When you walk into the African Pot, a Rastafarian themed restaurant on Rockey Street, Johannesburg, you are struck by a mural of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, majestic and benevolent, having supper with 12 dreadlocked black men.
‘This is an image of the last supper in the Bible. Can you see there are fruits and vegetables? We told the artist to emphasise the Rasta theme of feeding the hungry,†says Ras Elijah Phekani, a Rastafarian, who runs the restaurant.
The image is beautiful, striking and subverts a popular religious motif. Yet this is largely an aberration, as street art in Jo’burg’s inner city is rarely used to make social commentary.
There is none of that acerbic edge that characterises street art such as graffiti. It seems there is a keen awareness that art should serve a designated purpose: mainly to inform the clientele what a business is offering. This means the butcher has a drawing of a hindquarter, a cow and a cock; a barber has pictures of clean-shaven men. Similarly, a DVD rental shop has art works of DVDs.
It seems it is on Rockey Street that street art has social leanings. For instance, in the House of Tandoor there is a mural of Rockey Street itself. ‘We mustn’t forget what Rockey Street used to look like,†says Langa Mradu, who works at the venue. ‘This is how it was and we are looking back. I hope the Johannesburg Development Agency remembers to put in money that will renew this street in time for the World Cup in 2010.
‘That is Ras Eric [Mpobola] seated there, that’s a black cat,†he says, pointing at the mural. I ask him if the black cat is significant. ‘No, its not,†he says and points to another image in the mural, a cluster of men exchanging money. ‘Those people are drug dealers at the corner of Raymond and Rockey streets. â€
Mradu shows me the mural across the street from Tandoor, at Pavarotti’s. It shows Marcus Garvey, staring at the reggae revellers and extolling them: ‘Up you mighty people, you can accomplish what you will.â€
Some of the paintings seem hurriedly done; these are mostly smaller-scale paint-and-brush jobs. Many of the larger murals, however, involve sophisticated spray can art.
The artists use loud colours that remain even after lousy weather and other elements have taken their toll.
Guilan Lutu, a Congolese national, is an artist who concentrates on spray painting mostly landscapes and portraits. He says the price he charges depends on the nature of the work. ‘People say to me: ‘I want you to paint this to attract customers,’ if it’s work meant for their business premises.†He has done many jobs for Nigerian and Congolese nationals who ask him to illustrate their hair salons, restaurants and cyber cafés.
Lutu says his white customers mostly want him to do what he calls ‘abstract paintingsâ€. He says they might ask him to do ‘paintings of an African village, the sun setting or the sun rising or of a boy crossing a river in a canoeâ€. He says: ‘Frankly I don’t understand their ideas of art.â€
He occasionally does portraits and some of these are at business premises. Sometimes these do not seem to have a link with the business, though. At a barber shop on the corner of De Korte and Station streets, there is a colourful painting of a man, a woman and a boy: what might be interpreted as a happy family. An observer says this painting might depict the owner of the shop, who is married and has a young son.
Whether the art is functional, decorative or abstract there is one thing it never fails to do: grab your attention.