ART CELEBRATES LIFE
A new exhibition sets out to pay homage to the late great David Koloane on his own terms,
David Koloane lived to see the opening of A Resilient Visionary: Poetic Expressions of David Koloane, but not long after. The big retrospective of his work showed first at Iziko in June this year, and is on at the Standard Bank Gallery until December. “When he passed on, after 29 days of the exhibition, it shut me down,” says Thembinkosi Goniwe, the exhibition’s curator. Its meaning had shifted unexpectedly; suddenly it was a commemoration of his life, too.
“I had to rethink,” says Goniwe. He changed the original format of the catalogue he’d planned, and replaced it with something more like a tribute to Koloane. It will be out at the end of this month. A book of more sustained scholarly essays is planned for next year, creating time for its contributors to reflect and consider their subject’s legacy.
In the meantime, another exhibition, David Koloane: Chronicles of a Resilient Visionary, has sprung up at the Wits Art Museum (WAM), also curated by Goniwe, as a kind of extension of the main exhibition.
His curation of A Resilient Visionary involved working closely with Koloane, says Goniwe, and the artworks they selected were drawn largely from Koloane’s own collection. Goniwe was at pains not to put himself into a position in which he was speaking for the artist, but rather on behalf of him.
Goniwe says his decision to focus on Koloane’s “visual and creative production” rather than draw in his biography was deliberate. He wanted to focus on “not only what David contributed as a teacher, initiator or founder of institutions — that’s what everyone talks about — but also for us to enjoy his creative output”.
Koloane famously mentored others and made huge strides in promoting and transforming the possibilities for black
South African artists during and after apartheid.
In the 1970s, he co-founded SA’s first black-owned gallery, The Gallery in Jeppestown, Johannesburg, and the Federated Union of Black Artists (Fuba). In the ’80s he was involved in establishing the Thupelo Workshops and in the ’90s helped establish the Bag Factory artists’ studios in Newtown that became home to the likes of Sam Nhlengethwa and Kagiso Pat Mautloa.
Besides, Goniwe has spent much of his career as an academic, artist and curator being critical of biographies, particularly biographies of black artists. He says they tended to reduce individuals to products of apartheid — “subjects of black suffering, black oppression, black exploitation”.
“[B]iography takes away from the output of these individuals,” says Goniwe. “It’s not about their ideas. All I wanted to do curatorially [was] to create a condition for his ideas to be engaged.”
After Koloane’s death, however, Goniwe found himself in the odd position of suddenly having to engage with the idea of biography quickly and profoundly.
“Is there a way to write a biography of artists like David without reducing him to suffering, to context, but to say … he became an artist and a thinker and a writer and a father in spite of apartheid and the colonial setup?
“I wanted him to be present,” says Goniwe. “This is what I struggled with — how do you make someone who is gone [present], to retain his spirit?”
The WAM exhibition is an attempt to conjure Koloane’s presence or at least to start to think about how to deal with the artist’s legacy.
“I wanted to flood the gallery with quotes and images,” says Goniwe, and he has to an extent done just that. The exhibition includes artworks drawn from the WAM collection shown together with artefacts from Koloane’s home and personal archive.
There are photographs blown up larger than life-size on the walls, quotations from and about him, an excerpt from the speech his friend and colleague Ricky Burnett gave at his 80th birthday celebration last year, and a TV screen showing interviews and tributes to Koloane drawn from the SABC archives.
On the top level of the gallery, a row of glass vitrines contains memorabilia including snapshots of Koloane with friends, along with personal postcards, bits of handwritten poetry, notes and press clippings, which Goniwe retrieved from the “boxes” of his personal archive. There are even photographs that hung on the walls of his home — Koloane receiving honorary doctorates and such.
Goniwe calls it “a kind of essay”: an attempt or an exploration of how to bring together Koloane’s life and art. He talks about how much of Koloane’s mission as an artist involved rejecting the reduced status of “township artist” and the limited identities prescribed by apartheid and colonialism.
He argues that Koloane’s artistic and philosophical output involved “building on Steve Biko’s idea that what South Africa needs is a human face”, to create a visual language that opens up the possibilities of new identities.
“He refused to be this sort of ‘authentic African’,” says Goniwe, instead finding ways to express “the complexity of what it means to be human”.
In his representations of Johannesburg — what you might call his central subject — Koloane not only chronicles its unrepresented life, but abstracts and transforms it into the grounds for alternative possibilities and new identities.
This exhibition is, in turn, Goniwe’s foray into ensuring that Koloane’s human face persists in his legacy, and perhaps even to catalyse the preservation of his archive in an institution like WAM, where it can engender further scholarship rather than being commodified and scattered.
David Koloane: Chronicles of a Resilient Visionary is on at WAM until February 2020. Thembinkosi Goniwe will give a walkabout on Saturday November 23 at 12pm.