Essay: New ways of viewing 'the other'

student number: 607f2567

A blog is an online diary that consists of entries that take the form of articles writings, photos, web links or other entries made by the blogs' creators, or "bloggers." Blogs can be used for various purposes such as work or even just for fun. Viewers of a blog can respond to the blog by posting comments on the blog page. Blogging is made possible through web 2.0 which is,(according to wikitionary) the second generation of the World Wide Web, especially movement away from static webpages to dynamic and sharable content and social networking. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites such as face book and video sharing sites such as YouTube.

In this essay three blogs will be discussed; one South African, one African and an international blog. The blogs that I have selected deal with the subject of contemporary African artists. The term African artists is often assumed to refer only to ‘black’ African artists. I am taking the viewpoint that ‘contemporary African artist’ broadly includes non Caucasian race groups such as Indian, Asian, Aborigines. The three blogs that I have chosen are the Gogol’s Coat blog, African works blog and the Ashok art gallery blog.

The South African blog that I looked at was entitled Gogol’s Coat, and it was created by a writer who works under the pseudonym Peter Profitt. This blog has archives that only date back to June 2009.Therefore it could be fairly new .The creator of the blog on its homepage adamantly states that “this blog is neither a travel notebook nor a diary…” I find this statement quite interesting considering that a blog by most definitions is a web log aka an online diary. This blog consists of a collection of articles that the creator has collected on various artists. These articles deal with South African artists as well as artists on the African continent. What is engaging about this blog is that it also contains elements of the authors, personal experiences on journeys that he has taken where he encountered various art forms.
The blog has items on not only art in the ‘traditional’ sense but art that is particular to the local people of a particular country
The article ‘The art of trucking, Malian style’ describes one such adventure on which he encounters the tradition of ornately painted lorry trucks that occurs in Mali. There are other contemporary artists such as Moshekwa Langa, also other artists are drawn to my attention-such as photographer Santu Mofokeng. There are also many interesting snippets such as the article on Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave. An observation that I made with this blog is that there are few comments posted in response to articles. I think this is partially due to the fact that this blog is a collection of newspaper and journal articles that have been put together. As a source of information the blog is accurate. The creator of the blog has cited the date and name of the publication which he sourced the article from, therefore one could always go to the publications website to check the validity of a reference. When I clicked on the option to post a comment I found that all comments have to be approved by the creator of the blog, which is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time-because the creator could just choose to allow only the positive comments.

The second blog that I visited(The blog from an African country) was the African works blog and it deals with contemporary art works from Africa. This blog was created by Ed cross, who is based in Kenya and works as a curator/dealer and art collector for a London based art collection. He has a Degree in History of Art from Cambridge University. This blog is primarily an account of the exhibitions that he has curated himself, of work by contemporary African artists and there is also a post about one of his own art shows. The advantage of this site is that it provides information about African artists. I think this is very important, because there are not many institutions that focus on African art. A tertiary institution like ours hardly touches on African art.

I feel we do not learn enough about the art that on this continent that we live in. For instance in this blog there is a post about the Dakar Biennale which I did not know even existed!
The creator of the blog also responds to some of the comments that are made on the blog. An interesting work is that of Freddy Tsimba, from Kinshasa who creates sculptures from welding spoons and bullets. As a sculpture student I find this really interesting not only because of the materials he uses but also on the political commentary that I think his work makes on the maiming of women and children during wars which take place and continue to take place in African countries to this day.

This blog has the feeling of a travel diary, combined with an art review style. This blog brought to my attention terms such as “Ethiopian modernism" which I have never heard of before. What drew my attention to this blog was the fact that it portrays African countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Zimbabwe as countries in which a culture of art-making exists. It allows for a whole new shift in thinking-suddenly countries that are portrayed as comprising of nothing more than a population that is starving and ravaged by AIDS, are seen as creating works of art.

The international blog that I looked at was the Ashok Art Gallery blog. The purpose of this blog it seems is to promote upcoming exhibitions. This site deals particularly with upcoming Indian artists. The home page consists of a description and images of Indian artist Sajal Patra’s work. The post on the page is posted by art historian Dr Pradosh K. Mishra, so it has the quality of an exhibition review. Mishra has also written many of the posts on this blog. In addition to these posts there are also posts that are taken from published media such as newspapers and magazines; this is similar to the Gogol’s Coat blog. This blog also includes links to other media such as videos from YouTube and links to other relevant websites, there are also links to a photographic tour of some of the exhibitions. The images in this blog are copyright protected in comparison to the images on the other blogs which are not, therefore the images can only be viewed, they cannot be copied into other programs or applications. Another interesting item that this blog makes use of is a live traffic feed, which enables one to view the list of different users from around the world that are visiting the blog. Although the entries in this blog are quite long, they are written in a more formal style, which I think is due to the fact that this blog is not so much an online diary but more of a marketing page for the gallery as well as for the artist whose works are on show.
The African works blog combines an academic style together with a colloquial style of writing. The similarity between the African works blog and the Ashok art gallery blog is that they both present a review style of posting regarding the various works or artists that they are blogging about. The blog by Peter Proffit in comparison comprises of mostly collected articles regarding various African as well as other artists, with his personally written posts his writing style becomes similar to that of Ed Cross of the African works blog.

I think that blogs can be useful to a certain extent. With the three blogs that I examined I found that they provided other source material such as links and images about specific artists. The video links of news interviews were particularly insightful. However the advantage of blogs is that they provide information that’s current (not necessarily accurate in some cases), this process of looking through blogs has opened my eyes to a whole new range of work that people are doing and creating. As an art student in Grahamstown I think blogs are incredibly useful as they allow one to view works by other artists from all over the world and see how other artists are tackling issues that one is trying to solve in one’s own art. As a student in Grahamstown it is easy to become stuck in the mentality of living in a ‘bubble’ because it feels like we are disconnected from the ‘real world’.
We have less of an opportunity of seeing works of other artists we seem to be confined to looking at other students’ work instead of the works of other artists.