Sculpture
November 2006
Cape Town, South Africa

A Conversation with PAUL EDMUNDS, WALTER OLTMANN, and GORDON FROUD
by Claire Wolf Krantz        

Last year, when I was researching post‑apartheid South African art, I met Walter Oltmann, Gordon Froud, and Paul Edmunds, whose disinterest in theoretical or political agendas seemed fresh and dynamic. As I Looked more closely at their works, with their unusual choices of materials and methods of construction, these artists revealed intriguing similarities in their ideas and approaches to making art.

Walter Oltmann makes hand‑crafted objects using industrial materials. He twists, interlocks, and weaves pieces of wire into stylized forms that could be human, animal, plant, or insect. With their mesh‑like skins, these works appear to be simultaneously line and volume. Paul Edmunds uses cheap, throwaway industrial items, such as nylon cable ties, plastic mesh, shredded magazines, and glue. Joined together, these materials form abstract, solid objects that both reveal and belie their mundane origins, their uses and visual properties constantly in a state of flux. Gordon Froud began his career with cheap, found, and recyclable materials and objects such as toys, plastic cups, and plates, combining them into humorous sculptures and installations. His newer works are made from more permanent materials such as stainless steel and exist as stand‑alone sculptures or as installations.

Claire Wolf Krantz: I'd like to begin with each of you talking about your work.

Paul Edmunds: I suppose my work is generally characterized by repetitive gestures and cumulative processes. In the past I tended to work with scrounged and found materials, like Styrofoam cups.

Walter Oltmann: I've worked for the last 20 years with all forms of wire: copper, brass, aluminum, and steel. My latest imagery has been a crossover of insects, humans, and plants-a working in between species.

Gordon Froud: My work is about modularity: how to use very simple forms, rework them, and try out different configurations to build structures that can stand independently by their own weight. I've always crafted things that I pick up in the street into objects that look as though they'd been manufactured. What I think links all of our works is obsession-a knitting of wire, a building of 5,000 magazines to be carved, or a sticking together of 40,000 plastic cups. I always appreciate that obsession in artists' work.

WO: That kind of fashioning, the making process, may become a kind of discovery. Things happen on the way, as opposed to an idea being realized or mechanically produced. It's a natural kind of allowing the craft effort to direct you.

CWK: Your work all looks as though you had a pretty good idea of where you were going. Would you talk about your process of putting modular hits together?

PE: I often have a point at which I begin and a very clear point to which I aim. I never embellish or go on further. I fill the void or join the last two dots together.

GF: In my case, I put together a few things that look interesting, then I stack them one on top of each other and take photographs. Then I try a different configuration. Looking at the photos, I find which things worked, so I can make them bigger
in that form. That's where some of my really wacky works from a residency at the Cite Internationale des Artes in Paris (2000) came from. Knives, forks, and spoons were holding things up. It was very playful, but with a formal consciousness-trying to get
something that worked as an image as well.

CWK: And also held together and stood and balanced? 

GF: Yes, that was quite important.

WO: Working with insect imagery, I do have a beginning idea. Then things might change, and decisions are made in terms scale, or how I make it, or how I join certain things. I think scale is particularly important in my work. Often I have to think quite critically about what the piece will look like in the end because of the process being
so laborious.

PE: When I start working, it tends to be from a point of confluence joining the material, the process I put it through, and maybe an image or object I want to achieve. I have a fairly fixed idea of where I'm heading, but there are always small amendments on the way.

GF: Do you think that the materials serve as a guide?

PE: Yeah, and there are some things that you can't control, like sagging. Often I'm a little disappointed. I sometimes feel that I'd be happy to go through with my plan as I conceived it, even if the result is a failure. There is some reward in just seeing how to fix it. In fact, I don't like a lot of my work. It doesn't worry me that much, but I do like a piece here at the [Michael Stevenson] gallery. It came out exactly how I planned.

CWK: I'm intrigued by the modular quality of all of your work, that sense of building up cells to make a body. I'm wondering how your work relates to South African traditions as opposed to international conceptual modes.

PE: I think that Walter's work clearly draws on gabion structures (wire mesh cages or boxes filled with rocks as anti-erosion measures in the landscape); mine started out that way too. I was particularly influenced by Zulu plaiting (wire weaving onto artifacts). I studied in Kwa Zulu-Natal when I was picking up most of
my influences. That's also where Walter came from, and he studied in the same place.

WO: Yes, in Pietermaritzburg. These influences in the work happened from just fiddling around with bits of scrap wire and becoming intrigued with the material. Then, when I was on sabaticatal, I looked more deeply at local African material culture. That research opened my eyes and made me aware of local traditions of wire weaving.

GF: I studied at Wits (University of the Witwatersrand) as a figurative sculptor under Walter and Peter Schutz and Willem Strydom. But I've ended up moving further and further away from it and leaning toward a kind of playful formalism.

CWK: What about your childhood backgrounds? Where are you from and what kinds of things did you see?

GF: I grew up in the city, in Johannesburg. I had the detritus of the city around me, so that's probably where using everyday objects came from. I remember finding old xylophones when I was a kid and dismantling them and putting things in and finding
interesting objects and cutting them up. In a sense, my work has come back to that without my being conscious of it. It's very different from the experience of growing up in the country and being more aware of natural materials, objects, and traditions.
My traditions are going to the grocery, buying chicken, and cutting the bags up to make interesting things out of them.

PE: I always collected things. As a student, I worked with telephone wire. When I was younger, I had drawers full of it. I was fascinated by shiny, reflective things. I sometimes wonder if the way I work is a cop out because a lot of decisions are made for you already. I've also been concerned that this repetitive stuff is what they call horror vacuii. I wonder what it is that I'm avoiding by filling up the space.

WO: My background was rural. The crafts that we did were in the home, from our [German] family background. Those kinds of domestic objects intrigued me and have also come up in my work. It's the joy of making something, I guess.

GF: My modular experience is different because I was living in London and didn't have much money. When I got my residency in Paris, I had to plan what I could take on the bus with me. I knew that trying to get anything there when you don't speak
the language is immensely difficult. So I did a lot of research into things that I could use. I collected 3,500 gambling pens in London. When I was in New York, in 1997, I made a couple of pieces with McDonald's cups. When I came back, I bought a lot
of plastic cups. I started playing with them, and then as the ideas progressed, I put two things together and made a set, and put four things together and made a different set. So I took 20 kilograms of plastic cups from London, a whole lot of Super Glue and material to work with, and my CDs. I hardly took any clothing.
That's how the modular things started working for me-almost
by accident, out of necessity.

PE: I started off with images and ended up with things that were the result of processes. I'm not very interested in engaging in debates about artistic practices. I think I'm finding myself on an island that is further and further adrift off the coast. It sounds like a Minimalist approach, but I'm going about it the wrong way.

CWK: So you're less and less interested in any kind of theoretical discourse?

PE: Yes, or content even. I have to convince myself that there is some content to the work. But maybe that's a struggle that I'll go on with for the rest of my life.

GF: My most recent work is about the form and the playfulness of putting unusual things together. My stainless steel piece, for example, came from not wanting to use just materials from the recycling bin; people were saying, "We like what it looks like, but obviously we couldn't buy it for our collection." I've been trying to work in a slightly more permanent medium, but it's still about playfulness and also the random interaction of things. I also wanted to make functional objects out of things that people wouldn't expect.

CWK: Do you feel that you have to justify your work on grounds other than process?
   
PE: I'm not sure about Walter or Gordon, but I certainly didn't get work in any of the big"Decade of Democracy" shows or anything like that. I clearly didn't fit into their categories. When international curators come here, their criteria exclude anything that doesn't deal overtly with social politics. There's not a hint of narrative in my work, and I think that might be difficult to address.
                                                           
GF: It's much more about the object and what it is for itself. I'm sure that if we needed to justify our work, we could do research, find precedents, and work around issues, but none of us have that as a concern. It's the object that we enjoy, not how many pages we could write on the reason for doing it. One of the problems that I have with current art education is that a lot of people can talk for several days about the sculpture they didn't make instead of making it.

CWK: I think there's a kind of assurance in all of your work and authenticity. Where does that come from?

GF: For me, it's just enjoying what I do and not taking it too seriously, making it and showing it.

WO: Maybe there is less pressure now to feel compelled to deal with political issues, and artists feel more at ease addressing personal issues and experiences. I am reminded of judge Albie Sachs's (a Constitutional court judge, collector, and supporter of the arts) comment shortly after the first democratic elections in South Africa, when he proposed that art did not always have to explicitly demonstrate its relation to the social and political.

PE: Some works are very interesting as ideas but they're not necessarily worth realizing. If you commit yourself to spending three months making something, then there has to be something of interest in the actual object.

WO: You don't want people to walk past and not be affected.

GF: All of our work tends to be nicely finished because the object is more than just an idea. You want people to come up close and see the surfaces and the details. There is a big debate in South Africa at the moment about the craft thing: Why does something have to be beautifully done as long as it's put together and you can get the idea? People like us put a bit more tradition in our work. We need to make something that people will look at and say, "Wow, it's so beautifully made. Who would have ever thought of doing that?" They're intrigued not only by the object, but also by the way that it's made, by the beauty of the object itself.

CWK: Would you talk a little about differences in your work?

GF: Walter's work is much more permanent. It's also the kind of thing that happily slots into big collections and corporate environments, whereas my work is made to be trashed. It exists only as photographs, as a history of what was there rather than a
permanent expression. Maybe I'm moving toward something more permanent, but I don't see it as ever being shown in the National Gallery. Most of Paul's recent work is much smaller, more delicate, but also obsessive, sort of bold -- things carved
out of papers stuck together.

PE: I've also made entire bodies of work that I've taken apart and used for other things. My works are permanent in a way that Walter's aren't. Permanence in my work comes by virtue of the materials, for instance, the Styrofoam cups. I'm willing to
accept that they have a life span, and for some of them it's quite long. But possibly Gordon and I are working with materials that are less precious. There's nothing precious about aluminum.

CWK: You all have real jobs. You're not cab drivers, but some artists are. Would you talk about your choices?

PE: Artists who live on their art are few and far between, so we all develop a range of skills. Mine are largely in art writing, some editing. It's problematic, being a critic and an artist. In fact, I'm a critic less and less these days because it's an incredibly fragile,
mythical little world that we all sustain.

Very few people have the skills to create and to write about the visual arts as well, and inevitably there are overlaps. You end up reviewing your peers and your friends. I'm not sure that one can offer real critical advice to someone whom you see
every day. I've also done other things, for instance, I helped install the Brett Kebble Competition art awards, and I've done other kinds of writing. But these jobs are purely a practical thing, just to make enough money.

GF: If you're critical, people tend to take it as an attack on them,not on their work. The result is that much of the criticism in this country becomes a backslapping kind of praise, or a description, rather than getting into discourse and discussing stuff. There's very little engagement with issues, and when there is, there's a backlash. A lot of people won't even tell you their opinion of a show-they don't want anybody to get mad at them.

I've always described myself as a teacher first and an artist second. I teach at the Technikon as a lecturer twice a week, which I enjoy very much. It's tertiary education that talks to ideas and problems, getting the students to open up and try different things and new materials. And of course my major concern is the Gordart Gallery, which I opened two years ago. It's a developmental gallery. It's about bringing in new people who are not represented in Johannesburg and giving them a place to show so that they can move on to a major gallery and get into collections in Johannesburg, which is to a large extent the archive of South Africa. I turn down teaching posts because the gallery is my passion at the moment.

WO: I came to teaching almost by accident. I had just studied at Wits and found a position open, and I've remained there for all these years. I hope one day to be able to move on, but you learn from teaching. I also do a lot of corporate art commissions on the side, which brings in a little extra money.

PE: If I look at all the different things that I do and try to link them, I'd say that what I enjoy doing most is problem-solving - a grammatical problem or a construction or design problem. I enjoy the process of making work, but the most exciting part is
finding ways to get around problems.

GF: Yes, I've always taught the value of art education as a problem-solving exercise. If you can solve something in a creative kind of way on a piece of paper, then you can go out into business and rely on that creative thought process. You don't look at
problem-solving from an A to B logic, but from different perspectives. You try this and try that, because you know you've done it in your painting and your drawing. That's always been my approach, which is why I think art education is very valuable.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.