Another Week in Johannesburg, something in me is lost again. – Mbe Mbhele
Sometimes I wonder how the art survives in a place like Johannesburg. Most recently, I worry about how there are still exhibitions, music shows, and performances in a place that has, without a doubt, demonstrated no capacity for anything that seeks growth or goodness. It is a marketplace par excellence, but the problem is not the trading of goods for sustenance. It is the trading of souls, truths, and all things that shouldn’t be sold. There is a vibrant art culture, everyone insists or is made to believe, but what really thrives is a culture that allows pretence under the guise of community.
One weekend, three shows. The first was an art exhibition at Umhlabathi Art Gallery. The show was packed and well-organized; the artworks on the wall were important, we all agreed. But who is this "WE" that is agreeing? A community of art lovers qua beer lovers, or hustlers who want to have their names on a poster just for relevance. Again, the question resurfaces: Who is the art exhibition for? Should it even matter? It should matter because exhibitions are continuously presented as attempting to make an intervention, to express an idea, but what they successfully do most of the time is stifle dialogue instead of sparking it. As Nathaniel Mackey suggests there is a telling incompleteness in our cultural movements—a jaggedness that should be revolutionary but here feels merely stagnant. Exhibitions have just become spaces where, if there is something on the wall, it qualifies as "work," as artwork. It is more true now because it seems that the curators have given up or, even worse, now everyone can possibly become a curator.
In the recent exhibition at Umhlabathi, titled Khiph’ Ispani, there seemed to be no overarching theme; no curatorial statement and there were no intelligible conversations between the artworks. The brief was clearly simple: bring what you have and we will make it work—vula i-circle, as it were. It is up to you to decide if this is necessarily the direction that the arts should take. After all, are we not all about inclusivity regardless of what is at stake? The show was packed to capacity and this was the best thing about it. It shows that if we can open our imagination around what exhibitions can do and should look like, there is already an audience that is willing to be engaged. One must congratulate Bafana Zembe and the collective, not necessarily on the curation, but on their ability to mobilize so many Black people like that; they could perhaps pass as potential art-community-organizers-not-yet-curators.
The second show was a walkabout at the Bag Factory. I have always thought the gallery is weird: you bow to walk in, and even when you are in, you have to rotate like a spin-top to see the work. I’m joking, but I mention the place because I had gone there to see the work of Levy Pooe, which was part of the group show Maunguo. Unsurprisingly for me, the real walk-about happened outside the gallery; it happened in the fringes where the blacks carrying quarts of Black Label were, where their speech wasn’t supervised, and where conversations were not curated. In this Dead’s Town where the living and the ghosts of our struggle are in constant, unmediated conflict. The discussion was between the work of Levy Pooe and Zenande Mtati. Naturally, both of them claimed to be superior than the other and the other fought back. Not really a Bolekaja moment but it was interesting.
Unsurprisingly, more people were familiar with the work of Levy, owing to his large community of followers. Remember, it is a plus to have show-attenders as friends; they also come in handy when measuring the worth of the art, unfortunately. Levy has many of us. Mtati, on the other hand, has been controversial and quite unstomachable as a character—a very bad thing for sales. But honestly, none of these things should even matter. When looking at the art, I deduced that both artists are important or even necessary, but Mtati has no range; he thinks very little about what he makes and the consequences of his artworks. Hence, I think he makes for a good stumbler—what someone else might call a "lucky motherfucker." Zenande Mtati can stop making art today and nothing would permanently be lost; if it is, it is a matter of time before someone does something similar in theme or impact. This is an invitation for him to extend himself, a brotherly critique that he shouldn’t ignore.
But what I think doesn’t really matter. Let us perhaps look at the artworks much more closely. The discussion should perhaps begin to move away from using words like "beautiful" and "dark" carelessly when speaking about works of art. One chooses to describe the work of Levy as beautiful, but in my head, what I see beneath the bright colors is noise and chaos—a “primordial chaos” as Achille Mbembe would have it. I see a struggle to survive when I see the artwork titled End Street Johannesburg. Levy becomes a "signifying monkey" by way of Henry Louis Gates Jr.; he tricks us into looking, only to find that what we are looking at is not what we expected to see. After all, he documents the social life of Black people—perhaps the hardest thing to do, especially if one is aware of the complexities involved. Levy has, in a way, mastered how to do it without romanticizing it and without pimping it.
When the work of Levy is contrasted with the work of Zenande Mtati, there is always a suggestion that the work of Zenande is "too dark." But whenever I peep the work, I see myself proper: a torrent of all my sorrows, pains, grief, and anxieties overcome me. If the work is dark, then I too am dark—how can I not be trapped in this world where my skin is my case? Where I am over-determined, always a walking invitation for all things not good? Mtati, for me—although I appreciate that he can go further—does not only paint portraits but looks for something in our souls. It is for this reason why I think his work can be hard to resonate with, the duty of inward looking can be agonizing. But that is also why he features in a conversation about artists who could matter in the future. So the conclusion that I reached is that it will perhaps assist us to read art outside of our impulses of what would make a nice wallpaper or profile picture.
The last show was titled Mapping Sites of Memory: The Sobukwe Letters. I should not have attended this show. Firstly my motivation was weird, I wanted to attend because Prof Goniwe was part of the speakers; we all do it sometimes. “I am going there because of so-and-so” we have all said it at some point. While on that, I have been quite happy that the good Professor is gigging a lot—reminds me of a time where Dr. Lwazi Lushaba had his run. Speaking for Blessing Ngobeni for the Standard Bank Show, Speaking for KKK theatre show etc. But is it possible for someone to be a one-size-fits-all interlocutor for every discussion? In South Africa, it is, because the celebrity and influencer obsession has also seeped into academia and the arts where it necessarily should not find expression. This celebrity culture has become a shadow, a hollow performance of the intellect.
The second reason why I should not have attended is because I was too drunk and attempted to ask a question and, as usual, tripped over my own words. That being said, I want to mention that spaces that are said to be "safe" are the least safe; spaces where provocative dialogues are supposed to happen are the most censoring. No real conversations happen anymore. It is just vibes, aesthetics, catching up with old friends, and measuring how well or bad they are doing. I stretch it to even say these shows that we have are also just because we are tired of our draining nine-to-fives, which we can’t escape, so we use these shows to try and remember what it means to chew on something meaty. But we soon realize that what we think is meaty is also dead meat.
I think to myself if maybe I was supposed to go to an EFF event or the ANC event, because both organizations had something happening on the same week. I am sure the MK party had something too. There are points where I thought running towards the arts would be life-affirming, but I am slowly realizing that we might all be under the same yoke—artist and politician alike. Nx.