Brenda Atkinson
Excuse me, I’m about to gush. The object of this critical affirmation is a 500-page directory that will raise the excluded and chronically confused cultural majority in South Africa to the minority ranks (such as they are) of the cognoscenti.
A big welcome to the South African Handbook on Arts and Culture for 1998. Anyone who has ever spent days in a limbo of administrative angst, trying to track down Baleka Kgositsile for a quote, or whatsisname at Standard Bank for funding, can now reach for their handbook, do some real work, and watch their phone bills drop by half.
Edited by Mike van Graan and Nicky du Plessis, and published by their arts consultancy Article 27, the Nedbank-sponsored handbook is a wide-ranging document and database that pulls the veil from the word “transparency”.
Beginning with a selected chronology of arts and culture events from April 1994 to November 1997, the book goes on to provide invaluable information for cultural workers of all inclinations. It includes the White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage adopted in 1996, extracts from the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and details of Acts relating to language, film and video, heritage, the National Arts Council, and so on. It lists cultural festivals and events, national arts and culture competitions and awards, and just about every industry body you can think of. Moreover, it lists their bodily functions.
But the real import of this long-overdue publication is the access it provides to the seldom visible, frequently elusive “officials” who fund and direct arts and culture in this country. The handbook provides a list of contact details for national and provincial officials in the public sector, and a comprehensive overview of their budgets, including previous funding distribution, and guidelines regarding applications. The mysteries of the private sector are also revealed with glorious order and practicality.
In brief, what this means is that artists and arts administrators now have the knowledge resource to assume agency in the creation of a vital cultural community. While many are good at throwing up their hands in horror when local government funding is cut or withdrawn (as happened recently with the Johannesburg Biennale and the Africus Institute of Contemporary Art), few have worked out how to work the sponsorship system to their own benefit.
This is not a one-way problem: a culture of reliance on state funding has contributed to insularity and competitiveness both within and between different arts and culture sectors. Most artists chafe at the idea of getting their hands “dirty” by soliciting corporate sponsorship themselves, but the truth is that the private sector may be the only hope for keeping arts in this country breathing and vital.
But business is by and large about negotiation, and corporate concerns are not necessarily the wolves and philistines they are made out to be. As Nedbank’s Ivan May put it at the launch of the Arts and Culture Handbook: “Sponsors need you to be nice to them; they have very little reason to be nice to you.”
Elsewhere, art is considered a profession, and artists behave like businesses: they market themselves, and don’t consider corporate involvement a `degradation’ of their product. Of course, there are potential drawbacks to private sector sponsorship, and part of artists’ wariness concerns the censorship corporates might impose in the interests of their own commercial image and profile. Art is brushing shoulders with advertising in increasingly intimate proximity, often forming an alliance that’s not everybody’s tank of formaldehyde.