Scarica | Download - art a part of cult(ure)

on the table. One person put a book of Nelson Mandela’s speeches which another person
exchanged for his expensive wrist watch. I told the director of the Johannesburg Art
Gallery that perhaps someone from Soweto might come and bring a goat and exchange it
for a chair by Gerrit Rietveld which is in the gallery’s collection. Alas, that did not happen.
During the first week of the Johannesburg Biennial, Adam and I went to Cape Town.We
stayed in a bed and breakfast inn beneath the Table Mountain. One bright sunny morning
Adam and I sailed from Cape Town on a sail boat accompanied by a small crew of sailors
and cameramen and women. We sailed past the Cape of Good Hope towards Cape Point:
to the place where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. It was the place where dolphins,
sharks and whales mate.
From our boat Adam and I unfolded a colourful piece of cotton cloth above the waters. The
winds helped Adam and me in shaping the billowing cloth into the letter “C” – the initial
letter of Cape Town. A video was made of our event, which was part of our on-going
project entitled “The Secret History of the Mondrian Fan Club”. We took the video back to
Johannesburg and showed it in our twin installations inside the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
We returned to Cape Town and stayed, the second time round, in the tall skyscraper-like
modernist building at Greenpoint. During our second stay in Cape Town Adam and I
created impromptu events in different parts of the city. In one event we joined a chorus of
wandering singers in the city centre. In another part of the town I did an impromptu in
front of a shop with the sign “A Stitch in Time”. Adam did an impromptu in front of a
school surrounded by a cement wall topped with a fence of barbed wire and a sign saying
the barbed wire was electrified.
One day we joined artists, art critics, art historians, and art curators, who came down
from Johannesburg to Cape Town, in a boat trip to Robben Island. Robben Island was
where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated during the apartheid regime in South Africa. At
Robben Island, the international art community conducted an impromptu conference in
homage to Nelson Mandela inside one of the halls of the former island prison. Afterwards
Adam and I explored the jail cells where political opponents of the apartheid regime were
locked up. It was an eerie experience. I was reminded of Franz Kafka’s ‘The Penal Colony’.
Paradoxically it was also an exhilarating experience, for apartheid had ended and the
empty jail cells were mute witnesses to past state crimes while at the same time they
were very real testaments to the fact that injustice could end, did end for Nelson Mandela
and his fellow freedom fighters, and thus freedom can be accomplished.
It was on the boat trip to Robben Island that I conceived of the idea of the London
Biennale. I discussed the idea with Adam Nankervis on our way back to Cape Town. We
continued discussing the idea when we got back to Berlin.
Over the years as as an artist I have participated in many international cultural events
such as Documenta in Kassel, Germany, ‘Air Art’ at the University of California in Berkeley
Art Museum, ‘Fluxattitudes’ at the New Museum in New York, ‘Live/Life’ at the Musee d’Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris, ‘l’Inform’ at the Cntre Pompidou in Paris, and in many art
festivals and exhibitions all over the world. I felt that the nature of a famous cultural event
such as the Venice Biennale, because of its rigid structure of selecting artists through
national institutions, did not make it possible for artists who are citizens of countries
without national pavillions in Venice, or artists who live the lives of exiles, migrants or
refugees, artists with little or no ‘profiles’ in the art market, have very little chance to
show their works and participate in the most prestigious of art biennales: the Venice
Biennale. For many years, in the art circles of America and Europe, I was described as a
‘marginal artist’ (albeit with the cynosure ‘par excellence’) by French art critic Pierre
Restany (ideologue of ‘nouveau realisme’) and Harald Szeemann, the curator of
DOCUMENTA 5. At Cape Town in 1997I thought it was time to create a viable and
memorable platform for the world’s ‘marginal artists’, and that, initially, was the inspiration
for the LONDON BIENNALE, a biennale that would be open to every artist regardless of
age, sex, ethnic origin, and artistic language or style.
The first London Biennale was held in the year 2000, at the start of the new millenium, an
auspicious time for an auspicious occasion. Shortly afterwards, Adam Nankervis, who is
the internationl coordinator of the London Biennale, suggested that we do ‘Pollinations’ in