A is for Artistic Atrocities against Humanity. Foremost on this year’s list must be the SABC-commissioned production Avenues that had such an unfathomable plot and such putrid camera work that, after much public outrage, it was shifted from its prime time slot on Mondays at 9pm to late on a Sunday night.
B is for Barbie Doll, the wrinkle-free babe in the song by Aqua that went double platinum early in the year. In his book Forever Barbie, MG Lord says that originally the doll was made to look “like a little German hooker … she had a proletarian sex industry body”. The big hit of the year was Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On that sat on the charts for 43 weeks, at number one for 19 of those. Elton John’s dedication to Princess Diana, Candle in the Wind, was runner-up.
C is for cock-up. A small one occurred one Friday in September when the international performance troupe the Kneehighs were booked to play in Soweto, under the banner of Arts Alive. Arriving at Daliwonga High School they found the hall in the throes of a teenagers’ beauty contest, so they sat on the pavement until their minibus took them away.
D is for dance. The Vita Dance Umbrella celebrated its 10th year in February with two different kinds of pasta – seafood and veg – after the Washington Ballet had performed Savannah, choreographed by Boyzie Cekwana. In April Durban’s Playhouse Dance company expired, only to be reformed as the independent Fantastic Flying Fish Dance Company, under the directorship of Mark Hawkins.
E is still for ecstasy, even though there’s none of it in a pill these days. Ecstasy culture made a breakthrough this year with the Market Theatre production of Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking that confirmed every adult fear about the younger generation, before sweeping the board at the Vita Awards in July.
F is for facelift. Like the job they did on Jani Allan. Pity she couldn’t get a mind lift. On her new website, she says: “There must be something wrong with a society that makes you go to bed at night, praying that you will wake up as a black, lesbian, unmarried mother.” That’s better than waking up as you, Jani.
G is for gross cultural manoeuvres, that turned many stomachs this year. Plastic surgery performance artist Orlan breezed into town for an appearance at the Wits Graduate School, looking more like a golf course than the uberfrau of high art. The Jim Rose Circus had a female performer masturbating with an angle grinder (granted, she was wearing a steel chastity belt at the time). And Johannesburg’s gay fraternity opened their first all-naked disco, where you have to dump your clothes at the door.
H is for hung – well-hung. One of the poorest prosthetic jobs known to cinema must surely have been the 12 inches of tackily glued-on latex unleashed by Marky Mark at the end of Boogie Nights.
I is for international itineraries of successful South Africans abroad. Robyn Orlin’s Orpheus toured to France, Robert Colman’s production of After Nines did the Amsterdam Gay Games, The Story I am about to Tell toured Sweden. Handspring Puppet Company’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse did Brussels, Vienna, Berlin, Zrich and Amsterdam. Ubu and the Truth Commission did America and Scandinavia, among others. David Goldblatt showed at the Moma, Brian Webber appeared in Bent, and a host of shoddy conceptual installations took their South African inventors to just about every Biennale on earth.
J is for just parking off until I get my shit together, and is dedicated to those once-talented junkies who spent the year in their bedrooms; to unemployed white actors who blamed their failures on affirmative action; to refugee artists who fled the cities for small country towns; and to government officials and NGO workers who dipped into the coffers while dipping out on promises – and anyone else in the arts who may be planning a breakthrough in 1999.
K is for Karoo, the new site of South Africa’s burgeoning art of magical realism. Both Katinka Heyns’s Paljas and Gilda Blacher’s Inside Out took delight in the supposed stupdity of outback whites. Legendary Nieu Bethesda enjoyed a small rebirth in July with the !Xou site-specific exhibition. The town’s new energy is driven by the Ibis gallery that will begin the new year with Jo Ractliffe’s mammoth photographs in the desert-scape. Beezy Bailey hijacked Koos Malgas, one-time collaboator of the Owl House’s Helen Martins, roping him in to the construction of a new mega-gallery in Cape Town central.
L is for launches. Anyone who saw Sliding Doors would figure that the rise of the launch to the party mode of the moment is not just a national phenomenon. On the home front, Primedia kickstarted the trend of outlandishly lavish schmoozefests with their Big Brother-style multi-media bash at Gallagher Estate. Since then there’s probably been enough spent on launches to restabilise the Korean economy. Yfm went overboard in both Egoli and Cape Town with the buppiest bashes of the year and B&H took a whole bunch of media types – who they nicknamed “visionaries of the next millenium” – and plied them with food, alchohol and pyrotechnics in the Tswaing Crater in the Northern Province. But e.tv took the cake with their Waterfront orgy that made La Dolce Vita look like a Disney production.
M is for “Madiba will be more convincing if he was an American”. That’s what the casting agents were heard to utter after auditioning just about every black South African actor for the coveted role.
N is for nobody understands anything about Nordic culture. But, what the hell, with some of the most electrifying esoterica the cross- cultural Nordic Shuttle programme deserves more than just a passing glance.
O is for oops. Oops to Kendell Geers who, in January, tried to occupy Pretoria’s Fort Klapperkop in the name of art. Having been ditched by his sponsor, the French Institute, he arrived too late for his own party wearing camouflage, and was mistaken for a stormtrooper. Then again, he had already been upstaged by drag artist Steven Cohen who was marched off in a hail of Nazi salutes.
P is for poofs like Steven Cohen who, this year, was awarded the national fine art Vita award for wearing the kind of garb your bobba wouldn’t be seen dead in. P is also for pitch. Life’s a pitch in South Africa these days. Millions were spent on pitches for the breakfast show, the free-to-air channel and a host of contracts like the one for CTV. The entire industry pitched for the Sithengi marketplace, and we’re still waiting for something we can proudly call “local product”.
Q is for Quentin Tarrantino wanna-bes. And clearly the dude’s celluloid bloodfests have had an influence on the South African Film and TV School students whose three short films – Shooting Pinks, First Heart and Red Meat – were recently screened on M-Net. In Shooting Pinks three hapless white boys head into Westbury to score and end up getting terrorised and shot to shit by a bunch of deranged coloured boys on a sadistic mission from hell. Hardly a trump for Simunye. Despite the commendably high aesthetic standard of the films, contentwise they’re bleak enough to make audiences long for reruns of Little House on the Prairie.
R is for really pushing it. Boom Shaka really pushed it with their version of the national anthem, not because it was so sacreligious, but because it was so boring. Fine artist Mark Hipper got the publication board’s knickers in a knot with Viscera, an exhibition of child nudes at the Grahamstown festival. If it weren’t for the over-reactive Eastern Cape newspapers the censors probably wouldn’t have noticed it in the first place.
S is for Screwin’ SA (parts one and two), the entirely indigenous porn videos made for a meagre R30 000 early this year. It was a year that also saw the production of such auspicious titles as Africa Rising and Jocks of the Bushveld. Referring to the difficulty of making local porn, photographer Rudi van Dijk said: “South African males live in this macho society of beer drinking and rugby and braaivleis, but they can’t fuck.”
T is for Titanic. Need we say more?
U is for U2. U2 could pay a fortune and see nothing. This year South Africans finally proved that we have enough buying power to woo the real stars. Visitors included the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, Alexis Arquette, DJ Aphrodite, Kim Basinger, the Bee Gees, Boyz II Men, Akosua Busia, Jacques Derrida, John Digweed, Lynden David Hall, Michael Flatley, John Greyson, Micki Grant, David Helfgott, Gil Scott-Heron, Hootie and the Blowfish, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Dorkus M Johnson, Julian Joseph, Angelique Kidjo, King Sunny Ade, the Kneehighs, Kenny Latimore, Ishmael L, Sheikh Lo, Ludwigsburg Festival Orchestra, Ennio Marchetto, Massive Attack, Lizan Mitchell, Me’shell Ndegeocello, Orlan, Ruth Ozeki, Ronnie Peterson, Rodriguez, the Jim Rose Circus, Ed Rush, Sasha, Nina Simone, Skunk Anansi, Wesley Snipes, the Trokaderos, August Wilson, Luther Vandross, Satojiro Wakayagi, Stevie Wonder and the Zap Mamas.
V is for very disappointing. He turned out a promising performance in Zola Maseko’s short award-winning film The Foreigner, a searing indictment of xenophobia in Johannesburg, but Cte d’Ivoire actor Gervais Koffi was very disappointed when he was forced to leave the country, for Australia, because of problems with home affairs.
W would be for the wanker artists who conduct gallery walkabouts of their own exhibitions, if it wasn’t for one significant walkout. The Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology took the concept of the walkout to new heights when its director general Roger Jardine did just that for reasons yet to be divulged. Rumours abounded of an ANC-Inkatha schism within the department under the minister Lionel Mtshali.
X is for Xtremely Poor Show. The poorest show of 1998 must surely have been the Gift to the Nation concert that marked President Nelson Mandela’s birthday. Given the enormous amount of time the audience spent waiting for the various acts to manifest themselves, it was a miracle that a major riot didn’t break out. In Durban, bands who were top of the billing didn’t even bother to play. Extremely embarrassing.
Y is for You Made It! The president made it to 80, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer made it to 75, writer Lionel Abrahams made it to 70, Moving into Dance made it to 20, the Baxter Theatre made it to 21, the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic made to 15 and Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the beloved Country made it to 50.
Z is for zoll. If they legalised it, then hard- up artists could get a free bag with every government grant. Then they may come up with better ideas, in years to come.