3 Comments:

 Chicken McNugget said...

there's no kind of art more fuckin loathesome than the kind that takes itself seriously when it's actually boring. Boring is that cold, stultifying feeling that creeps over you as you read Artthrob.

7:41 PM  

 zoon said...

Reproduced from the October 2005 issue of Artthrob:

Brett Kebble
by Clive van den Berg

Brett had a canny understanding of the contemporary. He was interested in what a post-apartheid generation of artists was thinking. He sensed that new formulations of language and new narratives were intertwined. When I became the curator for the 2004 Brett Kebble Art Awards and insisted on the removal of limits, precisely to let artists set their own boundaries and define their own ideas of art language, he understood and readily accepted the need for this. He intuitively knew that known and unknown artists were poised to say new things and that new narratives need new stages. New stages cost money. It is, after all, much easier to pretend that art always comes in a frame or can be displayed on a plinth, but Brett sensed that to limit the form of art was also to limit its capacity for new articulations. Thus he supported the complex and costly preparations needed to mount an exhibition that could display Nathaniel Stern's interactive installation as readily as Ntombi Nala's pots.

His notion of the contemporary was informed by a broader interest in local knowledge, or more particularly absences in local knowledge. He realised that continuations, and indeed recuperations of language and tradition, were as important as transgressions, particularly as our heritage had been so largely defined by cultural suppression and exclusion. Thus his interest in craft and rural artists was motivated by a belief that any rendering of our culture in a national competition had to embrace the pit-fired coiled pot as easily as the motion sensor or data projector.

He did not make the mistake of thinking that a particular medium defined the present, or that the avant-garde was geographically located. Whilst he was interested in the new - indeed this was almost a definition of his personality - he was also quick to make a judgement and see through artistic cant in the guise of the hip or slickly styled simulation. His capacity to see value in the quietest and most modest of works gave me a revealing insight into his multi-layered personality.

One of the things I most valued in Brett was the separation of his own taste from his responsibilities as a patron. He never let his preferences define or influence my role as a curator and his support for his curatorial staff was absolute. He was also a man whose taste was changing. From the last awards exhibition he bought photographs by Pieter Hugo, a large sculpture by Marco Cianfanelli, an installation by Tanya Poole and sculptures by Philip Rhikotso, artists who are at some distance from Irma Stern, Alexis Preller and Walter Battiss, whose works characterised his collection up until that point. His long-term vision was for a purpose-built building that could house contemporary work, a structure where interactive digital media could co-exist to advantage with painting, craft and other media.

Brett had the prescience to know that the country after apartheid needed private sponsorship for art. He also knew that central to the growth of culture and patronage was the expansion of an audience. He had a fine sense of the popular. His personality was a magnet for attention and this certainly contributed to the interest that the awards attracted last year, but equally his support for decisions about publicity, venue, the catalogue and indeed the character of the exhibition all contributed to the popularity of the show.

We have lost a man who was unafraid of risk. This was integral to his personality. It brought him as much controversy as it did success, but his capacity to take a chance was part of the equation when deciding to support the arts. A quality that made Brett especially valuable as a sponsor was the fact that he combined generosity with intelligence. He was open to possibility and embodied a sense of potential, a sense that change and renewal were part of the deal. Indeed he thrived on it. He wanted to learn and did indeed expand his knowledge of art and simultaneously increased the pleasure he found in it. He was sensitive to the capacity of art to enrich private experience but was also becoming increasingly conscious of the role that art could play in helping us define and know ourselves in a time of rapid cultural change.

Brett Kebble had one of the most agile minds that I ever encountered. His capacity to understand a subject, or for that matter an object, was extraordinary, something I came to value greatly in curating the art awards. He could switch with comfort and fluidity between art, music and commerce, weaving humour and mimicry into the flow. His ability to change conversational tone and mode was an index of his complexity but also spoke of his attitude about the relationship of art to life. He was uninterested in bracketing off culture. That is what I most valued.

Clive van den Berg is a Johannesburg-based artist and cultural activist. He served as curator of the the 2004 Brett Kebble Art Awards and occupies that position once again for the 2006 Awards


 

2:56 PM  

 moon said...

Does it make a difference if he stole all the money?
Does 'from whom' come into this? Was he a Robben Hood?

Hmm. Was the BKA perhjaps just a glam scam, a move designed to make Kebble look good in the eyes of those he was ripping off? In the minds of those who were queing up to be fleeced?

Is this why - if his death had not brought the whole thing crashing down- there was a rumour that Mr Jeff Koons had been bought to run or headline te next bigger biggest BKA?

Are we as an art community gullible, or what?

6:57 PM  

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