Art aside, the touring Marc Chagall extravaganza is a defining moment in South Africa’s emergence from cultural isolation Kathryn Smith When a major Marc Chagall exhibition was announced at a rather lavish reception at Standard Bank headquarters earlier this year, my first impulsive thoughts were, why Chagall? If the French wanted to showcase their cultural heritage, why not choose a living artist whose language is of the moment? Other than the obvious privilege of being able to view such work in its original form, how is this work relevant to contemporary South Africa? A show of this nature is a huge and costly operation. But as the essays printed in the lush catalogue reveal, the team of thinkers and cultural workers involved in the two- year process to land the show here anticipated virtually every criticism. The stakes are simply too high. Marc Chagall, who died in 1985 at the age of 98, is considered to be one of the 20th century’s great masters and sophisticated colourists. Two separate exhibitions, conceived as two parts of a whole, opened within a day of each other at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg (paintings and works on paper) and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town (lithographs) respectively. It is the first major show of a European master to be held on the African continent, let alone at a corporate or national gallery. The Light of Origins (La Lumire des Origines), representing the artist’s Mediterranean period (1949-1977) is not some package-deal show that trawled the international museum circuit for years, ending up here as a dried-up old art tart who has seen better days. The show was conceived of and curated specifically for a South African audience, with a tangible attempts at sustainability being established.
An intensive six week-long education programme has been devised, running concurrently with lunch hours lectures and walkabouts. The approach is to encourage an active, informal and highly communicative visual experience, and long-terms goals include curatorship and museology training exchanges between France and South Africa. Where Chagall in Africa is concerned, it’s not about form, but about content and context. Rhapsodising about “beauty” aside, to interact with this work in a modernist idiom is so overdetermined it offers little fresh insight about the conditions of its existence. The musical metaphors that are so often employed to speak of his luminous colour are purely romantic rather than elucidating.
Born in Vitebsk in White Russia (now Belarus) his life was traumatic, fraught with periods of exile in France and the United States. He eventually returned to France, which adopted him in much the same way as Picasso had been. This experience of exile, repatriation, memory, reconciliation and love fundamentally informs both Chagall’s relevance here (parallels have been drawn between his experience and that of George Pemba and Gerard Sekoto), which resonates through the choice of works on the show. In this way, Chagall makes a fascinating entry point into the grand narrative of Western art for many local audiences who can’t afford to get their art-fix in museums abroad. In his hybridity of styles, which fuses expressionism with fauvism and symbolism and adds a dash of surrealism, Chagall was a movement unto himself, cloned by no one. Chagall’s “Jewishness” has been a point of entry for many writers about his work, but as his grand-daughter, Meret Meyer Garber, was hasty to point out, it is reductive to frame him as a “Jewish artist”. He is an artist who happened to be Jewish. Chagall is not an evangelist, but proposes instead a vision of the conflation of art, life and spirituality, shot through with pleasure and fantasy that exists not between Biblical parchment, but in the realm of magic and folklore. His personal iconography is deeply rooted in a desire for connectedness and belonging, reconciling a fractured self- identity through a visual exploration of memory, loss and the personal – issues which have become de rigueur for many contemporary South African artists. But the conditions and consequences of hosting such a show, particularly in Johannesburg, are infinitely more interesting than the art. South Africa doesn’t have a museum culture to speak of, thanks to years of cultural isolation. As advisor and co-organiser David Lvy pointed out, French museums required much convincing to assure them that a Third World country could pull this off. The mere fact that they lent to a private, corporate gallery is a first. The exhibition is a well-conceived and socially responsible PR move by Standard Bank (and its many co-sponsors and affiliates), who are closing a gap left wide open by the slow but persistent demise of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Without corporate money, the show would have been impossible. An exhibition of this sort required major renovations to the gallery (the show arrived in isothermic crates), so that it now stands as the only space in Johannesburg that conforms to international museum standards with regards to both display and conservation. And while the spin-offs that the bank will enjoy have been strategically calculated (the show opens the door to similar shows of this kind), the real socio-cultural import of this project was best noted by bank chairman Dr Conrad Strauss : “It is wrong to assert that a society like ours cannot afford the so-called luxury of engaging with the highest levels of artistic achievement. We cannot afford not to.” Biennale pooh-poohers be silenced. But corporate money stands to cause less fuss than government money. With the exchange of cultural assets internationally now a reality, the success of such a show rests as mush with the audience as it does with organisers. Attendance levels could radically affect future funding. The confidence that European nations are prepared to instil in South Africa, illustrated through the loan of national treasures, bespeaks something greater than simply good faith and an endorsement of the process of transformation. There’s more than money at stake.
The Light of Origins is on at the Standard Bank Gallery until November 25 and at SANG until January 14 2001.