The State of the Nation's (young) Art
by Jacki McInnes
Art competitions can be a messy and contested business. Selectors and judges rarely escape criticism, and gripes around partisanship, prejudice and political correctness can rumble on for months. On top of this, competitions tend to present a plethora of disparate pieces from an array of artists bound only by such rules of the competition as age group, materials used and geographical location of the competitors. In spite of these sombre sentiments, two recent Johannesburg-based competition exhibitions have managed to avoid most of the aforementioned shortcomings and present some important insights into the state of young art in the country today.
The MTN New Contemporaries Award sets out to showcase the work of emerging artists who have not yet received substantial critical acclaim but who are considered to be at the leading edge of new art. Artists do not enter the competition; rather, they are selected by the competition curator after extensive research and nationwide studio visits. The Martienssen Prize is open only to senior art students at Wits, who are tasked with producing a work during their mid-year vacation without the advice or assistance of their lecturers. A rigorous selection process then results in an exhibition from which an overall winner is chosen.
It goes without saying that the selections of artists and eventual winners of the two competitions were accompanied by the usual mutterings of discontent, but that aside, it is the emergence of a cohesive theme that is important here. Generally speaking, the Martienssen exhibition was a sombre and monochromatic affair. Students reflected on personal experience (as students are wont to do) but were not egocentric - their work focused not so much on themselves as on the impact of the social, economic and political turmoil in which they live. An overwhelming sense of fragility and ephemerality permeated the exhibition, as if life as they had known it was about to change fundamentally, unknowably and more than likely for the worse.
Emma Lawrence and Jessica Hurwitz's collaborative video piece Shop Shop depicted news clips of the recent xenophobic violence on a low stack of old-fashioned television sets. The clips were manipulated so they jumped and stuttered like a stuck record, and then ran smoothly for the next few frames, before reverting to a dysfunctional stop-start again. The work ran the risk of being dismissed as nothing more than an annoying cacophony, but after a few seconds it became powerfully compelling, drawing the viewer in, with or without their consent. The work suggested an impending disaster or something sinister; something being held back by nothing more than the video's inability to move efficiently to the next frame. The way in which the flickering TV sets were stacked was also somehow reminiscent of religious stained glass iconography, perhaps hinting at humans' essential need to hang onto the ideal of a greater power in the face of an uncertain future.
The outdated TVs reflected a trend in the exhibition: many of the students appeared to make a conscious decision to steer clear of new technologies and return to tried and tested art-making media. Charcoal drawing, ink sketching and simple objects predominated and seemed to reiterate the exhibition's tone of a mistrust in our future and an urgent scramble to revisit more traditional - and sustainable - techniques. Jacques James covered a section of the floor with crushed charcoal which he then brushed in places to create the likeness of a face. His choice of this simple medium resulted in the work being read as something more open-ended than a portrait, which was grounded and territorial, apparently referring to issues of power and dominance. And yet its temporary construction undermined its own message, rendering it ephemeral and, in a sense, inconsequential.
The strength of the winning work by Alexandra Maklouf was also contingent on simple imagery and techniques. The artist stationed herself at a desk in the gallery where she invited gallery-goers to sit down and tell her something about themselves. She then ink-sketched a small picture, symbol or pattern in response to their words. Each piece was torn from a large sheet of paper and tacked randomly onto the wall behind her, resulting in a wall full of fragments, each overflowing with seemingly arbitrary information.
As a whole the work seemed pretty inaccessible - just a wall full of jumbled snippets - but it was mentioned in the opening speech that the artist is in fact almost completely blind. She is scheduled to have an operation to restore her sight but has been told that there is no guarantee of its success. Inevitably, Maklouf's art-making techniques reflect her extreme anxiety about her own uncertain future. She mentioned that she feels compelled to make as many images as she can, while she still can. But the real significance of this work, and undoubtedly part of the reason it won, lies in its ability to affect us all. Not in terms of our sympathy for this young woman who may soon lose her sight, but in terms of our own near-universal sense of existential dread for the future of our lives on this planet.
Works on the New Contemporaries exhibition were perhaps more sophisticated than those on the Martienssen show and the topics chosen more external. But ultimately the warnings communicated were not vastly different. None of the MTN artists were self-referential but all commented on man's apparent inability to learn from past mistakes, our headlong rush towards commercial gain at the expense of human rights and our planet, and the inevitable disaster that lies ahead if we do not change our ways.
Dan Halter, originally from Zimbabwe, presented maps of Zimbabwe's farming districts interwoven with names from old databases and telephone directories together with an installation of plastic carrier bags of the kind used by immigrants streaming back and forth across our borders. The over-stuffed bags might have referred to the unabated needs of a burgeoning African population, and in view of the motif from the computer game 'Space Invaders' emblazoned on each bag, was a none too subtle reference to the xenophobic mood evidenced here recently.
Also grappling with the African shenanigans going on beyond our borders was Michael MacGarry, the nexus of his work being an interrogation of China's trade interests in Africa. China's involvement stems primarily from its need to maintain its expanding economy - 25% of its oil needs are now serviced by African countries. But there are other reasons for China's successful trade future with Africa that are less savoury - China doesn't appear to give a hoot about autocracies, self-serving despots and appalling human rights abuses. It is not ashamed of its policy of non-interference and as such is becoming the trade partner of choice in Africa. This should make one nervous.
Themba Shibase paints portraits of African and apartheid-regime leaders in order to scrutinise their ideologies and question the 'cult of the personality' so prevalent on this continent. Paintings such as We are a bruised people I and II take a cynical look at real-life scenarios for Africans while Economic Ascendance - A New Battle Ground alludes to the economic survival strategies and the ever-increasing material desires of the African population.
The winning work by Dineo Bopape was somewhat obscure by many people's reckoning. Bopape describes her work as 'aiming to engage the politics of language, the psychosexual, and the power politics embedded in the fabric of the everyday' but how this relates to her installation of incongruent objects such as panties, electric fans, colanders and mirror balls is not immediately obvious. She seems intent on presenting an imagined place in which all human narratives can co-exist and where social and racial boundaries are temporarily suspended in order to allow both the artist and her audience to discover new things about themselves.
South African art has frequently been criticised for its overly socio-political thrust, while art from so-called Developed countries has tended more towards minimalism, abstraction and a reliance on new technologies. But considering the fact that the topics dealt with by the artists on these two shows are global, it would be surprising if they did not filter down into international art. South Africa has never been considered a world leader and is dismissed as a minor-league player at best, so wouldn't it be ironic if our artistic concerns turned out to be ahead of the pack for a change?
Jacki McInnes is an artist, curator and writer living in Johannesburg
