Open letter

Land & Lives opening address by David Bunn

Dear Roger Jardine
You may know that the exhibition which opened (31 October) at the South African National Gallery is called 'Land and Lives: Pioneer Black Artists'. But what is a 'pioneer'? For both of us, I imagine, the word speaks of frontiers: the thud of the woodsman's axe in the pristine forest; the future unfurling in the schooner's bow wave; the sod turning redly under the harrow, and the ploughman's shadow moving ahead towards new horizons. To be a pioneer, in the old, ideologically charged sense of the word, meant to break new ground, in a spirit of innovation, against a field of resistances.

This is a highly eclectic exhibition. It contains some great examples of early modernist black South African art like John Mohl's These Grew Out of an Ash Heap, Ernest Mancoba's Ancestor, and Peter Clarke's Burning House. It also contains works that I'm sure neither of us know. But the show is most unusual perhaps for the way it tells the history of innovation and resistance. All the artists featured here were born before 1930, that is before the second catastrophic Land Act. All of them encountered tremendous obstacles in their attempts to establish careers in art making, but their problems went beyond obvious racism or grinding poverty to include ethnographers trying to convince them of the utter distinctiveness of the 'African mind', as well as various cloying forms of Liberal charity. For many of them, however, innovation was less a matter of radical experiment than of the life-sustaining influence of friends who gave them access to new ideas and images.

'Land and Lives' is one in a sequence of revisionist exhibitions that have attempted to change our understanding of race, modernity, and the artistic canon. This was the aim of the 1985 BMW Tributaries show and 1988 Johannesburg Art Gallery's 'The Neglected Tradition', to name but two. In 'Land and Lives', however, curator Elza Miles offers a different perspective. What she does is bring to a level of consciousness a series of invisible connections: for instance, the surprising juxtaposition of Louis Maurice and Selby Mvusi (both of whom exhibited at the First Quadrennial Exhibition of South African Art in 1956), or Job Kekana and Ernest Mancoba (both of whom studied under Sister Pauline at the Diocesan College at Grace Dieu). To appreciate these synchronicities fully you need to turn to the catalogue. Elza Miles is one of this country's most important and least appreciated archivists. Over the years, in a career of fidgeting and ferreting, she has established a remarkable collection of information about unrecognised black artists. It is an archive based on interviews, stories, and records of training.

But this unusual research obsession also entails a particular attitude towards the life of the artist and to self narration. In the catalogue, we read about Jan Schoeman, otherwise known as "Outa Lappies", who produces an autobiography on hundreds of elaborately embroidered flour bags. (One of them is over there.) When Miles tells the story of his work and life as a karretjiemens she describes how he enjoys living in shelters built in trees. This is because, Miles says on page 24 of the catalogue, "he does not want to obstruct nocturnal animals". At first, you might think that this is a bizarre mistranslation. As a literary person, I find the sentence intriguing: it is an example of what linguists would call "free indirect discourse", a third person utterance that retains some sense of the voice of the person being described. For Outa Lappies, the worst sin is to become an obstacle around which the flow of being-in-the-world will have to deviate. Yet the sentence is also revealing of Miles's method: never speaking as an ethnographer, she allows herself to fall under the spell of autobiographical statements.

So the show tells a new story of influences and trends. It will allow you to trace the startling changes in Selby Mvusi's colour palette when he arrived in Kumasi in 1962; it reveals capillary connections between artists in exile in Paris. More than anything, however, it tells a complex story of the hybrid appropriation of landscape conventions by black artists, and this is where I will bring my letter to a close, for I know you are a busy man. Fifties, sixties and seventies art historical analysis was bedevilled by the understanding that black artists appeared to have a different sense of spatial scale and perspective. In the past, this led critics to talk of an entirely different category of painting called 'township art'. More recently, historians have angrily rejected this racialized division of genres. Land and Lives dramatizes contradictions around the use of landscape conventions. Pioneer artists shown here did not simply reject linear or aerial perspective, the classic hilltop gaze of the Europeanized tradition; indeed, as in the case of John Koenakeefe Mohl, they sometimes accepted it wholeheartedly. More frequently, though, these artists adapted perspectival conventions to place a greater emphasis on the relationship between the self and the collective. Looked at from across the room, Gladys Mgudlandlu's Three Men in Blue seems like a conventional modernist landscape, reminiscent of Maggie Loubser.. I know that you cannot be here, but if you were to approach the work, you would agree that the emphasis is not on a singular gaze from on high, but on pluralities: on the formal connection between blocks of cobalt, ultramarine and raw sienna, and groups of people. Shadows are detached from the individuals, as though projected into the scene from other figures outside the frame. There is a very similar, uncanny moment in H. E. Dhlomo's 1941 epic poem "Valley of a Thousand Hills" You may know this strange work, full of magpie borrowings from Milton, formulaic Zulu praises, and biblical phrases. Unlike conventional topographical poetry, in which there is an imagined excursion of the eye from plane to plane to a distant horizon, in Dhlomo the valley is already home. Consider this odd moment:

"Drunk sprawl the sleepy vales, the herds graze dumb./ In peace and sloth a dappled snake parades/ Its beauty fierce . . . was it my ancestor?"

Here the self addresses itself to the immediate surroundings, not to a distant prospect or future. There is even the radical possibility that the non-human may be a form of the self in another dimension: "Was it my ancestor?"

Herbert Dhlomo was a friend and sponsor of Gerard Bhengu. 'Land and Lives' allows a rich variety of meditations on relations between self and collective, on conventions, resistance, and unfamiliar local influences; on the importance of patrons; on the variety of landscape representation, with everything from the multiplied perspective of Mgudlandlu's men or birds, to the intense planar compression of Anna Mashinini's My House, where the dwelling is hardly large enough to contain a life.

In the end, though, I must admit to a slight scepticism about the notion of the pioneer. What this show represents is an attempt to complicate our understanding of South African modernism by revealing a set of local connections and influences, out of which something new and strange was born. As a physicist, I imagine you would have some sympathy for the idea that whole new theories may be borne from the jostling of little propositions. Perhaps like me, too, when you are able to look at this show, the dawning of your enjoyment will be coloured by a certain sadness. We are desperate to know more about the complex interaction between black painters and sculptors, here and in exile, in the early twentieth century. However, in the very moment when we are beginning to rediscover our early "pioneers", this and other national galleries have all but stopped purchasing work by South Africans. Conservation is grinding to a halt; storage conditions are appaling. Great painters like Anna Mashinini have quietly faded away. And of her work, brittle gouache on paper, the same as that characteristically used by Mgudlandlu, who can tell how it will survive? Look now, before it flakes away completely. Politicians - and I am sure you are as worried about this as I am - are driving us to define 'Heritage' mainly in terms of an ethnicized crafts industry, and this in the very hour of our first coming to understand the complexity of our artistic past. We call on you to dedicate more funds for acquisition, preservation, storage, and research into works such as the ones on this show; above all, we hope you have the chance to visit Cape Town and enjoy the chiming together of synchronous lives in this intriguing exhibition which, on the 31st of October, I had the great honour to declare open.

Yours sincerely,
David Bunn

David Bunn is a Professor in the English Department of UWC, whose areas of interest include Visual Theory, Landscape Studies and South African Literature and Culture. He is currently involved in the 'Landscape and Memory Project' and his book Land Acts: Modernity, Representation and the Making of South African Space will be published next year.

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