In art-world terms, he’s not even out of diapers — but everyone wants a piece of Moshekwa Langa. HAZEL FRIEDMAN finds out why
MOI? Artist Moshekwa Langa doesn’t exactly respond “But why me?” to my request for a meeting, and certainly not in French. But everything about his reaction — from the almost hysterical giggle to the coy, sidelong glances — suggests sheer amazement, even dread, at the prospect of being interviewed.
Why him? After all, he hasn’t won an award, put together another solo exhibition or performed any of the public feats that would normally warrant an article. But Langa is undeniably news. In Berlin recently, where he participated in Colours, an exhibition of South African art curated by German critic Sabine Vogel, he was described by the press as a wunderkind. He spoke at conferences, on radio and was fted by the cream of the international culturati. He was even asked his opinion of President Mandela — as though his star status imbued him with special insights into the wunderpresident himself.
He’s 20 years old; in art terms, not even out of diapers. He’s had just one solo show — albeit a rapturously received one — in 1995 at the Rembrandt Gallery. Since then, he’s been camping with the elite club of white boy scouts known as neo- conceptualists, even though he had been producing his fake skins, maps and mutilated sheets of corrugated iron independently of the influence of contemporary discourse. The Potgietersrus-born, Waldorf-bred homeboy has exhibited in controversial group shows, and has been invited to exhibit in Havana, Lisbon and London, even though his oeuvre — by virtue of his inexperience — is inevitably limited.
He’s a symbol for the new South Africa. Young and black with rural roots, a literary sensibility and urban style, he’s the pioneer and flag-hoister of a new generation of black post-apartheid individualists promulgating an art not of ideology but ideas, whose struggle site lies not in didactic political turf but in more ineluctable existential realms. But like the conquered territories he disfigures and defaces on maps from a colonial era, Langa is potentially an object of colonisation by an art scene anxious for icons who confound one stereotype while conforming to another. In short, everyone wants a piece of him.
Understandably, he is both elated and terrified at the prospect. The former because he feels on the verge of “belonging” — a new experience for one who has always felt like a “foreigner”; the latter because Langa knows only too well that, in life and art, everyone loves a rising star. Almost as much as a falling star.
“I’ve always had this sense of otherness,” he says, with an ease and eloquence that belie his staccato gestures and (initially) nervous gaze. “I’ve found it difficult to make a space for myself in this landscape, whether at my mother’s home in KwaNdebele or at the Waldorf school where I matriculated. My experience is essentially a rural one, and my initiation into the city is new. Taxi drivers often mistake me for a foreigner.”
Yet he has taken on the cutthroat world of contemporary art with astounding confidence. “The art world is an extension of my working every day in isolation at home in KwaNdebele. I’m slowly learning the contemporary art discourse but theory wasn’t something that consciously informed my art.”
Langa describes his work as “having no logical narrative, of resisting semantic closure” — pretty much like Langa himself. “People can’t reconcile my idiosyncratic views with their desire to classify me,” he says. “I sometimes have a sense of people trying to lay claim to me, of putting me where they think I should be and not leaving me to do my experiments, have my failures in peace … People seem to talk about me rather than to me.”
Do they ever. Berlin makes for scintillating dinner conversation, and not because of the exhibition. The talk — some of it terribly cruel — revolves around Langa being ostracised by Africanists who accused both him and his art of not being “African enough”; and about his being exploited by honkies who find him the perfect pawn because he talks the white talk so convincingly. He gently shrugs off the rumours, but admits that in Berlin — on his first overseas trip — he felt like he was under surveillance. “For me it exposed the myth of multi-culturalism. We had no individual voices, but as South African artists we were expected to speak for the entire coterie left behind.”
He seems free of guile or guise. Yet he remains an enigma. Steven Hobbs, artist and manager of the Rembrandt Gallery, and Langa’s confidante, recalls their first meeting with a mixture of admiration and astonishment.
“He was hunched over, hands clasped in a gesture almost of supplication. I thought he was just coming to hustle his art, but the first words he said were: ‘I have read about your videos. I want to see them.’ It was only afterwards that he showed me his work. I was blown away.”
Langa also got on to The Works, not by punting his wares but by sending an untidily scrawled letter criticising the trendy television programme. Soon after, executive producer Kathy Berman phoned and offered him a job. Whether it was because his comments were taken seriously, or because the best way to counter criticism is to co-opt the critic, is debatable. But if his slickly edited, intelligent insert on movie-making in South Africa — compiled together with Jan Cheifitz and screened last Tuesday — is anything to go by, Langa’s filmic star is also on the ascent.
As for his art, it is inevitably, given his youth, uneven, often unresolved and repetitious. But as his recent work for the Faultlines exhibition at the Castle (commemorating the riots of 1976) indicates, it can also be metaphorically rich, conceptually sophisticated and very aggressive.
Consisting of brown paper and black plastic bags soaked in syrup, condensed milk and antiseptic fluids — household consumables with racial inferences — it is a visceral, almost violent work. And while it says nothing specific about 1976, its thematic resonances — mutilation and metamorphosis, tragedy and transformation — are universal.
In a paper presented at the exhibition, Langa claims the work is not about “anything”, but has to do with “flashes of things. It is about the dangerous potential of innocence, about artifice represented as reality, and the borderline between this and that, where one is neither fish nor fowl.”
He is talking as much about himself as his work.