'Twas a busy week last week. Plenty of shows on, plus I'm making progress on the Relaunch of ArtHeat (keep your eyes open for that in the coming month: Big Party in the works). This is keeping my brain in a mush-like state, hence the general round-up.

In news, James Webb won ABSA l'Atelier, although it has been almost impossible to find this out. Very quiet web presence. Congratulations to him, though. I liked the Auto-hagiography work. The Gerard Sekoto prize went to Retha Ferguson, and I cannot find the winning work on-line. Or again, much presence at all.

Maybe next year, South Africa will have grown some black artists.

Monday saw the opening of Scratching the Surface Vol 1, at the AVA. Independently curated shows make me happy, and the quality of the last two shows at AVA show this well, Baring by Eunice Geustyn was good (not reviewed here owing to aforementioned mush), and this one by Gabi Ngcobo and Mwenya Kabwe of manje-manje projects, was complex and interesting, and at times frustrating and bleak. Good ingredients. I'm writing a full review elsewhere, so I can't say too much more, so here is a review by Miles Keylock.

Tuesday featured Rowan Smith's Future Shock Lost at Whatiftheworld. Think Arcade Fire's Neighbourhood #2 (Laika), but less whiny. A must see show. Again, I can't say too much more at this stage: the downside of being a rock star.

I dropped by the Bell-Roberts to catch the tail-end of their inaugural show, Between Meaning and Matter. Being a mostly oooh-look-who-we-got-in-our-stable-show, the title was on spot: it didn't mean much nor matter much. There was some really delicate sculptures by Philippe Bousquet, nice and unmonumental, and a funny video by Fahamu Pecou. My only regret is that I appeared to have missed a video by Jaques Coetzer, whose work I enjoy.

Labels: ava, Bell-Roberts, Gabi Ngcobo, mwenya kabwe, rowan smith, south african art, What if the world

Stitches: attaching two items, whether flaps of severed muscle or images in digital collage, the word applies to William Scarbrough's new work at the Bell-Roberts. The only stitches missing were the laughing kind, unfortunately. The only humour was a tad too macabre for any belly laughs. What was stitched? Pain and horror, war, pussy, Arabs, blood, chickens (the funny bit), dogs, lots of children and dolls, a cowboy and other bits and bobs culled from the media. Mostly gory and paired with a (mostly) balletic sense of composition, the images are appealing, make you want to look a little.
Of course this is pretty normal. From car crashes to the news to Saw, we love to look at this stuff. Whether we look at this to attain some sort of the sublime, or if it is a cathartic experience of someone else's problem is up for discussion. More likely, this work fulfills neither of these functions but rather is a criticism of the media which has desensitized us to the horror of these images. Which in the end disappointed me. Having seen two of William Scarborough's previous works (The Trials of Dr Kawalski and Reclamation), which presented a far subtler and better critique, and more emotionally moving, this resort to horror and gore seems a little crass.

On the other hand, the act of him collecting these images, over twelve years. The act of searching, cutting, collating and thinking of these images over such an extended period of time gives me the creeps, and drives the point home more than the collages did.

Labels: Bell-Roberts, william scarbrough

It was a hot day. If I may be permitted to use the vernacular, it was poes warm. I walked, my body feeling like it was wrapped in a rug, and my mouth got the privilege of sucking on a corner of it till I could scratch the word 'dry' on my tongue. It follows then that walking into Bell-Roberts was an amazing experience. The air-con softly purred. The unsweaty desk attendant gave me a gentle smiling nod. The tiles gleamed cleanly. This, my friends, was transcendence. Going beyond one state and emerging into another and fuck Kant and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (who, by the way, was cremated on an enormous pyre of sandalwood yesterday).

Talking of burning, Lyndi Sales show at the Bell-Roberts, TRANSIenT, contained lots of laser-cut materials. And she has pushed her cut aesthetic really far in this show, the imagery is more concise, and the materials smarter. I was stunned by Shatter, a huge simulation of a point of impact on glass cut out of air tickets. A bullet hole, or the first crack that ends up with you sucked into the void at 35 000ft. It was a simple metaphor, and very terrifying. It was when the metaphors started getting a little more wishywashy that I started to long for the heat outside. It's too easy to talk about death as a transient period, that's the crap that sells spiritual books by the planeful, made the above mentioned yogi a multi-billionaire and has kept Christians twisting our balls for years. Moving from quite a scary work to this wall text: "Lyndi Sales investigates the subject of transcendence from a personal perspective. The aeroplane journey acts as a metaphor for departures and arrivals. Flying becomes symbolic of transition, transcendence and a state of unpredictability. The tunnel of light scenario and the vortex are explored as a portal between the known and the unknown." I'm not convinced that this metaphor explores anything interesting in the process of dieing, it's not the messy corporeal dead body, nor is it personal grieving (although there is, I understand, an element of this in it, it doesn't read that way) both which could be interesting. Instead it's quasi spirituality, poetry of the type that glosses over our true fear of death.

(As a brief aside: When I saw this show advertised I read it first as TRANSLenT, which was odd because it opened on Lent, an odd Christian Ramadan thing. This illustrates the danger of using those weird pomo(ther) parent(theses) punning. My pen is heavy as I write this)

Labels: Bell-Roberts, lyndi sales

Photography is a boring medium. Advertising ruined it for all of us. And then along came assholes with digital cameras, whose lives are less interesting than Wolgang Tillmans, who thought we would like looking at pictures of their friends, their ceiling fans, the corner of their beds. No sense of design, of colour, of composition, of tone (and these terms can be applied conceptually as well as formally). In the words of my friend in Paris: Random Contemporary. It gets worse when the photographer has a social bent: Concerned Random Contemporary. Ew.

Svea Josephy's Twin Towns made me happy. It made me forget all the horror I'd seen. For starters, the images were exceptionally well planned and executed. Secondly, I got a free copy of the catalogue, so I'm obliged to write nice. And it managed to be interesting and political at the same town. Wow.

The basic premise of the show, as the title suggests, was to photograph towns in different places that are connected by their name. It sounds really simple, but the more you examine the prints, the more complicated it gets, to the point where the matchy matchy names are just a device to examine different social and economic realities. It throws up questions like why is Africa poor and Europe rich, what events allowed South Africa to be colonised. My favourite pair of images are the ones above, showing Hanover in Germany and Hanover Park in Cape Town, where two messy histories are shown: Hitler's Germany and the Afrikaner's South Africa.

What really draws one into the images however, is the amazing compositions and the perfect matching of compositions in the matching pairs. Lines and focal points are almost perfectly matched or mirrored in the images. And I'm sure it was no easy feat. This type of hook is so appealing in work, and it brought me back and back to reexamine each image, not even the Bell-Robert's fine wine could distract me.

Labels: Bell-Roberts, svea josephy

I'd missed the recent opening at Bell-Roberts owing to a swathe of worldly boredom, but in a lighter moment I decided to go and see what was happening. Maybe I was in a good mood, but I wasn't disappointed. I vaguely remember a charmingish show by Claire Sarembock at Bell-Roberts back when they were still situated on wild Loop Street, some sort of memoryidentityinabox stuff but nicely photographed and arranged. Her new show Time Can Whisper Here was interesting, although along a conceptually similar vein. On of my favourite aesthetics is the old photograph, and Claire used it here to good effect, cropping and digitally enlarging childhood photographs. There is a beautiful moment in a print when analogue and digital media collide, when the flaws, the grain and off-key colours of a small photo are printed in crystal exactness. And when you make anything bigger you heighten the emotions of the small thing, but obscure its nature at the same time. Very nice. Of course anyone's childhood photies can only hold one's attention for so long, and Ms Sarembock tried to soup it up with panels of large braille. On the one hand it serves to accentuate the impenetrable nature of the photos, as in only those who recognise the symbols can read it, but on the other hand, the one that doesn't read braille, one would have hoped for a more relevant element, a hook. Because as it stood they remained photies.
Off on the side gallery was a new show by Natasha Norman, who has been very busy lately being her second show in a month or so, albeit most of this work was (or closely resembled) her graduate work from a couple of years ago. I liked the work then and I still like it now. Think Malcolm Payne's Illuminated Manuscripts crossed with the Cosmo. Being largely about the language of advertising being based in sexuality, they are layered rich images, with pretty colour. The new prints on the show, which was a separate series, were less convincing. It's a slightly stymied approach, reworking renaissance paintings in a contemporary way with photographs, and I'm not sure how much beyond a pure aesthetic I could get out of it. It could have worked because the prints again were rich and opulent, but on closer inspection the photoshop work left something to be desired. This flaw pulled down the believability of the work, and with that illusion destroyed they looked flat. I would only like to see halos where they belong, gilt golden and glossy, and not as a thin fuzzy black line around a foot. Again like the last show by Natasha it's the fine details of finish that are letting the work down, and maybe a better idea would be to spread the shows a little wider apart and getting it perfect.

Labels: Bell-Roberts, claire sarembock, natasha norman

I dropped by the Bell-Roberts this morning, en route to my studio. It was nice to go see a show way after the opening, which I missed because I was stupid last week. These things happen after a long winter, one tends to get caught up worrying about global warming and forget about other important things like leaving the house/bed/blanket. And when one does get out it is all too exciting, and one could end up with a curious, not to mention mysterious, moustache shaved on your face. Early Friday parties are bad, people.

Back to the show. In the Cube section, I was pleasantly surprised to see a video work by Ryan McGinley, the New York photographer, rising star, and contender for the Nan Goldin/Wolfgang Tillmans throne. I have always been partial to that style of photography, it always gives me a sense of happiness and innocence and idealism. Idealism especially, like neither the photographer or subjects are aware or care about the deathly gentrifying power of photography. A similar idealism exists in the video work called Urban Mobility (a strange title, which I'll get to later). The couple, happy, naked, are cycling through the famous farm Woodstock. They are playfully aware of the camera, but are so enamored with the dreamlike state of bliss that it doesn't matter. The video reads like a yearning for a simpler life. What makes it a little weird, and it's a complex issue, is the sponsorship of the video by PUMA, as part of their new campaign called Urban Mobility. On the one hand, corporate sponsorship of art is positive, a way of making money for artists, and a way for the art to reach a wider audience. Kudos to these concepts. It's just a little odd, in the idyllic setting of the video, to see the girl has a PUMA bag attached to her handlebars. Subtle, subtle, it could just be their picnic lunch. But it just adds an unwelcome layer to an otherwise beautiful video. Still, before I read the title, it gave me a moment of happy.

Carol-Anne Gainer showed in the main gallery, but I'm a little unfocused right now, and it's still raining, so look out for a review later today/tomorrow.

Labels: Bell-Roberts, ryan mcginley, urban mobility

Wednesday night was one of those: twenty different openings but very little fun. Well three to be precise. We started at Bell-Roberts to get some of that fine fine Lourensford wine, which for some reason they've been stocking lately, and discovered some art inside. It turned out to be a series of paintings called Detached, by Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta, an artist from PE. It was kind of hard work, as I couldn't really squeeze out a theme, except some vague, tame urban issues (poor people, abused people). And also, even though the work had a bright graphic beauty, the painting itself was pretty shallow and clumsy. Maybe that's just what you get when you use acrylic. There was a good dose of bizarre humour, such as a man with a little dummy peepee, and a goat sucking a woman's breast, but it wasn't enough to keep me inside. I then had an argument with my girlfriend if the woman we had passed was Eris Silke, without realising she had come back outside and was standing behind me.


A quick run past Erdmann, but a long and boring speech was under construction, so onwards to blank, to see Gabi Ncgobo's Unwel’olude. Another show which left me a little conflicted. I liked the hair, which was used to form these very strong iconic images, a Pierneef (the centre piece), as well a bible, a gun, a bottle of Johnny Black and a penis. All which made niceish metaphors and questions(a hairy Pierneef? What does it mean to make a Pierneef out of black people's hair? Are we replacing the people in this picture bare of any humanity? A hairy revolver? What does this mean? etc). Until, on the third wall, there was three hairy ties, on glitter backgrounds. Qua? It stopped making sense, why those particular materials were being used. The hair is a good tactile material, but at what point does it become a signature style, bald of real significance.

Labels: Bell-Roberts, Blank, Gabi Ngcobo, Mxolisi Sapeta