M.O.L. 2 - A FOCUS IN OUR CHAOS

M.O.L 2 A FOCUS IN OUR CHAOS By Ashraf Jamal

Iam at a luncheon in Rosebank, Johannesburg. The woman across from me is Claire Shields, a Sangoma and wife of the director of the Cape Town branch of the century-old art dealership, Everard Read. The luncheon is not entirely a social affair. I am there to interview Deborah Bell, an artist whom I admire for the feeling she injects into clay, ink, and paint. But first throats must be slaked, hunger appeased. To accompany a glass of sparkling water I’ve ordered a Bloody Mary, deep dark red and celadon green. When the maitre de concludes his liturgy I order fish.

Drink in hand, ice blocks chiming, I turn to Claire Shields and inquire as to her view of the mornings events, a conversation on the music and life of Hugh Masekela and the photographs of Daniel Morolong. Her reply is an intriguing deflection – ‘I speak with the bones in my hands more than my words’. Bones are an ancient tool for inner vision, not only in Africa. But for some reason it is not the mysticism of bones which exercises me but the bones clutching my Bloody Mary, the bones propping me up which will be fired down to gritty ash.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, my mind capers, before turning a bend. Bones, I now headily surmise, are not only an armature or mechanism, they are also metaphors for the complex functions required to understand art – what it is, what it does. Art after all is not only understood with the eye. Art requires much more of us – our mortality, feelings,

instincts, thrusts. Our doubt. For without that qualifying doubt, which is also the measure of our vulnerability, I’m not sure that we can truly understand or recognise the value of a work of art. Or a bloody cocktail for that matter. Because I now find myself raiding memory’s bony storehouse to recall Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful page-turner, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails – a catchy reminder of how important it is to view life and art as a smorgasbord.

When confronted with an art fair – or in the case of Johannesburg’s recent offering, three art fairs, and a chorus of exhibitions such as Circa’s celebration of the work of Masekela and Morolong – it is this giddy mix of sensations which matters the more. Because while art fairs the world over are all about business, for people such as myself who don’t have the means to splurge on a work of art, it’s the pleasure of its gravitational pull that is intoxicating. And the fact that I can make a buck by prospecting as a writer and speaker.

Words have a role to play in the interpretation of the soul of art. They are like the soft white gloves I donned in David Krut’s studio to open up a precious printed work by Deborah Bell, sheathed in tissue paper. Words are a transaction made with love. But, like love, words can also be bitter-sweet, cantankerous, difficult, frustrating, oftentimes hopeless. And yet, words remain sorely needed if we are to understand the world we occupy, and which occupies us.

“Drink in hand, ice blocks chiming, I turn to Claire Shields and inquire as to her view of the mornings events, a conversation on the music and life of Hugh Masekela and the photographs of Daniel Morolong”

Daniel Morolong, Beach 008

Daniel Morolong, Beach 009

Daniel Morolong, Men 003

Above: Daniel Morolong, Dance 003 Opposite Page: Daniel Morolong, Music 008

Athi-Patra Ruga, Proposed Model of Francois Feral Benga (1906-1957), 2018, High-density foam, artifical flowers and jewels, Approx 280 x 100 x 180 cm, Multiple 2 of 3 + 1 AP 06.

Over the intensive course devoted to three art fairs and much more, opinions and feelings fly back and forth. Surprising and often delightful encounters occur. One is in the rub and flush of a souk in which chatter is the going currency that becomes heightened, even delirious, for an art fair or exhibition generates a peculiarly giddy kind of human encounter. An extra-terrestrial creature might marvel quizzically at the zest we display towards art. A 19 th century invention, designed to distract and ease the burden of the workaday body, the art museum began as a Sunday repast. It has since become a defining cipher for human civilization. We are whom we are today because of art. There are many other cultural forms and lures which, after TS Eliot, are designed to distract us from distraction, but none in my view is as perplexing as a gathering centred on contemporary art.

In the aftermath of the global economic crash in 2008, Geoff Dyer visited the Venice Biennale and was baffled by the on-going economic strength of art. Despite the realisation that

Above: & oppsite page:Stephane Conradie’s fugly constellations of kitsch found objects.

the bubble had burst, Dyer surmised that the continued success of art as a commodity and culture implied the existence of some strange new law of physics. For how else was one to account for a burst bubble which, strangely, kept expanding?

In Johannesburg we recently witnessed a violent and deadly uprising, dismissively discounted as anarchic looting. The uprising is a stark counterpoint and foil for the art world. Seen in tandem these events expose a perverse paradox. Wealth and poverty are commonplace bedfellows, no more so than in South Africa, a country more perverse than most in which each and every one of us is a victim and witness of a life lived-enduredsurvived as an obscene and extreme sport.

It is in this obscene and inescapable context that I found myself in Sandton, the highend hub for pop-ups like the Johannesburg Art Fair and the newbie, Latitudes, and in Rosebank, the epicentre of the city’s leading art dealerships, realms in the Johannesburg

Above: Deborah Bell, Wolf Cave 2017-18, Spitbite aquatint and drypoint on Hahnemuhle Opposite page: Mia Chaplin, Oral Love 2, vase

CBD in which art as a business and culture are thriving. For doubtless we remain caught in Dyer’s strange new law of physics.

Along with all the art, boundless in its diverse range and expression, there was also one ubiquitous alcoholic drink to slake one’s thirst – Gin. The scourge of Hogarth’s England, gin, once considered ruinous, is now the soak of note, artisanal, honeyed, berried – the trope and lubricant for our times. Which was why, after my discussion with Percy Mabandu on the photographs of Daniel Morolong at Circa, I’d selected a drink that was heavily weighted with Worcester sauce and tomato juice, with a celery stick to boot. Sometimes one requires a sump rather than something lite, for art, like life, is also burdensome and taxing. Colonialism, apartheid, and our phantom democracy is no party. While art thrives with impunity– a bubble that keeps expanding – one also needs to look more closely at how, through

art, one can create a better life. In this regard, Daniel Morolong’s black and white photographs of black men and women at leisure in the 1960s is a heartening reminder that not all was doom and gloom. His images inspire us, warm us, and sustain a belief in grace and beauty as necessary then as now.

It was the artist Deborah Bell, at the luncheon I attended in her honour, who spoke the words that sum up the complexity of the times in which we live. ‘Who is holding the world in focus when we are in such chaos?’. The question roiled and rankled in the noon heat, forcing me to suspend my fork just shy of its goal, a plump and juicy dollop of Kabbeljou. The artist, I reasonably thought. It is the artist who helps us to hold the world in focus. As to whom that artist might be is up for grabs.

At the Johannesburg Art Fair, that artist for me was Igshaan Adams. His installation comprising hovering balls of tangled

“We need the bloated scale of a Zanele Maholi self-portrait, the artist charmingly dwarfed alongside it, all-too-human alongside the image’s iconic reinvention of what it means to be a black woman.”

Igshaan Adams, Cloud i (2019), Wire, beads, metal spring, brick force and other mixed media, approx 92 (144) x 48 x 25 cm

wire captured the strange paradox of weightlessness and gravity. We need both of course. We need the elegiac flight of Jake Singer’s shimmering steel sculptures spinning out of their orbit as much as we need Mia Chaplin’s galumphing illproportioned yet elegant vases in their muted earthy tones. We need Stephane Conradie’s fugly constellations of kitsch found objects. We need the bloated scale of a Zanele Maholi self-portrait, the artist charmingly dwarfed alongside it, all-too-human alongside the image’s iconic reinvention of what it means to be a black woman. We need Athi Patra Rhuga’s bling camp superhero aglow in roseate pink and jagged crystal. We need Thania Petersen’s colourfully threaded prayer mat leached of life at its base by a pitch black stain that speaks to the corrosive pall of Wahabism, a fanatical strain in Islamic fundamentalism.

Inside of chaos there is grace. Inside of threat there is the potential, always, for beauty and wonder. The realisation of this potent greatness is embodied in the music and person of the late great Hugh Masekela, feted on the rooftop of Circa in Rosebank, the city’s warm bright night stretching all about Percy Mabandu and Masakela’s sister spoke beautifully of the gentleness and bravura and grandeur of the man, of his loathing of artificial braids and his love of youthful talent, his distrust of parochialism and his championing of a planetary humanism. While Brett Rubin, whose photographs of Masekela stood vigil, conveyed through his gentle quiet the wonder that comes with touching the life of another Masekela was amongst us in spirit and bone. On this great occasion devoted to African art he encapsulated the richness in our dark time – a focus in our chaos.

KAT’EMNYAMA Tony Gum