kagablog

It is said that behind every successful publication stands a unique, strong-willed individual, someone whose distinctive personality helps to define it. Sean O’Toole investigates whether this is true of Scope, Loslyf and FHM.

Sometime in the mid-1980s. The men’s toilet (‘Whites only’) in a small engineering works on the bad side of Pretoria, out west – near the cement factory and the sewerage farm. Stacked on the musty windowsill above the cistern, a stack of magazines; their pages stiff from the sun. Only two to choose from: Scope and Car.

Where the latter reads like a heart surgeon’s manual, neat graphs and test results undressing the new Golf Gti Mk1 and Ford XR3, the former, well, it is something else. It is a magazine. Aside from the women in swimsuits, and this is a big aside, because that is where you invariably start and end, but aside from these women, all of them blessed with a fleshy plenitude and hard to pronounce names (like Siobhan), there are stories to read, pictures to look at, worlds to inhabit.

Stories about punk rockers in Durban, some of them with agitprop anti-apartheid ideals, others just dronklappe – perfect material for a standard nine prepared English speech. More conventionally, and besides the run of the mill travel stories and journalistic features, the magazine also includes record reviews. Reviews of vinyl long-players, the more outré stuff (The Birthday Party’s Mutiny EP and Diamanda Galas’ Litanies of Satan) diligently clipped out, each read and re-read, the act of reading a conscious substitute for never being able to hear or own the music. It is Pretoria, after all.

Strange, without even needing to Google their names, I can still recall most of Scope’s album reviewers: Richard Haslop, Martin Hendy, Jay Savage and Ian Kerkhof. Two of these writers are now dead. Hendy died in the 1980s, Kerkhof in 1999. Not that Kerkhof is really dead; he died symbolically, shedding the husk of his old self to become Aryan Kaganof.

You might know him as the author, most recently, of the book JJ Uselessly. It is his third novel, the first to be picked up by a mainstream publisher. The importance of Scope, and the discrete community of individuals that this Durban-based publication was home to, should not be overlooked. ‘My friend Martin Hendy was a passionate music lover,’ explains Kaganof on his blog (www.kagablog.com). ‘I met him at the Durban Chess Club in 1980. We became firm friends. Martin introduced me to so much great music I can’t even begin to enumerate how important he was for my development.’

The odd thing about magazine cultures, though, is how ephemeral and fleeting they are. In 1983, Kerkhof left South Africa to pursue filmmaking, his friend Hendy committing suicide a few years later; Haslop now writes a music column for Business Day; and Scope, well it got tossed into the proverbial dustbin of history as South Africa started the task of rewriting itself.

2005
A corner café on Pretoria’s Mitchell Street, not far from Iscor’s billowing smokestacks and the two concrete cooling towers nearby. While waiting for a toasted Dagwood, a quick detour to the magazine rack. Sure, Car and Scope are still up there, but by now the latter feels dated and ill defined, too gentrified to really titillate – a bit like Gentlemen’s Quarterly before it re-branded itself as an acronym.

As it is, there are choices now. Aside from For Women, which is, quite literally, for women, there is Loslyf, which is targeted at people who want the words surrounding the guava to be tough like biltong. And then, of course, there is Hustler, first of the big franchise titles to colonise the post-colony. Never mind what they say about our independence and all, way back in the infancy of our democracy Hustler was South Africa’s biggest selling magazine, shifting roughly 200 000 copies a month.

It was an unlikely success story for a publishing house that started out in the early 1980s producing sewing, cooking and music magazines. Founded by Joe Theron, his JT Publishing also unleashed the idiosyncratically local Loslyf, a magazine bearing the dubious honour of being the country’s first Afrikaans porn mag. The first edition caused something of a fuss, what with the kalgaat photos of a naked meisie standing in front of the Voortrekker Monument, the spare text explaining that she was descendent of Great Trek leader, Andries Hendrik Potgieter.

notion4In her recent book History After Apartheid (2004), the historian Annie Coombes remarks that years of state censorship and the emergence of an Afrikaner lower-middle-class constituency provided the necessary context for this bit of tomfoolery. Add to which the opprobrium of a gang of middle-class Afrikaner dissenters and intellectuals who provided the bulk of the editorial staff, notably Ryk Hattingh.

Before he became editor of Loslyf, Hattingh was a sub-editor on the Vrye Weekblad, a left-leaning newspaper founded by Max du Preez. In many ways the intellectual precursor to the hugely popular Bitterkomix duo of Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer, whom he later also collaborated with, Hattingh’s anti-establishment views were sharpened by a well-honed literary sensibility.

His 1988 play, Sing Jy Van Bomme, won him numerous awards, and as publisher of Hond, an Afrikaans language literary imprint, he released material by writer Koos Prinsloo, amongst others. The marriage of dissident literary thought with magazine publishing, which Hattingh briefly championed at Loslyf, is certainly nothing new.

Hugh Hefner did it at Playboy, this before he became a parody of the very idea of a playboy. Then there is Daniel Defoe. In 1703, the author of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe started The Review, the world’s first English magazine. A committed political pamphleteer, Defoe was even briefly imprisoned for his negative views on the Church of England. His magazine, which ran without interruption until 1713, established the template by which many magazines are still defined, namely the magazine as compendium of comment, criticism and opinion, the magazine as vehicle for influencing public taste. If Defoe made it okay for literary men to job in the land of pulp, Hattingh’s decision to follow in this mould certainly represented nothing new in South Africa.

Mike Nicol, a Cape Town-based novelist and crime writer, worked for Leadership during the 1980s, commissioning writers such as Zakes Mda. Recognising the peculiar role that magazines have played in this country’s creative writing, Nicol also wrote A Good-Looking Corpse (1991), a non-fiction account of the black writers, amongst them Can Themba, who came up through the ranks of the magazine Drum. Even David Goldblatt, who earlier this year was awarded the prestigious Hasselblad Award for Photography, cut his teeth in magazines.

From April 1964 until February 1965, he worked for South African Tatler, described as a society magazine for South Africa’s anglophile elite – think Style magazine. Goldblatt functioned as both a journalist and photographer, publishing his own feature articles, taking photographs, and even doing a series of fashion shoots. Nowadays, aside from writing books, Nicol teaches creative writing at UCT, and Goldblatt is internationally famous and exhibiting apace; neither works in magazines. As for Hattingh, who once said, ‘all writing is rewriting,’ he opted to bugger off to New Zealand, where he now reportedly owns a shoe shop.

2006
Exclusive Books. Located on the posh side of Pretoria, now Tshwane, the Menlyn Park branch of this upscale bookstore is tucked away in a large mall that can’t make up its mind whether it’s an ocean liner or an architectural wonder.

Unlike the windowsill in that factory toilet all those years ago, or the single magazine rack in that greasy corner café, there are magazines aplenty in this bookstore. Hundreds. Amongst the upstart local titles: Blink (or more correctly, BL!NK), a magazine pitched at ‘the quintessential suave Mzansi male’.

According to its founding editor, Simphiwe Mpye, Blink rejects the word buppie – ‘primarily because it implies that that person is a black clone of something created in a white world’. Looking over to that white world, which in print still vastly outnumbers the black world, it is hard not to miss Men’s Health, GQ or FHM. It is possible to collectively summarise all three in a nutshell: imported ideas slickly repackaged with a bit of local content. So much for the trailblazing efforts of Scope and Loslyf.

Ah well, globalisation won. When I interviewed him early last year, FHM’s editor-in-chief, Brendan Cooper, didn’t much like me calling his magazine Hustler-lite. ‘FHM is an up-market, premium men’s lifestyle magazine and is the market leader in this category by some distance,’ he stated. Formerly the editor of SL, Cooper has handed over the practicalities of editing FHM to Hagen Engler, a self-described ‘grease monkey in the workshop of verbal wizardry’.

Like Kaganof and Hattingh, Engler is an interesting proposition. Possibly less literary than the other two, in the posh sense of the word at least, he has nonetheless managed to garner an impressive cult following with his stoner fiction. Formerly from Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg-based Engler, a journalism graduate of Rhodes University, started out writing on a PE newspaper.

He is still widely remembered for his 1998 snapshot of the euphoric excesses of early post-apartheid South Africa, published under the title, ‘Ten Reasons Cape Town Can Fuck Off’. Amongst those reasons: ‘Everyone’s off their tits from drugs. It’s common knowledge that the only people in Cape Town who aren’t alcoholics, smackies, E-freaks, charlie-junkies, goofballs, acid-heads or nexus-fiends are Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Tunisian high commissioner.’

The goofiness of his fiction and commitment to a vernacular expression might not appeal to everyone, certainly not the establishment, but when has establishment buy-in ever been the sole criteria by which to judge a work of fiction. This in part explains Engler’s notion on ‘punk publishing,’ itself just a synonym for ‘doing it yourself’. In an interview with Michelle McGrane, English Poetry Editor of the South African literary website, Litnet, Engler elaborates: ‘In the punk publishing way, you write the book, edit it yourself, typeset it, print it, distribute it, plan a media strategy and sell it.’ Of course, the applause that accompanies DIY publishing is rarely deafening.

Which, ironically, accounts for why Engler is at FHM. Asked if he was not concerned that people might misread him as a writer while being a part of FHM, Engler responded: ‘I don’t mind. If people care enough to actually hold any opinion about me, then I’m thrilled.’ No doubt Kaganof and Hattingh would agree.

_Sean O’Toole is a Johannesburg-based writer and editor. He has never written for Scope, Loslyf or FHM

this article first published by enjin.co.za

In the mid to late 1990s, around time artist Stephen Hobbs was making a name for himself with a series of gritty, low-grade video recordings of inner city Johannesburg, actor Burt Reynolds was staging a comeback.

As audiences were marvelling at PT Anderson’s wayward masterpiece, Boogie Nights (1997), which stars Reynolds playing a caddish porn director, a doubtlessly embellished story started doing the rounds. It had to do with the cruel discourse of media success: asked how it felt to be back, Reynolds replied that he had never been gone.

The same is true of Hobbs. Since making 54 Stories (1999), a short video piece recorded by parachuting a camera down the centre of Ponte Tower, he has continued to live and work in Johannesburg. Like Reynolds, however, there was a time when the former Wits graduate was said to be lost in the woods, or to abbreviate things, gone. Many blamed it on his move from video to photography.

Hobbs retort: “The definitions around photography in this country are very limited.”

Rather than defer to these conservative definitions, Hobbs has over the past few years railed against them. A finalist for the 2003 DaimlerChrysler Award, Hobbs, whose ease into fatherhood hasn’t seen him grow his perpetually clean-shaven head, used the opportunity to construct a vast camouflaged wall display. Unlike Guy Tillim, who eventually won the award, Hobbs’ photos were anti-iconic and sometimes downright hard to even see.

“Rarely will one photograph serve as an essay,” he says of his approach to making pictures.

Equally significant is Hobbs’ argument that he is not a photographer.

“Photography is just one of the modes of expression I employ as an artist. It is not the definitive language that I’m interested in – it is part of an assemblage of languages.”

In September 2007, at Wits University’s makeshift Substation art gallery, Hobbs revealed just how adroit he is at moving between media – or, as he would put it, speaking in a new language. Titled High Voltage/ Low Voltage, this strikingly mature exhibition included small sculptural models made from dowel sticks, tie-straps and various found elements. It even included a homage, in the form a toy model, to his yellow VW Golf. Sat on plinths, these models suggested speculative architectural possibilities while offering wry commentary of urban utopianism.

The standout work, however, was also the largest. Two walls of mirrors, each decorated with grid-like tape designs, were held in place by rudimentary pine frames in the main exhibition area. Spotlights created a mesmerising display of reflected light and shadow. The optical experiments of contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson came to mind, as too a host of high Modernist ideas.

An elegant paean to Hobbs’ abiding muse, the city, this work also underscored a key point: “What I do in the free space of my artistic practice is to objectify, criticise, elevate, celebrate and pay homage to a city in flux.”

this review first appeared on gogol’s coat

an interesting blog worth watching

http://gogolscoat.blogspot.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this articler first appeared on artinfo.com

An Essay by Sean O’Toole
May 2008

Written words long outlast the emotions that give them form, weight and meaning as a text. We all know this, whether we have kneaded words in the rapture of love, or poked and prodded at them with the measured disdain of a stern editorialist. (We? Okay, me.) Either way, the intention is that those words, cajoled into order, will have affect. Why else write? Often, however, they don’t, the written word generally ending up travelling through time as an archaeological fossil, a remnant of some dead emotion. This might read like scepticism bleeding into cynicism, which I won’t contest, but it also provides the necessary context to Jean-Loup Pivin’s rousing editorial introducing the launch issue of Revue Noire.

“Revue Noire should be savoured on a shady terrace like a glass of ginger,” reads Pivin’s first sentence. I hate ginger, passionately, but I love these words. They gather together to deliver the perfect how-do-you-do: effortless and leisurely, but also faintly patrician, maybe even a little cloying, which is how lovers can sometimes be. Let me be clear here: the art world needs more people like Jean-Loup Pivin. He is a lover and an aesthete, not a hectoring bullyboy from academia.

“Revue Noire is not concerned with theorising on the universality of art or conceptual blocks or on an ever-forgotten continent,” his launch statement promised. Hallelujah, we sighed. “It is a wave of emotion riding back from the shores of Africa, bringing with it imprints, forms, movements of obvious power, from Africa as well as from the black lands of New York, London, Kingston and Paris.”

In retrospect, the first issue of Revue Noire announced itself in the language of a promissory note, which on a continent beleaguered by debt was a brave undertaking. Revue Noire, however, delivered on its binding promise, each successive issue arriving in waves of emotion. Like the seas, magazines have their highs and lows. Issue eleven, the stodgy South Africa edition, holds little interest for me; however, issue three, the one dedicated to Rotimi Fani Kayodé, does. Its language is prescient: “We are living in the epoch of an illness whose name doesn’t matter anymore; an illness which makes young talent fade away.” South Africa has seen so much young talent fade away, and still we wait for an obituary writer to acknowledge them - the aristocrats, as Pivin identified them, “bold and brilliant, but black”.

Revue Noire was established to celebrate blackness. I can’t help but get tripped up by this fact. I’m a white boy lost on the edge of a new centre. Lou Reed comes to mind: “Hey white boy, what you doin’ uptown? Hey white boy, you chasin’ our women around?” I take comfort in the fact that I wasn’t the only one getting tripped up by the ridiculous fact of pigmentation. When Revue Noire travelled to South Africa for issue eleven, the editors ended up doing racial head counts, “to make sure that a racial balance had been achieved”. I can dig this, because we still do here in South Africa, no matter, as Simon Njami wrote in his editorial to the South Africa issue, that this is “a sad, ridiculous confession to make”.

Revue Noire invites commentary. I this vein, I could praise its verbal economy, berate its quixotic design strategies, marvel at its audacity, celebrate its unapologetic diversity, even smile, with a hint of nostalgia, at the fashion spreads and forgotten names. For effect, I could also talk about how Pivin and Revue Noire’s successive editors were neutral, not neuters, how they delivered on Rajat Neogy’s insight that “a good literary magazine is like a blind man’s stick”. But this tilts things in favour of objectivity. Revue Noire was never neutral; it did not aim to satisfy the anthropologist’s gaze or the newsman’s curiosity. It was about love.

Paging through back issues of this magazine, three things are clear in my mind. I need to learn French. West Africa is far away. I must write with more love, no matter the restraint so much a part of my inheritance as a white writer in Africa. Love: it is an aching word. It embarrasses, partly because when we read it, it represents the husk of a long ago emotion. But love is danger, and bravery, something Pivin courted when he wrote, right at the start of things, that Revue Noire is “an unconditional act of love proving that beauty is our life and we all have the same trust for it”.

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this article re-published with kind permission of the author