In one of his interviews with author Denis Hirson, collected in his book Footnotes for the Panther, artist William Kentridge talks about his early resistance to “the white Nationalist ideology of African-ness”. He explains how it cast black South Africans as essentially rural, “only temporarily in the city”.
“So traditional woodcarving, beadwork and other kinds of craft were seen as the appropriate art forms for Africans.”
As a result, “during my whole childhood and adolescence and student years, there was a political refusal to take on traditional art”. For him and many like him, traditional art had been turned into an “apartheid ghetto” of sorts. Resisting apartheid meant resisting this idea of African-ness in favour of something modern, urban and multifaceted: a culture that could combine jazz, Beethoven, Shakespeare and “oil painting like Sekoto”.
Looking back, many years after the demise of apartheid, he’d come to see this view as blinkered. “Rejecting the use of traditional art also meant that we didn’t look at what was actually there, the extraordinary craft and carving and other kinds of image-making that did exist in rural areas,” he reflected.
In many ways, this blind spot persists among SA art collectors today. And it is precisely what Gina Mollé and Grace O’Malley have tried to address in their curation of the online exhibition Ancestors and Dreams, now on at Everard Read.
Though the exhibition is billed as “online”, a selection of works is on display at Circa Gallery in Rosebank, but because of the state of affairs described above, it’s only half the exhibition. The other half is in the US.
To explain: Everard Read has teamed up with New York gallery Jacaranda, which specialises in traditional African art, for this exhibition. Together they have paired some fine examples of traditional art from Jacaranda with contemporary artworks from Everard Read’s stable.
The idea is to tease out some of the ways in which contemporary artists are influenced by traditional art, or deal with its influence on their work. The reason that it has to be online, Mollé says, is that the best galleries dealing in traditional African art are overseas. That’s where the market is.
She and O’Malley see the exhibition as an intervention of sorts, leveraging the growing worldwide appreciation of contemporary art from Africa to reconnect the local art community to traditional art. A corrective to the blind spot Kentridge was referring to is well overdue.
O’Malley says traditional culture was “weaponised” by the apartheid government (as it has been by fascist governments everywhere), but we seem to have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. From our present vantage point, our attitudes and understanding of traditional art can be disentangled from those old biases. What better way to reframe it than to explore the powerful influence traditional art has on contemporary artists?
Mollé and O’Malley haven’t followed one single mode of comparison. Sometimes they have paired works because they have aesthetic resemblances, or they might be coupled according to subject matter, medium or even something more philosophical, such as an approach to spirituality, ancestors, heritage or even art itself. They don’t appear to be prescribing or endorsing any particular kind of relationship or influence. The artists they’ve chosen vary greatly in their attitudes and approaches to tradition. What is undeniable is the extent to which they are all grappling with it.
An artist like Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi, for example, is overt in her desire to preserve elements of precolonial cultural heritage in her work, returning to traditional knowledge systems, ways of life and values. Her critique of modernity is clear, and her representation of it as representing a fallen state is unequivocal in a work on this exhibition, Manhood. In her hands, a longing for tradition expresses something more like an artistic attempt to decolonialise the mind than a capitulation with a weaponised version of her own culture.
A younger artist, Lady Skollie, offers a different approach to lost cultural heritage. The exhibition pairs an ostrich egg with ⁄Xam engravings with one of her instantly recognisable wax-crayon drawings on paper, Look Daddy! I’m a Snoek! The work depicts mermaid-like figures based on a Khoi-San rock painting inside a floating “cosmic” egg. Its title links it to a viral video from 2021, as the catalogue explains, in which a “little [coloured] girl looks at herself though a mermaid filter on a cellphone, but instead of recognising herself as a mermaid, she identifies herself as a snoek”.
Lady’s Skollie’s (and the girl’s) “coloured” identity has roots in Khoi-San culture, but the work doesn’t draw any simplistic lines of influence between heritage and contemporary culture, and doesn’t really entertain the possibility of return to some sort of precolonial condition. Rather, the work involves a multilayered commentary that complicates the lines of influence as much as it claims them.
While the rock paintings in Look Daddy! are drawn from ⁄Xam culture, the egg sees that heritage via the “economic history of ostrich farming in Southern Africa, in the late 19th century” through which many coloured farmers benefited. Similarly, the little girl’s reference to snoek refers to the coloured involvement in the fishing industry in Cape Town. The little girl’s “mistake”, however, is a humorous subversion of the global cultural dominance of American images, made ubiquitous through contemporary communication technology.
It’s a humorous and poignant, but defiant, celebration of the way in which an innocent misreading can be seen as an act of resistance, reading global hegemonic culture against itself. Lady Skollie’s approach acknowledges the gaps and disconnections with traditional culture brought about through colonialism and apartheid, but still claims some sort of connection with the past — perhaps spiritual, perhaps genetic, but undeniably worth asserting.
The idea is to tease out some of the ways in which contemporary artists are influenced by traditional art
Blessing Ngobeni is another highly successful contemporary artist whose work engages with traditional art and cultural practice in a layered, complex way. The work on show, Bleeding Tribal Influence, deals directly with the problematics of cultural heritage that Kentridge alluded to: the difficulties of understanding that one’s cultural heritage and identity have been manipulated and turned against one for colonial, apartheid and more recent political ends. He collages magazine and newspaper cuttings and snippets — the ephemeral stuff of current affairs — into the larger context of his canvases. He also burns imphepho, a traditional medicinal herb said, as the catalogue has it, to “invite communication from the ancestors”, while he works, and often mixes the burnt ashes into his paint and layers it along with the disposable stuff of pop culture into the surface of his compositions.
Often, traditional art objects were made not for aesthetic contemplation, but very much as magical objects that enabled communion with the spirits of ancestors during various religious and cultural ceremonies. In many ways, this kind of artwork by Ngobeni fulfils a similar function to the traditional Mende helmet mask from Sierra Leone it has been paired with, used in initiation into adulthood. Bleeding Tribal Influence conveys the kind of difficult and complex self-awareness that is necessary to enter adulthood, but in a postcolonial mode. It is thus simultaneously contemporary and urban in its conception and execution, and deeply traditional in what it is intended to say and do.
There are so many variations in the exhibition. Teresa Firmino’s works also depict the kind of dreamscape one might enter to commune with ancestors in sleep or a trance, but addresses contemporary postcolonial questions of identity, displacement and trauma in this transcendental space.
Rather than psychic landscapes, Nandipha Mntambo’s works engage with elements of the embodiment of lost and secret histories in the present. In her Agoodjie statue, for example, she depicts herself physically (and imaginatively) entering the realms where history and legend intersect, and considers what it means to take on their history physically.
Some works can be read against tradition, such as Lucinda Mudge’s ceramic vessels that deliberately defy functionality and reposition this traditionally feminine art form as art worthy of being handed down through the generations rather than valued for what they contain: beer or food.
Perhaps what the selection of works illustrates is how rich and varied the influence of traditional art is on contemporary work. It also brings home the point that it is well-nigh impossible to fully understand and appreciate contemporary African art (and culture more broadly) without engaging with traditional art.
This is not the end of it. Mollé and O’Malley see this exhibition as an attempt to catalyse something, a little like the restitution of artworks from Africa, such as the Benin bronzes, that is taking place among larger institutions and countries, but in the private quarters of the art ecosystem.
Maybe, if this approach works, and local collectors develop an appetite for traditional art through the popularity of contemporary art, some of this heritage might be brought home in private collections: a kind of popular, commercial repatriation that might be an important cultural accompaniment to the institutional repatriations.
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