ArtHeat
THIS IS NOT A JOKE: Highlight of My Day
Hugh Upsher is a Michaelis Graduate/ DTP Student/ Bartender/ Practicing Artist
I watched about half an hour of the movie ‘Annie Leibovitz: Life Through A Lens’ today. Photography has always interested me and frustrated me simultaneously, not brought on by photographs themselves but mainly by the people behind the lens. In the movie though, Anna Leibovitz spoke about how photographs are not intended to capture the essence of a person or reveal some form of truth. The photograph is a construction, a pose, a drawing, a choice etc. I did already know this even though I never quite finished Roland Barthes’ Camera Obscura. I have the majority of it photocopied in a box of notes I’m planning on throwing away soon.
Photo: Rose KotzeFacebook is one big collective pose made up of images, interactions and text. A breathing shrine to oneself. A highly detailed self-portrait. It is a second life. An advertisement. Every choice one makes from status updates to the photos one uploads, to which groups one joins, they start to paint a picture. Photos are selected for albums in a similar way a curator would select work for a themed show. The idea is to tell a story more than anything else. The option of tagging, de-tagging and even reporting images reinforce this idea of moulding a particular character. In reality though, if someone wanted to write a thesis on a certain person, the Facebook profile of this certain person would not be a great reference. It doesn’t exactly translate into a textbook of the subject, more accurately it would be closer to a fantasy novel that romanticizes selected elements that may seem enticing.
This dangerously new digital arena is often misunderstood by it’s users and has been the reason for people not getting jobs, losing their jobs and losing the respect of friends and family. We are given the power to control our own image whether we know how to or not. Curating your own image has become an important must-know skill previously only practiced by celebrities in the public eye (Andy Warhol would have a very interesting Facebook profile). Although we are not famous to everyone in the world, we are famous to everyone we know. People’s moms, bosses, dogs and ex-girlfriends from prep school are all online now…watching.
LOVE EARLY FRIDAY (ft. Wedding Dj's)
ET GOES HOMO
BY YOUNGBLACKMAN
Laundry
New posts on Its Not a Tumor AND Mixtape:
Its Not a Tumor features a view from the Joburg Art Fair...
Mixtape hangs out at with colonial nostalgia and runs into someone interesting...
THIS IS NOT A JOKE: AWB vs. JR
Hugh Upsher is a Michaelis Graduate/ Barman/ Practicing Artist/ Desktop Publishing Student
" 'the DJ and the programmer are the twin figures of popular culture' - Bourriaud" - Linda Stupart
Most contemporary art enthusiasts are well aware of the idea of the remix in art production. Artists do this by taking a pre-existing image or concept and reworking it to bring out something new and relevant. The term remix is originally a DJ term but now it can be applied to almost any cultural production involving the reworking of existing content. The Internet is a breeding ground for all forms of remixes due to the rapid accessibility to unthinkable amounts of content. Although this theme could be taken in many directions, I would like to investigate a rather obvious use of the term remix in the form of the Youtube remix. A practice involving heavily reedited online content with the addition of a high-energy dance track. This process is almost as old as Youtube itself and can be applied to literally anything posted on the site.
In an attempt to make my content relevant and local I will use an AWB interview conducted yesterday on E News as my example. The footage was posted on Youtube and has received 59 100 views last time I checked. It was almost immediately downloaded, diced up and shoved into the painfully popular local track ‘Show Dem (Make The Circle Bigger)’ by South African musician JR. The online video ‘(Don't) Touch Me On My Studio [Mo's Circle Mix]’ utilizes a crude yet typical process of sampling inappropriate content to an upbeat dance track. On one side you have the disillusioned General Secretary of the AWB storming out of a televised interview blurting out schoolboy threats. The other side being the local party song themed around inclusiveness (Make the Circle Bigger) sung by black and coloured musicians.
Both videos are ridiculous enough by themselves but clashing these two separate worlds into one video work is genius on every level. All those South African video artists out there might want to take notes on how to make work that isn’t boring, self indulgent and/or meaningless. It’s nice to know there is a sense of humour out there in this time of little faith.
PRINTMAKERS EARLY FRIDAY
Valuing the Art Fair (From the Daily ArtHeat at the Joburg Art Fair)
By Matthew Blackman
Plato wished to banish the artist’s from his ideal republic. His argument was that art is merely a representation of a representation and that in the search for truth art was of no use. Some have suggested that art has value in that it expresses the inexpressible and that this allows at least some kind of balance between the rational and the irrational. This is what Plato denied - that there was a place for irrational expression and that the rational side of our minds would always be able to explain it.
If this notion that art is the expression of the inexpressible how then are art fairs, which largely focused on money making, of any use to man or artist. If this is true then perhaps it should be argued that art fairs be should be banished from our not so ideal republic. This argument has, to a certain extent, been the elephant in the Joburg Fair that has but spoken its name only once. Simon Njami made a rather weak attempt to say that art fairs are by their nature inclusive. He suggested that they allowed the general public the time and space to contemplate art without gallerists breathing down their necks demanding and expressing faux ‘insightful’ ‘interpretative’ discourse. The question is how do art fairs allow this time and space considering that the gallerists are even more on the prowl at them than they are in their galleries.
The simple fact is that art fairs are about making money, there is really no getting around this. Inclusivity at a R100 a pop seems slightly ridiculous. If art is, in Plato’s words, two stages away from the throne of truth then art fairs seem at least several stages away form throne of inclusivity (if thrones can in fact be inclusive). So what can the value of art fairs be? Well, there value is that they do produce money not only for the gallerists but also for the people two stages from the throne of art fairs, the artists themselves. Not all artists shown at art fairs are the Kentridges of the world. There is some filter down effect for the poorer artists by showing them with the Kentridges. There is even filter down for the artists who are not even shown. As Justin Rhodes of Whatiftheworld was saying to me, he needs to sell Andrzej Nowicki’s work in order to fund some the more conceptual artists in their stable.
So art fairs are about making money. Is this a great capitalist evil? The fact that art fairs are directed at collectors and that collectors can be as uninsightful as to buy Brett Murray’s Gorilla because ‘no human can could really be as pure’ (Miranda Friedman M&G 24 March) is of really little concern, at least to my mind. The reality is that artists need collectors and art fairs. If it is worth keeping artists going who sell to people whose poverty in interpretive skills is well below the poverty of people who earn R100 a day are in pecuniary terms is another question entirely. However, if gallerists like Rhodes sustain other, less saleable, artists through the money they earn at art fairs then one can in fact find some value in art fairs.
If the Shoe Fits (From the Daily ArtHeat at the Joburg Art Fair)
By Kat Pichulik and David Brits
One can tell many things about visitors to the Joburg Art Fair by indulinging in a little shoegazing.
Unless you are a camping/camp enthusiast, struggling single dad or confused tween, to rock up at an art fair (or any place within the sight of critical eye, for that matter) in these puppies is to commit social suicide. Think twice.
These little hot red pleather boots on the other hand, are a total must if you are three foot, puke green Krocodil in a red bowler hat and matching thong.
Only a man who would wear these leather thongs would ever consider buying something like this:
To accompany his paint technique Tuscan Villa fountain, of course.
The dual functions of heels at art fairs:
Either as cheap ploy to create controversy on delightful dancing Jesus’
Or
On hot gallerina’s as expensive ploys to sell art to middle aged male buyers
Black Stallion: The Horse in Mary Sibande's The Reign (From the Daily ArtHeat at the Joburg Art Fair)
By Linda Stupart
It strikes me as wonderfully appropriate that the anemically pale and moneyed crowd oozing through the Joburg Art Fair is being watched over by a monument of epic proportions; with Sophie, a woman cast off of Mary Sibande’s body, balancing majestically on a rearing bronze horse, her maid’s uniform billowing behind her as she performs a daring equestrienne feat; at once absolutely free and completely in control.
Mary Sibande’s The Reign is the latest in a series of works featuring Sophie, a domestic worker who is an amalgamation of South African history (and present) and Victorian stylings, a character who carries the weight of hundreds years of colonial history while still living firmly in the present. And though many of Sibande’s sculptures cast Sophie still within the role of the subjugated on the edge of emancipation, demurely knitting a Superman outfit in They don’t make them like they used to, this year Sibande’s character has escaped into a space of daydream and power, and a place where she claims her position in South African history – a narrative marked by monuments of dead white men riding well-endowed steeds.
And it is important to note that this horse is indeed a stallion, no tame asexualized Gelding who would kowtow to its rider’s wishes without a fight. The stallion is possibly the most widely recognised symbol of virility and sexual power, with Sophie, like many horsewomen and girls before her relishing the thrill and control that comes with holding such a beast between their thighs. Freud, of course, thought that little girls liked horses because of penis envy, that they longed to claim ownership of the cock they lack. Freud, however (as I like to say), can suck my dick.
While women and girls may gain autoerotic pleasure (note auto, as they pleasure themselves), from riding horses, it is power and control that girls and women, denied this right in everyday life, claim through horses. Equestrian sports are the only sports in which men and women compete equally, and the horse Sophie rides provides her with the right to enter the art fair, to claim agency as a woman on equal footing (or hoofing) with men. More than anything, horses relationship to women is one that reverses the traditional colonial gaze, where women are passive receptacles of desire. When with horses (in real life and literature) it is women who have the strength and the power, who project their desire on to the horse they master (or mistress as the case may be). As Enid Bagnold wrote of Velvet Brown’s virulent horse in he 1935 classic National Velvet: “He handed her the glory of command”.
While riding horses is a fantasy often made real for women, the equestrian world is still almost entirely the premise of the privileged, white classes. Certainly in South Africa, which exactly mirrors the British model of equestrianism, horse riding is almost entirely white, and completely privileged, with well-groomed men and women on well-groomed (by someone else) steeds drinking sherry and gallivanting around the countryside, only to leap off and throw their reins to a black helper while they go off to lunch. Thus, a domestic worker riding a horse is an almost ridiculous image, throwing immediately to light the colonial histories that keep race and class so intricately tied in South Africa, and giving Sophie a way to heroically break free of these ties herself.
Cast in bronze and rearing from the Art Fair floor, The Reign not only signifies horse-ness, but also the specificity of the equestrian monument; a well trodden trope with a history that spans centuries and a prevalence all over the world. Almost every great leader ends up immortalised on horseback, Louis Botha, for example, still stands proudly on horseback outside of parliament in Cape Town. Statues of horses, as well as all the images of virility, power and control discussed above, signify leadership in their rider – revolutionaries, heroes, kings are all cast on horseback, the medium through which they bring their people to victory, to power.
And the rearing horse represents even more: a daring, a fight, a war hero; the kind of frontier heroism St George exemplified when he slayed the dragon for his countrymen. The rearing horse suggests that Sophie is at war, and that she’s going to win. Is Sophie leading a revolution then, a takeover? Perhaps, here, like in her secret Superman costume, she is about to lead domestic workers to freedom. Perhaps she is about to take over her own history…
There is, however, another element to the rearing horse monument. For the rules of equestrian statuary state that a horse with two hooves off the ground signifies that the rider has died in service to their country. Does this mean the end for Sophie, or is this just one of the possibilities she must face, and one of the legacies of her history as woman, domestic worker and African?
The Reign is at once a monument and a memorial to the South African domestic worker. Here, Sophie once again claims a voice that she is traditionally denied, with her faithful, though turbulent, steed helping her to shout all the louder.
