David Krut Publishing,
Africa’s No 1 Arts Bookstore and Publisher

5 June 2009

I have just had a call from my printers to be on press tomorrow morning at 7 am for the last leg of the Sebidi book journey – well not quite the last leg, since I will have to think about the marketing and distribution of the book for the next couple of years. But the production is almost done and this is the most nerve-wracking part: will the book look beautiful? Will the artist like it? Will my repro produce beautiful images at the printers? Will I find any missed typos at three in the morning when it is too late to do anything about them?

This is the fourteenth in our series of TAXI Art Books, but it has assumed quite a special place for me in the line-up since I have got to know the subject, Mmakgabo Mmapulu Mmankgato Helen Sebidi (and she is worth all of those names; in fact there is even one more, Regina, given to her at her christening, but she said we could leave that one out, much to the relief of the book designer) quite well in the last two years. Her work has impressed me more and more as I have pored over images of huge oils and bright pastels on paper and I do hope that this book will make people look afresh at her oeuvre.

So this page is going to be dedicated to things that didn’t make it into the book. But I will also throw in some things about how the book got made, and some extra bits of information about Mmakgabo and her work. So it will be a useful page for anyone interested in the making and publishing of art books, but also for those doing research on Sebidi who are looking for more material – students and teachers and historians.

Things don’t make it into books for a few reasons – I have three main ones. Firstly, images don’t make it in because they are not good enough. Since the aim of the book is to present the artist in the best light (with some references to early work and how they have evolved over the years) we usually whittle images down to the ones that do that job best. We always have to ask ourselves why we are putting anything into a book – do we really need it? Does it enhance the publication? Does it shed light on the artist? Every picture goes through a kind of audition for the book and it is quite a gruelling process.

The second reason is that, no matter the merits of the work, we simply don’t have a good enough reproduction of the work. In the case of Sebidi, this was true for a number of her works – many of them were shot in installations on small cameras under bad lighting conditions (this was all before the days of digital photography made the copying of art work both easier and less expensive than before). And lots of these works have disappeared from public view – into private or corporate collections. We hunted down as many as we could (and had time for – in an ideal world we would have had five years to track down every last image in every corner of the world), sought permission to photograph or acquire a high resolution reproduction (a process that takes longer than the actual photography) and worked our budget around fees charged by some of the collections for shooting of works, or ourphotographers’ fees.

And the third reason is that the book itself keeps some images out. As a book takes shape, it acquires a character of its own and some pictures, no matter how we move them around, can’t seem to find their place in the book. Sometimes it is only through this process that we come to realise that an image we thought we should include was uncomfortable in the book simply because it was not as good as the others and wherever we put it, this was evident. Of course we try many different combinations of things before we ditch a picture that is giving us trouble (when you are making a book that may end up being the only book on a particular artist you take great care to represent the work as fully as possible – a good thing from an art-historical point of view).

So I am going to show you some things that didn’t make it, and you will see that many of the works are very fine, but got left out because all we had was one lousy low resolution reproduction – good enough for the web but not for print – or a badly scratched slide shot in the 1970s that no amount of Photoshop work could save. The picture at the top of this entry is one that didn’t make it – we made a scan off an old slide and decided that the image didn’t quite make the grade, much to the artist’s dismay, since this was a very large work, made for an exhibition in Sweden in 1992, and it was stolen. She felt that it would be some small form of justice to have it included in the book. Instead, I have opted to put it on this web page and in the days to come I will give you a little more information about the work. It was made a short while after Sebidi’s catastrophic car accident and she tells me that she was working through a lot of anger and pain when she made this picture.

Keep an eye on this page for more, and please send your questions or comments. You can go to the link below for the press release of the book, and if you want to be invited to the book launch, drop a note to books@davidkrut.com

By the way, the book designer for this project was Kevin Shenton – I’ll put his bio up too, along with bios of the writers and other contributors (photographers, repro people, printers, machine minders …)

8 June 2009: Second Installment

Well the printing went without a hitch –  almost. We had one correction to make on press, which never makes one popular with the printers since they assume that by the time we are on press we have made all of our corrections. I never know if I should hang over the pages as they come off press, for fear that I will indeed find a typo that I missed, but in this case I am glad that I did – it was a tiny error in the title of one of the works and it would have kept me sleepless for days if I had let it go. Fortunately it meant a change to only one plate – the black plate – so it was done in no time and we were soon back on schedule.

But the best part of the process was having Mmakgabo there for a couple of hours on Friday. She has done some etching, lithography, and silkscreen printing, so the process was not entirely new to her, except that of course printing of  books is now highly mechanised with images going from computer to plate and sheets coming off the machine at the rate of millions a month. But she was overjoyed at the excellent quality of the reproductions. She was particularly happy about how bright this work looked:

This is called A Vision of the Future II and was completed in 2002. It is a large work – 175 x 140 cm. Now I am breaking my own rules here since this image did actually make it into the book, but only just. On a last search through the archive at Everard Read, who have been Sebidi’s gallery for a number of years, I found a beautiful positive of this work and rushed it off to be scanned. The author of the essay in the book, Juliette Leeb-du Toit, had written a good description of the work, so I was relieved to have found it, even if at the eleventh hour. But it made one spread in the book particularly striking and it was great to have this work right next to A Vision of the Future I (you’ll have to get the book to see both).

Some of Sebidi’s typical iconography appears in this work – the (androgynous) mother figure holding a whole clutch of children, the kneeling female figures. What is particularly striking, however, is the spectacular blue of the sky in the background – it is almost celestial, with that large yellow sun breaking through.

In a quite different vein, here are two works that did not make it into the book:

These are two of a number of ‘musical’ works, some bearing shades of Sekoto, or Picasso. What is interesting about these two here, however, is the treatment of a similar theme in two such contrasting styles. This working out of ideas often ends in quite different works when Sebidi works in different media – pastel on paper for the 1997 work and oil on canvas for the later one.

6 July 2009: Installment three, A Word from our Sponsors

I should mention here that none of the TAXI Art Books would be possible without sponsorship, which also allows us to keep the price relatively low so that the book is accessible to a broad audience (the price has remained unaltered at R150 since the very first TAXI book). The funding for TAXI-014 was provided by the MTN SA Foundation and the National Arts Council.

And if you are interested in attending the launch of the Sebidi book, this will take place on Saturday 15 August – time and venue to follow.

27 August 2009: Installment four: after the launch

Well, it is several weeks since my last entry, and we have, in the meantime, launched the book. The event took place at our new bookstore downtown (Arts on Main, cnr Main and Berea). It was a fabulous event, and very well attended (I am guessing 300 people). Andries Oliphant gave a lovely speech on Mmakgabo’s work and it was followed by what was probably the highlight of the day, a poem recitation by Simon Sebidi, Mmakgabo’s brother. Here is the poem in seTswana – I would be grateful if anyone could send me a good translation:

Dumelang Batlhaping

Ba Mmakubela a Moratho

Ba ba noang Metsi ko lekotlopong, la noka.

Noka diaela, batlhaping ba re!!

Tlhapi solofela seretse, metsi a pyele oabona.

Batho ba Mmakubela a moratho!!

Kubu ke tsewa ke metse,

Metsi a noka a sa tse e.

Batlhaping!!

Batlhaping ba re!! sehoahoana!!

O thutha byang? O thuthang la matsea ke noka.

Mokqoshi wa aa lla.

Batlhaping be re!!

Ko mosate ho oa a jeoa,

Ho Supanwa ka menoana,

Ba re!! e kaba morupi ke ma a, a, ng?

Ke Kgathane O thebe di tshoeu,

O tsene dibata maseke,

Are!! ntshang lerapo!! re kokone.

Nama!! ho monate tsa Mekolo,

Moshimane oa motshehare! he! are!!

Tseke!! Tseke!! Banneng!

O be ha Sehoang lebete.

Mmakgabo asked me to mention several people who played an important role in her life, helping her mother and grandmother to raise her, teaching her the skills she needed for life (and not just the practical ones) and imparting their values. These are some of the people she would like honoured for their role (albeit indirect) in her success as an artist: Nkele Regina Sebidi; Kasuru Paulina Rakau; Efenia Ratshweunyana; Annetjie Ratshweunyana; Letshoko Jennifer Rakau; Ntina Sebidi; Robert Sebidi; Ramabele Sebidi; Nnanatsi Sebidi; Malefokeng Sebidi; Motshidi Sebidi; Happy Sebidi; Michael Sebidi; Heidi Petsch; John Koanekeefe Mohl; Simon Stone; Lynd Ballen; Ilona Anderson; Bill Ainslie; David Koloane; Lucky Sibiya. The other people to whom she (and we) are grateful for their support of this project are Kgosi Jeffrey Moepi; Simon Sebidi, Everard Read Gallery; the various private, corporate and public collectors who allowed us access to their collections; our sponsors The MTN SA Foundation and the National Arts Council.

Next time: a profile of Juliette Leeb-du Toit

Watch this space for more …

Press release

Unknown Author

Keywords: Taxi-Art-Books