The bookstore will be hosting a number of events in the coming months, beginning with the launch of our new book Handspring Puppet Company on the 19th of November, and a poetry Saturday on the 5th of December.

Mmakgabo Sebidi in her studio, 1992

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:

We Have Lost the Rhythm, 2005

Double Bass at Sunset, 1997

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

Glen Baldridge (in grey cap)

The mood was joyous last Friday at David Krut Fine Art in NYC, as artists, art lovers, and law students (who had been present at the New York City Bar for the launch of the new book Art and Justice from David Krut Publishing) gathered for the opening of “With Hidden Noise”. The show, organized and curated by Phil Sanders, and inspired by the Marcel Duchamp work of the same name, drew an enthusiastic crowd. Featured artists Alex Dodge, Glen Baldridge, Joseph Hart, and Tatiana Simonova were in attendance among an eclectic mix of quests that included noted sculptor Chakaia Booker.

By turns sly, dark, perverse, and wistful, the show includes silkscreen, lithograph, and woodcut prints, unique collages, original drawings, and multi-media sculpture. Although not able to attend, Jason Jägel’s gouache-and-pencil works drew plenty of attention with their splashes of color and cartoon-like figures. Alex Dodge’s wickedly tinkering skeletons, rendered in layers of oil wash on canvas-stretched silkscreen linework, generated much commentary, as did Glen Baldridge’s glittery print with “The End’s Not Near, It’s Here” written out in bullet holes. Quieter, but just as absorbing were Joseph Hart’s tactile collages in intaglio, gouache, and gold leaf. Tatiana Simonova’s delicate puffs of graphite on a vast sheet of paper had viewers spellbound. Not least were the works of Phil Sanders, the most prominent of which were two sculptures, one a small box, and the other a boat emerging from the gallery wall. Made of burnt wood, porcelain coins, and sand, Insurance and Liminal Point chronicle the journey of life from the white coins given in trust at birth, to the spent coins given to Charon, the boatman, to ferry a soul to its final rest.

(L to R) Phil Sanders, Chakaia Booker, and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

Smiling and surrounded by well-wishers, Sanders related the origins of the show’s name and theme. “With Hidden Noise” is taken from the name of a famed 1916 readymade collaboration between Marcel Duchamp and friend Walter Arensberg. Duchamp presented Arensberg with a ball of twine clamped between two steel plates and asked that he place an object in the coil and tighten the screws without revealing whether the choice was a coin, a nail, or a diamond earring. Duchamp himself never knew what Arensberg had placed in the twine, a secret that has been passed from curator to curator, and continues to mystify everyone who handles the object with a hidden noise.

Citing the collaborative aspect of the original With Hidden Noise, Sanders described the process that led to the show as “democratic”, saying that, in lieu of commissioning or gathering work with a specific idea in mind, the theme was developed through a series of e-mails between the participants about the common ground they shared. Though the many of the works were not prints, Sanders felt that all of the artists had utilized the combination of technique and exploration essential to a printmaker’s approach.  The importance of Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, he said, lay in an appreciation of the work “without having to understand exactly what the work is”. Without a doubt, this essential part of the Dada spirit is alive and well in this exciting group of fresh and established voices.

Tatiana Simonova (at L)

“With Hidden Noise” will be showing at David Krut Fine Art, located at 526 W26th St #816, through April 4, 2009. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday 10 00-18 00, by walk-in or appointment.

by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

By way of an epigraph I have inserted this hyperlink to one of John Cage’s one-minute stories, many of which were published in his books Silence and A Year from Monday. Ryan Arenson was doing some research on John Cage when he came across Picasso’s 1901 painting Child with a Dove. He asserts that this coalescence of things is interesting but not meaningful…

I am not a believer in fate – or things that are “meant to be” – but I do celebrate serendipity, which, I suspect, is at the root of much of the post-modern quotation, parsing, allusion and fragmentation that passes for serious and intellectual art these days. The title of Ryan Arenson’s first show at David Krut Projects is one instance of the serendipitous that seems to have enlivened the period Arenson has spent working closely with the printers at DKW. Failing to find a T in the box of wooden letters used with the letterpress, printer Jillian Ross and Arenson settled for Book of Ruth as the title for one of the prints (now the title of the show) rather than the weightier Book of Truth. This frees us all from a certain seriousness that might have weighed down the exhibition from the outset. It also gives us a range of allusions – biblical, historical, etymological – in which to situate our consideration of Arenson’s first major printmaking outing. But perhaps most importantly, Arenson’s willingness to switch his title points to the combination of the serious and the playful that has characterised this period of his work at DKW.

Certainly he began seriously, bringing to the workshop Willi Kurth’s The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer from which he had selected the 1510 woodcut The Penitent and the 1511 Cain Kills Abel as references for a series of prints. He also wanted to cite a small painting from Picasso’s Blue Period called Child with a Dove in which a small girl standing beside a brightly coloured beach ball clutches a dove to her breast. When I asked Arenson about his reference to these works (both of which he has reproduced in various ways in the etchings, linocuts and monotypes included in the exhibition), he remarked that it was not the meanings contained in the images that drew him to them but rather the use of line (in Dürer) and the anchoring technical device of the circle (in Picasso) that set off a series of drawing exercises committed to the creamy pages of a small Moleskin notebook. These drawings, which he later translated into motifs in variations of the two pivotal images, suggest an almost ascetic commitment to the unencumbered clarity of a single pencil line and the purity of the circular form. But rather than confine himself to the inherent solipsism of the circle, Arenson allowed his hand to lift off the paper, in order to create a break in the drawing motion, or trail off the edge of the paper to suggest a slip of the hand (deliberate or accidental).

As he immersed himself in this Zen-like activity, Arenson began to cross the lines of the circle to create a wave-interference pattern not unlike the patterning of lines he had observed and admired in Dürer’s etchings. What he sought was a way to interpret this activity through printmaking to which, he told me in conversation, he was attracted because it gave the artist the opportunity to dispense with all superfluity and focus energy on the making of a pure line. In two intense consultation sessions with DKW’s Jillian Ross and Mlungisi Khongisa and then in further discussions with Ross, Khongisa and visiting New York printmaker Phil Sanders, Arenson considered the various technical means available to him that would allow him to print a series of intersecting circles and lines. The printmakers suggested a combination of techniques: this would lend this body of work a level of technical complexity reflected in subtle variations in its tones and range of mark making. In further collaboration with the DKW printers, Arenson worked with Lungi Khongisa on the workshop’s letterpress and with Niall Bingham on the etching of a series of small circle prints called Void. In particular, Arenson’s final version of Man with Sword combines the sharpness of etching and engraving with the density of black allowed by linocut. It is a startling tribute to Dürer and a sustained, dazzling display of the results of painstaking cutting and gouging into various matrices.

Arenson’s quotation of the master, however, is undercut or tempered by a number of innovations and explorations. In the first instance, the axe wielded by Cain in Dürer’s woodcut is replaced by a Japanese sword that slices across the top of the image, its haft echoing the dominant circles that suggest weight and volume in the two struggling figures. In Arenson’s print, the sword is the only negative space through which the white of the paper shines through uninterrupted. I am not sure if Arenson had considered another Dürer image, the 1508 engraving The Betrayal of Christ in which a bearded Peter slices off the ear of the cowering servant Malchus, but what startled me when I compared the three works was the fact that the terrified Malchus, trying desperately to escape Peter’s swinging sword, is lying on top of a circular keg, the front of which is engraved with a series of curved lines. Certainly Dürer would have been familiar with the extraordinary musculature of early Greek sculpture immortalised in such works as the Laocoön and indeed his work, and in turn Arenson’s, echoes the masculine aggression and drama of that image. Willi Kurth notes that Dürer had reused the figure of Malchus (he appears in another woodcut on the same subject in 1510), but this time as the naked Abel lying prone beneath the swinging arm of his equally naked and traitorous brother Cain. Arenson is clearly fascinated by Dürer’s almost schematic, pared-down representation of the biblical narrative (in contrast to other works made around the same time that are thick with line and detail) and his masterful rendering of the human body. But at the same it, it is the archetype of Cain to which Arenson wishes to make reference, rather than to characters, such as one might find in, say, Gustave Doré’s moving 1865 engraving of the slaying of Abel in which Cain hangs his head in shame and exhaustion (though Doré is an important influence). In the Dürer, all excess is gone and the image is as lean as its two protagonists. It is, for Arenson, a “pure expression of love”, an emotion generated as much by the artist’s study of betrayal as by the enactment of betrayal represented in the image.

The second major image in this body of work is Arenson’s quotation of Picasso’s Child with a Dove (1901). Once again, Arenson applied himself to a series of exquisitely detailed circles to create the head and body of the girl as well as the other elements in the painting: the big bow on the back of the girl’s dress, the dove, the beach ball. Arenson saw these circles as being embedded in Picasso’s work and it was this that prompted his appropriation of the image and that helped him to translate his own obsessive circle-making into figuration. What is striking about the method applied to the figure of the girl is Arenson’s parsing of the image, his breaking it down into constituent parts, not in the cubist way that Picasso himself was to do in his own work after this period of strong realism, but nonetheless in a gesture that aims at interpretation through technique and at investing the image with meaning that is quite different to any meaning that Picasso’s girl, rendered in thick blue and grey impasto, seems to contain.

Once the girl, now Ruth (whose name, appropriately, means “compassion”) had been meticulously constructed through a combination of etching, drypoint and pochoir she seemed to carry some of the weight of her history and the artist’s technique on her frail shoulders. It was at this point in the working process that Arenson, quite literally, began to take her apart, circle by circle, until her head lay beside her. This series, called “Resurrection”, can be viewed from right to left or left to right, which means that the viewer can either decapitate the girl or put her back together again. The surprise of this invests the series and, by extension, all of the works in the exhibition, with a delightful self-reflexivity so that the art-historical seriousness of the founding impulse of the work is turned on its head (so to speak). What is not lost, however – and this is most surprising of all – is the compassion that Picasso seemed to pour into this image. What Arenson has succeeded in doing is to draw attention to the way in which line and form harbour emotion. In stripping the image of colour, in other words, and in rendering it in a series of circling shapes, he has shown us not only Picasso’s achievement but also the secret work of a line on paper.

Other works in this exhibition extend this exploration. A small series of etchings shows the progression of the circle drawing and functions as a study of a method. The etchings comment on the making of an image but also suggest the larger philosophical meanings attached to the circle as a geometric figure and a symbol (in many religions, cultures and traditions) both of emptiness and completion. And finally, the Moleskin notebook serves as a key to the works on paper. It is both fetish and footnote, central but subject, at any moment, to disintegration.

Arenson remarked to me in conversation that he too is not a believer in fate and that he selects images not so much because he is hunting for any particular meaning in a work but rather because he is searching for some point of entry, which could be technical or emotional. Similarly, when he names his works or even creates a body of work that might comprise an exhibition, it is in hindsight only – when the work or series is complete – that he understands the internal resonances that images (his own or those he has borrowed) have set in motion. Great works of art are, for him, like the found objects a sculptor might use – they turn up under the hand leafing through a book. He does, however, concede the importance of dreams and the subconscious, two forces in the brain that give serendipity its sweet taste.

Ryan Arenson, Book of Ruth opens at David Krut Projects on 16 October 2008. Images of the works on this show will appear on our website shortly.

Ryan Arenson, Book of Ruth runs from 25 October – 20 November at David Krut Publishing: Fine Art and Books in Cape Town.

Diane Victor’s work is usually described as social commentary, but what critics often miss, perhaps because her strong imagery repels the squeamish or faint-hearted before they can get a proper look, is its humour, either in the form of biting satire or revealed in the artist’s wry self-deprecation. Since the seriousness of Victor’s work is also, in part, a product of her extraordinary obsession with detail, viewers often need to spend time with the images to appreciate the ways in which Victor resolves the tension between technique and subject matter.

A trio of prints created at David Krut Print Workshop with printmaker Niall Bingham confirms this latter observation, showing not only Victor’s superb draughtsmanship and skill as a printmaker, but demonstrating her ability to strike a balance between seriousness and comedy.

Lot’s Wife is a densely layered print that began with a hardground etching that produced a finely drawn tableau: a woman carrying a child on her back and several shopping bags faces a burning horizon (the Sodom and Gomorrah of the biblical story) and a man with three children gathered closely around him turns back to watch her, a knowing smile on his face. To the etching Victor added burnishing to create areas of light and shade, hard and soft ground to produce varying densities and, finally, spraypaint and rosin aquatints to give a velvety blackness to key areas of the print. The result is a profoundly moody and detailed image, at once full of pathos and menace. The humour – which finally leaps from the print once one has got past its sobriety – is to be found in the bag that Lot’s wife holds in her right hand. “Cerebos, see how it runs,” reads the text on the packet, alluding to the pillar of salt that the woman is soon to become, all because, as Victor says with dry wit, “she wanted to know too much”.

Where the print Lot’s Wife is almost completely covered, from edge to edge, by dark areas of shade and texture, the second print in the suite, Bluebeard’s Wife, is lighter in tone since Victor has left areas of the plate unmarked. Again, Victor has employed a remarkable variety of printmaking techniques. To shade the clothing of the two characters (Bluebeard and his all-too-knowing wife) and to give texture to the drapery, she has laid different cloths down on a soft ground. The cloths are passed through the press to produce an imprint of fibres in the ground. When the plate is etched – and even here, Victor intervenes, blocking out areas that she does not want bitten by the acid – the parts of the image to which the cloth was applied are superbly detailed and suggestive. Finally, Victor has added drypoint in the form of a hyena that dominates the centre of the print, and the faintest suggestion of a landscape along the horizon. But technique, happily, does not overwhelm the wonderful humour of this work. Bluebeard’s wife, to the right of the image, leans saucily against a cupboard full of the heads of Bluebeard’s other wives. Her merry flaunting of her nakedness makes her an unlikely victim of his legendary pathology. Bluebeard, pictured on the left, sans beard, slinks away like a lecherous old man, holding the limp body of a hare, an allusion perhaps to the bodies of his poor, dead wives. The sordid details of the fairytale are given an idiosyncratic twist in Victor’s version, most particularly through the presence of the hyena, which looms large in the centre of the image.

After Eden completes this suite of prints about women who seek to know more than they are supposed to. In the biblical story, Eve’s temptation leads to her downfall and banishment from Eden, but in Victor’s extraordinary reinterpretation, Eve (reminiscent of Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque) lolls with her snake lover in unabashed post-coital bliss. At the foot of her bed, Eve’s computer shows a googled page on gardening and beneath her pillow is a manual on Gardening for Beginners. Through the window, a scene of apple harvesting presents a utopian vision of an Eden in which lions, humans and lambs cavort beneath trees laden with fruit. In this audacious and provocative work, the humour that is incipient in the two companion prints is unmissable. After Eden completes and comments on the two other works, casting the female protagonist as the agent of her own destiny, demonstrating Victor’s unorthodox recasting of well-used narratives, and presenting a psychological landscape that is as funny as it is disturbing.

- Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, April 2008

Mielie is a small innovative company specialising in authentic handbags handmade from completely recycled materials. The brainchild of Adri Schutz, Mielie was officially started on Adri’s dining room table at her home in Cape Town in 2002. Currently situated at the historic Montebello Design Centre in Newlands (close to the David Krut Bookstore and Gallery), the project is geared towards job creation in Cape Town and the promotion of arts and craft.

Mielie currently employs around eighty people, mostly women, residing in the surrounding townships of Cape Town. The organisation espouses what it terms “empowering employment”, which means allowing the women to work from home with flexible working hours, in order for them to spend more quality time with their families.

The organisation is directly influenced by its employees and seeks to make a difference in their communities by supporting various projects. Mielie now exports to countries around the globe, including Finland, New Zealand, Germany and the US.

David Krut Arts Resource is very active in its support of arts and visual literacy education. We are delighted to support Mielie by making their unique merchandise available in our bookstores at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and at the Constitutional Court in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.

The Joburg Art Fair
13 – 16 March 2008
Sandton Convention Centre

For further information contact:
Gallery Manager: Lucy Rayner
t: 011 447 0627,
e: lucy@davidkrut.com
w:www.davidkrutpublishing.com
142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood.
Hours: Mon – Sat 09h00-17h00

This magnificent new book, launched in October 2008, celebrates and documents the artworks integrated into and collected for the Constitutional Court of South Africa. The book pays tribute to the extraordinary vision of the architects and judges of the Court who sought to bring together, in the most inspiring, innovative and dignified way possible, art and the workings of justice, and to give a public soul to the new Court building. Working closely with the Constitutional Court Artworks Committee headed by Justices Yvonne Mokgoro and Albie Sachs, David Krut Publishing has prepared the book as a companion volume to Light on a Hill: Building the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Art and Justice: The Art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa is designed by Ellen Papciak-Rose and features photography by Ben Law-Viljoen.

Essential to the original design of the Constitutional Court by the Durban-based omm design workshop and their Johannesburg partner Urban Solutions, was the integration of art and architecture into the most important building of the new South Africa. To realise this aim, the architects sought designs from artists for elements of the building such as lights, security gates and sun screens. The architects also commissioned artists and craft collectives to design and make furnishings for the Court. The result of these important collaborations can be seen in the colour, vibrancy, warmth, and humanity of the building.

The inclusion of artwork in the structural and functional elements of the Court is enhanced by a growing collection of art on view to the public. The Constitutional Court collection started – with very few resources – before the Court moved into its current home and has taken shape around several key works by artists such as Dumile Feni, John Baloyi, William Kentridge, Judith Mason, Gerard Sekoto, Marlene Dumas, and others. The collection is noted for its exploration of figuration in contemporary South African art, a theme that is well adapted to the values that the Court seeks to uphold in its mandate to hear matters relating to human rights and the Constitution.

Art and Justice: The Art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa will serve as a record of the Court’s growing collection of paintings, prints, fibre art and sculptures, but more importantly it will pay tribute to an extraordinary vision: to bring together art and justice in a building that would welcome all citizens of the country.

Constitutional Court Art Collection website

SKILL SET: Knowledge Resource and Educational Series is a new multi-volume series for specialised design disciplines. Using a practicable, outcomes-based approach, Skill Set will provide instruction in various fields of design, including graphic design, stage design, fashion design and industrial design.

Skill Set will feature locally relevant content, as well as commentary and work by leading local design professionals. The series is aimed at a broad audience that includes learners at secondary schools and tertiary institutions, as well as emerging and experienced professionals.

SKILL SET VOLUME ONE: A PRIMER IN GRAPHIC DESIGN
By Michael MacGarry

Written by a graphic designer, featuring the work of leading design professionals, and targeted at designers, A Primer in Graphic Design features design fundamentals and principles; practical advice and guidance; designing for and within the local context; example of work by designers; Q & A with experienced local design professionals; and a glossary of useful resources and information. The book provides an intelligent balance of educational material relevant to design students and practical content to help young professionals embark on their careers, whilst providing sufficiently advanced material and content to appeal to mid-level and experienced designers and allied industry practitioners alike.

Michael MacGarry is a graphic designer, writer and artist based in Johannesburg. He began his design career in Dublin and London before returning to South Africa to work with The Trinity Session as designer, copywriter, and researcher. He is currently Senior Designer at Fever Identity Design. Michael has an MFA from Wits and is also a visual artist who has exhibited locally and internationally. He is owner of www.alltheorynopractice.com and is a founder member of art collective AVANT CAR GUARD. As a writer Michael is published in several local magazines, and recently co-published, with Lloyd Gedye, a limited-edition magazine titled The Pavement Special.

www.taxiartbooks.com
www.davidkrut.com
www.bodymaps.co.za

www.fever.co.za
www.alltheorynopractice.com
www.pavementspecial.com
www.avantcarguard.com

OTHER DESIGN BOOKS AVAILABLE FROM OUR BOOKSTORES

Design Books published by David Krut Publishing
Skill Set One: A Primer in Graphic Design
Light on a Hill: Building the Constitutional Court of South Africa
Art and Justice: Artworks in the Constitutional Court of South Africa
Architecture and Vegetation: Hybrid Home Spaces
Mapula: Embroidery and Empowerment in the Winterveld

Design Books distributed by David Krut Publishing
Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, New York
Design for the Other 90%
Piranesi as Designer
Design Now

TATE Publications, London
Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From Bauhaus to the New World
Pop Art
Julian Opie
Internet Art
The Stage of Drawing

Further Titles available from our Bookstores
10 x SA Fashion Week
An A – Z of Type Designers
Craft Art in South Africa
Design Like You Give a Damn
Design Thinking
Design, Writing, Research
The Designer’s Desktop Manual
Inspiring Designers: A Source Book
Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design
Modern Architecture and Design
Notes on Book Design
Ogilvy on Advertising
Points for Departure
Thinking with Type
Understanding Design
The Visual Dictionary of Fashion Design
Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone Wire Basket