Art Profile: Stephen Sack

Michael Coulson

It’s ironic that one who worked so long to subvert apartheid now operates from a building that was once the head office of that bastion of separate development, the Johannesburg Housing Department. On the ground floor, next to the lift that leads up to Stephen Sack’s office, is a 1980s plaque commemorating that use, replete with old-era names like Venter, Du Toit, Burger (a brace of them, in fact) and Du Toit. The building itself is somewhat older, and Johannesburg’s director of arts, culture and heritage occupies a pleasantly old-fashioned, 1950s-type spacious wood-panelled office.

Not that spacious implies uncluttered. The room is stacked with objects of art, prominent being the proposed maquettes for the sculpture of legendary jazz muso Kippie Moeketsi it’s planned to erect outside a re-opened Kippie’s.

Sack’s father is the well-known architect Monty Sack, so he grew up in a creative environment. He studied fine art, art history and art education at Wits and Unisa, and worked for a while as a teacher, but he made his name as curator of The Negelected Tradition.

This revisionist historical survey of SA art, which he says converted him from a political activist to a cultural activist, ran at the Jo’burg Art Gallery from November 1988 to January 1989. Together with Ricky Burnett’s Tributaries, it awakened white art lovers to the realisation that alongside the Pierneefs, Wennings and Coetzers was a whole parallel world of black artists, the Mohls, Pembas, Ngatanes and Sekotos, of which they knew nothing -- or, at any rate, next to nothing.

Subsequently Sack curated a number of exhibitions, including the People’s Park Pace Building, seen in several SA museums and in Sweden, and The African Carousel, which he describes as a functional merry-go-round made by 10 artists for the Oliewenhout museum in Bloemfontein, from 1994-1996. His initial five-year contract in Jo’burg expires at the end of this year, though it may be renewed by mutual consent.

Sack says his directorate has been housed in a number of municipal departments but seems to feel that its present home within the department of community development is appropriate. The department’s main mandate is to overcome social poverty, and the arts are a major tool in that effort.

Sack points out that few cities in Africa, and indeed within SA, have a directorate like his.

His brief naturally covers more than the visual arts. For instance, he says the city takes great pride in the achievements of the Jo’burg (previously Civic) Theatre, and recognises the importance of arts, culture and -- especially -- heritage -- more specifically, the heritage of the previously disadvantaged.

But given the seemingly limitless demands on the public purse to provide far more basic services, how does a municipal authority justify spending money on what many see as luxuries, and what is its role in the process?

He concedes that a municipality’s primary role is the provision of basic infrastructural services. In cultural services, it must be more of a catalyst, developing partnerships with the community and private sector. The Jo’burg Theatre, for instance, receives a R15m annual grant and generates about R16m in box office revenue, so in effect is a 50:50 public:private partnership.

And the planned new R60m theatre in Soweto has been made possible by making building it a condition of granting the rights to a major new property development.

In terms of the visual arts, he sees the role of the public sector as providing an enabling environment -- buildings and staff. The institution must then develop its own resources -- as, he says, Clive Kellner did at the Jo’burg Art Gallery, presenting exhibitions like Africa Remix.

In effect, though, this means that Sack is basically a fund-raiser -- as, he says, he was when he was working in national government.

“The important thing is the project, whatever it may be. But we’re never fully budgeted at the start of the year. We always have to work on keeping existing partnerships going and finding new ones.”

Optimistically, Sack believes that, if you devise a viable project, sponsorship and funding generally fall into place. Last year’s Africa Day, for instance, started with an R800 000 allocation but ended up with R13m.

“It can be a harrowing process, but by the end of the day if it’s a good project that excites people, sponsors will generally emerge.”

While this may have been true in more prosperous times, it will surely be a much bigger challenge in a recessionary phase. Companies are already cutting back on arts spending as a “soft” way of making economies.

He points out that his is by no means the only directorate that has to find innovative sources of revenue, citing the public:private partnership that’s redeveloping the old Paterson Park sports facility in Norwood, which is being extended to incorporate the old Spark! art space, new home of the Jo’burg Art Bank.

There’s also potential to redeploy existing underused assets. Here, he mentions the old mobile library buses, which the Transport Museum’s chief curator Peter Hall (son of John Hall, founder of the museum) is converting into mobile museums that will be taken to poor communities all over the city.

And a major achievement is the public art policy, whereby all infrastructure projects costing more than R10m must agree to spend part of the budget -- ideally, 1% -- on art. This will apply, for instance, to all the Bus Rapid Transit Stations, so will bring a lot of art to the old Townships.

The Kippie Moeketsie statue is in fact part of this initiative.

“We’ve created more public art in the past three years than in the entire previous history of the city. And much of it commemorates political figures ignored or vilified by the previous regime, like the Sisulus.”

To Sack, the art scene created space for a nonracial community under apartheid, laying an important basis for the new SA. Old-era institutions like JAG have already started to shift to embrace black artists, black audiences and a progressive discourse. Whether he renews his contract or not, the pressure to use art as a transformational influence in society will clearly continue.