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mary corrigall has started her own blog

read her opinions and insights into the south african art condition here: http://corrigall.blogspot.com/

lALEXIS Preller’s art was due for a re-reading. Or so asserts Clive Kellner in the new box set published to coincide with this retrospective - the last was staged in 1972.

Pegged as sharing close ties with the Symbolism, Surrealism and other western art movements it is suggested that Preller’s art should no longer be viewed through a Modernist (European) lens.

Kellner and Karel Nel, co-author of the book and curator of the exhibition, furthermore suggest that, if anything, Preller was a “pre-postmodernist” because he forged a unique vernacular that rallied against “dominant colonial orthodoxy”.

It all sounds good and in their text Kellner and Nel make a fairly good case, using terms such as “appropriated” and quoting from the likes of Rasheed Araeen, the recalcitrant English artist and writer who has made a habit of challenging western hegemony.

But, unfortunately, Preller’s paintings tell another story. One that, regrettably, appears to confirm a primitivist impulse at work. In other words there isn’t too much difference between his outlook and that of Modernists, such as Pablo Picasso, who also took their cue from African culture.

Without a doubt Preller’s motives for employing an African idiom diverged quite considerably from European Modernists, who were mainly interested in the formal qualities implicit in African cultural products - and, of course, their own projections of what African culture embodied.

Preller’s art also evidences a fixation with the stylistic character of African art and culture but it is suggested that, for him, it provided the means with which to identify himself with an African identity - Nel’s case hinges on this fact.

Of course, this urge only manifested after visiting the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris where Picasso also uncovered the “spirit” of Africa. Ultimately, though, what really counts is what Preller’s idea of what that African identity constituted and how he translated that into his art.

Without a doubt Preller developed an African-inspired aesthetic that drew from the European canon but (re)worked the African elements in quite a different manner.

His vocabulary is the result of an amalgamation of visual references drawn from a variety of ethnicities or cultures on the continent. It is this aspect, perhaps, which has led Nel and Kellner to suggest that Preller might have been a forerunner to the post-modern movement; with a stretch one could think of it as a syncretic language that collapses time and space - iconography from Ancient Egyptian, Greek and traditional African dress are melded into a singular expressive form. Of course, Preller doesn’t do so with any level of irony or self-reflexivity.

With works such as The Kraal II (1948), which shows an array of different African cultures shown to be inhabiting a rural village, one is left with the impression that Preller perceived African expression to be underpinned by a unifying theme, that there was an essence which intrinsically connects all African cultures.

This essence that Preller sought to describe or seek out isn’t predicated on any definable features but rather an intangible “mystique”. In this way his art positions the African as an unknowable and thus exotic other.

This painting is a good example of his brand of magical realism, in which a figurative image is infused with fantasy elements such as a drum that is balanced on the back of a mythical creature. A group of miniature people dance on the drum’s surface around a large candle. The fantasy features allow Preller to give physical expression to the mythical nature of African cultural practices.

It is hard to reconcile this idealised image of black people living in harmony in a rural idyll with what was happening in South Africa in 1948 - when apartheid policies were installed as law - when the painting was completed. Preller appears to have chosen to bury himself - and his viewers - in a fantastical vision of Africa drawn from the past or the imagination rather than face reality. It is within an imagined idea of Africa that he tries to locate his identity so whatever connection he forged couldn’t have felt authentic. His motives may have been genuine but his method was superficial.

Like Picasso et al his art does not evince a heightened interest in African culture per se but rather its external visual manifestations, such as the design and form of African sculpture, dress and patterned fabrics. But he subverts his sources, imbuing designs and patterns of his own making into the African dress of his subjects, consequently claiming ownership of their culture.

But perhaps the most bothersome aspect of his art is the manner in which the object/subject collapse into each other, demonstrating the manner in which he objectified his African subjects. Almost all his subjects parade a rigid deportment but it is only when one views Adam and Eve (1955), which features two large wooden effigies which are seated on a stool supported by a series of smaller wooden figurines, that it becomes obvious that mostly Preller’s African subjects are modelled on statues and not real-life subjects.

It is easy to understand why Nel and Kellner have tried to reframe Preller’s art: if he isn’t a pre-postmodernist, his status within South Africa’s art canon remains problematic.

Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows is showing at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg until December 5.

this article was first published in the sunday independent

Living in Strange Lands
The Tsafendas Story
By Mary Corrigall

It is fifteen years after apartheid and we are still counting the cost. But the focus has shifted from the physical effects on the collective to the consequences on the individual’s psyche. This approach draws our attention to the insidiousness of this corrupt racial system, which has wormed its way into conceptions of the self.

This aspect is amplified in the case of Dimitri Tsafendas, the Mozambican-born South African who assassinated then-prime minister Dr HR Verwoerd in 1966. The segregationist laws caused a seismic rupture in Tsafendas’ conception of himself.

The progeny of a black woman and white (Greek) man, Tsafendas didn’t readily fall into any of the prescribed racial groups. This had terrible practical consequences for him for most of his life; if he married the person that he loved, a coloured woman called Helen, he would have to be classified as a coloured.

This classification, however, would limit job opportunities, making it that bit harder to support his wife and prospective family. Besides, one senses from this dramatisation of his life that Tsafendas was an activist at heart, who was unwilling to give into the authorities’ rigid laws.

But the apartheid laws didn’t only have an impact on his working and romantic life but on his psyche, causing the ultimate split of the self: schizophrenia, a disease that manifests in multiple personalities. Not that we experience Tsafendas as a double-sided character in this play. Rather he appears like a cohesive persona given to fantasy and delusion as a means of escape from his real-life predicaments.

When we meet Tsafendas (played by Renos Spanoudes) it is towards the end of his journey, shortly after he has been imprisoned. He paces up and down his cell as he relays his life-story.

Though his actions and persona are so obviously a product of racial segregationist policies, ironically, Tsafendas seems to have posed a riddle to the authorities at the time.

Not that the audience is ever privy to the voice of authority. Aside from infrequent visits from an abusive guard who rarely employs verbal communication, Tsafendas remains the audience’s sole source of information.

Given that he is mentally unstable he isn’t a reliable witness either and there are moments when his narration becomes jumpy or irrational or there are blanks in his memory, implying that the truth can never be fully ascertained.

His sanity becomes an important issue: if the assassination was an act of madness then it undercuts the heroism of his attack on Verwoerd, the central architect of apartheid. No doubt the Nationalist government were keen to embrace this explanation.

But given the dehumanising and destructive ideology that Verwoerd propagated, Tsafendas’s act of violence seems reasonable. Certainly the apartheid system was predicated on a brand of madness.

This is juxtaposed with Tsafendas’s state of mind, leaving the audience wondering whether Verwoerd was as disturbed as Tsafendas and pondering on the nature of sanity and how it is temporarily defined.

Driving the narrative is the desire to uncover the conditions and events in Tsafendas’s pitiful life that propelled him to stab Verwoerd repeatedly.

As Tsafendas begins to recount a life of rejection and pain it becomes clear that the attack was simply the culmination of frustration and anger, which sought an outlet and a suitable target, the main architect of his distress and loneliness. In regaling the audience with each painful rejection and drawing attention to his social isolation, writer Anton Krueger quite firmly positions Tsafendas as a victim rather than a perpetrator, implying that the apartheid system caused the roles to become obscured and moral codes to be distorted.

No doubt, if he had had any strong political affiliations (he alludes to once being a member of a communist party) he would have been hailed as a hero and his name would grace a street sign, park or plaque in the new South Africa.

Krueger has reclaimed his position in our history and uncovers the personal cost that apartheid’s mad policies incurred. One can’t help but wonder, however, whether Tsafendas would have found happiness in the so-called Rainbow Nation, where racial and ethnic groups remain voluntarily defined and largely separate and where his fellow Mozambicans have seen their shacks burned to the ground because they “do not belong” .

The issues that this play raises therefore continue to resonate (it was first staged in the early 1990s) and Spanoudes turns in a very convincing and emotive performance, it’s as if he has somehow miraculously channelled the real Tsafendas.

Nevertheless the play isn’t as compelling as it should be; there is no dramatic tension. It runs at an even pace and the visits by the guard serve no purpose except to reiterate how Tsafendas has been persecuted throughout his life.

His assassination of Verwoerd should have been more drawn out: what was the expression on Verwoerd’s face when Tsafendas drove the knife in?

This should have been a vivid scene yet it melds into his life story as if it was an everyday occurrence.

To underpin the tragedy it might have also been interesting to have highlighted the futility of Tsafendas’s attack, even with Verwoerd out of the way the segregationist system he originated continued to flourish. As Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, once quipped: “assassination has never changed the history of the world”.

Living in Strange Lands: The Tsafendas Story showed at the University of Witwatersrand Nunnery Theatre as part of the 969 festival and Arts Alive Festival which run until the end of the month.

this review first appeared in the sunday independent of 20 september 2009

IN 1996 Stephen Hobbs offered a rainbow up for sale. Not a photographic, sculptural or two-dimensional representation of a rainbow but the genuine multicoloured arc that sometimes spreads across the sky after a heavy downpour. Surprisingly, he had quite a few takers.

But this was hardly astonishing for an artist who launched his career with an ice block (presented on a stand), attracting the attention of art dealers such as Warren Siebrits and South Africa’s one-time enfant terrible, Kendell Geers. Hobbs wasn’t just an art prankster poking fun at the art world. Well, not completely - he was fascinated with the notion of the ephemeral and how it manifested in architecture.

His ice block may have found a buyer in the Belgian collector, Pierre Lombard, but ultimately it was a transient object that could never be claimed. But it wasn’t altogether motivated by his rejection of the commodification of art. “The idea was that by the time my lecturers came round to assess my artwork, it would have melted,” recalls Hobbs.

He sees a kind of poetry in the transient or that which remains physically beyond one’s grasp. For him there is nothing more beguiling than that which leaves no trace. His fascination with this phenomenon ties in neatly with the conceptualist ethos that drives his practice. For the conceptual artist, ideas take precedence over the art object. Its full existence resides in the ideas that informed it.

“For the artist, the power of a statement is as good as the artwork. For me, the significance of what I do resides in the texts and essays I write about my work because I think that is where the integrity of one’s work lies - not in making the art object per se, but in questioning it,” observes Hobbs.

It’s an ethos that has given life to a number of cerebrally and sometimes visually startling artworks such as 54 Storeys (1999), video footage of a trip down the inside of the Ponte Towers, once a popular site for suicides, and consequently the ideal manner in which to visually explore the darkest depths of Joburg’s inner city.

Hobbs’s obsession with ephemeral phenomena has also been influenced by living in Joburg, a city in a constant state of flux, and the role he has played in the regeneration of the city through managing most of its high-profile public art projects as co-director and co-founder of Trinity Sessions. Hobbs has come to resent the time and energy that the Trinity Sessions steals from his own artistic practice and how it has overshadowed his persona as an artist - he calls it “the beast” - but it has further cemented his obsession with the fleeting quality in architecture and the urban landscape.

Involved in the regeneration of the city of Joburg, he has been able to closely observe the ebb and flow of this dynamic conurbation, concerns of which most recently featured in works such as State (2008), a work that captured its fluctuating nature.

Architecture is not exactly associated with the ephemeral but Hobbs has managed, through his photography, to best unearth this abstract quality, particularly in the Mirage City (1997) and Auto Camoflage (2002) series of works.

The former featured the mirrored facades of office buildings in Joburg’s inner city, which reflected distorted images of adjacent buildings, reducing them to abstract motifs that appeared to defy their solidity, thus challenging their seeming permanence.

Hobbs’s latest project, entitled Dazzle, continues this trajectory. Here he has painted the exterior walls of the Outlet Gallery in Pretoria with the Dazzle camouflage pattern, a monochromatic one made of geometric forms that used to be painted on to warships during the two world wars. Just as was the case back then, Hobbs also intends to trick the viewer, but for him it is about challenging the gallery’s architectural dimensions, obscuring its hard edges and its materiality.

“I have also been interested in looking at how I could go from a pure photographic source of the reflection or bounced light and really make it function, which for me is always there in the image that is a deconstruction or dematerialisation of architecture and a rematerialisation of it.”

But as usual, there are layers of concepts belying these zebra-like buildings - concepts that relate to ephemera of a different kind: it is the unrealised visions embodied in drawings and models of buildings by pseudo architects that hold a grip on Hobbs’s imagination. Instead of perceiving them as failed projects, Hobbs celebrates the grand visions that they once encapsulated. Of course, they also summon the intangible: they are buildings that only truly exist in the imagination.

“I have always been interested in architecture that is architecture that is never realised, that remains within the realm of the visionary, and my major frame of reference is Vladmir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, a constructivist tower built around 1919. Tatlin only ever made a 15m model.

“It was supposed to house scientists and revolutionists who would develop propaganda for the socialist movement. Tatlin always imagined that there would be a projector mounted on the top of the tower that would project propaganda films on to the underside of the clouds. Isn’t that beautiful?

“Part of the poetry of the piece for me is that, of course, it couldn’t be realised. So it remains forever symbolic as a constructivist gesture to the bigger socialist revolution. Tatlin’s creation is ultimately a statement, a manifesto - maybe it even brought about change.”

In paying homage to Tatlin, Hobbs is also recognising the value in all the unrealised projects that artists are never able to execute.

Usually, when artists are commissioned to create work for the Outlet gallery, they concentrate their efforts on creating objects to fill the interior, and while Hobbs has created a startling object that appears like an indefinable shining object (inspired by The Aleph, a short story by Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges), for the interior he has concentrated his energy on redefining and disrupting the spatial characteristics of the gallery. This is partly owing to his ongoing interest in architecture, which he says “is much more interesting than art because it’s the most imperialistic art form there is”, but it is also determined by his slightly anarchic tendencies.

The ephemeral nature of his often site-specific interventions has meant that he has largely remained on the fringes of the commercial art market, only finding a platform for his work in museums or non-commercial venues.

It’s a path he chose because he wanted “to do things my way and on my own terms. Working with a gallery means compromise. It was a compromise I didn’t want to make. I have never felt one’s art practice should be predicated on economics. In the 1990s, before there were all these galleries, we were just a whole lot of guys working in isolation and that’s how I thought that things should be.”

His resistance to sign up to a commercial gallery also came about when the close relationships he shared with Siebrits and Geers came to a painful and abrupt end.

Hurt and disillusioned, he gravitated towards making art on the fringes and made a name for himself as a curator, too, managing the Market Theatre Gallery in the late 1990s then setting up and running the Premises Gallery in the early noughties, where he played an integral role in launching the careers of a dozens of artists.

“I never liked the politics of curators and dealers. Partly because I was always a curator and I could make things happen on my own terms.”

In 1999 he was commissioned to come up with a project for Blank: Architecture, Apartheid and After, a book on architecture by Ivan Vladislavic and Judin Hilton.

Hobbs proposed doing a “signless city” and eventually got permission from the City of Cape Town to realise his idea, which involved blocking off an intersection and “erasing” all the street markings. The success of the intervention gave Hobbs confidence and he began to feel that “what I was doing was far more interesting to me than what was going on in the galleries”.

But he would rethink his modus operandi after a trip to New York in 2006 in which he spent time with Jeff Koons, the world-renowned American artist. Predictably, Hobbs was overwhelmed by Koons’s operation.

“I saw his studio and it is amazing… there were 18 massive canvases with two people painting and two people mixing paint for each canvas. There is a whole sculpture studio. It is a highly crafted system of delivery. It was an incredible experience to see what mass-production in art looks like at the highest end.”

What followed was a whirlwind introduction to New York’s art scene, which included attending gallery openings in Chelsea in the company of Koons, and rubbing shoulders with other art world celebrities and serious collectors. When it came to an end, he hit rock bottom.

“I was overcome with despair and depression. I just thought, what am I ever going to amount to?”

Hobbs felt “like crap for three days” and then it dawned on him “that as an artist, all that you have to show for yourself is the work that you make. So that’s what I did - I started to make works and began to worry less about whether they were ephemeral, or whether I had (gallery) representation. I decided to find the money do what I wanted to do and just get on with it.”

Determined to make tangible objects, he produced the acclaimed HighVoltage/ LowVoltage, which showed at the Substation at Wits University in 2007. It was a hit with critics and was selected as one of the exhibitions of the year in Britain’s Frieze magazine. It was a site-specific installation and, as such, would remain intangible to those who missed the opening night that was similarly the closing night. But it reflected a new direction for the artist.

“I was committed to making things. I want recognition for my work. I will be preoccupied with the ephemeral and the transient, but let’s wake up and be more strategic,” Hobbs says.

He has finally acquiesced to the commercial gallery market and will now be represented by the David Krut gallery.

“I am at a stage where I am growing up. To be successful, I need someone to lean on a little bit.

“Am I selling out on my true vision on what I think an artist should be? Of course I am. But that was all idealistic bullshit. You can still be strategic and brilliant. I just hope the integrity of the ideas stays there.”

Hobbs will continue to pursue his unconventional art projects and interventions, but now the documentation and series of prints relating to his projects will be the economic end of his initiatives. “There has got to be something you can buy.”

He has also become less dogmatic about his allegiance to the conceptual art movement.

“I have become less precious about whether I am a conceptual artist. If making an object is integral to the expression and the practice of the expression of articulation, then that is my job as an artist - I have to make things.

“If you look at all the work of Hobbs/Neustetter such as the Dakar project, it is really a whole lot of window dressing for nothing… documentation for an experience that we had. The artwork was about walks in Dakar and in Hillbrow.”

During those days, the ephemera of his interventions or pseudo-performance pieces were incidental to his practice.

“I was never so precious about the things I made, I was just inspired by the spaces I interacted with, and I eventually gravitated towards objects that could reflect on the spaces that I was interacting with; that’s why I never had any representation.”

Hobbs has also made peace with the visual poetics that some of his works exude. His reverence for Borges’s The Aleph, an intangible and seductive portal into an infinite world of lived experience, which is evidenced in his Dazzle exhibition, is proof of this shift.

“I am going to stop apologising for aesthetics and beauty. When you come from a tradition of conceptual work and people say your work is beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, it’s like a slap in the face.

“But I hope that those aesthetics will prompt an intellectual enquiry. That they present a further register for thought and not a passive experience of form, line and colour. My feeling now is that line, form and colour can be compellingly arranged, and why should one apologise for that?”

Hobbs is only beginning to recognise and accept the visual beauty in his work but he suggests that it is the result of a new-found confidence and his less dogmatic allegiance to the tenets of the conceptual art ethos.

“You are not allowed to be seduced by your own work, according to the rules of the avant garde or the conceptual realm. But that’s a load of bullshit. If it is beautiful and conceptual let it be.”

It will be interesting to see how this new approach will further impact on Hobbs’s trajectory and what sort of artworks he will produce for gallery shows. Such exhibitions might cause an initial frenzy among his long-time admirers, who have for some time hankered for a piece of his ephemeral brand of art. Hobbs may make part of his art tangible and available for consumption but it is likely that his practice will continue to not only map the untraceable but remain just beyond spectator’s grasp.

“With Christo’s (the Bulgarian environmental artist) work you can buy the plans and the documentation and preliminary sketches of his work, which to me is so poetic because it means you can never own the work. Either you saw it or you didn’t. And the actual work itself is still not something that can be entirely owned.”

this interview first appeared in the sunday independent of 20 september 2009

District 9 probes our country’s history in a novel way but in doing so does it trivialise the past? Mary Corrigall speaks to the film’s creator and cast

A spaceship looming over Joburg’s characteristic skyline is an incongruent and unexpected sight. It is an image that local cinemagoers are unlikely ever to forget.

Not just because an extraterrestrial invasion of Joburg is far-fetched or even because we tend to associate such staple science-fiction scenes with Hollywood products, but because this (mostly) home-grown cinematic product heralds a new era in South African film-making. Foremost, District 9 is a visual spectacle like no other. It feeds at the intersection between the imagination, history and popular culture, giving rise to a truly transcultural hybrid product. Further contributing to District 9’s hybrid character is the fact that Neill Blomkamp, the writer and director, has employed a heady mix of genres to narrate his unusual tale; from sci-fi and mockumentary to action-drama, with a heavy political subtext thrown into the mix, Blomkamp has produced a film that is tricky to pigeonhole. Consequently, it presents a peculiar visual and ideological aesthetic that breaks out of any established cinematic mould, making it the first of its kind.

Because it draws from so many familiar film genres, it has broad appeal; action lovers to academics will all be titillated by Blomkamp’s sci-fi spectacle. It is likely, therefore, to be the first bona fide South African blockbuster - Leon Shuster’s record will finally be broken - thereby ushering in a new epoch in homegrown cinema.

But, most important, it is the first local film that probes our dark and tempestuous past and present in such a unique manner. And this is where the sci-fi impulses in the film come into play: all the fantastical or otherworldly features create distance. Thus segregation, violence and prejudice play out in an alternative reality to our own, althoughthe setting and earthly characters are eerily familiar. In this way, South Africans will be able to view their culture from an objective standpoint - a perspective that has escaped our cultural producers thus far. But are we ready to view our history from such a position, particularly when it comes packaged in a satirical action drama tailor-made for American viewers? Does the sci-fi angle only serve to trivialise apartheid?

By employing a sci-fi idiom, Blomkamp does fix his audience in a remote position that evinces our society’s proclivity for violence and prejudice, which manifests or is amplified whenever it is presented with an unknowable Other. Here, of course, the outsiders come in the form of aliens or “Prawns” - the sobriquet that the Joburgers assign to this crustacean-like population that come to seek refuge in their city when a malfunction occurs with their spaceship.

The “Prawns” couldn’t have picked a worse place for a breakdown: they are summarily rounded up and dumped in a township called District 9. Here they lead an impoverished existence, forced to scour rubbish dumps for nourishment and objects to build shelters. And if this isn’t bad enough they must also contend with Multinational United’s (MNU) heavy-handed forces. MNU is a private defence contractor that the government has engaged to deal with the relocation of the “Prawns” to another locale, where they will be more closely monitored and isolated from mainstream society.

Joburgers support their removal: documentary footage confirms their resentment of these alien beings who are thought to present a threat.

Echoes of swart gevaar (black danger) loom large, as do other phenomena that characterised the apartheid era, such as forced removals, segregation and a reckless if not immoral disregard for others - baby “Prawns” are heartlessly exterminated by the MNU.

Completing the apartheid analogy are a host of South African archetypes such as the central character, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), assigned as head of the operation to resettle the aliens in a camp on the outskirts of Joburg.

Van der Merwe is a stereotypical Afrikaans bureaucrat drawn from the apartheid era: his buffoonery and apparent happy-go-lucky attitude belie a persona capable of carrying out acts of extreme violence and cruelty. But as his actions are sanctioned by the state and the multinational he works for, he does not question the nature or effects of his actions. That is, until he finds himself wearing the other shoe and he comes to truly grasp and empathise with the plight of the “Prawns”.

Wikus undergoes a physical metamorphosis, but it is his psychological transformation that promises redemption for the white Afrikaner. His change of attitude and willingness to help liberate the “Prawns” mirrors the political about-turn that occurred in the country before the 1994 elections.

“I am glad that I got to play an Afrikaner with a redemptive quality, because I think Afrikaners have been labelled the bad guys for apartheid. The fact that they voted to change the system is very quickly overlooked by the rest of the world,” observes Copley.

In playing Van der Merwe, Copley says he was able to deal with some of the emotional baggage that comes with being a white South African. “It allowed me to process some of the various emotions that I have had. I have gone from feeling ashamed and guilty to feeling proud to feeling afraid that our country is going to turn into the next Zimbabwe.

“To go through all (of this) is a complicated set of emotions and so for me the film touches on some of those feelings. It has provided a sort of outlet. Because it has satire, you laugh about how ridiculous it all is.”

Of course, the satirical and humorous undertones in the film, which are mostly established through the mockumentary form of narration that characterises the early part of the film, might prompt some to question whether District 9 makes light of the country’s history and the xenophobia phenomenon, which its plot also recalls. Nevertheless, the victims - the Prawns - and their suffering are never mocked; it is Van der Merwe, who embodies the figure of the Afrikaner perpetrator, that is the target of Blomkamp’s satirical and cynical gaze.

There are moments of lightness, but largely the movie conjures a morbid world governed by power-hungry authorities who think little of the social cost of their greed. With the actions of the MDU recalling those of SANDF Special Forces, District 9 evokes bitter truths about South Africa’s history, albeit candy-coated in the sci-fi action idiom.

“The bad guys that Neill (Blomkamp) conjures are taken straight from our collective subconscious,” observes Jason Cope, who plays Christopher Johnson, the main alien, and a number of other aliens. “I felt there were times when I couldn’t breathe while watching the cops beating people. It was very intense. But it is like all those films where the big bad mobster or evil Nazi is portrayed in a candyfloss action movie. It’s a disturbing and terrible process but an interesting one because of that.”

Mandla Gaduka, who stars as Van der Merwe’s assistant, Fundiswa Mhlanga, was taken aback to see “aspects of our past portrayed in this way. It will be interesting to see how some people will view our past portrayed in such a way, with action and sci-fi aspects to it.”

Gaduka is also concerned the clicks in the aliens’ language “might be a sore point with some people”.

Blomkamp insists that he never set out to make a film that overtly dealt with his country’s political past. The inference is that Blomkamp’s imagination is a product of his provenance. Hailing from such a politicised environment, it was a given that this South African-born film-maker would imbue any story of his home town with a political subtext. Perhaps any representation of South African life is burdened by its history.

“I was trying not to beat people over the head with ‘this is Neill’s message’. The genetic experimentation stuff in the movie is like Wouter Basson and the SANDF influence. The character of Kobus (Venter) and the other mercenaries recalls the rise of private military companies in the 90s.

“The film deals with a whole bunch of topics that I think about. But I think you can choose how serious or not serious they are to the film because science-fiction gives you a veneer,” asserts Blomkamp.

Almost in contradiction to the sci-fi vocabulary, Blomkamp has employed a number of filmic devices to situate the drama in reality, such as real footage of ordinary Joburgers commenting on an alien presence in their city and the docu-mentary idiom which mediates the early parts of the film, relaying the history of the “Prawns” and how they came to be in Joburg. In this way Blomkamp’s fantasy is tinged with authenticity, which intensifies how one experiences the drama.

Blomkamp says he wanted to reinvent the sci-fi genre. “I am interested in all science fiction but I wanted to portray it as real, and the most real would be to make a full-on documentary about aliens arriving in Joburg, but the thing is that it would never make its money back.”

The short film Alive in Joburg was the genesis for the feature and in creating that work Blomkamp simply set out to infuse a documentary-style film on Joburg with sci-fi elements.

“Joburg came first - I was really interested in Joburg in the same way that I am interested in Palestine. One day I realised I can put sci-fi into that setting. Aliens arriving on earth is a staple of science fiction. In order to keep the city you have to bring a foreign element to give it that sci-fi twist. The movie is not a particularly revolutionary sci-fi film; the ships, the weapons and the aliens are all familiar. The unfamiliar parts are Africa, the inspiration comes from Joburg.”

Nevertheless, in casting Joburg as this den of inequity, or a supposedly dangerous and unforgiving African city which even advanced aliens aren’t able to conquer, Blomkamp follows in the footsteps of a number of South African films such as Jerusalema, Tsotsi and SMS Sugarman, which all infer that this illustrious city infects its inhabitants, spreading corruption, greed and violence. In this regard, Blomkamp’s film trades on established tropes.

The xenophobic attacks of 2008 are also overtly evoked - linguistically it is easy to make the leap from aliens to illegal aliens, but also the manner in which the aliens are ostracised and packed off to live in makeshift camps in the movie recalls events in Joburg and other parts of South Africa during strife between locals and refugees. Watching the extraterrestrials being given the same treatment, one can’t help feeling that District 9 engenders the notion that South African society remains locked in patterns that were set in the past and that different forms of prejudice are likely to play out over and over again.

As it happened, Blomkamp co-wrote the script with Terry Tatchell in 2007 - at least a year before xenophobic violence erupted across the country. At the time of the attacks, Blomkamp was prepping the film in Joburg. He grew concerned that his film would be misinterpreted.

“It meant that our script was putting forward the idea of black citizens wanting aliens out before it had become a serious problem. I worried that maybe it would seem insensitive or appear that we were poking fun at a topic that is so serious. But the flip side is that Alive in Joburg was obviously really touching on that powder-keg environment. At the time that I shot that short I didn’t think that things would turn to that, and now it seems it could happen again.”

Although Blomkamp was careful to be sensitive to the issue of prejudice against African nationals settled in South Africa, the character of Obasanjo (played by Eugene Khumbanyiwa), a Nigerian warlord who operates inside District 9, is a negative clichéd representation of a Nigerian. Not only is he cast as an unscrupulous criminal but all the pejorative notions about Africans are projected onto Obasanjo. He is reared on a diet of violence; after watching his parents butchered, he goes on to become a child soldier, tutored in rape and mayhem. A game of cricket played with grenades leaves him paralysed. He is corrupt, violent and power-hungry: an exaggerated African archetype.

“He doesn’t believe in the system; he believes in guns and weapons. He knows that once he can tap into the alien weapons he will have the power. He is emotionless,” suggests Khumbanyiwa.

In this way the film peddles an oversimplified view of Africans, which may account for its success abroad. A sci-fi film set in African certainly contributes towards an exotic quotient.

“Setting it in SA gives it that uniqueness; not a feeling of something being rehashed. It comes from outside that place. The idea was to put western science fiction in an unfamiliar setting. We have all seen aliens arriving in LA and this is odd. People like originality,” notes Blomkamp.

In appropriating a largely American idiom Blomkamp does poke a finger at the West, subverting the traditional one-way cultural dialogue between the centre and the periphery. Blomkamp and many of his cast believe the issues the film raises are universal.

“The body horror of metamorphosis is universal - so is segregation and racism,” observes Blomkamp.

“This movie makes people realise that racism doesn’t really exist, that it doesn’t have anything to do with what colour you are but to do with how different you are. We find it difficult to accept someone, anyone, who is different. In this case in District 9 the black people don’t like the aliens, the white people don’t like the aliens, so we segregate them. Why? Because we are unsure what they are all about. For me it is an interesting theme. It might make some people realise that a lot of unnecessary hate is not there because of race but because we are different, and teaches us to be more tolerant, ” suggests Vanessa Haywood, who plays Tania, Wikus’s wife.

“The movie does ask the question: is this human nature and how far have we come as human beings?” adds David James, who plays Kobus Venter, the renegade mercenary.

In its opening weekend in the US, District 9 grossed $37 million, proving its broad appeal. But as Carolynne Cunningham, one of the producers, observed: “The real test will be with South African audiences. Because it was made here it is important that it is liked here.”

Its political subtext could either prove to be its main attraction or its pitfall. Regardless of which direction public opinion goes, the iconic image of a spaceship settled over Joburg will remain a flashpoint in the history of South African cinema.

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)

It’s cast as a veritable war zone but aren’t there other dimensions to this city, asks Mary Corrigall

THOSE who never leave Joburg are those who can’t. Cast as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, riddled by crime, corruption and moral decay, why would anyone want to inhabit this treacherous locale? Or such are the popular perceptions of this illustrious African conurbation.

Durban is pegged as a tropical surfer’s paradise and Cape Town summons images of a hippy existence. But Joburg, well, Joburg’s a veritable war zone: a fast-paced and dangerous metropolis that crushes the weak and the vulnerable. On days when the blood of the innocent or defenceless is carelessly spilled, its bad reputation seems justified. But cities are by their nature multilayered and complex entities with intricate personalities that defy superficial labels.

Certainly, Joburg has many dimensions, yet its dangerous persona has come to dominate how it is perceived, and not just by outsiders; even its most steadfast denizens hold this one-dimensional picture of Joburg to be true. In fact, it is with a certain sense of pride that many a Joburger boasts of the city’s less desirable attributes, publishing to the world that this is the most hazardous city on the globe.

It’s not just that they want the world to learn of their tribulations but to reflect on their stamina and/or determination to survive at any cost. The result, however, is that Joburg has become a mythologised locale, and for outsiders it has become emblematic of the quintessential corrupt, failed African city.

“You could tell your mother you were going on a package holiday to Kabul, with a stopover in Haiti and Detroit, and she wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But tell her you’re going to Joburg and she’ll be absolutely convinced that you’ll come home with no wallet, no watch and no head,” TV personality and journalist Jeremy Clarkson wrote recently in the British Sunday Times.

Surprisingly, Clarkson wasn’t put off coming to Joburg and after a brief sojourn he reported that it wasn’t half as dangerous as he expected. The Joburg that Clarkson saw to-and-fro from his swanky hotel room wasn’t quite the same slice of Joburg that most locals encounter. So predictably Clarkson’s article caused a furore as it passed through e-mail inboxes around the city.

Clarkson’s glib and light-hearted article underplayed some of the harsh realities that Joburgers regularly encounter, but revealed a curious fact: it seems that Joburgers are determined to preserve a one-dimensional view of their city. Stephen Hobbs is a committed Joburger in the sense that he not only believes that the city is ascending but has chosen to play an active role in guaranteeing that his conviction is realised.

As an artist and partner in Trinity Session, a company that manages art projects around Joburg, he has been in the ideal position to engage with and challenge negative views about the city. He suggests that pessimistic perceptions of Joburg have been predominantly propagated by the white middle-class – particularly those who have sought refuge in supposedly greener pastures. “They have a tendency to over-exaggerate conditions in South Africa and in Joburg to justify their leaving, that their leaving the country is predicated on fact,” he says.

Ivor Chipkin, a chief research specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council, who has made a comprehensive study of the literature on Joburg, believes that many white middle-class people are nostalgic about the Joburg they knew in the ’60s and ’70s, and their negative outlook on the city is centred on the reality that their old stomping ground in Hillbrow has changed dramatically.

“White middle-class people talk about Hillbrow of the past when it had a vibrant club scene and those people felt like they could participate in the real life of the city. “Now they don’t feel that they can do that and there is this deep sense of real loss. They have lost the places they grew up in. This bohemian multi-cultural space has been turned into a horrifying, violent place.”

Proof of such attitudes can be found on YouTube, where a number of videos document the demise of Hillbrow, inferring that it signalled that Joburg, too, was in a state of decline.One such video is called The Life and Death of Joburg. Footage of buildings in Hillbrow in a state of disrepair is shown, as are images of rubbish-strewn streets. A plethora of messages from visitors articulates disillusionment and fear.

“I lived in a block of flats in Charlton Terrace across from the Ponte and Ellis Park. I used to walk to the Doors night club. I used to walk to Rockey St. Now I am scared to drive,” reads one such message.

The degeneration of the inner city is clearly not incidental to the idea of Joburg as a dangerous destination. The inner city represents the heart and soul of a city; it embodies a city’s personality and it is where its success is measured. Once the inner city is seen to disintegrate, it gives root to the idea that the city’s core character has been corrupted.

The numerous books and academic papers that have been written about Joburg over the last decade give credence to this idea. Chipkin’s study of the literature on Joburg in 2005 showed that discourses are centred on the degeneration of the inner city, which is said to have begun around the late ’80s when there was an influx of black South Africans looking to escape the violent upheavals in the townships. Chipkin found, however, that the collapse of the inner city wasn’t simply about the changing racial profile of its inhabitants but that other types of demands, such as more parking facilities and modern buildings, spurred an exodus from the city, eventually contributing to its decline.

“The inner city certainly has experienced a long period of decline and crime has been part of the story, especially in specific areas like the Park Station precinct,” confirms Lael Bethlehem, chief executive of the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA), the company charged with managing regeneration programmes in the city.

“There was a sense that the city had undergone a social and psychological decay. The lower income population replaced the upper middle classes, bringing different values to the city, and this has accelerated perceptions that the city is full of crime and people live in fear of their lives,” observes Hobbs. Physically altering the city is one way of shifting attitudes about Joburg. A plethora of regeneration programmes aimed at uplifting the inner city have been in full swing for some time, giving rise to talk that the city is on the ascent.

“The last three or four years have seen sustained improvements including a better security climate. We are beginning to take back the streets and formerly slummed buildings through sustained investment by both the private and public sectors,” says Bethlehem.

“Large-scale regeneration pro-cesses, like the one we are experiencing in the inner city, create the opportunity to rewrite the story of the place.”

Though the JDA’s efforts have produced startling results, with parts of the inner city being fully revitalised and parading a clean and modern façade, the myth about Joburg as a dangerous place persists.

Hobbs suggests that it is only through physical encounters with the inner city that Joburgers’ attitudes will change. “It’s a psychological perception that can only be altered by confronting reality.”

Physically altering the city’s exteriors is only part of the solution; it doesn’t tackle the social problems that fuel crime, homelessness and public disruption.
“You can upgrade the urban environment to enhance the user’s experience of the city but for some users this doesn’t address his needs; why should a user give a damn about a better bus shelter or nicer urban furniture when his immediate needs aren’t being addressed,” asks Hobbs.

Joburg has always had a dodgy reputation, says Nechama Brodie, author of The Joburg Book. “A hundred or 120 years ago Joburg was exactly the same. When you read old newspaper reports you find stories about someone who got murdered while out on walk through the veld on a Sunday.”

Harsh conditions on the mines and dire living in a makeshift city in a dry, hot climate not only tested the character of its first inhabitants but instilled an advanced appetite for booze and loose women. A couple of years into Joburg’s inception there were as many as 400 bars, according to Brodie. This all contributed to Joburg being labelled as a place of ill-repute and danger, she suggests.

Despite these negative connotations, Joburg has also been associated with wealth and affluence; a destination that delivers riches to those with determination and a penchant for risk. It is this aspect of the city that has attracted people from all over the country and the continent.

“People just keep coming and keep coming here. It is a city of self-made people who have made something out of nothing,” says Brodie.

In a city that is continuously trying to cope with a growing influx of people it is only natural that there is friction and malice, infers Brodie. It is just such realities that have fed the myth of Joburg as being a precarious place to live.

Adrian Loveland, a filmmaker whose pop-documentary on Joburg, Unhinged: Surviving Joburg will be released in cinemas soon, suggests it is no myth that Joburg is a harsh place to live. But he doesn’t see it as being any more or less harsh than other major cities in the country. It seems apparent that the country’s woes have come to rest squarely on Joburg’s shoulders. “What goes on in Joburg happens everywhere in the country. The murder rate is higher in Cape Town. I think Joburg highlights the state of the rest of the country,” says Loveland.

Locally produced films such as Tsotsi (2005) and more recently, Jerusalema (2008), which are both set in Joburg and feature the city’s grittier side, perpetuate stereotypical notions of this city as being a hub of crime and destruction. Both films also promote the idea that this dysfunctional city produces damaged people.
The promo for Loveland’s movie advances the idea that Joburg has been “misunderstood” and that the film aims to clear up misconceptions.

Loveland is personally invested in the film’s objective, not just because he is a Joburger but because he is trying to get a handle on his love-hate connection to Joburg. He decided to make the movie after a friend was killed during a hijack and his mother was hijacked. These traumatic incidents compelled Loveland to reconsider Joburg and come to terms with all its facets.

“The movie was born from chaos; I felt all over the place. I was up about Joburg one day and down about it the next, wanting to leave. With the movie I wanted to pose the question: is Joburg like Sodom and Gomorrah or is it a city that can enjoy a place on the global stage?”

Johannesburg City Council is certainly hoping the latter will prove accurate as it has been actively involved in attempting to create a new perception: that of a world-class city.

“According to this plan, by 2030 international corporates will have been enticed out of the cushy New York, London or Tokyo offices into safe, middle-income, wide-bandwith Johannesburg. Our economy will lie firmly in a globally competitive service sector and the city’s poor will have migrated to ‘lower costs centres’ to where the manufacturing sector will have relocated,” observes Lindsay Bremner in Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds (2004).

Chipkin sees merit in casting Joburg as a capitalist metropolis. “By looking at the way people dress, the music they listen to, the places where they eat and go out, the way that they display themselves, it is possible to understand how Johannesburg, and with it Africa, is like the rest of the world.”

However, Chipkin suggests that emphasising its commercial potential over the social and economic structures that sustain it underplays the manner in which poverty, class and race continue to have an impact on the character of the city and the experiences of its inhabitants.

Bethlehem says: “To me the notion of ‘world-class’ means that we aspire to be on par with any great city. But we are not trying to create something bland or generic. We need to rebuild Johannesburg as a premier African city, rooted in South African life and reflecting the energy and vibrancy of this incredible place.”
Hobbs adds: “When we think of 2010, Gautrain and the Bus Rapid Transit system being set up now, we can start to understand that there is a degree of validity to the ambition that by 2030 Joburg will be a world-class city. All of it is hyperbole so one has to keep oneself in check, but it’s a changing urban environment and I think that instead of holding on to old myths we should be engaging with life here and be part of solving the problem.”

A number of South Africans are actively trying to shatter stereotypical notions about Joburg. In a video titled The death of Johannesburg, a local YouTube user tries to dispel the myth that Joburg is in decline by comparing footage shot on the same corner of an inner city street in 2006 and 2008.

The 2008 incarnation of this average street shows great improvement; the shop on the corner has been given a facelift. Other footage shows pedestrians walking through public spaces in the inner city. Text appears on the screen asking: “Do they look terrified?” The video concludes with the slogan: “the death of the death of Johannesburg” – in other words, it’s time to extinguish the idea that Joburg is a city in decline.

But it’s not just on YouTube that one finds calls to reappraise the city. Blogs such as “the Real Joburg (realjohannesburg.blogspot.com) have been established to “relay the truth to the general public”. Such phrases create the impression that it is ignorance that feeds the idea of Joburg as a “failed city”.

In 2007 Hobbs and his artistic collaborator, Marcus Neustetter, charged into Hillbrow on foot with a number of Joburgers in tow. It was the culmination of an art project designed to integrate themselves with this part of the city and engage with the politics of space.

Hobbs discovered that “you can actually cross over into deep dark and dangerous Hillbrow and meet and learn about each other and actually enjoy a meaningful exchange with someone.

If you don’t do that kind of stuff then not only are you keeping the myths alive but you are cutting yourself off from the greatest potential that this city has to offer.”

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

david ross close (2008)

By Mary Corrigall

This exhibition may share the title of a Kathryn Smith exhibition held at the Goodman Gallery in 2007, but the themes it explores are quite disparate.

In Camera is a Latin phrase meaning “in private” or “in secret” and, though Smith unpacked its use in the legal context where testimony is presented in private chambers instead of in open court, the Rosses apply the term to a study of intimacy and its relationship to photography.

Rather appropriately, a female nude forms the centre of a dialogue between the two artists, with each creating a corresponding body of work. The female nude is a staple leitmotif in the tradition of painting and, therefore, loaded with historical connotations so it is interesting to note how differently these siblings engage with their common subject. Their differing approaches seem to be informed foremost by their gender.

As a woman, Alexandra is unable to represent the female form without referencing and subverting its representation in art’s canon. The male spectator is represented by the silhouette of a bust of an older man, which appears in the background of a number of her photographs and then on its own in a photograph entitled Second Fiddle.

This is a wonderful reversal of the old order, so to speak; firstly, the male observer is inserted inside the pictorial frame, rather than outside and, secondly, although he is a mythologised figure that haunts these images, he is a static and passive viewer without any agency. As the title of the photograph implies, he has been relegated to a subordinate role rather than a defining one, as was traditionally the case. Alexandra uses a laptop camera to execute the photographs, which facilitates a level of intimacy that conventional photography is unable to achieve because it renders the author of the images obsolete – there is no witness. In this way, the relationship that predominates becomes the one she has with herself and her own naked body.

It is a vexed one influenced by the tradition of the female nude. Fittingly, Alexandra recalls the work of photographer Man Ray, his famous Violon d’Ingres (Ingres’s violin: a French idiom for “hobby”) (1924), in which the female form is likened to a musical instrument, a plaything. Once again, Alexandra inverts the relationship; she becomes the object of her own gaze and enjoyment, and in showing poses of her back and derrière, she is able to discover parts of herself she is normally unable to view. In this way, the act of observing the nude becomes a journey of self-discovery rather than one of objectification.

For her brother David, viewing the female nude is a less politically loaded act. His photographs of a female nude (apparently his lover) suggest a desire to delve beyond appearances, to uncover the essence.

Though the result – large blown-up images of isolated parts of a naked body – infers a formal reading of his subject, it isn’t a clinical investigation. His piercing gaze seems to be motivated by a desire to penetrate those intimate physical spaces of another; the ones that no else is privy to.

In Close (2008), David concentrates on the soft curve of his subject’s back, which is contrasted with the thick strands of her dark, straight hair. David isn’t just interested in the subtle lines of her body, he revels in a view of her that only he appreciates and knows. In photographing these intimate moments, he is able to hold on to both a point in their relationship and her body – with time, both will transform.

david ross vision (2008)

Using a cellphone camera, David has also chosen a low-tech, unconventional camera to achieve his ends. The cellphone camera is not only easy to manipulate in small spaces, allowing for more intimate shots, but, as Aryan Kaganof’s SMS Sugar man – a movie shot entirely with cellphones – showed, it is a medium that is associated with intimacy and technically geared for close-ups.

David has blown up his cellphone photos so that the pixels can be seen, imparting a grainy texture that serves as a constant reminder that the image is mediated. Alexandra allows the process of developing the image – stains of the chemicals used in the developing process – to be visible. In this way, photography’s lifelike representational character is obviated and the specks, grains and stains operate like the brushstrokes on a painting, imparting a sensual, physical quality to the images. The medium becomes tangible.

In David’s work this practice underpins his subject’s ephemeral existence; just as the uniform pixels have coalesced into a recognisable form, it looks as if they could just as easily disperse and scatter, making it impossible to possess her.

This is an exquisite exhibition not only in a visual sense but in an intellectual one too. The siblings provide not only a striking counterpoint on the female nude but their intellectual and visual engagement with photography is also refreshing. They make a well-balanced collaborative team; whereas Alexandra is clearly more intellectually adept, creating more conceptual work that engages with art history, David has a gift for creating striking visuals that are more viscerally driven.

– published in The Sunday Independent on February 1

p In Camera will run at the Resolution Gallery in Johannesburg until the end of February

During the past few years the Johannesburg Art Gallery has focused attention on black artists who were sidelined, staging large retrospectives of the likes of Dumile Feni and, more recently, Kay Hassan.

Although this exhibition is obviously an extension of that programme, the curators’ desire to elevate the art of Thami Mnyele has been so crudely executed that it forces you to question the methods entailed in rewriting or reclaiming history.

Mnyele and the cultural collective he was allied to, the Medu Art Ensemble, played a role in the anti-apartheid struggle movement, which means that this exhibition has undeniable historical and political value. This is not disputed. But should Mnyele, or any artist for that matter, be immortalised and mythologised to the extent that the curators of this exhibition have done?

Interestingly, Mnyele’s art is not at the centre of this exhibition, which is a pity considering the visual impact of his work. Instead, the curators have located his oeuvre in a political rather than an art narrative. As a result they unwittingly suggest his output and that of the collective has little significance in the realm of art. His oeuvre looks rather small. Perhaps that is why the curators were forced to construct elements around the art to give the exhibition weight. As a result the exhibition is like a conventional historical museum display with the concomitant clutter of memorabilia that are employed in myth making.

Art institutions are also powerful purveyors of history and have been known to cast artists as heroes, but their approach is usually less conspicuous, allowing the art to do the talking.

The curators (who are nameless) of this exhibition have gone to extreme lengths to canonise Mnyele. In one room, the central attraction is a glass box containing a branch of a thorn bush said to have pierced Mnyele’s skin during the raid on the Medu Art Ensemble (a Botswana-based cultural-political organisation) by the South African Defence Force in 1985, in which Mnyele died. His death was undoubtedly tragic, but the display is a crude attempt at sanctifying him.

Admittedly, I studied the branch with wonder. But it wasn’t that I wanted to spot Mnyele’s dried blood - I was just curious to understand the conditions that have allowed such a display to make it into a modern liberal art institution, which has proved to be fairly cutting-edge over the past few years. An exhibition such as this propels you, kicking and screaming, back to a time when religious institutions were charged with creating mystique around people who were supposed to possess special powers.

The canonisation of Mnyele begins with a display of photographs of him and video footage of interviews with family members. In other words, the exhibition proceeds with the assumption that Mnyele is a hero and suggests that this status has been conferred on him because of his commitment to the struggle and not necessarily because of his art.

There are newspaper cut-outs documenting a landmark exhibition, It’s a New Day, held by Mnyele in Dube, Soweto. This does contextualise Mnyele’s motivation and his contribution to what was then termed “black art”. He clearly had an impact on art in the townships and encouraged artists to produce work that wasn’t solely for a white audience.

Some of the work from that exhibition are on display but they are not visually startling. Politics and art do not always make good bedfellows.
One of the sculptures alludes to modernism but it is an uncomfortable fit in the context of a politically charged exhibition. After all, modernism placed form above function, which is no doubt why resistance artists largely avoided abstraction. Artists of the struggle era traded in an expressionistic form of representational art. But in so doing their art was incredibly limited, conservative even. Social art with political change as its main objective isn’t able to further art’s own goals.

Mnyele’s art might not have been progressive but it is visually striking and superbly executed. His mixed-media drawings are poignant evocations of the human degradation apartheid laws forced on black South Africans. Mnyele’s figures are battered out of shape, immersed in dirt; or have been atomised, summoning the abstract psychological horror and inhumanity of a brutal social system.

In pieces such as And the River was Dark and Alex and River Underground, he shows two parallel worlds coexisting. Above ground, a quaint and tranquil village is depicted. Deep below the surface is a dangerous, dark and dirty world, which leaves its marks on its inhabitants. The thick roots that snake through this realm encircle their bodies, holding them captive in this murky dysfunctional realm.

Mnyele’s resistance art is striking in that his mode of expression - a quasi-fantasy illustrative style - is unlike most resistance art. His work certainly doesn’t follow that characteristic Rorke’s Drift brand of resistance art, even though he did attend that famous institution.

It seems a pity, therefore, that he didn’t pursue his own unique style of art while at the Medu Art Ensemble, where he was put to work churning out political posters.

There is an extensive collection of these posters on exhibit but, frankly, not even graphic designers would be impressed. They may be bold but their design is rudimentary, which is to be expected, given the posters’ intended function.

With a profusion of gun motifs, these posters normalise violence and, although this gives viewers some insight into the ethos of that era, their significance is rooted in the fact that they mark a period of South African history. As such they should be displayed in a museum where viewers would not be trying to assess their artistic value.

Mnyele’s talent was squandered on creating commercial products and, considering how the new South African government has betrayed artists, you can’t help but wonder whether the sacrifices so many made were worth it.

If Mnyele had lived, it is doubtful he would have been hailed as a hero; more than likely he would be settled overseas where he could have had better access to funds to pursue his art.

p Thami Mnyele and Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective is on at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until the end of March

this article first appeared in the sunday independent on 11 january 2009

Title: SMS Sugarman

Director/Writer: Aryan Kaganof

Review: Mary Corrigall

Shooting a film with cellphones is obviously going to result in a unique cinematic experience but it is not just the unconventional medium that makes SMS Sugar man novel. Director and writer Aryan Kaganof has produced a film with a visual and ideological character that is not readily associated with South African film-making. It doesn’t deal with any of the clichéd South African themes and it has an extraordinary visual texture that sets just the right level of sombreness required to relay a twisted contemporary fairytale.

Centred on a pimp, Sugar man (Kaganof), and his clique of prostitutes, dubbed ‘The Sugars’ (played by Leigh Graves and Deja Bernhardt) the narrative delves into the underbelly of Joburg, where sex is a precious commodity and violence a form of communication. But it’’s not a gritty reality that Kaganof presents; mostly set in luxury hotel rooms and starring a trio of prostitutes who look more like Sandton schoolgirls than skanky Hillbrow hookers, it’s a glamorised rendition of a seedy counter culture. And with Sugarman decked in a retro suit and cruising around the city in a dated Valiant, SMS Sugar man exudes a Quentin Tarantino-esque vibe.

However, as much as the film parades a cool and alluring superficial façade it has substance; it is more like Tarantino-meets-early-David-Lynch. Belying the attractive veneer that the visuals exude beats a dark plot about a maladjusted society searching for fulfillment - and not just the pimps and the prostitutes but the eclectic array of disturbed clients that they service. A consequence of the troubled society in which they inhabit, each client possesses their own peculiar fantasies, for one client this means dressing like woman and then being put to bed like a child. Their desires, however, all seem to be united by a impulse to retrieve or reconnect with something which they have lost. So while this movie features a lot of sex, these sexual acts are a manifestation of some kind of deep-seated psychological longing.

For ‘The Sugars’ or prostitutes that cater to these yearnings, engaging in sex is about a lesson in emotional detachment. As intimate as the act of sex is, they must divest it of its closeness. Naturally, this leaves them hanging in some kind of emotional wasteland, rendering them unable to connect with anyone. Sugarman isn’t emotionally well-adjusted either; from the start of the film we learn that he is fatherless, rendering him a rootless character grappling for control. And this is probably where ‘the sugars’ come into play; they provide him with a domain over which he has authority - or so it seems.

Most of the story plays out in sumptuous, elegant hotel rooms, which seems at odds with the depraved and desperate sexual acts that take place. But these impersonal locales do serve to underscore the characters emotional detachment.

Set on Christmas Eve a time associated with warm and loving family get-togethers, only serves to emphasise not only the corrupted nature of this society but the meaninglessness of Sugarman and his Sugars existence. So even though their relationship is destructive, with no one else but each other to turn to they are bound to each other.

The world that Sugar man and his Sugars inhabit is a base world, stripped of the rules that govern more conventional societies. It is a place where gender stereotypes are perpetuated; the men are ‘the wallets’, the money makers and the women the objects of desire. Surviving is the only motivator - no matter the cost. While these realities should make for an unpalatable film, Kaganof has sugar coated the ugly truths; the settings, prostitutes and visuals are all aesthetically pleasing,which keeps the audience distanced from the real grime that would define this society.

The twist at the end of the film doesn’t come as a surprise and the plot is not terribly scintillating. But SMS Sugar man is not a plot driven film, it is about the twisted nature of human relationships; the push and pull between intimacy and detachment.

But, ultimately, it is the visual texture of the film that seduces. Certainly the shooting with cellphones has imparted a novel character to the film; the characters are framed within more intimate shots, they fill the screen, engendering a personal ambience. The closeness that this facilitates with the audience not only engages with the central motif but creates a voyeuristic relationship with the characters that recalls the reality TV genre. There are instances where one feels as if one is actually filming the scene with one’s cellphone, which can be exhilarating and distressing.

In this way one is always constantly aware of being an observer and the pixelated effect that results from the medium functions as a reminder that the story is mediated - with conventional cinematography one isn’t aware of the presence of a camera.

Shooting with a cellphone also allows for the screen to seamlessly flip from one angle to the next which Kaganof uses to invite the audience into a scene. The soundtrack, courtesy of Warrick Sony, is outstanding and melds in seamlessly with the action.

To be sure, SMS Sugar man is experimental and in need of some ruthless editing but is evidence of a great directing talent in the making.

this review first appeared in the sunday independent of 6 july 2008

review: Mary Corrigall

Wim Botha’s work has always been an art of calculated mimicry. Preferring to summon the precise visual character of dated but familiar vocabularies, he doesn’t simply borrow from the canon of art history and reinvest them with contemporary issues. He has never made an effort to reinvent established visual idioms; because we are viewing them in a time and place far removed from the context and conditions under which they were devised, they are involuntarily open to new interpretations. Botha forces us to place these old-fashioned idioms within our own milieu and it is in this process of identifying their present-day relevance that his art works its magic.

In this exhibition, natural history drawings common to the Enlightenment era and medievalesque linocuts of mythological figures are juxtaposed. The natural history drawings speak of an objective truth, and the linocuts conjure myths that are sustained by belief, summoning that long-running polemic between science and myth-making.

Botha doesn’t reveal any preferences; his interest seems fixated on the disparate ways in which human beings deal with the ultimate quandary that plagues human kind: mortality.

Death has always been a popular theme with artists and the public; the status and attraction of Damien Hirst’s pricey works could well be attributed to his fixation on this theme.

Botha’s interest seems focussed on the iconography of death and how that shapes our understanding of mortality and how we cope with that unpalatable reality.

His detailed pencil drawings of animal skulls immediately recall the quasi-scientific mode of illustration that was popularly adopted during the Enlightenment era in an effort to control the material world.

Even the scientific titles underpin the notion that these are technically accurate renderings. In this post-colonial, post-apartheid era in which we find ourselves deconstructing the systems that constructed racism, we are well aware that belying the naivety of realistic drawings are ideological and political undertones. Nevertheless, this type of drawing evokes a universal impulse to understand and harness the complexities of the material world. Yet, the process of creating such detailed drawings has quite the reverse effect on the illustrator, who inevitably becomes lost in the form of the object of his or her study, only perceiving its surface character rather than its function in the larger scheme of things.

Focusing on the object’s materiality, especially in the case of a skeleton, which alludes to other dimensions, also obviates any spiritual or philosophical undertones. Realistic renderings of skeletons emphasise their triviality; they become mundane objects of study rather than weighty symbols of death.

Botha’s drawings are mostly of animal skulls, so the discourse on death is even further removed from any concrete reality of human mortality. It’s a way of exploring experiences from afar. Much solace is to be derived from these drawings of skulls. They provide a window through which we can view the essence of life rather than death. In Python reticulatus (2008) it is only the jaw and sharp teeth of a snake that remain after it has perished. It’s as though the underlying nature of the snake has been revealed in death. Once the layers of skin and flesh have fallen away, the true character of the snake is divulged.

The skeleton is a curious manifestation of death because it transcends death. While the rest of the body decomposes, the skeleton remains intact - within a certain time frame. The skeleton not only lives beyond the life of the body but in these drawings it has a life of its own.

Yet, its almost homogeneous structure means that it does not retain the nuanced personality of the being that it is derived from. It therefore does not function as a marker of the being that is now deceased but rather, as that of a species. In other words, it only has universal resonance, symbolising the existence of life rather than death.

Undoubtedly, Botha’s art provides fodder for much metaphysical and art-historical contemplation but compared to his last big solo exhibition at the Standard Bank gallery in 2006, this one is a bit of a letdown.

Similar natural history drawings have already been shown at this gallery, when it was called Art Extra. Time Machine (2008), a large installation of a human bust carved from bibles with a long, twisting, snake-like configuration of air-conditioning vents circling below it, does break new visual ground for the artist.

But it is cramped within the limited dimensions of this small gallery; perhaps it is best suited to a museum, where visitors can view it from afar, taking in its full visual splendour. Nevertheless, Botha fans will relish the seemingly incongruent fusion of industrial and religious symbols.

Wim Botha’s solo exhibition is running at the Brodie/Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg until December 13

Gadgets of destruction depict a new generation of oppressors, writes Mary Corrigall

It is with surprise that one notes the dates when Willie Bester’s artworks were executed. With overt visual and conceptual references to the mechanics of war, one expects to find that they were conceived during the apartheid era and belong to that esteemed brand of visual expression tagged “resistance art”. Yet as much as Bester’s contorted metal assemblages and makeshift machines of destruction appear to hail from an era defined by violence, they were in fact conceived during this post-apartheid epoch.

One might argue that Bester’s preferred vocabulary - intricate disused metal assemblages - is more suited to a post-apocalyptic aesthetic, compelling him to persist with art that speaks of the dehumanisation and brutality of an entrenched cycle of violence. But it seems more likely, given that he also has a penchant for depoliticised portraiture and still lifes (if one believes that an artwork can ever be divorced from its sociopolitical context) that he simply believes that the cycle of violence set in motion by the apartheid state continues to pervade this era too.

Bester certainly hasn’t had to delve too deep into the psyche of our society to discover this ugly truth. One of his seminal works, Who Let the Dogs Out? (2001), is based on news footage that revealed local policemen to be training their dogs by letting them loose on African immigrants. Unfortunately, this artwork is not on this exhibit and although none of the artworks on this show are known to be reproductions of real-life events, the deeply entrenched nature of violence that his art expresses resonates with our crime-ridden society. In other words, his work no longer needs to draw from real-life events to ring true.

Long Walk to Freedom (2006), which portrays Nelson Mandela’s triumph over oppression, doesn’t necessarily embrace a euphoric tone. His iconic face is the lone emblem of transcendence in a montage weighed down by depictions of police brutality and the dehumanisation of imprisonment. The artwork mostly consists of disused metal fashioned to represent the cold, impersonalised jail cells Mandela inhabited during his 27 years of incarceration. In itself, this artwork appears to be a trite representation of a South African hero that would be more fittingly exhibited in a museum setting or reception area of a corporation wanting to align itself with a politically correct ethos. Nevertheles, in the context of this exhibition, it provides an ironic counterpoint to the struggle era and its rhetoric, which, incidentally, is only now manifesting in political spheres.

The Child Soldier (2008) series of sculptures, for example, depicting pint-sized combatants, suggests that a new generation of oppressors has sprung up to perpetuate a twisted system of governance. Fashioned from scrap metal that is used to summon the visual character of jail cells in Long Walk to Freedom, there is a strong visual link between the two bodies of work, implying that the roots of our current predicament can be traced back to our brutal past.

Child soldiers also provide the ideal metaphor through which to explore the loss of naivety that has gripped the country in these vexed political times. Although youths are more impressionable and are therefore more easily influenced, the corruption of a society’s youth implies that the soul of a nation and its future are under threat.

It is a haunting message that is further compounded by the ease with which these diminutive soldiers wield power. Their relaxed deportment suggests that they are accustomed to the unpalatable tasks that their position demands. Violence has become so commonplace to them that their expressions bear no traces of apprehension or regret.

Bester illustrates a culture of destruction with the large makeshift machines that characterise Staatkundige Ontwikkeling (State Development) (2003) and Bible and a Gun (2007).

Both of these metal assemblages consist of disused machine parts and a multitude of neglected objects from old toys to broken watches that have all been forged together to create dysfunctional machines. Underscoring the impact of South Africa’s trauma-tic past on its present state, Bester suggests that the detritus of previous society has given rise to a new corrupt system.

Although Bester’s machines recall those rudimentary gadgets from the Victorian era, they don’t have the same charm; a protruding chute delivers uniform misshapen, armless effigies of people into a basket.

Bester once quipped that his art was like “bad medicine”, referring to an unpleasant but necessary process. This exhibition offers some unpalatable mouthfuls that taste all too familiar.

Willie Bester shows at The Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until November 15
this article first published in the sunday independent of 9 november 2008

film: Paul Emmanuel
review: Mary Corrigall

It wasn’t the typical setting for a film preview. With an array of garden, lounge and dining chairs lined up in front of a white wall that would function as the screen, Paul Emmanuel had created a makeshift cinema in his loft apartment in Milpark for the screening of 3 SAI A Rite of Passage, which is part of his Transitions exhibition at the Apartheid Museum.

Haunted by the Hansie movie preview, the small clutch of arts journalists gathered in Emmanuel’s loft apartment looked apprehensive. It also didn’t help knowing that the discipline of film is a completely new avenue for Emmanuel. He is a fine artist by trade, and though he has five solo exhibitions under his belt, he is not known as a video artist - the designation for those who employ film as their medium of expression.

Video art has experienced a bit of a revival on the South African art scene. The Spier Contemporary Award exhibition earlier this year boasted quite an array of video artworks and the exhibition that Simon Njami curated for the Jo’burg Art Fair, called As You Like It, was dominated by video art. Almost every important exhibition of late has featured a video artwork.

It’s an immediate form of expression that demands viewers attention in ways that static objects can’t. But it is mostly prized by artists for its capacity to represent altered states. Its dynamic nature allows artists to visibly map change. This is probably why it appealed to Emmanuel; his new exhibition is focused on transformation, the shifts in male identity.

Billed as a cinematic art film 3 SAI (the Third South African Infantry Battalion), A Rite of Passage promised to be something different from the outset. And it didn’t disappoint. Emmanuel is an obsessive art maker; not in the sense that he is simply fixated with his craft but the meticulous and detailed etchings for which he is known are clearly the result of a compulsive hand and thinker. How was this approach going to translate into film?

And, more importantly, how did Emmanuel concede control of his art? After all, creating a film is not a solo project; ultimately, its success depends on the chemistry between all its co-creators. Perhaps this is why Emmanuel’s art film took so long to craft. It is mind-blowing to think that it took Emmanuel and his team more than four years to produce just 12 minutes of film.

Drawing from art, photography and the documentary film genres, Emmanuel’s film probes the politics of male identity through a series of non-narrative vignettes that move between images of vast and barren landscapes to army recruits being inducted into the South African National Defence Force. In this way Emmanuel juxtaposes reality with abstraction or truth with lyricism.

Most video art tends to draw on performance art; a set of artificially constructed or contrived actions that are designed to educe meaning. Emmanuel’s film, however, captures slices of reality. The individuals in his film may be performers but they are presented as real-life folk undergoing change.

The poetic or lyrical imagery depicting picturesque landscapes that are spliced in between creates these two parallel worlds: one of control and order and another of wild, sensual abandon. They could also signify the contrast between one’s empirical and emotional experiences of the world. Neither realm is static, however, even the seemingly untouched natural landscapes.

Using time-lapse photography techniques, Emmanuel shows this outwardly unchanging topography to be in a constant state of flux. In contrast, young men are shown having their hair shaven as they enter the army in real time, presenting a different kind of shift.

The two worlds aren’t necessarily separate and, as the film progresses, elements in the young men’s lives filter into or are echoed in, the empty landscapes, such as the physical connection between blond hair falling and the honey strands of grass blowing in the wind.

Whatever compromises Emmanuel may or may not have made in assuming this new medium, the end result is impressive. The film’s intellectual or conceptual dimensions are challenging, stimulating and rich: probing white identity, maleness, race and, on a more transcendental level, the link between our cognitive and emotional selves. Emmanuel has also achieved what no South African video artist has to date: he has created an artwork which fully utilises or exploits the qualities that only film can offer.

So many artists today are wont to employ various mediums in their art making, including photography, digital art and film, but more often than not they have no technical mastery over their medium. How can they, when they flit from paint to photography and then to sculpture? And though the value of art is no longer measured by the artist’s proficiency with his or her medium, one can’t deny the impact that a well-crafted object can have on the overall communication. This is why big-wig artists such as Damien Hirst pay folk to make his art for him rather than fiddling with mediums that he is not completely au fait with.

With 3 SAI A Rite of Passage, however, Emmanuel has created an artwork that has value as a cinematic initiative and not just as an art object. Most video artworks in this country have absolutely no visual appeal; they are completely concept driven. But 3 SAI A Rite of Passage is as aesthetically pleasing as it is intellectually exciting.

p 3 SAI A Rite of Passage is part of Transitions, an exhibition by Paul Emmanuel that is showing at the Apartheid Museum until December

An exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery juxtaposes international and local trends in conceptual art

The Dematerialisation of the Art Object 1934 - 2004
curator Clive Kellner
review by Mary Corrigall

There are only a handful of bona fide art curators in South Africa; that is, practitioners who view curating as a specialised skill and not as an adjunct activity to art making. Clive Kellner is one the most capable of this ilk and the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s (JAG’s) latest exhibition is evidence of his talent for curating a collection of artworks within the budget constraints of an under-funded public art institution.

One can’t help wondering what the JAG’s fate will be when Kellner leaves his post at the end of this year. No one seems to know where Kellner
will be going or why he is leaving. But perhaps this exhibition is indicative of Kellner’s eagerness to dispense with the administrative preoccupations
of his work, which must steal valuable time and attention from his love of curating.

Juxtaposing artworks from some of the most influential players in the modern and postmodern art movements, such as Andy Warhol and Fernand Leger, with contemporary artworks from this country, Kellner probes the disintegration of the traditional art object. And ever faithful to JAG’s mandate to educate the public, Kellner has a broad audience in mind. Many people with little or no understanding of art experience a mind block when it comes to conceptual art. Without a recognisable or conventional art object at which to direct their attention, they feel at sea. A brand of art that favours ideas over form has therefore not really proved to be a crowdpleaser.

Cognisant of this, Kellner has designed an exhibition that visually and practically – through the use of texts – demonstrates how and why the “dematerialisation” of the art object occurred and, more importantly, what impact this has had on South African art. South African contemporary art is most commonly viewed and studied in isolation from international trends – a consequence of political seclusion.

But Kellner creates a vital link between the roots of conceptual art and the present-day South African expression in such a way that homegrown art is posited within a global context and not as a product of parochial concerns or a flimsy derivative of Western trends. Had Kellner hung South African art from the same timeframe as the majority of international pieces (mostly dated from the 1940s to 1980s) he would have created a dialogue that sought to insert South African expression into the grand narrative of modernism. Instead, he proceeds as though South African art has already claimed a legitimate status in art history.

Though the exhibition encompasses the various streams of modernism, Kellner’s attention seems more intent on forging a link between the instigators of conceptual art and the work of South African conceptual artists, such as Kendell Geers and Willem Boshoff. This contexualises their oeuvres within the wider conceptual art movement, overriding the notion that their work is conceived within a vacuum. The almost circular layout of the exhibition is such that one commences and concludes with examples of boshoff ’s works, a journey which, hopefully, will end with viewers being able to place Boshoff ’s work in a historical context. But the configurations of the artworks don’t follow a strictly linear path, hinting at the complexities inherent in the evolution of the art movements depicted.

The crème de la crème of Pop Artists are represented with Roy Lichtenstein’s Crak (1964), Warhol’s Joseph Beuys (1980) and, in particular, Tom Wasselman’s Nude (1965). This collection demonstrates the manner in which traditional forms, such as the human body, became stylised, shifting focus from form to the ideas they articulate. Employing mass-produced objects, a collection of trite touristy postcards of London, Gilbert and George’s The Morning After (1981) continues in the same vein of Pop Art but takes the movement a step further. They employ aspects of mass culture so as to blur the boundary between art and life. In this artwork clichéd imagery is used to glorify English culture in an effort to undermine it. And just as one can’t imagine Gilbert and George’s unique aesthetic existing without Pop Art, the same could be said for Kendell Geers’ brand of art. Geers’s practice relies heavily on appropriating common, mass-produced objects. He makes slight alterations that not only elevate these objects to high-art status but in so doing provide commentary on the nature of art and society.

The Brick is an ideal example of this. A news story of the deaths of an impoverished family in a fire – attributed to a hot brick they used to heat their humble abode – transforms a run-of-the-mill brick into a profound sociopolitical statement. It’s hard to imagine a single brick causing such devastation. Ultimately it is the environment and conditions in which this brick has been used that have brought about such catastrophe.
The important point that Geers’s work, and that of Alan Alborough and Boshoff, makes in this exhibition is that, contrary to popular assumption, South African conceptual art doesn’t mimic its Western counterpart.
Rather, the visual and conceptual idioms have been appropriated so as to articulate concerns that are particular to South Africa.
In this way South African art is part of international trends while having personal relevance for locals.

• The Dematerialisation of the Art Object is on at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until the end of September

this article first appeared in the sunday independent of 17 august 2008

David Goldblatt tells Mary Corrigall about his desire to capture every facet of reality

David Goldblatt has a discreet presence. A habitual observer of South African society, it seems appropriate that his physical attendance is understated.

I follow his diminutive and wiry frame, which is concealed under a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, to a cluttered study at the back of his Fellside, Johannesburg home. The passing of time has taken its toll on Goldblatt; his back is faintly curved and his face is suitably leathered and lined for a 77-year-old. However, his gleaming, cerulean eyes speak of a mind still actively consuming, engaging and interpreting the world.

It is through these crystal blue eyes that this distinguished South African photographer has been surveying reality to reveal the nuances inherent to the South African consciousness since the 1950s.

Exploited miners toiling under the earth, national monuments, Afrikaans society, municipal bigwigs, the subject matter of Goldblatt’s oeuvre has always been highly politicised but it is not politics per se that he represents.

“I am concerned with the polis, the people,” he says.

The minutiae of South African life that defines his imagery denies the universal value of his work, he asserts.

“As a photographer I am always concerned with particulars. Bernard Shaw said that a painter can paint Rebecca at the well, but when a photographer does, it is Mary Smith. And you can never get away from Mary Smith. Universal truths are for me things I steer carefully from.”

The overriding impulse that compels Goldblatt, however, is not specific to an environment; it is an objective common to any artist.

“What drives me is the impossibility of conveying in one small piece of paper the whole complexity of reality.”

While Goldblatt acknowledges that it is impractical for photography to articulate the complete nature of reality - embracing past and future contexts in the way that the human mind can - he seems bent on a course that ultimately challenges photography’s limitations.

“The camera is fixed in time and space and can only reveal what you choose to put in front of it. By its very nature it cannot reveal that complexity, but that is what I aspire to do,” he declares.

Goldblatt’s latest exhibition, entitled Intersections/Intersected, currently on show at the Michael Stevenson gallery in Cape Town, certainly makes inroads in this regard. Juxtaposing his past and current oeuvres Intersections/Intersected creates a dialogue between these bodies of work, which has allowed Goldblatt to view his work as a cohesive whole, rather than as a sum of rigidly compartmentalised parts.

Goldblatt’s most well-known photographic essays such as The Mines (1973), Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975) - the narrative that caused such a hullabaloo - and In Boksburg (1982) reflect not just his habitual interest in the contentious aspects of South African life, but follow a pattern whereby different echelons of society are treated and read as separate bodies of work. Similarly, distinctions have been made between his monochrome photography of the apartheid era and his colour photography of the post-apartheid era. Intersections/Intersected disrupts this routine.

“When it came to selecting work Michael Stevenson put recent colour work with things from before and the images started resonating and doing interesting things. It has kind of broken a mould for me and freed my mind a bit. There is a strong continuity which has been blurred since I started working in colour.”

Since Goldblatt started experimenting with photography, first as an obsession when he left school in the late 1940s and then professionally from 1962 following his father’s death which freed him from the shackles of the family business, the aspect of South African society which he as found most compelling has not shifted.

“My concern has always been with values. I was concerned during apartheid with our values, our ethos and the crazy and appalling things that we did and tried to look at the conditions that gave rise to those values and how they were expressed.

“And in post-apartheid South Africa this is still what I am doing. We obviously have a new dispensation and that has brought up new values. I am particularly interested in how we express values.”

When Goldblatt first embarked on a career as a photographer, he wasn’t interested in creating nuanced images that divulged societal conventions. Believing that he needed to alert the international community about the conditions of apartheid, he was compelled to snap overtly political photographs.

“I set out as a missionary [photographer] in the early 1950s; I felt that the world had to know what was going on out here.”

When Goldblatt became aware that his photography would not alter the course of history, it was a painful realisation.

“I failed miserably, I was a hopeless reporter. I had no skills, it was futile. More importantly, I realised that if I was going to engage in photography that meant something to me that I would have to accept that these photographs might go into a box and never see the light of day. So I would be doing it not because I wanted to spread the word but because I wanted to do it for myself.”

This shift in his thinking marked a significant change in his evolution as a photographer; it liberated him from being a straightforward documenter generating explicit imagery.

Some Afrikaners further marked Golblatt’s progression into a new realm of photography. His subject matter was highly contentious and so was his approach; he demystified and humanised the Afrikaner, the oppressor.

“I knew then while doing that work that it wasn’t popular to look at white people. We know they are shithouses, immoral hypocrites, why look at them?”

Coming to terms with the Afrikaner and what that community represented wasn’t just a political statement. It had personal relevance for him. He grew up in Randfontein, a town dominated by Afrikaners.

“They [Afrikaners] were an important part of my growing up and experience of my life. Growing up in Randfontein there were a lot of Afrikaners, many supporters of rightwing groups. I experienced anti-Semitism and observed the treatment of black people in the town by the official structures.”

Working in his father’s shop, a men’s outfitter, Goldblatt had to come to terms with the fact that he would be dealing with those people.

“It wasn’t an easy ride, I began to enjoy the language and began to lust after its earthy idiomatic quality. I began to like many of these people, while at the same time I knew that for some of them racism was in the blood.”

Given his liberal outlook, it had always been difficult for him to reconcile his affection for Afrikaners with his disapproval of their worldview. This contradiction gnawed at Goldblatt’s consciousness and photography allowed him to explore the dichotomy, and, later, find catharsis.

The end of apartheid provided a different kind of release for Goldblatt. The socio-political dimension of his work no longer took precedence.

“During the years of apartheid I tended to suppress some things that I wanted to do or things that seemed at the time to be almost unthinkable. I thirsted for some lyricism and found it.

“Strangely, in some of my more hardegat photographs from that era I think that there is some lyricism - but it is quite private.”

Goldblatt’s desire for lyricism has found an apt outlet in photographing the landscape. Intersections/Intersected features a number of photographs that meditate on the textural and tactile qualities of the natural environment. Although the historical, social issues tied to the land faintly hover in the recess of the mind, it is the sensuousness of the land that seems to be informing Goldblatt’s gaze.

Goldblatt frequently travels around the country in his 4×4 camper van observing rural life. He talks of being “steeped and marinated” in the South African context.

“I am not interested in travelling outside South Africa. I don’t feel that sense of involvement that I do here. I feel at ease in my knowledge in the place.”

Goldblatt’s fixation with the landscape has also seen an interest in humans’ interaction with their environment; the ways in which we leave traces of our existence on the land.

From grand political structures to the plastic flowers tied to a fence to mark someone’s death, Goldblatt is fascinated by monuments.

“Monuments are all of the same order; they are an expression of values. We find it necessary to mark our time on the earth, we are all like dogs pissing on poles.”

Goldblatt has returned to a site near Sutherland three times, photographing a makeshift memorial to Nicoleen Van Wyk on the edge of the road.

“I haven’t got it right, I will be going back again,” he says. “I know that there is something there that I need to bring (into focus).”

Living, breathing subjects present a different set of challenges. Goldblatt says there is no furtive skill in getting a subject to “reveal” themselves to the camera.

“I tend to be rather tough. I don’t make it easy with the subject. I am not concerned with making my subjects comfortable. I want some tension but not an awkwardness where they end up revealing themselves in ways that are perhaps self-denigrating. Although I did exploit that quite deliberately when I photographed some politicians.”

Reiterating his supreme purpose, Goldblatt says the goal with any subject is to articulate the plurality of existence.

“The ultimate portrait is one in which the whole past of somebody and what is imminent and immanent in their future is laid bare.”

Goldblatt has yet to achieve this.

“It’s a bloody hard thing to do, to make a photograph that is going to be somehow evocative of that person’s past and future.”

No doubt he has set himself such an unattainable ambition so that he will forever remain on a path of discovery.

# Intersections/Intersected is showing at Michael Stevenson gallery in Cape Town until March. Goldblatt will also show a collection of photography of Johannesburg at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg from April 26

this article was first published in the sunday independent on 17 feb 2008

by mary corrigall

This was the week that the Dumas circus rolled into town and the media bandwagon jumped in head long, kicking up hype. On Tuesday Dumas gave a walkabout tour of her exhibition at The Standard Bank gallery during the press preview of the show. Having already interviewed her over the phone before Intimate Relations opened in Cape Town last year I had good grasp on Dumas, but it was nevertheless rewarding to see her in person. The voice that I bonded with over the phone from Amsterdam was easily reconciled with her physical presence; warm, reflective, playful and unpretentious that appears to be her character in broad brushstrokes as one watching from afar. Like most famous folk I think Dumas struggles with the public pesona that is ascribed to her. She loathes not being able to control what is said and written about her work. At the conclusion of the walkabout she looked out at the sea of faces - all media - sizing her up her and no doubt shuddered at the thought of what their conception of her and her work might be. “Please don’t put words in my mouth,” she urged.

keep reading this article on mary corrigall’s art blog art in jozi

The regeneration of Johannesburg’s inner city has yet to be realised. The middle classes are hesitant and the impoverished are fighting to stay put, writes Mary Corrigall

Commissioner Street is a good place to locate an inexpensive lunch of slap chips and Russians. This bustling city street is flanked by budget shops flogging clothing, cheap tupperware and faux gold clocks and is lined with informal traders purveying polished red apples displayed in tattered green plastic plates. It is a hub of crude commerce that seems an unlikely place for a contemporary art gallery with allusions to wealth and sophistication. But it is in this incongruous setting in Jozi’s inner city that Charl Bezuidenhout established Worldart nearly a year ago.

The bare concrete floor and exposed pipes that adorn the walls of his gallery visually root the gallery in its urban landscape. Downstairs is an empty basement that was once home to Jameson’s, a club that found favour with suburban whites in the eighties. A thick carpet of grime and dust covers the bar, the only trace of its former incarnation and the city’s illustrious past. Across the road is another icon of the city’s history, the Rand Club. A hungry fire gutted the landmark edifices’ interior in 2005 but like a persistent phoenix that won’t accept its demise this grand old edifice remains a swish destination and a permanent reminder that Joburg’s colonial history cannot be eradicated. Adjacent to the club are indications of Jozi’s future incarnation; a dusty construction site earmarked for a Vida e Caffe, a coffee shop chain associated with trendy shopping mall culture. Bezuidenhout is jubilant about the coffee shop’s expected presence. “It will change this little part of the city, it is a small thing but it will make a difference,” he observes.

Having inhabited metropolises across Europe and America, the Afrikaans-speaking Capetonian is a self-confessed serial city dweller, who feeds off the energy and buzz that accompanies city living. But his desire to dwell in the heart of Jozi’s inner city is rooted in a more complex matrix of human endeavours than simply an obsession with urban aesthetics.

Many progressive middle class South Africans like Bezuidenhout have bought into the vision of a revitalised inner city that the City of Johannesburg has propagated just prior to the turn of the millennium. When Thabo Mbeki launched a new vision for the area in 1997, dubbing it the Golden Heartbeat of Africa, it galvanised a plethora of development programmes by the Johannesburg Development Agency to uplift and revitalise a city that businesses had escaped a decade earlier, leaving it for dead. Since Mbeki’s grand gesture Jozi’s city centre has attracted a ruck of opportunistic entrepreneurs, looking to turn a buck while participating in the noble pursuit of re-erecting a flailing city. Like the thousands of prospectors who once flocked to Johannesburg to claim a chunk of the gold-laden reefs of the city, Bezuidenhout wanted to acquire a piece of a city rumoured to be ascending. It also made fiscal sense to embrace the vision while the city’s property was still going for a song.

“Joburg obviously has that allure for a businessman, the market is bigger. It’s the ideal place to come if you are looking for a challenge. I have been coming to the city for a number of years and noticed it getting cleaner and safer. The phase that the city is in now, rent is still affordable.”

“There is a definite optimism in the air I think it is because City council bought into the whole thing and a few people who were willing to try it. I don’t think it was rocket science it was a question of ‘this is too good to be true’ it was in line with international trends and few people willing to put their head on the block on going for it while the rest are just following their lead, slowly.”

Participating in the resurrection of a grand city, Africa’s most infamous conurbation, also offers a frisson of anticipation that is unquestionably seductive to financial daredevils.

“It’s exciting to be part of something special and I am playing my role in contributing to changing perceptions about the city,” says Bezuidenhout.

Jozi’s inner city promises more than just a pot of gold at the end the rainbow; it caters for a new breed of South African entrepreneurs who are socially engaged. Melding business ethics with a social conscience may sound contradictory but it just such an ethos that drives many entrepreneurs in Jozi’s inner city.

For Bezuidenhout setting up his business in this locale facilitates relationships with a wealth of African artists who he would never have encountered in the northern suburbs of the city. It also puts him in contact with a cosmopolitan society that takes its cue from African culture.

“I really wanted to put myself in the position where I am in contact with a more African experience. In Cape Town you don’t have that. You have to be proactive about striking up relationships with people from other backgrounds while at the same time you should not try too hard either, where the relationship is superficial. So the best thing is to put yourself in the position where it can happen to you.

“I think that you are cheating when you live in Cape Town and claim that you know anything about South Africa. I am not saying that everyone must live in Joburg but for me it is nice to know that I am gaining a certain understanding of (the country) by living here.”

Bezuidenhout’s desire to become part of an urban African culture hasn’t taken off yet; he is only gradually being absorbed into the bustling activity that takes places on the other side the thick glass windows of his gallery.

His clientele remain typically affluent whites - not the usual patrons that the inner city attracts. Not the market in town, expecting his market will change.

Some of Bezuidenhout’s clientele are afraid to come into the city. Bezuidenhout tries to allay his patrons’ misgivings about Joburg by relaying his own experience of the city or, failing that he sends a taxi to fetch them and bring them to the city.

“The streets have become cleaner and safer and there is a feeling that the city is being managed but people are not that convinced yet.”

It has been over a decade since Joburg acquired its new moniker, but Bezuidenhout believes that it is not yet the “Golden Heartbeat of Africa.” Optimistic investors have snapped up all the luxury apartments in town – Urban Ocean, one of the city’s most prominent property developers, have sold all the luxury apartments in the five odd buildings they have revamped in the city so far. But Bezuidenhout says that these swish lofts are sitting empty, indicating a lack of confidence in the city’s regeneration.

“A lot of people have bought in town but people haven’t moved into the apartments and started living in them. It is slowly beginning to happen once the retail side of things has picked up and you have more restaurants and bars and shops then things will change,” he asserts.

“The city thing is happening but it hasn’t reached that tipping point yet.”

Pockets of affluence

While Jozi’s inner city has yet to rise from the ashes, the establishment of Mapungubwe, a four star luxury hotel situated between Anderson and Marshall Streets, is being viewed as a sign that the ramshackle city is unquestionably upwardly mobile.

Once inside its slick, sophisticated Afrochic décor it is hard to believe that one is minutes away from the masses that pound the pavements on the hectic streets outside. The sepia photographs of rural African settings that decorate the lobby’s wall complete the fantasy but it is the hotel’s urban setting that makes it one of the most unique hotels in the country. Aside from a few dives that offer accommodation elsewhere in Jozi’s inner city, Mapungubwe is the only establishment that offers four star accommodation in the area. Since the Carlton Hotel and the Johannesburg Sun’s closure, there has been nowhere for tourists to rest their weary legs. Until now, it hadn’t occurred to hoteliers that tourists would be interested in spending time in Jozi’s inner city.

But it is not tourists that make up most of Mapungubwe’s clientele.

Tour companies that service foreign visitors are reticent about bringing groups to the city centre for an overnight stay, according to Carberry.

“They stay in Sandton or Rosebank and prefer to see the city from a tour bus. They don’t even get out of the bus; they just move quickly in and out of the city,” observes Carberry.

Mapungubwe doesn’t need tourists to stay afloat; the hotel can barely keep up with the present demand, says Carberry.

Primarily they attract businessmen who are in town to do business at one of the large corporations that have remained in the city, according to the hotel’s manager, Martin Carberry. Standard Bank, Absa and First National Bank’s headquarters compel people to visit the inner city and have kept Mapungubwe in business. Gustav Holtzhausen, managing director of Circlevest Properties, the company that owns Mapungubwe, says the presence of these corporate headquarters is what compelled him to look at investment opportunities in the city.

As with Bezuidenhout the affordability of the acquisition provided an extra incentive to purchase the defunct French Bank building and turn it into a reasonably priced luxury destination.

To make up for the limited range of activities nearby for the hotel’s guests to amuse a swish and trendy whisky bar is being built in the old vault located at the basement of the hotel, which will no doubt provide an oasis of luxury for those who live in the city.

Mapungubwe is not the only isolated patch of lavishness in Jozi’s inner city; there are pockets of affluence dotted around the city – sometimes one has to head into town on foot to discover them.

Newtown has been a mainstay of entertainment since the mid nineties with its funky bars and Afrochic eateries around the Market Theatre. The last year has seen the scene expand to include bars and an art gallery on Quinn Street and No 1 Central Place has become a must-do lunch spot with Capello’s and The Sophiatown Restaurant now attracting a trendy clique. A large amount of the patrons might well be suburbanites wanting to sample urban living without having to commit to it in practice but nevertheless they are contributing towards creating the impression that the inner city is cutting edge.

Main Street is now also offering what property developers call “the lifestyle element.”

Now a paved street with decorated with public art, it too is lined with fashionable eateries that show signs of an emerging street café society in the making.

Though a shopping mall is rumoured to be on the cards and a Woolworths food outlet will be open by the end of the year, further extending that ever illusive “lifestyle element” into the thick of the inner city, for now this brand of consumerism is restricted to just a few locales.

Home away from Home

Apart from the colourful mosaiced patterns that snake along the pavements in the so-called Fashion District, there is little evidence of rejuvenation in Doornfontein. In fact some say the suburb has degenerated since a number of clothing factories closed down during a downturn in business in the 1990s. Where once bottle stores and dark café’s sold greasy vetkoeks to seamstresses on their tea breaks stood, now stands vacant, unkempt properties with broken windows held together with caked fabric off cuts.

Amidst the grime, crime and decay, however, Lawrence Lemoaona has established a comfortable and roomy abode in End Street. An artist by trade Lemoaona was initially seduced by the ample space that his Doornfontein loft boasts. No matter what fantasy realms his imagination may transport him too, the vistas of Jozi’s concrete jungle that beckon from the expansive windows of his apartment will forever keep him rooted in an urban African reality.

Although Lemoaoana feels at home in his sparse loft, he has yet to reconcile himself with the world that exists from the pavement outside.

“I haven’t really been able to integrate with community here,” says Lemoaona.

He feels like a stranger in a strange land.

“I feel foreign to the space. There are lots of Nigerian shops that have opened and there is a resistance (from my part) to integrate. I feel like a I am dealing with an unknown quantity; I cannot place the people I meet.”

Until a over a year ago Lemoaona has lived in Soweto with his parents. In Soweto Lemoaona was used to being part of a tightly knit community, where he felt looked after.

“It is so different from Soweto. Soweto is so communal and there are always so many people around you that you know.”

He chose to live in Doornfontein because he wanted to access to the northern suburbs without having to pay the high rentals that living in those neighbourhoods commonly entails.

Initially Lemoaona was reluctant to move to the inner city.

“Living in Soweto I viewed the city as just a passageway to go to somewhere else, it wasn’t’ a place you lived in.”

Dwelling in Doornfontein took some getting use to.

“I couldn’t sleep properly for the first couple months. The city comes alive at 5am. That is when the taxis starting to hoot. Now I take comfort in those sounds, they have become familiar to me.”

Lemoaona sums up his association with his adopted home as a love/hate relationship.

The poverty that he is constantly surrounded by and the fear of crime have kept his optimisim for the city in check.

“Crime is a factor. I was mugged on Nugget Street on the same street that Gito Baloyi was shot,” says Lemoaona pointing out the window.

“They have installed cameras, which has made it a bit safer but my safety is one of my main worries.”

The building in which Lemoaona lives is somewhat of an artist’s enclave. Nicholas Nhlobo, Usha Seejarim, Gordon Froud, Jackie Mc Innes are just a few of the high profile artists who rent studio space in the building.

“This building feels like a bubble almost, its like living in Sandton and there is all this poverty around us. It is the sort of environment where you are safe inside but not outside.”

Lemoaona travels to Melville or other northern suburbs of Johannesburg to socialise. Most of his friends are reticent about visiting his Doornfontein loft.

“They have got a barrier about coming to town. Also when they do come they display this tourist mentality; when you take them to the roof they gasp at all the poverty, take out their cameras and start taking photographs and these are Joburgers.”

It is tricky living in such close proximity to the impoverished, says Lemoaona.

“You really see the poverty, surrounded by it. Looking at it makes me feel claustrophobic because it is so many people living in such close quarters, it is not very freeing.”

Though Lemoaona recoils from the poverty that he is faced with everyday, experiencing it first hand has shifted his attitudes.

“I was very judgemental at first; thinking how can these people live like that. But then I tried to dissect their mentality and realised that people don’t’ treasure space that doesn’t belong to them.”

Lemoaona has noticed the effect of regeneration programmes in the city and while he does believe that the physical structure of the city needs to be altered to shift negative attitudes he is simultaneously sceptical about which communities will benefit from the revitalisation.

“Newtown has become a very upmarket place in town. For me it represents the Black middle class. The establishments around that area don’t actually cater for the people who live around there. So you have a lot of northern suburbs people and tourists going to that part of town to places that have a menu that is “black”. But they are such expensive restaurants that people who live in town can’t afford to eat there. But there is a vibe there so I do like going there.”

Witnessing the Red Ants, the inner city’s notorious task team charged with removing people from “bad buildings”, have further challenged Lemoaoa’s conception of regeneration. “When it is happening right in front of you, you find out first hand what regeneration means.

When I was walking through Hillbrow one evening I noticed that the Red Ants are now coming at night and they have got these big trucks that move people away. And you start to think what does ‘away’ mean and where is it?”

The more positive thoughts he has about the city are founded in its future possibilities rather than its current status quo.

“I like it for what it potentially has,” admits Lemoaona.

The rich versus the poor

Near what was once the Financial District (and still is, depending on who you talk to), near Rissik and Market Streets are quite a different brand of loft apartments created by Urban Ocean, a property company headed by Alfonso Botha and Duan Coetzee. The duo snap up dilapidated architectural gems, return them to their former glory, fitted them up with all the best mod cons before selling them off for decidedly large sums of money. So far they have revamped five buildings in the inner city. And they haven’t exactly scrimped on fittings; from the best wooden flooring money can buy, designer sanitaryware, stainless steel appliances, oak veneer and solid oak carpentry, in-door coffee bars, spas and wellness centres, these two mavericks have caught the attention of the moneyed classes, compelling them to return their gaze to the inner city. Some of their deluxe penthouses – some of which have access via helicopter - have fetched as much R4-million – an unprecedented sum for living space in Jozi’s city centre. Not too surprisingly Urban Ocean’s successes have caught the attention of the media, engendering the impression that Jozi’s inner city is no longer the mainstay of the impoverished.

However, many say that these opulent abodes were snapped up by investors who had no intention of living in town in its present state.

Botha refutes these claims.

“In the beginning investors did buy into a lifestyle that did not exist yet, now that is not the case.”

Holtzhausen believes that Urban Ocean jumped the gun with their super deluxe apartments. He says that the city’s revitalisation has a long way to go before the affluent will happily settle in the city.

“We have a long way to go before we get there,” asserts Holtzhausen, “Revitalising a city is long drawn out process, which often creates the impression that little is happening the in the city, says Botha.

“People aren’t taking into consideration the technical processes and lag time that is involved in converting a building.”

Botha says the public should remember how far the city has come in the last decade.

“People forget that the whole city was like a slum, it has been a long process of changing behaviour. But there have been massive changes.”

More parks, schools and upmarket retailers would be needed in order to coax the well-heeled to settle in the inner city, suggests Holtzhausen.

Though Lael Bethlehem, chief executive officer at the JDA, says that all these kinds of facilities are on already on the cards, she suggests that the real focus has been to create residential developments for the low to middle income groups.

“That’s where the real action has been. The upper end of the market is a small niche market, it’s the lower income groups that need housing. One property developer will be building 3000 new units this year in the city and that is just one developer,” says Bethlehem.

The Inner City Charter, the document outlining the objectives for regeneration developments in the city for the next five years, looks set to put more revamp projects in motion, starting with infamous no-go areas as Hillbrow and Berea, where so-called “block by block blitzes” and the upgrading of public property will be set into motion.

While everyone agrees that Jozi’s inner city needs to be revamped and upgraded, regeneration strategies aimed at this part of the city have not been welcomed by the city’s current residents – mostly the poor, who are under constant threat from the municipality.

Mostly it is the City’s approach to dealing with “bad buildings”, which tends to entail forcibly removing its “bad” residents out of the city., that has drawn criticism from among others, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals) at Wits University, an organisation that have tirelessly battled the municipality on behalf of Jozi’s disenfranchised, fighting for their right to remain in the city centre.

Assumed to be criminals and the like, engendering a negative impact on perceptions about the city centre, it is thought that Jozi’s regeneration cannot be fully realised as long as these “bad” elements continue to inhabit and flourish in the city.

Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter, of the Trinity Sessions, a company that manages public art projects in the inner city, and have been commissioned to oversee the erection of R3,5 millions worth of public art in Hillbrow, in an effort to change the face of this notorious no-go area of the city are all too aware of the implications that regenerating has for the city’s apparent undesirable inhabitants.

“There has been criticism that this is an exercise to spruce up the neighbourhood so that one day the property developers can move in buy up all the buildings and kick the community out, which is a realistic threat wherever you go and you are working in these kinds of environments,” says Neustetter.

Revitalising a city automatically has consequences for the poor.

“The regeneration is not for the people that are there; the upgrade is pushing the value of the property up so that it has to be marketed to a middle class that is afraid to go there,” says Hobbs.

Bethlehem insists that regeneration programmes are meant to benefit the all echelons of our society. She says that the inner city is a diverse area that can accommodate a variety of economic groups.

The R170-million that has been set aside to spruce up Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville – the city’s next big regeneration programme – is designed to benefit its current occupants as well as potential residents.

“It is about making their quality of life much better.”

One must not think of the regeneration of Johannesburg as course of action that necessarily pre-empts a struggle between rich property developers and the poor, according to Bethlehem.

“It is a false dichotomy. It is not about property developers versus the poor. We need property investors; they are able to service working people.”

The Wrong side of the Tracks

The name “San Jose” conjures up visions of an exotic Spanish holiday home. The infamous building that stands in Berea on the border of Hillbrow that goes by the same name is by no means a pleasurable haven. There is no electricity, running water or working toilets. Most of the window panes of the 10-storey building are broken or missing. Graffiti is sprawled across its dirty walls and the heavy stench of urine permeates the air. For all sense and purposes it is the quintessential “bad building” that has given the inner city its pejorative reputation.

Fifty-five-year-old Nelson Khethani has been living here for over five years. Unemployed and destitute he moved into San Jose after the municipality cut off services to the building - a move engineered to coerce residents to move elsewhere. But with limited finances, Khetani and the other 600 odd residents of this derelict eye-sore had nowhere else to go and have had to fight the municipality– with the aid of Stuart Wilson, a researcher from Cals – to keep their foothold in the city.

“If it wasn’t for Cals we would have been on the street,” says Khetani.

Even thought it is a bright and sunny day, inside Khetani’s flat it is dark. In contrast to the dilapidated interior of the building, Khetani’s home is a well kept, tidy space. even during a sunny day no electricity, it is sparsely furnished but spacious flat with a lounge, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.

“This is a home Even if I don’t like to stay here I am forced to stay here. I would like to live somewhere with lights but I don’t have money so what can I do.”

Khetani uses candles and oil lamps at night and must trek outside to a portable toilet when he needs the toilet. Having lived without electricity and other amenities most of his life he is resigned to an impoverished living standard.

“It is not strange to me I am coming from the village and I am used to this life. It is not new to me I have grown up inside this (poverty).”

Khetani moved to Johannesburg from a small hamlet in the Eastern Cape in 1970. After losing fulltime employment in 1992, he has eked out a living selling a variety of goods on the city’s streets. Although the municipality would have it that Khetani and his ilk, lived on the outskirts of the city, Khetani has to live in Jozi’s inner city to survive – he says transport costs to and from the city “would kill me.”

“They are pushing the poor out of Joburg (inner city) they even said they want us to go. They want us to go to Soweto, Kliptown. We are too poor to stay in town.”

He also believes that it is in only this bustling metropolis, brimming with opportunities, that he still may have the chance to alter his fortunes and change the course of his life.

“Everything is here, close to everything, if you want to change your life you must change it here. In the village you will never change your life.”

So far the regeneration programmes in the inner city have not had any impact on Khetani’s life, or his outlook for the future. He believes that transformations in the city are not designed to benefit the poor.

“I have seen the buildings that they have fixed. It is okay for them but not for us. It is not for us and I cannot manage to live. I feel neglected.

Khetani disputes the idea that “bad people” live in purported “bad buildings”.

“It is not the case at all,” he sighs.

The residents of San Jose are at pains to curb criminals from inhabiting or operating in the building, according to Khetani, who functions as the chairman of the residents association. A set of strict house rules were drawn up by the inhabitants of San Jose to ensure that a “bad” element cannot flourish in the building.

One such rule stipulates that no resident may park a car in the garage on the ground floor.

“If we allow that then we have a problem because people could be bringing stolen cars and we don’t want that here.”

San Jose may not have been maintained since the managing agents of the building stopped reicieving remittances from the owners of the building to pay rates and services since the early nineties but the residents of the bulding seem determined to do what little they can to maintain the building.

At 4.30am on Sunday mornings San Jose’s residents wake each other up so that by six am they can begin their weekly clean up of the building, , according to Khetani.

Though they mop up the sewerage that fills ground floor, which is responsible for the stomach churning stench of urine that permeates the air, it has been a losing battle since the municipality cut services to the building.

If regeneration programmes had a positive impact on any of Khetani’s acquaintances at San Jose or in the environs, it would restore his faith in the regeneration of the inner city.

“I would like to see changes in my life and the lives of other like me. Even if it (regeneration of the city) doesn’t make my life better, if I came across someone I know that has struggled and I see that things have got better for him that would give me hope.”

For now, however, Khetani believes that revitalisation plans are profiting the rich.

“The poor are getting poorer and the rich richer.”

Khetani and the residents of San Jose will not be living in the building for much longer, Wilson has helped negotiate with the municipality to secure a new home for all of them in Hillbrow. Although their flats will be half the size, their new abode has electricity and running water.

San Jose will then fall into the hands of the property developers and be assimilated into the new vision of Johannesburg. No one is sure, when the new improved city centre will finally emerge. It is a work in progress.

By Mary Corrigall

Reminiscent of Bernie Searle’s inimitable brand of performance/video art, Lerato Shadi assembles visuals that are stripped of all pretensions, preferring to present base impulses unadorned by superfluous expression.

But that is where similarities between the artists end; while Shadi’s aesthetic is centred on laying bare the primordial compulsions that drive our society, she is self-conscious of her expression. This compels her to analyse her medium and its limitations.

Though this adds another rich dimension to her practice, it is the manner in which she is able to articulate such a variety of concepts through straightforward actions and imagery that makes her art so compelling.

Hema (or Six hours of out-breath captured in 792 balloons) (2007), for example, sees Shadi striving to capture the bare essence of existence by storing each of her breaths over a six-hour period in balloons.

Significantly, she chooses an office setting in which to enact this performance piece. No detail is coincidental to this work; every element of her imagery is functional. Even the architectural structure of the office (the advertising agency Ogilvy in Cape Town), an industrial formation in which the inner workings of the building’s mechanics are laid bare, has been selected to enhance Shadi’s performance.

Shadi positions herself at the centre of a symmetrical steel staircase that forms a diamond motif that looks much like a clock, alluding to the measuring of time. This creates the impression that Shadi is not only a cohesive element of the architectural space she is situated in, but also that her performance echoes the activities that habitually take place in the setting.

In a work setting where time is exchanged for money, existence has a tangible value; it is equated with the realisation of end products. In leisure time this is rarely the case; it is valued for its lack of productivity and its “timelessness”. Therefore, in the office environment existence has purpose and meaning. Shadi’s video proves, however, that such worth is subjective and work creates the illusion that existence has meaning.

From afar, the actions of the office workers seem arbitrary and pointless; people go up and down in lifts, cross the office, stare at their computers and type. Ultimately, in a philosophical sense, their preoccupations are as absurd and futile as filling balloons with air.

But Shadi’s repetitive and seemingly tedious performance isn’t simply engineered to highlight the meaninglessness and tedium of daily existence; it also articulates a compulsion to capture the bare essence of physical subsistence.

If Shadi is able to capture each breath that she exhales, then she will have a grasp on what it is to be a living being.

Instead of measuring time/being with a mechanical man-made contraption such as a clock, she relies on each inhalation and exhalation as a marker of time. Shadi chooses a frivolous receptacle to contain her exhalations; balloons have a short life span and are associated with frolicsome celebrations rather than a philosophical quest.

Shadi’s objective also appears to conflict with her final product. She has purposively set out to capture every moment yet the finished product sees her six-hour balloon blowing marathon edited down to an eight-minute video. Why go to such lengths to document each living moment only to discard these “precious” seconds/minutes/hours of existence?

Ultimately, though, Shadi’s tactics are driven by perceptive logic; experience is fleeting and intangible and our physical experience of living is divorced from how we process it psychologically. In our minds our experiences aren’t remembered in full detail; we cannot recall the minutiae of our existence. Instead, memory is composed of edited versions of experience.

Shadi also suggests that the compulsion to capture reality can only ever offer superficial results. The vehicles or mediums, such as video that artists employ to capture reality, remove real-time experience from the equation, imparting a sense of timelessness that contradicts the nature of being. So although Hema is visually rooted in an ordered, concrete context that assumes that time/experience can be measured, she suggests that existence cannot be quantified because it is an ethereal concept.

Aboleleng (2007) sees the artist engaging in another fruitless activity. In this video artwork Shadi is seen going through the painful experience of giving birth, however, what emerges from her womb is a long, narrow crotcheted scarf, signifying an umbilical cord, rather than a baby.

Employing a green screen – a neutral background that film-makers use to enable computer-generated imagery to be integrated at a later stage – Shadi draws the viewers’ attention to the act in which she is engaged, rather than an external condition that shapes action. It is the pure act of creation that Shadi is referencing.

Yet the object Shadi brings to life, the long crotcheted scarf that is also displayed under a spotlight adjacent to the screen, has no purpose. The scarf/cord may be fashioned to resemble the detailing on a baby’s booties and clothing but it is not a living, breathing being; it is a lifeless entity that refers to a newborn.

Shadi suggests that although art objects may not be living, breathing entities, they exist in ways common to living beings. Just as humans give birth to children so too can they bring ideas to life. Shadi obviously shares a deep connection to her art that she likens to offspring.

l Lerato Shadi’s exhibition is on at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until the end of January

this article was first published in the sunday independent of 13 january 2007

Hema or: Six hours of out-breath captured in 792 balloons
2007
Digital video projection with sound
Duration 5 min 26 sec
camera - tam wege
editor - tamsyn reynolds
sound design - warrick sony

Aboleleng
2007
Digital video projection, and wool installation
duration 4 min 59 sec
director - amichai tahor
camera and lighting design - dusko marovic
editor - aryan kaganof

this article first appeared in the Sunday Independent. published here by kind permission of mary corrigall

Like the spectral beings that haunt his art, Cyprian Mpho Shilakoe too appears an ephemeral character. Aside from his transient presence on earth - he died at the age of 26 - the supernatural abilities that are associated with him, and the title “mystic” that some ascribe to him, have all worked towards shrouding his persona and his talent under a veil of superstition.

Art world heavyweights have given credence to suppositions that Shilakoe possessed unusual psychic abilities. Linda Givon, proprietor of the Goodman Gallery, has suggested that Shilakoe foretold his own death; arriving at her Johannesburg gallery to bid her farewell a day before he died in a car crash. Fellow artist and friend, the late Dan Rakgoathe, was also open about Shilakoe’s telepathic abilities.

“Cyprian was like me - a mystic. We both used to communicate at a distance without being together,” Rakgoathe said in an interview.

Besides the anecdotes about his psychic abilities, factual accounts have focused on Shilakoe’s contribution to the incredible body of art that emerged from the Evangelical Lutheran Arts and Crafts Centre, known simply as Rorke’s Drift art centre, where he trained rather than his life story and unique aesthetic. So it is not too surprising then that the only portrait of Shilakoe that has emerged since his death in 1976 has been hazy, much like the indistinguishable, soft-edged figures that characterise his oeuvre.

However, a retrospective of his work now showing at the Johannesburg Art Gallery has allowed for a more comprehensive portrait of the artist to emerge. Research undertaken for the retrospective unearthed vital details about Shilakoe’s early life and lead to the discovery of a cache of undiscovered works by the artist that further prove that whatever supernatural abilities he may have possessed, they should not be allowed to overshadow his prolific output as an artist, and remarkable talent as an etcher and sculptor.

“Cyprian left an incredible body of work behind. He was extremely prolific. He was also a very skilled etcher. Not even etchings from the Michaelis (school of art in Cape Town) studio can compare,” observes Philippa Hobbs, one of the authors of Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints and manager of the MTN Arts and Culture portfolio, the sponsors of the retrospective.

Getting in touch with Emily Mahlungu, Shilakoe’s sister, widened the scope of the investigation into this iconic artist.

“Most of us in the South African art world had firmly believed that there were no members of the Shilakoe family still alive,” said curator Jill Addleson of her unexpected discovery.

Addleson and Hobbs wasted no time in meeting with Mahlungu at the Shilakoe family home in Dennilton, Mpumalanga.

When they arrived there, Addleson and Hobbs found a house untouched by time; since Shilakoe’s parents had passed away his siblings had rarely made visits to the family home. But more importantly, they also found a host of undiscovered artworks.

“When Emily opened the front door and led us inside to show us some of Cyprian’s works that were kept there, we were stunned. There were oil paintings - we had never seen any of his paintings - and numerous sculptures,” recalls Hobbs.

Shilakoe’s relatives had apparently reprimanded Mahlungu for hanging onto Cyprian’s “odd” sculptures. Mahlungu, however, couldn’t let them go and had even lovingly varnished some of the sculptures.

Although Mahlungu clearly valued her brother’s art, she was taken aback by the obvious enthusiasm of Addleson and Hobbs. “She had no idea that her brother was a famous artist,” says Hobbs.

“When we told her how famous her brother was in the art world, she burst into tears.”

Although one can attribute Mahlungu’s unawareness of her late brother’s standing to the gaping disconnection between rural and urban contexts in this country, the work from the Rorke’s Drift art centre and the artists who trained there have only recently gained prominence.

Owned by the Swedish Lutheran Church and run by Swedish art graduates, Rorke’s Drift was an independent arts institution that catered specifically for black students who had no access to formal art education.

“It was an international enclave that stood outside of apartheid,” said Hobbs.

The connection to the mission and the training of crafters at the centre also worked towards creating the impression that Rorke’s Drift was not a serious arts institution. The subversive nature of the work that was being produced at the centre, which appraised the social and political ethos of apartheid South Africa, also prevented Rorke’s Drift art from gaining acceptance in the South African art world in the Sixties, when the centre was established.

In fact, it was only in the early 1990s, when the exhibition Rorke’s Drift and After was staged at the Centre for African Studies, that art from the centre and its gifted graduates started to attract the attention of the South African art world. Hobbs implies in her book that the dissolution of the Nationalist government encouraged new readings of the art from the centre and the acknowledgement of the political undertones that characterised the art and elevated it to “struggle art”, a genre that is acclaimed in post- apartheid South Africa.

Shilakoe’s art covertly references the impact of apartheid on black South Africans.

Emotional trauma accompanying social disconnection is relayed through etchings such as Silence (1969), which features two forlorn ghost-like protagonists. A stream of dark tears stains the face of one, while the other figure’s head rests in his hands suggesting that he has accepted defeat.

Shilokoe’s childhood was marked by an early loss: the death of his grandmother, whom two-year-old Shilokoe was sent to live with in 1950. According to Mahlungu, Shilokoe was devastated by her death; he thought of her as his mother. His grief however, found a productive outlet in art, which he took up after her death. He was 16 when he returned to live with his parents at the Dennilton home.

Mahlungu noticed early on that Shilakoe was an unusual personality. He shied away from other children, preferring to immerse himself in making art. His artistic talent was obvious to all and caught the attention of his teachers at Paledi Secondary School, who advised his parents to take him to an art school. Soon after, Shilakoe was introduced to Rakgoathe, a school teacher and artist. Rakgoathe encouraged Shilakoe to join him at Rorke’s Drift.

By all accounts Shilakoe bloomed at Rorke’s Drift.

The Swedish tutors followed a “non-interventionist” approach to art education.

“The Swedes were squeamish about imposing ideas. While they introduced the students to new materials and techniques they preferred to encourage them to find their own expression,” explains Hobbs.

Despite this pedagogical approach, the Swedes couldn’t resist imposing some ideas on the students, which perhaps accounts for the subversive nature of the art that came from the centre.

“During art appreciation classes they showed the students images of labourers sweeping at a ‘whites-only’ beach and other provocative images that they hoped would encourage discussion, give them agency and develop them as individual thinkers,” says Hobbs.

While it might have been idealistic for the Swedish instructors to believe that they could create the ideal environment for art production, Shilakoe nevertheless flourished in the setting, developing a unique aesthetic that would set him apart from his fellow students and later international artists.

It was Shilakoe’s deft grasp of his medium, an intaglio process of creating spitbite acid plates, that allowed him to achieve subtle transitions of light and dark, engendering drama and conferring poignancy to his imagery.

Although he produced a low number of prints during his first year at Rorke’s Drift in 1968, attributed to intensive experimentation, a year later he had become not only a prolific printmaker, but he exhibited at the Durban Art Gallery and garnered much attention from art buyers and international visitors who frequented the centre.

Aside from excelling professionally at the centre, Shilakoe forged a close bond with Rakgoathe.

“Both men carried with them a deep sadness: an inner longing for relief from an ever-present restlessness, a rootlessness which could possibly be traced back to childhood loss,” writes Donvé Langhan in The Unfolding Man: The Life and Art of Dan Rakgoathe.

Shilakoe and Rakgoathe’s strong connection was not only based on shared experiences but the two friends also eschewed the moral and religious ethos of Rorke’s Drift, preferring to develop their own spiritual belief system, according to Langhan.

“Cyprian and Dan shared an essentially mystical view of the world. Both believed in extra-sensory perception, extraterrestrial life and reincarnation.”

No doubt Shilakoe’s spiritual philosophies must have infiltrated his art. The protagonists that fill his etchings certainly have an otherworldly presence; there is scarcely a dividing line between them and the environment in which they are pictured, so while they appear to surrender to the thick darkness that surrounds them, they are not rooted in it either.

Art historians have differing opinions on the abstract significance of Shilokoe’s oeuvre. Langhan proposes that the loss of the maternal figure of his grandmother explains the sense of solitude that pervades his work. In a 1990 Goodman Gallery catalogue, Karel Nel suggests that Shilakoe’s art manifests the effects of a migrant labour system and a harsh, alien urban environment.

Whether Shilakoe’s art expresses his mystical leanings, provides socio-political commentary on an apartheid South Africa or articulates personal tragedy, what is certain is that his art resonated with art lovers here and abroad.

As such a shining example of the Rorke’s Drift approach to art education, the centre invited him to stay on as an artist-in-residence after he graduated at the end of 1969. After clashes with the matron at the centre, Shilakoe left after two months and moved into St Angsar’s Mission in Roodepoort where he set up a studio with an etching press given to him by Rorke’s Drift.

By all accounts Shilakoe wasn’t a struggling art graduate looking for direction; he was a focused, confident and self-sufficient artist.

Givon, who describes him as a “serious young man”, recalls that Shilakoe arrived at the Goodman Gallery, put his work down in front of her, and politely informed her that he had selected her gallery to represent him in South Africa. Givon accepted and in 1971 he held his first solo exhibition at the gallery. In the same year his prints were shown in Belgium, Holland and West Germany.

Shilakoe’s career looked set to soar until his untimely death on September 7 1972 when he and Rakgoathe climbed into Shilakoe’s brand new Volkswagen kombi and drove through Soweto on route to see The Beatles’ movie Let it Be.

During his last visit to Rorke’s Drift, Shilakoe had done an etching of a tombstone entitled Time si (sic) Gone.

Of course, Shilakoe could have been grieving over the end of a fulfilling time spent at the art centre. However, for many of those he left behind who continue to lament his passing, it is perhaps more comforting to believe that this was a premonition and his way of coming to terms with his death.

• Cyprian Mpho Shilakoe Revisited: A Retrospective Exhibition is on at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until January 31 2008

watch unyazi of the bushveld right now on the web for free! courtesy of de witte doos online gallery. click here