this expectation of the new – that each photographer/artist is compelled to employ it in a distinctive and original way (albeit that the evolution of photography has already played out elsewhere in the world).

This is a particularly difficult objective for those who straddle the social documentary genre, such as Hugo, as off-beat or shocking social phenomenon attract a particular brand of photographer like flies. When I was a judge for the Bonani Africa Photographic competition last year this actuality came sharply into focus. Of course, there is a distinction between subject-matter and its treatment thereof. In light of this I would argue that Hugo’s series in Ghana is completely different to Ouedraogo’s – even the portrait with the smoke. Hugo is more concerned with the subjects (and portraiture) who inhabit this post-apocalyptic territory, whereas Ouedraogo seems to be giving a broader perspective, encompassing different aspects of this phenomenon and its impact on the landscape: such as the photograph of a bridge over a river of electronic waste.

Because this site evokes quite an obvious discourse centred on unequal power relations between the West and Africa, I suppose the question should be: are Hugo and Ouedraogo saying the same thing? What do you think?

BTW: Just one last little, ironic point: Ouedraogo is so averse to his images being copied in any way that I had to call in an IT expert to help link the above image from his website (he has code in place to ensure that you can’t even do a screengrab) onto this page. I suppose he might be outraged to see Hugo’s series.

Brett Murray's angry retort falls short

2011-01-03T22:14:00.000-08:00

Anger often bypasses reason as it circulates around the mind, gathering energy to force an explosion. Hail to the Thief is just such an explosion. It is not that Brett Murray’s anger is unreasonable: like many South Africans he is enraged by the pervasive level of corruption that has permeated the ruling party. Certainly, it is an inescapable phenomenon of our times. One cannot open a newspaper without being confronted with another story detailing how government or ANC members have exploited their position to line their own pockets. That few individuals are ever held accountable has compounded the sense of outrage that so many justifiably experience.

This perhaps might explain why Murray says the same thing over and over again in this exhibition: he is paralysed by an overwhelming sense of disbelief and powerlessness. An ANC logo is emblazoned with the phrase “For Sale”. “Cash is King” is a slogan that appears below a stylised rendition of Zuma, rendered to resemble a famous poster of Vladmir Lenin, the first leader of the communist Soviet Union. “Join the Tender Party” is the phrase that emblazons a wooden sculpture that is designed to appear like a poster. Like the former artwork Murray draws its language from communist visual and textual rhetoric. In another work Murray borrows the title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, Tender is the Night, except here the word “tender” is repeated over and over.

By repeatedly stating the phenomenon Murray evokes or replicates the habitual nature of the corrupt behaviour that all these morally twisted politicos and their collaborators engage in. Consequently this exhibition is almost as excessive as the behaviour it critiques. Certainly some of the visual forms that Murray uses, such as the oversized gold leaf and aluminium coat of arms that dominate walls around the gallery, suggest that he has assumed a mode of expression that mimics the opulent lifestyles which either drive such widespread corruption among the country’s new elite or is a manifestation of extreme wealth.

Like many, Murray is bitter that the ruling party has forsaken the noble ideologies that defined it during the struggle years. He does this quite obviously by “corrupting” well-known struggle posters, slogans and quotes by struggle heroes. In an artwork aptly titled The Struggle, a quote from Solomon Mhlangu has been altered to read: “Tell my people that I love them and that I will continue to struggle for Chivas Regal, Mercs and kickbacks.”
Naturally, it is the last few words that Murray has added. The manner in which Murray “corrupts” these slogans or quotes mirrors the way the ruling party’s belief system has been supplemented by greed and a desire for status objects. It’s as if they are evoking the same rhetoric as before, just adapting the lexicon to accommodate their current self-interests.

Murray’s other strategy is to show how this new ethos has been institutionalised. He achieves this by presenting coats of arms that embody this crooked mentality. Such as the eponymous work Hail to the Thief, which boasts this phrase. This work implies that this is the mantra of the new elites, who seem to prize unscrupulous acts committed in the name of capitalism. It’s a skewed and absurd ethos. One that Murray suggests is related to the completely incongruent confluence of capitalist and communist ideologies. Such completely divergent paradigms cannot be reconciled. Doing so paves the way for a chaotic ideological stance that can be exploited to justify any behaviour. This idea is quite obviously addressed in the work Hold my Hand, which shows two men united, their fists clasped tightly in the air. Visual cues around them suggest that one is an American and the other a communist.

This is a bold and unambiguous exhibition that many will enjoy if only to have their own sense of moral outrage confirmed. Murray does attempt to provoke his audience, particularly with a work called Grave Turners, where he lists the names of dead struggle heroes, giving them nicknames that suggest that they are implicated by the corrupt actions that their living counterparts are performing. As such Steve Biko is called Steve “kick-back king” Biko. This artwork implies that had Biko lived he too might have gone down this path, but it also directs attention to the fact that the antics of the living, undermine the values Biko died for.

This is not exactly a new idea. And this is the main failing of this exhibition: the observations Murray makes are not new: they have been articulated over and over in the pages of newspapers. That Murray has assumed a form of expression that doesn’t allow for any ambiguity also ensures that this state of affairs is one-dimensionally portrayed. It’s too simplistic: the ruling party and its followers are not an homogenous group.

Without a doubt he is critiquing a social and political phenomenon which appears to be fixated with the superficial characteristics that express status. Nevertheless one can’t help wishing that Murray had dug beneath this façade. Corruption is a real problem and there seem to be few explanations beyond greed to account for it. One would expect an artist to be able to cut through superficial observations, and uncover the dynamics that propel it. This topic demands as much. Murray’s preference for the language of design prevents him from probing beneath the surface. Of course, he doesn’t want to. It’s not just that he is too angry to make sense of it all, but perhaps in so doing he realises these crooked characters might be let off the hook. - published in The Sunday Independent, December 19, 2010

Roger Ballen's 'house of horrors' is a delight for critics

2010-12-12T22:47:00.000-08:00

Roger Ballen’s work really is the gift that keeps on giving. Every time I write about his art I find something new to say. This doesn’t always happen. Of course, his work is engineered to offer multiple readings. The Boarding House series is perhaps the best example of this and, in my opinion, is the strongest body of work he has produced thus far. I have reviewed it at length already. His mini-retrospective at SANG forced me to revisit work I had already seen, even the late sixties work, which was on exhibit at the Rooke Gallery some time ago. Because of this, I didn’t get caught up in any of the details of the work. I looked beyond the identity of his subjects - he does after all silence their presence (an interesting device) quite purposively, which is why I have always been perplexed by the unnecessary attention writers have paid to their status.
The most important subject in Ballen’s work is perhaps himself. I have always been so caught up in the conceptual underpinnings of the work that I have overlooked Ballen. There is a reason that he keeps returning to this dark aesthetic. It is not his subjects that are trapped within these barren, dilapidated spaces but Ballen himself.

Here is my review:

It is tempting to ask Roger Ballen to pinpoint the exact moment or image where his social documentary photography collapsed into conceptual photography that some have termed as constructed, because of its contrived appearance. The titles of the photographs seem to provide a clue: factual titles such as Diamond Digger and Son Standing on Bed, Western Transvaal (1987) should clearly demarcate the documentary work, whereas as abstract titles such as The Chamber of Enigma (2003)|imply that these works hail from Ballen’s extraordinary imagination.

But it simply isn’t as clear-cut as that because the former image bears many of the visual motifs and characteristics that mark Ballen’s abstract photography. Clearly, like most photographers, he consciously created his distinctive aesthetic from the moment he picked up a camera.

Superficially, there is little difference between his early body of work dating back to the 1970s – commonly pegged as his documentary phase – and his more recent ones which include the Boarding House series and the Shadow Chamber series, which are both contained in books bearing those titles. The settings and objects contained within these two discrete bodies of work are always unkempt, dirty, dilapidated and in ruin, creating this sense that he is fixated with the remnants of a culture that once flourished but is now dead.

In Sideview of Hotel, Middleburg (1983), Ballen presents a vacated rundown building. An old Ford car from a bygone era is parked out front. Because it is in mint condition (a rarity for a Ballen photograph) Ballen disrupts the temporality of the image – if it was not for the date in the title, the viewer would have no idea of the year/the decade the photo was taken. This is a key feature of his work and one which challenges one of photography’s supposed unalterable characteristics: fixing events in a specific time and place. Ballen, however, has conceived of a way of circumventing this in both his documentary and abstract work. Consequently the former body inevitably becomes abstract, fictional – other than reality.

Impoverished, white Afrikaners were his predominant subject-matter when the American-born Ballen first began to photograph in South Africa. In Dresie and Casie, Twins, Western Transvaal (1993) he presents two mentally and physically challenged adult male twins. Their ears are extraordinarily large and their heads unusually oblong. One could presume that this defunct society which is indirectly and directly referenced throughout his work is a white-dominated one that enjoyed its apogee during apartheid. The deformed, inbred Afrikaners mark the nadir of this reign of power. These physically repugnant and misshapen beings give expression to the consequences of a closed, insular society.

This capsule-retrospective, however, clearly shows that Ballen’s interest in these distorted human forms and the decrepit interiors they inhabit predated his South African photography. Blow Up Boy, East Malaysia (1976) features an impoverished child sucking air into his chest and thus distorting his upper frame. A dirty wall forms the background. Thus it is clear that Ballen’s fixation for soiled interiors and distorted forms reaches beyond political commentary. These kinds of people, these kinds of places are a conduit for something else. Loss and nostalgia.

It is not a loss of power (political or ideological) or longing for a better age that his distinctive aesthetic maps. His work acknowledges that the memory of a former existence has been lost. So to some extent, his photographs express a longing to retrieve an intangible state of being that no longer has a form – the animals and cute toys are part of a desperate ploy to retrieve lost innocence that was corrupted at its genesis.

It is not just Ballen’s subjects that are held captive by this reality but Ballen himself, who is compelled to revisit and re-enact these scenarios over and over. The impoverished looking subjects and objects in each of these macabre chambers are ciphers for his own longings, betrayals and recriminations. The bedraggled, threadbare teddy bears, the naive childlike doodles on the walls that recall spectral figures that reappear in photograph after photograph engender a recurring nightmare – a childhood horror – that cannot be transcended or made fully tangible.

In Upseedaisy (2008), Ballen presents a row of family photos that have been circled. Simplistic drawings of faces that appear on the wall above act like a mirror of these portraits. They are refracted through a childlike lens. This is a recurring device in many of Ballen’s photographs, where childlike drawings offer powerful animated renditions of the objects in the frame. This seemingly naïve lens carries a kind of agency in the sense that this expression is unfettered by an adult sensibility which has a tendency to conceal and aestheticise experiences/emotions.

But these dark chambers that Ballen keeps returning to are not simply bad childhood’s remembered, the fictional element suggests that these are disremembered spaces. They are vaults within the mind where time, reality and space have collapsed or become distorted. Ballen assumes to present his viewers with documents that substantiate the existence of these intangible spaces where memory and longing intersect while simultaneously holding all the|untruths and malformations that place them beyond our reach. It’s a remarkable visual and intellectual achievement, which is founded on the blurred lines between the real and the fictional. - published in The Sunday Independent, December 5, 2010.

JAG: A 100 year old relic or pertinent art institution?

2010-12-05T22:23:00.000-08:00

In my opinion JAG is neither. To tie in with the 100 year anniversary of JAG’s collection I wrote a feature on the institution in which I reflected on how its origins largely shaped its life span thus far (see below). Though major shifts in the 1980s accredited to Christopher Till’s vision really set this public art institution on a new path, this gallery does not set the trends. Commercial galleries in this country determine what is ‘good’ art, and who the up-and-coming artists should be. With an emphasis on retrospectives, JAG comes to the party after the fact: after an artist has secured a reputation. The Nando’s Project Room did serve as a platform for young artists but the quality of the work wasn’t consistent, little was done to promote the exhibitions. Nando’s have pulled sponsorship so that space no longer exists.

I am not comfortable with commercial galleries leading the art scene – as obviously a commercial agenda informs their choices and many of the gallerists don’t know much about art or even grasp the significance of the work they sell. But the fact is the commercial galleries adapted to shifts in the country much quicker than JAG and more readily promoted local artists – they democratised art. JAG has never really caught up and has since 1994 it’s curators have been preoccupied in reclaiming the history of the black artists that had been previously excluded/ignored. This is valuable work, though sometimes the glorification of these artists has left no room for critical engagement with the work and the narratives around these exhibitions tend to centre on the political aspect of the work or the difficulties in making the art rather than on the work itself.

Antoinette Murdoch is keen to shift the power dynamics between the commercial and public art institutions but during my discussions with her, it seemed she had no clear vision or knew how to re-determine this status quo. Perhaps JAG’s role should be in rewriting history. The City of Joburg is now establishing a new public art space in Sandton near the Gautrain station in that area, according to Steven Sack. It will be a public/private endeavour - most likely this will be the new model for public institutions in this country. The advent of this new gallery is good news – the more public art spaces, the better this will be for artists (and critics) and the discourse on art in this country. But given that the City has been unable to suitably fund and support JAG and Africa Museum, it makes no sense to start up a new space. This new gallery could also perceivably render JAG’s position even more peripheral.

My feature:
Art has a smell. It’s |a subtle aroma, suggests Antoinette Murdoch, the director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), as we stride along a narrow corridor passing large boxes containing artworks. |When we squeeze past the heavy door where the dated works are stored, I twitch my nose hoping to catch a whiff of the scent that the old masterworks might exude. With many dating from the early 18th century, it’s perceivable that they might give off an odour – time always leaves a trace.

It seems incongruent that all these valuable artworks – which include Irma Sterns, the Dutch Masters and a priceless selection of African headrests – have been consigned to the least noteworthy room at JAG. It’s a cold, barren basement and the noisy reverberation of an air conditioning system in the corner suggests that it is the engine room of this rather imposing ship that has been moored next to Joubert Park for nearly a century. Certainly its grand neoclassical exterior and allusions to high culture now seem out of place in its inner-city setting where bargain goods are displayed on cardboard boxes along the pavement.

Inside the gallery you can’t hear taxis hooting or the distorted music that plays out of the inexpensive speakers at the entrances of shops. The first painting I encounter in the historical vault is John Millais’s Fringe of the Moor (1874). It presents a tranquil rural British idyll. It looks naked without the external armour that a gallery interior engenders. It is propped up against a wall, waiting to be restored. A hundred years ago, when the British curator Hugh Lane bought this work for JAG – or the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art as it was known then – this painting was thought to epitomise the apotheosis of “modern” (not to be confused with modernist) British art. Thus it would aid in bringing the philistines that colonised early Joburg up to date with culture. Or so thought Florence Phillips, the Joburg socialite and philanthropist who first conceived of an art gallery for Joburg.

It is among faded documents, old photos and books that boast Phillips’s curlicue scrawl inside that I trace the history of this public institution and the personality who established it. The institution’s genesis is inseparable from Phillips, who is described by one writer as “opinionated, arrogant and self-important”. These might have been just the right characteristics to get an art institution off the ground, but they also seemed to have had a negative impact on the institution’s relevance and standing.

Some South African Recollections (1899), a book containing Phillips’s musings on life in Joburg, is proof not only of her sense of importance but also, regrettably, her prejudiced outlook. A chapter on “Kaffir miners” is cringeworthy reading – though it gives one a view into Joburg of yesteryear. It also explains the rather contradictory ideas driving the gallery: though Phillips wanted it to play a role in “nation building” – this phrase was not just exclusive to the post-apartheid era – her focus was on collecting and displaying almost exclusively European art, with an emphasis on British, French and Dutch expression. Undoubtedly her emphasis was in unifying a segmented white population largely consisting of French, British and Dutch origins, but it is telling that, aside from a few Anton van Wouw bronzes, no South African schools of painting were included.

Above: Some of the international 'contemporary' works that were bought during the 1960s. Here on display during Kellner's last curated exhibition at JAG entitled The Dematerialisation of the Object

This would have far-reaching consequences for the gallery, which remained locked within a Eurocentric curatorial approach for decades. Even in 1966, when Nel Erasmus became director, a focused policy to collect international artworks was initiated, according to Jillian Carmen, formerly a curator at the gallery and the author of Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Phillips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2006). This scheme paved the way for the purchase of sculptures by Henry Moore and a Picasso drawing of a harlequin, which Carmen suggests “caused a huge controversy and was the best public relations exercise the gallery could have hoped for”.
Phillips and Lane believed the Eurocentric collection would have educational value that would extend beyond encouraging young artists to mimic European art. And in fairness, there might have been some truth to this notion. Even Clive Kellner, who embraced a distinctly pan-African curatorial outlook when he took over the gallery in 2004, declared that it “is a very valuable experience for a schoolchild to come here and see a Warhol or an Impressionist painting in their own country, as it is to see a William Kentridge”. During his stewardship of the gallery, a Rembrandt van Rijn exhibition featured. So perhaps it should always have been about striking a balance between local and international art.

Phillips wasn’t sensitive to that balance and her dogmatic reverence for European art might have contributed to an inferiority complex that has characterised how local artists once perceived themselves in relation to those in the Western metropoles, and the public’s continued preference for European art – the Picasso in Africa exhibition at the Standard Bank gallery and Iziko South African National Gallery in 2006 drew record numbers of viewers. For many this was the first time they had visited a public gallery.

The origin and history of JAG is inextricably linked to South Africa’s connection to the Empire. Philips sought the ultimate seal of approval by securing the Duke and Duchess of Connaught for the opening of the collection at the Transvaal University College – the collection was assembled and celebrated before the Edwin Lutyens building had been completed. A black-and-white photograph of the opening shows crowds outside the college jostling to catch a glimpse of the royal pair. The art was almost a secondary attraction. Phillips had ambitions to entice the king and queen of England to attend the opening of the gallery itself after 1915 – but this was a fantasy tied to her illusions of grandeur.

The gallery wasn’t just engineered to foster cultural connections with Britain and Europe but rather, interestingly, was designed to shift perceptions of Joburg as a locus of crass materialism. In a preface to the 1910 catalogue, Lane opines that an art gallery would forever remove “the stigma that its (Joburg’s) citizens are concerned with naught else than the amassing of fortunes”. Given that Joburg remains a magnet for fortune seekers, one has to wonder whether Phillips’s gallery had much impact in this respect and whether in fact an art institution can cause a shift in society or the way it is perceived.

Over the past 100 years Europe’s cultural hold has loosened as white domination has been overturned. Thus, much of the debate around JAG, particularly since the early 1980s, has centred on whether it has evolved to serve a racially diverse public. Certainly black artists struggled to gain a foothold in this institution.
“Black artists were virtually ignored, with the exception of Gerard Sekoto, who had one Western-style painting acquired in 1940, the only item by a black artist held by JAG during those first 50 years,” says Carmen.
Christopher Till, who was appointed as the director in 1983 was appalled by this – he had just guided Zimbabwe’s national gallery through a transitional period and was sensitve to exclusionary policies.
“People didn’t even know that black artists existed, they hadn’t been acknowledged whatsoever,”he recalls. Till set out to change this culture with the landmark exhibition The Neglected Tradition, which was eventually curated by Steven Sack in 1988. The show aimed to reclaim the history of black artists working in the Western tradition. Till was also adamant about collecting traditional South African art. This was a complete about-turn for the gallery.
As Carmen observes, the traditional collection “contests the very criteria that Lane used to select items for JAG’s foundation collection: the aesthetic judgement that conformed to the grand narrative of Western art history in deciding what is good art, and what is not”.

Of course, this was not an unproblematic shift. Some detractors such as art historian Patricia Davison were critical of the fact that the self-same authority that rejected these objects still held the power to reinvest them with meanings that continued to be framed by Western taste.

Phillips’s legacy was finally reversed when, in 1994, JAG issued a policy document that terminated the acquisition of international art and cemented a commitment to consolidate South African collections: both so-called traditional items and contemporary works. The emphasis on local art was also determined by the fact that the gallery’s acquisitions budget was too small to purchase international art, suggests Till. Though during his tenure he promoted local art he believes “that it is important for South Africans to have a tactile introduction to international art.”

The policy shift may have benefited local artists but it didn’t necessarily translate into the gallery attracting hordes of punters. The degeneration of Joburg’s inner city, which, ironically, began to take hold as the gallery was transforming in the late 1980s, is largely attributed to the public’s reticence to visit. And while a few directors have asserted that their focus isn’t on white suburbanites with an overdeveloped paranoia about the inner city, they have also battled to draw crowds from the environs – despite all kinds of initiatives over the years.
Its current head, Murdoch, |attributes this to ignorance.
“A lot of people around here think the gallery is a police station because they see so many metro cop cars parked here,” she says. Murdoch had appealed to the metro cops to park their vehicles in the gallery’s parking lot to ensure that the traffic along the taxi ranks ran smoothly and to create the impression that the gallery was a “safe place”. Thus, in trying to appease the fears of one audience, she might have alienated another.

Meanwhile, Murdoch is trying to woo suburbanites back to the gallery by showing off some of its most prized works in small exhibitions in suburban locations. A month ago JAG presented an exhibition titled National Treasures at Villa Arcadia in Parktown. Next year JAG will show off some of its Impressionist works at the Circa Gallery in Rosebank.
“We are trying to market the gallery to the lost audience… assuring them that it isn’t any more unsafe to come to the inner city than the northern suburbs – it’s an ongoing battle.”
Visiting museums on weekends is not part of South African culture – both black and white, she proposes.
As I step out of the world Phillips created and into a bustling African city, it seems apparent that Phillips’s colonial creation is at odds with this world. But renegotiating our relationship to the colonial past is also a characteristic of life on the continent. The gallery may appear like an island but the shifts that have taken place in the last 100 years are proof that it hasn’t existed in a vacuum. - published in The Sunday Independent, 28 November, 2010

Between Chaos and Order: Marcus Neustetter at AOP

2010-12-01T22:43:00.000-08:00

Marcus Neustetter is an explorer. Not quite in the old-fashioned maritime sense, which saw men setting sail to discover and map unknown lands, but in the sense that he is fixated with mapping territory and the chasm between experience and objective reality. This obsession has seen him attempt to map the familiar (Joburg), the foreign (Banff, Canada), the historical (Vela Spila, Croatia), and the intangible (the Northern Lights).

Unlike the explorers of yesteryear, Neustetter isn’t interested in trying to accurately chart the places he visits.
When he began this artistic adventure over four years ago, he looked to technology, specifically Google earth maps, in an attempt to identify an objective rendering of space. When he juxtaposed these digital readings with photographs of places, it was clear the maps were out of sync with the realities on the ground. This led him to develop a novel form of map-making that could be best described as detached abstraction. Here is how it works; Neustetter makes marks on paper that relate to a space, without describing its physical characteristics. In fact he pays no attention to the drawing he makes – hence they are cluttered with random forms, mostly lines.

They are drawings but also maps – more like deconstructed maps where the lines have been pulled apart, atomised and randomly placed on the page in a chaotic manner. These map-drawings follow no logic and are meaningless as they are meaningful, for they do chart something significant: Neustetter’s experience of being in a space. He never views his drawings until they are complete. He does this by drawing in a book with the cover closed. In this way he maintains the supposed objectivity that is meant to define map making. It also ensures that he is not distracted from the experience of travelling through a particular space. Consequently Neustetter is an explorer interested in the sensory act of exploring.

In this exhibition, this approach and his mark making has developed considerably. The pages are larger and the marks more confident and varied. He now also allows the motion of travelling through various destinations – Banff, Bergen, New York and Dakar – to determine the mark making. In this way the delicate and fragile lines are a direct result of movement, of the friction between Neustetter moving through the space. This slant to his project seems logical given that we never remain stationary in a space even if we inhabit it, consequently our experience of it is constantly being renegotiated. The style of the mark making – for there is a style even though it is random – is such that the short lines overlap each other, creating a sense that movement is never linear and that in attempting to reconcile ourselves with a space or place involves retracing or circling the space.

Because the lines tend to converge in a central space – the limited dimensions of the paper contribute to this – there is also a sense that the experience of a journey, a space is like a tangled web that can never be fully understood. Neustetter submits himself to this notion quite fully. For him the process isn’t engineered to understand the nature of a place but to somehow tune into the essence that lies beneath physical appearances. For this reason the places that he maps are unrecognisable. The architectural characteristics that define New York and distinguish it from Dakar have been obviated because Neustetter’s exploration delves beneath this superficial layer.

His drawings/maps parade an organic sensibility; thus there is almost a sense that there is a logic to the randomness of the drawings. Some appear like dark crevices, others like soft short grasses or intricate spiders webs. There is a kind of poetry to them and to Neustetter’s mode of working, where he is both removed from the expression and wholeheartedly present.

Though the digital light drawings don’t possess these qualities, they echo the low-tech drawing mode in the sense that Neustetter accedes control to a software programme, which plots out digital maps that chart the placement of live subjects. Because this measurement tool is light sensitive, its path is determined by light.Neustetter moves torches around his subject’s bodies, forcing the programme to plot the spaces between them.The results are semi-figurative drawings that exude a cold, detached hand at work.

His reliance on the sensory experience of reality makes him the ultimate empiricist. However, the manner in which he surrenders to the irrational, the unseen, the chaotic and the unknowable defies this. That his practice moves between these two approaches is what makes it so interesting. - published in The Sunday Independent, November 21, 2010

Is Pieter Hugo's work maturing?

2010-11-21T22:49:00.000-08:00

It’s like the tide of a highly polluted sea has fallen back, leaving behind the detritus of a defunct technological civilisation. The empty shells of computer monitors are positioned face-down and like entwined threads of seaweed are piles of tangled webs of wire cabling. The assortment of broken, chipped and weather-beaten motherboards and hard drives that are strewn haphazardly around the landscape look like they have been damaged by a violent sea that has pounded them against rocks. A broken keyboard lies half-buried in the soil, like the skeleton of a dead fish. The people who wander along this uninhabitable locale wear dirty, threadbare clothing. They are like victims of a shipwreck who, deposited on some foreign land, must learn to adapt if they are to |survive.

This scenario might be the stuff of a sci-fi maritime fictional yarn but it is real: it is the Agbogbloshie Market in Accra, Ghana, where tons of the West’s digital waste is dumped each year in an effort to bridge the digital divide between the First and Third Worlds. The community that scrounges for a living off this dump site burns these disused objects to extract copper – a process that pollutes and destroys the natural environment. Thus, in quite an obvious way, Hugo’s series of photographs of the Agbogbloshie Market demonstrates not just the skewed relations between the West and Africa but the duplicity of Western benevolence.

Based on this series it seems as if First and Third World societies are distinguished by their technological advancement. However, Hugo also undercuts this notion by presenting a photograph of a man listening to music on a digital device. Consequently it is implied that the folk who mine this digital dumpsite are also consumers of digital products. Livestock wander across the market, implying that this is some sort of agrarian rural community, but in the background is a high density urban setting. In this way the urban and the rural, technological advancement and poverty all sit side by side, expressing the hybrid nature of African societies. The urban backdrop also ensures that the otherworldliness of the market, which infused with smoke and fire engenders allusions to a post-apocalyptical setting, isn’t completely located within the realm of the metaphorical.

For there is a kind of poeticism inherent in these photographs. This seems an incongruent observation given the subject matter. However, the scale of Hugo’s portraits and the drama inherent in the setting creates an immersive experience for viewers. The inert and contrived poses his subjects strike also work at ensuring that these scenes operate outside of the reality. All of this allows this series to vacillate between the real and the metaphorical.
The subjects of Hugo’s study appear like abject victims of a cruel and unequal world. This smoke-filled setting could easily be a modern rendition of Dante’s inferno. Nevertheless his subjects seem to be able to claim a degree of agency; though they are lumbered with disused goods that have no immediate use, they have found ways of extracting the “natural wealth” they contain. They are like miners: digging past the plastic exteriors of objects in search of the precious items hidden within. Though the process is harmful to the environment, and possibly their health, the point is that they have found ways to exploit the situation.

Adaptation is an underlying theme in this series and is most succinctly expressed through a photograph of a man sleeping on the edge of a hard, low wall. This man has found a way to condition himself to survive. This is both inspiring and tragic.

Undoubtedly this series is one of the strongest bodies of work that Hugo has produced, and it is classic Hugo in the sense that he foregrounds the otherness of his African subjects and settings – a fact that has never made him a firm favourite with the local arts intelligentsia. It is widely thought that it is this characteristic that has made his work popular with international buyers, who favour stereotypical representations of the continent. This series may present images that conform to that stereotype but the pointed remarks it makes about the West do complicate that view. Though this does suggest that the West continues to shape conditions in Africa, which is disempowering for Africans, there is a certain irony in European buyers purchasing art which documents the consequences of their activities.

Musa Nxumalo and 'Generation Disappointment"

2010-11-09T22:21:00.000-08:00

The young photographer Musa Nxumalo (pictured above in a recent self portrait) scooped an ACT Award last week for Visuals Arts. About a month ago I happened to interview him in connection with a story I was writing about the youth – the titular Generation Disappointment. What was most interesting about my encounter with Nxumalo was that I discovered that this young photographer had with his Alternative Kidz series taken the notion of the ‘constructed’ photograph to a new level in the sense that he had played a primary role in creating the social subculture that he would photograph. Thus he wasn’t simply a participant in the alternative Rock scene in Soweto but he had actually had a hand in creating that scene. From his photographs one would not be mistaken for thinking that the subculture which he documents is a growing one, however, it is incredibly small: in fact so limited and fleeting that it is only really given life through Nxumalo’s photographs.

Nxumalo was inspired by documentaries which mapped the rise of rave culture in Manchester. He yearned to be part of a similar youth movement. When he looked around there was nothing like it that he could latch onto so he created a movement with the idea that he could document it at some later stage. In other words he conceived of a society for the purposes of documenting it. In this way Nxumalo’s construction of his photographs extends far beyond the moment he stood behind the camera lens.

In my feature story below,which was published in The Sunday Independent a few weeks back, my interest was in contextualising Nxumalo’s work within the broader sociopolitical context:

With dreads and a tattoo, Thato Woody Khumalo looks a bit out of place in the non-descript rural setting. He seems completely unaware of Musa Nxumalo’s penetrative camera lens as he gazes deeply into a pool of water in front of him. It is not a narcissistic compulsion which has him contemplating his reflection in the water but rather an enquiring stare that one imagines is compelled by the brand of confusion that grips twentysomethings attempting to come to terms with themselves and their place in the world. The barren rural setting succinctly articulates the sense of alienation that Khumalo and his band of punk-rockers experience in Joburg, in Soweto, where they are outsiders.

Nxumalo’s image of Khumalo could function as a poster for this new supposed Generation Disappointment. His contemplative stare could be read as a despondent gaze. Nevertheless his dress, demeanour and the setting suggest that Khumalo is not part of this group of young people pegged as impatient materialists disappointed by the fact that they have been unable to fast-track their way into cushy well-paid jobs.
Khumalo and the photographer Nxumalo are part of one of the counter-cultural youth movements emerging in this country. It is these rebellious voices that are foregrounding the flaws in our society and driving us towards a new status quo. The youth are like a mirror of our society. So certainly if they are despondent it is not a situation of their own making. It is an expression of the environment that has shaped them.

Like many of his contemporaries, Khumalo carries a unique brand of baggage. As a young black man living in a post-apartheid society there are high expectations of him. Because there are no longer any racially defined laws hindering an upwardly mobile path, he is expected to supersede his parents’ generation, many of whom sacrificed their own youth so that he could freely pursue a bright future. Consequently, it is his moral imperative to succeed. The models of who the Khumalos of this day should be, are an ubiquitous part of South African popular culture. In adverts we see them sucking on fat cigars in between sipping brandy. In soap operas these twentysomethings head up big companies and in glossy magazine spreads featuring young high achievers there is a sense that not only are materialistic gains the true measure of success but that the accumulation of wealth is within the grasp of any young educated person.

The reality is quite different. High unemployment rates among the youth, the growing spread of HIV/Aids in this population group and an education system that is failing to equip young people for the technological age in which we live have all made the dream of wealth and success just beyond reach for most young South Africans.
Generation Disappointment. That is what Dion Chang, head of a trends analysis firm called Flux Trends, terms this population segment. It is a phrase he borrowed from a Time magazine article, which was coined to describe a global youth phenomenon.
It seems that the youth have been the silent victims of the world recession, which has substantially curbed job opportunities for a generation that “had come to expect a life of easy consumerism”. Approximately 81 million young people (aged between 16 and 24) around the world are out of work, according to Chang.

In this way the growing cynicism among South Africa’s youth is not necessarily limited to this country. Nevertheless, the trend here is laden with local inflections. The ubiquity of the so-called “tenderpreneur’ has engendered the notion that wealth accumulation is still within grasp - if you know the right people and are aligned to the right political set.
“The youth think that if they get in with the ANC Youth League they will have access to money,” observes Ian Calvert, managing director at Instant Grass, a leading youth trend-spotting agency. It is perhaps for this reason that Chang’s research found that many “born frees” hankered after jobs in the government.
“This has never been a sexy option for young people. But this generation has learnt that this is the fast track to success,” he observes.
Ironically, in this context, newspaper articles engineered to expose the excessive lifestyles of government employees and politicians only serve to promote models of aspiration for the youth. Chang suggests this culture has created largely unattainable expectations for the youth, who expect to have achieved all their material dreams in their 20s. But it has had much more far-reaching consequences for those youngsters who have opted to take the “slow road” to success by studying and working their way up the corporate ladder. Like Didintle Pilane, a 22-year-old marketing graduate who moved to Joburg to study and find suitable employment. She has been job-hunting for almost a year. It has not been easy, particularly when she has seen other young people get ahead because of who they knew.
“The opportunities here are limited. As much as young people are encouraged to go to school and study, most of the people who have proper jobs right now didn’t even study,” she says.
Thulaganya Pholose, a 21-year-old studying towards a sports management diploma at the University of Johannesburg, has had similar experiences.
“I have seen a girl, who quit university but is now living in a nice home with a nice car. It is all because she had the right connections,” says Pholose.
Zanele Malevu, a 23-year-old industrial design student, who will qualify at the end of this year, doesn’t hold much hope for her future. Living in a country with such a limited manufacturing industry means that there are few jobs available in her field.
“It is hard for me to imagine where I will be in five years. I will probably be waitressing,” she says.
“I know this guy who finished his marketing degree four years ago. He is still working (in a lowly position) at Clicks,” says Pilane, who opted to study marketing because she believed it would increase her employability.

Pilane, Malevu and Pholose’s parents sent them to university in the belief that education equalled financial success. Immediate success. But the limited number of jobs available to young people has meant that education is no longer a guarantee.
“Our parents think that when we complete our studies we will get a nice job and a nice car. But it isn’t going to be like that. We are not even sure if we are going to get a job that will help us survive,” says Pholose. Within this context the phrase “generation disappointment” might also apply to the parents of these disillusioned youths, whose expectations seem to exceed reality. Parents ambitions for their children are driven by pragmatism. They have made financial sacrifices for their children and need to see a return on their investment – they can’t battle on for much longer. Malevu is under pressure to generate an income for her family when she qualifies.
“My mother thinks that I will get a job when I finish my studies. I must have one. She has already given me responsibilities. She has been paying for me for my whole life and I am grateful for that but it puts so much pressure on me,” she explains.
If Malevu and her contemporaries don’t land well-paying jobs, their parents and their communities will perceive them as failures and it will appear as if the money spent on their education was wasted.
Pholoso and Pilane’s parents laid out a considerable sum to allow for their daughters to move to Joburg and study. To return to Rustenberg without any money or prospects will be a source of great embarrassment.
“If we go back home and are sitting in the same position as the rest of the young people in our community who didn’t go to varsity, and we are living the same life, then it will seem like our parents wasted their money.”
Though Pilane suggests that there is tough competition for internships, Chang suggests that young people simply aren’t interested in entry-level jobs.
“There is a job complex feeling among young people. We have a young generation who thought it was their birthright to have designer jeans, an iPod and gadgets on tap.”
Reality TV shows that document and create overnight success stories, young rich celebrity culture and technology that is geared towards achieving immediate results have engendered a generation that demands instant gratification, believes Chang.
“The consensus is that you should have made it by 30 – the house and smart car. This is why there is a resistance to entry-level jobs.”
Pholose and her contemporaries don’t appear to yearn for excessive wealth, just the basics – such as a car that will help them get a job in their field of specialisation.
In fact they find it hard to believe that they will ever have a house of their own.
“I want it so much but I see it as an impossibility,” says Malevu.

Other young people are rebelling against this entrenched notion that material wealth is a marker of success. This has become particularly apparent in the counter-cultural groups such as the Smarteez and the one that Nxumalo has spearheaded and documents in his photography. The Smarteez have mostly disbanded but in late 2007 a group of youngsters emerged on the fringes of Soweto who defined themselves via ensembles in primary colours that evoked the shades of Smarties.

The Smarteez embraced an “anti-label” aesthetic; they eschewed designer label clothing, preferring to wear second-hand and/or inexpensive clothing that had been altered and dyed to suit their edgy look. Combined with spiky hairdos and tight jeans, the Smarteez look evoked a distinctly punk sensibility. The “Smarteez” designation makes a wry reference to intellectual acuity. Thus some of the key characteristics of Smarteez attire, which include oversized glasses and bowties one would expect an old-fashioned professor to wear. These accoutrements were engineered to parody the bookish persona. The look implied that scholarly achievements or lack thereof were superficial markers of achievement. This seems to tie in with Chang’s assertion that young South Africans are more attuned to the outward manifestations of success.

Nxumalo and his crew similarly eschew the hyper-capitalist thrust that seems to be driving our society. While the Smarteez used dress as a platform to enact their rebellion, Nxumalo and his friends have, like many youth movements before them, used music to assert their identity and rebel against the status quo. Rejecting hip hop and kwaito, the predominant music styles in the township, is a core feature of this rebellion. As Nxumalo explains, these music styles and the iconography associated with them valourise material wealth and encourage young men to parade tough, impenetrable façades. Nxumalo suggests that the male persona was bolstered by and tied to flashy products.
“With hip hop it is all about saying, ‘look at me I am better than you’. I think rock music gave me the ability to say if I was sad and that would be okay.”
Nxumalo therefore turned his attention to rock music and alternative electronic rock. This kind of music was once the preserve of disgruntled white kids. Embracing this music style allowed him to break out of a preconceived mould. He was looking for an alternative value system that wasn’t determined by the kind of car you drove.
“If you are from eKasi (the township) you must dress and be a certain way. If you wear tight skinny jeans people think you must be gay. The way I chose to rebel against all these things is through the arts and music.”

Nxumalo quickly attached himself to like-minded youngsters and become a proponent of a small counter-cultural movement in the township, which has produced bands like Rebirth and Organised Distortion. This sub-culture, which Nxumalo has been driving since he finished matric in 2005, is relatively small. It has no name or fixed identity; though Nxumalo identifies with a group of people who enjoy rock music he does not like to think of himself as being part of a scene. At the same time, of course, he is part of one and through his photography he has found a way of concretising it.
By photographing images of his friends at parties, gigs and on the road, he validates this lifestyle and proffers a new truth. His photographs mostly present banal scenes of young people. Slightly inebriated and mesmerised by music, they look like they are living lives without purpose. The interiors they inhabit are ordinary – appropriately ordinary, given that his subjects are in their late teens or early 20s. There are no new leather sofas or flat-screen TV sets in sight. These images are the antithesis of the affluent lifestyles the youth are supposed to be living as promulgated by the media.
Nxumalo was tired of having to feel he needed to live up to that ideal.
“As a 24-year-old black man living in South Africa I am supposed to look and be a certain way. At home they look at that guy who gets paid well and has a top job and they compare me with him. Those aren’t my ambitions. I am looking for something else.”

Nxumalo blames the media for creating mostly unachievable models. “If you watch TV and see the programmes, especially the soapies like Generations, and see how they portray a 24-year-old, they show how black people are supposed to live. We are boxed (in by this image). Your parents want to push you to be like that. If you do things differently they don’t want to open their hearts to that and you don’t get the support that you should be getting (to pursue a career that isn’t well-paid.)”
The youth have been “pushed around” by the media and the government, says Nxumalo, implying that they have been expected to live by value systems that they have not determined for themselves.
“The majority of us don’t see it – especially the ones who aren’t educated.”
By displaying photographs of youths living a lifestyle of their own making, Nxumalo is attempting to the wrest back control from the media. His photographs suggest it is okay for young people to just be young. They don’t need fancy suits or a car. It’s okay for them to be irresponsible and to have fun. After all isn’t that what young people are supposed to be?

Mostly it is advertisers and commercial enterprises wishing to cash in on this burgeoning group who want to get a handle on this segment of our population. Hence there is such heightened interest in their mindset. The “generation disappointment” label may be giving expression to the sentiments this group experiences but it is yet another imposed paradigm which dictates what it is to be young. As Gerard Boyce asserts in his essay Youth Voices in South Africa: Echoes in the Age of Hope (2010), it has been popular to characterise the youth as a generation of crisis.
“According to this view the youth are characterised by problems that need to be ‘fixed’ somehow,” asserts Boyce. During his analysis of 2005 attitude surveys he concluded that not only were older people between the ages of 25 and 35 more despondent than the younger generation but that there were not enough differences in attitudes between the older and younger generation to warrant making distinctions between them.

A naïve sense of optimism has been one of the youth’s universal characteristics. Calvert seems to believe that there is truth to this long-held notion.
“They believe that their world is their oyster. Even if they get a wake-up call they haven’t given up hope. They just move on to plan B. They are very resilient. They think that they are always a couple of steps away from being famous. For many of them it is not a case of if they will be famous, but when.”
Malevu and her contemporaries might be determined and ambitious but one can’t help noticing that the flicker of youthful optimism one usually notes in young people is quite absent.
“These days if you have a dream you must keep it in your pocket. Because it is likely you will never get there. When I walk out of the university after my last exam the world will be open to me. But it’s a gamble. Will I win or will I lose? Will I end up an alcoholic? I make the choices but at the end of the day things around me will push me to make those choices,” says Malevu.

What happens when the 'pioneers' set up artistic enclaves?

2010-11-04T05:45:00.000-07:00

Within the next couple of days Joburg’s trendy art clique will be descending on Braamfontein, which is fast becoming the city’s new cultural centre. Brodie/Stevenson will open their doors tonight with a Pieter Hugo exhibition and on the weekend a cluster of new ‘curated’ designer shops will also start trading. This is not a replica of the Arts on Main development but it is competition. Adam Levy, the young property developer who has been driving this new hub, has tried to distinguish this development from Arts on Main by proposing that it is all geared towards fostering interaction with the environment. Nevertheless, as you will note in my feature on the suburb below, which I wrote for the Sunday Indy about a month ago, Levy has gone to quite extraordinary lengths to ensure his artistic enclave is populated by the selfsame people you would find at 44 Stanley or Parkhurst. He is openly resentful of the existing population in the suburb who are predominantly students – as he believes this will detract from the suburb’s upward mobility. Of course, I am excited about the emergence of this new artistic centre and appreciate the sentiment that is driving it but I think that in the arts community we really need to understand the ideas that frame these kinds of developments and be honest about their exclusionary nature. I find it troubling that the predominantly white people who settle in Joburg’s supposedly urban wilderness are cast as pioneers, particularly when they try to conjure the suburban worlds that they have supposedly eschewed. Thus this move into the city is not really about embracing what the city is but transforming it into what is thought to be more desirable. This is not necessarily a negative compulsion; this is how cities are regenerated. My concern is that we are never honest about our motives. Here is what I wrote:

HOW YOU perceive the world often depends on the vantage point you are viewing it from. From Randlords, a new rooftop bar in Braamfontein, I can’t perceive the everyday details on the ground. My gaze is concentrated on Joburg’s inner-city skyline, across from the Mandela Bridge. Sometimes it can be liberating not to be immersed in the details. It frees you up to absorb the bigger picture. Randlords is only 22 storeys up so it is not quite in the clouds but Joburg’s inner city appears like any in the world. It looks functional, pristine and desirable. It might not be all these things yet but from the rooftop of Randlords I can’t help believing that this could all be possible.

Of course, it’s easy to conceive of the rich possibilities that this city offers when you are ensconced in a sophisticated bar that is reached via its own private lift, has a rooftop lounge with glass balustrades, designer toilets and Afrochic tables embellished with beads from around the continent. But the fact that this is the most-talked-about bar in town – with everyone claiming to have visited it and having paid the R250 entrance fee for the pleasure – is surely a sign that middle-class suburbanites are reconsidering their relationship to the city, or at least to Braamfontein.

Braamfontein is the ideal place for suburbanites to test the waters of city life. It is a transitional area. The railway tracks that separate this compact suburb from the inner city creates a physical distance. Its proximity to suburbia and the profusion of trees and birds imparts a semi-suburban feel. Perhaps this is why this modest urban area is catching the attention of Joburg’s well-heeled – they can enjoy the cool, edgy cachet that is attached to the city without all the drawbacks associated with the inner city’s “deep” interior.
The moneyed classes did show a bit of interest in the city around the time that Urban Ocean tried to tempt them with R4 million penthouse suites with helicopter pads and doormen on hand to help them unload their shopping bags. Those who could afford to buy into the fantasy lifestyle were labelled “pioneers”. But years later many say there was little substance to the dream that Urban Ocean was selling: the buildings have been said to be full of empty shells.

Perhaps it wasn’t that people didn’t buy into the brand of opulent high living they were flogging, but that they didn’t buy into the rest of the city. If you needed a helicopter to avoid an encounter with the environment, was there any point in living in the city? After all, as seductive as the views from rooftops are, at some point you would be compelled to explore life on the ground.

And Braamfontein isn’t too shabby at level zero. The streets are infinitely tidier than those in the inner city and are thus perceived to be much safer – it all comes down to appearances. Braamfontein also went through a slump during the late 80s and early 90s, mirroring the deterioration that took hold in the CBD, but many say this suburb never sank to the same depths of decrepitude. Consequently, it has taken a lot less investment to reinvigorate it. Aside from a number of public art projects, such as the Juta Street Trees Project and Clive van den Berg’s imposing Eland sculpture, largely the city concentrated its efforts on structural upgrading – improving pavements and street lights.

Some locals complain that five years later the city has failed to maintain these improvements and the corners that were cut during their installation are starting to show. Nevertheless most seem to agree that Braamfontein is a much more habitable area. Katy Taplin, the “missus” from the Dokter and Missus furniture brand known for cutting-edge products with a distinct De Stijl sensibility, often strolls around the suburb. In fact she and her business partner, Adriaan Hugo, were so enamoured with the area that they teamed up
with the owners of Whatiftheworld Gallery in Cape Town to open their own gallery-cum-showroom in Juta Street. Called Co Op, the gallery attracts a young, trendy design art clique capable of lending the cool factor to any up-and-coming suburb.

I find Taplin in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She is hard at work in her studio at the back of the gallery.
“We wanted a place that was not totally industrial and not purely retail that we could do both,” she observes. This kind of business model has become attractive to young creatives who want to keep overheads down and be able to offer personalised service, says Taplin.

Since Co Op opened its doors last year, Afronova, an art gallery that deals in contemporary art from the continent, has opened and the Brodie/Stevenson gallery is due to celebrate its new premises with a Pieter Hugo exhibition in October. But that is just the beginning; next door to Co Op, at a development called 70 Juta Street, an advertising agency and architect are operating. And, at the beginning of next month, a group of creatives hailing from the fashion and décor industry will be occupying the colourful, street-fronted shops that open onto Juta and De Beer streets. One shop is to be called Aware; it is dubbed a “curated space”, meaning that the visual and/or conceptual relationship between the fashion, décor and music-related objects for sale will inform the display. In other words, these functional and decorative objects will get the art treatment.

The minimalist furniture pieces that Taplin displays at Co Op are also presented as prized art objects. This presentation approach has been galvanised by a desire to celebrate the uniqueness of these homegrown designer products. This new creative retail hub is also driven by a sort of anti-mall philosophy.
“You aren’t going to find Levis or Guess jeans for sale here,” observes Taplin.
It is no accident that these kinds of new proudly South African retail experiences are clustered together. Adam Levy, the owner of all these properties and others on De Beer Street where designers such as Lisa Jaffe has a studio, has made a concerted effort to attract these kinds of tenants to the little patch of Braamfontein that he has been cultivating for the past seven years. It’s all part of his grand scheme to establish Joburg as “a world-class city” – he thinks the “African” designation which usually is attached to this phrase is self-defeating.

Like most of the folk committed to regenerating the city Levy’s commercial aspirations are framed by a wider social interest.
“Making money is purely incidental to me; it is the making of culture that I am interested in,” he says. For this reason he was prepared for his buildings to sit unoccupied until he had identified the “right” tenants.
“This is about establishing a sense of aspiration, about taking young creative minds and creating things that are world class and that will make other South Africans want to aspire to be as dynamic and unique,” he says. Levy’s ambitious objectives might not be realised but he seems to be succeeding in establishing a new creative and cultural hub that will rival what has been established in Newtown.

Aside from the galleries and designers who Levy has attracted to Braamfontein, he also bought the Alexander Theatre in Siemens Street in 2006. Another victim of the deterioration that permeated the inner city it had been closed for almost 10 years. Following its refurbishment and restoration its doors opened again in 2007, becoming a platform for a cross-section of musical and theatrical acts from the Rent musical to staging Die Antwoord’s first Joburg appearance since their ascent to world fame. With the Alexander Theatre now open again, the nearby Joburg Theatre (previously called The Civic) and the new Wits Gallery, a large gallery due to open next year that will house the university’s extensive African art collection, Braamfontein could easily usurp Newtown as Joburg’s cultural centre. Levy and others believe the city never followed through on its pledge to Newtown, forcing the artistic community to shift its commitment to Braamfontein.
“Newtown has failed as a cultural hub. So much of what goes on in Joburg is about hype: you can brand anything. With Newtown the City identified the most low density place it could turn with least amount of investment and got interesting tenants but then left it to its own devices,” says Levy.

Starting in 1995, Henri Vergon operated his art dealership out of Newtown before opening Afronova opposite the Market Theatre.
“It was a hellhole then and my customers used to get mugged on their way home,” he recalls. But he was determined to stay put in the city and given the Johannesburg Development Agency’s (JDA) investment in the suburb, was optimistic about its future. Since he was muscled out of the area – the space where his gallery stood is apparently making way for a shopping centre – he has become disillusioned with Newtown. He believes the City has sold out and reneged on its promise to foster a cultural community. Therefore, he was encouraged by the fact that this new cultural hub isn’t a City or JDA initiative. The fact that the people who run Carfax, Newtown’s first night club and the first establishment to exploit Joburg’s industrial wasteland, are now running gigs at the Alexander Theatre is proof of the shift away from Newtown and towards Braamfontein, says Vergon.

Because the City is not driving the cultural hub in Braamfontein, some are of the opinion that it is less contrived, that it is an “authentic cultural hub.” When Vergon had to move his gallery from Newtown he looked at premises in Parktown North and Parkview, where he could purchase a house which could be adapted to suit his business’s needs but having lived and worked in cities such as Paris and New York, he wanted to remain in a city environment.
“I could have had a great business in Parktown but it is against my beliefs – it’s a political stance.”
Vergon’s excitement about the possibilities that Braamfontein has to offer and the role that the gallery will play in its evolution is infectious. There is a glint in his eye when he talks about the suburb and I can tell that the move has not only reinvigorated him but his restored his belief in the regeneration of the city. His clientele have responded positively to the gallery’s relocation.
“It doesn’t have the same bad image – when I told people I was moving the gallery here they were very pleased.”
At its new Braamfontein location on the corner of Smit and De BeerAfronova’s inaugural exhibition attracts a huge crowd. Among those who have come to view Musa Nxumalo’s documentation of an alternative black youth movement are fashionistas, academics and trend-guru extraordinaire, Dion Chang. With his finger firmly on the pulse of new trends, Chang is already in negotiations with South Point, one of the main property developers in Braamfontein, to create a reality show that will document and aid some of the long-term traders in the area to update their businesses to suit the new trendy vibe.

Chang suggests it is better to try and help existing traders to adapt, rather than them being displaced at some later stage. But he might have his work cut out for him. Some traders who have been in Braamfontein for more than 15 years have already been forced to change their businesses to adapt to high crime rates. Such as one man, who prefers not to be named, who runs an Indian takeaway from behind an iron grill. After being held up three times and twice in a month last year, he says he was forced to put up bars around his counter. He thought of moving, especially after the last incident, but felt that as crime was an issue wherever one opened up a business in South Africa, it was worth staying put and working with the environment. He is sceptical about the creative fraternity moving into the suburb. The glass storefronts these new shops boast are not feasible, they will be “an invitation for criminals” he suggests.

Glass storefronts are a defining feature of the buildings in Levy’s extensive stable – he owns quite a number of buildings in the area, including the one housing the loft apartment in which he lives. Levy has done well for himself. When I arrive at his two-storey glass penthouse he is trying to figure out where to place two new artworks among a collection hanging on his wall which includes works by Walter Battiss and Robert Hodgins. With its slick pristine white interior his loft has the feel of an art gallery and with its chic fittings and open-plan design it is the apotheosis of city loft living.

Surrounded by glass walls Levy can enjoy views of his muse, Joburg. Clearly he tries to practice his philosophy of city living, which is governed by the notion that one shouldn’t just live in the city but be immersed in it, be part of it. For this reason Levy’s new street-level shops and galleries all boast expansive glass walls, allowing those inside to view the street outside and those on the street to
engage with the designer worlds contained within.
“We are open, transparent and engaging. You can come in and we are going to come outside.”

Levy believes this open policy will engender a safer environment. He also believes this architectural and social device will erase the divisions, both economic and racial, that mark our society.
“I don’t want to build big walls and big fences and burglar proofing. I don’t have that philosophy, but if you get enough people to kick start this system… then perhaps we can change things.
“I am not selling a pipe dream. I truly believe in this.”

For Vergon this was a major attraction. He looked at other inner city developments such as Arts on Main, an arts complex established
by Jonathan Liebmann on the East side of the inner city, but he says he didn’t want to be working out of “a compound”.
“I think it is great what they are doing there but I want to be on the street in a real environment. When you are on the street you are in touch with the city, with real life. You are not in an artificial environment,” he says.

Despite what Levy says, one senses that while he has a good idea of what kind of society he would like to build in Braamfontein, he hasn’t engaged with the suburb’s existing population. A huge proportion of the people on the other side of glass windows in Braamfontein are students like Nokwanda Sibiya, a 19-year-old who is studying towards a BA degree at Wits University and is living in student accommodation in the area. Braamfontein has been the domain of students since South Point bought up at least 10 buildings in
the suburb and kitted them out for a student population. This has changed the face of Braamfontein considerably, as businesses keen to cash in on the student population have moved into the suburb. One of the most dominant businesses in the area are hair salons catering for a black clientele. There could be well up to 50 in the neighbourhood.
“Everyone wants a piece of cake,” observes Pamela Pelema, the manager at Studio 4.
Pelema says this population are affluent and think little of paying up to R5 000 for hair treatments such as microbonding (attaching human hair extensions). Pelema would live in Braamfontein if she didn’t have a family – she suggests it is geared for young singletons. Nevertheless she enjoys working in it:
“Everything is here, it is getting more like Sandton. It is the place to be. It’s getting classy.”

Sibiya hangs out in the restaurants in Braamfontein but mostly travels with her friends to Sandton or Rosebank “to party”. Apart from the gigs at the Alexander Theatre, the Kitcheners Carvery bar at the old Milner Park Hotel and the trendy eatery, Narina Trogan, Braamfontein hasn’t boasted much of a nightlife. Well, until recently when South Point rolled out three new bars; the S-bar, a modest student hangout, #1 Bar, a more upmarket lounge that would attract academics and postgraduates and, of course, the ever popular Randlords. These bars, are, however, temporarily closed due to a snag with their liquor licences, according to Geoff O’Grady of South Point. It’s a temporary situation and once open again, Braamfontein’s nightlife should pick up.

South Point have more recently shifted their focus towards establishing a number of upmarket establishments such as Lamunu hotel, corner Melle and De Korte Streets, which has a bar and outdoor café overlooking The Grove, an outdoor student hangout where there is a giant screen to watch sporting events and films. A number of new restaurants, cafes and shops flanking the Grove are also planned. Levy is excited about the interest that Randlords has directed towards Braamfontein but given that most of South Point’s residential properties cater for a student population, he wonders what locals it is engineered to attract. He also doesn’t believe that a student population will help uplift the suburb.
“We need to make Braamfontein a viable living environment; how can you do that with thousands of students on your doorstep?”
It is students who pave the way for creative, pioneering new communities, suggests O’Grady.
A number of new restaurants, cafes and shops are also planned. South Point are catering for the short and long term residential needs of young professionals at Auckland House, on the corner of Smit and Biccard, and No 1 Biccard, where fully furnished apartments with swanky fittings and décor with a retro feel are available. These buildings share common features: expansive photographic
images of Joburg are plastered on the walls, celebrating the location. Almost all of them boast an expansive view of the city. Where once the inner city was viewed as an eyesore, it has become a selling point.

Like South Point Towers, where Randlords is located, all of these South Point buildings have a rooftop area. They are places where residents or visitors can escape when life at ground level becomes too overwhelming. Given the changes happening on the street, however, these detached vantage points will no longer serve as oases amid urban decay. Braamfontein’s transformation won’t happen overnight.
“When Narina Trogon restaurant opened it looked like it would revolutionise the world but most of the 300 people who came to the opening never returned. It’s all about numbers, we need 20 different locations all within safe walking distance so that people will come and spend the whole day here,” says Levy.
Vergon concurs.
“We have all these wonderful little islands in Joburg, we just need to join them up and then we will have a proper city,” he says.

OMG: Who is buying this kind of art?

2010-10-27T23:27:00.000-07:00

It is hard for me to decide what is worse: that there are still artists producing romanticised images of Africa or that these images are being sold in Africa? It would be easy to mistake the above painting to have been produced somewhere in the 1800s but, regrettably, this is a present-day rendering by a Danish Artist called Paul Augustinus whose exhibition of paintings will open at the Everard Read Gallery next week. This is not an extraordinary event; I have received number of invitations from this well-established gallery that have evoked a sense of déjà vu of the worst kind. The question that this phenomenon begs is this: how educated are the buyers of South African art in this country and what is the consequence of this for artists? Could this be why Strauss & Co continue to flog Pierneefs instead of MacGarrys or Hlobos?

When Historical Documents become Aesthetic Objects: Ernest Cole at JAG

2010-10-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

Given that JAG apparently boasts quite a sizeable collection of Ernest Cole photographs one has to wonder why the gallery hasn’t staged a Cole exhibition until now. This Cole exhibition presented the Hasselblad foundation’s collection. It’s a pity it’s not a retrospective, where one could view all his work including his commercial/journalistic work and his early beginnings – he had a camera from a young age. It would have also been interesting to see the photographs he took in the US too; fixated on mapping social inequality he photographed African Americans and the homeless while living there.

I missed the Cole exhibition in Cape Town awhile ago so this was the first time I saw a large collection of his work. Aside from the content it was the size of the images that initially struck me. They seemed inordinately small. Of course, these were standard dimensions for photographs of that era and conformed to photographers’ notion of their craft as journalistic. According to the curator of this exhibition, Gunille Knape, Cole had a very clear idea that his work belonged to this realm of production. The art historian Michael Fried suggests that photography’s transition from documentary mode to art can on a most basic level be observed through the changing dimensions of photographs. Photographs with an art sensibility are considerably larger, he posits.

Nevertheless it seems that Cole did employ visual devices particular to photography designed for display. Some of his images, particularly one that showed people moving across a barren landscape (I discuss it at some length in my review), are incredibly dark. As any one in the print media will know, dark photographs do not print well. And in fact this one would never have made it into a newspaper – which is why it would have been impossible for me to have run it with my review in the Sunday Indy.
According to Gunwille, it was fashionable in the seventies for photographers of a certain ilk to print dark photographs – it was a way of distinguishing their work from journalistic products. It also added drama to the image too. Certainly it is reminiscent of the use of chiaroscuro in painting.

In my review, I tried to present this inbuilt friction surrounding photographs function as either historical documents and/or aesthetic objects, which is made all the more complex when the content maps political and social injustice. Though this discourse is perhaps tired, I am increasingly finding that it is a bit of a cop-out to simply embrace all imagery and photography as art. It’s an expedient way of circumventing this debate but it fails to address the fact that not every visual product shares the same origin, is shaped by the same intentions or is open to a certain brand of readings.

My review:

HERE was some debate around where this Ernest Cole exhibition should be staged. Given that Cole had dedicated himself to mapping the conditions of life under apartheid, some apparently thought it prudent to display this series of photographs from the Hasselblad collection at the Apartheid Museum. Gunilla Knape, its Swedish curator, was against this suggestion, fearing that the integrity of Cole’s work might be obscured
– in other words that they might be read as dry historical documents rather than thoughtful visual products. Fortunately Knape won out in the end and Cole’s survey of South Africa in the sixties now adorns the walls of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

The bulk of this collection of images were published in Cole’s seminal monograph, House of Bondage (1967), a book that Cole designed to inform an international audience led to believe that “apartheid is essentially about good neighbourliness”. Consequently, it is difficult to draw a line between the function of the photographs as political documents and aesthetic objects, and to completely embrace them as the latter seems almost immoral given the content.

Cole aimed to thoroughly describe black life under white rule. He captured every understated detail of this existence. In a series of images documenting the lives of the Mogale family, he shows the daily experiences of the young children: from the four crowded around a single bowl of porridge to studying by candlelight, to sleeping on flat mattresses on the floor. He does not attempt to describe “poverty” in a single image; rather he attempts to show the gradations of impoverishment so that the subjects are never released from their appalling status. When he trains his lens on another child, a boy named Papa, who in one image is said to be caught between sorrow and joy, he seems to be trying to grasp a vocabulary beyond the documentary mode. The image is slightly blurred and the child’s face is frozen in a contorted grimace. The caption, which explains that the line between laughter and sadness is a fine one, really qualifies this image and explains its relevance to Cole.

On the brink of becoming a teenager this young black child is also presumably on the brink of discovering his station in a white-dominated society. This state of transition will mean that he will move from naively surveying the world to seeing it for what it is and realising he has no place in it.

Cole mourns for the future these children will face and perhaps for the loss of his own naivety; the harsh realities he documents have forced him to repeatedly confront the warped sociopolitical reality in which he dwelled. He cannot live in denial.

Nor can his audience when he confronts them with a barrage of images which so thoroughly map every level of degradation the apartheid state inflicted upon black South Africans. It is hard not to be moved. Cole
demonstrates the ways in which racist laws permeated and corrupted almost every aspect of life. The thoroughness of his project is predetermined by the thoroughness of this inhumane system.

The text in House of Bondage, with which apparently Cole wasn’t satisfied, doesn’t engage with the formal aspects of Cole’s work or his process – only the political content the images evoked. In this way
Cole’s artistic acumen was obviated. Fact is Cole was a sophisticated photographer with visual savvy. A photograph of people traversing a semi-rural landscape to and from the Mamelodi township is nuanced and evocative, showing people moving towards a band of hazy mist on the horizon. It’s as if they are walking towards oblivion. It is such a dark image – his subjects are almost invisible, succinctly articulating the manner in which black people’s sense of self was perpetually negated.

Certainly Cole understood how to harness the poetics inherent in black and white photography to give expression to the suffering of that era. This is probably why his work has always been viewed through a sociopolitical lens. His wordy captions bear important details that suggest
that as thorough as Cole was in capturing the minutiae of the poor conditions, there were so many aspects that could not be visually described.

In the few lengthy captions that he wrote he doesn’t state the date and location of the photographs as most photographic documenters do. He is concerned with a different set of particulars. The caption for a photograph of a sick man lying in a bed explains that the mattress was a jute bag filled with grass, showing that even the ill and old weren’t afforded any dignity at the end of their lives. The mattress looks ordinary from afar, certainly one cannot see the jute that Cole refers to.

Cole must have been frustrated with the fact that not every detail of life under this repressive system could be captured but he also understood that the dry facts themselves wouldn’t suffice. However, he would not have wanted his photographs to be seen solely as aesthetic objects. Given that poverty, servitude and exploitation are still realities, the subject matter of his work remains an albatross around our necks.

Why Marilyn Martin is pissed off

2010-10-04T23:38:00.000-07:00

I heard that Marilyn Martin was less than enchanted with me following my review of Louis Maqhubela’s retrospective at the Standard Bank Art Gallery. I know that it is politically incorrect not to like Maqhubela’s work or at least to publicly express such a sentiment but I decided awhile ago that if artists didn’t have to play by the rules than art critics shouldn’t have to either. After all I am paid to offer my opinion, not simply to regurgitate that of a curator or society at large. Despite the tight deadlines under which I work I am never careless with my opinion or dismissive of an artist’s work. No matter how much the work might not appeal to me, I consider it quite carefully. I did agonise over this review. I so wanted to feel differently about Maqhubela’s work that I consulted colleagues and acquaintances, hoping that someone could convince me about the merits of his work. What I discovered in my mission was that many shared my views but were aware that it might not be polite to articulate them. For Martin, Maqhubela’s significance is largely tied to the fact that he was one of the first black artist’s to adopt an abstract vocabulary. From today’s standpoint I think we owe it to Maqhubela to look beyond this fact and actually engage with his work. I think it is very telling that the catalogue for this exhibition doesn’t really do this.

I don’t think that Martin did herself or Maqhubela any favours by getting Esmé Berman – who pegged Maqhubela as a “township artist” - to open the exhibition. How could Martin expect to reposition Maqhubela within the canon if she relied upon the very person who contributed towards typecasting him? I have also grown tired of the way black artist's work is framed by the institution where they studied when this is never the case with white artists. In any case all these views are stated in my review:

THE ART historian Esmé Berman has a short memory. At the opening of Louis Maqhubela’s retrospective in which she admonished the art intelligentsia for overlooking this artist’s contribution to the history of South African art, she seemed to have forgotten that she was the main culprit. Having penned The Story of South African Painting in 1975 and Painting in South Africa in 1993, Berman had ample opportunities to assign importance to Maqhubela and reposition him within the canon.

Of course, these days no one would dream of writing a definitive history of South African art – linear narratives that logically plot out an entire history of any preoccupation have fallen quite out of fashion. Mostly, this is because historians now accept that such stories almost always flatten out the complexities of history and obviate the often non-linear movements that characterise human activities. Thus Maqhubela will most probably never appear in some grand narrative on South African art. Today history exists in fragments loosely tethered to other stories. Marilyn Martin’s catalogue that has been produced for this retrospective
exhibition is just such a fragment and will form the lasting legacy of her efforts to insert Maqhubela into history.

But this slim volume doesn’t tell the whole story. Nor perhaps does the collection of paintings at this retrospective. Certainly, as one peruses the exhibition it is hard to grasp why so much attention is being paid to his art at all. The works are hung chronologically, tracing Maqhubela’s artistic trajectory, which began in the early 1960s with naïve paintings of township life. Like Gerard Sekoto’s idealised representations of such settings, Maqhubela’s palette is bold and colourful, thus portraying township life as upbeat and untroubled. Berman suggested that the drawing Little Black Boy Lost in a White Wood (early 1960s) was proof that his work could not be lumped in the “township” genre of painting.

It was a puzzling statement because she was the one to have pegged him as a “township artist” and she gave credence to this term, which today is viewed as pejorative. Berman’s observation implied that because Maqhubela didn’t portray the township setting in this painting, his work was not “township art”; thus she unwittingly suggested that the other works still conform to stereotypical notions attached to this supposed genre. Without a doubt this drawing is in stark contrast not only to his early paintings but his colourful oeuvre – rendered in black and white it has a melancholic undertone and is the only one at the retrospective with any obvious political subtext. The forlorn and helpless subject that stares out from the drawing, imploring the viewer to release him from the overcrowded forest in which he is trapped, is the antithesis of the carefree subjects that dominate the other paintings. Being the most emotive and visually strong artwork, it is the most striking. And herein lies the conundrum: the artworks displayed on the whole are not particularly visually or intellectually rewarding.

Reflecting on Maqhubela’s significance one young artist remarked at the opening: “It doesn’t matter what his art looks like; it is the fact that he attempted to make art during very difficult times; when black men didn’t make art and were prevented from doing so.” He furthermore suggested that his art could not be measured against the western canon. Nevertheless, Martin and Berman appeal to this very canon to substantiate Maqhubela’s import, citing that his work from the mid seventies, which experienced a substantial shift after he left the country, shared an affinity with the work of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. So where do we place Maqhubela? Predictably Martin positions him within the history of the Polly Art Centre, where he studied with many of South Africa’s most influential artists, and the broader “black” art history, beginning with the so-called “pioneers” such as Sekoto. To drive this home Martin exhibits the work of Durant Sihlali, who also studied at the Polly Art Centre, Sekoto and others in the main circular display area at the Standard Bank Gallery.

Usually, particularly for a retrospective, this area is home to an artist’s most compelling works. Aside from the fact that only black artists’ work is always framed by the influence of the institution at which they studied (and the influence of the white tutelage), this display forces one to make comparisons. Comparisons that are not always in Maqhubela’s favour.
Berman suggested that Maqhubela found his voice as an artist after he left South Africa and settled in London, where he discovered a language which she described as “non-objective abstraction”. This is a wonderful blanket term to explain a largely incoherent brand of art characterised by hazy geometric shapes and a combination of both figurative and non-figurative elements that fail to create a strong visual statement or evoke any kind of emotion in the viewer. Given Berman’s observation that Maqhubela was mapping an internal, spiritual landscape, one would expect these paintings to have some kind of emotive thrust. But for
this viewer, it simply wasn’t there.

How Artists Can Still Dream Big in a Commercial Gallery Space

2010-09-24T23:15:00.000-07:00

With a penchant for creating ephemeral art Stephen Hobbs has made a habit of avoiding commercial gallery shows. It’s not that he looks upon the commercial circuit with disdain – well, not completely – but rather that his interests in architecture and the politics of public space have prompted a natural inclination towards creating work and interventions that exist outside the gallery. This exhibition, his first since he entered into a serious relationship with a commercial dealer, was obviously going to generate interest; how would he adapt to the constraints?

With his characteristic sense of cunning and humour, Hobbs has negotiated this new course with an exhibition centred on presenting small replicas of larger grand-scale works that could not be contained within a gallery space. He also takes this idea one step further. Given that he will never make these works, he has allowed himself to dream not only beyond the gallery space but beyond financial and or other practical constraints.
For example, it is unlikely that Hobbs would be given the chance to alter the facades of the Empire State Building or the Chrysler building. But he does have free rein to enact his projects on miniature versions of these US landmarks.

Hobbs transforms miniature models of these buildings or at least goes through the motions of altering them - one does sense that on some level he acknowledges the futility of this process.In one rendition of the |Empire State building he disrupts the characteristic silhouette of this edifice with a sheath and matchsticks and in the other he fashions a model of the building from Meccano pieces and matchsticks that are meant to evoke the wooden planks used as scaffolding. The “scaffolding” in the latter model, however, is contained within the building rather than outside it as is customary, implying that it is subject to constant internal change. And it’s not just physical change: the title, State of Empire, implies that physical disruptions mirror ideological shifts in national identity.

These models are products where an architect and artist’s projected fantasies intersect and collide - architects construct fantasies and while artists are also preocuppied with building constructions they do so, so as to deconstruct other constructions. The colourful stylised models that Hobbs tampers with are presumably collectors’ items and thus also articulate ordinary people’s desire to control and know these landmark buildings. Because of their extraordinary dimensions they are only partially tangible – one cannot percieve them from a single vantage point. Hobbs, therefore, unpacks the function of miniatures and the act of miniaturising and how, on an abstract level, it plays a key role in negotiating national identity and visualising an urban utopia.

A key point that Hobbs makes is how our collective interest is focused on buildings and how this marginalises the importance of the spaces around them. This is particularly relevant to supposedly failed urban |locales, where attention is shifted to these non-functioning non-spaces, for ultimately it is these non-spaces that define the experience of a city. Buildings may establish the city’s visual persona but it is in these no-man’s-lands that the intangible essence of a place is |manifested. Given that these non-spaces are often just routes between places and buildings they are colonised by a transient public. This makes them highly dynamic and unpredictable and therefore almost impossible to map. Nevertheless the regeneration of a city and the sense in which it is seen to live up to a utopian ideal depends on this space being functional.

Hobbs gives expression to this non-space in three ways; first, in a photograph titled Troubled City, where he presents an aerial view of a city in which all the spaces between buildings have been erased. Second, in a video artwork documenting an idealistic urban space – the Point Road development in Durban – where this non-space is filled with water canals. In another work, photographs of hundreds of buildings are collaged on top of each other in such a way that the urban landscape between them has been obviated. It’s a claustrophobic scene as the buildings begin to meld into each other. They are mirror images of each other and thus form a distinctive pattern in which the core motif remains constant.

This establishes an endless sense of doubling; like looking into a mirror reflection of a mirror reflection. Hobbs props this collaged image on sticks, drawing attention to another kind of doubling in which the collaged images of structures becomes a structure in its own right. This obviously relates back to the notion of miniature models, which are also structures of structures. An artwork titled Fool’s Gold, which references the way in which one lesser entity is used as a substitute for the real thing, is a textual map of Hobbs’s plans for this exhibition. This drawing shows his ideas in their purest form – before they have been visualised.Nevertheless Hobbs implies that the substitute structures – which are substitutes for real objects and ideas – can be greater than the authentic constructions that they mimic because it is only within the model that ideas and aspirations can flourish without any limitations.

Thus ironically and paradoxically Hobbs concludes that it is within the gallery space that his grandest artworks can be visualised – albeit that they will never actually exist.

Why Artists Shouldn't Write 'Reviews'

2010-09-20T22:34:00.000-07:00

Ed Young’s recent 'review' of Zander Blom’ s latest exhibition, PAINTINGS. DRAWINGS. PHOTOS at Michael Stevenson, which appeared on the Mahala website is a prime example of why artists should not review their contemporaries work. Not that I would classify Young’s perfunctory musings as a ‘review’ – he never actually engages with the art. God forbid that he does; he would risk actually discovering that it has some kind of intellectual substance that would force him to write more than ironic sentences engineered to demonstrate how amusing he is – how detached he is from the art and maybe art in general. Young is so post-postmodern.

This brand of writing is not exactly out of keeping with the Mahala approach, where the writers are often concerned with being quirky, amusing and ironic. Thus form takes precedence over content. I suppose this style is engineered to appeal to the youth, who are more impressed with amusing turns of phrase than whether the phrase is illuminating in any way. This is very egocentric writing; it’s all about turning attention on the skills and persona of the writer than the subject-matter at hand. Hence Young's article/commentry is really about Young.

Very often writers fall back on this position as a way of avoiding engaging with their subject-matter. In the realm of arts writing it is often employed to mask their inability to grasp the work at hand. Because this kind of writing is entertaining it has its place. As a writer I do value this kind of showmanship, have been known to engage in it frequently myself and thus do actually enjoy perusing the Mahala website and admire the product that Andy Davis has crafted.Sometimes this approach to writing works and at other times it feels terribly awkward and self conscious.

It can also be pretty frustrating when you actually want to find out something substantial about the work/subject that is being written about. Such as Blom’s exhibition. I haven’t seen it and probably won’t visit Cape Town before it closes. I cannot, however, vicariously enjoy Blom’s work through Young’s writing. Young is so dismissive of Blom’s art that you can’t help but feel that professional jealousy is at work. As Young expresses, clearly all the boys in Cape Town are in a tizz that Blom got the call from Michael and they didn’t. Young wryly observes this fact, but the effort that he goes to, to demonstrate how vacuous Blom’s art is, implies that Young believes that the attention Blom’s work has received is thoroughly misplaced. Young has every right to feel that way; but I do wish he made a substantial argument to back up his opinion.

In absence of this argument and his obvious ignorance about Blom’s approach - more later – one is left with the impression that Young’s statements can be put down to sour grapes. Though I have not seen Blom’s exhibition from perusing the Stevenson website I am able to discern two important points about the work that seem to have gone completely unnoticed by Young. Firstly, the text, the artist’s statement that Young so keenly quotes, is, I would surmise, given Blom’s reliance on text and his interest in how it contextualises art, is part of his artworks. Before, Blom presented text in the form of a monograph (in Drain of Progress) and in The Travels of Bad, he attached the text to the bottom of each photograph. In this exhibition it is embedded in the work in such an understated but appropriate way.

Thus Blom’s artist statement should not be taken at face value. It is not about illuminating Blom’s actual intentions but is designed to refer to the process and narrative around his paintings – in other words it is a fictitious (though paradoxically also real) narrative that has informed the abstract paintings. You see, Blom isn’t interested in abstract painting per se but the romanticised story of abstract painting, how it is positioned within the grander narrative of the history of art and how this overarching narrative shapes the way artists conceive of the act of painting. In this way, paintings become documents of a way of thinking than artworks in their own right; they are symptoms of a larger phenomenon. Hence the title of Blom’s exhibition: Paintings, Drawings, Photos, which relegates these artworks to banal documents that can only be distinguished by the differing mediums.

Another important development in his art, which brings him sort of full-circle back to the Drain of Progress, is the way in which he has separated out his paintings from their ‘canvases’ – the walls of his house in Brixton. Here the canvas – the wall and ceiling – has a life of its own and as Young notices is quite visually striking in itself. Here Blom seems to be suggesting that the natural trajectory upon which abstract art was following should have concluded with the canvas itself – for isn’t this the most essential element of painting beyond the paint? Of course, artists didn’t ever follow abstract art to its natural conclusion for if they did they would obviate their role in art completely (hence the “black hole” title that Blom employs). Its kind of amusing that the ‘black hole’ of art is actually a pristine white surface that appears to have no depth. But maybe it should all have been about choosing your canvas – which is what Blom expends much energy doing. Not only selecting one that is personal to him but one which he can study at some kind of length and which has visual pleasures of its own.

I gave Blom’s last exhibition a lukewarm review. But, I do feel quite fired up about his work again. I do hope that this exhibition travels to Brodie/Stevenson so that I can view it in person.

There is just one last and important point I would like to make; some artists write great reviews. I am thinking here of Michael Smith and Chad Rossouw (aka Robert Sloon), who wrote a magnificent review of Pieter Hugo’s recent exhibition in the M & G, but there are many others too.

Shoddy arts journalism and Riason Naidoo's Pierneef to Gugulective

2010-09-11T01:19:00.000-07:00

I chuckled when I read David Smith’s story in The Guardian about Riason Naidoo who was said to have produced a “fierce backlash” for removing paintings of “the likes of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds” when he installed his exhibition 1910 - 2010: Pierneef to Gugulective. It was a poor piece of journalism for a number of reasons. Firstly, because the supposed “fierce backlash” occurred somewhere in May so it has taken Smith almost four months to report on the event – not that his editors in the UK would notice but I suppose that is one of the benefits of being stationed in “Africa”.

Secondly, Smith constantly refers to Naidoo’s racial profile, establishing this notion that he is defined by his race. It also is part of an effort to polarise the South African art scene, defining it as one neatly divided along racial lines. I suppose Smith isn’t aware of the code of ethics that journalists here are beholden too, which states that the racial profile of an interviewee/subject should not be included unless it is absolutely pertinent to the story.

Thirdly, I hardly think that a negative review in the SA Art Times is any reflection of the views in the South African art world. The views expressed in the SA ART Times are those of its editor, Gabriel Clarke-Brown. Had Smith actually bothered to interview anyone else in the art world he might have discovered that not everyone shares Clarke-Brown’s point of view. Of course, it wasn’t just laziness, it was strategic; he wanted to sensationalise the appointment of a ‘black’ director to the museum, positioning him as one who would naturally eschew the old colonial artworks in favour of contemporary works thus painting a stereotypical scene in which the new black appointment “ruffles the feathers” of the old guard. Has Smith actually seen Pierneef to Gugulective, because there are quite a number of artworks from the colonial era?

As Riason expresses in the article he does feel that his race has been the sticking point in Cape Town. Certainly, from my own experience Cape Town does at times feel like the last outpost. At the Bonani Africa Photography conference recently, Mario Pissaro observed in his presentation that few local black artists have been able to break into the scene. According to him, Cape Town galleries have a preference for more "exotic" Africans from other parts of the continent. There is some truth to this but it also worth noting that Nicholas Hlobo and Nandipha Mntambo among others established a name for themselves in Cape Town. Race is still an issue in this country and perhaps the racial divide manifests more acutely in particular regions and/or echelons in society, but I think that we shouldn’t always offer racial difference as an explanation for every phenomenon or disagreement, when there may be other forces at work.

It is also worth bearing in mind that Capetonians consider anyone who hails from elsewhere as an outsider, whether they be black or white, from Joburg or Durban. Is Smith even aware of the regional differences in this country: or is it too much to expect a British journalist to grasp the nuances of our culture?

In light of this it is worth observing that when Clive Kellner took over at JAG, he also faced a bit of “backlash” for removing the permanent display, also consisting of some old colonial master’s work. Many were critical and surprised (including Kellner himself) by his appointment; that a white male had been selected to head the gallery. Many have also viewed Antoinette Murdoch’s appointment at JAG with some scepticism. Is it because she is female, white or because under her guidance the Joburg Art Bank was a bit of a failure?
Despite the fact that our public galleries aren’t that well patronised, they occupy a special place for most of us in the art community for it is often in these buildings that we first began to identify our passion. As such we are protective of them and those who are trusted with overseeing them will always be subject to vigorous criticism and will always have to prove themselves worthy of the huge responsibility that has been entrusted to them.

I don’t think that Lloyd Pollack’s review of Riason’s exhibition should have been carried on the front page of the SA Art Times – its placement worked at establishing Pollack’s opinion as fact and sensationalised his opinion. Hence Smith treated it as a factual claim. Certainly, Pollack and Clarke-Brown do not represent the art world establishment – a fact I am sure they would not dispute.

Ironically, on the weekend that Smith’s ridiculous story appeared on The Guardian’s website my largely – I had a few criticisms - positive review of the Pierneef to Gugulective appeared in The Sunday Independent. Read it below:

It’s an extravagant visual spectacle. Every bit of wall space of every room at the South African National Gallery is colonised by art. And not just ordinary work, but key pieces that define South African art are in abundance. You could almost declare Riason Naidoo’s 1910-2010: Pierneef to Gugulective exhibition a visual assault, if it weren’t for the negative connotations. In the manner of a blockbuster or mega exhibition, such a glut of art is offered that you are forced to be selective about which of the discreet dialogues to follow.
As the title of this exhibition implies, Naidoo has attempted to chart 100 years of South African art, with works by Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef and Gugulective forming to the two book-ends. The fact that this brobdingnagian narrative begins with Pierneef’s pastel-coloured landscapes and ends with conceptual work by a collective of artists, is some indication of the radical socio-political and art historical shifts that have occurred during the past century.

Most curators or historians would baulk at such a task; particularly one which would force them to make definitive statements about such a huge period. Naidoo’s solution is simply to side-step framing his exhibition with any single over-arching statement. The exhibition is largely chronological and follows historical themes moving from the meeting between the colonial and the African, to meditations on the landscape, to urbanity, the conditions of apartheid, to the struggle movement, democracy or the post-apartheid era.

It’s an expected trajectory but Naidoo has inserted quite a number of surprises by insinuating contemporary artworks into historical periods and layering multiple narratives. In this way he is able to “talk back” to the past. So while he establishes a particular narrative thread he also works at destabilising it. This curatorial strategy is perhaps best demonstrated in the first room of the exhibition, which plots the beginning of the colonial era. Idealised landscape paintings by Pierneef evince a barren environment ripe for imperial domination. These representations of the landscape, however, are thrown off kilter by a contemporary painting by Wayne Barker, Blue Colonies (1995), which mocks Pierneef’s visual and political thrust. In this way the viewer is always aware that the history presented to them is conditional.

Adjacent to these landscapes, Naidoo juxtaposes anthropological images of Africans such as photographs by Alfred Duggan-Cronin with images that show Africans representing themselves, such as artworks by Gerard Bhengu. Of course, Bhengu did sell these to Europeans, so they did in some ways pander to needs of these patrons. But Bengu’s representations differed from those executed by his white contemporaries, and by placing his art side-by-side with that of Duggan-Cronin, Naidoo not only writes Bengu into the canon but, most importantly, establishes multiple viewpoints from which to observe the past.

In the next room, he juxtaposes black urban existence with works – dating from the 1940s to 1950s – by Alexis Preller, Irma Stern and Walter Battiss that evince these painters’ insistence on portraying black subjects enjoying a simple rural existence. Two paintings by George Pemba, The Audience (1960) and The Yellow Pitcher (1946), show contrasting depictions of black life. In the former, two sweethearts sip on their sodas while watching a film. This image shows a happy, carefree existence. In the latter, a black man is shown cleaning in the foreground. Behind him is a white couple, thus evoking the tension between the oppressors and the oppressed. What these two contrasting images establish is not just the manner in which black people wore a mask of servitude in the presence of white folk but the fact that life under a repressive system wasn’t simply one of pain and suffering – that there was room for love and laughter. This notion links up with Jacob Dlamini’s recent novel Native Nostalgia, which in his effort to show all the gradations of life under apartheid destabilised one-dimensional accounts of black existence during oppressive rule.

Certainly with this mega-exhibition Naidoo is seeking to capture all shades of life and a range of philosophical paradigms that have shaped art. Our political history does overshadow art production or is inseparable from it – creating the impression there has been little room for artists to engage with inner dialogues particular to their practice. A large and varied display dedicated to the minimalist aesthetic, however, gives expression to a discourse centred on form. Here Naidoo pairs photographs of troughs in a barren landscape by Nigel Fogg executed in the 1980s with high modernist minimalist paintings by Albert Newell such as Opposition of Related Forms (1957), establishing a common trajectory between photography and painting. Adding to this meditation on form is a display of Ndebele aprons, which is a pleasant surprise as it shifts the focus away from these items’ historical ethnographic significance and turns it on to its design value. It’s a wonderful twist.

At times the “conversations” Naidoo sets up between art works are a little superficial as they are based on the visual synchronicity between images. This obviously works with minimalism because it is all about form, but in other instances it flattens meaning. In places he also risks being embroiled in labyrinthian conversations that create confusion. Tagged on to the end of this exhibition is a small selection of works from the “Us” show that feels like an awkward appendage. Nevertheless these failings do not detract from the value of this grand exhibition, which proves Naidoo to be a ballsy and astute curator.

Siopis at Brodie Stevenson

2010-09-06T06:13:00.000-07:00

I heard a lot about Penny Siopis’s new show before I saw it. That’s always a good sign. Of course, most people who spoke about it described it in vague terms, as if it was an experience that couldn’t be articulated. My interest was piqued. I missed the opening night but apparently it was jam-packed - “everyone was there” someone quipped. And by “everyone” they meant everyone in the Joburg art scene. As Michael Smith observed in his latest editorial for Artthrob, Siopis is not only perceived as one of the country’s major painters – I think artist is more appropriate given that she uses different mediums – but was an influential figure in the Joburg art scene. So naturally she drew crowds of admirers. However, as with anyone with a formidable reputation she does also have her detractors; particularly among the young male artist contingent who recoil from her pink canvases as if they are the embodiment of angry feminist retorts. Some of the works that she produced recently, which oozed pink and red paint, did appear like bloody open wounds and probably weren’t for the squeamish. However, her work has undergone some dramatic shifts. I recently got to view Scene: Finale (ca, 1980s), which is part of a collection of art from JAG on display at Villa Arcadia. I hadn't seen this painting before and though I am not sure it is the best from her era of 'history' painting it was interesting to observe this artwork weeks after viewing Furies at Brodie Stevenson. The female subject might still be at the centre of her work but her aesthetic has shifted dramatically since the eighties. Few artists have been able to reinvent their aesthetic - one always senses that they are defined by it.

Furies, presents quite a different brand of work, albeit that the tones still evoke wounded, beaten flesh. Whatever you may feel about Siopis’ art these new paintings are demanding. The surface details draw you in first; sometimes the object of your gaze is a slightly raised transparent form treated to delicate smears of colour. In other works you are confronted, even assaulted, with a barrage of colour that explodes onto the canvas.

The compositions are intriguing too. Particularly with the artwork titled Xenos, a painting in which three subjects are configured within and outside a transparent fabric. This partially obscured view prevents the spectator from fully comprehending or being able to identify the full truth of the image. This is a pictorial device that Siopis employs frequently in the works in this exhibition.

Siopis' brand of painting is traditional in that it is a product of visceral engagement with the medium and evokes a visceral response. This is painting's inherent appeal - it elicits a relationship with form that operates at a primeval level. The intense and fiery colours that Siopis employs - mostly tones of red and orange - further encourage this kind of interaction. Evoking both trauma and sexual desire, these powerful tones blur the boundary between pleasure and pain. The inter-relationship between these two states is a part of the conceptual impetus underpinning a number of the paintings too.

This idea is most prominent in an artwork titled Spirit (2010) which depicts a couple copulating beneath what appears to be a low tent. The simplistic stylised rendering of the female subject's face, which protrudes from beneath the gauze, connects with the dated Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which have served as source for some of the works. It is hard to establish whether this female protagonist is a happy participant; has she placed her head outside of the tent to escape the carnal act that is taking place within? Her eyes are closed but this might not simply be a way of escaping the current situation, it could be propelled by a desire to fully inhabit her physicality and the pleasurable sensations rippling through it. The electric pink gauze that conceals her body makes it appear as if her head is disconnected from the activity that engages the rest of her.

This extraordinary motif is present in a number of paintings; such as Little Flame and Xenos engendering the notion that Siopis is meditating not only a polemic between the mind and the body but the manner in which these two differing parts of human existence are present. In Little Flame the subject's body is completely submerged in textured and speckled swirls of red ink and glue. It's as if the subject is soaking in a bath full of fire or blood - albeit that her serene expression would contradict this actuality. It appears as if her body has surrendered to the chaos and energy that swirls around her, while her head, her mind serves as an anchor. This creates a palpable tension that not only presents an ontological polemic but summons a formal dialogue between abstraction and figuration. In other words such works evince the meeting point between amorphous and non-amorphous forms.

In A child frightened by a bloom, a particularly large lilac-coloured painting (the scale of the work is important here), a small naked subject is dwarfed by a mass of free floating abstract forms and is pushed to the bottom edge of the pictorial frame. This creates the impression that a separation between it and the forms around it are vital to its existence. This battle evokes a number of concepts the intersection between image and thought, reason/emotion. It maps not only a struggle that the subject undergoes but that of the painter and the viewer, who initially seeks out figurative forms to grasp the inner logic of the painting. Siopis pushes the viewer to the point at which the logic has been destroyed or withheld.

Sitting rather awkwardly among these paintings is a video artwork entitled, Obscure White Message. Siopis combines images from different places and times with confessional statements made by Dimitri Tsafendas, who assassinated Dr HF Verwoerd in 1966. At times the statements coincide with the imagery such as when Tsafendas talks of his obsession with a tapeworm and there is footage of an octopus’s long, wavy tentacles. At other times the connection is arbitrary. In this work the text is like the "head", it anchors the body of the work, which moves in and out of view in much the same way that Tsafendas statements vacillate between logic and irrationality.

The Politics of Images: Bonani Photography conference

2010-08-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a conference dedicated to photography in Cape Town dubbed the Beyond the Racial Lens: The Politics of South African Documentary Photography, Past and Present. As I was one of the last speakers at the conference I attempted in my talk, titled Circling sights of Trauma: Representations of Abjectness in Contemporary South African Photography, to address some of the issues that had dominated the three-day conference and comment on the photographic works on display in the adjoining Bonani Africa exhibition.

While judging the 60-odd essays for the competition a number of glaring commonalities became apparent to me. Perhaps the most obvious, and to a certain degree predictable, and one which dominated discussions at this conference was the photographers inclination to train their lenses on societies or individuals located on the supposed ‘fringes’. During the conference Thembinkosi Goniwe rightfully lamented the fact that the more carefree and ordinary aspects of black life aren’t given expression.

Referencing a photograph taken by Bob Gosani in 1954 which features a pair of untroubled lovers locked in an embrace I suggested that such representations had existed during the most difficult period of our history. However, they weren’t innocent depictions; in that era they also functioned as “a political statement; a statement of defiance. By demonstrating that love continued to flourish in spite of oppression made clear that apartheid and the Nationalist government couldn’t control every aspect of life. Thus such images implied that the system could be overridden. Depictions of love in our era carry a different message. I believe that they articulate a kind of erasure, a denial of a hidden truth. Thus it is no longer a visual motif of defiance but one of denial.”

Drawing from Darren Newbury, author of Defiant images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa who suggested during the conference that reoccurring motifs in documentary photography were driven by the photographers desire to identify an expressive form that articulated a condition beyond the visual cues it harnessed, I proposed that “a new generation of photographers have chosen to amplify the abjectness of the downtrodden to give expression to a particular condition that might evade visual articulation.”
Thus I suggested that the leitmotif of “abject figures in bleak dysfunctional environments… provided a way of expressing a pervasive social illness that is not limited to disempowered figures. The constant repetition of this motif is evidence of a damaged society, who in the aftermath of trauma… keeps revisiting the site of trauma in an effort to finally exorcise its hold. However, as the sites of our suffering and our guilt are no longer tangible or physically traceable perhaps we seek out equivalent environments where we can replay our collective traumas, in the hope that we might arrive at an alternative conclusion.”

Below I reflect on the conference in The Sunday Independent:

Of course, a festival dedicated to photography and in particular, documentary photography, risks further positioning documentary photography as a discreet branch of photography and an independent genre of the visual arts. Nevertheless many of the issues raised at the conference were specific to photography and substantiated the need for a platform tailor-made to address them. However, photography’s position within the visual arts did haunt the conference, evoking predictable discussions around the “documentary” label and its relationship to art.

In an attempt to circumvent this tired polemic, John Peffer, an American art historian and author of Art at the End of Apartheid, suggested that it would be more useful to view the photographic image as one that enjoys mobility within the broader terrain of visual culture. Attention should be directed on the ways the meaning of the image shifted as it moved into different realms, he implied.

Though Darren Newberry seemed to think it was still useful to view a certain kind of photography as “documentary” he suggested that ultimately all acts of photography are informed by a visual aesthetic. As such any kind of photographs, even political photographs from the struggle years, weren’t just dry records of historical moments but aesthetisised readings of history.

Referring to the canon of Drum photography he demonstrated the ways in which images were constructed so as to be more visually appealing. For this reason Newberry suggested that the legacy of Drum had been “misremembered.”

Riason Naidoo, director of the South African National Gallery, echoed this view with a presentation of Drum photographs that documented the lives of Indian South Africans – a body of work that has been sidelined in favour of dominant narratives around black resistance.
“So much archival work still needs to be done that will transform our understanding of and imagination of this period of South African history,” observed Dr Jon Soske from the Centre for India Studies in Africa at Wits University.

During a discussion titled “Photography and the New Archive: Image, Memory, Museum” it became obvious that the act of archiving is one fraught with difficulties as is the act of rewriting history or establishing a “new” archive. One of the challenges is the fact that archiving has an inbuilt contradiction; that while it is meant to restore or preserve history it similarly “constitutes a removal”, said historian Ciraj Rassool. Attempts to rewrite colonial narratives often brought historians full circle, resulting in a situation that would culminate in “new forms of subjection,” observed historian Premesh Lalu. Much of the discussions mined the past, but a number addressed present dilemmas and trends in photography.

That audiences for photography are predominantly the white middle classes presented a problematic trend, given that images of marginalised and disempowered black people have emerged as a predominant motif, not only in the work displayed at the Bonani Africa photographic exhibition but in much of post-apartheid photography. Though artist and academic Thembinkosi Goniwe reminded audiences that this phenomenon is partly due to the fact that a huge majority live below the poverty line, he lamented that the more carefree aspects of black life haven’t been given expression.

Reflecting on the work of Pieter Hugo, artist Zen Marie suggested that perhaps it was through images of impoverished black subjects that white artists were navigating new ways of imaging the self. Marie’s presentation of the work of a new generation of African artists employing photography in their art, such as Samuel Fosso, Aime Ntakiyica and Tracey Rose, demonstrated that artists were keen to turn the camera lens on themselves to challenge fixed notions around black identity. This implied that distinctions could be drawn between the way artists and so-called documentary photographers manipulated the medium of photography, which brought the discussions at the conference full circle.

* The image above was one of the entries in the Bonani Africa Photography competition. It is part of a series by Araminta de Clermont

Gugulective, Goniwe and the Politics of Race, again.

2010-08-24T06:38:00.000-07:00

At the Bonani Africa Photography conference held in Cape Town this past week (ironically) titled, Beyond the Racial Lens The Politics of South African Documentary Photography, Past and Present, Thembinkosi Goniwe took issue with the comments I made in an earlier blog on Gugulective. While I was delighted that a post on my blog might be causing a stir his observations were totally unfounded. His suggestion that I didn’t believe that artists working on the so-called periphery should be showing in commercial galleries conflicted with the views I had expressed. If he had in fact read my blog post carefully he would have noted that because I had been lobbying for artists who operated outside the commercial gallery circuit to be shown at the Goodman’s Project Space I was disappointed that Gugulective hadn’t delivered.

He also suggested that this piece of writing was indicative of a tendency in (white) critics and arts writers in this country to foreground black artists’ biographical history rather than in engaging with their work. As I stated in my rebuttal at the conference I agree with this latter point - albeit that I think white artist's are often subject to this kind of reporting - but do not count myself as one of these writers. I do not believe that I paid any attention to the biographies of any of Gugulective members in my blog post. I simply referenced where they had been exhibiting before. The reason I did not discuss Gugulective’s work in my blog post in any depth was because I felt that there was little depth to the work: they had translated their stated intentions in such a literal way that there was no need for me to unpack the image - a fact which pained me given that I had implied in an ART SA article that the likes of Gugulective should be given such a platform.

Goniwe should have read my blog post with the kind of care that he urges critics to extend to the work which they appraise. Though I believe that he had an axe to grind because I did not give his exhibition "SPace" a favourable review, I think that he also chose to assume that because I am white I assess the work of black artists differently to their white counterparts. He should not make assumptions about me and my brand of criticism based on my race. By doing so he is enacting precisely what he is accusing me of doing.

Art criticism cannot flourish in this country if every time a white critic gives a black artist’s work a bad review they are accused of being a racist. Why is nothing said when a black artist’s work is received favourably when surely the same prejudice must also inform this reception? As it is I believe that many critics and writers censor themselves when writing about black artists work out of fear of appearing not to be politically correct. In this context white artists work is being subject to a more rigorous form of criticism than their black counterparts. This is not a healthy situation and it is one that is further perpetuated if every time a white writer or critic is attacked or accused of racism when they make a negative comment about black artists work.

P.S. Just one final point that I want to make about Gugulective. My opinion about their show at Goodman Gallery's Project Space is an opinion about THAT exhibition and does not reflect how I feel about them as people or artists. They are young artists who simply weren't ready for a solo exhibition and I do not discount the fact that they may startle me with their art sometime in the future.

Demystifying Hillbrow: the X-Homes Johannesburg project

2010-08-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Like a devout Catholic visiting St Peter’s for the first time I stood below the Hillbrow Tower transfixed, marvelling at its wide concrete trunk. It was a novelty to be viewing this quintessential feature of the Joburg skyline close up, on foot. For a born and bred Joburger, such an experience is akin to “coming home”.
Like most Joburgers, my more recent forays into Hillbrow have been from the safety of a speeding car. From this vantage point you can’t glean very much – and I never dreamed that this would be a disadvantage.
Hillbrow might once have been a desirable spot, when in the seventies Italian, German and Portuguese immigrants installed European café society culture into the suburb, giving it a distinctly cosmopolitan feel. But in the late eighties it began to undergo a shift when an influx of South Africans looking to escape violent upheavals in the townships settled in the suburb and surrounding areas. By the late nineties Hillbrow had become home to a new set of immigrants; this time from the rest of the continent. Buildings were hijacked by thugs, landlords reneged on their responsibilities, the municipality cut off basic services and the physical appearance of the neighbourhood deteriorated dramatically.

For those who recalled a carefree youth in the area, the deterioration of Hillbrow became emblematic of the social and structural degeneration of the inner city, a consequence of a new political (dis)order. Guy Tillim’s sombre photographic essay, simply titled Joburg, which documented the grimy dilapidated interiors and exteriors of this collapsing urban landscape, encapsulated the degradation, unwittingly confirming that this European foothold had been lost. Submerged in a process of urban entropy it had become a locale for the impoverished, the disenfranchised and the dejected.

While reports about the Johannesburg Development Agency’s Better Buildings project, an initiative to reclaim, restore and reinvigorate dilapidated edifices in the suburb, surfaced, negative perceptions about Hillbrow have remained steadfast. But, of course, just as the rest of Joburg is constantly being reinvented, so too has Hillbrow’s character been steadily shifting over time. It’s just that no one noticed or cared; photographers and journalists have a keener interest in neglect and degradation.

The X-Homes project, an unconventional performance art initiative-cum-tour of the suburb funded by the Goethe Institute and curated by Christoph Gurk, offers us an in-depth and multi-perspectival view of Hillbrow. On foot. We might be observing life in this suburb but we are steeped in the action we encounter, which both confirms and contradicts the stereotypical ideas of the suburb. It’s not a one-dimensional place.
In a dagga smoke-filled flat we encounter a young woman who leads us into her bedroom. She puts us at our ease, addressing us as if we are prospective tenants. We begin to imagine life in this cramped flat that houses five young people. Makeshift bedrooms are created in the lounge area. Heavy fabrics hang from the ceiling, demarcating the different sleeping areas. Two young men are passing a joint. When I ask them what they do for a living they shrug their shoulders and laugh. The young woman’s boyfriend grows angry and starts to beat her. A knife is drawn and we are quickly escorted out of the flat.

Although we know that the scene hails from playwright Paul Grootboom’s imagination, we are shaken. Earlier, in another Hillbrow flat we had been treated to an emotive jazz interlude, which centred on demonstrating that Hillbrow’s bohemian character is alive and well. It had softened our opinion of the neighbourhood. Grootboom’s mini drama reminded us of Hillbrow’s dark underbelly. The bad element that stalks Hillbrow isn’t always hidden from sight. As we pass through one busy street corner we encounter a group of Nigerians clearly up to no good; their eyes are trained on an expensive camera that one of the journalists in our group is carrying. But their transparent motives make it easy for us to shake them off our tail.
This is an isolated reality; mostly, as we walk through Hillbrow, we don’t feel under threat. When we traverse a park on the way to another flat in a high-rise apartment block we pass a group of men embroiled in a gripping card game; they look up at us and smile, making us feel welcome. Though we feel uneasy about our tourist-like status there is no sense that we are impinging on foreign territory. But we are readily noticeable – our white skins are a giveaway, drawing attention to us wherever we go. Whites are rarely seen walking around the suburb. Magufulo Mbonisi Phakathi, one of our guides, suggests that Hillbrow’s inhabitants are encouraged by the sight. He implies that the presence of whites means that entrenched boundaries are dissolving.

In this country tours of impoverished and undesirable neighbourhoods are not a novel phenomenon; township tours are a popular diversion for curious whites and tourists. But like Tillim’s photographs, these kinds of tours offer uncomfortable voyeuristic voyages in which the impoverished subjects loom as abject figures framed within a narrative of the viewers’ making. In an effort to circumvent this actuality Gurk offers fictional performances that straddle the boundary between theatre and performance art. They are staged in real people’s flats all around Hillbrow. In between these uncanny vignettes is the real Hillbrow, where true life stories are playing out on every corner. Life in Hillbrow happens on the streets. Because most of the buildings are made up of small bachelor flats, which often must accommodate more than a “bachelor”, young people opt to hang out on the street. Groups of young people use walls and railings to prop themselves up while they shoot the breeze. Some smiled and waved as we passed. Others looked slightly perplexed.

Hillbrow is much more tranquil and tidier than we expected. There is hardly any rubbish in view. This is attributed to a fastidious and regular street-cleaning service, which moves through the suburb three times a day, according to Phakathi. This continual and perhaps obsessive attention to tidiness can no doubt be attributed to a desire to disrupt the seemingly unshakable notion of Hillbrow as a grimy locale and the psychological associations it evokes. Dirt and waste are commonly equated with malevolence and disempowerment.

Such perceptions aren’t just held by outsiders but have been internalised by those who dwell in the suburb. Those who live or have lived in Hillbrow have found it hard to think of this neighbourhood as anything other than a transient pit stop, proposes Linda Michael Mkhwanari, who has lived here since 1998.
“People live here on their way to somewhere else. When you encounter people who have lived in Hillbrow they say that when they lived here it was while they were ‘just fixing up their lives’. People forget to make this place home. We need to find a way to do that.”

Hillbrow is an inhomogeneous terrain. Each of the seven buildings and locales that we visit during the X-Homes tour parades its own character. That’s not to say that there aren’t some similarities; few buildings have working lifts, and visible rules, posted on boards at the entrances, govern entry. In one building a sign parades a rule that asserts that “no visitors may sleep in the building”. To gain entry into another building we have to stand in front of a dark window and show the band around our wrists that serves as our “ticket” for the tour. We can’t see who is watching us; we simply move on when we hear a deep voice emanating from behind the screen. Clearly, home life is heavily regulated in this suburb. Perhaps that is why some inhabitants struggle to forge a long-lasting connection to this place.

We feel safe in Hillbrow. We turn this incongruous idea over and over in our heads before we vocalise it. We are almost giddy with surprise when we declare it. We feel slightly foolish too; though a face-to-face encounter with Hillbrow on foot has demystified the suburb, we question the root of our beliefs.
But, of course, this is no ordinary encounter with Hillbrow. We get to spend time in ordinary homes - even though we are presented with contrived expressions of the inhabitants lives. Our experiences are also mediated via seven performance artworks that illuminate different aspects about the neighbourhood – and ourselves.

When we followed a young performer into a dilapidated art deco-esque building, she attempted to describe what it might have looked like at the apogee of its lifespan. A time when the white marble floors where pristine and the decorative railings up the staircase weren’t chipped and weathered. She interrupted our nostalgic reverie, however, to remind us that Hillbrow’s glory days were not as glorious as we recalled; for those of colour were excluded from inhabiting this environment. Other performance works are more abstract and have a less didactic spin, such as Athi-Patra Ruga’s performance in a basement of a makeshift boxing club in a disused petrol station.

We felt like we were travelling into the bowels of Hillbrow as we descended a rickety, uneven staircase into a dark basement. There, Ruga had recreated the interior of a confined flat and concealed behind a panoply of coloured balloons he posed as its frustrated inhabitant, whose television functions as a window to the world and an escape from his own. He also evinces an awareness of his subjectivity and engages in a playful strip show behind a screen, bringing the politics of viewing and consuming the lives of the impoverished other sharply into focus. He achieves this by offering to expose his most intimate self.

Voyeurism is a recurring theme in the X-Homes tour. Bruce La Bruce, the Canadian filmmaker and performance artist, cheekily plays with this theme in a performance involving two young men dressed in soccer gear, who pretend to fornicate on the bed in front of us. In one flat that we visit the tables are turned on us when we are given an array of puppets and props and are told to entertain the inhabitants.

After hours of moving between fictional and real realms the boundaries between the two began to blur and the life on the street began to appear like a performance, while the constructed dramas in the flats started to feel authentic, which sometimes they were. This pushed us into a liminal zone that seemed to dislodge our preconceived notions, allowing us to inhabit Hillbrow quite freely and without baggage.

It was nearly 8pm when we made our way back to our cars after the last performance at the top of a hotel, where we glimpsed one of its legendary inhabitants: an old white woman who has remained in Hillbrow through all its incarnations. She eats dinner at the hotel every evening.

We don’t want to leave Hillbrow; it comes alive at night. All the shops are open. Salons are busy. Outside mobile phone repair shops are small tables on which the inner guts of these modern necessities are laid bare. Hillbrow has not been lost; its vibrant, cosmopolitan character continues to exist.

*Bruce La Bruce pictured above with another perfomer

Easy Come, Easy Go: Gimberg Nerf leave Facebook

2010-08-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

The Dear John letter arrived in my Inbox a couple of days ago: Gimberg Nerf have left Facebook. It was the most sincere insincere Dear John letter I have received. In the two weeks that Gimberg Nerf – the art collective/unit made up of Douglas Gimberg and Christian Nerf – existed in the virtual realm we know as Facebook they/he burned pretty bright.

For starters they befriended absolutely everyone in the art world in a matter of days, proving that this little community of ours isn’t terribly discerning. Nevertheless for us it was a highly amusing ride full of cheeky and, sometimes, lurid posts, pictures and pranks. Certainly in the past couple of weeks they explored the ‘depths’ – I use this designation with a full sense of irony it entails – of this social media tool and succeeded in some way in solidifying the Gimberg Nerf persona – albeit that ‘his’ visual appearance was slightly unstable, however, given ‘his’ rather awkward and contrived provenance it was to be expected. And in fact I had come to look forward to see exactly how this character might manifest next.

Of course, I do think that given more time, Gimberg Nerf would have felt more and more real to us. But, once they finally secured the prerequisite 666 friends thus achieving their devilish objective their scheme had reached its farcical conclusion.

Of course, the question remains is making art as easy as making so-called friends on FB as Gimberg Nerf suggests? If so it could valorise FB and the “practice” of F-booking thus ensuring that those who spend hours fashioning a status update or faking photos of themselves in some desirable foreign locale wouldn’t feel as if they have been staring into an endless void.

I think what I like the most about the FB Gimberg & Nerf stunt is that it is to some degree untraceable that their “face” has disappeared and everything they have said and done has been erased. Of course, we have all those fun memories. But they will fade. Fast.

And perhaps that is ultimately what I have enjoyed about the FB Gimberg & Nerf stunt, they have shown all us Fbookers and the flimsy connections we make for what they are; shallow, self-serving and engineered to boost our egos/profiles.

Here I would like to refer to a quote that our long-lost friend Gimberg Nerf left us with upon their sudden departure (Warning: ensure there is a box of tissues nearby) that offers alternative meanings for the words friend, friendless and friendship:

Friend, n. An investigator upon the slide of whose microscope we live, move and have our being.

Friendless, adj. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterances of truth and common sense.

Friendship, n. A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.

Some questions about Gugulective...

2010-08-08T02:25:00.000-07:00

The title of Riason Naidoo’s first major exhibition at SANG, Pierneef to Gugulective implies that while the discourse on South African art ‘begins’ with Pierneef, Gugulective in some way present or encapsulate our artistic trajectory in the present-day, the now. I have yet to see Naidoo’s exhibition – I will be in Cape Town soon and will be reviewing it for the Sunday Indy – so I haven’t a clue what this definitive Gugulective artwork/s might be, but suffice to say Naidoo has conferred this Cape Town-based artistic collective with some kind of import. Certainly it created some level of interest in their show titled Ityala aliboli/Debt don’t rot, at the Goodman Gallery Project Space at Arts and Main, which I had a look at this week.

This exhibition was significant to me for another reason. Earlier this year when I penned a trenchant opinion piece on the Arts on Main phenomenon in a column for Art South Africa, I more or less chided Liza Essers for setting out to establish a space for cutting-edge new talent and then opting to show bankable names like Kentridge and Goldblatt. To temper this criticism I reminded readers that the space did host a segment of Simon Njami and Bettina Malcomness’ Us – the bulk of the show was staged at the Johannesburg Art Gallery - which I suggested did in fact include rising young talents who were not regulars on the commercial gallery circuit. As an example I cited Gugulective, who showed Amanzi Amdaka at the gallery.

So naturally, when I saw that Gugulective would be enjoying their own solo exhibition at the Goodman’s Project Space at Arts on Main, it crossed my mind that Essers had acted on my observations. Buoyed by the idea that the Project Space was shaping up to meet its original mandate, I arrived at Arts on Main feeling optimistic and with my little notebook in hand was committed to writing an in-depth review of the exhibition for the newspaper.

But my notebook remained empty. There was nothing that I wanted to say about the work – other than that it was one-dimensional and dull. I did another turn in the gallery, perusing the enlarged prints of old money. On the bottom of the prints were deep etched photographs of people queuing. Yes, the prints did in fact articulate the exhibition’s stated theme, described by the gallery press release as “a postulation on the innocent, the marginalised and poor through the confrontation of the idea that South Africa’s economic crisis predates post-1994” - but what an unimaginative and obvious expression of that idea. As were works made from “rat traps” embossed with the old government’s insignia.

What could I possibly write? As I drove through the city back to our offices on Sauer Street I pondered not on the work I had seen but what happens when a group of artists working on the periphery of the art scene find themselves at the centre – does this immediately undercut their arguments – especially when they are said to be concerned with articulating the woes of the marginalised?

Furthermore: does their work lose its edge when it is shown in a conventional gallery space? In other words would this exhibition have had more significance if it had been shown at Kwa-Mlamli’s Shebeen in Gugulethu, where they have shown before? Is Gugulective’s appeal – particularly to the white dominated art world – founded on the environment in which they created and displayed their work rather than the work itself?

Fact is when an art object is displayed in a gallery space, it has to meet quite a different set of criteria - it is beholden to a canon, a history. Certainly a critic has this in mind. Based on the work on show at Goodman Gallery's Project Space I would venture that Gugulective are not ready to do a solo exhibition - even in a supposedly experimental space. If only the work was experimental.

Art and Capitalism

2010-08-02T00:40:00.000-07:00

Ross Douglas probably had a stiff drink before he made his way into the Circa gallery Thursday last week. Inside I was waiting to give a talk on art and capitalism where I would be joined by David Brodie, Kobie Labuschagne, Marianne Fassler and Douglas in a panel discussion. It was part of a Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism programme organised by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall of the Wiser Institute at Wits University. The audience were PHD students drawn from a number of disciplines.

Brodie took on the persona of the unapologetic commercial driven art player, confessing that gallerists were like drug dealers in the sense that they pushed their products on consumers, ensuring them that the brand of art that they were peddling would “make them feel good.”

It was satisfying to see that Douglas was no longer selling the art fair as an educational event - but, of course, he continues to imply that the art fair is a much better alternative to a biennale. Douglas doesn’t get it and probably never will. Brodie was quick to remind the audience – and indirectly Douglas too – that biennales and art fairs cannot be uttered in the same breath; they are completely different kinds of events with different objectives.

Much to everyone’s surprise I didn’t talk about the art fair at all; the interaction between art and capitalism is too obvious in that context and as an event that only takes place once a year its effect is minimal. We haven’t quite reached the stage where artists are producing art-fair-art - although I dare say we are heading in that direction. I am more interested in the more nuanced and covert ways in which commercialisation shapes art production – such as corporate sponsored art competitions and corporate patronage. One of the questions that we were asked to address in our talks required us to reflect on the ways capitalism permeated art and how it might corrupt the purity of art – the implication here was that this economic paradigm and art were mutually exclusive.

This was my response:

“It is impossible to delineate or characterise the nature of ‘pure’ art because such an idea is driven by reductive or a modernist notion of what defines art. Within this discussion I would venture that pure art might refer to art that evidences aesthetic autonomy; in other words art that hasn’t been shaped by the demands of the art market. However, realistically an artist would have to be producing art in complete isolation from the world to generate this kind of art.
Plainly put, in this era of accelerated commercialisation it is impossible to demarcate the exact sites/instances upon which capitalism penetrates artistic practice; I think most theorists agree that while art has symbolic and ideological value it similarly is a commodity within an economic circuit of exchange.

As an art critic, my focus is not to map and guard the borders of so-called ‘pure’ art fending off capitalist incursions, rather my interest is in discovering the ways in which this paradoxical aspect of art manifests in practice, and how different commercial settings, such as at an art fair, where an artworks monetary value is foregrounded, shape how art is read.”

Drawing from Bourdieu, I nevertheless reflect on the role of the art critic plays in ensuring that art is an activity positioned outside the boundaries of a capitalist paradigm:

“By highlighting art’s transcendental and intangible qualities the art critic unwittingly ensures that the illusion of art as a unique commodity unlike any other is maintained – one’s use of a high brow vocabulary and concepts that might not be readily grasped by the public ensure that art asserts its autonomy from the world of commerce. Thus any compromise to the language of criticism places art’s autonomy under risk. “

Naturally, art criticism is a product too and thus is subject to external forces that shape it’s production; in particular the vocabulary of criticism and it’s focus.

“Settling on an appropriate vocabulary in the mass media is a constant struggle which has become harder to resolve in the face of a populist brand of journalism in which entertaining the audience and holding their attention at any cost has come at the expense of quality reporting that might enlighten the reader.”

And here I weigh in on the pros and cons of the commercial art market in SA:

“The growth of the commercial sector of the art market since the advent of democracy has seen a power shift in which national and regional public art institutions no longer are the dictating authority on art. Given that many of these institutions were initially sluggish to transform in terms of widening the scope of their curatorial policies to include art and exhibitions of the work of previously marginalised artists, this actuality wasn’t necessarily a negative one – it has in some senses democratised art production, opening up discourses and allowing marginalised artists to enter the fray. Of course, the majority of these new galleries are white owned thus the power relations within this sector has remained skewed.

Because commercial galleries now hold the authority and under-funded public art institutions have become increasingly dependent on corporate funding, the brand of art that is displayed and celebrated is increasingly being determined by commercial factors or to meet the requirements of corporate sponsors. In other words art that might not be critically prized by academia, art producers or critics, is regularly given a pride of place in commercial galleries and other commercial settings such as at an art fair. This democratisation of the arts might have opened the once closed doors of the art world but it also means anyone with enough financial clout can dictate what kinds of art should be valued – often these individuals believe that their affinity for art automatically grants them insider knowledge of contemporary art practice. Thus the intellectual gulf between patrons and the arts intelligentsia is often quite vast.”

Gimberg Nerf on Facebook

2010-07-25T00:50:00.000-07:00

Douglas Gimberg and Christian Nerf’s project, or should one say objective, towards establishing a unified authorial identity in the world of art has reached its apogee with the entry of this “character” on Facebook. FB is the ideal place to concretise this “persona”; it is a virtual space where an identity can be invented and given credibility at the same time. Granted Gimberg Nerf is a bit of an odd looking bloke with a sort of Amish sensibility but his slightly jarring appearance seems appropriate given that he is made up of two separate people, the friction or slight incompatibility between the two should be palpable. This is such an appealing artistic gesture; it will be interesting to observe how Gimberg Nerf evolves in this social media realm.

Interview with Mary Sibande

2010-07-25T00:10:00.000-07:00

IT IS MARY Sibande’s hands that I first study when she sits down. Weeks earlier I had been transfixed by the large hands on her alter ego, Sophie, a fibreglass replica of Sibande, in the artwork I Decline, I Refuse to Recline (2010), on show at the SPace exhibition. I thought that the large hands that reach out, in desperation, towards some invisible object, might have been part of a deliberate ploy: perhaps a way of underscoring Sophie’s avaricious pursuit of material comforts, her determination to survive and her status as a worker. It made sense; for Sibande the figure of the domestic worker isn’t a disempowered character at all, but a strong, powerful figure.
“I wanted to celebrate them (domestic workers). I think that they are heroes. It was so hard to put food on the table,” observes Sibande, looking down at her hands, which don’t look like the oversized appendages that I had seen on her sculpture.
Sophie might be a replica of Sibande’s body and Sibande might parade as this character in photographs, but their personae are nothing alike. Sibande is obviously more animated. She is garrulous, upbeat and her chatter is punctuated with laughter. And every so often she makes a poignant remark about her practice – although she confesses she isn’t good at articulating the ideas that shape her art.
“I am a sculptor, I like to make stuff. I know that I can’t talk about my work. I find it difficult to express what I want to say. Even when I speak in Swazi I have the same difficulties. It probably doesn’t help that I went to an Afrikaans school.”

Sibande was born in 1982 and grew up in Barberton, Mpumalanga, where she attended said Afrikaans school. Though she received a better education than other children in the township where she lived it kept her at a remove, forcing her into solitude.
“People thought that I thought I was better than them because I went to this other
school,” she recalls.
Sibande moved to Joburg in 2001 to study fashion; she only signed up for a degree in fine art at the University of Johannesburg because she missed the application date for the fashion course. But her fascination for fashion and clothing didn’t end; she has channelled it into her art. Sophie’s dress is the most expressive element of Sibande’s art and the fibreglass sculptures resemble mannequins. In this way Sibande is recasting, reinventing and challenging the fashion ideal.

It may seem incongruous for a young well-educated black woman to want to dress up and pose as a domestic worker; it defeats the aims and ambitious of the generation who fought for equality. Sibande suggests that by portraying a domestic worker she is stripping back the privileges that she has enjoyed and positioning herself in the long line of domestic workers from which she descends: since her great grandmother, all the women in her family have been more or less trapped by servitude.
“I wanted to put myself among these women, these maids. I am making a work out of their work,” she comments.
Sibande’s reverence for domestic workers manifests in her rendering of this figure. By situating Sophie in the realm of fantasy, by dressing her an elaborate pseudo-Victorian costume she does not emerge as a pitiful character but one with a degree of agency. It’s a twist on the conventional manner in which this persona has been cast in the public realm; under-paid and subject to the whims of fussy white madams, the domestic worker is more commonly viewed as a powerless and exploited worker who occupies the bottom echelon of our society. In other words the domestic worker was the ultimate victim of the skewed social and political system that once governed this country.

At first I am surprised by Sibande’s reverence for the domestic worker but soon realise that claiming her history and celebrating these women’s strength rather than their powerlessness is an empowering act that allows her to reconcile with her heritage in a positive way. In retaining the connection to her past in her art Sibande also establishes the fact that there was no clean break between apartheid and post-apartheid society. We remain innately tied to the past even though there have been radical sociopolitical shifts. This paradoxical condition is expressed through Sophie’s hybrid domestic-worker-cum-Victorian dress, which conjures a colonial authority.
“I didn’t want to move Sophie away from being a maid. As much as she is moving forward she is also going back.”
In this way Sophie’s liberation is illusionary.
“Whatever she does she will always be a maid.”
This seems to imply that not only are domestic workers – Sibande never uses this politically correct term – unable to fully elevate themselves beyond their station, but that this heritage of servitude weighs heavily on the present (and the past).

Sibande’s work seems to have hit a nerve. Since her first solo exhibition, Long Live the Dead Queen, at Momo Gallery in Joburg last year, no large-scale exhibition has been complete without a sculpture of Sophie by this 28-year-old. Interest in her work isn’t just limited to the art world, either. It has featured in mainstream newspapers and on TV and radio stations. This month it will be displayed on billboards around Joburg’s inner city.
“If people are not raised by a domestic worker then their mother or auntie has worked as one. This is why Sophie always hits home, she always evokes the familiar.”
Nevertheless Sibande has become frustrated with the one-dimensional readings of her work. To address, or perhaps to even circumvent this in the work I Decline, I Refuse to Recline, Sophie is concealed by a multilayered skirt that suggests she has a complex character that cannot be determined by her appearance.
“A lot of people think they understand what Sophie is about because she is a maid and then they stop (to think further). I want to create layers so that people have to unpack (her significance) further. I don’t want to give a lot away instantly. I wanted to create another dialogue around Sophie.”

To say that the figure of Sophie is a leitmotif in Sibande’s art is an understatement; to date Sibande’s art has been completely centred on her alter ego. For this reason it is impossible to quiz Sibande on her career and life without encountering the origins of this enigmatic character that has turned Sibande into an overnight success – well, as much success as one could hope to enjoy in South Africa’s limited and perhaps parochial art world. Sibande giggles with delight when I suggest she has been an overnight success, but she points out that no one paid any attention to her first artworks. These were pairs of distorted, embellished shoes fashioned from velvet and other luxurious fabrics, which showed at the now defunct Gordart Gallery in Melville in 2006. These artworks indirectly marked the birth of Sibande’s alter ego.
“I first made the objects that Sophie aspired to owning: beautiful shoes,” recalls Sibande. Of course, these were no ordinary shoes but heavily decorated items that existed beyond the realm of functional footwear.
“They couldn’t be worn, they were completely impractical.”
To truly aspire beyond her station Sophie needed to desire objects that had no practical function, as this is a marker of true wealth. Owning such objects could enable her physical and social transcendence – not only over poverty but servitude. Sibande could identify with Sophie’s dreams. So it was right from the beginning of Sophie’s evolution that Sibande recognised elements of Sophie in herself. It seemed natural, therefore, that when it came to bringing Sophie to life, Sibande would model the domestic worker character on herself.
“I had to make Sophie real. I wanted to feel her presence. The best person to use as a subject was me. I realised that Sophie was me. I aspire to having all these beautiful
things. When I was growing up I didn’t have lots of beautiful things that other kids had. It’s not that I grew up poor but other kids always seemed to be 10 steps ahead of me.”

Wealth and an excessive display of it has informed the character of Sophie’s outfits. The exaggerated silhouettes and stylistic elements of Sophie’s dresses – in I Decline, I Refuse to Recline Sophie’s dress is part of a chaise longue – are intended to evoke the manner in which South Africa’s rising black middle class express their status through clothing and other accoutrements.
“You don’t know when to stop, you keep wanting more. You see a lot of rich people in the township wearing a lot of bling. They have 10 rings on their fingers, wear the latest wigs. It’s excessive. It’s as if they don’t know how to stop making themselves more beautiful. You think the more you have the more you are getting there.”

This excessive display of wealth is a means of shrugging off old identities, escaping a heritage of servitude and asserting the affluent “master” role. Sibande expresses this idea through Sophie’s hybrid costume, which parades elements of servitude and wealth.
“Sophie is trying so hard to move forward, she has to have more. If she wants shoes they must fill the entire room.”
The element of excess in Sophie’s dress has become more pronounced over time as Sibande has been developing the story of her alter ego.
“I want to see how far I can take her – not just conceptually but in terms of the size and scale of the dress.”
Sibande envisions a point where the dress will completely dominate the work, eventually fill a room or become an architectural structure. While there is still room for Sophie and the narrative attached to her to develop further, Sibande acknowledges that her alter ego cannot be the source of her art for much longer.
“I can only say so much with her. Sooner or later it will become too easy (to make work with her). I am preparing for her death. The work with the horse (The Reign) was the first step towards her death.”

Sibande may make jokes about the annihilation of her alter ego.
“She was dead before I even started,” she says referring to the title of the exhibition Long Live the Dead Queen. But she admits to sharing a bizarre connection with this character.
“When I get into her costume and pose for the photographs I really feel like I am her. It’s a bit twisted I know, but I become Sophie.” - published in The Sunday Independent, June 20, 2010.

Thursday Night Art Crawl

2010-07-19T00:52:00.000-07:00

In typical Joburg fashion there were three gallery openings all starting at 6pm on the same Thursday evening; the Brait-Everard Read Award show at Circa, a group show, entitled In Other Words at the Goodman and New African Photography at Gallery Momo. Art gluttons such as myself didn’t settle on attending one of the openings but had rather ambitiously set their sights on attending all three within the space of two hours. As I drove towards Parktown North, however, I saw that Eskom, in its usual untimely fashion, had put a spanner in the works. The suburb was in complete darkness and when I passed by Gallery Momo I saw people holding candles up to artworks – so I drove with the hope that Circa might have electricity. They did.

Circa’s exterior is impressive but it is not really a functional piece of architecture; the exhibition spaces feel cramped – particularly the space downstairs - and the space upstairs, which is meant to function as the primary exhibition area, feels like an entrance space that should lead onto something grander. Nevertheless because the venue does offer two disconnected spaces it is ideal for showcasing two bodies of work that are not interrelated, such as the work of the winners of this year’s Brait Everard Read Award: Carmen Sober and Gabrielle Goliath.

I rarely miss viewing the Brait-Everard Read Award exhibition – the work is usually challenging and fresh. And this year’s winners didn’t disappoint, well, not completely. Both Goliath and Sober are pushing the limits of photography by destabilising the accuracy or veracity of the documentary mode as a purveyor of any fixed truths. Granted, not a new idea but they approached this objective quite differently. Goliath’s exhibition was an extension of her preoccupation with identity politics. Multiple portraits of young coloured women in identical outfits rendered in a sort of Pieter Hugo style (pervasive light illuminating the subject’s face) all functioned as portraits of someone called “Bernice.” Adjacent to this line of portraits was video footage revealing the “real” identities of these women, thus propelling a search for the actual Bernice, a name the artist also assumed. I wasn’t particularly enthralled – mostly because I felt that it was simply a reversal of the modus operandi she employed in Ek is 'n Kimberley Coloured.

Sober’s exhibition had a bit more zing to it. Through different modes she presented the viewer with situations that were seemingly both real and fictional where unthreatening objects were shown to be lethal. In one scenario a school boy is shown slumped over his desk, stabbed in the nose by a pencil. A newspaper article documents how infected bananas can eat away at human flesh. In other words she meditates on fantasies cooked up by a paranoid society that feels under increasing threat from the world around them. At the heart of this anxiety they are fearful of themselves; for they are responsible for “corrupting” these objects.

Next stop was Gallery Momo, which was packed to the rafters - interestingly, with mostly black spectators. It is rather depressing to think that white South Africans more readily patronise white-owned galleries and black South Africans are more likely to make a bee-line for black-owned galleries. WTF? Are galleries perpetuating this division?

I was looking forward to viewing “new” African photography. But I had seen much of it before or was already familiar with the work; an enlarged Siemon Allen ‘record’, Sammy Baloji’s works, where he superimposes scenarios/people from the past onto politically charged landscapes (they showed at the Bamako stand at the Joburg Art Fair last year), and Patricia Driscoll’s semi-abstract painterly-like landscape photographs. I had sort of been excited to see Ayana Vellissia Jackson's photographs – one of which was used for the invite. But when I had a closer look at the photographs of a woman pictured in different ensembles including Victorian period dress and spotted the phrase “intersection between race and gender” I looked around for the wine; the work felt like a poor imitation of Mary Sibande’s work as even Goliath’s, Lawrence Lemaoana’s. I have grown incredibly weary of art that engages with identity: in order for this discourse to remain pertinent it needs to develop in a new direction or at least manifest in a new way. Please!!

I literally skidded into the Goodman Gallery as the last dregs of wine were being consumed so I only had time for a very quick perusal of the works on display, which I kind of regretted because there was a lot of good work on show. It was good to see some of Kendell Geer’s works – the beaded aprons - which I assume from reviews, came from the hotly debated Third World Disorder. I liked these artworks the most, mostly because I think that purely scripto-visual art tends to feel a bit like a one-liner, which, of course, it is in a literal sense. I will probably return to this exhibition and allow myself to ponder further on this brand of art so I won’t say anymore.

My journey home was punctuated by laughs courtesy of Brett Murray’s art work “Culture” which read: “Oprah Winfrey thinks Osama Bin Laden would look gorgeous in slacks.” Who says good art can't be amusing?

*The image above is one of Sober’s

The 'Grey Areas' debate 14 years later

2010-07-12T02:05:00.000-07:00

No essays were feverishly penned. No impassioned articles or e-mails were quickly dispatched. There were no public declarations of outrage. Nor did groups of art students flock to view the “offending” artworks. It seemed in the days that followed the opening of the In Context exhibition at the Arts on Main complex last month that the display of Candice Breitz’s Ghost series (1994-1996) had gone without much notice.

Had the 14 years that had passed dulled the works’ hard transgressive edges? Certainly it seemed as if the white figures that dominate in this series of artworks had truly become spectral characters, withholding the secrets from South Africa’s vexed past. More than a decade ago the Ghost series and Breitz’s Rainbow series were anything but unobtrusive; not only were they at the centre of an explosive polemic that rocked the citadels of art academia, but when the debate moved into the public domain, it posed the most fundamental questions that plagued post-apartheid identity: could white people identify with black people and did anyone have the right to represent another?

Answers to these questions weren’t easy to identify, causing the debate to rage for years, finally culminating in the publication of Grey Areas, a collection of essays. Does the fact that the Ghost series has not caused any waves a second time indicate that the discourse has become irrelevant? Breitz, who has since been settled in Germany for some time, was keen to find out.
“I have no idea what to expect. I was curious as to what it would be like to insert these works into this context at this moment in time. The recent fiasco at Constitution Hill (with Lulu Xingwana) made me wonder whether this particular dialogue remains relevant. For as long as the history of apartheid and questions of race continue to play a central role in our understanding of who we are, such conversations need to continue,” observes the artist.
So while the dust may have settled on the “Grey Areas” debate, Breitz obviously remains haunted by it. Certainly all spheres of cultural production in South Africa were implicated and affected by the debate; issues of representation are as pertinent to literature as they are to journalism.

Ironically, few involved in the debate had actually seen Breitz’s Ghost series – it was exhibited at the Chicago Project Room in 1998 but has never been shown on South African soil until now. As with her Rainbow series, the Ghost series was created by manipulating existing imagery. Breitz took ethnographic postcards of black women in traditional garb, of the kind one would find in a tourist shop, and with the use of Tipp-Ex she transformed the women’s bodies, turning the black women “white” – hence the ghost alluded to in the title of the series, which also referred to women’s lack of status.
“I wasn’t saying anything that hadn’t already been said at that moment in time. African women have largely been represented in the public sphere through their absence. “What those works did was to very simply make the absence visible and to project the presence of the represented women as an absence. These kinds of images of black women (that I presented) are ultimately less about the women portrayed than they are about the white photographers who sell the imagery to white tourists with their particular ideas about Africa.”

Okwui Enwezor, the African-born New York-based art academic, saw Breitz’s work from quite a different perspective and articulated his opinions in an essay in the art journal Third Text. He felt that by using negative ethnographicimagery Breitz was perpetuating the existence of such pejorative imagery, which he felt presented the black subject at the “liminal point of (his/her) defeat”. Thus in this way Breitz was indirectly maintaining black people’s lower status within the hierarchical structure that apartheid had set. Furthermore, he felt that Breitz could not justifiably speak on behalf of black women, even if it might be to raise awareness of the ways in which their subjugation was perpetuated via stock imagery. He felt that in so doing Breitz was overidentifying with black women – this was more particular to her Rainbow series, in which pornographic imagery of white women were spliced with images of black women in traditional outfits. He proposed that this form of identification conveniently allowed Breitz and the other white artists who were targeted in his attack to negate their complicit role in the apartheid system.

Today Breitz still vehemently disagrees with Enwezor’s point of view.
“It wasn’t about putting myself literally in dialogue with black women; it was about looking at how black women and white women were typically represented. To try and forge a space of identification does not necessarily mean that one is washing one’s hands of the past. I think it is possible to maintain both positions.
“Surely if you can acknowledge an active or passive guilt… the next logical step would be to try and step beyond those boundaries; does that necessarily entail a form of erasure? That was one possible reading at that moment in time. Frankly, I doubt that Okwui (Enwezor) would hold firm on it today.”

In retrospect, however, Breitz understands that the dialogue that her artworks elicited were inevitable.
“It was important that that debate happened at that point… regardless of how my work was framed within it; it was a very urgent conversation at that moment (in our history). I don’t think that it could have been any other way at that moment.”
One of the drawbacks of the Grey Areas debate was that it wasn’t very refined and it remained limited, suggests Breitz.
“It tended to be specific to the extent that there was not sufficient acknowledgement of the fact that the questions which it raised had/has a broader relevance. Obviously it’s productive to start any discussion by addressing specific examples, but in fact those questions around subject formation and identity and what is ‘representable’ resonate far beyond the South African context.”

Artist Minnette Vári came under criticism at the same time as Breitz, specifically for her Zulu series, in which she, too, appropriated ethnographic postcards of Zulu women in traditional settings and costume. They were contrived images conforming with notions of black South Africans as “tribalised primitives”. Vári altered one of the images by transposing her face onto the face of one of the Zulu women. Vári concurs with Breitz’s notion that the debate that their work ignited wasn’t nuanced but she also suggests that it has not developed since then.
“The debate never came to any adulthood. The original players have all moved on… and I don’t think that it has been taken up by subsequent artists in any meaningful way.
“Not that I would expect that because these are all people coming from totally different backgrounds. I also have a sense that that was a time when we could use such language; we were all inflamed by the idea of identity and who has the right to own and represent.”
Vári suggests that her own engagement with issues of identity at that juncture in her career was “crude”.
In works such as in the Zulu series she says she was looking to discover who she would have been had she been born black. “How would I look? How would I present myself ? That preoccupation had some very problematic ingredients.
“The images were truly startling on many levels and I don’t think I understood it.”
For Vári those works were less about representing blackness and more to do with unpacking the politics of whiteness.
“I wanted to invent a me that was more African than I felt. As Kendell (Geers) said in a piece long ago: every time he tells someone he is African he feels like he is lying. I feel the same.
Those works were a clumsy way of finding that identity.”

The strong backlash against Vári and Breitz’s “clumsy” attempts to reconfigure their identity in the face of a new political dispensation, which had compelled their work, had a dramatic effect on their art. Breitz, who was living in New York, ceased making work that engaged with South African issues, choosing to rather embrace a visual language that exploited the universal lexicon of American popular culture. This was obviously also compelled by the new environment in which she was now established.
“It was not a conscious or strategic decision; I was no longer connected to South Africa in the same way and felt that I could no longer authentically voice South African issues. I became interested in exploring trans-national forms of language as these impact on all urban contexts at large.”

For Vári, who was “mute with shock” when the debate took hold, it prompted a long period of
self-reflection. “I found it terribly distressing to be so misunderstood.”
Vári’s Zulu series and other related works were never exhibited again. But what Vári regrets the most is the impact that the debate had on the art community. At first she found the backlash by mostly white academics (as documented in Grey Areas) against Enwezor’s comments to be “overly anxious and neurotic” as they fought the notion that they were inherently racist. Vári believes that this level of neurosis became internalised and led to a form of self-censorship.
“Sadly I think art practice in South Africa responded by becoming much more careful and it resulted in swathes of politically correct art that I just found anodyne.
“It hamstrung certain enquiries that were under way and that could have developed into something much more sophisticated and interesting.”

The status quo of this debate will be the focus of an issue of the Critical Arts journal, which is edited by Leora Faber, an artist and academic who heads the Research Centre for Visual Identities in Art and Design at the University of Johannesburg. In her editorial Faber also notes the shifts in art practice that the representation debate had.
“These debates could, arguably, be said to have led to a position where, over the past decade, certain artists (such as Berni Searle, Tracey Rose, Minnette Vári, Senzeni Marasela, Claudette Schreuders, Jean Brundrit, Penny Siopis and Steven Cohen, to name but a few), have turned to the use of their own bodies as subject, and towards the articulation of more personal concerns, perhaps feeling that it was more comfortable to image and ‘speak for’ themselves.”

While Faber seems to be of the opinion that this shift did in fact lead to a rich discourse that allowed the personal to articulate broader political stances, she also has observed that a new generation of artists such as Lawrence Lemaoana, Athi-Patra Ruga and Mary Sibande have found new ways to engage with issues of representation in a manner that exudes “playfulness, humour or ‘fun’; it is almost as if the weight of the Grey Areas debate has been lifted from this generation, allowing for a new sense of artistic freedom, which is being realised through critical use of play.”

Of course, one could argue that Breitz and Vári’s contentious works were also playful in nature, as they, too, are tongue-in-cheek engagements with racial identity. Perhaps it was the politically fraught climate when the works were conceived that shaped their reception. On the day of In Context’s large public opening, Malcolm Purkey, artistic director at the Market Theatre, studied Breitz’s Ghost series closely. “How could these works
have been contentious?” he roared with laughter. – published in The Sunday Independent, June 20, 2010

Reflecting on the Soccer Art Frenzy

2010-07-04T01:19:00.000-07:00

GIANT body parts are scattered all over the workroom. A colossal woman’s head is balanced on a stick while an artist bends over her, pushing her plastic eyes into place. Massive sets of hands sit on a tabletop. The fingertips have yet to be covered by tan masking tape, so you can see the plastic bottles that have been used in their construction. Long strands of coarse rope, which will be used as hair, cascade down a spiral staircase in the corner of the workroom. The artists barely look up when we enter. With over 30 giant puppets, or grand personnes as the French participants in the Giant Match project call them, to complete before
the World Cup starts, there isn’t time to indulge curiosity. This room is one of many workrooms that colonise the 20-storey Wits University corner building. Over 100 puppet makers have been toiling in these rooms and in the theatre across the road since mid-April. Their frenzied creative work is emblematic of the heightened artistic activities that have been manifesting all around the city of Joburg in the run-up to the landmark sporting event. Artists, actors, dancers, curators, choreographers and theatre producers have within the last year been focused on creating artistic products to complement or coincide with the event. Never have the two contrasting fields of sport and art shared such synergy. Given the amount and variety of cultural products that have been designed to be staged during this international soccer extravaganza, it would be easy to think that it’s not just a sporting event but a huge cultural festival.

Although the Department of Arts and Culture’s promise of R150 million to fund tournament-related cultural projects didn’t materialise in the way that it should have, the art community forged ahead with the aid of foreign cultural agencies such as the Goethe Institute and the French Institute of South Africa, (Ifas), and other government bodies such as the City of Joburg and the Gauteng Provincial Government. That such a diverse cultural programme will run alongside the World Cup is testament to this robust and determined community, accustomed to fighting tooth and nail to survive without national government support and their keenness to exploit the opportunity the event has presented to showcase cultural products.

Undoubtedly, such efforts evince that the arts are not only relevant, in the sense that this sphere is able to engage with sporting activities, but have an equally important role to play in major events. Almost every sphere of the arts is presenting work during the World Cup: there is the African Film Festival at Africa Museum, musical and theatrical productions such as The Boys in the Photographs, but primarily it is large visual arts displays that dominate, including In Context, a multi-media multi-venue art exhibition, Without Masks, a large Afro-Cuban exhibition at the Joburg Art Gallery, SPace, a Pan-African exhibition
at Africa Museum, the aptly titled This is Our Time, an exhibition spread across Joburg and Cape Town venues (Brodie-Stevenson Gallery and Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town), Halakasha!, a soccer-themed exhibition showing at the Standard Bank Gallery, Harun Farocki’s Deep Play, also at Joburg Art Gallery, and the bi-national Brazilian/South African exhibition called The Eleven Football and Art – Africa 2010 x Brazil 2014.

In an effort to demonstrate the relevance of the arts and its integral connection to society many of these exhibitions make some reference to soccer or show individual works that meditate on some aspect of soccer or its cultural significance. An example is Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon’s 2005 video artwork Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, part of the In Context exhibit. In this work 17 cameras were used to capture footage of the famous French soccer player, which echoed society’s fixation with soccer heroes. While the work and themes informing many of the large exhibitions vary, shows such as SPace and In Context and even Without Masks parade a Pan-African bent, showing art from artists either around the continent or who form part of the diaspora and thus try to represent the continent and its expression.

In this way these exhibitions attempt to show the cultural connections beyond our borders that bind this artistic community to a global society. Proving, therefore, that our cultural products are not the result of a parochial or insular mindset; thus, underpinning all these exhibitions is a self-conscious awareness of how we are representing ourselves to the world. Given that the bulk of our international visitors are soccer fanatics, it’s not certain whether in fact they will be interested in art, even exhibitions like Halakasha! Which are completely centred on the sport.

When the Soccer World Cup was held in Germany, art galleries in that country put on large, expensive exhibitions but sat empty, observed a South African born artist who has been settled in Germany for over a decade. But Eléonore Godfroy-Briggs, communication and cultural officer of Ifas, believes it will be different here: “Foreigners are really interested in South African culture because it is so different from their own.”
According to Godfroy-Briggs, at least half of the 200-plus members of the French press who will be in the country during the World Cup are here just to report on cultural activities. The question remains, however, given that the exhibitions are geared for a foreign audience and many are soccer-themed, whether visitors and the foreign media will have an authentic view of local artistic production.
Furthermore, what value do some of these projects have beyond the event? And in particular,
what value do they have for locals?
When the World Cup ends and all the hoopla with it, will some of these exhibitions and projects have left a lasting impression?

When Ifas began planning its Giant Match project, one of the driving motivations was to create an initiative that would have a life after the World Cup, according to Godfroy-Briggs. So although the 30 giant puppets will entertain crowds as they move through the turnstiles at Soccer City on the day of the opening ceremony, they were primarily created to entertain township dwellers during and after the sporting event – the puppets will be part of a South African rendition of Romeo and Juliet. The idea is that that local performers, scriptwriters and artists will create new stories and present new shows with the giant puppets when the tournament is but a memory. Given that the project cost Ifas and the Gauteng Provincial Governmentover R5m, it is easy to understand the motivation for this imperative; that the investment have more long-term benefits for the participants aside from the transfer of skills. But the Giant Match project is one of only a few initiatives that will have any lasting benefits.

Standard Bank splashed out for the grand opening of Halakasha! with an almost obscene display, which included appearances by dancers, performers and high-profile African soccer players. Rather unusually, it also included a discussion between the soccer players Jay Jay Okocha (Nigeria) and South Africa’s Andre Arendse, Supersport presenter Neil Andrews and Achille Mbembe, a prominent academic and author. It was rare to see sporting personalities at an exhibition opening but the strained exchange made it clear that while both art and sport fraternities depend on corporate sponsorship from the likes of Standard Bank, they speak quite different languages. The tongue-in-cheek discussion also showed that the connection between art and sport is mostly superficial. Certainly the dialogue between art and sport that has been evolving in the past month is a oneway one; while curators and artists are able to reflect on the cultural significance of soccer, the soccer world and sporting fraternity do not have the means or medium for reflexive introspection that might enable them to engage with issues beyond their sphere.

Despite artists’ and curators’ abilities to engage with the cultural values implicit in soccer, there are instances when the theme is simply imposed superficially, like in Mzanzi’s production of Carmen, where soccer balls and vuvuzelas were used as an adjunct to the performance. Similarly, photographs and artworks simply depicting soccer balls and players without demonstrating an in-depth engagement with these motifs in any meaningful manner come across as empty gestures. The diverse collection of artworks at Halakasha!, however, offers insight into the role the game plays in society as the means through which gender and nationalism are negotiated. While some cultural producers, such as Constanza Macras with her Offside Rules, chose to exploit the metaphoric character of soccer, such as the way in which rules help regulate relationships between opposing or conflicting groups of people, other art products such as Halakasha! aim to uncover the cultural significance of soccer.

Fiona Rankin-Smith, the curator of the exhibition, primarily unearths its value by presenting
photographs from various eras and locales on the African continent documenting the dress and behaviour of soccer supporters. Largely it is documentary photographer Andrew Dosunmu’s portraits of fans in the build-up to the 2006 Africa Cup of Nations in Cairo that form the bulk of this kind of work. The embellishments, costumes and fanatical adoption of national colours worn by fans show how these sporting events provide a stage for people to identify and cement their national allegiances. Of course, this fact is not specific to soccer, nor is it an astonishing revelation. But this exhibition doesn’t offer a single perspective on the game. Through a series of commissioned photographs Zanele Muholi, the contentious photographer whose work caused a stir with Lulu Xingwana, presents portraits of female soccer players who appear quite androgynous. The suggestion is that this male-dominated soccer arena provides the stage where gender is determined. Rankin-Smith also establishes a sense of historical continuity between African material culture and traditions and soccer and the accoutrements its fans wear. A Mwana Pwo mask from Chokwe, Angola, echoes a mask that an Angolan soccer supporter wears in an image taken by Dosunmu. Given that both items pertain to a cultural ritual, the parallel between these areas of expression doesn’t appear misplaced. Perhaps the most striking aspect of soccer that this exhibit offers is the fact that soccer, like a religious encounter, offers transcendence. During a match individuals can surrender to the collective and transcend their personal identities, determined by religious, language or economic differences. It may be fleeting, but during the game these differences appear to be erased. If just a few soccer fans reflect on the mechanics of their fanaticism, the arts community will have achieved its own goals. - published in The Sunday Independent, 2010

* The above image is a Penny Siopis artwork that was shown at the Halakasha! exhibition

SPace at Museum Africa

2010-07-01T00:37:00.000-07:00

MINISTER of Arts and Culture Lulu Xingwana cast a dark shadow over the art community when she expressed her disapproval and aimed to censor Zanele Muholi’s photographs of lesbians and Nandipha Mntambo’s contentious Rape Of Europa last year at the opening of Bongi Bengu’s Innovative Women: Ten Contemporary Black Women Artists. While her prejudice against homosexuals was troubling, it was the threat of artistic censorship that really rattled this community. Thus her association with this exhibition, SPace, immediately established a sense of unease. Had the curators submitted to a form of self-censorship in an effort to appease Xingwana’s narrow views on art?

Was the absence of Muholi’s works significant? Would Mntambo’s striking Rape of Europa have made another appearance if Xingwana and the government and/or City of Joburg weren’t funding this event?
Fortunately for Thembinkosi Goniwe and Melissa Mboweni, the curators of this large-scale exhibition, Xingwana did not live up to her promise to open the exhibition and thus indirectly her personality and attitudes were distanced from the show. It also gave Goniwe the chance to slip in a disparaging remark about Xingwana on the opening night, which seemed to confirm that her uninformed presumptions about contemporary South African art might not have had any impact on their curatorial vision.

And a grand vision it was: not only is this mega-Pan-African exhibition supposed to give tourists visiting this country within the next month a taste of contemporary African art, but Goniwe suggested that their mandate was to reposition negative, stereotypical attitudes around the continent. In this way ideas underpinning
this exhibition echo the sentiments that were driving Simon Njami’s Africa Remix, which showed at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2007. And as such all the self-same criticisms that Africa Remix attracted. The main one being, of course, that challenging attitudes about Africa with an exhibition that implies that the continent is a united, single entity is self-defeating as it immediately conforms to western notions that Africa is a single homogeneous destination.

It’s a conundrum for sure: how do you redefine Africa without referencing Africa?
The title of the exhibition, SPace, (the upper-case “P” is meant to draw your attention to the word “pace”, too, which operates as a sort of submotif) directly addresses the complexities of reframing an imaginative and physical position. Given the rather awkward exhibition space at MuseumAfrika, where this exhibition is staged, you can’t help thinking that it also makes reference to the difficulties of actually placing and displaying art in museums and the conventions that underpin this activity. Certainly Goniwe and Mboweni have aimed to challenge some of those traditions by ensuring that the themes and subthemes of the exhibition – pleasure, beauty and intimacy – do not overburden the art, in the sense that the artworks’ connections to these themes are subtle. But the connections are far too subtle; so much so that in some instances even if you stretch the meaning of a work you still struggle to fit it with any of the themes – this also isn’t helped by the fact that there is no signage demarcating which subthemes are in play where.

It is pretty difficult placing Avant Car Guard’s Resistance Art in South Africa, a black foam and enamel sculpture that appears like an anniversary cake, comfortably in this exhibition. It is a cheeky work that derides the lauded efforts of (white) artists to expose and challenge the conditions of apartheid through their art and is thus a joy to view again; but it’s hard to reconcile it in the context of this exhibition. There are many artworks at this exhibition that elicit the same response; great art, but how does it reflect on the theme? So often a curator’s vision silences the idiosyncratic character of an artwork – and perhaps this is what Goniwe and Mboweni tried to circumvent – but their hand in the curating is almost imperceptible.
Had the catalogue been launched at the same time as the exhibition, perhaps it might have shed some light on their choices. The display area – three rooms on three separate floors – is also far too roomy and the huge spaces between the works prevent any dialogue from occurring. As such, each of the works at this exhibition really exists independently of each other, which contradicts the main thrust behind group shows.

It is the latest instalment from Mary Sibande’s ongoing Sophie series that stands out. Called I decline, I refuse to recline (2010), the sculpture features the character of Sophie in a hybrid domestic worker uniform that this time appears like an open parachute that has just landed. It also parades padded elements that echo the design of a chaise longue, which is attached to the sculpture via some long strands of the same colour as the dress. The work quite brazenly protests against being interpreted; or at least articulates Sophie’s reluctance to allow her aspirations and dreams to be analysed. It could be read as a response to the ideas that art critics and observers have thus far projected on to Sibande’s alter ego.
Gabrielle Goliath’s artworks also are a star attraction. Her Portrait of a Woman (2010) consists of a series of close-ups of a person’s face, hands and skin, which are displayed on the ground and are covered by footprints. In this work Goliath meditates on the “human shell”, the soft exterior of the body, and while one would think that these close-ups would reveal a nuanced reading of an individual, they are such close studies that the subject’s individuality is negated. In other words, exterior characteristics do not offer any information about the individual.

Another particularly interesting work is Berry Bickle’s Between (2010) in which she mediates on the (unbridgeable) space between images and spectators. She expresses this idea in two ways: first by placing the backs of chairs – suspended from the ceiling – in-between the three films that are being projected on the wall, creating a physical division between the films and her audience. Second, the films show spectators watching films; and while they appear to be integrated with the films in one, the spectator moves up against the image as if trying to penetrate it, implying
that a barrier exists. In both instances, we as viewers become spectators of
other spectators, and so the divide between the image and the spectator looms even larger. This is an excellent work. Certainly, Goniwe and Mboweni have a refined grasp on contemporary art – even though they have an inexplicable weakness for Godfried Donkor. It’s such a pity, therefore, that the curation of this show feels incoherent and thus fails to achieve any of their ambitious objectives. - published in The Sunday Independent, 2010

So who's the fairest photographer in the land?

2010-06-09T10:26:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I joined David Goldblatt, Riason Naidoo, Thembinkosi Goniwe and Omar Badsha in judging the Bonani Africa Photography competition. Desperate to chillax after a heavy week I wasn’t totally looking forward to the task. But I really, really enjoyed the experience; though there were over fifty photographic essays to view on the whole they were mostly of a high standard so it was a pleasure sorting through them. It was interesting to see how some established names in the art/photo world compared with newcomers and photo journalists making the cross-over into art photography. Naturally, it was a pleasure to spend time with Goldblatt and I relished hearing his views on the work as we wrestled over who the three finalists should be. I learnt a lot about the mechanics and poetics of photography listening and arguing with Goldblatt. I do hope that when I am 79 years old that I am as sharp and perceptive. It was also interesting to gage where Goniwe and Naidoo’s heads are at too. It was fascinating to observe the kind of photographic work and the predominant themes that are emerging in this realm of visual production and to see the photographs that don’t make into commercial galleries. Largely the work wasn’t highly conceptual; for art-artists entered the competition - the bulk of the work was more journalistic in its orientation in terms of social subject-matter with many essays documenting communities on the fringes, the fall-out from the xenophobic attacks and the city of Joburg (I am starting to tire of this theme).
What was interesting was the way in which we reached consensus quite quickly; it seems that a “good” photograph is easy to identify – albeit that it is difficult to verbally articulate the elements that contribute to its success. In other words the tangible qualities that characterise a successful shot are paradoxically at times just as intangible. This was particularly the case with one of the winners, whose name I obviously can’t reveal but whose work is simply sublime and while one can ‘name’ some of the reasons why this is so, it is similarly hard to really nail down that exact element that separates it from the rest. It was a really stimulating day and when we finally sat down to lunch we ended up tackling that old when-is-photography-art chestnut. Yeah, right.

*The photograph above was not one of the entries; it is a photo taken by Mkhize Khabazela from the Market Photo Workshop. I just picked this one out to tie in the with soccer frenzy that seems to have gripped Joburg

What Bollocks!

2010-06-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

Did anyone read that extract of Gavin Sourgen’s (has anyone heard of him?) essay from the book “Sport versus Art” that was reprinted in the M & G a couple of Fridays ago? The inaccuracies in Sourgen’s essay have really been bugging me; he clearly isn’t really that au fait with the art world or the South African cultural scene. For your amusement and to exorcise some of my annoyance with his illogical and uninformed observations I will share with you some of his flawed 'insights':

Sourgen presents a dichtomised view of the local cultural landscape suggesting that on one end of the spectrum lies the “indelicate and profitable creations that draw on a cache of trite, imperceptive assertions about poverty, race relations and other such social discrepancies”. At the other end of the field are “those more intelligent and penetrating works that are relegated to the shadowy corners of unknown theatres, galleries and bookstores for their unwillingness to concede to the pressures of cultural cliché.” Hardly a nuanced or accurate reading; from this perspective products which engage with race relations and other social discrepancies can only ever be trite and commercial. This is simply untrue. What about John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth, Craig Higginson’s Dream of the Dog (now showing at the West End) or the art of David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, and Michael McGarry? Aside from the fact that trite schlock rarely engages with issues pertaining to race relations I wonder given that musicals are the most popular form of theatre in the UK and the US whether the same framework applies to the cultural landscape in those respective countries? But I think where he really displays his ignorance is when he states that one has to “ferret through the small print of an independent newspaper to locate the latest Kentridge exhibition in a mysterious region of the urban hinterland.”
Before I address this ridiculous remark about Kentridge; I have to ask; what is an independent newspaper? Is it one that is not aligned to any print monopoly – not even the neighbourhood knock n’ drop papers are “independent” – perhaps he means the SA Art Times but even that paper is aligned with its overseas parent, the Art Times, as the M & G is with Guardian newspapers and The Sunday Independent, which is anything but independent; we are part of the global entity called Independent News & Media Group, which is (mostly) owned by the baked bean Irish kings, the O’Reillys. Or does he mean editorial independence? The chance of a small independent paper, which is even more heavily indebted to its patrons, asserting editorial independence is rare.
Besides Kentridge’s work has been written about extensively for years not only in The Sunday Independent-but-not-independent and The Star, The Times and Sunday Times but internationally, there have been articles on Kentridge in a number of mainstream papers too from the Washington Post to The Financial Times.
His claim that Kentridge exhibitions are shown in “mysterious regions of the hinterland” is also pretty absurd given that his work has in the last couple of decades mostly been shown in mainstream commercial galleries such as the Goodman in its Joburg and Cape Town galleries – the Joburg gallery is located in the heart of northern suburbia and not in some far flung “hinterland” either. Kentridge’s opera, The Magic Flute, (which also engaged with matters pertaining to race) was staged in a mainstream commercial theatre too, the Joburg Theatre, formerly the Civic Theatre, which is usually home to “a cache of trite” work that Sourgen eschews.

In Sourgen’s polarised view the trite works centred on poverty and race are “so accessible that it cannot be measured as a work of art” while the more serious works of Kentridge’s ilk are conversely so “inaccessible” that they “reach the point of being impervious.”
Where does one begin? I didn’t realise that a work had to be inaccessible to be classified as “art” – where does this place the work of say Andy Warhol, Gavin Turk or Candice Breitz who all exploit common, universal visual vocabularies that anyone can access? If Sourgen finds Kentridge’s art so impenetrable, frankly he shouldn’t really be writing about the arts at all.

Sourgen argues that the arts shouldn’t necessarily be a social tool – I too am not a fan of the instrumentalisation of the arts - but it I don’t hold onto a modernist view of art as an independent form of expression either.

I also don’t see what the relationship exists between the arts having to labour “under a historical burden of having to adhere to a set of redundant formal and political precedents” and the lack of historical continuity in the sports, demonstrated by “attempts to remove traditional emblems.” Seeing as the Springboks actually retained their name and emblem I am not sure how it is that their historical character was erased? But even if this was the case, what has it got to do with the historical continuity that he perceives burdens artists? And this is the problem with books/exhibitions and the like that attempt to set up a dynamic between art and sport; the writers are left fumbling in the dark, trying to forge connections.

Sourgen’s essay hops all over the place until he finally concludes that it will be left up to the two “mediums”, namely art and sport, for the “full import of democracy to be realised.”
Do me a favour but sport is hardly an expressive “medium” that has the capacity to unpack or critically engage with notions of democracy. Besides isn’t what he is advocating here a call on artists to employ their art as a social and political weapon? Also he suggests that “theoretical or abstract” engagements are redundant to the process of realising the “full import of democracy” – pray then, exactly how will artist’s contribute to this objective? Bollocks, it’s all bollocks.

Sessions at Africa Museum

2010-06-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I was part of a panel discussion centred on “Education on Contemporary African Art in Schools, Universities and the Media” - it was part of the SPace exhibition programme. Naturally, I was there to speak about the media’s role in educating the public about contemporary African art. I am not sure that the talk I presented was terribly satisfying for the organisers, particularly as I believe that educating the public about art is not art criticism’s primary goal; as the term implies its main function is to critically appraise art. Is there any point to creating art if no one critically engages with it? Even though some might argue that contemporary practice is characterised by a self-reflexive brand of art that has an inbuilt recognition of its ideological flaws, is it not important that those works too are subject to a close reading that is made available within the public realm?
Mostly my paper - which was entitled Speaking in Tongues: Does the language of art criticism enlighten or obfuscate? - dealt with the constant struggle to settle on a vocabulary that serves the two contradictory audiences of art criticism; the general public and the art community. Given that many writing about art or editing copy about art in the media have never formally studied art, I suggested that the media is not in the ideal position to educate society about art.
But after my fellow panellists, which included people from various spheres of education, with representatives from universities, township schools and private schools, outlined the gargantuan challenges facing art education in this country it became clear to me that failures in our education system are placing an extra burden on art critics who work in the mainstream media; not only do we have to write copy for a visually illiterate audience but we are expected to bridge the gaps in their knowledge of art which should have been addressed at school level. This burden does not make for great art writing, certainly not one that serves the artist and/or the art community, which demand in-depth analysis not just superficial entertaining copy. I believe that art critics and writers should be driven to create meaningful documents about art that have long-term value.
I detest that kind of art reporting - I use the term reporting here, as I am referring to a brand of writing which I distinguish from criticism – that evinces a marked emphasis on the biographical nature of the artist and anecdotal information. In this kind of writing the biographical or social context is foregrounded. This strategy often detracts from the work and as Candice Breitz observed during an interview I did with her a couple of week’s ago “is almost a scheme to stall or prevent interpreting it.”

The panel discussion was really illuminating; I had no idea how bad the state of art education was in this country. Once I get through the current features I am working on I intend engaging with this issue more fully in a large-scale feature/expose for the paper. Perhaps the most shocking statistic that emerged on Saturday was the fact that 99 percent of school teachers teaching art in government schools are not qualified to do so. Apparently some have been sent on courses to arm them with knowledge about art but these courses are only THREE DAYS long. This appalling situation affects the size and quality of audiences for art, it affects sponsorship and patronage of the arts.

In Context: Kentridge at JAG

2010-05-29T00:47:00.000-07:00

I know that it has become totally uncouth to enjoy a Kentridge exhibition. But from the moment I stepped into the centre of this exhibition of eight projections, which covered every wall of one room at JAG I was swept up by the imagery. Here is my review:

It seems fitting that artist William Kentridge has become transfixed with Nikolai Gogal's short story, The Nose (1837), a narrative centred on a man whose nose detaches from his face and goes on to lead a more successful existence than its owner. On some level, this metaphoric tale echoes the manner in which Kentridge's artworks and reputation have taken on a life of their own in the wake of his international success.
Kentridge has achieved a level of recognition where the value attached to his art is no longer always determined by the work itself but its association with him. This level of success places him and his work in an ambiguous position within the local art world - although he is revered many look upon his work, his persona, with cynicism. Feeding this contradictory response are efforts by local gallerists to display and celebrate almost any items which have passed through Kentridge's studio or are connected with his talent - an exhibition of dated theatre posters by Kentridge at the now-defunct Warren Siebrits Gallery comes to mind. This is not unusual; it's part of a well-established practice of canonising artistic genius. Thus in many respects within the realm of the media, art history, Kentridge is transforming into someone he has no control over. This idea resonates with the title of his exhibition I am not me, the horse is not mine, an absurd statement alluding to an implausible denial of selfhood. It is not a new work; it was first staged at the Sydney Biennale in 2008 and, like much of his recent artistic output, emerged during the preparation for his production of Dimitri Shostakovich's The Nose, which was shown to great acclaim at New York's Metropolitan Opera this year. This artwork/installation consists of eight projections that are interre-lated and play simultaneously, parading collaged animations and real-life footage relating to Russia's Stalinist era, the visual iconography associated with that period, and amusing drawings relating to the unruly Nose. The eight screens are placed side by side around a room, bombarding one with a cacophony of imagery that is at once confusing and exciting.

Like the nose in Gogal's story, which has legs of its own, this work too has value independent of the opera production. Its worth isn't necessarily based on Kentridge's burgeoning fame either - albeit that it is tricky to isolate his persona from his work. Their importance lies in the manner in which it acutely articulates our current political quagmire as well as local artists' inability or struggle to identify a new vocabulary that addresses/expresses post-apartheid conditions. Kentridge establishes these concepts by summoning the visual iconography of Russian Constructivism, a post-revolutionary language, a sort of East-bloc derivitive of modernism that was designed to serve the needs of an emerging nation with a new political dispensation.

Kentridge weaves dated footage from Joseph Stalin's era with stylised animations representing the period into eight projections, such as a procession of disfigured bodies emerging in the aftermath of a violent battle. One of them carries a small model of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, a design for a tower intended to house scientists and revolutionists who would develop propaganda for the socialist movement. Tatlin had envisioned mounting a projector on the top of the tower that would project propaganda films onto the underside of the clouds. It was a time when artistic creativity was galvanised by the vigour and optimism that a new political authority promised. It reminds one of the early days of the Rainbow Nation, when political rhetoric was taken at face value and the euphoria of democracy overshadowed anxiety about the future.

Extracts from Nikolai Bukharin's infamous plenum of the Central Committee in 1937 on one of the screens, however, reveals the duplicity inherent in Stalin's rule but also Bukharin's resistance to be accountable for his actions. Lack of accountability is alluded to in the title of the installation which is a statement taken from Bukharin's trial in which a peasant apparently "attempted to deny responsibility".

All of these events echo our current political landscape in more ways than one - not only in the manner in which our leaders are not held accountable for their actions - but also in Kentridge's allusions to the corrupt nature of the political ideology which underpinned our own revolution. Within this context Gogal's "nose" could be seen as an offshoot of a political ideology which, transplanted elsewhere, configures into something else suited for new conditions.

Apparently, Kentridge intended to celebrate "the creative energies unleashed by the Russian revolution". They also served as an "elegy for the crushing utopian hopes held by artists of that time". One can't help but think that Kentridge's lament for this loss is grounded in his own struggle to identify a language that articulates post-revolutionary or post-apartheid conditions or mindset. Paradoxically, the manner in which he parodies communist iconography implies a recognition that new visual vocabularies tethered to political contexts are just extensions of the ideological facades employed to justify violence and corruption. - published in The Sunday Independent, May 23, 2010.

Ten reasons why I can't attend another soccer-themed exhibition

2010-05-22T23:58:00.000-07:00

1.    I suffer from a peculiar affliction: every time I see a soccer ball my mind immediately goes blank
2.    I have soccer practice on – my version of soccer practice involves practicing at not watching anything that is related to soccer
3.    I have another soccer-themed exhibition to view
4.    My mind still hasn’t kicked back into action since I viewed the last soccer-themed play/dance/exhibition
5.    I am not actually in Joburg – I am in Grahamstown reviewing other soccer cultural products at the National Arts Festival
6.    I have a soccer ball attached to my head and I can’t see anything – absurd but could happen if you did a header and the ball burst
7.    I will be there the moment that a sports event becomes the be all and end all of my life (this is perhaps a bit too truthful)
8.    I was there, didn’t you see me: I was the one with a giant soccer ball on my head (see 6)
9.    I was there among a crowd of German tourists with makarapas on their heads
10.    Sorry, I have to stay home and crotchet Bafana Bafana scarves for myself and their three other fans

Soccer season certainly hasn’t translated into a go-slow period for cultural producers or institutions; since returning to the office after a three week holiday I have been inundated with invitations to view plays, dance performances and art and photographic exhibitions. Of course, almost all of them are soccer themed: catering for that large group of soccer fans who also happen to be art lovers - NOT.
Ok, they are not all dreadful: my introduction to this peculiar ‘genre’ shall we call it on Friday night at the Market Theatre wasn’t too painful. It was a provocative interdisciplinary piece titled Off-side Rules, which I will be reviewing for the paper next week. It mostly undermined all the hullabaloo around the World Cup, showing it to be nothing but an expedient political sham used to paper over the cracks in our society – that’s the really oversimplified version; in reality it was a challenging piece that reversed societal conventions or rules.   But frankly my interest in cultural products that engage with soccer is at an all time low: I might be proven wrong but I feel like when you have seen one of them you have seen them all. This is a bit problematic given my Inbox is full of invitations for soccer-themed events. Hence I devised ten reasons why I can’t attend exhibitions during this soccer mad season.

Tracy Murinik's A Country Imagined

2010-05-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

Recently a prominent academic and writer admonished South African cultural producers for their fixation with the land, implying that this obsession had become clichéd, dull and predictable. He accused artists of either projecting romanticised views on to the African landscape, rendering it as this earthy, barren and unoccupied space that tested the human spirit of endurance, or being confined to narratives that dwelt on the socio-political politics attached to land. Both pursuits could result only in tired, dour and unimaginative forms of expression, he said.

A Country Imagined, which is showing on SABC2 at 9pm on Sundays, focuses on exploring a myriad cultural products that feature or are inspired by the land, so it gives credence to the idea that our artists are preoccupied with this topic. Of course, this subject is not just confined to artistic circles; land reform or redistribution also remains a political hot potato.

But isn't a fixation with the land universal? In 2005 the BBC ran a similar series, A Picture of Britain, which explored the history of pictorial representations of the landscape. Commenting on the series, presenter David Dimbleby noted that "we don't just love landscape in Britain... it is part of our culture and we look at it in a particular way because we have been led to do so by artists".

Dimbleby's observation goes straight to the heart of the importance of such a study, particularly one accessible to a large TV audience, it allows us to see the ways in which our view of our country has been shaped by representations of it. Of course, those who have spent any time studying representations of the African landscape executed during the colonial era will know how influential these portrayals were in perpetuating or justifying the political imperatives of the day. With respected art historian Tracy Murinik behind A Country Imagined, no doubt these issues will come into focus as the series progresses. But it would also be interesting to learn how today's art is propelled by our new political dispensation. This South African series isn't a carbon copy of A Picture of Britain; while it, too, has a non-expert in the form of Johnny Clegg presenting, it hasn't confined its study to rural destinations as the BBC series (and accompanying Tate exhibition) did. It has also embraced urban destinations, which is just as well considering the gazillion artworks and writings on Joburg.

This series also departs from the British one in that the producers have included literary works and other - what they term in the series "outsider" (meaning uneducated and self-taught) - artists' ponderings on the landscape. The "outsider" title feels a bit uncomfortable - who is defining what exists inside or outside the norm? - but the unconventional forms of expression featured, which include dance and performance, mean that the series gives quite a rounded view of each area, province or city that forms the focus.

In an episode on the Karoo there is a wonderful scene where locals do a traditional dance that involves kicking up the sand. It's a literal engagement with the land but conforms in a way to a painter's desire to exert control over it.

The discrepancies between the different forms of expression are a sort of subtheme of the series. In the Karoo episode, Clegg discusses the different imaginings of Die Hel that emerge from Andre Brink's novel Devil's Valley (1998) and David Goldblatt's 1960 photographs of a family living in this isolated and unforgiving terrain. (As you can imagine there are lots of Goldblatt photos in this series including the one above I think). Naturally, Brink's medium allows for a level of artistic licence not afforded to Goldblatt, who is tightly bound to reality with his camera. In his writing Brink is able to project an exaggerated view of a dysfunctional society.

In contrast to these two images of Die Hel is Clegg, who plods around the area on foot while reconciling the images presented by Goldblatt and Brink with the actual place. But the truth is that the footage of Clegg is no more or less an artistic representation of Die Hel than that which either Goldblatt or Brink offer, for he, too, is starring in another representation - a filmic one.

The directors and cinematographers on this series were not immune to the seductive visual and emotional pull of the land, as there is no sense that they have set out purely to document the "real" landscape: each shot of the Karoo episode is artfully composed to enhance its natural beauty .

This is an outstanding series, even with Clegg, who is an outdated character on our cultural landscape.Most importantly, what A Country Imagined shows is that there is no single view of the country and that any declarations about representations of the South African landscape are never more than generalisations.

This series offers a nuanced view into this leitmotif in South African cultural expression, making clear that while each person's perception may be coloured by the times and/or political climate in which they live, each of their representations is moulded by their own idiosyncratic world view. In this way we each inhabit our own imagined country. - published in The Sunday Independent, April 25, 2010