Over the past decade Johannesburg’s public spaces have become the object of a voracious contest between urban developers, businesses, artists and criminals for jurisdiction. German artist and professional boulevardier, Hans Winkler (not to be confused with South Africa’s first Pop Idol, Heinz) has been in Johannesburg since the beginning of May to execute his sixth Walking Newspaper project, a public art intervention that he hopes will hold a mirror to Johannesburg’s administration of these spaces.
The Walking Newspaper is what Winkler calls a ‘self-made” publication in ‘living opposition to the outdated historical practice in public spaces of ‘plop’ art”– the traditional genus of public art that entails sculptures being mindlessly installed in public environments to prettify them, without there necessarily being any compelling relationship between a work and its context.
Since the first Walking Newspaper was produced in San Francisco in 2005, Winkler has conducted this project in New York, Istanbul, Havana and Sierre, Switzerland. For the Johannesburg newspaper, which should go to print in about two weeks, Winkler collaborates with the Drill Hall in Joubert Park, the Goethe-Institut and a group of 18 artists of varying levels of experience, who will generate the newspaper’s content. These artists include Anthea Moys, Maja Marx, Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, Bettina Malcomess, Ranoato Hlasane, Kudzanai Chiurai, Sidewalk Reservation (Ismail Farouk and Murray Turpin), Johan Thom, Anne Graupner and Thorsten Deckler of the architectural collaborative 26’10 South Architects.
Since the 1980s Winkler has worked from Berlin and New York, orchestrating site-specific interventions that force viewers to become participants in the artwork, as a means of coercing them into a heightened awareness of their surroundings. In 2004, for example, he paid two drivers to stage a road accident at the Polish/German border to alert onlookers to the ongoing conflicted linguistic and political relationship between the two countries.
Now based at the Drill Hall, home to the Keleketla! Library, Winkler continues his interest in collapsing public cultural boundaries by setting loose the ‘Keleketla Mobile Library” on the streets of Joubert Park. The library, run by Bettina Malcomess and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, is intended to promote literacy among youth living in the area. In keeping with this aim, Winkler appended wheels to a bookcase and began to cart it through Joubert Park with a small group of supporting performers. ‘The public responded really well,” he said at a lecture he gave at the Goethe-Institut recently. ‘People were taking books and reading aloud in the street … some were singing and dancing.”
In significant ways the Johannesburg Walking Newspaper is an elaboration on the Mobile Library: it requires that artists move through the city as a starting point for the works they produce; it develops a dialogue between the city and text; and, like the library, it is a portable archive, which can be taken to ‘the people” without being strongly tethered to an institution.
Winkler maintains that the Johannesburg Walking Newspaper will speak directly to a local urban audience because walking through the city, and thereby sharing an environment with this audience, has been crucial to each artist’s contribution to the newspaper.
‘The [purpose] of walking is to ‘read’ the city, to discover aesthetic elements of daily life, to work on objects found in the streets … to open one’s eyes to the ‘real’ works of art in the landscape,” Winkler says.
Here he is strongly influenced by Guy Debord and the Situationist international movement, whose notion of dérive, or aimless roving, allows one to happen upon works of art, as if they were themselves found objects.
The Johannesburg Walking Newspaperwill be distributed for free on the streets surrounding the Drill Hall and the Johannesburg Art Gallery and at various venues around the city. For details visit www.goethe.de/johannesburg