Just as you can’t know the meaning of a word except in context (consider the difference between " fire " as it appears on this page versus its being screamed in a dark theater), so too how we understand or appreciate a work of art depends on its context. Even a multi-million-dollar Van Gogh is meaningless on the wall of a torture chamber. And a commonplace household item like an earthenware jug can take on new meaning when transported several centuries into a glass case in a museum.
In that spirit, I found myself wishing that the peculiarly disappointing show at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum hadn’t been billed as an art exhibit. Perhaps the subtitle, " Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa, " is meant to signal a different intent from that of an art show. But the presentation belies that intent. The exhibit " reads " like an art show; it would be richer and more rewarding, however, if it were presented as an educational display about artmaking in post-apartheid South Africa.
In the catalogue to " Coexistence, " curator Pamela Allara acknowledges the danger of removing art from its social context — in this case, the community activism and direct political involvement that inspired much of what constitutes the show. She writes that " when transported from its culture of origin to the Western museum, the African artifact is appreciated primarily as an æsthetic object with unstated monetary and prestige value. " But her fretting comes off as disingenuous, since the presentation of " Coexistence " does next to nothing to bridge the cultural divide. The wall texts that accompany the various installations, sculptures, mixed media work, photography, and videos make no mention of personal histories or the workers’ cooperatives and AIDS-awareness programs that gave rise to the artmaking. Instead we’re treated to the traditional hermetic/academic banalities ( " With postmodernism the concepts of pluralist tolerance and multiculturalism became popular, encouraging an open-endedness that allowed for art that originated in Third World and other ‘peripheral contexts’ to be shown alongside art influenced by the Western ‘mainstream’ " ). And, lo, we’re left little alternative but to regard strange artifacts by unknown peoples " primarily as æsthetic objects. "
In the best — as in sharp, troublesome, and ironic — essay in the " Coexistence " catalogue, the one black South African artist/essayist points out that black curators, collectors, and critics almost don’t exist. Shows featuring black South African artists have been designed by and for white people. It’s an unsettling truth, and it should make you wonder whether the best art by people of color is being put forward. How different would " Coexistence " look if Thembinkosi Goniwe had been invited to co-curate? It didn’t help that the day I saw the exhibit, two sculptures had been removed (to clear the floor for a function) and none of the videos was working.
I am increasingly suspicious of group exhibits that don’t allow us to see more than one work by an individual artist, and with two minor exceptions " Coexistence " falls in that category. Of the best artists, all we get are isolated hints of their power. In fact, you could say the curators have dislocated this art from its context on two levels, first by removing it from its cultural conditions, and then by removing it from the individual artist’s œuvre.
Still, there are hints. The first of those intimations comes in the form of a giant photographic diptych that looks out from the glass wall of the Rose’s entrance, an untitled image from Thembinkosi Goniwe’s Returning the Gaze billboard project. It shows head shots of a white man and a black man, each with a band-aid prominent on his left cheek. The white man, fiftysomething, clean-shaven, graying at the temples, and sporting a sweater and black leather jacket, looks away from the camera. His pensiveness borders on worry, and his far-away gaze suggests he’s seeing into a troubled future. The black man, unshaven and perhaps still in his 20s, stares into the camera lens with an expression both hurt and defiant. The black man embodies the present; the immediacy of his gaze practically lifts him off the wall. The white man’s removal, his spiritual and psychological absence, embodies the future’s immense uncertainty.
Also rich in its suggestive power is Noria Mabasa’s unpainted, baked-clay Mbira Player, which depicts a seated male figure manipulating the traditional African thumb piano in his lap. Mabasa’s naïveté registers as deliberate and fully under her control. The mbira player’s body is equally reminiscent of flesh and earth; his ambivalent expression, somewhere between a smile and a grimace (think a lean Louis Armstrong with the same even, widely spaced teeth), combines with his oversized yet barely articulated ears and eyes to make him a haunting portrait of the artist. Through his body, to paraphrase the poet Umberto Saba, silences pass from the infinite.
I was not impressed by much of the beadwork or any of the embroidery on display, and I remain unconvinced that it represents anywhere near the best work being done in these traditional African media. The problem isn’t the didactic nature of the garments and wall mountings and figurines — the calls to protest or the warnings about HIV infection — so much as the lack of skill. Anyone familiar with the beadwork of the Ndebele people of South Africa (take a look at the Web site for the Hamill Gallery of African Art here in Boston to get a sense of what I’m talking about) or the better-known beadwork of the Yoruba people of Nigeria (who embellish everything from gourds to handbags and sashes with extraordinary networks of small glass beads) will perceive that what " Coexistence " offers diminishes the scope of others’ accomplishments.
But somewhere among the simple, beaded dolls of the Siyazama Project of AIDS awareness called " AIDS Crucifix " — a small cemetery of figurines with outstretched arms and undifferentiated faces, each beneath a beaded letter " J " — two woven bowls stopped me in my tracks. They were not attributed to any artist as far as I could tell, but they deserve to be. In the geometric, dyed patterns I presume to be purely decorative, the letters HIV and an angular version of the ribbon symbol of AIDS awareness slowly emerged from the surrounding patterns. Unlike the dolls, the basketry was impeccable — seamless, balanced, so precise it might be water-tight. Far from being antithetical to progressive politics, sophisticated technique is actually its most powerful advocate.
A large, dramatic installation by William Kentridge has silhouettes of huge figures — they look like mutated shadow puppets — climbing a wall along a set of stairs. They made me think of mangled ghosts assaulting Heaven. Willie Bester’s construction of found objects shaped into a cow with a gun on its back pulling a train of barbed wire and coffins grows ominous with scrutiny. And Walter Oltman’s Larva Suit, a life-sized outfit of woven aluminum and steel wire, looks part Hazmat, part Halloween, implying at once the dangerous and the ludicrous.
