Flash Art
April 3 – August 29 2004
Iziko: South African National Gallery
Cape Town, South Africa

A DECADE OF DEMOCRACY: South African Art 1994 – 2004
by Claire Wolf Krantz

While South Africa’s Apartheid began to be dismantled in the late 1980s, democracy only officially replaced the older repressive political system when Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994.  Many changes occurred.  Governmental power shifted from the white minority to the black majority and public institutions were integrated. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission enabled victims of abuse and terror to publicly confront their torturers, and torturers to describe and confess their crimes — sometimes in exchange for amnesty.  The Commission sought to begin the healing of a bitterly divided country and to prevent civil war.  If, as artist Willie Bester commented in an interview, victims of serious abuse were able to confront their nightmares, millions of others, who lived in terror and were denied participation in civic life, have still not had this opportunity.  While South Africa and its government are functioning and civil war has been avoided, changes have not yet produced the desired rainbow nation.  Peace and harmony are only tentatively beginning to develop. 

These transformations are the subject of "A Decade of Democracy: South African Art 1994-2004 from the Permanent Collection of Iziko: South African National Gallery." Curated by Emma Bedford, the exhibition brings together works dealing with political, cultural and social issues including the pandemic of AIDS, the rethinking of representation and identity beyond the narrow confines of race, the reappraisal of the value of traditional African cultural production such as basketry and beadwork, the exploration of power’s defining place in the writing of history, and the plight of women in a society that has not confronted their abuse. While the exhibition is organized in thematic clusters, the selected works underscore South African Conceptualism.

In Tracy Rose’s startling photograph "The Kiss," 2001, an apparently white, young, naked woman (the artist) posed from the back, lies across an equally young, vigorous black man’s lap, locked in an embrace resembling August Rodin’s "The Kiss".  The work symbolizes love’s crossing of race boundaries, which was strictly forbidden under Apartheid.  In this work, Rose, herself an artist of mixed race, also questions the validity of fixed parameters of identity such as race.

In "The Next Generation, 1994-1995", an installation of thirty exquisite, blurry, watercolors of faces and genitals, Marlene Dumas allegorizes her wish that diverse future generations will live together in peace.  The variety of portraits also represents the changing and expanding options South Africans confront in their struggle to come to terms with both the reality of Apartheid and their role in this terrible political system.

In "Chimera (black edition)," 2001, a large video projection on four overlapping translucent screens, Minnette Vari dances naked among the marble figures of the Great Trek frieze of the Voortrekker Monument.  Vari deconstructs this solemn, static monument to European power and the establishment of normative whiteness through the transience of the ephemeral moving image, the layering of screens, the performing nude female body, and its enactment of the monument’s repurposing as symbols of South Africa’s present.
Jane Alexander’s Integration Programme: Man with TV, 1995, a heart-rending sculpture of an elderly, poor, black man, also translates her hope for social change.  Dressed in his threadbare Sunday best, sitting on a bus station bench, he watches an affluent white man engaged in repetitive, meaningless activities on a TV monitor.

Keith Dietrich’s large wall installation," A Small Miscalculation in Sir Francis Galton's Eugenics Theory" 1996, documents the artist’s journey along centuries-old trade routes in the Kalahari Desert.  Reflecting his interest in the changing history of places, Dietrich’s watercolors depict random items picked up along the way, desert-related images, and South African history and culture.  Painted on torn sheets of thick paper, which suggest solid objects, the images become integral to the paper, just as rock paintings become part of a cave wall.  Their arbitrary arrangement suggests fragmentation and randomness.  They invoke the contingent nature of lived experience and the partiality of history.

The exhibition is well organized, and many of the selected artworks are exemplary. A few decisions, however, deserve closer scrutiny.  Organizers could have considered that many images may be opaque to visitors unfamiliar with the events they reference, and provided wall labels to help interpretation.  The museum also claimed that the exhibit presents the variety of significant art made during the past ten years.  Does it?  With the exception of a number of extraordinary traditional pieces, the works are conceptually based and address topical issues.  How many other kinds of work are marginalized by this unacknowledged bias?

This is nonetheless a wonderful show.  The works are intellectually rigorous, well made, and often beautiful.  Refreshingly absent are abstract works that engage in art world themes requiring complicated, theoretical explanations. Instead, these works both visualize the ideas they address and examine important real life issues.

 

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.