Brenda Atkinson unpicks the curatorial pitfalls in the current Liberated Voices exhibition in New York
In an article on an exhibition of new South African ”visual languages” held in Zurich (”Dialogue lost in transit”, September 17 to 22), I wrote that exhibitions which prioritise the national ”identity” of the production they frame ”[touch] sides with a resounding ambivalence”.
Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa, currently on at the Museum for African Art in New York, confirms that this ambivalence is variously located: in the agenda of the organisers, which posits this show as both survey and snapshot; in the functional split between promotion and education; more generally in the mistrustful mutual regard of different art worlds; and in South Africans’ desire for international recognition and their suspicion of the cultural and financial largesse of powerful foreign institutions.
And of course in the art critic herself, recognising that most artists living and working in South Africa would agree that some form of exposure is better than none, and that the ascent towards individual art stardom, la William Kentridge, might of necessity be achieved only through the generic national show. This despite the fact that exhibitions like the second Johannesburg Biennale have proved that you don’t need national pavilions to make a point or interrogate a construct.
Liberated Voices is the first contemporary show to take place at the museum – which was founded by collectors of traditional African art – and was curated by museum director Frank Herreman, himself a connoisseur of such art. The premise of the show is to educate its American audience in particular about the state of South African contemporary art after apartheid. As Herreman put it: ”We wanted the public here to have access to a show which they appreciate and relate to. We want them to understand what they see.”
Given that a number of Americans I spoke to seem to think that Sidney is the capital of South Africa, the fact that the exhibition is historically reductive is perhaps understandable – it’s hard to grow a market for work from a country about which nobody knows anything.
If the aim of this exhibition is to educate, then certain issues are clarified: for one, this is not a show in which the artworld of high-flying blue- collar galleries is likely to be interested. The impressive catalogue aside, Liberated Voices makes no claims to intellectual, historical or theoretical rigour, and offers no self- conscious meta-analysis of its own process and choices. As Herreman describes it, it is nothing more, nothing less, than a fairly informally assembled potted history of South African politics: from works that reference ”the struggle” and the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission (Sue Williamson, Willie Bester, Paul Stopforth and David Koloane), to works that interrogate identity through overtly politicised narratives or materials (Zwelethu Mthethwa, Penny Siopis, Brett Murray, Richman Buthelezi, Samson Mnisi, and Thabiso Phokompe), to very personal concerns (Bridget Baker, Claudette Schreuders, with Sandile Zulu’s minimalist installation thrown into the mix).
Herreman achieved his curatorial focus through two visits to South Africa, during which he met artists who he asked to select other artists they believed should be included on the show. ”Certain names kept coming back,” says Herreman, ”and so the show was put together.”
As Holland Cotter put it in his long and complimentary review of the show for The New York Times, other artists might easily have been chosen, and the show might have attempted to answer the question, powerfully posed in Siopis’s work, of what ”South African”, as an identity category, might actually mean. For Cotter these ”might haves” are beside the point: he sees Liberated Voices as a fresh, energetic exhibition of work and information never presented to New Yorkers before.
Perhaps it’s because I’m familiar with these works, with their history, with the complexity of their political terrain and with post-colonial art discourse that I found Liberated Voices less satisfying than Cotter.
Perhaps I struggle to come around to the much-vaunted importance of such shows because, although I could hardly disagree with Herreman that ”art is made by artists, not curators”, I don’t see this as reason for curators to abdicate the research, responsibility and conceptual development that shows like this demand.
Perhaps it’s because, as a South African enmeshed in the racial and social issues which Herreman acknowledges mark all contemporary art production from this country, I feel that telling South Africans critical of such initiatives to get over themselves is – although perhaps less loaded – a bit like whites telling black South Africans to ”just move on” from 40 years of constitutional and political violence.
My point, then, if points can be located in ambivalence, is not that there be a moratorium on international exhibitions of South African art; it is that, if these shows take place, their subject should be addressed with a critical self- consciousness that has been overwhelmingly lacking in these shows to date.
An institution like the Museum for African Art, which deals with a continent and which finds itself divided between the sanitised and the fetishised, needs to consider that, while it has the right to represent the cultural codes of a country, the way in which such projects are engaged requires a sense of self as student as well as teacher.
Given the potential which the Museum for African Art has – through its location, function and institutional history – to engage the layers of South African contemporary art, Liberated Voices could have been so much more interesting than the almost accidental snapshot that it is.