Christina Scott
It’s money. No, it’s art. Wait it’s pint-sized propaganda! And you used to think a postage stamp was just something that made envelopes fly to their destination, didn’t you?
Welcome to Washington’s latest exhibition of ephemera: Stamp Collecting Imaging South Africa. Here every picture tells more than one story.
Appropriately enough, 8000 stamps from colonial times to the Aids era are on display in that United States bastion of spinmeisters and image consultants: Washington, District of Columbia. If George W Bush preferred art to baseball, all he’d have to do is walk a block away from the White House to the beautiful and historic Corcoran Gallery to find some beautiful and historic and amusing contradictions.
Two earnest young members of the Voortrekkerbeweging, clad in khaki, gaze into the distance past what looks like an Olympic flame. Decades later, besuited and betied, Thabo Mbeki sports no fire but has a similarly earnest expression. It’s spooky.
Members of the royal family British, not Zulu smile stiffly in wool and tweeds. Later on, four muscular Gladiators grin in a sea of multi-coloured spandex. The authors of apartheid are replaced with evidence of their misdeeds, in an overhead shot of Robben Island. Traditional crafts such as beadwork nudge out stolid bronzes and oil painting.
“The stamp operates as both official currency and as a miniature work of art,” says the organiser, South African installation artist Siemon Allen.
The 30-year-old graduate of the fine art programme at the KwaZulu-Natal Technikon in Durban goes further: “The stamp is also a highly mobile record of visual propaganda.”
The show brings a more nuanced and detailed view of the bottom state on the African totem pole, which is important in a place like the US where most people cannot name a single country on the continent. Witness this conversation:
“Where are you from?”
“South Africa.”
“Oh, I always wanted to visit Africa.”
“Really? What country?”
Blank look. Nervous giggle.
Despite international interest in our political miracle, the country remains a place barely understood in North America except through a few media images. Mandela walking free from prison, grinning police appearing through clouds of teargas to whip and shoot, Father Trevor Huddlestone flapping like a crow in his vestments.
Stamp Collection offers more variety, happily offering up the contradictions between an image that has to be condensed to fit in the right-hand corner of an envelope, and the bubbling potjiekos of experiences and realities that quarrel and change on a daily basis.
Take the image of a beadwork red ribbon pin, the symbol for Aids awareness. As a stamp it operates as official recognition of a microscopic virus. “But behind this beautiful and modest image,” Allen says, “is a complex struggle of policy and attitudes.”
I take a look at my first-class US stamp: The Statue of Liberty, in a country where Mexican immigrants dehydrate to death crossing the border and Hispanic day labourers in the northeast fear muggings from white men masquerading as employers. Funny, haven’t seen that on a stamp yet.
For more information, visit the website: www.corcoran.org.