READ BETWEEN THE LINES

Always the iconoclast, Knysna art collector and gallery owner Trent Read has survived the ravages of South African cultural maelstrom to run a reputable, world-renowned Garden Route gallery. South visits him at his Knysna home for a more intimate look at his unique mindset and environment in thrives in.

             The imposing figure of a man hanging upside-down from the ceiling wrapped in prison bedding is the first thing that greets you as you back into South Africa’s sordid past. And it marks the beginning of an affective flashback to our tumultuous cultural history as we move from room to room packed with his carefully placed painting, sculptures, ceramics and creative light fixtures.

               With the sun bouncing lightly off his face on the deck of his electric home, Trent comes across remarkably intact for someone who has survived skirmishes such as these.

 As one of the leading custodians of South Africa’s fine art environment, he’s emerged scarred but not beaten by everything from the restrictive follies of Apartheid and the complexities of the Eighties cultural boycott, to the constant onslaught of bad taste and pretentiousness than often haunts his world.

Quaffing a cuppa Trent looks decidedly relaxed as we recall the heady but heavy days during the last convulsions of minority rule in South Africa.

When civil unrest reaches boiling point, the arts tend to flourish, and South Africa was no exception. While the Market Theatre was taken over by agitprop and performers were being labeled “cultural guerillas”, a myriad of artists and artistic organizations keenly elbowed each other off centre-stage for a slice of the attention.

“People forget what it was like then,” he says in relation to not only the political quagmire, but the free-for-all in the cultural circus. He found himself in the midst of this storm when he opened up the Everard Read Contemporary Gallery in Johannesburg in the early Nineties and saw the likes of Stephen Cohen, Wayne Barker, Belinda Blignaut (who until recently acted as his right-hand woman at the Knysna gallery), Jane Alexander, Brett Murray and the like, emerging from the fray with varying degrees of success.

“It was cutting edge stuff,” he says, explaining that each had their particular role to play with only very few deserving to be cast into the archives of artistic oblivion. He even retains a soft spot for some of the well-known wankers- ridiculous art-twist such as Kendell Geers who try to pass off childish statements, like masturbating over a porn mag centre-spread and framing it, as art.

 Though the extreme backdrop has changed, the campaign for a respected cultural environment continues and Trent refuses to throw in the towel. This particular struggle is in his blood.

 Jo’burg born and bred, Trent and his younger brother Mark are fourth-generation art-exponents in South Africa for those still not au fait with the late. His great-uncle Albert Everard Read started selling art from his corrugated iron shop next to a farrier in Plein Street at the turn of the previous century and the reins were handed to Albert’s brother Frefreik after Albert succumbed to gas poisoning during the First World War. Frederik in turn died just after WWII and his father Everard launched the now internationally famed Evarard Read Gallery in downtown Johannesburg.

 After, his schooling at Woodmead, he was initially thrown into solitary confinement for refusing compulsory military service, but eventually agreed to do his stint with the infantry in Ladysmith when threatened with a four-year prison sentence. As soon as he ‘klaared-out’, he hitched all the way to northern Namibia to recover. Near Etosha, he joined the Tsumeb Corporation as a prospector in the pre-digital days.

Stopping comfortably short of the obligatory ‘far-away’ look in his eyes, he nevertheless musters a nostalgic smile. “It was a healing experience,” he says. “They gave me a map, a few Ovambos and a San tracker and we went off into the wilderness to extract soil samples. Every six weeks we came back to town to get pissed and to try our damnedest to get laid. It was perfect for me at the time.”
Seemingly sound of mind, he returned to civilization after a year and immediately shipped off to London where he joined the famous auction house, Christies as a porter. “It was the most fantastic learning opportunity,” he beams, “hearing about and being around great art.” He swears by the tactile experience: “There’s simply no better way to get to know art than to actually hold it, touch it, encounter it physically. I was also subjected to such a diversity of art: Japanese art, European arms and armour, Faberge… and I saw the prices you could get for them”.

With this background- having been surrounded by remarkable art since birth- he was rapidly promoted to ‘front counter’. This is not akin to foyer-duty in the hospitality industry. Out of eight people in that position he was the only untitled employee. “The others were all Lords and Ladies- we even had one princess doing duty,” he laughs.

According to your performance at the Front Desk, one is then invited to join a department and he was soon placed in the ‘Old Master Drawing Department’ where he gleefully wallowed for a few years before returning to South Africa sufficiently charged to join the family business.

 He spent the first half of the next decade at the Everard Read Gallery (which moved from downtown Johannesburg to Rosebank in 1981) before temporarily joining the South African diaspora to open a gallery in San Antonio, Texas- thereby establishing a solid client base which still serves him well. He returned when the political climate changed in the early Nineties to open the contemporary Gallery.
 Enjoying the peak of his professional pleasure, he found himself at a crossroads in 1994, when his son was born. “I didn’t want my children to grow up in a shopping mall,” he said and moved to Knysna where, for the past 16 years, he’s kept up the good work.
He started out buying and selling but insists that he doesn’t “feel whole without a space to show art”. And not just any art: “I don’t sell views of the Heads,” he says seriously, “and money is not my primary driving force”.

One of his greatest kicks remains searching for, and nurturing, local talent. He’s the one who saw merit in George artist Hanlie Taute’s gothic viewpoint. “Some people find it creepy. It’s an astonishingly dark, noir vision- a bit Adams Family if you wish- but I think it’s a great. She lives in Prince Albert now”, he says. Likewise the unique landscapes by Emily Fellows now resident in Calitzdorp. And Simon Stone who recently left Knysna for Cape Town and whom Trent unhesitatingly labels the best painter in South Africa today. Two of his pieces adorn the walls in Trent’s home.

 At the recent 10th anniversary of the Pink Loerie festival he offered two local Knysna artists a platform: Florist DP Ferreira with an installation piece, and the owner of the well-known ‘Green Fairy’ landscaping concern, Mike Vlok, with some ceramics. Trent still displays the work of a budding talent at Cape Town’s Irma Stern Museum every year.

Trent remains as surprised by the lack of local artists approaching him to exhibit (“my door is always open”) as he disgusted with the direction art is taking. “People are becoming less visually literate,” he explains. “No-one even reads anything that’s not displayed on a 17-inch flat-screen anymore. We’re definitely dumbing down…”

We return indoors to wade through the dense display of artistic output- his personal favourites from the thousands of pieces that have crossed his path. They are not for sale. Every nook and cranny is filled with arts stuff from Hilton Nel’s unbridled ceramics- one a tribute to British transvestite Grayson Perry for his depiction of a masturbating Margaret Thatcher – to paintings by well-known iconoclast such as Joachim Schonfeld and Brett Murray whose Betty Boep- like ‘Liefie’ lamp helps light up the kitchen.

 The opposite wall is dominated by Pieter van Straten – including two severely personal portraits of his son and daughter- each trailed by larger ghost-like outlines which the artist has promised to fill in when they’re older. In the living room : two classic Stephen Cohen chairs, a Deborah Poynton self-portrait and a watercolor by British pop artist Alan Jones.

 We eventually come to a halt before an entire wall stacked with books in the dining room. “They’re all cookbooks,” he says, “every single one of them. I’m a good amateur cook and I love it. I’ll eat anything.”

His other passion is the bush and he perks up defensively when I enquire why he’s decided to live by the coast if this is the case. “What many people don’t realize,” he says pointing northward, “is that apart from the Richtersveld, the Bavianskloof is the largest real wilderness we still have in South Africa which shows absolutely no sign of any human intervention.”

At the foot of the stairs we pause at a framed black-and-white photograph by Francis Bacon’s lover Daniel Farson. In a drab pre-WWII Bacelona street scene, Spanish survivors of the first Great War hobble about on crutches begging alms from fellow victims of the Franco regime. “That’s what civil war does to you,” says Trent in typical laconic fashion before trekking up the stairway to a bold abstract splash of black and crimson which adequately displays Kate Gottens’ progress from the nearly Girls Own-ish realism evident on another work nearby.

In his son Jake’s room, a large CJ Morkel depicts the boy immersed in a PlayStation fantasy world complete with eight swirling 8-balls (representative of his stage at the time) and a coiled cobra rearing up behind him. Airbrushed in Duco paint the work is dotted with bullet holes. Trent’s normally rather guarded veneer lifts momentarily: “They’re real .45 bullets he shot at it,” he says cheerily. “It’s so cool.”
And for a moment at least, all the mischievous excesses and open-minded insight that’s made it OK to trust Trent with our art its teetering future, becomes glaringly clear.

By Chris Du Plessis

South Magazine May 2010