Posted on Friday 7th March,2008
Scratching the surface of South African art
By Aarti wa Njoroge
The New York Philharmonic Orchestra playing in Pyongyang, Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, in February 2008 was a monumental mediatised occasion. A second event taking one nation’s heritage to another’s public courted significantly less attention, maybe because the two countries are not at war, or since neither touts itself as an ideological force to be reckoned with. And South Africa has rolled back its nuclear program.
Scratches on the Face: Antiquity and contemporaneity in South African works of art from Iziko Museums of Cape Town, an exhibition with an unwieldy title that has toured Delhi and Mumbai (Bombay), is nonetheless worth mentioning, both for its content and symbolism. For while Gandhi is the most famous Indian export to South Africa, the diaspora is still present (Indian economic migration has meant more traffic in that direction) and both have freed themselves from colonialism, it was time the two took their relationship to another level. Like the NY Phil and the DPNK, culture has been given the responsibility.
The similarities do not end there. Scratches on the Face includes the work of people of Indian origin in the same way the NY Phil includes Koreans. An exhibition spanning such a long period inevitably scratches the surface, just as the concert was a mere glimpse into western classical music. (The scratching of the title “is explored in a number of works both metaphorically – in terms of hurting or wounding – and [literally, referring to the] ingenious use of sgraffito techniques employed by indigenous artists on eggshell, stone and horn.”[1])
Race and contemporary South African art are inextricably linked. “Apartheid’s rank insensitivities were reflected in its near-blindness to the significance of the visual arts [with the National Party trying to classify them as ‘white’, ‘coloured’ and ‘bantu’].” “In the 1980s attempts were even made to make [South Africa’s National Gallery] a ‘white only affairs’ institution. Fortunately this was resisted by its staff and Trustees.”[2] And Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art, a 1985 exhibition in Johannesburg, included the works of a number of the artists featured in Scratches on the Face.
Art theorist John Berger looked beyond race, “[commenting] that ‘philistinism is impatience with art’.”[3] What is racism if not another excuse for power? That power, struggle, human and environmental exploitation and casualties are rich subjects is not unique to South African art, but they contribute to it over and over in the works on display.
The subjects of David Goldblatt’s At the 50th Anniversary Celebrations of the National Party: Senior Members of the Party, De Wildt, Transvaal (1964) are unambiguously disdainful. Dark glasses prevent one from seeing many people’s eyes, but hard mouths leave no doubt. The image of a pensive Maid on Abel Road, Hillbrow (1973), also by Goldblatt, appears to be more sympathetic, though one wonders what is pre-occupying her. (Invisible scratches, one could say.) In Bantu Court (1952), a Ranjith Kally photograph, a white magistrate, seated on the only chair visible, is looking up at a black man, patently aware of the power he is wielding.
In the now politically incorrectly titled Mine Boys resting (sic) (1939), Dorothy Kay’s muscular figures contrast with Goldblatt’s portly party members. The mining industry and those that collaborated in it are criticised in Manfred Zylla’s series of self-portraits, Business (1970): he is putting on a gold tie which ultimately strangles him. Whereas Kay’s image is described as “dispassionate” in the accompanying catalogue, Zylla is considered to be a “very clearly articulate social realist, an artist who has chosen to participate in the struggle”[4].
William Kentridge’s 1991 animated film Mine contrasts the white oppressor’s decadence, safety and physical space with his black subjects’ claustrophobic and dangerous living and working quarters. Fictitious owner Soho Eckstein, lying in bed in a pin-stripe suit, propped up by pillows, pushes down the plunger of his cafetière. Instead of stopping, it penetrates the tray and into the mine-shaft. While anonymous miners dig and drill, above ground, Eckstein punches adding machines and cash registers at his desk. Kentridge's repeated erasure and resketching leave ghostly shadows of previous drawings, creating a jerky effect, “in parallel with his depiction of human processes, both physical and political, enacted on the landscape.”[5]
Destruction of the landscape as a result of man’s pursuit of shiny, hard metals and crystals may not have been what Robert Gwelo Goodman thought he was depicting in his 1917 oil painting Mine dumps and Dam. At the time, his work would have been a “[celebration of] the scale of imperialist exploitation and the triumph of its technology.”[6] No less innocent is Jacob Hendrik Pierneef’s N’Tabeni (1930), at least according to recent art historians. “[His] landscapes perpetuated the myth of the interior of southern Africa as an empty land, ready for the taking. In this could be read their incipient violence.”[7]
Today, apartheid is over. Arguably no contemporary South African art exhibition could afford not to have at least one image of the man who would lead the country after its first democratic elections. Nelson Mandela is captured by Bob Gosani in 1957 sparring with Jerey Moloi.
Still, the country is not free of violence. Power still preoccupies many artists, writers and musicians in ‘independent’ South Africa. Helmut Starcke depicts a throne, an ancient symbol of sovereignty, in his triptych Legend (1995). Indians will have been able to relate to the creation, destruction and renewal.[8] “The fact that there is a resurrection of sorts taking place in the final panel suggests that this sovereignty is in the process of being reclaimed and restored.”[9] Not all symbols in the works of art are local. Masks are not a part of traditional southern African art, but somehow seen by foreigners (presumably including the Indian audience) as being intrinsically ‘African’. “[A] Nigerian Ife head which appears at the beginning [of Mine, complemented by a miniature live rhinoceros carried up onto Soho's desk at the end,] alludes to exoticising colonialist attitudes towards Africa and its people, which reduce human and animal resources to trinkets and symbols of wealth.”[10] A mask also appears in Alexis Preller’s Christ Head (1952).
Let me not appear to be over-stating the significance of one exhibition. "It's naive to think that playing a single concert for what is bound to be the elite is really going to result in a substantive opening of North Korea," said violist Dawn Hannay.[11] In the same light, Indians are not suddenly going to embrace South African art. Yet, as Jon Deak, who performed with the orchestra after the fall of the Berlin Wall under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, put it, the late Bernstein "would have wanted us to go […]. He always wanted the arts to be in the centre of world events." Similarly, “[what] hopefully emerges for the [Indian] visitor […] is an indication of growing awareness, after three centuries of settler rule, of South Africa’s impressive pre-colonial past as well as the relevance of its recent and tragic history to contemporary art.”[12]
Aarti wa Njoroge
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[1] Hayden Proud, curator of Historical Collections of Painting and Sculpture, Iziko Museums of Cape Town [HP]
[2] Dr Z Pallo Jordan, Minister of Arts and Culture, Republic of South Africa (both quotes)
[3] As quoted by Dr Z Pallo Jordan
[4] Shelly Sacks, artist
[5] Elizabeth Manchester (EM), February 2000, http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=26469&searchid=9967&roomid=4615&tabview=text
[6] HP
[7] HP
[8] Creation-preservation-destruction is the basis of Hinduism, although “maintenance is an integral part of the processes of creation and destruction. For example, morning dies to give birth to noon. Noon dies when night is born. In this chain of birth and death the day is maintained.” http://www.rudraksha-ratna.com/hindu_trinity.php
[9] HP
[10] EM
[11] Guardian, 25 February 2008 http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2259640,00.html
[12] HP
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