Art in South Africa: the Future Present - Book Review

African Arts, Summer, 2002 by Janet Goldner

Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal

David Philip Publishers, Clarement, South Africa, 1996. 159 pp., color photos, index. $34.95 softcover.

WOMEN AND ART IN SOUTH AFRICA Marion Arnold

St. Martin's Press, New York, first published by David Philips Publishers, Clarement, South Africa, 1996. 186 pp., 40 pp. of color photos, bibliography, index. $59.95 hardcover.

The two books under consideration, published in 1996, two years after the election of Nelson Mandela, celebrate the end of the cultural boycott which had isolated South Africa since the 1980s. The boycott had not prevented the growth of a thriving domestic art scene, and after it was lifted, South African artists quickly and forcefully became participants in the international discourse. The use of art as a weapon against apartheid gave it a place of importance and honor in the culture at large that is not seen in the United States. The following are the impressions of an American artist examining the minefield of the South African cultural and political legacy.

Williamson and Jamal's book is an exuberant celebration of this emergence from isolation. Serious, but fun to read and beautifully illustrated, it presents forty major contemporary South African artists in short individual sections composed of essays, interviews, and many color photographs of each artist's work. The format emphasizes individuals, but there are several instances of collaborations between artists. I appreciate the directness of the tone and the opportunity to hear from the artists themselves. The works presented in the book examine many current issues--changes in identity and social position, forgetting and remembering.

Many of the artists showed their work in at least one of several exhibitions held in 1995 and 1996 locally and internationally. Thus Art in South Africa: The Future Present serves as an alternative catalogue of South African participation in these events: the first Johannesburg Biennial, two exhibitions at Cape Town Castle (a former military fortress and local headquarters of the South African Defense Force), the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Havana Biennial, and Container '96 in Denmark.

The obvious predominance of white male artists in Art in South Africa led me to the following count: just over half are indeed white men, just over a quarter are white women, and just under a quarter are men of color; there are no women of color or Asians, male or female. This is surprising in a book steeped in the political and social questioning that followed apartheid.

The omission is perhaps understandable given the reality of the immediate post-apartheid South Africa; my own introduction to the country was in 1989, when I co-curated a show on mail art by women, most of them white, which included both Sue Williamson and Marion Arnold. The imbalance in Art in South Africa, however, might have been mitigated by extending the parameters to include artists who had participated in slightly less mainstream exhibitions.

Arnold's call, in Women and Art in South Africa, for the rediscovery of unrecognized or underrecognized women artists is one that I support wholeheartedly. Their omission in Art in South Africa seems justification enough for the publication of such a book. As a sculptor who has been involved in the women's art movement in the United States, I appreciate the hardships and difficulties faced by women artists: they often work alone without the support of an art community or much support at all, stealing time and space from social and family obligations and having little contact with prevailing art movements. I understand when Arnold writes about the back seat that white feminism took because of the urgency of apartheid. It is certainly time to pay attention to the concerns of women artists in South Africa.

Women and Art in South Africa is about women as artists and as subjects of art. There is a good description of European male artists and their depiction of black women, and a contrast between early white colonists and African peoples. Arnold is careful to examine the difficulties women faced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continue to face today throughout Africa.

She is at her best in her concise history of the European settlement of South Africa told through the images and anecdotes of early European explorers, travelers, and settlers--and the artists among them. Arnold provides art historical support for previously undiscussed paintings and information about the lives of the women and historical events in South Africa.

In her characterizations and analyses, however, she often overstates her case in an effort to convince the reader of the importance of the artists, their motivation, their difficulties. On page 37, she tells us what female and male viewers will think when they see a given work. How does she know? Her heavy-handed opinions don't give us the evidence, or trust us to reach our own conclusions based on that evidence; it is often difficult to distinguish between evidence and opinion. Arnold is often plodding, methodical, and too cautious, over-explaining very simple concepts. Mysteriously, she sometimes neglects others. On page 103, for example, she tells us that photo realism is not objective but constructed, but gives no explanation of what she means by "post-structuralist late twentieth century perspective."