JAG exhibition sparks new di
New in-house show re-engages gallery’s diverse collection
Sometime in 2018, Johannesburg Art Gallery chief curator Khwezi Gule was poring over the gallery’s collection and its attendant archive with the aim of curating a self-reflective show that had long been in gestation.
While digging up material for the show that eventually became All Your Faves Are Problematic, he came across a likely springboard in scholar Candice Jansen’s trenchant review of Jürgen Schadeberg’s memoir The Way I See It, published in the Mail & Guardian in 2017.
In it, Jansen spent several paragraphs unmasking Schadeberg’s questionable 1959 trip to the Kgalagadi Desert with a crew led by palaeoanthropologist Phillip Tobias. In Ghanzi, in the middle of the desert, Schadeberg had participated in an anthropological exercise in which “different members of the expedition team had different tasks”, as he explains in his memoir. “Some were charged with weighing the San, some with taking measurements of their skulls, jaws, teeth … noses” and labia.
Sacred rituals were similarly prodded and observed, and photographic records were kept that today form part of the gallery’s collection.
Another “node” that offered distinct directions for Gule was the work of 19th-century French cartoonist Honoré-victorin Daumier. For Gule, the artist’s work occupied the dual role of critiquing the day’s bourgeoisie while at the same time being “overtly racist”.
Three of Daumier’s cartoons (at least two dealing with curious European encounters with “the other”) are photocopied on to A2 white paper and pasted on a wall in what one might call a strategic alcove in the gallery. In the way the show has been mapped out, Daumier’s works are hemmed in by diagonally mounted metal shelves, each containing a row of books that might broadly be grouped as “post-colonial knowledges”, crucial in terms of speaking back to the established academy.
The works of Daumier, in particular the intent behind them, bring up questions that are echoed throughout the show to varying degrees. This makes All Your Faves Are Problematic a coherent and refreshing contribution to the discourse about the blind spots that permeate contemporary South African art and its preceding stages.
As an intervention, the exhibition is premised on moving beyond the “show-and-tell” approach in terms of how national cultural institutions have tended to deal with their own collections, a condition partly brought about by the fact that the collections span several eras of South African social life and cultural production. They encompass the colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid eras.
“There are two ways that most people deal with collections,” says Gule, seated in front of Kendell Geers’ contentious work The Suitcase, while preparing to be filmed for a video interview. “One way is to resort to amnesia, to just pretend that they are not there, or even if we are looking at the images, we are just presenting them as is. The other one is to approach them with a sense of nostalgia, which is to look at them and marvel at their beauty or the brilliance of the artist without the political context in which the artworks are made.”
Although Gule is at pains not to deny people their preferred method of engagement, especially given the trauma associated with the colonial and apartheid encounters, he adds that “we who take on these institutions, either as members of the public or as people working here, have to confront these things on a daily basis. We are responsible for them. In fact, all of this collection belongs to the residents of the City of Johannesburg.”
Because the discourse about art has happened within an oppressive context in South Africa, it has invariably produced “holy cows”, protected by an underdeveloped art discourse and exclusionary practices that discourage forthrightness and discursive diversity.
Several “holy cows” spring to mind, primarily because of the prominence they are afforded in the show, either because of where they are placed or because of the number of works selected for display. Among these are William Kentridge, Irma Stern, Jodi Bieber, Pieter Hugo, Paul Stopforth, Sue Williamson, Walter Battiss, Anton Kannemeyer, Pippa Skotnes and Cecil Skotnes. In the way the show has been framed by the curator’s statement, Geers is less emblematic of the holy cow syndrome than he is of our habit of asking the wrong questions.
“In the late 1980s and 1990s,” reads the statement on the Friends of JAG website, “people objected to his work because they felt it crossed the boundaries of taste, while others wondered if it was even art. But this is not the most pertinent indictment of his work.”
Through the lens provided by Geers’ The Suitcase, and, indeed, Kentridge’s Casspirs Full of Love, Stopforth’s Biko series (graphite