Home of the avant-garde or just a place to work? IAN TROMP looks at the first four years of the Speedy Bag
‘BAG Factory = Petting Zoo.” Thus reads a handwritten addition to an article in printer Mark Attwood’s file of clippings about artists based at the Fordsburg Artists’ Studios; the article, titled “State of the art in the big game park”, appeared in the Mail & Guardian in March last year. It’s hard to get on top of who’s who in this menagerie, and opinions about the nature of this confluence of artists differ depending on whom you’re talking to.
The studios were opened in the disused Speedy Bag Factory early in 1991 as a workspace for artists associated with the Thupelo Art Studio. English founder and director Robert Loder had been in South Africa, facilitating workshops with artists from Thupelo. He realised a major problem for the artists was that few had continuous access to studio spaces.
The Bag Factory was his answer: the idea was to subdivide the space and offer it at subsidised rates as artists’ studios. In January 1991, Loder managed — with the assistance of local sponsors — to buy a building in Fordsburg, and the first group of artists moved in three months later.
During the last four years, the Bag Factory has seen the traffic of some of the top names in Johannesburg’s artworld. Among those who hold or have held studios are David Koloane, Alan Alborough, Joachim Schsnfeldt, Pat Mautloa, Bongi Dhlomo, Durant Sihlali, Deborah Bell and Penny Siopis.
Ask around and you’re sure to hear that this is the home of a young, predominantly white avant-garde. Although this opinion is definitely current, it is not (nor was it ever) really true. Director Sandy Burnett agrees that there was a small group of people who were apt self-publicists, but insists that the studios are simply spaces in which individual artists are able to work, and not the core of a new movement.
But, it seems rather that Burnett is clear about which worldviews she’d prefer to have the Fordsburg Artists’ Studios associated with. Schsnfeldt describes the studios as “genetically engineered”, maintaining a fine balance between black and white, male and female. Although studios are presently vacant, Schsnfeldt implies it’s a matter of not yet having found the “right” artists to fill them — right, that is, for a studio complex which was envisioned in vitro as a mirror of a newly democratised art scene.
Burnett expressed reservations about the current retrospective show at the Civic Gallery, as she felt the work of Bag Factory artists to be so diverse as to make it virtually impossible to curate a joint exhibition. Her intuition is vindicated by the impression the exhibition creates: the collection is so disparate it feels like a student show.
It’s an odd assemblage of paintings, sculpture, mixed- media works, photographs and video. Among these, a few works stand out, especially those of Paul Emmanuel, Nicky Blumenfeld, Isolde Krams and — primarily because it signifies a timely shift in her approach — Leora
Emmanuel doesn’t hold a studio at the Bag Factory, but works with Attwood at the Artist’s Press, which occupies one of two studios larger than the other 17. His work is a hand-coloured stone-lithograph of 12 apples, some intact, others either partially eaten, gouged or peeled. This is a work of subtle colouring and fine mark-making, at once gently colourist and linear — a quiet, unpretentious work.
Blumenfeld exhibits work in progress, three wooden maquettes from a commission for 56 bollards to be installed on Commissioner Street: a hand with upraised finger, a bus lifted on cartoon-clouds of its own exhaust. They’re shown with photographs of Blumenfeld and the artists she’s collaborating with at work using power tools. The maquettes are bold and gesturally marked — one wonders how this will translate into
Krams’ new work seems to touch the same spirit as Anselm Kiefer, especially in the case of a rubber plate painted with burning logs. Her work, in mixed media, has five parts; the other outstanding piece is a composition of colour images — a map, a clouded sky — mounted on rough canvas and covered in a transparent rubber emulsion.
Farber’s work is also made with mixed media: it’s an uncomfortable comment on flesh and fashion, and the fashioning of flesh. Coming at the tail-end of a vogue for medical imagery, Farber has made all-too-human sinew the substance of a sewing kit replete with surgical and dress-making tools.
Taking us back to the menagerie is Kendell Geers’ installation of 12 rat traps. In a fax sent to the gallery’s curator from Nice, Geers tells of being evicted from the Bag Factory on a technicality — he’s in France on a six-month scholarship; Bag Factory house rules say a studio can’t stand open for more than two, even though other artists have left theirs vacant for longer periods. Even on the fringes of the artworld, though, Geers’ differences with Burnett and her husband Ricky are well known.
Explaining his work, Geers writes: “Art = Rat” (he forgets how easily Rat Trap = Art Prat), and: “You may or may not know, but as prestigious as the [Bag Factory] studios are, they are infested with rats and
If you’re looking for cute creatures, the Bag Factory’s not the zoo for you. But the tenants of this ark are producing interesting and innovative artwork, and the idea behind the studios remains a good one, even if some animals with the wrong political markings are currently being left ashore.
The Speedy Bag Factory: The First Four Years runs at the Civic Gallery in Braamfontein until October 31