After 13 years, Art Against Apartheid is in South Africa — and destined to hang in Parliament. But, asks HAZEL FRIEDMAN, is this where it belongs?
FOR years it has borne the distinction of being the art world’s open secret: an international art exhibition assembled as a tribute to South Africa’s first democratically elected government. Now, 13 years after its offical launch, Art Against Apartheid has finally reached its destination — but not without its fair share of controversy.
The brainchild of Spanish artist Antonio Saura and his French counterpart Ernest Pignon- Ernest, Art Against Apartheid was conceived in Paris in 1983, at a seminal point in South Africa’s turbulent history — the year in which the United Democratic Front was formed. To exiled activists and human-rights agencies around the world, South Africa’s political and cultural liberation seemed close at hand. And to international artists sympathetic to the cause, this exhibition would serve both to denounce apartheid’s crime against culture, as well as to celebrate the imminent birth of the new, non-racial democracy.
Recalls Saura: “We hoped that once apartheid had been abolished, the works would be offered to the first free government of South Africa. At the time, we couldn’t anticipate it would take so long.”
Since then, the show — comprising works by 80 artists, as well as contributions by internationally acclaimed poets, writers and philosophers — has been exhibited in over 40 cities worldwide. Last year, its penultimate destination was the Zimbabwe National Gallery in Harare. Today it sits in the Mayibuye Centre in Cape Town, and from February 9 it will adorn the walls of Parliament before hitting the road as a travelling exhibition around South Africa.
And after that? Well, this is the subject of some debate. The organisers of Art Against Apartheid envisaged the exhibition as forming the foundation of South Africa’s first international museum of modern art. But Parliament, it seems, has other plans.
According to the Zimbabwe National Gallery, the exhibition was initially destined for the South African National Gallery (SANG). “But before it was due to arrive,” says the SANG’s Hayden Proud, “we received notification from the president’s office to say that it should hang in Parliament instead.”
This shift in arrangements is evidently designed to make both the exhibition and government more accessible to the people. To this end the choice of Parliament as a temporary display venue is logical. But the exhibition — although dedicated to South Africa — is neither by nor about South Africa. Apart from a work by exiled South African artist Gavin Jantjes commemorating the 1976 riots, and a piece in the catalogue by South African author Andre Brink, no local artist is represented on this show.
In fact, there are few references to South Africa at all, and these are in the broadest possible terms. They include Pignon-Ernest’s Intervention, which conflates images of Nice and Cape Town; Robert Rauschenberg’s World Against Apartheid collage; Tom Phillips’s Oh Miss South Africa lithograph; Fluoman’s tribute to Steve Biko; not to mention written condemnations of apartheid by French philosopher Jacques Derrida and other literary luminaries.
The exhibition reads more effectively as an extraordinarily broad selection of works by representatives of popular international art movements of the late 1970s and 1980s than as either a monument to South Africa’s liberation struggle or as a collection of works by local artists. Included in the unashamedly eclectic line-up are examples of conceptualism by France’s Christian Boltanski, in the form of photographs of children framed in glass; op artworks by Venezuelan artists Carlos Cruz- Diez and Jesus Raphael Soto; examples of abstract expressionism by Robert Motherwell and Antonio Tapies; and English artist Joe Tilson’s pop-art homage ( la Warhol) to Che Guevara.
There’s an original gouache by Roy Lichtenstein, as well as lithographs by James Rosenquist, a mixed media work by Claes Oldenburg and a figurative oil painting by Richard Hamilton. And these names represent but a fraction of the international signatures on the credit list.
But if Parliament perceives itself as a people’s place, it must use its space to house works by South African artists and help set up a separate and permanent site to accommodate Art Against Apartheid. That was the purpose for which the exhibition was intended, and ultimately that is where it belongs.