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The Mark Gevisser Profile
Homeless ‘king of culture’
The depression that sets in, as I take a late- afternoon walk around the Newtown Cultural Precinct with Christopher Till, is not so much a result of the desolation that surrounds me as of the gap between this desolation and its creator’s vision of urban redemption.
It’s a depression that comes from loving Johannesburg and yet despairing for it, for anyone who truly loves this city — anyone who has gagged at the ersatz ostentation of Sandton Square or the malodorous swamps of Bruma — cannot but want Till to succeed. No matter how much they disagree with him, he has been charged with the responsibility of carrying our dreams, and he has just been fired. Where does that leave our dreams?
Just three blocks east of where Till and I stand, on the elevated plaza outside the South African Breweries’ closed-up Bulldog Brewhouse (no sundowners here), there is congestion and commerce: hawkers, stockbrokers, taxi-ranks. Here, there are boarded-up restaurants and a few lonely chords of a tenor-sax coming from 1 President Street, rising above a few kids kicking a desultory football around on the grass beneath the derelict dowager of the glass-shattered Turbine Hall. A municipal security guard courts his girlfriend as the cars on the rush-hour double-decker highway above them roar home, their perpetual motion only serving to accentuate further the inertia beneath them.
“The number of occasions I have sat up here!” Till says, with the curious nostalgia for a moment that has not yet happened. “The movement of that highway — even that I love, even the sound — how about packaging it as the sound of the Jo’burg sea? Let’s get romantic about it … Looking over there, past the sculptures on MuseumAfrica’s domes, I have a sense of space I don’t get anywhere else in Johannesburg; the sense of scale of this place, these industrial buildings, I think it’s just fantastic. This is actually what South Africa’s about — raw still, dusty still, but I feel inside me there’s a hope here … Let’s look beyond my tenure here. You gotta have a bloody vision .”
Johannesburg’s executive has been restructured and Till has not been reappointed to the post he created in 1991: he has been replaced by Victor Modise, formerly of the Gauteng legislature. There are many explanations offered for why Till has been dropped. These include an arrogant and patronising attitude towards Johannesburg’s new city fathers; the imperative of replacing white with black in one of the few fields of metropolitan governance where there are, in fact, qualified black people; a vaulting ambition that has alienated and infuriated the cultural community and the new politicians alike.
Substantively, there is the allegation that he has refused — or been unable — to acknowledge that the vision he sold the old Democratic Party machine of Ian Davidson no longer holds weight in the new Metro: that of developing Johannesburg, through sport and culture, into a “Truly International City”, with (his critics claim) its attendant international profile for Till himself.
“His main problem,” says a senior sympathetic source at the Metro council, “is that all he has done with the old Jo’burg vision is to pronounce it to be the new Jo’burg vision. He is so passionate, so driven, about the projects he has initiated, that he won’t or can’t see that, because of their constituencies, there are other things the new councillors are interested in. He is too dismissive of the fact that people in Diepsloot and Orange Farm need culture too.”
With the support of the powerful South African Municipal Workers’ Union, Till lodged an appeal on Tuesday, and is awaiting the result. He will be unsuccessful. Even his supporters note that the way he has responded to his dismissal has appeared arrogant. “Rather than asking ‘what have I done that you are unhappy with? How can I change my portfolio to suit changing political needs?’,” notes one highly-placed supporter, “he has appealed the council’s decision by stating that they have made a mistake and committed an injustice, because he is simply the only one who can do the job.” Here’s the tragedy: his drive and his will — the very things which put culture on the municipal map — have proven to be his undoing.
This has happened at the very pinnacle of his career. The labels Till attracts — “Culture Czar”; “King of Culture”, with all their imputations of majesty — are not inaccurate: there is scarcely a committee the man does not sit on, a programme he does not have a hand in. If you go in search of cultural resources in South Africa you will find yourself, sooner or later, at the office of Christopher Till.
He does not deny his omnipotence; in fact he rather likes it. He recounts how “somebody once made a very telling statement that made me sit up and think. They said to me, ‘Christopher, we’d also like a little piece of the cake for us to realise our visions. You are commanding so much of the cake.’ But I was the only birthday party in town! There was nothing else! It was my cake and my candles, and everyone else was saying, ‘we wanna party too!’ I had to stop and think. I realised why people felt threatened. But that’ s my job. That’s what I’m paid to do. Maybe because I’ve done it successfully, people resent it.”
Can one forgive his indignation at being made to share a cake that he actually baked? Whatever power and resources he has, he created rather than commandeered. He took on the job, as he often notes, with no budget, and made it himself. Arts Alive, Newtown, MuseumAfrica, Africus Biennale: these are his grands projects. No matter what he says about looking beyond his tenure, he wields a sense of ownership over them: he vests his ego in them, and vice-versa. Some of his employees say this makes him an impossible boss; others appreciate the energy it brings with it.
“He wants to be liked by everyone,” says a member of the art world who knows him well. “So he says ‘yes’ to everyone. People then feel misled, and resent him.” People in the art world are still seething about how badly managed the finances of the R11-million 1995 Biennale were; how late funding was in coming. Till promised the money before he had it, and then found it at the last minute. Call it irresponsibility or call it balls: if he were in the private sector, you’d laud him for his entrepreneurship.
He holds within him, I suspect, the imperialist aspirations of a Baron Haussmann as well as the humanist ones of a Frederic Law Olmsted. He is a city- builder in the Spielbergesque culture-mogul’s attire of hair falling down over a relaxed linen blazer. Till has the flash you’d expect to find in SoHo or Beverly Hills rather than in the public sector of a burgeoning, creaking third world city. His style, as much as his substance, rubs people the wrong way.
He is an upmarket boy’s boy: he may be a biker, but he rides a Motoguzzi; he was rugby-player, but also an artist at Hilton College; he was head of house in a ponytail at Rhodes. “I was a strange sort of a guy,” he says, “The guys knew me: on a Sunday it was house rugby in the morning, volleyball at lunch, soccer in the afternoon. But I was very very separate from that group of rugger okes who went off to the pub and got pissed and picked a fight with the first guy who came in.” He was always, he says, “more involved in spirituality”.
He left painting and became an art-museum director, first in Rhodesia, from 1977 through 1980 into independence. He deftly — his detractors say characteristically — made the transition and became a firm advocate of Zimbabwe and its liberationist imperatives before moving back here to take up the reins of the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1983: despite controversies (he caught much flak for supervising a vast rebuilding project in 1986 as part of the much- maligned Johannesburg Centenary), he reformed it into a dynamic institution and brought black art on to its walls.
He has always, he says, “found creativity in management”, and he preferred “the bigger picture, rather than being the artistic aesthete so in tune with his own thought process that nothing beyond it matters, rather than going to teach at Sandown High and making art on the side. I think I’m richer for it.” Now, though, “I’m not so sure — there’s suddenly a huge need to paint again.”
Perhaps this is because, as he says, he is becoming aware — aged 44 — of his mortality and realising that there are different kinds of power; “other things to be achieved”. Perhaps, too, it is easier to paint a landscape on canvas than it is to do so on a city; perhaps, in the art he left behind to become a social engineer, he can attain the perfection Jo’burg is denying him.
He has been commissioned to do an installation on a volcano on the island of Reunion and he wants to “play with landscapes in a more conceptual way. I’ve been toying with the idea of an artist who is involved with the transference of energy … islands … stars … the centre of the earth as the life force; what it all means.”
He talks about philosophy and life and the passage of time, the way empowered heterosexual men do, among themselves, on a fishing trip after a joint or some beers: without that cynicism that is the domain of the marginalised, and with a frisson of excitement at the novelty of self-revelation: “Wow!,” they say, “Look at the stars! We’re so insignificant!”, when they know they are not.
Till’s office is protected from Johannesburg’s netherworld by artful burglar-bars. There is a wrought-iron crocodile clinging to the door that opens out on to the junkyard — the squatter settlement dustbowl rail junction taxi-rank — over which his office would look if the blinds weren’t drawn shut.
It’s a graphic indicator of the problems with his vision; problems that have as much to do with the social architecture of the city around him as with his own empowered subjectivity. Should the Newtown Cultural Precinct be a theme-park for day-trippers with disposable income —a landlocked Waterfront — or should it be the breathing space for Johannesburg’s inner-city new working class? Probe this with Till, and he vacillates, as if he wants it to be both, but doesn’t quite know how. The problem is that his antagonists at the Metro don’t have the answers either — or even a particularly intelligent way of framing the questions.
If Till and the Metro could find each other, then perhaps Johannesburg could find a way of being an Istanbul, a Rio de Janiero — holding, almost as an article of faith, the ambivalences of old and new, of first and third worlds, of biennales and township cultural centres, of, to use Till’s own phraseology, “cutting-edge as well as formulative energy”. Instead, though, we pay our rates for the one to ride on hubris and the other to wear blinkers. And so we slide, inexorably, into Lagos, into Bruma Lake. The tragedy is our own.