With South African artists now participating in most major international festivals and our own Johannesburg Biennale on the horizon, Ivor Powell asks: how good are we really?
DURING the years when South Africans were banned from the big world party, we kept ourselves going on a distinctly unhealthy cultural diet. Its substance was our own image, and its sauces were made up of varying mixtures of self-flattery, anxiety and fear of our own parochialism. We told ourselves that we were somehow special, that inside the oven of our isolation something unique and marvellous was coming into being. But in the arts the yeast that makes things rise is the regard of others and, well, for all our attempts to convince ourselves, we never really had that Snowflake experience.
Now, of course, with the political changes that have taken place over the last few years, we are back — as spotlighted debutantes — in world society. Over the past couple of years South African artists have participated in nearly every major festival on the international calendar. Every couple of months another exhibition is mounted in some First World capital showcasing South African art production. And at the end of February, with the opening of the Johannesburg Biennale, flawed and anti-climactic though it will almost certainly prove, our art world will be making some kind of pitch for the membership that comes with host status.
Against this background, the question inevitably arises: how good are we really? Do our artists, our curators, our critics, really have what it takes to enter into the system of exchanges that defines world art? It isn’t an easy question to answer. It is not like cricket or rugby, where such things are — often brutally — measurable, where defeat by an innings or 30 points creates its own argument. Still, there are some observations to be made.
One is that recent history is not going to be of any real help in defining the standards of the future. What has been celebrated and lionised in the past is not what will emerge as quality- defining for the future. Thus, for instance — and to move outside of the visual arts for exemplification — the political rhetoric of such a figure as Mzwakhe Mbuli, our largely self-styled People’s Poet, is not going to be enough to veil the essential banality of his verse. Even if she had not been awarded the last Nobel Prize for literature, Nadine Gordimer would not be likely to win the next. The equivalent of Sarafina, as playwrights have discovered in recent years, will not sweep the boards of Broadway in 1995 or 1996. In the visual arts, we no longer have to believe that, say, Gavin Jantjies is a major artist in the absence of any evidence to that effect. In short, we stand at a still point: new standards are going to have to emerge, and it is as though we are starting right from the beginning in finding for ourselves a place in global culture.
So let’s go to point zero. Point zero is that there exist in this country two still pretty much separate traditions of artmaking, one of which harks back to the discourses of colonialism and apartheid, and the other to an African spiritual milieu — though both have been changed in various ways by contact with the other and with the realities of the South African situation. Thus the Western tradition of artmaking strives constantly to find ways of accommodating itself to African realities. And the parts of African tradition that are immediately relevant in artmaking today are in general those that have been shaped and transformed by colonialism and apartheid.
Notably, the rural sculptural traditions of the Northern Transvaal — the number one area of South African art as far as international consumption is concerned — have their roots as firmly in the curio trade as they have in African thought patterns and artmaking traditions. Nearly all of the artists that have been identified and celebrated within this genre have, so to speak, come up through this school, from Jackson Hlungwani to Philip Rikhotso, Johannes Maswanganyi, Johannes Segogela, Doc Phutuma Seoka and the Ndou brothers.
It is the art world, not the artists themselves, which has elevated such makers of things to the status of artists. And in many ways the elevation remains as meaningless, considered from the inside, as it is problematic in terms of the dynamics of interpretation. Most of these artists just carry on working — they make little dogs and little dolls and little money boxes, funky wooden ties, and so on; sometimes they make bigger pieces of more complexity. Then we go in and make a sorting: the funky ties go to one set of shops, the more bizarre and complex pieces go to the galleries, and we then consider these according to entirely different sets of rules, as deep and expressive, as bearers of important and cross-cultural meanings.
Which is legitimate in many ways. It is the way that folk art from any tradition is brought within the ambit of “capital A” art. But the process remains an anxious one. It is something the art world does with artists, not something artists participate in; it is ineluctably a latter- day species of colonialism in culture. It is something that is anxious in another way too. For our own historical reasons, our culture is not prepared to leave the work of such artists inside the categories of folk art; we are in a position where we need to integrate African tradition into our cultural mainstream and these rural artists represent our best shot at doing so. So we ignore the conceptual difficulties; we shut our eyes to the fact that in many ways we are perpetuating a curio situation, and we wait for some reconciliation of these disparities just to happen.
Or we turn our eyes sideways to a Western-style art scene that is bubbling along very nicely, thank you, in basically the way it always has, following international trends with almost religious devotion, supporting the odd eccentric, trying without notable success to crack the international market by being more or less the same, but slightly different. So the current crop of younger artists is, for the most part, turning out as neo- conceptualists, post-graffiti artists, pathetic artists, late post-modernists, just as the last crop turned out as neo-expressionists and early post-modernists. All trying, with varying degrees of success, to find the solution to the terminal colonial problem of how to be local and international at the same time — and mostly getting it wrong by starting with the international, then trying to work in the local afterwards.
Of course, there are exceptions, artists whose internal logic is formative, convincing and authoritative. Landscapist Walter Meyer, for instance, though he has lately been releasing far too much work of indifferent quality, has found a way of just painting that makes just about everybody else’s contortions seem almost redundant. Willie Bester’s collages create a layering of history that is entirely authentic. Pat Mautloa has begun to find an aesthetic that marries black and white worlds to telling effect. Robert Hodgins gets better and more inimitable all the time. Brett Murray, Jane Alexander, David Koloane … to name a few.
Perhaps if I were to go through the whole list, it would add up to a substantial body of work, maybe enough to answer the question posed above. Still, pervading confusion remains the overwhelming sense of our art at the moment, and it is no accident that it is the rural artists that are being noticed by the big art world: they can still, unreflectively, be acquired as curiosities.
It is probably best to answer the question from a different angle. I’m not sure how good we really are — but we’ve got some world class problems.