Redefining Our Notion of African Art
by Lloyd Pollak
At long last a gallery worthy of Cork Street and Soho is here to galvanise the somnolent Cape Town art world and challenge its village pump mentality. That gallery is Michael Stevenson Contemporary, and the arrant professionalism of its director and his team makes all other commercial galleries in the Mother City appear hick and humdrum.
Stevenson holds a doctorate in art history and has established himself as a widely published authority on sub-Saharan art. This academic address, leavened with daredevil lateral thinking and imaginative leaps, infuses the gallery's inaugural exhibition with exceptional substance and depth.
'Contact Zones: Colonial and Contemporary', a survey of art spanning over one-and-a-half centuries and much of the African continent, generates sizzling intellectual electricity and demonstrates an astonishing breadth of vision.
The show redefines our notion of South African art, for Stevenson includes artists from every province, and also gives space to stars like Claudette Shreuders, Berni Searle and Hylton Nel, who mainly confine themselves to the international circuit. Marginalised "outsider" artists like Johannes Maswanganyi and Freddie Ramabulana astound us with the wayward virtuoso eccentricity of their sculpture. Schadenfreude has impelled many to dismiss the Michael Stevenson Contemporary as a mere outpost of the Goodman Gallery. When I mentioned this rumour to Stevenson, he vehemently denied it.
The gallery breaks ground in other respects. Erudite illuminati like Kathy Grundlingh (an ex-curator from the National Gallery) and Andrew da Conceicao (ex-curator at the Bellville Association of Arts) are on hand to introduce the exhibits, and elegantly articulate their style, context and meaning. The nigh windowless space is light, bright and airy with ample lebensraum and flow. The absence of clutter instils a sense of cerebral spring clean, and creates an emptied-out, meditative space that nudges us into communion with the art.
'Contact Zones' investigates how sub-Saharan artists construct defining images of identity, colour and class. It confronts the past to reveal how the coloniser depicted colonised and vice versa. It explores the present and examines how black depicts white and vice versa. In this vertiginous play of mirrors we see kings, queens, gods, slaves and ordinary men and women reflected and refracted through the eyes of our myriad different ethnicities.
The exhibition opens up yet another fascinating field of inquiry tracing how European and African traditions of representation rubbed off upon each other, and contributed to the birth of the new. Hybridised techniques, idioms and iconographic solutions evolved out of cross-cultural ferment, and these transfuse the art of this region with buoyant vitality and originality.
The first image to confront us, Keith Dietrich's Bodies, Traces, Identities, foregrounds ethnic shift and displacement. The work consists of 64 paintings of a format resembling broken pottery shards. Each presents an anatomical fragment in big close-up, and isolates details of tattoos, body piercing, circumcision, make-up and hair styling. Bodies, Traces, Identities is a study of what we do to ourselves in order to forge an identity, and proclaim our tastes, sympathies and allegiances. In this process, ethnicity sometimes evaporates. We live in the age of the black blond.
Dietrich's noses pierced with rubies are not necessarily Indian, and his beaded, braided hairstyles are not necessarily black. N element of peek-a-boo enters this disquisition on cultural crossover: We itch to assign identities to the artist's sitters, but he withholds the full picture and frustrates any such attempt. Our rapt scrutiny of Dietrich's assembly of strangers is mirrored by their rapt scrutiny of us. Eyes gawk at us through the shards as if puzzled by our ethnic affiliation, and all this furtive bottom-sniffing reveals just how obsessed we still are by colour and race.
Deft juxtapositions make 'Contact Zones' as densely layered as a Chinese ivory ball. Bodies, Traces, Identities keeps company with Berni Searle's Profile, another essay in bodily marks and the tight physiognomic close-up. Searle has pressed emblematic objects hard against her cheeks, and eight huge colour photographs record their imprint. A crucifix, an SAP badge, a Muslim prayer, a tray of cloves, the crown of England and a toy Dutch windmill all allude to her mixed ancestry, and the tribulations her coloured status visited upon her. However, the installation is no celebration of her many-splendid hybridity and Mauritian, Arabian, German, British and local forebears. Saint Bernadette de Searle can never resists iconising herself as victim and martyr.
The photographs are configured as a turnstile, so Searle turns the other cheek to her enemies, and sets up suggestions of treadmills and torturer's wheels. The mugshot formats, too, create overtones of forensic investigation, manhunt and prosecution. Self-pity undermines the frigid clinical brilliance of this conceptual piece, and one longs to whisper "Move on, Sister!" into the hairy jungle of Searle's hugely magnificent ear.
Profile picks up on the facial scarification seen in adjacent African carvings of seated male and female figures dandling infants on their knees. Some form a response to European representations of the Christ child with the Madonna or saint Anthony, and introduce 'Contact Zone's' historical component - a pioneering coup d'oeil at African carvings mainly executed for European consumption between 1840 and 1940.
This grossly underrated corpus has never been admitted into the hallowed canon of "classical" African art, as the scholarly consensus is that contact with Europeans somehow "contaminated" such artefacts and drains them of authenticity. Stevenson has assembled conclusive visual evidence in support of his thesis that such cross-cultural art is as valid a creative response to historical realities as pre-colonial African art. To cite but one example: the effigy of mother and child illustrated in here achieves such an ineffably tender solution to the problem of portraying emotional union that it rivals Raphael's achievement as a Madonnieri. The infant's legs batten like a limpet round his mother's thighs, and the two anatomies seem to melt indissolubly into each other.
Cross-cultural ping-pong attains championship heights in Claudette Schreuder's hauntingly lovely Watermeisie. Although the figure alludes to Eve, mermaids and carved, poly-chromed figureheads, the Makonde masks beside it alert us to the African influence implicit in the stylised physiognomy. Watermeisie is the progeny of serpent-bearing Hindu deities seen in Indian calendars disseminated in Africa through trade; these inspired west African figures of the mythic Mami Wata who conflates water and serpent spirits with the attributes of European women.
Cult figures of Mami Wata loom large in the west African voodoo religion, which assimilated elements derived from African slaves dispersed in the Caribbean islands and the American south. This global array of diverse strands is plaited together by a white artist reinterpreting African prototypes derived from Hinduism, Buddhism, and the voodoo icons of America and the Caribbean in the light of her European heritage.
Watermeisie.provides the parade example of how 'Contact Zones' dizzying labyrinth of echo and reflection dismantles stereotypes to reveal the rich compost of symbiosis on which our art so heartily thrives.
May 7 - June 14
Michael Stevenson Contemporary
Hill House, De Smidt Street, Waterkant, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 421 2575
Email: michael@michaelstevenson.com
Website: www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pm
Lloyd Pollak is an independent critic of long-standing based in Cape Town.
This review was previously published in The Sunday Independent, June 1 2003 under the headline 'Groundbreaking new gallery's imaginative leap helps redefine our notion of African art'. It is reprinted with the kind permission of the author.
