Moshekwa Langa
by Sue Williamson
While one is delighted at the success of South African artists who move abroad for periods of years, possibly for ever, one of the sad aspects is the loss of opportunity of seeing their work on a fairly regular basis, one to one.
This situation is redressed to some extent by the appearance of a good catalogue, like the one published on Moshekwa Langa by The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva to mark Langa's 1999 exhibitions in those spaces. Vast screens held photographic series such as the self-portraits of Langa jumping around dressed in his tight whites and socks entitled How I Left the Couch, mixed media drawings, text pieces, maps, annotated with notes, comments and collaged with buff tape.
Installations such as the one which appeared on the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Temporal Distance (with criminal intent) You will find us in the best places, a map-like web of yarn, toy trucks and bottles occupied the floor space. The generous array of full-page colour photographs are interspersed with A5 sized cards showing details.
The overwhelming impression is that the poetic Langa works with effortless confidence, able to take ownership of almost any image, to pick up each and every mark making implement, to put whatever object or material which comes to hand to good use as part of his canon. Put Langa in a charity shop for a few days and he'd come out with a new body of work. At the same time, one is only too well aware just how complex, how difficult it is to pull off this kind of eclectic artmaking, how deeply this process has to be rooted in a powerful sense of self.
The casual, chameleon-like approach adopted by the artist shields Langa's steely resolve never to be pushed into a niche by art world pundits, to remain elusive, to keep moving, simultaneously acknowledging and denying his own past while laying claim to everyone else's as well. In Elizabeth Janus' acute catalogue essay, The Discomfort of Distance (Finessing the Double Bind) , Langa is quoted as saying, "Many things have happened to me, around me and away from me. I do not remember them sequentially. I remember some of them. I am supposed to have a memory. I recollect certain things. But I have no memory in the conventional sense."
The other essay, by Hamza Walker entitled Moshekwa Langa: The Global Village Revisited locates the artist first as a son of apartheid South Africa, then as member of the international artistic community.
Moshekwa Langa (the catalogue) is a most welcome addition to the existing literature on the artist, a man whose extraordinary early promise is being fully realised. As with the most interesting artists, I can't wait to see what he will do next.
Moshekwa Langa, Softcover
Publisher: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneve, 2001
ISBN 0-941548-45-7
Price: Available on request from the Goodman Gallery.
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