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| Artspace Gallery's Mentorship Programme |
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Wilma Cruise didn’t want to be a mentor. When Teresa Lizamore, owner and curator of Artspace, invited her to participate in the gallery’s mentorship programme, Cruise was adamant: “I said to Teresa, ‘I don’t want to teach skills, to nursemaid anybody or to struggle with fundamentals’.” Fortunately for Cruise, the young artist she was paired with, Louis Olivier, didn’t need to be taught. Instead, she found herself taken aback by “the array of Louis’ sculptural and painting skills. It’s a thing of beauty to watch him cutting, grinding and manipulating material. He has an instinctive understanding of ‘how things work’.” Indeed, Olivier’s September exhibition, “Pale Male”, evinced a facility with both drawing and sculpting in a range of materials and media – including bronze, ceramic, wood, steel, wax, paper, charcoal, polyurethane and acrylic resin (he is also adept at producing Kentridge-style stop frame animations). Lizamore started the mentorship programme last year to help address the problem that “young artists usually battle to get into galleries because they’re not yet ‘big names’ whose work is guaranteed to sell”. In 2009, the programme has included not only the twinning of established mentors with up-and-coming mentees, but also workshops and well-attended exhibition launches. Along with Olivier, there are two other artists presenting work: Senzo Nhlapo and Sinta Spector, mentored by Kagiso Pat Mautloa and Usha Seejarim respectively. That talented young artists should learn from older, more experienced practitioners is a principle so ancient as to be archetypal – but the nature of the relationship is difficult to define. In the case of the Artspace programme, the mentoring process is too short to constitute an apprenticeship and is not intended to be directly pedagogical. Nonetheless, each of the participants attests to its great value and, judging from the work produced, it has been well worth the effort. Instead of ‘teaching’ Olivier, Cruise introduced him to the work of various contemporary and conceptual artists. “My role,” she says, “was to be a guide through recent art history”. She also saw her task as “turning Olivier’s gaze inward”, persuading him “to express the intangibles of life with the same skill that he applies to the external appearance of things. Perhaps this was the most difficult part of the process – to give Louis permission to be solipsistic.” Some may find Olivier’s work more powerful for its close study of posture, gait and body language than for the “existential” or “spiritual” dilemmas it ostensibly addresses. Nevertheless, he does stimulate the viewer’s hermeneutic capacity. The title of the exhibition promised an exploration of white masculine identity; striking similarities between the looming figure in the suggestively named sculpture “Pale Male: Still Standing” and that depicted in “Martyr” certainly seemed to offer purchase for a political interpretation. Yet Cruise has provided a different reading of these “autobiographical” works: “Most obviously, they are cast from Olivier’s own body ... he is patently a pale male going about his business of sitting, standing, walking. But pale here is also a synonym for naked, exposed. Louis is laying bare the pale male within – a person without adornment.” This vulnerability is an important facet of the mentoring relationship, as mentor and mentee have to develop a candid rapport and a mutual trust. Nhlapo and Mautloa have done so over many years. Their formal mentor-mentee dynamic is merely the continuation of a longstanding influence: it was when he first saw Mautloa’s paintings as a teenager that Nhlapo decided to pursue visual art seriously. Speaking to Nhlapo and engaging with his work, one is challenged to see Johannesburg in new ways. Having spent some years studying abroad, he returned to South Africa with a keen sense of the prevailing moods in different urban environments. After visiting various European metropolises, Nhlapo was delighted to rediscover “the orchestra of Joburg, like an avant-garde soundscape of noise” and to observe “the intricate movements of people across the city ... as if they were part of an animation”. Consequently, he has a particular interest in the different forms of behaviour elicited by public transport – for instance, “How do people react when they’re in a cramped space?” Such preoccupations are evident in the photographs and paintings comprising his exhibition, “Jowzi”. In addition to depictions of life ‘at street level’, however, there are also cityscapes that portray downtown Joburg in a flattering and almost futuristic light: the “City of Gold” series presents an impressive night-time urban skyline, neat and clean and shimmering. The arresting feature of Nhlapo’s work is that all of his images are composites. His signature approach is to cut multiple prints of the same photograph into horizontal and vertical strips, and then to weave them together into a lattice of both aesthetic and symbolic significance. Aesthetically, the interwoven strips add depth to a two-dimensional surface. The symmetrical squares they create complement the quadrilaterals of buildings, windows and balconies, drawing attention to architectural features that would otherwise be ignored; in other images, this is offset by the diagonal mesh of a fence or the curves of human figures and faces. The intended effect is to break the neat photographic line, to distort the image so that, as Nhlapo notes, “It can affect the eye, provoking the viewer into dialogue.” Dialogue, in turn, provides the symbolic impetus in Nhlapo’s work. He aims to explore intersections between the lives of the city’s residents – sometimes literally, as when he documents the activity at the intersection of two busy roads; and sometimes figuratively, as when he weaves together images of a black couple and a white couple posing for the camera. There is also a dialogue between traditional craft and contemporary artistic practice. Nhlapo smiles: “We Zulu people used to weave everything – huts, kraals, mats, everything! I felt my work had become too Eurocentric, and wanted to find a style that would reflect my heritage.” Sinta Spector locates her work felicitously between that of Olivier and Nhlapo. Like Olivier, she is concerned with the contours of the human form; but instead of exposing the body, she clothes it in creations that straddle the worlds of art and fashion (“wearable art”). Whereas weaving is both method and metaphor for Nhlapo, Spector’s forthcoming exhibition “Nomadixx” emphasises knitting. “Knitting is an inclusive activity – a technique that can be passed from skilled to unskilled people,” she comments. “It also has a therapeutic function.” These practical considerations are central to her artistic project; while Nomadixx is the title of her exhibition for the mentorship programme, it is also the name of an arts agency and catalogue she has launched that aims to promote “easier access to the arts”. It’s unusual for an artist to declare: “I aim for work that is replicable by others.” But Spector has a vision of economic upliftment through helping other women to produce both fashion garments and visual artworks in the way that she has – colourfully blending fabrics with found objects. “I want local manufacturers to be both respected and profitable. There’s no reason that community projects can’t supply high-end fashion,” she adds, reflecting on the potential in overseas markets such as the USA or Japan (she has lived in both countries). Spector’s social engagement is complemented by environmental concerns: using natural elements such as feathers, textiles that have been “reinvented” and mannequins moulded from recyclable papier-mâché. This resourceful, ecologically sensitive nomad will no doubt be wandering through galleries worldwide in the years to come.
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