The biggest art shows in the world get under way this month. BRENDA ATKINSON on William Kentridge, South Africa’s most notable player
THERE are few South African artists who can claim as expansive a career curve as William Kentridge, nor as consistently impressive a body of work. It seems that 1997 will consolidate his international status – he is involved in no fewer than 10 projects, including a play, Ubu, which is to tour 12 European countries in the second half of the year; an opera; and a solo show at San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
As South Africa prepares for the second Johannesburg Biennale in October this year, Europe’s summer months are sprouting more exhibitions and art fairs than you can cram into a calendar. Venice, Kassel, Munster and Nantes, among others, will see a vast influx of international culturati over the next few months, and a flood of critical writing about their political achievements and errors. Kentridge will take part in Nantes, along with a strong South African contingent that includes Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins.
He is also the only South African artist who will show at Kassel’s Documenta X – considered one of the more seriously intellectual European contemporary art events – and as such, a significant locus for international attention. Director Catherine David has selected him not as a representative of South Africa – Documenta X has no national pavilions – but as an artist whose work merits attention, regardless of its national origin.
Biennales are strange and intriguing events. As the primary showcases for international contemporary art, they pick up on the private and public political moments of the countries in which they occur. They generate competition and exposure, offer crucial networking opportunities for artists and curators, and require vast amounts of money to manage. They are also frequently afflicted by confused – and confusing – cultural agendas.
Although Kentridge acknowledges that, in European terms, Documenta X “carries a lot of clout”, he’s disinclined to drop other work to produce specifically for a context in which he is not commercially involved. But he also finds South Africa frustrating in that the local art world tends to produce with domestic limitations in mind. “We have a small group of collectors here,” he says, “and people most often buy for domestic interiors, which limits the size and nature of the works produced.
“It’s easier in those foreign countries where state subsidies and stronger commercial infrastructure for art allow greater creative freedom.”
Linda Givon, owner of the Goodman Gallery, and in whose stable of artists Kentridge has been for 10 years, says that South African artists are too fixated on international credibility. “When our artists have an international show they forget about home,” she explains. “They forget that this is the flower pot and the fertiliser, and we have a responsibility to establish a viable culture for artists, dealers, and the like. The fact that William’s work has greater recognition abroad than at home is a problem.”
The need to pursue international legitimation whilst coming to terms with local art-historical tradition is one that seems characteristic of South African artistic production in particular, and most artists find it hard to strike a satisfying balance.
In terms of his own international success, Kentridge is pragmatic, concentrating as much on his passions as on opportunities for exposure. His video installation, or “drawings for projection”, at Documenta X will consist of Felix in Exile, made in 1994, and The History of the Main Complaint, made last year, only partly with Documenta X in mind. The decision has also allowed him to concentrate on Ubu, which he currently considers his primary – and very organic – project. The adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s play, scripted by University of the Western Cape art historian Jane Taylor, and based on transcripts from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, pulls the original into the contemporary South African context with a deeply surreal spin. Ubu, which showcased in Johannesburg recently, will have its European debut in Weimar in June, just as Documenta X begins its 100-day run. Unfortunately, South African presence at Havana, Kassel and Nantes this year has done little to soften the hard fact that the Department of Arts and Culture has found itself unable to pull off one of its most important tasks.
An embarrassing and curiously opaque administrative bungle has meant that South Africa will not be represented at Venice, the oldest – and for many the most prestigious – Biennale in the world. It’s a worrying omission given our lengthy absence from events of this calibre, and the sense that South Africa’s “flavour of the month” status in international art circles is facing the dusk of its post-1994 glory days.
Givon blames a top-heavy local administrative structure for the scuttling of Venice. “Biennales have immense value for networking,” she says, “which is very important for our artists and curators, particularly given years of isolation from other developing countries.” She is also less than impressed with the modus operandi of the Johannesburg Biennale, which in her opinion has been shrouded in secrecy. “They’ll say it’s funding,” she says, “but it’s also because there are more directors on board than staff members.” For all the controversy that surrounded the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995, Givon feels that everyone had a sense of what was going on, that “at least there were meetings and sarmies!”
Givon will not be offering her impressive new gallery for use as an official Biennale space – instead, Pat Mautloa and David Koloane have a show in the pipeline called If You Scratch, which will move to the Goodman after its run at Grahamstown. As a dealer and gallery “co-ordinator”, Givon says she has a responsibility to her artists, and is averse to entering a commercial hiatus to support a Biennale she thinks of as being rude to its local constituency.
Kentridge, who will work with Korean curator Yu Yeon Kim at the Johannesburg Biennale, has little to say about its political workings or viability, other than that he hasn’t “been very close to it”. He is concerned about the degeneration of the Newtown Cultural Precinct and doesn’t have much of a sense of the shape the Biennale will finally take.
Of the 1995 Biennale, he says although there was no sense of immediate results, these have become apparent over time. Most of the projects he’s now involved in internationally have emerged as a result of foreign visitors seeing his work here – something he takes as an encouragement to “go on working in a fairly idiosyncratic way”.
South Africa’s lengthy absence from world cultural events has nurtured both an emergent sense of identity and a hunger for international credibility. The latter might well have to take a back seat as we begin to clear the political and administrative mess that seems to clutter our own back yard.