An invitation to co-curate an exhibition of contemporary South African art in New York is something of a dream opportunity in the local visual arts world. It is even more unusual and alluring when the project is backed by a generous patron, and involves the commissioning of new works for not one but two major venues, including the largest neo-Gothic cathedral in the world.
In October last year I became part of a curatorial team tasked with challenging New York audiences’ perceptions of art from South Africa. The man with the vision, and the means and influence to realise it, was Dick Enthoven of Spier, who had already secured an upcoming New York season for Spier’s resident lyric theatre company, Dimpho di Kopane (DDK).
The company had caught the eye of the Reverend Tom Miller, dean of the arts at New York’s Cathedral of St John the Divine, while performing to critical acclaim in London. Miller offered St John’s Synod Hall as a venue for DDK, and Enthoven, wanting to present a parallel visual art exhibition, immediately recognised the cathedral as a potentially breathtaking showcase.
The cathedral’s history as a locus of the anti-apartheid struggle, and its long-standing commitment to the arts, made it a particularly resonant choice of venue for an exhibition coinciding with South Africa’s celebration of 10 years of democracy. An initial site visit left members of the curatorial team awed and somewhat daunted by its vast spaces and ornate imagery, but simultaneously encouraged by the open-minded and philosophical attitude of the institution’s staff towards potentially controversial proposals.
This exploratory trip also marked the beginning of a dialogue with the Museum for African Art, which not only became the project’s New York-based partner, but offered to host an extension of the show in its space in Queens. The museum was a prestigious partner: it had staged the first major post-apartheid exhibition of South African art in New York, Liberated Voices, in 1999; and was at the time presenting Looking Both Ways, an exhibition of contemporary African art from the diaspora conceived by resident curator Laurie Ann Farrell.
It was decided that Farrell should join the curatorial team, which also included David Brodie, then curator at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Constitution Hill curator Churchill Madikida; art academic Liese van der Watt; and me, at the time editor of Art South Africa magazine.
It was a deliberate choice of the team and its adviser, art dealer and historian Michael Stevenson, to reject the top-down curatorial approach whereby art works are selected to illustrate a chosen theme, and to avoid following in the footsteps of numerous group shows that took identity issues as their start and finish.
Instead, it was decided to select artists whose work drew on the body and notions of ritualised action, to take them to New York and to formulate the show around their responses to the city and the two venues.
The artists’ New York visit in February was an inspiring experience for all, generating spontaneous reactions to the two very different, yet both fundamentally contemplative, spaces.
The title of the show evolved following much discussion between the curators about the artists’ proposals. Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art is described in the first volume of the accompanying catalogue as arising from the recognition that the artists’ responses to the challenges of both the exhibition and the historical moment were intensely personal and individual.
Constantly shifting feelings, emotions, memories and interactions are embodied in the objects we choose and create to respond to the world around us. As the curators articulated it, “effects become traces of our affects: they enunciate the power and poetics that characterise our interaction with the restless world through which we move”.
It was again with the intention of foregrounding the artists’ personal involvement in the realisation of the show that they were invited back to New York in September to install their works, a process that provided opportunity for numerous revisions in terms of placement and detail, and not a few logistical nightmares of hanging and lighting. In many instances, artists and curators were surprised by unexpected juxtapositions and resonances that brought new meanings to works.
In the cathedral, Mustafa Maluka’s desire to create a tribute to his friend, Cape Flats rapper and social activist Mr Devious, immediately asserted itself in response to existing memorials, as well as to New York as the birthplace of hip-hop.
Memorials also inspired Clive van den Berg’s Love’s Ballast, a reclining figure given the mark of the plague in the form of a large, raised gland. Madikida, involved as both artist and curator, found himself thinking about confessions and his own ambivalence towards the complexities of Xhosa tradition, giving rise to the video Blood on My Hands.
Wim Botha realised he had found a perfect location for an already conceived work, an inverted replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà , with maize meal and resin substituted for the original marble. Jane Alexander envisioned a tableau of hybrid child/animal figures in response to Psalm 51’s notion of “bloodguiltiness”.
Many of the artists established clear links between the cathedral and the museum. Minnette Vári, proposing an existing work redolent with Gothic imagery for one of the cathedral chapels, created a new video installation for the museum that echoed the structure of the cathedral’s spectacular rose window. Thando Mama proposed a two-part work, 1994, comprising an installation of figures painted on glass panels in the cathedral, and a video that brought the painted figures to animated life in the museum. Robin Rhode bridged the spaces between the venues with his Autonomous Drawing Project, designed to give furniture and other objects discarded on the streets new life, invested with memories of childhood playthings.
Sandile Zulu put the finishing touches to his installation in one of the chapels, characteristically using the elements of fire and water, by placing stones sourced at a local river on the altar and other key points, emphasising the centrality of nature to his art-making.
Claudette Schreuders’s carved and painted saint/mami wata figure was only complete once devotional candles and a red velvet kneeling cushion had been placed before her.
Berni Searle found a home for her subtle video work, Vapour, in a space newly created by the blocking of the entrance to the baptistry as part of the cathedral’s reconstruction programme.
In the museum, the hanging of Botha’s complex suspended room necessitated day-and-night work by the installation team to achieve the desired effect.
The opening at the cathedral on September 23 included a performance by Steven Cohen, winched up to the heights of the cathedral nave dressed as a living, glowing chandelier (and, to the relief of some, wearing a G-string beneath). A performance by 24 dancers on the cathedral steps, choreographed by Jay Pather, literally stopped the traffic in the streets. And Samson Mudzunga buried himself inside his massive carved wooden drum, presented as a gift by ambassador Barbara Masekela to the people of New York — and emerged a new man in a celebration of his personal freedom.
It was a night that left the huge audience blown away by the vibrancy of contemporary South African art.
The opening week concluded with a seminar at the museum at which many of the artists gave illuminating insights into their works.
A member of the audience commented that the socially and politically engaged works on display seemed to offer ambiguous perspectives on the achievements of a decade of democracy. To this, Pather replied that the exhibition celebrated the freedom of artists in the post-apartheid era to pursue personal and individual concerns. For the curators this was a welcome affirmation of an unusually but rewardingly open-ended process.
The project could only have been realised with the support of a patron such as Enthoven, who appeared to take great pleasure in encouraging every aspect of the creative process, as well as sponsors Spier, Brand South Africa, Nando’s, Hollard and Winecorp.
Season South Africa, comprising the exhibition Personal Affects and performing arts by Dimpho di Kopane, runs at the Cathedral of St John the Divine until December 3, and at the Museum for African Art until January 3