Colin Richards
Curating Conflict: Collecting the Art of the Nation in Post Apartheid South Africa
The years spanned by these works selected from the permanent collection of the South African National Gallery (SANG) are amongst the most remarkable in our country's recent history. The last quarter of the 20th century has been epochal for South Africa; the unexpectedly peaceful death of legal Apartheid, the release of Nelson Mandela, the victory of the liberation movements in the first free elections of a newly democratic state. Abroad, this time also embraced the millennial fin de siècle of post-modernism and post-colonialism experienced - albeit unevenly - across the world.
The epoch stretches across a full generation of South African artists, dramatising change through inter-generational shifts in artistic practices. It is thus not surprising that this has been a remarkable time for contemporary art in South Africa. Two features stand out against an already eventful cultural backdrop, both associated with our still (inevitably) unfinished democratisation. The first is the onset of profound and pervasive cultural and economic globalisation. We necessarily share this with all communities enmeshed - however tangentially - in an increasingly wired world. The second is the advent of the curator as a powerful force in local and global artworlds. These two features have combined - not always comfortably - to stimulate rapid changes in local artworlds. The increasing exposure of South African art and the mobility of many South African artists across our national and continental boundaries are now accepted features of our cultural landscape.
Deeply implicated in and even central to this epoch is the development of the 'new' South African nation-state in all its regional, continental and global complexity. Perhaps the fulcrum of this development is nationalism; nationalism in all its entangled histories of liberation and enslavement, democracy and tyranny, peace and genocide. The place of art within the robust and contradictory discourses of nationalism, of nation building, is fractious. Indeed, the very idea of a 'South African' art, and our devotion to this idea, begs nagging questions of the relationship between art and our new nation-state. Similar questions can be asked of the appellation 'African art'.
How do we understand and articulate the forces of individual, communal, national and international identity? What does agency mean in an increasingly interconnected but fleeting, floating world? Whatever the answers to these questions, it is increasingly clear that the highly differentiated contemporary 'post-Apartheid' South African art forges a critical relation to the discourses of nationalism implied in our narratives of national liberation, to our intra-national sectional interests and to the power of global art circuits.
One node in this network of forces and relations is perhaps the primary art institution in the public domain; the South African National Gallery. One mechanism through which to express these relations is its permanent collection of contemporary art. Simply to be in this collection confers status and symbolic capital for an artist. But, more importantly, the collection also carries an official national imprimatur, and with it a strong sense of being 'representative'.
The permanent collection conserves a disappearing cultural present to construct and stabilise a history, or histories, of South African art. It does this within the conditions produced by state cultural policy, economic constraints and the like.
This stabilisation of the flow of art and its conservation for the future is itself conditioned by some image, some institutional picture of the national past and future. Of course such conservation and stabilisation is seldom strictly programmatic, something which takes note of the fact that a National gallery and its collections are active agents and powerful forces in the production of a national culture. In this sense the institution reproduces a legacy not structurally at odds with the 'official' culture of either the past Apartheid State, nor indeed the colonial institutions which preceded it.
When we speak of a conservative impulse in such institutions, we most likely understand this in the best and the worst sense. Conserving cultural heritages is crucial for any community in developing a sense of self and history. Of course it is in the nature of such institutions as the National gallery to lack the suppleness, the eccentricity, the riskiness and cultural opportunism which often characterises important and challenging contemporary art collections. They work, at least nominally, by often rather laborious consensus. In this sense the national collections of public institutions follow as much as lead, conserving and reproducing a pre-set canon of some sort. In times of rapid change this incipient conservativeness weakens into inertia, dulling and deadening much of what is rich and dynamic in a mobile and heterogeneous visual culture.The corrective to this potential stasis is an open, visionary, provocative partisanship in both collecting policy and curating, a partisanship which catalyses art and cultural debate in living, accessible ways.
Given the essentially conservative continuity of purpose, the canonisation of pre-selected works, practices and traditions, and the exercise of cultural power in the National gallery, it thus becomes really important that the critical and curatorial framing for exhibitions drawn from the collection be robust and challenging. Exhibitions like Head North offer opportunities not only to introduce work to new audiences, but to provoke deeper critical interest, debate and pleasure. The careful conjuncture of specific works, curatorial framing and the different institutional contexts provides volatile ground for keeping culture open and, in a sense, in tension with the orthodoxies that tend to dominate public life. It is here that the often uncomfortable alignment of practice and intellectual work, of individual works and institutional narratives become combustible in provocative ways.
What currently shapes contemporary South African art? Is this expressed in the works collected in the permanent collection of the South African National Gallery? The first question we might begin to answer by recognising some trends in current art, while the second is best answered by viewers of this exhibition.
Amongst the aspects of contemporary experience shaping contemporary South African art we should include the shifting configurations in North / South, East / West cultural difference and economic inequities; changing relations between more-or-less settled 'settler' and indigenous communities, between these and the larger African diaspora, and between those claiming 'Africanity' and those speaking from other alleged origins. One of the more incendiary aspects of these last dynamics is identification with the 'native' as against the 'foreign' (or vice versa). More fugitive experiences would be the introspection, pessimism or anxious cynicism of many white artists set alongside the more expansive aesthetic ambitions of many black artists; the place of irony in trauma and the latest waves in the discourse of apology and cultural reparation. Important too would be the advent of new media and new ideas of space and place displacing 'traditional' notions of the body, hand, and 'craft' which have for so long signalled the 'authentic' art in Africa for non-Africans.
If we are to understand, or engage effectively the continuities and otherwise we have or wish to have, as individuals and as a community - imagined, fantasised, experienced - with a traumatic past and conflicted present, it is crucial that the interface between art work and world be addressed with intellectual toughness, insight and commitment. This places a special responsibility on curators within institutions such as the National gallery as well as those institutions 'hosting' art from South Africa in this context. These institutions need to present the conflicts and tensions so often muffled in the hubris and correctness of the post-liberation moment.
Can we ever have too much of walking the tightrope between art and its contexts? To walk this tightrope is crucial for the development and maintenance of a robust civil society, especially given the genocidal pasts we have inhabited.
Colin Richards is an artist and Professor at the Department of Fine Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.