Random thoughts on art: ten years hence.

We in South Africa are still too close to the apartheid era to be able to comment authoritatively about changes that have taken or are taking place. It is therefore difficult to pinpoint radical breaks with our past, the past that appears to be always with us. During any struggle there exist simultaneous developments for good or evil, conservative and revolutionary. It is only when we stop and take stock of what has taken place that we begin to appreciate the importance of the moments we lived through, participated in, or even initiated. We are at such a moment, then, in our country.

The question of art is further bedevilled by postmodern theories with their blending of high/low art and the collapsing of genres. In the West, hanging chunks of meat in art galleries viscerally pointed to the loss of meaning in society. In South Africa, at least, issues such as search for a common identity, HIV and AIDS, poverty, the celebration of our breathtaking landscapes, still hold fascination, perhaps tile more so now that "development" seeks to efface the landscapes as we know them, even as we emerge from the dark catacombs of colonialism and its grandson, apartheid.

Ten years of freedom have offered us an opportunity to carry out the archaeology of our fragmented past, to unearth great artists whose works remained hidden from the public eye and whose struggles to express dreams of a better life lay smothered in some frozen memories of friends. We here refer to artists like Thami Mnyele, killed in a raid in Botswana by South African "security forces," and the likes of Cyprian Shilakoe and many others, who were deemed by the then-regime not to be artists at all. Ten years have offered us also an opportunity to discover and reflect on the works of artists who were forced into exile. Ten years of liberation give us time to know where we come from, the better for us to know where we are going.

The colonial and apartheid projects were acts of massive dislocation and re-location. It was a process of profound cultural rupture. The discovery of gold and diamonds in the 1860s and 1870s in South Africa brought about a massive upheaval. Families were dismembered. Men had to be relocated in single sex hostels whilst women were left to eke out an existence for themselves and their children on barren lands. The men who farmed and carved objects were scattered. Creativity was stifled. Townships were born, marked by their barrenness. They were sprawls of monotonous matchbox houses devoid of color. Apartheid as a settler colonial project gave this particular exercise its own demented stamp.

In the 1960s there developed in South Africa what came to be called the Township School of Art/Movement and African artists painted township scenes for whites who could not visit these areas. Significant though this exercise was, it had nothing to do with township dwellers themselves. There were neither art galleries nor museums of art in the townships. There was no public art other than a few murals in the sprawling complex called Soweto. However, during the 1980s, at the height of the struggle, when the Mass Democratic Movement intensified its efforts to render the country ungovernable, Peace Parks were constructed where comrades fell. The apartheid regime recognized their potential for political mobilization and routinely demolished these sites, only to find new ones created come morning. But in the end the regime won. There are no traces of these monuments now except in some photographs.

The Peace Parks of the struggle years are deliberately recalled in the Freedom Park project on the outskirts of Pretoria that is designed as a counterpoint to the Voortrekker Monument that has long served as a symbol of Afrikaner identity. A sculpture garden is being created, with works by artists from across the rural/urban divide, across class and race, in the hope that it will cement a common identity for all our people. According to Yonah Seleti, the heritage manager, "Freedom Park is about creating a space for the liberation of the African mind, nation building, and for true reconciliation." The arts have always provided an oasis of reason within the whirlwinds of repression. Visual artists, musicians, writers, dramatists, and poets found ways of working together in those bleak times. It is therefore fitting that Freedom Park provide a space to celebrate these achievements and to bring together the pioneers and those who resisted, the better to heal the wounds of the past and inspire new creations for the soul of our new nation.

Similarly, certain South African cities, notably Durban and Johannesburg, have initiated projects of urban renewal. Thus through the Johannesburg Development Agency the city has commissioned local artists to produce sculpture that now populates urban spaces and celebrates art and creativity.

The birth of the "New" South Africa was heralded by major exhibitions such as the Collateral exhibition under the patronage of the Forty-fifth Venice Biennale in 1993. Writing about it in an introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Affinities: Contemporary South African Art, Glenn R. W. Babb, Commissioner for South Africa, said, "After a long, involuntary silence, South African art now can speak out at one of the most prestigious of the art world's events, the Forty-fifth Venice Biennale of Visual Arts. In all its vibrancy, its crossings, its diversity and its dialogue, South Africa emerges renewed in the final decade of the twentieth century...."

Soon after this, two major developments took institution of the Arts and Culture Task Group (ACTAG) by the then-Department of Art, Culture, Science and Technology to map out the way forward for South African art; and the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995, sponsored by the Johannesburg City Council.

With the cultural boycott over, post-apartheid South African artists emerged to grace some of the world's leading art galleries and museums, bringing with them a fresh outlook. There are problems, however. For instance, during the Johannesburg Biennale 95, a program was instituted to train young black curators by attaching them to Western curators. Yet after the training, these young curators were abandoned and the training was lost! Similarly, black curators are underrepresented on the exhibitions commemorating ten years of democracy in Cape Town. There seems to be no cohesive program of training young black conservationists or, rather, there seems to be no clear succession plan established to aid young black professionals in the field of heritage. In this, as in other matters, the problem or, rather, the challenges of redressing the imbalances of the past are pressing and urgent.

Whilst in fine art galleries and centers artists grapple with the latest art theories from Europe and America, local artists/crafters using beadwork, recycled plastic, and electric wires display innovative ideas untrammeled and unfettered by convention. Thus Alex Sudheim writes in the Mail & Guardian on November 12, 2004, on the African Art Centre, Durban: "Always on the cutting edge of contemporary indigenous art is the African Art Centre, whose nurturing of groundbreaking work by young black artists yields many surprises and brings a freshness to the local art scene often absent from the derivative nature of so much of what passes for "conceptual' art."

Since independence, artworks and craft from north of the Zambezi River have crossed into South African malls, crossroads, galleries, drawing rooms, and some of the unlikeliest places, signalling new challenges for our local arts and crafts and bringing an end to the clinical and sterile environments of the apartheid era. These works in wood, stone, metal, plastics, and grass challenge our old and comfortable definitions of what constitutes art and what is craft. Postmodern theories are lived and celebrated under trees and beside the motorways of our land.

The role of art in nation-building and reconciliation cannot be overemphasized. Ten years after liberation, our arts exist at the crucible of the African Renaissance, a period in which new forms of communication are desperately needed. This has been a period of reclamation, restoration, renewal, and re-membering dismembered communities. The role of art in identity formation and in reconciliation is much in demand, for art has a way of articulating truths in manners that are subtle, subliminal, and sometimes without obvious confrontation. It is surely the subversive elements in art that offer us a chance for a meaningful future in a world made beautiful by color, shape, form, movement, and design.