Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The colored population today has neither the privilege of the whites nor the self-actualization of many black Africans, and some colored people cling to the slight privilege they enjoyed during apartheid. They have too much to be blatantly destructive (like a good many black Africans) and too little to live well (like most whites). This population is fearful in two directions rather than one. Bester’s powerful collage-assemblages use found materials of the township in juxtaposition with painted images. One work has bits of barbed wire; a copy of the government book categorizing the various races; snapshots of a racist attack that, according to official documents, never took place; and a police officer’s ammunition belt. “When I was younger,” Willie Bester said, “I did pretty things for white men to buy and hang in their houses to help them ignore what was happening outside. Now I am free. Now I do work about real life and the problems of the townships. Now I am working for myself.”

Black Art, Yes; Black Artists, No

Bester’s assertion is only half-true. He may be working for himself, but almost all of his collectors are white. Liberals buy his work both because it is good and because buying it relieves their sense of responsibility. In the current climate, work by nonwhite artists in which they express their suffering is what white collectors want; you can no longer please them with attractive Cape landscapes. This is progress, but it’s hardly freedom. Some nonwhite people express an interest in nonwhite art, but few collect it; indeed, few take on board the idea of art as a commercial enterprise. Some of Willie Bester’s neighbors own and enjoy his work, but when they attended the opening of his big Cape Town exhibition, they could not believe the prices and were bewildered that so many white people wanted to interview, meet, and celebrate him. David Koloane’s paintings are collected by a few black doctors, and one hangs in Nelson Mandela’s home, but this is a small and rarefied audience. Koloane said, “The area where the Johannesburg Art Gallery is located was a whites-only park. And now it is a mostly black park. The black people like to take snapshots of one another at the gates of the gallery. But none of them ever thinks of going in.”

South Africa has only three important commercial galleries, all white-owned with almost exclusively white clients, showing a lot of black work: the Goodman Gallery (oldest; the flagship), Everard Read Contemporary (hottest, newest, trendiest), and the Newtown Gallery (a bit unfocused). How is a nonwhite population to resolve this monopoly of control? It is not simply a matter of who has capital, but of who has the will to engage in this commerce. Eighteen months ago, playwright Matsemela Manaka declared his Soweto home a gallery. When I visited, I found his crew patiently explaining to callers what art was; these visitors, though curious, were there more to observe the strangeness of the setup than to understand the messages of the work. Linos Siwedi has set up shop as a dealer, but though he used to sell from Soweto, he is now working through Johannesburg because the blacks won’t buy and the whites won’t come into a district they still perceive as dangerous. He’s a middleman, keeping track of what happens in the townships, getting the work into the public eye, setting up exhibitions in rented spaces. He even sets up private art tours of the township for rich visitors. Of the white liberals who have taught in the townships, he said, “They taught people how to make things, but not how to sell them.” But his admirable effort cannot compete with the larger, commercial, white-owned galleries.

Some people feel that even the radical artists of the black consciousness movement have been co-opted by this system. In allowing their work to be sold by white people to white people, they have become complicit in the existing power structure. Fikile Magadlela was long held up as the ultimate exemplar of black radicalism, but he was among the first to be snapped up by white dealers. “If your work is in an art gallery, it is working for the state,” Malcolm Payne said. “Fikile, too, wanted to sell.” Fikile was shown at the Goodman Gallery long before the waning of apartheid. Durant Sihlali’s work sold well in the galleries of apartheid-era Johannesburg. “It was incredible to me,” he said. “The perpetrators of injustice would buy my work and hang it on their white walls without ever noticing that it was telling the story of their cruelty.”