Brenda Atkinson : On show in Johannesburg
Looking at two Johannesburg exhibitions recently, it occurred to me that the position of the art critic – and of some artists – is increasingly one of impossibility.
This is because one of the ironies of globalisation, transnationalism, and all those other terms that would suggest the dissolution of bounded economic, national, and other identities, is that cultural producers are increasingly called upon to operate in terms of raced, gendered, and nationalised specificity. And when they fail to do that, artists and critics alike are both confused and culpable. British artist Nicola Gear’s exhibition, Key, at the Market Theatre Photogallery, prompted in me the all-too-clichd and unsavoury sentiment of xenophobia. It wasn’t Gear’s ephemeral and interesting installation that irked me, but the minibus taxi tour which preceded the exhibition opening. Gear undoubtedly intended the tour – which stopped at three diverse sites – as a way of marking the ambiguities of exchange across cultural thresholds.
But by packaging her personal experience of connectivity with cultural others through the “lense” of the taxi and some sound recordings we listened to en route, she assumed that we would find these instances of cross-cultural communication as profound as she did. She was, I felt, adopting a questionable ethnographic mode that asked local residents to collude in the exoticisation of their own urban culture. Joy Gregory’s Glove Project, exhibited at the end of her residency at the Bag Factory, provoked similar thoughts. But here Gregory’s identity credentials as a black British woman made me consider my own status as not black (as well as not British).
Gregory’s interrogation of aesthetics and the properties of beauty and privilege (signified in the veiled sepia of delicately gloved and ungloved hands), while itself beautiful and technically brilliant, seemed full of suspended intentions, particularly regarding the South African context. Her formal device wanted more, I felt, than the texts that finally only seemed to foreclose further interpretation: an explanation of the significance of gloves in European history, and textual reference to the Group Areas Act.
I wanted more. I wanted the concept in conceptualism to take me to a point of confrontation where I could draw on my own visual associations. As with Gear’s show, I wanted to be provoked, not told what to understand.
I understand contemporary, and conceptual, art in a particular way. I have learned it, if you like, from what is an insupportable position in certain strands of contemporary art critical discourse: that of the white, Western academic institution.
When I reviewed an exhibition by Indian artist- in-residence Ladi at the Bag Factory last year, I found the work conceptually thin and aesthetically ridiculous. David Koloane wrote me an angry letter, the gist of which was that I had grounded my critique in colonialist assumptions that sought to prevent racial and cultural others from intervening in a hegemonically constructed art history. These are fraught and painful questions. How does one assess intentionality within a global context, a context inevitably viewed from a specific geopolitical position? How do we deal with difference in our critical reception of works? How do we “read” the work of cultural others without becoming paralysed about our own “right” to comment, or without resorting to an ethnographic mode devoid of self-reflection? And how does the critic, no matter who he or she is, break through the terrifying, powerful injunction against “speaking for” cultural others, particularly when that injunction applies even to speaking of “them”?
Nicola Gear’s Keys is on at the Market Theatre Photogallery. Joy Gregory’s Glove Project is on at the Bag Factory, 10 Minnaar Street, Newtown