The South African contribution to culture — locally and globally — may be regarded as twofold. First, over the past two decades or so the country’s artists have found technical, formal and expressive ways to engage political and social questions of their time and place, affirming that art and culture can develop ideas and metaphors that can influence and change society. This is an aspect that distinguishes South African art from much of what is being produced in other parts of the world — and it can be an extraordinary and lasting contribution. It has already made the world sit up and take notice.
Second, we have challenged, and continue to challenge, the north/ south, centre/periphery binaries of Western domination. This is no mean feat. But what are the chances of these achievements being sustained and the hitherto untapped potential being developed?
For the politically engaged artist under apartheid there was no doubt about the identity of the target, and the 1980s saw the production of an extraordinary body of work that was stimulated and fired by opposition to the apartheid regime and made in the face of adversity. After 1994, both the challenges and the possibilities became more complex, ambivalent and unpredictable.
The white minority, together with a black elite, control the economy, while the majority of South Africans are sinking into the quicksand of poverty and are unable to realise their constitutional rights. A dominant culture of greed and profligacy has emerged,
fuelled by a macroeconomic policy that seeks to make South African capitalism competitive in the international arena. But that cannot meaningfully address the inherited inequities of the apartheid system, let alone transform them.
A number of visual artists are occupied with unravelling the past, they search and research history to try to come to terms with present experiences. A huge body of work has, for example, emerged from the hearings and findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Others remain engaged in the public sphere.
The escalation of crime and the concomitant threat to personal safety, suburban angst and security paranoia, the plight of the homeless and abandoned children and HIV/Aids are again challenging artists to aestheticise complicated public issues, as many had done during the apartheid years. For some it is a time to turn inward so as to explore identity and more personal dramas, and to investigate sexual and gender politics and roles.
Such work fascinates an international art community that is exhausted from so much work in the West that is not born from conviction or experience, but from the demands of fashion and the market.
A further contribution South Africans are making in the field of culture is our response to binary opposites imposed by the West. Since 1990 the South African art world has found itself facing (and often at odds with) a stream of visiting international curators and other culture-mongers.
Some are open to influence and discussion; others come with predetermined shopping lists and try to call the shots. We have resisted cultural neo-colonialism and Eurocentrism, we have learned to hold our own, but how can we hope to enter as equals when we have limited or no financial resources and are forced to perpetually go cap-in-hand, begging for funds?
Many South African artists, academics and curators no longer reside on the periphery of world aesthetic production and have entered the ”mainstream” with force and confidence, but they receive little acknowledgment and support from their own country. The funding available is simply inadequate. Practising artists attend residencies and workshops abroad, on invitation and dependent on the goodwill of those who invite them. For some artists international exposure has proved to be liberating and rewarding, while for those who come from disadvantage and deprivation it is often limiting. Overseas they are celebrated; when they return home the reality of their lives is unchanged, and they have a difficult culture shock.
The focus of South African aesthetic production and debate has shifted abroad, leaving those who do not travel out of the picture; they run the risk of being consigned to a Third World ghetto, if not oblivion, in the high-flying international curatorial circuit. Ironically, museologists, academics, curators and artists come from across the globe to see pluralism and multiculturalism in practice here, and to learn from us how to erode traditional boundaries and eliminate categories and canons that are not of our own making or that are no longer applicable.
The topic of unequal access to resources requires urgent attention, for if we do not address it, those in positions of power who live in the West — black and white — will continue to shape, if not dictate, how our arts and our lives are represented.
The South African National Gallery has not had an acquisition budget since 1997, and many sister institutions find themselves in the same situation. As a result, we are unable to fill the gaps left by our apartheid past and the country is losing major works — historical and contemporary — to international collectors and institutions.
Cities like Cairo, Bamako, Dakar, Havana and Sao Paulo (for obvious reasons I am not including Berlin and Venice) maintain their biennials at great odds and huge expense; Johannesburg could only do it twice. It is not only about resources, it is about political will, conviction and commitment. What is wrong with us?
The institutional framework for the arts, culture and heritage has changed significantly and for the better since 1994. The list of new policies, structures and legislation generated by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology is impressive, but adequate funding and efficient implementation are lacking in all areas, and some are in crisis.
We all know what government is spending on arms and a presidential jet, while R370-million only goes to the country’s major museums, heritage and funding bodies for film, performing arts, visual arts, crafts and literature. There are consistent attempts to relegate responsibility to civil society, ”partnerships” with the private sector and foreign governments and agencies. This is in tune with global trends and the global economy.
In the Cultural Weapon of September 16 Mike van Graan analyses the way in which colonialism has given way to neo-colonialism in a world order run, ”not on the basis of universal principles of freedom, or human rights, or democracy, but on profit, economic self-interest and the defence of the ‘way of life’ of the citizens of the ‘First World’. Alliances are made, guerrilla struggles initiated and supported, regimes isolated or sanctioned, armed intervention undertaken, ultimately, to preserve and protect the standard of living of a minority of the world’s population”.
In order to meet the demands of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, neo-liberal economic policies are implemented, welfare and social spending cut and subsidies to arts, culture and heritage slashed. Societies are required to take responsibility for themselves.
Globally it appears that multi-national corporations are becoming the new proprietors of cultural property and the market the patron. Arts and culture are designated an industry and run the risk of being subordinated by a political economy that regards permanent collections as trading capital, and aesthetic production as no more than an exploitable commodity at the mercy of market forces. This requires turning museums into tourist centres that have to be marketed and have to make money. Artistic production – a profound and essential activity of social worth – becomes no more than commodity. Filling in funding applications takes the place of painting pictures or writing plays, management workshops usurp creativity and the imagination.
Of course support is required from the private sector and foreign governments and agencies and this is admired and rewarded. I do not know where the South African National Gallery would be today without the contribution of business and foreign governments, for our core subsidy has remained the same since 1994. There are no tax benefits for donors, as there are for educational institutions, and we don’t even qualify for lottery money — not that anyone has informed us that our applications have been unsuccessful. We hear through the grapevine and see in the lists published in the press that parastatals have been excluded. Imagine London museums today without lottery money.
We value partnerships, but social expenditure by government, and acknowledgment of our role in society, are keys to our success. Lack of support for arts, culture and heritage and the pressure to constantly seek money from other sources — not to do groundbreaking projects but to do our daily work and fulfil our tasks professionally — diminish our dignity and status and threaten our independence. We need to seek partnerships on the basis of strength not weakness, as equals not as beggars.
Then, and only then, will South Africans involved in and committed to arts and culture be in a position to fully engage and achieve and take our place in the international community, while doing the work that needs to be done at home.
Only then will we be able to confront and interrogate a global system that wants to homogenise the world and that is creating deep divisions in the process, for the other side of the global coin is the local, and if threatened beyond endurance, it can change to obsessions with ethnicity, regionalism and fundamentalism, with insularity and the closing of intellectual borders. We all have the opportunity to question the values of our time, to make choices and to influence and shape our future and the narratives of our lives as South Africans. Let’s do so together.
Marilyn Martin is director of art collections at the Iziko Museums of Cape Town