The history of South African art has been chequered over the years, coloured by discrimination. Consequently, many significant chapters in its evolution fell through the cracks in documentation and serious awareness.
Academics Elizabeth Rankin and Philippa Hobbs have, for some years now, been instrumental in redressing the holes in formal and informal remembering in the annuls of art history, filling them with fact and anecdote — and comprehensive exhibitions of the work in question.
Their most recent project of this nature is a focus on the printmakers associated with Rorke’s Drift between 1962 and 1982, and a cultural centre initiative, linked to the Evangelical Lutheran Centre, which forged exciting possibilities for local art.
A place replete with South African history, having been named as a post office by an Irish frontiersman in the 19th century, Rorke’s Drift was also the site of a famous Zulu-English battle later in that century.
In 1962 the cultural centre was run by Swedish arts graduates Ulla and Peder Gowenius.
The Goweniuses had married while they were still students in 1959, and brought to the project their different specialisations: hers in tapestry weaving and his in printmaking, sculpture and tuition.
Without an articulate understanding of the ills and intimacies of apartheid, and no religious ideology to punt, the Goweniuses’ ideals were about making art self-sustaining, particularly for rural women, thus encroaching on its ostensibly exclusive domain as decoration for wealthy people’s homes.
Ground was broken for them when they met Azaria Mbatha, a Rorke’s Drift pioneer.
Mbatha’s representation of David slaying Goliath in the early 1960s — within the South African rubric of race discrimination and power-play based on skin colour — made the Goweniuses realise the potential in the medium they were teaching these young, black burgeoning artists. The visual language of printmaking and tapestry became a tool to extrapolate on political realities that were verboten in South Africa — particularly by black voices. And so the story unfolds.
The book, Twenty Years of Printmaking in South Africa: Rorke’s Drift — Empowering Prints, accompanies the exhibition, which is currently travelling the country. Considerably more than a catalogue, it is a comprehensive overview of this extremely rich period in local art history — one of the few that considers the centre and its most active period as significant.
The book is divided into four primary sections that elaborate on the difficulty of the research task, different periods into which Rorke’s Drift’s stylistic development has evolved, and the political thrust generated through the language of printmaking.
Ultimately, both the book and its accompanying exhibition reveal a rich litany of previously unacknowledged history and magnificent anecdote, fleshing out an important period in the development of local aesthetic and a critical political awareness by influential artists such as John Muafangejo, Cyprian Shilakoe, Bongi Dhlomo, Vincent Baloyi, Sandile Zulu and many others who went on to carve out exciting careers. Sadly, permission was not granted to reproduce Mbatha’s work in the book.
Endorsed by MTN, this project endeavours to tap the local tourism market.
Rather than only travelling to the big centres where the art audience is a given, it is also visiting the smaller towns.
With a troupe of young, indigenous drummers and a diverse but uniformly enthusiastic audience, the recent opening of the show in Kimberley —with its history of sidelining — was moving and remarkable. Dyed-in-the-wool Afrikaans-speaking white citizens stood cheek by jowl with the township residents, jiving awkwardly to the rhythms of the drum.
The powerful collection of prints on show demonstrate not only an astute command of political metaphor and expression, but a sophisticated use of printmaking approaches. These are not naive woodcuts or linoprints.
Here we see mezzotint and sugar-lift, subtleties of tone, the sensitive plying of acid on to metal plate, the use of colour, screen- printing, and photographic exposures.
The images are, indeed, overwhelming and belie their reproduction. The challenge, then, is to access the exhibition through its travels — and the material in the book.
Hobbs and Rankin have effectively put Rorke’s Drift back on the map.