Azola Dayile and Vusumzi Nkomo
November 2019 saw us one evening at the Goodman Gallery in Rosebank – our first time – to witness the opening of Sam Hlengethwa’s Joburg Selected exhibition, on show from 12 October to 9 November. Upon arrival & entry into the white, empty, taciturn showroom – and thinking of its histories of exclusion both for artist and audience – we did not, however, feel a sense of mis-place. The three-dimensionality and near-real feel of downtown Johannesburg on canvas hanging on the white walls, felt familiar. Like we could, with relative ease, walk into The Kitchener (2019), find a seat at the bar and ask for the usual, as we habitually do. The sounds of Louis Moholo making all the better.
Givent the befitting title of Joburg Selected, Nhlengethwa’s exposition reads as an ode to a city as old as memory, as old as colonial expansion, and the nightmarish insatiable appetite for African gems. Joburg Selected on display at the Goodman Gallery, is a selection of works at the service of and commitment to memory-ing, remembering: the people of and in Jozi, the architecture, and the colors, the textures, the music-sounds of a gigantic concrete jungle, te artist laid eyes and treaded quietly in and around its maze-streets.
We were drawn to the works with no sense of movement, that are not occupied by moving subjects. There’s a stillness, a kind of tranquil element, a calmness (save for a few that hint at the buzz and roar that is synonymous with Jozi) that is quite striking. But we’re interested in them as much as they are deployed in contrast to those that carry a different kind of movement: a certain movement from the past into the future-present, a deracination from a previous time to the current time. This is achieved in the careful placement of monochrome archival photographs in the pieces. These black and white figures are placed next to present day objects (building and people) in a way that disturbs conventional narrative strategies. This pictorial disruption of time (and space) troubles liberal notions of progress; what does development look like in Joburg and by extension, Africa, and Western conceptions of life; how dead are the Dead? How alive are Black people? It is obvious, we’d like to believe, Joburg Selected is a vignette of how present our past is, which is to say, how entangled is the present with the past.
The work’s commitment to memory, remembering the past (mining the gems of the Archive) becomes interesting to read when it is read against Nhlengethwa’s commitment to archiving the present, so that present narratives can be retrieved in the future. This is political in as much as it is artistic (though a separation of the two should always be avoided). The Timer is concerned about Joburg’s cultural sites/spaces and how they continue to disappear, owing to the ‘contemporary’ colonial expansionist project known as gentrification.
In the age of digital manipulation of images and oversaturation of photographs that look too-good to be true, Hlengethwa’s aesthetic intervention will never get old: deftly applying paint on photographs magnifies meaning while simultaneously beautifying the image. This technique allows us to re-imagine the image, to think of and beyond the limitations of the photograph (to go where a photo won’t go, that is, at the excess of the meaning of the photograph) as a thing that should represent reality. This (re)imagining of the real (upsetting our standard knowledge of the objective and concrete real), is the genius of the ‘mixed media on canvas’ pieces: the photographs of buildings have been blown up and deep etched, pasted on a canvas, and Tat’ Sam chose to re-do, which is to say, paint the background (and sometimes foreground) on the canvas, giving the pieces a surreal effect, thus inviting us to think about the productive dialogue between photography and ‘fine arts’, an experimental avant-garde-ism central to the Black radical aesthetic tradition in general, and Jazz in particular, and undermining any efforts to separate, or put differently, to think of photography as antithetical or incompatible with ‘fine arts’.
The question of the archive
In ‘I Love Jozi’, Park Station, J.S.E in Winter, The Marc (all 2019), as well as Inspired by Romare Bearden and Ernest Cole (2018), the people/figures painted by Tat’ Sam appear, or stand, next to monochrome images that have been borrowed from the ‘Archive’ (I Love Jozi and The Marc feature color photographs that look like they were taken ‘recently’).
Here, the artist problematizes Cartesian logic and the notion of time as linear (and space as fixed), using archival photo materials as leitmotif, in his imagination of the ‘contemporary’ Johannesburg melting-pot: preoccupied only/mostly with the Black who in the histories of the city has had to occupy designated spots at specified times, carrying with them identifiers that proved ‘belonging’, even if only for a few hours as mine boys, newspaper men, kitchen girls or the homeless who today opt for sidewalks/pavements as night-beds.
There is an interesting relation between architecture and bodies in Joburg Selected, both as objects that carry complex narratives. According to Nhlengethwa, “the buildings become the persona here.” The artist seems to suggest that the stories that bodies tell and carry, can be told and carried by these buildings. And both, the bodies and buildings, are both vulnerable to the violent colonising whims of racial capitalism. The buildings “have their own stories and relate to our history in various ways.” Therefore keeping the memory of these buildings, the artist seems to suggest, is as equally important as portraying/narrating the stories of the people. “When you look at what photographers like David Goldblatt did in the past, some of those structures no longer exist, but they’re on record. It’s about memory, more than just architecture”.
The absence of bodily representation of whiteness, even though we aren’t oblivious to whiteness’ presence in other ways, is a curious question. Johannesburg, as we have come to know, is the consequent result of a ‘discovery’’ by white capital that catapulted migrant labour in Southern Africa. Park Station is a key factor, with disposable Black labour arriving daily in Joburg having been ferried long hours by bus or train. By bringing these monochrome photographs back into the ‘present’ and foregrounding them as the main people in the pieces they appear in speaks to a persistence on centering Blackness (and/or Black people) and history as an incessant event.
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