Over 2500 artists across the country responded to the call. At central collection points, the entries flooded in. The dilapidated interior of the marble-floored Victorian Cape Town City Hall received a refurbishing, and was appropriately primped and painted.
So the good intentions were firmly in place. And of course, ‘hell’ is too strong a word to describe a visit to the exhibition. It was not hellish. Just terribly disappointing overall, with some elevating moments. The selectors appear to have suspended all rigour in favour of attempting to present to the public not only untrained artists working far from the centre of the art world, but also all those wannabes who believe that if life had not forced them to make money by working as architects, attorneys or whatever, they, too, could have been successful artists. Both of those preferences would have been in order had the work justified the choices. But on the whole it doesn’t. And thereby, the exhibition undermines the seriousness of art, and the lifelong commitment artists make in trying to develop technical skills and the intellectual curiosity which leads to the conceptual strength to produce great work.
This is not to claim for established artists the exclusive right to express their creativity in a tangible form. Not at all. But to present up to five truly awful works from entrants who do not have a single art exhibition listed on their CVs as part of a show purporting to the most important general survey exhibition in the country… I don’t think so.
Which brings us to the question international judges Mark Coetzee, RoseLee Goldberg and N’Gone Fall, flown in for the event, were all asking after the judging session: Where are all the established artists? Why aren’t they submitting work?
Not being privy to the selection process, this is a difficult one to answer. Perhaps a number of established and emerging artists did indeed submit work or proposals for work but were rejected. Or perhaps there are other reasons. One past winner said bluntly that his non-submission was about the money: he had won in the past, and was not likely to win again. Yet another reason might be that as one has to show new work to qualify for selection, an artist might be working hard for an upcoming show, and not have something available at the time.
But what seems rather more likely with work of such a low general standard, is that an established artist might not want their work to be hung alongside a badly conceived and executed object by an unknown. An artist wants to enhance their reputation by being on an exhibition, not damage it.
At the same time, one respects Spier’s commitment to open submission. One suggestion from the judges generated in informal discussion was to divide the show into three different categories in future: an open section, for all comers, a section for established artists with an exhibition history, and possibly a third section, a lifetime achievement award exhibition which, while a part of the overall event, could be staged at a different venue, like the National Gallery. And further, to appoint a curator outside Spier with the time, commitment and experience to direct the entire process.
Moving on to the specific. A cash award went to Araminta de Clermont, whose previous series of portraits of young girls from all backgrounds dressed triumphantly in their matric dance dream dresses impressed last year. For her Spier submission, de Clermont presented a new series, this of young men dressed in their best following a different rite of passage, circumcision. The seriousness of their commitment to their new status in life as men rather than boys is conveyed in their earnest gaze directly into the lens.
Hasan and Husain Essop - known for their energetic and sassy photographs in which the twins image themselves in a variety of Cape Town situations - here showed a series of photographs in which they grapple with their attempts to honour their Muslim heritage in Havana, a city filled with churches, but where the only mosque is a very small building. They, too, won an award.
Jessica Gregory and Zen Marie won for their video works, of which the most notable was entitled The Perfect Leader. Taking as its starting point the classic 1967 short by Danish film director Jorgen Leth, The Perfect Human, in which a lithe actor dresses, and undresses, eats and dances his way through the piece, Gregory and Marie present a much dourer, clomping version, with an actor who bears more than a passing resemblance to Robert Mugabe. Marie and Gregory retain the all-white background which suppresses any additional information, and while in Leth’s film, we do not know anything about the character except that he is a man, Marie and Gregory let us know that this is a ‘Leader’. The implication seems to be that even the simple daily routine of a leader, however mundane, is worthy of observation and respect. The piece brings into satirical question the cult of personal celebrity cultivated by so many who enter the political arena.
Another redo that comments on contemporary political reality and a shift in values is Cameron Platter’s cheeky reworking of master printmaker John Muafangejo’s linocut The Battle of Rorke’s Drift (1981) into the large scale The Battle of the Cinema Privé and Casino and Grill in Rorkes Drift About 2009. The hospital wall which once shielded the British troops of Muafangejo’s print has become a night club, and the shields of the Zulu warriors have metamorphosed into casino chips. The original Battle of Rorke’s Drift was fought over tribal territory, and the amabutho, regiments of young men of the same age, believed it was an honour to die in defence of it. Today, says Platter in script along the top of his pencil crayon drawing, ‘after the opening of the cinema privé and casino, the people became hypnotised by sex, money and meat’.
Work that engages with the political abounds – as it so often does in this country – and ranges from the adept to the embarrassingly ham-handed and overly self-conscious. In his catalogue essay, entitled 'Our Iron Cage of Race', writer Andile Mngxitama poses the question: ‘Can art help rip open the intestines of a society which is refusing to free itself from a past that traps its black majority in semi-servitude whilst feeding it false hope through staging one form of jamboree after the other: … the first inauguration … the TRC … jamborees of forgetting (which) will culminate in the FIFA 2010 World Cup?’
‘If we stirred a little bit more this stinking pot of our racial shit then we can’t avoid the conclusion that the motives that drive a white artist are unavoidably different from those that drive a black one. Here we invariably enter the world of the white whine triggered by the perceived lost world, a civilization based on meritocracy...The black artist on the other hand seems driven by the perennial call for inclusion into the house of privilege through pointedly pointing at the race balance sheet’.
Illustrating Mngxitama’s point literally and only too well, Polokwane artist Frans Masobe Mothapo carved a statue of himself as a street beggar, dressed his beggar in his own clothes, placed the obligatory piece of cardboard with the appeal for help in one hand, and a collecting mug in the other and put his artwork on the street. Masobe relates that the lifelike sculpture was mistaken for a real person, arrested and taken to the police station, where in a Kafkaesque situation, the artist was forced to bail ‘himself’ out. His aim in making the piece, says Mathopa, was ‘to see the world from the beggar’s perspective’. Mathopa’s approach and catalogue statement was direct, an uncluttered solution to investigating a problem which interested him.
White whines were apparent at every turn, and the variety of painfully contorted mixed metaphors which artists used to rationalize their confused choices in making their incoherent work was dispiriting.
It was a relief to get to some work which took the risk of being simple. With so much unrelated work on show, only one or two can be mentioned. Dillon Marsh took a series of photographs of cell phone towers disguised by the cell phone companies as palm or pine trees, the first of which appeared in 1996. Marsh placed each tree centrally in the frame, like a scientific illustration of a botanical specimen, desaturating the colour in the manner of a hand coloured engraving from the 19th century. Dillon called his series Invasive Species.
Invaders of a different kind populated Dan Halter’s Space Invader, a quirky little video located in a Johannesburg taxi rank. Filmed from a high viewpoint, a formation of the ubiquitous zip-up plastic bags used for carrying goods all over Africa appears as a Space Invaders icon, and then is physically moved by a group of men from one position to another. Speeded up, the movement mimics the jerkiness of the original computer game.
Wilhelm Saayman showed a series of small drawings, a number of which incorporated text: a bleary eyed man with a downturned mouth appears above the admonition: ‘Sometimes it’s best to avoid the Autobahn of Nostalgia.’ Indeed. Zakhele Moses Hlatshwayo used brilliant colour for the 17 panels illustrating his Strange Family – a series which could serve as the storyboard for a soap opera with its tale of conflict and priestly intervention.
One area in which Spier Contemporary excelled was marketing. The catalogue was well designed, with a number of engaging essays. Advertising extended to witty appeals to go and see the show graffitied on to the wall of Cape Town High. Ordering a coffee from Vida at the airport, I noticed that there was a shop copy of the Spier catalogue with a Vida label, available for perusal by customers. And that was just one that came to my attention – probably one of hundreds sent out into the city to attract visitors.
Now that the show is down in Cape Town, the winning artworks from Spier will move to Port Elizabeth from 17th June to 17th July, and from there will travel to Durban, Potchefstroom, Pretoria and Polokwane.
The pruned down version of the exhibition will definitely be a case of less is more.
