Tuks exhibition unmasks the art creme de la creme

Pretoria News, May 23, 2008 Edition 1

Tuks exhibition unmasks the art creme de la creme

Centenary 1908-2008

Department of Visual Arts, University of Pretoria

Until the weekend

The Visual Arts Department at the University of Pretoria is celebrating 100 years of making art and shaping artists. The long list of contributors may not be exhaustive - only those who have gone on to achieve some level of acclaim feature here - but the sheer quantity of artworks on display, not to mention the tiresome trek from building to building, is exhausting.

As an exhibition it is ambitious, and the effort put in certainly warrants a slightly longer exhibition period than the week and a half allotted. It may take the uninitiated one whole week to find all the hidden nooks and crannies. As an advertising campaign, overlapping with Tuks' upcoming Open Day, it draws attention to an illustrious list of alumni and staff that reads like a "who's who" of local and national talent, including Bettie Cilliers Barnard, Walter Meyer, Gunther van der Reis, Gustav Vermeulen, Keith Dietrich, Guy du Toit, Anton Karstel, Helena Hugo, Angela Banks, Collen Maswanganyi and Diek Grobler.

Clearly, the University of Pretoria is a fulcrum around which the local art scene orbits.

The conventional status of Tuks, historically a white, Afrikaner bastion of old-school academia, is somewhat reflected in this collection. Figure studies in bronze, in the vein of Angus Taylor and Francois Visser, realistic portraiture by Helena Hugo and Hanneke Benade, abstract and kinetic sculpture by Etienne de Kock and Johan van der Schijff, indicate a high standard of technical and aesthetic proficiency in painting and sculpture, broken only intermittently by the subversive more conceptual tendencies of artists like Johan Thom, Diane Victor and Minette Vari.

However, it's no secret that only a few of those who study art make it exclusively as professional artists - and you can identify them from the hair on their teeth.

Many of them supplement their art career with one in teaching or curating. For some it's a necessity; for others a vocation.

Many of these ex-students and lecturers have extended their scope and gone on to form the backbone of Pretoria's other art institutions and galleries.

Their names will be familiar to generations of art students.

Among the gallerists and curators are Elfriede Dreyer of Fried Contemporary and Gordon Froud of Gordart in Johannesburg.

Anyone who has studied art knows that teachers, lecturers, mentors and institutions make an indelible mark, not only on the development of output, style and content, but also on an individual's philosophy of life.

Institutions with their complex knit of stuffy academia and often eccentric personalities have all the ingredients of a tribe. A marginal and incongruous tribe perhaps, but a powerfully expressive one, and one which continues to expand and evolve from the stable centre of this prestigious university.- Miranthe Staden-Garbett