Stevenson
07.12 - 08.02.2025
We assemble-disassemble-reassemble our lives – we curate them. It is curious that a curate, a figure of the church, has become a verb, a lifestyle, or as Sarah Thornton phrases it in Seven Days in The Artworld, ‘a religion for atheists’. Curation is as theological as it is secular, museological as it is domestic – It has become an integral dimension of our fabricated lives. ‘Self-fashioning’, as the American critic Stephen Greenblatt memorably defined it, is always ‘regulated by social and cultural “control mechanisms”’ – this long before social media became the plus ultra of fabulation. Invention is never innocent. Context is always critical.
In the case of Stevenson’s group show – ‘When Works Meet’ – context is key. Indeed, the works are pointedly gathered in cellular groupings, the better to sharpen our understanding of parity and influence. As another American thinker, Harold Bloom, noted, influence is a form of love ‘tempered by defense’. ‘The overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding’. Devotion is key. Influence need not lead to imitation. As Picasso might have said, the greatest love can be an act of theft. It is how we understand and experience context and influence that is critical. If the Stevenson show is a triumph, it is because of the smaller groupings within a greater constellation. Six artists congregate around the theme of marriage … two artists display markedly different uses of readymade materials … three sharply differ in their depiction of the human face. Then again, two enormous dreamlike depictions of flora and fauna on the slopes of Table Mountain – the greatest biodiversity on the planet – flank an inner-city landfill.
Max Ernst’s description of collage sharply sums up the challenges presented by the Stevenson show. ‘Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which does not suit them’. If Bloom emphasises ‘love’ then Ernst amplifies discordance. Both states are central to honing our understanding of art and its place in our conflicted and conflicting world. Discordance need not be irrational. Indeed, difference can be the saving ground for a new-found mutuality. This is the key viewpoint in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s seminal work, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.
‘Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead’. Vitality resides in the embrace of continuity and change. Knowledge is the product of this frisson. Appiah’s viewpoint is perhaps the abiding conceit that shapes ‘When Works Meet’, an exhibition spanning decades in Africa’s artistic expression. It is within this span – comprising South Africa’s ‘State of Emergency’ in the 1980s, the ‘Interregnum’ of the 1990s, pre-democracy, and the ongoing challenges that inform what remains a ‘Phantom Democracy’ – that the show pivots, while always reaching beyond national borders. However, if this span must be understood as schematic, it is because life is never quite as simple, and neither is art. That said, it does allow us to find some strange rub between Jane Alexander’s haunting sculptures and installations, say, and the innovative youthful quest for spirituality in the work by Frida Orubapo. These two artists are not consciously joined by the curators. That I seek to draw them together reveals the generative power of the show. Ernst is correct in reminding us that innovation emerges on a seemingly irreconcilable ‘plane’. Dissonance can lead to revelation.
This is also the heart of cosmopolitanism. ‘I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilisations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another’, says Appiah. This is why, at the start of my walkabout at the Stevenson Gallery, I announced that we must agree to disagree. Something far more significant is required to ensure reciprocity, and that is a healthy ability to acknowledge connections and differences – be it between peoples, or works of art. As Appiah resumes, ‘Cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge’. In today’s silo-stricken and monstrously divisive world, all the more do we require a taste and culture that inspires productive comparative challenges.
This is the core objective of Stevenson’s show. That it resists the typical curatorial mistake – the punting of an Idea or jockeying for an ideological position – is to its greater credit. As the promotional text reads – ‘This exhibition is about … essential and ongoing conversations – between galleries, artists and collectors, and between artworks themselves – and how the story of an artwork is shaped to a greater or lesser degree by its movement, and by other works within its gravitational field’. Here, Bloom’s understanding of the role of ‘influence’ returns, as does Appiah’s grasp of difference within a given collective. As for the generative ‘movements’ which have shaped African art? These, surely, must alert us to the vital importance of ‘hybridity’, the rub of the familiar and the strange that allows for novel shapeshifts in artmaking.
In stark contrast to the decolonial spirit – a reactionary movement exemplified by Caliban’s barb in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, ‘You taught me language and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse’ – the show promotes synergetic exploration. If the cellular clusters are important, this is because ‘When Works Meet’ is not conceived as a reactively resolved vision. Rather, after Appiah, the show can be summed up as follows – ‘Conversation doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people to get used to one another’. This view is pithily echoed by Publius Terentius Afer, better known as Terence, an African slave raised in Carthage before being taken to Rome in the late 2nd century AD – Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto, ‘I am human: nothing human is alien to me’.
Reviled by the fundamentalist, celebrated by the cosmopolitan, Salman Rushdie’s vision from the Satanic Verses is another rich font. For what Rushdie celebrates is ‘hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world’. This, precisely, articulates the Stevenson show. As its directors note, ‘pieces made at the same time come together to call us back to a particular moment in history – and then have encounters with works made decades later, threading that history into the present moment’.
It is the thrill that comes from these novel encounters, understanding intuitively and cerebrally the why-and-wherefore of a given meeting of artworks – on a plane unsuited to them, as Ernst might say – that is the source of the show’s instructive pleasure. A non-causal and untimely lesson in history, the show allows us to marvel at the youthful innocence of Frida Orupudo while at the same time absorbing the brooding menace of Jane Alexander. It allows us, like Icarus, to crash-land with Wim Botha or connect the mortal and wondrous through the works by Claudette Schreuders. Or, then again, to assess the innovative collagist Neo Matloga, who nullifies black essentialism. Or the connection between the abstract artists, Turiya Magadlela and Moshekwa Langa, both inspired by industrial products such as pantyhose and plastic sheeting. Magadlela’s retooling of eroticized satin hose is a tour de force that reaffirms the fact that African artists are masters in the reinvention of industrial and postindustrial surplus and waste.
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi refuses the banality and tyranny of black portraiture and reminds us of the great bounty of the black void. Pieter Hugo gifts us an implacably raw all-too-human truth. Deborah Poynton reaffirms the fact that painting – as matter and being – trumps what a work looks like. Portia Zvavahera’s raw gestures entrench the immense influence of German Expressionism on Southern African art. Then again, we find two very different odes to the Joburg Jacaranda by Guy Tillim and Robin Rhode – a tree deemed alien, which Mandela celebrated with equal verve as he did the indigenous Mimosa in his 1994 Inaugural Speech. The connections are endless. What matters is how each and every one of us reconnoiters through a labyrinth, and how, therein, we all make productive connections. For me, whether intuitively or consciously, ‘When Works Meet’ allows for one very beautiful reflection and outcome – How newness enters the world.