Art and culture in contemporary South Africa

Abstract

This article focuses on the complex ways in which artistic innovation and creativity have been fostered by the experience of living in late apartheid and post-apartheid society. It argues that contemporary South African artists, film-makers and performers have developed highly inventive formal and conceptual vocabularies in their effort to negotiate the ever-changing landscape of contradictory and sometimes irreconcilable realities they encounter on a daily basis, often attaining major international acclaim in the process. Blurring the boundaries between long-established artistic genres, and challenging racial, sexual and other stereotypes, they have refused to abandon the hope of achieving the ideals of a renewal and respacialization of the current socio-cultural landscape. Many of them have done so against the odds of vociferous opprobrium from state officials and legal challenges by the ANC, which in recent years has questioned the right to freedom of expression of a number of artists.

Keywords

Artistic innovation blurring boundaries challenging stereotypes freedom of expression post-apartheid South Africa

In a recently-published article on the history of South Africa’s National Gallery (SANG) in Cape Town, Hayden Proud, the curator of the Gallery’s Michaelis Collection, lamented the ‘cyclical tale of state neglect, indifference and frustrated vision’ that has repeatedly thwarted the SANG’s attempts to realize its mission (Proud 2011: 37). Proud noted, in particular, the lack of ‘understanding by the Government of the role played by the SANG in providing recognition and career-enhancement for artists’ (Proud 2011: 42). In keeping with this historic trend, there has been little if any support in post-apartheid South Africa for the acquisition of works by long-neglected black artists. In 1995, for example, in the lead-up to a SANG retrospective of works by George Pemba (1912–2001), the Gallery was offered two major watercolours by the artist at a very affordable price. But because the R10,000 (US$ 1,194.70)¹ required to secure the purchase was not available, the National Gallery was forced to decline the offer. A victim of the success of this exhibition, which catapulted Pemba into local, if not international, fame: ‘Ten years later, having secured a special grant to purchase a work by Pemba, the SANG had to pay R140,000.00 (US$ 16,725.80)² for one watercolour of the same date and quality: 28 times more than what had been asked for ten years previously’ (Proud 2011: 43). Responding to this lack of public investment in the arts, Stephan Hundt, the curator of the corporately-funded Sanlam Art Collection, noted recently that ‘[a] national art museum that cannot fulfil its core function also starts to lose its relevance in the art world’ (Hundt 2009 quoted by Proud 2011: 44).

Critical underfunding by South Africa’s National Arts Council (NAC), which has also affected other long-established art forms such as theatre, dance and music, is consistent with policies developed in the post-apartheid era. Since 1994, the NAC has focused on making sizeable ‘amounts of grant funding available on a more equitable and transparent basis, as opposed to being sunk into the large and expensive national performing arts institutions and museums … located in urban areas and historically primarily serving white audiences and consumers’ (HSRC 2010: 188). The South African government itself has acknowledged that this has led to a dramatic underfunding of certain art forms, including the visual arts, ‘by comparison with other countries with a developed museums and collections infrastructure’ (HSRC 2010: 104). Even so, many contemporary South African artists and performers have achieved major international acclaim since the country’s extraordinary transition to black majority rule in 1994. In some cases, they have done so against enormous odds, overcoming poverty and cultural barriers with the support of private donors.

The opera singer Pretty Yende, who in 2010 was the first black soprano to perform at La Scala, debutting as Berenice in Rossini’s L’occasione fa il Ladro, is an obvious case in point. Yende never knew that opera existed until she heard Delibes’ classic Flower Duet from his opera Lakme in a television advertisement for British Airways. Then a high school pupil in a township in Mpumalanga Province, the overwhelming experience of listening to the Flower Duet led her to ask a high school teacher the next day what the music was. When he told her that it was called opera, she responded: ‘I need to do that’ (AFP 2011). Yende went on to study at the University of Cape Town’s Opera School, where she and many other young black performers benefitted from a very generous Mellon Foundation Fellowship Programme, and in 2011 she took first prize in the Female Section of the most prestigious international singing competition, the Operalia World Opera Competition.

Private interventions like that of the Mellon Foundation undoubtedly go a considerable way to explaining the international success of South African performers like Pretty Yende. But the rise to fame of other local artists, such as William Kentridge and Zanele Mohuli, the rap-rave crew Die Antwoord (literally, The Answer), and the film-maker Neill Blomkamp, begs important questions regarding the ways in which creativity and artistic innovation have been fostered through the experience of living in post-apartheid South Africa. All of these artists – but also many others, such as Steven Cohen, Nicholas Hlobo, Brett Murray, and the cartoonist, Zapiro – have produced work that in some important way engages the raw realities and unresolved and evolving issues of identity that continue to confront South Africans on a daily basis. In often very different ways, they have forged an uncompromising commitment to interrogating notions of self and other, to addressing the uncertainties surrounding the future configuration in South Africa of racial, cultural and sexual identities, and to exploring the ways in which the present has been shaped by painful experiences from the country’s past. But perhaps most importantly, many of them have tried to make sense of the erosion of South Africa’s post-apartheid commitment to tolerance and difference. Grappling with the implications for the future of major outbursts of xenophobia, brutal attacks on lesbians and albinos, the decimation of entire families through exposure to HIV/Aids, and the gradual loss of faith in a government served by corrupt officials, they have resorted to blurring and even shattering the boundaries between long-established artistic genre in an urgent effort to voice the distress of a nation that is at risk of losing its commitment to the values that shaped the Mandela era. In the process, some of them have had to contend with the additional burden of heavy-handed legal and other challenges from the state.

The meteoric rise to fame of the ever confrontational rap-rave crew Die Antwoord attests to the powerful impact of this engagement with the raw realities of life in South Africa. Within days of the release in February 2010 of Zef Side, its music video celebrating the trashy underbelly of post-apartheid South Africa, the crew’s website crashed under the pressure of millions of hits. Responding to this avalanche of interest from across the globe, Interscope Records flew Ninja, the leader of Die Antwoord, and his diminutive muse, Yo-Landi Vi$$er, to Los Angeles to sign a million dollar contract. But less than two years later, the label baulked at having its name associated with the challenging lyrics on Ten$ion, the crew’s most recent 2012 album. Rather than compromise the integrity of their work, Ninja and Yo-Landi decided to cut ties with ‘Into-Coke Records’, as the label is now referred to by Ninja, taking the risk of distributing the album on their own by setting up Zef Records in association with the Good Smile Company, a Japanese corporation that is also making Die Antwoord toys, and Downtown Records N.Y.C., which is handling the international marketing of the album. Demand for Ten$ion has been so high that Lady Gaga invited the crew to join her 2012 Born This Way tour. But instead of embracing the opportunity to work with probably the most acclaimed international pop star, Die Antwoord embarked on their own global tour, claiming that their ‘zef’ style is too ‘hardcore, like solid heavyweight’ to be associated with the ‘s—–y pop music’ of Lady Gaga (Sciarretto 2012).

‘Zef’ is an Afrikaans slang term for anything that is cheap and nasty, ‘like clapped out Ford Cortinas with fur on the dashboard’, or ‘tight mom jeans pulled up too high’ (Dombal 2010). Although the term is no longer associated exclusively with any particular group, or sub-culture, it derives from a car – the Ford Zephyr – that was popular ‘amongst the white working- and lower-middle class in South Africa in the ’60s and ’70s, especially in the mining towns of the East and West Rand’ (van der Watt 2012). In contemporary South Africa, ‘zef’ has acquired a positive if edgy status. It is celebrated on a local Afrikaans website (Watkykjy ³) which posts photographs taken by Zef-spotters who chronicle the sleazy stylistic excesses of ordinary South Africans, such as the current fashion of spraying second-hand cars bright orange, and borderline pornographic images of scantily-clad models posing in rugged outdoor landscapes carrying submachine guns. It has been adopted by young Afrikaners seeking to distance themselves from the burden of responsibility for the devastating racism that shaped South Africa’s past. According to Ninja, who acknowledges that ‘zef’ is the style of Die Antwoord, ‘[i]t means f—ing cool. But even more cool than f—ing cool. No one can f— with your shit. Zef’s the ultimate style, basically’ (Culhane 2010).

Despite this appropriation of ‘zef’ style, early efforts to characterize Die Antwoord as (alternative) Afrikaans artists fly in the face of the lyrics on Ten$ion, where there is some swearing and a skit in Afrikaans, but little else to suggest a concern to promote the values of South Africa’s fast-growing, ethnically-coded, Afrikaner ‘zef’ culture. On the other hand, it has been argued that their music, personae and performances emphasize what Hall (1998) describes as ‘new ethnicities’, in which racial identities are regarded as ‘multiple, porous, complex and shifting’ (Marx and Milton 2011: 743). But in South Africa, Die Antwoord has also repeatedly been accused of being ‘basically blackface’ because of its appropriation of the distinctive gangster style rap of the ‘Coloured’ musicians of mixed-race origins who live in poverty-stricken communities on the Cape Flats, close to the heartland of tourist-friendly Cape Town.

In an effort to develop a more nuanced reading of Die Antwoord, van der Watt points out that the crew sends out contradictory and therefore confusing messages. Calling Die Antwoord’s communications ‘illegible’ and ‘ambivalent’, she argues that they are obsessed with surface, ‘continually frustrating our desire to find deep meaning or consistency in their act’ (2012). She suggests that ‘it is when we embrace rather than fight this notion of surface … that we glimpse a contemporary moment lived fluidly and differently, affected by the past but more importantly entangled … in a here and now’ (2012). Van der Watt goes on to argue that, in this fluid moment, racial, linguistic and class boundaries are easily and repeatedly crossed, and nothing is ever what one expects it to be. Ultimately, therefore, eclectic sampling and the appropriation and mimicking of different styles, including the tattooing practices of prison gangs and the contemporary ‘zef’ aspirations of alternative Afrikaners, serve to fracture our capacity to identify boundaries, instead forcing us to accept the new reality of entangled connections (2012).

Since Ninja claims that people react to writer-director Niell Blomkamp’s movie District 9, ‘on the same level’ as Die Antwoord, it is probably not surprising that Blomkamp was one of the countless people who made contact with crew after their Zef Side video went viral in 2010. The subject line of his email read: ‘Oh my god’, followed by the message: ‘I f—ing love you guys’ (Hoby 2010). In Blomkamp’s blockbuster movie, which hovers between different genres, a crude, insensitive Afrikaner gradually transforms into an alien, ultimately emerging as a more moral and therefore also more sympathetic character. Made on a modest budget of $30 million, District 9 starts in 1990 when an alien spaceship stalls over the skies above Johannesburg. After three months, South African officials decide to board the ship, only to find a million aliens in deep distress. The aliens are banished to District 9, which, 20 year later, looks like a cross between a poverty-stricken post-apartheid black township and a refugee camp for foreign African nationals. Living conditions are appalling and the aliens, who are referred to derisively as ‘prawns’, are brutally attacked in an effort forcibly to remove them to a more distant location.

According to Blomkamp, who grew up Johannesburg in the 1980s, his creative vision was shaped by his memories of the social injustices and authoritarian control of the apartheid state:

It all had a huge impact on me: the white government and the paramilitary police – the oppressive, iron-fisted military environment. … Blacks, for the most part, were kept separate from whites. And where there was overlap, there were very clearly delineated hierarchies of where people were allowed to go. Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9. (Lee 2009)

Filmed in contemporary Soweto, South Africa’s largest black township with close to 1.5 million residents, the set is peppered with segregationist signage – ‘For humans only! Non-humans banned!’ It also includes a macabre image of Nigerians as cannibal witchdoctors and gangsters, leading to the confiscation of copies of the movie by the Nigerian Information Ministry, and a demand by the Nigerian government that the producer/distributor, Sony Entertainment, apologize for this negative portrayal of Nigerians and excise all references to former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo (CBC News 2009).

Unfazed by this response to his movie, Blomkamp maintained that

The Nigerian thing is there because I wanted to take as many cues from South Africa as I could. I wanted South Africa to be the inspiration. If I try to keep South Africa as true to South Africa as I could, then, unfortunately, a massive part of the crime that happens in Johannesburg is by the Nigerians there. It’s just the way it is. I wanted to have a crime group, and thought the most honest refraction of a crime group would be Nigerians, for one. Then secondly … the African witch doctor is also a huge part of Africa and many African countries. So I wanted to incorporate that as well. At the time I was writing the movie, there were all these tribal witch doctor attacks on Albinos, because Albino flesh was worth more than normal humans. That was the analogy to a different group or a different race, [with their] traditional medicine … even cannibalism, in some instances. (Chinedu 2009)

In an insightful analysis of District 9, Gunkel and König suggest that it is ‘hyper-reflective on its own status as a medium’ (2010). Calling it a hybrid film that works through strategies of subversion and that thrives on ‘aesthetic queerness’, they argue that District 9 ‘systematically denies the viewer easy access to the authenticity of what it portrays’ (2010). By doing so, it ‘unsettles dichotomies such as “us” and “them” as well as an understanding of difference and identity’ (2010). They go on to suggest that ‘Just as the film resists any dichotomous reading of “the real” and “the fictional/fictitious”, it resists any clear cut genre classification by being all at once: Science Fiction, social drama, cop-thriller, you name it’ (2010). It is in part because District 9 confounds clear classification that it is able repeatedly to unmask the limits of South Africa’s postcolonial project. Introducing timely references to the politics of border management, migration and xenophobia, it cuts and pastes references from South Africa’s past into the present, ultimately creating a vision of the future in which alien ‘others’, rather than people, understand and value the supposedly human capacity for empathy and compassion.

It is striking, and surely also very significant, that while Blomkamp and many other contemporary South African artists and performers are uncompromising in their commitment to the integrity of their work, they are generally neither arrogant or self-important, as evidenced by a recent, highly publicized incident, in which Die Antwoord’s copy-and-paste appropriations incurred the wrath of South African sculptor Jane Alexander, following the inclusion of a figure based on the artist’s internationally acclaimed Butcher Boys ⁴ in a teaser video for Ten$ion. Although Alexander generally shuns publicity despite her international success, she challenged the Die Antwoord, claiming that they had infringed copyright on a work that, for many local as well as international viewers, has come to symbolize the sinister abuse of human rights by the apartheid state. Responding to Alexander’s threat to take legal action against Die Antwoord, Ninja indicated that the horned creature in the teaser video for Ten$ion had been made in ‘homage to one of our favourite SA icons’ (Rens 2012). Die Antwoord nevertheless withdrew the video immediately, but by then Alexander’s negative reaction to the sampling of her Butcher Boy image had elicited a host of responses from critics as well as supporters. One commentator felt that she had, in effect, limited the ‘afterlife’ of her work (Corrigall 2012), while another suggested that she had done so in a ‘desperate attempt to try and retain some meaning, some memory, some history within the South African contemporary popular cultural landscape’ (Stupard 2012).

In the ensuing debate regarding the merits of Alexander’s decision to contest the reference to the Butcher Boys in the Ten$ion teaser, ‘open lawyering’ practitioner Andrew Rens argued that

[w]hether particular artistic expressions(s) should be allowed because of freedom of expression is a political as well as a legal debate, but even if an expression is legally permissible that does not mean that it is politically responsible or culturally appropriate. … The converse is also true, if the law permits particular artistic expression(s) we can still argue about whether the artist should have done what he did, and we can boycott galleries and shops that show and sell the artwork and withhold our donations from those who support the artist, these actions form part of the same liberty as the freedom of the artist. (2012)

Rens went on to point out that ‘moral right is obviously a limit on freedom of expression’ (2012), in the process raising an issue that has repeatedly vexed debates on the rights of artists and their publics in South Africa in recent years.

While these debates have become increasingly voluble since the display in March 2012 of Brett Murray’s The Spear at the Linda Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, depicting President Jacob Zuma with his penis exposed, they have dominated relations between South African artists and the state in recent years, forcing many of them to produce work against the odds of vociferous opprobrium from state officials. Others have had to contend with legal challenges by the African National Congress (ANC), which has questioned the right to freedom of expression of a number of artists, according to some commentators, thereby effectively ignoring both Section 16 of the South African Constitution which enshrines ‘the right to freedom of expression, which includes freedom of the press and other media; freedom to receive and impart information or ideas; freedom of artistic creativity; academic freedom and freedom of scientific research’, and the fact that South Africa is a signatory of UNESCO, which promotes global artistic freedom as a basis for a healthy democracy (Magengele 2010).

Lesbian photographer Zanele Muholi was one of the first artists to incur the wrath of South Africa’s post-apartheid government when then Minister of Arts and Culture Lulu Xingwana walked out of an exhibition after viewing the photographer’s images of intimately embracing naked women. Part of the Innovative Women exhibition that was held in August 2009 on Constitutional Hill in Johannesburg with the aid of funds provided by the Department of Arts and Culture, Muholi’s works unashamedly celebrate same-sex relations. A heritage site where political prisoners were interred during the apartheid era, the exhibition venue now forms part of a larger complex that has also housed South Africa’s Constitutional Court since 2004.

Although Xingwana was due to speak at the opening of the Innovative Women exhibition, which featured works by ten young black women artists, she claimed, after the event, that she had left prematurely because ‘[o]ur mandate is to promote social cohesion and nation-building’ (Smith 2010b). In her view, the exhibition challenged this project: ‘It is immoral, offensive and going against nation-building’ (2010b). Xingwana’s spokesperson, Lisa Combrinck, who followed up on this response, claimed that the Minister had also been ‘concerned that there were children present at the event and that children should not be exposed to some of the images on exhibit’ (2010b).

In a subsequent effort to salvage the situation, Xingwana indicated that she had been ‘particularly revolted by an image of “Self Rape” depicting a sexual act with a nature scene as a backdrop’ (Smith 2010a). The latter photograph, which references Renaissance images of the Rape of Europa, and is based in part on a sketch by Picasso of a minotaur, is by Nandipha Mntambo, one of the other artists who participated in the Innovative Women show. According to Mntambo, this work, which depicts the artist in the roles of both Europa and the minotaur, focuses on the idea of self-reflection, ‘looking at the things you don’t like about yourself. It was about me – looking at myself. It really has nothing to do with rape’ (Smith 2010a).

Not long after Xingwana’s attack on Muholi’s images of lesbian couples, and her subsequent misreading of Nandipa Mntambo’s self-reflexive work, Muholi won both the prestigious Casa Africa award for best female photographer and the Fondation Blachère award at the Bamako Encounters Biennial (Rencontres de Bamako), a festival of African photography which has been co-organized and co-produced by Mali’s Ministry of Culture and l’Institut Français since 1994. She also received a Fanny Ann Eddy accolade from International Resource Network-Africa for her outstanding contributions to the study of sexuality in Africa at the Genders and Sexualities in Africa Conference held in New York in 2009, and in the same year she was the Ida Ely Rubin Artist-in-Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Smith 2010a). Although a far cry from her early life experiences growing up in a township supported by her mother, who was a poorly paid domestic worker, Mohuli attributes her success in part to the fact that her mother taught her to respect other people, but also to the fact that she led her daughter to believe that ‘I can do anything with nothing. Her lesson was that you don’t have to wait for money to say something or do something. If you want to tell your story, you have to make do with what you have’ (de Villiers 2010).

Responding to Xingwana’s attack on her work, Muholi complained that the Minister of Arts and Culture failed to

understand that we exist as black lesbians, and that we are contributing members to a democratic society and to our African cultures. … The fact that she does not want to engage publicly on the issues we continue to struggle with in this country like hate crimes, sexual assault, HIV/Aids, poverty, unemployment is simply irresponsible as a representative of a democratic government. (de Villiers 2010)

She was particularly concerned that ‘[t]he Minister wants to censor my attempt to raise awareness about the complexities we lesbians experience in the new South Africa’ (de Villiers 2010).

In the aftermath of the debacle over Muholi’s photographs, South African art critic Anthea Buys pointed out that the artist had depicted women ‘with all the rude bits hidden’ (2010). She noted, further, that in South Africa female sexuality had endured remarkably more censorship in the arts than male sexuality: ‘Penises we seem able to deal with. Vaginas – if we must concede that they have something to do with female anatomy – we want at least to pretend that they are superfluous to issues of women’s rights and well-being’ (2010).

It is an extraordinary co-incidence that this comment was made very shortly before President Jacob Zuma launched a legal challenge to Brett Murray’s The Spear on 17 May 2012. The image, which formed part of Murray’s Hail to the Thief II exhibition which opened at the Linda Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg a week earlier, depicted the president in a pose reminiscent of Victor Ivanov’s famous poster of Lenin, titled, Lenin Lived, Lenin Is Alive, Lenin Will live, but with the South African president’s genitals exposed.

In an affidavit to the police leading up to a court case, Brett Murray explained why he had created this work:

At the outset, I would like to say that I am a proud South African and a former supporter of the ANC. I am not a racist. I do not produce art with an intention to hurt, humiliate or insult, and that includes the painting that has caused this controversy. … The Spear has a dual purpose: it is a work of protest or resistance art, and it is a satirical piece. (Murray 2012)

Murray then goes on to explain his personal history in an attempt to provide a context to the work:

I was born in South Africa and raised, in the 1970s and 1980s, in a society that was perverted, controlled by corrupt, morally bereft politicians who treated South Africa – my country – as a personal fiefdom of their racist elite. To preserve their position of illegitimate power, tactics of intimidation, coercion, violence, manipulation, and misuse of intelligence and police forces were the norm. Censorship prevailed and freedom of expression was severely curtailed. White men, such as me, were conscripted into the army to take up arms against fellow South Africans, to fight a war we did not believe in against enemies that we considered to be friends. I [therefore], in order to avoid conscription, studied for 10 years, and thereafter went into self-imposed exile in London until the ANC was unbanned and I returned to South Africa. (Murray 2012)

Reflecting on his optimistic vision of life in post-apartheid South Africa, Murray notes that

[l]ike many other South Africans … I proudly cast my ballot [for the ANC] on April 27 1994. That day signified hope, freedom, an end to tyranny and the dawn of a new era for me, my countrymen and the whole world. South Africa moved from being a pariah state to being the proudest nation in the world. (Murray 2012)

But this optimism was gradually replaced by

… a sense of betrayal, where heroes of the struggle now appeared to be corrupt, power hungry and greedy, or where ideals that many had died or made sacrifices for were abandoned on the altar of expedience. Over the past few years one ongoing narrative in our society has been the story of the first applicant [President Jacob Zuma]. For instance, in a judgment implicating the first applicant, a court found that the first applicant was closely linked to his former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, who was found guilty of corruption. Another controversial feature of the first applicant’s public life was the failure by the prosecuting authorities to proceed with corruption charges against him, notwithstanding the apparent existence of evidence to sustain such charges. (Murray 2012)

Murray notes further that ‘[d]etails of the first applicant’s sex life have been well documented in the public domain. Notwithstanding the fact that he has four wives, he has engaged in extra-marital sex on at least two occasions’ (2012). Faced with the loss of his vision of an ideal world ‘in which I want to live’, Murray concludes that there is

… no reason for artists to be censored, however uncomfortable this might be for individuals and for society at large. For me, The Spear has a far broader meaning than some of the public discourse on its meaning, including the first applicant’s interpretation. It is a metaphor for power, greed and patriarchy. (Murray 2012)

Murray’s work elicited violent protests, with ANC supporters marching on the Goodman Gallery shortly before the work was defaced. In an effort to defuse the situation, the Goodman Gallery agreed to withdraw the image from the exhibition, but the court gave short shrift to Zuma’s contention that the offices of the President of the ANC and the country had constitutional rights to dignity and privacy. According to Judge Gcina Malindi, such rights belonged only to individuals. Indeed, far from shielding an individual from awkward scrutiny, holding high office justified much tougher and more intrusive commentary. Partly in response to this judgement, most commentators, including journalists and opposition politicians, focused on the ANC’s political expedience in inflating the importance of Brett’s satirical art work. Echoing the sentiments of many similarly concerned voices, the editor of the South African Mail & Guardian, Nic Dawes, expressed dismay at Zuma’s efforts to use The Spear ‘to portray himself as a victim of white elitists whose disparagement of African cultural norms injured his dignity and repeated the humiliations of apartheid’ (Dawes 2012). In Dawes’ view, Zuma’s response was entirely self-serving: ‘Threatened by growing discontent within the ANC and the tripartite alliance [The African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions] over his leadership failures, his sexual mores and his handling of [political sagas], Zuma needed a standard to rally the faithful around’ (2012). Dawes suggested that ‘[t]he painting, with its pendulous penis, was a gift from a most unlikely quarter’ that Zuma tried to use to ‘erect a new legal standard’ for the protection of a notion of dignity ‘that would dramatically curtail freedom of speech and of artistic expression’ (2012).

Supporting this view, journalist-academic Johnny Steinberg, suggested that there was ‘something disturbing and new’ in The Spear affair: ‘Before, the ANC farmed out its populist energy to proxies … it could thus both say things and deny that it had said them; it could be outrageous and disavow its own outrageousness.’ But this time was different because ‘the roar came from the centre. … There was no voice of sobriety, no voice of dignity, nobody to stand above the fray and take charge’ (Steinberg 2012).

By late May 2012, the debate surrounding The Spear reached South Africa’s Parliament, where questions have also been raised about the work of the cartoonist Zapiro, who has been accused of defamation for depicting President Zuma as an emperor without clothes – a man of extreme vanity and self-importance who thinks nothing of manipulating South Africa’s justice system (de Vos 2010). Former ANC politician and government minister Mosiuoa Lekota led the parliamentary debate. According to Lekota, the controversy surrounding The Spear did not justify a dereliction of the President’s solemn duty to the Constitution and the principles of mutual acceptance and respect espoused by former president Nelson Mandela:

Our freedoms are indeed inseparable and our rights under the Constitution are indivisible. After leading the ANC to victory in the first democratic election, Mr Mandela made the following pronouncement on 9 May 1994: ‘Today we are entering a new era for our country and its people. Today we celebrate not the victory of a party, but a victory for all the people of South Africa.’ (Lekota 2012)

There are, of course, many historical precedents for the expedient use of art to support the battles of politicians, including the Nazi Party’s condemnation of so-called ‘degenerate art’ in the lead-up to the Second World War, and the celebration of American Abstract Expressionism in the CIA’s fight against communism during the Cold War. South African artists working in the late apartheid era, who were often acutely conscious of these histories of appropriation and rejection, developed highly evocative formal and conceptual vocabularies in their efforts to negotiate the complex landscape of contradictory and sometimes irreconcilable realities they encountered in their daily lives. Always vigilant in their struggles to retain an independent voice, they played a significant role in shaping a deeply affecting vision of late apartheid society as violent and dystopic. William Kentridge, who in 2010 was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, epitomizes the search for new vocabularies, which he used to capture the emotionally challenging experience of growing up and living in apartheid South Africa. Ascribing his creative energies to the experience of living in Johannesburg, Kentridge has repeatedly argued that this ugly industrial city affords inspirations that can never be attained elsewhere in South Africa, least of all in tourist Cape Town: ‘Joburg has a roughness. It is not disguised by “picturesqueness” like Cape Town’ (Garson 2004). According to Kentridge, this sense of roughness

… is appropriate to the nature of our society. One doesn’t have the feeling that the city offers a false view of society. Cape Town as a bucolic paradise is great but it’s not great to work with – you know you are working with a lie: Joburg’s ugliness, its brutish landscape … has value to me as an artist – it has shaped the way I draw … It’s artificially constructed, it draws itself … just like a child’s drawing of a mine dump … and you can erase the drawing, the land gets redrawn all the time. (Garson 2004)

To capture this sense of brutality and uncertainty, of a landscape that has been scarred, over and over again, through the greed of wealthy mining magnates, and to allow for a very dense layering of references to the past, Kentridge developed a unique method of making animated films by drawing images with charcoal before photographing the results, thereafter erasing sections of the original image and repeatedly re-drawing and re-photographing the results of these ongoing changes. Although a very laborious method which Kentridge refers to as his ‘illiterate’ or ‘stone-age’ approach to film-making, it allows him to produce images that ‘seem to spring up and disappear spontaneously, or morph into new identities’ (McDonald 2008). As McDonald suggests, ‘this is analogous to the mechanisms of personal memory’ since ‘at all times we are busy forgetting – or erasing – unpleasant facts. We distort, rearrange, find more congenial shapes for those things that trouble our conscience’ (2008). Alluding to the powerful ways in which Kentridge evokes histories of violence and exploitation, past and present, McDonald notes that ‘[m]any strange images emerge from this wilful erasure, as the unconscious mind struggles to forget’ (2008).

In an effort to make sense of the implications of Kentridge’s technique for the artist’s development of complex social narratives, Godby pointed out in the early 1990s – very soon after Kentridge first began to work with animation – that he ‘rejoices both in the suggestive openness of his forms and in the visible layering of images that tends to preclude any single fixed reading’ (Godby 1992). Drawing on Burke’s (1991) exploration of the ways in which contemporary historians use narrative fragments, including flashbacks, cross-cutting, and alternations between scenes and stories to avoid developing a sense of history that appears to encompass all events from a limited, authoritative point of view, Godby argued that Kentridge uses ‘thickened narrative’, akin to Geertz’s idea of ‘thick description’, to develop social dramas that ‘reveal underlying tensions and so illuminate social structures’ (Godby 1998: 206). This is consistent with the fact that, although Kentridge repeatedly comments, to a lesser or greater extent, on the enormous gulf between rich and poor, the powerful and the oppressed, and has on many occasions affirmed the importance of his South African experience for his work, he noted in an interview in the late 1990s that he had ‘never tried to make illustrations of apartheid … I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay’ (Christov-Bakargiev 1999: 14).

In years to come, South African artists will no doubt continue to explore the complex and contradictory realities of living in a society that remains at war with itself, but that also recognizes the need to heal and to find new ways of negotiating the present with a view to shaping its own uncertain future. While some might despair and end up emigrating, as countless other South Africans have done both before and after the watershed events of the 1990s, by far the majority will continue to celebrate the fact that their creativity has been shaped by, and therefore cannot be divorced from, the ongoing experience of living in South Africa. These artists will refuse to abandon the hope of achieving the ideals of a renewal and respacialization of the current socio-cultural landscape.

Footnotes

Notes

References

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