I realise that this week’s Hot Lunch may have been an elaborate and in retrospect unsubtle plan to get back into JCAF (Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation) to spend a little more time with Frida Kahlo.
Last week I visited her in my allotted time slot. A friend had booked the popular free-to-the-public walkabout and our small group met at the brilliantly reimagined century-old electricity substation in Forest Town with the erudite JCAF team led by Clive Kellner.
He welcomes every group.
The exhibition is a revelation. Kahlo, Sher-Gil and Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South is presented on an intimate scale in a richly layered parallel unfolding of each artist’s life.
Their diaries, artefacts, photographs and in Frida’s case, one of her famous indigenous Mexican dresses, are given to us like small talismanic gifts that the guides who talk you through each room happily deliver a few times a day.
I confess I wanted another go, and a chance to talk to the person who had worked so tirelessly for more than four years to give me this moment with each of these female artists of the cultural South.
So I picked up lunch at the Service Station in Melville (two flavours of their signature quiche, wild rice salad, a fresh mango and brinjal dish — perfect for the summer heat) and pinned Clive down in the JCAF meeting room/library between tours.
“It took four years to get the Frida Kahlo painting and artefacts,” he tells me. “That’s how long it takes.
There is huge demand. You will never get anything in under two years. I travelled from the east to the west coast to America, Mexico, Paris, back to Mexico, going to museums saying ‘this is who we are and what we are trying to do’, and it was ‘no, no, no’.
“Part of it is prejudice, and the otherness of Joburg, and Kahlo has never been to Africa before. And then it is the huge demand in Europe and America from major museums and that’s what you are up against.”
But he pulled it off, and hopefully it will open more doors in the future.
Born in Parys — the Free State version, not the French one, he laughs — Clive had a peripatetic childhood, moving between schools and boarding schools and back to the same high school six times.
It was what he calls an unusual upbringing and art was something of a safe haven — the place he knew best and what he knew he would ultimately make his life. He went to art school practices as a young artist and then a fortuitous visit to Documenta, a huge art show held every five years in Germany, exposed him to curating and he found a new focus.
He studied and worked all over the world and in South Africa, running the Johannesburg Art Gallery for several years. It was during this period that he had an ongoing conversation with one of the three people who are now trustees of the JCAF about the need for a foundation that was run along the lines that we now see in Forest Town.
Clive explains that it operates on principles that are unusual in the South African context, where private museums are becoming one of the ways the public engages with art.
“We went through a 10-year process with one of the trustees of the JCAF who I advised on his collection. We worked for three years with the Pompidou Museum [in Paris] to learn from them, and we asked the crucial questions: Who has the right to represent Africa? Should we be doing this? Is it a vanity project? How do you sustain the model?
The context is that in South Africa we don’t have big exhibitions that the public can go and see. We have a strong commercial sector, which is great, but we wanted to bring ideas and the love of looking at art and bring it to people in a personalised way supported by technology and research
“Which led to this model. The idea is that everything is free to the public. There is no art collection on the premises except in the exhibition space. We wanted to marry research, technology and exhibitions as a new model, so that DNA is imprinted in everything we do.
“We meet the visitors when they arrive. That is why there is an online booking system. We get feedback from visitors; we are creating and drawing in a new audience.
“The context is that in South Africa we don’t have big exhibitions that the public can go and see. We have a strong commercial sector, which is great, but we wanted to bring ideas and the love of looking at art and bring it to people in a personalised way supported by technology and research.”
The trustees, Phuthuma Nhleko, Adi Enthoven and Gordon Schachat are committed to spending their own money on this project with the idea that it is not about their names on the institution walls, but rather about the values they envision for this foundation.
“Nothing is for sale here. Spend time here, immerse yourself and be changed and transformed by the experience. There are no openings, no drinks, that’s all great and cool, but that’s not what we do because we wanted to move away from the same people going around the same galleries.
“We are trying to reach a new and different audience, which is a way to build civic mindedness through the medium of the foundation,” Clive says.
But he does believe that more of these hybrid foundation museums are good for South African culture and art,
“MoMA [Museum of Modern Art] was started by three old ladies,” he laughs.
He describes the arcane process it took to get the Amrita Sher-Gil painting into the country. They never allow her work to travel outside India and most of her work was left to the state when she died at 28. Her work and her story were new to me, so I tell him I felt privileged seeing it.
“It’s a personal quest to make this happen. I believe in it so much and wanted to share it alongside Frida and always with a local artist in conversation [Irma Stern].
"So always putting ourselves into art history, putting ourselves back into history, because to some degree we’ve been marginalised, we had apartheid and the cultural boycott for 40 years so people don’t know our modernist artists.
"Even if they're contentious, even if the issues are contentious, it is fantastic that art can do that in a way that politics cannot.”
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