By Linda Stupart

Listening to Ross Douglas’s press conference address, the phrase that was repeated with disarming regularity was “hard work”. The artists on show have WORKED HARD to craft this tirelessly constructed output with evidence everywhere in the intricate, well-made work at the art-fair. This was reiterated by the deadly-serious artists who feature on the Fair posters posing with tools of their apparent trades – leaning over sewing machines, working marble - generally being Artists, something that apparently means tiring over a hot mallet/paintbrush/block of something or other hour upon hour in a dark, lonely studio until a masterpiece emerges, imbued magically with these hours of toil.

Personally, though, I prefer to spend my time otherwise engaged. It’s not that I have anything against artists who have the luxury (be it through trust funds or fame) to spend all their time working on their art, and I know there are a lot of hardworking artists who do in fact toil tirelessly over things; I personally just have other things to do (earn money, run projects, have ideas, go for long walks on the beach etc) and I really don’t think that one has to spend time MAKING things to produce good art.

In fact, this particularly Protestant ideal of a great work ethic getting you into Heaven (or the Art Canon as it happens) really doesn’t sit well with me. I mean, other than the fact that many Great Works are no doubt produced quickly and easily, probably in some kind of inebriated state, surely we understand now that production does not only equal labour, particularly in the art world?

Thinking (god forbid), for example can create excellent works, recontextualising (remember Duchamp’s Fountain), collaging, consuming and, even, getting assistants to labour over your practical output (do you really think one man painted the Sistine Chapel? Ok, you probably do, but you’re e wrong). The thing is people like the idea that artists are hard-workers. And that they are very serious. And that they sit in their studios all day, taking breaks perhaps for the occasional coffee/whiskey/good cry before they go back to their work. But art really doesn’t work like that, especially in South Africa, where almost everyone has to work multitudes of jobs to have the luxury of being an Artist. And even beyond this reality, there needs to be an understanding that art is not the solo endeavor of a singular artistic genius, but a complex web of contributions and processes.

Consider Fluid, the apparently hugely laboured-over Grolsch work by Martli Jansen van Rensburg – a shiny green glass thing that seems to lack the very aboutness that should define what art is. I’m also, to be honest not particularly convinced by Boshoff’s Fair work (which lacks the conceptual and phenomelogical prowess of his usual offerings), and certainly not the utterly vacuous replication of a Madiba portrait by Paul Emsley (but it’s so realistic, it must have taken him AGES etc.)

In essence,

Hard work ≠ Good Art.

‘Working is a Bad Job’s a 1993 work by Maurizio Cattelan in which he rented his substantial space at the Venice Biennale to the advertiser willing to pay the highest price for the prime spot.