A cursory visit to the store reveals that it is just selling bicycles — to a soundtrack of Jimi Hendrix and a Cape Town gale appropriately simulating the chopper blades in Apocalypse Now.

The music puts me off. It over-determines my relationship with the merchandise, forcing me into a mode of engagement that, frankly, pisses me off. I don’t want the cult of cyclist as muscled hero — I want the cyclist as anchor to the ­religion of technology.

The above has nothing to do with the actual store, which I’m sure sells some great bicycles (I didn’t even bother to find out its name), but everything to do with trying to understand Edmunds’ art. The works on show are grouped in series, called Tone, Pitch and Field. There are also works called Solid, Tone and Timbre. Any reader with an ear will have picked up that music features largely in the conceptualisation of this show.

Edmunds’ blog explains it: “Many of us have a long and close relationship with music. From elements that are often non-narrative, mostly repetitive and largely abstract, we extract or assemble meaningful experience, repeatedly.

“In a series of pencil drawings, a linocut and two sculptures, I use only line and its sculptural analogue, edge, to explore visual correspondents for music and sound, and their constituent parts.”

Sometimes the way he leaches all meaning from his work frustrates the viewer. Is there a point to just being beautiful? Of course there is. But that’s not the point: with Edmunds, there is no inappropriate soundtrack to his work, no frame or visual element choosing a primary colour for your perceptions.

With him, what you see is not what you get.

So what is one to make of works such as those in the Tone series? They’re described as “drawings made with a stencil revolved around a centre which sometimes shifts in the course of a drawing … Each line builds in tone and then fades away, which, in accumulation, results in blurry-edged rings and discs of tone which vary both radially and around the circumference.”

An accurate description, if one that doesn’t describe the delightfully vertiginous beauty of being sucked into the lovely, tingling tonality that is the artwork.
Edmunds’ own explanation of his work is peppered with phrases like “the works [afford] an undistracted experience of limited variables” and “[they] are evocative and allusive, and invite the viewer to construct their experience of the work”.

Now nobody is suggesting that this doesn’t happen with all art, where, truly, everyone has to know eventually what they like. But with Edmunds, and specifically this show, we’re enduring something that is very like absolute freedom, with all the glorious constraints and ­limitations that implies.

(First published in the Mail & Guardian, May 03, 2011)

Visit Paul Edmunds‘ blog.

(Pics courtesy Michael Stevenson Gallery)

German edition of Positions.

Pondering the most useful entry point for an essay about Sue Williamson, it occurs to me that there are an inordinate number of ways for the viewer to come to an understanding of her art, and there are many different manifestations of that art. It’s not quite a one-to-one correlation – as always, exegesis far outnumbers artifact – but sometimes it seems that way. She’s never been one to stick with a tested formula – her work ranges from video to painting to photography to metalwork, and all the variations that lie in between.

You might choose to believe this to be true of many artists, but the particular difference in Williamson’s case is that her journey through many media is more an immigration than an interrogation, an always continuing diasporic adventure that is as much about mimicking an African social economy as it is about growing artistically.

This mimicking might be unconscious, although it’s unlikely that any aspect of her artistic production escapes Williamson, a woman who is as astute a writer on art, and critic of art, as she is a creator. Her three major works, markers in a body of shorter form criticism, are the books Resistance Art in South Africa (1998), Art in South Africa: the Future Present (1996) and South African Art Now (2009).

When a writer sits down to write about an artist, and art, he’s confronted with a couple of fundamental questions before he can begin. The first is: at what level of reverence or respect am I going to pitch the tone? In other words, will I allow the weight of the work to affect the lexicon I deploy, and the fame of the artist, the way her community owns her, to determine the works I choose to highlight?

The second is: do I need to aspire to a completist analysis of the artist’s oeuvre, or at least as robust as possible an interrogation of the values her art espouses, or am I going to dip into the rich feast of stimulus available, pulling out the the bits I consider to be choice?

My answers to these questions are determined by the way I understand Williamson, and this understanding is coloured by my earliest encounters with her which, curiously, revolved not around the mundane materials of traditional artistic production, but the more rarefied bits and bytes that constitute the internet. Williamson is the founder of Arthrob.co.za, South Africa’s oldest and most accomplished art website, and I worked for the company that hosted it in its early days.

Founded in 1997, Artthrob has had its fair share of award nominations, but its true status – as exemplified by its inclusion by Berlin curator Pat Binder in ‘Woven Maze,’ an exhibition at the University of Hannover in 2000 – is as an artwork.

And it’s perhaps the exemplary Williamson artwork, in that it relies as much on the goodwill of people as on the genius and application of the artist, and is more concerned with creating and nurturing a community, and taking a view on an issue, than standing alone to be gazed upon.

So for many years, Artthrob was hosted for free, and often clandestinely, and was populated by writers working for little financial reward. It was – and possibly still is, barring some worthy magazines like Art South Africa – the only sustained locus of art criticism in South Africa.

It’s worth noting that this put Williamson far ahead of the curve of internet development in South Africa, and you can see the tracery of this characteristic weaving its way through all her work.

Which brings us to the answer to my two questions: you wouldn’t want to limit interaction with Williamson’s art to a po-faced run through her major successes. She’s an early adopter of the internet age, and as such deserves to be experienced as a product of that discourse. This is not just a method for writing about her – it’s the methodology that her artistic output dictates we use when looking at her art. Her work demands personal engagement, and a spirit of hypertextuality in how we shift from one piece to another, untrammeled by a linear timeline.

The best example of this is how 1983′s “Winnie Mandela”, from the A Few South Africans series, speaks to 1999′s “Winnie Mandela and the Assassination of Dr. Asvat”. The first, a picture postcard celebration of a heroine, the latter, an indictment of a murderess. It’s soberingly instructive in the way it delineates how the simpler iconography of a revolutionary struggle is compromised by the judgements of history, how the myths needed for revolution are dirtied by the dictates of a subsequent lived reality.

A typical Williamson artwork amalgamates artistic, aesthetic appeal with socio-political commentary. It also speaks in a very particular way to both a local audience and a global. The example cited above works to illustrate this as well. “Winnie Mandela and the Assassination of Dr. Asvat” is part of Truth Games, a body of work looking at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It details the story of Doctor Abu-Baker Asvat, a Soweto doctor assassinated for allegedly refusing to supply false medical records providing Winnie Mandela with an alibi clearing her of involvement in the death of teenager Stompie Seipei.

In Sue Williamson: Selected Work, the artist describes her thought process. “What I was attempting to do was present the drama of the historic moment of confrontation simultaneously with the confusion left behind.” Speaking of the series in general, she says, “At no time is the whole picture visible. Viewers are invited to engage with the work by sliding the slats across the images, revealing a glance, a hidden detail, underlining the complex and shifting nature of the evidence.”

For a local audience, the viewing experience involves a conscious, physical engagement with the ideological contradictions the work espouses. Winnie Mandela is a hero of the struggle to free South Africa, and many of us would reject a simple, brutal dismissal of her as a villain. We move the slats in hope, more than expectation.

For a global audience, it’s a little different. With less invested in Winnie as the erstwhile Mother of the Nation, an international audience can be taken through the manifest expression of the tale, and enjoy – if that’s the right word – a narrative engagement given resonance by the hyperlocal pathos that informs it.

The same holds true of another work in the series, “Capt Benzien demonstrates the ‘wet bag’ torture method”. The piece shows Captain Jeffrey Benzien, who was responsible for one of the iconic images of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission when he simulated the “wet bag” torture method, where a water-soaked bag is placed over the head of the victim to induce suffocation.

Again, it’s an image which speaks globally of the horror of apartheid, but for a local audience there is another side to the work, in that one of his victims, Tony Yengeni, went on to provide the slang term for a luxury 4×4 in the South African townships, and was found guilty of fraud in 2003. There are seldom any simple tales in South Africa, and Williamson’s art always has this knowledge implicit in its execution.

Williamson’s eye has been fixed on current political and ideological issues for a while, but she’s also used the prism of a more distant history to interrogate and explicate the forces at war in South Africa today, those venerable issues of racism, oppression, xenophobia, nation-building and betrayal.

In 1997′s Messages from the Moat, Williamson interrogated the history of slavery in South Africa. She engraved and stencilled 1500 bottles with the names of slaves, their birthplace, the buyer, the seller, the price paid in rixdollars, and the date of purchase. These details were sourced from the Deeds Office in Cape Town, and dealt with transactions at the Cape of Good Hope. Inside the bottles, she placed cut up copies of Dutch paintings. Half of the bottles were suspended in a net, and half were floating in a moat reminiscent of the one that surrounds the Cape Town Castle, built by the Dutch in 1666.

At the time, according to Culturebase.net, she said: “It’s like the revenge of the slaves – ´we’re going to cut up your paintings and send them back to you.’” This trajectory – the empire writing back, if you will, but also speaking to itself in an elliptical conversation that leaves no-one inviolate – is one that’s observable in other Williamson works.

Pages from a Government Tourist Brochure (1991), for example, consists of pictures torn out of Native Life in South Africa, a brochure published by the state tourist department in 1936. These are framed in metal inscribed with snippets of anthropometric gobbledygook, and then marked in different ways. So barbed wire, holes drilled through the glass, and other scarring or containing elements are added, to hopefully make a crude reading of the work impossible. As racist governments enclose and expose other races, so too does our act of consuming these images as art, or refiguring them as ideology.

Two of these works hang in my home, and I’m always intrigued by the mixed responses they draw from visitors. The one that elicits the most conflicted interest is of a bare-breasted Xhosa woman, with the caption “Not unworthy of the genius of Michelangelo”. The picture is covered with a gauze, so that you look into the woman’s eyes through a veil that underscores the poignancy of her abuse, but also suggests that there is no easy path to freeing her from this discourse. Many people don’t see the framing as doing enough to offset the essential racism of the representation, while others immediately get the irony.

Or as Nicholas Dawes puts it in “Sue Williamson and the Trauma of History”, his foreword to Sue Williamson: Selected Works, the work is uncomfortable because “the gap between the racist idealisation of a noble savage for consumption on ethnographic safari and the anti-racist idealisation of a noble victim in the name of heritage is distressingly narrow.”

An important impulse behind Williamson’s output is, plainly put, to change South Africa for the better. In Annette Czekelius’ “Re-imagining a new nation. An interview with the South African Artist Sue Williamson” (African cultures, visual arts, and the museum. Tobias Döring (2002)), Williamson says: “I believe in the transformative power of art – and just as resistance art played a small but important role in bringing about change, I believe that the vision of the artists of this country, black and white, will help the country re-imagine itself as a new nation.”

Of the many ways in which change is brought about, education is probably the one best served by Williamson’s work. In her Better Lives series (2003), video portraits of other Africans who have come to Cape Town in search of a better life for themselves and their families, Williamson forces notoriously xenophobic South Africans to confront immigrants as human, and gives the subjects a voice. They tell tales of surviving in a sometimes hostile South Africa, “a series of… serious reflections on violence, abuse and the impossibility of returning home”, as Rory Bester describes it in Art South Africa.

In From The Inside (2000), Williamson worked with HIV positive people, graffitiing their statements on to walls in public places, and signing their names to the work, with the words “HIV positive” or “AIDS patient”. So Benjamin, for example, contributed “I’m sick of Mbeki saying HIV doesn’t cause AIDS” to a bridge in Cape Town. Williamson’s documentation of the process constituted the gallery instance of the artwork. So Benjamin was photographed a few weeks before his death, and this juxtaposed with a photo of the graffitied wall bearing his statement.

2009′s Other Voices, Other Cities is another instance of Williamson’s ongoing mission to give voices to the marginalised or neglected, or in this case, to those who would not normally speak to each other. The public art project started in Cuba, where Williamson was an invited artist at the 10th Havana Biennale. Initially, one part of the series was to consist of messages from the residents of a particular city, put up on a building in the city in question. The message from Cuba was “The blockade is also in the mind”, and one from Johannesburg was “Who is Johannes?” When, at the last minute, she was refused permission to do this, she asked artists and friends to hold up the letters instead. It’s an echo of the way she managed to keep Artthrob.co.za running, adding the resources of a community to her own considerable personal efforts.

This all sounds a little serious, and it would be doing Williamson a disservice to not present her as multi-dimensional. “Hotels”, for example, on the same show as Better Lives, featured the award-winning video “Welcome to the Jet Hotel”, a witty mock travelogue shot when Williamson was stranded in a hotel. She contrasted the promises of the hotel brochure with the grim reality around her, to humorous effect. It’s as if she’s mocking the trajectory I spoke of in my introductory paragraphs, the always continuing diasporic adventure that is the African artist at work. As is so often the case, the reality is not always the same as what we read into the work.

Pondering an exit point for this essay on Sue Williamson, it occurs to me that a suitable coda would be her contribution to 1997′s Thirty Minutes, a group exhibition on Robben Island. 1997 was the year that Robben Island, notoriously a prison for heroes of the struggle such as Nelson Mandela, opened as a museum. Artists were invited to make site-specific installations in the Visitors’ Block. As Williamson describes it in Selected Work, ‘In the prison years, a family member would be allowed one thirty-minute visit every six months, a visit in which the prisoner would be viewed only through a small pane of glass, and private conversation would be impossible.”

I remember taking the ferry across to view the show, and being struck by the incongruity of the journey as Cape Town receded and the island grew bigger. How, I wondered, could artists speak generally to a location that was so much about private pain? When we finally viewed the show, Williamson’s installation answered the question for me.

Each artist was given a visitor’s booth to use, and Williamson had turned hers into a small cell enclosing a monitor. The monitor played back the image of the viewer, to a scratchy soundtrack which I only now discover was the sound of a tape being rewound. It was an exercise in artistic humility, allowing the viewer to carry the burden of representation him or herself. Art can do a lot, the piece seemed to suggest, but in the final analysis, it’s all about the person looking.

Much of Williamson’s art is about this kind of co-opting of the viewer, a political gesture that seems to always be encoded into her production. I’ve never forgotten the shock of having to visit myself in the small visitor’s cell on Robben Island, and I would venture that this same moment of recognition plays out for many people experiencing Williamson’s work. For South Africans, it’s an important lesson to learn – that we’re part of a community of many voices, and inescapably so.

(First published in German, 2010.)

Went to Yeoville to take a look at a great public art/public service project that artist Terry Kurgan has put together over last two years. It’s a website (www.hotelyeoville.co.za) and art project in the Yeoville Public Library, which draws on the immigrant experience in Yeoville for its impetus.

Basically, the site works as a resource, and also stands in for the hundreds of bits of paper affixed to walls in Yeoville with bubblegum, adverts, pleas, offers and messages left by people.

It’s a fine project, which talks to immigration, xenophobia, loneliness, and the glue of diaspora that is the internet cafe. It’s taken Terry 2 years to get it up and running, mainly because of the slack municipality – the library was finished ages ago, but only opened recently. It’s a poignant experience, see the personal testimonies of people far from home, and yet in a place which is also home.

Clearly, Paul Edmunds doesn’t get paid by the word. His last five exhibitions have been entitled, variously, Scale, Houding, Phenomena, Array and Aggregate. And now we have Subtropicalia, at the the Michael Stevenson Gallery.
He’s growing syllabically, at least, and euphonic growth is complimented by tectonic shift. The only piece in the new show that I’ve seen in the flesh, so to speak, is “Weft”, a video piece featuring a bifurcating image of a surfer (a longboarder, it looked like, which fits Edmunds’ oldschool approach to sport – he rides a single speed mountain bike).
I saw an earlier version of”Weft” when I fortuitously found myself at the Bank Gallery in Durban last year, for Aggregate, which was a collection of old pieces with two new works -  the fine art equivalent of music’s “Best Of” albums. While the piece seemed to fit an idea of Durban, it didn’t fit my idea of Edmunds’ oeuvre.
Why waste our time with video tricks we can find in their thousands on any video-sharing platform on the net? But as always with Edmunds, there’s a slow release of new ideas that lead you to a different understanding of his work. So “Weft” is actually a gift to the viewer, a way into what can sometimes be dense works that defy easy narrativising.
Surf, sea, flow, motion, nostalgia – these motifs make a work like 2001′s “Reef”, hundreds of found polystyrene cups with an arrow motif cut into them, and then arranged into the shape of a wavy reef, more than just an exercise in beautiful form and environmental intervention. The motifs allow us to engage with the artist, and steer us from the cul-de-sac of the empirical down the road of explication.
Whether this pretty allegory works in terms of the new show is for you to judge. Do pieces like “Foam”, a pavement parallelogram made out of used skateboard wheels, and “Period”, where, according to the Michael Stevenson website, “Edmunds employs a material similar to that used in the manufacture of bodyboards to create structures that embody a series of growing and contracting waves”, suffer from being thematically linked? And by suffer, I mean take some of the perplexing mystery out of the beauty of Edmunds’ work.
In his statement on the new show, the artist suggests not. And it must be irritating having critics continually harping on about the abstract nature of what you do, and limiting your work to theoretical mumblings rather than visceral reactions. Undeniably, Edmunds’ work is as beautiful as it is sometimes baffling, and a visit to Subtropicalia will reward you in more ways than one.

For designers and artists, recognition used to arrive on the back of a show in a gallery, and a concomitant critical piece in a newspaper. Nowadays, it’s as likely to arrive as a blurb and link on Martha Stewart.com, or an SA Blog of the Year award.

The plaudits for designer and illustrator Heather Moore are from all those sources, which is exemplary of what it means to be a 21st century designer working from an outpost of the empire. And by empire, I mean both digital and design. And by outpost, I mean Cape Town, which for some people is about as far as you can get from the centre of design without actually going to the ludicrous Fourways Design Quarter in Johannesburg. (Described on their website as “tres chic”, which I assume is French for “something you put on your lap to eat fried chicken”).

So Moore’s iconic teapots and jugs tea towel is one of the featured 2009 Christmas Gift Idea on Stewart’s “Martha’s Circle” blogging community, and if you want a full view of the range of Moore’s products, visit her award-winning blog SkinnyLaminx.com.

But ecommerce affirmation and online accolades aren’t enough to differentiate the good from the great, and craft from art. The so-called real world still counts, and Moore’s work is also included in FENOMEN IKEA, running until February at the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg.

Moore’s “I Wish We Had Ikea” tea towels and cushions, a witty comment on the economies of design and how they relate to the margins inhabited by Moore and other designers from the developing world, are in the NON IKEA section.

Some will argue – and I’m aware that this is a fundamentally boring question, but bear with me -  that Moore’s designs shouldn’t be termed art. This would certainly be Moore’s standpoint.

“I’d hate to be called an artist. I’m an illustrator, not an artist. My stuff is attractive, it’s decoration. There might be an idea or two behind it, just an expression of pattern and rhythm. But it’s produced quickly.”

Modest words, albeit an implied criticism of Andy Warhol and his ilk. But while the crude binate of art and craft is one that’s been done to death, it does provide a useful vocabulary for looking at the impetus behind some of Moore’s early work.

Exemplary of this is her Sevilla Rock fabric collection, wonderfully simple iterations of self-conscious red elands, frisky blue ponies, and greenly-poised duikers. Looking at them reproduced as cushions, tea towels or aprons, one gets a sense of how beauty always has to inhabit a faultline between utility and ideology.

“Each of the five designs is based on ancient paintings from the cave walls at Sevilla in the Cederberg mountains, as recorded by rock art enthusiast [and cartographer extraordinare] Peter Slingsby.”

“The whole idea was to remove cave paintings from their value as artefact or tourist attraction, and look at them as beautiful drawings. It’s about the artists, not the history. And it’s also a rescue job – I hated the cliched Bushman stuff.”

Moore’s style has been termed Modern Revival, which she describes as “A kind of retreat from the design excesses of the 80s and 90s, going back to when things were made properly.”

“The 50s were such an amazing time for production methods, a time of simplicity, of cutting the crap. Some of my work draws very directly on artists of the 50s. For example, I’ve directly drawn teapots and jugs sourced at Milnerton Market, and made fabric from that. The Eeps [little birds that feature on many Moore designs] are a more general nod to the 50s.”

This would still be a fairly straightforward story of recognition and success, were it not for the way it happened. Rather than the more usual process of hanks to the power of the internet, Moore provides her distinctive products to stores all over the world, including the iconic Heath Ceramics in Los Angeles and Sausalito.

According to Moore, “Online’s been the enabler for everything. I’m not very good in self-promotion or marketing at all. Everyone I’ve ever stocked in the world, the initiative has come from them.”

The other pleasing aspect to Moore’s design ethic is that her merchandise is truly local. “I do every aspect of my production in Cape Town. The cotton is milled in Cape Town, and everything is printed and manufactured here.”

But it’s also local in the sense of being distinctively South African without relying on crudely kitsch juxtapositions (three flying ducks on a wildly overpriced t-shirt, for example), or impossibly romantic references to the prelapsarian bush (anything involving lions, and possibly giraffes).

Moore’s silently waiting birds, her poised animals and vital teapots, are at once reminiscent and something you’ve never seen before. Also – and Moore would probably say, more importantly – the craft and rigour that’s gone into the production process is a thing of beauty in itself. It’s also not incidental that her work is affordable. There’s no reason beauty should price itself out of the market once it becomes desirable, in the same way that there’s no convincing reason why good design shouldn’t be a prerequisite, instead of an optional extra.

(Disclosure: Heather Moore has illustrated the cover for Chris’ book, out June 2010. Visit her blog Skinny Laminx.