A series of art installations has been placed at key points in Johannesburg city. What will these mean to commuters who encounter them?
Brenda Atkinson and Thebe Mabanga
Whizz down Smit Street towards Braamfontein and your mind’s eye registers a billboard image that might be a mine dump, or perhaps a desert.
Stroll down De la Rey Road towards the Oriental Plaza and there’s another that looks more like a beach. At the junction of De la Rey Road and Burghersdorp Street there’s another, this time reminiscent of the Top Star drive-in.
Each of the images is a blurred strip of photographs dissolving into each other: cool blue winter sky, pale gold sand, here and there a hint of water. Their meaning is elusive, more memory or dream than statement of intent.
The ambiguity of these billboards is the signature of their maker, Johannesburg- based artist Jo Ractliffe.
Their appearance in the city coincides with the advent of Urban Futures and its accompanying art exhibition, Tour Guides of the Inner City, curated by Market Gallery director Stephen Hobbs.
Ractliffe’s three billboard images – part of a series of five which can be seen on a smaller scale at the Market Theatre Galleries – constitute one of numerous inner-city interventions that form part of the Tour Guides exhibition. But their scale and content – for these are, in fact, photographs of mine dumps – have already made them a fertile focus for debate around the show’s key concerns.
One of these concerns, as articulated by Hobbs, is to create, at static sites throughout the city, moments of defamiliarisation that invite Jo’burg’s denizens to see their urban context in new ways. Hobbs’s particular brief to the artists on the show is to challenge perceptions of inner-city Jo’burg as a locus of squalor and decaying economic promise. The result is a series of random “arrests”, if you like, achieved through a form of “stealth-art”, that creeps up and surprises you when you are least expecting it.
One of the issues raised about these kinds of interventions is whether or not they have meaning for the average pedestrian or commuter: will someone waiting for a taxi look twice at Ractliffe’s billboard? Will a fruit vendor on her way home through Joubert Park pause to consider the bronze pigeon, cast by Luan Nel, on which she has just stubbed her toe?
Ractliffe might well be an artist of considerable stature, but do her image- scapes impact on the lives of the many people for whom concepts and aesthetics are at the far end of a more pressing hierarchy of needs?
As with most debate around artistic production in this country, conversation snags on the inevitable accusation that contemporary art is produced by an elite, for an elite. Where that pursuit is funded on a grand scale by the government through local council funds – as with both Johannesburg biennales – it is often considered to be a grossly unethical waste of money.
Of course, one of the ironies of projects such as Tour Guides is that much of the impetus of their effort is precisely to expand the realm of engagement with art beyond the confines of gallery walls, taking works into the spaces that large numbers of people do frequent. And as Ractliffe points out, in the case of Tour Guides, the intention is equally to educate the so-called “elite”: the academics, architects, town planners and so on who are attending the Urban Futures conference.
“The works and events on Tour Guides give delegates access to a more public environment,” says Ractliffe. “They insist on engagement – through experience rather than just theory – of the city the delegates are talking about.”
A quick poll taken on Jo’burg’s streets indicates – again not surprisingly – that people’s responses to Ractliffe’s giant photographs are informed by their particular relationships to the spaces in question.
A middle-aged woman who walks daily to Braamfontein station acknowledged their visual impact but was oblivious to their meaning: “I saw them,” she said, “but they are just white people’s things.”
A man in his mid-20s told the story of his family’s history with the mines, pointing out that he recognised one of the dumps. A motorist who claimed to have lived in Jo’burg “from the time Hillbrow was a joller’s Mecca” said his curiosity had been aroused, although he initially thought the billboard was an advert for a product that would be revealed in due course. A 20-something journalist said he found the images honest, because while they’re beautiful they don’t romanticise squalor.
Ractliffe says her intention was to get commuters to look at the city differently, specifically by using and subverting the billboard medium, which performs a certain function in the city. “I wanted to work within the conventions of the medium, but without delivering the usual information,” she explains.
“Obviously people’s responses will differ – to some it’s incidental, others will be curious, and still other will take it further. I don’t think the impact of these works pivots on degree of visual literacy: the point is that these and the other works do something to your experience of the city, and they are valid in that sense.”
Ractliffe believes that the impact of these kinds of public intervention by artists will become another part of the urban lexicon over time: as artists repeatedly interact with their urban environment, their works will inform the way
people negotiate its space.
Hobbs agrees: “People take the signification of the city for granted, and this exhibition set out to put certain visual
components we take for granted on display, iconically.
“These works are another part of the definition and function of city as spectacle: we put billboards in it, we have spaces for monuments to recall things, we advertise in it – it’s a support for all kinds of ideas and transactions. In a sense, Johannesburg post-1994 is an inherited city, one that’s changing all the time – it is not the monolithic, non-negotiable city of modernism. The works on Tour Guides are impermanent interventions which, on an ongoing basis, will hopefully, at their best, make for interesting re-evaluation of that change.”
Tour Guides of the Inner City takes place at various venues throughout Johannesburg and at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery in the Market Theatre Complex, Newtown. Tel: (011) 832E1641