It was only later, driving home, that I was able to appreciate the slippery nature of Hofmann’s work, which is at once all encompassing yet non-prescriptive. Where nothing is quite as it appears — and where a cigar is never just a cigar – the artist’s work is suggestive and generous, inviting many possible readings. Pushing against grand narratives, Hofmann answers dogmatism with a studied evasiveness.
Required Reading is a compilation of thirty-six books recommended by thirty-six different friends, acquaintances, and a stranger. Contributors were asked to recommend a book on any subject in any genre, a book that has influenced them or one they greatly enjoyed. Required Reading was compiled with contributions from local and international artists, a curator and a collector. The list includes novels, philosophy, contemporary poetry, a book of short stories, a book about radical gardening, and a book about the universe.
“You never want to introduce yourself at a bar as an artist,” the painter Ian Grose, then twenty-six and a recent art school graduate, told Sean O’Toole in a 2011 interview. “Definitely not artist, never artist.” But as to calling himself a painter, Grose said: “I think something about its specificity makes it excusable.” Always meticulous with the language he uses to describe himself and his work, Grose never ‘paints’ a ‘painting’; instead he ‘makes’ a ‘picture’. The maker Ian Grose.
(the image pressing very hard)
press your front surface and back surface
toward each other and begin to ignore or
block the thickness of the wall. (remove
the wall)
“The country is falling apart,” our parents tell us. But we fail to understand the depth of their pessimism. We stopped reading the newspaper long ago, and now only flip to the back page to see our horoscopes and do the crossword. A lack of worry or interest, six letters down. The obstacles in your path are not as daunting as they first appear.
The guests are eating cake.
“This icing is remarkably light,” says the other M. He is wearing a pink shirt the colour of my cranberry cocktail.
“And not ridiculously sweet,” G adds. He is wearing a sheet as a toga in honour of the night’s theme, spring by way of Botticelli’s Primavera.
On Monday October 3rd, the University of Cape Town reopened. It had been shut down for two weeks due to ongoing student protests. United under the banner of Fees Must Fall, the students protested for free tertiary education, a decolonized curriculum, and the return of students excluded during the previous year’s protests. They protested against the outsourcing of workers, against police brutality, and against institutional racism.
There is pleasure in fragments, a curious seduction. The invitation to fill in the blanks. Where fact ends fiction begins. It colours in the spaces, it sings in the voids. I give you only the objects, and their accompanying names, places, and dates, the sequence with which each object was exchanged, one for another. And the rest?
The call of a muezzin accompanies a commercial, a French pop hit from the 80s competes with a Christmas carol. The news begins. Five voices speak in unison, filling the space with their austere monologues. Reports of triumph or tragedy are retold five times, before the voices diverge with their own stories, their intrigues.
An understated and unannounced performance/gesture in an urban shopping mall by Lucienne Pallas Bestall and Sharné Macdonald, with contributions from Thuli Gamedze, Mitchell Gilbert, Anna Stielau, and an anonymous collector
If art is either ‘plagiarism or revolution’, the objects in Some Art History are resolutely the former – illustrating fictions more seductive than the real thing, a preference for reproductions and for mediated experiences.
The fragments presented in this exhibition cannot be flawlessly reassembled, the images of a whole (of a home) constituted are necessarily false – echoing rather than reflecting the original.
