South African Art Now

Chapter 02 - Culture Turns Activist: The Spread of a New Resistance

GAVIN YOUNGE Resistance Register: Marlene Dumas 1975
Photographic screen print on cotton paper
84 x 118 cm
Photographer: Gavin Younge
© Gavin Younge

The 1980s were a decade of ferment in South Africa. Dissent had begun to stir in the mid-seventies. Those who had engaged in and responded to it, of course, conscientiously became determined to find a broad range of strategies to bring about social change. As protest became increasingly vocal and publicly demonstrative, the popular resistance organization the United Democratic Front was launched in 1983. The apartheid government responded by imposing ever more stringent measures to maintain its power, detaining activists and “removing from society” those it perceived as “troublemakers” at will, a good number of whom were simply never seen again.

The government imposed states of emergency and succeeded in partially censoring the media. From 1984, in the name of state security, the army was utilized to quell unrest in the black townships.

For artists, a 1982 symposium and accompanying exhibition entitled Culture and Resistance: Art Towards Social Development and held just outside the South African borders in Gaborone, Botswana, provided the leitmotif for this period. One of the clauses of the 1955 Freedom Charter, on which the present constitution of South Africa is based, was “The doors of learning and culture shall be opened!” It was at this conference that speakers and delegates began to consider the practical implications of this clause. As the information sheet for attendees read “The theme of this exhibition . . . reflects the constant battle among cultural workers to find a place for themselves in society that is not merely that of light entertainers but one of making an important contribution to the development of society.”

In the circles of those involved in the struggle against apartheid, “cultural worker” was the new nonelitist term for an artist. “Each one, teach one” was another catchphrase of the time, an important theme in a society in which white artists, through birth, class, and statutory rights, as well as through educational opportunities, were immeasurably privileged over their fellow black artists. Supported by fresh initiatives, new community art centers in black townships provided a space where young artists could cut their teeth. For example, Vuyile Voyiya and Sfiso Ka-Mkame were student and teacher at the Community Art Project in Cape Town and the Community Art Workshop in Durban, respectively.

By the mid-eighties a significant number of artists had become involved in grassroots activities alongside their own studio work—and by the end of the decade artists’ organizations like the Visual Arts Group in Cape Town and the Artists’ Alliance in Johannesburg had come into being. These both shared the mission of sharing skills, democratizing art, and organizing widely inclusive exhibitions. South African Mail: Messages from the Inside (1989) was one such project: an exhibition of handmade postcards by women, from professional artists to the wives of the political prisoners incarcerated on Robben Island. After showing in South Africa the show opened at SoHo 20 Gallery in New York under the curatorship of Janet Goldner in 1990.

Postcards, posters, pamphlets, graffiti—all forms of media, however humble, were seen as an important alternative form of information dissemination. My own series of portraits of women, distributed in postcard form, provided rare publicly circulated images of well-known activists like the banned Winnie Mandela, whose photo never appeared in South African newspapers at the time.

By the late 1980s workshops for silkscreening posters and T-shirts for trade union events, funerals, and struggle organizations, activities that often had to be carried on in secret at night, could be found in all urban centers.

In their own studios, artists responded in diverse ways. Perhaps the most iconic piece from this period, made while the artist was still a student, is Jane Alexander’s Butcher Boys (1985–86). Three life-size human figures with animal horns and grotesque faces were Alexander’s metaphor for the thugs of the apartheid society. Paul Stopforth’s haunting Interrogators (1979) were portraits of three of the security policemen accused of Steve Biko’s death. Vuyile Voyiya’s graphic linocuts Rhythm in 3/4 Time (1987) showed the fear of a person being questioned by the police, Kevin Brand’s 19 Boys Running (1988) are being fired upon, William Kentridge’s cupboard is stocked with heads, and Sfiso Ka-Mkame calls upon God to witness acts of atrocity. Working from the Netherlands, Marlene Dumas’s ambiguous painting Snow White with Broken Arm (1988) shows a naked woman laid out on a slab, observed by a row of faces, her broken arm still clutching a camera, and in Intensive Care (1986), Norman Catherine’s hospital patient is about to be cut into two by a circular saw blade advancing up his bed.

Gavin Younge’s baby furniture for the country’s infants included a shaped space for a gun in the feeding tray of a steel high chair, Gavin Jantjes made work around the issue of race classification, Penny Siopis’s History Painting series called into question the writing of history by the white colonial masters, and the societal tensions and the loss of culture caused by the imposition of apartheid are urgently portrayed in Mmakgabo Mapula Helen Sebid-i’s packed collage pieces in which people, animals, and spirits are fighting for space. Also using collage as a key element in his paintings, Sam Nhlengethwa portrayed mining conditions and a township funeral.

Media and themes may have differed, but the ethos created by this critical period in art history in South Africa, the idea of the artist as carrying an unshakable social responsibility, as being part of a larger community, and perhaps most important, of hitting hard and believing in the power of art to change attitudes, continues to affect the art production of this country to this day.