Art critic Ivor Powell is about to launch a glossy magazine of his own. He spoke to Ruth Sack
A STRONG gust of air is about to blow through our art world. It’s called Art Ventilator, and it’s the inspiration of Jeff Chandler, president of the South African Association of Arts, and Ivor Powell, who needs no introduction here.
Frustrated by the stuffy, airless atmosphere of most previous art journals (including SAAA’s own organ, The Arts Calendar), Chandler approached Powell to edit a new magazine — to be set up with SAAA seed money, but thereafter to be fully independent and self-sustaining — to give voice to some seriously probing and challenging thought.
Our art world is a small place in which it is difficult to manoeuvre without stepping on toes; it is filled with passion, sound and fury. So this forum for rigorous critical engagement is being welcomed with open arms … and some breathless expectations.
“This is the year dot,” says Powell. “There are no dead horses. We have the chance to start from here.” To be an active participant in the forging of a culture, the magazine intends to generate events, art-making, new kinds of documentation, new connections and, of course, intense debate.
Powell wants it to be truly national. Ventilator plans to nose out everything: from the possibly extraordinary — who knows? — unheard-of artists flourishing quietly in Karoo towns, on or off the walls, to the all-too-often-heard-of but now re-examined or unwrapped. The first issue, for instance, contains an archaeological “excavation” of The Lost City and its just-add-water mythologies.
Two sections of the magazine still need sponsorship. First, there’s the “gallery”, which will be filled with images. Second, a section on art education. Groups of art teachers and educationists are now urgently meeting to reconceptualise and attempt to rewrite the entire curriculum. Apart from being bound by frighteningly outdated, inaccurate or wildly inappropriate syllabus- content, art history teachers have largely had no alternatives to draw on. Much contemporary research is written in inaccessible language and published in expensive or obscure books and catalogues. This is a critical time for an art journal to be engaging with this fascinating and loaded process.
In putting together the first issue of Art Ventilator, Powell has consulted with his associate editors, Chandler and Michael Godby, and has talked to others such as Robert Weinek, Alan Crump and Rayda Becker. Eventually its contributing editors will grow in number and variety, and will include correspondents in other parts of the world, especially the Third World.
It is crucial, says Powell, to connect to the global (as opposed to “international-New York”) art world — which has always until now both informed, and remained remote from, our own.
“There is enormous interest in us from the rest of the world,” he says. “But also we are enormously interested in ourselves at this point. Art hasn’t been perceived as truly important here before; but now we have the time to create a free-thinking culture, one that we all really do care intensely about.”
Art Ventilator, despite its cutting edge, is in itself a powerful act of affirmation. And — judging by a photocopy version — it is also beautiful.