The Retreat of Creativity: Reflections on the Role of the South African Visual Arts in Social Development
by Joseph Gaylard
It has become commonplace to observe that we live in a society that is faced with a fairly spectacular set of social problems and challenges. One might venture to say that rather than having a social fabric, we have bits of social fabric that join, come apart and rearrange themselves over a chasm of disassociation, loss of meaning and horror. At the same time, this country is a place of exhilarating experiences, surprises, constant newness and wonder. The complex historical context for this compelling state of frayed societal being is known to most of us, and I will not re-hash it here.
Needless to say, all of this has provided contemporary visual arts in this country with plenty to chew on - a lot of arresting work that critically engages with the terrors, joys and complexities of being in this place at this extraordinary time has been produced. A body of work which more than holds its own on the international circuits of the contemporary visual arts from which it arguably draws much of its sense of reference, has been borne out of this. There have been substantial shifts in the demographics of this world, and young black artists and writers have forged distinctive, critical and strong voices. The sector is economically robust, fuelled by an international currency and an increasing patronage from the corporate sector. It is almost certainly the largest visual arts economy in Africa.
From another perspective however, there is a certain hollowness to these gains, which may be structurally related to the larger give-and-take that has characterised the progress of the remarkable project of hammering out a new South Africa. We have a stable and efficiently managed economy, an exemplary constitution and a host of institutions and instruments that promote transformation, growth and redress. However, the vision of an egalitarian society in which a range of fundamental rights are entrenched in reality and experience, has taken a severe beating in a country that now competes with Brazil for the dubious distinction of having the largest gap between rich and poor in the world.
Similarly, the idea - fermented in the 1970s and 80s - that the arts might play a central role in the development of a new South Africa has been quietly set aside, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the visual arts. (The performing arts, whose modes of production and consumption lend themselves more readily to people organising themselves and working relationally have almost certainly maintained a somewhat better grip on this overarching idea). While the notion of access to and participation in the arts for all South Africans is one of the central themes of our national policy framework for the arts, culture and heritage, the detailed ambitions embedded in this framework remain largely unrealised. The arts community is generally very quick (and with much eyeball rolling) to lay blame for this failure at the door of government, citing varying degrees of incompetence, mismanagement and corruption within state institutions as being at its root.
In what follows I would like to suggest that a more important failure perhaps lies with ourselves, in dynamics internal to our field, in a failure to respond to the radical challenge of building a new society with substantive shifts in how we think about the visual arts, and what it is that visual artists do. A central problem here has been the extent to which the visual arts community has by and large operated within a more or less solipsistic framework around these questions. It is a framework that has produced work that often engages in a serious and sophisticated way with sets of broadly 'social' issues (identity, race, gender, etc), but does so in a fashion, and for a context, in which it can have no real impact on wider society.
Fundamentally, we have not really engaged - as a community of practitioners, curators, administrators and organisations - in organised debate and action around the role that the visual arts might play in society beyond the gallery opening, the art journal and the arts academy: the world of the crèche, the school, the prison, the old age home, the HIV/AIDS hospice, mental health facility, and so on. Instead, as with many other areas in South African life, we have subsided into a rather unimaginative and self-interested business-as-usual approach to what we do in the context in which we do it. Within this framework, the artist is positioned in a spectator role in relation to the society - profoundly engaged at a personal level, seeking to produce work of imaginative breadth and seriousness, but operating within an essentially self-imposed and idiosyncratic brief and within a presentational context that hardly extends beyond the confines of galleries and arts journals.
The idea that the visual arts can play a powerful role in social development is one which the South African visual arts community continues to view with a certain patronising distaste, as falling outside the realm of what is considered to be serious and proper for artists to be engaged with in the course of their training and professional lives. What is lost here is an important opportunity for rich, complex and direct engagement with the societal material that many contemporary artists grapple with in their work, as well as important opportunities for the development of ancillary career paths and sources of income for artists. Ironically, these are avenues that have become increasingly entrenched in the professional landscape of the international contexts with which our sector enjoys an uncomfortably aspirant relationship.
In the Anglo-European and North American contexts, the social development agenda has penetrated policy, funding and institutional frameworks and the organised professional world, and now informs approaches to professional and career development for artists. The idea that visual artists can bring their creativity and skills to bear on a wider set of activities without compromising the imaginative and personal project that lies at the heart of what they do, is increasingly integrated into how artists think about themselves, and in the manner in which they are viewed by government - i.e. as a critical resource to the wider society rather than a disassociated middle class diversion.
From my own experience as a student and subsequently working in tertiary institutions involved in fine arts training in South Africa, there is in fact a real hunger and enthusiasm on the part of young arts students for engagement with and connection to a wider set of realities than that which the professional visual arts sector offers them. In general however, neither the tertiary sector nor the professional environment provide young people with opportunities for informed, thoughtful and satisfying engagement with the pressing needs of the society, an engagement where the artist is positioned as a resource, rather than as a voyeur of the woes of others.
The horizon of aspiration for young visual artists continues to be structured around an international circuit that directs them onto the pages of glossy art journals rather than into classrooms, clinics and community centres. Michael Stevenson, a sharp observer of the South African visual arts scene with an international locus in his work as an art dealer, observes that '� of all the students emptying out of universities, one a year will be integrated into the mainstream circuit. South Africa is currently in an exceptional position, having about 20 artists on the international circuit'. Incredibly, this piece of insight does not deter the visual arts field in this country from doggedly insisting that this international circuit is the destination-of-most-meaning.
Of course, this is not an either/or situation - there is a juxtaposition of false opposites that easily kicks in here in this kind of discussion between 'art for art's sake' and 'art for a purpose or function'. Part of what I would argue is that these can and should be mutually reinforcing pursuits, and there is no particular dictate around the mode or manner in which this reconciliation should best occur. 'Johannesburg Circa Now', a recent project staged at the Johannesburg Art Gallery by two 'heavyweight' artists (Jo Ractliffe and Terry Kurgan), points to how profound and personal creative agendas can inform and shape an imaginative process that involves the participation of wider communities in the development of an extraordinary species of urban South African Gesamtkunstwerk (in this instance, teachers and learners from schools were involved, as well as 'publics' that would not normally go into a public art gallery).
International research has shown the benefits that flow from the involvement of the arts in different spheres of social development. In educational settings (which are one of my main areas of professional focus), the arts have been shown to contribute significantly to cognitive development generally, to have knock-on effects in achievement across the curriculum, and to lead to the development of the kinds of creative, flexible, 'initiating' and confident problem-solvers that are the fundamental human capital of societies and economies at the present time. Although arts and culture is featured as a compulsory learning area in General Education and Training (grades 1-9, GET) in South Africa, research commissioned by the National Department of Education has shown that the extent to which this is properly implemented is extremely limited, with a significant proportion of learners enjoying limited or no access to arts and cultural education.
The picture for arts provision in Further Education and Training (grades 10-12, FET), where it is not compulsory for schools to offer arts in the curriculum, is far worse. In both instances, the major stumbling block is the absence of appropriately trained teachers to deal with the demands of these new learning areas. The same piece of research has shown that the extent to which tertiary institutions contribute art graduates with professional teaching skills to teach at particularly the specialist FET level, is extremely limited. This is almost certainly not a function of inertia in tertiary arts departments, but part of a more generalised difficulty that the tertiary sector as a whole has faced in establishing itself as a responsive, needs-driven sector. And this is not to say that important initiatives have not been mounted out of these environments, but that they generally operate within limitations of capacity and resource that make it difficult to move toward implementation and impact at anything like the scale that is required to address the massive backlogs in the provisioning of skilled human resources to nurture the creative energy in our schools that our country so desperately needs.
In this brief discussion, I have operated at a level of fairly obtuse and serial generalisation. Many of the constructions that I have deployed (for example, the 'South African visual arts community') would probably not stand up to serious scrutiny, and I would not want the sentiments expressed to be read as undermining the extraordinary work that has been done by individuals, NGOs, tertiary institutions, public and private galleries, corporates and government in beginning to promote a social development agenda within the visual arts. In the provincial context with which I am most familiar - Gauteng - a critical mass of organisational infrastructure directed to these ends has emerged over the past 10 years, involving particularly tertiary institutions and NGOs, but driven by a relatively small group of overstretched individuals.
My overarching point has been that we live in a society of radical social disjuncture, inequity and need (on a variety of levels), and that our sector has not really responded in kind, or shaped itself in a significant way or with a sense of real urgency around the creative challenges and opportunities that this situation presents. I have also avoided commenting on the enervating role that government has played in all of this, out of a sense that the first priority is to take a hard, honest look at ourselves. If we spend a bit of time sifting through some of the mythology, the response of the Cuban government and people after the 1956 Revolution stands as one historical precedent from which both government and the sector could, with appropriate caution, learn a great deal - specifically with regard to the question of how people get mobilised into concerted action around the fundamental needs of an entire society. Why have we not, for example, extended the community service model developed around the medical profession into the arts?
In closing, I would like to bring this all into some kind of practical focus around the possible role of the Visual Arts Network of South Africa. VANSA is an important (if fledgling) initiative, which has the potential to make a contribution by gently galvanising the sector around the role of the visual arts in social development, and tapping into the opportunities that such interface may enable, particularly with regard to the expansion of work opportunities for visual artists. VANSA sees itself playing a role in making the visual arts a more 'joined up' part of the arts sector, one that is responsive to both the mandates of government and the interests and needs of the complex and sometimes volatile community that comprises the 'visual arts sector'. But to do so, it needs to gather a proper mandate around these issues, one which emerges from animated debate and discussion rather than by default, against a backdrop of general apathy. As a first practical contribution to such a debate, the following are presented as some of the priorities that VANSA might address relative to the issues presented in this discussion:
Gather information: play a role in auditing projects and initiatives that impact at the most local level, and start to establish a knowledge base in this area. Play a role in facilitating that most difficult of discussions - the sector talking to itself, and sharing information and resources.
Engage with the tertiary education sector: lobby for the broad skills required for this area of work to be presented as part of the general repertoire of skills that visual artists acquire during the course of their training in tertiary institutions, at both graduate and postgraduate levels. Facilitate the development of partnerships between institutions and organisations working in this area around both teaching and research, and play a role in levering support from government to make this 'expanded brief' possible.
Engage with government and the private sector: start to interact in a structured, informed and constructive fashion with the policy and programming frameworks of relevant arms of government, from the Department of Education, through to Social Welfare, Health and Public Works. This might also help in shifting the sector out of the 'begging bowl' framework that currently characterises our engagement with our putatively lead department, the Department of Arts and Culture. There is the potential for the DAC to operate as an agency that facilitates the dynamic contribution of the arts to the social mandates of government located within other departments across the local, provincial and national spheres. Similarly, and perhaps with more likelihood of immediate result and action, lever support from the corporate sector around specific projects and initiatives in meaningful relationship with what already exists in the field.
Do Something: perhaps most importantly, formulate strategies around the social development agenda that are informed by the input and participation of individuals, organisations and institutions, and establish practical pathways toward concerted action on modest and 'doable' projects at the most local level.
Joseph Gaylard is a researcher, lecturer and projects manager based at the University of Witwatersrand's Johannesburg Centre for Cultural Policy and Management as well as Secretary General for the National Executive of the VANSA
