Investec Cape Town Art Fair
17.02 - 19.02.2023
For context, I worked in the ArtThrob booth at this year’s fair, selling prints so that the publication can continue to pay me and other writers for the work we do. The days were long, but I enjoyed being able to look at things properly over the course of a weekend. The materialist in me believes that a critic needs to know what goes into the production of the art world, so it felt like an appropriate vantage point. I heard all the dirt from the underpaid art school grads who actually made the pieces that their big name artist bosses sold for disproportionate amounts of money. I saw gallery workers cut their hands carrying edgy sculptures to and from storage. My flatmate did not stop working for seven days straight. The materialist in me wonders whether the toll of art production is worth the effervescent value of the artworks, but I also know that implies a false equivalence. The work always seems to transcend its production, or can never be reduced to the labour that goes into it. Even so, being caught up in the nuts and bolts of it all does tend to take the shine off. The art left hanging on the walls by the end can seem trivial, trinket-like, unserious.
Daniele Sigalot, Orange, 2022. Courtesy of Anna Laudel.
I have had this newfangled twitter adjective, “unserious,” on my mind lately and circled back to it on the first day when Amogelang Maledu noted the relative levity of this year’s fair. There were jokes aplenty and I saw less of the confrontational severity that South African art history often favours. Githan Coopoo made his presence felt with an arrangement of cartoonish, buck-eared pots bearing his signature one-liners like “friends with all my exes” and “my boyfriend broke up with me during pride month.” I enjoyed walking past them every morning. Not all the jokes landed as well as these did though. What is tricky about comedy in contemporary art is that you typically cannot rely on a set-up. Most often the punchline needs to be delivered in a single gesture and few artists have Coopoo’s ability. I found Daniele Sigalot’s more cynical sense of humour to be pretty lame for the most part. For her most eye-catching stunt, titled Orange (2022), the artist sarcastically scrawled the words “ART MUST BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY” with pastel on what looked like a giant post-it note. I don’t get the sarcasm here, of course art should be taken seriously, especially if you are trying to be funny. Comedy is all about timing and Sigalot’s attempted jab at the self-seriousness of the art world felt like it had missed its moment. Its presence managed to accentuate the hollowness of the warehouse we were in.
The most recycled topic of small talk amongst the booth workers this year was “it’s like a fucking casino in here.” Days and nights remained consistently fluorescent, which we all had fun complaining about. As a result I am finding it hard to provide a linear narrative of the weekend, so I will continue to toggle back and forth through my recollection. Thursday night’s vernissage was a blur. I mostly remember feeling underdressed, but word reached our booth that some big deals had already been closed. We managed to sell a couple of Ed Young’s old chestnuts, most notably a print that says “It’s fun without you”. On Friday after closing time, I visited the ICA Live Art Network Africa, where I was pleased to find that even performance artists had discovered comedy. I watched a slapstick physical performance called Fake News by Nelisiwe Xaba and Mocke Jansen Van Veuren, which I thought was great fun. A camera hanging from the ceiling filmed the stage from above, which was then projected against the back wall of the auditorium. By flipping the audience’s point of view 90 degrees, Fake News required that we imagine the force of gravity to have adjusted accordingly as well. The performers were thus flush with the floor at all times, but projected as if they were upright, dancing along the bottom edge of the projection. The show did not have much else to offer beyond this gimmick, but it made for some entertaining gags and impressive physical feats. It was also just nice to leave the Cape Town Mall of Art for a while and look at something softly lit.
Lo-Def Film Factory, In Defence of the Poor Image, 2023.
By the time Saturday rolled around I had more freedom to roam the labyrinth and pick out some favourite works. Up until then I had been compelled to pay closest attention to an enormous collage dedicated to Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image (2009), which was up at Bubblegum Gallery across from us. It was just about the only work that might count as post-internet art in a fair that was conspicuously analogue. Not that the lack of new media, nor the absence of anything particularly confrontational, should come as a surprise. The fair is hardly a laboratory for transgression, nor does it need to be. The dearth of flashy digital artworks was made up for by a wealth of sparkly art. On my usual route to the booth every day, I passed a chic looking French gallery showing an array of giant glittering lozenges. I had to restrain myself from licking them. Around the next corner, there was Rosie Mudge’s usual selection of reappropriated pop song lyrics in shades of pink and gold, which apparently sold like hot cakes again. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it I guess. I also consistently passed a portrait photograph of Nelson Mandela’s face looking really sad and vulnerable at Dale Sargent. For some reason it kept catching my eye and I found it either amusing or relatable depending on the time of day. Steve Biko also made an appearance in Ayogu Kingsley’s revisionist portrait of the Black Consciousness leader reclining in a presidential office wearing a sleek designer outfit. I am not sure what political gesture the artist was going for here, but it can only be described as profoundly unserious.
Now let’s get down to the serious stuff. I was really impressed by the exhibition that Reservoir put together. The pieces were subdued yet well-wrought, like Anna van der Ploeg’s concave carved plywood that hung like a heraldic flag. They also showed my favourite stand alone artwork at this year’s fair: Pompa Funebris (2022) by Cape Town’s golden boy Inga Somdyala. The title means funeral procession and I felt properly humbled in front of the abstract solemnity of Somdyala’s composition. When words fail to describe the surface quality of the artist’s work, I find myself rubbing my thumb over my index finger, as if I am testing the consistency of a fine powder. Crowning the eight strips of canvas coloured in varying shades of soil, ochre, oxide and ash, an arrowhead guides the viewer’s attention to the ground. Somdyala’s preoccupation with the earth speaks for itself and in this case also spoke to Dale Lawrence’s Ends and beginnings (Helderberg 2022) (2023), which hung appropriately beside the former’s work. I have always enjoyed Lawrence’s sensuous conceptualism and once again felt strangely compelled by the thick slab of cow fat and veldfire ash I was confronted with. Where Somdyala depicts a spiritual descent into the ground from whence we came, Lawrence presents us with the dense heaviness of being one with the earth in death.
Inga Somdyala (left) and Dale Lawrence (right) in Reservoir’s booth
The smaller booths, like Reservoir’s, were generally able to provide a more cogent thesis than any of the big galleries, most of which were too broad and diffuse to take in. The uncanny surfaces inside Gallery-De-Move-On’s modest corner retained my interest over multiple visits. Michael Tymbios’ lone figures looked awkward, big-boned and bent by anxiety. His repining purples dovetailed nicely with Selwyn Steyn’s sun-bleached face brick, which captured something existential about South African bureaucratic architecture. The accompanying sculptures of Láura Viruly had an unusual totemic potency and consolidated the exhibition’s disenchanted core. I finally got to see Warren Maroon’s Persian rug laced with crushed glass at Church Projects, before spending some time with Shakil Solanki’s dainty panel paintings of St Sebastian. To my mind it was clear that the artist was not depicting the actual historical saint here, but rather a model posing as St Sebastian. The performance and poise of the figure drew me into Solanki’s imagination more than a coarser portrayal would have. Marsi van de Heuvel wrote all the exhibition texts for her small solo show titled skoonveld out by hand, which demonstrated something of the intimacy and honesty of her work. The show arguably finds itself at the tail end of a family archive craze in South African arts and letters, but van de Heuvel has a keen and careful enough eye for skoonveld to leave an impression.
As for the bigger galleries, I was intrigued by the pairing of Buhlebweze Siwani and Belén Uriel presented by Galeria Madragoa. Siwani’s contribution included a five channel video installation studying a group of stately nude performers. A chorale accompanied the figures whose gaze continually shot back at the viewer, interrupting our impression, remaining closed. Uriel’s sculptures, made mostly out of bullseye glass and iron, bend the way a human body might, but have an unforgiving hardness about them. The pairing accentuated a tension between organic curvature and dense opacity. The flexibility of the human body confronts what is stubborn and impenetrable in the human subject. Across the way at SMAC, Michaela Younge embraced softness completely. Her felt tableaux reminded me of something in my childhood; not so much a memory, but a texture I can recall. Jeanne Gaigher’s solo show at OSART also felt softer than a lot of the artist’s more grotesque recent work. I was moved by Dilemma Guard 2 (2023), wherein the curvilinear outline of a weeping figure is reduced to a pithy effusion of tears, with knees tucked and a shoulder buckling inward. What else? THK showed some nice work, ranging between Guy Simpson’s filial interiors and Johno Mellish’s surrealism. Everard Read, in their turn, off-set Githan Coopoo with Gerhard Marx and blank projects served an hors d’oeuvre of stand alone pieces. The established institutions needed to give a balanced account of the work they show so we got a smattering of everything. Inevitably this meant that there would be a lot to look at and not many inspiring ideas to speak of, but these are the cards we have been dealt. Wishing an art fair to be any different would be unreasonable.
blank’s booth at ICTAF 2023
At some point during the weekend, I sat down with my editor Keely Shinners to do a radio show for Raq Radio broadcast from A4 Arts Foundation. We had fun talking smack about the fair, the art world’s drinking problem and the first CDs we ever purchased (mine was Linkin Park, Keely’s was Avril Lavigne). If there is anything to be cherished about an art bonanza like this one it has to be the conversational fodder it provides. The fair is like a trinket you can turn over in the palm of your hand. A shiny ornament you observe from various angles before commenting on its shape and its provenance. The problem is that most people, myself included, feel hesitant to formulate any kind of opinion on what we are looking at, because what we are looking at is the absolute free play of signifiers that contemporary art delights in. So we err on the side of reticence or critical distance. But the very fact that there is no external guarantee that our reading of an artwork is true is precisely what compels us to try and say something about it. Cynicism is the improper response to this uncertainty, because it disregards the way meaning is discursively cinched up over time. It is not arbitrary or subjective, but fought for. We invariably arrive at a minimal understanding about what the work is doing, but how we arrive there is always contentious and political. Art is a serious matter and we need to keep talking about it.
