THOUGH we know that objectivity is impossible, arts writers still gesture towards neutrality. Part of that gesture is coverage: making sure (in the case of visual arts) that we write about exhibitions at a range of galleries in different areas, about practitioners from across the possible demographic spectrums and about a variety of artistic media, styles or techniques.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have our favourites.
Often, in preparation for this column, I find myself drifting towards a 100m stretch of Jan Smuts Avenue — a pocket of Johannesburg on the fringes of Rosebank before it becomes Parkwood, Saxonwold and other affluent suburbs. As arterial roads go, it’s fairly typical: an intersection with hawkers weaving through the traffic; pavements that track the rhythms of the day, washed clean in the morning but slowly littered as the hours go by; a garage; some squat blocks of offices and flats; a small selection of retail — scooter outlet, pool shop, tailor, locksmith, convenience store and, of course, the ubiquitous Adult World.
Over the road, the bold, white Goodman Gallery building rests like a ship at anchor, its landmark status assured since that fateful day last year when a certain presidential portrait caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But if, driving past, your eye is drawn to the Goodman, you may well miss one of the most productive visual arts hubs in the country: here, side by side, sit a handful of galleries that rarely fail to please and challenge the visitor.
David Krut’s "footprint" in the area continues to expand. In addition to the gallery and publishing/printing/project spaces, the team at David Krut has now established a bookshop just up the road (at 151 Jan Smuts, being launched this Saturday), joining craft, design and décor retailer Des Armstrong of Hadeda.
The result, 151 Parkwood, is an eclectic combination of colourful density and quiet minimalism, a venue that will no doubt draw collectors and bibliophiles alike.
The tranquility of 151 Parkwood is matched by Robyn Penn’s Echo, the work on display at David Krut Projects until November 9. Penn has produced oil paintings, drawings and lithographic prints in which ocean and sky echo one another: seascapes and cloudscapes that seem to shimmer even as they declare themselves to be moments of artificial stasis.
"Something interesting happens to our experience of time when we look at the sky or at the ocean," writes Penn. "At a glance they are static and unchanging but after an interval they are transformed entirely." Time-lapse photography and videography, she notes, encourage us to see shifts in our natural environment only as transformation — "this changes into that". Instead, Penn "calls a halt" to the movement of water, or water vapour in air, hoping "to freeze the seas and to slow the clouds"; this temporary ceasing of motion can then draw our attention to the continuing "process of alteration" in elemental phenomena.
There is a nostalgic impulse behind Echo, a longing for a past when the course of time was perceived more slowly and deliberately, when "people tinkered on cars and knitted things". This is linked to a particular memory — the "clicking and clanging noises" of her father working on an old Fiat — and to her own practice of knitting "without plan or purpose". In "Reason is the Slave of the Passions", this connection is manifested visually in drawings of needles and wool made on pages taken from the Fiat’s manual.
A comparable negotiation between the public and the private is enacted in concurrent exhibitions at the Goodman Gallery: Kudzanai Chiurai’s Harvest of Thorns and Frances Goodman’s Sub Rosa (both on until November 9). The latter is a series of anonymous photographic portraits demonstrating the art of "vajazzling" ("a cosmetic treatment in which a woman’s vulva is decorated with jewels").
Harvest of Thorns, taking its title from Shimmer Chinodya’s novel, considers the representation of acts of violence and of mourning. Contrasting with the quiet understatement of Penn’s Echo, these bodies of work are concerned with different kinds of sociopolitical "spectacle".
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