the sourcerer: "The Big Hole" at the Kimberley Hotel.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

"The Big Hole" at the Kimberley Hotel.

The blurb promised "a madcap art exhibition and party". Not. The art was badly displayed (ie. in piles on the floor) and badly lit.

And where were the Kentridges? No-one knew.

The Kimberley reminds me of those hotels in Grahamstown in the late eighties. Downstairs there are still signs of a grander heyday - pressed ceilings and beautiful old tiles. Then follow the brown carpeted stairway all the way to the top and see the refurbished bedrooms. In former days this was a brothel. We did an impromptu little shoot:

And discovered some psychedelia.

There was a good crowd of people, but I wouldn't call them revellers. Everyone seemed a little low. We're blaming it on solar flares and the proximity of Mars...

A photographer said to me: "August is the darkest month."
I said: "Bring on September."
Kimberley Hotel, Corner Roeland and Buitenkant Streets, Cape Town, Tel: 021 461 2160

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: ...at least they put some bubble wrap under the piles of paintings...; August 12, 2010 at 3:19 PM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.