Loading ...After a night of merciless schmoozing and boozing at Thursday’s exclusive launch event, The Joburg Art Fair sleepily opened its doors to the public early on Friday morning. The crowds trickled in slowly and consisted predominantly of school-goers, pensioners and a few bleary-eyed journalists who came to claim their free cup of coffee from the Vida e Café stand before 1pm.
The much-touted BMW Art Talks programme kicked off in a glossy glass box sponsored by PG Glass with presentations by video artist Theo Eshetu and Hugh Fraser, the designer of said glass box. Meanwhile, Mirjam Asmal-Dik, MD of Cape Africa Platform, and the Goodman Gallery held a guerrilla press conference for the upcoming Cape 09 Biennale, to which they lured an audience using branded “Cape 09” cupcakes. It was only 11.30am and we had already been subjected to five brand names, only one of which was not commercial (and they bought our favour with food).
After the cupcake conference the day’s events took a turn for the avant-garde, and the big brands kept quiet until the evening. The Urban Scenographies booth, manned by “Joan Do” (Joseph Gaylard, Anne Historical aka Bettina Malcomess, and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt), held an auction at which registered visitors to the fair could bid on three views of the inner city, an ephemeral public text intervention by Maja Marx titled I walk in two worlds, a musical performance by Simon Gush and Ruth Sacks titled Early on a Sunday and Near Misses, a public flag installation by collaborative Dead Heat. The difficulty these works posed for bidders is that they yield no real objects which can be bubble-wrapped and taken home. Marx’s work, which entails an inscription in chalk on a public street, could be photographed, but the actual work — the writing on the tar — would be scuffed into nonexistence as soon as pedestrian traffic picked up at the site of the intervention. Sacks and Gush’s work is a once-off performance of a Bach cello suite which will take place at the art fair this Sunday morning at 8am while the gallery stands are busy setting up for the final day of the fair. In both of these works the buyer would act as a patron for the work, enabling it to exist at all. The views for sale were trickier. The buyers of these would be entitled to a live webcam broadcast of a particular view of the city for one year. According to Anne Historical these are “contemplative” objects, “like a window you can stare out of and feel happy or sad, or jump out of if you want to”, only this version poses no such risk. Bidding for these works started at R20 000 each and dropped rapidly to R5 000, with most of the bidding done by Meryl Malcomess (Historical’s mom) against herself.
The day would not have been complete without a public appearance from Avant Car Guard, who, for their “performance” at the Whatiftheworld/ booth early on Friday evening, lounged smugly in an orange golf car knocking back beers. The performance was extended apparently owing to public demand, which, if it’s true, betrays the pathological love affair the South African art world has with Avant Car Guard. We know that entertaining their exhibitionism will only leave us feeling dissatisfied, duped and dirty, but we go to their performances anyway. We kick ourselves for it afterwards, but still we go back to laugh at ourselves being laughed at. In fact, most of us who rolled our eyes last night’s golf car jaunt, probably arrived at the fair early on Saturday morning to make sure we got a seat for their talk in the glass box.
After the car guards, the free cosmopolitans upstairs at the Absolut Art Party were more than welcome, but it wasn’t long before this event, too, became degrading for all but the gawky groupies of Kidofdoom. We were the subjects, we learned, of art-cool photographer Liam Lynch’s “performance”, a photo-shoot based on his gritty documentations of the Pretoria music scene.
Just when it felt like everyone who shouldn’t be “performing” was, Anthea Moys and Tony Morkel saved the day with their “Fast Art Girls” art takeaway stand on a busy street outside the Convention Centre. Passers-by and hungry refugees from the Art Party could get a Jeremy Wafer shwarma, a William Kentridge sandwich, a Dianne Victor chilli dog or just about any variation of these (disappointingly, no Penny Siopis beetroot soup). I tried a Butcher Boys bunnychow, which came with a free autograph from the fast art girls and a saucy vienna sausage thrown in for good measure.
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We arrived at the Art Fair on Friday at about 15:30 and paid the full R100 per person just to find out that all the bags are finished. We got our tickets and the floor plan of the exhibition and went in. But the disappointment of not receiving the beautiful bag grew and grew. I think we should have received a discount because the Art Fair could not give us a bag. It is not our fault that they did not plan to have enough bags for the day!
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