PORT ELIZABETH
IT’S KNOWN AS THE WINDY CITY AND THE FRIENDLY CITY, BUT AT ITS VERY HEART PORT ELIZABETH DISPLAYS AN ARTISTIC, CREATIVE, SOULFUL SIDE
Windy and friendly it may be, but author David Robbins uncovers the city’s artistic undercurrents
The origins of Port Elizabeth are well known. In 1820, the first of many boatloads of British settlers splashed onto the beaches of Algoa Bay. By the early 1830s, nearly a hundred houses graced the hillside overlooking the sea. In 1861 the town was granted full municipal status, and with the arrival of the railway from Kimberley a dozen years later came the rapid growth to cityhood.
Today, for the tourist, this thriving city offers an array of attractions: warm Indian Ocean waves, Blue Flag beaches (including Pollock Beach, named in honour of the city’s most famous cricketing family), the gargantuan Boardwalk hotel, casino and entertainment complex and, in the countryside beyond, game viewing aplenty at Addo Elephant National Park. But how can visitors really get beneath the city’s skin?
Central is one of the oldest districts in town. The streets slope steeply down towards the harbour, and they are studded with venerable Victorian buildings, some restored (like the King Edward and Grand hotels), others waiting for renewal as the city planners work on upgrading Central into ‘a rich cultural precinct’ and ‘student village’ for Nelson Mandela University (NMU) close by.
A rich cultural precinct it certainly is. There’s the Athenaeum, an exhibition venue where township art is frequently displayed. The Little Theatre stands just round the corner in Athol Fugard Terrace. Actor John Kani is also given a street of his own. Here the visitor will find the Opera House, built in 1892 and claimed to be the oldest theatre in the whole of Africa. It’s impossible not to notice the invigorating juxtaposition of this venerable building with the minibus-taxi memorial mounted on a cliff cut into the steep hillside across the street.
Central’s Feather Market Centre stands with other graceful public buildings around the cobbled market square that was once the heart of Port Elizabeth. The building, completed in 1885 in response to the Cape Colony’s ostrich-feather boom, has been refurbished into a stylish multi-purpose facility and fitted with one of the world’s largest pipe organs. Fourteen metres high and 10 metres wide, this huge instrument weighs 20 tons, has four keyboards and more than 5500 pipes. Although it’s beautifully finished – the organ’s timber facade took 10 local woodcarvers two years to complete – it’s not just ornamental. Regular recitals by South African and international organists keep this beauty in tip-top condition.
So there’s music and theatre galore in this rich cultural precinct – and an impressive proliferation of public art. There’s a walking tour called Route 67 that takes visitors to 67 works of art that adorn the walls and pathways and open spaces of Central. Much of the work brims with the joys and challenges of the birth of South African democracy. The 36th artwork on the route is the ‘Mosaic Stairs’, representing ‘an experimental journey’ that ‘starts in
‘The streets slope steeply down to the harbour, and they are studded with venerable Victorian buildings’
darkness and turbulence and progresses to an explosion of colour and a new dawn’.
One particularly arresting example of public art is the Anton Momberg sculpture standing at the top end of the Donkin Reserve, a windswept open space in the heart of Central. Donkin is well endowed with public art, which includes a huge SA flag as big as a tennis court flying from a 65-metre pole; nearly 500 square-metres of mosaic walkway intended to celebrate the multicultural heritage of the city; and a series of laser-cut metal silhouettes that symbolise the voting queues in 1994 as millions of South Africans of all races voted together for the first time.
But Momberg’s sculpture cuts much deeper. He studied art at PE Technikon in the 1970s and has emerged as one of the finest realist sculptors currently working in the country. His Donkin piece is untitled, deliberately so, because the figure is devoid of idiosyncratic detail. But it is unmistakably a woman. She is standing with her hands resting on the back of what might be a kitchen chair. Is she a trekboer mother, or the wife of an English settler, or a San or Xhosa woman? She is all of them. She seems to transcend the conflicts of the past, not by ignoring them but by including them through her determination to survive, her courage to hold steady, and her ability to withstand the sorrows. She is Everywoman; she is human; she carries humanity through to the next generation.
This is what the public art evokes, or at least where it culminates. Could it be that this sense of human commonality is what has permeated the streets of PE through its statues, mosaics, silhouettes and vivid wall art? The question will encourage visitors to move from the public art and into the galleries to take a closer look. There are many to choose from. The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum and the GFI Art Gallery both have permanent homes on Park Drive in Central. In nearby Bird Street, you’ll find the colourful facade of ArtEC and the NMU Art Gallery. Further afield are others, but don’t leave Central just yet. It’s time to probe even further under the city’s richly ornamented skin.
There’s a street here called Cuyler that changes into a crescent lower down. Quite near the top end of the crescent part stands Holmeleigh, the home of Estelle Marais. She’s widely regarded as one of South Africa’s finest landscape painters, and she’s lived in Cuyler Street for 15 years. She relishes the city, and indeed the Eastern Cape, for the deep-rooted artistic traditions that continue to play significantly upon the ethos of this corner of the national canvas.
Estelle spoke about how this ethos might be described. She compared the elegance of Western Cape art, and the tendency towards the decorative that often emanates from KwaZulu-Natal, with the landscapes made in the Eastern Cape. ‘There is often a subtle brutality about them,’ she said. ‘I think this was encouraged by very strong teachers at
‘Donkin is well endowed with public art, which includes a huge SA flag as big as a tennis court flying from a 65-metre pole’
Rhodes University and PE Technikon. “Bring no preconceptions of style to your paintings,” they said. “Paint what you see.” Was it intimations of the 19thcentury frontier wars that the artists saw in the scenes they painted?’
She’s referring here to the arrival of those settlers, brought in to populate the no-man’s-land between British forts and Xhosa expansion. This was South Africa’s fiercely contested eastern frontier, where conflict sullied an entire century.
Estelle’s house is full of paintings, her own and those of her fellow Eastern Cape artists and friends, and it is also home to several thousand books. In Noel Mostert’s Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People, the setting for the wars is described as ‘centred between Algoa Bay and East London’. Although Mostert notes the outstanding beauty of the area, it is not long before he becomes conscious of something more, ‘a distinct and plangent power deriving from forces occult as well as visible’, and from a sense of malignancy within a landscape that has ‘provoked more jealous antagonism and combat than any other in all Africa’.
This is what the searching gaze of the Eastern Cape artists continues to uncover. ‘The frontier conflict created the essential South African conflict,’ says Estelle. ‘That is why the artistic traditions here are so strong, why our paintings and sculptures are so gripping, why the urge to make art remains so important and widespread. The ethos of the place simply cannot be understood without its art.’
Two doors down from Estelle’s in Cuyler Crescent live Derrick Erasmus and Christine Ross-Watt, also artists. Every room in their house serves as a studio of some sort. Canvases are piled up around the walls. The back porch looks out onto an Art Deco block of flats, with a taller modern block immediately behind. Derrick has painted the taller block by turning it into a mask. He explained how his interest in masks began. ‘I was cutting a green
pepper and suddenly I saw the intricate insides of the vegetable as the components of a mask. I had found my leitmotif.’
Derrick studied at PE Technikon, while Christine lectured there when she came to the city in 1993. She works in dry-point etchings, charcoal drawings and mixedmedia panels. The interiors of old buildings are a recurring subject. ‘I’m fascinated by light and shade and by all the geometry to be uncovered in the world out there.’
In a semi-detached house further down lives Robert Brooks, retired head of the Department of Fine Arts at Rhodes in Grahamstown. He is best-known for his landscapes, although he also paints portraits. ‘Why are we so landscape-mad in the Eastern Cape? I see the country here as harsh and strong. That’s what excites my interest,’ Robert says. But the city also draws him. In his studio an atmospheric painting hangs on the wall. ‘It’s a combination of Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, using elements from both that express my sense of our urban reality.’
There’s one more house to see. After living and working in various places in Central, a small hunched-over man named Frederick Hutchinson Page moved into a boarding house almost at the very bottom of Cuyler Crescent. He lived in one room and in another he set up his studio. He was considered South Africa’s foremost Surrealist painter – although some say his bent was more metaphysical than surreal. Whichever is the more accurate, his art is essentially Port Elizabethan. He painted the cityscapes of Central in a pallet of stark blacks and whites, sometimes with touches of dull terracotta and tinted greys. Windows and doorways gape in a bleak silence, and always the skies are dark.
But he painted more besides. Into his PE pictures come strange figures, which are always at odds with the realism of the backgrounds. Humans and their ghosts and nightmares stalk the empty streets. A lion prowls against a stark white wall. It is the hidden spirit of the city made manifest in painting after painting. There is a book on Page entitled Ringmaster of the Imagination, in which his paintings and woodcuts are described as being ‘laced with mordant wit, a sense of the ridiculous and an encompassing sense of the tragedies of life’.
It is impossible not to link these tragedies with the tragedies of the frontier. In this way, the art of Fred Page finds affinity with the Momberg sculpture in the Donkin Reserve. Momberg’s everywoman echoes ‘the tragedies of life’ while the haunting shadows and jarring juxtapositions of Page’s work do the same thing, but from a different perspective.
From the back porch of Estelle’s house, the view was glorious. The harbour lay in the gloom of approaching darkness. The vessels at their moorings were decorated with clusters of lights, as if in quiet celebration. Beyond stretched a pale pink sea as it reflected the remains of the day. A waning moon, already luminous, hung high up on the seaward side of the sky.
‘Why are we so landscape-mad in the Eastern Cape? I see the country here as harsh and strong’