Hazel Friedman
AT first glance, Ricky Burnett’s exhibition at his Newtown Galleries looks like a classic case of ”if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. Here’s the party-pooper, the proverbial brat who refused to join the circus procession, suddenly getting in on the act.
Not only does his exhibition coincide with Africus ’95; it also features three of South Africa’s foremost artists: David Koloane, Pat Mautloa and Kay Hassan. You’d expect to see them on centre stage. But you’ll discover that the points of commonality between Burnett’s show and the Biennale go no further than time and place.
Burnett is fundamentally opposed to what he perceives as the ”Olympian” pretensions of the Biennale. ”My exhibition is not only about giving space to artists who deserve, but have been denied, representation,” he explains. ”It is a riposte to the Biennale’s Boswell-Wilkie notion of culture. This ideology is based on the belief in a universal argot or jargon that is ‘art’, which is unattached to the socio- historic moment. It does not attempt to create new structures and ideas about the way art works in adverse conditions.”
In some ways Koloane and Hassan are doing just that. Although influenced by international art, all three are products of community training and have received no formal art education. ”For them, art is a way of learning,” Burnett explains. ”Instead of their art needing to ask their experience what to do next, their experience has found a way of articulating itself through their work. And they are mapping out a new vision for art in this country.”
This vision, it is evident from the show, is articulated through a gritty language — the bricks and mortar of everyday life. Koloane, for example, focuses on his experience of the city, its cloying smells and murky presences. His mark is crude, loose and, in places, uneven, but it depicts a raw realism that emanates in subtle, complex ways.
It’s not that his subject matter is new. He’s depicting pretty much what his peers and predecessors have been doing for decades: township scenes and slices of urban life. He’s not even presenting a critique of the cliches. But what differentiates his work and makes it convincing is his approach. It is as though he is trying to ”unlearn” the prescriptions that have compromised the art of his predecessors.
Hassan, too, has focused on the scraps of life, but in a more literal sense. His works read like strips torn from a billboard, reconstructed into giant collages. They, too, are crudely hewn, but there is something in the dislocated and fragmented forms that brings to mind the cubist paintings of Picasso. It is as though, as Burnett suggests, he is reclaiming the forms appropriated from his culture by the early modernists.
Of the three, Mautloa is the most conceptually oriented. He begins from an abstract expressionist platform, on to which he piles materials — worn and rusted — that have powerful socio-historical connotations. But his work reads less as a metaphor than as an accumulation of lived experiences, pointing the way to an expressive language that is appropriate to this moment in South Africa’s history.
Their creative liberation is, paradoxically, part of a process engendered by the Thupelo workshops of the late 1980s. Slammed by white critics for introducing black artists to the techniques of abstract expressionism, without acknowledging the genre’s historical context, the workshops were dismissed as therapy. But while the painterly products were at best uneven, in retrospect the process served to free black artists from the prescriptions of a predominantly white market with a romanticised view of township life.
”Thupelo provided these artists with the opportunity to explore, not merely ways of making art, but ways of trying to make sense of their world,” says Burnett. ”And what is the Biennale providing? A bit of America, a bit of Germany and Japan.”
He shrugs off the Biennale’s potential spin-off for local art: ”It doesn’t redeem the process. The commitment to making exciting things happen on a daily, ongoing basis is more important than a once-every-two-years effort. We have spent more on a few weeks of spectacle than museums spend in a year on education.”
Does he believe the entire biennale concept should be overturned?
”We need to do a lot of lateral thinking as to what an international art event means and what it would do in Africa. By ducking the sociology we’re ducking the real issue of context, which is ‘how does art function in such conditions?’
”We need to establish a culture we can celebrate on a daily basis with ongoing participation among artists and with the public. In order to be put firmly on the international map and become a major destination, we need the development of a cultural infrastructure on an ongoing basis.
”Once we’ve achieved that, then we can graduate to the celebration. But we must earn it. We can’t simply proclaim it and believe it will happen. It didn’t even work that way for God.”