Durban, KwaZulu Natal - a report on two weekends in May
by Sue Williamson
Durban is the city where I lived from the ages of 16 to 21, where I went to university and started my first job as assistant to the news editor's secretary on the Natal Daily News, a wannabe reporter. I was here last 15 years ago, at which time the only real contemporary art gallery in Durban, the NSA, was still badly located in the suburban mall of Overport City while in the city centre, the Durban Art Gallery which occupies the floor in the city hall above the library and the museum, slumbered unnoticed by the passersby on the street below.
In 1996, the NSA moved to a purpose built gallery in Glenwood, and in May 1998, the DAG shook off its fusty image with the introduction of regular art parties, to take place on the first Friday of every month. Entitled Red Eye Art, these parties combined a crazy mix of contemporary art, music, fashion dance, performance and design. The word spread, and soon lines snaked around the block for each new event, pulling in hordes of young people on a regular basis. Cape Town and Johannesburg sat up and took notice, but although both have staged events using the same kind of formula, the pace was too hot to keep up, and it is only Durban's Red Eye, now performed four times annually, that has been able to survive.
This year, for the beginning of May, the decision was made to combine Red Eye Art with a second event - the Durban Designer Collection, an annual fashion show celebrating its 25th birthday and featuring the city's best young designers.
It sounded like an irresistible combination which would pull in an even bigger audience for Red Eye than usual, with all the fashion crowd swelling the usual audience over the two nights planned for the DDC 25 meets Red Eye event. Funds were found to fly in a large number of media people, including myself, as ArtThrob editor. I was delighted to be given the opportunity to witness the Red Eye phenomenon first hand.
But come Friday evening May 13, where were all the people? Most of the art installations were located in the public gardens facing the city hall, with Dineo Bopape's LOVE CONQUERS ALL in illuminated letters on the city hall balcony. A small crowd wandered around, but the elaborate pavement buffet service set out by the Royal Hotel was hardly patronised, and the small containers, each with its own art installation on the Smith Street side of the City Hall attracted little attention, and rows of empty white plastic chairs faced the Transnet music stage.
Perhaps the problem was the barriers closing off the streets, and the R25 (usually R10) entrance fee, or maybe those who'd come to see fashion were interested only in looking at what other fashionistas were wearing on their way to their seats - but the buzz I'd always associated with Red Eye was lacking. Pieces that caught my eye were Desmond Zeederberg's Work - an installation of dozens and dozens of luminescent orange gloves hung from a tree like strange human fruit, and Francesca Varga's double grid of crochet covered coat hangers, name labels fluttering in the breeze. Varga sourced these hangers, probably all made by elderly white women, from charity shops all over Durban, and her wire strung grids were located in front of the engraved tablets set into the wall which listed the names of the men killed in World Wars 1 and 11. Varga was to be awarded the prize for contemporary art for the evening.
In one container, Vega art students mapped their comings and goings to art college from their homes across the city, and in another, artists and crafts people from the BAT Centre provided an opportunity to watch artists at work. As one approached the city hall itself, artist Brigitta Gaylard was on hand to cajole people into putting their heads through cutouts on boards with life sized images of herself naked, or nearly naked. Those who obliged were photographed by the artist on her cell phone.
Performances included mimes, dancers, an aerobics group from Cato Manor, and an unscripted heavily toupeed gentleman wearing a T-shirt with a photograph of himself, many years younger, with type proclaiming him to be the world champion marathon dancer. On request, he twinkled and tapped his toes a little, and announced his stamina was all based on milk.
In an interview with Durban Art Gallery director Carol Brown the next day, Brown declared herself mystified and disappointed by the poor turnout of the night before, but cheered up when she started discussing the gallery's expansion plans. Inside the impressive dome of the City Hall there are three beautiful circular floors, completely empty at present, accessed through a series of corridors currently housing specimens and documents from the Natural Science museum. All this is to move, and municipal manger Mike Sutcliffe has proposed that all the additional space should be utilised by the Art Gallery, which will practically double its present floor area. The prospect is exciting.
The Red Eye weekend was the second in a row I spent in Durban. The previous weekend, I came up for the NSA Young Artists Project seminar, organised by Storm Janse van Rensburg and his assistant, Nathi Gumede. As with Red Eye, the YAP project has found its way into the national art consciousness. YAP is being seen, in a country where scraping together the money to pay for the production costs of an exhibition can be almost impossible, as an ambitious programme which offers funding, curatorial support and a showcase exhibition to those young artists putting forward a sufficiently strong proposal. Since its inception in 2002, it has supported four artists working in performance, installation, video and/or new media annually.
On May 5th, the most recent four presented their work in a closed seminar. Vaughn Sadie laser cut the negative spaces of his drawings of public street lighting, and used these as covers for lights in the ceiling of the NSA Gallery, allowing light to filter through thes e thjn shapes into the gallery below. Viewers could pull rope switches to turns lights on and off to create shadows, though these switches were randomly programmed.
Performance artist Mlu Zondi showed images of two works. Using the gallery space to lay out a traditional board game called Umlabalaba with painted lines and low lighting, in the first, Zondi used his own body as the game piece, slithering and rolling slowly through the labrinth. In the seminar, Zondi explained that he found people often looked at him very hard, and this was to give them the opportunity to really look. In a totally different performance, designed to raise questions about what we regard as 'the other person', Zondi worked to provoke a "What the heck is going on with this guy?" reaction when he went swimming off North beach in green plastic and oversized sun glasses.
Dean Henning and Rike Sitas showed a sophisticated, multilayered interactive piece entitled 'a city', in which figures, or sometimes a wire puppet appear and disappear as the watcher utilises buttons on a control board - except that as in life, it is really not possible to make things happen to order by using buttons on a control board, and the results are often not what was expected, or seem stuck against their backgrounds of the city and its peripheries.
Studying in the cold north of Oslo, in Norway, Anawana Haloba of Zambia, the first artist not to be a South African in the YAP programme, decided to make herself a blanket against the chill. This blanket would consider what it meant to be a foreigner in Norway, so was constructed of units of currency, old Norwegian coins, so the 'blanket', handsome in appearance, was cold metal with gaps through which the drafts could creep, and glimpses of flesh could be seen. Powerful metaphors. In Haloba's video, Loud Silence the artist lies under her blanket, shifting slightly in her unsuccessful efforts to find a comfortable position, the unyielding blanket grating harshly and metallically as she does.
All of the artists worked from different points of view, but one felt that the YAP process had given each the opportunity to properly think through their ideas, their concept and their presentation, and thus the final work which was put before the public was rounded and satisfying.
