This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

31st October 2009

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There are many facets to the Joburg aesthetic. There’s the ‘minedumps and highways’ cliché that out-of-towners hold so dear when they deride SA’s biggest city. There’s the capitalist/consumerist synthesis expressed in corporate palaces, coffee shops and couture boutiques. There’s the leafy suburban street, complete with high walls and grassy pavements.

Driving along the roads of this heavily-treed metropolis and listening to the mild inanities of afternoon talk radio has its own particular appeal. But after hearing yet another show in which the host bemoans the lack of village cricket in Parkhurst, solicits ice-cream recipes, promotes the delights of Jacaranda blossom viewing from the Westcliff Hotel or panders in some other way to the petit- and haute-bourgeois ambitions of Gauteng’s denizens, one begins to think: surely there are other (more interesting) ways of representing Johannesburg, of exploring its multiple contradictions, of experiencing the city?

Indeed, for most residents in the urban sprawl that makes up greater Joburg, day-to-day life is played out amidst the bustle of the city centre (often incorrectly referred to as the ‘old’ CBD), across the disparate energies of Soweto and through the bittersweet taste of life in the townships.

And – in sharp contradiction to the nay-sayers who might declare these spaces unreceptive to ‘beauty’, ‘refinement’, ‘contemplation’ and other abstractions that are typically associated with works of art by urbane urbanites – Joburg’s most densely-populated areas are have become the collective site for a proliferation of public art.

“Our general policy is to spend one percent of the budget for any infrastructural development project on artwork for the location,” explains Lael Bethlehem, CEO of the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA). “And with big budgets,” she adds, “that can be a substantial amount of money.”

Recent additions to the Jozi cityscape include the Fire Walker, a dynamic structure by William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx that stands eleven metres high on Queen Elizabeth Bridge; statues of Walter and Albertina Sisulu between Commissioner and Market streets, and of Kippie Moeketsi outside the Newtown jazz club that bears his name; and wooden sculptures ingeniously carved from tree stumps on Constitution Hill and in Pieter Roos Park. Otherworldly presences have found a place downtown – in amongst the pedestrians, commuters and buildings, you can spot angels, a giant eland or soccer players caught in freeze-frame.

So when the JDA and the team led by Johannesburg Mayoral Committee member for transport, Rehana Moosajee, were developing and implementing the first phase of the Rea Vaya Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, there was no question that this would include the commissioning of artwork to adorn the major stations along the route.

The BRT is undeniably changing the way Joburgers travel – “creating more public life in a city that is privatised in so many ways”, as Bethlehem puts it – and in doing so pioneering a public transport model for other SA cities. Perhaps it would be an overstatement to claim that the BRT artworks programme is changing the way Joburgers see and think and feel; but for those waiting at the stations or passing by on foot, the artworks provide entertainment, visual stimulation, social commentary or simple relief and distraction from the workaday grind.

“The works can be seen as a continuation of the artistry in the station design, rather than an ‘add-on’,” affirms Bethlehem. “The architectural team has made an important contribution to the visual landscape of Joburg and Soweto.” The standardised design of the stations placed certain constraints on the artists: works are situated on the transparent panes at the oval-edged entrances to each station; they have been sand-blasted into the glass and do not block light or vision.

Some of the pieces invite viewers to interact with them. Conrad Kemp’s “Bubbles”, for instance, “aims to allow commuters and passers-by to produce their own narratives by allocating speech and thought-bubbles to other commuters and passers-by”. The artist’s idea is that, imagining a complete stranger thinking or speaking words and phrases like “Salaam”, “Mom?”, “Mutton or lamb?” or “...so tired...” encourages us to consider “other people’s realities and what we share with those people.”

This involvement represents a significant development in the way that public art is conceived and executed. An artist may have a particular vision for the impact of his or her work but, as art critic Anthea Buys observes, “the artwork’s capacity to deviate in meaning and effect from the artist’s intentions is activated by the potential for exchange between work and site ... and, crucially, from the interaction of a viewer with both”.

Invoking Nicolas Bourriaud’s term “relational aesthetics” – which refers to works “explicitly concerned with viewer participation, communication and a supposedly democratic or equitable exchange between the artist and the viewer” – Buys describes “a notable movement in recent public art production in South Africa (and abroad) towards realising works that are increasingly fugitive and relational, instead of those that assert their position in a public landscape”.

Thus, there has been “a shift in public art production from the permanent and object-based to the ephemeral” (a focus on performance art, for example). This is also the result of “a growing concern with the ethical implications of inserting art into the public sphere, where its audiences may not ultimately consent to or benefit from its presence”. Public art, as “a tool in gentrification processes”, can be complicit in less-than-democratic policies that “jeopardise existing uses of city space”.

Bethlehem is confident, however, that this is not the case with the JDA’s public art interventions: “I agree that public art shouldn’t be a matter of imposing objects on the city ‘from on high’. But it’s also manifestly clear that it needn’t be like that. It’s all about who you collaborate with, the choice of subject matter for the work and the function that it serves.”

Certainly, as far as the BRT artwork is concerned, a carefully inclusive process was followed. “At the JDA, we’re a bunch of engineers,” admits Bethlehem, “we’re not equipped to commission art! We depend on intermediaries and agents from the art world.” Enter Steven Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter of The Trinity Session, who disseminated the JDA’s call for designs to as many artists as possible.

Just as the names of stations – many of them, such as “Old Synagogue” and “Hillbrow Bath House”, evoking a hidden or forgotten heritage – were decided on through a combination of public input, focus groups and City of Johannesburg historical research, so the artwork commissioning process was envisioned as community-oriented. Where possible, artists were chosen who have a specific relationship with the area around the station where their work is displayed.

Many of the station artworks achieve a particular resonance in the “exchange between work and site”, as Buys describes it. At the Carlton Station eastbound on Market Street, for instance, Georgia Walsh and Quinten Williams have both created designs that refer to the surrounding ‘fashion district’, comprising hundreds of shops that sell textiles, jewellery, second-hand clothing and brand name knock-offs.

Up the road, Hans Foster’s piece at the Library Gardens Station eastbound takes its inspiration from the old Rissik Street post office, incorporating the architecture of the building as well as postmarks and stamps.

Hobbs and Neustetter, who worked on the Johannesburg Art Gallery Station on Twist Street next to Joubert Park, inserted text into their design to comment on the ambiguities in the road’s name (quoting from a newspaper article of 1926): “Twist ... not because of the wiggle it makes when it crosses Plein Street, but because it was the boundary of two farms over which a quarrel (Dutch twist) arose.”

Other works comment on their environment in unexpected ways. Paul Molete describes the striking image of a young black face that he created for the Library Gardens Station westbound as follows: “The artwork was inspired by a street-kid I met ... I told him that I didn’t want to give him money, as I thought he might go and buy glue with it. ‘Sniffing glue isn’t good for your health,’ I said. He replied: ‘I don’t care, uncle. Life does not threaten me.’ ”

Given the location of this work alongside the ANC’s offices at Walter Sisulu House (sibling to the party’s main headquarters at Luthuli House a few blocks away), one is tempted to moralise: could Molete’s work be seen to symbolise the ways in which the ruling party has failed South Africa’s children? Posters advertising an upcoming Youth League discussion on the nationalisation of mines offer a further, temporary irony.

The fluidity of the environment provides constantly changing contexts for the reception of public artworks. Even the ‘fixed’ visual markers move hour by hour – the appearance and replacement of advertisements or street vendors’ tables, different angles of light throughout the day or as the weather changes – and of course each passing pedestrian and car provides a new interpretive gloss.

Take Hannelie Coetzee’s “Abba”, which she says is “about the first mode of transport an African baby experiences”: being carried on its mother’s back. Coetzee has captured a sequential image of a woman “abba-ing” her child near the intersection of Commissioner and Troye streets. Does this artwork ‘mean’ something different when viewed by a mother carrying a child in the same way?

Theorist Miwon Kwon insists that the site of a work of art is not simply a geographical place but “a social matrix of class, race, gender and sexuality”. Therefore, Buys notes, a site-specific installation cannot be seen to depend on “the stability of reference to the permanent physical qualities of a location”; instead, meaning is forged through the “impermanence and singularity” of the fleeting moment in which a particular viewer accesses a particular work. Yet Buys also cautions against “romanticising the instant in time”.

Public art is often ignored – particularly art that does not impose on or obtrude into a city scene. Not every passer-by or commuter will notice a new work, fewer still will study it once noticed. Alternatively, it can be become so familiar as to be forgotten. In great cities across the world, tourists flock to famous artworks on public display while locals go about their day-to-day business, indifferent to (or, at best, peripherally aware of) their presence. Perhaps this is as it should be.

It will be some time yet before visitors to SA prioritise public urban artworks on their ‘must see’ lists. Admittedly, the logistics of a public art tour around cities like Johannesburg are tricky, even for locals. Nevertheless, initiatives such as the BRT artworks programme are creating a new dimension to the Joburg aesthetic.