Labels: Joburg art fair, Lizza

Labels: Cape Town Biennale, Lizza

The Biennale is being taken forward step by step with unfailing precision. Really, we are so lucky to have a Biennale and nothing is going wrong. It only gets better. Well done South Africa, I didn't believe we could ever pull off something like this.

The second part of the Biennale, which opened on Wednesday, was curated by Cathy Coates and featured the international artists on the show. Really, in terms of controversy, we have buried Venice. This is because, instead of trying to police the perimeter of art, and exlude African artists who don't have the money for a posh art education, we opened the floodgates wide and let them in. As a result we got what the Venetians are too afraid to face: a show that looks like the artists haven't had an art education.

Which raises some thorny and fascinating questions. Does having an art education make you a better artist? Who can afford one and why? What do you call someone who is trying to make art but who doesn't have an art education? What is art? All these questions become especially fascinating given the opening of the Biennale, which featured a philosopher who is considered an affront to white middle class values, and white middle class people tend to be the ones who can afford an art education. So all in all this show, which was organised by white people with an art education, is a brilliant statement about what is going on with art in South Africa.

I don't think it makes the art which was on the show brilliant though. A lot of it was really really bad. It made me think about the organisation, “Voyage Ensemble”, that many of these artists come from, and whether that organisation is serving their artists. I don't know whether they have any funding, but I think if they did it would be an extremely good idea to spend some of it on helping these artists develop their ideas beyond first base. A lot of the stuff seems to have found its inspiration somewhere between cliched 1970's modernism and touristy/hippyish levels of ideas. I think this is a waste, as it is likely that these artists are very intelligent people and it is a waste for them to be working from an impoverished base of ideas and discussion.

I tend to fantasise, though very ineffectually, about making a difference to this kind of thing, but guess what, where would one get the funding. In order to try to address the problem without funding, like this Biennale has done, I've even written an essay outlining the entire history of Western art since the Greeks in only seven pages so it's cheap to photocopy! I'm so proud of it. But it will not go very far all alone. A lot of talk happened around the time of Cape '07 about free art education. My view is, if people can't access databases of knowledge, then you can workshop till you're blue in the face and it will only do so much. We need an art Wikipedia and libraries. The Minister of Culture likes libraries, I'm just not to sure if he wants art books in them or when he will put them there.

But I had this great idea. Don't you think we should ask Ronald Suresh Roberts to explain all about art to Thabo, and then maybe he will spend some of the government's unspent reserves of cash on this thing? C'mon Ronald! Give it a go! Tell him art could be a great source of national pride, and if there was some money around it wouldn't be being made by an overwhelming majority of white people!

But then I got depressed, realising that this is a very long shot and not exactly the kind of idea you can bank on. But then I perked up again. I thought, Hey! Charles Saatchi might be reading this!

Labels: Cape Town Biennale, Lizza, Voyage Ensemble

Labels: Lizza

It's been a quiet week here at the ArtHeat offices, and I'll be the first to admit I have been preoccupied with other things like earning a living and feeling sorry for myself. As a good friend of mine said to me this week, "What's up Robert? Your site looks like an advertising brochure." My shame overwhelms me, and I struggle to look myself in the eye. Thanks, then to Lizza, who has saved this week from being a complete write off, by sending me this great review of the SABC show:

This exhibition didn't feel like propaganda at all, but the word rhymes so nicely with Luanda and in the murky world of sleaze journalism (which I of course inhabit) such arbitrary connections are made all the time with utter disregard for the consequences. According to my rhyming dictionary, I could just as well have used candour, pander, Rwanda, backhander, philander or the juicy gerrymander.

But then a good thing about 'propaganda' is that this exhibition showcases a selection of works from the SABC art collection'. Which enables me to engage with yet another honoured tradition: that of bandying about vague threats and accusations in the name of art. This is one of my personal favourites, as it is bound to give even the most forgettable work the air of activist urgency.

Much more fascinating to me than any concerns that the SABC may disseminate propaganda is the fact that they have an art collection at all. And a good one, too. Such a well kept secret, for a public broadcaster. Why have they never told the producers of Carte Blanche?
Even the title of their show, “Making Waves”, openly alludes to the fact that they make the air-waves around here. Yet if you look at TV you wouldn't imagine that they'd recognise any art if they fell over it. It should be renamed “Making Waves: except, mysteriously, in the arena of visual art culture.”

Having said that, though, they did once have a good insert, on the art of Matt Hindley, which fortunately for them was carefully curated by Matt himself. It was such a clear and apt (and successful) study on the rigours of making art palatable to a South African audience that I think it should be required viewing in art schools across the country.

Besides the work on this show, another good bit is that you get lots of free stuff, once you've paid to get into the Castle in the first place. You get a catalogue and a box of postcards and, my personal favourite, an alphabetical checklist, pictured above. I vote this show goes to the next Venice Biennale where, seeing as corporate African fiefdoms seem to be so in vogue, they may as well have an SABC pavilion.

Labels: Lizza, Making waves, SABC

Thanks to Lizza for this one...
Click on the image for a high-res version.
R100 in the post and a free lesson in Inuit throat singing for whoever gets the solution to this murder.

Labels: Lizza

Thank you Lizza...
Click on image for high-res version.

Labels: clive van den berg, Lizza

Another fine review sent to me by Lizza:

Something is out of order at the new all-women Graca Machel Residence at UCT. Personally I can only explain it as an evil patriarchal conspiracy to destroy the natural appetites of young female university students, and drive them into abject self-abasement and ultimate suicide. They have Debora Poynton paintings in the dining room.

While any of her work can put you off eating, this huge diptych, which dominates the space as thoroughly as posters of Big Brother in 1984, is carefully directed at destroying a broader range of appetites. A common, even humble, aspiration of most undergraduate students is that university life will involve going to a few parties. Daily experience of these pictures will change all that. The paintings depict a party scene, in a hideous, clinically-lit frieze frame of the kind
which one's memory reserves for life's most excruciating experiences. There's a gallingly boring woman who looks like she's from Rondebosch East rubbing her ugly bra for no apparent reason, as the party is to say the least not sexy. The most dominating figure is a man with his mouth thrown wide open in the rictus of a silent scream, Poyntian tonsils on show, who appears to be none other than the artist's ex-husband. Small wonder. And the usually affable and humane Ralph Borland snarls out of the painting as if he had contracted rabies, his eyes
rolling up into his skull.

More insidious, to me, is that this work is on university property, placed in a position calculated to affect the impressionable young womens' appreciation of culture. My suspicion is that the true aim of these paintings is to destroy for ever the students' appetite for art.

Labels: Lizza

Read the Art Times for the inside track on this one.
Thanks Lizza.

Labels: Lizza, Rose Korber

This review sent to me by Lizza:

I did a sprint around some galleries this morning. There's nothing like art to make me sprint. I'd be so fit I lived in New York, cos I could put on my sweatband and sprint through the Metropolitan Museum every morning.

My first pause was at Joao, where the current show is by Justin Anschutz. Justin's been involved for years in a dedicated craft-based exploration which one can see the effects of in this body of work which consists of paintings on glass, mostly of intricate wickerwork-like patterns. Not the kind of stuff that's going to set current debates on fire, but still I liked it. The reason is, so many people do this kind of stuff badly, and he's done it well. For what it is. Conceptually it's completely jumbled and his artist's statement is bollocks. But so much work which does have clear conceptual underpinnings is hideously cheesy, and at least this stuff is graphically interesting. If only he hadn't used whitewash on the wooden frames, which is something that makes me break out in a rash. And that lumpy conch shell object has got to go.

Then I jogged around Bell-Roberts, where Fritha Langerman's The Knowledge Chambers was on, which incorporated the special bonus of a clear artist's statement so for once I could actually work out what the hell was going on, and that was nice. I slowed down to a walk. I really enjoyed thinking about the paths knowledge has taken between Diderot's ambitious encyclopedia and the current 'information age' we are in. It was a clever link to make. But as
always with this kind of work, the sheer work ethic of it exhausts me. It is so immensely earnest, huge and expensive, it seems to be upholding a seriousness about the importance of art objects which I can't identify with. I yearned to do some of that interactive work known locally as physical criticism.

Having said that, though, I did get inspired by the central piece, the big rose window. Its chromed surfaces so powerfully evoked trashy corporate architecture, and I think corporate culture is a major force is the contemporary structuring of what is presented to the public as knowledge. Diderot would be aghast if he could see the relationships between religion, knowledge and corporate power that his categorisations have facilitated. I think the rose window would look perfect in that huge white neon-lit Nigerian church in Darling Street. I forget its name, but from its appearance it may as well be called GodCorp.

Labels: Fritha Langerman, Justin Anschutz, Lizza

Labels: Lizza, Pallo Jordan, Vansa

Thanks to Lizza.
Click on image for high-res version.

Labels: Africa Remix, Lizza

While Robert Sloon was having his cash taken off him at the National Gallery, I was voluntarily giving mine away to the barman at the Kwa Mlamli shebeen in Gugs, which had been turned into a temporary gallery for the day. There was another group show by the 'Gugulective', which included video (good), painting (very good), interactive painting (got a bit sentimental), and performance, which was the main focus of the show.

Most of the performance was live and of the musical kind, and it was spirited and fun. But I'm afraid I have a strange neural dysfunction which makes me resistant to the charms of dub poetry, which there was quite a lot of too. I liked the performance by Unathi Sigenu who sat in the bar sending sms messages. Mine said “Arrest the art”, which I liked. Though he should probably have sent it to Robert Sloon instead.

This piece written by Lizza

Labels: Gugulective, Lizza, painting, performance, Unathi Sigenu, video art

Sent to me by Lizza Littlewort, in response to the Nick Ut pics further down the page:

I've spent some time recently looking at the transition from Westerns into war movies, and when I saw those incredible pictures by Nick Ut I was reminded of one of my favourite lines from my favourite anti-Vietnam-war movie, 'Full Metal Jacket' (see pic). So much of war-speak is about defending the women and children back home, and Paris plays a massive role in structuring domestic culture in America. She's the most visible protagonist in an enormous conservative backlash which seems to be taking women into a kind of schizophrenic X-rated version of the 1950's. One of the saddest features of this craze is not so much the sexual victimhood, but that it goes with a culture where women despise other women and become desperate for acceptance as 'one of the boys' in a spiralling absence of self which so reminds one of Paris's emptiness.
While on the subject of Stanley Kubrick's movie, I discovered in my recent movie-fest that 'Full Metal Jacket' is a direct response to John Wayne's pro-war movie 'The Green Berets'. This is probably something everyone gets told in Film Studies 101, but I stumbled across it by myself and it made me think about the media wars surrounding actual wars. Which brings us to the present and the horrible suspense we are caught in as America swivels its sulfurous sights towards its next victim, Iran. And what should emerge from Hollywood just at this moment but the most chillingly unambiguous pro-war movie since John Wayne, the 'historical drama' called '300'. I could no sooner actually watch a load of shit like this than watch Mel Gibson's Jesus Christorama, but here are some reviews which made me long for Stanley Kubrick to come back from the dead.

A Movie only a Spartan could Love by Dana Stevens

Go Tell the Spartans by Touraj Daryaee

Labels: 300, Lizza, Nick Ut, Stanley Kubrick

Thanks Lizza...

Labels: Congo, Lizza

This sent to me by our favourite weather correspondent Lizza Littlewort:

It's been interesting watching the tide of new ideas in drawing/painting turn from a trickle into a flood. By now it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a full-blown tsunami, bringing massive changes in the global art world.

About six years ago a painter, Luc Tuymans, became the most talked-about artist at the Venice Biennale. But the biennale organisation refused to give him a prize because they 'didn't want to be seen to be encouraging painting.' By the next biennale there was a pavilion dedicated to painting, and by the one after that the main pavilion was chock full of the world's contemporary painting heavies like Tuymans and Dumas. They even wheeled out Francis Bacon for the show. I'd been hearing for years that painting has taken over European art
schools practically to the exclusion of anything else. It's a hard thing to imagine what would come out of it. So many people painting all at once is bound to produce something of interest. From the vantage point of South Africa one can but try to join the dots.

It's been reaching South Africa in a range of different streams for several years now. On the 'serious' end of the spectrum are global conceptual artists like Moshekwa Langa (one of my personal favourites right now), and the 'afropolitan' artists shown as a group at Michael Stevenson on the 'Distant Relatives/Relative Distance' show. Plus Lisa Brice, who's always a good benchmark of what's current, and new cooler washier drippier paintings by Penny Siopis. Cheeky of me, but I can't help noticing that the 'serious' crew all have a decidedly Dumas look about them. Guess you have to choose your influences with care if you want to be perceived as deep.

And then there are the 'unserious' sources, which are generating a huge range of seriously interesting ideas. Los Angeles outsider/skater culture and Japanese trolls alone have generated a massive groundswell of ideas. There have been ranges of hooded beasts and mutant reindeer and undead ghouls going on for years, a lot of which has been too cutesy to really say anything, but some of which has taken a really thought-provoking turn. Then there have been New York painters like Karen Kilimnik and Dana Schutz, satirising in genius slacker style the insane extremes of American culture with their works on, among others, Paris Hilton (yay!) and Michael Jackson.

There's no single direction in any of this, and each of us has our own reaction to it, but for me the first time I really saw the tide turn in Cape Town was when I was stopped in my tracks by an Early Friday poster by Georgina Gratrix. I couldn't believe there was anyone who could draw like that at Michaelis, it was just unheard-of to me. I continued to be gobsmacked and delighted when I came across the work of her contemporaries, Becky Haysom and Andrej Nowicki (whose name I don't think I can spell properly, but I'm trying). I swear if I was religious, this would have counted as the moment for me when god met me on a rocky road, and promised to create a flood that would wash the memories of Debora Poynton and Tanya Poole out of my mind forever. I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but holy Jesus, there's only so much one can bear without starting to crack.

Of course if you were a conspiracy theorist, which of course I am, then you would believe that this whole climate change had been orchestrated by the shadowy Illuminati in the form of Charles Saatchi, who decided there should be a “Triumph of Painting” and set about putting it into place using vast bulwarks of cash, and dredging up the ghost of Martin Kippenberger to lend authenticity to his claims. As for me, if this is the effect of my world being constructed
by a big ad mogul in the sky, I'm happy to float along with the tide.

Labels: Lizza, painting