Exiled photographer Ernest Cole’s work documenting life under apartheid had never been shown in South Africa until the retrospective exhibition on at the Joburg Art Gallery; the same is true about painter Louis Maqubela’s work, also recently on exhibition at the Standard Bank Gallery in the Johannesburg CBD.
When Andile Magengelele curated My City, a group (at times collaborative) exhibition featuring the young, largely unknown artists Senzo Shabangu, Nelson Makamo and Lehlogonolo Mashaba, this was foremost in his mind. For the independent curator, the fact that the works of Cole and Maqubela were largely unknown in their homeland was proof that the ‘cultural playing field isn’t level”.
His ire is directed at ‘so-called taste makers who continue to arrest development”, such as the City of Johannesburg that, for instance, has approved plans for the building of a mall next to the Market Theatre in Newtown. ‘Newtown [as a cultural precinct] is soon going to be history,” Magengelele says.
Among the exciting young artists featured in My City, Shabangu grew up in Mpumalanga in a village called Driefontein where he matriculated before doing a three-year printmaking course at the Artist Proof Studio. He has won the David Koloane Residency Award and works from the Bag Factory studios in Fordsburg.
Makamo was born in Modimolle (formerly known as Nylstroom) in Limpopo. Like Shabangu, he studied at the Artist Proof Studio. Some of his works have been acquired by pop star Annie Lennox and fashion icon Giorgio Armani. Mashaba was born in Kwa-Thema on the East Rand and studied visual art at Funda Centre in 2003; from there he moved to the Artist Proof Studio where he studied printmaking. He also holds a qualification in interior decoration. It’s appropriate that the three artists — one from the margins of the city and two from two provinces seemingly a world away from Jo’burg — have been included in a group exhibition staking a claim on the metropolis.
‘I wasn’t interested in curating established artists,” Magengelele says. Young black artists like Makamo, Mashaba and Shabangu, he argues, have suffered from the inertia that set in because of the prevailing ‘philistinism” and the ‘privatisation of culture” opening it up to ‘the vagaries of the market”.
He says there’s a need to ‘demystify the art gallery” for some elements of the black middle class for whom art spaces are no-go areas. It is a segment of the population, he says, with the means (after all, this class of people owns fancy gadgets, expensive cars and suburban houses), but as a sector is unaware of the value of investing in art.
When such people want an artwork to hang up in their living rooms, they head to the nearest intersection and buy street art. ‘It’s the same as introducing golf,” he says. ‘We are competing with shopping malls and shisanyamas [braais]. We have to make buying art cool for them. This doesn’t mean undermining scholarship.”
My City is an attempt to claim the ‘elusive metropolis” that is Jo’burg. The propertied class, the legal owners of most of the buildings in the city, have fled to the suburbs; yet the city’s residents — tramps, migrants and the working class — don’t quite feel they belong.
It’s a point he emphasises in his curator’s statement: ‘There’s no sense of ownership in the city. I always feel like a visitor. The only thing that makes me feel like I belong is the majority of black people around me.”
Most of the works reveal an aspect of the city: the grime and the graffiti; the ‘squatters” and the scavengers; gleaming structures and brooding edifices, from which even the rats have the good sense to stay away. Mashaba is, of course, at home in the city as he uses techniques that emanate from graffiti (a menace for most city planners).
Although most of the works feature everyday people doing the mundane — such as carrying a crate of provisions on the head or in a plastic bag — poignancy is achieved by throwing in colour, upsetting the order or by blowing figures out of proportion.
Some of the works seem to examine anonymity in the city. Not There Yet features the figure of a gaunt- looking, faceless woman. Another, Change, shows a besuited man, his face partially shadowed by a baseball cap, over whom an upside-down city (with Ponte City sticking out like a phallic symbol) is suspended.
About these over-sized charcoal and watercolour figures, Shabangu says they are ‘people trying to find their place in the city, desperately trying to be in control of it instead of being controlled by it”.
The upside-down city, Magengelele says, symbolises ‘the city’s sharp contradictions”, something apparent in the choice of gallery itself. The Project Space is housed within the sleek Arts on Main compound, just streets away from working-class hostels.
Some of the artworks suggest a city on the move. People stride across the dwarfish city and, in a work titled The Scavengers by Shabangu, snazzily dressed men are a testimony to changing circumstances.
But the most potent and, for some, the most frightening symbol of this mobility is to be found in a collaborative piece by Mashaba, Shabangu and Makamo depicting a taxi hurtling down a city street.
If the working class remains mostly invisible in the city, tentative in its ownership, the same can’t be said