Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

But the dialogue being advanced was more focused on social reconciliation than on creating good art. I went to a Tupelo workshop in Cape Town, and it reminded me of summer camp. Everyone was talking, laughing, and having a good time; the smell of paint was heady, the conviviality, stirring. The same result could equally easily have been realized at a cooking class. Meanwhile, as South Africa fell off the top of everyone’s “oppressed” list following the release of Mandela, the money for socially engineered art centers evaporated. Some have now been abandoned; others have been turned into commercial operations. The Alex Art Center, at the edge of the Johannesburg township of Alexandra, for example, was once funded by idealists abroad, but now it’s virtually a shell; the potter’s wheels are still there, but the clay is not. On the other hand, the Katlehong Art Centre—in a particularly dangerous township, where big guys with big guns incongruously achieve peaceable fulfillment through weaving, printmaking, carving, and drawing—sells work to white South Africans, rendering it one of the township’s most profitable enterprises.

Black and white students attend Michaelis, the big art school in Cape Town. A few black people also study in the fine arts departments at Wits (in Johannesburg) and at the Natal Technikon (in Durban). The two independent art schools for blacks are Fuba, in Johannesburg, and Funda, in Soweto. But even in these contexts, the questions of art for art’s sake and art as a tool of social advancement are muddled. “We get letters,” Sydney Selepe, who runs Funda, told me, “from mothers who say, ‘My son has failed at school, so please make him an artist.’ ” The graphic artist Charles Nkosi described trying to judge candidates who had never drawn anything except in school science classes. Though some students are sophisticated, others arrive without ever having been to a gallery. “We ask about their dreams,” Selepe explained. “In this way, we move forward.” Sometimes, in these unlikely places, a true artist stumbles upon a deep calling.

The role of white people in these contexts is thorny. Stephen Seck, the white director of the Johannesburg Art Foundation, said, “It’s a two-phase process: the colonials destroy, and then the patrons help to rebuild. It’s been so fashionable to try to retrieve a ‘true’ black identity, as though the work were somehow more authentic before the whites came. Recently, some black students asked me for a class in color theory—they wanted to be serious oil painters. Is teaching them to do beadwork instead a matter of restoring their identity, or is it the ultimate apartheid gesture of giving everyone their place?” Whites simultaneously tend to diminish the work of black artists by patronizing it and to glorify it by sentimentalizing it. Most black and most white artists hate the belittling but commercially successful phrase township art, with its echoes of art born in a separate, primitive context; even more, they hate transitional art, a phrase that appears often in the press, which implies a logical progression whereby black traditions are supplanted by white ones.

“I know exactly where I come from and who I am,” the painter Alson Ntshangase said to me. He had walked over to meet me when he’d finished his shift as a handyman in a white-run Durban hotel and was in white overalls. “I grew up in Zululand, and I am a Zulu.” He showed me that underneath this immaculate uniform were ordinary Western clothes, and that underneath those was a traditional Zulu loincloth. “I don’t wear it all the time, but when I feel like I am forgetting.” His work, however, marks some departure from Zulu values. “Show one of my people a basket, and they will know at once whether the grasses have been well dyed. But show them a painting and”—he looked across the room—“that plastic shopping bag with the bird on it, and they will not be able to see why one image is better or more valuable than the other.” His painting The AIDS Doctors shows a doctor, a priest, and a sangoma (witch doctor) all ranged surrealistically around a patient lying in bed. How to make sense of the science, the spirit, and the black and white views of life and death?