Rorke's Drift: Empowering Prints.

Rorke's Drift Empowering Prints

Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin

Double Storey Books, Capetown, 2003. 242 pp. 206 b/w & 48 color illustrations. 250 Rands hardcover.

The Evangelical Lutheran Art and Craft Center, Rorke's Drift, located in a remote region of the Kwazulu-Natal midlands, occupies a strange place in the imaginations of culturally minded South Africans. It comprised a fine arts school, along with a series of so-called "crafts" workshops; however, the histories of the two enterprises are fairly tangled and often overlap. (In general, I thus follow the authors, who refer to the fine arts school simply as "Rorke's Drift," according to the South African convention, although sometimes I specify the "school at Rorke's Drift" for added clarity.) Having played a pivotal role in fostering the arts during the darkest days of apartheid, its fame is legendary, yet few South Africans know much about it specifically. To be sure, it is regarded more as a rural crafts center than as an outpost of utopian European aesthetics which provided, among other things, sophisticated training in the graphic arts. Moreover, although widely supposed to be a missionary endeavor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, it was in fact only nominally so. (Its founders simply used the framework of the Lutheran Church to facilitate their pedagogical and artistic activities.) It is the web of truths and half-truths, myths and contradictions which have accrued around this curious project that authors Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin seek to untangle in Rorke's Drift: Empowering Prints, as they map out a history of this center for visual art.

The book is largely chronological, bracketed by a short introduction and a concluding thematic chapter that delves briefly into topics such as gender issues and the political efficacy of prints. In between, two substantial chapters trace the history of the school, beginning with the 1962 arrival of its Swedish founders, Ulla and Peder Gowenius, fresh out of their Bauhaus-inspired art school, the Stockholm Konstfackskolan. The couple spent their first year based at a Lutheran missionary hospital in Ceza, north of Ulundi, where the tubercular patients of the hospital could be found painting, drawing, weaving, and making prints. Although patients took to these creative activities with varying degrees of enthusiasm, one inspiring natural talent soon emerged: the young Azaria Mbatha.

The social functions of artistic practice--specifically its potential for social engagement and economic empowerment--inspired the couple's two-pronged plan of using art as both a diversion for confined long-term patients and a way of providing marketable skills. Motivated by this activist vision and accompanied by Mbatha (now recovered), the Goweniuses left Ceza in 1963 for an empty Lutheran-owned building at Rorke's Drift, where their training center for "Arts and Crafts Advisors" (they would now be called occupational therapists) was soon operating alongside what quickly became an economically viable women's weaving workshop. By 1965, in a seemingly meteoric ascent, Mbatha's prints were being bought by the director of the South African National Gallery and donated to New York's Museum of Modern Art, while soon afterwards the workshop weavers could boast of four of their tapestries being exhibited at the 1968 Venice Biennale.

The School of Fine Arts was officially established in 1968 as well, just as the Goweniuses departed and another couple (also Konstfackskolan graduates), Otto and Malin Lundbohm, stepped in as their replacements. From 1968 until 1982, when financial constraints, administrative problems, and the lack of interest of the sponsoring board in Sweden forced the "Fine Arts School" to close, four to eight students were admitted annually for two years of intense multimedia art training. In all, about eighty students passed through the school, with perhaps fifty graduating--a miniscule number relative to the impact of the Center, for at least fifteen of these graduates went on to pursue successful careers as artists.

As the Swedes' Bauhaus-derived strain of anti-elitist aesthetics stressed the social utility and potential empowerment inherent to art, so the authors, artist and critic Hobbs and art historian Rankin, honor the spirit of the Rorke's Drift founders by highlighting the sociopolitical dimensions of the school's history. In particular, the authors analyze the prints' capacity for registering political expression, proposing that many images were either overtly or covertly "political" and that the Center itself was an arena of political consciousness. However, this central notion of the political is ill-defined, and the pressing, adjunct issue of the conduits between art production and political agency is not explored. To be sure, the relationship between art and politics is rarely or never linear or causal; nonetheless, in a book proposing the "empowering" nature of the printed image during the heyday of apartheid, the confluence of art, power, and empowerment is hardly a topic that can be marginalized.

In terms of the book's structure, Hobbs' and Rankin's aims seem to be threefold. First, they reconstruct the history of the Evangelical Lutheran Arts and Crafts Center from the time of its inspired genesis in 1962 until its uninspired demise in 1982. Second, while narrating this history they analyze a range of art works, primarily prints, introducing little-known works to their readers. Third, they attempt to delegitimatize the insistent mythologies that other writers have perpetuated about the Rorke's Drift Center, such as mistaking its early teachers for missionaries. Throughout the book, they also repudiate the notion of a unitary "Rorke's Drift style" by stressing the diversity of the students' motifs, the range of graphic techniques employed, and the panoply of individual styles. By bringing to light the work of artists less well known than John Muafengejo and Azaria Mbatha--whose signature styles are largely responsible for the conflation of the entire school with their particular work--they hope to expand what has become a calcified notion of a Rorke's Drift print style.

The authors must be congratulated for unraveling the complex history of this art school, providing a comprehensive, well-researched, and clearly written narrative of a unique institution in the history of South African art. Hobbs and Rankin have conducted an exhaustive amount of research, corresponding with former principals, teachers, and students; conducting oral and written interviews throughout South Africa; as well as combing through the Center's records. As a result, the history of the school is documented in detail, backed up by a formidable armature of primary research, yet unencumbered by extensive scholarly footnotes to hamper the "average reader" the authors seek to address. As an additional research aid, the authors have included generous appendices comprising biographies of all the students, along with a chronological table charting each student's progress through the school.

Yet, despite the impressive research and the book's lucid historical narrative, the authors are less effective in articulating a cogent art-historical argument. Throughout, visual analysis is rendered subservient to the overarching history, resulting in disconnected and often prosaic commentaries. In addition, although amply illustrated, many of the images are as small as 1 by 2 inches, making it difficult to discern either the narrative detail or the technical attributes that the authors' discussions of the prints highlight. There are no detail blow-ups to aid the reader and, most frustratingly, images are titled but not numbered, necessitating constantly scanning the page to find the print under discussion or to ascertain whether it is even reproduced. To be fair, the book is otherwise well laid out, and the images are usually found where they are discussed. However, many of the works discussed are not illustrated, rendering their discussion ineffective.

The authors' positioning of the Rorke's Drift School within the context of South African sociopolitical histories is commendable: They consider the place of the Lutheran church in South Africa and its internal power struggles; the apartheid government's shifting, often bellicose attitude toward the Swedish sponsors of the project; and of course the urgent political struggles played out in South Africa during the 1970s. However, I would have liked to see more effort made to place the school within an art-historical context, particularly within the larger narratives of international twentieth-century artistic practice. What does it mean when the Ur-modernism and distinctive pedagogies of the German Bauhaus arrive in the rolling green hills of a former colonial battle site in South Africa, via the conduit of well-meaning Swedes? How do we insert this complex cultural and aesthetic exchange into the narratives of modernism?

To be fair, these deeper probings could easily comprise another book, but the cross-cultural aesthetic exchange of the Rorke's Drift project demands some contextualization within the larger narratives of African and international modernism, if only because not doing so can easily be read as a failure to consider the modernity of these artists.

The panoramic scope of this book also dictates that the authors are unable to provide much more than brief commentaries on many artists; they are clearly trying to balance depth of engagement with breadth, hoping to discuss as many artists as possible. Indeed, for many talented printmakers, such as Charles Nkosi, Paulos Mchunu, Muziweyixhwala Tabete, Vuyiswa Sondlo, and others who have been sorely neglected and rarely if ever published, this book offers an exciting introduction to their work. Written in conjunction with a comprehensive retrospective of the Rorke's Drift printmakers curated by Hobbs and Rankin and currently on tour in South Africa, the book offers a sensitively balanced and judiciously selected group of images. For these images alone, this book is an invaluable addition to any South African art aficionado's library. Moreover, the last, thematically focused chapter (if not the entire text) would be an excellent addition to the reading list of any course devoted to South African art.