July
Wednesday, July 6
Wednesday night has become a bit of a gallery opening night in Cape Town - a good idea, as the prospect of killing several birds with one stone (not to insult the artists) is a crowd-puller. Tonight there are three events. First stop: blank projects (with its fashionably lowercase logo), a small new gallery intended to provide a space for one specific project at a time rather than a full exhibition. The location is in the Bo-Kaap, the old Malay quarter above the city centre, and it's on the corner of Buiten and Buitengracht Streets.
Pierre Fouche is the first artist to show at blank. The cartoon of a large tapestry is on one wall, and all the colours of the embroidery silks to be employed in the making are on display. The image is taken from a faded colour photograph taken on his parents' honeymoon - a beach shot of his father and a male friend, one with an arm around the other's shoulders. Pierre tells me that he worked out all the colours to be used by eye, and shortly after he completed the task, DMC, the manufacturers of the embroidery silk, brought out software which allows one to scan an image and then supplies all the correct number codes, so one can get a really accurate colour rendition of the image. The tapestry will take about a year to complete.
blank is being run by three partners - Jonathan Garnham, Lisa Grobelaar and Mike Casey-Smith and is open on Wednesday afternoons or by appointment at 072 198 9221.
Second stop: Erdmann Contemporary, where Dario Matter is showing sculpture and twinned polaroids (see Kim Gurney's review). Gallerist Heidi Erdmann is off to the States soon - the gallery has been invited to participate on a photographic art fair in San Francisco. Finally: at the Bell Roberts is Keith Dietrich with his segmented maps of the entire country of South Africa, annotated with drawings, and Carol Gainer with the 2005 update on Warhol's piss drawings (see Linda Stupart's review).
Saturday, July 9
Talking about Carol Gainer, if you are interested in learning more about the feminist take on the artworld you could do worse than get hold of a UK based journal edited by Katy Deepwell called n.paradoxa. This is not a glossy with pages of beautiful colour reproductions of work, but a focused and highly articulate series of articles on the work of women artists. There's a website too, with different content to the print version. Online, there's a diary - written anonymously - under the wry title of Diary of an ageing art slut.
Have to say, sometimes when I go on to the net and find my google searches end up at back issues of my diary on ArtThrob, I find my blatherings-on highly embarrassing and wish I had also chosen to write anonymously.
Thursday, July 14
Have heard that I have been accepted for a residency in California, at the Montalvo Arts Center, 50 minutes south of San Francisco, through the Lucas Artists Program. It's for up to three months, and I have asked to go this September, thinking I will use the time to work on the upcoming show at The Light Factory in Charlotte, North Carolina, next January. The residencies are not just for visual artists, but also writers, film makers, composers etc, and each participant gets their own house and studio, with dinner served every night in a building called Commons.
Of course I am excited, but also anxious - three months is a long time to be away from home and family - and also from all the loads of stuff which one has in the studio, which one doesn't think about from year to year until suddenly one day that particular image or object is exactly what you need right now, and if you can't lay your hands on it, you can't possibly go on with what you're doing.
Friday, July 20
Was amused by the AVA invitation to Donovan Ward's opening of his show, 'Barbie Baartman, Homecoming Queen', which shows an image of a generously sized doll with smooth, Barbie type modulations against a background of the beach at Sandy Bay. The 19th century Sarah Baartman, of course, is a symbol of the exploitation of women, and particularly black women, taken as she was from her homeland of South Africa and paraded around Europe because of the peculiarities of her sexual organs, pickled on her death and retained at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris until their recent return to this country for a ceremonial burial.
It takes a brave man to focus on the iconic Sarah Baartman as an exhibition subject in a way that seems less than reverential, and although I missed the opening, I am interested to see what Ward, known for his use of the symbols of popular culture, has done. A series of identical Barbie Baartman dolls are arranged on a long display shelf, each dressed differently: as banner waving activist, veiled Muslim, working mother, academic etc. Without in any way playing down the degradation of Baartman's experience, Ward does make one think of the multiple roles in society her sisters of today have to assume.
