Art

Art

When it comes to creativity, questions arise as to who owns the art. These days, with so many options open to us, as consumers we are spoilt for choice. As creatives we can stumble into whatever trend is current and then change genres in a fickle flick of a switch. So, in this complex world of making and taking and using and transposing all kinds of media, what exactly does it mean to be the author, the composer, the painter, the designer? Who owns the art?

Art

With his latest solo presentation Lingua Nero, Richard Hart, creative director at disturbance design, explores new territory both materially and conceptually – a continuation of his investigation into the complex relationship of semiotics, signs, symbols and language. Lingua Nero, loosely translated as ‘Strong Language’ and ‘Black Language’, offers the viewer both in terms of hue and humour.

Art

During the oppressive years of apartheid rule in South Africa, not all artists had access to the same opportunities. But far from quashing creativity and political spirit, these limited options gave rise to a host of alternatives – including studios, print workshops, art centers, schools, publications and theaters open to all races; underground poster workshops and collectives; and commercial galleries that supported the work of black artists – that made the art world a progressive environment for social change.

Art

Paul Butler is an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team. It was his map of 500 million Facebook friends that inspired research analyst Olivier H. Beauchesne's visualisation of international scientific collaboration. Beauchesne works for Science-Metrix, a bibliometric consulting firm that engineers ways to measure the impact and growth of scientific discovery.

Art

For me mainstream refers to the culture that formed part of American and European life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These ideas appear in mass media, survive on heavy exposure and, for a time, form part of our everyday vernacular. They are downloaded onto our iPods, live on our Google searches and dominate our magazine covers. Pop culture is constantly evolving and is a result of a very unique time and place. It constantly renews itself – and it is the innovation and fresh thinking of young people that ultimately determine exactly what makes it into the realm of pop culture.

Art

I first came across SA Burger in Pretoria in June this year. While producing an artistic product, they call themselves a brand. More pertinently, they reject the terms 'artist', 'designer', 'art' and 'anti-art', preferring to define themselves as conscious citizens in support of imaginative activation – deeply insecure, pro-life, but not strictly Catholic – and what they do as seeking to find a way of engagement between what is inside and around them, demonstrating relativity in everyday events and communicating this using the media of the day.

Art

Parodying Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo (1931), a new book by Anton Kannemeyer delves into the underlying racism of the colonial project and the corruption that persists in Africa today. At the same time he takes on the vigorous debates around race that enliven and shadow daily life in South Africa.

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Twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop came to promince with fabulously fake photographs that explored their muslim identities. In 1978, seven years before the birth of twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop, the South African writer Ahmed Essop published a luminous collection of short stories titled The Hajji and Other Stories. The 22 fictions contained in Essop’s collection evoked the discrete, fragrant world of Fordsburg, a predominantly Indian neighbourhood in central Johannesburg.

Art

Michael MacGarry is an artist, designer, writer, kak stirrer and some other things we’ve forgotten. For those who’ve never heard of him, Sean O’Toole offers the necessary introduction.

Art

Harlem is not just about Lou Reed’s dope peddlers and southern style soul cooking. Sean O’Toole reports on a current exhibition of young African Art. The Apollo Theatre: its name encapsulates a whole slice of modern American life. Seventeen year-old Ella Fitzgerald made her debut at this legendary Harlem live music venue in 1934. James Brown, growling, groaning and gyrating on the boards, recorded his seminal live album here in 1962 (’the greatest live album ever recorded,’ say Rolling Stone.

Art

Street art, urban art, call it what you will. One thing’s for sure, people are paying silly money for the work of graffiti artists. Before he became the poster boy for street art, that is art made for and consumed on the street, Jean-Michel Basquiat was just another hipster with ambition. Art making aside, he played clarinet and synthesiser for an outfit called Gray, and wrote whimsical slogans on urban walls under the moniker SAMO.

Art

Since 1999, the prices paid for photography at auction internationally have skyrocketed. Sean O’Toole maps this trajectory. In February this year, a buyer bid $3.3 million for a photograph by the German photographer Andreas Gursky. Titled 99 Cent, his photo, one from a series of two, shows a colour-saturated vista of a discount store. The sale, brokered by London auction house Sotheby’s, set a new record for the price of a photograph paid at auction, the previous high set in February 2006 when a 1904 monochrome study of a moonlit pond by Edward Steichen fetched $2.9 million.

Art

A sixteenth century novel about a retired country gentleman who fancies himself as a bit of gallant might not immediately seem a logical reference point for anyone interested in an exhibition about space and space travel.

Art

It is said that behind every successful publication stands a unique, strong-willed individual, someone whose distinctive personality helps to define it. Sean O’Toole investigates whether this is true of Scope, Loslyf and FHM. Sometime in the mid-1980s. The men’s toilet (‘Whites only’) in a small engineering works on the bad side of Pretoria, out west – near the cement factory and the sewerage farm. Stacked on the musty windowsill above the cistern, a stack of magazines; their pages stiff from the sun. Only two to choose from: Scope and Car.

Art

Bigness. It is not a word one often hears spoken in daily conversation. Biggish, yes, also biggest, they’re pretty common. But bigness, technically the noun form of the adjective big – it’s usage is pretty rare. In a sense, it is this very rarity that has ensured the word’s longevity, made sure that when someone says bigness it still implies the fact or condition of being large in size, extent, amount.

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He’s been described as pioneering, innovative, sexy, although doubtlessly no-one has ever told sound artist James Webb that he is a collector of noises.

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On a visit to Mali, Sean O’Toole found himself chatting to local truck drivers about their brilliantly decorated trucks. This truck is older than me,’ laughs Mamadou Seye. The 25-year-old Senegalese trucker is standing in front of a dilapidated yellow lorry parked in a dusty plot of land near the central train station in Kayes – a bustling market town in western Mali.