Sue Williamson's Diary
Wednesday, May 2 2012
Twins, their outward similarities belying their inner differences, are the subject of Candice Breitz’s Factum series, which opened as part of ‘Extra!’ at the National Gallery last week. And right on cue, there were two of her subjects, who had flown in from Toronto especially for the opening. Rather like the pink clad fairies one always sees in Venice, Pauline and Mary Misericordia have flown around the world to be present wherever Factum opens, always dressing identically for the occasion, and in this case, bringing a spangly grey scarf for Candice as well.
The week before, Julia Rosa Clark’s ‘Booty’ opened at Whatiftheworld. Described by the artist as ‘Drawings’ these quirky mixed media works incorporate collage elements of every kind on richly painted backgrounds, evoking a cultural history of nostalgia and half buried memories, like a song one cannot quite remember, except for a single phrase which reverberates through the mind.
Meanwhile, fashionista blogger Malibongwe Tyilo (check his delicious site out at skattiewhatareyouwearing.blogspot.com) decided to compete with Julia’s artwork by swanning around in a jacket which could easily have gone up on the wall.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
This week, we heard that the gig went to Julia Anastasapoulos, with one of the best designs for a bus station I’ve yet seen. Thibault used the classic golden mean system of proportions in making his designs, and Julia took the circles which had determined his structure and dropped in areas of transparent colour. A beautiful solution to honouring the architect, fully utilizing the glass panels of the bus station, and at the same time enriching the passengers’ experience of waiting for the bus to come.
It reminds me a bit of an old David Kramer song, where he talks about growing up in Worcester, and how the most exciting part of Sunday was standing at the front door looking at the cars going by outside, first through the green glass panel and then through the red.
Good Friday, April 6 2012
Wednesday March 21, 2012
Last year, American artist Christian Marclay won the Golden Lion at Venice for his 24 hour video played in real time. ‘The Clock’ was an edit of thousands of cinematic clips which involved clocks or watches, and the magical part was that If, for instance, one was looking at Harold Lloyd hanging perilously from a clock above a New York street, one knew the exact time in real life was, in fact, 6.30.
For those who are interested in the process that lay behind this masterpiece, the latest New Yorker has an extended piece on Marclay and the three year marathon making of the ‘The Clock’
Here is a trailer, one of several available on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp4EUryS6ac
But what really caught my attention was this. Last week, I talked about Mark Dion’s comment that an artist’s particular methodology should be able to be adapted to any context. Marclay started as a DJ, playing scratched and broken records, and then made works using broken records. An artwork involving a collage of cracked vinyl pieces may seem a long way from ‘The Clock’, but the impulse to edit existing material is the same.
The red lighting on the water was gorgeous. The synchronized swimmers looked good for the first fifteen minutes, after which they did not seem to be particularly energized, or in time. They were probably cold by then, poor things.
The ability of the artist to endure has to be balanced against the desire of the audience to reach closure.
Obrist is on record as saying he loves talking to artists and exchanging ideas, so it was a pleasure to renew an acquaintance first made over breakfast in Dakar a few years ago. A slightly nerve racking pleasure.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Artists, friends, and the glamorous stars of Generations mingled at the after party following the opening of Candice Breitz’s ‘Extra!’ at the Standard Bank Galleries in Johannesburg this week. Breitz, in a polka dotted Gianni Versace top, was clearly delighted to be back in her home country for this most brilliant of occasions.
‘Extra!’ was commissioned by the Standard Bank especially for this exhibition. In trying to decide what to make for the show, Breitz came up with the idea of asking Mfundi Vundla, who conceived the idea of Generations, now Africa’s biggest soap opera, if she could act as a white extra in scenes, totally ignored by the actors. Vundla agreed.
The resulting 35 minute video is a treat to watch. Sometimes wonderfully absurd, as at moments such as the one where Breitz’s white feet are centre camera and the caption reads: ‘There’s no bigger blessing than watching your child grow up’. Often provocative. What is that white woman doing there, hovering around?
It’s been a busy week in Johannesburg, with a great opening at the Goodman Gallery of their show ADVANCE last Thursday week. My piece is in the window facing Jan Smuts Avenue., and other artists include Mikhael Subotzky, Marina Abramovic, Moshekwa Langa, Alfredo Jaar and Candice Breitz.
I am also trying to start a new series of work, but more about that another time ...
OMG. So beautiful. Just as well I had a plane to catch and couldn’t spend more than 45 minutes …
Thursday, January 26, 2012
As January hits the third week of the month, the city’s art galleries take down the group shows directed at the summer visitors, and get serious again. Or, relatively serious.
At blank projects last week, Avant Car Guard and friends were staging a finissage. The text on one of their banner pieces read, IF YOU DIE, CAN I HAVE YOUR CELL PHONE ? Perhaps only in South Africa could this statement seem like a reasonable request.
Across the road from blank, at the Stevenson, Viviane Sassen’s seductive, off kilter images are a complete antidote to the perfectly lit, carefully placed subjects one has grown accustomed to encountering on gallery walls.
Viviane Sassen’s Kapijmpange
In this portrait of a young girl, the focus of Sassen’s attention is the fragile, rose printed voile of her dress. In order to concentrate on this gentle texture, the girl’s features have been lost in a soft dark pool. Conversely, this makes her more magnetic than if we had been able to discern every eyelash.
Stuart Bird’s Blood Knot
Round the corner at the Goodman, Stuart Bird has mounted his first solo show, and displays a dazzling virtuosity in his handling of materials. Blood Knot is the title of a searing Athol Fugard play about two half brothers, one black, one half white. it is also the title of Bird’s intertwined knotted sculpture, made not of rope, but carved, meticulously and sinuously, from wood.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
It’s really too hot to work today. Come on, it’s a baking 34°C, or 93.2° F. Of course, there’s no air con in the studio. And if you open the windows more than a crack or turn up the fan, papers blow everywhere.
So I’m trying to keep cool by writing about Athi Patra Ruga’s watery Ilulwane at the RoseLee Goldberg-directed Performa Biennial of performance in New York last November.
Ruga drew part of his inspiration from the 1970s and 80s photographs of Alvin Baltrop, a photographer who struggled for recognition for his photos of queer life on the West side piers of Manhattan. Baltrop died in 2004, and it is only now that his work is beginning to be exhibited in mainstream galleries. Working with Baltrop’s evocative visual references, Ruga added elements from his own Xhosa culture, on initiation ceremonies, and also reflected on the AIDS crisis to build up his 45 minute synchronized swimming performance.
A performance detail from Athi-Patra Ruga’s Ilulwane
Synchronized swimming? This is a sport I have always associated with ruched floral bathing suits and colour coordinated rubber caps. I believe Ilulwane will be performed in South Africa later this year. I can’t wait to see how Ruga pulled all these diverse elements together.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Storm Janse van Rensburg and Claire van Blerck
One of the best things about the New Year is the opportunity given to wipe last year’s messy slate clean again. Emails one should have – but did not – respond to ages ago can now be sent out with Happy New Year wishes and the recipient will probably forgive you.
This period of armistice doesn’t last long, however – after January 15 the truce is toast.
It’s also the time of year to make a list of all the half formed projects in your mind, and see which ones have strong enough legs to warrant further work. And which ones can be dumped right now.
Over at the Goodman Cape last week, the artists gathered for end of year drinks and to say goodbye to Storm Janse van Rensburg, who is off to Berlin. The incoming director is Federico Freschi, currently associate professor in the history of art department at Wits. Let’s raise a glass to his success.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Last time I saw Okwui Enwezor was in Venice in June, at one of the Goodman Gallery Biennale bashes. It was great to meet up. Okwui was, of course, the director of the legendary 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, and is now the director of the Munich Haus des Kunst.
This week I heard news of him from two different sources: curator Rory Bester told me he was due in Johannesburg at the end of this past week, to make final choices for the show he will be curating some 18 months hence at the International Center for Photography in New York, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid.
And from an unrelated email from NYU student Allison Young, who was part of my Other Voices: New York shoot earlier this year (I MEAN, WHERE ELSE ARE YOU GONNA GO?) I learned that Okwui will go to New York in the new year as visiting professor to teach a course on contemporary African at NYU.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
As a child of 7, I stood at our living room window in Florida, just outside Johannesburg, and watched two curved dark tunnel shapes spiraling powerfully across the horizon. The tornado hit Roodepoort, five miles away, and next day I learned that four people had died. My father packed us into the Pontiac and drove us out to view the streets littered with crumpled corrugated iron roofs.
Today, in those parts of the US where tornados occur, tracking them has become a popular pastime with those who crave being drawn into the elemental. But experiencing being drawn into the force field of a tornado is now as possible as dammit at the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. On the exhibition ‘What we talk about when we talk about love’ the brilliant Mexican based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs is presenting Tornado.
Running with his camera directly into the swirling dark forms of the tornados in what seems an act of total madness, Alÿs, allows himself to be battered by flying debris and huge volumes of sound. One cannot but be awed by this unstoppable natural force.
The beam of light emanating from Penny Siopis
Last weekend at the lagoon at Churchaven, walking with Penny Siopis and Emma Bedford as the sun sank in the sky, we witnessed an intriguing natural phenomenon of a much quieter kind. Each of us could perceive a beam of light above the shadow of our own heads, but not of the other two. Interestingly, the beam could be seen even as we each photographed our own shadow.
Friday, November 25, 2011
No pictures today. I need all the space for writing. A few weeks ago, the diary featured David Goldblatt’s remarkable photograph of jubilant parliamentarians celebrating the signing of the new constitution in front of the House of Assembly. You can view it on David’s current show at the Goodman Cape.
At the opening of the show, David told me he had had only thirty minutes to shoot the picture, taken from a high window in a building opposite the parliamentary buildings. Communication with his subjects was by bullhorn. After each shot was taken, the parliamentarians cheered and waved ecstatically and had to be subdued via the bullhorn for the next shot.
On Wednesday this week came the news that David has declined to accept the State Order of Ikhamenga Silver, awarded to South Africans who have excelled in the arts, in sports or in journalism. The letter was sent to President Jacob Zuma following Black Tuesday, the day on which the Protection of State Information Bill was passed in Parliament.
Wrote David, ‘Firstly … this action severely undermines our brave but fragile democracy and the rule of law. Secondly, I decline the award in protest against what has been done to the spirit in which the award was created.’
The letter in full can be found elsewhere on the net.
To my knowledge, David’s action is the first sign from artists that State patronage is no longer acceptable when that State attempts to muffle debate and silence the press.
One thinks back to the time of the 1979 State of Art in South Africa conference, when artists signed a pledge not to participate in any State backed art exhibition (and that included invitations to international biennales, then channeled through the government) until art education was open to all races. Artists refused from then on to give legitimacy to the apartheid government.
Sadly, it seems that the need of opposition to the State has once again arrived. Each of us will have to consider again what it is we need to do as artists and as South Africans to make the State understand how crucial it is to preserve the democracy which was achieved at such terrible cost.
We cannot sit back and just hope for the best.
Sunday, November 20
My room, decorated by Dokter and Misses
I am in Johannesburg for an intensive conference on public art organized by Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter of the Trinity Session. On the first day, there’s a packed programme of presentations of public art and architectural interventions from around the country. The Johannesburg Development Agency has a policy in place that allocates 1% for art on public building projects – would the rest of the country please take note.
On day two, conferees can choose between tours of public art in Soweto, or in the inner city parks. A difficult choice, but I am interested in taking a look at Hillbrow and the city centre in their current manifestations, and it’s good to see how heavily the parks are used on this Sunday morning.
Mpho Mpolokeng talks about his playground project, next to a sculpture by Marco Cianfanelli
By 6 p.m. we are back up on the roof. By now, it’s pumping.
Donna Kukama and Roger van Wyk at the rooftop bar.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
What does one do with a piece of art that you have finished, but don’t really like and you certainly don’t want to have shown?
Jane Alexander once told me that in the very early stages of her career, the Butcher Boys period of the 80s, she was so concerned that a reject sculpture might be found frightening by rubbish collectors if dumped in the bin that she cut the sculpture up and took the pieces to the municipal dump herself.
I once took some poorly printed etchings to the local charity shop in Observatory, thinking at least they could be sold anonymously and raise a few bucks for a good cause, only to have Peet Pienaar gleefully announce a few weeks later that he had found a cache of my work and bought it in. One print must have been signed after all. My heart sank as I imagined the titters as Peet showed them around.
This week, like a unwanted body resurfacing, a steel book piece I made 20 years ago and never liked and finally threw into the recycling bin several months ago was carried back into my studio by our cleaner. Even the recyclers didn’t want it, it seemed. But strangely, when I opened up the plastic wrapping for the first time in ten years and had another look, time had softened by poor opinion of the work, and I think with a few changes ….
And on the social side, the Stevenson Gallery hosted a highly convivial dinner at Anatoli for visiting artists Frohawk Two Feathers and Angela Ferreira, following the opening of their excellent show at the gallery.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Every day, at least 20 invitations to exhibition openings from here and from around the world arrive on the screen of my laptop, most of which I glance at and delete, noting one or two I would like to know more about, or visit.
Today there is one from the Goodman Gallery Cape announcing a new show of work by David Goldblatt. The invitation images shows a large group of people formally grouped for an official photograph in front of the Houses of Parliament.
The caption reads: Members of the Constitutional Assembly on the steps of the Senate House in the parliamentary precinct, shortly after they had unanimously adopted the Constitution of South Africa, Cape Town, 11 October 1996.
As a photographer who had unrelentingly recorded the harsh effects of apartheid through the years, from the demolitions to the grim faced Nationalist ministers in all their high handed arrogance, this photograph must have marked a significant career moment for Goldblatt, the recording of the people who had signed the country’s pledge to transform itself.
The mark of a great artist is one who works continuously for years, pushing through periods of self doubt in the attempt to share a personal vision with the world and thus building a sustained and authentic practice. Of no one is this truer than David Goldblatt. How much poorer would this country be without his photographs.
Tuesday, October 11
By the second week of the Istanbul Biennial, walking the streets every day, I was beginning to feel almost at home in this pulsating metropolis of 17 million people. Frances Goodman and I had steamed and been scrubbed in a hamam, interior designer Yelda Bayraktar had generously introduced me to a hidden world of antique dealers who work behind unmarked doors, and it was time to get down to work.
The young Biennial staff had offered to be part of a workshop to discuss what it meant to them to live in this city as part of my Other Voices Other Cities project. The group finally voted on ISTANBUL IS RELENTLESS As Ceylan Hepis said, ‘one moment you can be having a nice time with your friends in a club, the next, someone has been stabbed on the street’.
We decided to do a night shoot in Taksim Square, a central meeting point. We started with the longest word, RELENTLESS and as we moved on to ISTANBUL the police arrived and told us to stop shooting. I learned they had looked up the meaning of ‘relentless’ on the internet, and were not happy.
A noisy argument followed, with people on the square taking sides, and in the end, the police said it was okay, we could go on. A relief.
Sunday September 25
Week One at the Istanbul Biennial: A picture round up
The 12th Istanbul Biennial is being held in two large orange coloured warehouses, next to the Nesretiye Mosque and the Istanbul Modern on the waterfront.
Posters for the Biennial are up all over town.
The view from Gallery Rampa’s rooftop party was stunning, and
the food and drink just kept coming …
but the best food in town is Bread Fish from a streetside seller behind the spice
market … a freshly caught grilled fish with herbs, cress and onions on crusty Turkish bread. The cost: 3.50 Turkish Lira … R14.
A detail from Mentalklinik’s retrospective, curated by Jerome Sans in Haskoy
Breakfasting with artist Frances Goodman at Café Firuz
Wednesday, September 13, 2011
The yellow freesias I bought the day I got back from Switzerland to bring spring into my apartment have not yet died, but I’m leaving again today. For Istanbul. The 12th Biennial opens on the 17th, under the curatorship of Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Perdrosa, and is titled ‘Untitled’. It’s a homage to the late great Felix Gonzales Torres, and I am on a section called ‘Passport’.
One highlight since my return was a performance in a small, sharply raked theatre once used for anatomy demonstrations. Titled After Cardenio, this new play by Jane Taylor had the author reseaching early English literature on the web, and mixing ‘Shakespeare’s world of heightened psychological realism … with the wild novelistic romance and idealism of Cervantes.’
A detail of the backdrop
As the audience files in, artist Penny Siopis is on a ladder, sketching in chalk on the blackboard backdrop, a backdrop added to each night, but designed to be washed clean at the end of the play’s run.
Based on the story of a 17th century woman hanged for the murder of her infant, the cast of five plus one Gavin Younge designed puppet, the silent effigy of the woman, give a vigorous and often humorous performance of the play, which succeeds in raising a series of ethical and moral questions which linger in the mind long after the play is ended.
Actress Jemma Kahn and her alter ego puppet
Thursday, September 8
Dineo Seshee Bopape, with a vitrine of dying flowers beneathCurator Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist chose as her theme, Juicy Contaminated Circle: from Art to Life and back, and the discussions of the first wrap up afternoon were followed by a performance which involved the fellows serving juicy contaminated cocktails to the assembly. You drank them at your own risk. Many took the risk. Several times over.
A selection of juicy contaminated cocktailsThe evening finished with a buffet dinner in a marquee set up next to the swiftly flowing Aare. By this time, the rain was bucketing down, and I felt sorry for the catering team trying to get a braai going under umbrellas, but in true art world fashion, the party went on regardless …
Cooking in the rain
