Potlatch

THE POINT OF SALIENCY

Last week I decided during the course of the day to pay homage to that mile of art down in Woodstock stretching from Michael Stevenson burrowing then into the Goodman / South / Bell Roberts and then along to the WhatIFTheWorld.  Of course one of the best things about this Danish village at the edge of mighty Africa is the art scene; like a box of Quality Street on a rainy day–it’s there wrapped in all sizes and colors, ready to be consumed even critically when the rain goes away and sun begins to shine and the chocolates melt…And things get muddy.  But before I get to the meltdown, let me start with the beginning of the journey, like all good interdiscplinarians–not only content on walking to Woodstock from Town (only twenty five minutes) I took a bus from the Parade and got there in (ten minutes) for four rand and twenty cents.The best thing about the whole morning was Andrew Putter’s Hottentots Holland: Flora Carpesis, in facts it is the best thing in a long while. It is a photographic-digital series of Cape flower arranging; of history and identity that speaks not only of splendor but demands a kind of scrutiny, only to discover there is much ruin in the fynbos. I spent a long time just marveling at the work luckily bumping into Putter himself who for a few minutes paraded me back through his botanical banquet pointing out the stuffed caterpillar and the like… behind us, was Michael Stevenson who had David Goldblatt by the hand leading him through Goldblatt’s own work and it felt for moment like a movement, pointing towards something definitive in my own life, maybe pointing to my fascination with the world of art and artists.  I suspect, what I admire most in artists is this thing about saliency-making an imaginative point in an immediate frame… that is not really settled. This gentle like epiphany took a turn for the worse, later in the afternoon and early evening when I begrudgingly went on to the Michealis Graduate Show where once again its photographic division proved to be way ahead of everything else. In fact everything else blurred in comparison…the painting was smudgy, the conceptual work was so derivative that it didn’t even know who its was ripping off and in defense of this review I returned to the work twice to make sure someone had not spiked my drink the first time round.  I did have some favorites and they include: Lauren Fletcher, Ashley Miles, Michelle Ferris, Rob Water Meyer, Madeline Groenewald, Reginat van der merwe, Racine Williams… all making my preferred list because they projected an affected originality in producing the right amount of tension in the viewing… and as for the rest of the evening it was not just square and diverse like the box of chocolates metaphor that had been left too long in the sun but also beginning to appear drab and messy.  A week later I am little bit more cheerful and return to the art scene and the show was called Big Wednesday which in my mind had nothing to do with optimism and coming of age that the surf movie was so on about instead this was melancholic and little more like heroin chic than effervescence evoked by the spray in the golden bleached seventies film by John Milius. In regards to the shows content curated by Julia Rosa Clarke and Danny Levi I can find no fault, its was remarkably mature and exact but the point here was that it all felt exposed under the wrong title. Like Watership Down is actually a movie about Nazi U-Boats and not English Bunnies or Gone with Wiind is actually about flatulence then the epic drama of the America’s south.  You get my point don’t you?  It is all in the title….  Titles are almost everything…Later the entire crowd both artists and the crowd of viewers moved downstairs from the exhibit of Big Wednesday to the wonderfully atmospheric Albert Hall accommodating exactly what I feel about this scene, eccentric, strange and rather enjoyable.  Somehow, I only wish that there was someone amongst this reverie to frame the subjects like Grosz just to prove my point that sometimes the best thing about art is just living it.

(also posted on new blogsite on pythagorous tv)