Art helps us to interrogate our climate of isolation
• Pebofatso Mokoena is fascinated and repulsed by attempts to put humans into spaces that shouldn’t contain them
This is a devastating time for artists and for the industry that sustains them. The “gig economy” is a catch-all phrase, but most performing artists have always lived more or less gig to gig. Closing theatres and concert venues is a necessary coronavirus public health measure but it means that many artists, their income already precarious, are now facing a precipice.
It remains to be seen whether the SA state will find methods to sustain artists during this period. Other countries have announced government support, but implementation seems impossibly complicated: who gets money, how and how much? Our department of arts & culture has shown itself inept in so many ways over the years that artists, organisations and institutions will not expect rescue from that quarter.
Members of the public can help. When theatres offer you a refund for cancelled shows, let them keep the ticket revenue. If you’re one of the lucky few who can afford to spend a chunk of money, stave off panic buying urges by purchasing works of art. Most important of all: arts patrons need to get used to paying for digital content.
The National Arts Festival has announced that its 2020 edition will be completely virtual. It’s a bold and admirable move, but will require audiences to buy in. Other organisations and festivals are sure to follow suit, experimenting with digital models. When this happens, the common assumption that “if it’s online, it should be free” can no longer hold.
Visual artists are unlikely to be as badly affected by social distancing practices as performing artists. They can continue to market their work digitally, and while busier or larger galleries and museums can no longer operate as they have done, more modest spaces that see less “traffic” may remain open as low-risk, nocontact zones.
One such space is David Krut Projects in Parkwood, where Pebofatso Mokoena’s exhibition “Internal Probes” is on display until April 14.
Moments of crisis can often bring a certain clarity and acuity to one’s experience of art, particularly when there is an uncontrived articulation between the artist’s vision and the wider concerns that press in upon the viewer. In this case, there is an uncanny sense both of disparity between the density of the work and our current climate of isolation, and of proleptic commentary by the artist on the causes and consequences of Covid-19’s spread.
The impetus behind this body of mixed-media images (Mokoena combines silk screen printing, collage, drawing, painting and a practice of sometimes whimsical, sometimes deliberate annotation) is a claustrophobic one. The artist is both fascinated and revulsed by attempts to pack humans into spaces that should not contain them. He cites the Ellis Park disaster of 2001, in which 43 people were killed by a stampede during the Chiefs-Pirates derby because too many people were allowed into the stadium. He also invokes a much more calculated and cruel example of overcrowding: the slave ships of the Middle Passage, notorious for cramming human cargo into inhumane holds.
These become the visual and conceptual motifs for his interpretation of how commuters typically navigate Johannesburg’s urban ocean — squashed into minibus taxis and other forms of transport, forced to wait in long queues, moving between teeming parts of the city and its more comfortable suburbs. How odd, then, to view the work at a time when the authorities have discouraged people from using public transport — but without the guarantee that they will be able to keep their jobs if they don’t do so.
Mokoena is interested by the freedom (or lack thereof) that people have in criss-crossing the city. Does the breakdown of order give individuals greater or less agency? When governments are mapping out systems, whether for transport or for public health, those individuals inevitably lose their personhood and became mathematical “points”. Mokoena portrays this reduction of complexity through small circles or coloured dots: the plural of person is data.
The artist takes his exploration of the relationship between proximity and distance further by projecting it beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Slave ships morph into congested space shuttles. Is this the future that awaits us?
MOKOENA PORTRAYS THIS REDUCTION OF COMPLEXITY THROUGH CIRCLES OR COLOURED DOTS: THE PLURAL OF PERSON IS DATA