Mail & Guardian Editor Nic Dawes’ Launch Speech for Sue Williamson’s South African Art Now

October 21st, 2009 by Emily

Sue Williamson should be exhausted, but she hides it very well. She manages to produce new work steadily; she shows it both in the metropolitan centres of art-world gravity and on the far-flung fringes, but somehow, in between, she finds time to be a persistent, consistent recording angel of South African art history.
Williamson is the motivating force behind the website artthrob, which is probably the most complete record available of the past decade, but if you want a quick synoptic view of where we are, and where we have been in the past four decades, you could do a lot worse than to take a look at the covers of her three major surveys of the local scene.
Resistance Art — 1989 –features a Bureau of State Security cop imagined by Norman Catherine. It is a crude but effective thing, bristling with violence, which, like the book, does what it says on the tin.