In the catalogue for the Brett Kebble Art Awards, entrepreneur Kebble asks the salient, if rhetorical question: “Art? What does a businessman know about art? As much, I suppose, as an artist knows about business.” He also points out that art is a currency, subject to the whims of the open market. It’s a refreshing candour, and one that provides a handy insight into the motivations behind the Brett Kebble Art Awards. It’s a brand-building exercise for Kebble, but also an attempt to inject some economic life into the art world. These are both laudable ambitions and ones that many gallerists and artists could learn from.
The catalogue’s uncredited introduction is less candid, describing art in familiar glowing terms as some sort of saviour of civilisation. It’s the same muddy thinking that seems to have informed the curatorial process, which has resulted in some absolutely wonderful works being hung alongside some sadly inferior ones.
It would be churlish to concentrate on these faults, though, when on the whole these awards have been a notable success. Judges Julia Meintjes, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Penny Siopis, Lucia Burger and Kebble have chosen well, and I love the fact that Kebble has the balls to include himself as a judge. The winners are a nice mix of edgy art and solid investment art.
Few would argue with the awarding of the first prize of R100 000 to 29-year-old Doreen Southwood (flown in by Kebble from Italy to accept the award, a piece of sound marketing that caused much twittering in the art community), for her sculpture The Swimmer. It’s a beautiful work, one that I would term monumental if its nicely judged economy of scale wasn’t precisely calculated to be anti-monumental. No picture or verbal description will do justice to this work. You have to view it yourself. Simply described, it’s a painted bronze sculpture of a woman poised on the edge of a diving board. Southwood has invested the woman with such life, though, such dynamism, that her stillness is filled with an overwhelming array of possibilities, some horrifying, some delightful.
There were also six category awards, each worth a healthy R30 000. I particularly liked Abrie Fourie’s winning entry in the photography category, a piece entitled Solitary Confinement. It’s a brave and astute choice by the judges, as it’s an extraordinarily abstract picture. It’s described as showing a fragment of a prison room, but it’s really just a wash of colour and light that somehow manages to convey the experience of solitary confinement.
Hanneke Benadé’s Shadowboxer, a portrait in pastels of different angles of a woman’s face, took the painting and mixed media award. Dikgwele Molete’s delightfully absurd linocut Moonstruck garnered the printmaking award, and the new media award went to Anne McIlleron for White Swim, a video projection onto sand. The craft award — and I can imagine that deciding what is art and what is craft must be a difficult, if not thankless, task — was awarded to Lobolile Ximba for Beaded Crucifix: Women Who are Crucified to Aids.
The sculpture category was particularly strong, with entries from artists of the calibre of Isolde Krams, Norman Catherine and Wilma Cruise, and the judges certainly didn’t go for the obvious choices. The winner was Josephine Ghesa’s Man Eaten by Fish, an extraordinary clay sculpture that I would be tempted to classify as magical-realist. Krams’s Trophy, a rubber latex sculpture of a crimson elephant’s head, was my pick for the winner, but in truth there were many worthy candidates.
It’ll be interesting to see where these awards are headed. Patronage is a notriously fickle thing, of course, but Artthrob reports that Kebble has commited to a further two years of funding. What will happen after that? A change of brand as the awards get another corporate sponsor, a quiet death, or further commitment? We’ll have to wait and see, but in the meantime, it’s great to have the South African art world stirred up a bit.