CAPE TOWN

Remembering District Six

Opening on Heritage Day, September 24, the largest outdoor sculpture project ever to take place in Cape Town, involving over 70 artists, will commemorate the annihilation of District Six. The intention of the 'District Six Sculpture Festival' is to stake a claim for a public space of remembrance for the community which once lived there and was systematically removed over a peiod of years ending in 1981. The project has been initiated by the artists themselves, under the direction of well-known artist Kevin Brand, and has been done in consultation with a number of community organisations.

Some of the art will not last longer than the month-long duration of the festival, other pieces will stand until the bulldozers move in early next year - this time, to start the new building process, the sensitive task of redevelopment. In the process of once more flattening the land, the bulldozers will eventually destroy all the remaining sculptures. This collective 'art happening' will put the closing seal on a tragic chapter in our history.

Sculpture sites will be marked with beacons with a symbolic design of broken decorative masonry, and will be visible from far off. Participating artists will include Clive van den Berg, Peet Pienaar, Kevin Brand and Randolph Hartzenberg. There will be information, maps, eventually a full catalogue, and on opening day itself, a procession will start on the Grand Parade at 10 a.m. and culminate with live music and performances near the Holy Cross Hall at midday. For more information, contact project manager Renate Meyer at the District Six Museum at (021) 461 8745.

Mid-month update:

This weekend, the slopes of District Six will be covered with artists putting up their work in preparation for the big opening on Heritage Day. All of Cape Town is invited. A celebratory procession will leave the Grand Parade at 10 a.m. on the 24th and proceed up to the Holy Cross Hall in District Six where live music and performances will take place at midday. Clive van den Berg has arrived from Johannesburg, and will be setting the local landscape alight with one of his fire pieces in the evening (see the books section this month for pictures of one of Van den Berg's earlier projects).

Just ended at the Cape Town Castle, is 'Memorias Intimas Marcas', the show initiated by Angolan artist Fernando Alvim and his wife Catherine, who worked for three years to get the show underway. Together with the other two artists involved, Carlos Garacoia of Cuba and Gavin Younge of Cape Town, Alvim journeyed to Cuito Carnavale, the seminal battleground of the Angolan War. The show is intended to provide a space for reflection on the meaning of that futile war, and indeed, there are some truly profound artistic moments. A particularly memorable piece by Alvim is a hospital bed, painted white, with representations of mutilated babies suspended in the springs. Younge has produced a haunting video which shows daily life in an exhausted Angola, still deeply scarred by the war. The video is projected from monitors in the carrying baskets of a circle of bicycles bound together. Though a major catalogue is in the planning for future venues, regrettably the lack of information at the Castle about the show itself and the artists and their intentions left many visitors a little confused as to who did what, and why.

In Mandla Vanyaza's current show at the Association for Visual Arts (closes September 13), the overly sweet and simple pastels of daily life have given way to a new series of more assured and interesting collage works. Using discarded snapshots obtained from a township photographer, Vanyaza has used enamel paints to devise new backgrounds for his self-consciously posed subjects. This combination of photograph and paint is a technique the much better-known Willie Bester has used extensively to portray black township life, but the differences here are the way Vanyaza's subjects, gazing into the camera, engage directly with the viewer, and the intriguingly dream-like character of many of the loosely painted settings.

As travellers used to gloat over new and exotic stamps in their passports, Kim Lieberman delights in the vagaries of the postal services around the world. In 'Pushing the Envelope' at the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet, Lieberman has papered the walls with Canon colour photocopies of dozens of airmail letters she has sent adressed Poste Restante to herself at all the places she has visited - and had returned to her in Johannesburg, decorated now with a variety of rubber stamps in various languages and interesting labels. This engaging project deals with 'place, voyage and memory'. Until September 27.

The interest generated by Aliza Levi's show 'Still Life'at the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet has led to an extension of the exhibition until September 15. Levi is a young Durban artist whose sculptural portrayals of the human body have on occasion been compared somewhat unfavourably with the work of Jane Alexander. Alexander is a hard act to follow, and though no doubt Levi would say she is not trying to, the materials she uses and the painful quality of the poses are a little too close for comfort. On this show, the most successful piece is a series of heads, death masks perhaps, hung here in two columns.

'Why would an angel break my heart?' is the adorably plaintive title of Peet Pienaar's new show at the Hanel Gallery which opened on Sunday, September 7. It's all about Pienaar's relationship with South African rugby. Once a provincial rugby player himself, Vita-award finalist Pienaar has become known for his performance pieces in which he investigates the hero worship accorded to players of the game in this country and the effect, often homo-erotic, this devotion has on both the players and their public. On this show, the walls of the Hanel are lined with almost a hundred small tributes to rugby heroes, souvenirs and memorabilia worked into an investigation of this subject using such materials as photographs, music boxes. jewellery, velvet, underpants. The deliberately naive way in which these have been fabricated, as if Pienaar had been raiding the bedrooms of schoolboys, adds to their slightly shocking effect.

On opening night, dressed only in a pair of rugby shorts, Pienaar reclined on the floor on a mattress covered with a sheet with the words NOT MY OWN printed on it. In this performance, Pienaar was handing out his own souvenirs. In the style of movie stars bestowing kisses on adoring fans, Pienaar invited viewers to receive a love bite, which he then signed with a red pen. Only a few were brave enough.

Mid-month update
Local photographers Stan Engelbrecht and Brian Hill are showing black and white pix at the Picto Ifas Gallery in Bree Street on 'Exhibition'. Engelbrecht works around the concept of the movie still as an expression of identity, while Hill explores the genre of self-portraits. Until mid October.

Silence! at the Goodman

Joachim Schönfeldt is one of those contemporary artists who strike out in a number of directions at once. An extraordinarily skilled and sensitive carver, Schönfeldt uses this talent to produce pieces which give acid consideration to the way in which the honoured tradition of woodcarving in Africa has become debased by the tourist market. Schönfeldt's carvings are mutants - birds with three heads; lions that can be dis-assembled for easy packing in the tourist suitcase. Two of the most interesting of the new pieces are powerful painted heads, deeply gouged - by what? An attacker? A giant wood borer? Moral decay?

And then there are Schönfeldt's performance pieces, one of which will be carried out on opening night at the Goodman Gallery. Entitled My Boy is a Beautiful Girl, Schönfeldt's video is an instruction video on how to do a gumboot dance, the idea being to give opening night guests the chance to have a thoroughly good time learning a new skill.

And then - well, go to Schönfeldt's show at the Goodman and see for yourself. Silence! opens on September 14 and runs until October 4.

Ghanaian curator Azure Attah has assembled this provocatively titled exhibition which opened at the Rembrandt van Rijn Art Gallery at the Market Theatre on September 7. Attah is an independent curator and writer whose concern is to introduce African art into the international arena - though on this show only two of the five artists are African. Briefly, the theme could be said to be the responses of the participating artists to aspects of contemporary cultural domination.

Alan Lipchin, born in Durban and currently doing his MFA at the University of California addresses the social phenomenon of people sticking two death penalty stickers in the form of a cross onto the rear windows of their cars to express their support for the reinstatement of the death penalty. In a piece called Mortal Combat, Lipchin invents his own version of this with stickers on the gallery's windowpanes.

James Hilton, a young Californian artist, presents Piece, a photograph from a series addressing popular media representations of the black male.

Fulera Quaye, from Ghana, is one of the most promising young African artists to emerge in the 90's, working to uncover the way in which Western art draws on African art and culture for inspiration, while at the same time seeking to maintain the authority of the West. Projected Surface , an installation from her show 'Africa Revisited' will feature on this show.

Jacek Yurczk is a Polish artist who refers to his artistic process as 'anaesthetics' or, 'true emanciaption from all forms of ideology'. Here, his video Utopia shows the artist reading a book on Polish culture while drinking vodka. He does not progress far until he is completely drunk and cannot continue!

Californian Mary Paterson presents a video called Bird in Space in which the artist performs auto-erotic acts with a miniaturised replica of Brancusi's phallic sculpture of the same name. In this profane gesture, Brancusi's emblem of modernist high art is reduced to the status of a mere utility object. Paterson places notices next to her work, giving permission for only women to view it.

Mid-month update
Did the above copy (condensed from a three page press release) make you want to rush off and see the show? Well, it all turned out to be an art con! It was announced at the show's opening that the Ghanaian curator, artists and their elaborate histories were all the products of the imagination of local artist Anton Karstel. Karstel apparently felt it was about time a local artist got the same kind of attention we give to visiting stars. No wonder Artthrob was unable to get advance pix from usually highly efficient Rembrandt van Rijn gallery director Stephen Hobbs!