Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  I asked David Koloane, who is black, and Beezy Bailey, who is white, how they became painters. “I’d always liked to draw,” said Koloane, “but I never knew you could do anything with this. When I was sixteen, Louis Maqhubela moved in across the street from me and said there were people called artists who did drawing and painting and nothing else as their work. We decided we wanted to do that.” Koloane, at sixteen, had never heard of art. Bailey said, “When I was sixteen, I was seated next to Andy Warhol at lunch, and he suggested I apply to the London art schools.” Lunch on Fridays is all very well, but it doesn’t align such differences.

  The White Liberal Artists

  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.

  “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

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p; 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.

  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?

  White discomfort when visiting the townships can distort the understanding of art made in these areas, whether it is “township art” or not. Though the danger of the townships was exaggerated by the apartheid government, and though many whites retain a disproportionate fear of them, township violence is unpredictable and people do get killed. The ritual surrounding a white visit is complex. You are well advised to be accompanied by someone known where you are visiting; it is usually best to meet on neutral ground, then let your guide take the wheel. You are never sure whether you are going to make it into the township on the day you had planned, because often enough your guide may warn you that it’s a “bad day.” Your guide takes responsibility for your safety, and you are dependent on his knowledge, connections, and radar. Sometimes during a visit to someone’s house or studio, the phone will ring and your host, without any real explanation, will say that you have to leave.

  The people I met in the townships all understood the effort involved in a visit; I was given a gratifying, perhaps exaggerated, sense of my own courage. Just by coming, they said, I was doing something for them. They knew that someone thought it was worth the trouble to bring me. That decision stood in contrast to their own experience of segregation. “I was excluded from many places during apartheid, and I am still excluded in many places,” the painter Durant Sihlali said to me as we sat in his house in Soweto. “And I am not so eager to include all the whites who say in their casual, offhand way that they want to come here. It’s my territory here, and I don’t bring anyone who I don’t like. It’s an effort for me to come into Johannesburg and pick someone up, think about their safety all the time, entertain them, and drive them home. I am not going to give my life over to doing it.”

  Sihlali grew up under apartheid, but he is educated, self-assured, even diffident, with a rich use of the English language. As a young man in the sixties, he once stumbled upon some white art students and their teacher who had come to the township to paint. He watched them for a long time, then walked up to one and silently held out his hand. The art student handed Sihlali a paintbrush, and Sihlali finished the picture. The art teacher was impressed by his skill. Although Sihlali could not enroll at the school, the teacher invited him to model for them. “In this way, though I never lifted a brush during class, I was able to learn everything, just by watching and seeing how the teacher criticized the students.”

  For years, Sihlali made a living painting and selling seashell souvenirs and commercial signs; in his free time, he created a series of watercolors depicting local scenes. These figurative watercolors address few of the concerns about the nature of representation that occupy contemporary Western artists. But the work of black South African artists, which often focuses on family, history, and dreams, must be understood on its own terms. Sihlali’s watercolors document a life that th
e apartheid government wished to conceal. “My interest was not in beautiful things, but in recording our history,” Sihlali explained. “They are not an expression of rage; when you tell the truth, you don’t become angry. I felt I had to do it. Often it was a race against time. I painted against the bulldozers as a mode of protest, and when I finished painting a house before they destroyed it, I felt that I had won.”

  Sihlali’s house was in Jabulani—or, as he called it, “deepest Soweto.” Houses in the township all have metal grilles over their windows, and Sihlali had made art even of these bars at his house, working them as narrative scenes, one showing a mother and child. We left that area and went to see Vincent Baloyi, a sculptor, and Charles Nkosi in the Chiawelo Extension section of Soweto. There we sent some children off to get us beer and sat in the front room talking. In the townships, you do not in general close your door to your neighbors except when you perceive a threat. It doesn’t matter if they are drunk or tiresome or if you just don’t like them; the house is open to all, and everyone stops to talk. “So you are in Soweto!” people would say as soon as they saw me. “You’re afraid now?” And everyone would laugh. “Tell them it’s not so bad, not so bad, not so bad,” they would say. Many wanted to know why I was interested in art. Art is the basis of a proud and almost sovereign dialogue that is rare and precious in the townships, that exceeds in its meanings anything you could adduce from the appearance of the work. “All this about equality and working with white artists,” said Charles Nkosi. “It’s going to take a lot of time. It’s like when you get a new hat. For the first time you have it, it’s really a nuisance. You just keep leaving it everywhere, you can never remember you have it, and when it’s on your head, you feel the weight of it all the time. Even if you used to be cold, the new hat’s not easy to start having.”