I was last at the AVA to participate in a podcast run by Kirsty Cockerill. The topic was museums – what are they good for? Need they be exclusive, or exclusionary? How do museums get people through the door? Are museums friendly, why can’t they be? Followed by a host of other musings.
A white box – and the AVA is no different – a gallery or museum is designed to strip away context, create its own temperature, ensuring zero distraction from the outside world in the way of natural light and random human traffic. They are antiseptic, rarefied realms. What we usually get are recessed overhead lights which, notes Elena Filipovic, emit ‘a uniform, any-given-moment-in -the-middle-of-the-day glow’. Sobriety is key. But we forget that the white cube, the defining backdrop for galleries and museums, only came into being in 1929 at MoMA, New York.
The AVA façade pre-1994.
On Church Street in Cape Town – where the AVA is located – we find a mash-up of antiseptic white walls and a bustling pedestrian street scene: bistros, bric-a-brac, antiques, art. We are not quite trapped in a rarefied realm, and even less so now that a new project space has popped up opposite it, painted gold no less. More Montmartre than a high-end dockland, the AVA is a chirping nest, and all the better for it.
Context is key, it informs the life and survival of an institution. In the case of the AVA – the cornerstone of independent creative innovation in South Africa – the location is hugely significant. An elegantly proportioned Cape Dutch façade is overlaid with an in-your-face mural by King Debs. It could be Arabic, but its not. The hieroglyphics is the artist’s invention. What it tells us – or me at least – is that for all its inherited sobriety and standing, the AVA is wild, feral, game for any loose cannon. This spirit is undoubtedly generated by the museum’s director, Mirjam Asmal, who, more than most, understands the vital importance of experimentation and risk.
Ronald Muchatuta and William Kentridge in Circle: AVA 50 Collectors, 2021. Installation view: AVA Gallery, Cape Town.
This was not always the case. Once more exclusive and exclusionary, and, subsequently, more restrictive in its taste and values, the AVA proved a problematic gatekeeper. The most glaring instance of this is the board’s refusal to allow Vladimir Tretchikoff an airing in its hallowed rooms. I’m told Irma Stern had a key role to play in the excommunication of someone who, to this day, remains more popular than any other South African artist; much to the chagrin of the cognoscenti. But then, I’m not here to be gloomy on God’s day.
To celebrate 50 years in operation on Church Street, Asmal and her crew have gathered works by artists who have played a key role in the museum’s evolution. They deserve to be read individually:
Igshaan Adams
Willie Bester
Patrick Bongoy
Steven Cohen
Stephanié E. Conradie
Bonolo Kavula
William Kentridge
Dorothee Kreutzfeldt
Tracy Megan
Clare Menck
Siwa Mgoboza
Ronald Muchatuta
Claudette Schreuders
Jill Trappler
Mandla Vanyaza
Sue Williamson
Max Wolpe
Whether cultish or canonical, institutional or irreverent, these figures represent a condition report, a record of a property’s condition. In this case, one not only of the AVA, but also South Africa, the nation which recklessly, fecklessly, has generated some of the greatest artistic talents I’ve encountered anywhere in the world. This, of course, has everything to do with the perversity of this country, its continued delinquency and dereliction, its intestate, malformed, butchered state – all of which has proved immensely inspirational for artists. Prompting Kendell Geers’s memorable mantra ‘The perversity of my birth, the birth of my perversity’.
Siwa Mgoboza in Circle: AVA 50 Collectors, 2021. Installation view: AVA Gallery, Cape Town.
The challenge, always, lies in maintaining rules while breaking them (or burning buildings while building them). Paradox is key. Without it a museological or curatorial project is dead in the water. If the AVA can celebrate 50 years with impunity, it’s because it has never strayed from a commitment to ethical innovation. There has been, overall, a measured balance of comfort food and daring. It is perhaps surprising that I should turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American transcendentalist, by way of trying to explain what the AVA has been doing. Still, to me, the AVA is a ‘transparent eyeball’.
As Emerson writes, ‘Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God’. Over-the-top? Hyperbolic? Perhaps. But museums, if they are to thrive cannot ignore a greater – divine – inclusivity. No longer a religion for atheists – a 20th century concoction – museums, now, must recognise that, for all their eccentricity, they serve a goal greater than Ego, a goal which absorbs conflicting and divergent ‘currents’. Faith comes in all forms. It cannot be separated from the condition of making, or seeing and experiencing art. A woman saw ‘Jesus’ when she saw Steven Cohen wending his glittering way through a squatter camp in 2002, bedecked in a chandelier. The angles in the making of art refract, as they must. And institutions such as the AVA must continue to ensure this love affair of perversity-divinity-wonder.
Bonolo Kavula in Circle: AVA 50 Collectors, 2021. Installation view: AVA Gallery, Cape Town.
I’m not sure if the job of any art show is to ‘complete the “circle”.’ It might make business sense to introduce collectors to works by great artists at different points in their life, and, thereby, deepen a consumer’s private collection, but for me, unmoved by a private collector’s stockpile – unless it is shared with the public – great art, fundamentally, should remain, always, in the public domain. This is why public museums matter so greatly. And why the AVA operates a vital role. Of course, we need collectors, especially those who buy one work for themselves and another for a museum – thank you. Of course, art is a business. And museums have a key role to play in the rarefaction and commodification of that business.
The AVA, however, is a peculiar entity. Its purpose is to devise or engineer value, participate in the construction of a national art canon, while, at the same time, and increasingly so, operate more recklessly, fecklessly, dangerously. Why? Because as the American poet, A.R. Ammons reminds us in Corson’s Inlet, risk is full, every living thing in siege. The demand is life, to keep life.
No museum can survive without taking risks. Not to do so amounts to an embalming. It is unsurprising that many museums in the world are corpse-like, devoid of vitality, having wholly succumbed to a devotional practice, a sick religion. This is why perversity, or amorality, is vital in a curatorial enterprise. Craig Cameron-Mackintosh and Brett Seiler’s show at the AVA, ‘Love in a loveless time’, celebrated Billy Monk’s queer energy. They recreated the dingy innards of 1960s Les Catacombs, a niteclub for sailors, ‘sugar girls’ and the outre citizens of Cape Town, where the bisexual Billy Monk worked as a bouncer and sometime photographer. Dare I say that I found divinity in the midst of a trashed vision? Definitely. If I recall that show now, it’s because it reveals the AVA’s daring.
Brett Seiler x Billy Monk Collection, Love in a loveless time, 2020. Installation view: AVA Gallery, Cape Town
If the AVA’s group show, which celebrates the lives past and present of some of our most celebrated artists, is a fitting venture, it is because it feeds the economy and, far more significantly, the greater vision of art’s inspirational-radical-innovative-consolatory powers. This principle is writ on the AVA walls, summed up in King Debs’s vision: ‘I have created an alphabet … meant to spark a sense of awareness of owning up to one’s own identity, and also think about what it is to be an African in a contemporary context of the global village’.
Indeed. More than any other institution in the city of Cape Town, the AVA has burnt brightly, with all the risks that come with such an enduring flame. Here’s to another 50 years! Here’s to the artists of the future!
