A sedate and evocative exhibition in Cape Town turned into a fist fight when some hecklers challenged the artists to prove they were African enough to qualify. Chris Roper reports
There were amazing scenes at the labyrinthine Cape Town Castle last Friday. It was the opening of Memorias, Intimicas, Marcas (Memory, Intimacy, Marks), a stunning collaborative effort between three artists who, very determinedly, placed themselves in terms of geography. Gavin Younge claimed to be South African and Fernando Alvim seemed to feel that he had some right to call himself an Angolan. Carlos Garaicoa is Cuban, but nobody seemed to care about that.
The works are also marked by geography: their meanings are circumscribed by the landscape of war in Angola, and they arise out of a visit by the three artists to Cuito Cuanavale.
The opening address was by Albie Sachs, who spoke movingly about the travails of war and art that occasioned the creation of the sombre, horrific and often beautiful pieces infesting the Castle.
At least I found it moving, unlike the drunken fool in the audience who insisted on heckling, shouting out comments such as “Albie, you may be right, you may be wrong” as he pushed his way through the crowd. He turned out to be one of the drunken buskers that had decided to play uninvited at the opening.
The drunken busker had an accomplice, a faux revolutionary who seemed to feel that he had a right to question the Africanness of Alvim. During Alvim’s speech, translated from the softly-spoken Portuguese by Albie Sachs in a manner reminiscent of some of the testimony at the truth commission, there was more senseless jibing from the drunkards.
Alvim’s speech outlined the sufferings of Angolans during the war – one million dead, 200 000 amputees, 97% of people materially affected. Above his head hung Younge’s Achtung Cabra, hollow vellum casts of quaggas that dangle in brittle formation. They should be fantastical flying figures, but instead are roughly sutured and clumsy, their mute reproach denying any whimsical playfulness.
In another room, a primitive wheelchair with mighty wings outspread sits brooding over some lost paradise. It is a visual echo to the end of Alvim’s speech, where he expresses the hope that the senseless violence of a mea-ningless war will never be repeated.
Moments later, Alvim is rolling around the floor, exchanging blows with one of the buskers, who turns out to be the mildly notorious Cape artist Tyrone Appollis. The transition from me-ditative philosophy to brutal violence is swift. Jibes and insults are exchanged. Appollis tells Alvim, mysteriously, to: “Go back to Europe.”
A large Angolan woman is screaming that she is going straight back to Angola, and that she has never been in such an uncivilised country before. A woman on crutches jabs at the combatants and Albie Sachs tries to pull them apart. Appollis breaks loose and tries to colonise a microphone, ranting about how they are trying to silence his voice.
The violence is ludicrous, as ludicrous as the debate from which it stems. Who has the right to represent “Africa”, and what is an “African”? It is an argument that can only ever be about the territorial ambitions of individuals. The only useful thing revealed by the debate is that the protagonists still believe that “Africa” can be quantified, contained, and owned.
In one of the claustrophobic exhibition spaces Younge’s laager of red post office bikes – the kaffirtrappers of the past – circle endlessly. On each is a TV monitor, playing a video that includes scenes of the hundreds of burnt-out tanks that scar the landscape of Angola.
The piece comments on many levels on the complicated effects of Western technology in Africa. The tanks are destructive, but the bikes are crucial to communication. When I ask Appollis about the brawl, he describes himself as a fighter, keeping African art pure from the encroachment of the West. He says, with no trace of irony: “I’m like Bob Dylan, man.” He also says that he is known as someone who “will cut off my nose to spite my face”.
It’s a clich that mirrors the essentialist Africanist debate, and even more the growing tendency among South Africans to think of themselves as the struggle- ordained arbiters of African style.
When I ask Appollis what it was about the exhibition he found so eurocentrically offensive, he says: “I didn’t get to see the exhibition, because they threw me out.” The very terms of the debate necessitate a wilful blindness.