JOHANNESBURG BIENNALE

Yinka Shonibare Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour 1996-7 Installation with props and African fabrics By courtesy of the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London This piece which is, and soon won't be, on the show in the Electric Workshop is by one of the young British artists currently showing on 'Sensation' at the Royal Academy in London. Shonibare's work takes a caustic look at the clash of cultures between Victorian colonists and Africa. What do you think of the early closing of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale? Is it an outrage? Or was it all just a waste of money? Email us with your comments on this or any other things you'd like to say about the Biennale - if you went, which pieces you liked or hated - and why. Should there be another Biennale in two years time? There'll be a special forum for all your views next month   Two pieces by Bodys Isek Kingelez on the show 'Hong Kong Etc.' at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery

Shock announcement of early closing Last week, the Johannesburg municipality horrified the art world by announcing that the closing date of the 2nd Biennale, originally scheduled for January 18, would be brought forward to December 12. Severe budget constraints were cited, and one press story said that the early closing would save the city R670 000 on the day-to-day running costs of the Biennale. If no last-minute fundraising effort is successful, this will mean that the Biennale will have run two months from the opening date of October 12. Now this is a perfectly respectable period for a Biennale to run, but the problem is that this decision should have been taken right at the start. The Biennale has been widely advertised internationally as being open until mid January, and to close it now will mean inevitably that important visitors will arrive to find the doors closed. That early closure will be seen by the international art community as being an admission of failure. The credibility of Johannesburg as a city capable of running a major art event will be totally destroyed. Which of the long list of overseas sponsors will wish to get involved again, when they see their generosity treated in this way? Johannesburg has already spent R8.8 million, an investment which according to Dan Cook in the Sunday Independent (Dec 7) has already seen a return of R15.6 million in international media coverage. So why ruin all the good publicity generated by behaving in this incredibly unprofessional high-handed way? Admittedly, daily attendance figures have been low, and this is the second disappointment: that the people of Johannesburg have not had the interest to overcome their antipathy to downtown Johannesburg in order to visit what is surely one of the richest visual feasts ever to come to this country. But South African habitually leave things to the last minute, and possibly the December-January holiday period would have seen a marked upswing in visitors. Let us hope for a stay of execution. The Cape Town venues for the Johannesburg Biennale will not be affected.

Cildo Meireles Marulho 1992-1997 The artist preparing his installation in the Johannesburg Art Gallery Photo: Ignus Gerber   Cildo Meireles Marulho 1992-1997 - detail                                   Sophie Calle The Detachment, deserters memorial plaque, 1996 colour photograph framed and book.   Ana Mendieta Silueta Works in Mexico 1973-1977 Colour photograph documenting earth/body work	Important and Exportant at the Johannesburg Art Gallery One of the most felicitous pairings on the Biennale is the side by side placing of the work of Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles and Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto's seascapes on the Gerardo Mosquero curated show, 'Important and Exportant'. Each artist is entirely successful at drawing the viewer into that poetic space where land becomes sea, but the emotional heat generated by the two pieces is very different. Meireles has enclosed one end of the gallery with a raised wooden boardwalk. Climbing the steps, the viewer is able to walk out along a pier and gaze down at a 'sea' composed of pages of books printed with images of blue waves. A gentle and melancholy chorus of voices rises and falls, like the waves on the shore. Meiriles' skill lies in the use of these simple materials - wood, paper, sound - to evoke a mood. One is reminded of the role the sea so often plays in Latin American, and particularly in contemporary Cuban art - the sea as a barrier that prevents us from leaving, that divides us from the ones we love. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Sugimoto's masterly photos provide a cooler, more distanced and contemplative viewing: each is a seascape, a platinum-toned view taken gazing down on a smooth sea blending into the horizon - the sea as a calm symbol of the infinite. The views seem similar, as if they could all have been taken from the same place, but an examination of the subtle raised white lettering under each photo will reveal that they were taken from spots all over the globe. And then there is the French artist Sophie Calle. For his show 'Important and Exportant', Mosquero took as a curatorial task the selection of established artists who have become icons to the younger generation of artists, and Calle certainly fulfils this criterion. In a text on the wall, she explains her project, The Detachment. 'I visited places from which symbols of former East Germany have been effaced. I asked passers-by to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces. I photographed the absence and replaced the missing monuments with their memories'. Large framed colour photographs such as a wall with holes where bolts have been pulled out hang above the open pages of a book that shows the monument which once existed, together with a series of recollections by the people from the area. The interesting part of this piece is to read how these accounts of what people thought had once been there differ widely, and also what their feelings were about the monument. The piece is a potent reflection on the role of public sculpture in society. Other work includes the 'angel' photographs of Ana Mendieta, the Cuban artist who was to die under suspicious circumstances, and reflections on language and image by Frederic Bruly Boubare and Willem Boshoff. Every piece on this show is worthy of its place.
A performance piece by Tracey Rose on 'Graft' at the South African National Gallery. Photo: Michael Hall   Penny Siopis Patience on a Monument - 'A History Painting' (detail) 1988 Oil paint and collage Coll: William Humphries Art Gallery Kimberley                                         Sandile Zulu Centurion Model 2 (detail) 1997 Burnt and moulded grass   Moshekwa Langa Temporal Distance (with criminal intent) You find us in the best places... Mixed media installation                   Alan Alborough Heathen Wetlip 1997 Elephant ears, feet, rope and steel Installation view           Candice Breitz 45 Rorschachs & 1 Mute Cube (detail), 1997 Colour photgraph mounted on wood.	'Graft' at the South African National Gallery This was the only all South African show on the Biennale, curated by Colin Richards, whose theme of 'Graft' with its many meanings led the young artists he chose to some interesting resolutions. Overall, it is one of the strongest shows on the Biennale. Having negotiated Siemon Allen's elegant and enigmatic screen of woven video tapes in the foyer gallery, coming around Anton Karstel's imposed architectural column, early visitors to the show found themselves gazing at a classically posed naked woman in a glass case seated on a television set. At her feet is a mound of long black hair - her own. Head bowed, not looking up, she is engaged in endlessly weaving and knotting strands of this hair, with the monitor showing her actions in closeup. This is Tracey Rose, a young artist from Johannesburg. One is reminded immediately and irresistibly of Penny Siopis's painting , Patience on a Monument: 'A History Painting' (1988) in which a black woman, seated on a pile of debris, peels a lemon against a background of colonial war scenes, a painting which in turn evokes a whole series of historical paintings and sculptures of women seated just so, working with their hands. The difference between those early works and then Siopis's and now Rose's is that Siopis and Rose are using irony to question the social structures that attempt to keep women in a submissive role. Rose is going so far as to present her vulnerable and naked body to be gazed at in public - an act of bravery in the name of art which few would dare. And the hair? It is Rose's own. Her performance is not just about gender but also race. In the past, the kind of hair you had could determine your racial classification, and accordingly, straight hair has widely been considered more desirable. Here are the artist's own notes on the subject of hair: 'I can remember a time having been envious of my mother's hair. I, too, wanted to coax the kinks out of my own - I had none. My cousins had them. Coloured hair is strange: a fusion of black and white but not quite. Not black enough to be shamefully treated, not white enough to be pampered.' These notes and others relating to Rose's childhood perceptions are being deeply incised into the long wall of the gallery by a convict on a ladder in a daily labour which will last the length of the show. In the same room as Rose's glass case is Sandile Zulu's fine work. Zulu's major achievement here is the flawless fusion of traditional African rural materials with contemporary concepts and meticulously worked sculptural forms - a crossover almost no-one else has accomplished with the same skill. Instruments of war created from burnt grass, roots and wire hang symmetrically down the length of the gallery wall, while on the floor below parallel rows of burnt grass plants, laid out root to root, invite contemplation. Another artist who came onto the national scene at the same time as Zulu - only two years ago - is Moshekwa Langa, currently studying at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam,who returned to make a quirky and playful floor piece, a sort of miniature urban landscape of brightly coloured cotton spools, toy cars and bottles linked by tangled threads. Langa used to avoid giving his pieces titles 'because titles tend to fix things' - but the wordy title of this one - Temporal Distance (with a criminal intent); You find us in the best places... seems to offer little access to the piece. Langa is still asking his audience to make up their own minds as to meaning. In the central gallery is perhaps the strangest graft of all - Alan Alborough's provocative arrangement of dried and salted elephant ears suspended like rows of flags from the four central columns of the gallery, held in position with steel carpenters clamps. Between each pair of columns a metal shelf is suspended on which repose two elephants feet, turned upside down, the rounded surfaces worn by a lifetime of walking, and still deeply ingrained with the soil of the bush. The piece is curiously repulsive - one of the most ridiculed of colonial souvenirs were the ashtrays mounted on the lower half of an elephant leg - and this display of the still beautiful parts of this most noble of animals in combination with the steel of industry is a most uncomfortable reminder of the price exacted from Africa by the coming of the white man. There are more grafted body parts in the next room, or at least, photographs of them, where Candice Breitz is conducting a witty foray into psycho-sexuality with her piece 45 Rorschachs & 1 Mute Cube. Pinkly naked male and female bodies sprawlingly engaged in sexual activities have been cut, reassembled and rephotographed as a series of Rorschach blots which are presented in a formal grid arrangement on the white back wall of Breitz's mute cube. Others on the show include Marlaine Tosoni, Johannes Phokela, Maureen de Jager, and Angela Ferreira. Until January 18.
Jocelyn Taylor Alien at Rest 1996 Video projection               Lorna Simpson Counting 1991 Photogravure with screenprint                                                   Melanie Smith Orange lush 1997 Mixed media	'Life's Little Necessities' at the Cape Town Castle The title of this show is an interesting one, the word 'little' consciously toning down the importance of the words 'life's necessities'. It's a show of installations, all by women, and one cannot imagine an exhibition of men's work with this title. One might think of the old joke about the wife who, when asked who makes the decisions in her family, replies 'I decide on the little things, like how to spend our money, and where the children will go to school, but my husband makes all the important decisions, like how to change the world'. Traditionally, women have felt impelled to suppress their own needs and successes to keep the male ego in place. The artists selected by American curator Kellie Jones largely investigate current feminist practice, with its emphasis on a reclamation of a sense of self, and an assertion of control of one's being which is not to be denied. Take New York artist Jocelyn Taylor's three-screen video piece Alien at Rest. This is an in-your-face self portrait of the artist striding freely naked, save for sunglasses and shoes down the city streets, or sinking below the surface of bathtub of water, then rising to confront the viewer with a direct and uncompromising gaze. In her catalogue essay, Jones quotes feminist writer bell hooks as noting that the black female body is itself already a sign of sexual experience. It is this stereotype of easy availablility that Taylor courageously tackles head on. The title seems to give a mocking key to the way she has felt herself regarded. Lorna Simpson is known for her remarkable photographic pieces which subtly investigate racial prejudice. Here, she is in lighter mood with one of the most enjoyable pieces on the show, a video entitled Call Waiting. Shot in black and white in moody interiors - a bar, a bedroom with rumpled sheets, a man behind a glass screen - the video exudes style notes of the old movie melodramas from the fifties, but each of the protagonists in this movie has that essential 90's accessory - the mobile phone. The ringing of the phone and the ensuing conversation links one brief scene to the next, and short as the video is, at the end of it, so many links and suggestions have been established that it is almost as if one has sat through an entire movie. Call Waiting plays with aspects of contemporary life and the superficial interconnectedness given to us by buttons on electronic gadgets. Two rooms farther on, an African view on gadgetry can be found reflected in the work of Nigerian Fatimah Tuggar , now based in New York. Her witty, to-the-point sculptural pieces combine electric appliances with traditional domestic implements - an electric egg beater will have its steel shaft replaced with a stick, on a record player, a record made of grass revolves to the sound of African music. Tuggar writes: 'I use traditional tools to point out the toggling that goes on in a contemporary city kitchen in a developing country. For example, housewives use the electric mixer in conjunction with the traditional stick whisk due to the inefficiency of the power system. My attempt is to dispel the media stereotype of the poverty or purity, and yet remain honest to the shortcomings of modernisation'. 'Perfect for Halloween' muttered one American visitor, passing me as I gazed at the wall of Melanie Smith's installation Orange Lush, a collection of objects garnered on Smith's travels, each manufactured of orange plastic. This is a piece to be enjoyed purely for its impact on the eyes, the observation of how many subtle variations there can be of this particularly strident industrial hue, and the reflection of how a wide assortment of very different objects take on an almost uniform appearance by virtue of their colour. Other exhibitors include Pat Ward Williams, Valeska Soares, Silvia Gruner and local artists Veliswa Gwintsa and Bernadette Searle.
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