Archive: Issue No. 72, August 2003

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REVIEWS / GAUTENG



The Arabella Sheraton Grand Hotel's art collection
by Lloyd Pollak

Immediately after its opening, I visited the new Arabella Sheraton Grand Hotel. The Sheraton, like its neighbour, the Cape Town International Convention Centre, is sited at the grubby Port Said end of Adderley Street where our windy city fizzles out in stunted trees and parking lots. A slabby glass monolith, the hotel soars up from a wedge-shaped site tightly sandwiched between the Convention Centre, the N1 and N2, and another arterial thoroughfare, the Coen Steytler boulevard.

All the hotel's public rooms look onto Convention Centre Square, a stark, penitential quadrangle hemmed in by architectural masses, which part to reveal the flyovers of the national roads. These concrete monstrosities have been partially masked by a makeshift screen. An unimpressive pond provides further evidence of a last-ditch scramble to 'beautify' this space. The pond forms part of the 'canal' so loudly trumpeted by Cape Town Tourism. Narrow, shallow and mean of dimension, the 'canal' is a mere gutter by the standards of Venice and Amsterdam, and it typifies the failure of Cape Town's urban planners to transform the soulless wastelands of the foreshore into something human and appealing.

Within the hotel however, all is swish, glamour and luxury. The pulse is upbeat and metropolitan. There is a sense of consequence about the Sheraton, a buzz of internationalism. The interiors ooze elegance and chic, and steer clear of what tragically appears to have become our national style - the tacky, old pan-African look. Fake zebra skin, wickerwork chairs, ostrich eggs, giraffes and other carved wooden curios are given a disdainful thumbs-down.

The subtle African accent recalls the effects of sumptuous primitivist splendour that Parisian deco designers created for avant-garde connoisseurs. Ruhlmann, Rateau and Legrain re-interpreted tribal artefacts in costly materials, labour-intensive techniques and highly refined design traditions to contrive a couth primeval opulence, and the Sheraton too achieves this stylish cool.

It is also the sole hotel in the country to boast a collection of museum-quality South African art. These innovative pieces whip up excitement, and enhance the Sheraton's air of modish contemporaneity. The prescient dealer, Michael Stevenson was appointed to commission the art-works, and he worked closely with the architects and interior designers to produce superbly integrated decorative ensembles that celebrate our city, our people, our country and our culture with incomparable conviction and dash.

Immediately we enter the foyer, Jeremy Wafer's stout sculptural column waives us down, and says welcome to Africa. The column has liberated itself from its Graeco-Roman matrix, and it asserts a rugged sub-equatorial identity. It's squat dumpy proportions and earthy, sun-baked terracotta hue depart from the classical canon, and introduce a new order - KwaZulu Doric. The amasumpa motif of raised diapers dear to Natal's tribal dynasts and their subjects transforms this piece of international minimalism into a potently emotive totem.

Dense associations infuse this creation with majestic superbity. Columns point to the heavens, and are thus emblematic of faith, God, man's 'divine discontent' and his capacity for transcendence. The embodiment of strength and stability, the column is to the nation, what the hearth is to the family, the core of its being, the locus of its roots. Columns punctuate all major civic spaces. They stake out seats of government and mark the centres from which power radiates outwards.

Vanished tribal glories are evoked in black marble floors; richly figured timber panelling, stone-clad walls, shaggy geometric carpets, side-tables modelled on African stools, altar-like desks and throne-like settees. The craft on the walls extends this chieftainly panoply, and testifies to Stevenson's eye for telling juxtaposition, continuity and contrast.

Nesta Nala's gleaming black, calabash shaped, ceramic bowls echo the austere magnificence of Wafer's sculpture, and pick up the amasumpa motif. Clarified geometric structure unifies Stevenson's artworks, which are mainly abstract in idiom and contemplative in mood. Bold non-representational pattern underpins the Maqhabele family's minceka pincloths, traditional Tsonga-Shangaan shawls, used as wall hangings and decorated with embroidery, safety pins and mirrors. Their glitter introduces Walter Oltmann's breathtaking wire-work sculpture.

An explosive bouquet of three gigantic silvery-grey aluminium flowers - erupt out of the stairwell, and soar into the foyer, commanding vast spaces with the sheer impetus of their ascent. One gasps with enthralled surprise, for, like the burrow that tumbled Alice into Wonderland, the sculpture roller-coasts us into a topsy-turvy domain where reality is magically inverted. Flowers are never the subject of monumental sculpture, and these titanic blossoms provoke a sense of Surrealist shock and dislocation. The springy, tensile coiled metal lends them an aggressive momentum. They appear poised and ready to invade our body space.

The monstrous becomes gorgeous, for Oltmann's finely plaited mesh of silvery filaments lends the bouquet a Faberge-like filigreed intricacy. Miraculously suspended in the void, the blossoms revolve, catching the light and creating optical shimmer. These regal, heraldic flowers challenge our anthropocentric values and confound categories of art and craft, once-off and mass-produced, handwork and industrial manufacture, forcing the viewer to question his mind-set and consider the world with fresh eyes.

The sculpture defines the hub of the hotel from which all public rooms diffract, and it also links basement to ground floor. Like Wafer's column it draws attention to place, for the flowers, agapanthus, strelitzia and April fool's plant, are all indigenous flora.

From this vantage we see how inside and outside are linked by wunderkind Paul Edmund's ingenious sculptural contrivance. Edmunds takes the most puritanically repressive of modernist devices, the grid, and skews it, so that it sheds its usual stark rigidity. Rebelling against the tyranny of parallelism and rectilinearity, Edmunds constructs a trellised screen upon an S-curved ground plan. This introduces a gentle undulating flow, which builds up into more complex syncopated rhythms as angularity is pitted against the curve.

Verticals and horizontals are dynamic zigzags aligned just out of true, so that the sculpture's buckling geometry shimmies, and cocks a snook at prissy Agnes Martin, Mondrian and Sol LeWitt. Titled 'Peaks and Troughs", the sculpture's marine plywood material, and its coral colour evoke ocean tides, and introduce redemptive hints of nature into the foreshore's jungle of bludgeoning high-rise.

Unity is the goal, and the smoking lounge on the mezzanine is related to the ground floor with a sculpture by Kevin Brand, a cut-out metal panel that offers a play of solids and voids in which the razor-blade patterns of Ndebele murals are punched out of flat sheets of thick, gleaming aluminium. The strict frontality, geometric exactitude and knife-edged crispness of contour recall the crystalline American Precisionist idiom of the 1940's. Demuth, Sheeler and Davis also iconised commonplace consumer products by abstracting their forms into pure hard-edged, sharp-angled configurations.

Deborah Poynton's vast painting 'The White Minute', a work of thundering Wagnerian drama - all swirling apocalyptic clouds and zooming perspective - positively lassoes the viewer, and drags him downstairs into the basement function rooms. This high-pitched extravaganza, a post-colonial variation on Ford's 'Holiday in Cape Town', completely up-stages Sandile Zulu's far quieter 'fire paintings'.

Although these resonate lofty mystic asceticism in a gallery setting, they seem far too unassertive to hold their own amidst the worldly bustle of a five-star hotel where they appear like faded batik. For me, this was the sole failure in an enterprise which sets new standards by forging architecture, decoration, craft and art into one spectacular gesamtkunstwerk.

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