100 Years Of South African Art: From Pierneef To Gugulective.

Okechukwu Nwafor Abstract Friday and Saturday the 1st and 2nd October, 2010 respectively, were very important days in . The reason being that the Iziko South African gallery in organized an artists’ panel discussion to mark the grand finale of “1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective,” an exhibition hung on April 15, 2010 to mark 100 years of South African Art. This essay examines this epochal exhibition (which I attended in Cape Town) and its accompanying artists’ panel, underscoring their significance in the defeat of colonial legacies and the transformative process that witnessed resistance art in South Africa.

Exhibition Theme A reflection over October 1, 2010, which is the opening date of this South African exhibition, would reveal that the date is also momentous for Nigeria’s history. On this same day (1st October, 2010), while Riason Naidoo, the first black director of South African National Gallery was busy upturning the face of Iziko gallery which had suffered from a 100 years of colonial legacy, a bomb exploded near the venue of Nigeria’s independence day celebration. It is remarkable that these two incidents simultaneously underscore a contradiction of some sorts: while the one deploys art to achieve national cohesion the other deploys terrorism to threaten national cohesion. The theme of the exhibition, “1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective,” is indeed a conceptual one that speaks a practical language also. It is a theme that draws on selective genealogy to convey a purposeful and readable treatise. The curator, Naidoo, who incidentally is the museum director, might have been accused of selective amnesia or subversive genealogy but he was out to disengage history from lopsided perpetuation. By juxtaposing the works of the younger generation artists such as Gugulective with

91 AJELLS: Awka Journal of English Language and Literary Studies Volume 4 No. 1, 2013 the old masters like J. H. Pierneef, he achieved an exhibitionary egalitarianism that has eluded the gallery over the past 100 years. By allowing younger voices to speak inside the spaces hitherto filled with old colonial voices, the whole Iziko display spaces now sing an emancipatory epoch-making song. This epoch-making song reflects the nature of freedom that resistance art aspired to during the period. However, while it seems that resistance art during apartheid experienced creative strangulation and containment, this essay deploys some of the artworks in this exhibition to suggest that South African contemporary art, through this exhibition, achieves freedom necessary to chart collective identities across boundaries of difference.

Exhibition strategy as historical interrogation The Pieneef show involves the collective engagement of artists of sundry socio-cultural backgrounds spanning a period of 100 years. The whole Iziko gallery closed in March 2010 to give way for what Riason Naidoo described as “the re-hanging” of all the works in the entire gallery (4). Apart from this “re-hanging” more works were collected from other municipalities, universities, cooperate and private organizations. The exhibition, which Naidoo described as “an amazing adventure” was organized in 10 weeks and was opened during the period of World Cup to tie in with the increased visitors expected during that period. . That exhibition strategy serves as historical inquiry is echoed in this exhibition. For example, the works and experiences of the 1930s and 40s were once again unveiled in Moses Tladi’s work titled No. 1 Crown Mines and Jabulani Ntuli’s minutely detailed pencil drawings. These two artists represent epochal efforts by black artists to find their feet in the questionable artistic environment of early 20th century South Africa. Both the artworks produced during and after apartheid seem to have integrated

Copyright@Ezenwa-Ohaeto Resource Centre, Awka, Nigeria. 92 AJELLS: Awka Journal of English Language and Literary Studies Volume 4 No. 1, 2013 collective and personal experiences of sufferings and triumph into a creative process needed to articulate national history. In the broad perspective provided by this exhibition, one can begin a reappraisal of the interrelationship between professionalism and levels of artistic experience. If the exhibition is poignantly critical of establishments and status quo then it has initiated a space for radical reassessment of exhibitionary complexes. While historians have shifted from regarding visual images as emblematic of the past they also note of ’visual history’ as that which makes and remakes meaning and historical knowledge (Witz, Minkley and Rassool, 4). In this way one may view the Pierneef show as visual history given the fact that in South Africa “histories have erupted into the public sphere in visual form” (Rassool, 5). It is possible that the Pierneef exhibition created different understandings of culture and also contributed in shaping and reshaping history. Riason Naidoo, the exhibition curator, created a space for collective artistic engagement outside the dominant apartheid discourse. Inside this space new understandings of culture and history were articulated. Not only did Naidoo play an active role in recreating South African art history, he was also able to focus on the supposed suggestion mapped by the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa Report (443)” which urged South Africans to engage in integrating their shared histories. According to TRC “Somewhere down the line, we must succeed in integrating, through political engagement, all our histories, in order to discontinue the battles of the past… If we fail in this regard, we will fail to be a nation” (443). It seems that the practicality of this report is well exemplified in Naidoo’s exhibition which no doubt also recognizes the differences and contentions raised in the months following the exhibition. Some of these contentions hold, for example, that Naidoo “eschewed the old colonial artworks in favour of contemporary works” thereby offering racial differentiation of old white artists against contemporary black

Copyright@Ezenwa-Ohaeto Resource Centre, Awka, Nigeria. 93 AJELLS: Awka Journal of English Language and Literary Studies Volume 4 No. 1, 2013 artists in South Africa (Corigall, 16). Another critic, Llyod Pollock in the South African Times condemned Naidoo under the title “SANG’s reputation trashed for 2010 show.” There are positive remarks on the show. For example Miles Keylock praised the exhibition as nothing short of a revolution” (Minnaar, 12). the exhibition as nothing short of a revolution” (Minnaar, 12).

Some artists and their artworks presented at the show Some of the works exhibited in the show include an installation piece titled Amanzi Amdaka (Figure I) by the Gugulethu based art collective known as Gugulective. The Gugulective reflects collaborative art project that enables the spectators to see new socio-economic relationships in South Africa through installation. In this installation, factors to be taken into account include not only the individual’s embodied, discursive and habituated practices of interaction with other artists but also their relationships with the spaces they work in, and their personal engagement and identification with collective historical and social issues in South Africa.

In these historical and social engagements the Gugulective, since its inception in 2006, has questioned the boundaries that continue to fragment South African society.

Figure I. Gugulective Amanzi Amdaka, 2009-2010, Installation, zinc baths, audio. Photo: Okechukwu Nwafor

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The collective is made up of a group of young artists, musicians, writers, DJs, rappers and poets active in Cape Town’s eastern townships. Current members include Ziphozenkosi Dayile, Athi Mongezeleli Joja, Ayanda Kilimane, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Dathini Mzayiya and Unathi Sigenu. These cultural practitioners proclaim that the collective was borne out of a need for intellectual and creative spaces on the periphery of the mainstream art world and for the past years have primarily been working and exhibiting in a local shebeen called Kwa-Malmli’s in Gugulethu. Reimagining the shebeen as an exhibition space, the Gugulective have persisted in having shows in their own neighbourhood rather than being pulled into the centre of town. However, they have begun showing on a number of big shows around South Africa and other parts of the world. It seems fitting therefore that the Gugulective, in their installation in this exhibition, portray the crisis of socio-economic predicament of contemporary South Africa. Their work is made up of zinc washtubs of the type ubiquitous in smaller homes and townships, with concealed recordings providing viewers with an audio experience. This work disrupts the narrative of progress advanced by the new post apartheid state. As an instrument of social change the Gugulective reflects the deprivation from economic advancement which individuals living in the slums experience. The artists collectively assert that democracy’s policies have not engendered an eradication of the previous regime but rather veiled the reality of poverty through a smoke screen of democracy.

Other works at the show include ’s The Audience (Figure 2). George Pemba, born in 1912 in Hill’s Kraal, Korsten, , was a South African painter and writer. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Ikhamanga. George was encouraged by his father to draw and paint at a tender age and so began painting murals in the family house as a child. At that time he produced portraits from photographs of his father’s employers.

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His dexterity in art won him a Grey Scholarship, which enabled him to receive post primary education, and in 1931 he obtained a Teacher’s Diploma at the Lovedale Training College in the . That same year he began working for the Lovedale Printing Press, and continued to work there until 1936. In 1937 he studied under Professor Austin Winter Moore at for five months. This study was made possible through a bursary awarded from the Bantu Welfare Trust. A second bursary in 1941 enabled Pemba to spend two weeks at Maurice van Essche’s studio in Cape Town attending art classes.

Figure 2. George Pemba. The Audience. 1960. Oil on Hardboard Photo: Okechukwu Nwafor

Pemba met and John Mohl in the 1940s and they encouraged him to work as a full-time artist. However, during this time economic conditions also forced him to work for the Native Administration in Port Elizabeth as a clerk. Apart from that, from 1952 to 1978 Pemba augmented his income selling groceries in a

Copyright@Ezenwa-Ohaeto Resource Centre, Awka, Nigeria. 96 AJELLS: Awka Journal of English Language and Literary Studies Volume 4 No. 1, 2013 shop. Following that, Pemba taught art to children at the South African Institute of Race Relations and in 1979 was awarded an Honorary Master of Arts Degree from the . Pemba’s paintings from the 1940s onwards were exhibited at The Everard Read Gallery in 1991. In 1992 a second exhibition served to commemorate his 80th birthday, which was also celebrated with the artist at the King George VI Art Gallery in Port Elizabeth. Pemba died in 2001. In figure 2 Pemba depicted life inside a cinema house and what transpires within. It seems at times a pity that he abandoned watercolour almost altogether in favour of oil, but the shift, advised by his friend Gerard Sekoto, who told him that white patrons paid more handsomely for oil paintings, was made for financial considerations. On the other hand, the shift offered richer scope in terms of scale and colour, and these shine at their best in his finest oils.

Another notable South African painter Gerard Sekoto was also featured in the exhibition. Sekoto was born on 9 December 1913 at Botshabelo mission, near Middleberg, Mpumulanga and he died in in 1993. He trained as a teacher at the Diocesan Teachers’ Training College in Pietersburg and on graduating he taught at a local school, Khaiso Secondary for four years. He left for in 1938 at the age of 25 to become an artist. He was compelled by the economic difficulties at the time to live with relatives in , a township outside Johannesburg. In Sophiatown he found his subject matters: genre images of active life in the community. He rendered these genre scenes in bright colours and in expressionist style. He held his first solo exhibition in 1939. In 1940 the Johannesburg Art Gallery purchased one of his pictures titled ”Yellow Houses - Sophiatown” in 1940 for their permanent collection and this was to be the first picture painted by a black artist to enter a museum collection. In 1942 he moved to in Cape Town and in 1945 to .

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Figure 3 Gerard Sekoto Street Scene. Oil on Hardboard. 1939. Photo: Okechukwu Nwafor

Sekoto’s ambition to visit Paris, the centre of the art world came to reality in 1947 when he left South Africa to live the rest of his life in Paris. His first years in Paris were difficult and he was better known as a jazz musician. In 1966 he visited Senegal for a year. Sekoto’s paintings became political in the 1970s. In 1989 the Johannesburg Art Gallery honoured him with a retrospective exhibition and the University of Witwatersrand with an honorary doctorate. Sekoto is recognized as the pioneer of urban black art and social realism. He broke the convention of ’native’ studies that had preceded his work. Sekoto used strong bright colours and unusual perspectives to convey the lively vitality and spontaneity of urban street life despite the hardship of life in Sophia town and District Six. His work is highly sought after by collectors. He is represented in the Art Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery,

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Pretoria Art Museum, South African National Gallery. In figure 3 Sekoto mirrors the humdrum life witnessed on the streets of probably Sophia town. The formal qualities of figures coloured with patches of bright light gives the painting the freshness and resplendence quite characteristic of the dexterity with which Sekoto developed his compositions. He (Sekoto) seems to be one of the earliest artists in South Africa to recognize everyday subjects as an independent category in art. With great observational and artistic skills, he does not depart very much from reality and wishes to draw the viewer into the life of ordinary people. And his expanding audience might have come from these ordinary people.

JH Pierneef was undoubtedly one of the earliest South African artists whose landscape paintings cleared the path for landscape painting in the early twentieth century South Africa. Jacobus Hendrik (Henk) Pierneef was born in Pretoria on 13 August 1886 and died in Pretoria on 14 November 1957. Pierneef was considered as one of the best among old South African landscape masters whose works have attracted national and international acclaim especially because of his distinctive style. His inspiration came mainly from South African landscapes including South African Highveld. His style is characterized by a simplistic reduction of vast landscapes into flat planes of geometric structures. Most of his landscapes mirror the dramatic integration of formal qualities into a unified and harmonious ordering of nature. His colours are bright enough to suggest that he must have undertaken to study the landscapes under bright sunlight. Pierneef’s international reputation as an accomplished artist is seen from his numerous collections in private, corporate and public organisations, including the Africana Museum, Durban Art Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, King George VI Art Gallery, Pierneef Museum and the Pretoria Art Gallery.

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Figure 4 Pierneef, Jakob Hendrik, Watermill near Stellenbosch, 1944, oil on board, 540 x 655 mm.

In figure 4 Pierneef demonstrates a mastery of the painterly technique of naturalism. The trees hung above the river amidst the intruding sunlight that created a reflection on the river. The careful integration of atmospheric conditions within the recess of the trees, the sky and the river shows the level of Pierneef’s proficiency in ’nature’ painting.

Jane Alexander was also exhibited at the Pierneef show. Alexander studied at the University of Witwatersrand where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art degree in 1982. That same year, she was the winner of the National Fine Arts Student Competition as well as the Martienssen Student Prize. In 1988 she completed her Masters in Fine Art. Her initial course of study was painting, but she eventually switched to sculpture upon a realization that she would be a more accomplished artist as a sculptor. A clearer view of the political instabilities of South

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Africa confronted Alexander at the university especially through students’ underground organizations and activities. While her childhood was veiled from the police brutality and civil turbulence on the streets of South Africa, she found artistic inspiration in these vestiges as a university underground in the city of Braamfontein when, perhaps, the violent reality dawned on her. It is already well known that Alexander’s works capture the political instabilities of the 1970’s South Africa. Irrespective of her non-participation in these crises her works make bold pronouncements on the extreme inhuman consequences they portend. Her unique surrealistic style, deployed in the precise interpretation of draconian apartheid laws, has distinguished her as a major exponent of this style in the twentieth and twenty first centuries South African context.

Figure 5 Jane Alexander The Butcher Boys, 1985. Plaster. Photo: Okechukwu Nwafor.

A winner of so many art awards including the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Fine Art in 1995, the First National Bank

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Artist of the Year award with Kevin Brand in 1996, the DaimlerChrysler award for exceptional artistic achievement in 2002, National Fine Arts Student Competition Award (1982), Alexander’s work, no doubt, remains legendary in the annals of South African art history.

Not only does Alexander’s work deploy the human figure for incessant anatomical inquiry, her life-sized human figure is also potentially the centre of various kinds of political investigations. The dramatic effect provided by the amazing presence of her figures is testament to this overwhelming importance the human figure holds in her scale of creativity. One of the iconic works that defined the socio-political face of South Africa is unarguably Jane Alexander’s “Butcher Boys” (figure 5) which is strategically positioned inside the exhibition space. ”The Butcher Boys,” which is in permanent exhibition at the Iziko South African National Gallery consists of three surrealistic life-sized humanoid beasts with powdery skin, black eyes, broken horns, and no mouths sitting on a bench. The figures exhibit fearful bestiality that tends towards terror. Their apparent tendency to frighten does not detract from the strategy employed by apartheid’s laws and their enforcement agencies. In their desperation to instil fear and terror, agents of apartheid (probably captured in Alexander’s beasts) are “devoid of their outside senses - their ears are nothing more than deep gorges in their heads and their mouths are missing, appearing to be covered with thick roughened skin.” The loss of humanity, the brutish imposition of draconian laws, the general sadism of state security operatives are all traces echoed by the perceptible meanness and animalistic tendencies evident in the Butcher Boys.

Another artist whose work was shown in the exhibition is . Van Wouw was born in Driebergen, Holland but relocated with his family to Rotterdam in 1864. In 1874 he studied

Copyright@Ezenwa-Ohaeto Resource Centre, Awka, Nigeria. 102 AJELLS: Awka Journal of English Language and Literary Studies Volume 4 No. 1, 2013 drawing part time at the Rooterdam Academy, but later got interested in sculpture. He moved to Pretoria in1890 where in addition to teaching drawing and painting part time he also worked for a gunsmith. At various occasions he was engaged in a number of creative endeavours including the productions of decorative mural mouldings, drawing press cartoons and caricatures, among other activities.

Figure 6 Anton Van Wouw The Dogga Smoker, 1907. Bronze Photo by Okechukwu Nwafor.

It took Van Wouw 10 years of active struggle in Pretoria before the financier, offered him his first sculpture commission of a monumental statue of . This statue which, no doubt, launched him into prominence now stands on Church Square in Pretoria. The high regard he had for the Boer nation informed his artistic growth and style. This style was soon to engender his unique rendition of Boer lifestyle at the time. Apart from many of his commissions he was most notable for the

Copyright@Ezenwa-Ohaeto Resource Centre, Awka, Nigeria. 103 AJELLS: Awka Journal of English Language and Literary Studies Volume 4 No. 1, 2013 work “Women’s Monument” near and the statue of in Durban, among many other statues. In 1938 he completed his last commission, “Women and Children”, honouring the role of the women in the . This sculpture is located at the base of the and stands 4.1 metres tall and weighs 2.5 tons. The Dogga Smoker (figure 6) is one of Van Wouw’s numerous miniature studies of indigenous peoples marking his deep insight not just for the Boer world but the entire South Africa.

More works in the show include that of Gavin Jantjes. Born in Cape Town in 1948, Jantjes studied at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art and left in 1969. A DAAD scholarship in 1970 enabled him to undertake a Master’s degree in the Hochschule Für Bildende Künste, in Hamburg.

In his active struggle against the apartheid regime, Jantjes produced “ID” (Figure 7) being his identity card consisting of his photographs and accompanying texts emblematic of apartheid laws. The sharp tone of sarcasm and derision in the work produce a graphic sign that strongly reminds one of how apartheid’s segregationist laws inhibited freedom and movement. The work (Figure 7) describes Jantjes as “Cape Coloured” which is a noxious invention of apartheid to dehumanize the people. This dehumanization infuses the bearer of such identity card with inferiority complex, fear and a sense of inequality especially in the face of “Whites Only” stickers posted across the nation. Jantjes stamps the word “classified” on the front page of his pass and provides a clear implication of such classification: “The racial label put on a non-white child at birth is not only a badge of a race, it is a permanent brand of inferiority, the brand of class distinction. Throughout his life his race label will warn all concerned which doors are open to him, and which are closed.”

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Figure 7 Gavin Jantjes ID 1974-75 Screenprint photograph Photo by Okechukwu Nwafor.

Jantjes has also produced other works that point to the ruthless exploitation of the black population. Some works that address these acts are titled “Colour this Labour Dirt Cheap”, “Colour this Slavery Golden”, and to the Sharpeville massacre —“Colour these People Dead”. On a work with the instructions “Colour this Whites Only”, the face of the South African Prime Minister Vorster fuses into that of Adolf Hitler. The strong political message these works elicited soon attracted the ire of the brutal regime who responded swiftly by banning all of Jantjes’ works in South Africa. He was thus forced into exile.

Exile provided Jantjes with the professional opportunity he had longed for. For example he became a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1986 to 1990, advisor for the Institute on New International Visual Art’s Council in 1992, advisor for the Tate Gallery in London from 1992 to 1995. He eventually taught

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Visual Arts at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, Liverpool in 1995, and was a curator of the Serpentine Gallery, London from 1995 to 1998. Since 1998, Gavin Jantjes has been the artistic director of the Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo where he resides. His works are displayed in public and private collections in the United Kigndom, USA and other places.

A work titled “Conversation with Madam C.J. Walker,” by Mary Sibande was on display in the Pierneef show. Mary Sibande was born in 1982 and studied Fine Arts at the University of Johannesburg graduating with a B-Tech in 2007. Sibande’s work addresses the issues of identity in Post-apartheid South Africa using the human body as a medium of expression. Her major point of departure is the stereotypical depiction of women, especially black women in South Africa.

Figure 8 Mary Sibande “Conversation with Madam C.J. Walker,” 2009. Photo by Okechukwu Nwafor.

The psycho-social routine that the human body and skin have acquired in the postcolonial context informs Sibande’s life-sized figures. Most often her figures are clothed in fantastic robes that question the historical (dis)empowerment of black women in South Africa.

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In Figure 8 titled “Conversation with Madam C.J. Walker,” Sibande calls into investigation the issue of femininity, beauty, pride and domesticity associated with the female gender and situates them within the wider context of postcolonialism in Africa. Madam C J Walker was an African-American woman born on December 23, 1867 in Delta, Louisiana to Owen and Minerva Breedlove. She was one of six children; she had a sister Louvenia and four brothers: Alexander, James, Solomon, and Owen, Jr. Her parents and elder siblings were slaves on Madison Parish plantation owned by Robert W. Burney.

She was the first child in her family born into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Her mother died, possibly from cholera, in 1872. Her father remarried and died shortly afterward. She lived with her brother in-laws and eventually with other distant benefactors who helped her until she became 14. She married at 14 to escape the abuse of her brother in-laws. She tried her hands on a number of handiworks and eventually experimented with home remedies and products already on the market until she finally developed her own shampoo and an ointment that contained sulphur to make her scalp healthier for hair growth. She grew to become one of the greatest manufacturers and suppliers of this shampoo in the United States. The Guinness Book of Records cites Walker as the first woman to become a millionaire by her own achievements. At her death she was considered to be the wealthiest African-American woman in America and known to be the first self-made female American millionaire. Figure 8 provides a counterpoint to a commonplace preoccupation with the idea of gender weakness in South Africa, arguing that women can rise to fame through discipline, perseverance, and strive. Through rituals of work and drudgery, it is possible that Sibande inverts the socio-cultural class surrounding ’slave’ and ’master’ especially as Madam C J

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Walker’s history is lined by a genealogy of slaves. In Sibande’s work, one can assume that a history of servitude and subordination may have been overturned and made to assume a heroic role in the domestic economy of South Africa.

Another artist shown at the exhibition is Andries Botha. Botha is an internationally renowned sculptor and human rights activist. In his art issues of power, western value systems, colonialism, apartheid, ethnicity, global conflict, economic migration, philosophy, and mythology hold preeminent position.

As a human rights activist Botha collaborated with Sam Ntshangase to create a skills-based creative training program for women known as Bheka Phambile in 1994. He founded Create Africa South in 1999, a non-governmental organization that promoted creativity in South Africa. In 2001, Botha conceptualized a creative memory project committed to developing economic autonomy for black South African women.

Figure 9 Andries Botha Alleenpraak in Paradys 1991. Photo: Okechukwu Nwafor.

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In the event of South Africa’s democratic dispensation Botha served as National Visual Arts Chairperson, a position which saw him articulating a new vision for the visual arts in the South Africa. It is based on his report that the national cultural policy for the arts was created. Botha’s activities, among many other things, included the creation of opportunity for formerly disadvantaged South Africans especially through his pet project known as Community Arts Workshop.

It seems the Pierneef exhibition emphasizes a juxtaposition needed to acknowledge differences, but equally on finding a meeting ground for cultural similarity, ancestries, interaction and understanding that exist among different groups in South African. The above mentioned artists are but few of other numerous artists featured in this exhibition. The above have been elaborately dwelled upon because of the level of poignancy generated by their works and their enormous contribution to the history of South African art. However, there are similar great pieces by early twentieth century artists such as, Gerard Bhengu’s undated “Young Zulu woman,” Jan Volschenk “Morning Light in Glen Leith Riversdale,” 1911, and other contemporary artists such as Zen Marie’s “Embassy: the Republic of Us,” George Hallett’s “Jean Turner with Eugene de Kock,” Andrew Verster’s “Holy Fire,” Lindelani Ngwenya’s “Escape from material desires,” and then from Omar Badsha’s 1958 “Artist in the Landscape,” among many others. More voices echoed from the Rorke’s Drift and DRUM magazine legends in the fifties, Ernest Cole, Santu Mofokeng, David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, Mikhael Subotzky, Penny Siopis, Sue Williamson, William Kentridge and from Ndebele art. And from many more others the voices echoed loudest. Needless to mention that the materials range from the traditional mediums of oil, wood, metal, bronze, to more conceptual installations and new media. In this exhibition a muse

Copyright@Ezenwa-Ohaeto Resource Centre, Awka, Nigeria. 109 AJELLS: Awka Journal of English Language and Literary Studies Volume 4 No. 1, 2013 with psychedelic thematic peculiarities was as strong as a conversation with radical stylistic experimentalism. There was a meeting, as well as a melting point, of unusual materials, mind- bending formalism, conceptual depth and postmodernist texts. Inside the exhibition space, another show known as “US” curated by Bettina Malcomess and Simon Njami feature a medley of young South African artists, whose individual stylistics attempt to interrogate the idea of nationalism and sovereignty as provided by the new South African State.

Brief notes on the discussion panel of the ’Pierneef’ show The Pierneef show was followed by a Discussion Panel. The discussion panel which started on October 1 with the session titled “Curatorship: New Ways of Seeing,” was chaired by Andrew Lamprecht. The panellists included Gabi Nqcobo, Hayden Proud, Ricky Burnett, David Koloane and Steven Sack —all of whom are established curators in their own right. The panellist injected new readings into the curatorial text especially as it concerns the new South Africa. The second session titled “Audiences: All Aboard?” interrogated the museum audiences and their impact in the evolving transition of the new museum. Chaired by Zayd Minty, speakers were Vuyile Voyiya, Ayesha Price, Robert Mulders, Annette Loubser and Musha Neluheni. Both the panellists and their audiences struggled to identify the museum audiences in the face of the new rainbow nation. The third session was chaired by Ciraj Rassool under the theme, “Art Museums: Aspirations and Fragmented Realities.” The meanings of the art museum were interrogated. In the face of expansive intellectual erudition that was beginning to creep into concepts of museumization, what is then the fate of South African art museums in the articulation of a sense of purpose and direction? The panellists included Gordon Metz, Irwin Langeveld, Marilyn Martin, Jenny Stretton and Omar Badsha.

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The day was brought to a stop with Albie Sachs’ “Spring is still Rebellious,” being a Sage’s narrative of a holistic history of creativity in South Africa. Sachs’ memoir sounded like high life music of the old, as the audience became enthralled by his mellifluous voice tinged and loaded with memorable historical facts.

The second day, 2 October started with the theme, “Art Criticism and the Media: Sticks and Stones...?” And in keeping faith with the theme, panellists saw themselves throwing sticks and stones to everyone as they critically engage South African art criticism over the years. The audiences hauled back the sticks and stones in response to the almost fisticuff-like engagement of the nature of South African art criticism. Chaired by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, panellists were Gerhard Schoeman, Alex Dodd, Thembinkosi Goniwe, Melvyn Minnaar, Ashraf Jamal, Lloyd Pollak. The second session came with the theme, “Art Education: Status Quo or State of Emergency?” Under this session the future of South African art education was questioned. Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa, Pippa Skotnes, John Roome, Lionel Davis and Zen Marie were the panellists chaired by Jo-Anne Duggan.

The final session was chaired by Riason Naidoo and had panellists Patricia Hayes, Premesh Lalu, Ruth Simbao, Colin Richards, Emile Maurice. This session under the theme, “The Last Word” offered the last but not the least words to the two day panel discussion. These last words were conclusively articulated as a form of communiqué even though they were not intended as such. As I listened to Professor Premesh Lalu mention art and history my mind deduced the final message of their last words: that this panel discussion has challenged us to re-think the interstitial spaces between art, politics and history, that this panel discussion opened up new directions in formulating notions of nationhood using art and history as points of departure, that the discussion

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Conclusion This essay has demonstrated that exhibition strategies can serve as historical inquiry through the time period that the Pierneef exhibition covered: a one hundred years interval. Artists of different historical epochs were assembled to chart a new direction for South African art. Different artists featured in the exhibition have been discussed with a view to locating their works within the larger discourse of socio-political and cultural history of South Africa. In this essay, I have shown that exhibitions can be a tool for anti-colonial struggle. In the end it was obvious that both the Pierneef exhibition and the accompanying panel discussion tried to break away from colonialism and articulate a sense of national ’modernism.’ Both urged for a re-interpretation of clichéd legacies. Above all, they called for a halt to the system of reification and replication that recycled oldies and negated change. The essay has captured the artists

Okechukwu Nwafor, Ph.D Department of Fine & Applied Arts, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka [email protected]

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Works Cited Corrigll, M. Shoddy art journalism and Riason Naidoo’s Pierneef to Gugulective http://corrigall.blogspot.com/2010/09/shoddy-arts-journalism- and-riason.html; visited July 20, 2012. Minnaar, M. It’s our art, warts and all .The Good Weekend, Sunday; July 11, 2010.

Naidoo, R. The making of “1910-2010, from Pierneef to Gugulective. South Africa National Gallery Cape Town: Iziko , 2010. Witz, Leslie, Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool. “ Who Speaks for ’ South African’Pasts”? Paper presented at the South African Historical Society Biennial Conference ’Not telling: Secrecy, Lies and History’ held at the University of the Western Cape 11- 14 July, 1999. Rassool, C. Kronos: Journal of Cape History. “The Rise of Heritage and the Reconstitution of History in South Africa”. August 2000. No. 26. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Volume 5, 1998.

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