A sweeping assumption about South African art is that, like the country, it has always been about division. While artists have explored cultural division, critics have dwelled on the division between fine art and craft. But like the country, attitudes are changing.
Nationally recognised exhibitions such as the Department of Arts and Culture’s Craft Imbizo and the First National Bank-funded Craft Now have done much to elevate craft to what can be considered a fine art.
Two recent books about craft aim to elevate the craft-worker further, to the status of art producer. Indeed there is great overlap between Elbé Coetsee’s CRAFT ART IN SOUTH AFRICA (Struik) [Buy online] and CRAFT SOUTH AFRICA (MacMillan) by Susan Schellschop, Wendy Goldblatt and Doreen Hemp .
The dimension the books bring to the subject is one of elevation. Like books about fine art these treat the craft object — normally functional — as an artwork. They reproduce images of the craft object for study and admiration, and they engender a cult of personality around the craft worker.
As in other echelons of the art world, both books draw little distinction between say a world-renowned traditional potter such as Nesta Nala and contemporary ceramicists like those at Ardmore in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal.
Both books dwell on the aspect of transition found in the production of craft, and Craft South Africa’s content is actually organised to reflect the idea of an art of “yesterday, today and tomorrow”.
These are great gifts for overseas travellers. If one wants to pamper them, why buy them a single craft object when one can purchase a delectable book with images of the nation’s homespun inventions?
Useful art comes in the form of public murals and is studied in Sabine Marschall’s COMMUNITY MURAL ART IN SOUTH AFRICA (University of South Africa) . Here is further exploration of the notion of transition. Southern Africa has always been a hotbed of mural production, stretching from the ancient San rock painters to the Aids-awareness muralists in cities today.
Marschall’s book is not a coffee-table edition. Rather, it provides a valuable catalogue and an academic discourse around the major moments in mural production over the past 20 years. If you’ve ever wondered who the hell creates these mammoth messages then this is your opportunity to discover their names.
Marschall concludes that mural production in South Africa “parallels the dramatic changes of the socio-political landscape”. As an art of relevance, mural production also echoes the African artist’s frustration with the high art world of galleries and dealers.
The contradictions in the art world are dealt with in Elza Miles’s study of the remarkable painter Gladys Mgudlandlu in NOMFANEKISO WHO PAINTS AT NIGHT (Fernwood) [Buy online]. Here is the story of an almost forgotten landscape artist who is the subject of a present retrospective of national importance.
Miles’s study, accompanied by incredibly well-reproduced images of Mgudlandlu’s paintings, tells the tale of a painter who produced a body of expressionist masterpieces — many depicting birds — in the space of nine years. The painter achieved recognition in the Sixties and early Seventies, when apartheid was at its height. And she produced her oeuvre from her matchbox township house.
Another painter to achieve recognition relatively late in life is ROBERT HODGINS, the subject of a glorious book published by Tafelberg and with essays by Brenda Atkinson, Ivor Powell, Kendell Geers and others (Tafelberg.) Filled with images of Hodgins’s paintings, it pays tribute to one of South Africa’s most extraordinary artists, one with a personality as colourful as his work. Characters such as King Ubu stalk his pictures, alongside a host of other mysterious figures, housed in ambiguous spaces, creating a whole world of wit and whimsy. [Buy online].