beauty is available

Is contemporary art accessible to the general public?

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903)

The idea that art is not accessible to its contemporary audience is certainly not new, as this quote by the painter Gauguin implies.
But what causes this disconnect? Is the problem with the audience itself? Gauguin certainly believed it was: “There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite,” he said.
The judges of the Spier Contemporary are given free rein to choose the works that speak to them most clearly. As N'Gone Fall, a judge in the 2008 competition explained, “I am looking for artists who are able to give me keys to understand the world”.
The Turner Prize, the UK and arguably the world's best known contemporary art exhibition, recently announced its shortlisted artists. Three out of the four either draw or paint, in stark contrast to recent years. According to Stephen Adams, arts correspondent for the London Telegraph newspaper, previous Turner awards “have been dominated by video installations and hard to understand "sculptures".
Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, denied the choices were a reaction to the competitions of recent years, which have been criticised for rewarding art that only a small elite of curators can appreciate.
It is, of course, impossible for any judge to be completely objective about the work (s)he is examining. Art, by definition, calls out for a response from its audience. The artist, according to Camille Pisarro, “defines the society he lives in because he sees further and deeper than other men”.
Or women.
But do public tastes and expectations influence the judges of contemporary art competitions?
Are judges under pressure to present more accessible works?

Excerpts from the front

Ashraf Jamal:

With all the talk of freedom, the society is ghettoized, and art, apogee of privilege and taste despite its banalization post-Pop, has barely conquered the imagination of the country's citizenry. Tretchikoff remains the one artist that has crossed racial and class divides. That Tretchikoff was blacklisted by the cognoscetti as bad art or kitsch says a lot about just how segregated taste is. That the South African National Gallery will host the first major Tretchikoff retrospective in 2010 says worlds about the long overdue demystification and deregulation of taste, a move symptomatic of an entirely new moment in South African art history. The Spier Contemporary 2010 promises to reinforce this move. Spier Contemporary is no Turner Prize with front page tabloid coverage, national televisual airing, and the likes of Madonna as master of ceremonies. Uneasily positioned between a rarefied and popular imaginary, Spier Contemporary has no model to fall back on, which is all to the good because art, today, allows for no final arbiter or gauge. If accessibility and awareness is one key objective, the other far greater objective is to redefine the very nature of the event, the better to generate a more hydra-headed aesthetic and more lateral pulse points. So, while there is no clear agenda, there is, nevertheless, a hunch that by widening the net, breaking down the art cartel, and doing so without paying knee-jerk homage to a phantom democracy, one could be in for a surprise come March 2010...

Budgets?

Off of Creative Cape Town's Facebook page, a salient comment:
The wives of the President get R15m for their households, while the National Arts Council's entire budget for distribution to artists and arts projects around the country is R14m. What do you think?

WALL WRAP

WALLS WRAPPED
WALLS UNWRAPPED
SC10 - OPEN FOR ART

Ambassador Collective

Spier Contemporary 2010 hosted a group of enthusiastic participants of the Ambassador Collective Program on the 27th February to talk about art in South Africa, touching on some of the debates and giving participants an preview of the exhibition space. We also spent some time imagineering about crazy inventive ways to expand the audience for art.

On looking and not looking - Response to Minister Lulu Xingwana's Comments

Response to Minister Lulu Xingwana’s Comments about the Innovative Women Exhibition

Dear Minister Xingwana

To place yourself before a work of art is a complex and potentially transformative experience. Sometimes that means looking at something you’d rather not see. But as the Minister of Arts and Culture, you preside over a realm in which that line between what you’d rather not see and what you need to look at is an ever-present factor, and a theme of much art.

Minister, I invite you to look at art that challenges you, like that of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi. That looking is an active and complicated experience that includes all the discomfort, shock, unsettling of established notions, new ideas and feelings that you appear to have had at the Innovative Women exhibition, and that together can amount to illumination. That is what art does. The problem with walking out of an exhibition is that you miss the many meanings that the works evoke, both separately and together. You miss what they create and unsettle, and therefore the possibility of transformation.

Immoral, offensive and going against nation-building … there were children as young as three years old in the room … where do we draw the line between art and pornography.

Minister, where does this language come from?

When you turn to such justifications for your actions, it is our duty as artists, writers, feminists and citizens to point out how revealingly close your words are to those of the apartheid censors.

Artists and governments have always had a contentious relationship. Artists can reach into the minds of people and change them. That is a power that states are wary of and want to regulate. But to constrict art is to erase the capacity for imagining what does not yet exist. We need that capacity because our world is imperfect and we need visionary, epiphanic initiatives if we are to succeed in changing it. Art generates epiphanies.

So let us name what happened in that brief glance, that instantaneous assessment, that abrupt walking out, and the explanations from your office that followed. Let us name it and its dangers.

The name is censorship, and the dangers are reactionary ideas about art and the fueling of homophobia.

Fortunately, there is another language for thinking about art and artists.

Minister, what would you have seen if you had stayed and viewed the works of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi alongside all the other artists in the Innovative Women exhibition and talked about them with other visitors?

You would have seen works that use the language of allusion, intimacy, beauty and pleasure.

During your brief glance, you may have mistaken the intimacy in Muholi’s images for pornography and the erudite allusions in Mntambo’s work for carelessness about sexual violence, but that mistake can only be sustained if you don’t truly look at their art. If you stood in front of Muholi’s photographs, you would see lesbian lives outside of the narratives of violation and pornography through which they are more commonly presented to us. You would see how her work opens up a discussion about visibility itself. For lesbians, visibility carries an immense cost - the feminist writer Pumla Gqola calls this a “hyper-visibility” that has been used to violate lesbian lives through a sensationalistic focus on suffering that has simultaneously made it possible to ignore that suffering. Muholi’s images confront such hyper-visibility and reclaim a space for the women in her photographs away from denigration and hostility and toward presence, pleasure and wholeness. Her work shows us there is no category of human being whom it is safe to despise and whose hurt it is expedient to ignore.

And once the photos existed and came into public view, other good followed. Some of the best new South African writing on art, citizenship and belonging has been sparked by Muholi’s work, including essays by Desiree Lewis, Pumla Gqola and Gabi Ngcobo. You might be pleased to know, Minister, that this new direction has also been traced by a vanguard of the African continent’s finest feminist scholars, among them Sylvia Tamale, Patricia McFadden and Charmaine Pereira.

No artist is afraid of being a dissident to conventional thinking. That is their role. Mntambo, Muholi and other artists continuously spark our creative, ethical and political responses, but also our personal and affective ones. We envisage ourselves anew after their art enters our imaginations. If we see someone’s wholeness, can we continue to ignore their violation? The most radical possibility of art is to generate change – and in the process create a more inclusive notion of community.

Minister, perhaps unintentionally, your words have generated a great deal of alarm in the world of the arts and among those of us who strongly support the rights of gays and lesbians. We wonder if we are entering “our George Bush years,” as Gender Commissioner Yvette Abrahams contemplated on hearing your comments, ironically at a conference on the contemporary meanings of Sara Baartman, where Abrahams and Muholi argued for the revolutionary possibilities of love and art for directly addressing racism and its violent legacies.

Minister, I would like to imagine a different outcome to this controversy. I want to imagine you will come back to the images you walked away from, and look deeply at what you thought you didn’t want to see. I imagine you rethinking received ideas about art and pornography (the great poet and activist Audre Lorde gives us some beautifully nuanced insights on this) and arriving at a hard-earned transformation. I think of you reflecting on your responsibilities as the guardian of the nation’s best impulses in art and culture – which is not to limit but to enable such work. Then perhaps this experience of looking again at the thing you didn’t want to see will have brought you closer to the most radical and expansive possibilities of art.

Gabeba Baderoon

Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar. Details of her work are at www.gabeba.com.

Do public tastes and expectations influence the judges of contemporary art competitions?

Are judges under pressure to present more accessible works?

The Turner Prize, the UK and arguably the world's best known contemporary art exhibition, recently announced its shortlisted artists. Three out of the four either draw or paint, in stark contrast to recent years. According to Stephen Adams, arts correspondent for the London Telegraph newspaper, previous Turner awards “have been dominated by video installations and hard to understand "sculptures".

Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, denied the choices were a reaction to the competitions of recent years, which have been criticised for rewarding art that only a small elite of curators can appreciate.

It is, of course, impossible for any judge to be completely objective about the work (s)he is examining. Art, by definition, calls out for a response from its audience. The artist, according to Camille Pisarro, “defines the society he lives in because he sees further and deeper than other men”.

Or women.

Swiss Miss points out the lighter side of art collection:

http://www.swiss-miss.com/2010/03/why-you-should-buy-art.html

Wrapped around the city!

5 MARCH // WRAP DAY

Let's change the way people look at the world!

Spier Contemporary 2010 is hosting Wrap Day.

We hope you'll join us in turning the everyday objects of your life into works of art! This can be your apple, the desk of your boss, your fax machine, your doorway, dinner, television, phone, house, husband, …the list goes on and on…

Behind the idea is the notion that things that are wrapped are differentiated. A wrapped object is set apart by being mysterious. Why is it wrapped, what is underneath? These thoughts are informed by the eye of the beholder. Once unwrapped, The Spier Contemporary Exhibition hopes to do just that – change people’s perspectives by having us look at our everyday environment differently – through the eyes of our artists.