The accidental tourist: Notes on a discourse without end
by Sean O'Toole
"To catch truth there must be conflict, debate, interpretation, and reinterpretation - in short, a discourse without end."
- Ian Buruma, from The Wages of Guilt
Wiretapping is defined as the practice of tapping a telephone line to monitor conversations secretly. I was a wiretapper. At least this is how I sometimes defined my role as editor of ArtThrob over the past two years. Admittedly the metaphor was intended as a clever wisecrack at first, something to highlight my outsider perspective on a community I claimed no privileged knowledge of. After all, I took up the position having spent four years living abroad, blissfully disengaged from a rapidly changing political, social and - importantly - cultural landscape.
But there is more to my metaphorical aside than simply clever jest. In a sense, the comparison reflects on a lingering sense of self-doubt, of being a voyeur, a writer, a person of words operating in a visual terrain. The word, remember, is not art, even if the converse is not always true. At best words can animate, inform and possibly even elucidate a distinctive sensory experience, looking. Words, however, cannot substitute for the gift of seeing. Words are not art.
Not that this statement adequately accounts for everything. Pressed now to consciously excavate my intent, I am surprised at the layers of meaning latent in the awkward simile. The hostile subtext implicit in the action of spying ought to have offered an early cue. In spite of its cultured gloss, the South African art world is a hostile terrain. Often invisible to the public eye, it was my unexpected encounters with the sometimes embittered, occasionally fractious side of the community that first suggested the metaphor to me.
When I took up the role of editor, it was as an outsider. I was not an artist. Neither for that matter was I an art historian (I am trained as lawyer), nor an arts administrator. I was just a writer, a journalist, a curious onlooker, a spectator somehow representative of that amorphous grouping of 'others' intrigued by art, which is a spare noun to name such a fragile construct.
I say fragile because despite the successes of South African artists abroad, the economy that has produced this result is by no means certain. Indeed, it is mightily delicate. I have consciously selected the word economy, as distinct from community. It is a sullied word, one that seemingly besmirches the libertarian history of art as cultural weapon in this country. But an economy it is, a transactional one in which ArtThrob's commodity has always been information.
Opacity and jargon, it sometimes appears, are the sine qua non of the artworld. In many respects, my role as editor of this website has always been a simple one, of clarification, of making sense - more often than not to myself. In the process I have become deeply embedded in the economy I describe. It has not always been easy to accept, although I now accept that I am no longer a wiretapper, but simply an interpreter.
Interpretation is an onerous task, and requires far more than just aloof observational skills and a clever turn of phrase. The South African artworld is at an awkward juncture in its history. As Mario Pissarra recently observed in a piece of writing for ArtThrob, "the visual arts have fared worse than other art forms in the transformation process". It is a simple insight that frames the existence of an entire community.
Olu Oguibe, writing in the preface to his new book The Culture Game, makes the criticism a little more palatable by pointing to the universality of the problem. "Ironically," Oguibe writes, "the contemporary art 'world' is one of the last bastions of backwardness in the West today, which makes it an uneven playground, a formidable terrain of difficulty for artists whose backgrounds locate at the receiving end of intolerance."
I want to pause on this 'terrain of difficulty', particularly as it is evident locally. Earlier this year I was asked to present a talk alongside Sophie Perryer and Vulindlela Nyoni at Durban's NSA Gallery. My topic: a forward-looking summary of the issues that would animate the local art community in years to come. It was a difficult brief as I am no soothsayer, not by a long shot. I did, however, remember something I learnt from French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's consummate evocation of the future now, Alphaville. Simply put, I looked to the present for suggestions of the future.
Two issues stand out. One pertains to the difficulties and deficiencies of our local critical culture as it pertains to visual art; the other squarely relates to the issue of race and matters concerning racial hegemony in the South African art world. I will discuss each individually, even though they are somewhat inseparable in my mind.
Over recent years, there has been a lot of speculation about the robustness and/ or quality of art criticism in this country. Much of it is, of course, expressed in private, some of the criticisms occasionally trickling over into public discussions. The core concern relates to the muted and/ or tempered quality of art criticism in this country. Everyone is too chummy, the colloquial version of this critique goes, no one is willing to publicly separate the wheat from the chaff.
One proponent of this view, speaking at the Impact Printmaking Conference last year, suggested that this was because local critics had a vested interest in seeing local artists admitted into the international fold. I am a little doubtful as to verifiable logic of this argument. In spite of William Kentridge or Zwelethu Mthethwa's successes abroad, South Africa boasts no comparable Okwui Eweznor or Olu Oguibe.
In fact, no South African art writer has yet emerged as a coherent and sustained voice internationally, a mediating presence adjudicating on the relative value and integrity of South African art abroad. Ivor Powell and Colin Richards have always only threatened, and in the interim South African art has to some extent fallen prey to what Olu Oguibe describes as "an elaborate game of manoeuvres in which institutions, patrons, brokers and promoters peddle not only art but the careers, loyalties and fortunes of artists also."
Certain examples of art writing locally have not helped the case either. It is often stated (implicitly rather than explicitly) that South Africa has far too many sales reps and evangelists, all of them in the business of selling art. Where are the art critics proper goes the lament. It is an interesting quarrel. Accepting that there are smatterings of truth about this account, what one might ask is required to inculcate a culture of robust critical commentary?
Last year I put this question to a number of writers. Well-known Cape Town critic Melvyn Minaar offered an interesting insight. "There is a difference of substance and means between a committed art observer who tries to get a sensible word in on the brashly populist pages of a newspaper (do artists realise how difficult that is?) and the theorist who contemplates publishing a discerning contribution to the discourse at hand," he observed.
The provisional status art occupies in the popular mind hasn't helped matters either, although this is by no means unique to South Africa. In his new book Design & Crime, Hal Foster starts his chapter titled 'Art critics in extremis' with the observation: "The art critic is an endangered species." Across the Atlantic, in London, respected English art critic JJ Charlesworth noted something similar. Writing in the September 2003 issue of Art Monthly, he stated that it is not art but art criticism that is in crisis.
"The slip of terminology from art criticism to mere art writing in recent years is symptomatic of a growing indifference to writing's polemic and contestative potential," Charlesworth added. Writing from an admittedly populist perspective, I would argue that the retreat of art critics into the academia has to some extent helped pilot the demise of art criticism. Over the years art criticism has become far too Catholic, critics increasingly charmed by the beguiling sound of the Latin they learnt at university, blissfully unaware that the congregation is sleeping.
"Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there," Susan Sontag perceptively remarked in her essay 'Against interpretation', first published in 1964. "This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odours and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience."
It is disappointing to note how often critics fall short of the dictum Sontag appended to the foregoing statement: "The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us." Not that the entire debate is framed exclusively around the befuddlement of words. As the academic Andrew Lamprecht has pointed out, sometimes the author is the key problem.
Lamprecht raised this point last year in an ArtThrob debate, stating: "Another problem [with critical writing locally] is the composition of the company of critics. Many are artists themselves, others are trained in conventional art history. Only some have formal journalistic training. This is not to say that an art history graduate who is a practitioner and has no background in journalism is not capable of making a fine critic, merely that it seems that a large number of critics come to it through necessity rather than a conscious vocational choice."
Lamprecht further added: "We are faced with a situation in which, through force of circumstances, a great deal of criticism is written by people who should not be writing it" It is a brave statement, all the more so because of its unerring honesty. Of course, none of this really describes the tenuous existence of the local art scene in the popular mind. Art has a limited currency in mainstream South Africa, with the result that words - no matter how imperfect - are still regarded as a gift.
All too often this gift is unevenly distributed. Despite my own, ostensibly enlightened insights into a "formidable terrain of difficulty", I have often helped perpetuate the schema of the "uneven playground". I am white. This very simple assertion of fact manifested itself in the complexities and ugliness that dogged my ill conceived "black issue". Curating otherness was never so ineloquently spoken.
Oddly enough, though, the issue received only two public rebukes, one by the American academic Julie McGee, and the other by Sophie Perryer, in an editorial accompanying the Summer 2003 issue of Art South Africa. I am still somewhat intrigued by the fact that these were the only two public respondents when it was made known to me privately that I had offended a number of black readers. In many respects the lack of public censure simply repeated a common happenstance in the South African art community, where debates of public importance end up being concluded where they started, in bunkers and alleyways.
Ntone Edjabe, editor of Chimurenga, was exceptional in this respect. In a contribution titled 'Restate the focus to shape local polemic' he pointed out my editorial folly. "There is such a thing as an 'art world' in South Africa," he observed "and contemporary black visual arts practice is generally located outside of it. So an enquiry by ArtThrob - from the steep hills of the 'art world' - into what's happening with black visual artists has the predictability of an ethno-gaze. Others have similarly wondered why the 'great South African novel' (by a black writer) is so late in coming� One constant remains: all these enquiries originate from the establishment, and more often than not act as insurance policy in the status quo."
Edjabe then pointed out that a more relevant question in these times would have been on the role of visual arts in contemporary South Africa. "As any casual observer would note," he continued, "in this country there is a general lack of interaction between artistic creation and other areas of intellectual activity� There seems to have been a brutal divorce between the creators of contemporary art and the intellectual elite - and I'm not talking about university graduates here."
Speaking on behalf a constituency very often marginalised by ArtThrob, he added: "The struggle for young artists to enter the 'art world' - i.e. the minds and dinner parties of reviewers, curators and gallery owners - continues to be frustrated by the expectations these connoisseurs have of 'contemporary black visual arts in South Africa' at this time."
Hearing one's own words repeated verbatim is often the most salutary form of criticism. Has it occasioned a rethink, though? To the extent that it has highlighted a sensitive and difficult area of engagement, yes, although my answer should not be divorced of context. If you're reading this online, the truthful answer is actually no.
"The advent of virtuality and cyberculture in South Africa is particularly interesting, for not only is this culture sited in the midst of a larger society marked by the unimaginable poverty, deprivation and despair still evident in townships," Olu Oguibe notes in his essay 'Forsaken Geographies', "it is also circumscribed by the persistence of minority white privilege amid a disadvantaged black majority". This insight certainly calls into question some of the successes of ArtThrob over the last few years, particularly as a portal devoted to South African art.
While the site is easily accessed in places like New York and Berlin, the online magazine claims a precarious constituency. "Cyberspace reinserts the culture of insensitivity while further dislodging the disadvantaged from the scaffold of power," writes Oguibe, pithily defining a fundamental flaw so much a part of ArtThrob's make-up.
Highlighting this on my exit might smack of false piety, to which I respond that it is no different for print publications such as Art South Africa, nor indeed institutions such as the South African National Gallery. Race is a fundamental, unresolved problematic of our society, despite the illusion that we collectively bridged the need to speak about it in 1994.
Not that race deserves to be elevated above issues of class and gender, nor indeed issues related to the clarity of cultural discourse. All are equally important to a sustainable community attempting to live out the egalitarian promise on which it is founded.
