The Vita awards have been reorganised, but they could still do with a tweak or two, writes Brenda Atkinson
If South Africa’s annual FNB Vita Art Prize can achieve the degree of angst, ecstasy and public attention surrounding its British counterpart – the prestigious and controversial Turner Prize – local contemporary art might just be able to unhitch its oxygen tank.
Gasps, deep breaths and some animated discussion greeted the announcement of this year’s finalists last Monday night, beginning what will hopefully become substantive debate about the shape of things to come. Of the six finalists, only William Kentridge, Sandile Zulu and Steven Cohen were present – Moshekwa Langa and Siemon Allen live respectively in Amsterdam and Washington DC, and Lisa Brice couldn’t make it from Cape Town. (Kentridge has also been shortlisted for the $50 000 Hugo Boss prize in the United States.)
Now in the second year of its new incarnation, the prize – revamped along Turner lines by Sandton Civic Gallery curator Natasha Fuller and sponsored by First National Bank – is still at a stage where critical input from the art community is necessary and can be effective.
What Fuller’s input has effectively achieved is to streamline the formerly generalised and critically unfocused prize into a more curated and specifically contemporary phenomenon. As such, although public nominations are taken into account, they do not constitute a vote, and it is finally up to the panel of judges, elected initially by FNB and the Sandton Civic’s advisory committee, to motivate for the final nominees.
In the shallow pool of mostly ravenous sharks that is the local art world, the constitution of this panel is the fulcrum of the prize’s future direction. In the first place, panel members sit for two years.
In the second, these judges recommend members for the next panel when they step down. Although, as Fuller points out, judges previously sat for up to five years, the two-year rule and the substantial influence of outgoing judges on the next panel can only serve to keep power very much in the family.
And whatever your investment in political correctness, slanted panels make for slanted exhibitions. For the last two years, the three-man, one-woman panel of Frank Ledimo, Kendell Geers, Okwui Enwezor and Bongi Dhlomo (all, but for Enwezor, Johannesburg-based) has seen more or less equal racial representation in the selection of finalists, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that South African women just don’t make art. In 1997, two women – Robyn Orlin and Tracey Rose – were chosen with five men, and this year Brice is the lone female representative in a group of six (no, men in drag do not count as women).
Geers disagrees with this analysis: “It’s not up to us to fill quotas,” he says. “We’re looking at the quality of the work and its contribution to local contemporary art, and not at the racial or gender profile of the artists. Those inequities obviously exist in the art world, but they have to be addressed at grassroots, infrastructural levels, not at the level of a competition like this.”
Perhaps the issue at stake is what a competition like this actually is. On the one hand, the organisers aim to solicit broad opinion in a democratic way (via public nominations), and to give all finalists a piece of the pie (each nominee receives R4 000 towards making a new work). On the other, there’s a desire to nurture an aura of prestige and rigorous critical values around the prize – for Fuller, judges must be knowledgable and carry cultural capital. And in future, members of the public will have to be more seriously motivated about their nominations: “We’re going to ask people to submit proposals as well as slides of the works they nominate,” explains Fuller. “This may mean fewer nominations, but we’ll know that these people have been thoughtful about their choices.”
Then there’s the kudos attached to the “Grand Prize” of R20 000. For drag artist extraordinaire Steven Cohen, who collected his prize from FNB’s group art custodian Steven Bales butt-naked, bloodied and handcuffed (Bales got an eyeful of tranny fanny, since Cohen’s hands were cuffed behind his back), the prize’s “financial carrot” affects the way artists work.
“When you work for one thing,” says Cohen, “it changes the way you think and produce. If the amount of money was larger and evenly distributed, the event would be less about competing than about the chance to make your own work better.”
The great potential success of the FNB Vita award will be to shift tired and overdetermined notions of South Africa’s “cutting edge” by bringing together artists as diverse in their approach and production as Kentridge and Cohen. The potential pitfall is to encourage and perpetuate power blocs that refuse to look beyond the usual suspects in their purvey of the realm they appraise.
In other words, judges should be selected from all over the country, not just Johannesburg. They should come from a variety of disciplines and occupy very different positions in relation to contemporary cultural production. And at least two of the panel members should rotate on an annual basis. Because despite the apparent depth of the pool, there are more than a few good men and women who are more than adequate to the task.