The moments that made it

Sarah Buitendach - Former Wanted Editor 2018 – 2021

Arty in the city where the heat is on (but also the country-club cover), February 2020

Whenever I think of this press jaunt with Lexus to see Design Miami and Art Basel, it makes me smile. It was a two-day trip and a complete onslaught of art and culture — and a fantastic, crazy city. It also happened in the December before Covid hit. What’s more, the article appeared in the issue in which we featured the then newly overhauled Country Club Johannesburg, Auckland Park on the cover. The very spot was recently engulfed by a fire, but the veranda structure we snapped remains standing and that is heartening. In fact, this entire issue makes me think that life can change so fast — and never in ways you anticipate.

Alexis Preller discovery, September 2019

As readers know, the September issue of Wanted is always themed around art. We’d mostly put the 2019 version to bed when we heard that a much-speculated-about “lost” Alexis Preller artwork was almost ready to be revealed with the opening of the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria. Only, it was a bigger deal than that. The 12m-long mural, which was painted in the late 1950s on a wall in the Transvaal Administration Building — mothballed for decades — had just been relocated. We raced over to the university, snapped a detail of the work, and went to print. The following week was FNB Art Joburg, and I remember everyone being delighted with the cover. The same image is still the background of my phone. I adore it.

The importance of being idle, December 2019

When you’re having a harried day — and who isn’t, all the time? — just go back to this article and have a read. Its author, Tom Hodgkinson, is the founder of the brilliant UK magazine The Idler. The title says it all. He wrote this piece, about the virtues of doing less, for Wanted and it still speaks to me regularly. Idling has a terrible reputation but a glorious history and we can glean a lot by reading Hodgkinson’s thoughts on the topic. From the visionary Brit, I learnt that doing less actually helps with working and thinking and happiness, plus, it’s free — you’ve just got to extract yourself from the web of guilt.

Slim pickings, March 2021

This was one of those strange little stories that had me enthralled. Heritage architect Brian McKechnie was looking at some iconic images by the famous US photographer Slim Aarons and came across one of a house he recognised. It’s now a sadly dismembered Sandhurst pad (“improved” by renovations, ya know) but when Aarons visited the country in the late 1950s, he snapped it in its tropical modernist glory. We had to wangle cheap usage rights for the pic and promise we’d never use them online, but I’m so glad we documented this little bit of important, forgotten SA design history.