A little-known fact about South African artist Dumile Feni is that he studied film with Spike Lee in New York. Although completing only one movie, he created storyboards that were a heady mix of sex, music, death, futility, hints of narcotics and the politics of being black.
On show at his forthcoming retrospective exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery is his storyboard Nelson Mandela: The Struggle Continues. But the sketches here are not a reflection of the greyness of the title. Instead we see a maniacal visualisation of what the word “struggle” meant to Feni: in one scene, a pianist plays under the Atlantic Ocean; in another, a live woman has sex with a dead stallion.
Feni died in New York in 1991, in poverty, frustratingly short of living to see the respect with which his work is now vested.
While still alive there were hints of his posthumous acclaim. Solo shows at Gallery 101 — before his exile to London in 1968 — were seemingly the highest points in his career. Already at these shows collectors and curators sat up and took notice.
The drama in his Railway Accident was sufficiently superb to be shown at the 1967 São Paulo Biennale, and was also included in The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, the 2001 blockbuster show curated by Nigerian Okwui Enwezor.
Last year Bruce Smith curated an exhibition for Johannesburg’s Art on Paper, showing a collection of work Feni produced in exile. And now, opening on Sunday at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), is a retrospective that, according to curator Prince Dube, attempts to complete the picture of the enigma that is Feni.
In 1991 Wally Serote, then a member of the African National Congress’s arts and culture desk, first suggested the JAG show. Financial constraints put the project on the back-burner.
But later financing by the Lottery fund, the Department of Arts and Culture and the MTN Foundation meant the process could begin again. “Preparing for the show was an exercise in geographic forensics,” says Dube.
Travelling in the footsteps of the artist of Bushman descent, Dube tracked his movements through various towns in the Western Cape to Queenstown, where he relocated as a child. There, during his teens Feni made and sold terracotta sculptures from the Queenstown Museum, an astounding achievement considering his highest education was grade three.
After his move to Johannesburg Feni continued to work in potteries. Although he made forays into other art forms, it was only after contracting tuberculosis and his subsequent treatment at the South African National Tuberculosis Association hospital that he really began to produce his own work.
First working with artist Ephraim Ngatane on murals at the hospital, Bruce Smith writes in the catalogue to the show at Art on Paper, “later he also received support from a key group of Johannesburg intellectuals including Lionel Abrahams, Bill Ainslie, Barney Simon and Cecil Skotnes”.
At this point his exhibitions and success drew the attention of the government, which threatened him with relocation to a homeland. Feni was forced into exile. Moving to London, his path was picked up 36 years later by Dube.
Interviewing Feni’s friends, colleagues, lovers and gallerists, Dube constructed a tale of the artist’s life in London, and his subsequent move to the United States in 1970. Although he showed in a few group exhibitions, his source of income as a commercial artist was meagre.
The last 10 years of Feni’s life in New York involved heavy drug-taking. Living in poverty, at one time he spent a year sleeping in subway stations, later to be rescued by Hugh Masekela.
For the JAG exhibition, Dube has structured the work into themes. The first shows work Feni produced before exile. Included is African Guernica, a large format charcoal drawing shown last year at the Decade of Democracy exhibition at the Cape Town Castle.
The second theme shows work from Feni’s stay in London. The most staggering is The Scroll, a 53m visual autobiography executed in pen on paper. Taking nearly three years to complete, the narrative is not linear and includes annotations within the body of drawings.
The third and last theme in this chronological sequence of three is work from his time in the US. The most arresting are from his Nina series of love poems. Dedicated to Bergman, they show Feni and Nina together, dancing, pursuing each other in an erotic frenzy. Unlike much of his other work these are in archival ink on archival paper.
A fourth, seemingly arbitrary, theme showcases about 60 works from the JAG collection. Dube wanted to “demonstrate the significant inroads the gallery has made in collecting the work of black South African artists”.
The fifth, and last, theme shows erotic works. Evident here is that Feni found people sexy, and his depiction of erotic pleasure is so intense in some of the work that Dube grouped these together and placed them in a room with restricted access.
Dube’s interviews with friends of the artist, his colleagues and gallerists are shown as videos. It is these interviews that he is using as the anecdotal baseline for Feni’s biography, due for release next year by KMM Publishers.
Not much has been written about Feni, although Dube says, “Critics have described his drawings as romantic, quaint and naive. These writers were searching for the traditional elements of Western art. Upon not finding them, they frequently described his work as child-like.”
This may partly explain the lack of critical writing about much of black African modern art. Dube says: “Feni didn’t study art so his work is not premised on Eurocentric art teaching. So you can’t analyse his work using Eurocentric art principles. It’s like trying to referee a rugby match using the rules of soccer.”
Hopefully this exhibition will help develop a different history of African modern art; one that moves away from anecdote and focuses on the development of critical principles of analysis.
More details
Minister of Arts and Culture Dr Pallo Jordan will open Dumile Feni: A Retrospective Exhibition on January 30 at 6pm at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.