For those who live in, or even near the edges, of the art world, it is easy to forget that the narratives of art history are absent from most people’s reality. In the same way that only a small group of people are particularly interested in scientific paradigm shifts or non-contemporary cinema, most people are entirely unaware of the great confrontations that took place in art in the twentieth century. And more specifically, they really don’t care.
At the same time, however, art is seen by many as something which needs to be properly understood in order to be appreciated. So when it comes to broadening the audience for art in South Africa, this conflict between not wanting to understand and needing to understand becomes a
real problem. As a result, there are a great many people who might enjoy all that art has to offer, but instead keep well away from it.
Of course, understanding has its own rich pleasures. But its absence shouldn’t stop you from experiencing art – or anything else for that matter. Personally, understanding trails experience by relative eons – with which I’m perfectly content. I’ll swim down a river first, and work out where I’ve been later. And if I’m heading for a waterfall, well, I’m not scared, it’s only art.
All of this comes to mind because I’ve just finished writing a review of the show Silent | Listen by avant-garde sound-based activists Ultra-Red. It was a show that I liked, but which others found problematic, both because of its relatively obscure art historical references and the fact that it represents a specifically American reality.
As well as a haunting cacophony of American voices talking about the Aids crisis, the show incorporated specific references to Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting and 4”33’, the four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence which avant garde composer John Cage produced in response. Space prohibits an investigation of that relationship here but if you explored Silent | Listen without that knowledge, much of it would have passed you by. Which is both okay, or not okay, depending on who you talk to.
The existence of the American voices in Ultra-Red’s work also pointed to another problematic dichotomy. We want to see international work, but we also want to see that same work as relevant to our own context. And, certainly if I saw Silent | Listen in a gallery in London or New York, where the avant garde finds audiences more naturally due to those city’s large populations, I doubt that I would give much thought to its relevance. But that might also be some kind of reverse prejudice on my part because, at the same time, I’m seen many cutting edge events in local galleries that would struggle to find space in the United States arts world, where conservatism and radicalism experience far greater – and often politically fueled – conflict than they do in South Africa.
Galleries have many functions, and given the increasing lack of public space in this globalised world, they represent, or are capable of representing, a replacement or substitute for the town hall. Admittedly, it is inevitably a somewhat rarified town hall but they nonetheless make excellent venues for public forums. This is partially because of their highly formalised structures and infrastructures, and partially because the parameters of conversation around art tend to be broader than anywhere else in the culture. If you are talking about crime, as a group of us were, also at the KZNSA a few Mondays ago, in a space where someone has publicly made chocolate moulds of their vulva, you’d imagine there’d be much scope for discussion.
But while the speakers and topics were mostly fascinating, the audience was strangely muted. Perhaps we’ve discussed crime for so many years that it has moved on from the collective dinner table, replaced by the economy and just how poor everyone suddenly is. Or perhaps many people have already made up their minds about crime and criminals. I spoke to one woman who had been physically attacked but who didn’t raise her voice during the forums; she was vehemently in sympathy with Susan Shabangu’s “kill the bastards” comment.
Another successful function took place at Bank Gallery a few weeks ago, where Paul Willemsen from the Brussels-based Argos Centre for Art and Media showed a quintet of fascinating films. Billed simply as non-narrative-based films, rather than video art, the works were – and here I am being allegorical more than literal – the work of art film-makers, rather than artists making films. It might seem like a silly distinction but the level of technical skill on display – even though it is mostly invisible – is absent from most of that discipline we call video art.
And I am reminded of that old chestnut about Picasso being able to paint perfect realism. The truth is that film-makers – whether they are artists, directors or the countless teenagers around the planet who are embracing digital video in their bedrooms– need to learn to make films before they can make films. Pointing a camera at a clever idea is only occasionally enough, and the vast gulf between this small fragment of the Argos archive and so much contemporary audiovisual expression, is testament to that truth.