I must confess that my automatic response to this year’s Joburg Art Fair’s theme was peppered with my usual onslaught of cynicism. This was perhaps attributable to a skim-reading of the theme registering only the words “art” and “industry”; “art industry” if you will. Needless to say this prompted the customary “Guffaw, guffaw South African art industry…snigger” response, perpetuating the sentiments embodied in the following Lizza Littlewort work:



A second glance revealed the all-important conjunction “and”, implying a separation of disparate elements within the theme. Fair enough, the question is, “If art and industry are separated, what is implied by each term?” Taking Industry as the collective component parts of a specific goods-based commercial enterprise, where does that leave our humble protagonist Art? In this case, something produced for creative reasons other than commercial gain; a notion somewhat at odds with the concept of an art fair.

The next question would be “what changes with the addition of Industry to Art production?” If the drab facial expressions of Willem Boshof and Lawrence Lemaoana et al in the promotional photographs for the Art Fair are anything to go by, then the result is that there is no joy to be found in the task merely proletariat-approved manual labour. Hmmm.

Examined within the commissioned projects, the idea sees to be a bizarre form of mutualism. Industry commissions Art to utilize the materials pertinent to its production and Art reciprocates by transmogrifying these into something eminently unsellable. The benefit of doing so is unclear. Perhaps it’s a sort of Stockholm syndrome derived from 100 years of Art’s readymade filcheries. Or perhaps it stems from some basic need to keep the Art train a-rolling. Lord knows that that steam-powered Sisyphus needs all the help it can get.

What is clear from the opening press conference is that regardless of where you’re coming from, the point is that we’re knee-deep in a recession where money in the art world is like Eskimos in the Antarctic. What this lends itself to is another reading of the theme “Art and Industry” wherein Industry is pinched from “industrious”. After all, what it ultimately comes down to is that for some bizarre reason, even though it’s a financial sinkhole, Art resiliently manages to soldier on.

Perhaps more than anything else, this defines the “Art and Industry” Joburg Art Fair and unifies it as a whole. Indeed we live in the land of perpetual botch-ups and false starts with all things art-related on any sort of large scale (lest we forget Ross Douglas’ infamous quote in the Mail & Guardian (20 March 2009)).

For something as reliant on the existence of an Art Market as the Joburg Art Fair to have survived this far shows that they must be doing something right. The fact that FNB pledged to continue to invest in it until 2012 further emphasizes this. And ultimately that’s entirely indicative of Industry qua definition two. If it takes a liberal reinterpretation of the event’s theme to reach that point then so be it.