“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.”
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)
Some stuff happened. It involved many things: several discussions, multiple emails, epic travel arrangements and rearrangements, and an entire exhibition of Eastern Cape artists. It included comments, references and quests for such abstracts within contemporary artistic practice such as ‘The Now’, human experience, authenticity and sincerity vs. visually neat, theoretical illustration. It incorporated how we might, and do package our pathologies and spilt over into matters of national identity and nation building.But that’s not the beginning of the story.— Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)
 |
| Installation view of the Colour Exhibition |
THE BEGINNING:
Vodka. A conversation. One of those late night, state-of-the-nation grizzles between friends about what we think is wrong with the particular, parochial, jargonized system in which we invest so much of our time and passion. The dialogue dominated by questions verging on the petulant: Why is so much of the art written about in this country and canonised for school level so monochromatic? Why is so much art criticism written in such a desaturated way? Why in this current context, does the word colour still persistently more often mean race, (a skin tone and no more of its complexities) than a hue denoting a chromatic representation of emotion or experience?
A conversation, which later, may have simply been a whinge with a hangover tinge. But then we thought that other people should join this conversation, from other places and that they should come here, to the middle of nowhere to discuss our provocation. Colour.
