South Africa: the art of a nation

In his review of Martin Scorsese’s Silence, John Patterson comments that ‘Christianity is one of the Big B’s of violent colonial intrusion – Bullet, Bottle, Bacillus, Bible.’ (‘A test of faith’, J. Patterson, guide 31 Dec – 6 Jan 2017) This succinctly outlines the issues with which the curators of South Africa: the art of a nation have to grapple when it comes to exploring the influences later religions have had on South African art. They do so with rather more nuance, subtlety and grace than Patterson manages in his review.

As is the case with Shusaku Endo’s novel on which Scorsese’s film is based, artists in South Africa exploring aspects of religion have done so within their own culture and, as a result, what we view and discuss cannot simply be dismissed, as Patterson seeks to do, as alien poisons. The curators of South Africa: the art of a nation tackle these complexities from several angles. They showcase artworks indicative of indigenous beliefs as well as positive examples from later religions of engagement with the Arts, whilst also balancing confessional artwork with art which questions religion from within the belief system of the religions questioned.

This is the first major UK exhibition to use objects to tell the story of South Africa’s art heritage and history over 3 million years, including rock art images which often depict shaman (or spiritual leaders) entering trance-like states while dancing, giving them the power to heal the sick, overpower evil spirits and summon rain. This modest but astonishing exhibition includes some of the earliest known human artworks and iconic pre-colonial art from southern Africa. It also explores the impact of nonAfrican artistic influences and traditions from the 17th century onwards, showcases 20th century apartheid ‘resistance art’, and celebrates the contemporary art of post-apartheid transformation.

When the history of modern art in South Africa is examined, as here, the influence of Christian missionaries cannot be overlooked. Rasheed Araeen described Ernest Mancoba as ‘Africa’s most original modern artist’ and noted that ‘he enters the space of modernism formed and perpetuated by the colonial myth of white racial supremacy and superiority and demolishes it from within.’ Mancoba’s missionary training, however, was typical for ‘that magnificent generation’ (to use Mancoba’s own words) of ‘pioneer modern artists in South Africa that included Gerard Sekoto (a close friend and colleague of Mancoba) and George Milwa Pemba.’ ‘These artists were all, to a greater or lesser extent, educated and Christianised members of a small but influential African middle class that espoused the Victorian liberal values inculcated by their missionary training.’

Rather than highlighting the work of Mancoba, this exhibition shows the influence of the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift, which together with Polly Street Art Centre and the Thupelo workshops, was ‘vitally important to the development of new artists.’ The legacy of these centres ‘lives on in South Africa’s contemporary art scene.’ (South Africa the art of a nation, J. Giblin & C. Spring, Thames & Hudson / The British Museum, 2016) Rorke’s Drift ‘became one of the most important institutions for black South African artists during apartheid,’ with Emma Dammann, Lionel Davis, BongiDhlomo, Avhashoni Mainganye, Philda Majozi, Kasigo Patrick Mautloa, AzariaMbatha, Elizabeth Mbatha, Gordon Mbatha, John Muafangejo, Sam Nhlengethwa, Anthony Nkotsi, Mpolokeng Ramphomane, Joel Sibisi, Paul Sibisi, Velile Soha and Vuminkosi Zulu all having taught or studied there. Works by Davis, Muafangejo and Nhlengethwa are all included within the exhibition, as are works from Helen Mmakgabo Sebidi and the Siyazama Project which utilize Christian imagery in the context of struggles with apartheid and HIV/Aids.

Rorke’s Drift was far from being a one-off however. Sister Pientia Selhorst of the Congregation of the Precious Blood as well as other Christian missions, including the Ndaleni Teachers’ Training College and Mariannhill Art School, all made their contribution towards the provision of access to opportunities for art education.

As a means of exploring the positive and negative legacies of Christianity in South Africa, the curators examine the work of Jackson Hlungwani and Willem Boshoff. Hlungwani was ordained in the African Zionist Church and founded New Jerusalem, a church at the site of an ancient hilltop settlement where he carved monumental wood sculptures of animals, warriors and Biblical figures. His Christ with football indicates the essential humanity of Christ, as a man for all peoples. Boshoff’s Bad Faith Chronicles skewer thirty-six very small baby dolls through the heart, like insects, labelled and displayed on a collector's chart. The labels bear the names of Old Testament nations who had lost their land and lives in ancient Israel. Below each collection is a Bible in an official South African language, opened at Psalm 111:6, which in an English translation reads: "He has given His people the power of His works, giving them the lands of other nations.” Boshoff’s work is ‘an angry response to the way in which Christian churches colluded with the apartheid regime, and to how the Bible was used to justify apartheid.’

Fiona Rankin-Smith has noted that ‘the immense and often unfathomable topic of faith is frequently debated in the public sphere in South Africa’, including its political history. The 2006 Figuring Faith exhibition that she curated provided multiple depictions of the symbols, people and places associated with belief. William Kentridge, whose work features in South Africa: the art of a nation, spoke at the opening of Figuring Faith saying that the works showed that ‘we are incurably en route’ between ‘a quotidian, every day reality and the world of mystery and transcendence beyond.’ This journey is ultimately what is depicted in South Africa: the art of a nation. The very activity of making the work’, Kentridge suggests, ‘involves the artist in a journey of going from what is known to what is glimpsed at, half understood and tentatively approached within the work.’ (Figuring Faith, ed. F. Rankin-Smith, Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg, 2006)    

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Soweto Gospel Choir - Thina Simnqobile.

Europe’s openness about religious images has grown out of the Christian tradition

'Europeans may believe that in defending free speech – including contentious religious cartoons – we are standing up for human rights won since the French Revolution, but this is not strictly true.'

Jonathan Jones, writing about Art Below's Stations of the Cross exhibition at St Marylebone Parish Church (an exhibition which features work by commission4mission's Christopher Clack), notes that: 'Europe’s modern openness about religious images has grown naturally out of the Christian tradition itself.'

As a result, 'Europeans should recognise, when we rightly defend the right to offend, that for inheritors of the sensational tradition of Christian art, it is actually quite easy to say that artists have the right to do what they want to religion. Even the church agrees on that, as it always has.'

While this is a valid and important corrective, Jones will also be well aware of the propensity within certain streams of Christianity to protest against the right to offend. In his article he mentions Andre Serrano's Piss Christ, a cibachrome print of a crucifix submerged in urine, which 'became a hate object for cultural and religious conservatives in 1980s America.'

Yet, as he rightly suggests, Christians are as 'likely to embrace the outrageous image as they would a lamb strayed from the flock. 'Jesus,' he quips, 'how can you offend these people?' In his excellent talk on faith and contemporary art entitled 'Icons or Eyesores?' Alan Stewart does precisely that in relation to Serrano's Piss Christ:

'For me the real power of the piece is that it encapsulates a Christ who comes into the filth and refuse of the world, who himself is rejected, expelled like a body fluid. God in the refuse of life; dignifying it; sitting with us in solidarity. Allowing himself to become contaminated with the fall-out of life.'

Some years ago Philip Ritchie, Paul Trathen and myself led several courses entitled The Big Picture exploring faith and popular culture. In one session we considered the pros and cons of Christian protest or engagement in relation to controversial portrayals of Christ. In the 1970’s and 80’s films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ resulted in thousands of Christians demonstrating outside cinema’s while Christian organisation’s like the National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association headed by Mary Whitehouse lobbied for these films to be banned. However, the release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, although it dealt with similarly controversial material for Christians, did not result in mass protests. Instead, through seeker events, bible studies, websites and booklets Churches encouraged discussion of the issues raised by the film while clearly contesting the claims made about Christ and the Church.

We noted that the protests often did not tally with the content of the films and displayed a lack of understanding of the films, their stories and meaning. As Richard Burridge, Dean of King’s College London, has said 'those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were “embarrassingly” ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message.' Life of Brian portrayed the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced this stereotype. The Church had to relearn that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites etc. that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised which made use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims.

This brings us back to Jones' comments that, following the Iconoclastic controversy, 'When it comes to portraying God and Jesus, there never were many restrictions in Europe ... Artists were not only permitted but encouraged by the Church to depict Jesus in the most shocking ways they could.' This approach has helped to develop 'Europe’s modern openness about religious images' but has grown naturally out of the Christian emphasis on 'the humanity and suffering of a god brought down to Earth' or, as Stewart puts it: 'a Christ who comes into the filth and refuse of the world, who himself is rejected, expelled like a body fluid. God in the refuse of life; dignifying it; sitting with us in solidarity. Allowing himself to become contaminated with the fall-out of life.'

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Kanye West - Jesus Walks.

Lou Reed RIP

'With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example.' (Rolling Stone)

'No songwriter to emerge after Bob Dylan so radically expanded the territory of rock lyrics. And no band did more than the Velvet Underground to open rock music to the avant-garde — to experimental theater, art, literature and film, to William Burroughs and Kurt Weill, to John Cage and Andy Warhol, Mr. Reed’s early patron ...

he seemed to embody downtown Manhattan culture of the 1960s and ’70s — as essential a New York artist as Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen. His New York was a jaded city of drag queens, drug addicts and violence, but it was also as wondrous as any Allen comedy, with so many of Mr. Reed’s songs being explorations of right and wrong and quests for transcendence.' (Washington Post)

'As an English major at Syracuse University Reed fell under the sway of the poet Delmore Schwartz, and, as a result, his focus has frequently been more literary than musical. While most songwriters from Reed's generation were inspired by folk songs and blues music, Reed's influences were the Beat writers like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs.' (Gadfly Online)

'Reed's more profound ambition was to use rock's immediacy as a vehicle for a certain kind of literary approach. "Let's take Crime and Punishment and turn it into a rock'n'roll song," he said. As well as Dostoevsky, his heroes included Raymond Chandler, Hubert Selby Jr, William Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe. His later career included collaborations with artists from various fields, including theatre pieces with Robert Wilson, films with Wim Wenders and works with the composer Laurie Anderson, who was his companion for the last 20 years.' (The Guardian)

'Many of the [Velvet Underground's] themes — among them love, sexual deviance, alienation, addiction, joy and spiritual transfiguration — stayed in Mr. Reed’s work through his long run of solo recordings. Among the most noteworthy of those records were “Transformer” (1972), “Berlin” (1973) and “New York” (1989) ...

“Heroin” ... treated addiction and narcotic ecstasy both critically and without moralizing, as a poet or novelist at that time might have, but not a popular songwriter.' (The New York Times)

'Quite simply, the [Velvet Underground and Nico] had no real precedent in popular music. While the most of the rock world was busy extolling the liberating possibilities of drugs and free love, Reed’s songs saw past the scene’s carefree facade to the nervous junkie waiting for his dealer on a Harlem street corner, the whip-wielding dominatrix in an underground dungeon, and the weary society girl crying alone in her room after the party had ended. The music was just as distinctive, ranging from the sweet, wistful folk-pop of “Sunday Morning” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” to the propulsive Stonesy rock of “Run, Run, Run” and the ear-splitting dissonance of “European Son.”

... 1969’s self-titled third LP marked another abrupt shift in the group’s approach. Ballad-heavy and spare, the record was perhaps the band’s cleanest, most straightforward showcase for Reed’s strengths as a songwriter, climaxing with “Pale Blue Eyes,” a haunting, ethereal tune that ranks among Reed’s most beautiful vocal performances.' (Variety)

'The moments of brilliance were usually those most likely to lose him his following, such as a song-cycle of epic morbidity titled Berlin (1973) ... Street Hassle (1978), The Bells (1979) and The Blue Mask (1982) all contained pieces in which he stretched himself in interesting directions, but with New York (1989) and Magic and Loss (1992) he hit his full stride once more, the songs Dirty Blvd and What's Good proving his continuing ability to invest the two-chord rock'n'roll song with an irresistible freshness.' (The Guardian)

'Berlin is a song cycle that uses the decadence of its namesake and some Brecht/Weill-esque orchestrations to tell a story of two psychically damaged people and their doomed relationship ...  Far from the rock-star poses of Transformer, Berlin is lyrically and musically frank and blunt. The arrangements move from sophisticated, arch orchestration to naked-sounding acoustic sparseness, but the words are uniformly unflinching in their depiction of violence, addiction, and desperation. Not for the faint of heart, Berlin is a harrowing journey through the aforementioned tribulations, and one of Reed's most unusual, demanding, but ultimately rewarding albums.' (CD Universe)

'The Blue Mask, one of Lou Reed's bona fide masterpieces. Sparse and unflinching, the album takes on such harrowing themes as self-abuse, mental decay, powerlessness, and heroin addiction; and yet still manages to find some tranquil moments of beauty amidst the chaos.' (The Modern Word)

'Lou never got more intense and soulful than on The Blue Mask. It’s one of the toughest, truest, funniest albums about husbandhood ever made. Lou’s fallen in love, but he finds it just scares the hell out of him. As he sings, "Things are never good / Things go from bad to weird."' (Rolling Stone)

'New York (1989), Reed’s dispatch from the crumbling necropolis of the late Koch era, the city of AIDS and Howard Beach and Tawana Brawley. This is Reed as a cranky New York moralist, fulminating over his morning Times ...

My favorite Lou Reed record is Magic and Loss, the elegiac 1992 album inspired by the death of Reed’s friend, songwriter Doc Pomus. Since I heard the news about Reed this afternoon, I’ve listened several times to “Cremation,” in which Reed laments his friend’s demise and envisions his own cremation. “The coal black sea waits for me me me/The coal black sea waits forever,” Reed sings. It’s one of Reed’s loveliest songs — listen to Rob Wasserman’s moaning double-bass — and one of his saddest. But Reed allowed himself a dark chuckle in the face of death, a joke that held a hint of solace: “Since they burnt you up/Collect you in a cup/For you the coal black sea has no terror.”' (Vulture)

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Lou Reed - Caroline Says II.