SECTOR HOGAR

Although Tributaries was a privately sponsored exhibition, it left an indelible mark on the South African cultural landscape, firstly because of its scale and secondly because of the ambitious task of presenting a view of contemporary art in the country. This had never been attempted before and therefore posed a number of challenges for both the participants and the conveners of the exhibition. Whilst Burnett’s approach promoted heterogeneity, it also reinforced some assumptions and stereotypes about certain art forms and artists. However, this was further complicated by the exhibition’s ambiguous positioning between the commercial art world and the canon of African art that was challenged within universities and other institutions who objected to the kinds of separation that existed between ethnographic/cultural history museums on one hand and art museums on the other. This may explain why Tributaries features in the way it does in the art-historical narrative, as opposed to say an exhibition like Neglected Tradition, which had a strong emphasis on a research component. Tributaries thus features as part of a particular historical epoch and canon that alludes to the legitimation of ‘authentic’ African art. At the time there was also a growing concern about African artworks leaving the continent and so, inasmuch as Tributaries was conceived around ideas of diversity, exchange and the collective, it also exposed certain artists, in this case the ‘rural’ artists, to a market that would ultimately appropriate and frame them in a particular way.

There is a false assumption that Johannes Segogela participated in the Tributaries exhibition, a discrepancy I use to substantiate an investigation of this exhibition’s role in the reception and representation of the ‘rural’ artists it featured. This inaccuracy is recorded in various publications, such as the catalogue produced for Segogela as part of the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in 1995 as well as on numerous websites, such as the Contemporary African Art Collection by French collector Jean Pigozzi (Pigozzi n.d.). It is an assumption that, I argue, is based on

Segogela’s framing as ‘rural’, and that also implies that there is a particular moment when Segogela began producing work that was considered ‘contemporary’.

I therefore argue that the false assumption that some of the so-called ‘rural’ artists were included in this exhibition like Segogela, can be attributed not only to its status as ‘ground-breaking’ but also to its shaping of a particular narrative about these artists. In this narrative they were presented as a novelty and were ultimately left vulnerable because they were unfamiliar with a predominately Western market that had, prior to this, never bothered to engage with their work. My assertion is that their inclusion was in fact a result of a kind of ethnographic curiosity as opposed to a formalist exercise in curatorship, as is suggested by the curator and by commentators such as Jennifer Addleson (1985), Barbara Ludman (1985) and Inga Molzen (1985).

Another idea that has gained currency about the Tributaries exhibition is that it has been politically situated and constructed in historical accounts, despite the curator being adamant that he was not intending to make a political statement. However, Burnett must have known that because the exhibition sought to achieve something that had never been done before, it was in some sense political. Although it claimed to be presenting a ‘view’ of contemporary South African art at the time, its framing as a political event in historical accounts constructed particular ideas that have shaped perceptions of the exhibition as the eventual repository or determinant of what contemporary South African art would resemble. The exhibition thus shared a similar disconcerting sense of paternalism with the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition, where on one hand it showcased a wide range of artistic expressions whilst on the other still operating in a space that the separatist cultural and political ideologies of South African apartheid society were bound to permeate. Furthermore, it can be argued that although it in some ways worked against ‘the primacy of the modernist canon’ (Martin 1985: 110), Tributaries perpetuated, if not reinstated, certain ideas about what ought to be considered contemporary art. As argued by Marion Arnold, Tributaries ‘was not promoting South Africa but rather exposing contemporary South African art’ (Arnold 1985: no pagination). She claims that it sought to demonstrate that there was a diversity of work in the country but also showed that ‘South African art is fragmented into many styles, and motivated by numerous different intellectual and sensory impulses’ (1985: no pagination).

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However, in demonstrating this the exhibition also created assumptions about certain art forms and artists — that they were not influenced by any Western culture and were therefore ‘authentic’.

CHAPTER THREE: THE NEGLECTED TRADITION: TOWARDS A NEW HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICAN ART (1930–1988)

In this chapter I examine the exhibition titled The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art (1930–1988). It was a large-scale exhibition, hosted by the Johannesburg Art Gallery from 23 November 1988 to 8 January 1989. The chapter examines the content of the exhibition with reference to the reception of the ‘rural’ artists included, who, in relation to their black urban counterparts, featured less prominently in the stated objectives of the exhibition and in its final form. It explores the role of the exhibition in generating a particular kind of narrative about black art through the biographies it produced about ‘rural’ artists and some black urban artists — in that this was a selection from a pool of many other black artists — and interrogates the content produced for the catalogue as the remainder and reminder of the exhibition. In addition, this chapter seeks to establish to what extent the literature that followed further contributed to the way in which these artists (‘rural’ artists) were received and subsequently incorporated into the broader South African art-historical narrative that was established by the Tributaries exhibition of 1985. I acknowledge, however, that The Neglected Tradition exhibition had a different focus, one that sought to give a much broader account of the development over five decades of specifically ‘black art’47 in the country.

The exhibition was faced with certain challenges from the outset, in that it first had to grapple with assembling a fragmented and displaced narrative of black creative expression and culture. In order to revisit the neglected history of ‘black art’, curator Steven Sack notes how he was compelled to make crucial decisions, including whether ‘to write about black art as a separate category or insert it into the mainstream’ (Sack 1989: 7). In reassessing this history, Sack notes the importance of ‘acknowledging the complexity and variety, as well as the degree of cultural interchange that has taken place within this history’ (1989: 7). As a result, the work selected for inclusion was then grouped into categories that began to weave and connect a particular narrative — ‘towards a new history of South African art’ (Sack 1989: 7).

47 _{Although the term “black art” is itself contested, I refer to it in this instance as a framework used by Sack in the choices he} made for his selection for the exhibition.

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Aside from its political stance and its function as a research project, one of the key objectives of this exhibition for Sack was ‘to re-examine the prevailing notions of the nature of “black art” and indeed the definition of art’, which he observes had for the most part been ‘adopted unquestioningly from Western art traditions’ (1989: 7). This, I suggest, affected the framing of the exhibition, in that it was held in an institution based on that same tradition. It therefore also involves an examination of the politics of display and representation, and how they played out in this case with the exhibition being held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). It is important to note that JAG is a public, municipal institution governed by the City Council, which meant that from its inception it functioned differently from a national museum. It has always been governed and funded at a municipal level and so its status as an institution of national importance was attributed via a series of historical events, rather than being officially recognised. But this national status is itself debatable because at the time art museums in South Africa were off limits to all but white middle-class artists and audiences. The importance of JAG as an institution with a national reach was signalled in the late 1980s by a changing political landscape and the appointment of a new director.

In 1987 the director of JAG, Christopher Till, approached Steven Sack, a lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Fine Art at the University of South Africa (UNISA), to curate an exhibition of art by black South Africans. In an attempt to write a more integrated history of South African art, Sack and a team of researchers consulted the archive of newspaper reviews and existing literature, as well as artists, educators and members of community-based organisations, to establish the basic information required for the exhibition. As this occurred only three months prior to the exhibition’s opening, Sack and his team were assisted by Matsemela Manaka,48 who had begun to lay some of the groundwork in the field of black art studies that would look at questions of redress in South African art.49 The exhibition featured 100 black artists, amongst whom were several ‘rural’ artists. It also included three urban white artists: Bill Ainslie, Cecil Skotnes and Edoardo Villa. Although Till points out

48 _{Matsamela Manaka was a writer, director, actor, poet and cultural theorist living in Soweto. He was instrumental in the} establishment of the Funda Drama Centre in Diepkloof, Soweto in 1978 and in the early 1980s worked with the daughter of the French ambassador, who was completing her Master's degree on black South African artists (Interview: Sack 2013). Manaka subsequently published his own book on the subject called Echoes of African Art: A Century of art in South Africa (1987). 49

that the exhibition was aimed at ‘reflecting and re-evaluating South African art history by tracing the development and influence of black South African artists’ (Till, in Sack 1989: 5), the inclusion of the three white artists was explained by Sack as being ‘based on their integral relationships with the historical development of black South African art’ (Sack 1989: 7). This relationship is discussed at a later stage in relation to patronage, changing social conditions and new educational influences, all of which were factors that played out differently for the ‘rural’ and urban black artists.

While the focus is on ‘rural’ artists, it is important to acknowledge that The Neglected Tradition exhibition included a diverse selection of black artists from different periods within the 58 years it covered. However, as pointed out by Anitra Nettleton, the exhibition seemed to favour artists ‘working predominately within the paradigms of the Western art tradition, art that is considered “high art”’.50

The dating Sack suggested was also meant to challenge the accepted narrative that identified the black Fine Art tradition as beginning with Sekoto, despite artists like John Koenakeefe Mohl and Ernest Mancoba predating him (Sack 1989: 2).

The disparities of black artists differed according to various factors, including the apparently opposed rural and urban, a duality on which Sacks places particular emphasis in both his essay about the ‘rural’ artists in the catalogue (1989:29) and also in an interview with the author (Appendix 2). While this duality was primarily based on the idea of opposing locales between the rural and the urban, Sack later elaborated on why he took this approach, which he chose to omit from the original transcript of his interview included in Appendix 2 of this study.

The Neglected Tradition thus sought to bridge a gap in, if not transform the history of, South African art. It confronted not only the challenges of rewriting history, but also the fragile nature of the archive and the fact that it is not always accurate and is at times inconsistent. Evidence of this unevenness can be seen in the

50 _{New acquisitions of art by black artists, she observes, were of those artists who had ‘received some kind of formal training in} the canons of Modern Western art, a training which was largely urban based and still excluded other traditions of aesthetic production such as those from rurally-based artists’ (Nettleton 1992: 10). The debate around what constitutes ‘high art’ is argued here against the notion of collecting objects as opposed to artworks; the distinction, she points out, is important to emphasise as it raises issues around modes of display and representation. The inclusion of artefacts in the form of a selection of objects made by black people, according to Nettleton, tends to privilege certain objects while detracting from others: ‘This form of appropriation is intended to redress imbalances that have manifested themselves historically in the constitution of the collections, but it has the effect of valorising historical productions of popular aesthetic forms in one sector of South African society and denying aesthetic worth to parallel productions from other sectors’ (Nettleton1992: 16).

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biographies and commentaries produced about the various artists, in the written entries of the catalogue which I examine later in the chapter. For this reason the catalogue is a critical aspect of this study as its apparent comprehensiveness explains why the exhibition remains acclaimed as an important survey of the development of black art covering a particular period.

Generally The Neglected Tradition is viewed as a revisionist exhibition aimed at redress and reparation. However, I suggest that this view tends to detract from its potential as a starting point for further investigation of some of the artists, in this case the ‘rural’ artists it included, precisely because of the way it included them. The exhibition occupies a significant position in South Africa’s art-historical narrative, located within what Nettleton describes as ‘watershed years in South Africa’s political transformation’ (1995a: 65). It is significant also because it was overtly political in that it not only sought to change the exclusive narratives of South African art’s histories, but in so doing also sought to highlight the process of transformation within institutions like JAG. At the time JAG had a strong desire to keep on par with international trends in curating and programmes aimed at greater inclusivity.

In a paper presented at the History Workshop organised by the University of the Witwatersrand in 1992, Nettleton discusses the history of two institutions (one an art museum and the other a cultural museum) in Johannesburg, one of them being JAG and the other the Africana Museum. Her assertion is that ‘certain kinds of museums tend to privilege some objects over others in terms of value and potential significance to our understanding of culture’ (1992: 1). The fact that such institutions were entirely partisan in relation to the cultures they represented, she argues, suggests that they not only followed a specific political agenda but also one that was closely linked to colonial structures and particular ways of thinking about the museum (1992: 1–2, 6). Nettleton’s account thus highlights the historical attitudes associated with such institutions, particularly in relation to the discriminatory acquisition policies they maintained until recently (1992: 8).

Therefore, before discussing the exhibition itself it is important to consider the formation of JAG, because the establishment and the development of its collection, which later included some works from The Neglected Tradition exhibition, was peculiarly shaped by its formation. As pointed out by Jillian Carman, this history presents another dimension of the gallery in relation to its contribution to the

formation of a national identity in terms of South African art, as well as its institutional role in stimulating and encouraging scholarship in art making (Carman 2006: 91). Yellow Houses: a street in Sophiatown, 1940 by Gerard Sekoto was acquired in 1940, and, while it was the first acquisition of a work by a black artist, it set a possible precedent for a different kind of narrative that subsequently became part of the history of the painting, the collection and the gallery.51 The orthodox (colonial) narrative of the gallery was in a way disrupted by this acquisition, although Sack argues that the inclusion of Sekoto’s canvas in the collection was partly because of the association of easel painting with the Western tradition (1989: 12).52 However, it remained the only acquisition of a work by a black artist for the next 32 years: no further works by black artists were acquired until The Neglected Tradition eventually opened in 1989.