And the Cape 09 criticism begins. Joburg Art Fair director Ross Douglas, in an article for this week's Mail & Guardian, dropped the following subtle yet scathing bomb:

"In May last year we sat to plan the 2009 fair. With the absence of a biennale or any other perennial contemporary art show in the country, there was an opportunity for our fair to play a bigger role than providing only a market for art from the continent."

He drives the point home later with:

"As the art world focuses more sharply on value, art from Africa will become of greater interest. To capitalise on this opportunity we need to create art events that last long enough to become part of the international art calendar. The start and collapse of the Johannesburg Biennale and the stillbirth of Cape Africa Platform reinforce negative perceptions of Africa."

Eina.

Labels: Cape 09, Joburg art fair, Ross Douglas

artheat is happy to announce that Brenden Gray says he takes it all back and so we are going to be friends now. Goody, we say. Tea and buns and strawberry jam all round.

Labels: Art South Africa, artheat, Brenden Gray, Joburg art fair

This from Brenden Gray's blog on the Art South Africa website. I'm gobsmacked.

I am tired of the methodology of the likes of Avant-Car Guard, Art Heat and the cartoons of Lizze Littlewort. It is boring to see the adolescence of this self-professed avant-garde pissing in the little puddle that is the South African Art scene. The first problem is these pathetic personas, which remove these practitioners from the very self-interestedness they attack other practitioners of having. At least regular artists use their own names and are unashamed of their aesthetic commitments. To me, they are parasites on the back of artistic integrity, offering little but light entertainment on the dynamics of the art industry. A someone who is somewhat addicted to criticizing the self-interestedness of the field of cultural production, I have realized that this is pretty standard stuff, hardly avant-garde and once you have unmasked the ideology at play in the art industry, there is very little else original to say. I am not arguing that that the game of art should not be critiqued and provoked but this purile pseudo-avant-gardism really has no substance. The Daily Artheat at the fair ("It Ain't Art And It Ain't Fair"), had clearly run out of steam by Sunday, offering little in the way of incisive criticism. What the team of photocopy collage experts did manage to achieve was implicit endorsements of artists that they liked at the Fair (Robin Rhode, Avant Car Guard et al). Here they aligned themselves with practitioners who they profess are like them, which is hardly true. A real critic is able to critique the base of their own power, rather than reproducing their own privilege. I am so pleased to see that Avant Car Guard sold work at the fair, lubricating the sale with the spectacle of inviting the Johannesburg Gospel Choir to dance on the grave of Kendell Geers. I wonder if Geers cares now that he has ejected himself out of this purile game of provocation? I will look forward to the day when I can dance on their self-dug graves as they achieve success and find their rightful place in the privilege of the establishment.

Brenden Gray

Labels: I think I'm going to be sick, Joburg art fair

Michael Smith
-------------
Lizza

My goodness, I'm really amazed by you people. Does it not ever occur to you that different people have different ways of contributing to the discussion, and that all of them are valuable? If Artheat has managed to make a few people think and talk about art during the fair then it has done a good job. I have no doubt that is why the organisers were interested in having us there... to provide a variety of voices. We worked very hard to present food for thought in the style in which we enjoy doing so, which I do not regard as the slightest bit subversive. I think it is more or less impossible to be subversive as an artist, after all the debates which have been raised up till this point in history. Your negativity and resentment does not bode well for your willingness to build a strong artworld for all of us, as you seem only to condone your own kind of message. Perhaps you would also like to prohibit the use of editorial cartoons in newspapers because they are, God forbid, funny, and have them all replaced with tweedy, windy little essays by yourselves.
--------------------

Michael Smith

Yes, Lizza, one hundred percent correct. Watch your local press for a book-burning endorsed by 'us people'.

Labels: Art South Africa, artthrob, Brenden Gray, Joburg art fair, Michael Smith

Labels: Joburg art fair, Lizza

by Robert Sloon

When I went to Spier Contemporary in Cape Town last year (it opens at JAG tonight), only one work has stuck with me, and I think with almost everyone else who saw it. Andrew Putter’s Secretly I Will Love You More is a video based on a painting, a classic Dutchy woman, middle-class and stern, who tenderly sings a Khoikhoi lullaby. The backstory is that of Maria Della Quellerie (Boet Van Riebeeck’s wife), who adopted a Khoikhoi girl. It has been seen and spoken about as a beautiful and delicate work, without polemic, about transcending race and prejudice through love. However, tender as the love of a mother is, it is also a role of power, stewardship and control. Maria is the colonial mother, exchanging a troubled but often two-sided love with her adopted child, while she fulfils her own desires. Her needs are far more creepy: she needs the exoticism of the foreign to normalise herself. By placing someone else as different and other, she makes herself superior, and justifies the power structures, and thereby her whole cultural identity, right down to that prim little bow. She needs the exotic more than she is willing to let on. This is why it is a secret love. Obviously, this incident takes place at the beginning of the colonial project, she is not aware of the destructive power of the new relationship she is developing. This is why she will love her more.
In an era of post-colonialism, or neo-colonialism, where financial control of ex-colonial nations has replaced political control, Maria is still gazing over us, softly singing her lullaby.
I found these two conflicting meanings of the work playing through my mind, as I thought about the commerce of art inherent to an art fair. Is the purchasing of black art by mostly white buyers from mostly white galleries a search for exoticism, and is that exoticism becoming crystallised by the acceptance of money into the bargain? (Curiously, one of the few black owned galleries, Gallery Momo, was showing work by Johannes Phokela, which makes a concerted effort to exoticize white culture. I hope it sold well.) Or is the purchasing a love that transcends race and prejudice? Or just an investment, a smart one considering that the art market is fluctuating less than many others? Does holding the fair in Africa negate the neo-colonial aspect?
I’m not trying to make anyone paranoid about their motives for buying art, or even, god forbid, discourage them. Indeed, as an artist I secretly need your exotic money. But rather I want to encourage the idea of fair trade, like we have in the coffee industry. Fair trade, to me, is about being knowledgeable of what your capital is doing. Not just buying what you like, but what is good too.

Labels: andrew putter, Joburg art fair

by Robert Sloon

It is indubitable that we live in a world where the flow of information is a prevailing current, in terms of business, in terms of politics and in terms of culture. It is also indubitable that this has made the world a far more paranoid place. The more information we have access to, the more the information we are lacking shows up. Information can be a veiled threat. It has been said that we live in an age of conspiracy, in which we try desperately to make links between multitudes of data that don’ t always make logical sense.
Art, like many things, can be seen as a microcosm of this. It is a flow of visual information that is both global and local. For those who try and understand, or at least follow it, it can be a desperate scrabble to make sense of it all.
Lately, I have taken to reading spy novels. I love the intrigue, the plot, the research and the characters. But I have found too that they have provided me with a metaphor, or a model if you will, to understanding contemporary art production in a paranoid age.
My theory, perhaps espionage aesthetics, where aesthetics denotes a philosophy to understand art, borrows quite heavily from American curator Ralph Rugoff. In a famous exhibition in 1997, called Scene of the Crime, he used the theme of a detective to help understand postwar art, when art (and similar trends govern today’s production) was largely a recording of actions .Significantly, he cast the viewer as a detective, possessing “a scanning gaze able to sift through the details of a scene, to shuffle fragments of information that seem only haphazardly related”. The viewer was then responsible to solve it, not like a sum, but like a detective pulling together an interpretation from the clues.
I really liked this, and have found it useful to my understanding of how art works. However, in trying to understand contemporary art two vital points seemed missing. Firstly, artists, unlike criminals, are active collaborators in the leaving of clues. The passive, but violent, body of art didn’t quite fit. Secondly, the act of exchange, which is a major part of art was wholly absent. A more active, and perhaps more morally grey crime seemed to work better, that of espionage.
If we twist Ralph Rugoff’s metaphor slightly, we can imagine the spy master as the detective. The receiver of the micro-dot, of the purloined letter and the one who has a “scanning gaze” invterpreting the mounds of data. Here I imagine, if you have read any Le Carre, George Smiley sifting through the papers and his memory, in a desperate search for the elusive prize Karla. He turns the drudgery of beauracracy into an intellectual puzzle, one whose solutions are often inconclusive, but produce for him an intellectual pleasure. If we, the viewers, are George Smileys, the interpreters of disparate information, the artists are the secret agents.
The way agents communicate, out in the field, is through various methods: the dead drop, the hidden transmitter, the diplomatic bag, the secret compartment. What is significant is the agent actively obscures and encodes the information. The artist, similarly, is an active collaborater in the encoding of meaning.
Another important aspect is to look at the secret agents motive. The flow of information isn’t a one way, but a transaction. Some act out of idealism, a belief in an abstract, country, motherland, ideology, patriotism, or shall we say art. Others act for financial gain. And most for a bit of both. There is an committed and willing exchange.
Art operates as a Cold War. The question you need to ask yourself is where do you stand, and what are you fighting for.

Labels: espionage aesthetics, Joburg art fair

Robin Rhode's Empties as part of his Featured Artist exhibition

Labels: Joburg art fair, robin rhode

by Lizza Littlewort

Simon Njami is the curator of a big show central to this art fair. Let’s hope you noticed it. If not, you should get over there right now. Because Simon Njami is a massive big deal in the artworld, and he’s been brought out here specially because he is the reigning world expert on a huge thorny contradictory and guttingly painful chunk of global culture: curating contemporary African art. And here we are at the first contemporary African art fair in history.
Of course, even as I write these words I can hear the daggers being unsheathed by those in vehement disagreement, who think someone else knows better than Simon Njami. And there is a sharp edge given to their disagreement by the fact that Africa is a very, very complicated place. And something about the sheer self-serving intellectually frothy uselessness of art tends to foreground Africa’s complexity until it’s shouting in your face.
I asked a friend who knows a lot about contemporary African politics to let me know what she thought about art in Africa, and she had this to say:
“Art from Africa is necessarily going to be troubled by the commodification of suffering - off the top of my head, it sounds like there are two angles here: one is the skewed (and essentially colonial) relationship between the first and the third world, resulting in producers from Africa getting a pittance for efforts that would be rewarded a hundred times more were they produced in Europe/America etc, purely as a result of an unjust global economic system, with all its injustices and abuses and resulting trauma.
“The other angle is the representation aspect - representations of Africa and how this is distorted to fit the first world’s sensibilities, and therefore how this affects how art is produced on the African continent (i.e. because Africa is disadvantaged economically, Africans must make art that appeals to a European’s idea of African Art (pictures of starving children, joyful natives hoe-ing their way through cassava fields, clay pots etc). There is therefore less space for more ‘honest’ art, whatever that may be - this seems to be the preserve of those with a lot more economic power (e.g in SA the white middle classes, who essentially have gained their wealth through a colonial relationship with Africa anyway, or Africans who are living in Europe) who seem to use this opportunity to wank off, for the most part. Alas.
“Then I guess there’s the colonial/first world psyche and its need to imagine Africa in certain ways so as to cement and reinforce all its own ideas about itself....
“Sorry, I could go on for hours. And you know all this.
“Vomit/cry here.”
So Simon Njami is someone who takes on the arduous task of finding the way through and beyond all of this, and a lot of what he does consists of challenging stereotypes by introducing new ways of understanding Africa, and breaking down the separation of Africans from everyone else. Especially Europe, home of the imperialist nations. And yet one of the reasons Simon Njami is trusted to do this is that for many years he has lived in France, a major imperialist nation, so he is able to talk to Europeans through the medium of their own culture. And this is why they deem him sophisticated enough to do the job, which wouldn’t be trusted to a mere peasant from Africa. As the French president famously stated recently: “The African peasant, who for centuries has lived according to the seasons, whose ideal is to be in harmony with nature, has known only the eternal renewal of time via the endless repetition of the same actions and the same words. In this mentality, where everything always starts over again, there is no place for human adventure, nor for any idea of progress.”

And so the contradictions continue, and Simon Njami has his work cut out for him, and the daggers continue to sparkle as they catch the light.

Labels: Joburg art fair, Simon Njami

by Linda Stupart

Simon Njami is wearing his sunglasses inside a corner of one of the rooms of his black walled makeshift gallery. Scowling, and clad in minimal-vamp Modernist uniform, he camouflages well. It’s Friday midday and Njami is supervising the hanging of some paintings that are still not up on the walls. Next-door is an unopened box, a nice installation in the corner. A few hours later some more work has arrived and The Curator is doing a walkabout. I attend; eagerly awaiting some insight, though receive rather a sexy quiet drawl naming each artist and some vague facts about them.
Hard as it is to look past the curator’s rock star persona, As You Like It is a vital part of the Joburg Art Fair. Both a part of the bright lights, rank commerciality and slick consumability of the Art Fair and also enclosed in is own high-walled darkness, the mere fact of a curated show of African art intersecting a South African art fair is worth considerable thought. How does the notion of space function in this makeshift gallery within an exhibition hall in a conference centre? Perhaps the answer is mirrored in the place that South African artmaking situates itself within an African discourse, or maybe looks at the notions of how contemporary African production has been viewed by the ‘centre’ powers for centuries. Dark, and easy to bypass.
My favourite piece on the show was Bili Bidjocka’s video and print piece of the same series, The Jetlag Experiment – 24 Hours Watching the Mount Sainte Victore. The video shows, real time, 24 hours (presumably) of footage of this monolith that is such a popular icon of Provence and famous subject of the post-Impressionist, Cezanne. The projected image has a magical, hazy quality to it; appearing as if on a surface of glitter. On closer inspection, however, the screen is covered in white beads, lending the picture plane physical and cultural dimensionality. The printed images too use beads, here as a framing device, though in the harsh gallery light the beads seem clumsy and unnecessary, losing the subtlety that lends itself to that moment of discovery in the video piece and also taking away from the power of the images themselves.
Zen Marie’s video piece, Pakistanis Do Not Understand Simple Instructions was, in Marie’s usual style, simultaneously funny and disquieting. The piece shows footage from outside of Lords Cricket Grounds, the grounds’ colonial frieze forming the backdrop for everyday human interactions. Meanwhile, a voice seems to be discussing a close England Pakistan cricket match, including the sentence from which the work takes its title.
Another piece I enjoyed was Michéle Magema’s Overseas Stories – Mary and Bruck a Successful Integration Series. This installation shows a series of over-exposed almost identical posed wedding photographs. Bruck’s pale face is almost erased leaving a Cheshire Cat grin floating in the more demure and circumspect faces of his new black family.
These pieces were all successful for me because they manage to explore notions of identity, race and place with a wry humour that keeps their statements fresh and interesting. There was also a lot of other strong work on the show: particularly the beautiful, weighty photographs of Emeka Okereke and David Damoison. I found these pieces very hard to digest though, as the prints were stuck, unframed, on the badly painted black walls of a makeshift gallery within the context an art fair, where no one expects to really have to think hard about anything. Although this removal into ‘serious’ art would be welcomed in this context, I feel the illusion was just not convincing enough – the show lacking in a slickness and curatorial punch that one would expect from the organisers, Njami and the artists on board.
By the end of Friday, the ‘A’ of the show’s title had been removed from the outside wall, an installation has a piece of paper on the floor telling us installation will be complete by 9pm and He is still wearing his sunglasses.

Labels: As You Like It, Joburg art fair, Linda Stupart, Simon Njami

by Ronal Suresh Roberts

After soccer boss Irvin Khoza used of the word “kaffir”, some people demanded that the word be expunged from national discourse completely, while others have sought to confine use of the ‘K’ word to blacks only. In Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word Harvard Professor Randall Kennedy looks interestingly at the analogous American word. He concludes that the word should not be banned nor confined to use by black alone.
Instead, Kennedy suggests that, like all words, racial slurs take their true meaning from context. After Spike Lee objected to white colleague Quentin Tarantino’s use of “nigger” in his films, Kennedy countered that the Lee’s posture would “cast a protectionist pall over popular culture . . . [I]nstead of cordoning off racially defined areas of the culture and allowing them to be tilled only by persons of the ‘right’ race, we should work toward enlarging the common ground. . .”
Whites who use the word in its original sense as a racial slur, will face criticism and, in appropriate cases, legal action. But that hardly settles the vast, complex—and frankly more interesting—arena within which whites as well as blacks may use racial epithets in order to subvert racism rather than to practise it. A notable example here is Ed Young’s work, “Niggers Can’t Be Choosers”, which has numerous subversive and anti-racist implications, including Young’s protest against the cramped choice-lessness of any societally imposed “Nigger” status.
Well-meaning whites such as Young nevertheless undertake an enormous risk of misunderstanding and misinterpretation when they use racial epithets, given the slumbering and unruly beast that is public discourse. They may find themselves crudely attacked by the uncomprehending, as indeed Young himself was in the pages of City Press.
Kennedy himself gives the related example of a well-meaning Michigan basketball coach who during a half-time pep talk ranked his racially mixed team (with their permission) into “niggers” or “half-niggers” using the term, as did his black players themselves, to mean “a person who is fearless, mentally strong and tough”. The team defended their coach, but the broader community did not. After word leaked out, he was fired. Mark Twain repeatedly deploys the word “Nigger” as part of his critique of racism in Huckleberry Finn and only cretins (albeit cretins aplenty) have called Twain racist.
Such risks are however certainly worth taking. Writing in The Nation last February 22, the African American cultural critic, Patricia J Williams, drew attention to the work curated under the banner “Legacies” by the New-York Historical Society and the Studio Museum, in which contemporary artists reflected on slavery. One work was a short film by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. Williams explained: “It featured McCallum, who is white, and Tarry, who is black, configured as a ‘twinning doll’—a nineteenth-century toy that has two heads, one at each end of a common torso. At the doll’s waist is attached a long skirt or a cloak. Held vertically, the skirt falls and obscures one head. Flipped one way, it becomes a white doll. Turned upside down, the skirt falls the other way and suddenly it’s a black doll. In the film, McCallum and Tarry, joined at the waist by some feat of pixilated trickery and dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, flip head over head down a long dark marble corridor, first a white head, then a black head, first a white man, then a black woman, first a Thomas Jefferson, then a Sally Hemings. As they describe it, ‘the races are joined head to toe...continuously revealing and concealing one another.’”
We must be careful not to freeze the evolution of non-racial discourse by being overly panicked and too regulatory about the use of silly racial epithets.
Suresh says he earned two samoosas for this piece, one of which was consumed by editor Lizza Littlewort(h)

Labels: Joburg art fair, Ronald Suresh-Roberts

Labels: Joburg art fair

by Linda Stupart
A Report From the Floor

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. – Andy Warhol
A few days before I flew up to Johannesburg a fairly distraught friend of mine informed me that her gallerist was upping their commission to 50% for the Joburg Art Fair, almost 15% more than their standard as a very young Cape Town gallery. “And,” she continued, “they don’t want to raise the prices of my paintings too much because they were quite high already” ( high being approximately R4 000) leaving the artist with barely enough to cover her flight, accomadation and expenses to even attend the fair. This is not to demonise the gallery neccesarily, certainly Cape Town’s Whatiftheworld… is, as William Wells, director of the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, put it: “investing in their artists.”
This stand in particular is one that seems on the surface to be almost in antithesis to the general feeling of an art fair, or any fair – that is to make money. While the majority of galleries have made a conscious (and obvious) decision to bring desirable, sellable work, Whatiftheworld has chosen to fill half of their stall with a non-sellable installation by Julia Clark, from her Hypocrit’s Lament which was on show at Joao Ferreira last year. This risk is on some levels laudable of course, the bravery inherent in showing an unsellable work, as well as Rowan Smith’s fabulous and commercially un-viable Dot Matrix Loop, suggests that this gallery is prepared to take big risks in promoting their major artists. It does occur to me, however, that the rest of the gaellery’s stable is paying for Whatiftheworld…’s big favourites.
Mr Ferreira seemed more pragmatic view on money and the art fair. With experience at a number of international art fairs, he calls Joburg Art Fair “very hard,” discussing how most international art fairs fly gallerists and their work up to the venue, cover their accomadation and so on, and that the galleries from Cape Town particularly have had to lay out an huge amount of money for this venture. Salivating at their bits for months now, many of the Cape Town gallerists and dealers get hugely excited at the mere thought of a real art market. Although with the advent of big galleries like Goodman Cape the market has improved in the Mother City, the money is still firmly rooted in Joburg and galleries from the rest of South Africa are desperate to make contact with some of Johannesburg’s big collectors.
Of course, Joao says, the idea is to sell at an art fair and with luscious easily consumable prints and fun-sized paintings ranging from R 3 500 – R180 000, and featuring one of the hottest young contemporaries around, Bridget Baker, he should be fine. According to Joao, the organisers felt he should be able to turn one million rands with a stall the size of his. He aims to break even.
One of the hopes expressed by many at the art fair, and stated as an outright prediction by some, is that contemporary South African art prices are going to be raised across the board as a direct result of the Joburg Art Fair – with South Africa finally starting to take cognisence of the current international boom in the contemporary art market. One gallery who has already seen this interest in art from the continent is the October Gallery from London. “Africa’s hot,” gallery director, Chili Hawes, tells me in a Paris Hilton-esque fashion, “there’s no doubt about it” . Specialising in contemporary West African art in a city where the idea of a contemporary Africa is only now really taking hold, the October Gallery is host to some giants of the continent. When asked about their prices for the art fair Hawes tells me they are in line with international prices, and “hopes” that there is a market for these works here in South Africa.
From the other end of the continent, the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, comes to the fair as a sponsored invited guest. The director of this not-for-profit gallery, William Wells, spoke of the import of the art fair not only as a commercial venture, but also asa a way of gaining South African interest in artists from up North. When discussing our poor art market, Wells insisted that the South African maket is considerably bigger than theirs, saying “ We’ve spent the last three years just trying to get people to look at contemporary art!” I assured him we empathise.
Wells also re-iterated the importance of an African art market in a space where all the major buyers, artworks and often artists end up overseas. In particular he defined a problem that is perhaps particular to North Africa where the influx of contemporary art auctions and big money interest in the Middle East has meant that a lot of Egyptian artists are selling their work through auction at three times the price they could fetch through their local galleries, galleries that are “the lifeline of the artist”. Big money, but no show.
Finally I walked past Art On Paper, a Johannesburg gallery that on the whole seemed a lot calmer than the general fray. I overheard someone looking at a Conrad Botes print, saying, typically “hold on to that one, it will be worth something one day, one day soon”. It turns out, in fact, that Art on Paper have been dealing in Conrad Botes for the last eight years – selling his hand printed etchings for about R 200 eight years ago. Now his works at Art on Paper are gong for (what seems a very reasonable) R 8 000, making a lot of young collectors very happy.
Looking across the way at Michael Stevenson, I wondered how much Botes’ installation would go for there. The Joburg Art Fair allows a platform where, for the first time, one can make both national and international market comparisons and hope that when it’s all over, South Africa may come out on top. Remembering always, to quote Robert Hughes, “A fair price is the highest one a collector can be induced to pay.”

* Afterword: I finally managed to speak to Justin and Cameron, the directors of whatiftheworld late last night, after considerable interest in their artists, particularly Rowan Smith, and pretty good sales. In response to my question as to why take the risk of putting non-sellable work in their space, Justin replied “Not everyone is only interested in money, Linda. We also like the art.”

Labels: Joburg art fair

by Lizza Littlewort
Globally, the art market is experiencing a boom which just seems to go on and on, to the astonishment of all onlookers. Will the bubble last, will it burst, and if it does who will come crashing down in the carnage?
The bubble dates back to the 1980's when, according to Richard Feigen who lectured on it at the Harvard Business School, "art was monetised". It was then, he says, that "art began its transformation from luxury to fungible asset, from bagatelle to investment."
But that bubble burst in the mid '90's and it was assumed that there would never be another… until suddenly up it came, larger and stickier than ever. There were fears that it would be pricked by the sinking value of the dollar, but it appears that art, and specifically Western art, is not supported by the West alone. It is highly prized by the Chinese and the staggeringly wealthy Russian oligarchs, and could remain unruffled by major shifts in global economic power, as the buying population could keep following the patterns of emerging wealth.
One aspect of this bubble that seems to mystify and offend the huffily conservative Feigen, though, is that within the spectrum of art on sale, the greatest price hikes have not been in the old traditional works… the Titians, for example, which Feigen perceives as works of unimpeachable genius. He is mildly scandalised by the fact that the greatest area of growth in the art world is in contemporary art.
Feigen's view seems based on the lamentably common assumption that no mere mortal could possibly ever be as intelligent as an old master, despite modern intelligence being very much in evidence in areas outside of art. Even though Titian has been argued in retrospect as producing little but soft porn dressed up as a string of vacuous and vain Greek goddesses, it is the view of such as he that Culture with a Capital 'C' has been on the decline since the heyday of Socrates, and the moderns times which we are fated to actually live in are not significant enough to merit artistic reflection.
Fortunately, there are art collectors sophisticated enough to be able to understand a little more than this about the dialogue between contemporary life and the culture it generates. It is a difficult skill to achieve, as making serious money doesn't often leave a lot of time for cultural engagement of any depth. Traditionally, this role has only been achievable by those with very old wealth, but recently some perceptive and agile thinkers have pushed the boundaries of art collecting.
The most famously well-known of these is Charles Saatchi, the British advertising mogul, inspiration for a brand new art term, "Supercollector". Saatchi's collecting of contemporary art has been on such a scale that it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the staggering global rise in the value of contemporary art could be largely his doing. The stimulation produced by his adventurous buying has sharpened up energy levels in the whole world of contemporary art production, and inspired a growing number of Supercollectors. And this has had no small effect on a massive burst of interest in contemporary art, resulting in so may Biennales that there is one opening somewhere in the world every week of the year, and so many Art Fairs that they outnumber Biennales.
I'm sad to say that South Africa is, at this time, the world slowcoach at art collection. Probably largely due to forty years of dismal apartheid conservatism, we are comparable in our utter philistinism only with countries governed by draconian religious fundamentalists. It seems difficult to persuade our public that art has any validity at all, or any validity beyond the stodgy, anachronistic depiction of seascapes and vineyards. (Not to forget those lovely brass sculptures of the Big Five.) We are about as sophisticated as a cheesy theme park, and wouldn't know the difference between that and intelligent art if we fell over it. There are many great artists of international repute emerging from this country, but largely they are forced to forge careers abroad.
All of which is good news for some, as despite our conservative popular culture we have very good art schools, so that we are an almost completely untapped resource of new art of a high quality. It will be interesting to see what our first major international-scale contemporary art fair will bring to this strange and volatile circumstance.

Labels: Joburg art fair

by Lizza Littlewort

Art is useless. That there should be public institutions dedicated to the perpetuation of this arcane activity is laughable. Well, okay, it has one use. It can provide a bit of sensory pleasure. Some nice form and colour, tasty like a good cigar as we mix ourselves a drink at the end of another long day. But this ‘contemporary’ rubbish doesn’t provide any sensory pleasure. There’s no excuse for its existence at all.

Having fun qualified for chastisement (10 across)

Unless we get a bit better at pleasure. There are passive and active forms of pleasure. The passive form you sit back and it is all provided. The active form you participate. With contemporary art you are not given the answer, but only the clues, and like a sleuth you make your deductions. When the artwork is good, there is a keen and subtle thrill, a thinking person’s pleasure.
Consider for a moment the English tradition of crossword puzzles. They’re not much good at face value, unless you really like little squares. It’s in solving the clues that you get your pleasure. And what a subtle, intangible pleasure it is. Because crosswords take pleasure in the English language as a place to play. Anagrams, palindromes, words read backwards and upside down. Surface meanings, dual meanings, ambivalence, the sense in nonsense. And with it strange bytes of history, reversed cultural assumptions, embedded implications of other patterns of thought we only see in fleeting snatches.

Impossible to express in a four letter word? (9 down)

Solving crosswords is a culture with its own traditions. They are hard to explain, till you start to get them. “It’s not about what the words mean, it’s about what they don’t mean,” says Sandy Balfour’s girlfriend in Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose.
But yet the clues are not arbitrary. There is a structure which they obey, and through which they can be solved, and when one appreciates this structure one also begins to appreciate the peculiar mastery of the crossword setter, a mastery which had until this point been hidden.
And most of all, one begins to enjoy the game.

Labels: Joburg art fair

by Christian Nerf

Is it legal for an artist to use a pop track as part of their work? Is it legal for an artist to make a replica of an everyday product? Is it legal for an artist to re-edit Hollywood films? Is it legal for an artist to mimic another artist’s work? Strictly speaking, unless authorized, all of these acts are illegal and if the victims are so inclined they have the law on their side.

To the detriment of some we artists can and do all of the above. Then you, the collector, is offered our work by a gallery. Why should you think twice about acquiring it?

Artists, contrary to popular belief, are not outside the law and you are implicating yourself in our antisocial behaviour by endorsing it. Perhaps even viewing the work implicates you. Maybe artists that utilize appropriation as part of their praxis should be shut out, told off and reminded that freedom of expression is not a right but a privilege in today’s controlled world.

As the collector you aid and abet the thief, inspire the thief to continue and in some cases you are the very reason the work is being produced. I suggest next time you buy a contemporary artwork from a gallery you demand a 666-page legal document indemnifying you from any future legal action.

Nike has stolen Robin Rhodes’ work and BMW has stolen Gerhard Marx’s work but god forbid just anyone can write Fan Fiction. Even that, as it is derivative, is illegal.

Unfortunately for us visual artists Ms Justice is blind. Hold thumbs she doesn’t drag Damien Hirst out of his bed and stone him, whilst his weeping son Connor tries to take the blame for inspiring the 20-foot enlargement of a Science Set figure. Or tell Candice Breitz, Kathryn Smith and Elaine Sturtevant to fuck off and come back when they have something Original to offer. Oh and shut down ArtHeat while she is at it.

Koons lost a case in 1989 with the defence of fair use and parody but won another 7 years later based on the fair use defence. There are many cases you can Google. Question is do you want to be caught up in this area fraught with danger?

It is not only financial damages that the prosecutors will come after. Your freedom may be at stake, in the 90’s new laws were set up in America shifting certain copyright infringements into the felony bracket. If the neoconservatives have their way these draconian laws will be applied to us all soon enough.

One could argue that it is parody, fair use and not for financial gain. But this doesn’t wash in the eyes of the law or the corporations that take offence and when we are all part of the United States and their gavel falls so shall we; artists, gallerists and collectors. If the world continues on its current path we are all at risk of attending a new global art fair: Entartete Kunst ||.

Christian Nerf is an artist, public investigator and reprobate.

Labels: Joburg art fair

Instead of asking, as we all will be prone to during this week of money, what is the value of an artwork, ask what are the values of the critics, curators and artists. Instead of asking what the meaning of an artwork is, ask what the critic, curator and artist means. In a time where spin is as easy as sincerity, can we trust these people?

A polygraph test, more commonly referred to as a lie detector test, is considered a pretty reliable measure of sincerity, and the only scientific measure of truth. The test is performed by a professional analyst and a special machine which measures your pulse, respiration and the conductivity of your sweat. Abnormal changes in these three bodily functions indicate your body’s subconscious response to lying. Therefore, if we wanted to get accurate answers from an artist, critic or curator, and not just lip service to current trends, this would be a good way of doing it.

Anne Historical with the Joubert Park Project, in a ‘panel discussion’ entitled You Deserve The Truth, invited several art world specialists to submit themselves to a series of questions, while being polygraphed. These five people namely Sean O’Toole, Storm Janse Van Rensburg, Simon Njami, Lawrence Lemoana and myself were separately sealed off from the audience, but with a live video feed and asked to answer some pretty tough question about our relationship to art and to money. The results and analysis of the test were exhibited and put up for sale (price decided by the examinee).

My personal response to the experience of being mechanically interrogated was interesting, and very revealing of the nature of the project. Firstly, there was deception implicit in my appearing, as Robert Sloon is only an aspect of the idiot whose body we share. In short, I was lying before I even started. Secondly, there is the pressure of expectations, your own, as well as the audience’s: are you saying the right things. It’s embarrassing to be caught lying, and that is worse than a sociably unacceptable answer. The test caught very few lies, it rather forced participants into honesty.

The five questions asked were: Have you ever pretended to understand and artwork when you had no insight into it at all? Is your mother proud of what you do for a living? Is making money more important to you than making, curating, writing or selling good art? Is it alright that the primary market for contemporary art lies outside of the continent? Do you feel hopeful about your future? Keep a look out, as the answers as well as a graphic representation of the test will be up for sale at the fair.

Labels: Joburg art fair

Today, South Africa’s first international art fair opened. Everyone is excited. The galleries are bustling, the credit cards flashing. None of us is used to this kind of action. How do we understand an art fair and where do we situate it?

Art fairs are a distinctly different beast from other large scale art events. They are not biennales, of which South Africa and Africa have plenty, some more successful than others. A biennale often has a specific agenda from its director, it’s a curated show which aims to either showcase local offerings or establish a city/place as cultural hub and show that off. Art fairs are also not art competitions. These often function as a way for a corporate to establish its identity as liberal, cultural and creative. Essentially, they are an extended exercise in advertising, in which the artists do the work. They can be quite prestigious, someone ends up with a bunch of loot, but at the bottom line there is only one winner. Of course, both of these creatures generate audiences for art, and hopefully new ones.

An art fair has elements of both these things within it, but they are overshadowd by a fair’s funtionality. It is set up as a market, which although plays the showcasing role, and the advertising role, is mainly there to sell work. This is the bit that is exciting. There is faith from the organisers, backers and galleries, that our economy can sustain an enlarged art market. This bodes well for the industry, as everyone from the artist up relies on the sale of work to make a living (or at least would like to). A bigger market makes artists rich. The flip side of this industrialisation of culture. The commodification of the art object chips away at its integrity, turning intellectual capital into good old capital capital. The art object becomes reified, taking on meanings that are not intended. The artists respond to market forces, as opposed to cultural or intellectual forces, which cuts down on diversity and experimentation. This, in return, affects what a market has to offer. This is the beast with two backs, each needing each other to function, but slowly gnawing on each others innards. There is no solution to this conflict, except for each of us to be responsible for what we think, create and look at.

Labels: Joburg art fair

Labels: Joburg art fair, Nadine Gordimer, Peet Pienaar, Zen Marie

We found the perfect spot for stealing paintings from the art fair. Just drop a hook from the restaurant on the mezzanine straight into the storage space for Everard Read… if there's anything at Everard Read you'd want to steal. We doubt it. Although it's early days yet to see what the cheese factor of this fair's going to be. We can see it all from up here though, a bit like an airport lounge without the planes. Everyone's running around with ladders and the place stinks of wet PVA.

Let's face it, there is always a cheese factor at art fairs. They are the kinds of things that make you feel ill as they remind you of the full horror of what actually sells in this crass, crass world. But this art fair, so far, has my vote of approval. This could have been so wrong, but it's not, it's good.

People don't usually discuss what their allegiances are to those shadowy figures who are paying their bills, but frankly it is a subject I'm quite interested in talking about in our case: how did a couple of semi-employed layabouts from Artheat find the money to put out a daily paper at the Joburg Art Fair, or even to get to Joburg in the first place? Here's the facts: Artlogic (the Joburg Art Fair organisers) paid. Robert Sloon proposed the idea, and they said yes, and here we are.

What has really blown me away, in the sense of inspiring me in a very good way, is that that was the end of the discussion. Nobody from Artlogic has said a word to us again, except for organising loads of press passes. They're never once asked us what we are going to write about, or whether we are going to trash them or say anything that might compromise their corporate image. And weirdly enough, I don't even have to ask them to know that even if we said terrible things (and of course we will) they wouldn't give a damn. In fact they'd welcome it. Why? They understand the point of having a critical culture.

Now this may not seem like rocket science to you. Allowing there to be discussion is surely the route to a healthy and substantial art world. The strange thing is how pitifully few people realise this around here. We live in a culture strangled by the power of toadying corporate freaks. They are the funders, and they put their company stamp on everything they touch, till it reeks of office park cheese. They absolutely cannot see beyond the crap "team-building" that tries to force the entire nation into the kind of sport-jock mindset that makes stupid square-chinned boys into school prefects and ultimately leaders of men. They have striped shirts and blow-waved rugs and everything they ever say is a sporting platitude. "Playing ball, levelling the playing fields, shifting the goal posts, S.A.B." Oh fuck off fuck off please please please fuck off we are so-o-o-o-o tired of you.

I don't know if, bitching as we always do about everything, we have any idea how good it is that something like this is happening. The kinds of people who wouldn't give a shit if Spier Contemporary existed or not are going to come to this fair with their gold cards. And when they get here, there will be some really good art.

One of the ways the Art Fair is achieving this is by wheeling out two carefully-selected big guns, Simon Njami and Robin Rhode, to set the tone. Rhode is the art fair's featured artist, and has his own dedicated exhibition space, where he will be doing some very interesting stuff, if the press release is to be believed. It is all to do with billiard balls, and it's deep. More on this later.

Simon Njami is curating a biggish show in the centre of the art fair, featuring artists from the rest of Africa and some locals. At the press conference he talked a bit about the show, which should introduce some crucial debates into the art fair. He described this show as aiming to foreground and question the mechanisms of the market, by installing what he describes as a studio, in which the works on show have not been priced yet.

He said that this is an opportunity to rethink what art fairs are, because the possibility for doing this is inherent in the South African situation precisely because it is so dysfunctional.
This is where I thought uh-oh, here we go again. Another over-endowed European comes out here, thinks that this place is "fresh" because it's so goddamn chaotic. Then it begins to dawn on them how endemic and unsolvable the chaos really is and they throw their hands in the air yelling "I can't work like this!" and fuck off back where they came from.

So far, though, things are looking good. The feeling in the air is that this event is going to work, and if it does our artworld will never be as quite so debilitatingly sluggish ever again.

Labels: Joburg art fair

Everyone is busy at the Joburg Art Fair. Last minute prep, last minute deliveries and last minute copetition for storage space. ArtHeat is busy at the Art Fair too. We're up here, by the grace of Artlogic, to produce a daily rag, the Daily ArtHeat. If you're at the Fair, there'll be copies at the coffee shop, and wherever we can find free space. If you are not at the Fair, then don't despair. The full content will be posted here daily from the 14th to the 16th, as well as some online only extras.

Labels: artlogic, daily artheat, Joburg art fair