September 26, 2005
By Lucille Davie
William Kentridge, David Goldblatt and Edoardo Villa are exhibiting in Joburg simultaneously - one city, three world-class artists.
Kentridge and Goldblatt are exhibiting at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG); Villa has 40 sculptures at the Johannesburg Zoo, bringing to the zoo a mysterious, other-worldiness. Animal squawks and squeals intrude on but do not distract from an appreciation of them.
Goldblatt is also exhibiting at the Goodman Gallery until 1 October.
The JAG owns works of all three in its collection: 30 of Kentridge, 21 of Goldblatt, and three of Villa, whose St Sebastian stands prominently at the gallery's entrance, its black angular shapes a perfect foil to the sandy arches of the gallery.
The three artists, all resident Joburgers, have held numerous solo and group exhibitions, locally and internationally. There are shelves groaning with books written about them, and their work has been bought by private and corporate collectors across the globe.
William Kentridge
Kentridge's exhibition is entitled
Retrospections, reflecting 26 years of his work and consisting of charcoal drawings, films, videos and sculptures.
On a walkabout of his exhibition with him recently, it was clear Kentridge enjoys talking about his work, offering valuable insight into how he works and the thinking behind his pieces, as any artist would.
Kentridge gives his walkabout wearing a jaunty panama hat and his trademark white shirt and black trousers. He stands on a chair, talking into a microphone and gesticulating in various directions.
Three or four galleries at the JAG are bursting with his work, in all exhibiting about 100 artworks, including 14 films of animated art, an exhibition that has shown in Turin, Düsseldorf, Sydney and Montreal.
They give the visitor a good feel for Kentridge's work - walls are jampacked with different-sized, rather sombre charcoals; a selection of small and large metal sculptures, magical figures dance across a table; and giant figures impose their presence on the Phillips Gallery space.
His first film, entitled Johannesburg, Second Greatest City after Paris, an eight-minute animation, was made in 1989 and clearly reflects his source of inspiration - the city.
He needs to work quickly, Kentridge says, whether making films or producing art, which is why he works in charcoal.
"Oils take too long, and besides, I'm crap at colour," he admits, with a laugh. "You're very unlikely to see oil paintings from me."
He makes a film the same way he does a drawing, without a script or storyboard, but as a reflection of life. "We half hear a conversation - we get it as hints or riddles."
And that is the way he has captured his films - in a slightly jerky way, sometimes in shadows, sometimes in cryptic slices.
Kentridge explains how he half-draws his works, running between camera and canvas, adding small dots or strips of paper, to get the action effect he wants. He can make up to 250 changes to a drawing, and produces one of his 10-minute movies in a month.
The effect is of strange strips or lines punctuating the works, puzzling to those who don't know what they mean.
The artist talks about how much his childhood comes into his work, like a flashback to times on the beach with his family and nanny.
Children are prominent in these memories, and still are in his life - in a recent FairLady article it is clear that his wife and three children are his priority, not his art.
Second-hand bookshops are a favourite haunt, where Kentridge searches through the books - not looking at the content but contemplating the texture of the paper, pondering whether it is suitable as a medium for drawing.
"I like layering information on top of other information," he explains, saying that he has to tell the bookshop assistant that no, she can't help him with a particular book, but would she just leave him to feel the books instead.
Pointing to a large drawing on the wall, full of people, a bridge and other structures, Kentridge says he took him an hour to gather the masses by adding dots. They are all static.
"I have very few images of people walking; it's too time-consuming."
Someone asks why he has a love-hate relationship with the city, his birth place and place of residence.
Cape Town has the mountain and sea, says the artist, but Joburg hasn't a distinctive feature except for the power pylons and mine dumps, which are disappearing anyway, in the quest to squeeze the last remnants of gold out of them.
"I feel cheated out of a landscape," he says, while at the same time admitting that we have the vibrant summer thunderclouds. "They are our Alps."
In the exhibition's brochure, Kentridge says, "I have never been able to escape Johannesburg and in the end all my work is rooted in this rather desperate provincial city."
Explaining his medium, he talks about burnt grass in Gauteng, already black, a natural charcoal. "It makes it easy to think in colour." When he does use colour, it is "found colour", achieved by drawing in black on a colour page.
There is a political dimension to Kentridge's work. "I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films are certainly spawned by, and feed off, the brutalised society left in its wake."
The William Kentridge exhibition runs until 23 October.
David Goldblatt
David Goldblatt's exhibition, called
51 Years, a Retrospective Exhibition, captures the photographer's impressions of South Africans through the thick and thin of apartheid.
The exhibition covers the period from the late 1940s until the early 1990s, when Goldblatt took his photographs in stark black and white, a reflection of the apartheid divisions around him.
In a 1986 video showing at the exhibition, Goldblatt (interviewed by Kentridge) explains his guiding principle as a photographer: "There is a certain sense of the occasion when people are being photographed; a self-awareness. I tune into that."
Goldblatt somehow appears to manoeuvre things out of the way, to allow the viewer to focus on just what is important in his photographs - the people and how they relate to their worlds.
Growing up in Randfontein (where he was born in 1930), Goldblatt was very aware of the political undercurrents in South Africa. Randfontein is a mining town about 60 kilometres west of Johannesburg.
The divisions in society were clear-cut. "I was aware at an early age of the place of people in society, of what was happening," he says.
Being a Jew, anti-Semitism was always a factor in his life - it existed in Randfontein and elsewhere. "My father had a strong sense of outrage at anti-Semitism, any form of racism," Goldblatt says.
He recounts the indignity of the daily procession in Randfontein of handcuffed black prisoners walking from the prison to the courts. The white prisoners were driven in a bus.
These kinds of incidents made a deep impression on him (and still do); his photographs reflect what life was like for blacks and whites, living in different worlds in the same country.
"I don't see myself as being political," Goldblatt says, "but I raise my voice through the photographs."
He explains that he focuses on an aspect that catches his eye. When he was photographing in Soweto in the 1970s, he focused on "facets of Soweto that are quintessential", like motor cars and the life that goes on around them.
The result is a selection of rusted, broken-down cars that become other things, such as playthings. In the process the cars come alive again.
Then the photographer focused on people's lives and the personal spaces they create; he took a series of photographs of people in their living rooms. Then he wondered about them in their bedrooms. He took out an ad in the newspaper, asking to photograph people in their bedrooms, offering free portraits.
The results are stunning in their simplicity. He was surprised how much trouble people had taken to decorate their bedrooms. They created something special in that room, he says, often very different from the image they portrayed to the world.
Goldblatt's Boksburg photographs reflect his exploration of what it was like to be white in South Africa. "I explored a sense of quite everydayness, that it is possible to be decent and normal in a situation that was mad, evil."
One of the pictures from the Boksburg series is of a teenage girl posing in her tutu on her front veranda, with the shadows of the pergola reflecting on the wall behind her.
He says he was struck by her living the moment, in a society that bound her to remain in a limited world because of apartheid.
"The exciting thing for me is the is-ness of what I am looking at," the photographer says.
His exhibition at the Goodman Gallery, entitled Intersections, is a further exploration of apartheid and its still-lingering effects after the democratic elections of 1994.
The images are in colour, but it is a diluted colour.
In 2002 Artthrob.co.za recorded Goldblatt's views on colour photography: "I have been enjoying working in colour, but it is still a bit too colourful for me.
"One of the reasons why I didn't persist with colour in my personal work was because it was too sweet, too colourful. Using these new technological processes I de-saturate most of the colour, I take colour out. This has made it more interesting to me."
There are various themes: people stare out of the harsh desert of the Northern Cape, standing next to their rudimentary shacks, impassive and disempowered; municipal officials stand or sit in their offices, neither happy nor sad, just being themselves; monuments are captured on film, all caged in protective metal, against the onslaught of vandalism.
A book, also entitled Intersections, has been published to coincide with the exhibition.
The exhibition at the JAG runs until 30 October; the Goodman Gallery exhibition runs until 1 October.
Edoardo Villa
It's hard to imagine that a 90-year-old man is still working with large pieces of steel, sculpting them into extraordinary artworks.
Edoardo Villa is such a man and, although he uses a walking stick, his pure-white, neck-length hair peeping out from his beret, his manner is that of a man who is still vital. And still actively engaged with the world.
His 40 works of art on display among the foliage and zoo animals, in an exhibition entitled Villa at 90, are colourful and expressive. The sculptor completed them in the past two or three years.
An Italian by birth, Villa came to South Africa as a prisoner of war and, after 1947, remained in the country.
At the opening of the exhibition on 8 September, Alan Crump, professor of fine arts at Wits University, said of Villa and his art, "His works, in thin steel, fly. They are acrobatic, circular; the objects morph, they change, they adapt."
In an interview in the 1980s, Crump asked Villa why he had stayed in the country. "After being a prisoner of war in South Africa I decided to stay and start my career because of opportunities available for the youth, the 'open space' as opposed to the 'closed' life of a continental.
"Everything in Europe I felt had been done, questioned and exhausted. Here, in Africa, I felt I had the opportunity to explore."
When asked about his medium, he responded, "Steel was the Villa path. Why steel? Steel responded to my needs. It is a twentieth century material where one copy is made - no recasting.
"Steel is conducive to the way I think, the way I feel, and how I see the world today, that is sharp and strong."
Villa has been prodigiously prolific over his artistic lifetime. There is a Villa Museum at Pretoria University, and another near his birthplace in Italy.
In 2000 he received the award of commendatore, given by the Italian government, an equivalent of a knighthood.
An A3 book, entitled Villa at 90, has been published to coincide with his exhibition.
Crump has previously described Villa's work as "immaculately crafted", exuding a "jovial sensual innocence", and exhibiting a "masterly knowledge of form". A stroll around the zoo will confirm that, in 2005, this is still the case.
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