Timeline and data collection

J F M A M J J A S O N D

2014 2015 2016 2017

August House core interviews and fieldwork Scheryn core interviews and fieldwork Synthesis and writing

Table 3: Research timeline

The fieldwork for this research took approximately three years in total. The research period for August House started in late 2013 and formally concluded after 18 months, in mid-2015, drawing a line when the building was finally sold. This period was informally extended for follow-up research, in particular regarding artworks that continued to travel. New artistic hubs created by the August House diaspora in the wake of the building’s sale also continued to develop and advance research findings.

The building itself found new traction when the new owner brought other artists back to repopulate it as an atelier. The start of this second artistic life for August House is where my fieldwork formally ended.

The first case study included several extended interviews with each of the four

selected artists in their studios, more or less at monthly intervals. This timing allowed for sufficient progress in the artwork series that I was following, and I was also conscious not to over-burden the artists or be too disruptive of usual working routine.

Other tenants in the building were also interviewed to inform the research – the caretakers, the landlord, residents who were not artists, as well as interested parties such as the new buyers. Another prime source of information was the studio environment itself, which was captured through visual documentation, notes and observation. I gave the building artistic identity and considered the offerings from its basement, passageways and rooftop as vital clues that revealed their own narratives.

External sites were visited to get a sense of the production process for all four

participant artists, including a plastics factory, exhibitions, a foundry, and an

installation site for a public artwork. This composite data was then triangulated with the physical trajectories of artwork journeys to make observations and findings. Four new bodies of artwork were tracked – one from each selected artist, whose studio locations more or less corresponded with the four floors of the building.

The four artists were selected for their long-standing connections to the building.

They were all early tenants when August House was converted from a former textiles factory into an atelier in 2006. They consequently had a deep understanding of how the building operated and how it related to its immediate environment and had an overview of its reconfigurations. They were also selected for their range of artistic disciplines (painting, sound/ performance, mixed media and sculpture respectively), their demographic diversity, and their willingness and availability to participate in an open-ended project over an extended period of time. Ultimately, one newly resolved body of work was successfully tracked for each; other shortlisted works fell by the wayside as the research progressed. The participant artists were: Mbongeni Buthelezi (a series of paintings titled Nobuhle, Beauty Queen), Daniel Stompie Selibe (a new collaboration and sound performance titled Miles Rehearsal), Jacki McInnes (a

sculpture titled Wife’s Lot) and Gordon Froud (a series of sculptural installations titled Cone Virus). They created these specific works toward varied ends including private collections (Buthelezi), public performances (Selibe), a solo exhibition at a

commercial gallery (McInnes), and public art (Froud).

The duration of the research period for the second case study, Scheryn, was likewise approximately 18 months. It began, once formal agreement had been reached, in September 2015 and formally concluded at the end of December 2016. The research focused upon the co-founder Herman Steyn as key interlocutor, with repeat interviews roughly every six weeks. This interval was more practical to accommodate work schedules including travel, and to reflect progress in the collection itself. A few months into the research, a collection manager was appointed, Brett Scott, who joined the formal interviews. Other fund associates and industry experts informed the

research further, including through interviews. Another key data collection point was regular internal Scheryn meetings that were held to discuss the collection and decide upon new artworks to purchase. These occasions, about every six to eight weeks, provided important background data. External sites were also visited including

exhibitions, an auction floor, and art fairs. As with August House, a major event drew the research period to a close – this time the disruptor was a in rather than a buy-out. A new member, Piet Viljoen, decided to join the Scheryn setup and to add a major portion of his significant personal art collection to the Scheryn portfolio.¹³ This buy-in offered a neat bookend to the research period and the research study as a whole. The side passages/ offspace equivalent of the August House atelier in this case study were social media channels, which offered up an ongoing stream of information about artists and their work. As with August House, all of this composite data was then triangulated with the artwork trajectories of several works selected from the Scheryn Art Collection to make observations and findings.

The choice of which Scheryn artworks to follow changed over time. At first, I

favoured a geographical spread of artists to represent various countries on the African continent given the collection’s mandate to acquire works of African contemporary art with global appeal, from the continent and diaspora. “The Scheryn Art Collection provides collectors with the opportunity to contribute to the growth of African art while benefitting from both aesthetic rewards and long term capital appreciation.”¹⁴ But once the collection had built up further and the choice of artworks expanded, I switched this selection to artists who had a discernible link to the first case study, August House. This was to make evident interconnects in the artworld that were becoming more apparent with time, and to bring the worlds of the case studies into direct dialogue. As it happened, this selection was less important than imagined at the outset. The artworks understandably did not move far beyond the corporate or private premises of collection members, nor relocate with any frequency while the collection was in this startup phase. One work travelled publicly and internationally on

exhibition during the research period. But the collection was in its early formative stages so its public face had yet to emerge. Tracking the artworks was a

methodological device that in this case study fortuitously served to reveal less literal mobilities and structural processes instead. What is more, while some artworks ‘sat still’, their significance was recursively affected by the trajectories of comparable works and the lives of their makers. The artwork thus became a repository of

derivative value, so to speak, and took the measure of less visible dynamics. This idea

13 At time of writing, the exact terms of this transaction were being finalised. In the end, 286 artworks joined from Viljoen’s collection to create a joint Scheryn portfolio valued at R55 million in December 2017. See Chapter 5 on the Scheryn case study for more.

14 www.scheryn.com, Scheryn website, accessed 2016.

is fully engaged in Chapter 5 to demonstrate this mobility by proxy, and Chapter 6 deals with the implications.

The formal fieldwork process, which relied on iterative interviews, had advantages and drawbacks. Insight was gained at regular intervals into internal processes and dynamics that were otherwise opaque – whether inside the studio or assembling a private collection. These spaces are otherwise privileged; witnessing process, via the creation of artworks and the infrastructures of the artworld, was instructive. It offered an opportunity to observe how artistic value and valuation were approached from different positionalities. That said, the formality of the research process also meant these interactions were only a partial picture taken in sequential moments of arrested time. Research subjects were understandably embroiled in the realities of their work;

they were not thinking between interviews about providing ongoing information for external research objectives, and these objectives in any event were necessarily recalibrated as the study progressed. Useful exchange mostly happened during face-to-face settings and targeted follow-ups. My research was consequently a truncated view of ongoing processes and its findings qualified to this same degree. That picture nonetheless affords an interesting and valuable composite regarding often opaque spaces from which some insights can be drawn. In addition, both case studies were observed at a unique and distinctive point in time. In the case of the atelier, a highly regarded independent artists’ space was coming to an end and would be replaced by something different; in the case of the collection, a new and original African

contemporary art initiative was just starting up in a pre-public process of innovation.

In summary, insight was accumulated in nine complementary ways:

• Formal interviews including repeat interviewees to follow changes over time;

• Site visits to get insight into artistic process and assemblage of collection;

• Meetings both formal and informal;

• Observation and field notes;

• Drawing upon quantitative analyses (e.g. GCRO Quality of life survey; Capi);

• Textual analysis of art discourse;

• Digital tools including social media;

• Fieldwork journal;

• Visual research / visual notes.

2.2. Location

The August House research was conducted primarily in Johannesburg and the Scheryn Art Collection research was conducted primarily in Cape Town, South Africa. The artworks themselves travelled multiple trajectories, from greater

Johannesburg to the Western Cape, as well as global cities including London, Milan, Paris and Beijing. They were exhibited at locations including a residential garden, a seaside clifftop, an inner-city rooftop, a countryside sculpture park, commercial galleries, an auction house, international art fairs and more.