South African Artists at Home offers a glimpse behind the public exhibitions and gallery showings into the private worlds of some very private people who, while icons of the country’s art world, are also internationally acclaimed. What makes this book about a random collection of artists, and the homes they live in, so interesting and relevant is that each person in it is an artist working right now in South Africa.
There are painters, conceptual artists, a photographer, a ceramicist. They’re represented by some of South Africa’s most important galleries, among them Brundyn+, Erdmann Contemporary, Stellenbosch Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery (SMAC), Stevenson and Whatiftheworld. Most of them are established; all of them are respected and collected, right now. Each makes an individual statement, and belongs within the current debates around art and the context it comes from. For the most part, readers of this book who are art lovers will recognise the names and be aware of their work.
This was not an easy book to put together. People who’d agreed to be in at first, were subsequently unavailable, causing my cast list to vary wildly from one week to the next. Then, just when I thought I’d struck a balance between so-called ‘struggle artists’ and those not making art for the revolution, it all came unstuck. As a reader, you may have your own view on the checks and balances underpinning this book. If you do, tell me about them, but be gentle. This book is not art discourse; it’s not a mirror of the country’s art scene. What it does offer up, though, is an insight into the relationship between making art and the daily life of an artist in their domestic space.
‘I’d love to see how these people live,’ João Ferreira told me, suggesting a whole raft of other artists for inclusion. A gallerist and dealer who’s had relationships over many years with a variety of artists, Ferreira believes that artists generally, although not always, value their privacy and prefer to stay out of the limelight when they’re not exhibiting or doing media interviews. There are exceptions, of course, Willem Boshoff and Beezy Bailey among them. Beezy’s home is always open and he enjoys the conversation around his art and his home life, integrating sociability, family life and the making of art into the same inclusive process. In its day-today arrangements, his lifestyle brings to mind Picasso who, when living in the south of France, was very accessible. Willem Boshoff offers a highly visible entrée into his life as mentor, guru and accessible Big Druid in a manner that seamlessly brings together art personae and the artist as ironic seer and social prophet. Not only does he let others into his workshop, he leads walks around urban streets in search of the overlooked genius loci.
Some artists on my list questioned whether being in the book would be a good idea. As a few put it, ‘this is not the sort of thing that artists do’. That may be true, and yet there’s an innocent voyeur in all of us, a simple curiosity about others’ lives, what they hang on their walls, or have for supper. Think of how we crane our necks to scan the bookshelves behind a writer being interviewed on TV. As Baylon Sandri of SMAC says, ‘it’s just a glimpse, and I wish more people had that opportunity occasionally’.
For some artists, the boundaries are less strict, for others the desire for privacy is absolute. Assembling my cast list wasn’t a walk in the park. Artists who responded with generosity and even enthusiasm to welcome the presence of the photographer into their homes often felt that the connection between the personal and the making of art would in some way be made visible. The glimpse may be a subtle or oblique pointer to sources of inspiration or work habits in the making of art. In the case of Sam Nhlengethwa, a vast and informed jazz collection housed at home gives us the entrée into his art. Hence we’re able to look into the homes not only of Nhlengethwa, Boshoff and Bailey, but also Roger Ballen, Hylton Nel, Beezy, Johann Louw, Michael Taylor, Willie Bester, Barend de Wet, Kate Gottgens, Jody Paulsen, Tom Cullberg, Conrad Botes, and husband and wife team Brett Murray and Sanell Aggenbach. All of them opened their doors generously, put the kettle on and invited me to sit at the kitchen table and chat, sometimes venturing into territory where one rarely goes, given that this book is, in the end, about some of the best-known people – with some very bankable names – in the business.
Hylton Nel revealed the provenance of objects between mouthfuls of chocolate cake and rosy strawberries as plump as a putto’s buttocks served off one of his plates. Beezy and I sipped Fernet Branca before heading off in Elton John’s Bentley for fresh prawns at a Portuguese workmen’s caff in Maitland. Kate and I discovered similar backgrounds over divine coffee at her kitchen table, while Johann Louw and I trailed off and up the mountainside to his studio with a bottle of warm white wine and no glasses.
I wish I’d had space for more people. This book taps into a rich stream of hitherto unexplored life and I’ve enjoyed every moment of its, albeit at times nerve-wracking, trajectory.
Perhaps South African Artists at Home is a bit voyeuristic, but I think it’s illuminating to look at what goes on behind the artwork. In Tom Cullberg’s home, as in Jody Paulsen’s, you see clues, coded or otherwise, to the content of what he’s doing. Not only does this book bring the art to life but it reveals something of the humanity of the artist behind the completed and hung art on the wall. It demystifies an often inscrutable world and, while a little mystery can be a precious thing, even the smallest insight helps an audience often intrigued as to why a gallery supports the artists they do. This book lifts the curtain cautiously without giving the game away. But lifts the curtain on what, exactly?
Baylon Sandri offers an easy analogy with a situation in which he once found himself in Italy, having asked to be invited to lunch with a group of well-known avant-garde artists, all of them friends showing at the same exhibition. ‘I remember being so nervous, thinking I’d sound stupid or appear too conservative for the rarefied world they inhabited. To me, their art pegged them as people who lived on another planet. I was wrong. But if I’d had an encounter with a book like this before that lunch, I’d have seen a group of normal people discussing football and comparing notes on their mothers’ pasta!’
As someone who has always enjoyed looking at art but has no training as an art critic or art historian, some trepidation was understandable, but the ordinariness and down-to-earth at-hominess of these artists was reassuring. Debunking myth is never a bad thing it seems and, anyway, people have a tendency to enjoy looking at the commonplace where famous people are concerned. Elana Brundyn of Cape Town’s Brundyn+ says she is ‘very interested in the small things I see when I visit an artist’s home. Seeing what’s on the table, on their desk, or how they set the table, where they sit and conceptualise their work, what the kids are playing with.’
There’s considerable diversity and individuality in the mix. When you look at books or magazines about peoples’ houses they tend to be places where an interior designer has been at work, where everything has been, or you assume has been, placed there by the designer with conscious intent. They don’t necessarily tell you anything about the owner. Artists create their own interiors and they reveal an awful lot about the owner. These artists are unique people with unique homes. While one will start work in the early hours of the morning, or begin at 9 a.m., another will only get going at four o’clock in the afternoon. Each has a consistent or varying personal ritual, an environment peculiar to the type of work he or she does, and a way of working that makes them different – and which you begin to understand when you get a glimpse into the private worlds of their homes. Even painters who use the same medium can work in ways that are diametrically opposite.
Let’s start with Beezy Bailey, whose house, straddling a terrace on a contour of Table Mountain, boasts attention-grabbing views of Cape Town and its iconic mountain. What does this architecturally rather beautiful Italianate building, that serves the painter very well, say about him? In Beezy’s house there’s an openness. Throughout the different rooms, there’s no specific style or design, but there is a consistency in the opulence of colour. His house is an expression of Beezy, his painting and his background. And it’s very relative to his work. If you look at a lot of his paintings, and then walk into his house, the same language is being used. ‘There’s a looseness. There are lots of expressive statements. It’s as though he’s living in one of his own paintings,’ says João Ferreira. ‘In fact, if you look at his early monotypes, they’re so like Beezy Bailey at home. Those quirky interiors are beautiful, but so is the landscape view from the terrace. You get a great sense of the pride he has in his surroundings and in this house in particular.’ Bailey, ‘not part of the main art establishment in Cape Town’ (his own words), always wanted to be a rock star; his is the house of a showman.
Willie Bester’s ‘customised’ house in Kuilsriver could be seen to be an artwork in itself. Like Norman Catherine, he designed the house (‘to my mind that’s where Willie got the idea,’ muses Ferreira) very much like one of his works. He uses the same colour on his house as in his work, the same morphology, and there’s a recurring sense of irony and black humour inherent in its features that somehow give it life. It’s bravely expressive: could this be an artwork that became his home?
Every corner of the building has a story to tell and, while it doesn’t look as though it’s a comfortable house to live in, it’s become a venue for cultural events, populated by friends and strangers, colleagues and acquaintances that somehow constitutes Willie and his wife, Evelyn’s, universe. It’s a local landmark and perhaps a kind of informal self-promotion.
The mantelpiece above the fireplace in Kate Gottgens’s sitting room resembles a secular altar. Displayed there is a collection of cyphers, wooden heads, an ebony Virgin Mary from Ibo Island and a warthog tusk found in the sea. A Brancusi-like soapstone deer comes from the Milnerton Market. Although randomly placed, the spaces between them are full of gravity.
In Barend de Wet’s home studio, evidence of his preoccupation with knitting crowds every available space.
What do we get from seeing the tiny, bare, ephemeral apartment at the top of Cape Town belonging to Jody Paulsen, a topical young artist who moves through his environment with so light a footprint that you can’t help wondering if this is the counterbalance required by the sheer intensity of his work, in particular the loud, vibrant felt collages with which he’s quickly making his name. The crowning point of his short career thus far is a giant work – Paulsen calls it daunting – commissioned by the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) for a bespoke space under a glass dome. We’ll only get to see it in 2016 though, when Africa’s newest and largest contemporary art museum, from the studio of internationally renowned designer, Thomas Heatherwick, opens at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront.
The minimalism in Paulsen’s home is understandable. Who in their twenties, and barely out of college, is thinking about creating a home other than as a place to eat, sleep and go online? But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the starkness is a welcome respite from the provocative cacophony of colour, branding, fashion, and references to sex and online dating generated by his collage ‘posters’, as well as the relentless noise generated by the madness of where he works, in the corner of a factory that manufactures clothing. ‘It’s like Jody just needs calmness around him,’ says Elana Brundyn, whose gallery took him on board in 2013. It’s also an indication of the transience of a younger generation that is defined by mobility: social, economic and professional.
If Paulsen finds reprieve at home from the chaos of his studio, a look at the orderly curated interiors of Conrad Botes and Tom Cullberg makes you wonder what goes on their particular studios. And what of the calms spaces inside the home of Roger Ballen, a zany clowning personality who revels in the dark and bizarre side of the South African psyche?
And what about the subterranean dugout beneath the Oranjezicht home of Barend de Wet, the man considered to be South Africa’s first real conceptual artist and skilful as Houdini when it comes to resisting any definition that might pin him down? Here, in what his wife, Diana Cilliers, calls his Man Cave, I interviewed him, wedged into the corner of a leather sofa, the ceiling, the underside of the floor above, mere inches from my forehead, confined, constricted, more than a little claustrophobic. Was I part of an art installation? In fact, for Barend, there’s a constant dilemma: when is it art, and when is it life? The portal that takes you between the two is a shifting one and he constantly jokes with the idea. ‘But he lives it,’ says Baylon Sandri whose gallery, SMAC, De Wet joined in about 2009. Take that bunker beneath his house. You’re invited down there and you want to break into nervous laughter because you have to bend double to get into the little space. In fact you enter it practically on your knees. It doesn’t make any sense. ‘But that’s typical Barend de Wet. He can’t stop playing with the concept that everything he does is art. Literally, while he’s speaking to you, it’s a performance.’ And yet his house is so normal. But maybe that’s part of it, too, although he did move into what was already home to Diana. It seems crazy, more so when you remember that this is the man whose body became an artwork. This is the ‘living sculpture’ who once officially, and mischievously, ‘resigned’ from the art world – but not from making art – when he had a child, a son, who at one point he was seen to put on a plinth. ‘By taking your baby, and putting him on a plinth, he’s telling you that every single aspect of his life, whether eating, sleeping, dressing, or putting his child on a plinth, is art. I honestly think that even the way he brings up his son is an artwork in process,’ says Sandri.
What can we learn from seeing Hylton Nel, master potter, collector and one-time antique dealer, at home in the countryside outside Calitzdorp, that we haven’t already fathomed from the detail of his extraordinary ceramics? A man written about and acclaimed as a Living National Treasure, what more could there possibly be to say, other than that his house is a glorious cabinet de curiosité filled with displays of unimaginable treasures that inform his work. Michael Stevenson, in his book Hylton Nel, Conversations, says that Nel’s collecting is an integral part of his creative process, and the breadth of his collection is reflected in the diversity of iconographic and stylistic references in his work. ‘Your collecting,’ he says to Nel, ‘almost provides references for your work, a “study” collection at hand with an array of sources.’ It’s important to know this because almost certainly there are links between Nel’s years as an antique dealer and between his own collecting and his work. Why else would his home, which he shares with his partner Bernard Wilke, look as it does?
Roger Ballen perceives the magnificent trees in his garden as symbols of permanence and continuity.
Willem Boshoff at home in his sitting room.
‘I’m naturally an untidy person’, says Johann Louw. ‘Tidiness doesn’t really interest me.’ In fact, chaos surrounds him.
Look now at the Hout Bay home of Kate Gottgens, a brilliant painter with her own unique style who, wrote Andrew Putter in Art Throb in 2010, has ‘an exquisitely refined sensitivity to paint’. She’s often viewed as the local artist specialising in suburban angst. The rooms are painted in gorgeous, offbeat tones chosen by Kate, who’s an exceptional colourist – a point noted by her reviewers time and again. Putter goes on to mention the ‘muted range of bitumen-browns and ash greys, modulating here and there into cool pinks, and blues,’ a poetic response to an extraordinary ability with colour. Look at the kitchen table where we sat drinking coffee, and the colour of the wall behind the cooker. You see it in the collections of objects clustered on the tables in her sitting room. You also see the sophisticated use of negative space between the tables and the chairs and how they’re placed along the walls. ‘Those negative spaces she uses in her paintings,’ says João Ferreira, ‘they bring to mind the painter Giorgio Morandi, who worked with the idea that something exists around the objects you see in front of you.’ Ferreira has always seen this in the houses Gottgens has lived in. She has an intuitive response to the world in which she lives, and it’s at that level you must engage with her. ‘I’ve always felt comfortable in her houses, somehow settled,’ Ferreira continues, articulating a depth of ‘feeling’, of humanness with which her paintings are imbued. She’s most probably an instinctive cook, of the big-on-flavour versus the cordon bleu sort, a tea and coffee connoisseur. If she wrote a novel it would be the literary version of one of her paintings. Sitting at her kitchen table, drinking freshly ground coffee, you get how her eye works. And hers is a still, Zen-like home where there’s peace and harmony and calm. Her children are mooching about, her plants are being watered and there’s a man doing the laundry. Her process is the opposite of those artists who require chaos and panic and angst in order to work. Those artists do exist: perhaps they’ll have a couple of heavy nights and then they’ll wake up and suddenly the spirit will grab them and their artistic outpourings will be earth-shattering. Not for Kate. ‘Kate’s the opposite,’ says Baylon Sandri, her gallerist. ‘She’s one of those artists, I think, who really produces her best work in a very contemplative, serene space.’ Have a look at her studio in the garden and you have to agree.
By comparison, there’s way more chaos in painter Johann Louw’s life, and his work is filled with energy and turmoil. He’s a very expressionistic painter, in the way that Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon were, his portraits showing the same turbulence and compressed violence. Simple things like skulls and bones and odd bits of broken objects – things that lie around at home, in the garden or the attic – find their way into his work. A visit brings it all to life and the atmosphere it creates is worthy of a David Lynch movie. Johann doesn’t care that the backyard where he has his braai is filled with broken beds or that you have to skirt a broken-down Austin Apache to get to the dam that his children use as a swimming pool. ‘Even though every other day the sun shines and this is only a rural dorp an hour or so from Cape Town.’ says Sandri, ‘there’s an eeriness about it that’s found in his work. I think if you go very deeply into what he does, there are occasions where he confronts certain existential questions about what happens from here on. Are we just empty vessels? I think Johann’s philosophy is a little bit on the dark side in that sense.’ If you cleaned everything up and gave Louw a clean, sterile, clinical environment, he probably wouldn’t be able to function. He thrives on the chaos that surrounds him and enjoys it. Tidy it all up and the following day he’d recreate that same chaotic state. ‘Many creative people work that way,’ says Sandri.
That quirkiness is addictive too. ‘It’s what I find fascinating about Sanell Aggenbach,’ says Elana Brundyn of one of the stars of her own gallery. ‘And it’s much fuelled by a play on her Afrikaans heritage which is sometimes forgotten. There’s a lot about her that’s traditional as well – and you see it in her home that is in fact an old farmhouse and has that country feeling inside in spite of all of the wonderful contemporary art that it houses. In spirit, it’s exactly who she is and what her work talks about. But this is also the home of a mother; again you see this in her work. Look at her children’s bunnies that turn up in the Pietà she did for the Joburg Art Fair. So there’s this classic-ness to her work and there’s a quirky classic-ness also – and the home speaks of that, definitely.’
And so, on it goes. This is a book about private worlds within worlds – the synergy between them and the art their owner’s make on occasions stripped astonishingly bare. There are rich pickings in this seam of South African artistic life and I’m surprised it’s taken so long for anybody to have a look. Did my investigations open a little window on something hitherto not known? Yes, of course – and there’s so much more to say.