Alex Dodd
Strange how we’re so often blind to our own artistic treasures. Many of us speed past one or two works of wall art every morning on the way to work. Meanwhile in Holland they’re busy lighting up the lives of pedestrians and commuters. Led by public artist and popular Jo’burg DJ Nicky Blumenfeld, a group of South African mural artists have just returned from a usually cold, grey Rotterdam where they turned the uniform, monochrome pillars of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) into a deliciously bright explosion of colour.
Shafts of light fall between the pillars, lighting up a dizzy jamboree of proteas and tulips, drums and windmills, lizards, palm trees, mine shafts and hot-air balloons. Perfectly situated in a well-populated zone of the city, the murals bring together the icons of both cities in a bold exclamation of global kinship, and lots of Rotterdammers walk through the now-colour- filled arcade every day.
The mural project is part of a series of events called South African Seasons, initiated by the NAI, which began in Rotterdam in March this year. For one year activities reflecting the broad scope of contemporary South African culture will be taking place in Rotterdam.
The South African artists, Blumenfeld, Ashley Heron, Stephen Maqashela and Philani Mhlungu, collaborated with four artists from Via Kunst and some volunteers over a one-week period to create the work.
Via Kunst, a foundation for contemporary street art, is part of the Pauluskerk organisation which offers food and accommodation to homeless people, drug addicts and asylum seekers in Rotterdam .
When they started the project, Blumenfeld admits to feeling more than a little daunted at the prospect. She was worried that some of the participants were on such shaky ground,they wouldn’t even be able to keep a paintbrush steady, let alone cover both sides of 20 pillars with paint. Egos clashed and each person had their own idea about how the final product should look.
But she positively beams when speaking about the transformations that happened interpersonally while the pillars underwent artistic metamorposis.
That’s the great thrill of public art, she says – the journey is the destination. There are all these variables (”even the weather has to be taken into account”), but it’s the process of getting beyond the thorns in individuals’ sides and working towards a single goal that is heralded in the final collaborative product.
When the artists were done they held an impromptu street party. ”We were drumming and playing sax in the arcade. People from the institute came with champagne and passersby joined in too,” says Blumenfeld.
By the end, she says, ”everyone in Rotterdam seemed to know us”. The Dutch are so delighted with the final product the director of the NAI wants to extend the mural’s single-season-run to an entire year.
Since establishing Apt Artworks: Public Art and Creative Projects in 1993 Blumenfeld, together with a continally growing troupe of other artists, has been involved in about 60 street art projects around South Africa.
Inspired by muralists like Diego Riviera, David Alfaro Siquieros and Jos Orozco, who were actually paid by the Mexican government to paint state buildings, she began experimenting with public art as a reaction to her deep frustration with the mainstream art scene. She saw gallery- centred art as ”tight, closed, exclusive and inaccessible to the majorityof the South African population”.
Up until the early Nineties the local art world was deeply divided by apartheid politics. Galleries were the reserve of the priviledged few. Street art broke the rules, but graffitti was viewed by many as dangerous and trashy. Artists were arrested and walls painted over.
Apt Artworks is changing all this.