As with all the new works created by the recipients of the
Standard Bank Young Artist Award (SBYAA) who make their debut at the National
Arts Festival, the visual arts winner’s exhibition is always subjected to
intense scrutiny. It is the source of such focus for the visual arts community
mostly due to the fact that the festival continues to sideline this sector. The
organisers say it is due to a lack of appropriate venues for art and down to the
fact that exhibitions don’t fit into their business model: they can’t charge
tickets for people to view them – only for walkabouts – and those are limited.
And so it is that the winner of the Standard Bank Young
Artist award carries the burden of presenting the ‘highlight’ for the visual
arts for the festival. It sucks because they also have to present their work in
one of the worst venues for visual arts, the Monument Gallery, which reminds me
a bit of my dreary office in Sauer Street. Please god may an artist who wins
the prize in the future make some sort of architectonic intervention in this
space. In truth the SBYAA winner usually grows the exhibition over time as it
moves from venue to venue, finally landing up at the Standard Bank Gallery,
where it exists in its optimal state. Unfortunately, by then everyone has
stopped writing and analysing their show – the story has gone cold, so to
speak.
The Grahamstown showing presents the moment in which the
artist must prove they are worthy of the accolade they have received. Kemang Wa Lehulere found the ideal solution to
this custom; in History Will Break Your Heart he mostly presents the work and
life of other artists, thereby cunningly shifting attention away from himself. This
was clearly articulated in the publicity material available at the exhibition,
where his biography is preceded by that of artists Gladys “Nomfanekiso” Mgudlandlu
and Ernest Mancoba. In this way he sort
of also inserts himself into history – joins them.
In presenting the works of Mgudlandlu and dated footage of
Mancoba narrating his life story, Wa Lehulere has seemingly found an expedient
way to avoid risk and fill a room with art (in a short amount of time) that is
above criticism.
Fortunately, this novel solution is clever in other ways too
– he appears to have found a way to reinsert (art) history into the present/the
now – this exhibition is always viewed as being an expression of what’s hot in
contemporary art. In so doing he also poses the question that art perennially
asks: what is art? Is curating works, making documentaries, art? Might a
curator or art historian get a bash at winning this award in future, stretching
the definition of artist a little further?
You could argue that Mikhail Subotzky posed these same
questions a few years ago when he took the prize and also ‘curated’ existing
work (drawn from his own photo collection) and footage, though he too made a
new documentary.
Not that Wa Lehulere limits his talents to curating. Each
Mgudlandlu work he presents is pared with angled blackboards bearing crude
drawings in white chalk, drawing attention to gaps, absent works. This refers
to not only works that are missing from the archive but were never made – the
times in which Mgudlandlu made her art limited what it could be. These also
function as ‘mirrors’ as alluded to in the title, Does this mirror have a
memory, though they do not reflect the image which they face but rather operate
as a site of retrieval, where memories of her work, both real or fictional can
be re-imagined, reconstructed and erased – it’s a never-ending process, as is
the act of remembrance and digging into history, beyond art history.
There is an installation too – Another Homeless Song (for
RRR Dhlomo), an arrangement of salvaged school desks at the centre of the
gallery, further driving home this school, instructional theme. We are in the
process of relearning the narratives about people who were erased from the
history books and reclaiming those “firsts” – was R.R.R. Dhlomo’s first
novella, An African Tragedy, the first work of fiction by a black South
African to appear in book form? Mgulandlu was also supposedly the “first” black
woman to stage an exhibition – a fact that Nontobeko Ntombela, the curator of A
Fragile Archive, challenged in an exhibition of her work, in which she made
clear the gaps in this artist’s ‘narrative’ via blank spaces on the walls of
the Joburg Art Gallery, where it was staged in 2012. Wa Lehulere’s exhibition
is impossible to imagine without Ntombela’s – in a way it is an extension of
it, if not with more expressive interventions. Does Wa Lehulere take it far
enough? How does he extend the discourse? We have to ask this because he has
entered into the space of art history, where these questions become pertinent
in assessing the ‘value’ of the show. He could take it further not only
conceptually, but visually too and he probably intends to as the show travels.
Wa Lehulere brings these legendary ‘firsts’ together in a
room without challenging those titles – which Ntombela showed in a Fragile
Archive to be not only inaccurate but as such they act as a foil for the
messier histories they conceal. The blackboards facing Mgulandlu’s works which
are angled to face them could be an instructive way to reveal what they
conceal, or they function as this blank space upon which anything can be
projected. In this way the act of retrieval is as corrupt as the narratives
that they are meant to displace and the art object functions as this silent
witness to history that appears to ‘reveal’ so much – it is a visual
manifestation of a time and place – yet speaks in a vocabulary that is
vulnerable to reinterpretation.
Ntombela made this point – the only way Wa Lehulere takes it
forward is via inserting his own abstract response to the work – which is his “work” - in this way he continues in the tradition
of western art where he responds to a history that preceded him to take him
forwards – except he ends up in this no-mans land, because his ‘anchors’ are
seemingly unstable and he appears interested in returning and recouping a place
in the past rather than moving forward.
History hasn’t ‘broken his heart’, history is broken, and
the chronology is disrupted because of this desire to recuperate that which is
lost. In the film, The Bird Lady, in
nine layers of time, Wa Lehulere documents a process of trying to uncover an
artwork Mgudlandlu created in a home in which she had lived. It cannot be
reclaimed – there are too many layers concealing it. This is an obvious
metaphor for the difficulties entailed in cultural recuperation in the
post-apartheid era.
Art historians, curators, theorists and writers have long
focused on the incompleteness of archival records, which prevent reconstructing
history. Wa Lehulere follows this line, but also seems to direct our attention
to the ways in which the narrative is immovable. In the stop-motion footage of
recreating a Mancoba work, it seems obvious that every one of Mancoba’s strokes
was informed by the moment – his background in South Africa, the racism in
France and the inability for anyone to see him and his work beyond his racial
identity. This is the tragedy of his existence; he tried to outrun his identity
when he moved to France, but was immured to white supremacist societies and no
re-reading of history, no act of recuperation can set him free. Even in this
exhibition, which is not bound to art historical conventions as such, Wa Lehulere
himself is trapped within this well-worn narrative of failed retrieval as the conceptual
pivot rather than the art itself. In other words Mancoba isn’t represented in this show because of his art
or contribution towards it but due to his inability to ‘contribute’ – this becomes
the marker of his place in history. – an edited version of this was first
published in The Star, Cape Argus July 10, 2015.
No comments:
Post a Comment