Normativa Nacional

This research study, as indicated, borrowed from anthropology and employed some ethnographic techniques to piece together clues about how (and why) art comes to matter. Ethnography, or comparative inquiry into the cultural aspects of human nature, has multimodal methodologies that mostly rely on qualitative data and these often shade into arts-based research methods (Crossick & Kaszynska, 2016: 139).

These include interviews, observational approaches and iterative-participatory techniques, and often physical mapping and audio-visual techniques (Crossick &

Kaszynska, 2016: 139). My research chiefly drew on 58 personal interviews (55 face-to-face), meetings, site visits, observations in situ including visual documentation, and relevant literature. The two case studies largely comprised qualitative research

supplemented with secondary quantitative data on investment trends, indices and sector information, plus non-verbal data gleaned from objects, artworks and other non-human actors. The information afforded from this range of research devices was then triangulated with artwork trajectories.

This combination of devices constituted a form of “bricolage”, as Estelle Barrett has described creative arts research (2007: 191). The term has roots in the work of French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who described ways of re-combining closed sets of materials to find new meaning. Moreover, “by his craftmanship [the artist] constructs a material object which is also an object of knowledge” (Lévi-Strauss, 1972: 22).

Today, artworks are also dematerialised. Conceptual art has liberated contemporary art from the object. As Tony Godfrey puts it: “Conceptual art is not about forms or material, but about ideas and meanings (1998: 5). But the point about artworks as potential knowledge bearers remains, “halfway between scientific knowledge and

mythical or magical thought ... the artist is both something of a scientist and of a

‘bricoleur’ ... the scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the ‘bricoleur’ creating structures by means of events” (Lévi-Strauss, 1972: 22).

This evocation will become more important as the thesis proceeds, bringing both artistic and structural thinking together in its final analysis. In the resulting

propositions generated in response to uncertainty, we will note “the human capacities to develop structures that turn indeterminacy into specific practical concepts capable of regulating behaviour and defining responsibilities” (Altieri, 2016: 245).

While following artwork journeys, this research sought nodes of value transfiguration – moments when assessments of value shifted, and their catalysts. In doing so, the ideas of ‘hosting’ and ‘ghosting’ became useful, and were inspired by the artist Donna Kukama.²¹ These terms could also be understood as appearances and disappearances, echoing De Boeck’s mountain and hole, above. I interpreted hosting as the successful breaching of the studio door, when artworks became formally visible in the public domain. These kinds of trajectories are demonstrated in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. The collection in particular serves this function, having the switching power, through decisions on whether or not to accession a work, to render them more or less visible in circuits of validation. Indeed, this social production of materiality or durability is the effect of extensive cultural interventions, says Buchli, “the exchange value of the market or the science and politics of ... curation being prominent” (2002: 15).

Ghosting, in contrast, followed a different kind of trail, observing ‘leftover’ objects gained from other sorts of evidence and fugitive forms. I considered examples of such ghosting as clues on the cutting-room floor as it were. They revealed information about underlying processes, which became more apparent as the research progressed.

Ghostings were in fact productive trajectories in their own right and also helped make explicit the convergences or divergences that make things possible or impossible to produce. Curator Gabi Ngcobo, who co-founded an artist-led space Center for

Historical Reenactments (CHR), which operated for a time from August House, told a 2015 public art conference, Remaking Place, that strategies of re-enactments are strategies of confronting ghosts or phantoms, “a paradoxical hurt one chases after in order to chase away”. Indeed, CHR was itself ghosted when it decided to commit

21 Kukama spoke about ‘ghosts’ and ‘hosts’ at a 2013 public discussion on independent art spaces at King Kong, Johannesburg, hosted by Visual Arts Network South Africa (VANSA) in relation to interventions with Center for Historical Re-enactments, at the time based at August House.

what it termed institutional suicide and end its own life, prior to August House being sold. Ghosts work against reified memory, writes Tim Edensor: a disembodied entity that can conjure up a half-recognisable world through empathetic contact but also provoking the ineffable and mysterious (2005: 835). Ghostly qualities are partly captured by the uncanny or unheimlich, Edensor adds, “wherein the familiar and homely suddenly become strange”. In a deeper sense, Edensor says the disruptive forces of modernity did something similar. August House certainly turned uncanny when it stopped being a home.

Fig. 14: The ghosts of artists past. Bié Venter’s empty studio after she left August House.

An example of ghosting in the first case study applied to an artwork I set out to track that got stymied in financial and logistical constraints so I ended up switching to follow another artwork series instead. This failure was interesting in and of itself since it demonstrated the material realities that impact upon artistic production. The intended sculpture was titled Jacob XX and the artist, Gordon Froud, had created it from prior works of his own, Sperm Baby. The latter comprised casts of doll heads and limbs grafted together. These forms were in turn recombined to create a plaster-of-paris conglomerate, Jacob XX. The title referred to the alleged 20 children sired by

then President Jacob Zuma. Chrysanthemums and crosses were added to allude to genetics, in particular repetitions and sequences. Froud created a complex mould of this sculpture to be cast into bronze and that is where things came to a halt during the research period. Later, he in fact managed to overcome this resource hurdle and exhibited a finished bronze of Jacob XX at Everard Read gallery. When I visited Froud’s new studio after relocation from August House, this new sculpture was being stored under the stairs leading up to the mezzanine level. It had finally manifested, following a new alignment of possibilities. The nodal moments of transfiguration were quite clear: original dolls as found objects; creating their plaster-of-paris graftings; recycling these into a conglomerate form; devising a mould of the

conglomerate; casting the sculpture into a precious metal; and publicly exhibiting the work for sale. The mould itself was also exhibited as part of a solo exhibition (Fig.

19).

Fig. 15 Fig. 16

Fig. 17 Fig. 18

Fig. 19 Fig. 20

Above: Jacob XX from Sperm Baby to bronze. Image credit for figures 19 & 20: Gordon Froud.

Another example of ghosting was Mary Sibande’s sculptural artefact stored for the duration of the research period in the August House basement (Figs. 21-23). Sibande lived and worked in August House at the time. This rendition of her alter ego, Sophie, had an underground life of its own. I first photographed the figure with bulbous skirt in the basement parking, positioned with its head against a firehose reel. It seemed to be banging its forehead in frustration and humorously expressed the governing sentiment in the building at the time as tenants (including Sibande) readied

themselves to relocate. Later, the artefact was covered in bubble wrap that over time unravelled. Then a line of crates transporting artworks to exhibition stood outside the lift on the basement floor. “Mary Sibande. Wish you were here” read the tagline, prefiguring the artist’s August House departure. The career of Sibande, as she emptied her August House studio, continued to reach new heights. I spotted Sophie exhibited on a group show in Finland and later at a British Museum exhibition about South African contemporary art. The Sophie body of work largely concerned forging a new identity and place in the world; an oversize image of Sophie had even hung down a façade of August House during a public art event that conceived of the inner city as a gallery. During the research period, Sibande’s oeuvre fathomed new ground with a visual language that articulated in purple tendrils a rhizomatic agency to imagine new futures.

Fig. 21 Fig. 22 Fig. 23

Ghostings: Mary Sibande’s sculptural mould of her alter ego, Sophie, in the August House basement and one of her installations packed for moving, far right.

The ghosting concept also applied to Chapter 5’s valuation processes, where decisions to accession a work into a collection, or not to do so, affected its visibility. When a work is accessioned, it gains an enhanced provenance. It is also more likely to be exhibited, catalogued, stored and handled well, and generally cared for in the future with professional custodianship. The more prestigious the provenance, the more valuable a work of art is considered by other collectors and curators. By the same token, a work that fails to sell at an auction and pass into the hands of a collector is considered in artworld terminology to be “burnt”.

Hosting and ghosting as a play between visibility and invisibility was also evident in the research site itself. Scheryn interviews were conducted in a business park in Westlake, about 20 kilometres from Cape Town central, private venues in the

upmarket suburbs of Constantia and Camps Bay, an office in central Cape Town, and a meeting in Johannesburg’s business centre, Sandton. Site visits included top-tier galleries and an auction at a hotel. By contrast, August House research was conducted from Doornfontein in Johannesburg inner city where there is a high proportion of working-class residents who live at the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum;

26.2% of these are migrants from other countries and 25.4% from another province, according to figures from Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) for a Quality of Life survey carried out during 2015-16.²² This means daily life is full of ghosting strategies to just get by. The area itself is also on the receiving end of ghosting, from inferior service delivery to heightened crime and risk vulnerabilities.

22 https://africacheck.org/reports/mayors-claim-80-joburg-inner-city-residents-undocumented-foreigners-absurd/

This section began by acknowledging that this thesis borrowed from anthropology and employed some ethnographic techniques to piece together clues about how (and why) art comes to matter. Anthropology has moved on to consider and configure the material conditions of our interactions, or “how does materiality function, what does it do, what are its new social costs and who is included or excluded, given a voice or silenced” (Buchli, 2002: 18-19). The mattering of contemporary art likewise

encompasses inclusion and exclusion, or hosting and ghosting.