Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The white artists at the Bag Factory are young, the trendiest crew in South Africa, a trendiness manifest in clothes, mannerisms, reading materials, and racial attitudes (“that testosterone-dripping avant-garde,” Malcolm Payne called them). Joachim Schönfeldt presents his pieces under the banner of “Curios and Authentic Works of Art,” playing with Eurocentric definitions of “native” African production. In subtle, funny, and disconcertingly beautiful carvings, always made from the wood of blue gums (the most politicized trees in Africa, introduced by settlers to build struts for the mines), Schönfeldt combines an Afrikaans sense of kitsch with a cynical approach to those questions of art versus craft that the National Gallery prefers to finesse. Alan Alborough works with boundaries, crossable and inviolable, and has done a particularly powerful series in which children’s games become metaphors for social definition and exclusion. Belinda Blignaut’s formalist production makes a point of not engaging with politics. Kendell Geers’s art often includes the materials of violence—broken glass, barbed wire, the tires used for “necklacing” (the practice of vigilante execution with a burning rubber ring)—and incorporates poststructuralist and modernist conceits. The effect is often powerful and occasionally pretentious. The work of these youngish artists is sometimes too sophisticated; they fail to realize that nothing is more provincial than denying your own provincialism. Their work can feel confused when it tries to fit in with, but misunderstands, the international art world, and derivative when it grasps it more accurately but fails to add much to it.

For someone engaged in political work, Geers can be strikingly insensitive. “I’ve had as hard a time as anyone in this country,” he complained when I mentioned oppression. “It’s damned hard to be a white South African, especially if you’ve grown up without a lot of money and privilege.” Though it can be unpleasant for whites in South Africa to be constantly reminded of others’ suffering, to be denied a right to any sadness that is not empathetic, Geers’s life has not been as difficult as myriad others’ in South Africa; this kind of competitive self-aggrandizement is deeply troubling.

The competitive tension between black and white artists at the Bag Factory is hard to overlook, much as the residents deny it. Foreign critics and curators tend to focus on black artists even though the work of white artists is generally accessible to them and the work of black artists is often more reliant on local context for its meanings. “It’s pretty unfashionable to be white here,” Kendell Geers said. Wayne Barker, who likes to play the enfant terrible, conflates personal, formal, and social concerns in highly theatrical and often angry work. He submitted a work to a 1990 drawing competition under the black-sounding pseudonym Andrew Moletsi, and it achieved some renown. He suggested that all white artists should work in this way to break down the existing barriers.

Among the younger Cape Town artists who work in a similar mode to the Bag Factory group, Beezy Bailey—whose captivating, hyperexpressive, loosely conceptual, highly imagined, pink-and-orange-and-green work had had some success but had never entered the top echelon of South African galleries—took Barker’s challenge to heart. In 1991 he submitted work to the prestigious Cape Town Triennial. One piece went in as the work of Beezy Bailey, and three others he submitted as the work of Joyce Ntobe, a domestic worker. No one paid much attention to the Bailey work, but Ntobe’s work was purchased by the National Gallery. He revealed the ruse only months later. Bailey and many other white artists believe that the buying of black work because it is black does more in the long run to erode black self-esteem than to increase it. Bailey subsequently mounted a “collaborative” exhibition of work by himself and Ntobe; he continues to promote his work along with that of his black alter ego, claiming that only by trying to live with both a black and a white vision can one be an artist of the New South Africa. The white liberal community was outraged at Bailey’s ploy, but many black artists applauded his courage.

I asked David Koloane, who is black, and Beezy Bailey, who is white, how they became painters. “I’d always liked to draw,” said Koloane, “but I never knew you could do anything with this. When I was sixteen, Louis Maqhubela moved in across the street from me and said there were people called artists who did drawing and painting and nothing else as their work. We decided we wanted to do that.” Koloane, at sixteen, had never heard of art. Bailey said, “When I was sixteen, I was seated next to Andy Warhol at lunch, and he suggested I apply to the London art schools.” Lunch on Fridays is all very well, but it doesn’t align such differences.

The White Liberal Artists