Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa: History after Apartheid

African Studies Review, Dec 2004 by Chandler, Robin M

LITERATURE AND ARTS Annie E. Coombes. Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa: History after Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 384 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95. Paper.

Dominion has been a timeless theme of art, and monumental public art the most dramatic articulation of politicized nationalism. Monuments to war heroes, victors in conquest, totalitarian despots, or distinguished statesmen all typically pay visual homage to the idea of power, specifically male sovereignty. In South Africa there have always been two orders, the seen and the unseen, the ravaged and the reconstructed, mortality and immortality, death and rebirth, violence and beauty. These are "warring ideals," such that in public culture the victor and the vanquished seem irreconcilable, always contradictory. The museum world and the domain of visual and performance culture were, for decades, among the few sites where visions of resistance and social transformation could be presented in a society hemmed in by censorship.

In Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa: History after Apartheid, Annie Coombes attempts to fence off a space in which recessed lighting figuratively illuminates the museological, the chronological, the diabolical. In writing about the complex political affiliations of the South African art world, however, she resurrects a somewhat dated ethnographic enterprise that reflects the intellectual cadence of a neocolonial art world. The sheer weight of the white authoritarian colonial mind over-powers text and subtext, and it is difficult to accept the author's analyses of models of historical knowledge when her vision has been shaped by European systems of thought. How does contemporary South Africa relinquish the "post-apartheid" nomenclature as a driving theme of public debate, art production, and art critique? Part of the dilemma in writing about South Africa's art world is that it is, compared to that of many other societies, a relatively small world. Apartheid put South Africa on the map. Thus Coombes's relentless focus on memory culture and the politicization of art demonstrates the challenges of trying to fashion any narrative of national identity outside of the realm of the political. The tensions concerning the museumification of Robben Island and District Six (chapters 2 and 3), for example, directly engage the question of exclusion-the exclusion of constituencies victimized by apartheid. Part of the problem in the South African art world has been the absence of alternative nonwhite institutions.

In other societies with histories of genocide and enslavement (read: the U.S.) in which those alternative art worlds thrive, however precariously, the articulation of power, politics, and art gradually develops its human capital; professional communities of color compete, if not always equally, to define their own realities. A community-based arts movement, built and sustained by committed cross-racial alliances in the 1960s-1990s, has provided an anti-museum site of counterhegemony which this book would have done well to document.

Globally, museums have served as public temples, a counterpoint to religious sites. Coombes explores the new codes of behavior stipulated by the "new" South Africa in chapter 6 by recounting the effects of contemporary events such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and how memorial and historical contemplation affects the new art emerging from a nation in the throes of reinvention. Race and the state will always inscribe the South African museum from Jo'burg to Cape Town-that generic architectural site which seeks to contain the monumentalism of national identity at the very moment when freedom from constraint is at hand. There is a borderland of anomie described here, a picture of an art world pondering an empty field of vision, then immediately overflowing with the passions of a dispossessed nation haunted by its ghosts. The questions since the democratic election of 1994 are: What do we paint? How do we design new structures of visual and performance culture that focus on the future and not the past, that empower a new generation of people of color in real power-sharing? Yet hope springs eternal. Perhaps the current U.S. touring exhibition, "A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa" (2004-2005), featuring a new generation of South African artists, will uncover a new aesthetic.

The prurient spectacle of "new" art closing Coombes's text-whether the "Hottentot-Baartman" referent or the township photograph-reveals more about the direction in which a white generation of senior Wits faculty have commandeered the impulses of its art students, particularly students of color, whose numbers in 1996 exceed previous matriculants. The fiduciary relation thus contrived has limited the blossoming of an indigenous installation movement which is mimetic by global standards but eminently useful in the South African context when demon-wrestling is called for. Coombes misses this hotpoint of internal national political dialogue, the realpolitik of activist engagement about race. Even Rose's "Scan I" and "Scan II," while praised at the time of its creation in 1997 by white audiences for its courageous self-exploitation, was severely criticized by elder black artists as playing into the hands of the collective white imagination about "otherness" and exploitating the black body. Rose is ancestrally San, was a neophyte at the time, and was plummeted into the international Biennale world, but is also quintessentially gifted in the new media. But we do not hear the voices of those senior artists, cultural workers, and community-based organizers in this text, only another generation of younger artists who are controlled by an old guard in the gallery, museum, and academic industries of South Africa.