Archive: Issue No. 67, March 2003

Wake up nervously at 5 a.m. with long TO DO list to be completed before I can get on the plane at noon. Finish English version of the notes for the catalogue for my show in Brussels. They are to be translated into French and Flemish, and must be sent off to the translators this morning. Select slides of work to show at panel discussion in Oz. Try to make some electronic payments, but the submissions keep coming back 'Fail'. Hope the electricity isn't cut off while I'm away. Frantic dash to airport. Collapse onto Qantas flight bound for Melbourne.

Late night arrival at Radisson Flagstaff Hotel. Check out TV, minibar in my room. The price of a miniature bottle of Gordons is the same as a 750 ml size back home, but I pour a gin and tonic anyway. I deserve it.

Breakfast with BHP Billiton curator Natasha Fuller and artist Johannes Phokela, who have flown in from Johannesburg and London for this week's programme. The RMIT Gallery is attached to the University of Melbourne, and to be found behind faceted applegreen metal doors in the midtown area of the city. Entitled 'Intersections', the show looks great! The BHP Billiton collection started under the Gencor name, with Kendell Geers as the original curator, reporting to then CEO Brian Gilbertson. Geers pulled no punches in putting together what he considered to be challenging and high quality contemporary South African work, even though some of it was heartily disliked by Gencor staff members who encountered it in the corridors of the company's head office in the course of their working days.

Here, for Melbourne, Natasha has selected about 30 works for the show, stretching from Paul Stopforth's graphite depiction of the swollen feet of the tortured Steve Biko, and Gavin Jantje's Colouring Book, through Jane Alexander's photographic collages and Willem Boshoff's coded jail diaries to an interesting pairing of Hentie van der Merwe's headless officer's jacket with Moshekwa Langa's drawing of a skeleton. My work is three of the etched and screenprinted portraits from the A Few South Africans series made in the 80s, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Miriam Makeba and Mamphela Ramphele. At the crowded walkabout we conduct at lunchtime, the students show most appreciation for Robin Rhode's wacky basketball fantasy, I Got Game.

Time to eat! Melbourne is famous for its Asian food, and we pull into Mekong Noodles (previous diners: Jackie Chan and Bill Clinton) for enormous bowls of tasty Pho noodles. Noodled out, a tram ride takes us to the ACCA, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, where we are lucky enough to catch a show by Australia's candidate for this year's Venice Biennale, Patricia Piccinini, entitled Respectology: the world according to Patricia Piccinini. In room one, stacks of video monitors show images of bright green trees swaying in the wind, the whooshing sound of the branches filling the space. It's like taking a walk in a tropical forest. Closer inspection shows the trees are all fake. Another piece is of a human-faced sow suckling her litter of piglets with baby faces. In a third room, three unidentifiable but human looking sections of body are breathing in and out of peculiarly unattractive orifices. Must have been a popular show - the catalogues are all sold out.

However short a time one is in a new city, it is always good to get a sense of the larger picture, and the quick fix way to do this is to get up somewhere high and look down. From the top of the Rialto Tower, we see open water for the first time - the Yarra River snakes through the town and enters a bay dotted with dozens of tiny white sails. From here, the Richard Serra-like ACCA we left thirty minutes ago is a sculpture of rusted metal plates.

Over breakfast this morning, Natasha shows me a story which has appeared in today's The Culture section of the Melbourne Age. The picture shows Patricia Piccinini standing next to one of her works at the ACCA, holding a cloth. Should hawkish prime minister John Howard commit Australia to follow the US into war with Iraq, Piccinini is one of a number of artists who will cover all of her work on public display in protest.

Incidentally, The Culture section comes out every day with eight full size pages of well written articles on art and cultural happenings - not the tacky little tabloid Tonight sections highlighting mainly television series that is our daily fare in South Africa.

After a 10 a.m. radio interview at the RMIT Gallery, we are free to wander round Melbourne a bit. Gertrude Street is a neighbourhood of galleries and interesting shops. In a second hand clothes store, Natasha succumbs to a little black rabbit fur jacket which looks great on her. In one gallery, an artist has used the rectangular lids of 70's electric frying pans to make grids on the walls. In some grids, all the lids have been scoured down to the metal, in others, the distinctive 70's kitchenware colours of cream, burnt orange and brown recall the days when every kitchen had this precursor to the microwave. Where did the artist get them all?

By 5 p.m. we are back in the gallery for a meeting with the other panel members for this evening's discussion. Coincidentally, gallery director Suzanne Davies, who will chair the discussion, was head of the committee of the 1992 Biennale of Sydney. The last time I saw her speak, was when she opened that exciting event at the Gallery of New South Wales - the first time I had been present as participating artist at such an important show. Suzanne still lives in Sydney, commuting the two hour plane flight to Melbourne each week to work.

Chairs have been set out in the gallery, and about thirty people have arrived for the discussion. An average sort of turnout. Natasha talks about how the Billiton collection came into being. I discuss how the term 'resistance art' came into being, and showa few slides of my own work. Jo Phokela tells how he left South Africa in the 80's, and his difficulties in the U.K. in resisting the 'African artist' slot. Phokela worked against this by re-appropriating classic western modes of art in his production. He shows slides. Poet and art critic John Mateer, born in Roodepoort but now living in Australia, is next. Mateer, having remarked on the dynamic of allegory in Paul Stopforth's work, linking Biko's feet with crucifixion imagery, commented on the complex mix of the personal and political in the later work, by artists Rose, Langa, Van der Merwe and Vari, finding in the work "an interesting connection between the local and a powerful openness legible to an art audience around the world".

African art historian David Darwood comments on how little Australian students actually know about South Africa, despite the synergy between the two countries, allies through most of the 20th century. A major difference was that like America, Australia had dealt with an indigenous population by first exterminating them and mariginalising the remainder, while South Africa had followed the colonial model of segregation, keeping violence as a prerogative of the ruling party. He considered the relocation of political art outside its context an act of courage. Jock McCulloch, an academic in the field of mining, commented that he had never met an apolitical South African. Recounting the difficulty of finding records and photographic images of the asbestos mining industry in South Africa, McCulloch pointed out that much of the subject of the exhibition was about bearing witness. Points are made from the floor, inevitably leading to a discussion of how Australian artists deal, or do not deal with the political. "Art draws up what has to be exorcised," says Mateer.

All that talking has made us hungry, and the evening finishes with wonderful Chinese food in a small neighbourhood restaurant - steamed buns, oozing with thick red bean paste, bite-sized noodle parcels of minced prawns served in steamer baskets and crunchy green vegetables.

Up at dawn to get on a plane to Sydney where I will have 24 hours to spend with old friends Derryn and Bruce Heilbuth, who emigrated there some 15 years ago, and now run their own company, Business Writers, writing annual reports, speeches, travel articles, directing publicity. Derryn meets me at the airport, and we stop off at the Gallery of New South Wales to catch a show by Tracy Emin. Derryn says when bad girl Brit artist Emin arrived in Australia for the opening, the press and TV stations were all over her, quoting her ad nauseum.

When over the years one has seen one piece here, a few others in a magazine and so on, it is great to see a whole body of work laid out for inspection. One's opinion almost always alters this way. The gallery brochure reads: "Emin has a remarkable ability in her art and her interviews and TV appearances to provoke a public response, whether she is consciously seeking this or not � her art is her life, her history, and vice versa. It has meaning only insofar as Emin herself does." The videos bear this out - Emin tells of her failed abortions, at being shouted off the dance floor with calls of "Slag, slag", but no matter how severe the trauma, the stories always seem to end on a note of recovery.

Wake to the mad laughter of kookaburras outside my bedroom window at Bruce and Derryn's � wish I'd had more time with my good friends, but I have to catch a plane back to Cape Town this morning, and such is the weirdness of international travel, that after an eighteen hour flight, I will be in time for the evening art event of YDESIRE at the Cape Town Castle.