/ 25 November 2010

Abandoning some of the sobriety of the past

The M&G’s Matthew Krouse, co-editor of Positions: Contemporary Artists in South Africa, spoke at the book’s launch on Tuesday.

In his speech, he focused on the relationship between the arts and the media, suggesting “Although critics need artists, its probably true to say that the arts media is so powerless now that the artists don¹t presently need the critics.”

This is an extract from his speech.

“In a way, it’s possible that the publication Positions: Contemporary Artists in South Africa could be nicknamed ‘Art After Kentridge”. This is because the artists profiled here are all of a new generation, except for Sue Williamson whose work also found its way into the book.

The inclusion of Williamson (in an essay by Chris Roper) is important since she has done so much to foster and make visible the art of the those who are emerging.

I don’t think, when Albie Sachs wrote Preparing Ourselves for Freedom and when Njabulo Ndebele wrote The Rediscovery of the Ordinary (in the early 90s) that they envisioned a ‘today” in which which artists would abandon some of the sobriety of the past, repalcing it with the present taste for ‘cheekiness.”

They certainly would not have envisaged a moment in which Nandipha Mntambo could create The Rape of Europa (picturing herself naked, taking herself in a bovine manner), a moment in which Michael McGarry would make a bust of Thabo Mbeki as a shapeless blob on a table. A time in which the third President of the liberated republic would be pictured raping the figure of Justice (by Zapiro) or pictured sniffing cocaine surrounded by a bevvy of so-called loose women by the Laugh it Off collective.

I don’t think either of these erudite commentators (Sachs or Ndebele) would have comprehended a time when a Minister of Arts and Culture would walk out of a Women’s Day exhibition for being ‘too lesbian”—

At the same time, this week we also discovered that this year’s K Sello Duiker Memorial Literary Award has been won by a novelist called Annelie Botes who confesses she is planning to leave South Africa in the near future because she dislikes black people, and feels that black men are all potential rapists.

So when I asked my colleague Percy Zvomuya what I should say tonight, and if he had anything to say that I could relay, he asked me, “why?”.

I said I didn’t have much to say, and I asked him whether he has a message for humanity.

‘Fuck humanity”, is all he said.

I thought to myself, ‘Well, Zvomuya has been spending too much time reading Lesego Rampolokeng”. Rampolokeng is another featured artist in Positions.

When I thought back on our title Positions, and what I would say about it I thought, ‘Well, where else do we use the term?”

Obviously, we use the term in relation to sex. In art and in sex we say, ‘well, you can adopt any position that works for you with the exception of the position that deprives the other person of her or his fundamental human rights”.

The difference, perhaps, is that in the arts it is possible to adopt a position designed to hurt the other party and still maintain one’s reputation. Levels of confrontation, and its appropriateness, in the arts are certainly themes that crop up in the book.

It would not be polite, in present company, to sprout a string of truisms about the arts in South Africa now.

But it must be said there is nothing that binds us, and we are not threatened, as various sectors, by the very existence of the other. In our engagement, and in the heirarchies of power, we don’t stand at loggerheads to our political counterparts, although we may not see one another in a very favourable light.

Although critics need artists, it’s probably true to say that the arts media is so powerless now that the artists don’t presently need the critics.

Perhaps this book, then, is a step towards redefining the power relations that exist — to offer the critics the space to define the moment, and to see what they have to say.

To see whether they have anything, at all, to say.”