Kathryn Smith
Consumers entering or exiting various shopping meccas in Johannesburg and its immediate peripheries last Saturday morning were likely to be accosted by a different sort of panhandler. The sort that gives you something.
Pupils from Alexandra, Soweto and Hillbrow formed colourful chorus lines (in costumes designed by Preston van Wyk from World’s End Productions and under the creative direction of the Inzalo Dance and Theatre Company), dishing out free copies of UnTITled blURB, an urban tabloid that positions itself somewhere between the mass appeal of The Star and the small- scale, large-heart initiative of Homeless Talk.
UnTITled blURB is one aspect of the ongoing, four-tiered Retreks project endorsed by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (Dacst), which hopes to provide some food for thought about polymorphous, post-apartheid Johannesburg in the form of a ”metro allegory”. Directed by visual artist Rodney Place, the paper depicts cities as themselves a fascinating form of cultural phenomenon.
While cities have been the focus of (Western)creative endeavour since the Sixties, it is only with the advent of Wits-initiated Urban Futures 2000 that we are offered a chance to start creatively considering urban space closer to home.
According to Place, it’s impossible to have a view on art without having a view on the city. The city provides a ”lateral, flexible and proximate sense of events and opportunities where creative endeavours invariably thrive”. Citizens need to take cities back from the planners so that they become something more than numbers and letters – a sense of pride, which goes hand in glove with a sense of value and ownership, is tied up in all this.
As he says: ”Speculation is understood as doing work for a designer for no money. Why can’t we consider ‘speculation’ as a useful art critical term?”
UnTITled blURB – or simply TIT URB, as in ”great city, ma bru!” -is planned for quarterly publication. The first issue focuses on our three major metropolises (Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban). Functioning as a lens that offers varying focal points, TIT URB hopes to frame cities in ways that ”hold them still” for a moment to allow us to establish some mental and physical co-ordinates.
And he came up with a suitably amusing psychoanalytic model to deal with all this rhetoric. If we consider our three principle cities as children spawned by the overbearing parents of apartheid, Cape Town emerges the beautiful eldest daughter and heritage-keeper; Durban is the middle kid, brought up in a relatively calm lacuna of neglect, but because of this stands a fighting chance as our best hope; and Johannesburg is the youngest, the spoilt brat who keeps demanding more, its violence a residual element of capital waste that spurns history in favour of instant gratification.
The choice for Johannesburg editor was obvious: Stephen Hobbs, manager of the Market Theatre Galleries and curator of mega-exhibition Tour Guides of the Inner City, collaborated with ex-Homeless Talk journalist Boetie Tsepho Damane to create a photo and textual narrative, Out of Sight, Out of Mind.
Durban was tackled by Durban Art Gallery director Carol Brown in the form of a seductive and brashly colourful photomontage.
And Cape Town, edited by Public Eye administrator Robert Weinek, is seen through stills from Lovephones, an exhibition by Gregg Smith.
Cities are places were the personal meets the political and the strategic against a variety of dispersed ghettos – and artistic endeavour is poised to provide the blueprint for some very necessary original ideas.
UnTITled blURB is available at all venues hosting Urban Futures 2000 throughout Johannesburg, and at public art events in Durban and Cape Town