When South Africa Joined the World, and the Art World - NY Times
Andrew
When South Africa Joined the World, and the Art World
By BARBARA POLLACK
NY Times
In 1997, the New York art world discovered South Africa. Curators,
collectors, museum directors and art dealers deserted the streets of Chelsea
to attend the Second Johannesburg Biennial, lured by its charismatic
curator, the Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor, and his stellar list of
international artists. The event launched the new "global art world," and
the travelers returned home with a revised map that added Johannesburg to
Paris, London and New York on their art itinerary.
This news was hardly a surprise to Linda Givon, who has run the Goodman
Gallery in Johannesburg since 1966. Widely acknowledged as the most
important gallery owner in South Africa, Ms. Givon had already seen changes
in her country - the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela in
1994 - that were nothing short of miraculous to her. Since then, it has been
possible for her artists - a roster that includes William Kentridge,
Zwelethu Mthethwa, Tracey Rose, David Goldblatt, Penny Siopsis, Willie
Bester, Sue Williamson and Kendell Geers - to emerge from the isolation
caused by the economic sanctions against South Africa under apartheid and
participate fully in museum exhibitions and art fairs in the United States
and Europe.
By 1997, Ms. Givon, who trained in the early 60's at the Grosvenor Gallery
in London under the tutelage of its founder, the Brooklyn-born writer,
dealer and collector Eric Estorick, was ready to operate on a global level.
Indeed, in retrospect it seems that decades before the art world descended
on Johannesburg, Ms. Givon was primed for its arrival.
"Oh, if I could have been Denise René," said Ms. Givon, 67, during a recent
trip to New York for the opening of Mr. Mthethwa's show of new photographs
at the Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea. René, the grande dame of Paris art
during the bleak postwar years of the 1950's, was an apt choice of a role
model for Ms. Givon, who faced a similarly troubled cultural scene when she
returned to South Africa in 1964.
Her first gallery space, a storefront on a business strip in Hyde Park in
Johannesburg, grew in size as adjacent stores became available. Six years
ago she moved into a spacious, free-standing modern building in the nearby
Parkwood neighborhood. She has evolved into a bit of a grande dame herself,
warm and gracious yet authoritative and somewhat intimidating, after decades
as the biggest fish in a rather small pond, a pond with some very dangerous
waters.
"Most of the galleries in Johannesburg lauded artists who made pretty scenes
of life in the townships," Ms. Givon recalled, "so that the white elite who
bought these works could believe they were doing their bit for the blacks
but were just living with pretty pictures. I decided to go for the artists,
when I could, who were confrontational and who were addressing socially
important issues."
For Ms. Givon the choice was merely an extension of the aesthetics she had
learned at the Grosvenor Gallery, which specialized in works of the Russian
avant-garde and the Italian Futurists. But she soon discovered that the
reality of running a gallery during apartheid was quite different from
selling works of art from revolutionary periods long past. "I was constantly
getting into my car and driving down to the cop shop to bail my artists out
for pass offenses," she said, referring to the notorious "pass books" that
all blacks were required to carry.
Openings required "cop watchers," who kept an eye out for the Special Branch
police, sure to shut down multiracial gatherings. Ms. Givon kept stacks of
trays around and handed them to black guests if the police arrived.
"Everyone would turn into a waiter," she said. "We would have more waiters
than guests at our openings."
Many of the artists that Ms. Givon showed at the time - Dumile Feni, Julian
Motau and Ezrom Legae among them - came to her through Cecil Skotnes, a
white artist who was the director of the Polly Street Art Center, the first
art school for blacks in South Africa. When Motau was killed in a domestic
dispute in 1969, Ms. Givon arranged for a memorial show of his work at the
Association of Arts in Pretoria, then the bastion of white nationalism,
insisting that the reception be open to blacks and whites.
Overcome with emotion at the opening, Dumile Feni gave Ms. Givon a kiss on
her tear-drenched cheek. The next day, the police arrested Ms. Givon for
immorality. An Afrikaans judge who sat on the board of the arts association
came to her defense - "I stood next to her the whole night and did not see
her kiss anyone," she recalled his saying - and she was released.
In 1978, Ms. Givon showed Legae's infamous "Chicken" drawings that
represented the murder of Stephen Biko through pictures of poultry. "A
clever reporter got hold of the story, so the cops arrived and asked, `Where
are the Biko drawings?' " Ms. Givon recalled. "I said: `I don't know what
you are talking about. We only have drawings of chickens.' " The series is
now considered an essential example of resistance art and is featured at the
South African National Gallery.
By the 1980's, the Resistance Art Movement, in which black and white artists
took to the streets and risked imprisonment and worse to combat apartheid,
overshadowed the more modest efforts of dealers like Ms. Givon. She
acknowledges that in many ways she felt guilt-ridden, comforted only by her
circle of friends that included the writer Nadine Gordimer, whose husband,
Reinhold Cassirer, was also an art dealer, and Sir Sidney Kentridge, the
lawyer who led the Biko inquest, represented Mr. Mandela at the Rivonia
trial and is also the father of the artist William Kentridge.
Despite coming from a well-off family - her father, Morris Finger, was a
real estate developer who founded a chain of hospitals and nursing homes in
South Africa - Ms. Givon did not have the means to leave and start over in
London or New York. "I stayed in South Africa because I could never afford
to go," she said. "But I also really thought there was a gap to be filled,
to promote art that wasn't desperately decorative or desperately colonial."
Today, sitting in the Shainman Gallery, Ms. Givon looks back on the 1990's
as a dream come true. In 1989, Cassirer retired and ceremoniously delivered
William Kentridge to her. Five years later, Mr. Kentridge, now represented
by the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, was featured at Documenta in
Kassel, Germany, and soon had an international career.
That year, Willie Bester took Mr. Mthethwa to Ms. Givon's gallery, and she
has watched him become, at 42, in great demand in the contemporary-art
world. His photographs, portraits of residents of a shanty town outside
Capetown, revisit the themes of township art in ways that Ms. Givon has
always encouraged.
Beyond the Shainman and Goodman galleries, Ms. Givon can point to several
establishments in New York - Greene Naftali, Florence Lynch, the Project,
Artists Space, the Bronx Museum of the Arts - that either represent or are
currently showing works by her artists.
Ms. Givon has also learned to negotiate in a much broader arena. She
notoriously and publicly criticized Mr. Enwezor, who also organized the 1999
Carnegie International and the 2002 Documenta, for his management style in
South Africa. Several dealers and curators have complained that she is too
controlling and overly protective of her artists. (None of them would be
quoted by name for this article.)
Yet others in the network of gallery owners and curators who are working
with Ms. Givon praise her contributions. Marian Goodman attested to their
long and good relationship. Dan Cameron, senior curator at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in Manhattan, praised her endurance.
"Linda operated a world-class professional gallery during a time when there
was very little economic support for that kind of work in South Africa," he
said. "She never eased up on herself and cut corners, even at a time when
any reasonable person would have found an easier route to take."
Barbara Pollack is an artist who frequently writes about contemporary art.
Moira de Swardt
Andrew <n...@home.co.za> wrote in message
> When South Africa Joined the World, and the Art World
<Snip interesting article>
I wish I knew more about art. Perhaps Peter Brooks has some
articles he'd like to paste over here.
I own two Ntekqwana's, a Claerhout, a Lionel Ashley and a completely
unknown artist, Riana Vorster, but that's the sum total of my "good"
art.
Moira, the Faerie Godmother
Peter H.M. Brooks
"Moira de Swardt" <moira.d...@wol.co.za> wrote in message
news:3e6ca03f$0$2...@hades.is.co.za...
Moira de Swardt
Peter H.M. Brooks <pe...@new.co.za> wrote in message
> "Moira de Swardt" <moira.d...@wol.co.za> wrote in message
> > I own two Ntekqwana's, a Claerhout, a Lionel Ashley and a
completely
> > unknown artist, Riana Vorster, but that's the sum total of my
"good"
> > art.
> That's a pretty big sum!!
Five good paintings. The walls still look bare. A friend has lovely
Kentridges and Claerhouts and .... His walls don't look bare.
I bought the Ntekwanas back in the dark ages (seventies), and now I
cannot remember whether I paid R12.00 each or R12.00 for the two.
:-) They were unframed. I was stunned a few years later to
discover they were "valuable". My ex-husband always hated them.
I let him have some pretty etchings we bought. Aren't I generous
and kind?
Moira, the Faerie Godmother