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​The CAP Institute for Contemporary Art Practice presents an Artist Workshop with Elfriede Dreyer 14 – 18 December at the Gallery @ Glen Carlou About Professor Elfriede Dreyer ​ Workshop Theme ​ ‘New normal’ is a term we have lately become accustomed to. What does it mean? Getting out of our ‘boxes’ of daily normalcy? What is normal? Living our lives in our ‘boxes’ we occupy specific spaces containing operating systems and structures we create ourselves and consistently default to. We feel safe and comfortable there. Until some brutal unexpected (or planned) event shoves us out. In a different way this is often applicable to artists too. In this workshop, Snoops & Treks, we will consider what is normal for an artist; which are the ‘conventions’; the easy solutions; and the traps artists fall into. You will be introduced to artist ‘snooping’ and we will explore and find inventive ways of thinking, processes and techniques. You will also be guided into ‘trekking’ to become a flâneur and journey away from your ‘box’. The workshop aims to rekindle creativity in thinking and doing, and to find new opportunities in a world outside the boundaries of our ‘boxes’. We will distinguish between fly-by-night artistic practice and a professional art practice driven by meaningfulness, intention and enduring purpose. During the workshop Prof. Dreyer will teach you how to become a snoop and a trekker: essential coping and production skills for any artist. Some of the questions we will deal with are: What are the advantages and limits of being a curious traveller? What are your proposed destinations and goals? There will be focus on each workshop participant’s individual art production, techniques and thought processes. Advanced experimental thinking and creativity will be cultivated and developed. Each participant will produce at least one new artwork during the workshop. ​ Workshop Programme ​ The programme entails a four-day workshop to be held at the Gallery at Glen Carlou, from Monday 14 to Thursday 17 December. During the course of the workshop, works will be identified for exhibition, to be installed on the 18th (Friday morning), and opening at 12:00. ​ Exhibition works will be selected and curated by Christa Swart, the Glen Carlou Gallery curator, and Elfriede Dreyer. The exhibition will close on 24 January 2021. ​ Day Programme ​ Every day from 09h00 to 16h00. Lunch break every day from 12:00 – 13:00. ​ Monday 14 Dec (Day 1): Introduction and getting acquainted. Presentation of Artists Boxes Creativity methodologies ​ Tuesday 15 Dec (Day 2): Snooping Practice Presentation of Treks Starting new artwork in any water-based/quick drying medium ​ Wednesday (Day 3): Continuing artwork Assessment ​ Thursday (Day 4): Continuing artwork Assessment ​ Friday (Day 5): Setting up the exhibition at 8:30 Presentation techniques and methodologies; labels ​ Opening of exhibition at 12:00 noon. ​ Work will be presented unframed. All artworks selected for exhibition are to be presented for sale. Pricing will be agreed upon between the artist and the Gallery at Glen Carlou. Cost ​ R3500-00 inclusive of a lunch every day and exhibition costs. ​ ​ Book ​ Places are limited and will be booked on a first-come-first-served basis. Contact Christa Swart at gallery@glencarlou.co.za to book your spot. ​ ​ Additional notes The Estate is centrally located between Stellenbosch and Paarl so accommodation could be arranged in Paarl, Stellenbosch, Durbanville or another nearby venue. Rooms booked through Airbnb are usually very reasonable. From Monday to Thursday we will workshop from 9am to 4pm and you will receive a special estate lunch on these days. Drinks are for your own account so also please bring some water and other drinks you prefer with. Friday is still part of the workshop when we will consider exhibition installation practice, discuss issues particular to the specific exhibition, and install work together with the Glen Carlou Gallery team. The opening of the exhibition will be at 2 pm that afternoon. You will thus be free to lunch there or somewhere else, or the group can go somewhere together. Or, if we don’t finish soon enough, there will be no lunch! Covid-19: Please bring your own masks and hand sanitiser, although the Gallery has sanitising arrangements in place. Bring old clothes for the first few days and something nicer for Friday. The exhibition will be on show until 24 January 2021 after which unsold works could be collected or delivery could be arranged with the Gallery. Keep in mind that Gallery commission will be added to the prices of the works. @CAPwithElfriedeD

In a society marked by waning social bonds, a flood of epidemic bad news and a longing for the freedom of the past, a Romantic spirit in art is surging. It entails a vocabulary of yearning for another world, another time and another place. To transcend the present horizon becomes a goal and its achievement is inspired by possible better futures as well as past good times. No wonder the social media is flooded with stories of happier times in the past; the safety of parental shelter; precious personal belongings and experiences. Yet, in its many manifestations in art, literature and music, Romanticism has never really been about the sentimental and the picturesque. Looking at Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1817), the picturesque of the scene serves to portray the lonely wanderer's wish to escape the present and explore the unknown. Friedrich confronts us with a symbolically charged landscape. Many contemporary New Romantic artists do exactly that. The work of Performance artist Francis Alÿs is saturated with a wish for societal change; comment about the cyclical nature of things that don't really change; and a lonely struggling figure on exhausting journeys trying to produce alteration. In a recent exhibition at the Beirut Art Centre, Alÿs presented Knots 'n Dust (2018) in which he deals with the dust circulating in the air between Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Part of this exhibition was also a series of postcards with images of the dust on cars and the city. Becoming symbolic of the residue of war, Alÿs's dust reminds us of the coronavirus we are fighting. Another New Romantic artist is the Spanish/South African artist, Pascual Tarazona. In his work currently featured by Elfriede Dreyer Gallery Romantic notions of solitude, journey, duality, two worlds and yearning abound. Just like many other 19th century Romantic works and contemporary New Romantic works, Tarazona's art reveals an engagement with the unknown or a void, which links to transcendence; a sense of duality (here and there, different worlds, evident in the Vigil and Desire/Deseos works, for instance); and a lone travelling figure in the unknown, such as forest, a wilderness or a landscape (evident in Tarazona's Don Juan figure). Pascual Tarazona, Vigil I, n.d. In a fascinating set of works entitled The Way, the title itself indicates a pathway, road or journey to somewhere (or nowhere). The artist uses mirrors that reflect the viewer when looking at the work, which turns into a reciprocal reflection or dialogue with the self. Through the use of mirror the work becomes confrontational and pulls the viewer and his/her reality into the discourse. Any photograph of the work shows the mirror reflecting a portion of the present reality, but the mirror is broken, thus becoming symbolic of a 'broken' present. In the image below this is clearly illustrated. The work is double-sided having a front and a reverse side, speaking about two worlds: the here and now of the present reality and the 'other' place longed for. Pascual Tarazona, The Way III, n.d. (reverse side) Pascual Tarazona, The Way III, n.d. (front side) The front side of the work presents a silhouetted, delineated 'place' as a vague unknown with a semblance of a void inside. Nature is represented as a space for transcendence and a dream vision. The space of the work entails a synthesis of past and present. Here - as in his other works - the Romantic spirit intertwines with gushing Spanish expressionism. Today the Romantic spirit in art is as alive as ever. The themes of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018 was Becoming and in 2016 it was Unfinished, both Romantic concepts. https://www.archdaily.com/895218/becoming-spanish-pavilion-at-the-venice-biennale-2018. In our current time of global crisis, The stance taken by these exhibitions, also reflected in the Romantic spirit in the work of Tarazona, is ultra-relevant for our current time since we have entered a phase of maximal self-reflection, questioning old ways of doing and speculating about the future. Gauguin's famous 1897 painting, D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?) also asked these existential questions. For more information on Pascual Tarazona and to view work for sale, please visit www.elfriededreyer.com/elfriede-dreyer-gallery. Want to know more about Romanticism? CAP Institute for Contemporary Practice offers a module Art and Land that partly deals with Romanticism. For more information visit https://www.elfriededreyer.com/product-page/cap-module-in-art-land #elfriededreyer #elfriededreyergallery #CAPwithElfriedeD #newromantic #pascualtarazona #contemporaryart

Today, in the quiet of COVID-19 lockdown, I lost my sense of which day it was for the first time. I visited one of my favourite authors, J.G. Ballard, again, wondering what he would have said about all of this unexpected craziness, him being such a futurist and an acute observer of the world. In many of his dystopian novels and often in his interviews, he talked about our fear of the void: a fear not about that something terrible is going to happen, but about that NOTHING is going to happen. It is a fear about a boring, eventless world. And I started musing about the confluence of COVID-19 and the surge in social media posts, online products especially on the social media, also maybe as a counter attack to our fear of the nothing. Maybe it is not so much about the isolation that has driven us to the web, instagram, facebook and the works, but our horror vacui of being left alone with no-one to talk to or even the possibility no human contact. Maybe our apocalyptic kenophobia is not so much about contracting the dreaded disease, but about it becoming so intense that we will need to stay in isolation, in emptiness, for much much longer and maybe indefinitely. The surreality of it all, and especially of the emptiness drives us to fill it with whatever. But what if we start losing our sense of imagination, our creativity to fill that vacuum? It's a new kind of psychopathology that seems to have kicked in. This is Ballard: Dystopian contexts are created from within societies and they operate in history, not outside of or at the end of history. Within the dystopia of COVID-19, or a world gone wrong, there is no doubt that we are experiencing a posthuman condition of isolation of being-in-the-world, but only partially and mostly virtually so. Twenty years ago Michel Foucault and Hetherington (1997:12) already argued that an important contribution of utopian and dystopian literature has been the awareness it brought to the interplay of space, site and modes of spatial and social ordering. Currently we are finding ourselves in little bubbles or cocoons, making the best of the pandemic. This is also a thought that Hetherington (1997:43) articulated as postmodernity being entrenched in heterotopic spatiality. Similar to dystopia, a heterotopic existence in space functions in relation to other spaces and the character and nature of those space; in our present case a virus-filled world. One wonders whether the lack of physical interaction and the abundance of cyberrelationships and telematic experiences influences will, as Ballard has often suggested in his surrealistic novels, lead to rampant violence, threat to self, insensitivity and indifference to critical socio-cultural problems. Yet, in high-crime South Africa, it has actually led to a significant decrease in criminal activity. COVID-19 most definitely brought about a significant shift in our awareness of space and the places where we operate and survive. But do we know where we are going? How to navigate the future? Then a previous series of works of mine, Ship of fools come to mind. Are we all on a ship as fools en route to an undetermined destiny? The concept of a ship of fools was derived from the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. It was common practice was to put the outcasts of society, especially the mad ones, on a ship and send them away on the ocean. They had no captain, no destiny and no plan. Do we have a GPS?. The idea of a ship going nowhere, having no destination, and being a kind of tower of Babel, is fundamentally dystopian and defers time and purpose. In Ballard's High-rise (1975:19) he writes: "It was only fitting that the sun first appeared between the legs of the apartment blocks, raising itself over the horizon as if nervous of waking this line of giants. During the morning, from his office on the top floor of the medical school, Laing would watch their shadows swing across the parking-lots and empty plazas of the project, sluice-gates opening to admit the day. For all his reservations, Laing was the first to concede that these huge buildings had won their attempt to colonize the sky." Ballard renders the high-rise building both as an anthropomorphic space and as a dystopic capsule. So very apt to the manner in which our homes, our 'capsules' of protection, have acquired anthropomorphic meanings of defence, nesting and shelter in our dystopian world. Sources quoted: Ballard, J G. 1975. High-rise. London: Flamingo, HarperCollins. Foucault, M, Khalfa, J, and Murphy, J. 2006. The history of madness. New York: Routledge. Hetherington, K. 1997. The badlands of modernity: heterotopias & social ordering. A publication of the Inter- national library of sociology (founded by Karl Mannheim), edited by Urry, J, Lancaster University. London/ New York: Routledge. #CAPwithElfriedeD #contemporaryart https://www.elfriededreyer.com/product-page/4-cap-short-course-in-applied-art-history Could Artist Collectives Transform A Post-Corona Art World? https://www.artspace.com/

COVID-19 has plunged us into an abyss of online posts, images, jokes, wisdom and the things people do to keep busy. But the way things are going now, online working and learning seem to be here to stay. It has probably changed the face of the interaction and exchange of knowledge, skills and business forever. Forbes says "when global health emergencies take place, they often bring to light gaps within the infrastructure of the world—and the workplace. It’s up to businesses to recognize these gaps and make improvements to protect their employees in the future." The company confirms our suspicion that it is going to lead to a permanent turn to less travel and more reliance on tech. What are the dynosaurs in our midst going to do!! I'm not talking here about the Alpha Generation and cronies who are born with mobile devices. No, the other end of people, those without much tech skills. Simple. They are going to catch up and get with. And it's not difficult. Mercifully most software has become super user-friendly and much more accessible. So together we stand ... Seriously, we've discovered that it's nicer and more productive to work from home and online because there is less travel time and we are happier people being in the comfort of our homes. So, due to a CAP workshop being cancelled due to COVID-19, I jumped on the bandwagon and turned my physical workshops in contemporary art practice into online courses. It was quite a learning curve moving from academic writing—aimed at (mostly printed) journal publication—to a different, much more concise medium with more visual material, a more popular approach and web-based intertextual reference. And given our current corona predicament, I'm sure I'm not the only academic who went this way. One of the modules that forms part of the Short Course on Applied Art History is Writing About Art. In this module I look at journalistic versus academic writing about art; different formats of writing, such as the exhibition review; the catalogue essay; the theoretical art essay/academic article on art; and the artist statement. I consider various interpretational vantage points such as the biographical, comparative, historical, contextual and theoretical frameworks. Two theoretical frameworks that are shortly introduced are decoloniality and feminism. There is much additional reading and recommended resources included in this module, to serve as examples of good quality writing about art. CAP Short Courses in Contemporary Art Practice Short course 4: Applied Art History Module 4.5: Writing About Art Target Audience: Art lovers or artists who want to learn how to write about art and want to understand the different styles, conventions and content required. Course Duration: There is a one-month limit to do the courses after registration. It is difficult to determine how long it will take you to complete the course. The average time to read through the tutorial material is about 3 hours, but it can be longer, depending on how much time you spend on the links. This Module has much reading to do, so it can actually take you much longer to complete. Language: English #CAPwithElfriedeD #learning in art #elfriededreyer #contemporaryart #covid19 CAP Online Courses >

Are you one of those people whose parents said: No you are not going to study art, you are going to become a lawyer, or an engineer, or an accountant? Well, you are one of many in the world. So being the obedient child that you are (were), you did what was expected from you. And ever since, you’ve done some Sunday painting in a corner at home or you’ve visited galleries with long eyes and a funny sense of missing out in life. The people who discouraged you were right, and they were wrong. It IS difficult to establish yourself as an artist and make yourself heard and seen in a world overly saturated with visual images, information and an abundance of artists who want to MAKE IT out there. You have to be an entrepreneur whilst trying to be the next William Kentridge. But those people were also wrong, since being born with a creative soul is not going to go away. You can suppress it for as long as you want, but it’s going to raise its neck time and again. And make you feel frustrated. Many professionals in careers other than art, start looking seriously at art practice later in life. So before I say something about this, I want to ask whether you know that Robert Hodgins only became an established artist at the age of 61? A short bio on Hodgins from SA History Online states the following: “Robert Hodgins was born on 27 June 1920 in Dulwich, London. In 1938, he immigrated to South Africa, and joined the Union Defense Force in 1940. In the Second World War, he served in Kenya until 1941, then in Egypt until 1944. During the same year he returned to England and was discharged after the end of the war in 1945. From 1947-1950, Hodgins studied part-time and from 1950-53, he studied full-time at the Goldsmith's College of` Art, University of London. He first studied teaching, and then art. In 1951, he obtained an Arts and Crafts Certificate, and in 1953 a National Diploma of Design, the equivalent a major in painting. He returned to South Africa in 1954. Between 1954-62 he taught painting and drawing at the Pretoria Technical College, and from 1962-66 he worked as a journalist, art critic and then Assistant Editor of Newsweek. As senior lecturer he taught at the Department of Fine Art of the University of the Witwatersrand from 1966 to 1983. Thereafter he painted full-time. Despite having exhibited since the early 1950s, it was until 1981 when he was properly recognised. … Hodgins has exhibited extensively in South Africa, London, France, the United States and Netherlands for over six decades.” His work is currently on exhibition at Goodman Gallery in South Africa, entitled A Sense of place - https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/ONLINE--Sense-of-Place/955048A5748109BE. On 10 May, Hodgins’s Out Shopping sold for R500 000. (Lot 653 | Robert Hodgins | SOUTH AFRICAN | 1920-2010 | Out Shopping | signed and inscribed with the title on the reverse | oil on canvas | 91.5 by 122cm excluding frame. Let's consider international French artist Louise Bourgeois: She worked professionally as an artist until the ripe old age of 99. The Art of Louise Bourgeois. She was a second-generation surrealist and feminist sculptor and one of the most important American artists of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bourgeois used her art as catharsis and the main force behind her work was to deal with her troubled childhood memories. Jackson Mbhazima Hlungwani (1923 - 2010) from Gazankulu produced art until the age of 87. His father was a Shangaan migrant worker who taught him how to carve household objects, sharpen tools and work with iron. Until his death, Hlungwani produced such functional objects, in the sense of functional African art, as well as 'sculpture' in the Western-European sense of the word. Hlungwani’s work was first exhibited in the Tributaries exhibition held in Johannesburg in 1985, after which he travelled to Germany and later Japan to show his sculptures. In 1989 his work was exhibited in The Neglected Tradition, a retrospective curated by Steven Sack, which was held in Newtown, Johannesburg, making Hlungwani a recognised name in the South African art scene. In 1995, his work was shown at the first Johannesburg Biennale. After years of poverty and socio-economic difficulties, his recognition came when he was in his sixties. Jackson Hlungwani, Adam and the birth of Eve (1985-1989). So what does this tell us? It’s never too late to seriously start making art. Sometimes things happen later. How will you do this? First of all, through a mind shift that being creative - productively creative - makes the world a better place and you a nicer person. Secondly, that for once and for all you have to put your art first. Thirdly, realising that you can actually earn money through your art. After the mind shift, you need to realise that it takes very hard work to become an artist. You have to produce all the time; you have to network all the time; and you have to stay informed and learn all the time. To be an artist is very much an all of nothing situation: either you don’t make enough art, or your work does not have a niche, or it does not speak to the world of today; or it is a success, including an economic success. It's up to you. Free CAP module: Surviving as an Artist at www.elfriededreyer.com/surviving-as-an-artist elfriede#surviving-as-an-artist. #latestarterinart CAP Short Courses in Contemporary Art Practice CAP Certificate in Contemporary Art Practice ​ CAP Online Courses >