Hazel Friedman
CALL her a big fish voraciously feeding off South Africa’s art plankton. Call her a prophetess and profiteer in one. Call her a superbitch and nurturing matriarch in the same breath. Call her, even, the Mother Teresa of the cultural church. In fact call her virtually anything at all. Just don’t call Linda Givon the high priestess of South African contemporary art.
“That’s a really horrible description of me and totally untrue,” says the woman who for 30 years has been regarded as the biggest fish in the glass bowl commonly known as the South African art gallery circuit.
And even though it likens her to a cultish power monger and brings to mind comparisons with her American counterpart, Mary Boone, who in the 1980s was the undisputed queen of New York’s Soho art scene, the epithet is not entirely inappropriate.
After all, from relatively modest beginnings “in a tiny black corner” Givon went on to represent the brightest stars in the local art firmament. She closed her gallery doors temporarily last year – at a time when the face of local visual arts was looking decidely downcast – partly because she felt it was “morally reprehensible for galleries to hold exhibitions and force artists into debt without the guarantee of selling their work to a depressed market”.
Now she has returned to relaunch her new gallery (the lease expired on the old one) in a suitably cavernous and stylishly industrial space in the suburbs, with exposed roof rafters and flexible partitions designed in the equally suitable minimalist Soho-style. And – given the huge overheads she must be carrying and the arbitrary returns of her products – she clearly isn’t in this for the money.
“I’m fortunate in that I’ve never had to depend on the gallery for my economic survival,” she says. “But I just can’t see myself retiring quietly. Mind you, I’ve learnt to be less of a Leo and more of a lamb. I’m too old to be a trendsetter, but I’m still open enough to anything new. Relaunching the Goodman is a challenge to my intellect, a wonderful opportunity to choreograph a new presentation of art and a new perception of South African art – not in terms of its national status but its international status.”
She adds: “In this country there is such a penile assertiveness and a fixation on physical prowess at the expense of the spiritual. Our macho sports heroes who make it internationally are treated like gods, but I’ve yet to see President Mandela publicly acknowledge the artists who achieve this status. Art is the bloodstream of a nation. If you cut off its supply the country goes gangrenous.”
In one fell swoop Goodman has manifested the dual personae that have helped sustain her reign: the cannily expedient businesswoman who can read the signs of the times in much the same way that namesake Linda Goodman, the astrologist, studies sun signs; and the genuine art altruist, passionately promoting the work of artists in whom she believes, irrespective of fashion or financial risk.
The pick of her crop are on display in Lift Off, the Goodman’s inaugural show. It is an impressive and unashamedly aesthetic exhibition by artists of undisputed maturity. It also offers more a consolidation of past concerns than a portent of future directions.
Of particular note are works by Penny Siopis and Kendell Geers.
The former’s Reconnaissance: 1900 to 1997 is an installation consisting of bits and pieces of personal and public history, tender memories and painful inner conflicts. In many respects it is a quieter, 3-D version of Melancholia – Siopis’s painterly masterpiece produced in the mid-1980s which is now owned by Johannesburg Art Gallery.
On the wall facing the installation are a series of “still lifes”, also harking back to Siopis’s earlier output, with their skin-like strokes depicting fragmented religious relics. Siopis has rendered them as fetish objects of nostalgia, desire and abuse in a poignant treatise on excess and abjection
Geers’s installation offers a more clinical study on the vagaries of political, cultural, social and personal classification. Divided into three components, it consists of anonymous multi- racial mug shots, photostatted and enlarged, with the words “murderer/rapist/terrorist” branded on the foreheads of each face. Hanging on the opposite wall appears to be a series of abstract works that, on closer examination, are finger- and handprints – de- invidualised, decontextualised and also anonymous.
Next to these is a print by Picasso displayed wrong-side-up. It was owned by Givon’s mother, whose surname – Finger – has provided Geers with an ingenious pun (Finger Print). The glass surface of the work has been “dusted for prints” that leave smudge marks on the otherwise pristine surface. This work raises questions relating to issues of authorship, the mark of the artist, and the signs of identification, stigma and stereotypes that dominate and determine our lives.
Looking at the Goodman Gallery as a sign of the times, it is clear that while its glow has mellowed, its sun has far from set.
Lift Off is on at the Goodman Gallery until Saturday February 22