The ArtThrob Diary

Winging it... Wim Botha's works at Stevenson

2011-09-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

Stir it up: art fairs run on cappuccinos

2011-09-26T12:51:00.000-07:00

Everybody get up... Mary Sibande's sculpural installation at the FNB Joburg Art Fair 2011

2011-09-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

All about the vajayjay... Wayne Barker's installation at SMAC, FNB Joburg Art Fair 2011

2011-09-26T12:46:00.001-07:00

So jazzed about this... Sam Nhlengethwa at Goodman Gallery

2011-09-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

I need to take this: it might be a European collector... Goodman Gallery staff and visitor, FNB Joburg Art Fair 2011

2011-09-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

Bigger is better: various works on paper by William Kentridge at Goodman Gallery, FNB Joburg Art Fair 2011

2011-09-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

All at sea... Jake Aikman's painting at SMAC, FNB Joburg Art Fair 2011

2011-09-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

Fair trade: the FNB Joburg Art Fair in images

2011-09-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Put those hands where I can see them... Athi-Patra Ruga's Portrait of the Yellow-Bone at Whatiftheworld

2011-09-25T04:47:00.000-07:00

Pretty in pink... publicizing Frances Goodman' s Goodman Garage offsite installation

2011-09-25T04:45:00.000-07:00

Polishing a Turd: Kyle Morland's Fibonacci's Spiral at blank projects

2011-09-25T04:43:00.000-07:00

Painting the painter: Georgina Gratrix's portrait of Ian Grose

2011-09-25T04:42:00.000-07:00

No-one looks good in orange... Ian Grose's Lindsay paintings at the Wanted lounge

2011-09-25T04:40:00.000-07:00

Keeping his hand in... Ed Young's Arm-1

2011-09-25T04:37:00.000-07:00

In Maker's drawers: Avant Car Guard's prints

2011-09-25T04:32:00.000-07:00

Bag it... Dan Halter's Rifugiato Mappa Del Mondo At Whatiftheworld

2011-09-25T03:49:00.000-07:00

2011-09-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

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...

Chad's São Paulo Diary: Bienal Day 2

2010-10-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

Friday 28th October

The Bienal is sardine-packed with school kids today, as it has been every day. The educational department is fabulous, and they have teams of volunteers explaning the work to groups from pre-primary kids up to adults. Its incredibly nice to see (although screaming children can make it hard to concentrate on the art). This was our tour guide explaing Kendell Geers to us:

Three works really stood out for me today, and true to this Bienal all of them live and work in developing nations. Emily Jacir, an artist from Palestine, produced a work called Lydda Airport. The airport was once the largest in the British Empire, and she makes a gentle slow black-and-white-film around the old building. It takes its cue from two legends.

The first is the mysterious disappearance of a Hannibal, one of the largest passenger planes of the 1940's, which was based at the airport. It vanished one day over the Red Sea, without a trace of the plane, pilots or full complement of passengers. The second is the tale of Edmond Tamari, an airport official who received a message that he should take a bouquet to the airstrip and wait for Amelia Earhart. She never arrived. Recreations of these stories are set against a ruined and abandoned airport. I found the combiation of waiting, sadness and disappearance to be very moving, as a film and in the context of Palestine. A model of the airport was situated behind the film room:

Francis Alÿs produced a video called Tornado, in which he films himself running into tornados. With shaking camera and the sound clipping from the high speed winds, he runs over and over into the tornados. Its a mythical contest between a man and nature. A Sisyphean task. The video climaxes when he breaks through a wall of wind and dust and stands in the eye of the storm.

One hopes for some calm, some purpose to this useless task. But the quiet barely lasts a few seconds, before he spins out into the dust. Then a new loop begins. Alÿs has been working on this film for numerous years, and this accumulated time extends the one-liner element of the work.

Antonio Marcotela's work is about exchanges, time and economy. Something similar to Santiago Serra, but with a little more heart to it. Over a period of three yearshe visited the Santa Marta Acotica Jail in Mexico City. There, where people have time, but no ability to use it, he started a series of exchanges. He would undertake a task in the outside world for an inmate, and in return the uinmate would spend the same amount of time producing an artwork for the artist, though relating to the prison. An example, he tries to find the love of an inmates life, and the prisoner scratches out the centre of the Count of Monte Cristo.

The nice part about the work is that they are understated, and he doesn't show his parrt of the exchange. In another exchange he serenades a mans mother, or watches his childs first steps or finds someone's son. These are incredibly emotional works.

Chad's São Paulo Diary: The Fruit Man

2010-10-28T16:53:00.000-07:00

27 October

Biennale's are hard work. They should have them in cities where there is nothing else to see. Sahara Biennale, something like that. We headed off to the Mercado Municipal, the major food market in the city. On the way we stopped off at Benespa, the State Bank Building. Here they allow tourists up for a strictly cntrolled 5 minutes on their roof. You get the most fantastic views of the city. Three-hundred and sixty degree skyscrapers.

To get to the market you have to walk through the district of kitsch. Its cheap jewellery, cheap vases, a whole shop of imitation flowers to put in them and, bizarrely, costume shops. its absolutely bustling, like these are the things necessary for existence. Refreshingly, but annoyingly, there is no tourist junk (annoyingly because a t-shirt even mentioning São Paulo on it has become the holy grail of this trip.)

The food market is marginally less bustling, but no less bewildering. If you want some sense of authenticity to counter the madness outside, this is the place. Loops of chouriço, rolls of cheese, chewing tabacco and olives. Fresh rabbit, honey, pimentos, cashews, pickled garlic and bacalhau. The last is a type of salted cod, which is the market's speciality. Very salty but really good. Us eating all of the above:

The fruit was pretty amazing too. Shapes that are a far cry from the humble apple and colours to give a solid blow to your average mango's ego. I was just beginning to feel like a Paulista natural, when the fruit seller totally fleeced me. He tried to charge me R$ 80 (Reais is the currency here) for a strawberry dates and a mystery fruit. This is almost R360. Managed to bargain him down through hand gestures and scowly looks, but afterwards I realised I had still paid 4 times the right amount. Been grumbling about the sly fruit man all evening. Looking forward to heading back to the Bienal, where for a short time we can pretend to be free of mercantile capitalism.

Chad Rossouw's Sao Paulo Diary: Day One at the Biennale

2010-10-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

Wednesday 27th

Wow. Thats all I can say.

The last few days have been absolutely amazing.

The bienal is full of art, and it can be a little overwhelming to take it all in. Some works that have stood out are David Claerbout's The Algiers's Section of a Happy Moment. It's a single photograph of a man feeding seagulls on a rooftop in Algiers. Its a slideshow, which shows the same image from hundreds of different angles and viewpoints. Its a masterpiece of compositing, and complete freezing of every possible moment of the photograph.

Aernout Mik produced a silent film of a political gathering. Without any clues as to motivation or intent, he gestures of the crowd become very loaded and intense

Chantal Akerman produced a series of videos called D'est. Many of them are slow pans across the streets of Russian cities, during the early nineties. Very moving

Chilling in between stretches at the Biennale, in the Park Ibipeura

Joseph Kosuth: Amazingly boring in the flesh!

Chad's São Pualo Diary

2010-10-27T04:32:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, 27 October
Accursed Internet! Online but struggling to upload images. You can see some stuff on Facebook here; http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=544318&l=d123b1e7fb&id=623495290

Chad's São Paulo Diary: Computer Says No

2010-10-26T04:11:00.000-07:00

Struggling with connectivity today. Apparently a virus on my camera destroyed the computer at the hostel! I don't think it was me. Tomorrow morning I'll find an Internet Cafe, and put up a double post. Lots of action today.

Chad's São Paulo Diary: Bienal

2010-10-25T02:25:00.000-07:00

Monday 25th October

Even Sunday's in Sao Paulo are mad. Traffic, both human and cars, pack the streets. We woke up early, and did a little exploring of our neighbourhood before the madness. There's this strange graffitti everywhere called pixaçao. It's a mixture of gangland marking and bravado. You see this stuff on top of skyscrapers and other impossible places (apparently people literally abseil of the buildings). It looks kind of runic, or pictographic. At the 2008 Bienal, the one with the empty floor, pixaçao artists broke in tagged the whole interior. This year, some artists got invited especially (perhaps to avoid the problem through official inclusion). But more on that later.

Some relatively tame examples of pixaçao

The architecture here is really wild. My camera died in the afternoon, so some of the crazy Modernist stuff is going to be left to the imagination (though think strange cantilevers and raw concrete slabs). Here are some examples just from our neighbourhood:

The skyline is 360 degrees. Everywhere you look you see more and more buildings.

We walked down to the Bienal at around 9ish. It sits in the fabulous Parque do Ibirapuera in the Ciccillo Matarazzo pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer. This building is made for art.

I'll talk a bit more about the work on the Bienal when I have had a closer look. But here is a work by Ai Weiwei, Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals, consisting of oversize reproductions of the heads which used to adorn the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, before being destroyed in the Opium Wars:

Chilling after a hard days looking:

In the afternoon we went to Liberdade. It's the biggest Japanese community outside of Japan. There was a Sunday market, and I ate a fantastic Udon soup from a stall.

I'm not sure how I ordered this, because there is very little English spoken. Apparently, I have enough Portuguese to say "One Udon Soup , please."

And then home on the efficient metro.

I'll post some more images tonight, as we also managed to squeeze in a visit to the enormous Cathedral.

Chad´s São Paulo Diary: Wide-Eyed

2010-10-24T01:57:00.000-07:00

Sunday 24th October
It´s just before 7 in the morning, and I am uncharacteristically awake. This time zone thing is pretty bizarre.

First sight of Brazil coming into Guarulhos Airport

The flight was long and arduous, with the Wedding Singer on repeat, and a lot of cloud outside. But as we came down to land I got the first sight of Brazil. Green and hilly.

Things get interesting already: I lose my custom declaration form (How?) while one of my companions on the trip Mohau loses his passport in his pocket. But we get through alright, grab a couple of cabs and head out. The road from Guarulhos Airport to Sao Pãulois stunning, and really gives you a first sense of the city. High-rises in the distance, palm trees, and lush flowering purple green things. We´re staying pretty centrally in a suburb called Vila Mariana, and to get there we head through the centre of town. It´s awesome, an architect´s wet dream. Modernist brutalist concrete next to tiny colonial buildings, next to Japanese pagoda style stuff. The scale just keeps on shifting. And suddenly between two enormous shiny glass skyscrapers a little house straight from the Alps. I couldn´t get a good picture, because it was dusky and taxi-drivers here follow the archetype. They drive bloody fast. (In fact, even Saturday night traffic is crazy. Hundreds of cars speeding down central highways. Bridges and tunnels and crossovers)

Went for a wander around the streets and dinner, beer and sleep. Heading off to the Biennale tomorrow.

Some of my companions, drinking beer and shaking off the post-flight blues.

Chad Rossouw's São Paulo Diary: Pre-flight Jitters

2010-10-21T03:52:00.000-07:00

São Paulo is the seventh largest city in the world. You could fit half the population of South Africa into the city. Or 4 and a bit Jo'burgs.

It still hasn't really sunk in that I'll be flying out there on Saturday. But the ticket is booked, the money is changed, so I guess it is happening. I'm going as part of my Master's programme at Michaelis to see the Biennale. Its one of the major perks of this degree, and an exceptionally generous gesture from the school.

The São Paulo Biennale is one of the longest running and biggest biennales outside of the US or Europe. This seems really significant as an artist working outside of those spaces. After the 2008 Biennale was a strange beast (self-critical biennale with no budget) and not particularly well received, I'm curious to see what the curatorial team pulls together this year. The line up is massive, with more than 160 artists from around the world. The theme too is broad, dealing with the political in art. The title is "Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar" (There's always a cup of sea to sail in), a line from the poet Jorge de Lima. I'm going to try with this diary to share some of the experiences of the art and the city. I'll try and keep it fresh everyday with loads of pictures and interesting commentary.

Unless, of course, the caipirinha's get me.

K Smith in Moscow

2010-07-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

Kathryn Smith is the only South African-based participant in Qui Vive? II Moscow Biennale of Young Art, which opens in Moscow on July 1. The biennale will present the work of some 500 artists from all over the world, the majority from Russia and Europe, in a number of venues all over the city of Moscow. See http://www.youngart.ru/en/

Context
It was towards the end of 2009 when I received a notice requesting applications for a biennale in Moscow I had not heard of before. Called Qui Vive?, it was to be the second presentation of a biennale of ‘young’ art. I immediately warmed to the title, which means to be on the alert, vigilant; historically equivalent to “To whose party do you belong?'” or “Whose side do you support?” It seemed like the recipe for an interesting collection of work that would have something to say, a position to declare. I made an application without thinking too much about it. I was interested to visit Moscow (who wouldn’t be) and also to think about another version of my project ‘In Camera’ where I could work specifically with the story of Andrei Chikatilo (watch Chris Gerolmo’s haunting film Citizen X before you stumble onto any weird websites).

Some months later I was notified that the project was accepted, and would feature on Darya Pyrkina’s exhibition ‘Glob(E)scape’, to be installed at ArtPlay Design Centre. Some online research attempts did not produce very much, and having to rely on Google Translate to understand the Russian made for some amusing interludes. My communication with the organisers and their assistants was prompt and detailed, but did occasionally end up being a bit confusing, what with technical matters being discussed and translated back and forth between Russian and English. There was to be no support for flights, but the biennale would cover accommodation. Although they also offered to ship works, I wanted to make a new suite of drawings, which would mean carrying them as part of my luggage as their work would not be complete in time. After a pretty terrifying experience in Stockholm last year, presenting the same project (it worked out wonderfully but the communication with the gallery was extremely difficult), I also realised I would have to make what was an extremely hardware-heavy project much more portable and flexible than its previous iteration, and so set about trying to find out who could assist and I was confident that it would be an amazing experience regardless of what could go wrong. The biennale team are very young – in their early twenties – but seem to possess an admirable energy and will and I want to be a part of this.

June 14, 2010
It’s less than two weeks before I am supposed to arrive in Moscow and the promised support for my flight has not yet materialised. And I must still apply for a visa. What to do? Coming very close to cancelling the whole operation, the Dean’s office at the University of Stellenbosch comes to the rescue and I suddenly have a flight. They have never once let me down and I am grateful for such a supportive environment in which to work. The visa is no problem - the biennale have organised it through the Russian Ministry of Culture and the Russian consulate in Cape Town has a telex about my participation, so the process is hassle-free.

June 22, 2010
My flight departs on June 25 (3 days away) and I have just received an email from the biennale to say they have moved my venue to a space called Proekt Fabrika (the Factory Project). I check it out online and it looks great. Instead of staying in a hotel, I will now stay in the residency apartment of the project. This sounds perfect to me. I had never seen images of the other space, so it’s no real problem. The only worry is that I was initially planning a room of 20 sq/m, and this space is now 120sq/m! Fortunately I went a bit mad with the drawings and ended up making them far bigger, and making more, than I had anticipated. Now it seems I will not have to edit them. I still don’t have photographs of the space, only a floorplan, so I cannot see if there are clean walls, windows, or what condition it is in. I have assurance of technical support, but just in case, I pack a mini-toolkit and every conceivable manner of fixing the unframed drawings to whatever surface I can imagine.

Lists for the Listless

2010-05-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

by Paul Edmunds

I knew the 'plane was headed home when I caught sight of a Sunday Times headline in the galley. It could have been from 2 months ago: threat of strike action during the World Cup. After a mad dash through OR Thambo and a little hitch at customs, we boarded our connecting flight to Cape Town to find in front of us Archbishop Emeritus Tutu and behind us Badhi Chaabaaan, reminding us of the tightrope we walk, tautly strung and twitching side to side from hope to cynicism.

All of this gave me pause to reflect, and what I came up with is this, which I've named after a piece by Paul Krassner (thanks), but which, after 20 hours on an aircraft, may well have been called 'Lists for the Listing'.

Fauna (various):
- Red-tailed hawk
- Bluejays
- Northern Cardinals
- Two raccoons dozing in Central Park
- Debbie Harry
- Lenny Kaye
- Chipmonks (much smaller than I thought, more mouse than squirrel)
- Pinellated woodpecker

You can't see Lenny Kaye, but he's there, just behind Debbie Harry

Music we wigged out to:
- Apples in Stereo
- Generationals
- Jim Campilongo
- Andy Friedman
- Natalia Zukerman
- Holopaw

Weird but good weird:
- A ferret on a leash in a bicycle basket
- A symposium on the Grateful Dead and New York at the New York Society for Ethical Culture
- If you watch the Tony Awards you'll see me atop a rock in Central Park claiming to be 'King of the hill'. This should really be 'Other weird' but it's everyone's dream to be on TV in America, no?

Other weird:
- Artisanal pencil sharpening
- A bog roll ad compelling me to 'Enjoy the Go'. (OK. Thanks)
- Bathrooms in every restaurant have a sign that says: 'All employees must wash their hands before returning to work'. (If you look closely you'll see there's an asterix at the end, and then if you hunt around the bathroom you'll find its friend on a sign which states: 'All employers must have a sign which says "All employees must wash their hands before returning to work".') Honest.

This is a rip off! They do it for $11.50 down the road

Things I don't want to know:
- What exactly a 'Philly cheeseteak' is

Wild:
- Being rear-ended by a hipster on a brakeless fixed gear bike because I stopped at a red light
- Using the Dyson hand dryer at MoMA

A Dyson hand dryer on Monday

Museums of extraordinary interest (but you knew that):
Dia: Beacon
MoMA
The New York Historical Society

Artists I had previously not known or to whom I had paid less attention:
Meredith James
Hilary Berseth
Wes Lang
Marina Abramovic
The Romans
Sol LeWitt (doh!)

With that I leave you and extend, once more, my thanks to Jack Ginsberg and the Ampersand Foundation for the invaluable opportunity afforded to us. So long...

From the Left Bank to the Right Brain

2010-05-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

by Paul Edmunds

It was completely coincidental that I visited the Gagosian's 'Claude Monet: Late Work' and Pace Gallery's 'Carsten Nicolai: Moiré' on the same morning. Both artists ostensibly explore the optical experience, and, in retrospect, both have engaged with the nature of artmaking in their practice.

On paper, Carsten's was the show which should have really appealed to me. He has a bit of that left-brained, rational approach to making art that I like to think my practice shares. Nicolai is ostensibly very hip, involved with nightclubs, music, and makes whacky works with jellyfish and an architectural proposal so bold as to alter one of the city's sacred cows: Frank Lloyd Wright's untouchable Guggenheim.

The Guggenheim tomorrow (possibly)

With Monet, I guess, it depends who's asking.

I've never doubted that he was the father of modern painting, and all the work in that lineage, from Jackson Pollock to pure Greenbergian abstraction, has always appealed to me. That might have to do with how it was taught to me in art school, and that it seemed a lot more exciting than early Renaissance painting (in light of an earlier experience I may have to revise this too). On the other hand, his work is so darned pretty and we're taught to mistrust that. Also, it's not that far a leap from Monet to this:

Claude Monet: 'It wasn't me'

Or is it? Perhaps too much is made of the relationship between early experiments in photography and the gestural colour mélange characteristic of much Impressionism; and maybe this detracts from the likes of Monet whose painting appears so uncalculated and so born of an instinctive response to what he saw.

Carsten's monochromatic exploration of the moiré effect is doubtlessly engaging and provides plenty of visual candy for the likes of me. In one work he creates interference by stretching black chords across a wall, shining a light on them to produce parallel shadows behind. This light moves up and down on a track, causing the shadows to move. In addition, the 'wall' is actually made of latex which inflates and deflates continually causing the shadows to warp, sending shifting patterns of interference across the chords. A lot of trouble, but a bit contrived, perhaps?

Nicolai's claim that his work does the groundwork for scientific and aesthetic exploration of the effect is a little tenuous, and I remain uncertain of where he thinks this can go, and how it goes further than what anyone has done before. I'm not sure that he reaches a conclusion, and I'm not sure that leaving that up to the viewer is likely to yield any results.

Perhaps the work's value lies in the fact that Nicolai undertakes these experiments and sets up conditions for these experiences in an artmaking context. And it is great to see ink drawings, LED's, inflatable PVC walls and brain-warping computer graphics, but ultimately, it's a little like a sculpture at a science fair, only here the scientists are wearing black coats.

I don't think Monet set out to explore colour, light and surface in a predetermined way, it was just that the way he saw things, and how he articulated his observations, disassembled painting's conventions and reconstructed the practice in such a way as to explore its very nature. But he did this without putting a full stop (or a period, as we say here) at the end of his sentence. Now there's progress!

So, while the way may be fraught with uncertainty, some things are unchanging. Like happens all too often these days, I was reminded of my age at the Monet show when I found myself wondering what it cost to insure.

My very own theme park

2010-05-24T15:17:00.000-07:00

by Paul Edmunds

Went to the Museum of Art and Design on Columbus Circle where I saw a fantastic piece by Tim Hawkinson, and another by Alastair Mackie. Downstairs was an exhibition of bespoke handmade bicycles, including some beautiful machines by the inimitable Jeff Jones. Later I strolled up to the the New York Historical Society to pick up a button badge for the Dark Star Orchestra concert on Saturday night. Walked through Chelsea on my way back home and stopped in at a whole bunch of galleries. Made it home in time to listen to an interview with Joey Ramone on KEXP on the occasion of his would-be birthday. Went out to dinner at a vegan restaurant with a gallerist.

Did anyone say 'focus group'?

Tim Hawkinson, Point

Classic Rock

2010-05-18T07:02:00.000-07:00

by Paul Edmunds

There are some things they won't tell you about New York. Firstly, you'll need a five-sided spanner if you want to open up a fire hydrant for a summer shower. Secondly, if you go near a park in the summer, you will hear a saxophone. Something they will tell you though, wherever you go, is that youth is wasted on the young.

In order not to waste what there is left of my youth (not much, actually), we headed to the Met, largely, I will tell you, to see 'Big Bambu', this season's installation by New Jersey-based Mike and Doug Starn. I mean, what's not to like? A large sprawling bamboo structure atop a stuffy old museum? Made by guys with tattoos and named after an album by Cheech and Chong?

Big Bambu

The thing is, that was the less attractive part of our visit. We kind of got hung up on the Classical antiquities. Honestly. Hell, I learned about this in high school, in Art History and Latin (yes, I know, but it's not that surprising is it?), in History of Art at art school as well as in 'Classical Civilisation' which was most often taken by Fine Art students because it overlapped with History of Art. I really didn't pay much attention, it was just something to be got through.

In a later part of my receding youth I wandered the halls of the Louvre several times, which is not short of such antiquities either. It was vaguely interesting, I guess.

A Roman sculpture yesterday

So it was with great surprise that I felt myself so drawn to 2000 year old marble busts, lapidry, wall painting, and work in glass and gold. It felt like a glimpse into a world where artisanship was raised to supreme artistry, where patronage of the arts was quite the norm. It's well accepted that this was a society at its peak, and what remains is an invaluable record of such a society's cultural production. Oh, and Western society pretty much based its philosophy and law on theirs too.

The Starn ploy is brilliant. Draw crowds of people up through the museum (where many of them are led blankly by an iPhone held aloft) into this edgy, fresh construction on the rooftop where they can all feel important. Or as a woman I would call a 'kugel' back home, said into her phone as she walked past me with a glass of something bubbly: 'I am in heaven!'. The thing is, after all the extraordinary craftsmanship downstairs, and that glimpse into a society where life revolved around cultural production, the arts and philosophy, the bamboo construction looked kind of messy.

On the other hand, a couple of weeks ago we went out to listen to some music with a guy who knows about these things. After a very long pizza we set off on foot for The Living Room, passing by the Bowery Ballroom. Our host started begging the doorman there to let us have a peak inside, in the hope of catching whoever may have been playing. The doorman was almost too eager to let us in, as if to say, 'You asked for it'.

Onstage were rock 'n roll histrionics of the most dramatic and cliched sort. We caught the band in the midst of their grand apopleptic finale. While the bass player windmilled like Pete Townsend, the drummer beat up a storm and the androgynous lead singer slunk off stage, the guitarist somehow managed to climb up onto the venue's gallery where he began humping his guitar against the railings. With dramatic flair the singer reappeared wrapped in a large banner covered in pictures of himself. His face emerged jawa-style and he introduced the band, leaving himself for last:'Justin Fuckin' Stanter'.

We left there speechless with laughter and excitement, but able to appreciate with the benefit of our advanced years the self-belief and serious intentions of everyone there, as well as the shallow, unchecked energy of youth. The Living Room was an entirely different story. The Jim Campilongo Electric Trio were talented, funny and quite literally mind-warping, playing all styles of music but playing none of it straight (thanks to TONY for that description). It's hard to explain.

I got a little sad there, lamenting the fact that it doesn't really pay enough for anyone to be that good at home, and it doesn't pay enough to have that kind of sound system in a venue a little larger than a lounge. It's nothing like Ancient Rome. But then I remembered, some things don't change anywhere, at any time. Just the other day in a chichi little basement Mexican restaurant, I heard the Gypsy Kings.

I know what The Artist is getting for Christmas: I have felt her presence

2010-05-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

By Paul Edmunds

MoMA is currently recovering from a 'perfect storm', I'm told. My Inside Source tells me that such a storm is taking place for a number of reasons.

First and foremost amongst these was the Tim Burton show, which closed a week ago. So popular was this that visitors had to book entrance times once they had entered MoMA, and the show ran for 5 months, a very rare occurrence at the museum.

At the same time, the museum has been staging a major Marina Abramovic retrospective entitled 'The Artist is Present'. This includes a performance she has been staging since March 14, and some re-enactments of earlier pieces by ersatz Marina Abramovic's.

There is also a major Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective, and of most relevance to us, William Kentridge's 'Five Themes'.

And did I mention Picasso?

So, as my Inside Source states it, between the Tim Burton show, Picasso, one of the giants of 20th century photography, Kentridge, all the 'naked people upstairs' performing Abramovic's earlier works (including Imponderabilia where one is forced to squeeze between two naked strangers), and the artist's current performance which invites participation from visitors, the museum has seen upwards of 17 000 people passing through its doors daily. Of these, up to 6 000 have been visiting the Kentridge show.

The latter includes the wonderful model theatre playing Learning the Flute and the quite extraordinary, completely automated theatre and animated projection Black Box. I'm ashamed to say that I had previously seen neither of these works.

Getting back to Marina Abramovic, let me be upfront and say that I generally circle cautiously around performance work before approaching. I must be honest again and say that is largely due to my fear of 'audience participation' which is well founded. In one performance I found myself tied up by a topless woman (whom I knew, but not that well), and once I found myself with a Brazilian standing on my shoulder juggling burning torches.

Abramovic has completely changed me in that respect. However, I'm afraid she has taken the polish off any other performance I will ever see. The documentation of past works of hers, particularly the series she produced with Ulay, has been nothing short of illuminating. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that even such a hardened, non-romantic like myself was nearly reduced to a jibbering wreck when viewing the final work they produced together. It seemed, as I took it in, that the story of their collaboration was a love story wrought in a furnace the heat of which I have never encountered.

'The Artist is Present' (which you can view live here) is surprisingly powerful. This is in no small part due to Abramovic's presence, which is obviously an integral part of the work. A large portion of her performance hinges on her particular brand of presence, one which is both cerebrally and physically remarkable. She really does seem to occupy time and space in a particularly impressive and assertive fashion.

In this piece she sits on what seems to be a slightly over-sized chair facing, across a similarly scaled table, another such chair. It is here that visitors are invited to sit and engage her. She wore a long red dress on the day I visited, which dropped onto the floor and spread out, hiding her feet and contact with the ground completely.

It is in part a re-enactment of a work she did with Ulay, where the two sat opposite one another and looked into each other's eyes for some interminable period. Here, the interaction is something other than a staring match, but something more than a friendly engagement across a table. Abramovic has been there since March 14.

You can understand that a visitor, fears of audience participation aside, may want to engage with the artist whose presence is so tangible. You can probably understand too the desire that we each secretly harbour to be the one whose presence is such, the penetration of whose gaze is so powerful, that we break the artist's stride. This would really make us special.

Only one person has so far achieved this. Amir Baradaran engaged Abramovic in a work of his own entitled The Other Artist is Present. Even then, it was only when he proposed marriage that she reacted, and then it was with a smile.

My own visit to MoMA met with a little less success. My Inside Source offered us a ride in the Staff Elevator, which we accepted. The doors opened to reveal an elevator the size of a Gauteng garage. I stepped in to find only one other person there, and he was wearing the same shirt as me.

Mayday!

2010-05-05T05:38:00.000-07:00

So it was the first of May on Saturday, and to that end my lovely wife and I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, known as Sakura Matsuri. Possibly due to the very wet winter, most of the trees had lost their blossoms already but there was no lack of action.

We caught the end of a wildly energetic Taiko drumming set and also saw some 'Japanese Gypsy Rock' music which was better than it sounds. There were loads of kids, both Japanese and not, dressed as Manga characters and Harajuku boys and girls. We strolled around the beautiful Hill and Pond Garden, ate a slice of cherry pie and exchanged niceties with all the other people who were out enjoying a beautiful spring day.

The day's beauty and innocence were slightly disturbed by an unusual event however. Shortly after we had settled down on a soft grassy bank, some commotion roused me from my would-be-slumber.

I had heard about New York's red-tailed hawks before but never expected to encounter so gruesome a sighting as this. On a branch, metres away from me, landed a hawk with a very much twitching and very 'nonplussed' rodent of a large variety, a squirrel perhaps. Said hawk dispatched his lunch without ceremony and tucked into some hors d'oeuvres before moving off to another spot where he was not the subject of 250 cameras wielded by a bunch of Harajuku and Russian tourists. My favourite NYC blogger captured a similar event recently:

New York's most famous Red-Tailed Hawk is known as Pale Male and he has been nesting on a very chichi 5th Avenue building adjacent to Central Park since 2002. Pale Male has apparently sired 26 chicks with several mates over the years. The building's owners were a little 'nonplussed' about this at some point, and removed the nest, before being seiged by a barrage of twitching New Yorkers (including Mary Tyler Moore), who demanded the return and preservation of Pale Male's abode.

Talk of blond birds brings me to the next item on my busy calendar last Saturday - Debbie Harry. After attending a Maypole dance, I followed the procession of dancers to Deitch Projects for the Shepard Fairey opening. He's the guy who produced this image when Courtney Love was sentenced to Anger Management classes:

And this, when the Obama kids were petitioning Pops for a Portugese water dog:

New Yorkers are not afraid to stand 'on line', as they say, and this they were doing in great numbers in order to get a glimpse of the work. The line snaked three deep all the way around the block and didn't appear to be moving. Deitch Projects closes after this show and director Jeffery Deitch is moving to LA to take up his post at MOCA there, so I guess this is part of the reason for the excitement. Besides, New York has always done pretty well at elevating artists from the street to the gallery; see Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat for example.

I had a Dim Sum date later and I'm not as good as standing 'on line' as New Yorkers, so I retired to the doorway of an abandoned building across the road to watch the parade (This doorway, incidentally, did not reek of piss, and I attribute this either to Giuliani or the fact that New Yorkers have bladders like airships.)

I was joined there by a girl from New York and her boyfriend from Milan. It was he who identified Lapo Elkann, 'playboy' and heir to the Fiat fortune, as the driver who pulled up in a Ferrari and parked badly in a spot just vacated by a black SUV that appeared to placemarking for him.

This was not nearly as exciting as Debbie Harry though. I would say she was tottering on vertiginous heels, but so broken up is the surface of Wooster Street, that you would even totter in a pair of Whoppers. I didn't really see what she was wearing to be honest, but it certainly wasn't this.

It was then that I realised I was ahead and should quit. I had hoped to meet Shepard and propose that we collaborate on a work. In his absence I've just gone ahead by myself, and here's what I came up with:

Paul Edmunds, New York 2010

You're all invited!

2009-09-24T05:46:00.000-07:00

Barely a week after I ran over his finger, Ed Young is opening a gallery. He's doing this with M. Blackman because of the witty name theirs' make when conjoined (or Siamese in the old parlance): YOUNGBLACKMAN. Brilliant!

I see they aren't in it for the money and perhaps this is why their website doesn't work. I see also that they have a naughty number in their address and this might be the problem.

Now, I think Ed must be rewarded for the effort he's making: after all, the crawl from the Kimberley Hotel across Roeland Street is surely more fraught with danger than the shift from art-producer to -facilitator. You have to watch out for me, for example, on my way to yoga. Or hordes of people descending on the book lounge for the launch of the new Dan Brown novel.

They're opening with Sue Williamson's Better Lives series which comprises six video portraits, migrants, exiles and refugees. That's on Tuesday at 6.

I'm not too clued up on the exact address of YOUNGBLACKMAN and whether they've taken over the laundromat or the bottle shop, but you can rest assured that there will be plenty of dirty laundry and drinking there either way.

But anyway, the real reason I'm here is to invite you all to my exhibition opening, which is on Thursday and will be a much more somber affair with crisp, clean shirts and gownless evening straps, and after which there will be no party at the Kimberley.

So, pencil me in: Thursday, October 1. I present 'Subtropicalia' alongside Meshac Gaba's 'The Street', and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye shows 'Pleased to Meet You' in the FOREX section while Musa Nxumalo exhibits 'Alternative Kidz' in the side gallery.

Speak and Spell

2009-09-20T22:40:00.001-07:00

I guess you'd have caught me out if I'd have claimed last week's post as my own writing. After all, everyone knows I'm more Pzizz than iPod.

Moving on from there:

Being involved, as I am, with this art-producing and consuming thing, I thought it was time I exploded this whole myth, laid bare the bones, and revealed the emperor for the naked that he is. To that end, I present an early draught of my soon-to-be-published art-speak lexicon, which is guaranteed to steer you safely through both this site's archives and your collection of Art South Africa back issues.

Makes reference to: looks like, but not enough to infringe copyright
Alludes to: looks like, but not that much due to lack of proficiency
Evokes: makes the mind wonder
Metaphor: long word for 'five'
Medium: smart word for poster paint. Rhymes with 'tedium'
Mixed media: lots of different kinds of poster paint, some of which we can't spell
Installation: in the way
Situationism: you had to be there
Relational: an in-joke
The Other: not you, burk!
The Gaze: some of my best friends... blah blah blah

And we love a bit of foreign language:

Zeitgeist: trendy
Flaneur: lazy bugger, in winter pyjamas
Tromp l'oeil: French TV programme from the 70s, dubbed into Afrikaans
Triptych: three times as irritating

I leave you with that as I must hasten to conclude preparations for next week's exposition. Now, where'd I leave my whalesong CD?

2009-09-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have been pipped at the post. My parade has, so to speak, been pissed on. And besides, I've about used up all the "p's" on my keyboard.

I present a suggestion from my editor about how to liven things up (last one) a bit around here:

'Needed to finish a 6 x 6m grid of drinking straws called Slurp for a Coca-Cola HQ commish by the end of the day, but the infernal ABI supplier in greater Salt River was just arrested on crack possession and couldn't deliver, and now on my way home caught my iPod cable in the bike's spokes, and then, to top it all off, drove over Ed Young's fingers as he crawled out of the Kimberly at 11am, and now have a pending court case...Jesus Suffering Fuck, what a day!'

Sorry. Can't beat that.

Blog blog blog

2009-09-13T09:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I made it through the weekend with only a minor contusion from bicycle jousting and congested sinuses from an extended bout of sandpapering.

It has been brought to my attention that opening night is not far off, but I subscribe more to the 'Keep calm and carry on' school of thought than the 'Jesus is coming - Look busy!' approach. I've been nibbling away at this body of work since July last year and I don't really fancy the late nights/groundrush panic that deadlines can cause.

I mean, I do a good job pretending that I pootle along to work at a godly hour stopping in for coffee at an increasing number of venues. In actual fact I keep regular hours, maybe sneaking in an early morning stop on my way to the studio and I've never been able to shake a modicum of guilt I feel at even that. I'm like Andy Warhol but without any of the glamour and drama - it's just a factory and I'm off to work.

However, for all my routine and planning, it must be said that I have no idea where I'm going with this entry. Except maybe in the direction that says that no blog is complete without a short essay on blogging.

Web 2.0. We can all take part, we can all generate content.

Well, what about English 101 or Intermediate Phase Design? I'm not sure we should all be doing this. Sometimes a trawl around the web feels like a visit to your local Der Blaue Reiter exhibition where someone has swapped out some of the works with kids' paintings and stolen all the labels. Click on a wrong link here and you could be somewhere pretty scary in another three clicks' time.

Then there's the Trojan Horse Effect where the biggest bollox can be dressed up in the latest Flash, or its opposite, where the most valuable resource can look like, well, bollox. It's alarming that even I, pretty much a Luddite, can develop and maintain my own website. At least I can sort of string a sentence. Together.

And Twitter. Have you heard about the urologist called Dr. Piss?

So, in time-honoured essay writing tradition, I've said what I'm going to say, I've said it, and now I'm saying I said it.

There. It's fun being cranky, no?

From the grounds up

2009-09-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

Of an evening I like low light, maybe some hooch and, later, a bit of navel-gazing. By day I like to work, and to get there, I like a cup of coffee. Lately it occurs to me how this fancy has mapped both my own a career path as well as the gentrification of parts of Cape Town, with little tendrils of development inching their way from the city centre through some less salubrious nieghbourhoods all the way to Observatory.

My first studio was in a beautiful old building in Gardens, owned by a cranky old carpenter who lived upstairs. Coffee, when I could afford it, came from a vending machine at a garage shop around the corner. It had an afterburn like avgas but I grew fond of it. If I felt daring I would meet my girlfriend for a take-out cup bought at a gondola in the Gardens Centre.

As is the way of things, that building was bought by developers and jazzed up beyond the reach of the likes of me. I then moved to an old industrial building in what many of us call Woodstock but Telkom insists is Zonnebloem.

There was no gagarge shop nearby, but the greasy spoon across the road sold some cans of grounds that probably 'fell off the back of a truck'. This was of varying quality but without fail left in its wake a trail of uncleaned cafetieres and a kitchen sponge filled with coffee grounds. All of this drove me to a habit of stopping at Lola's on Long Street. I'm generally there too early, but the likes of Ed Young, Andrew Lamprecht, Ronald Suresh-Roberts and Dan Halter have been known to darken that doorway, either working off today's hangover or working on tomorrow's. And the place has provenance: Brett Murray lived upstairs for years, and Julia Clark did some time downstairs from him.

In the last year or so things have changed between there and my current studio in Salt River. Firstly, as gentrification nibbles at the city's edges developers have been snapping up old buildings with alarming frequency. Of course this meant that we had to leave our studio. Almost simultaneously the Goodman, Michael Stevenson and the now defunct Bell-Roberts took up residence on the same block.

Following this came Karen Dudley's Kitchen. So now chi-chi gallery staff and goers alike can get a fix. Be warned though, the Southeaster can blow the top of your cappuccino all the way to the Good Hope Centre. More importantly, this gives me another option on the way to work, especially now that Lola's has gone straight.

But I don't generally travel on Sir Lowry Road anyway. I prefer Albert Road which is narrower and where cars move slower. And besides I got into the habit a long time ago of not riding past the top of Gympie Street where cyclists regularly used to get mugged. No, I take my chances with the Red Door Crack House down below, and the Salt River traffic cirlce further on. I'd take a pic of the crack house but I'm concerned their security cameras will nab me.

Now, as if those folk from Whatiftheworld needed anything more to do, they've gone and launched Superette, on the corner downstairs from the gallery. I'm too fussy and like too much the semblance of poverty to eat lunch there, but this is one more coffee option, and could serve to settle my nerves between the crack house and the traffic circle.

But, there's competition - Espressolab at the Old Biscuit Mill further down the road. Although the coffee's not cheap, the staff are amicable and there's a large I-beam to lock my bike to. If you're lucky you'll catch them while they're roasting.

Oh, my exhibition. Well, things proceed as they must at this stage, let's just say that the thing that was giving me gip last week has kind of sorted itself out and bifurcated at the same time. Here's a glimpse of what's happening in my studio right now:

Now, where's that hooch?

Is there anybody out there?

2009-09-05T05:23:00.000-07:00

I missed the opening as I'm generally not fond of scrumming for a styrofoam cup of cheap wine, and, in the days when I used to be ArtThrob Copy Editor, I was averse to running into people who owed me copy.

So I slipped into Whatiftheworld on Friday morning to see Rowan Smith's 'If You Get Far Enough Away You’ll Be On Your Way Back Home' http://www.whatiftheworld.com/now-showing/ . I wasn't surprised to be absolutely gob-smacked. Smith's work is mature beyond his years and he commands your attention in so many ways.

He might lapse into a little Barend de Wet-type brinksmanship with a work whose title I can't recall (googling 'Rowan Smith' is slightly more helpful than googling 'John Smith') which features a 1969 newspaper and the results of some forensic work, but the slightly unruly herd of old radios playing their monotonous symphony of background radiation is absolutely stunning.

It evokes the Boys' Annual-type excitement of post-War technology as much as it functions as a synecdoche for the unfathomable vacuum of space in which our galaxy finds itself suspended.

Oh, and did I mention Smith's hands? I confess to some jealousy here and a small amount of embarassment at having hired him to help me with some of my work a couple of years ago.
Which brings us back to me and what I'm doing here.

Your editor asked if I would fill some space here in the weeks leading up to my show at Michael Stevenson http://www.michaelstevenson.com/contemporary/exhibitions/edmunds/index2009.htm

I know his devious ways and I suspect he's looking for Storm und Drang or at least some snot en trane but I shan't entertain him. Although if I had have been able to operate this blog before yesterday that might have been a different story. To wit, a small teasing picture of something that's giving me a bit of shit at the moment:

There's more about my work on my own site: http://www.pauledmunds.co.za/

Sunday, 29th March

2009-06-23T03:28:00.001-07:00

I have a last Cuba Libra with Emeka and a Spanish lady called Elena. Then come the teary goodbyes and I leave Havana.

Saturday, 28th March

2009-06-23T03:24:00.000-07:00

The SÍnestas concert

At Wilfredo Lam I meet Black Box, a group of Nigerian photographers who have just arrived to set up their work. I wait at the cathedral steps to meet Susel who has agreed to accompany me shopping. She arrives 45 minutes late, just as I was about to give up on her. We haggle for curios in the markets and I walk away with a bag full of treasures. We walk along the seaboard from Malecón and have a drink in a bar overlooking Havana (Edificio FOSCA). At the huge modernist hotel the Havana Libre, I buy some cigars. We bump into a friend of Susel’s who gives us concert tickets to Síntesis, a group consisting of X-Alfonso’s parents and sister. We attend this and then party until sunrise.

The view from Edificio FOSCA

Friday, 27th March

2009-06-23T03:21:00.001-07:00

The Biennial opens today. Andrew’s work has still not arrived. People are setting up furiously and visitors are already swarming around the Cabãna. I have a look at the work, there are some good pieces but most of it is not that impressive. The scale of the Biennial is huge though and it extends far beyond the Cabãna. Logistically it is a remarkable feat.

At 7pm Punkasila perform to a small group on plastic chairs. They don’t give a damn! The lead singer only threatens to stop when the band run out of Bucanero Beer. Later the official opening act is X-Alfonso who performs Cuban fusion music to dancing crowds. An unofficial afterparty begins where Punkasilia performed earlier.

Thursday, 26th March

2009-06-23T03:19:00.001-07:00

Another view of the seaboard

On my way into town I bump into Emeka from Nigeria who is also staying at the house. At the Cabãna I have a mojito with Berni Searle. I arrange to meet Emeka and Guy (from Cameroon) later. We go to another exhibition opening and then to a bar where we join Emeka and Guy. We meet some of Susel’s friends and then go back to a house party with them. Everyone is drinking rum. Later Emeka, Guy and myself go back to the house where the hosts serve us food at 3am.

Wednesday, 25th March

2009-06-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

Andrew Putter and Susel with the Fortaleza de la Cabãna in the background

With Susel’s help I hang my map and photo works, and tweak my bag installation. I have lunch with Andrew and Minette who is having $5 lobster. We attend the catalogue launch at Wilfredo Lam. Afterwards there is a party and we dance in the courtyard.

Tuesday, 24th March

2009-06-23T03:10:00.001-07:00

Alexandro and me in his apartment

At the Cabãna I find someone to paint the walls of my space. Two students do an interview with me. Susel and I catch a lift in a van going to town. We go to the opening of an exhibition where I bump into Jane Alexander. Afterwards we buy a bottle of rum and go to Alexandro’s house near the Capitilo in the middle of Havana. We eat some food, he gives us some paintings and we listen to music. Later Susel shows me some grand colonial hotel where they do not mind admitting Cubans. We have a mojito and I catch an old car home.

Old American cars

Monday, 23rd March

2009-06-23T03:08:00.001-07:00

The Fontaleza de le Cabãna

Andrew and I take the bus to Wilfredo Lam. There he discovers his artwork is tied up in Paris. We meet an artist from Surinam called Remy and two artists from Trinidad and Tobago called Steve and Ayodhya. They know Ronald Suresh Roberts. We all head to the Cabãna and check out spaces. Later Andrew and I meet up with Sue Williamson, the Essop twins and Minette Vári in the Cathedral Plaza. We have mojitos. Afterwards they go to dinner while Andrew and I go back to the house for our free rice and beans. In our room we find the members of punk band and artwork, Punkasila sprawled on every other bed smoking clove cigarettes.

Sunday, 22ndMarch

2009-06-23T03:06:00.000-07:00

Papa and me

It rains the whole day. I lie on the top bunk next to an open window and read. Later I hang out with the family from the house. I smoke a cigar with Papa and we all joke with each other in sign language. I go to bed early and am woken a while later when Andrew Putter arrives and is shown into the dorm.

Saturday, 21st March

2009-06-23T03:03:00.000-07:00

A fire in a field in Miramar

I get up early, slip out of the house and make my way back to mine where I eat breakfast and go back to sleep. Later I walk up to Miramar where there are giant hotels along the seafront, massive, sealed-off entities that do not feel welcoming. Instead I find a supermarket that reminds me of the shops in Zimbabwe. I can’t find anything to buy and so I go grab a bite in a little beer garden nearby. A fire starts in a field opposite me and I watch as events unfold and fire engines come to extinguish the flames.

Miramar, the Russian Embassy in the background and a supermarket on the right

Friday, 20th March

2009-06-23T03:01:00.001-07:00

Cathedral Plaza with the Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Centre in the background

I find my way to Wilfredo Lam by bus; this process involves changing buses once and it takes me more than an hour. I am told a bus is called a ‘Güa Güa’, pronounced ‘wah wah’. Bus etiquette includes asking at the bus stop who is last in line, and then shouting ‘permisso’ to get through the people on the bus. The buses are packed, and on the next one I barely manage to squeeze into the doorway – with my toes just inside. Miraculously the doors close wedging us in. The fare is a token 40 National Cents. The bus driver, cigar in mouth, plays his own taste in music at whatever volume he likes. He also stops en route to pick up some food and run errands.

At Wilfredo Lam, I am introduced to a beautiful young Cuban lady called Susel who is to be my assistant. Together we go by bus through a tunnel under the Bay of Havana to the Fortaleza de la Cabãna, an old Fortress. At the Cabãna, I am shown my exhibition space. It is a long room with a curved ceiling that was used to store ammunition or house soldiers. There are many of these lined up next to each other, making up the fortress.

Susel and me

Together we unpack and loosely arrange my installation. We share the lunch Susel has been given as a worker there. Afterwards we have a mojito at an outdoor restaurant where we meet some of the other artists. There is Ishmael from Peru with his assistant Dan from the UK. I also bump into Marcio who I know from São Paulo. We arrange to meet up later.

Susel shows me some of Old Havana and then we take an old American car to the neighbourhood of Vedado. Many of the old American cars work like the taxi vans do here in S.A, working along certain routes and picking up passengers on the way. Inside they are often heavily modified with seats taken from other vehicles, but with no door handles or window-winders.

In Vedado, the university district, we visit her friend Yacksie (no idea how this is spelt). In her street there are men playing dominos and a neighbourhood dog called Charity that everyone feeds. At Yacksie’s we eat some rice and beans. The women shower and dress and then we set off into the night.

We walk down the Avenue of the Presidents, the main emo hang-out in Havana. Later we end up in a club with Ishmael, Dan and some artists from Brazil. At 3am the club closes and we go back to Yacksie’s where we microwave a pizza and I pass out.

Thursday, 19th March

2009-06-23T02:52:00.000-07:00

Jorge and me

I am given a bread roll and some sweetened black coffee for breakfast. I discover my hosts are three generations of the same family all working together in the same house. After breakfast I watch the women sit around a table picking out husks and stones from piles of rice and beans. They do this until it is time to start cooking lunch.

Meanwhile I wait, sure that the VIP treatment will extend to my being fetched and taken to the Biennial venue. However after some time this begins to look less promising. Without internet access, all the information I have is in my little notebook. Two phone numbers and the name ‘Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Centre’.

I try calling the numbers, but in both cases the language barrier proves too much. It looks like I will have to make my own way there. Papa, the son in my family of hosts, points me in the direction of a bus. I get onto the first bus and overpay the fare with a whole Peso. I try to ask various people including the driver how to get to Wilfredo Lam. At the next stop the bus driver starts yelling ‘Peh Uno!’ at me and effectively kicks me off the bus.

Startled at this rude behaviour, I glance around at the people gathered at the bus stop. Someone kindly signals to me that he means I should take the P1 bus. On the next P1 I am asking directions again and after sometime I am told to get off and walk. Lost in Old Havana, I eventually flag down a taxi. We drive around asking everyone on the street if they happen to know the Wilfredo Lam. It takes several hours but eventually we find it. It is next to a very famous Cathedral that everyone knows.

I meet with Pepe, one of the curators, and he shows me around the area. We walk to Parque Central, a concrete plaza where Cubans congregate to talk about baseball. Not to bet or watch, just talk. I wonder around. Later I meet with Jorge who offers to show me the bus route home when he finishes work. I end up waiting for him on the steps of the cathedral, and begin talking to a man named Luis who has piercings all over his face: long needles. He poses with tourists for a living. I share some of his rum and then head home with Jorge.

Wednesday, 18th March

2009-06-22T03:05:00.000-07:00

The seaboard near Malecón

by Dan Halter

I land in Havana at around 3pm on a Virgin Atlantic flight from London. Disembarking onto the gangway I am surprised to find a man waiting there with my name on a board. The man, Jorge, has my Cuban Visa and he escorts me through immigration. I feel like a VIP in front of the other passengers.

Walking out of the airport we get drenched by a warm tropical rain shower that quickly subsides. It is hot and muggy. Driving from the airport I am impressed by the old American cars on the roads that are I have always associated with the island. There are also horse-drawn carts and some newer Russian and Chinese cars.

I am taken to a government-funded house that accommodates artists and musicians from abroad. It is a rudimentary building with dormitory-style rooms filled with bunk beds. The windows are without glass, just heavy wooden shutters. There is no toilet seat and only a trickle of shower water. It is not far from the home of the original Buena Vista Social Club.

I enjoy a hearty meal of rice and beans with a Vienna sausage with my hosts. Unfortunately our conversation is somewhat limited by the lack of a common language and we use lots of hand-signals.