It's a small world
by Paul Edmunds
The most difficult thing to express is that I feel I don't have any strong or general ideas about the state of art-making or criticism in South Africa. There are a few things, but they hardly register as more than a small blip on a radar screen that's probably incapable of describing an accurate picture anyway. Here goes.
The art world here is pretty small (I suspect this is the same everywhere and operates on many different scales too). Receiving by email the other day a press release from an art gallery about an upcoming show, I noted the familiarity of the words. A little check-up revealed that this was in fact cut-and-pasted from a listing I had posted on ArtThrob. The cheek of it.
Having previously had a set-to about a similar issue with the particular gallery, I was disinclined to raise the issue. Also I am busy working with them on another project and didn't want to rock that already shaky boat. To boot, my information was cobbled together from an inadequate and indecipherable earlier press release and information from a friend currently studying the work of the artist whose show we were listing. As far as I know, neither my friend nor the gallery had actually seen the work, so heaven knows how accurate my description was.
The faster we go, the rounder we get. Of course this principle operates when we look at art works as critics. Our responses can only approximate the visual experience to which we are referring. Unfortunately, on the most part, we are reluctant to pay much attention to this looking process and trade largely in the currency of ideas. A quick look is enough to grasp the principle on which something operates, and following this is an analysis that places extrapolations upon extrapolations.
Unfortunately the initial data is often inadequate. As a critic, I guess, I'm resigned to this as it's unavoidable in a model where one attempts a verbal description of an altogether different process. While attempting to direct a viewer's gaze at the artwork, we send it packing in the opposite direction. As an artist, I'm reluctant to accept this. As an artist and a critic, well, that doesn't sit so easily with most people. Unfortunately, it's a very small art world.
