So it was impossible to get an answer on the main switchboard of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG to me and you) about anything. Telephone enquiries received an ongoing ”nobody home” ringing tone, and personal appearances produced the usual scenario of a well-meaning, bespectacled jobsworth from the old regime trying his best to kick his new-found colleagues of darker hue into shape to take interest in the artefacts on display, and also to take an interest in interested parties, like me, who would have liked to view them.
The well-meaning jobsworth, tie properly in place, told me that the only catalogue he could give me was the one for the exhibition that was happening on the other side of the gallery. But what I had come for was the strangely eclectic Negotiated Spaces/Black Identities show, for which there was no catalogue apparently available.
The JAG is changing, albeit painfully. The old must remain in place, but the new, the threatening present, must also be hung there in such a way as to make you see the connection between these two inevitably colliding worlds.
This, it would seem, would be the underlying reason for the Negotiated Identities: Black Bodies exhibition being there in the first place.
It is a pity that there is no catalogue readily available for passing visitors to pick up and peruse while strolling through this eclectic collection. The casual visitor is not given a clue as to why this has all come to be like this.
No lies. There is some beautiful stuff. There is some interesting stuff, and there is some challenging stuff. There is also some baffling stuff.
It is just that it would have been good to know why all this stuff, from almost half a century of supposedly black South African output in the field of the visual arts should be gathered together in a supposedly singular narrative at all. How are these artists’ works related to each other, anyway, apart from in terms of the colour of their skin?
Whiteys (not darkies) are asking if this is not a new version of apartheid (and the hell with them anyway). But at some level, the question has to be answered. Which is why the unanswered telephone at the gallery becomes singularly unhelpful. What do they mean: Negotiated Identities: Black Bodies? Who is negotiating what? And why is it only black bodies, through the works of supposedly black artists, which are being negotiated?
The whole notion becomes immediately suspect — especially given the contested, supposedly negotiated, space of the JAG itself, still striving to find its own negotiated identity in the midst of the madness of rapidly re-Africanising Joubert Park, Johannesburg, South Africa, Africa.
I am struck by how many images of black misery I am confronted with up front — images of sad black folk with supposedly nowhere to go, to hope, no aspirations to dream about. A language and landscape of possibly noble people with interesting textures to their lives and faces, but basically without hope.
Is this the image of Africa? All too frequently it seems that way. The enigmatic, stony-eyed faces of the Benin mask, giving away nothing, either of pain or joy, wealth or famine, insinuate themselves into the body language of the self-consciously post-modernist South African artist. The secret message of endurance becomes the self-conscious pain consciously or unsuspectingly reflected into the outside world.
And why not? It has been a painful, consciously neglected road. Why should this not be what is reflected in the works of art produced by those who have lived it?
It is not clear why this exhibition chooses to straddle so many generations of black artists, and so many different styles and formats. But the net result is instructive.
In the middle, for example, are Ernest Cole’s compelling, black-and-white photographic images of black life — stark, uncompromising, evocative. Cole, in his brief career, expressed the lives of black bodies suspended in a limbo dictated by an all-powerful, unseen white world. In the traditions of great art, his seemingly subdued characters are truly represented by the artefacts that surround them — the battered suitcase, suggesting the uncertainty of the migrant life, and the brand-new bicycle with its shining wheels, going nowhere. And the dark, questioning eyes, giving away nothing — just like a Benin mask.
Zwelethu Mthetwa and Sam Nhlengethwa take this a step further with their collaborative collages that piece together the awful bits of these same black lives and give them immediacy and meaning — a woman in her self-decorated shack staring into the lens with a look that suggests resignation and defiance at the same time. Who are you, anyway, to be looking into my world?
But the real context is given in works by Gerard Sekoto and George Pemba, the khehlas of black South African art, which provide an unexpected message of hope — not least because they bring the dazzling colour of black life into an otherwise dreary and unrelenting world of despair.
Both Sekoto and Pemba’s worlds represents a time gone by — Sophiatown, the early days of Soweto, the black life on the outskirts of civilisation that was not always regarded as necessarily being a final resting place.
Sekoto’s work, in particular, shows up his mastery at giving distinct personalities to his subjects, most of whose faces are unseen, character emerging simply by the curve of a woman’s stationary hip, the attitude of her leg, the angle of her head and the colours she chooses to wear as she stands on a seemingly desolate Sophiatown street and exchanges gossip with her peers.
It is just a shame, as I said, that there is no road map to guide you through what all these images mean in a combined context. You make your mind up for yourself. You negotiate your own black body through these multifarious identities.