The nature of SA art awards is changing to fit new realities. HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports
THE FNB Vita Art Now Award exhibition will soon be a thing of the past due to “the closure of many art galleries in South Africa”, says Vita director Phillip Stein. But there is no need as yet to write an obituary for one of the last of an almost extinct breed of local art competitions. Vita is not on its way out but up. From 1997 it will be reborn in another form, according to Stein, “in order to adapt itself to changing times and circumstances”.
Established in 1985, Vita has become the most accurate barometer of contemporary art countrywide, even though its selection process has revolved around Johannesburg exhibitions.
Over the years a team of selectors — critics, artists and curators — has been visiting galleries throughout Johannesburg to assess their exhibitions. Each show would be judged according to a points system. At the end of each quarter a winner would be chosen and at the award exhibition, held annually at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, an overall winner would receive the coveted prize.
“When Vita was first launched, the timing was appropriate,” recalls Stein. “There were many galleries and the political pressures were a powerful inspiration. Interest in black art was also growing.”
Indeed, 1985 is still widely regarded as the year that South African art came into its own. Paradoxically, one of the most repressive eras in South Africa’s history — the State of Emergency — seemed to unleash an unprecedented wave of creative expression. Local art shed its also-ran skin and began focusing on the distortions of its own history and that of apartheid South Africa, in the process acquiring a subversive status that it might not have occupied in a normal society.
Those years were accompanied by the sprouting of a culture of art competitions, such as the Volkskas Atelier prize and the Cape Town Triennale which was sponsored by the Rembrandt Foundation.
But by the Nineties the celebration was wearing thin. Labelled as elitist, the selection process was taken over by cultural workers intent on ensuring that competitions would be judged like lefty seminars. Rembrandt withdrew its sponsorship, having concluded that mud wrestling would probably be cleaner than cultural politics. Vita was also bruised, but not entirely battered, by accusations that it had become a cosy consensual cabal.
“Vita was always dependent on the lynchpin of our art life: the commercial galleries,” recalls Stein. “They were this group of invisible people behind the scenes who determined what the public should see. And inevitably, although it was the most representative and democratic arts award, it was limited by its retrospective nature and the standard of art during a particular year. And now the closure of so many galleries and the dwindling museum budgets have changed the face of South African art.” He adds: “Over the years we’ve had to adjust and enlarge our parameters”.
In many ways Vita is to South African art what Bill Clinton is to American politics: the proverbial comeback kid. It has outlived two of its three sponsors (AA Life and IGI) and is about to sign up with present sponsor First National Bank for another 3 years.
And while it will discontinue its annual award exhibition, negotiations are currently under way for new arts projects to be launched in 1997. The first, in partnership with the Johannesburg Art Gallery, revolves around an artist-in-residence programme. The second involves establishing an award similar to the Turner Prize in the United Kingdom, whereby the public submits recommendations to a team of judges on four artists who will then be commissioned to make works.
“What remains unaltered though,” says Stein, “is Vita’s ongoing commitment to recognising established talent and discovering new talent.”