Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The older generation of white liberal artists were tireless in the fight against apartheid, always working to build a more equal society. They were the equivalent of the writers who won vast international approbation: Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, J. M. Coetzee. Yet they did not get nominated for the Nobel Prize or its equivalents; indeed, they languished in relative obscurity outside their country’s borders. Their heroism continues to be debated, and so does the quality of the art they produced. Visual art is always more oblique than the written word, and while this could be liberating for such artists, it could also muddy their professions of idealism. Apartheid was dismantled primarily for economic reasons, but the white liberal artists did soften a brutal country with their persistent humanity and moral righteousness. Yet they are now often deemed hypocritical for disdaining a system from which they have benefited and then marketing their disdain. Many white South Africans are almost as embarrassed by the label liberal as by the label racist. White liberalism can have a sense of obligation about it that is antithetical to art.

Throughout the eighties, the cultural boycott, set up by the ANC in exile and enforced by the United Nations, served to undermine the apartheid government’s appearance of legitimacy. Under its terms, foreign artists, athletes, and academicians were asked not to come to South Africa, and South Africans not to exhibit or compete abroad. The cultural boycott helped speed the demise of apartheid, but while that isolation had devastating effects for both blacks and whites, it had silver linings. Black artists in South Africa would have been largely cut off from European influences even without the boycott, but white artists would have been working internationally, a possibility that was rendered unavailable except to a wealthy few who could afford to travel. “The cultural boycott helped to cut the umbilical cord to the US and Europe,” Marilyn Martin said to me, arguing that the independence and vitality of the art scene were the immediate consequence of this isolation. “Of course the cultural boycott was cutting off our own noses at one level,” said Sue Williamson, one of the leading artists of the older generation. “But it did have the unsought positive effect of increasing our sense of South Africanness.”

Williamson does sophisticated work in which she confronts problematic local history. For a recent piece, she took scraps from District 6 (a rich and diverse colored area that was swept away because it was too close to white land and had too pleasant a view for the coloreds), encased them in Lucite, and used these bricks to build a small house, a testimony to what was lost. Penny Siopis’s mesmerizing paintings and collage/assemblage pieces often address women’s history and experience and the integrity of the female body. They are strangely overcrowded, full of faces and bodies pressed close together; the power of her work lies in its hidden quality of empathy as much as in its technical achievement and sophisticated intellectual base. She is both a rigorous thinker and the most humane artist in South Africa.

William Kentridge’s work is poetic, lucid, and eloquent, fully engaged with the situation of South Africa, but refreshingly free of the political self-consciousness that circumscribes the work of so many of these other artists. Kentridge is producing a series of drawings that make up films (or films that require drawings). He does large charcoal sketches, then redraws and erases them, shooting one frame at a time, to make beautiful symbolist parables, free-form, loosely narrative sequences tied both to the horror of the country and to the elusive associations that define human consciousness. They are at once stark and romantic. Kentridge puts together the music for the films, shows them as shorts, and sells off the final states of the drawings. Unlike the Bag Factory artists, he does not try to exaggerate the importance of South Africa above the rest of the world. “In Venice, we seemed quaint at best,” he said, referring to the Biennale. “We must figure out how to enjoy and exploit the margins where we live. Johannesburg will not be the next New York or Paris.” In his latest film, a complex dialogue between a white man and a black woman takes place in symbolic terms as they watch from their separate perspectives the creation of the landscape of the East Rand, an area east of Johannesburg that has been the site of extreme violence. Figures appear, are shot or killed and covered with newspapers, then turn into hills or pools of water and become the stuff of which the landscape is made, so that this bleak terrain, so familiar to all South Africans, comes to be not simply a geological phenomenon, but the physical manifestation of an accrual of deaths.