Dialogue between works sets unmarked beauty against preoccupation with history
In recent months, I have encountered a fatalistic but nonetheless persuasive view about our national quagmire. It holds as follows: President Jacob Zuma and his cabal haven’t “broken” SA; instead, the Zuma presidency can be seen simply as a continuation — an inevitable consequence — of four centuries of brutality and venality that have served to define our country.
No free and true and good thing, according to this logic, can be identified in the South African story.
Natural beauty? A daily reminder of displacement from the land. Our cities, our industries? Built on the backs of exploited labourers. Our revolutionaries who fought against oppression? Either unsuccessful in their lifetimes (struggle martyrs), tainted by messy political compromise (Nelson Mandela) or utterly corrupted by power (almost everyone else).
There is, of course, a more hopeful counternarrative. According to this interpretation, we are a plucky little country, still a postapartheid fledgling really, holding out against relentless attacks on our sovereignty and our founding principles. We have a lot to offer, we are full of talent and potential and grit and wonder. We will see the back of Zuma and things will get better.
You can find evidence to support both these perspectives in Shifting Conversations, a new exhibition of pieces from the MTN and University of Johannesburg collections at UJ Art Gallery.
The conversations are between curators Melissa Goba and Johan Myburg — whose relationship must navigate their different backgrounds as shaped by race and gender — but, more explicitly, between the works displayed.
The first dialogue is staged between Durant Sihlali’s Forced Removals, Ndinga Street, Pimville (1974) and two paintings by Walter Batiss: Farm at Faure (1960) and Old Farmhouse, Lady Grey (1944). The techniques employed are similar: an impressionist style executed in watercolour on paper. But the difference in subject — a desperate urban plight versus pleasant rural scenes — could not be more severely marked.
This is an opposition sustained throughout the exhibition. Frederick I’Ons’s romantic 19th-century landscape On the Kariega is undermined by Brett Murray’s stylised wrought-iron treatment of an equivalent image — a river running through a valley — in the sardonically entitled Empire.
Mdu Twala’s crisp and colourful Johannesburg Skyline from Gold Reef City (2009) is paired with Joachim Schonfeldt’s 360 Degrees (2008), in which the city is less idealised and more fragmented.
It is inevitable that many of the works treat the land, with humans as subjects in and of the land. But if JH Pierneef’s Wilgebome represents an ahistoricist tradition of depicting landscape as if it were not marked by politics, then its companion piece stands for another South African arts tradition: one that dwells in a preoccupation with history.
Pierneef is twinned with a disturbing ink drawing by Dumile Feni, a study for the large-scale African Guernica he finished in 1967. Like Picasso before him, Feni sought to convey misery and suffering through his grotesque and contorted figures.
If the dark works seem most suited to the depravity of our captured politicians, however, the exhibition does offer some consolation.
Credo Mutwa’s rather elaborate mythos in The Judgement of the Kings (1996) may lure us into contrived and apocalyptic wish fulfillment: “the kings and warriors and leaders of this world”, Mutwa explains, will be forced to confront the evil deeds they committed, to repent after being humiliated, and will be given “new souls” to “preach the law of peace”.
Emerging from a crack in a rock, the modest duo of a small flower and a worm are chosen to challenge these tyrants. Perhaps that is closer to the kind of encouragement that SA’s citizens need right now.
Shifting Conversations is at UJ Art Gallery in Auckland Park until November 22.