Sorry for the slowness of posts this week I'm not only a useless artist wanker, but also have a real job, which occasionally gets in the way, along with the odd hangover that debilitates my desire to write. I've been meaning to put up a review of One Million and Fourty Four Years (and Sixty Three Days) for a little while, but my copy fell apart at the spine, and I was too depressed to continue (at least the ISBN was easy to find: 978-0-620-38259-5). I hear rumour that a whole bunch of the books were sent back to the printer to be rebound in hardcover, so if you bought a crappy-spined copy like me, sorry, you were too eager, and you know what they say about the early worm.
However, and all that aside, Kathryn Smith did a good job of putting the content together, with a lot of interesting input from a variety of interesting people. Essentially, the book puts forward the question: Is the avant-garde still a viable/tenable notion in the current contemporary moment? You can read Zachary Yorke's review on Artthrob here as he is more capable of wading through a Colin Richards piece than I am. Some of my favourites were the more visual submissions, such as Gustavo Artigas' Spontaneous Human Combustion 1 where the artist burst into flames during a talk about Mexican artists and the avant-garde (see his website here, it's worth a look. You can also see a video of the SHC piece and some other awesome works) and Kristofer Paetau's Artforum Accident where the artist vomits at an art fair (his site here). The local Avant Car Guard sent some pictures which were also pretty funny. The text pieces were in a variety of styles, some short and aggressive, some long and dry, and some plain fascinating. My personal favourite was Stacy Hardy's Everyone Hates Me Because I'm Nerdy and White, an unsettling journey featuring Ed Young (partially fictionalised) and a blowjob. Other pieces that took a more academic or more formal stance were also enlightening, such as the contributions by Robert Storr, Bettina Malcomess, Liam Gillick, Sean o'Toole and others. I think the book is vital reading, not only because of it's diverse content, but also because it is an example of where books on art in South Africa should be going... not just monographs and surveys of South African art, but rather questions being asked and answered on valuable topics, that include a South African focus but refuse to be so insular.

Books available at Baobab Books, Clarke's Books both on Long Street, Cape Town. SMAC gallery in Stellenbosch has copies too, and I imagine you could order from them if Long Street is off your tramping grounds.

Labels: art, avant-garde, book review, Kathryn Smith, review, South Africa