(This article was originally published on the 25th of June, 2018)
Asher Gamedze
From going to final year Michaelis exhibition openings to walkabouts and drinking wine at blank galleries, I’ve always hated the art scene. It’s always made me feel really uncomfortable, like it’s impossible to feel good in those spaces. But because of what many Black artists - many of whom I am close to - are trying to do in these spaces, and also what they are trying to dotothese spaces, I still seem to find myself compelled to check out the scene.
Two exhibitions I’ve seen recently – Lungiswa Gqunta’s solo show Qwitha at What If The Word,[1]and shady tactics, a group show curated by Thuli Gamedze at SMAC[2]– seem to confront the uncomfortability and impossibility of being at home in the gallery. In a moment where Black artists are the in thing and are continually having to dance through the threat of being swallowed by, in Thuli Gamedze’s words, “the neoliberal art world, which reproduces new trends but spews the same power-relationships,” both shows seem to present creative and critical insurgent approaches to this conundrum.
Perhaps here, before going any further, it’s useful to get something out of the way: some might read into my piece (due to the fact that Thuli and I are siblings, I have a close relationship with Lungiswa, and I know many of the other artists in the group show) that there is a ‘conflict of interest.’ In short, I would say that it is Black artists’ improvised responses to the historical and social conflicts in which the gallery is implicated, that I am interested in. This positions me in a different way to their work than a ‘removed, expert, objective art critic’. Sylvia Wynter says that the “reinterpretation of this reality is to commit oneself to a constant revolutionary assault against it.” I am with and for this project as are the artists.
Lungi seems to invite us to imagine the possibility of what if (what if) the world burnt?
Under the present societal conditions, when the creative potential of fire has been given new lungs, Lungi seems to invite us to imagine the possibility of what if (what if) the world burnt? Fire, a state of chaos potential renewal unbelievable loss heat violence creative destruction and a chance to begin again, is the state of the nation. How fitting, then, that the opening exhibition in the gallery’s new space suggests to the art establishment at large that it too is liable to go up in flames. Gqunta reminds us, through the nursery rhyme ‘Umzi watsha’, that the house is burning. And through the choking fumes of the petrol pool under the bedframe in one of the rooms, our imaginations run free: imagining, not the shack fire this time, but what might be next: The gallery? Black students, under conditions of militarised repression and chaos, have shown that art(efacts), in fact, are not sacred. If Black homes can burn, so will tyres and boring paintings, and perhaps next the buildings that house and worship them (shout out to Burning Museum!). Fire invokes flux and insists that everything can change. And if all it takes is the act of lighting a match, Qwithaalso points to the precarity, not only of Black homes, but also that of whiteness and its spiritual home, the art gallery.
Callan Grecia’s spray-painted rainbow on SMAC Gallery’s wall and his piece Doomunveil the violent production of citizenship in the post-Marikana era. On the wall, while all the other rainbow colours have their own space, the Black (or dark purple? Forgive me, I’m not an artist) layer appears to have been added at the end, hastily and haphazardly sprayed on top of and between blue and pink. A mere afterthought. Doom, seems to draw connections between a violent computer game of the same name, the insect repellent church incident, the structural violence of private property, and the shedding of Blood on which the mirage of the rainbow in occupied Azania depends. Heavy as the implications are, Grecia’s work, and shady tacticsat large, comes across much lighter. From superstar Sitaara Stodel’s video collage/performance, which playfully portrays the precarious notion of ‘home’ under capitalism, to Katleho Mosehle’s sardonic appropriation of white feminism – both of which are, in part, engaged through the television, the mainstay of many home lounges – humour and poking fun are legitimised as, not only radical spaces of critique and intellectual production, but ones that are familiar and accessible to us all.
Qwitha. . . highlights not only the impending fires of crisis but might point to the horrific reality that many women are continually being burnt by the violence inside homes.
Extending the motif of humour and the familiar, Bonolo Kavula’s work demystifies the production of ‘art’ objects versus ‘craft’ objects, laying bare the class biases that underlie the categorisation. At the Gallery’s expense, she has a laugh. By exhibiting both ‘art objects’ at a ‘craft stall’, and a hilarious video in the style of a youtube instructional, even as the intervention is confined to the cube (not, in this instance, ‘white’), she ridicules the distinction and the institution. Lungiswa also seems to play with the distinction between domestic objects and art objects, insisting that the various dynamics of home – who lives in what type of home, and where, and who does what type of work in the home – is not only an acute political crisis, but is also an important site of creative production. Her title piece, Qwitha, matchstick scrubbing brushes and their burnt markings on the walls, highlights not only the impending fires of crisis but might point to the horrific reality that many women are continually being burnt by the violence inside homes. Mitchell Gilbert Messina seems to work in a similar critical terrain, asking and showing what forms of labour, corporate fuckery and violence ‘The Institute’ (rather than the home in Lungi’s case) is based on. (My reading of) his funny video, A Brief History of The Institute,amplifies the sinister undertones associated with aestheticisation of ‘development’ through its close interlinking with the ‘design’ industry (whose role seems more and more to market a hip, stylish, investment-friendly and socially- and environmentally-sustainable version of contemporary capital!). With the projector perched cynically atop a pile of broken bricks, Mitchell’s work seems to speak back to Simnikiwe Buhlungu’s fugitive fax machine which sits aloof on a number of cardboard boxes. A Loooooong Ass Message, ya dig?, Buhlungu’s intervention-in-absentia references the resistance strategy of the Black fax and intermittently faxes ‘counter-narratives’ into the Gallery, interfering with their communication channels and refusing them the right to write the only history of the institution.
Occupying the Gallery to think, speak, experiment and play with tactics which are improvised responses to the timeless question of ‘what is to be done?’, seems to be one way to flip the space in on itself. In Cape Town, with the City’s unceasing capacity to ‘disappear’ Black spaces, these spatial interventions (which is what these exhibitions are) are just one facet of the historical struggle for space and the autonomy to do our own thing in a settler landscape. In these two interventions there is seems to be an unceasing questioning by the insurgent artists, of themselves and the Gallery space they operate in. And it is, partially at least, from that place of questioning that the creative work emerges. Whether that is through the mode of latent fire or making us laugh, the im/possible question of home – in the Gallery, under capitalism, with our families, (not) in the rainbow, in the fire, in the bed, behind the barbed-wire fence, on the internet, making crafts, in the master’s house, playing while the cat’s away – reminds us that ours is a transient space in the shadows, under construction, and it exists wherever we choose to make it.
Asher Gamedze is a Cultural worker based in Cape Town. He's a writer, loves reading, a 'muso' who organises education work.
[1]See images from the show and Chaze Matlaka’s essay on it at: https://www.whatiftheworld.com/exhibition/qwitha/
[2]See Thuli’s text on shady tactics and some images from the show at: https://smacgallery.com/exhibition/12552/; and see a review of the show by Scott Eric Williams at: https://artthrob.co.za/2018/06/01/throwing-shade-shady-tactics-at-smac/
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