Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

“My work has many polemics and no message; it is not to inspire people to save the country,” Kentridge said. He has a strong ethical viewpoint, but he shies away from persuasion. The inherent danger of confidence about anything is his work’s only surety. He is secure in his methods and bullish in his beliefs, but he is the patron saint of ambiguity. His qualm-riven art consistently reverts to a critique of dogmatism, limning the compelling but necessarily fruitless impulse to know. That phenomena are indecipherable does not mean that they are disastrous. Kentridge presumes injustice to be an ineluctable characteristic of the world. One must confront it even if trouncing it remains impossible. He never lapses into the existentialist proposition that everything is pointless; he merely elaborates on the idea that we seldom know or can even guess the point of anything. But beauty is not incidental to him, nor is humor unserious, and questions are worth asking even if they have no answers. “One of the tasks of the years has been to find strategies to keep clarity at a distance,” he said. Both the melancholy and the exuberance of his work hinge on the impossibility of resolving most human problems.

Malcolm Payne, David J. Brown, Pippa Skotnes, and the capable sculptor Gavin Younge are the most highly regarded of the older artists in Cape Town. Among younger artists, Kate Gottgens’s kitschy landscapes are full of romance and dread and cleverly play with the South African obsession with fear. Barend de Wet’s sculpture and installation are powerful also. Andries Botha is the leading artist of Durban, and his sculptural constructions often express European ideas with African techniques. Botha has been accused by white liberals of having exploited the workers who actually construct his sculpture. He is inept at the rhetoric of liberalism (an Anglo invention more than an Afrikaans one), but two black assistants defended him to me; they said that by teaching in the townships, he had helped them to make art and sell it out in the world.

Jane Alexander’s large-scale models of displaced or homeless black men, built in plaster and then dressed in scrap clothing, are eerie, desolate, and compellingly human. “In the New South Africa, there won’t be a place for work like mine,” she commented wistfully but not sadly. “Everyone wants jolly little black men running around and looking utopian. Black artists paint their leaders the way Russians once painted Lenin. White artists will have to move into the background as part of affirmative action. I taught for a while in a colored school, in part because I wanted to reach out to that population. But I had to give up my job when a colored teacher came along who wanted it. In the next ten years, my work will go down to the storerooms, even if to you it looks sympathetic to the struggle.” I talked to her about the current politics, the spirit of compromise, the efforts other whites were making, the impetus for change. She smiled quietly and said, “A large part of the white population is trying to redress the inequalities as quickly as possible because they want to get it over with.”

Townships and Art

The borderlands between sinister social control and admirable attempts at social improvement are confused across South African society. Within the townships, art centers, mostly set up in the apartheid period, provided a venue for residents to make art and music, to dance, to act, and so on. They kept people off the streets, taught them a cottage industry, and let them discover themselves and their talents. Throughout apartheid, art centers also served a second function. It was illegal to organize political rallies or meetings in the townships, but it was not illegal to organize cultural evenings, and so forbidden organizations, including the ANC, would hold art events as a cover for their activities.

The support of art centers was an international priority until Mandela’s release in 1990. Before the midseventies, black art activity occurred only at Cecil Skotnes’s Polly Street Centre, at a Swedish missionary-run art school for black students at Rorke’s Drift, and at the Johannesburg Art Foundation. The foundation was established by Bill Ainslie, a white painter, as a teaching facility where black and white artists could mix. An abstract expressionist, Ainslie tended to teach abstraction, a safe style during apartheid because it was explicitly nonpolitical. With the black artist David Koloane, Ainslie later set up the Tupelo Workshops, designed to advance racial dialogue.