My first encounter with the living dauber was an invite from painter Beezy Bailey to lunch, along with my wife, at his house on the hilly outskirts of Capetown. Ludicrously spacious, cosseted by wild sexy gardens. Bailey's life-structure I put down to his father, Jim Bailey, founder of Drum magazine. Back in the '50s, Drum was unique in employing black photographers and feature writers to home in on life in the townships. Its archives are now complete pictorial records of how the soul of black South Africa nurtured itself through those hideous times.
Scion of the Bailey dynasty, Beezy B bounced into prominence as an artist by presenting his work as by both himself, white painter and carver, and then again as by Joyce Ntobe, black female domestic and part-time printmaker and sculptress. On first viewing, Bailey's work strikes me as a scattershot Clemente without the Italian and lots of Cape. I like it a lot. It's got a light touch and is frequently amusing, probably flippant at times, hut that's not such a had thing in a country where weight and burden have so far failed to squash the life-force. In fact, it amazes me how little hostility to the big bad past is expressed by the black community as a whole. An unremitting intention to move forward, fostered by that greatest of all, Nelson Mandela, has seemingly dissipated all nuance of recrimination. It's an uplifting and so-civilised attitude that stands as a lesson to the rest of the world. I love this country. It's very cool.
Bailer's earliest encounter with African art after gaining his Fine Art Degree was a mentor-pupil relationship with Nelson Makhuba. Bailey was twenty-five and Makhuba sixty-five. Makhuba was the major sculptor and great master of the Venda artists, living in a rural area with his family and his huge carved heads. The sculptures were kept in his 'museum', a back room attached to his house, and he was reluctant to sell. But he would show. In 1986 he exhibited in Johannesburg, arriving to the sound of cow-hide drums beaten by his wife. He dressed in a pink lace gown with clown collar, walking on stilts that gave him a height of some eleven feet. On his head he wore a fountain of grass. He danced and blew fire from his mouth. He taught Bailey now to use an axe to carve wood. He taught him how to blow fire. The next year, in a ritual murder, he axed his wife and two of his children, set fire to his house and threw his third child into the flames. He threw a rope into the branches of a tree and hanged himself.
We walk through Bailey's garden, plotted throughout with his own carvings and those of Makhuba. Some are collaborations. Inside his studio, a large shack at the garden's end, we launch into making some acrylic and charcoal works on paper. Using Andre Breton's fold-up method, neither of us quite knows what the other is doing until the piece is finished. It's fast, and a reasonably exciting way to pass a mid-week afternoon. The results are encouraging enough for us to make plans for a reunion in New York to embark on a larger multi-panelled work. Bailey feels bitter about affirmative action in the visual arts, believing that overenthusiastic support of black art of whatever standard is creating divisions between black and white artists. The whites are now finding themselves in a netherworld, unsupported and abandoned. I'm not so sure that I am willing even remotely to buy into this as I see very little evidence in SA of white destitute garrets, loaf-of-bread-and-water type situations. And there are still countless numbers of black artists working away in the townships who won't get a sniff of this or any Biennale. But whatever, he's an interesting and talented guy, with as many admirers as detractors and, hey, his work is in the permanent collection of the SA National Gallery where he was also artist in residence in 1989. All his shows are major events and his reputation as exhibitionist and iconoclast has catapulted him up among the Hirst-Schnabel subversives.
