Since 1850, AVA has risen to the occasion in one form or another
• The Association for Visual Arts’ exhibition Circle: AVA 50 Collectors is one of comparison and pairing
Readers of this column have been introduced to some of the associations, alliances and collectives established over the past year to try to mitigate the ravaging effects of Covid-19 and state ineptitude on the SA arts sector. The crisis has also exposed various existing representative and advocacy bodies for artists as largely ineffectual.
In this context, it is indeed worth celebrating an artistdriven organisation that can boast success and longevity. Such an entity is the Association for Visual Arts (AVA), which has now occupied its premises on Church Street in Cape Town for five decades.
The association traces its roots to the SA Fine Arts Society founded in 1850, though inevitably this organisation — later the SA Fine Arts Association and then the SA Association of Arts — was bound up in a narrow colonial-era understanding of artists and their “publics”. AVA, by contrast, has long positioned itself as an inclusive body that is driven by the interests of a diverse membership.
The association cherishes its not-for-profit identity and its accessibility (members pay R150 a year and can then apply to exhibit their work). This is not to say that AVA is removed from the visual arts’ financial ecosystem; its Church Street building was donated by Spier, it has numerous partners in the private sector and it collaborates with commercial galleries.
Moreover, and appropriately — given that the gallery space exists primarily as a platform for artists to exhibit their work for sale on the art market — AVA is connected to a network of private collectors, whose acquisitions in turn sustain the association and its members. In 2019, this was formalised through Circle, an initiative through which 50 collectors pledge annual support to the gallery.
The 50-year anniversary of the Church Street headquarters thus presents a pleasing symmetry, and the result is Circle: AVA 50 Collectors, an exhibition that includes pieces previously acquired for private collections and places them in dialogue with more recent work by a selection of artists who are AVA members. These include big names such as William Kentridge, Willie Bester and Sue Williamson, but also lesser-known artists.
As Mary Corrigall writes in
the text accompanying the exhibition, there is an urgent need to encourage new local collectors of SA art: “In selecting works by some young SA artists that are more accessible, curator Carlyn Strydom hopes to draw a new generation of
collectors into the AVA’s literal and metaphoric ‘circle’.”
The exhibition facilitates multiple comparisons and pairings. Siwa Mgoboza’s Dress, in the colourful style of her Africadian series, stands in contrast to the bent figure in Patrick Bongoy’s Kimbongila. The dark upside-down world of Dorothee Kreutzfeldt’s Hanging Tree complements the submerged wonder and terror of Ronald Muchatuta’s Vadzoki veNyanza (The Owners of the Lake). Clare Menck’s nude figures hint at the alienation that creeps into domesticity and intimate relationships, while Stephané E Conradie’s mixed media assemblages gesture towards something similar through the quietly accumulating wreckage of ornamental objects.
Perhaps the greater interest lies in the matching of an artist’s work from different periods in his or her career: an offsetting that, Corrigall notes, invites us to “consider how the artists have shifted their aesthetic or dug
deeper into it”. The works by Kentridge and Bester suggest that they are among those who have dug deeper, although this would not necessarily apply if other pieces by these two artists were exhibited.
There is a gratifying continuity, or in some cases a sense of completion, in the paired works from Bonolo Kavula, Claudette Schreuders, Mandla Vanyaza and others. In Steven Cohen’s recent Make-up Research series, one senses a reflexivity and perhaps a critical looking back that inflects our viewing of earlier performances such as his Chandelier, filmed during the destruction of an informal settlement in 2001.
What the SA arts scene will look like two decades — or five — from now is anyone’s guess. But I have a feeling that AVA will be part of that future.
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