A renowned hip-hop poet and Graffiti artist friend of mine and I recently engaged into a drunken dinner-party debate/row over the ubiquitous tagging of public property going down in Durban.

Tagging to my “mother-Grundy” mind, is a creatively hollow pastime appropriated and practised by bored “Banksy-befok” adolescents who like to think of themselves as “urban anarchists”.

The subject of our row was a local Durban tagger who had been recently trialed in court for 850 counts of tagging and now found himself slapped with a hefty prison sentence.

While I would not wish a prison sentence upon anyone, I would imagine that after 850 counts of tagging, one might decide to shift their lacklustre modes of rebellion in favour of a more effective means of urban commentary.

Time it would seem to grow up and move on. 

“It’s not considered vandalism” my friend had argued, “if it doesn’t break or defeat the purpose of the object. Spraying something on a wall doesn’t destroy its function, the wall still stands. How can you tell me this is a punishable crime” he ranted, “when murderers and rapists in this country get off scott free?”

While (sub)urban hip-hoppers may consider it an “innocuous” and even “subversive” act, one must pity the grouchy local residents ,whose walls serve as prime canvases, digging weekly into pensions for the buckets of paint to erase the offending marks.

Offering a refreshing and very welcome take on the contentious art form, is a group of ex Durban Vega Brand and Communications School students, who were inspired by the work of British street artist Paul Curtis (AKA “Moose”) who began pioneering his form ‘Green’ or ‘reverse Graffiti’ three years ago.

Curtis, as legend has it, first hit upon the idea while working as a kitchen porter in a restaurant scrubbing mountains of pots and pans. One dreary evening while trying to erase a grease stain on the sink wall before him, he discovered he had cleaned a large white patch onto the grimy surface.

It didn’t take long before the aspirant street artist had left the kitchen and began conquering London cityscapes, applying his vigorous selective scrubbing to more prominent walls and bridges.

“I’m not the world’s biggest environmentalist” he stated in a documentary focusing on his work “, but it’s impossible for me not to toe the environmental line. The whole core of what I do is based around drawing in pollution and writing in nature. Cities are really dirty places and I think my type of art draws attention to that.”

Curtis gradually scrubbed his way to fame using giant stencils and high-pressure water hoses to wash reverse images (mostly of trees and nature) onto soiled city surfaces. 

In was an idea that Durbanite Martin Pace initially borrowed and adapted while rushing to meet a deadline for a final second-year creative project at VEGA.

Sighting a polluted free-way wall in Essex Terrace Westville as an experimental canvas and armed with a metal scrubbing brush (purchased at a local hardware store) Pace proceeded to hand-scrub the defiled 17 m wall with a pictorial time-line of Westville’s architecture.

It’s an impressive artistic feat that sees higgledy-piggledy kraals and tents subsiding into Cape Dutch style houses and pointed cathedrals.

Encouraged by the success of his efforts and the mostly complimentry responses it recieved (“there will always be the one old hag”, he assures me, “who misinterprets our efforts as vandalism and tries to set the police on us.”), Pace united with fellow Vega students Stathi Kongianos, JP Jordaan and Nick Ferreira and began to tackle more ambitious city canvases.

Over the next few months the Dutch Ink clan had etched a florid set of trees into a Durban North wall, and more recently, a mammoth Sardine Run (featuring a school of stencilled fish) darting across the surface of a down-town city bridge.

It would of course defeat the object in employing such a benign artistic method to scrawl agro-urban city typography across sullied city surfaces, which is why the Dutch Ink outfit have wisely eschewed ‘angsty expletives’ in favour of depicting more organic and natural imagery in their murals.

Further encouraging aspects of the technique is that unlike graffiti, such etchings are ephemeral, gradually fading from the effects of time, sunshine and carbon grime.

While this sort of collective falsh-mob scrubbing is often referred to as “Green Graffiti”, when I mention the term, Pace and his cronies begin to shift uncomfortably in their chairs.

“It’s more of an etching” He corrects me, “or green tagging, but even tagging comes with its own set of territorial connotations which we’d like to avoid.”

Whatever you may term it, there is nothing, it seems, illegal about the technique. One cant really be accused of vandalism when all they have done is set out to wash (albeit selectively) a mucky city wall!

With this in mind, I imagine the absurd Monty Pythonesque trial that might ensue should this ever be the case.

The judge suppressing a snigger as he cranes forward from his podium and declares: “We hereby sentence you scrubbers for the unlawful selective-cleaning of city property.”

“That’s the beauty of the whole project” says Pace chuckling maniacally at the thought. “We have had council guys in police cars stop us in the middle of the day while we are working and asking us if we have been commissioned to do this and when we answered no, they gave us thumbs up and said keep doing what you are doing.”

“Our work” he adds, “merely highlights how siff (a derivative of the word syphilis and popular Durban colloquialism for ‘disgusting’) these city walls are.”

While law enforcers and municipalities have no legal grounds to stop reverse graffiti they are, it seems, overly eager to eliminate evidence of their neglect by swiftly painting over the murals.

Ironically, such an action makes these walls an ideal target for taggers to leave their more permanent territorial stains.

“The art on the walls draws attention to their states of grubbiness” confirms Pace. “Municipalities don’t recognise the worth of out art and simply end up painting over them. Of course a concrete wall is porous, so the enamel of spray paint doesn’t take so well but white-paint on the other hand just seals it taggers and graf artists. So really they just shoot themselves in the foot every time they decide to remove of our pain-staking scrubbings.”

©Neil Coppen

Tree Boy tells a deceptively simple story: set in 1960’s South Africa, an eleven year old boy’s mother dies, his father is unable to cope with the loss and turns to alcohol, they move from a farming area to an industrial town and hope is born again through the example of the life cycle of trees. Voila! But the script is something of a banyan tree, spreading its branches into related territory and sending its many roots into the earth.

Within a simple narrative frame, the piece evokes the nature of a journey; journey through time, in a time, through relationships, identity, age, growth, loss and healing.

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Stupidity plummeted to new lows in Durban this week (with Sunday newspaper headlines that even satirists like Haibo might have been hard pressed to come up with) with the report that acclaimed artist and sculptor Andries Botha’s R1.5 million life-size elephant sculptures, made of recycled wood, metal and rubber, were ordered to be removed from a Durban free-way island, after passing ANC megalomaniacs found them reminiscent of the –shock horror— same unwieldy mammals gracing the IFP logo.

Let’s get one thing straight. With three sculptures, costing as much as this and weighing over six tons each, this was no trivial commission. This was no beaded chandelier or beach-front curio City- managers commissioned to dangle in their reception areas.

Predictably, Durban City-Manager Mike Sutcliff (currently enjoying the more wintry climes of Vancouver, Canada, where he is attending the opening of the Winter Olympics) issued his usual diss to Durbanites for “over dramatising” the situation and claiming that Botha’s Elephants were not passed through the correct procedures and committees before going ahead.

At the cost of R1.5 million one would imagine (but hardly hope) that the that city leaders and planners had pontificated long and hard enough before blowing tax payer’s money on an art work that is now in danger of being reduced to a pile of rubble because it has irked certain “elephant-sized” insecurities within the ANC.

At the same time, can we blame those who commissioned the sculptures? Should we pity eThekwini Municipality head: international and government relations Mr Eric Applegreen?

Could Mr Applegreen have ever in his wildest, woolliest dreams imagine that such preposterous claims would be laid against the sculptures and, more bizarrely, that such claims would seriously ever come to threaten the fate of Botha’s art-works.

The Elephant it seems is no longer allowed to be considered just an Elephant. No longer can we see it as a quintessential African symbol of power, freedom and grace. Rather the ANC would like us to believe that the Elephant© was created exclusively by and for the Inkatha Freedom Party, conceived, not by some higher power, but rather by a loopy illustrator armed with copious amounts of Ganja and a pencil.  Read the rest of this entry »

It is strange to be standing this side of the stage, when not so long ago, I was sitting in blazer and tie and sweating where you are, praying that self important ponce at the podium would keep it short and let us all get the hell out of here. So I will do my utmost to keep this presentation as short and valuable as possible.

I will not stand here today and give you a patriotic rant on having pride in your school and yourself.  These are all givens. I will try to avoid giving you an essay on tradition and discipline.

While I am extremely proud of my ties with DHS, it is not, I feel, in the limiting sense that some of the school’s old boys are.

The type of old boys who often claim that they attended DHS in its so called “glory days” and that after they left (and perhaps because they left) it all went to pot.

Given half the chance these types of men will bend your ear about what true discipline and respect was. Over a beer– or in their cases several– they might claim that DHS has gone to the dogs and that things, regrettably, just aren’t what they used to be. Read the rest of this entry »

Durban based furniture designer and artist Xavier Clarrise is unmistakably French. French ,you could say, in the way film maker Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie) makes cinema and Marcel Duchamp once conceived sculpture.

He is a tempest of energy, ideas and creativity, speaking with a musical accent and at a rapid pace (his eeees elongated for emphasis.). He is unbridled in his levels of invention and flamboyant in his enthusiasms. Get him on a subject he loves (his interests are many and varied) and he will unleash a torrent of philosophical musings and observations. Get him on a subject he loathes (mention the word ‘Unique’) and he will pace the room, gesticulating like a conductor coaxing his orchestra towards a Wagnerian crescendo.

Clarisse was born in Lyon, France and claims that as long as he can remember he has been obsessed with making things.  He studied mechanical theory and technical drawing before attending the prestigious “L’ecole nationale des beaux art” of Saint Etienn. After specialising in sculpture and product design, he began to travel the world working as a freelance designer. It was in London that he met and married his wife Suzanne, relocating back to her hometown of Durban three years ago.

In recent years, Clarisse has applied himself in many areas and arena’s, working in furniture design, sculpture and installation. He has collaborated on various international and sight specific art projects in between launching a furniture range (vanities and the like) alongside Durban manufacturer Marco Bertacco for ITALTILE outlets.

His more idiosyncratic commissions can currently be found gracing many a trendy Durban household, eatery and more recently,  soccer stadium presidential suite. Read the rest of this entry »

To kick start each morning of the South African Military Societies International Anglo Boer War History conference, held in Ladysmith two weeks ago, a blank was fired from a British Naval 12 pounder. This I soon discover is the Military equivalent of slugging back a double Espresso first thing the morning. A reverberating shock to attendees’ ear drums and pace makers, prepping us all for the illuminating and often arduous day of battle-speak ahead.

Held at the Platrad Lodge, overlooking significant Anglo Boer War battle terrain, the conference boasted a range of international and local speakers talking on topics that ranged from this War’s many myths, tactics and military blunders as well as revisionist takes on controversial and largely misunderstood historical figures of the time.

With one hundred and ten years having passed since the War, it seems Boer and Brit can now comfortably share the same room without wanting to ‘bliksem’ each other every time things get a little heated. Throughout the conference, areas of research and interest were analysed with healthy amounts of objectivity and the atmosphere reminded one of a jovial old boy’s reunion.

The aim of the conference was to provide a new source of understandings around the causes, events and consequences of Anglo Boer War. As organiser and military historian Ken Gillings stated in his opening address: “Such a conference is arranged so we can learn from the past and ensure that such atrocities never again occur in the future.”

Certainly the seminal purpose of any historical gathering– the very hook on which history’s precarious future hangs– is how to ensure that younger generations of South Africans are made privy to such findings. Read the rest of this entry »

Working towards a philosophy of architecture without walls, Mauritian born and Durban based architect Doung Anwar Jahangeer’s guided  city- walks  have been  reshaping and shifting perceptions around the cities ’in-between’ spaces. Neil Coppen treads the pot- holed asphalt.

Uniting a love of architecture with art and activism with imagining, Doung (who completed a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the then University of Natal in 1996) labels his city-walk initiative as an exuberant exploration, as well as a humbling cautionary tale, an allegory on the infinite complexities of spaces and timings in the city of Durban.

I have lived in Durbs all my life, yet after a five-hour meander alongside this urban Shaman and his toret’s of inner-city- insight returned feeling as if I had just visited a foreign country. The result is of course an unsettling wake-up call–one that tends to highlight the apathy with which engage the seemingly ‘inane’ everyday. Read the rest of this entry »

My brother Gregg and his wife Angella (a web developer and illustrator) live on a mountainside in Fishhoek in the Western Cape. Their house overlooks the main swimming beach. On a balmy summer’s day their lounge window frames an idyllic picture: a stretch of white beach lining an azure coastline littered with bathers, surfers, tourists and the like.

From such a height the people on the beach tend to resemble the miniature figurines populating a model train-set or the busy layout of a Where’s Wally picture book.

On Tuesday afternoon, around 15:35 Gregg and Angella heard a commotion on the Fishhoek beach and ran outside to see what was happening. Glancing down at the Fishhoek bay they spotted a giant shadow (of about 150m) gunning towards a colourful bobbing object.  From such a distance they were unable to make out whether this object was a bather, bouy or beach ball?

It’s now pretty well known that the shadow turned out to be a Great White Shark, a suspicion confirmed when they saw the creature break the waves and wrap its jaws around the bobbing lump before submerging itself again and taking the object with it. Gregg being the techno savvy guy he is– with i-phone permanently attached to hip– Tweeted the sighting on micro blogging portal Twitter as fast as it seemed to happen.

His first Tweet read……

Tue 12 Jan at 15:40: Holy shit, we just saw a GIGANTIC shark eat what looked like a person right in front of our house in Fishhoek. Unbelievable.

Seven minutes later he posted a new update……

Tue 12 Jan at 15:47: We are dumbstruck, that was so surreal. That shark was HUGE. Like dinosaur huge.

This was followed by further tweets over the next few hours that included details on the arrival of the emergency services and confirmation that the colourful bobbing lump was indeed a human-being.

What is both fascinating and disturbing to see was how quickly these ‘tweets’ were snapped up by Internet news agencies and how fast news, via the rapid and tangled broadband grapevine, is capable of getting around these days. Read the rest of this entry »

For any sane person (that is one not overly fond of dental sadism) a trip to the dentist’s chair is avoided at all costs. No one enjoys a gloved hand poking around their mouth. No one looks forward to the injections, the drills. The saliva vacuum cleaner which makes me feel as if I have just leapt out of an aeroplane and forgotten to shut my mouth on the free fall.

For most of my life I have managed to avoid the Dentist for anything other than the odd check up and clean. That was until a few months ago, when I woke to discover a rumbling in my gums, a headache that threatened to split my cranium in two. Days later an X- ray confirmed that after years of waiting patiently in the wings, my wisdom teeth had finally decided to make their entrance

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To this day the Art Deco style remains a contentious and oft disputed entry into the Architectural journals and history books. With its penchant for excessive ornamentation, non functional frills and outlandish colour schemes, the style is all too often dismissed by contemporary Architects as a brief and embarrassing rush of blood to depression era architects’ heads.  Certainly the conservative colonial population of Durban thought so, when in 1931 the veritable anti- Christ of architecture reared it unsightly head in the form of Art Deco apartment block known as the Enterprise Building in Aliwal Street. Unhappily for its detractors, the style would flourish like an overly flamboyant fungus in city and suburb across the country before petering out during the outbreak of the second -world war.

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