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Text published
in Zones of silence, edited by the
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, 2001 .
"About 8 months ago, I was driving on the M4 north bound
towards Umhlanga. […] Somewhere near Kings Park swimming
pool I encountered something that inadvertently became the inspiration
for this first project. Walking along the low concrete barrier
that divides the 2 freeways was this tall black woman - clearly
inebriated - weaving her way deliberately like a tightrope walker.
She was barefoot and dressed in black plastic. This plastic was
contrived as a wedding dress, with long train trailing behind
her. In her hands she clasped a posy of white plastic flowers.
[…] Later that evening on my way back into the city centre,
I saw her again, this time emerging out of the bushes near Virginia
airport some 7 or 8 kilometres from where I had originally seen
her. Wedding dress now a little tattered, posy now replaced by
a neat bundle of dry wooden branches balanced perfectly on her
head, moving back into the city. There is a plethora of what I
call urban shamans, attaching bits of detritus to themselves […]
They are possibly examples of the hybrids that emerge from the
interface of rural with the urban. I became absorbed by these
sorts of collisions or fusions."
Greg steack, October 27, 2000.
The first South African initiative of the RAIN network took place
in Durban, South Africa in October 2000. Although one of South Africa’s
three major cities (Johannesburg and Cape Town complete the triad),
Durban is often excluded from the loop of major local art world
activity. The significance of this event not only raises the profile
of this heady and complex city, but also created a rare intimacy
between local artists and our international contemporaries.
Pulse: Open Circuit exposed and coaxed the cultural growing pains
of a country having to mature in the public eye. Not unlike a child
actor thrust into celebrity limelight from birth, identity crises
abound, and the double bind of integrity versus the need-to-please
informs the locations and biases of South African contemporary visual
art on every level.
In speaking about localised differences in South Africa, there’s
a neat saying that goes: "Cape Town’s on rewind, Durban’s
on play and Johannesburg’s on fast-forward". While generally
taken to refer to lifestyle idiosyncrasies in each of South Africa’s
major cities, on closer inspection the triteness reveals many of
the subtexts of each zone’s cultural and political affiliations,
where although detail has changed, the fundamentals have remained
pretty much the same both pre-and post Apartheid.
Durban is often touted as a point of reflection
and respect when it comes to debates around cultural ‘hybridity’.
Where Johannesburg’s grab mentality, harking back to gold rush
days, is rapidly replacing serious culture with a laager(1)
of European-themed casino-mall developments enveloping its periphery,
Durban’s quiet efficiency has seen its dedicated artistic community
single-handedly save the Durban Art Gallery’s fated acquisitions
budget through a series of ‘art party’ events.
South African contemporary visual artists are exquisitely aware
of our potential to become curiosities. It is something that we
guard ourselves against, or strategically embrace for better or
for worse. In less than sensitive hands, forays into identity and
place (along with history and memory) can so easily become oversubscribed
and tired. As unappealing a word as it is, Pulse: Open Circuit was
a true reflection of the potential of the ‘glocal’.
The climate leading up to and from the first democratic election
in 1994 saw an unprecedented interest in ‘art from South Africa’,
almost as if the visual culture produced in South Africa would offer
some sublime understanding of the schizophrenic state of the nation(s).
As a result, any number of group exhibitions have been hosted by
Euro-American institutions, many of which received critical acclaim
in their host country, but were panned ‘back home’ as
simplistic, retrograde or fundamentally misinformed(2).
While not exclusively symptomatic of the South African status quo,
financial and other more abstract factors translate into a lack
of ‘imported’ exhibitions to South Africa. Events predicated
on ‘cultural dialogue and exchange’ often end up as desperately
one-sided, frustrating and limited in terms of productivity. As
such, young local artists without the means to travel abroad often
feel as if they are producing in a vacuum. The details of the whys
and wherefores are predictable and boring, resulting in circuitous
debates around postcolonial politics that more often than not end
up parodying the seminal issues at hand (and by extension, making
caricatures of the critics themselves).
Two tumultuous Biennales later and no promise of a third, we aren’t
any closer to understanding ourselves, apparently still doomed to
being constructed rather than constructive. Groundbreaking as they
were, neither Biennale appears to have wrought any real change on
the cultural topography of this country(3).
Pulse: Open Circuit took up this challenge, with its telescopic
crosshairs strategically focused on bringing local differences into
view through interaction with international contemporaries. Intersections
between First World (hi-tech) and Third World (lo-tech), their mutant
art/craft spawn, and the increasing ‘absent presence’
of technology in the information age were all on the agenda.
Lo-tech needs and hi-tech wants
Artists from ‘Africa’ are time and again confronted with
strange preconceptions from international ‘centres’ that
are not so much about whether the possibilities of working in hi-tech
media exist this far south as much as they are about what we are
expected to produce. This is generally two-pronged. In the first
case scenario, any technologically-dependent work is celebrated
regardless (any video is a good video). In the worst case scenario,
it sometimes seems that international audiences often want a kind
of production that corroborates with some sort of anachronistic
‘primitive exotica’, an attitude that is often informed
by an ignorance of cultural nuance between one African country and
another.
As Olu Oguibe has pointed out, for a country where the gap between
the haves and the have nots is still so large, the cyberspeak acronym
PONA (People of No Account, i.e. those not ‘connected’)
accounts for the majority of the population. In the politics of
inclusion/exclusion, it takes on a more sinister inflection. The
rhetoric of posthumanism will celebrate the perceived ability to
transcend the biological body, but we have not yet solved the problems
of hunger, thirst and disease, let alone electricity, basic telecommunication
and literacy.
For many, the promises and possibilities of cyberspace simply do
not exist. And, as Oguibe is at pains to point out, the pseudo-democracy
of the global village, monopolised as it is by a few multinational
corporations, erects new boundaries where others have been destroyed.
I love the web. I celebrate it for facilitating easier and cheaper
publication opportunities, revel in its hype about democratising
access to art and design, and take advantage of transcontinental
discussion forums and information trading. But because all this
has added impetus to the notion that creativity is increasingly
inseparable from "commoditisation", we do need to keep
a close check on just how we laud digital culture, to what ends,
and how it is used to market culture and heritage across its specific
spatio-temporal convergence.
From where I sit, first and third world debates aside, the true
potential of digital technologies lies in the shared communities
of highly specific interest groups that while creating some sort
of converged economy (I hesitate to use the definitive term ‘global’),
intensify their own niche zones. But what interests me above all
are the assumptions some make as to the apparent ‘cleanness’
of the digital medium, and the spaces where its perceived seamlessness
is ruptured by the organic and biological.
In her curatorial essay for Transversions, Yu Yeon Kim adopts computer
virus rhetoric to describe the trade in international mega-exhibitions
as "a system of mutually ensured infection", and asks
the question: "How are we translated, modified and re-embodied
in these crossings?" [1997: 348].
Production and existence, for those with access, now occurs at the
interstices of informational systems. But what of an understanding
of lo-tech that is crucial to position oneself in the world of hi-tech
that moves so fast between 'new' and 'old' that it almost disallows
a transitional state? Lo-tech as media may be sentimentalized or
nostalgic, but what of seeking out the instances that we describe
as lo-tech (and in so doing, as 'other' to the digital) in order
to better focus the critique of hi-tech? It allows us to ask questions
of necessity, seduction, desire and self-reflexivity.
Mutant grafts – or flawless copies?
If we exist in the spaces that Yu Yeon Kim envisages - treading
water in globalised and digital seas without cultural anchors to
hold us in place - we run the risk of sacrificing heritage for The
Empire of the Sign. In the information age, we’ve inherited
postmodern culture’s status as being defined by simulacra,
signifiers out of context that by their very nature take on meanings
divorced from their original source. If this is the case, does the
global marketing of ‘culture’, she trenchantly asks, "effect
a dilution of the original culture, or is it just a feature of its
evolution?" [1997: 347]
In the book Grey Areas that collected commentary on the heated representational
politics debate in South African visual art, artist Marlene Dumas
commented: "After discovering the body (as if it were ever
gone), the art world immediately started to search for its ID card!"
[1999:129]
As digital technologies increasingly (invisibly) change the way
we perceive ourselves and others, so more boundaries between the
acceptable and the unacceptable present themselves to be policed,
albeit in a strangely paradoxical democratised space.
The week-long experience in Durban, which included a walking tour
through the CBD that covered the cultural gamut from traditional
African markets to mosques, Catholic Churches and bunny chows at
the famous Patel’s eaterie, got me thinking once again of the
notion of cultural ‘grafting’ as proposed by Colin Richards.
Possessing both surgical and botanical applications, grafting inescapably
involves contact and exchange across 'difference', but presupposes
an incision before contact is made. It extends and opposes cliched,
organic metaphors of ‘cultural hybridity’ or ‘cross-pollination’
to highlight ever-present but unspoken tensions between nature and
culture. A ‘graft’ is not simply a boundary or an edge,
but a traumatic cut that may or may not be regenerative or reparative.
As such, it is about aesthetic contamination, "the sometimes
violent aesthetic of the imperfect fit, the parasitic in the symbiotic"
[1997: 235]. It is most successful even in its failure, reminding
us "how things can be made to turn out differently".
According to Richards, grafting requires cultivation and time, the
'work' of culture. Which leads me to the question again: in the
cultural context of South Africa, is the digital edge seamless or
scarred? Are works produced by digital means a new kind of ''entangled
object' as described by Nicholas Thomas(4)?
I would agree with Richards that the space between the cut edges
is symbolically dense, as space and spatiality have come to dominate
our understanding of visual culture as well as our interaction across
geographical borders.
By way of a conclusion
The subtext and significance of such a venture like RAIN comes down
to access, pure and simple. Money and international networks provide
the valuable means by which we can begin to tackle these issues
discussed in ways that are productive and even controversial . It
is deplorable that we should need to rely on help from our international
friends to carry out the work of local culture, but if they are
prepared to take up the gauntlet and enter into such a project,
it becomes contractual with mutual responsibilities. The provider
cannot assume the role of ‘parent’ as this risks regurgitating
colonial legacies. The same can be said for ‘reaching out’,
the flipside of which is maintaining our own Oliver Twist begging-bowl
mentality. Nor can the funding agency renege with the excuse "but
it’s not about the money". Because it so clearly is, which
then makes it possible to extend the field of production, and in
so doing, a clearer idea of our position within this field.
Les mots du jour are ‘contained’ and ‘sustainable’.
As the countries in which these events take place have their own
particular conditions of production, each future event must be consciously
considered such that it does not simply perpetuate old guard attitudes
and formulas in its construction as an ‘exhibition’ in
the traditional sense. Participants too, in their complicity, need
to enter the contract self-consciously. These things need saying,
because to dance around the fundamentals is not unlike creative
lobotomy.
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Kathryn Smith (1975) is an independent critic,
curator and artist, born in Durban and based in Johannesburg, South
Africa. She relocated in 1994 to study Fine Arts at the University
of the Witwatersrand and graduated with an MA(FA) degree in 1999.
She is a partner in The Trinity Session, an independent arts consultancy.
Smith is Gauteng editor for www.artthrob.co.za and writes regularly
for the Mail&Guardian and various local and international magazines
and journais.
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