The new Michael Stevenson gallery opens this evening, in the same building as the Goodman and the Bell-Roberts'. Branching out to stick together in one big malltastic artopia.

LATER THAT NIGHT.......
Yes it is all true, it is very glamorous, and the art is big and it is glossy. Unlike the strange poo-brown architectural anomaly which housed the old Michael Stevenson, this one is in a good traditional industrial building that makes sense and provides the opportunity for a toned and glitzy street entrance worthy of Manhattan, although not usually found in, say, a run down crack hood on the Lower East Side, which would be the equivalent of Woodstock.

What I really do like about Michael Stevenson's general attitude to layout, though, is instead of having one huge open space that encourages you to look at the other people, he breaks it up into smaller spaces which foreground the fact (easily forgotten) that you are here to look at the art. It's assertive. And one is grateful when anyone makes the point that art can actually be worth looking at.

Labels: Michael Stevenson

In all the excitement of the week, I forgot to write about the other show at Michael Stevenson, Salute by Simon Gush, installed in that other gallery on the side. The one with all the bookshelves in it. The artwork consisted of a contract between the artist and the buyer, presented on a glass covered podium prettily lit in a dark grey room. The contract stated that at the buyers death the artist will arrange a 21 gun salute, a military salute in which 21 guns are fired, usually reserved for president's funerals and Princess Diana and stuff. (Please note the video above shows a 3 volley salute, traditionally performed by seven men. So while 21 shots are fired in the three salvoes, this salute is used for military funerals, and it's not the big guns fired successively used in 21 gun salute. A small but significant difference if you are going to die for your country). So if you get it right, then the collector/buyer of art is afforded the same respect as JFK. But if we look at the current inflated situation of the art market, which everyone is goddamn talking about, then I guess I can see the validity of this.

The other part of the contract states the conditions, the most important being that the artwork cannot be resold. So not only is the collector/buyer given respect after his/her death, and not only has he/she purchased this respect, but the respect is all he/she purchased. No other investment has been made.

Living in our over-capitalised world these are salient points: what is the value of what we are buying, etc. Living in our over-capitalised art world these too are salient points: what is the role of the collector/buyer of art and for what purpose does this person buy it.

On the other hand, if I see one more work about art I'm going to vomit.

Labels: Michael Stevenson, simon gush

P is for painting, and P is for Penny. The two are almost synonymous in South Africa, in which Penny Siopis has remained a Grande Dame of painting over a protracted length of time. P is also for Pink, her favourite colour for some time now, and the central colour of her current show, titled “Lasso”.

You have to hand it to Penny Siopis, she works at her painting. Unlike a lot of artists who have allowed their methods and approaches to painting to stagnate over the years, Siopis subjects her work to constant overhauling and refreshing, giving her current work a relevance unusual in painters who have been around for a while.

Instead of her large Modernist-era works which were thick with impasto daubing, this show also ventures into a more contemporary anti-heroic style of small experiments with water colour and milky glaze in which marks are allowed to spread and coagulate without orchestration by the author's hand. This is a style which strays interestingly into the area of mark-making as a form of fragile and intimate open-ended thought or question, rather than the epic history-painting she has been known for in the past.

Having said all this though, I really battled to find anything of interest on the show. Her best work consisted of the few occasions where her experiments had been allowed to obscure altogether the mark-making of her own hand. Because Siopis's mark-making is trite. Considering the length and status of her career, one would expect more of her. She has not made serious inroads into learning how to draw. One would expect that by now she should be able to approach the skill of someone like Terry Kurgan. But her drawing is fluffy and weak, and does not even interestingly accommodate her own fluffiness and weakness.

It's an outrageous cheek for an unknown nobody like me to fantasise about how I would teach famous and successful people to make better art. But nonetheless I can't help myself sometimes. To Penny I would say, see what you can do with a cloth with dipped in thinners.

Labels: Michael Stevenson, painting, penny siopis

I've taken a while thinking about this show, Ingabisa, because I'm two minds about it. On the one hand it is interesting work. It is erotic and politicised at the same time, a good combination in my books. The sculptures use cow hides, which are moulded into female shapes, creating these disembodied forms, revealing the curve of an ass or a breast in the folds of the material. At the same time using cow, the symbol of lobola, equating women with monetary exchange in patriarchal system makes the eroticism a little uncomfortable. The title, a word meaning a young virgin ready to pick a husband or be picked, confirms this impression. On the whole it's a strange yet satisfying combination of feelings, and relevant to the current dominant attitude towards African women.

On the other hand, I worry, having seen Nandipha's previous and very similar work, that she has hit on a successful formula, and is repeating it. This misgiving is reinforced by the presence of prints of photographs of sculptures available in the back room, a cheaper and editioned alternative. It gives one a sinister whiff of money that is at odds with sinister whiff of money I mentioned above.

Still, I'm looking forward to see where it goes in the future, and hoping that the only smell I get is that of a tannery.

Labels: cow hide, Ingabisa, Michael Stevenson, Nandipha Mntambo

“Cape Town has a lot of galleries, but they only really have Michael Stevenson, who is truly professional, with an international status.” -Linda Givon

I mean really.

Do I have to go to Cape Town's only professional gallery and look at rainbows? My first girlfriend had a poster like this above her bed when I was 15, and it was naff back then even. Can we please take a step away from representing spirituality so literally. Next thing you know we going to be quoting American Indian proverbs.
If you want to know anything about the sacred yang and kung fu, watch a Zhang Yimou film, rather than look at a Tracy Payne painting. Now that's what I'm talking about. At least the colours are sumptuous.

Do we need to take this stuff seriously? I think not.

On the other side, in the little gallery (and a surprising choice to accompany Tracy Payne), was the obsessive Fabian Saptouw's Unravelled and Rewoven Canvas. Saptouw showed this piece before at his graduation from Michaelis, but seeing it again in a proper gallery space vastly increased my appreciation. Essentially, he unravelled a piece of blank canvas, and then rewove it by hand, using the threads in exactly the same order. Needless to say, a very labour intensive process.

I think there is a lot to be said for this work, it plays (or should I say works) on a variety of levels: a criticism of the importance of painting in visual culture (and a physical deconstruction of that); a look at the futility of craft in a mechanical era, but nevertheless showing a sense of enjoyment in the process; relearning lost skills; obsessiveness as a spiritual exercise; etc.

I was having an argument later in the Spur later with Eddie Yang and Andrew Limprecht. Ed seemed to think that the rewoven canvas was an uneccesary part, that the strings of thread were enough. Andrew said that the grey walls emphasised the strings over the rewoven canvas, where it should have been the other way around. The strings did seem out of place, a sign that the work was unfinished, perhaps.

My personal argument on the matter was that the process needn't have been shown at all, that in truth the process was implied by the title. My thoughts would be to ditch all the strings, equipment, graphs and videos, restretch the canvas, and just show that. Sometimes it seems that the labour should be explicitly shown, but I think that leaving it to speak from a finished piece is a more powerful work for its subtlety.

Still, for a first solo I was awed, and I can't wait to see some of the problems resolved later. It's worthwhile to see. Just run through the first rooms.

Labels: Fabian Saptouw, Michael Stevenson, Tracy Payne