Archive: Issue No. 69, May 2003

It's Thursday. It's Belgium. My first day here coincides with the opening of David Goldblatt's show at the Brussels Palais de Beaux Arts, recently phonetically renamed as Bozar. Entitled 'David Goldblatt: Fifty-one years', the exhibition is a comprehensive survey of themaster photographer's images throughout his working life, from his extraordinary images of exhausted and sleeping workers on the Kwa-Ndebele/Johannesburg buses to the humorous Saturday morning in the hypermarket: Semi-final of the Miss lovely legs competition, with its self conscious contestants and critical or bored onlookers.

Perhaps because it's the evening before the Easter weekend, the opening crowd is thin, but this is a bonus when it comes to examining the images closely. David's work is as impressive as ever, South Africa unadorned.

Crossing a street afterwards for a post show dinner, David and I are slightly ahead of the the rest of the group and take little notice of a loud voice shouting something behind us. The shouting grows louder. Turning, we find it is us who are being addressed angrily by loudhailer from a police car. As South Africans are wont to do, once we had looked down the street to check that we were not about to be run down by a speeding taxi, we hadn't bothered to look at the traffic lights to see if they were green or red, and had just crossed.

The reason I am in Belgium is for a solo show at the Centre Contemporain d'Arts, an art deco style building diagonally opposite the Museum of Art and History. Opening day is next Wednesday, so measuring, hanging and lighting will go on for the next three days, broken today by a lunch being given by Brussels collector and art personage Herman Daled for David Goldblatt. Herman lives in a truly wonderful house, the only one in Brussels designed by the famous architect, Henry van de Velde, he who stated, "Ugliness corrupts not only the eyes, but also the heart and the mind."

The house is designed in the grand manner, with a "double circulation" design - meaning that there are two street entrances - one for family, and one for staff, and two staircases, with a connecting door between staff quarters and the rest of the house at each of three levels. The paint is peeling off in curving thick layers throughout the house, creating crazed and undulating patterns in each sparsely furnished room. On the underside of the ivory paint is silverleaf. In an admirable exercise of restraint, Herman has left the house exactly as it was when he bought it, thirty years ago. Some artwork is hung, other pieces lean against walls, still more is taken out of crates for our examination. Lunch is excellent: potted shrimps with crusty bread, smoked salmon and fresh green salad. In the dining room, there is no art on the walls, but Herman has pinned up the invitations to David's and my shows on one bare wall, a welcoming and stylish gesture.

Back to the CAC for more hanging until six, when director Fabienne Dumont and her husband Jean-Claude and I go to a recording studio to participate in a project of Belgian artist Johan Muyle. Johan is designing a forty metre long mural to run along a Brussels street, with closeup images of the faces of his friends and acquaintances. These images will be painted from photographs by Indian signwriters trained in the painting of the enormous Bollywood posters many storeys high and used to publicise new films in India. ,In the past few years, advances in largescale digital printing have rendered the signwriters skills obsolete. Johan's project will bring a group to Brussels and give them an opportunity to paint again, in a new milieu. Once the mural is complete, passersby will not only see the images, but hear a message given out by many voices, and transmitted by a series of concealed speakers, following them down the street. We are here to supply three of those voices and our common message, recorded individually to be mixed and layered one voice over the other is: "I promise you a miracle".

The hanging is just about complete. Tonight I will meet South African artist now living in Belgium Kendell Geers and his wife Cindrine for supper. "This is a country of bad art and good restaurants. Suits me perfectly", says Kendell, as we sit down at Le Toucan, a neighbourhood brasserie. Kendell is working hard on a one night performance to take place in a theatre in the Pompidou in Paris next Friday night. Entitled Red Sniper, Kendell and Patrick Codenys will work together behind a lowered screen to throw up images and mix in sound in a one and a half hour session. One of Kendell's absolute criteria has been that his technical requirements be met and that the sound system will be 5 to 1, a system which locates speakers around the theatre, so that crystal clear sounds can be sent around the room. My opening is on Wednesday, and I leave on Saturday, but I am beginning to feel that I must find a way to get to Paris on Friday night for the performance. After all, by train it is only 90 minutes - the length of a car drive from Cape Town to Worcester.

A day off from the work of getting an exhibition ready - Fabienne, Jean-Claude and I head for the coast, to see part of a project taking place in a number of Belgian seaside towns, a triennial of public sculpture on the beaches and nearby areas. Such luminaries as Anthony Gormley (De Panne) and Anish Kapoor (Blankenberge) are taking part, but as we are heading for Zeebrugge, we will not see their contributions. We will see a 50 foot banner on the underside of a drawbridge, designed by Jan Muyle. Luckily the drawbridge is in the raised position for a ship to pass through when we get there, but soon the massive image of the woman is descending towards us and we are able to read the message between her lips: "What a wonderful world" before the bridge thunks closed.

More from Belgium next update.