Art Cowboy - Peter Machen

“If you build it they will come.” It’s a paraphrased line from one of my favourite Hollywood flicks that has made its way into popular culture. The actual film, Field of Dreams, is of all things, a baseball film, and the only sports film ever to garner any warm critical feeling from me. It is a film that teeters on the edge of ludicrous sentiment, but just manages to get away with it, in the process creating a genuine and moving exploration of non-religious faith.
It’s also a line that applies to the small but consistently expanding circle of gallerists in Durban, from such modest concerns as Gallery 415 in Umgeni Road to the large-scale commercial space of Kizo Gallery in Gateway Theatre of Shopping (to the give monolithic shopping centre its full title) and particularly to Kizo’s hosting of the expansive Heritage Arts Festival in and around Gateway over the course of the last month.
But perhaps it applies mostly cogently to the Heritage Auction, during which the work on display in the Heritage Exhibition (the central element of the festival) will be auctioned off, rather than sold during the exhibition as is usually the case. An undercurrent here is the perception that corporate investors and well-heeled individual art buyers are thin on the ground in Durban. It is this perception – which few gallerists or artists in Durban would deny – that the auction seeks to challenge. Whether the challenge proves to be quixotic or manages to illustrate an effective demand for art in KZN will have been determined by the time you read this. The breadth of the festival’s content and its engagement with figures such as ceramicist Clive Sithole and artist/curator Khwezi Gule also signals a sea-change in the way that Kizo operates in KZN. What was once derided by some as a commercial gallery is increasingly engaging with its local and national context and morphing into a more contemporary hybrid. Of course, this approach is standard practice in most parts of the world, but in Durban the words commercial and contemporary are still seen by many as mutually exclusive, no doubt one of the reasons why so many KZN artists leave the province.
Which is an appropriate if somewhat belated point at which to congratulate Dineo Bopape for winning the MTN New Contemporaries Award for 2008, and also to mention that three of the four nominees hail from Durban. Two of them, Michael MacGarry and Bopape have left our shores while Themba Shibase remains in the city, lecturing fine art at the Durban University of Technology. Shibase has just had a show at the KZNSA gallery (the gallery has also shown both other Durban nominees in recent months) which reconfigures history, politics and masculinity with a sceptical eye. Shibase’s painted political figures – unlistening for the most part as politicians tends to be – worked beautifully in relation to the exhibition that occupied the rest of the gallery. The work of radical art collective Ultra-Red, Silent|Listen is a sound and installation based
research exhibition that engages directly with the personal and political struggles around HIV and Aids. The haunting exhibition includes recordings of multiples voices discussing aspects of the epidemic as well as an investigation into the aesthetics of performance of organisation.
It is one of several research based exhibitions to have show at the gallery recently, and at the KZNSA’s AGM this year, one of the Society’s members wanting to know how such research could constitute art. A brief discussion of the hoary banality of is-it-art started to ensue but was cut short by a majority who simply didn’t want to go there. But it is telling that these research-based exhibitions have not engaged the public as much as other shows, although that’s an unfair phrasing; it’s really the public who not engaged the works. Now there’s a can of worms and a lack of space... Finally, I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon exploring the work on show in Construct currently on show at the Durban Art Gallery. Curated by Erdmann and Jacob Lebeko, the exhibition explores the increasingly blurry edges of the documentary photograph, ultimately positing the unworded question: is all photography documentary photography? It’s a fascinating show, and one which bears repeated visits. Thankfully, its up until the end of January so there’s plenty of time. If you’re in Durban over the next few months, don’t miss it.