The Arts and Culture Task Group’s report casts new light on the Biennale, writes Ivor Powell
IS there anything left to say about Johannesburg’s Africus Biennale? It happened; there was a lot of good art to be seen, but more that was indifferent or bad. Sixty-three countries participated, along with a sizeable number of South African artists and curators. They displayed their wares, and enough interest was generated among the public (the organisers claim a total attendance of about 50 000 people) for the Biennale to count as a (minor) promotional success.
Twelve people were trained (with varying degrees of success) as curators/administrators under the auspices of the Trainee Curator Programme. Some enrichment of critical discourse may have occurred at the Bua! conference; and so on. Murders, life and death struggles, are bloody and exciting; post mortems are almost inevitably dull.
But some of the old issues came into sharper focus last week with the publication of the government-appointed Arts and Culture Task Group’s report on future arts and culture policy.
Here is a measure of the way the country is moving, the way our public thinking is developing. (It is worth remembering that, whatever its shortcomings, Actag is a more representative policy-making body than has ever before been convened on the arts.) Notably, the Actag report may be used as a gauge for priorities in spending.
The report clearly identifies the challenges facing this country and the priorities thrown up by the democratic imperative. It questions with admirable rigour the ways in which arts and culture have been used to serve the white elites of the past, both by foregrounding Western cultural values and by centralising artistic and cultural resources within the white sectors of society. All this at the expense of the values, traditions and cultural forms of the black majority.
Actag recommends the radical revision of the cultural sector, starting with the recommendation that at least 50 percent of all arts and culture funding be channelled into developing resources in areas marginalised under apartheid. The report insists on a pluralistic and multicultural approach; that arts and culture be reconceptualised in order to reflect the diversity of South Africa’s heritage.
Measured against this kind of reconstructive thinking, the Biennale might as well have come into being on a different planet. Less than five percent of its funding resources were allocated to community projects and development. Of its 20-odd exhibition venues, two were located in black townships. These are the Mofolo art centre, which hosted a show essentially of whatever works local artists happened to stick up, and the Funda centre, where a mural by students was unveiled. Neither venue presented an international exhibit or a funded curated show.
While millions of rands were pumped into the development of the Newtown cultural district, no venues were developed in any of the townships. While many of the South African artists on the shows were black, only one curator (the participant who defines the conceptual position of the exhibition) wasn’t white. The statistics tend to speak for themselves.
Admittedly, 21 African countries are represented; more than half the 63 national exhibitions could be categorised as emanating from the Third World; and the Biennale did fund about 20 South African curated exhibitions. But it would be hard to argue that a pluralistic sense of South African culture was explored in the Biennale’s conception. Nearly half the original budget was spent on bringing groups of foreign curators to this country to choose South African art or artists for their proposed shows. While much can be said about this kind of exercise, all I want to note is that it is pretty meaningless unless you see culture as globally centralised, singular, and probably spelt with a capital letter.
Taken to extremes, the approach adopted in the Actag report can become ridiculous, and terrifying. But the concern that underlies it is worth taking seriously. In South Africa, cultural identity is not stable or defined, and neither are perspectives on culture. Such things still need to be explored, confused and distorted as they have been by the history of this country. It is not enough, as the Biennale organisers have done, to throw everything into a melting pot; the question is, whose hand holds the spoon?
As critic Thomas McEvilley noted, Third World art fairs – – and part of the problem is that the Johannesburg Biennale failed to identify itself as such, despite the real demographics of the country — can only become meaningful after a process of cultural self-exploration has taken place. Only then can the country market itself to the outside world.
Of course, it is unsurprising that the Biennale should have been out of step with current times. It was born as a project of the old Johannesburg City Council, and sought to promote Johannesburg as a “world class city” by that organisation’s lights.
But it is the new dispensation that will oversee the next Biennale. If there is one.