Lauren Shantall
It’s a blustery Friday evening in Cape Town and I’m still waiting to catch one of the city’s signature Golden Arrow buses. When it finally careers round the corner of Bree Street, its rambunctious horde of singing, laughing passengers yell the driver to a stop. Our public transport system is in chaos – but this time it’s intentional.
Thanks to its first Art Night, last weekend saw the city swarming with culture vultures, artvarks and other creatures, who packed said bus to capacity, several times over, for a free circular tour of the central business district’s galleries. Mimicking tours held annually in Paris and other cities, the event stands as a ripsnorting rejoinder to the monthly Red Eye @rt initiative which has kick-started the Durban Art Gallery into action.
Art Night was an outright, rollicking success – due to the joint efforts of the AVA Gallery and the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet. Each of the 16 participating galleries contributed to the running costs of the event which had hundreds of people hopping on and off the bus at different venues between 7pm and midnight.
When I caught up with co-organiser Mark Coetzee somewhere along Loop Street he enthused about the turnout, bringing home the importance of this unusual marketing exercise in exposing a range of people to a range of work.
Burgeoning crowds lapped up performance artists, a magician, a mendhi tattooist, street parades, fire sculpture and a steady stream of wine. Schoolkids, who would otherwise have been raving at the Good Hope Centre, mingled with urban hipsters sucking lollipops at Joao Ferriera, businessmen making Tibetan sand drawings at the 3rd i Gallery, and grannies injecting syringe- fulls of coloured tequila into their mouths at the Hanel. The Church Street mall pumped to the Afro-vibes of the Young Bakuba band, while one of the infamous Pickle DJs got things spinning at the Area.
With hundreds of works on show at galleries with decidedly different agendas, the evening became an amusing exercise in the old Kantian axiom that you can’t force anyone to recognise anything as beautiful. Part of the fun was watching one person turn away perplexed from the theoretical exigencies of Jo Ractliffe’s End of Time, only to see another enraptured by the superficial, abstract decorativeness of Tay Dall’s surface explorations.
Yet Art Night was hardly about erudite contemplation. Very tangibly, it was a plain ol’ fashioned jol that gave much- needed publicity to a mode of cultural production generally trapped in a niche.
Nonetheless, one of its most appropriate and engaging aspects for viewers from all walks of life was a neat conceptual trick from upstart collective JJ, who randomly butted their way into memory by distributing reams of little yellow dots to artsy acolytes.
A humorous take on the ubiquitous convention of green or red stickers connoting a reservation or a sale respectively, yellow stickers indicated appreciation for work that one desired, but could not afford. While poking fun at occasionally inflated prices and the way in which works are positioned as consumer objects, the dots collapsed the distance between artist and audience, letting viewers interact physically with pieces while allowing artists to gauge appreciation for their work.
Coetzee and the AVA are to be lauded for giving the jaded art scene a proverbial kick in the pants. But this relatively inexpensive venture, utilising existing structures, is exactly the kind of project the city council (ever eager to promote its tourist venue) should take up and support – rather than missing the boat, er, bus …