Black marks for keepers of the gates
Activist-agitators say that knowledge, access and resources are obstacles to artistic transformation
When Anitra Nettleton curated Black Modernisms, her controversial exhibition on the black modernist tradition that ran at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg earlier this year, she probably didn’t anticipate such a thorough engagement with her curatorial process and the system of gatekeeping she would be accused of upholding.
The subsequent June 6 panel discussion, titled Black Artists/White Labels, included Black Mark: Collective Critical Thought members Khwezi Gule, Same Mdluli and Nontobeko Ntombela, as well as guest speakers Sharlene Khan (a visual artist and writer) and art critic Lwandile Fikeni.
It was a vociferous exposé of the local art world’s machinations and an encouraging exhibition of the collective action needed to challenge the status quo.
Black Mark is a Johannesburgbased reading and writing group consisting of curators and arts administrators Mdluli, Gule and Ntombela, as well as Londiwe Langa and Tiffany Mentoor.
Gule says such discussions represent only one way of challenging the status quo. The problems faced by black practitioners in the art world, however, are systematic in nature, he says.
F i k e n i , wr i t i n g i n City Press, pointed out that the Black Modernisms exhibition amounted to the erasure of black artists by commission or omission.
In her response to the article Nettleton agreed that she may have neglected some pivotal artists and then proceeded to speak of how she had played a major role in transforming the arts curriculum at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Gule says that the hurdles black art practitioners confront in the art world are those of knowledge, access and resources.
“Problems of knowledge are epistemic, dealing with how we approach subjects to come to an understanding of them. In some cases you find a proliferation of pseudoscience, based on prejudices around gender, race and ethnicity.”
He adds: “Around access, there are problems of gatekeeping, where people set up mechanisms to exclude. Around resources, you find that it is not necessarily the case that people in institutions have resources. What they have is access to resources. So you won’t get funding for projects unless you have access to funding bodies.”
Khan, the most forthright speaker on gatekeeping at the Black Artists/White Labels panel discussion, believes more work needs to be done. “A number of black scholars have added their voices and support to this debate and that creates pressure towards the acknowledgment of the problem. Acknowledgement is not a solution, though. These debates can be traced in written discourses since the late 1980s [but] since 1994, little has changed fundamentally.”
Khan says the issue of race reared its head in 2004 when 10 Years, 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa, edited by Sophie Perryer, was published. “In the curatorial discussions that the book hosted, the racial dynamics of such projects were dissected, and the fact that most white curators went with white artists was ‘invisible’.
“The myth used to be that there were not enough black scholars and artists, but in the past two decades so many black scholars, curators and artists have come up that it’s pure fallacy to claim one doesn’t have enough expertise and that white interlocutors and categorisations are still needed. But that myth has come up strongly again in that exhibition [ Black Modernisms],” she adds.
Khan says the Fallist movements have given a different impetus to these debates, as there is added pressure from students, whereas in the past it was largely black academics calling for systems of whiteness to change at universities.
Fellow Black Mark member Mdluli says strategies and interventions to accelerate change include changing the leadership at universities.
“We need the right people at the top. I don’t even think someone like [Wits vice-chancellor] Adam Habib knows what is happening at the art school,” says Mdluli. “If he does, I’d be very surprised. I don’t even think he knows what the Black Modernisms exhibition sparked, or what it means to the entirety of a department like the history of art.
“That’s why we are all getting qualified so that we can sit in those positions and bring about that change — because it’s not happening, clearly.”
To students, Mdluli says the obstacle of access can be addressed by “finding something you are passionate about and being consistent in studying it”.
Art practitioners, she says, should always strive to find ways of opening up space for a multitude of creative voices, hence her involvement in Sosesame Gallery, which opened in the Johannesburg suburb of Melville recently.
“It is to ensure that it’s not just the usual suspects you see showing at the top galleries. It’s about trying to break that monopoly.”