Turning inside out

Sue Williamson is one of South Africa’s most influential and prolific artists. Focusing her work over the decades on the particular social and political stress pot that is South Africa, Williamson draws on intense, personal experiences to develop her conceptual visual art.

She was the founding editor of www.artthrob.co.za, South Africa’s premier site for contemporary art, author of Resistance Art in South Africa (1989) and, with Ashraf Jamal, co-author of the more recent Art in South Africa, the Future Present (1996), and continues to play a leading role in the critical formation of contemporary visual art in this country.

Her work has been shown extensively internationally. In January this year, her room-sized installation about the demolition of District Six — The Last Supper Revisited — was shown at the National Museum for African Art, in Washington DC. Other work is currently on shown in Dis/Locations at Sale Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain, and The Short Century, curated by Okwui Enwezor at P.S.1 in New York.

Her latest series, From the Inside, addresses the silence and the shame that surrounds HIV and Aids in this country. It was started in response to a commission for the International HIV/Aids Conference in Durban in 2000.

Williamson started by talking to people who were HIV-positive and realised a new approach was called for. Work seen only in galleries had no chance of reaching the larger community and therefore little chance of addressing the issues. Her solution was to make the work in public.

Each work starts with an interview with someone who is HIV-positive. Personal comments, or verbal notes, on living with the virus are extracted from these interviews and reworked by Williamson and her subjects until the nucleus remains — a personal core that the interviewee wants to make publicly known. This is the message Williamson then transfers to a wall outside in a public space. The subject’s name is added in vinyl lettering below the text, elevating the words from the genre of graffiti to the level of quotation. The wall is then photographed as part of the documentation process.

For the first message, Williamson worked with Mitchells Plain graffiti artist Falko to install young Aids activist Busi Maqungo’s message next to a railway bridge in Cape Town. The wall they chose already displayed graffiti of the Sexy Boys gang, setting up a resonance with Busi’s message: “It should be taken as a crime if someone doesn’t wear a condom and he makes you go to bed.”

It is the work’s location that gives it its power, alongside existing graffiti and in the eye of endless streams of commuters, pedestrians walking over a footbridge. This is the power of Williamson’s public art — taking influential visuals out of the white cube of the gallery space and directly to the audience.

With the consent of the interviewee, Williamson has also taken portraits of her subject-collaborators. These, along with the photographs of the walls have provided the works for her exhibition. On show at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg from Saturday are Williamson’s “double-portraits” — a term she uses to describe the adjoining placement of person and statement to provide two personal views; the face and mind, the lips and words, the eyes and hopes, the body language and its directives.

All works from the Durban Conference in 2000, including her Busi, 2000 — the first of an edition of three — were moved to Boston where they were auctioned through Harvard University to benefit Aids charities.

The wall messages attract anger as well as positive attention. For the third in the series, Williamson interviewed 42-year old Cape Town DJ Benjamin Borrageiro and installed his message beneath a bridge near the Gardens Centre, Cape Town. Two weeks before his death, Borrageiroand’s message screamed the accusation: “I’m sick of Mbeki saying HIV doesn’t cause Aids.” Reachable only with a high ladder, the message is still up 16 months later, though soon after it was installed someone tried unsuccessfully to paint out the name “Mbeki” — the name still shows through the black paint.

This work, Benjamin, 2000, reminds one of the 1988 poster by American activist group Gran Fury, “The government has blood on it’s hands.” Williamson says: “The link is very clear. Since the government health system denied him [drugs] through the invocation of a false ideology — HIV doesn’t cause Aids — Benjamin blamed Mbeki for his imminent death.”

Last year Williamson extended her series to Johannesburg and, working with a team of assistants from the

Department of Fine Art at the University of Witwatersrand, put 12 messages up on walls around the city. The documentation of this process was installed in the Johannesburg Art Gallery last year as part of the Joubert Park Public Art Project. One appeared on a billboard in Braamfontein and two more in the window of the Goodman Gallery.

Seen collectively, the Johannesburg series addresses different aspects of coping with Aids. Artist Judy Seidman’s message, “You have to work at it to survive. It won’t just happen”, installed in the Goodman window, acts as an umbrella for the others and makes living with HIV an action, something to do consciously.

Some messages are appeals, as with Daveyton resident Nosisa Ndlela’s’ message on the wall of the local butcher shop: “It is wrong for families to reject members who are HIV-positive. Families must give support.”

Others are reassurances about possibilities of a new self awareness. Aids activist Peter Busse’s message on Harrow Road (and earlier on the graffiti wall on Jan Smuts Avenue) states: “Being diagnosed HIV + can be a new beginning. You reasses what is important.”

In the wake of the recent crackdown on graffiti in Cape Town, the most recent message in the From the Inside series was inscribed on a vinyl couch, which was intended to take pride of place in the VIP lounge at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Good Hope Centre. The message by Cape Town restauranteur Andre Steyn was: “People with HIV/Aids should be treated just like anyone else … This is the new millennium …”

The organisers, however, insisted the couch be covered, calling the message “offensive” and “inappropriate”. Williamson sees their action as a muffling; a fear of thrusting what they thought might be an unpalatable message into the face of the premier and other government officials.

In protest, the couch was set up outside Parliament last week as an unusual item of street furniture, attracting the attention of the passers by, and photographed there instead.

Jane Taylor, who holds the Skye Chair of Dramatic Art at Wits, underlines the “sense of urgency about this concept [of public art]”. She says that art in public spaces is one way of creating authority for “South African citizens to contest state authority”.

She also sees public art engaging “both our inner and our outer selves”. This is the power of Williamson’s work. From the Inside works on placing our inner thoughts outside, giving perspective to our actions. They encourage us to realize, and to act on, the fact that what we do can impact all around us.