Random #1

 I  love this photo by Guy Tillim: Oupa's geraniums, Yeoville, 2004

I was peddling up Table Mountain yesterday, it was sometime after six in the evening, when I remembered something. I forgot whatever it was soon after. Late last night, just before midnight, I picked up where I'd left off the night before with On the Natural History of Destruction. A brief passage in Sebald's book made me pause, something about the accuracy of diary kept by a Japanese physician after the atomic bombing. Factual accuracy.

Over the past two weeks I've been slaving away - there is no other way of putting it - on the next issue of Art South Africa. So much happens during this process. Very little of it is ever recorded. Today's entry is a record of the things I forget about producing Art South Africa. Some might be factual.

1. For this new issue, I decided to interview artists rather than commission boring discursive essays. Listening is such an embodied experience. I say this because while interviewing Guy Tillim, Malcolm Payne and Stephen Hobbs, I was struck by their eloquence. Reading the transcripts of these interviews, well, I'm not so sure anymore. About my own proficiency as a speaker too. So many of the peculiarities of South African speech come through: "I mean", "just" "sort of" and so on. What I also thought would be a simpler solution to editing an essay turned into a large-scale exercise in cutting, cutting, cutting... Gardening, that's what I do.

2. So much time is spent emailing people, requesting this, asking for that. Pictures mostly. I watched that movie September. What I do exists far down the evolutionary chain from what happens in Ms Wintour's office. It's like woodwork compared to steel making. Sometimes, I think carpentry is a better pursuit. Other times not.

3. Writing about art is really a process of rationalizing, after the fact, a visual experience that, for the most part, is immediate and fleeting. There is a contradiction here. I suppose the task of the art critic, arguably, is to make the contradiction more, rather than less palatable. Otherwise it's just writing about things that don't exist.

4. Deciding on a cover image is a bit like walking into a bar and looking for a face that impresses. It's a stupid way to fall in love.

5. This blog entry was inspired by peddling. Malcolm Payne: "...critics are bottom feeders like art peddlers."

6. Despite the caffeine tone, I was prompted to write this because of the joy of possibility. Malcolm Payne, again: "There are very few art critics that write pure art criticism for the sheer joy of it. I think Greenberg possibly was one of those kinds of mavericks that decided he was going to do it and damn everybody else."