Archive: Issue No. 109, September 2006

As Colin Richards pointed out in his essay 'The Thought is the Thing', in the Summer 2002 edition of Art South Africa (vol. 01 issue 02), Conceptualism became a mainstay of SA contemporary practice post-apartheid, especially for young black artists making their way in the global art market. The primary reason for this seems to have been an insistence on separation from the history of Black SA art up until then, one frequently bound by modernist ideas about how artists should operate.

Against this backdrop, it is surprising and interesting to see the degree to which 'New Painting: A Selection of Contemporary South African Painting', curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg (former curator of the NSA Gallery in Durban), foregrounds the presence of young Black artists choosing to re-engage a medium which 10 years ago was largely shelved by young contemporary artists. And while commentators like James Sey may attribute the worldwide resurgence of interest in painting to a 'compulsion to package art for consumption' (Art South Africa Vol. 4 Issue 3, Autumn 2006: pg 45), it is nonetheless interesting to see the extent to which young Black artists in SA are using painting on their own terms, and the extent to which the fraught South African context still finds valid expression in the medium.

What I originally took for an admission of curatorial looseness, the disclaimer-like statement printed on the gallery wall at the show's entrance, turned out to have some significant things to say: chiefly that the show was not intended to construct its participants as exclusively 'Painters'. Artists like Dineo Bopape, Tanya Poole and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt already push the boundaries of the traditionally-defined painter, using the medium as either one part of their process or as only one tactic in an overall strategy of contingency. Of these, Bopape is probably the most interesting to watch, despite the status of Kreutzfeldt and Poole.

I usually emit a low, pained cry and run away when confronted with the ubiquitous video-monitor-on-a-plinth presentation style that South African artists and galleries have honed to a virtual subgenre since 1993, but the lowliness of this presentation was entirely consistent with Bopape's imagery in A Love Supreme (2006). The short video DVD shows the artist, replete with cheap back-lighting a la early New Romantic music videos, licking a paint-like substance off the glass pane through which she is being filmed. The intimate simplicity of this action belies a sharp take on the historically gendered nature of paint and painting. The effect of the action is also significantly an erasure of the substance from the surface, a wry emasculation of the white male painter, in his inevitable position of art world dominator, by a young Black woman.

The harnessing of contingency is a strategically intelligent way to operate as an artist right now, and Bopape, who is better known for sculptural installations, proves this with her participation in this painting show. But contingency, of course, has its down side, and one of the benefits of painting's technological simplicity is its independence from undesirable contingencies, e.g. technological breakdown. This was inadvertently reinforced by Poole's work Drift (2005), a dual-track oil painting animation projected onto two pillow-like structures. Upon my visit to the JAG, only one of the projectors was showing an image, and that one was frozen; the other treated me to a jauntily-coloured Sansui screensaver logo. Thus, what I assume was to be a moving experience in the presence of an allegedly cutting-edge interdisciplinary exercise turned out instead to be the stuff of an Audio-Visual Club geek's nightmare.

Elsewhere in the show, the presence of Black artists putting painting to good use became more apparent. In the central space of the show, a work by the street smart Kudzanai Chiurai (Go Back Home (2006)) set up a stimulating dialogue with the hip hop-inflected approach of Mustafa Maluka (Nigga with an Attitude (2005)). Their references to 'low brow' culture (with Chiurai it's the TV, with Maluka it's the early gangsta rap of NWA) in turn creates a productive friction with a work across the space, Johannes Phokela's Chocolat (2004). Phokela's relentless reinterpretation of styles and images from the pages of Western (read: white) art history make him one of the most exciting local artists to watch. The paradigm shift I suggested earlier is in fact most visible through the example of Phokela: in 1997 his work was included on Richards' seminal show 'Graft', which placed focus on the work of artists loosely grouped by virtue of their experiments with various strains of Conceptual practice.

Here, Phokela's continued impertinence is entirely at home within a painting context, as he subtly subverts Rubens, Hals and Fragonnard. His choice to paint is strategic in that it allows him to work less like a terrorist (like Kendell Geers' detonating of bombs within the institution of art) and more like a gleefully hideous virus, disfiguring and mutating the most hallowed art traditions from within. Unfortunately, against the whirlwind that is Phokela (a serendipitous collision of this show with a solo show of his new work in the adjacent space underlines his power), the works of Dinkies Sithole (Meditating With the Shamans I and II) and Colbert Mashile (numerous works), with their tentative reworking of abstraction for a local context, come off looking a bit polite, a bit quaint.

Janse van Rensburg is to be congratulated for his willingness to highlight the empowering potential painting still holds for South Africa, and for avoiding the myriad anaemic clones of current European and Asian painting styles that threaten the dynamism of South African painting by playing right into Sey's reductive statement.

Opens: July 23
Closes: September 3
Johannesburg Art Gallery
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