Monday, September 26, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Fair trade: the FNB Joburg Art Fair in images
The close of a fair is inevitably met with mixed feelings: the staff manning booths can't wait to get out of their high heels, while gallerists who maybe haven't moved as many works as they had hoped to would prefer a bit more time to swipe credit cards and seal deals. For all the ups and downs of this year (the Dow in NYC has has its worst week since October 2008; our own currency wants to know where it is going and why it is in a handbasket), most involved in the 2011 edition of the FNB Joburg Art Fair agree that the results are more positive than negative.
Art fairs are chiefly about bottom-line thinking, with many galleries having already spent long dollars to get themselves and their work on show before the first patrons trickle through the turnstiles: packaging, shipping and insurance bills quickly mount up, as do the costs of keeping one's staff in cappuccinos and margherita pizzas. If the title plaques don't start bleeding red dots quickly enough, galleries begin to stare down the barrel of considerable losses.
But for all the pressure and hard-sell dressed up as banter, the art fair also provides great opportunities for chatting, catching up, tracking artists' aesthetic shifts, buying books and generally schmoosing. This year an ArtThrob intern, Marc Barben, skulked around the fair unobtrusively on our dime, photographing the work and the people that made the fair memorable. See the results of his labour in this blog.
Art fairs are chiefly about bottom-line thinking, with many galleries having already spent long dollars to get themselves and their work on show before the first patrons trickle through the turnstiles: packaging, shipping and insurance bills quickly mount up, as do the costs of keeping one's staff in cappuccinos and margherita pizzas. If the title plaques don't start bleeding red dots quickly enough, galleries begin to stare down the barrel of considerable losses.
But for all the pressure and hard-sell dressed up as banter, the art fair also provides great opportunities for chatting, catching up, tracking artists' aesthetic shifts, buying books and generally schmoosing. This year an ArtThrob intern, Marc Barben, skulked around the fair unobtrusively on our dime, photographing the work and the people that made the fair memorable. See the results of his labour in this blog.
Friday, September 23, 2011
The FNB Joburg Art Fair opened last night for invited guests, and the event saw many galleries pulling out all the stops to secure the attention of the well-heeled crowds.
Hardest to ignore was Rooke Gallery, whose performance had Joachim Schonefeldt raising two flags while Linda Buthelezi of the Blk Jks played an indecipherable but rocking version of the national anthem on an electric guitar through an amplifier mounted on one of the flagpoles.
On a quieter tack but no less diverting is Fair artist Paul Emmanuel's mesmerising prints coupled with a strong, documentary-style accompanying film. The installation provides a welcome moment of focus among the polyphony of one-liners which art fairs inevitably, perhaps must, engender.
The Goodman Gallery has pulled out all the stops with a set of large-scale works by William Kentridge bedecking its booth's back wall, as well as a great bronze by Brett Murray from 2010 titled The Party vs. the People (see ArtThrob's Facebook page for an image of this). They're also taking chances on some younger turks, showing killer works by Colbert Mashile and Stuart Bird, which is great to see.
Stevenson once again shows its appetite for a focused approach to fairs, with a booth dedicated entirely to works by two of the gallery's stable, Wim Botha and Serge Alain Nitegeka. This is to great effect, the shard-like wings of Botha's sculptures playing off Nitegeka's sparse neo-minimal paintings with an aplomb absent at most other booths, many approaching an FMCG-style merchandising philosophy in their curating.
A similar approach is evident at Joao Ferreira, with the booth dominated by a body of new oils by Sanell Aggenbach.
My bias towards painters shows itself in my unofficial vote for the non-existent 'best-in-show' award: Michael Taylor's acrylic Bruised fraternity (2011) at Whatiftheworld shows this artist at full stride and with few currently able to rival his abilities.
At the entrance to the Fair last night I ran into Brenden Gray, academic, writer and sometime ArtThrob contributor. He suggested creating a 'map of migration', a study of whcih artists have shifted galleries since last year's Fair, and where they've moved to. This is a great idea, and is certainly the most gossipy fun you can have at the Fair without talking about Botox: has this artist fled gallery x because of slow or non-payment? Is the marketing at gallery y iffy, and can gallery z promise greater exposure? What kind of knock does a smaller gallery take when one of their startists ups and moves somewhere sunnier? At a Fair where safe bets seem to have prevailed, the subtext is often more interesting than the work...
Hardest to ignore was Rooke Gallery, whose performance had Joachim Schonefeldt raising two flags while Linda Buthelezi of the Blk Jks played an indecipherable but rocking version of the national anthem on an electric guitar through an amplifier mounted on one of the flagpoles.
On a quieter tack but no less diverting is Fair artist Paul Emmanuel's mesmerising prints coupled with a strong, documentary-style accompanying film. The installation provides a welcome moment of focus among the polyphony of one-liners which art fairs inevitably, perhaps must, engender.
The Goodman Gallery has pulled out all the stops with a set of large-scale works by William Kentridge bedecking its booth's back wall, as well as a great bronze by Brett Murray from 2010 titled The Party vs. the People (see ArtThrob's Facebook page for an image of this). They're also taking chances on some younger turks, showing killer works by Colbert Mashile and Stuart Bird, which is great to see.
Stevenson once again shows its appetite for a focused approach to fairs, with a booth dedicated entirely to works by two of the gallery's stable, Wim Botha and Serge Alain Nitegeka. This is to great effect, the shard-like wings of Botha's sculptures playing off Nitegeka's sparse neo-minimal paintings with an aplomb absent at most other booths, many approaching an FMCG-style merchandising philosophy in their curating.
A similar approach is evident at Joao Ferreira, with the booth dominated by a body of new oils by Sanell Aggenbach.
My bias towards painters shows itself in my unofficial vote for the non-existent 'best-in-show' award: Michael Taylor's acrylic Bruised fraternity (2011) at Whatiftheworld shows this artist at full stride and with few currently able to rival his abilities.
At the entrance to the Fair last night I ran into Brenden Gray, academic, writer and sometime ArtThrob contributor. He suggested creating a 'map of migration', a study of whcih artists have shifted galleries since last year's Fair, and where they've moved to. This is a great idea, and is certainly the most gossipy fun you can have at the Fair without talking about Botox: has this artist fled gallery x because of slow or non-payment? Is the marketing at gallery y iffy, and can gallery z promise greater exposure? What kind of knock does a smaller gallery take when one of their startists ups and moves somewhere sunnier? At a Fair where safe bets seem to have prevailed, the subtext is often more interesting than the work...
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