The Africa Centre and Cape Town itself put on a grand show for the opening of Spier Contemporary 2010 on March 13. In the early evening a resounding, stirring piece of music was sung by a group of youngsters from the highest balcony of the City Hall.
Thereafter Andrew Boraine, chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership, reflected on the difficulty of holding an exhibition and awards that believe so much in their own importance (they claim loudly to be the “largest” and “most relevant”) in a sociopolitical terrain that is “fractured and polarised”, where “opportunism is the order of the day”.
Artist James Clayton presented his humorous mechanical installation, Washa and Gnash, on the pavement as the throngs filed on to the landing where Nelson Mandela made his first public appearance after emerging from Pollsmoor in 1990. Clayton’s work consists of copper tubing sticking out of an old washing machine. As the catalogue puts it: “Fuelled by high-pressure propane gas [the air horns] play the national anthem while being observed by a concrete baboon.” It may have had racist undertones but the crowd received it in good cheer.
Up the ornate marble staircase, within, the exhibition rambled, as did the crowd, through the cavernous mock-Renaissance reception rooms. I saw an amazing array of people I’d not seen for a while, some for decades even. It caused me to reflect on the nature of community and how self-consciously the art world navigates its co-dependencies.
The selection itself has been a bold task undertaken by the curatorial team of Clive van den Berg, Jay Pather, Farzanah Badsha, Meskerem Assegued and Mwenya Kabwe. The judging was done by three art world notables: Mark Coetzee, N’Gone Fall and Roselee Goldberg. Most arduous must have been the processing of the 2700 entries in 14 locations, as the catalogue notes, in a haute variation of the reality show SA’s Got Talent.
The unevenness of the selection is a compelling aspect of the show and not a hindrance to making sense of the art of the times and so we have conceptual works produced with advanced technologies that include a piece of machine-woven fabric representing the human immunodeficiency virus (by Jane Solomon) alongside, say, Phula Richard Chauke’s carved and painted wooden figurines of football players and tribal maidens. (The kind of thing that thrilled the art public in the Eighties when Steven Sack presented his breakthrough Neglected Tradition.)
In his catalogue essay, Our Iron Cage of Race, Andile Mngxitama steers away from engaging with specific works by black artists on show, but reminds us that the fractured terrain has given us “white whines and black laments”.
The black lament may be found in works such as Frans Masobe Mothapo’s life-like Makatzlin Lerole, a sculpture of himself as a beggar, and Richard Letsatsi Boller’s Shattered Innocence, an oil painting depicting child rape. To contradict Mngxitama, it seems as though black artists are presenting works of a diversity equal to their white counterparts (does this really need to be said?), representing the full gamut of experience, including xenophobia and challenges to authority. But such challenges, obviously, occur across the colour divide.
In her catalogue essay about the video works Art, Motion, Voice, Sarah Nutall reflects on Jessica Gregory and Zen Marie’s award-winning The Perfect Leader, which portrays a Mugabe-like figure dressing for work, then undressing afterwards. She quotes a voiceover: “Here is the Perfect Leader. Will we see the Perfect Leader? What kind of thing is it, the Perfect Leader? How does it function? Will we investigate that?”
“There is nothing particular about this body,” Nutall writes. “It is perhaps an ageing, tired body. But what is being shown is that he, the Perfect Leader, is just a body.” This, she writes, “signals a move away from the dignified body of an earlier ANC leadership”, one revered almost religiously.
Visual-art awards in South Africa don’t have a long or good track record. Over the decades they’ve come and gone according to corporate willingness to provide sponsorship and that’s often stood in the way of consolidating their importance.’
But this has had no bearing on the award-winners who, in many instances, have established international careers, seldom mentioning the local accolades they have garnered.
For a full list of winners go to www.spiercontemporary2010.co.za. The exhibition runs at the Cape Town City Hall until May 14