Sankara said, there is no such thing as neutral writing. I say there is none such as neutral Art, Skhokho may agree: Art is a mirror and at times forecaster. It it tells us about our progress in terms of the South African ‘identity’, and where it could lead to. Ii is important to project what is different about South African art. Diverse societies are a global phenomenon, and so is the unrest that comes with them. Such societies have pockets of ethnic groups that resist integration and pockets within the original population who oppose the inclusion of strangers. South Africa is different, because the separation was dictated and is deeply ingrained in the unconscious. It is a fragmented society where integration feels ‘unnatural’ and the option to leave the familiar social context is rather new and takes place predominantly in the city. However, instead of positively experimenting with a new South African identity, the city environment has unfortunately also become the main playground of crime, which enhances our fear of ‘the other’, and shoves us back into the safe and familiar.(Aparheidized reality, existence and mind-set) This dynamic is reproduced in much of South African art and is reflected in exhibitions, where the majority of the art can still be divided along apartheid lines, almost as if looking at cultural diversity through a magnifying glass. Artists who are exposed to and familiar with a more global context seem to have overcome these restrictions and can deal with these issues in a less literal and more playful manner. The master of turbulent imagery was undoubtedly Dumile Feni, who was known as the Goya of the townships. His apocalyptic vision talks directly of personal experience, indicating the extent to which the political and the personal had become inextricably intertwined. The violent imagery of Dumile was complemente d in the 1960s and 1970s by a different kind of aesthetic: mart that celebrated the beautiful and the mystical. It was an art inspired by music, literature, poetry, and an affirmative view of the political struggle: as a site of hope rather than despair. Fikile Magadlela, Thamsanqwa Mnyele, Dikobe Martins, Peter Clarke and others reacted against the prevailing township imagery of hopelessness. They were a generation of artists who showed the way out of the aesthetic of distortion, producing images of great beauty and mystery, evolving a symbolism that offered some relief from the degradation and squalor. A more complex and subtle response to political repression began to manifest in the work of Ezrom Legae. Working with delicate and tense line, Legae used images of birds and eggs as a metaphor for a new awakening of consciousness. Inspired by the story of Steve Biko, he produced a series of graphics using the chicken and egg imagery. Yet in spite of its explicitly political inspiration, he avoided any directly political reference either in the content or in the title of this series (which was chosen to represent South Africa at Chiles Valparaiso Exhibition of 1979).
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 06:53:20 +0000
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