Connecting with da people

If you really wanted to depress yourself about the nonsense sometimes offered as ‘art’, a visit to a far-a-way corner of the recent Decorex at the CTICC was pure poison. Using the designation ‘kitsch’ seemed an all too easy write-off for bad taste and visual stupidity that filled stall after stall next to pretty chairs.
At first one laughed a bit at hefty-priced, funky frames with what resembled pop-up mini opera-designs (with that specific patina of the unreal realness of stage decor) in careful (built-in) lighting. Then the sad penny dropped that this event is where interior people are supposed to acquire their ideas and the stuff that get them a spot on Top Billing and Pasella. This is where you’d throw quite a few thousand rand around for a new couch and a couple of lampshades, and possibly buy something to hang on the wall.
Of nice art (we’re not talking deep, hefty stuff that only attracts the initiated) that will cheer up a smart little apartment, bring zing to a business office, or add life to a family mansion, there was nothing to be seen.

One would have thought that a smart little gallery with affordable, good prints (of which there are so many being made right here and now in the Mother city) and a knowledgeable person on duty could have used the opportunity. But, I suppose, when the halls are filled up with framed twaddle, the competition is overwhelming. (The much-punted and popular Design Indaba also seemed to have run out of steam on this point.)
In a way, such amusing scenes at Decorex hinted again about the gentle crisis in the contemporary art world, where people simply don’t know - and get waylaid by talk and money. (Oh, and a nice frame.)
After all the hoopla which saw the local galleries up north for the Joburg Art Fair, most are back with little to report on sales and influence. How long they’ll hang on to the blind belief in the fabulous bond between money, fame and art remains to be seen. Maybe we’ll see some of them in the Decorex corner next year.

If Gauteng (who tried so hard, way back, with its biennales) is working to box (hopefully) exciting and new art within that money/fame paradigm, the Cape, at least, still has, well, Cape.

As the merry month of May gets into its stride, that rather chimerical organisation which sometimes also goes as the Cape Africa Platform has launched its second effort at a city-wide art event, Cape 09.
Those who remember those early days - the sad chaotic talk-shop called Sessions eKapa, way back in 2005, the over-reaching plans for TransCape and the flaccid Cape 07 - may smile that Cape 09 is now punted as a biennale.

Throughout those hot-headed years, the political correctness of being otherwise, the organisers refused to use the word ‘biennale’; in the present version, Cape 09 is firmly named as such. (Important to note that this signals that there is a two-year future for such an event, even though the organisers are already saying they’ll do something next year at the time you-know-what-cup.)
To be honest, this year’s programme looks promising, even exciting in preview. There seems to be a reality-checked honesty about the fifteen or so projects that will unfold during the month. The hoopla has been contained and the curatorial mumbo-jumbo is not too dizzying.
But what is particularly heartening is not that the sights are not set too high, but that there seems to be a genuine effort to connect with people on the ground. Previously politically-correct (anti-gallery and sometimes highly patronising) curatorial decisions collapsed due to lack of proper logical and management support. Most of the present projects look as if their very reason-of-being is grounded among Capetonians of all persuasions.

February’s Spier performance festival, Infecting the City, showed that, even if they are slightly flabbergasted at what they are confronted with in the name of art, da people can connect. Cape 09’s installations, performances, site specific works, processions, and the rest, the organisers say, are “participatory, encouraging visitors to step inside art and discover new ways of looking and thinking about life today.”
Now isn’t that a much nicer invitation than having to decide whether you want to hang some Decorex kitsch on your wall, and still now know that it ain’t art?