Janet Smith On show in Pretoria
When your eye first catches the glitter and runs over the roughness of the sand, you don’t see the exquisite miniatures occupying spaces that would otherwise reveal emptiness.
On more intimate inspection, it becomes evident that there’s performance in every part of Motlhabane Mashiangwako’s The Efforts of Those Who Came Before Us – a dedication to jazz artist Johnny Dyani which introduces the sonorous instruments of sand, glue and mixed media to the double bass.
Those considering this recent piece included in Oto La Dimo, the collaborative retrospective by Mashiangwako together with Lefifi Tladi, will be absorbed by the harmony of the place in which Mashiangwako, a stalwart of the African contemporary movement of the 1970s and 1980s, seems to find his aesthetic today. His is a collection detailed with evocations of the higher consciousness of an artist, and the recent work occupies that same place in which his influential Afro-surrealist mixed- media paintings of the late 1970s were located.
Mashiangwako’s artistic path is entangled with synaesthetic power, and his current use of unconventional materials in iconoclastic ways, conceptualises an aesthetic rooted in Afrocentrism increasingly as ritual. Sand, white-sugar, water, coloured pigments, printer’s ink and mixed-media on batting – all of these animate the brush and the roller to elicit the metaphysical in materials drawn from the environment.
But no matter the excitement generated by a personal and artistic evolution in work which has not strayed from a fundamental philosophy, it seems the context created by the joylessness of apartheid has been replaced by an environment of aesthetic ignorance and cultural ennui. Even as the psychological conflict of political chaos in this country is stunned into silence, Mashiangwako and Tladi believe that a revisionist era in South Africa’s visual arts has yet to begin.
After nearly two decades of communing with inhumanity in paintings which were protected from the security police, the artists are pleased to be united again in a time of liberation. Oto La Dimo – essentially a search after Afrocentricism and traditional value-systems – spirals with the rejuvenation of the spirit, but also presents the artists as reluctant outsiders.
Once promised a celebrated re-entry into the cultural fray of a free country, neither has found a destination in a democratic country obsessed with sport and politics. Tladi would like to see South African artworks still in exile in galleries around the world repatriated to galleries and museums back home. Mashiangwako, whose portfolio reads like a mystical history of this country’s recent past, says this is the reason why artists like himself and Tladi must continue the revolution – this time against apathy.
Mashiangwako’s work, Meditator on the Sun, is as much a probe into an oppressed soul as are the shacks of Untitled, drifting through the feminine colours of emotional reds and dramatic browns.
“We are forever revolutionary artists,” Mashiangwako says. “Now we’re exploring how to get past people being unable to see that what we do is art. Once we thought the middle-classes would understand. Now we know they can’t tell the difference between a picture cut out of a calendar and stuck in an expensive frame, and art. This is our revolution now.”
Like Mashiangwako, Tladi has dedicated his life to reflecting on canvas what it means to be South African. He’s increasingly dispassionate about the meagre support artists get from a community which once embraced Black Consciousness and defiance. Yet he can’t accept that there will ever be enough reason to wash his brushes and stash them away, dreaming of a better time – to acheive what was inspired in anti-apartheid conferences on the arts in the 1980s. Art is forever transformational, it detracts from ordinary, banal existence and regenerates life.
In the rhythmical strokes of Song for the Sunflower, Tladi opens the way to the sixth sense, the belief in a higher consciousness shared by Mashiangwako. He has returned in the 1990s to the blissful movement of metaphor and to the voice of the spirit guide in works like Plotting Sound, Pha and Eng. If apathy resounds, it is up to the artist to discover himself again and to offer hope through an inner life-force.
Unlike the late South Africans Dudu Pukwana, Chris McGregor and Gerard Sekoto – artists who were denied their right to return to a free country and whose names are included in a list of people to whom Oto La Dimo is dedicated – Tladi and Mashiangwako are determined to continue the struggle for art in the community. It’s not a battle for gallery space which alienates ordinary people from artworks. Rather, it’s about bringing people closer to artistic production, restoring a unified human psyche.
Oto La Dimo is on show at the Unisa Art Gallery in Pretoria until March 21