PENNY SIOPIS Patience on a Monument— “A History Painting” (detail) 1988
Oil paint and collage
200 x 180 cm
Collection: William Humphries Art Gallery, Kimberley, South Africa
Photographer: Kathleen Grundlingh
© Penny Siopis
This book is something that was waiting to be conceived—more than an art history, a venture into existential aesthetics, a revelation of values beneath and above the daily IT battering that is to be sought only in the arts. Sue Williamson’s work is all these.
Her texts following visual art carried along the dramatic trajectory of life-determining political changes in South Africa do not prescribe what the viewer-reader must think and accept but set in concept the roused right and necessity to interpret for oneself the essential—unavoidable—relation between the creative imagination, time, and place. From her own objective knowledge of the force of visual art in the development of the human intellect and her keen subjective insight as herself an artist, she writes vividly, and the accompanying reproduced examples of artists’ works arise out of rather than illustrate her discussion of each work and its creator.
The development of what we have been able to claim for some generations now as South African art, as one speaks of American or Australian art, is explored in this book under a succession of intriguing rubrics, from “The Stifling Years: A Time of Exile” through “Culture Turns Activist,” art as “The Spread of a New Resistance,” to “Through the Lens” brings not only an acceptance of photography into the canon but also photographs integrated with other materials in the defiantly eloquent ragbag of collage, paint, cloth, metal, whatever, to express a transformed image of time and experience. Performance art follows predictably.
Should I have said “emergence” of South African art rather than development? Because, revered rock paintings apart, I remember from my first childhood visits to the Johannesburg Art Gallery seeing South African art as a sculpture by Anton van Wouw entitled The Sleeping Kaffir (1907). There was also still life if not sleeping life: indigenous fruit and flowers, landscapes painted by European visitors with the inhabitants seen as romantic species if not actually beings without consciousness. As this remarkable book shows, there has been no still life, only upheaval, since the South African artist’s consciousness began to be invaded by human reality. The unspeakable brutality of apartheid will never be veiled by any Truth and Reconciliation while Jane Alexander’s Butcher Boys appears in one of our public galleries. The satirical art begun as protest from Polly Street and epitomized decades later in a drawing where “an overfed orator addresses an audience with a wind-up key in his back” was searingly apposite to the Bad Old Days of fascist-racist South Africa—but one can’t resist seeing it relevant in our present times, with some different orator.
“Freedom at Last” is Williamson’s rubric for “Euphoria, Doubt, and Reflection,” attributed to the 1990s. The work of our artists then and now is seen to be confronted deeply and essentially for us, with this promise of human fulfillment. Our artists, not just blacks in reassertion of the bulldozed aesthetic vision, the art of their past, but whites who are surely nothing if not African in their own perspective by now, are expressing art as public self-analysis of identity (I quote the phrase): Its meaning for all of us, each in his/her selfhood going through the same necessity, is vital.
—Nadine Gordimer
Johannesburg, 2008
Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa, in 1923 and has devoted her life to her writing. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 and is the author of fourteen novels, nine volumes of stories, and three nonfiction collections. In 1974 her novel The Conservationist was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction. She lives in Johannesburg.