Nobody interested in modern and contemporary art can have failed to fall in lust, as it were, with German publishers Taschen’s lavish compendia — its grand summations of the oeuvres of single artists, or sweeping surveys such as Art at the Turn of the Millennium. The idea of such big, fat, good-looking books was to pack as much in as possible (a few pages per artist, a handful of striking images and a concise explanatory text), upping the quantity and thereby the quality of the book as a whole.
In her introduction to 10 Years 100 Artists, a magnificent new tome on South African art, editor Sophie Perryer admits frankly her ‘desire to emulate … international survey-type publications” such as Taschen’s — and the first round-number anniversary of our new democracy seemed the perfect time to do it.
Perryer, who until recently was editor of this country’s finest fine-art magazine (well, practically its only, but even so), Art South Africa, devolved the selection of the 100 artists to 15 curator-writers, and they each selected 15 artists. Then they all ‘horse-traded”, as one of them puts it, settling on the final 100, and then decided who would write about whom.
The introductory material in the book provides a clear statement of where each curator-writer is coming from, and what their choices signify. Thus, alongside the comprehensive cross-section of art-makers in South Africa as of now, we also get a cross-section of the issues that come into play when you ask questions about art and society: the relation to power, the return to the personal, the very notion of ‘shifting terrain”…
Race is, naturally, an ongoing issue. It permeates even the selection process: one black curator-writer, for instance, avowedly made his selection of artists on the principles of affirmative action, while many of the white selectors are more calmly multiracial in their choices. Thus the process of selection itself is determined by the state of the society this art is in some way reflecting — as is proper.
It is fascinating to see how certain specific issues are coming to the fore: for instance, three artists (Thembinkosi Goniwe, Churchill Madikida and Mgcineni Sobopha) deal with traditional African circumcision rituals and their role in the construction of masculinity. Here one can see the overlap of the bigger social picture and personal investment in identity issues, and the way artists can very constructively work in that overlapping space — this, I think, is an area that is going to provide much grist to the mills of our art-makers for years to come.
Identity, in fact, seems to me to emerge as the issue of the day, inflected though it is in hugely different ways by individual artists. Of its nature, identity as an issue also interfaces with social concerns, with the nature of tradition (and the impact of modernity), with history, covert and overt oppression, and asks questions about freedom itself.
The method of compilation appears to have worked, providing a wonderfully representative selection, and the texts on the artists are uniformly good — though disparate in style and in their authors’ choice of which aspect of art-making and artist-being to emphasise. For some, it is important to frame the works in conceptual-theoretical terms; for others, it is necessary to point out that basic material needs are still part of the struggle and/or stimulus to make art at all.
But that doesn’t begin to suggest the sheer richness of 10 Years 100 Artists. The images of artworks alone represent an archive of immense value. I cannot pretend that I have absorbed it all yet — that will take time. The images ask to be pored over, then looked at again in the light of other images, as they begin to speak to one another in unpredictable ways.
In its beauty, its breadth, and its intelligence, Perryer has fulfilled her ambition of emulating the Taschen-style compendium. She and her co-workers (and the designers, photographers and copy-editors must also be given credit for a job well done) have come up with the most important work on contemporary South African art yet.
There’s simply no competition, and 10 Years 100 Artists should stand alongside those Taschen books; it should represent South African art to the world. It’s hard to imagine that this book will be surpassed any time soon, though Perryer should start working on the sequel — 20 Years 200 Artists, perhaps?
10 Years 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa is published by Bell-Roberts, in conjunction with Struik. It sells for R375