Mirjam Asmal takes umbrage at Brenda Atkinson’s review of towards-transit: new visual languages in South Africa, a recent exhibition in Zurich
Out of anxiety for aesthetic, political or cultural ghettoisation, South African art critics seem to escape into shouting “colonial misappropriation”, “voyeurism” or “European gaze” instead of facing the challenge of an international art discourse.
For being invited to attend the exhibition, the opening, the “talks in the blue”, the conference and the website of towards-transit: New Visual Languages in South Africa in Zurich last month, the organisers expected Brenda Atkinson to come home with an informed evaluation, not with misinterpretations and reiterations. This article is by no means to argue that towards-transit is beyond criticism, but to show that Atkinson missed the point (“Dialogue lost in transit”, Friday, September 17 to 22).
The review sets off by stating that “towards-transit is an internationally curated exhibition of South African art”, even though the catalogue, designed, printed and 90% written by South Africans, explains that it is an exhibition curated in dialogue with South African curators, artists, designers and critics. The title, moreover, reads South African visual languages, not “South African art”. The difference, in Atkinson’s terms, may be explained as the latter being the one prone to a “European gaze”, but the former, according to the people who informed us, is accurate for the current South Africa as a place where boundaries between art, craft, design, comic strips and archival material are not divided with a razor blade, but where rather a healthy crossover exists between them. An exhibition of this kind, including the design work of Orange Juice, the comic books of Bitterkomix and the studio portraits of Mohanlal Bobson, but also a video installation by Minnette Vari and a spice/photo installation by Berni Searle, was a surprise to many European visitors to the Blue Room in Zurich, but should not have been to you.
towards-transit cannot be called a South African show for yet another reason, and that is because the Brazilian/Swiss duo Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg took part, as well as the international art theorist Homi Bhabha. The whole concept of towards- transit (or had Atkinson, as an ex- student of the guru, not noticed?) emanated from Bhabha’s theory. In fact it opened the doors for a true international debate with at its core the South African visual languages presented at the exhibition. The two quotes in the introduction of the catalogue are therefore not “strangely juxtaposed”, as Atkinson puts it, but meaningfully juxtaposed, true to South African (cultural) life at the moment.
It sounds like a grievance of Atkinson’s that “the diverse ‘visual languages’ … are thus spatially and discursively packaged as a self-consciously eclectic collection, one in which ‘South Africa’ is the hold-all term for a transitional clash of styles, intentions, perspectives and markets”. If there is one thing South Africans seem to agree upon, it is their multi-culturalism, pluristylism, and the non-existence of the European concepts of “high” and “low” art. Whether this is a transitional state or a desirable, lasting one, was left open for debate during the intimate “talks in the blue” in Steven Maqashela’s shebeen and the public conference to which Bhabha was invited as the international authority on the subject.
Why did Atkinson not speak at the conference or “talks in the blue”, as she was expressly invited to do? It would have been particularly interesting to hear the reactions of the artists she seems to feel the need to protect. Because in all honesty, I don’t think that inflated terms like “colonial misappropriation” and “voyeurism” are going to protect South African artists much longer.
As for the choice of venue: wrong again, there was no gung-ho diplomatic agenda. It was spotted as the place to show today’s visual languages of South Africa and foster the international debate that emanates from them. The Blue Room is in the same building as some of the city’s most prominent art galleries, offering the encounter with non- South African art. This same building also houses a school for asylum seekers, which is equally meaningful for towards-transit.
The inclusion of the sound work by Dias and Riedweg, recordings of immigrant voices responding to cutting questions, was curated to make Zurich realise that the South African mix of cultures and the resulting clash of styles that they may perceive are not uniquely South African. It was curated to show that “you” are not perceived as “them” by “us”, as Atkinson accused “us” of doing. Thus they were definitely not “categorised as national attributes”.
Atkinson was offered a platform not only to exhibit South African work, but to place it in an international context, to speak about it, explain it or enter into discussion about it. Was she in Zurich merely as a voyeur for a week long? Or did her evaluation just come to her on the way back on the aircraft?
Mirjam Asmal is the director of Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland