Who decided Wayne wasn’t just some juvenile delinquent with a penchant for adrenaline seeking behaviour, but actually an artistic genius who pioneered a movement? What is, after all, art?

I’ve lost count of the occasions walking around a gallery, where some bombastic parent, with a muted pastel crew neck sweater, scoffs about the fact that his son or daughter could do loads better than the artist in question. This dude’s prodigal kid meanwhile, has a sticky lacquer and is busy groping every available artwork and yelling about an imminent snack emergency. Maybe this is performance art? Father and Child: Seen in a Gallery, 2018. 

The perennial question looms, ‘But is it art?’ And our response to this seems to all be in the title, or in the location, or perhaps, it’s all in the frame?

You may be familiar with My Bed. Not my literal bed obviously, this is a family show. My Bed is probably my favourite contemporary example of The Emperor’s New Clothes. And, this is a grandiose claim because for those of you who’ve heard me bleat on before, you’ll know that I am bossies for the Emperor’s clothing metaphor. But stay with me, this is a greatie. My Bed is a 1998 artwork by Tracey Emin, and it is just a dazzling display of how to reframe domestic ineptitude. Watch this space for My Sink, My Laundry Basket, and My Bedroom Chair. I have an overactive imagination and I’ll find a story out of absolutely nothing, but even my propensity to BS my way out of a hat was tested by Tracey’s siff bed. 

Yes, Tracey’s bed is grim. It’s reflective of depression, and a foray into alcohol abuse and using sex as a coping mechanism. Wikipedia nails it by saying, ‘When she looked at the vile, repulsive mess that had accumulated in her room, she suddenly realised what she had created.’ I think the key here is “created”. What a loophole. One woman’s mess, is Charles Saatchi’s next exhibition. And to those parents, and critics, poo-pooing this, Tracey defends herself as a lank trailblazer at the apex of creative genius. Sure your teenager can have a filthy unmade bed, but their failure to exhibit it in a prestigious white-walled gallery is where Tracey’s got the edge. Emin points out, ‘No one had ever done that before.’

That sure is dope Tracey, but is it art?

Is the crux of the matter that art is just about blazing new trails and being the first person to push boundaries a step further than anyone else? Is it by testing the very geography of art? Michael Ondaatje poignantly said, ‘Do you understand the sadness of geography?’ The very fact that geography stifles us is because it draws lines, defines boundaries, and declares borders.

So is something art because of its geography – where it’s placed?

As we understand it, art happens in a space. If tradition is anything to go by, these spaces are white walls owned by white faces. Traditionally, art is art, because it happens in a vacuum. But what does this do to storytelling and expression? Mapping, boundaries, ownership, geography, are prescriptive, and that’s not to say we don’t need structure, of course we do. However, we need to be able to reframe, to break rules, to make a mess. As my legendary English teacher Moira Lovell told me, ‘You can break the rules when you know them.’ 

Is rule breaking the essence then? Is it in understanding the distinction between a morose teen scratching their initials into a desk, using a permanent marker to write E+K 4Eva on a bathroom door, spraying YOLO over an existing piece of street art, or actually understanding how rules can be broken to create order?  

Creating order out of chaos is no mean feat. It’s an exercise in “iconoclashism”. Tension occurs when we observe clashes between cultures, where we change the visual landscape of public space, when we create, react, and respond. In short, it’s when humans move from passivity to interactivity. And it’s in asking questions about whose public space we are cultivating.

The normative happy medium is the reason we have Christmas cracker jokes, beige colour palettes, and elevator music. These “inoffensive” public systems are developed because they’re neutral and therefore no one can take umbrage to them. But what happens if you’re not neutral and are highly offended by panpipes playing Strangers in the Night, or working in a municipal building with yellowing beige walls? Is public life supposed to be moving from one space to the next in a state of catatonic bland liminality. Should we not be engaged in public space?

The theorist Clements highlights the fact that we need to engage with communication and space. We need to look at context and discourse. He observes that a shift happens when art is ‘displayed in public as opposed to hermetically sealed white cube gallery spaces’. When this happens we can change the frame and art can ‘become the central focus for a range of competing discourses.’ Applying this argument, we become better citizens of the world when we are faced with questions, when we encounter struggle, and when we observe clashes. 

The latest clash in Hilton is not just manifesting on election posters (yuck), but it’s being whispered in passing. To be honest I’m surprised Hilton Chat isn’t going gangbusters about it, but I think electricity is occupying most of the bandwidth. Here’s the thing, someone has “vandalised” the community Rainbow Bridge. A woman literally came into the gallery and announced that everyone needs to be angry about this. It’s “unacceptable”. It’s “diabolical”. It’s “not right”.

Jono and I immediately drove to the tunnel to look for the offending graffiti, and I won’t lie I was hoping for more. I was hoping for a rich combustive expletive. Instead I got “YOLO”.

Although well done, is there a more offensively beige phrase than YOLO? Are the millennials trolling us?

Sure, there was a time when YOLO was cool, and for a moment it was akin to saying cowabunga in the early nineties. But, like cowabunga, it was a fart in the wind. Maybe, in a few decades YOLO will be like high waisted jeans and make a comeback?

Ideas and trends spread through innovators and cavalier mavericks who take hold of something and share it with the world. Then early adopters weigh in, paving the way for the masses to climb on board. The masses are what make something go from alternative or counter-culture, to mainstream, and they’re the reason we have fashion and trends. Finally, the trend drops off when the laggards come on board. They’re the very late adopters, usually old folk, and they’re the death knell to something being cool. Close your eyes and remember the first time your mum said YOLO. It was probably the last time you said it. 

So, there Jono and I were, looking at the word YOLO painted over the rainbow. My knee-jerk reaction as a writer was to be offended by YOLO. I wanted better. I wanted poetry in motion. I thought to myself, ‘If people are going to lose their shit over this, it needs to be worth losing their shit over’. Of all the words to choose, they chose “YOLO”.

Jono, however, smirked in a satisfied way, and said, ‘I like how they’ve gone over as many colours of the rainbow as they can which will make it harder for people to fix.’ The artist in him was looking at the big picture. He was changing the frame.

Street art is not hermetically sealed. It’s communal. It’s a changing landscape and a changing story. We can feel nostalgic for what came before it, and we can be sad when things feel like they’ve been ruined. But reframe. Ondaatje explains, ‘We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.’ And I for one am bloody grateful for that, because panpipes suck, and apparently you only live once. And everything changes, even art. 

By now you’ll know that there are no prizes for sitting in the corner, and if anyone loves a public platform it’s me. I don’t just volunteer to do speeches, I actively push myself into the programme. So it was a no brainer, I was going to haul ass to the microphone come hell or high water. And boy did we have both. Saturday was the Grand Opening of Gallery ZAZA, and I kind of knew what was on the cards for the weather (in some circles they call me Jaqstradamus). 

I was the child who never got to have a pool party because every single birthday of mine was an absolute fucking rotter of a day. Fortunately, I was the type of child who was more into the food table, and less into the swimming pool, but it would have been nice to have the option.

Typically, Saturday morning rolled in a bit wet, and as each hour towards 10am approached it got steadily more like the “vicious cycle” on the washing machine.

At some point you resign yourself to these things and just open a beer. The breakfast beer helped to settle the nerves and things started to look up. However, Murphy was having a whale of a time, and so, as if by magic, things started to snowball spectacularly. The only thing keeping my sense of perspective intact was the wedding we had at the Hilton Hotel where the marquee literally blew away, tables ended up in the pool, and a tree split the best man’s car in half. The bride and groom ended up having their wedding in the Mist & Drizzle pub because every other venue was occupied. Turns out it was the best wedding ever.

I’d like to maintain the illusion that everything went according to plan on Saturday, but when the hail started and the generator flooded my adrenaline decided it was going to go into hyperdrive. Jono suggested cancelling speeches altogether, and for a few seconds I agreed. Then I reassessed, and decided I was completely keen to get up there and do my shit. Sadly there are times when the body and the mind have what some would call an “unconscious uncoupling” and others would call a cataclysmic divorce. My brain, it turns out, has still not grasped that “mind over matter” thing. Cue Uncontrollable Shaking from stage right. Of course the more I tried to control it, the worse it got. It’ll be chalked up as one of those performances that I’d sooner forget, but I guess I can reframe it and say it was special because it was so shit.

Anyway, here’s what I said. (For authenticity, if you read it out loud I suggest sitting on your washing machine and setting it to take off mode.) 

I remember when David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, it was pretty dope. My question was, what’s next David? Get better David, do more! 

Magic in this context is about instant gratification and constantly seeking to amaze an increasingly unfocused and overstimulated audience. 

Perhaps it’s time to reframe. To slow down. To bask. 

As a child, magic was the recesses of imagination, it was the slow and lingering anticipation of the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas, and the Tooth Mouse. It was waking up on Christmas morning to the crumbs of a mince pie, an empty glass of brandy, and a nibbled carrot. It was that first pair of ballet shoes, putting Dubbin on a first soccer ball, watching a movie on the big screen for the very first time. Smelling the birthday cake fresh from the oven. 

For me, magic is about finding stories in strange places, but it’s also the ability to create them out of banal familiarity. Magic is painting pictures from nothing, from procuring sounds and smells from a string of small words, it’s the art of making a world out of nothing. Magic takes effort. 

Magic is home. Magic is place. Magic is community. It’s quite literally the stories we share. 

So allow me to share a story. 

My very first home was the cottage at the Hilton Hotel, further up the road from there is the Shell garage which was the only petrol station in the village. In those days Hilton was a village. Opposite the Shell, the Hilton Town Board Hall. This is where I’d spend Tuesday and Thursdays at Ros Nicholson’s School of Ballet. Here I proved my inability to live up to the expectation of Jaqualina Ballerina. The Town Board Hall was also where our folks went to pretend to look at our kak art, while they drank beer at the annual Hilton Lion’s Fair. Where every skottel braai in Hilton met once a year to play host to lashings of frying onions and sweaty wors. Carry on over the bridge, now festooned with flowers… If you were to sneak under that bridge you might happen upon me, in my later years doing rebellious things. If you take a right, you get to Laddsworth, a place that forged me into who I am. A school filled with the Sally Kellys, Pete Liddles, and Flick Wrights of the world. Humans who inspired magic from within the linear face brick architecture. 

Not far from Laddsworth is Hilton PrePrimary, the biggest most magnificent place on earth. Sandpits the size of Olympic swimming pools, a race track like Monza, a woodworking table fit for Santa’s elves, jungle gyms, and a crown for when it’s your birthday.

After school, if we were lucky, we went straight to the Fruit Basket, since demolished, or the Spar owned by the Footselars (I’ve used bad phonetics here) for a Super Moo. Sometimes Dave Hansmeyer would give us biltong. Often we’d have to hang around in Hilton Drapers waiting for our mums to have hour long “quick chats” and buy fabric to turn into matching tracksuits. All the kids in Hilton were dressed the same. Primary coloured tracksuits, gumboots, or Bata takkies from the Aladdin’s cave that is Kubela Stores. On Sundays we’d head to the Hilton Tea room clutching R1 coins to buy our candy cigarettes and other contraband sugar laden guilty pleasures. Terry the Greek would know which kids’ parents gave permission to buy the Benson and Hedges Special Milds for the dad in the car rushing to get to Opstal to blast clay pigeons out of the sky.

We had to make our own fun. Kid friendly bars and restaurants were basically those that allowed parents to push two bar stools together for small bodies to nap on. Communal parenting was everything. Wherever you were at 4pm is where you bathed. BMXs zooted down every road, pizza came out of a freezer and into an oven. We ate polony sandwiches by the dozen. Juice was red, green, or orange. It was an adventure to open the post box at the Post Office and see if there was anything exciting. Tupperware parties and book clubs were touted as these mysterious and magical events for our slippered feet to peek in on. 

Hiltonians have a history of seeing potential, as if looking through the mist and imagining what lies beyond it. And it’s up to us to create, to build, to explore, to play, and to throw glitter, confetti, and magic markers at every single problem.

Gallery ZAZA was an empty blank corporate office. It was the ultimate blank canvas. Now it’s the product of the passion and vision that only Jono Hornby could have cooked up. Even the starlings are dazzled. It’s home, and now things are appearing, not disappearing, as if by utter magic. It’s up to us, we can appear, or we can disappear. 

Special thanks to the amazing Hilton community for the awesome turn out, we had the best day sharing the space with you, and making it a place. There’s so much more to come, and I’m super jazzed!