Artists respond in collaborative exhibition
30 September 2010
This is the fourth in a series of annual exhibitions and concerts, commissioned in celebration of the visual and performing arts, and staged as part of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s cultural calendar. It marks a further affirmation of the NMMU’s commitment to support the visual and performing arts as a vital and fundamental cornerstone of the University’s academic activities. As was the case in previous years, this exhibition provides the venue for the staging of the Vice Chancellor’s Evening, at which Prof Derrick Swartz hosts the leaders of industry, commerce and local government, as well as members of the NMMU Council.
In the exhibition, forty artists respond to the idea of RE.SPONSE, as they engage with thirty artworks from the Art Museum’s permanent collection. Each artist was invited to select an artwork from a ‘menu’ of significant works that the curatorial team had chosen from the permanent collection, and to produce an artwork of their own in response. All the works on the ‘menu’ are important pieces in their own right, in terms of their form and content, and in terms of their ability to excite the viewer with their magic, their craft and their messages.
Artists were asked to respond to the work that ‘spoke’ to them most clearly, that engaged them most, that had the greatest potential to inspire them to produce an artwork of their own making. They were not expected to recreate art in the manner of the past, or to replicate the tradition. Rather they were asked to use the work to their own advantage, as an inspiration, as a catalyst; to respond to it, to take from it whatever pleased them, whether this involved producing a work that honored the spirit of the original, or one that challenged its premises to the core, whether they responded to the work they had selected as a whole, or to a snippet of the composition.
The evoked responses and the original works are hung together in an exhibition that provides a visual conversation with the past. In the accompanying catalogue, six academics respond with their own thoughts on connections with the past, on histories, and on the continued relevance of museums and the visual archive.
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