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Traditions of Abstraction: Feeling Our Way Forward Five Bhobh: Painting at the End of an Era

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Traditions of Abstraction: Feeling Our Way Forward Five Bhobh: Painting at the End of an Era Five Bhobh: Painting at the End of an Era and historical roots. Concepts and experiences of abstraction, nurture evolving ideas about art and selfhood have undergone—and continue to undergo— its place in society, and develop their identities radical reformulation. Artists’ socio-political concerns as artists—all the while working in close proximity Traditions of and the often charged local environment in which to one another. Frank McEwen, Helen Lieros, they worked, I suggest, have also meant that Marshall Baron, Paul Wade, Chikonzero Chazunguza, Abstraction: Feeling expressionist approaches to abstraction became a and, more recently, Misheck Masamvu, are among those vital means for exploring and signalling different kinds individuals who, at different times and in different ways, of freedom, and the interconnections among them: have championed expressionist approaches to Our Way Forward artistic freedom; expressive freedom; individual, social, abstraction as a basis for socially relevant art-making, and political freedom. During the anti-colonial struggles of and had an influential role as mentors.2 Through their the 1950s, through post-independence euphoria and the work, a new set of ideas around the relationship of the growing pains of post-colonial Zimbabwe feeling its way artist to society, and about what art could (or should) by Gemma Rodrigues toward a more just and prosperous future, abstraction look like, took root. in painting has never been ‘art for art’ but always a deeply committed exercise. In spite of this commitment In 1957, Frank McEwen became the Founding Director to the outside world, it is important to note that, of the National Gallery of Rhodesia and opened the unlike in a number of other African nations, painting National Gallery Workshop School, whose first, ‘Now you should find your own way, by gestural, ‘free’ brushstrokes; non-naturalistic colours; was never promoted as a vehicle for articulating a modernist-inspired experiments were in oil on canvas. how to do things in order to develop.’ revelling in the materiality of paint, canvas, paper and national identity. Instead, painting (as well as other McEwen introduced new concepts of painting other substances; and lyricism combined with a general art forms, including writing and drama) largely which were dependent upon an interiorised concept Thomas Mukarobgwa, artist (1924-1999) serious-mindedness—came to feature powerfully, and in constituted a space where individuals worked out of the self, and stressed the need for artists to distinctive ways, in this small corner of Southern Africa. their own relationships to the world around them. ‘reach inside themselves for the source of their creativity.’ 3 ‘... you have to have harrowing fights and Gestural styles, ‘free’ brushstrokes, and thick, hair-raising panga duels with the language From Thomas Mukarobgwa’s oneiric experiments with In Zimbabwe, twentieth and twenty-first century impasto surfaces became signature visual tropes before you can make it do all that you want oil paint during the 1960s, and Marshall Baron’s ‘drip’ abstraction represented a culturally hybrid approach of the Workshop School. By signifying spontaneity it to do.’ 1 paintings or Helen Lieros’ densely textured canvases of to art-making. Artists absorbed globally circulating and an intuitive process, these expressionist approaches the 1970s, to Wallen Mapondera’s and Portia Zvavahera’s ideas about art and self-expression and re-made were seen as offering a window into the inner emotional Dambudzo Marechera, writer (1952-1987) deeply personal experiments with materials, colours, them according to local visions and demands. and cognitive world of the artist. The idea of ‘painting and imagery of the mid-2010s, expressionist approaches These interpretations sometimes mingled modernist from within’ also privileged new ideas about originality. As the exhibition Five Bhobh attests, painting in to abstraction have provided successive generations approaches with existing indigenous ideas about In this light, art not only provided an index of an individual, contemporary Zimbabwe and its diasporas is of Zimbabwean artists with ever new and flexible creativity, artistic identity, and spirituality. Over time, but also of the self as the source of art that was as dazzlingly plural in its methods, ideologies, ways to mediate the relationship between self and the a constellation of key mentors and institutions have singular and distinctive as the individual who and thematic concerns. This essay offers a preliminary external world. In the varied contexts of Zimbabwe’s shaped and re-shaped these approaches to art-making created it. In the words of Thomas Mukarobgwa, look at one particularly influential and enduring complex history, this external world has been notably and ideas about art. At Harare’s National Gallery a beneficiary of the Workshop School and one of approach toward painting within that mix, marked by the imprint of state power; the exigencies of School and BAT Workshop School; the Art and Design Zimbabwe’s first internationally recognised painters: starting from the mid-twentieth century: abstraction. urban and rural life; and contested ideas about cultural department of the Harare Polytechnic; the National Within this category, I focus on how an expressionist Gallery in Bulawayo; and Gallery Delta, artists could strand in painting—characterised, for example, embark upon technical and formal experiments involving 1 F. Veit-Wild and E. Schade (ed.), Dambudzo Marachera (1952-1987): Pictures, 2 Disclosure: I am among Lieros’ former students. Poems, Prose Tributes, Harare, Baobab Books, 1988. 3 S.L. Kasfir, Contemporary African Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 1999. 70 71 Traditions of Abstraction: Feeling Our Way Forward Five Bhobh: Painting at the End of an Era landscapes of local artists. Responding to a We want to do something absent, conservative critic in the local newspaper in 1969, which you can bring from your mind Baron wrote: into your eye, and you talk with it until the last of your work and you can say, Finally, just for the record, I can draw. ‘Yes, I’ve finished.’ And that work which I do not claim to do so especially well, you finish can also say ‘yes’ to you because my interest is not to render when you have finished it in the way images from the phenomenal world, you feel, because it has been created but to create an iconography of the by your spirit ... when you’re trying imagination, to find viable plastic to do work on behalf of someone, metaphors for the inner world – that’s not yours.4 the hopes, loves and experiences which constitute the ultimate The gestural styles and non-naturalistic realities for us all … 6 approaches that typified painting in the National Gallery School could not help but assume strident Baron played an active role in liberal politics. political connotations in the context of Rhodesian He was an outspoken critic of racial white settler society. The settler state did not view segregation and, as a lawyer, frequently its African subjects as intellectually, culturally, represented clients of colour. In this context, Marshall Baron, Sonne, 1971. Oil on canvas, 106 x 106 cm. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare. or artistically equal. Nor did they view them as Thomas Mukarobgwa, Baboonman, 1971. Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 cm. Image courtesy of the it is easy to see how Baron’s engagement National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare. equal human beings, with inner lives, desires, with abstraction was not simply an beliefs, and yearnings worthy of recognition artistic exercise but a choice based in and respect. In both form and content, expressionism and abstraction, using them to give visual form to the complementary relationship he Bulawayo-based Rashid Jogee, who freely cites Baron’s example this style of painting foregrounded African a modern, liberated self. As the twentieth century pastor and perceived between political progressiveness as a powerful influence. Jogee’s massive, gestural, colour-field interiority and was profoundly disturbing to anti-colonial activist Thompson Samkange once said: ‘Are we not and artistic experiment. For Baron, compositions share many qualities with Baron’s later works but the settler order. Unsurprisingly, McEwen was also men?’ 5 The example of Mukarobgwa’s expressive line and white Rhodesia’s political and cultural evoke a sense of boundlessness and freedom that is particular blacklisted by the Rhodesian government and dream-like depictions of the world finds resonances in the work conservatism were intimately intertwined. to Jogee’s oeuvre (p. 218). Jogee’s paintings’ typical lack of eventually stepped down as Director of the of many later artists, including Luis Meque, Ishmael Wilfred, Remaking society and exploring new artistic representational elements carries within it the suggestion of a National Gallery. Indeed, anti-colonial thinking Misheck Masamvu, Portia Zvavahera, and Mostaff Muchawaya. territory were both projects that could be seen pre-verbal, universalising visual language—one which has the of the preceding decades had been closely linked to have advanced together. During the time of capacity to transcend the divisions of race and defy the social with new understandings and ways of expressing Active during the same period as Mukarobgwa, the Bulawayo- sanctions and censorship, Baron sought to conventions and repressive racial laws that kept like-minded African subjectivity. The Workshop School’s based activist, lawyer, and painter
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