The fight against dead Europeans

The FNB Joburg Arts Fair held at the Sandton Convention Centre is without doubt the calendar event in the South African art world, says the writer. Picture: Motshwari Mofokeng

The FNB Joburg Arts Fair held at the Sandton Convention Centre is without doubt the calendar event in the South African art world, says the writer. Picture: Motshwari Mofokeng

Published Sep 28, 2016

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The Joburg Art Fair is at once challenged and boosted by international competition, says Gabriel Crouse.

Johannesburg - A full tour of the FNB Joburg Art Fair should start over the road, at the epicentre of the “richest square mile in Africa”, in front of the statue of Nelson Mandela in Nelson Mandela Square.

Arguably the most beautiful person, inside and out, of the last century, Mandela is rendered in six metres of bronze: each metre worse than the last. It is the worst executed statue this critic has ever looked at.

It went up in 2004. Fortunately, 2004 is also the year that Artlogic was founded. And four years later, it launched this annual fair - without doubt the calendar event in the South African art world.

Commercial galleries, artists, buyers and discerning viewers that want to keep on track have no choice: they must do it, and this year, they did so again.

The opening gala of the fair held in early September was an occasion for fancy dress, loud boasts and the soft fizz of champagne.

But seeing the art through the crowd required sharp elbows or a fat chequebook. Since most of the work is unique buyers raced each other to put down their cash for the best.

They are likely getting their money’s worth.

Across the planet, headlines beam the self-realising fact that this is Africa’s moment in the art world, one intensified by Nigerian-born Okwui Enwenzor’s curation of the Venice Biennale last year, where Ghanaian-born El Anatsui won the pre-eminent Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement.

But the difficult questions to ask in a moment of exuberance are: how long can this last, and what next? Reducing to rands and cents Africa’s moment in the sunshine is a bright morning.

The Standard Bank Gallery, in the CBD, is presently hosting a major exhibition of Henri Matisse, one of whose paintings recently sold for nearly R520-million, about 20 times more than the total sales at last year’s Joburg Art Fair. The Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), also in the CBD, has unexpectedly extended its Centenary Celebration exhibition. In that exhibition, one room about the size of the 90-plus booths at the Joburg Art Fair, is worth at least as much as the total sales of the fair. That little room in JAG includes dead European artists.

So the really big money hanging on Joburg’s public walls is either on loan or state-owned. And the money gets far bigger abroad.

A single Jackson Pollock painting can sell for over R1-billion. Paul Gauguin’s painting of two Tahitian girls sold for about R4.3-billion. In 2012 Anatsui hit a record when one of his pieces sold for about R20-million. Massive difference.

This critic is not an investment manager, but if the best African artists today are as good as the best Europeans of the last century then the market will eventually value their work accordingly.

That means growth potential for the market in African art.

Is the official investment manager term for 10 000% return on investment “astronomical” or “diabolical”? Whatever it is, Pollock and Gaugin are long dead and we will probably join them before the market corrects itself.

Still, in the short term, the enormous price gap between premium African and Western art is narrowing, and dealers have taken notice. Eight galleries that focus on trading African art have opened up in London since 2009. The 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair has been hopping between London and New York since 2013 to the same end.

Auction house Bonhams has been developing a dedicated African section since 2009 and will face new competition from Sotheby’s when they open their dedicated floor in May next year.

For most South Africans this frenetic development is taking place at a great remove. The Joburg Art Fair is at once challenged and boosted by international competition. Although the fair runs in the “richest square mile in Africa” only the most established galleries can quote their works in dollars and pounds to the few international buyers who fly in, bespoke.

The Catch-22 that the Joburg Art Fair faces is all-too familiar. The likes of Anatsui will exhibit here as soon as enough buying power converges on the fair. That buying power will converge here as soon as the likes of Anatsui make it an unmissable opportunity. But both sides are hesitant, for now.

What the fair lacks in dollars and pounds it makes up for in breadth and immediacy: 600 artists; 80 exhibitors; 15 special projects. The public relations books and pamphlets do not even have to spell it out: all under one roof.

Visitors are getting more than the opportunity to invest in a growing market. Here was an opportunity to encounter different versions of what good art is and ought to be. Radically different versions.

This critic is yet to encounter the possibility of gathering it all up into a cohesive unit. But plurality is the mode of our times.

All of the gallerists interviewed emphasised that they measure their success not only by the financial take-home, but also by the connections made and contrasts exhibited, especially as seen by the artists they represent.

That might sound like an attempt to spin a bad balance sheet into a good-news story, especially when the internet provides an inexpensive way to make connections and view art across any geographic divide. But the act of looking resists reduction to screens and memes, and this resistance occurs on many fronts.

The fair included work of almost every media current in the visual arts, but each one is something foremost to be looked at.

This critic’s eye was repeatedly arrested by a painting on charred wood, tucked in a sconce of a minor booth from Harare, Zimbabwe. Epheas Maposa of the Unhu Village collective comes from a place this critic has never visited and a painted a face he does not know. And yet now he cannot forget it. The pronounced cheekbones, withdrawn jaw, watery blue eyes and slumped mouth assemble under duress. The distressed white, black and red overtones make the pathetic subject into something horrible.

It might have been a cautionary tale stretched across two dimensions: a corrupt old man is, like the wood onto which he is painted, too hard to snap so instead he is charred away by fire. But his hair is drawn up into two girlish buns. The background is gaudy pink. A playful effeminacy dislocates the sullen ruin. It also concentrates attention on that essentially human feature, the sclerae, which are too pink too. This could be a painting of Robert Mugabe’s alter.

The story of this work’s arrival in Joburg starts in 2013 when artist and Village Unhu administrator Kresiah Mukwazhi worked two jobs to save up, and then borrowed money to top up, for a bus trip and visit to the Joburg Art Fair. The next year Mukwazhi and Misheck Masamvu raised sponsorship for a road trip to the fair and then gathered more funds from the European Union, via the Culture Fund of Zimbabwe Trust, to rent a booth and exhibit their work in 2015.

They did well, so they came back in 2016. Meanwhile the Unhu Village collective has grown its residency and education programme.

Its affiliates have been taken up the Goodman Gallery and SMAC and next year they hope to be represented at 1:54 in the realm of dollars and pounds.

Money is almost everything. Buyers and sponsors must feel secure in the credibility of their investments, and that requires lowered barriers on both sides: shorter trips for the artists, greater transparency and access for the buyers. The fair has done that.

We all stand to gain.

One day that statue of Nelson Mandela will come down. It might be at the hands of #Fallists who have already begun to call him traitor, a term they may just as readily apply to African artists who seek international acclaim by competing within the global art market.

Alternatively the local market could become strong enough that art lovers can gather their resources, economic and aesthetic, to put up a monument that fits our greatest dreams and their embodiments.

You know, something to be proud of. Something to look forward to, together.

* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

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