Inayet Motara
The millennial spirit is bound to inspire a unifying climate in world culture. A typical foray is the effort to assemble the world’s largest canvas in Australia at the end of the year. On October 2, 24 South African artists began their contribution to what has been termed Global Images – a collage of paintings from various countries expressing views of the future.
The project is meant to be more than a sterile conglomeration though. Aaron Stevenson, who dreamt up the idea three years ago, sees it as a celebration of the artists and their diverse communities via the Internet. The results will be accumulated into an immense global interaction that, at first, had to be put on hold until the Internet had become as widely accessible as it now is.
On October 2 a day of creative fun was held simultaneously by the cities of Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Sydney, Palmerston (New Zealand), Tel Aviv, Bendigo (Australia), Malm (Sweden) and the Amundsden-Scott Base in Antarctica. Los Angeles held their day at the Manor hotel in Hollywood to the accompaniment of musicians, poets and dancers, creating enough interest for CBS to broadcast a portion of the proceedings live.
Palmerston, Stevenson’s hometown in New Zealand, set up a live webcam broadcasting each artist’s work over the Internet for the 24-hour duration of the project.
Johannesburg Civic Gallery curator Justine Lipson said she invited a broad cross-section of young, emerging South African artists whose different visions of the future she hoped would reflect the diversity of Johannesburg and its people.
Lipson also invited schools to set up workshops at the gallery and to exhibit their work alongside that of the more experienced artists. From the outset, the project was not meant as an exercise in the avant-garde. The works by South Africans, which included Lipson, Amos Letsoalo, Naeem Bismillah, Fiona Coultridge, Michael Smith, Alex Trapani, Kendall Petersen, Antoinette Murdoch and Stephen Erasmus, ranged from the very obvious literal interpretation of the brief to more challenging conceptual work. Erasmus hung strips of paper illuminated with definitions, interpretations and quotes from history books that, he says, was a means of confronting our perception of “the future as a conquest of the past”.
The world’s largest canvas will be assembled and exhibited in Sydney to coincide with the 2000 Olympics, and then it will be displayed in all the contributing cities. Stevenson hopes that the next Global Images endeavour, which happens in May 2000, will attract an even larger number of cities and much more community interest.
Have we witnessed the birth of a new global cultural institution? Let’s hope so.
The Global Images exhibition of work by artists and school participants from Johannesburg shows at the Johannesburg Civic Gallery until October 26 and thereafter it can be seen on the Internet at www.globalimages.net