Johannesburg Biennale: Good works, heated debate. Brenda Atkinson reports
Not since Cape Town artist Beezey Bailey adopted the identity of a black woman to get his work into the South African National Gallery has the local art world been as anxious as it is now about racial politics in the visual arts.
The tension follows events at a conference held shortly after the official launch of the Biennale in Cape Town this month, where local and international artists, critics, and curators were again faced with the spectre of racial misappropriation in local art production.
Plainly speaking, the issue is whether white artists have the right to make images of the bodies of black men and women, the argument being that this kind of art tends to fall prey to unexamined and unresolved – even if it is unintentional – racism.
While Bailey’s intervention might have been considered an amusing prank at best, and ethically questionable at worst, the stakes regarding cultural production have since risen, and the players are now international.
In post-1994 South Africa, what makes for responsible art-making has become a focal point of an intense debate – witness the controversy around Kaolin Thompson’s “vagina ashtray” – which came noisily into the open at a recent event held in Cape Town as part of the Johannesburg Biennale.
Called “Speaking of Others”, the conference was organised by Olu Oguibe, a Nigerian- born, Florida-based artist, critic, and curator, and moderated by United States- based academic Salah Hassan. Hassan asked panellists Colin Richards, Carol Becker, and Francesco Bonami to lead a discussion through the touchy territory of who may represent whom in the South African context.
But cool academic commentary was thwarted by other issues. Gender joined race in the litany of complaints: both Oguibe and artistic director Okwui Enwezor have written recently on these issues, focusing largely on the work of white, mostly young, women.
Oguibe has harshly criticised South African artist Minette Vari, accusing her of misguided political conduct in her artistic representation of black women (Vari, for example, morphs her own facial features with those of black women in some of her work).
And Enwezor has focused on Penny Siopis, Candice Breitz, and Pippa Skotnes in his analysis of assumptions made by these artists in putting out work that has, in his opinion, failed to consider its own racially offensive subtext.
At the debate, Siopis objected to what she called the “reductive and generalised” arguments in Enwezor’s article. Enwezor told her she hadn’t read the article properly. Siopis also pointed out that only white women artists had been singled out for critical attention, and added that this kind of criticism would make it impossible for anyone to make work about anything, for fear of treading on toes.
Hassan gave artist Sue Williamson the chance to fire the last salvo, which she aimed at Oguibe. He, she said, was wrong in thinking that critics could determine the intention of an artist when making a work.
In the words of one artist, the conference assumed the form of “a mini-truth commission”, in which confessions and accusations came to nothing less than a symbolically devastating brawl between the convenor and the moderator for possession of the microphone.
Perhaps what artists and critics in South Africa should hope for is that nobody gets the last word in a debate that is crucial to our ongoing redefinition of our work and ourselves.