by Vince Condesini

"Rules?" I hear you ask, with an accompanying snort of dismissal. "Art people despise rules! They trample on rules with the nonchalance of true iconoclasts!" The thing is, though, how is anyone going to know how iconoclastic you are unless you point out carefully which rules you so nonchalantly trample on?
All of which serves as a crucial introduction for those wishing to understand what on earth an artist's work is about. Clinging like a clam to any given work is the rule which the artist fondly believes themselves to be breaking. Sometimes, when you work out what the rule is, you might be duly impressed and feel inspired. (This sensation is mild and so if you want to realize you've just felt it you really need to concentrate. It is somewhere in the same league as the feeling you get when you remember where you put your bedsocks on a cold night, knowing of course that you have other bedsocks should the first pair have gone missing.)
On the other hand, you might feel that the artist is desperately insisting on the existence of a certain rule that nobody you've ever known would be worried about. In fact, you might feel that they had gone so far as to invent a rule purely so that they had something to be iconoclastic about. You might go further still, and wonder if the invention of this rule had not involved more molar-grinding, whiplash-inducing effort than the artwork itself.
Happily for the continued existence of art, though, you will soon see that this doesn't seem to bother anyone. Public perception as to the degree of fatuousness of the artist's rule will depend, not upon the actual existence of the rule, but upon the artist's confidence in convincing their audience (and most specifically their buyers) that the rule is a big challenge which they were very brave to overcome.
South Africa is really blessed in this regard, as our most influential buyers tend to come from overseas and don't really know which rules have influence in South African culture. They like to wistfully imagine the rules they dimly remember from when they did a chapter on South Africa while studying Politiekenenfilosofie in high school in Hambourg in 1974.
You might find the conversation of certain artists a bit hard to follow because they constantly mention rules which you find completely irrelevant. But, like all great art, you should not take this at face value but look instead for the subtexts being alluding to. What they usually actually mean is, "I know you think I haven't read a newspaper in years and have been living in a hole in the ground, but actually I am followed around all my life by a retinue of European collectors, and so my conversation consists entirely of reminding them which rules I am breaking. Or, to put it more pithily, I'm a whole lot more successful than you are, loser!"