This article first appeared in THE SOUTH AFRICAN ART TIMES

December 2009/January 2010

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In 2009, a year during which South Africa acquired a new president, a bulky new cabinet and a raft of new policy documents that may or may not remedy an old set of socio-economic problems, art exhibitions in Johannesburg reflected continuity rather than change.

There was, of course, plenty of work by artists following the injunction to “make it new”; but there was also a curatorial tendency to look backwards, to recuperate or consolidate aspects of the country’s twentieth-century artistic legacy. For this reviewer, certainly, the year began and ended in retrospection.

The Everard Read Gallery started 2009 with an exhibition of small bronzes by Anton van Wouw – a sculptor perhaps best known for his large-scale statues situated at the Voortrekker Monument, in Pretoria’s Church Square and elsewhere. The collection on display was an important reminder that there is much more to Van Wouw’s oeuvre, and that art historians would be wrong to write him off as a stooge of nascent Afrikaner nationalism or of the mining barons for whom he produced numerous busts.

The Standard Bank Gallery brought 2009 to a close with a retrospective of Alexis Preller’s work that coincided with the launch of Karel Nel and Esme Berman’s two-volume ‘visual biography’ of the enigmatic artist. The combined exhibition-and-book offers a convincing vindication of Preller’s place in South African art history – locating him alongside, but distinct from, precursors such as J.H. Pierneef or near-contemporaries like Walter Batiss, Irma Stern, Maggie Laubscher and Gerard Sekoto – and affirms the visionary nature of his creative-intellectual project: combining African cultural and aesthetic traditions with those of Europe and of ‘world art’ (before that was a common term).

During the course of the year, the same gallery used its upstairs-downstairs space to good effect by hosting simultaneous exhibitions of Edoardo Villa and Andrew Verster, and Len Sak and Lolo Veleko respectively. Of these, the Villa, Verster and Sak selections were also largely ‘backward glances’, containing pieces from early in each artist’s career and extending to more recent work.

As with Van Wouw, Villa’s renown as an artist stems largely from his monumental public artworks. But the small sculptures – not maquettes – in Villa’s “Moving Voices” were, according to the late Alan Crump, evidence that “monumentality is by no means a synonym for large”. Instead, they were a reminder-in-miniature of Villa’s fascination with primary colours and basic shapes (which, admittedly, many viewers find somewhat dated).

Verster’s “Past/Present”, on the other hand, evinced his delight in combining and manipulating complex patterns and rich textures: as opera costume and set designer; as bold explorer of “the male body and queer sexuality” (which Clive van den Berg emphasises in his contribution to the catalogue); as re-interpreter of stylised iconography from India, Japan and ancient Greece and Egypt.

Len Sak is not a widely recognised name. Yet Jojo, the affable character created by Sak for Drum magazine in 1959 who subsequently appeared – with his small shock of ‘Afro’ hair on an otherwise bald head, his trademark braces and white shirt bulging over his paunch – in various newspapers and on TV, has endeared himself to generations of South Africans. The exhibition celebrating Jojo’s fiftieth anniversary showed the various roles that he has played in South African public life: comical township observer, social commentator, educator and activist.

Another retrospective tribute was to be found at the University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, where a selection of the late Braam Kruger’s work was on display as part of the Arts Alive Festival in September. Portraiture was predominant: sultry nudes in exotic settings, allegorical figures representing black resistance to apartheid, and of course the self-portraits through which Kruger perpetuated the larger-than-life persona he cultivated in other guises as restaurateur, TV personality and author.

Insofar as Kruger remained a ‘marginal’ figure (deliberately so on his part, one feels), another significant retrospective exhibition spotlighted those who have been placed in the ‘centre’ of the national stage as recipients of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award over the last 25 years. It remains a moot point as to whether those selected as winners would have garnered the acclaim they have without the publicity generated by the annual award; nevertheless, it is incontestable that the list of Young Artists since 1984 reads like an extract from a ‘who’s who’ of the South African art world.

The photographs exploring urban youth identity in Lolo Veleko’s “Wonderland” (exhibited, incongruously but felicitously, with the “Jojo” exhibition) stem from her work as SBYA winner in 2008. In 2009, it was the turn of Nicholas Hlobo, whose “Umtshotsho” met with a mixed reception. Some viewers found the looming figures he stitched together from rubber inner tubing and arranged in dim red lighting to be a haunting and insightful comment on Xhosa identity; others were bemused by the work’s opacity and unimpressed by the gloomy venue Hlobo was allocated in Grahamstown’s 1820 Settlers Monument building.

It will be interesting to see what 2010 Young Artist Michael MacGarry produces. His description of the proposed installation is intriguing: it will include a film dealing with “problematised whiteness” and the “brain drain”: “Called LHRJHB (London to Joburg), it will be looped to a voice-over narrative containing extracts from J.M. Coetzee’s Youth.” This continues a ‘literary’ trend in much of MacGarry’s previous work, which invokes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Camus’s L’Etranger among others.

It will also be interesting to see how the Young Artist award, which inevitably forms part of the fine arts ‘establishment’ in South Africa, will inflect MacGarry’s work with his fellow members of Avant Car Guard – a self-consciously anti-establishment collective that, depending on who you ask, is either truly subversive or insubstantial posturing.

There is more consensus over the merits of Brett Murray’s satire; the artist’s “Crocodile Tears”, which was shown at the Goodman Gallery in February, confirmed his status as an incisive critic of public figures and ‘Joe Public’ alike. In the exhibition, Murray aimed his barbs at Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and anyone who had anything to do with the ANC’s Polokwane conference, along with Robert Mugabe, corporate opportunists and white South Africa at large.

More flattering portrayals of both private citizens and celebrities were on display in “History Recorded Through Portraiture”, a three-part exhibition curated by Reshada Crouse at Museum Africa in June. Visitors had the chance, firstly, to peruse some of the historical portraits kept – but not usually displayed – in the museum; secondly, to admire Crouse’s technique(s) as a portraitist in a selection of her work spanning three decades; and thirdly, to see the pieces produced by the students in Crouse’s painting group, aimed at encouraging novices to take up their brushes.

There were portraits, profiles and busts of a different sort on display in “Capital: How Heads Talk”, an exhibition forming part of Wits University’s Arts and Literature Experience (WALE) and promoting the cause of the Wits Art Museum – a yet-to-be-completed structure that will house the university’s collection of South African paintings, sculptures and installations, as well as masks, figurines, headdresses and other historical pieces produced by African artists. Among the famous faces depicted in “Capital” were Nelson Mandela, Hendrik Verwoerd, Lucas Radebe, Edwin Cameron, Steve Biko, Charles de Gaulle and W.H. Auden; there were also numerous renditions of unglamorous and unnamed citizens, which the curators used to suggest other paradigms for understanding “how heads talk”: the ways in which heads can signify justice, power, death, memory and our sense(s) of beauty.

The Wits exhibition’s punning title resonated unexpectedly with Jeannette Unite’s “Headgear”, which was fused with ‘capital’ in other ways: displayed at AngloGold Ashanti’s headquarters in Newtown before moving to the company’s Gold of Africa Museum in Cape Town, Unite’s drawings of headgear (also known as winding gear, mine heads or shaft heads) tread an awkward line between critiquing the socio-ecological damage caused by mining and aestheticising heavy industry in order to justify and even efface this damage.

A comparable ambiguity was evident in Aparna Swarup’s “Bioscope”, a series of photographs of the Indian artist’s home town, Allahabad. While many of the people and settings in Swarup’s photographs manifest poverty and pollution, her skilful manipulation of the lens (as well as of the developing process) turns them into beautiful and even sacred subjects. Yet this was not an exoticising view of India; rather, it was a kind of intimate love-letter to the city, written by someone who knows its charms.

Those who attended both Swarup’s exhibition and “Painted Narratives from India”, curated by Anjana Somany as part of the nationwide programme of events comprising “Shared History: The Indian Experience in South Africa”, could no doubt identify numerous parallels. While neither the medium nor the content were the same, both contained artworks that owe more to myth and legend than they do to social or political realities.

Jan van der Merwe’s “Ontwortel/Uprooted” (currently on at the UJ Gallery) does engage with such realities, albeit indirectly. Van der Merwe’s work addresses vague categories of the downtrodden and dispossessed (“ordinary people who become victims”, “women”, “children” – a topical but perhaps trite echo of the “16 Days of Activism” campaign). It is more interesting, however, for the rusting process to which he submits found objects, lending each work metaphorical potential in “the fight against time, vulnerability and transience”.

On a lighter note: Joburg may empty out over the holiday season, but if you’re in town there’s still artistic festive cheer to enjoy. Following successful exhibitions by Louis Olivier, Senzo Nhlapo and Sinta Spector as part of the Artspace Mentorship Programme, Teresa Lizamore will be curating the ninth instalment of her “Oppitafel” festive series at the gallery’s Rosebank premises and at the Artspace Warehouse in Fairland. Over fifty artists will be contributing to the show, which takes its inspiration from the book and film Babette’s Feast.

And in 2010? South Africans can hardly read or hear that combination of numbers without automatically thinking of the FIFA World Cup – and the country’s artistic life will undoubtedly be influenced by the event and the influx of visitors it will bring. Already there has been some controversy, with prominent art critic Sean O’Toole highlighting the compromising of artistic integrity that might ensue with “artists, curators, entrepreneurs and plain old hucksters ... readying themselves for the first whistle” and “jockeying for position” in the “panicked hunt for a quick buck”.

Is this unnecessarily alarmist? We’ll soon find out.