South African Art Now

THANDO MAMA

Cape Town-based Thando Mama is intrigued by the role of television in shaping popular opinion. When he read about Castro’s use of television to sell the idea of the revolution to the people of Cuba in 1959—when Castro said “The revolution will not be televised. The revolution is here”—Mama was inspired to create The Revolution Is . . . (2007), a three channel video. In this video the artist performs as the typical, fatigue-cap-wearing, bearded revolutionary of popular imagination. The series also includes a set of ten prints on paper, Revolution Now (2007). The work examined the way that television is used as a tool to promote the popular ideology of any given moment.

Filming himself using mini-DVD tape, the artist transferred his sequences to VHS tape, the technology of the seventies, to transfer the images. Rerecording degrades the images, making them rougher, less detailed—a distinctive look of earlier, analog times. The sampled soundtrack includes a piano introduction to a Nina Simone song, “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” a live recording from 1971, gun shots sounds, and the artist’s own breathing.

Mama’s use of 1970s references evokes a particular era. It was not until 1976 that the Nationalist government allowed the limited introduction of television service into South Africa. Before that there were only radio broadcasts. The government had wanted to control the flow of information, and so it was only in 1976 that television sets first became available in the shops, and the first television channel was broadcast for a few hours every evening.

Born in 1977, Mama remembers vividly the excitement he felt the first time a television set came into his family home in the small town of Butterworth in the Eastern Cape, when he was about four or five in the early 1980s. He still pictures clearly the Philips 1980/1 model with buttons on the set that had to be pressed to change the program. “It was not encouraged for the television to be on, but you kind of sneaked into that room,” he says.

His interest in art was aroused at school, where the theory of art was a subject in Std. V (seventh grade)—unusual in a black school. There Mama learned not only about European painters like Picasso but also about important South African artists like painters George Pemba and Gerard Sekoto and sculptor Sydney Kumalo, a background that stood him in good stead when he decided to study fine art at the Durban Tech. His longstanding fascination with television led to a particular interest in video art and a practice that is largely self-referential.

A number of his works, like the video Back to Me (2003), exhibited in the 2008 show Flow at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, examine his own position as an African man, “with a history of forced silence, of confinement to an impossible space,” as he says. In this work Mama is portrayed crouching naked in the embryonic space created by the glow of the a television screen in a dark room, recalling images of the hunter gazing into the flames of the fire that lights a small area of the night.

Gazing intently at the screen and its flickering images, the artist is in turn lit by its glow. In his search for an understanding of his position in the world, the messages he receives, in their distortion of “blackness” and “Africa” are all too often unrecognizable.