Positions –– Contemporary Artists in South Africa
Edited by Peter Anders and Matthew Krouse
Jacana
Review: Elspeth Mendes
Pause. Listen as the voices in the room take shape. Different forms of expression, ways of questioning, perceptions, experiences, history, colours.
What makes this collection on artists so captivating is its intertextuality. This is partly due to the aim of the series which is to look at “developments within today’s cultural flashpoints through interviews, portraits and essays… Each volume produced in dialogue with journalists and cultural scientists from the respective art scene”.
The artists are political creatures, passionate and engaging, mostly placing themselves at the centre of the work – the classic self portrait in oil transposed into the flesh as photos, performance and installations.
In each essay, the artist’s voice is heard, as well as that of interviewer, who tries to mould the information for the imagined European audience. Even the editors add their flavour with their introduction, “Love in the time of Zuma: Mandela’s children reach adolescence.”
The anthology is reflective of the cacophony of cultures in the urban melting pots – Jozi and Cape Town, with a touch of Pretoria and Durban on the side. The hype and development around the World Cup and general South African backgrounding forms part of the staging of the book. The collection/collaboration is a work of art in itself.
What gripped me most was the way each artist grapples with how he or she perceives the audience/reader interpreting their work, questioning imagined readings and stating what the work is not about.
Paul Grootboom expresses genuine fear that black members of the audience could kill a white spectator were his play Interracial staged again. He feels embittered that he has not been included in the line-up in Grahamstown since Interracial, which caused an outcry. We are not yet ready for his profound insight into the festering hatred bubbling under the veneer of tolerance, he muses.
Grootboom speaks to Kwanele Sosibo, a writer and cultural producer. It is a natural conversation, honest and personal. “I thought they would understand that this is just a play,” he says, ironically undermining the power art has. “People want to live in that illusion that this is a reality, which it’s not.”
A radically different read, is the enticing academic essay on “word-bomber” Lesego Rampolokeng by Andries Walter Oliphant, Unisa’s head of the department of literary theory.
“(Rampolokeng’s) aesthetic is grounded in postmodern textualised performance, wrought and practised as counter-modernity to the print-centred traditions of colonial literature.”
Race is the dominant dialogue in South Africa and in the book, as in society, white male perspectives remain the majority. Here there is a fundamental investigation of their identity in relation to others, rather than the intransigence of old patriarchal colonialism.
Yet, the shade of mud of each individual’s physical form – and how it manifests in art – is “somewhat inescapable”, says Nandipha Mntambo, the only black woman among the 18 contributors in the book.
Mntambo does not want to be famous for being a black woman. She wants people to engage with her art, but disagrees with how her work has been interpreted. She uses the interview as a platform to lash out at minister of arts and culture who felt that her depictions are pornographic.
Mntambo’s work is based on her own body through photographs and Photoshop, and raw, rotting cow hides draped over her sensuous body. Asked by art critic Anthea Buys about the traditional or masculine symbolism – like lobola or bull fighting – evoked by the hides, Mntambo again tries to sculpt how the audience interprets her work by insisting that this is what her work is not about. The cows just “crept in”.
Accidental artist. Accidental insight?Art keeps us thinking… and changing. And as we change, the world changes too. But we will think what we will.