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.
Read MoreJohn 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreAn 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.
Read MoreBattiss 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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