Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

These artists won prizes at art competitions. South Africa has more competitions in more fields than anyplace else on earth, and these, in Payne’s view, “became the most powerful instrument of oppression.” Although Fikile spoke to me about blood and suffering when we met, he spoke as much about his white collectors, and his recent work seemed studied and somewhat artificial. More than one commenter warned that an artist might “go the same way as Helen”—a reference to the painter Helen Sebidi, whose beautiful work became repetitive after the galaxy of prizes she won from white juries led her to repeat her inspiration rather than renew it. Even as these painters’ art of struggle became a commodity, it served to answer their own struggle to survive. Now, township artists are accused of reducing their heritage to pablum for the white market; crossover artists, of working in a “European” mode.

I knew that the black Durban artist Trevor Makoba had been featured in the South African exhibition at the most recent Venice Biennale, so when I visited his township, I asked him about the allegorical picture that had been exhibited, which depicted a piece of cheese in the shape of South Africa being nibbled from one side by a black mouse, and from the other side by a white mouse. He, in turn, asked me all about the Biennale. Was it really an important exhibition? Would a lot of people have gone to see his work? When I finished describing the show, he said, a bit sadly, “I’m glad that I have been in this exhibition. But I do wish that they’d asked me first. I would have liked to talk to them about it.”

I was astonished. “No one asked you whether you wanted to be in Venice, representing South Africa?”

“No. The first I heard of it was the week of the opening.”

South Africa’s invitation to the Biennale (after decades of exclusion) sat with government officials for ages before the rushed “democratic” selection of the artists, whose work was shipped in days. The government paid for bureaucrats to go to the opening, but did not provide tickets for artists. Several white artists bought their own tickets, and when the South African authorities found, to their embarrassment, that they had many white and no black artists in town, they quickly sent tickets to black artists. In most instances these were people who had never traveled across their own country, much less overseas. The sculptor Jackson Hlungwani sent a message saying, “The radio is good but the message is bad,” indicating that though he might have liked to travel, this was not the way to go about it. He declined to leave his home in Gazankulu. Makoba made a valiant effort, but even with the help of white friends he couldn’t get himself on a plane in time. No one seemed able to say what the arrangements would be in Venice, what would be paid for, how the artists would eat. “The clear implication,” observed Sue Williamson, a white Cape Town artist, “was this: you are not important; only the fruit of your labor is important. It’s what the whites have been saying to the blacks since the start of apartheid.”

Art from Above

In Gazankulu in the late apartheid period, white liberals set up a program for local blacks to explore their heritage by learning basket weaving. Since the appropriate grasses did not grow locally and none of the local people knew how to weave baskets, the organizers had to import materials and teachers. No one observed that this area was rich in clay and that these people had a tradition of clay modeling. The basket weaving was absurd. It’s not that artists in Gazankulu should have to work only in local media, but simply that ignoring the clay and importing grasses is so wasteful not only of resources but also of abilities; it represents a monolithic view of black people that is one of apartheid’s ugliest legacies. Art made according to a political agenda dictated from on high is seldom revelatory.

South Africa has no tradition, in either the black or white communities, of going to look at pictures. In the same way that developments in American ichthyology tend to be of interest primarily to American ichthyologists, art in South Africa is of interest primarily to South African artists. Though art’s audience is limited to its producers, as it was in Soviet Moscow, that number is not small, because in the New South Africa, everyone is being encouraged to make art, including many who, left to their own devices, would never consider such a possibility. “Rural outreach” programs, big on the liberal agenda, attempt to persuade people far from urban centers to make art. To this end, enterprising individuals have descended on one community after the next with big pads of paper and lots of crayons, or with beads and thread. The work produced through these programs is touted as highly “authentic.”