South Africa from North America: exporting identities through art.

South Africa is a player on the world stage and on sports fields. Where once it had to employ any number of bureaucratic tricks to get Zola Budd into the Olympics, it now openly exports Oscar-winning belles.

(Bachar 2004:4)

Africa, an entire continent long overlooked as a source of contemporary art, has suddenly burst onto the international art world's radar screen. In the past five years, artists from Benin, Senegal, Zaire, Mali, Tunisia, Egypt, Nigeria, and, especially, South Africa have been receiving high-profile exposure in museums, galleries, and biennials.

(Pollack 2001:124, emphasis mine)

A decade after South Africa's much-celebrated transition from apartheid to nonracial democracy, the country once shunned by much of the world is positively hip, with South African artists, writers, and musicians now in great demand the world over. From actress Charlize Theron to photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa, South Africans have a prominent place on the world cultural stage. In the realm of the visual arts, certainly, South Africa has emerged from pariah status to become an international force. Four recent art exhibitions (one of which has a small companion exhibition), presented in a wide range of institutions, indicate South Africa's exceptional prominence in the United States. (1) I will focus much of my discussion on two of these exhibitions, Personal Affects and A Decade of Democracy, both of which commemorate the 1994 transition; the other two have no explicit connection to the anniversary. My discussion of these timely exhibitions, each of which offers powerful insight into South African lives, is not intended as a conventional review but rather as an exploration of South Africa's representation in the United States through the visual arts. Although they differ widely in their intentions and their contents, these exhibitions all offer opportunities to reflect on South Africa's symbolic significance for US audiences. They also provide a window onto the complexities of South Africa's dramatic transition, which is often represented, especially to international audiences, as a heroic march from bondage to freedom, leaving aside its ambiguities and imperfections.

A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa, an exhibition of recent work by twenty young South African artists, was presented at a venue that focuses on African-American art. The artists use painting, photography, video, sculpture, installations, and collage to address past national struggles as well as contemporary issues such as HIV/AIDS, poverty, and women's empowerment. It was curated by three South Africans (2) as part of sondela, a project aimed at fostering exchange between South Africa and the United States. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that assembles essays, interviews, and observations by eleven South African, American, and British contributors. The catalogue provides historical background, personal reminiscence, and African-American perspectives on South African culture and recent political transformations (Fig. 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art presents seventeen artists, some with international reputations and others whose work has not previously been shown outside South Africa. Following consultation with the five curators, (3) each artist created work specifically for this exhibition, held at the Museum for African Art and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, both in New York City. Two loosely articulated themes underpinned the curators' selection: questions of identity and "notions of performance and ritualized action" (Enwezor, Murinik, and Van der Watt 2004:19) With several artists creating work that is performance-based, interactive, and site-specific, it is probably the most conceptual of the exhibitions mounted in South Africa and elsewhere in 2004. The works discussed here are from the catalogue's first volume, which was produced before the artists had created the pieces that were commissioned for the exhibition. A second volume, published in November, 2004, documents the exhibitions at the Museum and the Cathedral (Fig. 2).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

An affiliated exhibition at the Museum consisted of thirty-two sculptural works from the collection of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Glimpses from the South offers an alternate view of South Africa. Staffs, headrests, figurative sculpture, and other works of art owe more to indigenous than to international style, "classical" rather than "contemporary" (Fig. 3).

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

In the same vein, the private collection featured in Asking for Eyes: The Visual Voice of Southeast Africa consists of objects with deep roots in local, indigenous cultures. Artists' names are replaced by ethnic designations, clearly distinguishing this work from the studio art tradition. The exhibition and its catalogue are the work of an advanced art history class at San Diego State University. Asking for Eyes presents objects that were created for local use or for nonlocal markets (such as a group of nineteenth century wirework trays and baskets), which are placed in cultural context by the catalogue essays. Much of the exhibition is focused on body adornment, primarily beadwork (Fig. 4), though sculpture in a variety of media is represented as well. The work of one contemporary artist, sculptor Josephine Ghesa, breaks through the anonymity in which much African art still dwells.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

William Kentridge Prints is a retrospective of this South African artist's prodigious work in printmaking. Kentridge is arguably South Africa's best-known artist in international circles; he was recently the subject of a major US retrospective. (4) The exhibition's catalogue, with an essay by poet and literary critic Susan Stewart, places Kentridge's work within a long history of printmaking as political protest and cultural critique. The artist's own commentary on the work provides historical context and elucidates the technical aspects of his work (Fig. 5).

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Rediscovering the Self: The Post-Apartheid Body

Identity--both the importance of asserting it and the futility of delimiting it--is at the core of all of these exhibitions. Diverse works of art, including ear plugs and beaded anklets as well as etchings, digital photography, and performance art, provide insights into a wide range of South African identities, both individual and collective. History is also a central theme in all of the exhibitions, in some cases explicitly confronted, in others obliquely acknowledged. The response to South Africa's history of cultural interactions and collisions is especially vivid in recent artistic production, as artists respond to the explosion of changes that occurred at every level of society when white rule ended and the African National Congress became South Africa's ruling party. Simon Njami, in an essay that accompanied another recent US exhibition of South African art (5) described the exploration of history and identity that was unleashed by the demise of apartheid:

   Now that apartheid had been definitively
   placed in the archives of
   history--at least according to the
   law--it was no longer a question of
   defining oneself according to the
   artificial division that separated the
   good guys from the bad guys. Finally,
   people could explore their internal
   demons, with no obligation other
   than to be faithful to themselves. To
   interrogate history and its consequences
   (Njami 2003:34).

For some, however, this freedom to address apartheid and its reverberations contains the potential for enforcing a new limitation on artistic expression. In his essay for Personal Affects, Okwui Enwezor described apartheid's marketability as artistic subject, creating an ironic situation in which "bearing witness to the memory of the dim years of apartheid became de rigueur for work seeking admittance into exhibition possibilities. Thus were South African artists in belated forms and ways introjected into the discourse of identity" (Enwezor 2004:33). The end of apartheid freed South African artists to confront its legacy yet simultaneously created a readily marketable image of the country that threatened to confine those artists. So treacherous is this territory--the space between representing South African experience and participating in a national stereotype--that some observers and artists advocate for evading identity altogether. Liese van der Watt's essay for Personal Affects proposes that the work in the exhibition is the product of a post-identity culture:

   Although the exhibition emerges out
   of democratic South Africa, many of
   these artworks want to be liberated
   from that context; they refuse
   to announce their identity or to
   be forever locked into the circuits
   that expect a certain look or a certain
   conceptual framework from
   the art of South Africa (van der
   Watt 2004:49).

Tumelo Mosaka, curator of A Decade of Democracy, makes a similar assertion:

   During the decade of democracy
   just passed, a major change occurred
   among younger, emerging
   artists. This generation, though
   socialized under apartheid, seems
   unburdened by its tragedies. Their
   work no longer responds to isolated
   local politics or works within the
   familiar political idiom of earlier
   decades, which seems predictable
   today (Mosaka 2004:31).

Thus, these exhibitions represent a South Africa that seeks liberation not from apartheid itself but from apartheid as an already predictable subject for artistic production--an astounding distance covered in ten years.

These and other issues addressed by South African artists have been hotly debated in South Africa--fervent debates have surrounded Albie Sachs's "Preparing Ourselves for Freedom" (Sachs 1990), a paper written to suggest a course for post-apartheid art-making, and the Okwui Enwezor-curated 1997 Johannesburg Biennale. (6) Because the exhibitions under consideration here are all presented in the United States, the issues surrounding the use of distinctively South African subject matter reverberate with the long struggle over "authenticity" in the fields of African and other non-Western art. As I have discussed elsewhere, many African artists have described and decried the impact of international expectations--the need for international markets exerts pressure on artists to conform to "authentic" styles and iconography (Rovine 2001:61-4). With the commemoration of South Africa's democratic transition, the country's artists have a forum in which to speak directly to the international market, expressing their intentions and their inspirations through their work as well as through interviews and essays in catalogues. Johannes Phokela, one of the artists in Personal Affects, echoed many African artists in his response to a question concerning the "African" identity of his work: "Once you have the work it doesn't really matter who produced it. What counts is the quality. But unfortunately, the contemporary international art scene has this tendency to dwell on the background of the artist" (Murinik 2004:117). Phokela and the artists in these exhibitions are not only the subject of artistic discourse by critics, curators, and academics; they are active participants in that discourse.

The Boston and New York City exhibitions focus explicitly on the "new" South Africa, with its post-apartheid interrogation of identity and history. Both feature works created since 2000 by artists who are predominantly under forty years of age. Thando Mama, the only artist whose work is included in both exhibitions, succinctly expresses how history and identity are linked at both global and personal levels:

   I've always wanted to take on the
   whole notion of history and memory.
   Throughout Africa and the
   diaspora, one of the things that is
   very widely debated and contested
   is the notion of the identity of
   the people that reside on this continent.
   And that has some connection
   with how I started looking at
   myself, at my own identity, who I
   am..." (Murinik 2004:99).

Mama's work, primarily video-based, uses his own body to explore black masculinity in contemporary South Africa. The body is, in fact, the prism through which many of these artists explore cultural, national, and personal histories and identities. These artists take on a wide range of somatic subjects, including circumcision, HIV/AIDS, sexuality, and state control over the personal realm. The work includes photographs of the broken bodies of AIDS sufferers (Fanie Jason; Fig. 6), painted evocations of the trauma of circumcision (Cobert Mashile; see Fig. 1), graffiti-like portrait memorials to victims of urban violence (Mustafa Maluka), and dramatic gender-bending performances that confront economic and social inequities (Steven Cohen; Fig. 7).

[FIGURES 6-7 OMITTED]

William Kentridge's work provides a degree of historical perspective within the context of South Africa's studio art tradition, presenting work that began in the 1970s (ancient history, relative to the New York and Boston exhibitions, which only barely reach back to the twentieth century). His is the only work in this group of exhibitions that spans pre-apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, though, tellingly, without any clear distinction between the two. His work critiqued the apartheid regime and it continues to expose its legacy, through searing imagery and recurring narratives that explore the numbing experience of repression through the body. The prints abound with images of bodies crushed by despair and bloated with power, and inanimate objects made ominously human (Fig. 8).

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

While recent work by studio artists is prominently featured in these exhibitions, no less significant responses to the twin forces of history and identity are contained in the beaded ornaments featured in the San Diego State University exhibition. Here, too, the body is central to artistic expression, as the elaborate beaded ensembles were made for and completed by the bodies that wore them (Fig. 9). They serve as markers of identities--individual, ethnic, social, and, most recently, national. This exhibition documents the regional and chronological specificity of dress styles, as well as the multiplicity of variations within a single type. If the recent work of studio artists represents the diversity and creative drive of a postapartheid culture, the 120 works in Asking for Eyes represent a similarly diverse and artistically energetic pre-apartheid culture. Because many of the pieces were made between 1950 and 1990, the period of apartheid rule, this characterization is more metaphorical than historical; like any historical transformation, pre- and post-apartheid cultures cannot be cleanly delineated by the passage of a law or the outcome of an election. Whether they were made before or after the upheaval wrought by apartheid, these works emerge out of a cohesive sense of identity that endured in spite of, and in some instances because of, the pressures of the apartheid regime. (7)

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

Perceiving South Africa: Asymmetries and Extremes

South Africa's celebrated beadwork traditions might, in fact, serve as a metaphor for my exploration of the country's presence in American art exhibitions during the past year. Like the colors and patterns of beaded ornaments, South Africa's recent history makes an immediate impact, for its dramatic narrative of the triumph of equality and democracy over racism and repression is vivid and morally satisfying. The bright colors and geometric patterns of beadwork, like the appellation "rainbow nation," have all played a role in South Africa's public, international image. A closer examination reveals complexities--in beadwork, asymmetrical patterns and colors that seem to clash; in South African society, economic and political inequities that persist.

To the eyes of this recent visitor, South Africa appears to encompass seemingly irreconcilable extremes of wealth and poverty, progressive and reactionary politics, world cities and vast rural regions. While such discrepancies and inequities are, arguably, universal, South Africa's extremes are dramatically visible, like the sight of the shanties of Cape Flats from the windows of an airport shuttle van--the impact is immediate, impossible to ignore in the journey from airport to hotel. In her cogent analysis of public culture in the post-apartheid era, Annie E. Coombes draws attention to this incongruity:

   In many ways, South Africa is anachronistic
   in the extreme. On the one
   hand, it is a country that to the outsider
   with some experience of other
   African states bears only a slim resemblance
   to many of them, having
   an infrastructure of roads and other
   support institutions ... that has more
   in common with a highly developed
   industrialized capitalist state.
   On the other, South Africa shares
   many of the problems of developing
   nations with histories of extremes
   of unevenly distributed
   wealth (Coombes 2003:3-4).

South Africa's visual arts vividly reflect Coombes's anachronism, presenting US audiences with an experience similar to that of the taxi passenger who encounters extremes of poverty and wealth. The country is most prominently represented in US museums and galleries by artists at opposite ends of the art market. At one end is William Kentridge, an artist so renowned that one portion of his oeuvre merits a solo exhibition (his prints, for example, in the Grinnell College exhibition). At the other, we find "traditional" artists whose beadwork and sculpture is usually identified only by their ethnic affiliation and estimations of the decade--or century--in which they worked. Although South Africa's artistic identity is much more nuanced than this stark opposition suggests, its simultaneous prominence in two distinct art markets--both contemporary, international studio art and indigenous, so-called traditional art--is exceptional. These exhibitions feature artists whose work represents this broad art world spectrum.

South Africa's indigenous or traditional arts have historically been marginalized in the international markets for African art. Until recent years, surveys of sub-Saharan African art barely represented southern and eastern Africa, regions that were not known for wooden sculpture and masks--long the sine qua non of the African art market. The brochure accompanying Glimpses from the South, an exhibition of traditional South African sculpture, posited several reasons for this lack of attention, including

   the complex history of the peoples
   of this region, which consisted of a
   series of migrations rather than settled
   kingdoms.... Furthermore, African
   art from the region was widely
   perceived through European eyes to
   be merely of ethnographic interest.
   The objects were, by nature, small,
   domestic, and personal rather than
   large, public, and institutional, and
   so were almost invisible as legitimate
   expressions of artistic impulse
   (Glimpses 2004:n.p.).

The canon of African art, formed largely during the early twentieth century in Europe and the United States, centered on West and Central Africa. This tendency is now beginning to change, with more North American museums collecting South African beadwork and sculpture.

Meanwhile, as beadwork makes its way into art museum galleries and surveys of African art, South African studio arts have attained high visibility. Although the country had a rich tradition of community-based visual arts schools and cooperatives as well as university-level art schools, its studio arts had little visibility outside South Africa. As Sue Williamson noted in 1999,

   Before 1993, the year South Africa
   was once again invited to the
   Venice Biennale after an absence of
   almost twenty-seven years, the art
   of South Africa was almost completely
   unknown to the outside
   world. Not only has apartheid provoked
   the international cultural
   boycott of the country so that even
   so-called resistance art was little
   seen outside the borders, but geographical
   isolation also played a
   part (Williamson 1999:32).

The Johannesburg Biennales drew international attention to the country's contemporary arts, and South African artists were soon exhibited in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. (8) Thus, South African art today appears in both cutting-edge contemporary art contexts and in exhibitions of canonical African sculpture.

Mandela and Marketing: The Fascination from Afar

I turn now to a brief exploration of South Africa's symbolic weight in the United States, in order to elucidate American interest in the country's commemoration of a decade of democratic governance. South Africa's story (9) has particular resonance in the international community, for the country's recent history was shaped by global forces in a very literal sense--the anti-apartheid movement that eventually uprooted a racist regime was fueled both by resistance from within South Africa and, importantly, by solidarity from many people outside the country, if not always their governments. South Africans shared the euphoric events of 1994 with activists and sympathizers of many nationalities, including North Americans, who had a hand in or at least a sense of common cause with the movement. In the preamble to a document posted on the official governmental web site for the tenth anniversary commemoration, the integral role of protests and boycotts outside South Africa is noted: "Tribute also needs to be paid to the world anti-apartheid movement, whose selfless struggles contributed to the achievement of our freedom.... Through their campaigns ... they kept the issue of the liberation of South Africa on the international agenda." (10) Gary van Wyk, in the Decade of Democracy catalogue, notes that many in the US lobbied for sanctions and divestment from South African businesses, so that "This anniversary is therefore one that Americans can celebrate proudly with South Africans. In many ways they share it" (van Wyk 2004:5).

Many Americans who participated in boycotts and protests continue to feel solidarity with South Africa. Nelson Mandela's ascension to the status of living legend has ensured that even people who were not involved in the anti-apartheid movement know something of the country's astounding transformation. Soweto and Steven Biko are among the references that have become international signifiers of resistance and revolution. For some in the United States, South Africa represents a parallel to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, creating a sense of identification that had a direct impact on the exhibitions under consideration here. A Decade of Democracy had its inception in this equation of the struggle of African-Americans with that of "black" and "colored" people in South Africa. Donna M. Keefe, the Boston community activist who initiated the exhibition as part of a development project, wrote of her first visit to South Africa in 1997: "South Africa reminded me of what I had experienced growing up in the 1960s ... I was sensitive to the similarities between my native United States and South Africa in their histories and their segregation policies ..." (Keefe 2004:1). While South Africa's transition might be reminiscent of the end of segregation in the United States, following in the footsteps of an American precedent, South Africa's new constitution should inspire admiration for the even deeper ground it breaks. Much of the work presented here invites analogies to US culture, providing a mirror and a model as much as a window onto a distant country. And yet, even as South African sets new standards in the human rights arena, life and death issues of dire poverty and high unemployment rates should temper our enthusiasm. As in the United States, South Africa's constitution is a worthy set of goals rather than a description of rights as they are lived.

These exhibitions offer an appropriate commemoration of South Africa's past decade, for these ten years have been marked by the advent of democracy, rising pride in indigenous identities, and the opening of South Africa to the world, as well as by the scourge of HIV/AIDS, mounting crime rates, and governmental corruption. South Africa's story is neither an inspirational account of success nor a narrative of disaster. Balancing between the two, South African artists have sought to express the changing reality of a country that has captured the international imagination.

A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston (April 1-October 31, 2004)

Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art Museum for African Art/Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City (September 21, 2004-January 3, 2005)

Glimpses from the South: A Selection of African Art from the Johannesburg Art Gallery Museum for African Art (companion exhibition to Personal Affects; through February 28, 2005)

Asking for Eyes: The Visual Voice of Southeast Africa (Selections from the Edward M. Smith Family Art Collection) University Art Gallery, San Diego State University (November 8-December 4, 2004)

William Kentridge Prints Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College Grinnell, Iowa (October 1-December 12, 2004)

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2004.]

(1.) While I viewed two of these exhibitions in person (A Decade of Democracy and William Kentridge Prints), I was unable to view the other two before writing this piece. My discussion of those exhibitions is therefore based on checklists, press materials, and exhibition catalogues.

(2.) Curator Tumelo Mosaka along with curatorial associates Sophie Ainslie and Thembinkosi Goniwe, both artists as well as curators.

(3.) The curators, four South Africans and one American, are: David Brodie, Laurie Ann Farrell, Churchill Madikida, Sophie Perryer, and Liese van der Watt.

(4.) The 2001-2002 retrospective, William Kentridge, was coorganized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. The exhibition also traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.

(5.) This exhibition, Coexistence: Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa, was jointly organized by the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and the South African National Gallery/Iziko Museums of Cape Town. I have not included it in my overview of South African art in US exhibitions because I am here addressing only exhibitions presented in 2004. The exhibition included several artists also represented in the New York City and Boston exhibitions.

(6.) This and other debates are discussed in catalogue essays in both A Decade of Democracy and Personal Affects. Atkinson and Breitz gathered a series of responses to recent art world controversies in Grey Areas (1999)

(7.) Apartheid policies, such as the obsessive organization of South Africa's population into racial and ethnic categories, ironically contributed to the survival of beadwork traditions by reinforcing ethnic identities.

(8.) The biennials began in 1995, with Africus: Johannesburg Biennale, and continued with Trade Routes: History and Geography in 1997. European exhibitions of contemporary South African art include the 1996 exhibition at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt, "Colors: Kunst ans Sudafrika," and "Art from South Africa" at the Museum of modern Art in Oxford (1990).

(9.) I use this term deliberately to refer to the transformation of South Africa's history into a narrative of struggle, resistance, victory, and redemption, encapsulated by Mandela's biography. Though simplistic, this narrative has given South Africa a place in the imaginations of many Americans, for whom Africa is otherwise an undifferentiated collage of safaris, war, and famine.

(10.) "Ten Year Celebrations of Freedom: The International Programme" http: // www.10years.gov.za/celebrate/events/int naprog.pdf

References cited

Atkinson, Brenda, and Candice Breitz, eds. 1999. Grey Areas: Representation, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary South African Art. Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press.

Bachar, Arik. 2004. "A Matter of Perspective." The Safundi Member Research Newsletter (March):4.

Coombes, Annie E. 2003. History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Enwezor, Okwui. 2004. "The Enigma of the Rainbow Nation: Contemporary South African Art at the Crossroads of History." In Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, Tracy Murinik, and Liese van der Watt. New York: Museum for African Art and Spier.

Enwezor, Okwui, Tracy Murinik, and Liese van der Watt, eds. 2004. Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art. New York: Museum for African Art and Spier.

Glimpses from the South: A Selection of African Art from the Johannesburg Art Gallery. 2004. New York: Museum for African Art.

Keefe, Donna M. 2004. "Acknowledgements." In A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa. Edited by Gary van Wyk. Boston: sondela.

Mosaka, Tumelo. 2004. "A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa." In A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa. Edited by Gary van Wyk. Boston: sondela.

Murinik, Tracy. 2004. "Thando Mama" (interview). In Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, Tracy Murinik, and Liese van der Watt. New York: Museum for African Art and Spier.

Njami, Simon. 2003. "Another Country." In Coexistence: Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa. Edited by Pamela Allara, Marilyn Martin, and Sola Mtshiza. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University.

Pollack, Barbara. 2001. "The Newest Avant-Garde." ARTnews 100, 4:124-9.

Rovine, Victoria L. 2001. Bogolan: Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Sachs, Albie. 1990. "Preparing Ourselves for Freedom." In Art from South Africa. Edited by Kendall Geers. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.

van der Watt, Leise. 2004. "Towards an 'Adversarial Aesthetics': A Personal Response to Personal Affects." In Personal Affects Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, Tracy Murinik, and Liese van der Watt. New York: Museum for African Art and Spier.

van Wyk, Gary. 2004. "Reflecting Democracy." In A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa. Edited by Gary van Wyk. Boston: sondela.

Williamson, Sue. 1999. "Looking Back, Looking Forward: An Overview of South African Art." In Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa. Edited by Frank Herreman. New York: Museum for African Art.