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...
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Chad's São Paulo Diary: Bienal Day 2
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.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Chad's São Paulo Diary: The Fruit Man
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.
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