FINE ART: Brenda Atkinson
TITUS MATIYANE stood in the middle of the gallery at a microphone, turned his lips into a pitifully squeaking trumpet, held a tune with his vocal chords and delivered a stinging parody of both South African national anthems. Knowledge to the Visitor opened at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery with a ripple of snorts and giggles.
The performance – funny, moving, and a little unsettling – set the curious tone for a show that is a fascinating and poignant response to the social necessities of survival in the cities and suburbs of Gauteng.
The exhibition consists of two elements: a drawing by Matiyane, who works at Consol Glass, and a scamtho mini-dictionary in progress, compiled by Joseph “Zem” Mdwayi, a maintenance worker at Diepkloof High School.
The two objects impact powerfully together, each giving the other additional contextual layers and sociological substance. Matiyane’s gouache, watercolour, and felt- tip drawing, which took three years to complete, is 20m long – a meticulous aerial map of Gauteng produced by someone who has never flown in a plane. Matiyane charts the province’s stretch from west to east, from Carltonville and Randfontein, through Soweto’s sprawl and Johannesburg’s grid, to Springs, with Mpumalanga receding into the distance.
Mdwayi’s dictionary is a guide to negotiating scamtho, an urban descendant of township tsotsitaal, and a language that, according to its documenter, “grows and accomplishes something new every day”.
Both works have been created, without irony, as structures for visitors or tourists to Gauteng.
They are codes, functional keys that seek to empower visitors to successfully negotiate the otherness of unfamiliar cultural landscapes: Matiyane would like his map to be positioned centrally at Johannesburg airport; Mdwayi sees language as something that, once shared, enables the freedoms of “communication, movement, association, and protection”.
It would be easy in a climate in which we are desperate to laugh at ourselves to read these works as ironic, bitterly laced with hard-won humour. Together, these are works that underline the fraught intimacies of anonymity in their shared historical and cultural landscape.
Knowledge to the Visitor is on at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery until July 26