I often marvel at how much more beautiful large-scale buildings are when they are half built than when they are completely finished. Indeed many of Durban’s most garish and formless monstrosities were once, for a brief period of time filled with beauty, texture and awe, before their structure was covered with facade and plastic and polish and made safe for shoppers. Looking at the digital rendering of the proposed final structure, the Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban’s chief 2010 venue, might, perhaps, be an exception to that tendency. But even if the monolithic post-modern sea-turtle ends up being anything less than exceptional, it will, at the very least, be home to a broad selection of South African art. And considering how sport pretty much kills art dead in the endless game of paper-rock-scissors, such a cultural highjacking can only be a good thing. This is after all, a guaranteed way of ensuring that hundreds of thousands of of South Africans will walk past, and perhaps even look at, a whole bunch of contemporary art – even if that art has to make allowances to the colour scheme of the décor.
The eThekwini Municipality has made a public call – the first, apparently, among those municipalities blessed with a stadium – for work which will populate several walls and atriums in the building, as well as any other spaces suggested by artists. In broad democratic strokes, artists were invited en masse to propose site-specific works and were, to this end, also invited on a brief tour of the stadium, the giant mass of steel and concrete naked, unadorned and rising into the sky. It was difficult to work out exactly how things would look when all the scaffolding was gone but I’ve always loved a building site (the ultimate sandpit) and I was struck by the fact that the beauty of all this massed raw concrete would be a hard act to beat. Fortunately for the participating artists though, the judges will no doubt have broader set of critera than cooler than concrete.

The still skeletal stadium reminded me of Stephen Hobbes’ exploration of architecture, structure and light in recent works which showed in Durban at the KZNSA and Bank Gallery. Traces of Hobbes’ conversations echo – in entirely different form – in Vaughan Sadie’s exquisite exhibition, situation, currently on show at Bank Gallery. While Hobbes calls our attention to the beauty, fragility and brutality of cities and their architecture, Sadie’s current work, produced for his Masters degree, explores the very nature of light and the way in which it constructs our interior and exterior world, worlds which are more fragile even than buildings.
Encompassing a century of modernism and post-modernism, Sadie’s personal evolutions and convolutions exists in the countless areas in between. Although several pieces are gorgeously accessible, for the most part the show consists of the kind of work that will send Sunday Magazine editors running in one direction or another, depending on how keen they are to identify with contemporary art. But like DuChamp’s urinal, which occupies at least one harbour in Sadie’s ocean of theory, complexity is often the mask worn by simplicity. And I know that I’m not as well versed in theory as Sadie, but after the initial relent that always needs to happen when viewing any exhibition, I was completely enchanted. The levels and layers came later in a one-question-interview with Sadie, which cascaded into a mini-avalanche of conversation. We agree to meet later.
In work that is, at least on some levels, about theory, I’m always interested in whether an artist thinks that a degree of theoretical engagement is necessary in the viewer. In other words, if my mother, who loves art but lacks theory, visited the show, would she be able to engage with it in a manner that satisfies both her and the artist? (and that last “satisfies” is mine, not Sadie’s; he lacks arrogance, possessing instead a critical rigour that no doubt drives him mad in the production of his own work). He never really answers the question but he does point out that he’s more satisfied producing complex work which hopefully extracts a mental investigation in the viewer than complex work which is accessibility but whose accessibility allows the viewer to be content with the surface.
I left Vaughn Sadie staring at his digital clock installed on the front of the gallery, above the entrance. Constructed out of twenty eight fluorescent tubes, each minute passes not discreetly, but in flickering indecision. I waited with him as the clock turned from 11:59 to 12:00. A flurry of flickers. He was visibly thrilled.