/ 3 October 2006

Soft power

If you’re a visual artist planning to make it in the world’s largest contemporary art market, Chelsea on Manhattan’s westside is the place to go. And that’s where these days you will find works by two inspiring South African artists — photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa and sculptor Claudette Schreuders. Both have made a significant impact on the elite international contemporary art world with their clever visualisation of modern Africa.

Mthethwa (42) is a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art. His stunning photographic portraits of the domestic environments of South Africans living on the economic margins are giving New Yorkers a taste of the vividly enunciated contradictions of transient contemporary existence at the edges of urban society.

In New York the artist is represented by the savvy, progressive Jack Shainman Gallery on Chelsea’s West 20th Street. This year the Shainman will exhibit a collection of new work by Mthethwa in the artist’s third show with the gallery in as many years.

Later in the 2003/04 art season, Mthethwa’s images will be presented at Artists’ Space, one of New York’s most respected critical frontiers for contemporary art. His work is also heading for the Sao Paul, Havana and Istanbul biennales in 2004.

Mthethwa’s photography presents an insight into the reality of post-apartheid South Africa that is at once despairing and hopeful. In photographing poor rural emigrants in their temporary urban dwellings around Cape Town, Mthethwa articulates the contradictory pace of South Africa’s struggle to integrate into the globalised world while striving to improve long-neglected social cohesion.

Looking at these images through a New Yorker’s eyes, Mthethwa’s exotic subject matter is provocative, with the potential to enrage and evoke a rant about the appalling poverty that still confronts the majority of South Africans. However, the artist’s intention is a good deal more nuanced. Mthethwa’s work is not about political sloganeering. In his own words, he is making the point that his work ‘doesn’t really pertain only to South Africa but to all places in the world where people drop off the economic chart, like Sao Paulo, India”.

So how does the ideal of hope emerge from this work? It’s in Mthe-thwa’s subjects’ faces: the pride and resilience of the Woman in Blue and White or Head Held High, or the demeanour of the young South Africans in Two Boys, Pink Background. Mind you, not everyone sees these images this way. Sarah Schmerler, reviewing Mthethwa’s 2000 show at the Jack Shainman Gallery, commented that this is a South Africa that is ‘a place of poverty and transience, where progress toward freedom has been made slowly, if at all”. Maybe that’s right, but by making us aware of the post-colonial struggle, Mthethwa subtly induces the developed world to make a more conscious effort to share the spoils of progress.

Mthethwa’s compatriot, Pretoria- based sculptor Claudette Schreuders presents a different insight into contemporary South African life. Schreuders’s clever carved, wooden polychrome figures have also been showing annually at the Jack Shainman Gallery since 2001. While she is yet to receive the same high level of international exposure as Mthethwa, the 30-year-old artist is steadily gaining critical acclaim in New York. Influential New York Times contemporary art critic Roberta Smith places Schreuders’s blunt figurative idiom in the company of the post-pop artist, Jeff Koons. Her 2001 Jack Shainman Gallery show sold out, which is not bad for an unknown contemporary artist in one of the most competitive art markets in the world.

What do Schreuders’s figures tell viewers about South Africa today?

They are distinctly political, but relate to the individual experience of South Africa’s unique apartheid and post-apartheid dynamic, unlike Mthethwa’s more globally orientated messaging. As a white South African Schreuders expresses what Sculpture magazine’s Erica-Lynn Huberty describes as ‘hyper-awareness of [Schreuders’s] own personal identity within a culture intolerant of non-conformity”.

This form of expression is perhaps best seen in Third Person. A white woman stands slightly taller than the black woman immediately behind her. The former is casting a shadow over the latter. The figures, as with all of Schreuders’s current work, are carved in West African colon style, which is distinguished by an outsized head on a small body. It is a powerful metaphor and leaves viewers wondering if the white South African is still, as Schreuders terms these figures, an ‘ambiguous alien” in today’s multiracial South Africa.

Unbeknown to the artists, both Mthethwa and Schreuders can be seen as important exponents of what Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government’s Joseph Nye has called the ‘soft power” of nations. In Nye’s view, nations build their influence in the world as much through culture as they do through guns. If South Africa is to attract attention and support it is critical that its cultural outlets represent the values of diversity, openness and tolerance.

And that’s exactly what the Jack Shainman Gallery is enabling South Africa to do through its championing of Mthethwa’s and Schreuders’s work. Through their efforts, the world is able to see a South Africa rich in sophisticated forms of contemporary artistic expression that are not mindlessly patriotic or utterly negative. In the images of these two imaginative artists we can view the ‘new” South Africa as evolving and energetic.