In search of an outside perspective on Johannesburg’s much- mooted Biennale, Ivor Powell spoke to influential visiting ArtForum critic Thomas McEvilley
As interviewees go, Thomas McEvilley is more than a little like a chess player: the strategy unfolds according to interior logics that are more telling in their totality than as individual responses to individual questions.
This is one reason why I am going to let the eminent art critic speak more or less without interference. But there are others, such as the very eminence of the man as a critic and thinker about art — for two decades, especially as a writer for the influential journal ArtForum, he has done more to shape the way that contemporary art is considered than any other writer that comes to mind. There is also the simple fact that his is an outsider perspective on an event that has been so mauled by insiders that it is hard to know any longer what it looks like.
And there is, of course, the quality of my own contributions at the end of the inexorable round of exhibition openings that we have attended beforehand, in the course of what punters are, increasingly, calling the Beernale. McEvilley, tucking into the bottle of vodka that we have picked up on the way back to his hotel room, remains miraculously lucid, but, as for me … well, my tape recorder is sober enough.
The first thing that needs to be understood, McEvilley notes, is that the “recurring international art exhibition” has its precedent in a more or less naked assertion of colonial power — via the inaugural Venice Biennale which took place in 1885 “at the height of the colonial period, 10 years after the Berlin Conference where Africa was carved up by the Western European colonial powers.
“What that art exhibition meant at that time was an assertion of centrality by the Western European powers. It was like ancient Greece and the Olympic Games: only supposedly ethnically clear Greek cultures could participate; everybody else was out.”
It was, McEvilley asserts, essentially in reaction to such hegemonic claims for European culture that, at the end of the colonial period, former colonies and other marginalised countries began instituting their own rival biennials and triennials.
“Previously colonised peoples around the world have found a variety of strategies with which to attempt to reconstruct identities that were ravaged either by long periods of foreign control or of internal repressive government. They began to try to turn the tables and reverse the hierarchy. One of the ways this showed up was they started having their own recurring international art exhibitions. In other words, they began experiencing themselves as centres.”
The first to hold an international art exhibition was India, with its New Delhi Triennial in 1969, closely followed by the Sao Paolo Biennale, and then by similar festivals in, among other places, Havana and Sydney. (And Johannesburg — but we are not there yet.)
“In the first place, the creation and especially the exhibition of art by a community tends to define or redefine that community when its circumstances have changed and the society needs redefining. The other side is that, having defined or redefined itself, a community then presents itself to the outside world — the so-called international community — by way of these major exhibitions.”
And pawn takes rook: “So the question that has arisen … in connection with the (Johannesburg) Biennale is whether that first step of defining or redefining the community internally has been leapt over, and whether perhaps there has been a premature leap to the second step of presenting this face to the outside world before it has been studied, analysed, criticised and redefined.”
It is here that the problems arise. McEvilley enters into a long, seemingly inconsequential digression on the subject of the rural sculptors of Gazankulu and Venda. He commends the dominant South African approach to this work, the open- ended and pluralistic way that it — since the 1985 Tributaries exhibition, at least — has routinely been exhibited alongside work from the Western mainstream.
Nevertheless, he also notes that, for the most part, the actual production of such sculpture has a relatively recent pedigree; that, however authentic its feel, much of it was “artificially revived” under apartheid. By the same token, he observes, the “bright young artists who read ArtForum and FlashArt and are totally aware of what is happening in Soho galleries” bear the imprint of an apartheid heritage.
Which brings us back to the question of identity. And, suddenly, without any obvious change in the board, we have a checkmate looming. Watch that bishop!
“This gets us back to that earlier topic of the two functions that an exhibition like this is supposed to perform. One is analysing, critiquing and redefining the community itself. The other one is presenting this redefined community as a new persona.
” You see, the disturbing thing is … I’ve been travelling around the world a lot in the last few months and the analogy that I’ve heard two or three times is to the original Dokumenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1952 — that is, of course, very soon after World War II and the revelation of information about the Holocaust.
“In this first Dokumenta, there was absolutely no reference to the recent problems of German history. It was like the Germans were coming out of the crematoriums having washed their hands and saying: ‘Oh look, we’ve got clean hands, we’re nice people, we’ll put on a tea party for you.’
“Some people are perceiving that this is the way this Biennale has been handled. It doesn’t address the problems of recent South African history; it doesn’t attempt to analyse and critique and redefine South African identity in any significant way. The problem that some people are seeing with this show is that it’s just a lot of art.”
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