I ♥ Dada, Dubow & the Iziko National Gallery

'Out of Africa there is always something new' 
so said Pliny, the Roman historian and natural philosopher some 2000 years or more ago
 

 
The Chance Muse above in one of her Dada-ist incarnations in the late 70's

One has indeed to come to the end of the world, and for me at least to Africa, to find the most ancient, the most archaic things and also – surprisingly though it may seem – the most up-to-date, the most extraordinary things which were dreamt of forty or thirty years ago and are now becoming a reality on this soil of Africa…this new world, which is in a state of ferment…is clearly going to be the world of the future.
- Tristan Tzara, after visiting Zimbabwe and Mozambique, 1962

 Well, yes and no, on the above. My country of birth, Zim - me pictured above in one of our lost African gardens - has long gone into Kafkaesque melt-down, destroyed by a mad megalomaniac, as crazy as any emperor of the Theatre of the Absurd. Despite its beauty, Mozambique is still littered with landmines, corruption and poverty and South Africa - well - tonight Zuma gives the 'State of the Nation' address, so I'll keep my fears about crime, the economy, Aids et al for another blog...

We left in the late 70's - abandoned a narrow-minded, parochial, culturally deprived, white supremacist, anti-feminist, right-wing, rugby-playing society of corrupt politicians and self-censoring media - phew that's quite some list! - for the perceived glories of London town - we never believed that Apartheid would fall. Now we are back in good old SA for part of the year - and having a great time rediscovering both our past, our vanished youthful selves and looking at current cultural icons - not without a critical eye, of course, honed by our years in the cynical Uke

The Iziko South African National Gallery in the Gardens is the showcase for a large selection of South African contemporary art and we have seen some fine exhibitions over the last few years. The collection of contemporary work extends from the bad old days of the 60's and 70's to the uncertain volatile present. The acquisition policy considers "the redress of historical omissions as vital to the collection". Hmmm...


So, we have the marvellous Mary Sibande’s 2010 sculpture 'The Reign' depicting her famous creation - Sophie - a fabulously flamboyant young woman in trade-mark blue skirts - an extravagant fantasy version of the traditional SA maid's uniform - astride a rearing black stallion. Sibande created Sophie, based on her great-grandmother Sophie-Elsie, grandmother Sophie-Merica and mother Sophie-Velucia. Her work is a celebration of the women in her life who worked as domestic servants. Now we didn't see anything like this when we were students here in the 70's!

   
Or this provocative, deceptively decorative crocheted-lace portrait by Pierre Fouché; entitled 'The Kiss', from 2008 - a stab at homophobic attitudes and gender stereo-types - why shouldn't a boy make lace?

 
And here a still from the wonderful William Kentridge’s celebrated series of five 'Soho Eckstein' short animated films (1989-1996) which tackles the leaky morality of white SA, in the form of an Ubu Roi type figure - a powerful metaphor for an absurd abuse of power

One of my favourites - Penny Siopis - her 1989 oil on canvas, 
'Piling Wreckage Upon Wreckage' - speaks for itself - a comment on the imploding and surreal society from which we fled, where to have stayed would have buried us under a mountain of post-colonial cultural detritus - and a landslide of guilt

Jane Alexander’s terrifying sculpture Butcher Boys of 1986 speaks eloquently of the barbaric horrors of the Apartheid years as well as the more universal qualities of evil inherent in man's nature

And in more gentle mode, a wonderfully evocative portrait of a beautiful androgynous young man in pink, deals with the taboos of AIDS, homosexuality and questions gender stereotypes - for so long forbidden territory

A retrospective of Louis Maqhubela, called 'A Vigil of Departure', curated by former head of the museum, Marilyn Martin, brings the slum badlands of South Africa into the rarefied confines of the Gallery - and recalls the uneasy genre of ‘Township Art’ - a fine line between kitsch 'curio' art, Naive Art and European trends such as Expressionism 

A fantastic show entitled 'Dada South?' explored Dada legacies in South African art. It's nearly a century since Dada was 'invented' with its crazy manifesto demanding total freedom and the reinvention of art as a form of political tactics - all ideas that surface at troubled times, all notions basic to the conceptual and installation art we made at art school and as relevant today. Curated by Roger van Wyk and Kathryn Smith with Lerato Bereng,  it provoked considerable thought and seemed to sum up our time in SA and the reasons for our departure...

Works by European Dadaists:  Picabia, Duchamp, Ray, Tzara, were shown alongside local artists - Jane Alexander, Candice Breitz, William Kentridge, Kendell Geers and Robin Rhode etc. At first glance the exhibition seemed to be the usual pastiche of South African copyists. Hadn't we seen it all before a thousand times? At art school in the 70's, Michael Oblowitz's 'Blood Bath' - a bath filled with gallons of ox blood - a fitting if literal metaphor for the times and a profound neo-Dadaist statement said it all



In the late 50's and 60's, Dada attitudes began to filter into South African art, by the 70's exposure to international artists and trends took place within art schools such as Michaelis - attended by privileged white students - we were among this lucky group - taught by teachers such as Kevin Atkinson, Walter Battis and family friend, the brilliantly talented Neville Dubow

 Art’s relationship to revolutionary and totalitarian politics formed the core of Neville’s oeuvre and  his syllabus - here pictured above as we remember him in the '70's -  a consciousness that informed the psyche of every single student at art school and was partly responsible for our self-propelled exile to greener free-er lands. Thanks Nev for the journey!

The weight of the past, the fearful baggage of prejudice and repression, cantilevered dangerously over the void of the future - love the bright orange braces! - who could blame us for wanting to travel a little lighter and a lot freer?

Ja Nee - indecisive pig's head - a perfect image for a moribund society - where yes, of course, we called the police, 'pigs' and yes, we did get hit over the head with police batons at those iconic student protests of the late 70's.  As a movement founded by exiles and migrants - we could identify with that - Dada challenged notions of territoriality, nationality and prescribed identity. Its lack of allegiance to any style or ideology, as well as its anarchic political and aesthetic attitudes resonated with the spirit of the day and with much of SA resistance art. 
God! We were Dadaists and we just didn't know it!

Brett Murray's cut-out prowling steel beast,  reveals hunter and hunted casting an intricate intertwined shadow on the wall - a work conceived in the spirit of Dada, seeking to question the conventions, values and function of art in a dangerous, night of the long knives, law of the jungle, dog eat dog, society

Nowhere more eloquent, than in Wily Bester's colourful SA soldier automaton - note the dummy aka pacifier -  welded out of the detritus of the scrap metal yard of SA history - part of "an alternative history of resistance in a culture of isolation and repression, one that intersects with the canon of ‘resistance art’, but which deviates into forms that are less didactic, more eclectic and experimental."  
That's from the Dada South blog

In a land where everyone wears masks, Dada South? questioned the masks of conformity we all wear and also the role of the art institution. "How can we talk about anarchy and the radical when we are bound by conventions of display and the inevitable fetishisation of the art object that the art museum supports?"
The Dada South? blog 

Like so many, after him, artist Christo Coetzee left South Africa in the 50's to study abroad. 
His experimentation with assemblage began as early as 1956 in London and so began a 
trend to be followed by thousands of young South African writers, artists and theatre people. 
Part of the Neo-Dadaists of the time, he was included in The Art of Assemblage (1961) 
at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, alongside Duchamp and Schwitters

 
The 1980's in South Africa were characterised by despair, terror and anger. 
‘Security’ forces attempted to squash increasingly aggressive political resistance. 
We chose exile, albeit a privileged one and we were able to return at least once a year - 
for others it was a matter of life or death, a one way ticket. The fine balance that artists had 
to strike between freedom of expression and self-censorship became ever more treacherous. 
In the words of experimental Afrikaans band 'Koos', South Africa was 
“een honderd en een persent bang” - 101% scared


At about this time, Walter Battiss and Norman Catherine set up Fook Island.  
Needing to disguise their political opposition, the imaginary Fook Island represented 
a poetic refuge for creative and personal freedom. Battiss invented Fook from a name 
he found in the phone book. From these Dada-like beginnings he developed Fook passports, 
recipes, money, stamps, linguistics and poetry!

An artist like Candice Breitz continues the Dadaist narrative - by deleting words 
the way a censor would. The gaps she creates open up the possibility of another narrative 
‘hidden’ within the main story, emerging as a provocative story made up of text fragments


In the same way, her more recent video installations as viewed above, have multiple 
narrative points of view which create a super narrative made up of many parts - 
see Subotsky's Ponte City below....
 

In a society where every aspect of the personal was politicised – where everything 
that mattered was censored or forbidden, where watching 'The Exorcist' in a secret location 
was a political act - where growing your hair or smoking dagga was a crime, sleeping with 
a Black man could put you in jail, where sexuality, fashion, belief systems and relationships 
were all under state scrutiny - any art, music and theatre that mattered was of necessity
subversive and by its nature - Dadaist


Acclaimed Afrikaans actor, Marcel van Heerden, part of our extended post-UCT 
student circle, pictured above in his very groovy 'Koos' period - explains the background 
to the formation of his 'noise-protest' group of the same name: "We wanted poets to be heard
and that’s why we made a hell of a noise. We didn’t want to rock. We wanted to commit murder, 
be unconscious. Preferably naked. To ignite the world with words. It was urgent. It was more important than anything else. We never talked politics. The political situation was obvious…
We didn’t want to reason with them; we wanted to dance a twisted line."

Apartheid’s toxic legacies continued to be processed through various creative strategies. 
In the early 90s, Kendell Geers introduced ‘aesthetic terrorist’ tactics,  responding to local 
conditions with an apocalyptic global perspective. Here his fantastic 'Ceci n'est pas un Pipe' 
is a subversive tribute to the arch surrealist super-Daddy Dadaist - Magritte. 
It's definitely not a pipe as we know it....

Belinda Blignaut's beautiful visceral work continues on the themes of reappraisals of 
race and gender as in this fab work of exploding bubble gum creatures splatted on glass. 
A kind of ephemeral surreal aquarium of crazy sea-creatures or mutant blooms with herself 
as both art work and artist - and those Lady Macbeth hands...

The impossibly named Araminta De Clermont photographed a series of portraits of young Coloured and Black girls dressed up for their matric dances, shot on the Cape Flats, a vast area outlying Cape Town, which became apartheid’s dumping ground after the Group Areas Act threw people out of their homes. Her portraits are made more moving by the fact that they mimic glamorous images of fashion and movie celebrities despite the poverty of the settings

'

De Clermont's flashlit Cinderella pix hint at a world of fantasy escapism, a chance to live out individual dreams for just one night, through costume, hair and make-up - just like the movie stars - - before the hired limo became a pampoen (pumpkin) again and the specially made dress pawned back to the dress-maker. A moment to shine in a world where not much is certain, except death and unemployment

In the slums and squatter camps of the Flats, up to 8000 new and desperate people arrive every month - many families deny their children nothing for their matric outfits outfit; going hungry if necessary, costs budgeted into household expenses up to a year in advance.  The final results speaks volumes about the hopes, dreams, aspirations and influences of young South Africans today. Everyone wants to be a celebrity even if it is only for one magical night!

Where the reality - such as this one appearing in an installation at the Gallery - is more likely to be a tiny labourer's room with no space to swing a cat - let alone a child - where bucket and bath and bicycle are suspended from the wall like objects in an exhibition

Yes, Africa is still a wild untamed surreal place - above a pic from 'Africa Borders' an exhibition from the 'Bamako Encounters 8th African Photographic Biennale', provided a unique opportunity to see contemporary photography from Africa and its diaspora - and it's not all black and white....

Not all smart safari shots in glossy travel mags and endless dismal news stills of the starving and downcast in the latest natural or man-made disaster. African Photography is also as surprising as this cross-dressing young Masai with his fantastic red killer heels - localised, critical, unusual and insightful. For a continent-wide snapshot beyond the clichés and post-colonial portraits, 
let Borders click your shutter…


Curated by Michket Krifa and Laura Serani, this panorama of contemporary photographic creativity revolved around the theme of ‘borders’ - places we may never go, borders of race, geography, history and prejudice -  and included more than 230 works bringing together the work of 40 photographers and 13 video artists from across Africa.
Maybe Tristan Tzara wasn't wrong after all?

Even if many of the images are truly surreal like this deserted beach with CCTV camera. 
"Borders’, for us, was a nice theme because it uses the metaphoric, practical and geographic meaning. It’s a way to check the stereotypes, and to go beyond that. It’s extremely open to interpretation. It can be the border problem of immigration, or the border between rich and poor, or secular or religious. Sometimes it’s the borders between photography and painting, photography and fashion. " so wrote co-curator, Michket Krifa

South Africa's own Mikhael Subotzky, who graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art and has shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as the SA National Gallery where his 'Ponte City' installation was shown. A long term project in collaboration with Patrick Waterhouse, 'Ponte City' focuses on a single building in Johannesburg - a vast block of apartments, the subject matter for this fragmented multiple-view point photo installation of the iconic fifty-four-storey building which dominates Joey’s skyline

Built in that uber-symbolic year of 1976 – the year of the Soweto uprisings and the year of our own departure for Britain - originally home to middle-class couples, students and Jewish grandmothers. As the city changed the bourgeosie picked up and left for safer terrain - the Northern suburbs, Sydney and San Diego - and the area became associated with crime, urban decay and the influx of Black refugees and migrants from neighbouring African countries. In 2007 the building was bought by developers who went spectacularly bankrupt after emptying half the building and stripping the apartments leaving a shell in which refugees continued, unbelievably, to live. It was here in this surreal tower block,  that Subotsky created his amazing multi-faceted work

And finally!  An Afro optimistic project! - How surreal! How Dadaist!
 'Imagining Beauty and Body Adornment' by young SA Designers, many of them Black -
curated by Carol Kaufmann where textiles and items of adornment from Iziko’s permanent collections were put on show with Award winning designers with improbable names such as 'Black Coffee', 'Craig Native', 'Darkie' and others who have taken inspiration from the continent’s rich heritage to create global fashion with a distinctive African signature. 
Who would have thunked it back in 1976?

Young White Girl about the age the Chance Muse was when she left, ponders her future....

The Chance Muse thinks Dada is a good idea and how strange life is now that she is back - 
albeit temporarily - in CT!