kagablog

The most banal Marxist would be vindicated by the return of the Fair: Art finally demonstrating economic determinism- but instead of textbook forces and relations of production the Crunch has bared a speculative market with scarce momentum within a bursting bubble

The overlit drywall labyrinth at first seemed more like the Chicago stockyard than a desolate trading floor , with confused, harried and self-conscious beasts ( in their hearts minotaurs) stampeding past hundreds of little downscale morsels -the buy one get one free stockingfillers of hedging galleries.

Even the constitutionally unflappable impresario and publisher Brendon Bell –Roberts forgot to put on his jacket and tie for the opening, urgently corralling foreign journalists and herding German video crews in his beach attire until late in the evening.

The intelligent Arts and Culture MEC Barbara Creecy delivered a starting signal and benediction from the balcony but nobody heard - down below the dazed pack browsed on remorselessly , stood glowering across bargain finds or jostled to establish taste-turfs and clades united in art-savvy.

I was witnessing random stampedes as response to the drying landscape of post-speculative art. All around were scattered the Tulip bulbs and Kruger Rands of recent South African history. Were we already in the tar pits of the future? Would our excavationist heirs be able to read the sequence of extinctions most clearly here?
Would art ever take place in Gauteng again once it could no longer be equated with money?

In any mass cataclysm the swift, small and lean radiate out into the vacated niches ; some candidates – still shrews and voles- were the art centres , wrongly classed as community but in fact filled with young highly individualist eyes with nothing to lose except the chains of patronage. Next to these refreshing stalls were the other potential survivors, the publishers, fast mutating all kinds of affordable access to something more important than South African art- the terms in which to discuss it

Back into the fray past a hyperbolic Astroturf machine latching on to the pathos of Zimbabwe as if it were Roswell. I see Bacons sybilline shadows have become a 3D bird in quarantine but then I notice the label and the perplexed security guards, hired for literal effect and it shrinks to a one liner.- Do dictators ever go away without carefully choosing their successors? Any adult knows they don’t. The spectators are extremely confused, is this so valuable then that it must be guarded 24-7? Or is it dangerous? At this point the Tsvangirai exemplification collapses, The only danger I sense is of this plodding rebus of a commodity engulfing its message.

My herd charges on- I think every path is equally promising in a market where all bets are off . My mall- somnambulism is shattered by a familiar face- the inspiring architect Sarah Calburn- she has bought something- this is important experimental data – it seems a square canvas of Richter confetti but it is actually a view of debris floating up from the Helderberg disaster by a descendant of one of its victims.

Being tall I see far into my herd- bureaucrats and plutocrats mingle and trade opinions at top decibel. . Trailing them are dealers trying to be cool and in turn being cooled to by the mark- its an hilarious clipped, coded exchange filled with the euphemisms of illicit trade- its kind of retro- yes, I have even more retro!- is it relevant or is it camp?- I don’t want to seem breathless, you know? Come to the gallery I have what you need.

I pass William Kentridge- we greet each other knowingly - were both perplexed thinking about the same thing - hes wondering where the security of taste has gone and I m wondering why it never went sooner.
My usually cold heart goes out to him, because he’s the victim of both fawning and ambush marketing on this occasion - to the latter some early middle aged men billed as punks/autonomists/new bohemians have popped a facetious cap in his ear- a huge deliberately inept portrait of the celebrated artist hangs between other pilloried figures:. The Poor Mans Picasso ( id have thought the Perennially Concerned Mans Chagall )
Poor William is figured as Frankenstein’s monster, complete with up to date neck stud , not bolt. On his brow the Hollywood real estate sign. Semiojunk is arrayed with painstaking casualness on this mannerist portrait- another of the shows many metaphorical exemplifications––in it today’s avuncular and Wildean personage looking as haunted and driven as he did in his youth
Perhaps the blokishly named Avant Car Guards have painted the portrait of Dorian Gray?

While musing on this potential showdown between punked up Fluxus and nineteen eighties New York I wonder how many apart from Hunter Thompson, Frank Zappa or Dieter Roth managed to make a career and a canon in the difficult trope of facetiousness.
The coming crossfire between dancing enclavist Cinderzille and Shrek-stereotyped Zuma would pale this ad hominem parrying in the art world by absurdly raising the stakes

My herd sweeps me to a faux oasis styled as a corporate lounge- not only rugby has Boxes. Somehow marketers have belatedly sensed that art is a good thing to flatter the intelligence of clients . I wonder though what the eager neophyte clutching a free pass makes of this essential-services-only leprosy town of the Crash?
Dealers are moaning all around me , is this the field hospital? The crowds are down
( not from where I was standing) the works are more conservative ( not really just sliced like street pizza) the whales are absent ( yes I never saw the high rollers and kingmakers on the floor- maybe some secret preview was the scoop time for the T-Rex buyers and the real patrons?) should we tour this art as a circus of exotica and ex exotica overseas? Have we over farmed the local turf? Do we hedge into books, prints movies and records/?In their eyes the same questions: how do we restart the bubble? Where is the next insanely great thing? Can a share portfolio on a diet be a model for art collecting?

I see a schedule of talks by very interesting people, not the usual carnival barkers of the boosterism circuit. I wish these speakers were around now to deliver commentary on the market adjustment. I hear later that the talks were excellent but attended by the same faithful core that supports every interesting thing on the Johannesburg horizon: maybe the sons and daughters of the real ,invisible audience who bought editions from Goldblatt when he sold them door to door or supported the obscure Preller, Villa or Battiss ? the great intelligent amateur is temporarily in shadow, outshone for the while by the naked rich and their investment advisers

Back in the stream past a taxidermic totem and disgruntled jazz men carrying music stands away from another eclectic pancultural cross-promotion. In the same spirit of indiscriminateness I see some fine Lucian Freuds of poultry and some Lorrain landscapes drenched in Marmite with Jasper John’s ruler calibrating one of their antiqued surfaces and I realise that if the Titanic were an academy the iceberg would sink.

A familiar face- Joni Brenner, the brilliant ghostbuster of likenesses I don’t see her work on the show- this has the galleries finally pegged for nostalgiststs- one last Reaganomic binge of Extra Outsize Works before the diet. I walk over with her to my publisher, intent on selling him on a monograph about this fanatically discriminating artist.. She seems like Joan of Arc among tired mercenaries, picking like an anorexic at molecules of interest here and there – a blind swimmer like her mentor Karel Nel, oblivious to the general bêtise of fame, retinues and trading. The herds and their drovers would certainly cull her if they didn’t superstitiously fear the judgement of posterity or the logic of ground floor investment.

On the periphery the hunt goes on. The shy first timers enter the milking stalls filled with the high priest snobbery and resonant knowingness of the dealers – but suddenly the place seems filled with friendly franchise salesmen touting the many benefits of art to nuisance investors scared off shares. Little ways of getting your toe wet without risking too much are the order of the day -Art as a gateway drug? Some twentysomethings with their first real jobs are boasting about what they would eventually buy. Somehow art is now a good thing alongside supplements, homeopathic cures, cycling, Tai chi and organic sunscreen, a naieve aspirational buy like Alfa Romeos or Audi TTs . The old timers who bought South African art because they gave a damn about the public realm from which it sprang and which it addressed are either dead or risen to the august business of being collectors with advisors and archivists and the whole deadening retinue of managers of the value form.

Im seized on the arm by Mark Erasmus, a smart and intense young artist whom I once taught briefly - he never went along the academic path of grooming and patronage but negotiated the oddities and non-sequiters of nineties art intuitively, affecting a self styled plebeian eye. He shuttles between the avocation of a house paint expert and a painter of obsessive grids. If anything he is a disciplined punk, a daredevil -unstoppable , massively odd and typical of the intelligence on the outside looking in. He doesn’t want to own anything, he simply wants to make things: a poor man endlessly devising his own collection.

I begin to edge along the crowds- the view from the escape routes is interesting- I pass the giant tapestries- are the castles of the arriviste really this drafty? The bronzed editions and photorealist ceramics are eerily like Lourdes memorabilia or expensive Milagri ( are noses so in need of blessing? Did coke or cosmetic surgery ravish swinging Johannesburg like a plague ?) I try to carry on this reduction to a dumbed down demotic eye rigorously, looking to find the crudity that might unlock all this commercial refinement as wit. I think of the gags that Danto might append to objects so often obsequious, scrupulously absorbable and flattering of the harmless average social concern but the toothpick of Hans Haacke would be needed to dislodge the webs of patronage, ownership, speculation and scarcity that boost South African art in its bid for the Big Time . The eerie aspect of a stock market settles over this white hall- one where stammering metaphysical commodities have taken the place of invisible tokens of value

Some ad men are talking nearby, their spouses gathered at a macabre ceramic table filled like Caligula’s dustbin with exact ceramic bones , something like the white painted apples and milk bottles popular in the seventies. There is nothing edgy here- its not in the gnarl… well that giant pencil was pretty gnarly- I wonder if it works ?

It must be distressing for a vocation that has ransacked the avant-garde for decades to find the artists of the present consensus merely dishing back up to them the one liners, trite smartnesses, libidinal glibness and attenuated political correctness of their own ads

I remind myself to be serious but by now im far too in touch with my inner philistine: how deeply can you sympathise with bullish dealers finally confronted with the limit of the Bubble? How many more awestruck , naive apprenticeships to Richter, Kokoschka or Dumas can we still witness ? how many more tired ironies , creaky gags and facelifted facetiousnesses are there out there?

Pucker up- maybe this Frankfurt moment is caused by wearing the wrong shoes Feuerbach famously said a chair was the greater part of understanding art and here we are swept along like Korean pilgrims in the Vatican

There are some outstanding luminous things here- the calligrams apostrophising Derrida alongside Camus ( the two also-rans of successive philosophical generations seen from afar in a pictogram) the Bitterkomix frames now Dickless in Gaza , the droll invoice the overgrown punks drew up for the soi disant art world , the Nel screen parked in the corner like a princess awaiting deportation in a swine carriage. I try to imagine the mixtures that would be primed if a film fair were superimposed on this event instead of the fast food franchise award upstairs ( King Pie swept the boards ) or if a new music festival took place throughput the weekend in the echoing stalls. Perhaps the volatility of this is unthinkable to the Zillaesque hygienic public relations mentality of the promoters – art out of place is dirt.

I see up ahead a labile art world person known for uncontrolled public harangues – my childish dream of a mute amnesic experience of the fair scatters - in my mind I feel like Siegfried about to confront Alberich or Roosevelt facing one of those Japanese stalwart troops who fought on for three extra decades . I demur these historical re-enactments and slip away from the grimacing anachronism into the night. Beside me is Connie Malusi who modestly insists he’s running a spaza somewhere in Sandton- will you have space in your high rise container for this art? His wry polite smile says it all.

Jean-Pierre de la Porte

Interview with Ross Douglas
by Michael Smith

In 2009, the Joburg Art Fair entered its second year, and considerably trickier terrain. ArtThrob spoke to the director Ross Douglas after the Fair, to get an insights into what some are calling the most significant major art event in the country.

Michael Smith: So, Ross how are you feeling after the Art Fair? Have you caught up on sleep yet?

Ross Douglas: I’ll be catching up on rest this weekend! But about the Fair, I’m happy. Ticket sales hit the 10 000 mark, up from 6500 last year. We had a quality audience engaging with the works and the gallerists, and we had great press leading up to and during the fair. The only disappointment has been the sales. The galleries did about half the turnover of last year, with smaller works selling well. It is now clear that we are in the middle of a recession.

MS: What were the highlights? And were those highlights necessarily big sellers, too?

RD: As the director of the fair I never punt one gallery or artist over the rest, for obvious reasons. I do, however, think the Jane Alexander installation, ‘Security’ was a major coup for the Joburg Art Fair, and the result of a good collaboration with the Gordon Schachat Collection.

MS: There seemed to be a general scarcity of sculpture on display, but photography still seems to play a key role in many galleries’ stock. How does photography sell at events such as this?

RD: It seems that photography sales were slow this year, with the exception of the Bang Bang Club archive prints sold by Rooke Gallery. There were a great pair of works by Guy Tillim that, surprisingly, did not find a buyer. My sense is that in a recession people become more conservative and steer away from photography in favour of paintings.

MS: I noticed some galleries took smaller spaces than they did at last year’s Fair. Was floor space much more expensive this year?

RD: Yes

MS:A statement you made in a Mail & Guardian blog, specifically referring to ‘the absence of a biennale or any other perennial contemporary art show in the country’, essentially dismissed the Cape ‘09 and Spier Contemporary as insignificant. Would you agree with this? What is your sense of the importance of the Joburg Art Fair?

RD: I spoke about the absence of a biennale in the country, and had no intention to dismiss either Cape or the Spier Contemporary. Cape is not a biennale yet, and Spier has no intention of being one. For the first Joburg Art Fair I experienced huge resistance from the international art community that had traveled to South Africa to attend the first Cape and were massively underwhelmed. They felt that it had over-promised and under-delivered.

A biennale or any other curated show in this country would be a fantastic initiative, and one that I would support. I think the Spier Contemporary is a good bi-annual event and fills an important niche. In fact, we collaborated with the Spier for the first Joburg Art Fair, and hope to for the third.

MS: The business aspect of any art fair is, after all, its reason for existence, and vital for its longevity. 2008’s Fair was reported as having grossed ‘between R25 milion and R30 million’. Was 2009’s Fair a similar financial success?

RD: No, it wasn’t. Galleries achieved about half that, but they have all committed to next year. This is a serious recession, and if we can stick through it the rewards will be there.

MS: The continued presence of entities like ArtHeat, which published a disarmingly frank daily broadsheet at the Fair (with your sanction), as well the addition of the blank projects space and a number of peripheral performance events, arguably shifted the character of the Fair from one of simply ‘hard sell’ to something altogether more fluid. How do you see this dichotomy between art commerce and more critical facets of the discourse playing out in the future?

RD: When we started the Art Fair we had a number of clear objectives, including growing the audience for contemporary art. While these fringe projects are not great for business, they do bring their own audiences and educate the visitors that art is not just about an investment. I think ArtHeat added great value to the fair, and brought light relief into what is often a tough business.

this interview first appeared on artthrob.co.za

By Mary Corrigall

At the Frieze Art Fair in London in 2007, devotees queued up to have artists Jake and Dinos Chapman defile the royal insignia on their pound notes.

Adding to the buzz was Rob Pruitt, an artist who turned a gallery booth into a flea market, where he flogged disused objects donated by other artists.

A life-size copy of a 1970 Dodge Challenger made by Richard Prince dominated another booth and a performer dressed as a bobby entertained passersby with his yoga moves. But the most notable moment was when Kris Martin affected his intangible artwork, dubbed One Minute Silence (2007), which demanded that everyone in the fair remain quiet for one minute.

Call them art fair gimmicks if you must, but all of these staged interventions at this art fair not only created a frisson of excitement, but reiterated the fact that artists cannot be contained within the confines of a strictly commercial art event. Nor can their subversive compulsions be tamed; they will automatically disrupt and challenge convention at every turn.

At this year’s Joburg Art Fair, however, there were few such memorable attractions or interventions. Marcus Neustetter’s Work in Progress (2009) was perhaps the only artwork that defied the art fair setting. Consisting of coloured building blocks stacked up to the ceiling, it protruded from the confines of the white display, physically and conceptually challenging the boundaries that define such an event. As a temporary object, Neustetter’s artwork couldn’t be sold or transported, thereby defying the objective to create sellable or easily packaged art.

Even Jane Alexander’s installation, Security (2006), with its barbed wire borders that hemmed in a rectangle of artificial grass, seemed to conform to the controlled spatial dynamics of the art fair. Nevertheless it was originally commissioned for the 27th Sao Paulo Biennale, but perhaps its neat boxlike configuration appealed to the organisers.

At least last year art world tricksters Avant Car Guard created a stir with their performance piece at the Whatiftheworld booth, with their tongue-in-cheek memorial marking the “death” of Kendell Geers.

The absence of such performance interventions at this year’s fair ensured that it was nothing more than an exercise in heightened commercial activity. Avant Car Guard’s The Invoice (2009), a make-believe receipt painted on to canvas, made a wry comment on the commodification of art. But otherwise there were few works that threatened or questioned the conventions of such an exposition.

The fair did, however, provide an opportunity to identify what is considered sellable. Photographic works were in abundance and there was a palatable sense that artists working with this medium were searching for ways to stand out from the crowd. From superimposing existing dated cut-outs on to contemporary photographs to sealing each part of a photograph in a see-through plastic container to photographing aged women draped in clothing made from animal entrails, they were trying out all manner of visual tricks to get attention. But mostly their efforts felt contrived and superfluous to their expression.

Berry Brickle’s Melancholia 01 (2007) from the Encounters of Bamako collection stood out: a synthesis of collage and photography that saw a variety of found images and photographs layered over each other to create an otherworldly image that played with its temporality - no mean feat considering that photography is inextricably tied to reality.

The documentary style genre, which was fairly well represented at the fair, just couldn’t compete in the face more progressive forms of art. Photographers should take Zander Blom’s lead in his Travels of Bad series, displayed at the Rooke gallery stand. Blom exploits the documentary function of photography while simultaneously allowing it to serve a so-called high art function too.

With so much art on view it was hard for individual pieces to shine. It often was the more three-dimensional sculptural pieces that tended to steal attention, such as Mary Sibande’s A Conversation with Madam CJ Walker (2008), on show at Gallery Momo’s stand. It featured two mannequins of domestic workers in their “maid attire”, which appeared more like a period costume, suggesting that their task/role belonged to another era.

Though the title may have inferred they were engaging in a dialogue with a white woman, the conversation that Sibande refers to is one with the first black American millionaire, summoning a more metaphorical dialogue that encompasses issues pertaining to servitude and the aspiration for wealth and power. One can only guess what the Sandton madams visiting the fair would have made of the artwork.

Wayne Barker’s Desire and Golden Girl, showing at SMAC’s booth, were also eye-catching. He has ditched the neon lights (at last!) and progressed to produce wonderful, kitschy-art-slash-crafty-slash-pop-artish beadworks that appear like a stereotypical advert parading obvious markers of sex and wealth. They were beautifully crafted, witty and relevant.

Most gallery stands showed artworks in isolation from the bodies to which they belonged - except for Blom’s Travels of Bad series. And the arbitrary arrangements of the art ensured that most of the works were shown out of context which silenced their subtext.

But art fairs are about generating sales and, as such, most gallerists were keen to hedge their bets by displaying a full array of art in the hope that they would have more of a chance of nailing a sale. In such a context, the aesthetic or transcendental nature of art objects is stifled.

And with hoards of people jostling for a view and a glut of art distracting one’s attention, there is scant room for the viewer to meditate on each piece. In other words art fairs do not make ideal environments for viewing or appraising art. Nor are they, as Ross Douglas, the organiser of the art fair, proposes, opportunities for the South African public “to be educated about contemporary art”.

The BMW Art Talks at the fair did provide occasions for the public to learn more about art production in this country, but the catalogue, a thick book that almost exclusively contained images, ensured there wasn’t reading material that visitors could take home that might have provided some sort of introduction to the central issues.

The introduction of a design stand - staged by Southern Guild - might also distort the public’s understanding and appreciation of art. While the boundaries between art and design are blurred, there is a distinction; it might not necessarily manifest in the final product, but exists in terms of the creator’s intentions and motives.

If the art fair is to achieve its objective in terms of “growing a new audience” for art, then it seems paramount that a novice audience is able to grasp the difference between a slick chair and an artwork. However, it is more than likely that succeeding Joburg Art Fairs might include more design stands.

It is not because designers don’t have a platform - they do; there is a surplus of interior décor and design expos. The problem is the limited number of bona fide contemporary art galleries - most of those little shops in malls peddling trite landscape art don’t count.So in order for Artlogic, Douglas’s company, to grow the fair each year they will be forced to embrace more and more object displays derived from that fuzzy territory that delineates the overlap between art and craft.

No doubt Artlogic will find expedient ways of dressing up this art event as something more substantial than a commercial venture as they have done to-date with public assertions that their event is a more viable endeavour than the Johannesburg Biennale’s or Cape Africa Platform’s art initiatives in Cape Town. The Joburg Biennale might have ceased and Cape Africa Platform may have faced an upward struggle in staging their event but these are exhibitions and not commercial art expositions. There is huge difference in terms of their approach to display and the discourses they engage with and create. Douglas may believe that he is offering an alternative to such events but in no way does or can a primarily commercially driven art initiative be able to compete or achieve the same objectives as a biennale.

These Joburg Art Fairs only provide a temporary diversion and will no doubt cease to be of any interest once the makeshift galleries inside the Sandton Convention are pulled-down to make way for the next exposition.

(first published in Sunday Independent April 12)

JOHANNESBURG—The second Joburg Art Fair, a showcase of contemporary African art that ran April 3–5, was ushered in with the usual pre-fair media buzz, with one of the event’s sponsors promising an “an electromagnetic experience.” Unfortunately, the curious metaphor had unintended resonance in a fair marked by its generally low-voltage sales.

One conversation, overheard on the April 2 opening night, came to define the restrained buying mood. “It has to stop now,” a business executive from SASOL, the South African petrochemical conglomerate, instructed his company’s art buyer in Afrikaans. It was unacceptable for executives laying off staff and forfeiting bonuses to see new art acquisitions flaunted at their workplace, he said.

While buying wasn’t entirely muted — London’s October Gallery sold (by telephone) a large-scale aluminum-and-copper-wire-textile drapery by Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui for $650,000 to a royal buyer from Abu Dhabi — many of the 26 participating galleries reported sluggish sales.

“Compared to last year, where the work sold itself, this year we are having to do a lot more work on the ground, a lot more chitchat and hard selling,” said returning exhibitor Brenton Maart, whose KZNSA Gallery champions artists from the regional eastern seaboard city of Durban. Among the many works that went unsold at his booth was Andries Botha’s Empty Spaces, a monochromatic installation incorporating a photographic tapestry and 51 resin sculptures, which the artist had previously exhibited at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, in 2008. Maart was unable to place the work, priced at $83,000, with the “mainly South African” buyers who visited his booth.

For first-time exhibitor Henri Vergon, whose offerings included a photograph by Malian photographer Malick Sidibé ($9,500) and a totemic wood sculpture by Willem Boshoff ($11,000), business was “extremely slow.” By Saturday afternoon, the second full day of trading, the South African dealer’s only major sale had been a work by Mozambican sculptor Gonçalo Mabunda, a metal chair made from recycled weapons, priced at $12,000.

“All the sales I made here were to overseas buyers,” said Vergon, who earlier in the day had asked a South African visitor to leave his booth after he made a racist remark about Mabunda’s work and its pricing. “It is disappointing to see how South Africans are reluctant to even look at African art,” Vergon added. In recent years, Mabunda’s chairs have found increased favor, including in the design world. An example was included in the show “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary,” presented by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York last year.

Bisi Silva, a prominent West African art critic and a driving force behind the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, an independent visual art organization from Nigeria, echoed Vergon’s sentiments. “It is a very South African art fair,” remarked Silva, whose offerings of photographs and sculptures invited few sales. Commenting on the negligible turnout of African buyers from oil-rich countries like Angola and Nigeria, Silva said the fair’s organizers would have to do more outreach if the show was to outgrow its current status as a “very local” event and fulfill its pan-African ambition.

Of the 18 South African galleries exhibiting, only two have a presence internationally: Long a fixture at Art Basel, Goodman Gallery debuted at the Armory Show this year, alongside main rival Michael Stevenson. The two galleries reported vastly contrasting sales results at Joburg. Stevenson’s offerings, which included works by Nigerian Odili Donald Odita and Ethiopia-born Julie Mehretu, failed to find buyers. Goodman’s Liza Essers, however, had better news. “We have certainly had a good fair,” she told ARTINFO. “I think people are more cautious, definitely, and they want quality work.” While a large canvas of Gavin Turk as Che Guevara went unsold, an untitled charcoal-and-pencil drawing of peonies by William Kentridge fetched $136,000.

Kentridge, whose survey exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened on March 14, was the undeniable star of his hometown’s fair. The artist’s face appeared in two striking portraits: one an austere charcoal drawing by Paul Emsley, winner of the 2007 BP Portrait Award, the other a pop-satirical acrylic painting of Kentridge as a Boris Karloff–like Frankenstein by the collaborative Avant Car Guard. Both works were sold by Cape Town galleries: the first, for $30,000, at iArt Gallery; the second, for $2,400, at Whatiftheworld Gallery.

An amiable Kentridge was seen touring the fair with friends on two of the three days of trading. Also present was his local namesake, the young Johannesburg artist who last year legally changed her name from Roelien Brink to William Kentridge; she was spotted making a brief, almost embarrassed appearance on opening night.

Asked about a white button-up shirt he was recently pictured wearing in San Francisco, the real William Kentridge stood up and proffered a style tip: “I have them made by a tailor. They are very easy to bleach, which is especially useful when you work with charcoal.”

this articler first appeared on artinfo.com

The toughest challenge yet
The Joburg Art Fair is back, but will it be as successful, asks Mary Corrigall

Unlike most big art extravaganzas, art fairs are primarily about generating sales, not about engaging with art discourses in challenging ways. So their ultimate success is measured in numbers.

From this perspective, last year’s inaugural Joburg Art Fair was a resounding success, with sales amounting to R27 million. Though a few Cape Town galleries bemoaned the hefty fee for a stand – around R200 000 – and the costs incurred in transporting their wares to Joburg, many of the Joburg-based galleries seemed fairly delighted with the business they racked up and the new patrons they could add to their books.

Despite these varied experiences, for the first time the art fair brought gallerists and dealers from around the country under one roof, engendering a sense of community that had thus far escaped the local art world.

Artlogic, the company that initiated and managed the fair, lost R1m in the process but it was content to do so given it was the fair’s first year.

Of course, the company didn’t escape criticism in the art press. Many disapproved of the manner in which it framed the fair as a platform for “contemporary African art” when it was by no means representative of art from the continent. The rubric it advanced was also criticised for perpetuating notions that contemporary art from the continent was a genus unto itself.

Traditionally, art fairs aren’t designed to promote a particular brand of art, so many in the art world were puzzled and bemused by the slogan that Artlogic was promoting.

At the time Ross Douglas, the director of Artlogic, was adamant that it was the only way to sell the fair to an international audience. “There was no chance of creating an art fair here that was anything other than a contemporary ‘African’ art fair,” he told The Sunday Independent before the 2008 event.

“We are putting African contemporary art into the world media.”

Despite appealing to what many in the art world deemed the lowest common denominator, the Joburg Art Fair did not succeed in attracting too much international attention. Most of the 6 500 visitors who ploughed their way through the expansive fair were Joburgers, who perhaps did respond positively to the “African” label.

Without a doubt, Douglas has more business savvy than art savoir-faire. But he’s a quick learner. This year the fair hasn’t been shamelessly plugged as a “contemporary African” art affair.

Well, not completely: an introduction in the catalogue does assert that organisers have “assembled the most comprehensive collection of contemporary creativity on the African continent”.
Given that most of the 25 galleries taking part in this year’s fair are South African with predominantly local artists in their stable, it’s unlikely that the fair will live up to that promise.

Undoubtedly, Artlogic has proved that a Joburg Art Fair, or for that matter an art fair on the African continent, is a viable venture. With most large-scale art initiatives such as the Johannesburg Biennale and Cape 07 (formerly Transcape) having struggled to remain sustainable, it seems Douglas has hit on a model that works.

But with a financial recession putting pressure on businesses across the country, the art fair might face its toughest challenge yet. However, at the launch of the fair catalogue, Douglas seemed optimistic and inferred that the fair wasn’t just about sales but about educating South Africans about contemporary art production in the country.

Artlogic has reined in its spending considerably. This year there won’t be any off-site events as there were last year, such as the launch party at the old Johannesburg Stock Exchange and discussion sessions at the Alexandra Theatre in Braamfontein. There will, however, still be “art talks”, but they will all take place at the fair itself.

For the talks, the Goethe-Institut will be pairing up with Wiser (the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research). Speakers include Alfons Hug, the German-based curator of The Tropics exhibition which will be showing at Iziko National Gallery, and Hayden Proud, historical curator at Iziko, who will present a talk on Formalism in South Africa. Gallery owners João Ferreira and Warren Siebrits will be giving advice on art collecting.

Jane Alexander will be the featured artist at the fair and will show her Security installation which was originally commissioned for the 27th São Paulo Biennale. A number of other so-called “special” projects will be on show, such as an exhibition curated by artists Kathryn Smith, Christian Nerf and Francis Burger titled Bad Form: Things and Stuff, which promises to be a highlight. Certainly, this year’s art fair promises to be a visual spectacle. Whether it stimulates more than the senses remains to be seen.

this article first appeared in the sunday independent of 5 april 2009

After a night of merciless schmoozing and boozing at Thursday’s exclusive launch event, The Joburg Art Fair sleepily opened its doors to the public early on Friday morning. The crowds trickled in slowly and consisted predominantly of school-goers, pensioners and a few bleary-eyed journalists who came to claim their free cup of coffee from the Vida e Café stand before 1pm.

The much-touted BMW Art Talks programme kicked off in a glossy glass box sponsored by PG Glass with presentations by video artist Theo Eshetu and Hugh Fraser, the designer of said glass box. Meanwhile, Mirjam Asmal-Dik, MD of Cape Africa Platform, and the Goodman Gallery held a guerrilla press conference for the upcoming Cape 09 Biennale, to which they lured an audience using branded “Cape 09” cupcakes. It was only 11.30am and we had already been subjected to five brand names, only one of which was not commercial (and they bought our favour with food).

After the cupcake conference the day’s events took a turn for the avant-garde, and the big brands kept quiet until the evening. The Urban Scenographies booth, manned by “Joan Do” (Joseph Gaylard, Anne Historical aka Bettina Malcomess, and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt), held an auction at which registered visitors to the fair could bid on three views of the inner city, an ephemeral public text intervention by Maja Marx titled I walk in two worlds, a musical performance by Simon Gush and Ruth Sacks titled Early on a Sunday and Near Misses, a public flag installation by collaborative Dead Heat. The difficulty these works posed for bidders is that they yield no real objects which can be bubble-wrapped and taken home. Marx’s work, which entails an inscription in chalk on a public street, could be photographed, but the actual work — the writing on the tar — would be scuffed into nonexistence as soon as pedestrian traffic picked up at the site of the intervention. Sacks and Gush’s work is a once-off performance of a Bach cello suite which will take place at the art fair this Sunday morning at 8am while the gallery stands are busy setting up for the final day of the fair. In both of these works the buyer would act as a patron for the work, enabling it to exist at all. The views for sale were trickier. The buyers of these would be entitled to a live webcam broadcast of a particular view of the city for one year. According to Anne Historical these are “contemplative” objects, “like a window you can stare out of and feel happy or sad, or jump out of if you want to”, only this version poses no such risk. Bidding for these works started at R20 000 each and dropped rapidly to R5 000, with most of the bidding done by Meryl Malcomess (Historical’s mom) against herself.

The day would not have been complete without a public appearance from Avant Car Guard, who, for their “performance” at the Whatiftheworld/ booth early on Friday evening, lounged smugly in an orange golf car knocking back beers. The performance was extended apparently owing to public demand, which, if it’s true, betrays the pathological love affair the South African art world has with Avant Car Guard. We know that entertaining their exhibitionism will only leave us feeling dissatisfied, duped and dirty, but we go to their performances anyway. We kick ourselves for it afterwards, but still we go back to laugh at ourselves being laughed at. In fact, most of us who rolled our eyes last night’s golf car jaunt, probably arrived at the fair early on Saturday morning to make sure we got a seat for their talk in the glass box.

After the car guards, the free cosmopolitans upstairs at the Absolut Art Party were more than welcome, but it wasn’t long before this event, too, became degrading for all but the gawky groupies of Kidofdoom. We were the subjects, we learned, of art-cool photographer Liam Lynch’s “performance”, a photo-shoot based on his gritty documentations of the Pretoria music scene.

Just when it felt like everyone who shouldn’t be “performing” was, Anthea Moys and Tony Morkel saved the day with their “Fast Art Girls” art takeaway stand on a busy street outside the Convention Centre. Passers-by and hungry refugees from the Art Party could get a Jeremy Wafer shwarma, a William Kentridge sandwich, a Dianne Victor chilli dog or just about any variation of these (disappointingly, no Penny Siopis beetroot soup). I tried a Butcher Boys bunnychow, which came with a free autograph from the fast art girls and a saucy vienna sausage thrown in for good measure.

this blog first appeared on thoughtleader.co.za

The sex act called fisting is a source of confusion and misconceptions for many Christians. This is unfortunate, because it means that many Christian men and women are depriving themselves of what could be the most spiritual sexual experience of their lives. Like anal sex and BDSM, fisting is often mistakenly associated with the gay community or is considered a sex act too extreme to be appropriate for Christian couples. Not only are these views incorrect, but fisting actually has a scriptural precedent, as we will show.

The Fist of Might

Over and over in the scriptures, the hand and fist of God are described as a symbol of His awesome power and the means through which this power manifests: “O God, God of our ancestors, are you not God in heaven above and ruler of all kingdoms below? You hold all power and might in your fist.” (2 Chronicles 20:6) Of course, the Old Testament often makes reference to God smiting his enemies with his fist or striking down the wicked with his hand, but it is also the means through which he administers his blessings and benevolence to the righteous: ”You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” (Psalms 145:16) Through the hand of the Lord, he guides us to do his will, touches our lives, expresses His love, and provides for our needs with His abundance.

The biblical significance of the hand is important, because in the act of fisting, one partner (usually male) inserts his entire hand and fist into the vagina or rectum of his partner. Rather than copulating with his penis, he penetrates her with his fist. Given the powerful symbolism of the fist, it is no surprise that couples who have partaken in the practice of fisting have described it as being a profoundly spiritual experience. On a symbolic and sexual level, a wife who is fisted by her husband has the experience of surrendering completely to the divine love and power of the Lord, as embodied by her partner’s hand. The husband in turn has the experience of touching and caressing her inwardly, in such a deep and intimate manner as God touches our own souls with His grace.

Powerful Yet Gentle

In the Song of Solomon, the Bible describes the act of fisting and the profound erotic bliss it induces: It is the voice of my beloved! He knocks, saying, “Open for me, my sister, my love, My dove, my perfect one”…My love thrust his hand through the opening, and my feelings were stirred for him. (Song of Solomon 5:2-4) Here we see the lover gently coaxing his companion to open up to him, metaphorically “knocking at her door,” preparing her sexually and emotionally to receive his hand inside her. Gradually he works more and more fingers into her, until the moment when her vagina yields and his hand slips fully inside her, thrusting “through the opening.” She then describes the powerful passion that this arouses in her as she envelopes his entire hand inside her body. Many couples describe this moment, as the fist makes full penetration into the vaginal opening, as transcendent and a sexual revelation. As the woman’s body accommodates her husband’s hand, both may experience a sense of physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual oneness.

Some common misconceptions about fisting are that it is very painful or that it is somehow violent or abusive. This is far from the truth, and as we can see from the above description, it can be a gentle, loving, and highly erotic act. Fisting does not have to be painful if it is performed correctly, using enough lubrication and patience. The hand is inserted in a slow and controlled manner, and is preceded and followed by other sexual stimulation which may lead to orgasm. Both the vagina and the rectum are extremely elastic – a vagina, after all, can stretch to accommodate a full-term baby. And in fact, a woman who has been blessed with motherhood can more easily enjoy fisting because her vaginal opening is more flexible.

The act of fisting is physically challenging to perform, requiring patience on the part of the active partner, and relaxation on the part of the receiving partner. It cannot be rushed, and the two participants must communicate closely, with the fister carefully observing and attending to his partner’s comfort and limits, and the fistee directing her partner as to when to push forward and hold back as he works his hand into her. A Christian couple can use fisting to build trust and intimacy between them, as well as strengthening their relationship with the Lord.

Fisting as an Act of Faith

Before attempting fisting, a Christian husband and wife should pray together and ask for divine guidance. The husband should ask that God guide his hand and work through him, and for the skill and patience to fist his wife correctly and maximize her pleasure. The wife should pray for openness and readiness to receive God’s love and grace in the form of her husband’s hand.

Both should treat the act of fisting as a divine spiritual mystery to be entered into with reverence and awe, especially the husband. In another spiritual interpretation of fisting, as he inserts his hand into his wife’s vagina, a man is symbolically re-enacting the moment of truth following Christ’s resurrection from the tomb, when Doubting Thomas touches the wounds in the Savior’s flesh: Then He said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and observe My hands. Reach out your hand and put it into My side. Don’t be an unbeliever, but a believer.” (John 20:27) Thomas’ doubt would not be satisfied until he physically felt the wounds in Christ’s body and penetrated His flesh with his hand. Likewise, the spiritual and sexual power of fisting cannot be known unless experienced physically.

Role Reversal

So far we have only discussed a husband fisting his wife, but some couples may wonder if it is appropriate for a wife to fist her husband if he enjoys anal stimulation. In most cases, a wife indulging her husband’s desire to receive light anal play is not problematic in the context of a healthy sexual relationship. A wife may even anally penetrate her partner with a strap-on dildo if he enjoys this, and if their respective roles as husband and wife are secure outside of the bedroom.

However, because of the intense nature of the act of fisting and the degree of surrender and submission involved in being fisted, a couple should first look deeply into their own hearts and pray for guidance as to whether it is wise for the wife to fist the husband. They should undertake this only if their relationship is such that the husband can assume a submissive and passive role during a sexual act, while afterward still maintaining his role as the spiritual head of the household and leader in the marriage. Our article on Christian BDSM also addresses this issue.

this article first appeared on sexinchrist.com

Invitation / Reminder

Shebeen Blues Photo Exhibition by Ananias Léki Dago

26th March – 22nd May, Goethe-Institut Johannesburg

Special event in Soweto

Photo projection and casual gathering

When: 4pm, 5th April 2009
Where: Shakame M Market Madzena St crn Phandamashango Rd, Chiawelo

One of the places Léki Dago photographed is the Shakame M Market. The shebeen is a “tshisa nyama” (eating and drinking place) located in Chiawelo, Soweto. Shakame M Market this year celebrates its 20th anniversary as an important meeting place of the area. You can buy and grill meat on the spot, as well as get pap and drinks. The juke box installed against a dark red wall offers music that inspires dancing in the haze of smoke. It’s a place where under the corrugated roof the day turns into a foggy twilight, and workers in their boiler suits intermingle with young people hanging around, and families having lunch. And it is a perfect spot to gather and view Léki Dago´s works on a late Sunday afternoon. We hope you will be able to join us for the opening of the exhibition at the Goethe-Institut as well as at the Shakame M Market at the last day of the Johannesburg Art Fair for a bit of Shebeen Blues.

Bus shuttle: There will be a shuttle-bus from the Goethe-Institut, 119 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood to Soweto on Sun 5th April at 3pm. Leaving back to Parkwood by 7pm. Please RSVP by 3nd April, seats are limited: dpt@johannesburg.goethe.org

Contact: Dagmar Wittek pr@johannesburg.goethe.org / tel. 011 – 442 3232

Joburg Art Fair: The launch and coveted red dot

It’s time for the 2009 Joburg Art Fair — it started today at 10am — and this means, among other things, that I have to resurrect this blog from its long hibernation. For daily coverage of the fair from the Mail & Guardian watch this site.

Last night’s launch was peopled by pretty young things in black dresses and red lipstick, a stock cast who for years, it seems, have been stepping out of their coffins after dark to put in an appearance at the world’s big art events. They were everywhere at the last Frieze Fair in London, which alarmed me for two reasons: first, red lipstick can’t possibly be so enduringly fashionable and second, I had clean forgotten my little black dress (not to mention my wooden stake). Same problem this year. I turned up at the launch of the Joburg Art Fair in pink and looking somewhat bedraggled and I discerned that I fielded significantly less air-kisses than I have before at similar events where I’ve donned the LBD and played the vamp. This act is precisely what big commercial art events are all about. The game of cool, the selective shmooze, the money, the performance of a sublime boredom with all things common — and, most of all, placing your red dot with taste.

The red dot, the little scarlet sticker placed next to a work to indicate that it has been sold, is as ubiquitous at art fair launches as the red pout. In past international art fairs it was not unheard of for gallery booths to sell out (in the literal sense) completely at the launch event, leaving nothing but a triumphant “Sold Out” sign hanging in the cubicle for the bottom feeders who make it to the fair on days two and three. No one cleared their walls last night, but I was fairly impressed by the number of red dots I came across at each gallery stall. I didn’t count them. I’m saving that treat for this morning. But at each of the local gallery stalls I noticed at least three or four red dots on the wall before 8pm. These numbers are not going to keep the whole industry afloat, but they are certainly promising in a time of great frugality.

What are people buying? Pictures, mostly multiples like photographs and editioned prints, Nandipha Mntambo, William Kentridge
(see his new Nose etchings at David Krut’s stall), the Essop brothers, Zander Blom. The word on the street is that local buyers are going to keep on buying these kinds of pictures because they are relatively affordable and look nice in the lounge.

For an antidote to this imagophilia visit the Urban Scenographies booth where at 12pm today Joan Do will auction a sublime view of the inner city (not a picture of a view of the inner city, the actual view) and an ephemeral text performance by Maja Marx.

Tickets to the Joburg Art Fair cost R100 for a single day pass or R200 for a three-day pass and can be bought at the Sandton Convention Centre, at the entrance to the fair. The three-day pass gives you access to the Absolut Art Party, which takes place tonight at the Sandton Convention Centre from 6pm.

anthea’s blog is here

Watch the performance. I was at the opening of the Joburg Art Fair last night along with a few hundred other people, all dressed up, mingling, eating teeny weensy snacks and looking at some spectacular pieces from SA’s top galleries and other sellers of contemporary African art. The Fair is worth a visit for many reasons — chief among them Penny Siopis’s haunting works made with glue, the gigantic graphite and wood pencil for R5600 (if I had the cash I would buy two plus the sharpener), Jane Alexander’s Security installation (even more affecting up close as the audience appears to be caged in every direction), Lyndi Sales’ delicate paper cut-outs depicting the world’s flight paths, and Mary Sibande’s “They don’t make them like they used to”, a witty and ironic take on the “maid becoming the madam” and the hands of a domestic worker bringing Superman into being.

The representations so diverse, engaging and smart. I also loved Carl Becker’s Pierneef-like landscape with motocross rider and the brilliant collaborative work of William Kentridge, Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins displayed by the Goodman Gallery. Add to that Araminta de Clermont’s Matric Queens photographs and of course the urban hip images of Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko and the Avant Car Guard’s Poor Man’s Picasso (below). Plus the astounding collection of contemporary South African furniture and other design objects — that alone is worth the visit.

There were a few speeches but all I could hear from where I was standing was Barbara Creecy, the MEC for Arts, Culture Sport and other weirdly associated things in the province who spoke about “artistic entities” and other blah blah economic impact blah blah …Gauteng… blah blah. The art had more than enough to say and needed no help in getting a message out.

more here

description

Mitozoos is an interactive artificial life model created with the objective that through experimentation and play participants will understand tgohe relationship between genetic code and life. The work presents an interface that allows participants to create virtual organisms, called ‘mitozoos’, essentially encoding their DNA, and then witness the evolution of those organisms in a simulated, biological universe. These mitozoos live, reproduce and die, in a system which allows their genetic code to carry on and even mutate, generation after generation. In Mitozoos, genetic information is displayed as a series of color codes, designed taking into account the actual chemical basis of DNA.

more here

STATE, (SINGLE CHANNEL VIDEO PROJECTION) 6’10”

The artist here employs the multiple states of wax - solid, smooth, sticky, soft, smudgy, liquid, hot - to talk of his experiences and interpretations of the city. Hobbs sees the African city in particular, as a malleable, transformable environment - a space of survival and reinvention, but also one of decay and suffering. His single channel projection, presents a poetic yet pathetic rendition of the erosion, decay, re-ordering and ordering of a seemingly devastated landscape which reshapes and forms itself in a bare and almost skeletal state. The viewer is prompted to imagine what type of city or modern environment this cityscape might want to be. The application of the material properties of wax metaphorically allows a visual time based depiction of destruction and growth of urban space. This is underpinned by the reality that urban decay happens within a short space of time, but urban regeneration can take decades. The city that the artist has in mind is conflicted by first world ordering and control systems and so-called third world informality. The meeting place of these tendencies has the potential for a transformation, a repurposing of the present to service the future experience and reality of cities. With the viewer in mind Hobbs aims to
create a set of visual references that link the art experience with the urban experience, to the extent that a viewer might single out details in the city that stand for his concerns around the formal and the informal.

Due to the nature of human ambition and drive, cities will always evolve and change. The flux that interests him is the result of a collision of socio, economic and political forces. Johannesburg for Hobbs is a perfect example, where the regulating Apartheid city with its planned segregated space is almost beaten down in the post apartheid era, to the extent that the ‘urban degeneration’ visible in the city becomes a visual code, an indicator of change.

STEPHEN HOBBS

Early on in his career, Stephen Hobbs recognised the need to produce and publish across the disciplines of artistic production, curatorial practice and cultural management. He graduated from Wits University with a BAFA(Hons) in 1994. He was the curator of the Market Theatre Galleries (Johannesburg) from 1994 to 2000. Since 2001, he has co-directed the artist collaborative The Trinity Session.

Living and working in Johannesburg, Hobbs views the city as “an African metropolis of perplexing contradictions and unpredictable developments in the social, urban environment.” Johannesburg was once the powerhouse of South African business, its Manhattan of glittering skyscrapers, but in recent decades corporations have moved into the suburbs to escape
high crime rates. After Apartheid laws that forbade Blacks from living in the city were scrapped, many made the inner city their home. Today, Johannesburg no longer has the feeling of a policed White capital that it once had; it is clearly an African city. It stands as a powerful index of transformation - and is a site for innumerable transformative moments. Hobbs draws on urban vocabularies of images and signs to point to cities’ transformative qualities, which are often invisible and ineffable. He has worked with video, photography, and installation to “record” such “intersticial ensembles” as human interactions, meeting points, or merely the traces of sites of transformation in city environments.

Diary of a Star is a critical take on blogging that appropriates selections from the Andy Warhol Diaries.

This project started on 2/28/2004 and ended on 12/31/2007. Originally, I expected to finish it in one year (thirty selected diary entries per year blogged per month), but in the end it took me three years; and this is the only thing that changed from the critical outline that follows below. When necessary, I planned to take no more than a month off from the diaries because of other commitments, but as it turned out at times I took several months off. This could not be helped. What should matter is the integrity of the accounts currently present in this blog. You will find many voices on both sides of the blog, simply because that’s life: people live, and die. If after browsing through the entries you feel like dropping me a line for critical feedback or just a question, please don’t hesitate to do so: eduardo_at_navasse_dot_net

Eduardo Navas
12/31/2007

more here

Hello Artists and Friends

The organising page for the special project on Internet Art for the 2009 Joburg Art Fair is complete and live.

http://jafnetart.digitalarts.wits.ac.za/

Enjoy.

Tegan Bristow

Interactive Digital Media Lecturer
Digital Arts Division
Wits School of Arts
084 206 0625
011 717 4604
tegan.bristow@wits.ac.za

http://www.2bc.co.za/

more here

About Traceblog

Traceblog is a daily ghost log of Eduardo Navas’s online searches, created with TrackMeNot (TMN). While Navas surfs the web, TrackMeNot is activated with the aim to cover his online surfing. TrackMeNot is a browser extension designed for search engine obfuscation. The developers define the Firefox plug-in as follows:

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.

Keeping track of people’s surfing activity has become an essential element for data-mining, which is often used by private and public as well as state entities to better understand people’s trends. Traceblog is developed to reflect on a new stage that global culture is entering, which follows a recent period when millions of people around the world willingly shared information about themselves online, via social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and Myspace, as well as Youtube, not to mention thousands of blogs. This sharing is still at play, and is becoming ubiquitous. The argument behind Traceblog is that social networking and online transparency encompass the solidification of Web 2.0. The result is that everyone is encouraged to be more social under the subtext of constant exposure, at times indirectly and others directly informed by the concept of the celebrity. Everyone can be star in Youtube, if an uploaded video becomes viral, or everyone can feel extremely popular when amassing thousands of friends and “fans” in Myspace and Facebook.

Navas’s logs of pseudo surfing are published on Traceblog to reflect on the archiving of daily activities of any individual who surfs the web. And to ask online surfers to reflect on the real implications of the current state of online tracking. The project in many ways is the opposite of Diary of a Star, in which Navas commented on the Andy Warhol Diaries, while often sharing some personal information of his own. Traceblog, does the opposite: It shows Navas’s unwillingness to share information, while exposing how information can be taken from him. Traceblog also presents the surfing-logs in a way that is unappealing and hard to read by the online user, something blogs are usually designed to avoid. This is done to reference the actual form in which the logs would be stored in a database.

TrackMeNot has received some criticism on its effectiveness, as can be attested by selected links provided on the blog’s top right handside of the front page. Traceblog is not primarily concerned with how well TrackMeNot performs; instead it utilizes the Firefox extension for critical commentary on the preoccupation of losing one’s privacy.

# Cyberzoo is a virtual zoo where it is possible to experience the wildest expressions of the artificial life in the security of your computer.

# The mission of CyberZoo promotes the conservation of endangered species and the habitats in which they live. CyberZoo is involved in international programs of protection of threatened species, and participates in different projects from recovery and reintroducción of artificial life.

who’s behind sowetouprisings.com?

soweto uprisings . com is presented by The Hector Pieterson Research Project and is a creation of Ismail Farouk and Babak Fakhamzadeh.

Ali Hlongwane, chief curator at the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum initiated the research project which lead to the creation of soweto uprisings.com.

Ismail Farouk is an urban geographer and an artistic centipede. On July 29th 2006, he had a one day exhibition called ’sometimes a fire’ at the Parking Gallery in Johannesburg. Earlier, he tried to make money selling rocks and sand.

Ismail identified and collected the information which is available on soweto uprisings.com. He can be reached through his website.

Babak Fakhamzadeh is an Iranian web developer from the Netherlands with a keen interest in art. Back in 2003, he considered selling rocks from Mongolia.

Babak created the interactive environment which is soweto uprisings . com. He can be reached through his website.