Taking a taxi ride through Cape Town one day in 2000, multimedia artist Thembinkosi Goniwe found the driver kept looking at him familiarly, as if trying to place him. As they drove down the hill flanking the Baxter Theatre in the university suburb of Rondebosch, the driver exclaimed triumphantly, “I was right. It is you!” Facing the car was a billboard with a double photographic portrait—of Goniwe himself and his white colleague at the Michaelis School of Fine Art lecturer and artist Malcolm Payne. Each has a pink adhesive bandage on his cheek. Goniwe is looking directly into the camera. Payne’s gaze is averted.
The untitled billboard was Goniwe’s contribution to an art project initiated by Cape Town curator Zayd Minty, entitled Returning the Gaze. For centuries, as art historians have widely analyzed, black people in art have been portrayed almost exclusively as the focus of the white gaze, a notion that can be investigated by picking up almost any book on pre-1970s South African art. Internationally this oppressive treatment of black subjects by white artists has been exhaustively documented in the four volume series The Image of the Black in Western Art (Menil Foundation/Harvard University Press).
Inviting artists to consider this issue of the Gaze from a post-apartheid point of view, Minty chose to locate his artists’ works on billboards for maximum public impact. Goniwe’s use of the pink adhesive bandages on the two faces was not only to point up a society that is still so white-oriented that it is not possible to buy a brown-colored bandage, but much more significantly refers to the deep wounds left by racism. The message of his billboard was easily understood by a broad public—from curators to cab drivers—yet retained a clean and powerful aesthetic.
In 1997 Goniwe had taken part in a video piece made by Payne for an exhibition on Robben Island, the prison island where political prisoners like Nelson Mandela were once incarcerated. Also curated by Minty, the exhibition was entitled Thirty Minutes and was held in the prison visitors block.
Payne’s video, framed by the small window that divided a prisoner from his visitor, opens with a black screen. From behind the screen, an unseen hand starts to draw a face. Gradually the drawing action removes the black paint and reveals the face of a man trapped behind the glass, played by Goniwe.
Says Goniwe, who was born in Cape Town in 1971, “In postcolonial South Africa, tensions between black and white continue. Change will take time. My billboard piece was also the continuation of a dialogue I was having with Malcolm about politics and what would happen in the country. In his video work I am the subject—he is outside the frame,” says Goniwe. “In my piece I wanted him in it in terms of presence and visibility.”
Untitled 2000
Billboard as part of the Returning the Gaze Project, Cape Town
Dimensions variable
Photographer: Sue Williamson
© Sue Williamson