Chapter 07 - Old Influences, New Work: Fresh Interpretations of Cultural Traditions

PENNY SIOPIS Pinky Pinky figure (detail) 2003–04
Wire and beads
112 x 40 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© Penny Siopis

The intersection of the conceptual freedom of contemporary art and the laboriously acquired skills and codes of traditional craft has yielded richly layered works for a number of South African artists. At one time craft techniques were not considered appropriate for art school-trained artists, but this attitude began to change and become more inclusive in the eighties. This change in attitude was reflected in the exhibition Tributaries in 1985. Curated by Ricky Burnett, the show featured work by the country’s contemporary artists alongside artists who previously sold their work through galleries specializing in craft objects. Or perhaps the new cross-pollination of art and craft could be attributed in part to a worldwide loosening up of the boundaries of precisely what is considered to be art and what is not. American artist Mike Kelley’s installations, for instance, include yarn animals, fabricated with everyday knitting and crochet techniques.

For white South African artists, this broadening of the methods and materials used for their work meant drawing on traditional craft techniques. In doing so, these artists laid claim to a shared African heritage, an assertion of a white African identity and an acknowledgment of the black traditions behind the finely crafted objects that had surrounded them since birth. For in almost all white suburban homes in South Africa handmade basket ware can be found, woven rugs are on the floor, tables are adorned with beaded wire bowls, reed placemats, hand-carved wooden platters, and objets d’art, bought directly from the makers of the objects, from roadside vendors, or from craft shops.

In 2006 artist Penny Siopis commissioned a roadside artisan to fabricate a three-dimensional version of one of her paintings, following it up with further commissions.

Since the mid-1980s the country’s public art museums, like the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, have changed their attitudes toward showing traditional craftwork such as Ndebele, Xhosa, and Zulu beadwork. Once this work would have been classified as craft and relegated to the ethnographic departments of natural history museums. Now such exhibitions are given equal space with artwork made in any other medium.

More than a craft, Zulu beadwork in particular, using colored glass beads woven into necklaces, girdles, and other articles of adornment, carries a system of coded communication similar in principle to a written language, with the colors and geometric shapes conveying the expression of ideas and feelings, particularly between the sexes. Johannesburg artist Frances Goodman has taken the brilliance and sparkle of beadwork to fabricate her small shaped elliptical wall sculptures.

MICHAEL MacGARRY
L’Etranger 2008 Life-size fiberglass mannequin, industrial foam, wood, epoxy and enamel paint
190 x 56 x 40 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Art Extra Gallery, Johannesburg
© Michael MacGarry

Zimbabwean artist Dan Halter, working with phrases and slang from the vernacular of his home country, turned to Monkey Biz, a Cape Town beadworking cooperative that employs women who are HIV-positive to reproduce a classical oil painting of King Henry IV as a flat piece of beadwork. “Henry IV” is white Rhodesian slang for HIV/AIDS.

Like beadwork, Ndebele wall painting has been elevated to receive the serious attention of collectors and art museums alike. The queen of the field is undoubtedly Esther Mahlangu, who learned her skills as a girl from her mother and grandmother. Similarly, Samson Mudzunga received his artistic training from older members of his community, learning from them how to carve wood and make the drums that are a key factor in his arresting performances.

Sculptor Claudette Schreuders works in wood, using the “colon,” or colonial, figures of West Africa as a starting point, figures that blend traditional carving, bright enamel paints, and elements of European style. The idea of the African artist who makes art objects to satisfy European collectors looking for the “authentic” is one that artist Joachim Schönfeldt has satirized, turning the art/craft debate on its head by making as highly priced art works a parade of carved wooden animals, a favorite subject for craft workers all over the continent.

Young artist Michael MacGarry has also brought humor to the newly elevated position of craft in the postcolonial nation with figurative work that suggests tourist art.

Some artists work from a position of more serious scholarship. Walter Oltmann’s extraordinarily intricate wire sculptures followed an extensive study of the history in Africa of wire itself and the objects made from it. And sculptor Jeremy Wafer buys the clays with which he clads his large-scale minimalist wall sculptures from the suppliers of traditional medicines in urban markets.

With the new cross-cultural hybridity in South African art, authenticity that essential quality traditionally required by collectors, may have gone missing, but the new work is all the more interesting for its eclectic origins.