Investec Cape Town Art Fair
16.02 - 18.02.2024
Opinions are like arseholes, everybody’s got one. This memorable line delivered by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry is all the more sobering in these most opinionated of times. We all carry our soapboxes inside our heads, galumph about like Kentridgean megaphones. We are easily disappointed, outraged, mortified – ‘triggered’. And, of course, there’s nothing more prone to outrage than that immensely rarefied commodity – Art. Its inutile appeal largely confounds us. It’s global fetishization more so. It seems that art is the most inscrutable of grails, and as such as alluring as it is damnable.
As for an art fair, its ultimate commodification? Invariably opinions vary, more ideologically than instinctively, because ideology is temporally and culturally bound, while instinct is far more difficult to pin down. That said, the two are by no means mutually exclusive. The recent boom in a taste for abstraction is a case in point – championed as a radical turnaround in taste and feel, it is also a counter-intuitive response to the current holding pattern – namely, identity politics. The course of recent history has been consumed by this fixation to such an extreme degree that we cannot operate without being triggered by the demands it fosters, whether righteous or opportunistic, that determine our actions and feelings, our expectations and frustrations, our very embodied selves. Such has been the very real yet crippling burden of ideology, that we have found ourselves in equal parts hysterical and catatonic. Enter abstraction. Stripped of perceivable content or directive, abstraction has allowed us to breathe again, to reimagine the world without any historical materialist dicta factored into the mix. Or so it seems, for some would argue, reasonably, that abstraction as a socio-historical phenomenon is political too – that politics is inescapable.
Abdus Salaam, Our Last stone, 2024. Foraged and sculpted Table Mountain sandstone river boulders.
As for the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, the supreme national, even continental, event in the yearly roster? It was immediately noticeable that Black Portraiture, the fetishistic crux of ‘Contemporary African Art’, was markedly absent, or at least in abeyance. Certainly, the most talked about work, or, even more so, the one which everyone communed with most intensively – so much so that a cordon sanitaire was placed about it by the artist’s gallerist THK – was Abdus Salaam’s heap of boulders, their undersides ground so that they drooped atop each other. Stone was transformed into puffed dough, everything solid, after Karl Marx, melted into air. Of course, this highly popular sculpture-nee-event was an optical illusion. Yet the breadth of its tender appeal, spanning robust youth and those nearing death, revealed our fragility. Both youth and age understood its meaning – that life cannot bear too much reality, that the human burden needs to ease, that joy comes from paradox, and that life – despite all claims to certainty – is far more marvellous and fantastical.
CLAY FORMES | Edited by Olivia Barrell, Published by Art Formes
Frances Goodman, Jenga II, 2023, Glazed Ceramic. Courtesy of SMAC and the artist.
This realisation, for me at least, was the defining spirit of the fair. This desire for heightened connectivity, some beautifully mortal frisson, was also eloquently expressed by the clay works exhibited by Olivia Barrel. Her book, Clay Formes, was one of the most important published in 2023 – not least because it reintroduced the art world to the vitality of ceramics. In this regard, the knockout punch was surely Frances Goodman’s clay tablets which greeted us as we entered the Convention Centre, or Temple for Atheists – very literally a large assemblage of pills. Are we not medicated to the gills? Co-dependent, addicted, captured. Is political dogma not a wing of Big Pharma?
Dale Lawrence, A Lot to Unpack Here, A Lot of Weird Dreams, 2024. Courtesy of RESERVOIR and the artist.
Another striking marvel, which a dear antagonistic friend considered banal, was the new work by Dale Lawrence, who together with Clare Johnson runs the design agency Hoick. Suggesting a rock face, the work, from a series titled Midden, was made of thousands of densely layered meters of … clear packaging tape. Exhibited at the potent new dealership, RESERVOIR, Lawrence’s strange new object exemplified a synergetic innovation in business and art. Obsessive-compulsive for my friend, to me, it was an ingenious retooling of an essential product with which we stick our lives together, without which the endless bubble-wrapped boxed goods we consume via Amazon and Takealot would be vulnerable. That it also exemplified the most enduring movement of the mid-to-late twentieth century – Arte Povera – affirmed the continued need to reinvent our lives in-and-through burden, find the marvellous in the everyday, beauty, goodness, a kinder never a bitter love.
A panel discussion with Dada Khanyisa, Lukhanyo Mdingi, Max Melvill, and Msaki, perfectly embodied this spirit, which Khanyisa described as ‘urbantu’ – a spirit shaped by a generative mutuality yet singularity of purpose. Mdingi concurred, reminding us that ‘beginning with human beings is where the essence is held for creating meaningful and intelligent design’. This view was further emboldened by Melvill who spoke of ‘human-centred architecture’, and by Msaki who described herself as a ‘catcher of songs’, for whom music was a ‘spiritual and healing gift’. Each uniquely inspired artist – sculptor, fashion designer, architect, musician – sought to connect with other wavelengths, dimensions, and worlds within worlds. None were trapped within secular dogma. If their recorded conversation will prove enduring, it is because it tapped into the core thrust of the art fair – an unbounded creativity, an openness to experiment – and because it defined the new life-affirming inclusive zeitgeist.
Max Melvill, Eyes Wide Shut walkabout, Phography by Sune van Tonder
Later that day I joined Max Melvill’s walkabout and talkabout. A playful interactive affair, it further affirmed this defining new age and temperament. Constructed as a shifting movie set, Melvill’s crew shunted the audience from an in-depth chat with Clare Johnson about art, design, and business, to an intervention at CHURCH with its very Dubai bling-golden façade, where we were invited by the Sphinx-like Nkgopoleng Moloi, the new editor of Artthrob, to write down our feelings and reactions toward one of three artworks – mine, regarding a neon work by Warren Maroon, was about needing to be both smart and stupid, when it counted. Our transcriptions were then sewn into a tapestry by Pia Truscott, who made her brilliant debut a few months earlier at FNB Art Joburg. It was the playfulness of the entire event, underscored by a reading from John Armstrong and Alain de Botton’s Art as Therapy while we kept our eyes shut, that allowed for a topsy-turvy medley of emotions to pass through our bodies.
Warren Maroon, Jy moet slim is as jy dom is, 2024. Ice blue neon light. Courtesy of CHURCH and the artist.
Playfulness, performance, and profoundly held truths – under the sign of ‘urbantu’ – were my core takeaways. Contra cynics, for whom art fairs are strictly money-making ventures, my un-flush-self found it a restorative affair. While begrudging associates bitched about the preponderance of ‘youthful’ work, the relative absence of great ‘masters’, a VIP event overrun by the hoi polloi, the supposedly depthless sheen of peculiarly Capetonian art, or some such snivel, I delighted in what was undoubtedly the most affirmative fair in three years, nay, perhaps the best fair ever – in the equivalent spirit, say, in which I regard the 1994 national election a watershed moment, but the rapidly nearing 2024 election a seismic breakaway from all bitter hatred, arrogant cant, and sanctimonious bullshit.
Yes, we need beauty in our lives, goodness too. We need art that pleasures us, that is consolatory. As Mark Read of Everard Read remarked, fairs are never just about a coterie of collectors, it’s about ‘a cultural turbocharge’. It is no accident that culture is globally definitional and globally inscrutable. More an elixir than a transaction, art is a unique ecosystem. ‘I don’t believe in pure investment in art’ the director of the Cape Town Art Fair, Laura Vincenti, remarked – it is also about ‘falling in love’. As such, at its best, the art fair belongs to that unfairly belittled genre, the rom-com. It is in this spirit that we should embrace its potent value as a cultural sign and event horizon which, for me at least, signals an epistemic shift away from dogma towards what we all long for most, even those who love to hurt and hate, which is love. As such, instead of carpet bombing the shit out of it, seeing this lovable event as merely a capitalist’s paradise, or some hell-hole of moral indecency, excess, waste, profligacy, scandal, inequity, blah-blah, in the immortally divvied expression by Aretha Franklin, perhaps the I-C-T-A-F deserves our R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
