‘Benign’ relationship melts under the spotlight By Mary Corrigall

This article first appeared in the Sunday Independent

The conflict between corporate sponsorship and art has dogged the Sasol Wax Art Award, reaching a crescendo in this, its third and final year. It wasn’t just Hentie van der Merwe’s winning work that made an overt assault on the corporate. It was also the recent brouhaha over Sasol’s other art initiative, the Sasol New Signatures Award, which saw the corporate giant distancing itself from the winning work, Richardt Strydom’s Familieportret 2, a supposedly risqué photograph, that also brought the
politics of Sasol’s art sponsorship under question.
The art world’s relationship with corporate South Africa has always been a love/hate affair; although corporates have stepped in to support art initiates in the absence of government aid, their assistance
has often come at a price. With the Sasol Wax Awards, the price has been high – artists were forced to produce either works in wax or use wax as the conceptual impetus for
their art. Without a doubt, over the past three years there have been artists who have flourished
under the artistic restraints of the competition, such as last year’s winner Walter Oltmann, the 2006 winner, Jeremy Wafer, and finalist Diane Victor.
But the compromises that the competition demanded of the artists did not engender such satisfying results this year. The five finalists – Stephen Hobbs, Tracey Rose, Brett Murray, Avhashoni Mainganye and Van der Merwe – all responded to the competition’s brief in intriguing and unexpected ways but, ultimately, you have to wonder whether any of the artworks they
produced have any value outside of the competition.
As one art aficionado observed: “There was nothing visually thrilling” to view.
Perhaps Hobbs’s State has the most visual and expressive gravitas. State is an atmospheric video work that maps the metaphorical and physical regeneration and disintegration of a city. Focusing on the shadows of rudimentary scaffolding structures fashioned from wax, the cycle of reconstruction
and devastation is played out over and over, transporting the viewer into an almost meditative state. This seems to suggest that although humans are instrumental in this cycle they are simultaneously powerless bystanders – we see no human intervention. Also implied is that a city is always
trapped in a state of becoming – either ascending or degrad
ng. Never static, it is unable to maintain its state of completion. As it fluctuates between birth, death and rebirth, the city comes to mirror an order more common to nature. So, although cities are seen to be in conflict with nature, they follow an organic cycle that
mimics the cycle of all living beings.
State may be a natural extension of Hobbs’s artistic practice, which has always been concerned with urban issues, but it is not bubbling over with the usual heady concoction of themes that typically infuse his art. The point is that an artist of Hobbs’s calibre should not be hemmed in by any kind of thematic or technical regulation – nor should Brett Murray, whose work for the award was like a wry and one-dimensional advertising slogan. His large text piece, Power, is fashioned from candle stick holders and consists of the struggle mantra “Power to the People”. Lawrence Lemaoana also referred to this slogan in his recent solo exhibition. Clearly the phrase is coming to symbolise the disillusionment with the ANC and its betrayal of the values it once represented. Murray’s work refers explicitly to the load shedding of electricity, but it also obliquely pokes a finger at corporate sponsorship.
Van der Merwe’s attack on corporate sponsorship is more direct.
His video artwork is displayed in a corporate setting and shows a suited man giving a speech. He is
standing in front of the company’s slogan, “Reaching New Frontiers”, and, speaking in Latin, he explains how bees make wax.
This is a multilayered piece in which the corporate’s ambitions to be part of the future clash with the staid traditions of its capitalist outlook. The speaker also represents the artist, who communicates in a language that is unintelligible to the corporate world and needs translation. The content of the speech has no place in this setting, creating an incongruous and conflicted scene that parades as if it’s an established functional relationship. Van der Merwe suggests that it is in the official pageantry that the vexed and unbalanced relationship between the artist and corporate is glossed over.
On the evening of the awards, Van der Merwe’s observations came to life in the trite speeches and corporate rituals that all but ignored the uncomfortable disconnect between art and business.

• The Sasol Wax Art Award exhibition is atthe University of Johannesburg Art Gallery until November 5