The Long Read

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.

But the thing about the art world, especially when it comes to auctions, is that it operates on a different economy that is not always subject to the same pinched nerves that the premature unseating of a finance minister might bring to the market place.

With spring seemingly arriving and the smoke and shouts of student protests apparently fizzling out, it was time last Saturday to take a saunter down to the Goodman Gallery for an opening.

Kate Gottgens is South Africa’s master hunger artist. No one has better conveyed the crack and the hollow that fissures and empties experience.

Letters, hand-written, stamped and posted, are archaic throwbacks to a culture we nostalgically dub ‘slowness’ – slow food, slow beer, slow sex, slowed down hand-made things. The art gallery however has remained largely immune to this threat to slowness.

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.