Jungle fantasies in an African Disneyland
by Lloyd Pollak
The highly publicised sculptural 'collaboration' between Tuoi Stefaans Samcuia, of the !Xun and Khwe San Art and Cultural Project, and 2002's Standard Bank young artist award winner, Brett Murray, was finally revealed to the public at the grand opening of the Cape Town International Convention Centre last month. Murray and Samcuia ousted the other finalists, and won the national competition to secure the Convention Centre's major artwork commission in October last year.
The budget for executing the piece was R 400,000, the two artists also carrying off a prize of R 40,000 each. The collaboration consists of three gigantic painted steel, cutout plaques which dominate the principal foyer of the Convention Centre. The ensemble measures 28 by 7.5 metres, and never has so much space been used to say so little. The flat sculpture is flimsy and akin to 'airport art', a magnification of the fridge magnet, tea towel or tourist souvenir. This manipulation of scale misfires and merely accentuates the work's overblown character.
The motive force behind this towering sculptural colossus is twee decorative whimsy, and what it portrays is a sentimentalised African Disneyland. South Africa is seen as a tizzied-up natural paradise where harmless and loveable animals (even the elephant is devoid of tusks) browse contentedly amidst bizarre flora laden with plump, juicy fruits. Festive sprays of leaf and berry heighten the bright and breezy feel of this sub-Saharan Dinky-Dell, and enhance its Greeting Card air of chirrupy good cheer.
The artists aim for arch, the coy and the cute, and they achieve a simpering charm. The cloyingly naïve, or perhaps, faux naaïf, style is associated with graphic design rather than art, and it strongly reminds one of Safari Lodge pamphlets and Game Park letterheads.
One feels compelled to ask whether such mindless decorative frippery is appropriate to one of the grandest civic commissions in the Mother City's history. Surely public art of such prominence and scale should exude dignity and grandeur, and serve as an inspirational visual symbol of our city, its people and its history. What was wanted was a rousing national icon, not fretwork trees and Zoo biscuit plaques.
The Africa presented by the cutout sculpture smacks of Rider Haggard and Rice Burroughs' outmoded jungle fantasies, and one wonders why the judges were unanimous in awarding the prize to this work, which also completely fails to meet the competition's brief. It neither reflects "the rich diversity of South African cultures", nor does it embody "the qualities that speak of Cape Town as a unique place."
One suspects that aesthetic considerations were cynically sacrificed to muddle-headed political expediency and tokenism. No doubt the heart-warming thought of a prominent and sophisticated urban white artist, and an obscure marginalized San rural artist, pooling their talents, and working together to produce an original creative hybrid, appealed to the rainbowist sympathies of the committee. The concept would have seemed a politically correct choice.
It points in the direction of reconciliation and nation building, and falls in line with the current trend toward cultural affirmative action. Finally it has positive propagandist potential for it purveys a benign utopian image of the new South Africa as a place of peaceful coexistence and racial harmony. Such visual persuasion is calculated to allay any misgivings on the part of the foreign visitors and potential investors who will visit the Convention Centre.
To claim the work represents cultural pluralism and that, to paraphrase Marilyn Martin, it provides "a wonderful example" of artistic interaction merging Tuoi Stefaans' "ancient symbols" with Brett Murray's "extraordinary vision" is disingenuous. No 'collaboration' or 'artistic interaction', in the sense of vital creative exchange took place. Nor did any novel cross-cultural artwork come into being.
The work is based on three pre-existent linocuts, which Samcuia produced in 1994 long before he met Murray. Murray directed the team of about 30 metal-cutters, welders, grinders, painters, computer-scanners and riggers, who copied and enlarged Samcuia's blueprint while transposing it into metal. Murray did not alter the original linocuts one jot, nor did he allow his biting wit to enliven the inexpressive blank schematicism of Samcuia's prototype. There was no artistic exchange, no bridging of different cultures.
To complement the unveiling of the work, the Cape Town International Convention Centre has produced a self-congratulatory brochure. This disseminates further casuist mystifications. Marilyn Martin praises Samcuia for drawing on "the oldest visual culture in southern Africa", and critic, Paul Edmunds notes how "the San ethos of the interconnectedness of humans and nature" infuses the work. Thereby they imply that the sculpture is steeped in the same aesthetic as that behind our legacy of San rock paintings.
This is an insult to the memory of these anonymous San artists. It is Loony Tunes married to the curio impulse, rather than San art, which inspired Samcuia's cuddly-toy menagerie. San stylisation is idiosyncratic, expressive and devastatingly elegant. Line, contour and silhouette are charged with a tense quiver and urgency. Such vital energy and linear sophistication are alien to Samcuia whose simplified idiom yields forms as blank, static and standardised as those in a child's colouring-in book.
The same sprays of leaf repeat over and over again like pressed flowers in some desperate Victorian spinster's uneventful diary, and induce a sense of monotony and boredom. The three friezes with their ugly horizontal divisions, are also devoid of the supple rhythm whereby San artists achieved formal harmony, and this absence of flow creates a jarring staccato effect.
The results do look African however, and it was probably this that appealed to the judges. Unfortunately the work's African flavour is entirely ersatz. The design could have been produced in Stockholm or Cincinnati as it relies on scenographic clich� rather than reality, and employs a designer's shorthand for Africa. Juxtapose a baobab tree and an elephant and - hey presto! - you have Africa, just as aligning a camel, a pyramid and a palm tree spells Egypt. Samcuia's Africa is cobbled together from tribal carvings, San rock art, Mission school linocuts and the foliate designs seen in African ceramics and printed fabrics. All these inspirations have been artfully diluted for indiscriminate foreign consumption, and the results are as banal as wallpaper.
Another major civic commission - a three-stage national competition for an artwork to embellish the space in front of the South African National Gallery in Cape Town - will take place from June 2003 to March 2004. The provisional budget is R 200,000 and the brief calls for a collaborative work of "significant and groundbreaking public art" which will encourage people to visit the gallery. One ardently hopes that on this occasion, aesthetic - and not simply political criteria - will inform the judges' choice. If not, this may well be yet another shaming triumph of the bogus.
