Posts by Sean O'Toole

Barend de Wet

After pulling up my handbrake, I asked De Wet about his fascination with colour. Why? What is its yield? He looked at me through his Gene Hackman glasses. It is the material in its truest form, he said, passenger door ajar. It is paint as paint, nothing else. It just is. No complications. He slipped out my car, and was gone.

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John Berger – A Life on the Page

Criticism, be it fusty essaying of this sort, or the jazzy punditry of Facebook, is an accessory practice. It is saying, not doing. What distinguished Berger was his attempt to weld the two possibilities – saying and doing – together.

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A Tally of Culture Making

In late October, around the time finance minister Pravin Gordhan delivered his mid-term budget speech in parliament and student protestors used brick paving to register their anger on the streets outside, a group of University of Cape Town students were planning something. I don’t know whether to call that something a party or an exhibition. Actually, it was both, and neither.

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The Impoverished Visual Choreography of Refusal

Students allied to the Fallist Movement are currently lightly occupying Hiddingh campus, an outlier property of the University of Cape Town where its art and drama schools have long been quarantined in an eccentric warren of colonial buildings.

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An irrational history of failure

Is it too early for Adjective to be self-reflexive? Probably. Does this mean it shouldn’t be? Hell no. Here, at the outset of its indeterminate journey, self-awareness is crucial.

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Battiss in Johannesburg

Two dissimilar, and each in their own way engaging exhibitions in Johannesburg, engage with the mythic figure of Battiss, a big-hearted adventurer and nonsense-maker from an era known for extreme baloney, and worse.

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