KZNSA Gallery
01.03 - 24.03.2024
What does it mean for an artist to pay homage to another, freely borrowing from that artist, with full acknowledgement? When is the tribute about the declared object of interest, and when does it depart from this focus, telling us more about the supplicant or something else? And what is the significance of such a dialogue between muse and mediator for us as the audience? These are some of the questions that I grappled with in viewing recent works by Thami Jali at the KZNSA Gallery.
Jali’s career dates back to the early 1980s when he attended the legendary art school at Rorke’s Drift. He has been a prolific artist, working in several media (principally painting, printmaking and ceramics) and deploying a diversity of visual idioms that run the gamut from realism to abstraction. The richness of his practice was abundantly evident in his retrospective exhibition at the Durban Art Gallery in 20141Jenny Stretton (ed) Thami Jali: Restless Spirit. Durban Art Gallery, 2014. See also https://asai.co.za/artist/thami-jali/ . Jali has also been influential as a mentor to younger artists, particularly in KZN and Gauteng.
Thami Jali, Stone Garden II, Acrylic on canvas, 2023. Courtesy KZNSA. Photo by Paulo Menezes.
Jali’s recent exhibition, titled Mphendla Ndlela (I’m looking for a way), is ostensibly a homage to the late Nukain Mabuza, a farm labourer/gardener of Mozambican or Swazi origins who spent fifteen years producing a ‘stone garden’ in Mpumalanga2Mabuza’s work was first brought to the attention of the art world through research by the artist John Clarke, who has assembled an archive of material related to Mabuza. In conducting his research on Mabuza, Jali has engaged with Clarke and others who knew him. See https://www.jfcclarke.com/the-painted-garden-of-nukain-mabusa. The work on show manifests a fascination with Mabuza that dates back to 1991. Jali, then involved in establishing art centres in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, encountered Mabuza through the pages of Farmer’s Weekly. He couldn’t make much sense of the text since it was in Afrikaans but he describes the impact of seeing the images as having “hit [him] right between the eyes.3All remarks attributed to Jali are drawn from an informal conversation with the artist and his opening speech at the KZNSA (29 February – 1 March 2024).” Subsequently, a fortuitous sojourn through Barberton enabled Jali to visit the Stone Garden in 1999. His homage to Mabuza began tentatively a year later, through his participation in the Matsulu Art Centre in Mpumalanga, where he taught young people to produce ceramic tiles based on Mabuza’s distinct aesthetic.
Jali’s new work borrows liberally from Mabuza. His distinctively painted rocks appear scattered across Jali’s compositions, nestled into the ground and floating through the air. Mabuza’s painted chairs, said by Jali to be among his few possessions, assume a regal and surreal presence, soaring through the skies. Signs of Mabuza are so prevalent that, as Russel Hlongwane comments, “… one might say he has gone too far…4This remark appears in the wall text penned by Hlongwane.”.
Thami Jali, Seated Figure II, Acrylic on canvas, 2023. Courtesy KZNSA. Photo by Paulo Menezes.
Mabuza himself is pictured by Jali, although the artist chooses to conceal his muse’s likeness by draping him in a red and white striped cloth (Seated Figure II). This cloth reappears in other works, serving to conjure a cloaked, body-less presence (Seated Figure 1, Resurrection I and Resurrection II). This choice to avoid mimesis and rather to depict Mabuza’s presence as shrouded and ethereal tells us that Mabuza has assumed the function of a symbol or sign. Mabuza is both historical figure and idea. Indeed, much of Jali’s iconography does not draw directly from Mabuza. The aforementioned cloth, Jali reveals, is one he himself owns. The landscape is not rocky Mpumalanga but rather the sandy Namib, referenced from photographs. Thus, the land that is pictured is an expansive one, bridging swathes of the subcontinent. And the ruins and discarded building blocks that pop up intermittently remind us of an earlier, gritty body of work where Jali depicted broken dwellings — poignant works that speak to the traces of human presence that linger beyond life as we think we know it.
The eclectic array of motifs tells us that — despite Jali tending to steer all discussion of his recent works back to Mabuza — the artist is quoting selectively from his source. He doesn’t, for example, follow Mabuza’s lead in depicting a wide array of animals. Nor does he present Mabuza’s rocks in the compact form in which they were assembled — instead they tend to appear as singular items, despite their evident relationship to each other.
What then, draws Jali to assign a central place to Mabuza? For Jali, Mabuza is the quintessential outsider artist. Such persons develop a unique visual language, manifesting a vision, passion and commitment to express their own authenticity, bereft of any self-conscious conceptions of ‘art’. Such a path is often a lonely one and can have tragic consequences – Mabuza himself committed suicide in 1991, a year after he left the farm. It can be inferred that Jali uses Mabuza to affirm his conviction that art is about something deeper than materialism. That deeper purpose resonates for Jali who gave up what promised to be a lucrative career in law to become an artist at a time when Black artists were seldom featured in public collections and published surveys of South African art. It also resonates deeply in that he finds in Mabuza qualities that he first encountered with his maternal grandmother. She was fascinated by mirrors, glass and light5There is also a connection here with Helen Martins’ Owl House, which Jali cites as an influence. It can be noted that Jali’s interest in both Martins and Mabuza was shared by Athol Fugard, who produced plays based on both these figures., and created large cardboard aeroplanes that she hung from trees. Like Mabuza, her solitary, idiosyncratic ways were misunderstood and she was shunned for her difference. Both were considered insane, witches, or both6Jali’s grandmother was committed to an asylum at one point.. Hearing Jali thread links between Mabuza and his grandmother suggests that — through the methodology of researching Mabuza’s life and seeking meaning in his work — Jali has constructed a gateway through which he can engage reflectively with the memory of his maternal grandmother.
Thami Jali, Stone Garden V, 2023. Courtesy KZNSA. Photo by Paulo Menezes.
Jali’s landscapes — some arranged as triptychs and diptychs — provide much cause for reflection. However, it is arguably through a series of six abstract paintings that his interlocution of Mabuza’s aesthetic is most fully realized. Mabuza’s name features in four of the titles — Rhapsody for Nukain and three versions of Blues for Nukain. It is in these works that Jali hones in on stylistic elements associated with Mabuza’s bold aesthetic – dots, rectangles within rectangles and parallel bands of colour. Here too, one can’t ignore the circular format adopted for Jali’s Blues for Nukain series, which, coupled with the geometric patterning, recall isiZulu earplugs, although the motifs themselves are more explicitly those of Mabuza. Jali’s intent to utilize Mabuza’s lexicon of motifs to pursue questions of a South/ern African aesthetic recalls other attempts to develop a postcolonial aesthetic through the assimilation of both local and global sources7Uche Okeke’s formulation of “natural synthesis” is the most obvious example, but this is in fact an approach that has been undertaken by several artists across the formerly colonized world, including here in South Africa. I discuss several African examples in the second chapter of my thesis. See M. Pissarra, Locating Malangatana: Decolonisation, aesthetics and the roles of an artist in a changing society. PhD thesis, UCT, 2019.. And like the best of these artists, notably those that lean towards abstraction, his abstract paintings are more than formalist arrangements of colour and pattern — their eloquence pulsates with presence. There are paintings that look better as photographs and there are paintings that are not done justice by photographs. These belong emphatically to the latter.
Thami Jali, Blues for Nukain I, Acrylic on canvas, 2023. Courtesy KZNSA. Photo by Paulo Menezes.
While the abstract paintings present the strongest evidence of Jali’s assimilation of Mabuza’s aesthetic, they also transcend Mabuza’s visual lexicon through their allusions to music. The artist explains that music — particularly Jazz — is central to his studio practice. These paintings manifest Jali’s effort to imagine the music Mabuza would have listened to. Thus, we are called to imagine how these works sound as much as we are taken by how they look8Following an invitation from Jali, musician Sibusiso Makhathini created compositions in response to this series of abstract paintings for the exhibition opening. Unfortunately, his performance had to be cancelled due to logistical constraints.. This is a stimulating proposition, as it reminds us not only of early Western modernists who sought to bridge the visual and aural9Vassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Paul Klee (1879-1940) come to mind, as does Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–43). but also has some affinities with Nkiru Nzegwu’s theorization of an African (Nigerian) aesthetic through the idea of ‘multi-dimensionality’10Nkiru Nzegwu, Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art. Binghamton: Binghamton University International Society, 1999.. This resort to bridging sound, vision and movement can also be considered to complement decolonial theories of aesthesis as a multi-sensory alternative to the visual preoccupation of traditional Western aesthetics11See R. Vazquez and W. Mignolo, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial wounds/decolonial healings”. Online: Social Text, July 15, 2013. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/.
Jali’s recent work transcends its stated objective as a homage to Mabuza. We are challenged to look beyond the surface, to think about the very purpose of art — who makes it, why they do so, and how we consume it. We can connect Jali’s mediation of Mabuza to what other artists have done and are doing in forging new languages that consciously reflect their place in the world. We can follow Jali’s example and look for innovative ways in which to draw on our legacies to imagine and create new futures. We can find a way.
