Take a look outside.

Take a look outside.

Some years ago, there were whispers of Durban getting its own Guggenheim, an idea whose sheer outlandishness made it enormously appealing. Outlandish, not because Durban is a bastion of philistinism (although that suggestion has been made by those who only look in the direction of the city’s lukewarm mainstream) but because it is a place that is perceived as being very far from the centre of things – and correspondingly, very close to the edge. But while physical centrality has lost its importance in the digital age, it is that edge that really makes the city. Not only in the art that emerges from the Durban/eThekwini (and which substantially informs the creative scenes in Cape Town and Johannesburg) but on the streets and the pavements and all the spaces outside and in between.
Liminal and interstitial have become contemporary holy grails which 21st century artists like to attach to their conceptual charm bracelets, but these notions are particularly relevant where the South East coast of Africa meets the Indian Ocean. In Durban, it’s possible to never enter a gallery (and let’s face it, most people don’t) and still experience a rich cultural life in the city.
Visual art is everywhere, from the sometimes technically astounding and always surreal adornment of the city’s buses to the hand-painted signage of plumbers and electricians to the individually styled mblaselo pants worn by Zulu men festooned with colour and nguni designs. In Durban, adornment is never pure adornment. It is always layered, ironic, spiritual, historical, encapsulating the vague but insistent sense of anarchy that defines the city. Dehal’s Bus Liner captures these contradictions best, handing out profoundly resonant spiritual advice from Sai Baba and Jesus Christ on the back of buses, while flaunting sexy phrases on the side, beautifully rendered in anachronistic typography.
The ongoing performances by many of those who spend their days at Durban’s traffic lights and intersections also add much to the experience of Durban as an endless cornucopia of surreality. Moses Nxumalo, the city’s Nothing Man, whose begging boards have made their way into the city’s galleries, is one of Durban’s most celebrated examples but there are many others, quietly adding to the visual texture of the city. On the corner of Berea and Hunt Road, a beggar’s sign is lovingly made out of coloured glitter. In the right gallery, given the correct context, it could sell for thousands. On the corner of Churchill and Umgeni Road, sits a genuine outsider artist. The first time, I saw him he was sitting cross-legged on an electrical box, dressed only in transparent plastic bags, half a pumpkin balanced on his head. Every day he presents a new installation constructed of found objects from the immediate vicinity, addended with Zulu text scrawled on the pavement. It seems that he makes these things because he has to, because he is driven to. The fact that an audience is so incidental to the work is beside the point.
Fifteen years ago, these observations might have been taken as condescending or over-extending notions of the contemporary. Today, they are virtual currency in the art world, but still, for many, such work only acquires the lustre of real art when it is taken into the gallery, given the formalism of the catalogue, the recognition of critical discourse. These were some of the considerations that took place at a seminar on public art at the KZNSA Gallery and which included a series of experienced voices from around the country including Stephen Hobbs, Doung Jahangeer, Dorothee Kreutzveld, Roger van Wyk and Andries Botha, national voices having a national conversation in an apparently marginalised fishing village.
Meanwhile, at Gallery 415 in Umgeni Road, a place that is surrounded by street-level creativity, the feeling of outsiderness continued in an exhibition entitled Love And Monsters by three young artists Liezel Prinz, Anet Norval and Caryn Tilbury. Although all three artists have studied fine art and regularly show their work in local galleries, they remain peripheral, on the faltering borders of recognition. Anet Norval’s work literally looks like outsider art, her moving meditations on love, family, gender and sexuality, deftly conveyed through painting, text and the embedding of found objects in to her work, all studded with a moving naivety. Even at her most sophisticated, Norval’s work carries the essence of heart-rendered doodling, providing a palpable sense of someone’s else’s sense of emotional reality. It is this depth of intimacy that carries her work into the mental life of the viewer.
The work of Caryn Tilbury fits directly into the absurdo-pop canon of Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami but despite these heavyweight references, she sits outside of the fine art scene more than the other two artists, spending most of her time not making art but working in a bookstore. Her medium continually changes but its essence remains consistent – soft, fluffy and absurd, and just ever so slightly sinister. For Love and Monsters, Tilbury produced a series of knitted and sewn monkeys, each elongated creature somehow imbued with it’s own seductive soul. Liezel Prinz produces wall-mounted installations that echo the traditional frame of fine art but extends it into three dimensions. Her work is darkly humourous and lightly alienating, - chicken bones, Astroturf, physical and metaphysical trophies blended into works that capture both the tropes of South African life and her own deeply personal narratives. And I was struck by the fact that this modest little exhibition would feel comfortable and accessible in London, New York, Bloemfontein and KwaMashu.
Perhaps Durban will one day get its Guggenheim – or something similar in scope and weight – in recognition of the fact that it is both physically and metaphorically one of the cultural centres of the South. It would be grand, and sceptics should consider the fact that two decades ago – before the glory of the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the ascension of Barcelona – Spain was widely considered a peripheral third world country, little more than a place where the English went to behave badly. But regardless, what I’d really like to do if I possessed vast (or indeed any) tracts of wealth, is start a museum of outsider art. Although, in a way it would be unnecessary since if you look carefully enough the entire city functions as such.