Anyone can be a Rembrandt
When Bongani Madondo took his children on a gallery tour, they blew some fresh air into the stuffy world of art appreciation and made the veteran art critic and author wonder: how do we make art education part of our daily family existence?
“I don’t believe in genius. I believe in freedom. I think anyone can do it. Anyone can be like Rembrandt.” — Artist Damien Hirst, quoted in The Guardian in 2009
Taking in the David Koloane retrospective at the Wits Arts Museum (WAM) with my children got me thinking about a few seemingly unrelated things. How can a healthy society develop a solid art education, thus enriching a culture of tolerance and questioning; a society that prefers dialogue over the bayonet? It also, to a mirthful extent, made me wonder about the confidence-building lies we tell ourselves in the process of raising our children.
Hold your horses. The two shall be reconciled along the way.
This is not a review of the show. It’s about the place of art, or rather artistic expression, in children’s lives, and for that we need to go past the misused but fascinating phenomenon called “genius”.
I call it the child-genius trap. It tends to lead both child and parent down the rabbit hole, like beloved Alice in that rollicking, evil, funny and ultimately liberating Wonderland that so enthralls my children.
For us boomers and Gen-Xers alike, raised on tough love, respectability politics and veneration of the “good book” (at school, church, mosque, synagogue), our upbringing, we lament, hindered our ingenuity.
How far we could have gone had our parents relaxed their grip a bit. Never again! We swear we’ll give our children all we never had, an opportunity to acquire experience or even just dream, which might mean we have to indulge in a few feel-good lies, all in the name of — that psychobabble again — developing their inner confidence. Eow!
For my generation (this phrase is always a sign that a boomer or Gen–Xer is about to sing the virtues of a golden period that never took place except in our heads), children are little angels.
“Ncoooo, awww, isn’t Camilla, like, just so adorbz?” we coo. “Did you see the artwork little Sihle produced for her show-and-tell? Gawd, you really must see it. This child is … truly … I’m speechless. She paints just like that childlike artist you love so much Biz… Biz… John Michael Biskit, no seriously.”
At which stage the visitor is obliged to go: “Uhm, it is Jean-Michel Basquiat, he is not childlike, more figurative reimagined through a lovely mash of surrealism and realism, but never mind, indeed Sihle is beyond awesome, nah, really.”
Were the visitor blessed with a sense of humour he might add: “Sihle will grow into a far more self-assured talent than John
Michael Biskit, that’s fo-sho.”
Our cute little angels are just whiling away time in our care while waiting to roller-skate into their oh-so-swell futures, or so implies the self-help industry.
The above scenario also throws into relief another 21st-century middle-class dilemma: how are young children expected to appreciate art?
How does anyone appreciate visual expression in such a hypervisible visual culture as ours?
How do we discover the truly gifted “John Michael Biscuits”, as well as the also-rans (children who might be aesthetically impaired but are oh-so “natural” with numbers, or at building things)?
Simply put: how do we make art education part of our children’s daily existence?
This should be a life (style) question applicable to all parents and children across all strata — colour, class, gender and creed — and not only for the bougie bores.
In some schools, and suburbs, as we’ll soon appreciate when the school holidays kick in, art education and exposure — even art as recreation, which is what it ought to be for it to achieve anything at all — will be just about everywhere, for a few quid and a pop, thank you very much.
Not everyone can afford art education, or art recreation lessons, or even afford just basic time, to roll with the children in paint.
All the more reason to jump at the opportunity when my editor dangled an assignment for me to take my “brilliant angels”, LiyemaTouré, 8, and Cuba, 4, to check out David Koloane’s retrospective exhibition, curated by Thembinkosi Goniwe, at WAM.
At the risk of outdoing the parents I have just mocked (“Every moment you mock others you are involved in an autobiographical exercise,” my middle-school English teacher, the truly eccentric juffrou Swanepoel, never stopped reminding us), I must confess that my children are not strangers to art.
They are surrounded by art, or perhaps let’s say visual culture, if you include fantasy and animation flicks such as The Princess and the Frog, Despicable Me or the biggest visual hero, T’Challa, aka Black Panther.
The question set my wife and me thinking. Can we use this possibly harmless but profound question to our advantage; maybe to explore ways of instituting art education within the bounds of their comprehension?
A while ago, and desperate to notch up art education a bit, we devised a not-so-didactic plan. It was, we thought, quite simple.
For them to truly understand and appreciate art, not in the adult way of theoretical pretence and whatnot but appreciation for its own sake, we felt we needed to teach the two “geniuses” (sigh) the difference between “art”, and “culture”.
“Art”, we cut the lesson to their mental cloth, is something tactile: something you can create, touch, even dismantle, with your hands. Thus, art takes time and concentration to create.
Whereas “culture” is omnipresent. No, not like Gogo Granny (as they refer to her), who will one day just grow wings and fly out of this world to watch over us in … mhhh, “heaven, right?”
Yes, heaven, baby.
Culture is, in fact, like muzak. It’s always there, in the background and sometimes the forefront of daily life. It’s quite dependable, though we don’t always appreciate it; we believe it will always be there, like the air we breathe. See, kids?
For a while the trick held.
We also added monthly gallery and museum shows. Like the Koloane retrospective we went out to check at WAM. This time around, the experience turned out to be more interactive.
What renders Koloane’s work timeless is its disavowal (not that I’ll ever use that expression with the two little “geniuses”) of affectation.
Though the WAM show is somewhat an extension of, or complementary to, the much broader and more fully realised show at the Standard Bank Gallery downtown, individual pieces are reflective of their creator’s sense of community.
Koloane’s art, as my daughter interprets it, speaks with, not down to, the viewer.
His city pictures, often painted in dense, earthy hues — ochrereds and scarlet, with snatches of orange escaping as though to crack open the scene to allow the light in — invite the viewer in. Immediately he or she is not an outsider but part of the tableaux of city denizens.
“But I love the pictures where I can see people’s faces,” Liyema-Touré cries. While making our way to the museum’s top floor, they ask: Was he also a photographer? No, he was not.
For a moment, the walkabout was suspended due to something even more exciting — an “art exposure” workshop, which we learnt later was organised by an “artivist”, Nthabiseng Sekhobela, in collaboration with WAM’s art education programmes for teens and children aged five and up.
The children quickly dumped me to join a circle formation of about 20 children and a few parents. They were divided into groups and encouraged to choose any of Koloane’s artworks and paint their interpretation of it.
It’s as much a storytelling exercise as it is a visual training method. Within 30 minutes some children had drawn truly touching pieces.
There is a long way to go before art galleries and museums become truly child-friendly
One was a poignant, somewhat foreboding sketch about the consequences of natural disasters like the floods in KwaZulu-Natal.
Another was an evocative piece about the debasement of black women in all strata of society; heavy stuff for children, ek sê.
Without doubt, running a parallel art education session for children during a Koloane show — hosting a group of children keen to doodle their way into some kind of familiarity with art — is quite a charming social outreach project.
But there is a long way to go before art galleries and museums become truly child-friendly, with tangible educational tools, booklets and videos.
We need to provide real instruction in art for minors and develop the children’s equivalent of art history.
This initiative is important, however, and might encourage the arts fraternity to take pre-teen art education seriously.
Programmes like these have the opportunity to monitor the progress of groups of children over time. Perhaps after a while one of these groups will be ready to stage some sort of exhibition under the guidance of a curator.
Community artist Yolanda Stamper, a Rhodes University fine arts master’s student, runs a solid project like this in Pedi in the Ngqushwa area of the Eastern Cape’s Amathole district.
It is an art education project run from a rondavel hut she has transformed into an “art space”. The exhibiting artists are children and youth who Stamper has trained over an extended period and are ready to show their work and move on to the next level.
Back at the WAM show, I notice something new about my children.
Although we’ve explored exhibitions before, this time my girl is drawn to abstract, more conceptually challenging black-on-white charcoal lithographs, while my boy is more responsive to epic-scale paintings drenched in earthy reds.
Usually Liyema-Touré is the one who gravitates to colourful images.
In practice, though, Cuba prefers posing, and his sister sees herself as a future Helen Sebidi.
Damien Hirst — the punk-rock enfant terrible millionaire who is one of the British art rebels known as the “Britpack” — once rather dismissively suggested to an interviewer that “anyone can be Rembrandt”.
Clearly he had never met my Cuba. The guy, perhaps like Hirst himself, prefers posing for snaps to creating art.
Soon, he recruited his sister to pose for photos with Koloane’s pieces as framing backdrops. But not before a debate between the two broke out.
“Posing is art, too,” he thundered.
“No, it is not,” Liyema-Touré retorted. “Art is art.”
“Yah,” he argued, “but those girls you like” — a reference to Paul Gaugin’s Two Tahitian Women, which we cut out of a magazine to display in our kitchen — “are posing. Daddy says it’s art.”
She challenges him: “Why can’t I pose and have uTamkhulu David Koloane come here and paint a picture of me?”
“He can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because he is in heaven!”
David Koloane: Chronicles of a Resilient Visionary is at the Standard Bank Art Gallery until December 6 and at the Wits Art Museum until February