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Gold Met's true winners were down at the bowling club
February 06, 2007 Edition 1
Suzy Bell
Dark Lunch
I went off to Clicks with my mum to buy a pair of white knee-highs. They didn't have any in white so I bought a pair of what the label said were "diabetic-friendly" long white socks.
Peet Pienaar was throwing a culture night at a bowling club in Green Point - "so I have something amazing to go to each month", said Peet. I needed a bowling outfit, so I squeezed my Christmas mince pie tummy into my nurse's outfit that now doubles as a white tailored bowling dress, pinned my Comrades medal to my chest and slipped my new long white socks into my white Nike rip-off takkies from Game and, with a white felt hat bought from a Somali shop off Adderley Street, I was set.
The Bowling Club is a cool, new creative concept by artist Maverick, hot-shot designer of Afro magazine and, with his smart and sassy partner, Heidi Chisolm, they by day run the agency, daddy buy me a pony. The agency has won more Loeries than you'll find in the Knysna forest. Such is their creative prowess.
I first met Peet in Durban 10 years ago. Carol Brown, the former director of the Durban Art Gallery, and I invited Peet and artist Barend de Wet to perform at the monthly art event, Red Eye. Peet and Barend arrived with two amplified Singer sewing machines under their arms. They were dressed in black suits with mendhi tattoos on their matching bald heads. That was tame compared to Peet videotaping himself being circumcised in the Bell-Roberts art gallery at a time way way before crude reality TV, daily blogs and the popularity of My Space. Clearly a creative, not only ahead of his time, but doing the lang arm at his original pace. The discarded foreskin became a celebrated separate art work.
"I'm using art as an excuse to live a very interesting life," said Peet. "Art allows you to be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do, and go wherever you want to go." This is a man with a glittering lime-green lamé dinner suit with Springbok emblem, who lost 30kg in the name of art to exhibit himself in shopping malls and the SA National Art Gallery. I love it that Peet matriculated in Potchefstroom, is a former Springbok rugby player, and that in his creative studio there are Klipdrift on tap, swallow cushion covers in shwe-shwe and nyala skin carpets.
Peet's first Bowling Club night event was a contemporary exploration of music, photography and for others, vodka lime. It kicked off with an old-fashioned slide show which was really two Swiss boys in white with lap-tops taking us on a fascinating sonic-art journey with pictures.
We heard Arabic orchestral music mixed with Afro-Latin jazz, haunting Islamic devotional Qawali singers set to oompah-pah bands, and an exquisite tabla solo with viola, while we watched images of clubbers in Munich dancing to Ishmael kwaito remixes and of a lone trumpeter on a balcony in Lebanon playing against the sonic backdrop of Israeli war planes.
"I can name all the weapons of war by their sound," said the trumpeter. "The influence of war on music … the sounds of war, helicopters and machine guns, these are my soundscapes and silences of my work."
We sat quietly in our white bowling hats. There was Jo'burg Bar owner Bruce Gordon, with new sideburns, wearing his dad's crimp-lene "Rhodesian" rugby jacket and white linen pants that belong to his wife, celebrated artist Sue Wil-liamson.
Avant garde theatre director Brett Bailey was there, as were playwright Peter Hayes, Freshlyground singer Zolani Mahola and violinist Kyla-Rose Smith and animation artist Lyndon Daniels in an Yves Saint Laurent T-shirt. "It was my dad's shirt. I just sewed the Kiss badge on the front to deface it."
Did I tell you this was the alternative party in Cape Town on the night of the glam and bling of the tired J&B Met, where the music, crushingly bad at the after-parties in sanitised white, PVC-sponsored tents, is a drunken Come on Eileen, Abba classics and radio-friendly remixes like the famed Pata Pata. Ho-hum.
Next up at Peet's cultural shin-dig was "David Hockney on tik", Bruce Gordon quipped in high spirits. A drummer without a drum (he used his body as a drum) and a guitarist were on stage with another Swiss chappie, a vocalist, who picked up an old radio and worked through the stations to tune it to a pre-recorded station (of the artist's imagination, of course), to "find" a domestic and family James Harriot-type drama with a child crying, a dog barking, a bee a-buzzing, a seagull hulling, a horse a-neighing, a fly annoying … while he repeated, mantra-like: "Do you really understand what I feel?"
And I thought there were no problems in Switzerland.
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