A week ago I was invited to give the opening address at the presentation of the Martienssen Prize, a prestigious award for which third- and fourth-year students at the Witswatersrand University School of Art were invited to compete. These were the thoughts I shared with the artists, their teachers, and a large invited audience assembled for the occasion at
the Johannesburg Art Gallery in Joubert Park:
What I know about art is probably dangerous. Nevertheless, here I am, addressing you on the subject.
I struggled for many nights, trying to understand why it was I who had been called upon to throw light on these proceedings. It was only when I came to take a sneak preview of the work that is in competition for the Martienssen Prize that I began to get an inkling of why, perhaps, it was I, rather than someone who actually knew what art was all about, who had been drafted in to speak to the material in question. Knowing what art is supposed to be might well have proved a fatal impediment.
And yet it is not necessarily only me, but possibly everyone in this country who no longer has a handle on what art is supposed to be all about.
Take the environment in which this prestigious event is being celebrated. In scarcely a dozen years, Joubert Park has been transformed from a bastion of verdant, lilting civilisation, a place of sanctuary for genteel white folks, close to the hurly-burly of central Johannesburg — Joubert Park has been transformed into the real thing. Today Joubert Park is itself a puzzling, jarring work of art in transformation — which is what art is all about, after all.
But is it art, or is it desecration? It is certainly disorderly. But since the city’s new fathers and mothers have chosen to leave the chaos to unfold as it will, refusing to impose any moral judgement, and thus any moral leadership, it must be assumed that our new dispensation, as demonstrated in the area surrounding the prestigious Johannesburg Art Gallery, officially favours a laissez-faire approach to both life and art. Dada comes face-to-face with the ANC, only to discover that the ANC has already long abandoned the Freedom Charter, and joined the Dadaist movement instead.
What is the new point of entry for those who would care to explore the probing, curious, challenging world of the artist in the present day? You’d be lucky if you can find it, bracing yourself as you run the gauntlet of a parade of minibus taxis whose main credo seems to be, “Fuck art, let’s get this show on the road.” The entrance to this once dignified, rarefied space dedicated to the more delicate aspects of civilised thought has been obscured by the arrival of the long-predicted barbarians. “Art” has been relegated to a space as obscure and inaccessible as the subterranean vaults of the British Museum. There is, as I have said, almost no point of entry. And yet here you all are.
What do you find inside? The main entrance hall still gives the impression that the world is still ordered as it should be — or rather as a now-extinct species of hominids imported from a far distant world once ordered that it should be. In spite of the roar of the vengeful crowds, and the flicker of al fresco bonfires throwing shadowy images of mayhem against the walls, the colonial order, complete with elaborate moustaches and bustled petticoats and cigars and bonnets is, to all intents and purposes, still firmly in place. The hideously ornate gilt frames that contextualise this fantasy are themselves enough to send you screaming into the African night.
Bronze sculptures of bounding gazelles leaping carelessly across the African bushveld have already been appropriated from the outside of the gallery. Some hard-working artist’s earnest contribution to the preservation of a certain bizarrely Eurocentric aesthetic of order and beauty has long since been unhinged by silent African hands, and sold off for scrap — enough small change, perhaps, to keep a small family ticking over for another couple of days. The urban gazelles have disappeared in the night. A new breed of hunter-gatherer has emerged into the inner city.
In that act of survival, the timeless nobility of Africa, supposedly contained in the frozen image of those leaping, bronze gazelles, the timeless, ageless, apolitical nobility of Africa, has been wrenched off its plinth, and our time, real time, at a hundred murders a minute, has been put in its place. As the book says: Welcome to Our Hillbrow.
Why does this new, faceless hunter-gatherer, who is infecting all of us in his or her stealthy way, and yet does not sit still long enough to have her portrait painted; why does she or he not choose to go the whole hog, walk in through the front door of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and cut those colonial moustaches, with their haughty Victorian heroes and heroines, out of the frame completely? Leaving a suggestive silence in their place: a post-modern, Dadaist insecurity, in step with our times. A deconstructed emptiness, surrounded by the heaviest possible gilt frame. Or, perhaps, a framework of guilt. Which these hollow spaces we are inhabiting tonight might stand for after all.
It is interesting that there is neither guilt nor blame framed in the works we are here to absorb, and possibly heap praise upon, this evening. No guilt, no blame, no shame. To my untrained eye, they speak of more abstract feelings, self-consciously disjointed memories, lack of memory in a world that has fallen apart; as well as a brave reworking of the anarchy of the inner city into cautious new frames of reference; coupled with a desire to begin to know the self, in this elusive world where the self has been appropriated by a formless, colourless, untextured, external other, which yet lives deep inside our collective soul.
No moustaches, no gazelles, no petticoats. No Negro heads, no potato eaters, no Guernica, no Othello, no Desdemona — although we have plenty of examples of each of those brushing shoulders with us at every passing instant of the Johannesburg day. Art looks out, reflects inward upon itself, and struggles to find new meanings for the very concept of “art”.
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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