Posts Tagged ‘Art’
Veronique Untrashed
THE saga of Veronique’s rise to fame and immolation on the alter of popular appeal and rejection by mainstream culture does not stop with our fallout at the Bell Roberts gallery. Though the temper tantrums would last for over a year, she invariably found the wherewith-all to forgive those she perceived as betraying her vision of a narcissistic, Janus-headed pop-culture, driven to self-destruction, paranoia and drug-taking.
I was invited to a follow-up exhibition at Joao Ferrera, in which Veronique had pitched a tent and held the art-world hostage. SPEEDQUEEN & the SAMPLEGODS, and NAKED LUNCH – DISCO KITCHEN screamed the press release.
“Art detective VERONIQUE MALHERBE invites you to the shocking and funking etc etc.” in which a CD launch was combined with an art-exhibition and announcement of the immanent release of an autobiography.
Despite the labour, I found the carefully concocted fantasy slightly disturbing. Gone were the crowds that had literally cued. Instead we were treated to dinner, a very private affair in which the detritus of the last five years was dished up like a used sanitory pad.
A little harsh perhaps, but surely I am entitled to an opinion? At the peak of her career, Veronique did not have a biographer or even a catalogue to show for all the work which had epitomised the white, nineties counterculture. Despite all the media attention, not one art critic had bothered to inquire as to the progress of her “book” and the disappearance of a large body of work under the combined impact of 911 and several years of cultural antagonism.
Ashraf Jamal, the Hanif Kureishi of South Africa’s literary scene
THE man who produced the first serious attempt to fictionalize Observatory and the Cape Town art scene in a contemporary narrative, was saved from the gutter by his wife Christine, a wealthy heiress who later took her own life in mysterious circumstances — some say a protest against a stifling academic environment and the constant globetrotting of her husband.
Ashraf and I sit down at a local café – Le Petit Paris. It is 1995. Fresh back from San Francisco, I casually mention a novel in progress, The Fleshiton, a surrealistic orgy that is part Science Fiction novel, part romantic disaster. My final break-up with Rehane Abrahams has had devastating consequences and there is only one thing to do, regroup, plan ahead. Write the “great novel”.
We arrange a reading in the Tamboerskloof home of my actress sister, Carolyn. Needless to say, the academic is a little shocked. I have painted characters from a post-gender existence with a landscape that cross-references pop-culture, Aushwitz and the blues. Lindzi Rabinowitz and architect Johnny Jacobson are there, but my kabbalistic erotic fantasy fails to impress them.
Is Ed Young a Satanist?
Latest attempt at publicity
THE pretentious white-boy from Welkom who arrived on the Cape Town art scene during a millennial slump, had very little to show for himself except a big mouth. Young quickly made a name as an infamous rude-boy, whose method of operation was the hackneyed “art attack” involving one or more victims. (As one of his “victims” I believe I can report about such nefarious activities). Not content with sacrificing aesthetics and profit, Young took to bully boy stunts and conning the media into participating in what he called “conceptual art”. In reality Young disliked everything he saw. As columnist Suzy Bell who “bought” Bruce Gordon after being approached by Young in a scheme relates: “The problem with Ed is, he isn’t an artist. Not like Wayne Barker who was rude, had attitude but at the end of the day, produced the goods.”
With little to show for his visual arts degree purchased from Michaelis, Young was forced out of desperation into producing futile and sterile acts. Young even struck up a weird relationship with Ronald Suresh Roberts at the height of the scandal involving Robert’s defamation case against the Sunday Times. Whilst Roberts was being pilloried and depicted as a carpetbagger with his head up our second President’s behind, Ed chose to support Robert’s freedom to be unlikable.
Ed "Belzebub" Young's business card
Veronique and the Plundergods
VERONIQUE, the closest thing South Africa has to a female conceptual pop artist, plundered everything from late 20th century modern primitivism, to rock art feminism, literary theory, post-modernism and deconstruction.
It was this post-punk sensibility that first attracted me to her. Granted, she was one of the most striking creatures of her time with a European ramp modeling career under her belt, which had quickly been dumped for the off-beat allure of University of Cape Town’s Drama Deparment then still struggling to emerge out of the seventies and in a conceptual time-warp as far as the eighties were concerned.
V arrived suddenly at a house party I had thrown for an assortment of heads from UCT philosophy & classics. A truly bacchanalian event with a T. E. Lawrence 7 Pillars of Wisdom and Ecstasy theme which was meant to shock as well as enlighten the European sensibilities of the period. I had purposefully created an art happening in which a pastiche of ambient music, Brian Eno, and Psychic TV was interspersed with poetry recitals, astrological forecasts and food delivered by my younger brothers dressed as cheribum.
Needless to say, there was quite a bit of nudity. Diane George, my Latin tutor had taken the lead by revealing a breast or two. John Cooper (relative/non-relative of Cape Town anti-psychiatrist David Cooper) and Hume himself had taken off their kneck-ties and declaimed on Plato while Leonard Shapiro circulated manifestoes written up by the beatnik Sinclair Beiles.
Enter Veronique accompanied by playwrite Martin Jacklin and Camilla Kraft. She was like a women possessed and I was spellbound. The counterculture salon would continue along with a parade of boyfriends. I remember being invited to a V Christmas party the same year, which must have made it 1988. Not a single woman. Around a large dinner table sat 10 vaginocentric amorattas competing for V attention while we all contemplated the meaning of pumpkin fritters.
Bruce Wessels who would later become Fynn and then Serophin and I, we were all curiously involved in a publishing project along with Jonathan Garnham (Blank), a cultural precurser that had taken its cue from the missives of counterculture hero Tim Leary, the quixotically named Starseed Transmission after a cause which had began at Millbrook.
The exploration of consciousness in CT was inextricably involved in an underground movement that included anarchists, poets, classicists, conceptual artists, queers, draft-dodgers, pirates and mutineers. The late eighties and early nineties was a period of revolt and revolution for the RSA that would not settle down until the dramatic events of the first democratic election. Then Veronique moved to Johannesburg.
ART: Bull to Picasso’s Cows
PICASSO’s bulls reminds me of another bull story — apparently the same Marilyn Martin responsible for this years ground-breaking exhibition, curated a boycott-breaking show in Pinochet’s fascist Chile during the reign of apartheid president PW Botha no less. Amazing really how things have changed in the world of cultural fertilizer and South Africans are free, politically-speaking, to smell the visual delights, of arguably the world’s greatist Spanish artist, courtesy of, you guessed right, the French government.
The astonishing images can be found at Examples of Abstract Art from the University of Calgary.
Personally I could never figure out why historians go on about Picasso’s line drawing without discussing his depiction of women — a supreme mysogenist or just somebody too pissed to worry about the finer details of the female nude? I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
CULTURE: African Universality challenged by Picasso Criticism
IF IT were not for the seething acrimony of contemporary South African art criticism, the debate over Picasso’s alleged appropriation of African art forms — the accusation of theft leveled by Sandile Memela and the subsequent belligerent reportage by Donaldson — would have probably descended into polite satire — the culture of the absurd.
Instead of upbraiding the Pretoria News for its initial opinion piece, which had slammed Memela’s remarks for being: ‘more sad and pathetic than disturbing because they reveal an Afrocentrism clutching so desperately for something that it can claim as all its own.’ Memela chose rather to roast Donaldson’s admittedly egregious banter with yet another statement that inflamed the conservatives.
‘The voices that must have the final word are white. There is no room for the political and cultural critique by independent African voices on this contentious subject,’ Memela protested, in what one can only presume to be a sneaky piece of polemic calculated to bait former racists and cultural imperialists alike, but as it turned out, the imperialists and conservatives were right, having swallowed the hook, they would now witness the truth behind the Africanist position on Picasso, before the eyes of the world, or so it seems.
One can only commiserate with all those high-brow cocktail party-goers, those exhibition schlebs munching on pretzels while ineffectual cultural workers still slouch on the sidelines.
Regardless of cultural status, one still seeks common ground, and believing in the slow dance away from polarization. Yet again the public is enthralled by a debate of extremities — the neat binary opposition of the exclusive Africanist position vs vi die-hard Europhiles. An invariable extremism of tastes, a frenzy of aesthetic desires that see fit to ostracize certain Africans on the assumption that race is the determining factor in our identity as a nation; race and race alone is what will conclude this visual arts debate, thereby cementing the new African Renaissance and Globalism with a new flavour of pap, untouched by white hands?
For Memela, Africa can only be defined by what it is not. Africa can never be European, it must stand apart, and be purified like some dark continent only accessible to its original inhabitants. For Donaldson, the European Continent will always be the omega point of cultural discourse, while Africa must stand alone, like a poor, half-sister forever at the cocktail bar of discourse.
Memela on the other hand presumes that his own people are synonymous with the first peoples of our land, the Khoekhoe, the !Kung San, the Griqua; furthermore, that the ‘birthplace of humankind” is also the “cradle of civilization and only ‘African intellectuals’ may debate these issues. Donaldson moreover falls into the trap of a patronising snideness, an effete familiarity that can only bread contempt for the position of “white critics” on the sub-continent.
Turning Mamela’s attack upon Donaldson, in on itself however, may be considered a little disingenuous; it opens us all up to accusations of Eurocentricism and the harshest attack of all, of simply ‘being white’ regardless of ones skin tone. The very same kinds of attacks leveled at Memela by the conservatives, and now thrown about, in a circus of ritual absurdity that has begun to characterize popular debate in South Africa. One must therefore find another means of waging intellectual assault, perhaps the notion of universality spoken about by white intellectuals like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?
If the juxtaposition of Memela’s use of the term ‘African’ (in contradistinction to the use of the term ‘whites’ ) our own semantically starched trap, were not bad enough, Donaldson’s use of a simple phrase without any universal appeal, except perhaps to his own mother, has snowballed into a literal form of xenophobism, a negro-centric attack against so-called white Africans of European descent.
This kind of intellectual sparring inevitably results in hate speech, of the insidious kind outlawed by our constitution. It is pointless going back to that time when racists of all hues could launch verbal barbs with a flick of the wrist, without forethought or fear of censure. It is even less advantageous for pale critics and ebony-coloured bureaucrats to deploy the arguments of racists, in the attempt perhaps to better themselves and others, uplifting nothing except the hated ideology of the past.
Luke Human 1970-2005 An Artistic Existence
THERE is an existence worth contemplating and it is the existence of an artist. No ordinary artist, Luke Human embodied that capricious spirit of outrage against a system that denied the most fundamental human right – the right not to give a damn about anything, except being yourself. Luke was more than anything in the world, himself. His art was second nature and for what it’s worth, I could not bring myself to simply mollify his journey into “figurative expressionism” since so many figurative expressionists fall into a psychiatric ward of self-examination and fail to return with the goods.
If there was a failing it was that Luke was more of an artist, than a producer of artwork. As such, it is worth assessing what being an artist like Luke Human must have been. For one there was no sign of pretension and braggadocio which marks so many art-school graduates these days. No attempt to render likeable, easily digestible, commodity fetishes. Absolutely nothing of the decorative or banal. No, what Luke possessed was an uncanny ability to render portraits of ones own inner turmoil, the strife and crisis of ego we experience on a daily basis.
After sitting for one such portrait on New Years Eve in 2002, in his studio above Wellington Fruit Growers, I was amazed to see my features extracted like some rare inner monologue, and redrawn to perfection in the nether regions of Luke Human-ness. Today I would love to know if anything came from these preliminary sketches, that were bound to wash-up at various galleries, and always marketed as the act of sheer and utter raving lunacy, the life of an artist whose portfolio of work must have included a fair amount of studies of young girls from Bishopscourt and Constantia.
I hate to sound trivial, but the very thing which gave Luke his stormy impulsive personality turned out to be his finally undoing. With no formal schooling he turned to a variety of distractions to compensate. Among these were his drug-taking and liberality, mixed with a volley of understatement and self-praise, that issued forth many incantations into the night. I dare say that he was eventually done in by one of the many skollies and criminal types that must have provided Luke with a daily pharmacological sustenance for this, his most artistic of folly’s.
– DRL
Cape Town, 22-09-2005
