'Returning the Gaze' catalogue edited by Candice Smith
by Sophie Perryer
It's taken a while for the 'Returning the Gaze' catalogue to reach the shelf at Clarke's Bookshop - the public art project it documents took place during the Cape Town One City Festival in September 2000. But better late than never (the all too common alternative), and the clean design and crisp reproduction go a long way towards making up for the wait.
In an introductory essay, Zayd Minty (co-curator with Carol-Ann Davids) describes 'Returning the Gaze' as "a series of 'in your face' public art interventions ... [which] used postcards, billboards, murals and a web animation, with the curatorial agenda of raising issues of power, race, culture and identity in the city". Initiated through BLAC (the Black Arts Collective), the exhibition sought to make visible work interrogating issues of blackness and the concept of "the gaze". This is described by Valmont Layne in his catalogue essay as "the imaginative and visual arm of colonial conquest" - its "return" thus necessitating an engagement with and unravelling of the workings of aesthetic power.
The project was most successful in its highly visible appropriation of strategic urban spaces - billboards on the N1 and N2 highways and opposite Guga S'Thebe and the Baxter Theatre, murals on Buitenkant Street, Langa Civic Hall and Klipfontein Road, and postcards handed out in the city centre. Thus the catalogue is most rewarding where it gives space to documentation of these interventions in situ. Used large, Nick Aldridge's photos of Sky 189 and Ice's graffiti murals Township 2000 and Return to Sender and Donovan Ward's Leisure Time billboard communicate something of the works' impact on or interaction with their environment.
My only quibble with the catalogue is where this site-specificity is played down in favour of showcasing the isolated "work" - at which point billboards become interchangeable with postcards and an essential element of scale and context is lost. And quite where Shelley Barry's poems fitted into this public art project is never made clear.
That said, the project facilitated some wonderful pieces - Thembinkosi Goniwe's unforgettable billboard featuring his own face and that of fellow artist and lecturer Malcolm Payne, plastered with Bandaid, inspires as much discomfort on the cover of the catalogue as it did facing motorists at a well-chosen intersection in Rondebosch. Each artist is given space to articulate something of the ideas and processes that informed their work, and potted biographies are included for the artists, selection committee members and curators.
It adds up to an eye-pleasing browse, while both works and essays continue to offer grist for the mill that is the ongoing challenge to, as Layne puts it, "imaginatively unmak[e] our colonial legacy in order to make in its place a rich, complex, yet humane and democratic future for us all".
'Returning the Gaze' is available at Clarke's Bookshop (email: books@clarkesbooks.co.za; website http://www.clarkesbooks.co.za) at a cost of R75
