Storm Janse van Rensburg at the Redcross Hospital Auction, South Africa, September 2011.

Storm Janse van Rensburg is a South African curator and Senior Curator of the Goodman Gallery group currently based in Cape Town (CT), South Africa.  Van Rensburg began his curatorial career straight out of the University of South Africa in 1995.  Until 1999, he served as assistant curator at the Market Theatre Galleries in Johannesburg. It’s important to note that the Market Theatre was founded in 1976 and operated as an independent, non-racial theatre during the apartheid regime.

Later the same year he found himself at the KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts (KZNSA) Gallery in Durban where he was offered his first curatorial position.  During those six years, he established the Young Artists Project, a stepping block for young artists and a program of national significance.  The KZNSA was founded  nearly 108 years ago as a platform where artists could discuss, exhibit and market their work.  The gallery has gone through major transformation over the years and currently is the province’s premier contemporary art gallery.

Since 2009, he holds the position of the Senior Curator at the Goodman Gallery Group. Van  Rensburg has been with the gallery since 2007 where he previously held the curatorial position at Goodman Gallery Cape while establishing the CT branch. The Goodman Gallery’s website notes that “the gallery has a long history in South African art.  It was established by Linda Goodman (now Givon) in 1966 and, from the outset, supported and encouraged artists to exhibit despite the strictures of apartheid.  It was involved in the seminal Art Against Apartheid exhibition in 1985 and held shows that spoke out against the repressive apartheid regime. The gallery is home to forty artists including visual art luminaries such as William Kentridge, Kendell Geers and David Goldblatt.”

Van Rensburg for many years has been the face of the Goodman Gallery at the Armory Show; Art Dubai; Art Basel Miami Beach; Art Basel Switzerland; Paris Photo; and at the Joburg Art fair. He has worked closely with artists Mikhael Subotzky, Hasan & Husain Essop, Sue Williamson, Hank Willis Thomas, Kudzanai Chiurai, David Goldblatt, Mikhalene Thomas, Moshekwa langa, Ghada Amer, Reza Aramesh, Kader Attia, Nontsikeleelo Veleko and many others, and has curated numerous exhibitions.

Storm Janse van Rensburg is an absolute gentleman and a multifaceted individual with a marvelous art past and an inspiring future, as he will soon venture into the art world independently. It’s my absolute pleasure to present him today.

Georgia Kotretsos:  What role has the studio visit played in your professional life as it has evolved over the passed decade?  Did the different positions you’ve held as a curator define the quality and frequency of your visits? 

Storm Janse van Rensburg: The studio visit is an important aspect of what I do, in fact what any gallerist or curator does. It is literally at the coal face. A couple of things also intersect at this point. It is a moment to see and talk about ideas, to see the progress of an artist’s project, see developments from one visit to the next. It is a moment for suggestions, resolving problems, practical and conceptual. It is a dialogue that I think is really essential to being a practicing curator.

Cat asleep, studio of William Kentridge, Johannesburg. February 2011.

It is not simply a moment to ‘chew the fat’ with an artist. It is about a trust relationship too. I am also careful during a studio visit that my feedback is not to guide or pressure artists into following a particular direction. It is simply coming in with an open mind, to engage with what is in front of you. And, if there are absences, to articulate them.

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Siemon Allen, "better," detail, 2009. Bank Gallery, Durban, South Africa

Siemon Allen is a South African artist who currently lives and works in the United States. He received his MFA from Natal Technikon (now Durban Institute of Technology) and was a founding member of FLAT gallery, an artist’s initiative in Durban, South Africa. In 2010, he was invited by the gordonschachatcollection as the featured artist at the Johannesburg Art Fair. That same year, he presented Imaging South Africa, a survey of work from the last ten years at the Anderson Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Allen’s concurrent solo exhibitions took place at The Durban Art Gallery and Bank Gallery in 2009. His work has also been shown at Artists Space, The Whitney Museum, and Momenta in New York City, The Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. His work was included in the 2^nd Johannesburg Biennale at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. Allen is a visiting artist and adjunct professor in the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. His most recent project is an ongoing web-based visual archive of South African audio.

For the past ten years, Siemon Allen has been exploring the image of South Africa through a series of collection projects.

In his own words he tells me:

Ironically, most of my work is the result of my being in the United States, where I find myself looking at the image of South Africa as I might reconstruct it—through historical artifacts (stamps), through current media (newspapers) or through received audio (sampled sound works). To some extent, it speaks to what I feel is a kind of separation from the source, and leads me to consider how much of this work is, at its core, an investigation into notions of branding and identity through displacement.

He is currently showing two works at the South African Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennial.

The most current collection, an archive of South African audio, is made up of over 2500 items, including 650 rare shellac discs. Records is a series of twelve large format prints (78” x 78” x 3”) on Hahnemühle Museum etching paper selected and scanned from the larger audio collection. Allen is presenting five prints from the series for the South African pavilion at the 54^th Venice Biennale—these include Better, His Master’s Voice, Rave, Tempo, and Zonophone. The scans of the records produce remarkable detail capturing not only the grooves but also the accumulated historic traces of scratches and damage that speak to the memory of the object. It is significant that though these prints are considered by Allen to be part of his audio collection and speak to the primacy of music in South African cultural history, they are silent.

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Last month, I had the privilege and pleasure of attending a symposium that served roughly as a capstone to one of my graduate courses. The symposium was coordinated in conjunction with the Victoria and Albert Museum’s just recently closed Figures & Fictions show, an exhibition of a range of South African photographic practices. The second term of my course focused on many of the photographers featured in the show, touching on issues of photographic ethics, gender and sexual identity, and the legacies of Apartheid in South Africa, among others. I can hardly count the exhibition and symposium’s timing as an unexpected coincidence – the curator of the exhibition, Tamar Garb, also happens to be the professor of the course I was in.

Zanele Muholi, "Martin Machapa," 2006

It’s interesting to see how an art historian’s current research interests shape and are shaped by the courses she teaches; even more so to see those interests presented for a larger public audience. Throughout our course, my classmates and I saw resonances of the post-colonial theory around Orientalist depictions of race and gender we had studied in the first term regarding late 19th-/early 20th-century French portraiture. The juxtaposition of contemporary South African artists, mostly photographers, and western European painters of a century earlier may seem unexpected, but when viewed through a social history-informed lens, certain parallels regarding the power and expectations of truth in representations continue across period and location.

And those questions around the political nature of the assumed truth-value of photographic representation served as the crux of the Figures & Fictions show, as subtly indicated by its alliterative title. The exhibition consisted of the work of seventeen South African photographers from the well established to the emerging. While the photographers’ practices vary greatly in content and intent, the common thread of work included was the depiction of human beings, human bodies as subjects. Some such as David Goldblatt’s Ex-Offenders photos may be commonly identified as documentary practice, and others, like Kudzanai Chiurai’s satirical portraits of fictional African leaders, offer more explicitly constructed or imaginative projects. Others still remain in a grey area between the two, perhaps constructing a dialogue between photographer and photographed. To collect such broad range of representations in one space is to raise questions and challenge the alleged objectivity and presumed narratives of any and all the photographs. Or so I have no choice but to believe, having raised such questions all term long in class with Professor Garb.

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Juozas Cernius, "Bale Mountains, Ethiopia," February 2011. Photo credit: Anita Vizsy.

Juozas Cernius is a Canadian visual artist based in Toronto. He has received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004) and his BFA from Concordia University in Montreal (2002). Juozas has worked in numerous media and has exhibited drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures in both Canada and the United States. He has shown at Allen Gallery, at Denise Bibro, and at the Dumbo Arts Center, among other exhibition spaces.

His advertising photography has appeared in Elle Décor (UK, Hong Kong, Russia, USA), Byzance (Middle East), Architectural Digest, Wallpaper* (UK), Art+Auction, and others. He also contributes photographs to ArtFagCity.

Having said all of the above, the reason for this post is Juozas’s most recent enlightening realization that art, opportunities, life, and the world do not end in Manhattan. You see, it all started when one day, waking up in New York for the 7^th consecutive year as a legal alien stopped making sense.  In 2010, time came to renew his visa again – Juozas had tenaciously pursued an art career and life in New York until Truman Burbank’s spirit took him over for good this time.

"The Truman Show" by Peter Weir, 1998

He packed his camera bag and got on a plane to a journey of discovery, which lasted over 200 days starting on December 1, 2010. Juozas visited more than 53 towns and cities in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Swaziland, and South Africa. Last month, he returned to Toronto with a vast body of work of over 12.500 photographs.

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Diane Victor (South African, born 1964), “Fading Man I,” 2010. Intaglio. Plate: 20”x16”. Publisher and printer: Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT. Edition 25. Courtesy Center for Contemporary Printmaking. © 2011 Diane Victor.

As interest in William Kentridge’s work has grown over the past decade, so has interest in South African art as a whole.   Printmaking is a central component of the cultural landscape in this country and it is an important form of expression for many of its artists.  In general, South African printmaking is characterized by political and emotional honesty and a refreshing fidelity to the technical roots of the medium.  Kentridge, of course, is a prolific printmaker (see the November 2010 post of this column),  as are Conrad Botes, Norman Catherine, Robert Hodgins, Anton Kannemeyer, Cameron Platter, Claudette Schreuders, Diane Victor, and Ernestine White, to name a few.  The work of these and other artists, who are well known in their homeland, have begun to garner increased attention in the U.S. recently, appearing in art fairs and featured in solo exhibitions at major galleries and museums.

Several exhibitions this year have introduced a wider American audience to the vital printmaking scene in South Africa.  Most visible and comprehensive among these is Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now, a group exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art on view through August 14.  Earlier this spring, Boston University hosted dual exhibitions in honor of the 25th anniversary of Caversham Press, the first professional printmaking workshop in South Africa.  At the same time, the Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa, launched the first major solo exhibition of Diane Victor’s work in this country – an auspicious introduction to this important artist who is becoming better known to an international audience.  In March and early April, David Krut Projects mounted “Contemporary South African Prints: DKW and I-Jusi,” a retrospective of I-Jusi magazine (an underground art ‘zine dedicated to South African identity and politics, founded in 1994), and David Krut Workshop, a professional printmaking studio established in Johannesburg in 2002. Later this fall, Jack Shainman Gallery will host a solo exhibition of Anton Kannemeyer’s work.

The MoMA exhibition now on view provides “a representative, quality cross-section of contemporary printmaking activities in South Africa over the last five decades,” as described by exhibition curator Judith Hecker, Assistant Curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books in a recent e-mail interview with the author.  Drawn from the museum’s collection, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue provide critical insight to role of printmaking in South African culture and politics, presented in terms of the country’s recent massive political changes from an apartheid-ruled state to an evolving democracy.  In addition to a scholarly essay by Hecker, the accompanying catalogue provides further information and bibliographic citations on each of the artists, collectives, organizations, and workshops represented.  It also includes contextualizing photographs and a timeline of printmaking, cultural, and political events.

The exhibition was inspired by Hecker’s previous work with William Kentridge’s prints (she contributed to the recent traveling exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes and authored a related publication titled William Kentridge: Trace; Prints from the Museum of Modern Art) and prompted by a curatorial initiative to “expand the museum’s holdings to better represent the breadth of printmaking activities in South Africa”  (Hecker in a recent e-mail interview with the author).  The first South African artist to enter the print collection was Azaria Mbatha in 1967 but he was the sole representative until the department began to acquire Kentridge’s work in earnest in the 1990s.  Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now (and the museum’s holdings) were developed over a period of six years; in preparation, Hecker traveled to South Africa for extended periods in 2004 and 2007.  As noted in her introduction, this is not the first scholarly examination of the topic (preceded by Printmaking in a Transforming South Africa, 1997, and Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints; Twenty Years of Printmaking in South Africa, 2004, both by Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin).  However, it is the first to be made widely available to a U.S. and international audience, by virtue of MoMA’s visitorship and following.

The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are divided into five categories, four of which are technique-based – the final category, Postapartheid: New Directions, shows the openness and experimentation that characterizes recent print production.  Due to the nature of the exhibition, artists are generally represented by only one or a handful of works – therefore, it is best understood as a starting point for exploration.  In Hecker’s words, “The show, and our holdings, do not aim to be complete or definitive… it reflects a work in progress; we plan to continue to acquire works by South African artists” (e-mail interview).

The first section focuses on the favored status of linocut amongst South African artists, a tradition that began during apartheid.  As discussed by Hecker, its ease of use, affordability, and accessibility made it a natural choice for the community workshops and non-profit art schools that served black artists, who were attracted to its stark graphic power.  Early practitioners included Azaria Mbatha, John Muafangejo, Dan Rkogoathe, and Charles Nkosi, many of whom were involved in the Black Consciousness Movement founded by Steve Biko.  Their work centered around “themes of ancestry, religion, and liberation” (Hecker, Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011], 12).

In the early 1990s, the country moved through intense political protest and international political pressure into a peaceable – though contentious – conversion to a democratic nation.  Meeting of Two Cultures (1993), a linocut by Sandile Goje, summarizes the spirit of reconciliation that characterized this period.  The image shows two biomorphic homes shaking hands: the structure on the left is in the style of the Xhosa people (who were the original inhabitants of the area), at right is a home characteristic of the European ruling class.  The linocut section of the exhibition also includes recent prints of stunning technical achievement by William Kentridge, Vuyile C. Voyiya, Cameron Platter, and others.  These are less intensely political in their subject matter, though still grounded in the recent history of the nation.

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Jan-Henri Booyens at his studio, in Pretoria, South Africa

Jan-Henri Booyens is a South African artist based in Pretoria, South Africa.  Jan holds a BFA in painting from the Durban Institute of Technology, in KwaZulu Natal. Since 2000, he has widely exhibited nationally as well as internationally. His work may be found at numerous collections but the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris is the one that stands out.  He is currently represented by WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery in Cape Town and he is a member of the visual art collective, Avant Car Guard.

I am presenting Jan today because his work reflects the “sensation,” as he put it, of being a South African. His textures, pallet, forms, and chaos are there to serve the edginess of a reality he naturally discusses in the interview later on. His works read as the artist’s very signature, as a fingerprint — a generous portion of his visual intake is mirrored on his surfaces and I recognize him and his world in paint clearer than by anyone else among his generation of artists.  Jan’s work has myriad layers, yet the one that conceptually excites me the most is his take on Modernism and his guts to experiment with and stretch this dogma as if it’s gum between his fingertips.  It takes intelligence and informed decisions to initiate a dialogue with a tradition from the past and further successfully produce contemporary paintings today by using a supposedly exhausted vernacular.

Jan-Henri Booyens, "Stoned," 170 x 200 cm, 2010

The minute he held up Stoned at the depot of his gallery at the Johannesburg Art Fair last April, I stood there instinctively connecting the dots. Images and texts of Abstract Expressionist painting were flashing before my eyes – it was mentally a cross-art history puzzle.  All the information was there, all the clues are still right there; thus, I stand by his side when he wishes he could respond by saying “you figure it out!” every time he’s being asked about the content of his work.

Jan speaks directly to a specialized audience — his work is developing rapidly and with this body of work, he is significantly contributing to the evolution of South Africa painting. It is always a pleasure to present a fellow Durban Institute of Technology alumnus. Please read on…

Georgia Kotretsos: What does it mean to be a contemporary artist/painter in South Africa right now?  What kind of voice do artists have and why have you chosen to have two — one as a painter with an independent practice and one as a member of Avant Car Guard?

Jan Henri Booyens: Well it is a cutthroat business out there. Literarily I saw an artist stab a gallerist in the throat one time.

Jokes aside, I’m working in an ambiguous space — between a history of South African art known for its political undertones and that of South African and African abstraction that is rich in mysticism, ritual, and an emotive understanding of the world.

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On Johannesburg | “William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible” (2010) Preview | Art21 from Art21 on Vimeo.

It is nearly impossible to talk about William Kentridge’s artistic practice without mentioning – if not devoting entire exhibitions, articles, books, or blogs to – the subject of home. In fact, one rarely sees the artist’s name without the qualifier “South African,” and he himself has said that his work is rooted in his hometown of Johannesburg, where he was born and continues to live and work. It is not surprising, then, that amidst the many influences drawn out in Art21’s William Kentridge: Anything is Possible, dwells a pervading sense of hearth and home.

While home for Kentridge is Johannesburg, the traditional home of artwork — in Kentridge’s images specifically — is the studio, which is explicitly evident in his work. Kentridge employs such diverse media and techniques as drawing, tapestry, torn paper, sculpture, film, and music. “Understanding the world as process, rather than as fact,” his work is a palimpsest of form that almost always bears traces of its making. Kentridge’s artistic practice mines the turbulent history of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa, resulting in a layered picture of both historical events and personal experiences and memories. As Leah Ollman observed, in the aftermath of apartheid that Kentridge experienced, “South Africa was drawing itself, drafting, erasing and reformulating its structures of power, its social relations, and its systems of rights.” Similarly, Kentridge’s charcoal drawings, which most often form the basis of his work, are continually rendered, erased, and redrawn. Inextricably tied to the notion of home is that of memory, and the resultant smudges, shadows, and ghostly lines of the permutations that Kentridge’s drawings undergo exemplify the tenuous and fluid nature of memory itself.

An early point of origin for much of Kentridge’s subsequent work in stop-motion films is 9 Drawings for Projection, a series of nine films that began in 1989 with Johannesburg, 2^nd Greatest City after Paris, which was made through this process of drawing and erasure. In Anything is Possible, Kentridge describes Johannesburg as “a city of dichotomy between leafy suburbs which are man made to a bleak landscape around it, a complete fiction.” He goes on to say that, “the history of the city is of course the history of two cities – the white city and the black people living either invisibly in the city or in the areas around the city.” Kentridge’s work explores this dichotomy, dealing with both home and homelessness, the familiar and the foreign, black and white, reality and illusion, and the opposition between still versus moving image.

Berni Searle, "Untitled (red)," from "Colour Me" series, 1998.

Home, family, and an interrogation of identity also inhabits the work of Cape Town-based artist Berni Searle, for whom the theme of origin provides a context for understanding her work. More specifically, being of both African and German-English descent, Searle’s artistic practice often explores the split origins of her mixed racial heritage.

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In celebration of Art21′s new feature film William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible — which premiered nationally on October 21, 2010 and will continue to air on PBS (check local listings) — the Exclusive series is devoting the month of October to telling stories about Kentridge’s numerous artistic collaborators whom we’ve had the distinct privilege of meeting these past few years. This is the fifth of six episodes.

Episode #126: Anne McIlleron, William Kentridge’s studio manager, discusses the artist’s working method and penchant for collaboration. Featuring behind-the-scenes moments from the artist’s studio in Johannesburg, South Africa; a performance of I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008) at the 16th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; and rehearsals for Kentridge’s production of The Nose (2010) at The Metropolitan Opera, New York.

Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

William Kentridge is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series and the Art21 special, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible (2010), both on PBS. Watch full episodes online for free via PBS Video or Hulu, as a paid download via iTunes (link opens application), or as part of a Netflix streaming subscription.

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Philipe Charlut, Robert Elfstrom & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Ray Day, Patrick Mullins & Roger Phenix. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: William Kentridge. Special Thanks: Anne McIlleron, The Biennale of Sydney & The Metropolitan Opera, New York. © 2010 Art21, Inc.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Fall preview season is upon us, so it’s time for us to throw our cards into the mix. The first trailer for William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible is now available for your viewing pleasure on the special film site (and after the break below), as well as at any of your (and our) favorite video-sharing or video-watching platforms.

On the subject of media, new image slideshows are coming later this week, each featuring thematic narratives by way of pairing artworks, photos, and exclusive production stills with selected quotes from the artist. In the meantime, catch up with the first two slideshows: In the Studio is a glimpse of the artist at work in his Johannesburg studio; and On Perception shows the range of optical trickery and techniques adapted by the artist through various projects.

Finally, we released two more teaser videos since mid-August; all four teasers can be viewed in the Media section of the film site. Catch the trailer past the break, and be sure to browse through the Media section of the film site for additional videos and images.
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Art21 is proud to announce the forthcoming broadcast of our latest film, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible, the first film produced by Art21 for national television broadcast outside of the biennial Art in the Twenty-First Century series. The film is also Art21′s first feature to focus on a single artist.

The broadcast premiere of William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible takes place this October 21 at 10:00 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings).

The film gives viewers an intimate look into the mind and creative process of William Kentridge, the South African artist whose acclaimed charcoal drawings, animations, video installations, shadow plays, mechanical puppets, tapestries, sculptures, live performance pieces, and operas have made him one of the most dynamic and exciting contemporary artists working today.

A Web site complements the film, where you can learn more about the film, watch related videos, and browse through image slideshows. Throughout the coming weeks leading into the October 21 broadcast, we will be releasing additional features related to William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible. Features will include essays and interviews contributed by writers from the Art21 Blog stable of contributors, preview and exclusive videos, thematic image slideshows, educational features, and much more.

Stay tuned, we’re just getting started!