ICTAF
17.02 - 20.02.2023

Sean O’Toole is the curator of the SOLO section at this year’s Investec Cape Town Art Fair. We caught up with him to discuss  curatorship, the fair phenomenon, and the artists exhibited.

Can you tell us a bit about your background in curating?

At the early start of my journey as a writer, I curated two exhibitions. They were both at the KKNK, in 2003 and 2004. The first looked at the border between fashion photography and art photography. The following year, I had a more ambitious project. It was 2004; there was a big hoopla in South Africa about the tenth year of democracy. I did an exhibition around portrayals of Nelson Mandela in art and graphics. It was fun; it had credible content. But as I realised – and is still true in the present – you’re not going to make a living curating. It’s a very nuts and bolts job, too. You can have a grand concept, but there is major execution required, and you often can’t outsource it with the budget. I admire young people (and it seems mostly women) in South Africa who still fly the flag of curating, like Khanya Mashabela or Amy Watson. I really admire their tenacity to make it an independent project. 

After that, a couple things happened. I moved on from ArtThrob to Art South Africa. I worked almost weekly for the Sunday Times, writing political profiles and doing arts coverage. So, I entered a monogamous relationship with writing. And I didn’t miss curating. But then, fast forward to 2019, having been so betrothed to writing, I became frustrated with the potentials of journalism. I remember in the toilet at the journalism school in Grahamstown, they have all these quotes. One that always stuck is, “Journalism is literature in a hurry.” I wanted to work on longer, research-driven projects with writing outputs. Curating seemed to offer that as a possibility. That led to conversations with Owen Martin at Norval Foundation and Josh Ginsberg at A4 Arts. They were incredibly supportive. The projects – Congress: The Social Body in Three Figurative Painters at Norval and Photo Book! Photo-book! Photobook! at A4 – were a lot of fun. 

I still, at my age, treat projects as a way to ‘catch up’. I never did curatorial studies. Worse still, I never did art studies. I studied English literature and law. I still feel like an interloper, or a charlatan. But reviewing, and having the good fortune of travelling a lot, I got to see a lot of exhibitions. I’ve built an archive of experience: references, models, possibilities. 

Joachim Schöenfeldt, Moo moo moo, 2021. Courtesy of Nel.

You’re curator of the solo section at this year’s Cape Town Art Fair. In a recent post, you described, “Maybe gently shepherding is a better way to describe my labours.” Can you tell us about how you came into this role? 

The Cape Town Art Fair approached me with an offer: “Do you want to curate?” I said, “Sure.” It was evident that this process of curation is not necessarily about an argument or a narrative created through a set of objects, choreographed in a certain way. It’s more about striking a relationship with artists – but artists who are represented by a commercial gallery. That certainly narrows the pool. Someone reading this might say, “Does that compromise you?” Yeah, of course. You can’t say it doesn’t. But it’s not a reflection on the people I’ve selected. If it’s a comment at all, it’s a comment on the possibilities of curatorship, particularly in this country. If you decide to commit yourself to a career in the arts here, it involves hustle and compromise. It’s very hard to stand aloof from the market if you don’t have a trust fund. And I don’t have a trust fund. 

There are consolations that come with rolling in the mud, so to speak. Often, the story of art is one of friendships. You learn more from speaking and being around artists than necessarily treating them as scientific specimens that you gaze at from a distance. Opportunities like this for the art fair give one the chance to do studio visits, to create conversations and rapport. 

In your process of doing the studio visits, have you been impressed or surprised? 

As a broad statement – and I have to be careful not to reiterate William Kentridge – the studio is a kind of laboratory. When you go to visit artists, I’m always surprised at the mix of mess and purpose. It’s not a showroom. As a curator, it can be difficult to see the future of a work that is presently unfinished. I have great respect for, say, Jonathan Garnham, who is committed to studio visits and has that capacity to say, “Wow, look at that wire on the floor. It’s going to look great as a solo exhibition.” That takes incredible foresight and translation. 

Hugh Byrne, On the Tip of Your Tongue, 2022. Photo by Dillon Marsh. Courtesy of EBONY/CURATED.

But there is a difference between making work for a booth at a fair and a solo exhibition. 

You have this weird bifurcation that you see in artists’ CVs: solo shows and solo art fairs. I’m still trying to figure out the phenomenon of the art fair. I don’t mean that in a naive, provincial sense. Is it a moment like the salons were in the 19th century? 

It’s quite a new phenomenon, the art fair, historically? 

The hyperdrive certainly comes from the last two decades. And the proliferation. If the 90s were about the horizontilisation of the Biennale project – so you had Biennales everywhere – the post-2000s is the fair. Because it’s resourced – meaning, they’ve got money – they have the capacity to sponsor add ons. You have the hardcore business of selling, and then the frilly and energetic activity around it. 

It’s interesting to me to note the frenzied activity that balloons around the fair. 

If you look at Venice (if one strips away the romanticism around it), it’s a city-led initiative for a fairly impoverished part of Italy. It creates reliable tourism; that’s the underlying motivation. It’s interesting how the core proposition has sponsored a vibrant fringe. South Africa tried, during the 90s and 2000s, to find that central proposition. You had the two Joburg Biennales, which would have been sponsors of fringe programmes. I remember them being that. There was a lot of excitement around them. The fair has somewhat filled that void. You have a core proposition, and there’s this vibrant fringe, which is often more interesting. You can talk about centre and periphery, fringe and main. But it becomes interesting, say, with Michael Tymbios, who had a pop-up exhibition last year and has now decided to put up cash and show in the heart of the beast. Church Projects is doing the same, and I see Under Projects is showing in the fair too. Maybe next year they won’t. Everything is temporal. I think often we tend to read things too hermetically, less contextually. 

Lunga Ntila, March On, 2021. Courtesy of BKhz.

Should we talk about temporality as the umbrella theme of this year’s fair? Why do you think they chose ‘time’?

I suppose two factors influenced it: 1) it’s the tenth anniversary of the art fair and 2) the interest in time, globally, after the pandemic, that mixture of slowing down and acceleration. 

I settled on Jorge Luis Borges’ idea of time as a labyrinth, that is, multiple forking roads. That’s what the present is. It’s many possibilities. I took that as a loose idea, held by a broad interest in photography and drawing. It’s no more complicated than that. I don’t want it to be more complicated than that. It’s unfair to the artists. It’s almost like saying you have to wear a lens to see them. They didn’t, in the main, make work responding to the theme. They’re following their own set of preoccupations, as they should. 

I suppose the luxury of being a curator is that you get to spend time with objects. Time, not in the thematic sense. Time, as in, discovering aspects and seeing them differently. Walter Benjamin’s writing on that Paul Klee – the one that everyone quotes, the ‘angel of history’ – that was his painting. It wasn’t something he saw in a museum, went home and said, “My God, my head’s exploding, I have ideas that are going to inform the twentieth century!” It came from consistent and renewed looking. 

Jeanne Gaigher, Torso Drifting, 2022. Photo by Max Pescio. Courtesy Osart Gallery.

Can you tell us about the artists exhibiting?

I’m delighted that Cape Town will get to see Lunga Ntila. I don’t know the circumstances of her death (I don’t know if that’s important), but the fact of the matter is that her practice has a closing bracket. It wasn’t seen here during her lifetime, not fully, only on a group show. I’m very thankful to Banele Khoza. The booth proposal he’s made looks fantastic. I think it’s going to be very striking. Partly because, today, there are a lot of artists working with photo-collage. Personally, I think hers is the strongest I’ve seen. 

Hugh Byrne is someone I encountered at Ebony. He’s fundamentally trying to unlearn and redo his painting and sculpture practice. I like the fact that Marc Stanes has allowed him and given him space to exhibit installation, almost a kind of deconstructed showcase, rather than, “Give us four of your best paintings.” What’s the arc of some careers? You have two shows, three; the third one doesn’t sell and you get shown the exit. The gallery relationship shouldn’t be so instrumental. Yes, the artist must have a public and sell. But your duty as a gallerist is not just as commercial agent, particularly if one’s respectful to the history and tradition of dealing. 

Let me go to the oldest artist. (My apologies, Joa!) Joachim Schönfeldt is from the Possession Arts crowd.¹Possession Arts was an artist collective from the early 1980s, Johannesburg. Key members were John Nankin, who’s Jane Alexander’s partner; Ivor Powell, the brilliant art critic; Joachim Schönfeldt; Jeff Lok, an artist and designer (if you’re a fan of Vladislavić, he designed his first book covers). His career over time has formalised into two strands: 1) neo-conceptual practice and then 2) a more traditional painting and sculpting practice. The emphasis is going to be on the latter, especially the relationship with drawing there. Joa tends to make light of it, but he’s very accomplished at the basics of draughtsmanship. He’s a wonderful plein-airist (which is possibly the most unfashionable thing to be, even if painting is alive and kicking). He continues to work on this extraordinary series of essentially environmental paintings. He has his animal sculpture series, which actually come out of a Marxist tradition, particularly his reading of Benjamin and the status of the curio. That was the thing that Okwui Enwezor liked about him; he was a big champion of Joa’s work. In a project like this, it’s good to show older artists who are still relevant, and not to entirely focus of youth. 

Gerhard Marx, Cave, 2019. Photo by Matthew Bradley. Courtesy of Everard Read.

Gerhard Marx probably sits between youth and old age. Of course, for scandalmongers, what’s interesting is that he’ll be at the Everard Read booth; he’s left Goodman. I’ve always admired his collage. If I had money, I would buy one of his sea maps, because it seems like the most pointless thing, all these cut-up fragments of blue. They’re just so gorgeous. He studied sculpture at Michaelis, so that is the sweet spot of what he does. But he’s an inventor too. William Kentridge came to him to solve problems. For instance, the sculpture exhibition at Norval, the ideas may have been William’s, but Gerhard figured out how to execute it, to construct it. Gerhard also has an extraordinary career in theatre. He worked on Tshepang with Lara Foot. I have a long history with him.

I suppose someone I also have a history with is Jeanne Gaigher. I had to write about her for one of her early shows as a press engagement, and I was struck by her laugh and her hands. Over time, I’ve come to recognise that she’s so deeply interested in layering images. If you look at her more recent work, they have these assertive women subjects. There’s so much layering in the process of making them: the canvas, the scrim, the cutting, the drawing marks, the painting marks. There’s such a rich field for visual experience in her work. Gabriel García Márquez wrote a novella called Leaf Storm in 1955 about the ruin brought about by banana cultivation. I always loved the image of a leaf storm. Jeanne’s work is like that: being immersed in this swirl of leaves. 

The artist that I probably know the least about is Charity Vilakazi. What’s interesting is that one of the base materials of Charity’s work is the red iron oxide soil. It’s a key component. In broad terms, it’s culturally resonant. But it’s interesting in how that material creates kinships across time. Suddenly, you can think of Lucas Seage’s abstract fields from the 80s, or Moshekwa Langa’s drag paintings. I like the history that a material can suggest. I think what’s also interesting about Charity’s work – and it’s unavoidable in the times we live in – is that identity matters. When she speaks about women, she speaks about womxn. It’s important to see the works in relation to that. There’s a certain intensity that she brings to bear, especially when it comes to matrilineages and matriarchal identities. 

Athenkosi Kwinana, Supervene (detail), 2021. Courtesy of Berman Contemporary.

Athenkosi Kwinana comes from a different geography – Eastern Cape, I think Gqeberha. She has albinism; she makes self-portraits. That’s the gist of it. They’re done at a certain scale, where they confront you. I saw her work in person for the first time at 1:54 in London. The drawings are challenging, but they are firmly grounded in an assertion of self. It’s not a normative self, so the acrobatics that the viewer does is a reflection of their own biases and values. When you see the work, you realise that she’s incredibly gifted as a draughtsperson. What I hope – and this is true of all the artists who are in their twenties – is that the opportunity to be seen on a platform like the art fair is propulsive. That’s what a platform can allow: growth. 

Then there’s Johno Mellish. He’s showing black and white photography, principally made along the Garden Route. They fall into a history of conceptual (with a small ‘c’) photography. The photographs that will be exhibited will be a distillation of a larger body of work that he’s hoping to put into book form. I like what Johno’s doing, particularly when he gets more wacky. The public may know him for his Jeff Wall-esque scenario photos, the most famous one being The Day David Goldblatt Died. But he did a book with Tymbios where he went to investigate, ostensibly, a site in KZN where a woman claimed to have met an alien, visited its planet, and had children. They only made three copies of the book. It has a very strange topography, bound by an incredible narrative. I’m hugely supportive of that kind of thing, partly because – much like our literary tradition – our photography is so bounded by realism. So I’m very enthusiastic about the project. I hope it finds a public. 

Maja Behrmann is from Germany. I saw her work at the last fair. I felt a sensory or emotional , attraction, rather than an intellectual one. Like, “Damn, this is nice.” There were sculptures and textiles, and there was a relationship between them. Highly patterned, geometric patterns, colourful, lots of references in terms of European art history, Hans Arp and so on. I don’t know if this is my projection, or if she stated it, but her work recalls the Memphis Group, which is that zany Italian interior design collective who made those wacky, postmodernist design things. What I saw was an expression of formal interests and resolutions that were very different to what we typically see in South African art. The showcase needs that breadth. As South Africans we are starved of creative inputs from elsewhere, be it Dakar or Leipzig, where Maja studied. I’m excited to see her work in Cape Town 

Maja Behrmann, OhneTitel (Ros Gitt), 2021. Courtesy of Galerie Eigen + Art.

Lastly is Simphiwe Buthelezi. What struck me when I saw her work for the first time in Stellenbosch in 2020, and what made it stick, was going to see the exhibition of historical work that was put up in the US Museum for the Stellenbosch Triennale. They had two wonderful works in there: one was a George Pemba watercolour, and the other was a Lucas Seage large, abstract with red sand, just so not like anything from that time. I saw in Simphiwe’s work something that has many of those touchpoints, working with culturally resonant materials and trying to transform them – break, test, undo them. But beyond all of that, it was joyous to look at. 

Overall, it’s a mixture of known artists and then who I would consider to be lesser-known. It’s designed to provide a concentrated opportunity, to show the artists’ practice as a whole rather than just one work. I suppose that’s the suspicion of an art critic. You ask, “Is this a one-hit-wonder, or is there an album here?” Perhaps I’m curating albums.