Whether the achievements of individual artists or the growing interest in public art events, sculpture and its comfy bedfellow, installation are rather du jour.
In a rare occurence for an art competition, those in attendance at the DaimlerChrysler Award for Sculpture 2002 agreed unanimously with the judges on their choice of winner. And those who heard the news via the artvine felt the same.
Cape Town’s Jane Alexander is the well-deserving queen of South African sculpture, pocketing a prize of about R500 000, including cash, the production of a glossy, full-colour catalogue of works, an overseas research grant and a series of solo exhibitions in Germany and South Africa during 2002.
Alexander scooped the honours for a work Bom Boys, a collection of scaled-down, masked figures inspired by children living on the streets of Cape Town. Her arresting and menacing work was described by DaimlerChrysler jurist and Venice Biennale director Harald Szeeman as “existing in a nowhere land where the difference between victim and perpetrator is blurred and immaterial.”
A few days later, at the Standard Bank Young Artist Awards, fellow Capetonian sculptor Brett Murray walked away with the prize for visual art, that awarded him a national touring show, oodles of kudos and sparking Murray to quip that he’s delighted to now be a part of the “art mafia” — a comment that is entirely appropriate coming from Murray, who has made a substantial local and international career out of witty and critical work that targets the guilt and foibles of the white South African liberal.
Both prizes are coveted, but the DaimlerChrysler is the cherry on the cupcake. With a view to contributing to the establishment of a multicultural society that will ultimately ensure
empowerment, DaimlerChrysler has invested substantially in South African arts and culture. Two visual arts prizes and one prize for jazz have been awarded since the prize was launched in 1999. In the next few years the prize will be extended to include drama, literature and dance.
To state the obvious, awards serve several purposes, the primary one being profile — supposedly of both winner and the sponsor. But the bias doesn’t sit too comfortably at times. They also serve as a litmus test for what is perceived to be the relevant and/or fashionable intellectual and creative pursuits of the moment, and which hopefully don’t spurn too many poor imitations. That’s the idea, anyway.
The awards landscape is slowly expanding beyond the confines of rearguard formats and exclusive “art mafia” decision-makers and it seems to be happening rather quietly, without much public investment.
What has rocked the apathetic cultural boat over the last year has been the growing support for public art events that either have critical and engaged social awareness ambitions at their hearts or those that set out to spectacularly entertain in the form of art parties in our national galleries.
Some might argue that “public art” is a contradiction in terms — does art still have a public to speak of? And how does this affect the willingness of sponsors to dish up the dough?
With the number of visitors to our art galleries dwindling at a rate scarier than the rand’s freefall, we are all painfully aware that something needs to be done to rekindle a genuine and engaged interest in the artistic production of our country. International audiences are waxing lyrical and whipping out their cheque books without much fuss, but we get off on the antics of cabin-fevered individuals with cutlery fetishes.
Although not immune from the politicking that so often defines competition, art events and projects with a public profile have a better chance of pleasing more punters and participants. Official national events aside, there have been a couple of corkers this year, including the Joubert Park Project, Public Eye’s Softserve events, Red Eye, Blindspot and others whose success was fuelled by the kind of independent guerrilla energy of a few individuals that have a way of intervening when the policy-makers are having a siesta.
Exhibitions in galleries are one thing, but if it’s a public we want, then public we must become. Where Alexander and Murray are concerned, they benefit this year by having major awards acting as their agents on year-long contracts, so to speak. Awards and events exist in an obviously public space and as such are poised to do the most work in this regard. Marketing campaigns needn’t be costly, just clever.
Having said that, may 2002 see more entrepreneurial artistic activity generated, more artists celebrated and more rules governing polite practice broken.