Despite acclaim, the Second Johannesburg Biennale is likely to close early. What, asks Brenda Atkinson, went wrong?
After more than a year of political foreplay and a consummation between Art and the Public that never quite took place, the second Johannesburg Biennale faces closure a month early, following the last-minute withdrawal of funds by the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council.
According to Executive Officer for Arts, Culture, Development, and Facilities Victor Modise, the council “was aware of the financial crisis some time ago”. This, and the fact that the council’s financial commitment of R3,5-million just two months ago made it the biennale’s primary sponsor, indicate a communicative gap behind an act that is startling in the scope of its political ineptitude. And the existence of future biennales is in jeopardy.
According to sources both within and outside of the Africus Institute of Contemporary Art (AICA), the biennale’s administrative headquarters, neither they nor other local parties involved in the biennale were consulted.
Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa, AICA Director and chief mediator between the council and the biennale, says the former approached biennale staff only after they had taken the decision to close: “They decided, then they asked us. It’s only now that they realise the consequences of what they’ve done.”
Modise denies accusations of unilateral decision-making, but his version of events supports such a view of the committee’s processes. His meeting with biennale management before November 8 to discuss and cost “options for closure” suggests that closure was a fait accompli that simply required co-operation over strategy.
Such apparently uneven consultation is not the only aspect to the closure controversy: the amount that the city hopes to save ranges, in different reports, from R200 000 (unofficial) to R1-million (official). According to Dhlomo-Mautloa, AICA’s shortfall is in the region of R400 000.
Although biennale staff are scrambling to raise the amount – they have already received an additional contribution of R108 000 from the Department of Arts and Culture, which will fund another week – the blow could not have come at a worse time of the year. Just two weeks before Christmas, private-sector people are away, staff are exhausted, and there’s little chance of recalling existing sponsors and asking them for more money.
Ironically, this is also the period in which the biennale would have received most of its foreign visitors, following extensive international media coverage, with the value of local print media coverage in the first month alone estimated at over R3,2-million.
The ironies of closing after two years of intensive planning in the face of dire financial odds, and having spent 95% of the budget, are not lost on anyone. But opinions vary as to where, and if, blame should be laid.
Dhlomo-Mautloa herself is tolerant of the council’s financial problems: “Council isn’t closing us down out of spite,” she insists. “South Africa should be proud of what they’ve helped us do against incredible odds, and we should remember that we’re not the only casualty.”
Biennale executive director Christopher Till supports Dhlomo-Mautloa on this point. “Ultimately, the decision to cut spending on the biennale was taken out of council’s hands by the so-called `committee of 10′, which seems to be a higher body that decides on cuts nationally. They’re not interested in the minutiae of each situation, and unlike the council, they don’t see the biennale as a special case.”
But South African National Gallery director Marilyn Martin describes the decision as “short-sighted and philistine”; Goodman Gallery director Linda Givon, a major private sponsor of the biennale, is “deeply concerned about future biennales”; and Henri Vergon, cultural director of the French institute, which is lobbying for additional foreign support, describes the decision as a fatal one for local art in a climate of what he calls “Afro-pessimism.”
“Many people are waiting for another sign that Africa is a failed continent that cannot get large projects together,”says Vergon, and the closure takes place “when for once Johannesburg could have been internationally recognised for its cultural initiatives, rather than for crime”.
This year’s biennale has been fractured not only by internal political and financial problems, but by a cool public reception and considerable local disgruntlement over creative director Okwui Enwezor’s handling of his South African constituency. Enwezor, in turn, has expressed concern about what he perceives as South African xenophobia, and has regularly chastised the South African media for their apathy and indifference to the event.
According to Givon, a stalwart of the South African art world for 32 years, Enwezor should have “assumed the cloak of our xenophobia before trampling on it – his lack of confidence in us has been both marginalising and humiliating”.
Givon is one of several critics who feel the biennale has failed to engage the community in which it is situated, conversing instead with an international audience celebrating this biennale as a landmark event which has invigorated the form per se.
While Trade Routes: History and Geography has undoubtedly broken with the tradition of the Large Exhibition, the presentation of the event in a specialised academic discourse that addresses global cultural and economic phenomena is perhaps a contributing factor to the paucity in the media of critiques of the art itself. A grittier engagement with artwork has been partially precluded by overdetermining analysis that is as annoying to some people as it is seductive to others.
The question of whether or not the biennale should take place at all is not on anyone’s lips. But there is debate about whether government or the private sector should bear the brunt of the costs, which this year amounted to R8-million (a negligible amount by international standards). And there is also the question of how future Johannesburg biennales will find ways of engaging the general public.
“I’m concerned about the possible negative response should the biennale close,” says Till, “but I’m more concerned that the spirit is kept alive, and that the process continues to unfold, whatever the teething problems may be … The primary challenge is to get the biennale into the public domain.”
That South Africans should still be defensive in the face of international initiatives on their home turf is perhaps not surprising: ours is still a traumatised society not fully healed by the ideology of rainbowism and the band-aid of sporting victories.
The challenge to both local and international cultural producers is to work with our history, to engage it, and perhaps to see biennales as catalysts for that engagement. They are not the conclusive episodes in our past, nor are they the only routes to our future.
And, like any cultural event, they cannot be the salve for every political and cultural problem. But with sufficient education, and in tandem with other, complementary projects, they could be useful markers in the process of our own making.