This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

15th August 2009

It is a truism that the arts – and in particular the visual or ‘fine’ arts – cannot thrive without patronage.

The celebrated painting, weaving and pottery of medieval China flourished under the Tang, Ming and Qing emperors. Likewise (despite their many faults) we have the Medici dynasty and a few popes to thank for the Italian renaissance artworks of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and others.

Artists have always depended on either public or private capital to support and promote their work, from the tomb-obsessed pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the guilty philanthropy of the Guggenheims in America. There is often a taint attached to government- and corporate-funded works, an expectation that the artist will endorse a particular ideology or brand; but great art has the capacity to outlast such considerations and to rise above its murky origins.

In South Africa, given that the apartheid state rarely commissioned works challenging the status quo and that the current government tends to provide funding to artistic projects matching its own concerns, corporate sponsorships and prizes have seemed to offer artists a rare but vital combination of financial support and creative freedom.

It is worth bearing these factors in mind when viewing the works comprising the “Standard Bank Young Artists: 25” exhibition, currently on display at the bank’s gallery in Johannesburg.

The Young Artist awards grew out of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown – the festival committee wanted to create “a prize aimed at artists in the first flush of their careers” who were “established” and “demonstrated exceptional ability” but had “not yet achieved major national or international exposure and acclaim”. Commencing in 1981 (they were sponsored by Five Roses for the first three years), the awards have become synonymous with the bank’s sponsorship of the arts and have, arguably, played a defining role in South African art over the last twenty-five years.

Certainly, the list of award winners contains the names of some of the country’s most widely respected artists. In his introduction to the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Emile Maurice goes so far as to claim that “the significance of the award is such that, without an exploration of the work of the winners, I doubt whether any cultural researcher could gain proper insight into the history and meaning of South African art ... no major South African public collection can be said to be representative of the nation’s art without work by the award winners”.

This is, of course, partly because the publicity associated with the award, the opportunity to exhibit at major galleries across the country and the publication of exhibition catalogues are guaranteed to raise an artist’s profile. But one could also argue that those who have selected the winners over the years have shown insight and prescience in identifying artists who would have garnered acclaim even if they hadn’t received a Standard Bank ‘boost’.

Four of those involved in the visual arts category of the Young Artist awards – Barbara Freemantle and the late Alan Crump, who curated the exhibition, as well as Andrew Verster and Marion Arnold – along with Melissa Mboweni and Maurice, have each contributed an essay to the catalogue. Collectively, these texts not only offer an account of the history of the award but also make some interesting general comments about South African art over the last three decades.

The phenomena and trends that they describe can be discerned in the works displayed in the exhibition. There is, for instance, the shift from painting and sculpture as predominant art forms or ‘genres’ to the increasing popularity of photography, videography and multimedia installations (a shift that was perhaps delayed in SA because of the country’s isolation from international artistic movements and debates). There is the collapsing of distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. And, throughout, there is the tension between the responsibility of political engagement and the desire for artistic autonomy.

Mboweni describes a move from implicit or explicit protest against apartheid towards the exploration of individual and collective identities in a post-apartheid society with a more nuanced understanding of race and culture. Yet she also points out that there are no neat divisions to be made using the watershed year of 1994. Arnold concurs: the “insertion” of the works produced for each year’s Young Artist exhibition into SA art history “help to disrupt attempts at a narrow categorisation of art under apartheid, in transition, or post-1994”.

So, while Maurice writes that the works are “touchstones for our past” and “make for a South African narrative”, that narrative is not a linear one – in the gallery, the artists are not exhibited in a chronological sequence of award winners. Each artist is represented by two pieces, and even though this is insufficient to trace continuity and change in a particular oeuvre, there are opportunities to make comparisons between ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ works.

For example, Brett Murray’s 1987 resin-cast figure Policeman – with oversized boots indicating the violent authority associated with the SA police at the time – is contrasted with his 2000 Bubblehead series, which offers a satirical take on popular culture and ‘whiteness’.

Facing these are Fée Halsted-Berning and Bonnie Ntshalintshali’s very different ‘sculptures’: ceramics from the Ardmore studio where Halsted-Berning mentored Ntshalintshali (they won the award together in 1991).

The biblical overtones in Ntshalintshali’s work – her ‘Africanised’ take on The Last Supper or her screenprint of Jonah and the whale – form part of an unexpected theme running through the works collected for this exhibition. The skeletal but ‘saintly’ mother-and-child in Wim Botha’s linoprint Apocalumbilicus (echoed, uncannily, in the intricate wirework of Walter Oltmann’s Mother and Child) find unlikely companions in other haloed figures: Peter Schütz’s wood-carved St Sebastian and Jane Alexander’s breastfeeding, ragged mother in the disturbingly lifelike Pastoral Scene.

Religious iconography is also appropriated by Helen Mmakgabo Sebidi, who became the first black woman to receive a major SA art award when she was the Young Artist winner in 1989. Sebidi’s Modern Marriage is crammed with figures who seem to evoke Renaissance depictions of hell, while her more recent work Who Are We and Where Are We Going? also adapts the conventions of ecclesiastic art to extraordinary effect.

There are other intriguing connections and comparisons to be made. The rough, fluid figures in William Kentridge’s miniature bronze Procession Series #6 can be contrasted with the stasis of Andries Botha’s similarly-sized bronze A Delicate Moment in History. Kentridge’s charcoal-and-pastel animation Felix in Exile, which is emblematic of his inimitable style, shares a video loop with Churchill Madikida’s painful pap consumption in Struggles of the Heart and the quietly violent undertones of Berni Searle’s Still About to Forget.

Kathryn Smith’s photographic portraits evince a kind of deliberate anachronism, like the period fashion suggested in Botha’s Generic Self-Portrait series of busts, but her photographs could also be seen to ‘converse’ with those of Pieter Hugo and Nontsikelelo Veleko.

The urban setting for Veleko’s work, in turn, resonates unexpectedly with the vivid city scenes of Tommy Motswai; these contrast with the consciously ‘rural’ focus of Trevor Makhoba’s images, the prominence of ‘natural’ elements in Lien Botha’s photographs and prints and Margaret Vorster’s more abstract compositions, or the environmentalism of Arnold’s Zoned for Development.

Other notable works in the exhibition include Gavin Arnold’s Riot Protected Pram, Pippa Skotnes’s San etchings, Sam Nhlengethwa’s collages, the striking colours of Nhlanhla Xaba’s oil paintings, Alan Alborough’s enigmatic installations and Nicholas Hlobo’s rubber-and-ribbon stitched Uzimbamb’emsileni.

* “Standard Bank Young Artists: 25” is at the Standard Bank Gallery until 19th September.