Dunhill Challenge: Bland misses out as Player opts for Buhrmann
GOLF: Jon Swift
IT is ironic that Gary Player, the Southern African team’s non-playing captian in next week’s inaugural Dunhill Challenge at Houghton, opted for the youth of Hendrik Buhrmann ahead of the experience of John Bland in finalising his line-up.
As the current holder of second spot on the FNB Tour’s order of merit, Buhrmann fully deserves his place. His performances on the circuit have demanded that his talents be recognised.
But such is the consistency of Bland’s play and the vast depth of his experience, that he was — by Player’s own admission — very much a candidate for one of the two spots left open until after the Philips SA Open at Randpark.
Retief Goosen’s convincing victory over Ernie Els in the championship — as much as the staggering five iron in to the final green for an eagle to rub in his dominance — secured the other spot.
There is much to come from this contemporary of Els. True, he has been slower by a considerable margin at growing into the ceaseless demands of the game at professional tournament level.
But he has abundant talent and winning the SA Open could just be the mpetus needed for Goosen to kick what is patently a superb golfing machine into the kind of overdrive needed to become a consistent winner.
It is from the young players like Goosen and Buhrmann that the future growth of the game really lies. Those who have gone before — the Players and Blands among others – – have carved out the path.
Yet Player, a long-time proponent of the idea that life does not finish as a top golfer at 40, found himself in the situation where youth had to take precedence.
One must feel a touch sorry for Bland, one of the great gentlemen of the game and a loyal servant to the dictates of the South African tour’s monopolisation of time generally spent in rest for the professionals on the United Stsates ad European tours.
It would also have been a fine addition to an already impressive CV for Bland to take into the senior tour when he turns 50 later this year.
Still, Player tempered what must have been a difficult statement for him to make by saying that Bland would be “my next choice” if there were any late withdrawals.
That said, the tournament promises much in its Ryder Cup- style format, giving the top players who do not qualify by virtue of having been born outside the US or Europe, a chance to match collective talents.
Topping the list for the Southern Africa side is world number one Nick Price, who gets his chance to take on his great friend, Australia’s Greg Norman.
This prospect is an intriguing one. So too is the sight of Els in this matchplay competition, for surely there is no bigger drawcard around in world golf right now than the tall, angular figure of the US Open champion.
In all the tournament offers much; some of it for the present in the form of some of the top players in the world and some of it for the future as the event grows, as it unquestionably will.
ARTS
Shadow dancing at the Biennale
With less than two weeks to go till the Johannesburg Biennale, funds have yet to be received, roads have yet to be built. Ivor Powell asks: Will everything be alright on the night?
`WHO knows Veliswa Gwintsa? She is on Emma Bedford’s exhibition. If you know her, please contact Michele Sohn urgently. (I need to contact her to get her artwork from her).”
Thus, with some pathos, reads a notice tacked to the door of the Johannesburg Biennale offices at Museum Africa; and one can only sympathise. Not only because I do not know Veliswa Gwintsa, but because anyone trying to make sense of this event at this time deserves sympathy.
Biennale director Lorna Ferguson — poring over proof- reading that should have been done six or eight months ago — doesn’t know how many countries are going to be represented on the festival she has organised. The number changes on a more or less hourly basis from 60 countries to 61 or 62. Nor does she know which of the 68 countries listed in publicity material produced about two weeks ago have subsequently pulled out.
Things are, you might say, fluid, two weeks before the opening of Johannesburg’s Africus Biennale. A dignitary has yet to be secured to make the opening speeches — though it has repeatedly been advertised that President Nelson Mandela will be performing that function. Panellists are still being approached for the scheduled conference.
South African curators are still trying to squeeze out the remainder of the monies they have been promised. The festival fringe only got its operating budget (reduced, like just about all the other budgets allocated to South Africans) this week.
Artists are still learning with surprise, and purely by chance, that their work is to be included in this or that exhibition. Sculptor Jackson Hlungwani, though his art has been used in promotional material with a strong implication that he will be centrally featured, has yet to be contacted regarding permission to use his work.
The organisers are still trying to find ways of raising money to get various African countries’ exhibitions to Johannesburg in time. And, though this may have turned round in the interim, nobody yet knows who Veliswa Gwintsa is.
It would be a unique Biennale project which was not beset by such gremlins. At one Venice Biennale, for instance, the building of one of the national pavilions was finished on the day the festival closed. No doubt it will be alright on the night.
But Christopher Till, Johannesburg director of culture and the man bearing the final responsibility for the Biennale, for one, is having trouble seeing how it will be. Standing on what is going to be the forecourt outside the major exhibition venue, the Newtown Cultural Development’s Electric Workshop, Till is looking a little frail. Like me, he is having difficulty visualising the roads that, within two weeks, are going to sweep imposingly from Jeppe Street and both sides of the precinct block to meet on a paved parking piazza. The development just refuses to rise from the dust kicked up by monster trucks.
But paving the forecourt is the least of the problems. There are great holes in the walls of the vast echoing hall that is the Electric Workshop; there are sections of ground where the floor has yet to be laid. The place is still being wired; work has only just begun on the drywalling which will transform the venue into a warren of separate exhibition spaces.
“They tell me it will be ready in time,” Till says as he looks around him. They, the architects and construction contractors, also told him it would be ready on January 20.
It’s a bit surreal trying to imagine this place sparkling and filled with works of art in two weeks’ time. But it probably will be ready, more or less in time for the opening. Whether artists will have time to make their installations is a whole different question.
When it does all come together, there will be “international” art in sufficient quantity to dazzle the eyes of the South African public; there will probably be enough South African art in its various forms to satisfy the foreign visitor. And perhaps some alchemy will occur to turn Johannesburg into the “world class city” that Till and company project, and to lead to the kind of exchanges that could integrate South African art into the global context — assuming you want to do these things in the first place.
Meanwhile, there is the art. And, though much remains an unknown quantity, there is a good deal that promises to be of interest.
There is the extravaganza curated by Jean Hubert Martin (of Magiciens de la Terre fame or notoriety, depending on your perspective) around the notion of the “decentralisation and contextualisation of Western art as it relates to other cultures” — though you might just want to read that as “displacement”. One of the artists included is Christian Boltanski, who will be producing an ironised and distant anthropological installation on the life of what is coyly designated “a South African”. Another is Laurent Joubert, who will be working with a group of South Africans, including Ndebele mural painters, to transform a batch of 70 identical traffic signs.
The Belgians have taken the “into Africa” theme a step further by going to the Northern Transvaal and working with sculptor Albert Munyai for a week or so.
The Japanese entry, curated by Tokyo private museum owner Koichi Watari, includes a Chinese artist by the name of Cai Guo Quang whose chosen medium is, appropriately in this context, gunpowder. One of Cai’s pieces involves a bag of live snakes to be viewed with the aid of mirrors amid an installation; another involves igniting a fuse which will blow out most of the windows from the building adjacent to the Electric Workshop.
Equally theatrical is the collaboration of William Kentridge and Doris Bloom, South African-born but resident for the past 20 years in Denmark. Based on the metaphor of “constellations” as bringing together personal histories and social geographies, the collaboration explores inner and outer spaces through the interplay of drawings executed in fire on the veld, an anatomical drawing of a heart executed in whitewash and measuring 80m in diameter, peepshows, and so on.
Perhaps the most discussed of the scheduled shows is that of Johannesburg conceptualist Kendell Geers. Geers, equipped with a rucksack, a pathetically small budget and a bucketful of cheek, has succeeded in bullying, conning and charming a glittering cast into basically sponsoring themselves. Around the theme of Third World artists working in critique of the mainstream system, Geers has included Janine Antoni, who has had her nipples cast in gold and made into brooches as part of her display, and Ilya Kabakov, who, not for the first time, is planning to create an installation around work that he will not be unwrapping.
Some of the participants will have responded to the Biennale’s invitation to turn themselves into spiritual tourists and bwanas who will solve all our problems and leave a bag of mielie pap when they leave. Others will have been more subtle. Whether our minds end up decolonised, as the Biennale theme would have it, or recolonised, is pretty much up to us.
The official opening of the Johannesburg Biennale is on February 28. Don’t miss the Weekly Mail & Guardian’s Biennale supplement — a critical guide to what’s on — on March 3