Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World 9781474299664, 9781474299688, 9781474299671

Citation preview

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Also available from Bloomsbury Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World, edited by Raminder Kaur and Parul Dave-Mukherji Beauty and the End of Art, Sonia Sedivy The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic, Monique Roelofs The Public Sphere from Outside the West, edited by Divya Dwivedi and Sanil V

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World Daniel Herwitz

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Daniel Herwitz, 2017 Daniel Herwitz has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, Peabody Essex Museum All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Herwitz, Daniel Alan, 1955- author. Title: Aesthetics, arts and politics in a global world / Daniel Herwitz. Description: London, UK ; New York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016039280| ISBN 9781474299664 (hb) | ISBN 9781474299671 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474299695 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Postcolonialism and the arts. | Arts, Modern–21st century–Themes, motives. Classification: LCC NX180.P67 H47 2016 | DDC 700.9/045--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039280 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9966-4 PB:978-1-3501-4163-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-9967-1 eBook: 978-1-4742-9969-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgmentsix 1 Introduction 2 Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain  3 Postcolonial Critique: Frida and Amrita 4 Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa 5 Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga 6 Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi 7 Xu Bing’s Archive of the Past 8 The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes Notes Bibliography Index

1 25 55 69 103 125 149 161 177 185 189

List of Figures 1.1 Diego Rivera, La Grand Tenochititlan, Palacio Nacional, Wikipedia in the Public Domain. 2.1 M.F. Husain, Arjuna with Chariot, Mahabarata 15, 1971, Oil, canvas, 75 × 48 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Gift of the Davida Herwitz Fine Arts, Trust, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

5

33

2.2 India, Tamil Nadu, Shiva as Lord of the Dance (Nataraja), Chola period, c. tenth/eleventh century, Bronze, 69.3 × 61.8 × 24.1 cm (27 1/4 × 24 1/4 × 9 1/2 in), Kate S. Buckingham Fund, 1965.1130, The Art 34 Institute of Chicago. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago. 2.3 M.F. Husain, Ganga Jamna or Mahabarata 12, 1971, Oil, canvas, H: 70 in, W: 120.5 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

40

2.4 M.F. Husain, Maya or Tribal Girl, 1977, Oil, canvas, H: 76.5 in, W: 44.5 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Gift of the Davida Herwitz Fine Arts, Trust, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

42

2.5 M.F. Husain, Cyclonic Silence, 1977, Oil, canvas, ¼ × 96 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

49

2.6 M.F. Husain, Dacoit, made c. 1980–1983, Oil, canvas, 69 × 36 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

52

3.1 Nalini Malani, Frida and Amrita: Old Arguments on Indigenism, 1989, Oil, canvas, acrylic, 36 × 48 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz 57 Collection, Peabody Essex Museum. 3.2 Nalini Malani, In Celebration of Birth, 1988, Oil, canvas, 36 × 36 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, Peabody Essex Museum.

65

List of Figures

vii

4.1 Dumile Feni, In Respect of the Dead, the Living and the Unborn, charcoal, Pretoria Art Museum, photo by Coen C. Oosthuysen, rights courtesy of Marriam Diale.

80

4.2 OMM Architects, Constitutional Court from the Front, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

94

4.3 OMM Architects, Constitutional Court from the Side, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

95

4.4 OMM Architects, Constitutional Court in Braamfontein, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

96

4.5 Walls of the Old Fort Prison, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

97

4.6 Lobby, Constitutional Court, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

98

4.7 Lobby with Bricks from Old Fort Prison, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

99

5.1 Clyfford Still, Ph-401, 1957, Clyfford Still Museum, rights courtesy of Artists Rights Society.

105

5.2 Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Tjapaltjarri, Warlugulong, 1976, Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, rights courtesy of Aboriginal Artists Agency Limited.

106

5.3 Owen Ndou, Gentleman’s Game, Private Collection.

115

5.4 Artist unknown, Job Seeker, Collection of Daniel Herwitz and Lucia Saks, photo by Peter Smith.

116

5.5 Owen Ndou, Recent Sculpture, Private Collection.

122

5.6 Judy Watson, Our Bones in Your Collections, 1997, etching and chine colle, 29.4 × 20.5 cm, 30.0 × 21.1 cm platemark, 40.0 × 27.2 sheet, Mollie Gowing Acquisition Fund for Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998, rights courtesy of Artists Rights Society.

124

7.1 Xu Bing, Background Story 7 Frontal View, photo courtesy of Shinyi Yangart.

151

7.2 Xu Bing, Background Story 7 from the Back, photo courtesy of Shinyi Yangart.

152

7.3 Bushman Diorama, Iziko Museums, Cape Town, photo by Pippa Skotnes.

154

viii

List of Figures

8.1 George Gittoes, Eyewitness, drawing from Rwanda diaries, 1994, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

167

8.2 George Gittoes, Blood and Tears, 1995, photography by Silversalt, image and rights courtesy of the artist.

168

8.3 George Gittoes, Tony Mullingully, 1983, photography by Silversalt, rights courtesy of the artist.

171

8.4 George Gittoes, Fear.com, New York City 2002, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

173

8.5 George Gittoes, Ice Cream Boys Staring Up at Poster of Snow Monkey, 2015, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

174

8.6 George Gittoes, Still from Snow Monkey, Steel with Guns, 2015, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

175

8.7 George Gittoes, Still from Snow Monkey, GulMinah on the Street, 2015, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

175

8.8 George Gittoes, Still from Snow Monkey, Steel and Shazia, 2015, rights courtesy of the artist.

176

Acknowledgments This book was written in the past three years but is really the work of three decades. My first venture in publishing was a monograph on the Indian artist M.F. Husain, written in the late 1980s, and I have been thinking about modern and contemporary art and culture outside of Europe and the United States ever since, while observing the great events of decolonization and nation building give way to the globalization of markets and also of minds. This book is set between those events. I would not have been able to write it without support from the University of Cape Town, which offered me first a Mellon Visiting Fellowship (2010), second a Fellowship to its Humanities Center (2013), and third an ongoing Honorary Research Position (since 2011). Equally important was my stay at WISER (Wits Centre for Economic and Social Research) in Johannesburg (2015), and at the National Humanities Centre, Canberra (2013). Chapter 7 arose on account of a speaking engagement on the Chinese artist Xu Bing at the Inside-Out Museum, Beijing (2013). Without the gracious support of Carolyn Hamilton, Deborah Posel, Shamil Jeppe, Sarah Nuttall, Tim Murray, Shinyi Yang, and Debjani Ganguly, none of these writing and speaking visits could have taken place. I am grateful to these friends and colleagues. Early versions of the chapters of the book were read out at the University of Stellenbosch, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan, leading to all manner of improvements in the thought and writing. The University of Michigan, where I teach, offered me research money on which I lived in South Africa during the fall of 2015, during which time I more or less whisked this book to conclusion. The University of Michigan also awarded me a subvention grant toward the cost of color plates. I thank my home institution for these monies. Persons too numerous to mention over a quarter century have helped with and sometimes prompted the ideas in this book. I will highlight a few of these persons, hoping that they stand in for those not mentioned. First and foremost I want to thank Akeel Bilgrami, who has written on secularism and politics with a trenchant clarity, passion, and cultural knowledge (of India, Europe, and the United States) in my view unequalled in philosophy and politics today. Bilgrami grew up embroiled in the dilemmas of Indian nationalism and brings deep familiarity with the politics of secularism, identity, and disenchantment

x

Acknowledgments

(the title of his recent book) to the writing table. Michael Steinberg and I have conversed over the globalization of opera for decades, and formed together a kind of joint venture with the opera school of the University of Cape Town, where we have presented papers in stereo. I’ve always learned from his work on music and cultural politics. Imraan Coovadia, Lydia Goehr, Catherine Burns, Keith Breckenridge, Pippa Skotnes, Dennis Davis, Kemal Khan, Jean Comaroff, Will Glover, Caroline Turner, Thomas Blom Hansen, Mike Morris, and Lucia Saks (without whom not) have all weighed in to my advantage as this book was being written. George Gittoes, the artist with whom I end the book, has been profoundly helpful, through the example of his work and his buoyant generosity. Dirk Oegema, Omar Badsha, Jude Fowler Smith, Cara Pinchbeck, Rachel Van Blydenstein, and Sean Pyburn have been particularly helpful in the preparation of the images for this book. My editor at Bloomsbury Press, Colleen Coalter, has been wonderful throughout. I dedicate this book to my daughter Sophia Saks-Herwitz, now twenty-one years old and currently living between Cape Town, South Africa, and the United States. Long may she inhabit the global pathways this book is about—with her beauty, effervescence, fascination, funny bone, and irony intact.

1

Introduction

I This is a polemical book, but also an exploratory and questioning one. It is concerned with visual art, music, and culture in diverse parts of the world (from India and Mexico to South Africa, Australia, and China). The book argues that the cultural politics of those places and the various arts produced in them today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, are in many important respects post-postcolonial. The complexity and power of work done today exists in a world that is defined by a set of purposes that have a different logic, equally complex, but with a different set of conditions, opportunities, and problems, from that which occupied the postcolonial world—the world of the postcolony— in the immediate decades of decolonization, and also the writings and theories that arose as part of that world. It is not that the concept of the postcolonial (and with it the concept of the postcolony) has no application to culture today—far from it. The postcolonial world was characterized by nationalism and decolonization, ongoing cultural exclusion, and neocolonial castigation. This led to a demand for the colonial centers of Europe and America to pass beyond those intellectual legacies central to the ideology of colonialism that prevented new postcolonial nations and peoples from taking their place in the throes of modern life. The postcolonial world demanded of the new postcolonial nation that it overcome it’s remnants of abjection and discover who it was and what it could become in the new world of its nationhood. Postcolonial writing and theory developed new concepts of the nation to understand the complexity of the postcolonial state, inventing such enduring legacies as that of subaltern studies. Neocolonialist ideologies have not disappeared. The problematic or failed postcolonial state is still, unfortunately, very much with us, making the postcolonial critique of that state and of the character of its national life still relevant. Indeed if one takes the long view of history it could be said we are still

2

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

early to the age of the postcolonial. Of course the long view also argues that we remain in the middle of the French Revolution (begun with the storming of the Bastille in 1789), and we are still marching with Civil War general Sherman toward American emancipation some hundred and fifty years after he slashed and burned his way to the Georgia sea. From this historical perspective the life of the postcolony will likely be with us for a long time to come—including its malaise, which continues now with global neoliberalism. There is something to this long view of history. Art produced today in such states is still very much embroiled in national disaffection and sometimes-violent cultural politics as we shall see in the case of India’s premier painter, M.F. Husain, in the next chapter. The archive of postcolonial theory remains one of the great achievements of the twentieth century. When Marlow says “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” in Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness he could be said to mean everything from religion to philosophy to the birth and articulation of the sciences, to the rise of European heritage formulations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with their canons of European superiority, to theories of culture and race. A fabulous amount of work has been done over the past half century about the contributions of medicine, biology, linguistics, Enlightenment philosophy, history, and many other fields of knowledge to the articulation of colonial ideology especially in relationship to race—among the central filters through which the colonizer understood the colonized. Racial inferiority was attributed to character, culture, language, skin, and also to agency, for the colonial subject was considered incapable of entering modernity except marginally. These racialist/racist legacies are still very much with us today and still contribute to human dispossession. They are a direct consequence of colonialism, although aided and abetted by neoliberal economic politics and the brutal movement of markets, which generate new forms of degradation. Insofar as art and culture produced today is about race—or needs to be understood in relation to legacies of race—the postcolonial archive of writing and theory remains indispensible, from Fanon to Mudimbe and Mbembe (along with a broad domain of African American writing from Du Bois onward). However, there are many other ways in which the postcolonial archive and also the postcolony have run their course, given how the world has changed since the heyday of decolonization after the Second World War. This book is largely about those changes. We inhabit a world that has largely shifted from the earlier days of nationalism, decolonization, cultural exclusion, and neocolonial castigation to one of global markets and networks. Today’s world is one where young people think of themselves in relation to global culture rather than

Introduction

3

nation-building, where the history of decolonization is largely over or has merged with neoliberal economics, where postcolonial canons of authenticity central to the process of decolonization have lost their relevance or are widely disbelieved or ignored by young people, where the project of producing a new and modern art for the incipient and rising postcolonial nation is pretty much out of date. When nation-building remains on the scene of history, it is a project associated as much with transitional culture—the democratization of nations across Latin America and also South Africa that occurred around the time of the fall of communism in 1989—as it is with anything postcolonial. Chapter 4 is about the transitional culture of South Africa that arose exactly at this moment, in the wake of the collapse of communism, which triggered the transition to the new democratic state. The chapter suggests that the South Africa of the transitional moment (a moment still continuing today) needs to be understood as postcolonial in certain respects but is closer to the emergent democracies (from authoritarian/fascist rule) of Latin America than anything postcolonial in other respects. Which is why of course one of the chief sources for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996–2000), among the central events of its transition to democracy, was in the Chilean Rettig Report of 1991— The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report—detailing human rights abuses under the Pinochet regime (1973–1990). While Chile was at one point in its history a colony of Spain, and therefore has a postcolonial history, this history began nearly as early as that of the first postcolonial country, America. In Chile’s case independence arrived in 1818, in America’s 1776. Chile has been a sovereign nation for centuries and its transition to democracy cannot rightly be described as postcolonial in much of a meaningful sense. As is often the case with detailed analysis, a number of concepts are required to get the picture right rather than any overriding single concept. The postcolonial world produced brilliant art. The modernism of M.F. Husain, Diego Rivera, and one generation later of Nalini Malani—painters whom I will discuss in this and the next two chapters—fits into this world. It was a world in which the Indian, or Mexican, or Ghanaian nation was just emerging, and for the first time in history, a world in which the demand of culture was to produce a new form of art capable of giving voice, and vision, to this national project. The link between modern art and postcolonial culture is central to modern art when modern art is properly understood as a global set of adventures rather than a single, European one called modernism, rendering all others peripheral. And so the first task of this book is to limn that project—of modern art arising at the postcolonial moment in Mexico, India, and other places across the globe.

4

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

In order to track how the world has changed since those days, one must first be very clear what that modern/postcolonial moment was all about. I turn to it now.

II There are I think three concepts most central in detailing the link between modern art and the postcolonial world, concepts which also show how modern art outside Europe differs from European modernism. These concepts are best introduced by example. And so, to take an example, Diego Rivera, the great Mexican artist, arrived in Europe from Mexico in 1907 and remained until 1920. Living mostly in Montparnasse, he befriended Alberto Giacometti, Ilya Erenburg, Chiam Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Max Jacob, and others, steeping his work in cubism and, later, Cezanne and post-impressionism. In 1920 the Mexican ambassador to France urged him to tour Italy, which he did, incorporating the Renaissance tableau into his repertoire. Then, in 1921 he returned to Mexico, where he became involved in the Mexican state-driven mural program. For the next thirty years, he covered the walls of palaces, schools, and other public buildings with murals, mostly in fresco, working in Mexico City, Texcoco, Cuernavaca, Detroit, and New York. Political to the core, in 1922 Rivera was involved in the founding of the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, and later that year joined the Communist Party. The murals he painted in the Palacio Nacional depict the Mexican Revolution of 1910 in bold colors, simplified forms, and pre-Colombian/Aztec figures and scenes. In these densely packed monumental works, Rivera fuses the violent tumult of the Mexican revolution with the intensities of the Mexican past, its rituals of blood and sacrifice, dance and war. History becomes in his murals a tableau of pyramid, power, and conquest, grafting the violent energies of the past onto the revolutionary struggle that produced the Mexican nation, which was little more than a decade old upon his return from Europe. In these murals, with their pre-Colombian physiognomy, iconography, and color, the artistic forms of the past become a mythologized origin of a long arc of Mexican power and struggle, lending the revolution a vast temporal lineage. At the moment of the then-new Mexican nation Rivera monumentalizes its claims of sovereignty, independence, and emancipation by causing them to emerge through the unique colors and forms of the past. For Rivera the inexorable, if also shattering, drive of Mexico toward its revolutionary/national future is presaged in pre-Colombian times.

Introduction

5

Figure 1.1  Diego Rivera, La Grand Tenochititlan, Palacio Nacional, Wikipedia in the Public Domain.

The Aztec past was authoritarian, violent, uncompromising, and cruel. Rivera’s work repurposes its brutal power. In his murals that past becomes a time when, long ago, Mexico ruled itself, was as independent, and powerful, as it is becoming again now that it is finally, a nation. By turning to the once-was before the days when colonial rule shattered the identity and integrity of place, Rivera creates in the past a mirror of the present: of what Mexico now again is, and will become. The past is a river of time, lending the present tense its lineage and origin. It is also a mirror of the present, a way of exalting it. And so the past is rewritten, as Fredric Nietzsche said, in light of the concerns of the present, and for the present.1 It is well known that new nations turn to the past to provide themselves with a common origin, a long arc of history to which the diverse peoples comprising the nation can imagine themselves belonging. This began with the nations of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which turned to the past as a heritage: a compendium of exalted, time-tested values and a common origin. That origin, in accord with the heritage formula of the European nation, was thought of as the source of the nation’s future. By finding again the common origin of the nation, the nation was in effect finding its route to the future: its destiny.2 Even the murals Rivera did in the United States in homage to the American automobile worker are infused with the color, form, and iconography of preColombian art. The huge machines of the auto industry become, in Rivera’s murals, oversized Aztec gods, pyramidal in shape, bizarre replications from the past rescaled as icons of capitalist power. The power of the past is almost inevitably

6

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

harnessed in his work to render the present in larger-than-life and incantatory terms. It is to the past that this modernist who lived fifteen years in Paris turns when he returns to his native land to paint its newly minted revolution. The past, bloody, violent, filled with the pain of sacrifice and conquest, becomes a living origin for the emancipatory present. Deracinated of its brutal authoritarianism and social control, the Aztec past lives a second life in fresco as the historical source of Mexico. The turn to the past upon return to Mexico was an essential purpose in Rivera’s painting. This link between the return to the past and the nationalist impulse is the first concept needed to understand how modern art outside of Europe and America is associated with the rise of the postcolonial. It was a purpose that could not have been more different than that of the modernists Rivera befriended and studied in Paris. Modern art in Europe begins in the present tense, which is where it lives. Impressionism lives in the frisson and energy of the city, tracking its crowds, boulevards, department stores, its women with parasols, summer fetes in the Luxembourg Gardens, turning of leaves in the Tuilleries. Impressionism is dazzled by the speed of horses, the arrival and departure of trains, the steam glazing the sky as the train disappears toward a country destination, above all by the day in the country at the boathouses, restaurants, on the banks of rivers, and in the forests outside of Paris, where the city dweller might go for the day, now that the trains of the day can take him there, allowing him to bring home memories on the night train which can then become eternalized by the impressionist’s brush. The impressionist painter loves children in blue dresses, mothers with broad yellow hats, young girls wearing pink bonnets and mauve shawls, the changes light registered on the facades of churches, houses, and country estates. Impressionists painting from the early 1860s to the end of the nineteenth century are bewitched by the prismatic changes in light that can turn even a simple haystack into a kaleidoscopic patina of colors so that the haystack may glow purple, aqua, azure, or yellow-brown as the minute, hour, day, or season changes. Hence Monet’s famous series, which portrays the haystack as a foil for the shifts of light over time that give this humble object its visual timbre. This fascination with light on haystacks, the energies of the city, and with the slowing down of time during those Sundays in the country when lunches were taken at the boathouse and brought home on the evening train to Paris in the form of memory meant the impressionist lived in the vagaries and stream of the present tense, following in effect the famous injunction of the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire to become a “painter of modern life.” In his essay the “Painter

Introduction

7

of Modern Life,” the same year the painter Eduard Manet produced his famous Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) and in a period (1860s) when Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille met while studying under the academic artist Charles Gleyre and began to exhibit together, Baudelaire speaks of the painter as an artist in search of modern life: He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call “modernity”… he makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory …. By “modernity” I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.3

The painter of modern life lives in search of such transitory moments of experience, which he or she captures in brushstrokes. Brushstrokes indeed: Because the painting is composed of brushstrokes that the viewer must visually, actively complete, the scene becomes one into which the viewer is actively immersed. One is immersed in an impressionist picture as one is in the sight of a rainbow appearing unexpectedly after rainstorm, a girl in an orange dress bathed in midday light, a barn knurled and gray against the weak gray light of November, a pair of eagles circling the sky above a green pine forest in early spring. The viewer must formulate from the sketch, the brushstroke, and an ambient play of light a scene, which, because it is impressionistic, seems evanescent even at the moment of its becoming. The impressionist painting bespeaks the quiddity of things, the this-ness of this moment and not another—and its disappearance into the past, or memory. The elongation of time and its foreshortening prove central to the impressionist work. The light will change, the figure will move, and the quality and texture of color will shift. Even if things seem to stop moving, time seems to stop happening, when we play our eyes along the orange sweater of a woman sitting in spring sunshine. The paradox of impressionist painting is that by acknowledging this transience, the moment and its passing become eternalized, captured on canvas for an endless number of viewers. The impressionist painter inhabits the present not the past. The past of Europe is of no interest to his or her work. Indeed when the European past does become thematized in a modernist work it is often in the form of critique. Whereas postcolonial modern art recruits a mythic version of the past in a nationalist impulse, whereas for the postcolonial modern artist the past is an object of desire, indeed of origin, this could not have been more different than the way the past appears in the work of much of European modern art. One might say the critique of the past in paint is an invention of that art. The key figure is Eduard

8

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Manet. Manet’s art is in the first instance about the art world in which he lives. This is a context in which a work of art is at once eternalized in the museum as priceless, auratic, almost an object of secularized religion, and treated as a mere commodity, to be sampled (looked at in a gallery), bought, and sold in a way no different from the things which now populated the new department stores on the grand boulevards of Paris. The price of this otherwise “priceless” commodity was set by the writing of the art critic, the whim and interest of the collector, and by what the gallery owners could get away with charging (what the market would bear). It depended upon the rise of a new middle class, a bourgeoisie keen to celebrate its coming of age by draping its homes with new art. It depended on a concurrent rise in literacy rates so that newspaper and magazine circulation could rise, and the role of the critics could become more important. With the rise of the middle classes the art market began to boom. At the center of this cultural world was the spectacle of life4 and the obsession with looking or what has been more recently called “the gaze.” Populations with new money (the bourgeoisie) wished to appear splendid before others as they mixed and mingled on the boulevards and in the parks. And they wished to take pleasure in surveying, scoping out, studying, and then trying on or trying out everything from dresses to works of art. The term “Baudelaire” used to describe them was that of the flâneur. This being was a distinctively modern person who flitted about in the arcades and parks of Paris, studying the goods in the shop windows of the new department stores, watching the crowds interact from his seat in the café or on a park bench, sometimes trying on new hats, coats, cravats, and shawls. He or she did the same with art. And if it was a he, he also trained his eye on the women of the streets, sizing them up with an eye to an evening’s purchase, perhaps after having imbibed champagne at Folies Bergère, where he reveled in the dancing of women in risqué costumes, kicking and turning, showing more than a bit of crumpet. This same eye for pleasure and purchase he directed to the eternal paintings of the past, which he found in the Parisian museums, and there he took equal voyeuristic delight in the portraits of nudes on the walls, pictures of women luxuriating passively in their nudity, awaiting his gaze with a pliant softness. John Berger in a famous essay5 distinguishes the category of the naked from that of the nude in Western art, the nude being the representational norm. That norm pictures the undressed woman as passive, her body flaccidly awaiting the viewer’s touch, her eyes softly caressing him, saying, I am ready for you at any time, including right now. (The more unusual category of art, Berger argues, is the naked, in which a woman is pictured without clothes but very much her

Introduction

9

self, her body being her own. She directs her attentions to a lover of her own choosing, vibrant, full of erotic subjectivity. Or she is naked and afraid, hounded by unseemly men as in Rembrandt’s famous representation of Suzanna terrified of the elders who are stalking her rather than passively pleased at the unseemly voyeurism of her elders.) In the Parisian life of the nineteenth century these visual objects flow together as things and people to take pleasure in—the prostitute, the dance girl, the mistress, the commodity to be tried on, the work of art in the museum, and an object of contemplation yielding also its frissons of pleasure. A world in which everything is increasingly treated as a commodity, gifting pleasure for those who can afford the price of admission (to the house or prostitution) or ownership (of the work of art). Manet’s painting is designed to actively intervene in this cultural world. And so Manet’s famous Olympia of 1863 is a direct transcription of Titian’s famous Venus of Urbino of 1538. In Titian’s painting a luscious nude reclines on a divan, her head turned toward the viewer in a welcoming gaze, her right hand holding flowers, her left on her sex, as if saying, I will remove this hand when you are ready; you are what I desire and I am yours. She is an overripe pear, passive as fruit, waiting to be activated by the predatory gazes of her viewers. Manet parodies Titian’s painting by grotesquely foreshortening his Olympia, also nude and also reclining on a divan, turning Titian’s pear-shaped Venus into the stunted body of a girl little older than a child. Olympia’s expression is one of something between hostility and indifference, contempt and boredom, perhaps vacuity. Indeed, as is almost always the case with Manet, the more we seek to grasp her expression, the more we must conclude that it permanently eludes us. She is in a sense unknowable. This failure of epistemology is meant to challenge the bourgeois’ expectation that the woman in the picture, like the world at large, is his oyster, that she will indubitably conform to his expectations, confirm his sense that the world is exactly what he wishes it to be, that he may expect to know her perfectly. Olympia is in effect blocking this possessive, all-knowing gaze, motivated by the illusion that the nude in the picture, like the prostitute, can’t wait to be “known.” Olympia’s attitude seems to be: gaze at me if you will, buy me by the hour, but don’t do so under the illusion that I am yours, that your pleasure is shared by me, that I enjoy it, that I am a mere figment of your world. You may purchase my services but I allow you no voyeuristic pleasure. And so the flowers so softly held in Venus’ right hand become a strident image of Olympia’s sex thrust forward into the face of the viewer by a black servant who stands behind her, black servants being a popular fixture in houses of prostitution of the time in virtue of widely held stereotypes about black African sexual prowess.

10

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

The effect of Manet’s picture is to criticize the entire tradition of the nude and its role in the texture of Parisian life. And so the past becomes an object of critique, its legacy in the present a problem that demands intervention, rather than a source of value and identity to be idealized as in Rivera’s work. This is the second way in which the modern art of Europe separates itself from the past rather than reveling in it or depending upon it as source material for its visions of the present. The past is a problem, not a cure. Even more so for the avant-gardes which arise after the First World War and remain in place until the end of the Second World War, or beyond. With Constructivism, De Stijl, Futurism, the Bauhaus, the school of Le Corbusier, avant-garde movements wish to erase the past and begin to construct the future from scratch, with art in the lead. The constructivists, futurists, the Bauhaus, the artists associated with De Stijl all respond to the devastations of the First World War, in which everything that seemed like progress—nationalism, peace treaties between nations, and new technologies—implodes into a world conflagration in which an entire generation of European youths, not to mention their commonwealth compatriots, die in the trenches, consumed by poison gas, cut to shreds by bullets and cannon fire. The Europe of nineteenth-century modernity lies in ruins at which point the avant-gardes arise as a movement dedicated to bringing about radically transformed European futures. At that moment, the 1920s, European modernity seemed fungible; its path could, it was thought, change radically: To the left lay revolution and a future with a classless international society, to the right grandiose images of authoritarian nationalism (fascism) and national domination. Art, wishing to stake the route to the utopian, transformed the future of Europe, and formed itself into movements of artists in solidarity. Art took itself to be the forward flank of utopian historical progress and entered the business of politicizing its experiments in new form and medium, material and narrative, investing these visual innovations courtesy of the avant-garde manifesto, journal, and pronouncement, with political force. Visual experimentation in consort with the position paper or poetic manifesto became art’s way of seeking to place its innovations in the political field: as icons pointing the way toward the radical new future, indeed acts of consciousness raising that would heighten the viewer’s visual sensibilities and make him reflect on his own relation to reality, thus training him for revolution. It was all about bringing the future into being, the past (and present) being the enemy. Tatlin’s monument to the Third International, created in 1922 for the third meeting of the world communist organization, is a riff on the Eiffel Tower, also the leaning tower of Pisa which points a gun (it also resembles a canon) toward

Introduction

11

the future, wishing to catapult history there. A double helix of steel strands ascends toward a form, which is at once vertical and bent at an angle, complete in itself and unfinished, like the work of history toward which it is about to shoot its cannonballs, or didactic pronouncements. Rodchenko’s photographs capture ordinary reality (the side of a building, a woman sitting on a bench with light through slatted windows placing her in a pattern of shadow), in angles so thrilling and new that one feels reality has been delivered to your eyes for the first time. The point is to free the viewer from received patterns of experience, to cause him to become uncertain about where he stands in relation to reality in the photo (where his perspective is), and to instruct him by example that his relation to ordinary reality can radically change, that he is a historical subject capable of seeing, thinking, and inhabiting the present with new eyes, a new mind, in new ways. The avant-garde becomes in the words of Marjorie Perloff a laboratory in which a new relationship to reality may be created and explored.6 This idea of the avant-garde as a laboratory is a guiding mission for the Bauhaus, which is also about actually designing the instruments of the future, through which humanity may live better, and in a higher state of consciousness. The Bauhaus invests its energies in new architecture, furniture, typeface, theater, and almost everything else that would become the building blocks of the new landscape. And here is the second desire of the avant-gardes, to literally build the new future cities, towns, and media of communication based on new design principles that will inevitably, it is believed, improve life. Le Corbusier’s designs for the major cities of the world involved the complete destruction of the city of Paris as we know it and its replacement by a series of high-rise buildings defined by principles of spatial division in accord with work, leisure, dwelling, and circulation. Ironically (and in the case of Corbusier luckily) the very experimental character of the avant-gardes largely precluded their having any major role—at least in the short term—in the design of the future. The Bauhaus ended up furnishing every psychoanalyst’s office in New York. Corbusier’s ideas on the high-rise and city planning became the monumental capitals of Brazil and the Punjab, but more often the dreary housing projects across the United States, not to mention the drab Stalinist apartment blocks found in Eastern Europe, and only now repurposed as designer buildings. As Peter Burger has written,7 it was essential to the avant-gardes that they stood against the institutions of art. An art out there in the trenches of history, wishing to be an icon for the utopian future, aiming to raise consciousness so that viewers would become revolutionary spirits, intending to build that future

12

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

block by block, hardly wished to be contained by the hermetic halls of the museum, where it would become reduced to an object of contemplation and pleasure. Much less did it wish to become a commodity to be bought and sold in galleries—and turned into a commodity by the very bourgeoisie it wished to consign to the scrap heap of the past. Duchamp placed the entire fabric of the museum, its artwork, its aesthetics, its practices of looking and contemplating as the veritable starting point of his Readymades. These objects culled from shops, factories, and sometimes the street during the years 1914–1920 challenged everything about the visual culture of painting and sculpture in museums, and did so through, when exhibited, taking on an uncanny resemblance to canonical works of art. About these romping, duchamping things it was too simple either to say they were or were not art. Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel crashed its way into the sculpture section in virtue of its uncanny semblance to sculpture. A simple wheel stuck into a wooden stool, it has all the references to sculpture you could want. The wheel can appear (with a little prompting) as a face, a head, a head of hair, a head and neck, even a torso, or full body, with the pedestal turning magically under the viewer’s gaze into waist and legs. It plays with the sculpture’s inherent capacity for anthropomorphism. You want sculpture that excites tactile values; you expect to caress the soft curves of the female nude buffed in fine marble? Well Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel is for you! When you look at it you get the feeling that you want to spin it (touch it and make it turn). You want an object on a pedestal? Well this is it! It is anthropomorphic, comic, ironic, a provocation, a way of reflecting on visual culture in museums (looking at sculpture and bringing aesthetic/erotic expectations to that). And so the bicycle wheel acts as the impersonator of sculpture, turning sculpture on its head and into a comedy, with the intent to cause reflection in the viewer about what sculpture is, and also what the true quality of its benighted values really are. I mean the values of touching, gazing, reverential contemplation, and the like. But it is not handmade (except for the sticking of the base of the wheel into the pedestal). The simulation becomes most fierce with Duchamp’s infamous Urinal, Fountain of 1917, called that because it simulates a sculptural fountain (all that water spewing from the baroque fountains of the Villa d’Este and the Piazza di Spagna). Except in this case a fountain of piss is meant to flow into it, only to be washed away when the thing is flushed. The gleaming white surfaces of Fountain invite the quality of touch, and exhibited in the way Duchamp did, it can be seen as both penis and vagina. And so this urinal is a poor relation of sculpture, which, when of museum quality, is very expensive. And that is another layer of meaning embodied in the object when Duchamp exhibits it, since the German word for poor and “the

Introduction

13

poor” (the impoverished), Armut, is one of the acronyms of the object’s title—R. Mutt, R. Mutt being a character in the famous comic strip of the day, Mutt and Jeff. R. Mutt is also Are Mutt, as in are you a mutt rather than a pure bred dog, something this object certainly is since it is half pisserie, half artwork. One must try to put oneself in the mind-set of the 1917 bourgeois to get the full force of Duchamp’s provocation. In every way the avant-gardes wished to break through the constraints of the art world, break out into the world, and break from the past. Even if the field of battle was usually within the art world, in Duchamp’s case it was the museum and exhibition room rather than out on the streets and in the barricades. Modern art outside of Europe and America finds itself in nearly the opposite position. Embroiled in decolonization and the emergence of new nations, for the postcolonial modern artist the past takes on an importance central to its cultural politics and artistic mission. Central to the purpose of modern art outside of Europe and America is a highly valued retrieval of the past in the name of the ascendant or imagined nation. The future is understood by the art of decolonization, nationalism, and the like as flowing from the glories of the past, if only that past can be retrieved, and codified as national and cultural heritage by being fused with modernist impulses. And this valuation of the past by modern art (and modern culture generally at the moment of nationalism/ decolonization) is fraught with a different kind of politics, about such things as which version of the past should be set forth as the national paradigm, if any, and who should be empowered to do it (see Chapter 2 for an example of this). The return to the past did not always happen in art outside of Europe and America, but was the rule. The exceptions were, for example, certain Latin American countries like Venezuela, whose modernist art allied itself with international canons of modernism (constructivism and Le Corbusier) under the impulse that for Latin America to grow it must shed its traditions, mired as they were felt to be in quaintness, nostalgia, the folkloric, and the colonial, not to mention the lazy and unimaginative. Franz Fanon spoke of a dialectical waffling between the desire of new nations at moments of decolonization to return to and glorify their past as a way of asserting difference from the colonizer, and the desire to modernize the country by importing modernity from elsewhere.8 (We will revisit this idea in Chapter 6.) Architecture took the latter path in creating the capital cities of Brazilia and Chandigarh, both taking over (creatively to be sure) principles of international architecture to proclaim the new nation as international, cosmopolitan, and rational as anything the avant-gardes could dream.

14

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

The second concept of importance to the link between modern art and the rise of the postcolony follows from this same discussion. It is the concept of diffusion. Rivera learns cubism and surrealism in Paris and works elegantly in these modernist forms, and then brings them back home and fuses them with pre-Columbian forms to bring the past to life through the medium of a European modernism that it itself transformed in the process. This double activity—finding a way to reactivate the past by fusing it with what is imported from Europe, and in a way that changes the character of the modernism imported—becomes the way diffusion of European modernism turns into innovation around the globe. To use a big word, the practice is dialectical. Both the past and what is diffused from Europe become changed into a third, new thing through their very interaction, and the difficulty, the modern problem, is to make that happen in a way that is coherent, powerful, beautiful, and expressive. The work of Manet, and the avant-gardes, brings up the third concept needed to understand modern art in relation to the postcolony. It has to do with making art in the absence of a robust art world. Again we may turn to Manet and the avant-gardes in elaborating this. Manet and the avant-gardes produced their art in the context of a highly robust art world, of galleries, museums, collectors, critics, viewers: a culture and a market. This art world, or modern system of the arts, became central to their critiques—and their fascinations. In many respects modern and avant-garde art is about the art world in which it circulates, and about the way the gaze is related to commodification and the power of purchase when it comes to clothing, women, and the wider domain of Parisian society. Without an art world (and wider bourgeois world beyond it) Manet’s project would be literally inconceivable. What then are the stakes of producing art outside of the capitals of Europe and America where, at least at the beginning, there is no robust art world, where the museums are few, collectors fewer, critics rare, possibilities of exhibition small? In the early days of the Indian nation (the late 1940s and early 1950s) when the Progressive Artists Movement formed to create a modern art worthy of it there was little that could be called an art world: There were few collectors, fewer critics, little public attention, no corporate sponsorship, and no museum of modern art until the National Gallery of Modern Art was established in 1954. As for galleries: to exhibit in Bombay an artist had to hire a room and sit by the door taking money, and making sure no one ran off with the paintings. In the absence of an art market, and with few possibilities of circulation, the terms of making art cannot be critique of the institutions of art, since they are so minimal. It would be literally impossible for a Manet to turn his tricks in the world of early twentieth-century South Africa,

Introduction

15

or India, or Venezuela, or China because there would have been an insufficiently robust art world to do it in. This lack of a robust art world paradoxically freed the modern artist in such places to work without the pressure of art markets, commodification, and critics which banished the impressionists to the Salon des Refusees. Art worlds had, and have, their many problems. But working without an art world also has its share: isolation being one. Although not always, Diego Rivera was fortunate to work at a moment when the nation demanded his murals. But a painter like Irma Stern, German Jewish South African, who grew up in the Transvaal and departed for Germany to work with Max Pechstein and Die Brucke before returning to Cape Town as the fires of the First World War were raging in Europe, lived the rest of her life in a solitude that was deeply lonely, mocked as she was by a society largely incapable of appreciating her bold colors and brilliant modeling of the figure, a provincial culture uninterested in her pathways into modern art, her fusion of German expressionist utopian imagery with the cultures of Africa and its green landscapes. Stern bespoke the pain of isolation in a private visual diary called Paradise, composed around 1922 and only much later published. Retreating to her home in the Cape Town suburb of Rondebosch, she turned her home into a personal incarnation of Africa, with huge Zanzibar doors, African sculptures, and her own paintings on the walls. Call this her private, lonely refuge. Had she remained in Germany it is not unlikely she would be in many European museums today (although she also might have perished in a concentration camp, being Jewish). Such is the life of a woman artist who returned home to a kind of internal exile: from the European art world to the South African colony. Sometimes artists from the colonies did not return home, Paris and its robust art culture being a magnet for them in the same way it was for artists from the European “hinterlands” of the time, where art worlds/markets were equally undeveloped. (And so Brancusi came from Romania and stayed in Paris, Moholy-Nagy from Hungary to Germany and then to America.) But the fact remained that given the absence of robust art worlds outside of Europe and America, at least in the early days of modernism, such artists were dependent upon the art centers of Europe and America for reception and circulation of their work. And herein resided the rub. For in an attitude that can only be described as neocolonial, the art centers of Europe and America tended all too often to write off the modernist inventions taking place across the globe as derivative and supplementary. As late as the 1980s more than one major art critic in America wrote that Diego Rivera doesn’t count. Meaning there is no way in which he drove art history forward in accord with the modernist and avant-garde dictum

16

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

of perpetual innovation from Manet to Picasso to Eisenstein to Jackson Pollock. This could only mean that the story of driving art history forward through heroic innovation was an exclusively West-centered one, written in the script of the West’s particular missions. A backwater will always be a backwater, the thought went: Europe has always been in the lead in bringing about modernity, and this could only continue into the field of modern art. The attitude was neocolonial because it carried the ideology that the colonial subject is incapable of mastering European modernity except in the form of mimicry, that of a lackey trying to speak English with a funny accent, a man who ought to be driving a cab in New York City rather than making modern art. This ideology led to an epistemological fault. As soon as signs of difference were detected by Western critics, museum curators, artists, or intellectuals, in a modern painting, sculpture, or mural coming from outside Europe, it was standardly assumed the non-European, non-American artist was “speaking European modernism badly,” incapable of mastering the European composition. Signs of difference which might otherwise, and better, have been taken as implications that the project of modern art outside of Europe and America is different and demands new epistemological/ interpretive lenses were written off as signs of art “speaking bad English” (Rivera’s pre-Columbian forms and imagery for example). For it was decided in advance that the modern artist outside of Europe and America could not have his own alternative route into modernity which might give him a different kind of project from artists in the art centers of the world, one assigning a different value to the past to locality, to the fusion between past tradition and modernist frameworks. The colonial was, it had been long ago decided under colonialism, incapable of his own route to modernity, condemned to ape the European, and badly. And so there was but one modernist dialect that could count: the one spoken in Europe and America. All others were full of fault, second rate at best. Indeed there was little interest in the inflections of modernism learned in Europe and America and then brought home to the project of nationalism, decolonization, retrieval of the past, and so on because there was little interest in the colonial world period. It’s role had been to supply Europe and America with materials, and labor, and with traditional art: the waves of Japanese, Chinese, and then African art in the nineteenth century so important as materials for the modern artist. This condition of modern art in the rising postcolonial world is then the double whammy of creation in the absence of a robust art world, and exclusion or sidelining by the art worlds of Europe and America.

Introduction

17

III European and American attitudes began to change only in the 1980s. What happened were two things. First was the globalization of markets, including art markets, leading to an interest in art outside of Europe and America as markets expanded to include India, China, Latin America, and so on. The search for new products led to an interest in art outside of Europe and America. Second, and most important, was the rise of art worlds in India, China, Australia, and Latin America with robust economies of collectors, critics, museums, and producers. These combined events propelled art outside of Europe and America to stature and profile. Money talks. The art world began to turn into a series of decentered worlds, interrelated of course but also with a modicum of independence—a process, which has been going on to this day. New York Galleries are now in Beijing and Shanghai, and Indian art is auctioned in London and New York and exhibited in San Jose and Sydney. M.F. Husain, the Indian artist discussed in the next chapter of this book, used to say that art follows politics. As soon as China takes center stage in the global political arena, its art becomes of global interest and everyone is on a business class flight to Beijing. By the 1990s the world of decolonization is largely over. African countries are thirty to fifty years old; it is the same for India. The early moment of an art associated with the rise of the new nation gives way to critique, dispirited resignation, combat, and also rapid globalization. The circulation of art becomes more open (a result of art markets searching for new products around the globe and also of the international scope of Asian and Latin American markets, catering to Indian and Latin American populations of means who live in Silicon Valley, Miami Florida, London, and the like). And so neocolonial attitudes fall away. Everyone becomes increasingly interested in everything. The link between modern art and nation-building increasingly becomes a thing of the past. And with it comes a change in the consciousness of what the past is for the present. The past is no longer adulated as a source or origin of the new or transformed nation, a river lending it longevity and identity. This book explores that shift in how the past is accessed and imagined through the work of the contemporary art of Xu Bing (Chapter 7), a Chinese artist fully part of the cosmopolitan and global system of the arts who maintains a studio in New York as well as Beijing. For Xu Bing the past is no mythic origin of modern China, but something understood as alienated into the ancient land of the long ago and far away. Given the importance of tradition in Chinese life, this might seem surprising. Xu Bing cares deeply about tradition, which is a motivating source

18

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

of his art. But to retrieve the aesthetic power of traditional Chinese landscape traditions for contemporary art in the twenty-first century means for him to invent an installation in which the past is simultaneously put on display (as a curiosity, almost a thing from the natural history museum and its world of dioramas) and re-created through a new and surprising medium for representing it. The circuits of art exhibition and circulation, and of profiling and marketing are now global. The Biennale was always a cosmopolitan event since its inception in the Venice of 1895, but it is now a thing of the world, with Biennales in Sao Paolo, Moscow, Johannesburg, and Shanghai. Its market-driven cousin is the art fair, and Art Basel now takes place on at least three continents. If there is inequality in the circulation and reception of art it is less about neocolonial exclusion than about the inability of a particular location on the globe to command global attention in the marketplace. The reasons may be various. A particular spot may be marginalized because it is not flavor of the month and the market has turned elsewhere. Or because of the concentration of cultural capital (artists, work, money, exhibition, writing, circulation, performance) in New York, London, and Beijing, and so on to the detriment of what is often glossed as the “global south.” In many ways globalization has called into question the pair of terms global north/global south—but not in this way, for markets and their products are still concentrated in the north for economic reasons, and for reasons of circulation and venue. This is a legacy of colonialism during which time goods and materials were extracted/ripped off from native populations and brought to the capitals of Europe where they were manufactured or exhibited or bought and sold. Such concentration of wealth led directly to neoliberal inequality today. But while neoliberal inequality was historically prepared by colonial inequality its terms have shifted: exclusion is now largely a function of markets and their behaviors. At the same time, markets have become more decentralized throughout the globe. Globalization has attenuated the national instinct central to the postcolonial moment through the deepening of systemic interrelationships between places: India and California are part of a technology system, China and Nigeria, the United States and Bangladesh, and so on. There is profound exploitation in these new economic and cultural relationships but it is not exactly colonial anymore, rather it is about the way markets exploit workers, strong nations cut deals with weaker ones to the benefit of the strong over the weak, and so on. Neoliberalism has replaced colonialism as the driver of inequality. The nationalist instinct has also lessened through travel and access, with persons from around the globe thinking of themselves as “global citizens,”

Introduction

19

capable of working anywhere. Whether this is a matter of fantasy (I can work anywhere I like) depends on the “who” and the “where,” but the way persons, especially young persons, imagine themselves has surely changed. This is in part due to the Internet which brings the globe to just about anyone who can afford the price of admission by buying a computer or going to an Internet café. The global attitude held by many—and especially Americans—is unfortunately one of consumerism. They are busy consuming information, Web sites, and images of the world in a way bordering on obsession. And their vision of the world is increasingly consumerist. Students at New York University or other elite universities in the United States are encouraged by their university’s brand to sail down the Amazon, pick grapes in Tuscany, work in HIV/AIDS clinics in Mozambique, and become denizens of Parisian museums, depending on their taste and passion, as if higher education were now a consumer travel opportunity. And this is the other thing that has changed since the postcolonial moment of Husain and Rivera: the growth of consumer culture hitched to celebrity forms and branding, which everyone knows pervades art and culture from the Biennale to the retrospective to presence on YouTube, Twitter, and the like, giving rise to global superstars who play central roles in everything from setting market prices to commanding attention in which criticism and publicity become nearly indistinguishable. We live in the global hunt for the new, the latest, the unusual cultural/art product: this year the work of Iran, next the work of Bolivia, finally the work of Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga and aboriginal art (Chapter 5), whose traditions are unalterably changed by inclusion into the marketplace of global circulation and exhibition. Three decades ago the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard referred to this endless search for new products as an exhausted postmodernism. In spite of Lyotard’s trenchant vision of things at the time he published his famous Postmodern Condition (in French in 1979 and its English translation in 1984),9 subsequent history has shown it is not tired at all but continues to happen in a robust and fascinating way, given the way the landscape of the world is increasingly populated by exiles and cosmopolites and also the way the globe seems to give rise to ongoing forms of diverse excellence as well as a cornucopia of new brands. What has also changed, especially for young people, is a belief in the canons of authenticity so central to postcolonial culture, and writing. For the postcolony the past was a virtual object of authenticity. The canon preached return to indigenous materials, the evacuation or critique or downplaying or sidelining of formerly Eurocentric forms, a celebration of the local and of local populations, and a suffusing of art with national consciousness. Husain and Rivera were part

20

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

of this world. The rules for cultural authenticity are disappearing fast today. Young people in South Africa have no problem performing grand opera, a paradigmatically Eurocentric and elitist art form, even though some twenty-five years ago they would not have been allowed in the Cape Town Opera House even if they had the cash to buy a ticket (which mostly they did not). Chapter 6 is about a number of issues flowing from the freedom from authenticity and its postcolonial burdens these young South African singers feel, about their sense of their own freedom to negotiate the world, and about how the world has changed so they instinctively feel they can negotiate it in this way. The chapter raises questions about the duty or role of historical memory in this contemporary world, and the neoliberal culture in which these singers live where everything and everyone experiences a gravitational pull to the north. All of this means that modern art in the postcolony has largely given way to a new form of production, altering everything from the visionary to the terms of circulation.

IV There is yet another way in which the world we inhabit is no longer to be called postcolonial without a question mark. We now realize there are a series of alternative ways in which art can make contact with the throes of modern life beyond the standard postcolonial model of diffusion at a moment of nation-building. Rivera comes to Paris, steeps himself in cubism and postimpressionism, and then returns to Mexico with European modernism in his luggage, to fuse it with Mexican history, color, physiognomy, nationalism, and with a return to an idealized vision of past (Aztec) tradition. His project differs from European projects because of its embroilment in nationalism and decolonization, which is typical for modern art outside of Europe and America. But there are other ways in which art practices, broadly construed as modern, or at the edges of modern art, or alternatively modern, may be said to arise and have character and content. Namely they may arise from indigenous traditions of carving or painting which do not make significant contact, at least at the beginning, with the modern art of Europe or America. Rather they grow organically from within their traditions to embrace modern life in their own ways, in accord with their own repertoire of techniques, their own religious, cultural, or social visions, and their own social anxieties, ironies, and conditions of modern life. These traditions do not modernize through the

Introduction

21

diffusion of Western modernism and its fusion with local form, tradition, and intent. They do not intend to speak out of any explicit concern with nationalism (nationalism is a European invention transposed to the colonies in a variety of innovative and less innovative forms). They make contact with modern life of their own accord and through innovation in their own traditional resources. They are in important senses modern because about modern life, but perhaps not postcolonial, because they do not concern themselves with nationalism, colonialism, race, or other elements central to the postcolonial project. I qualify this because, as we will see in Chapter 5, the key to this art (if “art” is the right word to use) is its un-decidability, its elusive content. One cannot be sure exactly what its rhetoric is and therefore the extent to which it raises postcolonial issues about nation, decolonization, and the like. Paradoxically this very un-decidability marks such “art” as in another way postcolonial. Insofar as it is a kind of subaltern project, speaking in a voice that subaltern studies and other postcolonial theory has explored in great detail, the voice of a rural, peasant deeply isolated from the language and culture of elites, who mostly do the “speaking” for this figure, then clearly postcolonial theory is central to its unpacking. As the chapter will try to show, the deeper problem is not simply one of interpretation—who is speaking for the tradition and with what authority in trying to acknowledge/understand it—but of cooptation of this art (if “art” is the best word to describe it) by the world of curatorial practices, critics, circulatory systems, globalization, and markets.

V A final way in which contemporary art differs from its postcolonial elders concerns the relationship between art and human rights or humanitarianism. Postcolonial art was inevitably political because of its relationship to nationbuilding, and also because of its way of speaking back against colonialism, in solidarity with decolonizing movements around the world and so forth. But in many ways postcolonial ethics and politics have shifted to a kind of global humanitarianism. The second half of the twentieth century articulated the great and noble game of humanitarianism: from its founding documents (the Human Rights Charters and Covenants signed by the members of the United Nations) to its nongovernmental agencies (Amnesty International, Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Red Cross), to its aid workers, governmental interventions in the name of human rights, to the vast amounts of money that have been

22

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

poured with dramatically varying degrees of success into the various regions of the world at moments of disaster, war, brutality, and so on, to its openness (insofar as it has been open) to the plight of refugees, exiles, and victims, to the World Courts and the justice dispensed (or not) there in the name of human rights. Humanitarianism is a global system. And this system has so profoundly affected the globe that it is hard to imagine our ability to think disaster or plight or war or the dignity of the individual and the indignity done to him or her without it. It is everything from a set of instruments to a set of ideas and ideals, to a set of institutional practices, to a long philosophical history of human rights beginning in the eighteenth century. This is a system which David Rieff in an important book terms a system in “crisis.”10 The 1990s showed just how dysfunctional the system can be, given the spectacular failures of humanitarianism in Rwanda and the Balkans. But humanitarianism is still very much in place in Europe, America, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, in nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations, in the philanthropic activities of the Gates Foundation, and in many other institutions, countries, and locations. Humanitarianism has in many ways replaced postcolonial consciousness as the locus where justice is thought and practiced (although not, as I said above, when art turns to the topic of race). Humanitarianism is about universal rights, basic human dignity, and rapid intervention. It is not about nation-building or the critique of colonialism or anything like that. It follows that the problem for the arts, when they wish to speak of justice, tends to be a humanitarian problem, not a postcolonial one. Installations at the Venice Biennale today tend to be about refugees, terrorism, violence against women, the degradations of labor: humanitarian problems. They are problems endemic to postcolonial states, but they are equally present in Europe, China, Australia, and the United States, most recently in the flood of refugees from the Middle East that is overrunning the nations of Europe, placing them in something close to crisis. And so the final chapter of this book is about the ability of contemporary art to capture the throes of contemporary violence in the world. To do so it must break out of the hermetic encomium of contemporary art, which ironically is as difficult as capturing the distant past, and harnessing it to the national project was for an earlier generation of artists. To break out of the encomium of the art world in the name of politics was a key mission of the avant-gardes, which mostly failed. It is no easier today than then. The chapter focuses on Australian artist George Gittoes, who has made it his career to travel with Australian peacekeeping forces and record, in the rapid sketches of a witness, atrocity and

Introduction

23

degradation as they unfold, then returning to his studio to paint from these diaries or records in pen and ink. I want to end this introduction with an acknowledgment of what is not in the book, namely a discussion of the central role of digital culture in the globalization of art and culture today. Without new technologies there could have been no globalization beyond mercantile capitalism, which led to the discovery of the colonies and the history of colonialism. Only because of the automobile and jet plane, which replaced or augmented the train and the ship, could flexible capitalism have arisen, where half a product is made in Argentina and the other in San Diego, but it is put together in Ireland—this along with the telephone and now, the Internet. The effects of digital technologies on art and culture are so vast that it would take a whole book to explore them properly. Many books. And, more importantly, we are still early to digital culture, making it difficult to get a handle on what these effects are. Much of the writing on the effects of digital technologies on culture tends to be—befitting the fact that it is early to a brave new world—more pronouncement than analysis, more prophesy than diagnosis, more Jeremiad lambaste than careful unpacking of complex realities. We know that digital culture has played a profound role in globalizing human consciousness and I will, inadequately, leave it at that.

2

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

This chapter explores the life, work, and times of India’s premier painter, M.F. Husain. It studies him as a way of further understanding what a postcolonial modernist is. The chapter elaborates through the example of Husain two of the themes presented in the Introduction (Chapter 1). First the issue of diffusion: how Husain’s project and style arise through the assimilation of European modernism (Picasso, Germans expressionism) which are fused with what he recruits from the Indian past, and in a way that changes both. And how that new thing Husain produces, fused of the past and of modernism, symbolically functions to rescript the past in a way that allows it to function as a source, or origin of the new Indian nation while simultaneously celebrating the modernity of that new India that comes into being in 1947 at the moment of his early work. The second theme this chapter takes up through the example of Husain is the stakes of modern art when it arises in the near absence of an art world, especially given the way neocolonial attitudes held by the art worlds of Europe and America for decades prevent Husain’s work from proper recognition and circulation on the European and American stage. Husain’s work is, at the beginning, the victory of voice over actual circulation in the very nation it bespeaks so adamantly, and with such verve. Third and perhaps most important, the chapter explores the political ramifications of an artist whose project has been secularizing nationalism. There is vulnerability in this project, which to this day remains fragile before competing visions of the nation-state, some virulently religious and exclusionary. In the India of the late 1980s and after, it has been fundamentalist majoritarian (Hindu) politics that has been a chief source of such malaise for art—and for Husain. European modernism has also felt the whip of virulent and exclusionary politics (Hitler, Stalin), politics which reformulated the nation-state around opposition to some hated “other” (the Jew, the gypsy, the liberal), a politics which began in

26

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

the nineteenth century and became all the worse in the twentieth. Modern art has been preyed upon by such virulent and exclusionary visions of the nation all over the place. The story here differs from that of Europe. The European modernist was lambasted for being modernist (which the Nazi’s believed corrupt, the Soviets intellectualized and felt irrelevant), or for extreme/utopian visions of the historical future, including revolutions, which would abolish the system of nation-states as we have known it since the Treaty of Westphalia. Husain is attacked for the very nationalism he celebrates, for his formative position in the cultural politics of the incipient nation, for his role in symbolically articulating a version of the nation intolerable to others. It is in the middle of this fierce contestation between visions of the nation—part and parcel of the moment of decolonization—a postcolonial, modernist finds oneself in.

I I begin with some remarks about heritage since Husain is in the business of creating or celebrating the Indian past as a national heritage. Heritage is that particular reconfiguration of the past, which arises in the Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It rescripts a people’s past into an exalted set of time-tested and time-honored values which are believed bankable into the future, therefore offering that people the prospect of a unified future. By preaching a common origin it proclaims common destiny. Heritage making is equally central to the rise of the postcolonial nation-state. “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with hiding a people in its grip,” the ever-perspicuous Frantz Fanon wrote. “By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”1 Since the devaluing of traditions across the colonial world was a mechanism by which that world was robbed of its identity and independence, decolonization immediately turns to the past as a way of reasserting both. Heritage creation is restitution. But it is more. The new state deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, universities, to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny. It can hardly avoid doing this when it takes over the form of the nation-state from the colonizer, or from an earlier regime. The turning of the past into a heritage is part of the symbolic currency of the nation, defining and driving its common future by marshaling the past into a mythic, and sometimes religious, form, an origin, a set of bankable values distinctive to the nation, a common origin and destiny.

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

27

Benedict Anderson long ago showed how violent a process nation-building can be,2 demanding that persons and groups renegotiate and sometimes break their local, religious, and other allegiances in order to enter into an imaginary state of belonging with other citizens in the new thing called the nation. Scripting a common thing called a national heritage is part of the cultural politics through which this condition of belonging is articulated and forged. However, the script or scripts of heritage (for there are usually more than one) may (and usually do) favor one version of the nation over others, one group’s politics and culture over another’s, leading to intense and sometimes violent contestation. The politics of how the past is scripted into a heritage are a window into the divisions between citizens at moments of national formation or transition. Different kinds of postcolonial states mythologize or otherwise script their pasts into dramatically distinct kinds of heritage.3 If heritage creation is critical to the cultural politics of the nation at a moment of decolonization, and to the modern art which arises at that moment, seeking to secure for the nation a retrieval of its past, then in India—the subject of this chapter—these cultural politics were from the start embattled around religion. The battle at the moment of India’s birth as a sovereign nation-state in 1947 was between inclusive and exclusive versions of Hindu religious heritage (Hinduism being the religion of the vast majority of persons from the Indian subcontinent). Mahatma Gandhi’s version of universal peace, dignity, and nation-building preached classless equality, refusing caste and gender distinctions. Gandhi’s was an idealized, even radical version of Hinduism but it was also a deeply tradition one, preaching pluralism and openness to all other religions. This pluralist conception of an India of many heritages/religions was also Nehru’s, the idea being that nationalism and nation-building should rescript these traditions in nationalist terms while retaining religious diversity and—it was hoped—respect. In stark contrast to Gandhi’s openness to multiple heritages was the Hindu nationalism of Savarkar, whose Hindutva movement wished to construct an Indian state on majoritarian Hindu politics and devalued minorities, especially Muslims. Savarkar followed the modern European formula of the purebred nation, crafting a vision of India on the basis of the European nationalisms that downgraded, ghettoized and nearly destroyed Jews and gypsies. It was the vision of national unity based on hatred and exclusion of some “other,” here especially the Muslim. Savarkar’s version of a Hindu nation ethnically cleansed of minorities was so intolerant of Gandhi’s traditionalism, with its pluralist leanings, that it was a Savarkite who assassinated Gandhi on January 30, 1948, a year after India gained independence.4 Hindu heritage in India has been

28

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

embattled between these opposing religious formulations ever since: the one benign, the other virulent. Both are heritage driven and religious, but they differ dramatically about the content of the religious past and the principles of nationbuilding on which it should be erected. To complicate the matter, there have been from the start versions of Indian culture and state policy that have been secularizing, including, I will try to lay out in this chapter, Husain’s. The histories of modern Indian art and culture, along with the history of the modern Indian museum and university, were in significant ways secularizing histories. Indeed Husain’s career is a window into the cultural politics of this secularizing Indian position, which he helped articulate, and which came to haunt him at the end of his life when he fell under assault by religious fundamentalism. For Husain the point of his art was to reach deep into the past to fuse tradition with modernist sensibility in a way that would participate in the creation of a new India. This involved reinventing the character of the past, turning a religious past into a secularized one, making it the property of each and every citizen in virtue of their belonging to the nation. The past had been variegated: this aspect of it belonging to this group while sometimes fiercely excluding that group, and so forth. Now it became (with certain qualifications) understood as a huge undifferentiated river, call it the Ganges, founding the nation in the spirit of all, encompassing all, everybody’s in virtue of their being Indian citizens. This scripting of the past contributed to an image of liberal democracy in which each and every Indian was placed front and center as a citizen in virtue of having emerged from this river, and who had the right to own or appropriate it. The past was homogenized yes, but in the name of equality. Enthralled with the burgeoning fact of the new Indian nation, Husain and his cohort felt the rise of the nation in their bones, as a kind of spiritual awakening. Unable or unwilling to distinguish the nation-state from its in-dwelling people, they viewed the people as the very substrate of all that is spiritual in India, replacing religion with a deeply felt humanism. For Husain, the people of India were a spiritual mass, the “roots” of everything that mattered. Moved by all forms of spiritualism, from Hinduism to Sufi, Husain and at least some other modern Indian artists shared with Gandhi openness to all religions, but unlike Gandhi not from any singular religious perspective. It is in this sense Husain and these fellow artists were more secular as people—although not every modern Indian artist viewed their own religious background in the same way. Over the last half century this enchantment with the new nation and the allinclusive river of its past has largely passed into the historical archive. The past

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

29

has come in for dramatic criticism by artists, intellectuals, and many others. Its variegated character refuses the undifferentiating river-like gaze. But contestation around the pluralist concept of Indian heritage and also the secularizing project of so much of Indian modern art remains fierce. When the fundamentalist of the early 1990s, living in the legacy of Savarkar, challenges the secularizing fact of modern art, the pluralism behind it, and indeed the very concept of the secular state (in which civil and political rights trump religious authority), when that fundamentalist wishes to censor or otherwise restrict free speech and expression of the past, when he or she even (in the extreme case) wish to restrict civil and political rights to the majority, it is an ethnically cleansed vision of India that he/she is asserting. The fundamentalist’s image of Indian heritage is Hindu and, most important, exclusively for Hindus. Fundamentalist battles around the past are therefore about the cast and character of the nation, about its core values and core populations. Such battles are about who is central and who is marginal to India. And so modern art in India (as I think, elsewhere across the postcolony) has been historically embroiled in a set of ongoing conflicts around citizenship, and civil and political rights. For the postcolonial artist these are played out around visions of the past, around heritage. The unresolved character of these fights bespeaks a lack of resolution in the very commitments of Indian liberal democracy.5

II In order to understand how an artist called M.F. Husain became a postcolonial modernist and then a uniquely vulnerable target for Hindu fundamentalism one must grasp not only his pluralist and secularizing vision but also his unique career as a national painter and icon. At the time of his death in June 2011, M.F. Husain owned a fleet of Bentleys, a string of houses, a full fall collection of threepiece suits, handmade by the best tailors in Doha, Qatar, Bombay, and London from linen, wool, and rough Indian silk, and a farm that doubled as a museum outside of Delhi, which he had not visited in a decade. In Delhi, Bombay, and other cities he had a procession of young and luscious lovers ready to swell the Ganges with their tears at his demise, some seven times younger than he, at least one a Bollywood star for whom he directed films (not his best work). He could dash off a string of horses twisting in tensile, ebullient beauty in the time it takes anyone else to log into their computer and then sell the canvas for the

30

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

same price as a racehorse. He had two feet and no shoes. He had aquiline fingers and toes. His paintings fetched prices off the charts. Three decades earlier he had been declared a national treasure and made a member of the upper house of parliament where he sat sketching everyone else, especially his friend R.K. Narayan, the writer who had also been booted into that hall of fame. As a national treasure he took full advantage of the free cabling he was allowed, then the latest technology, sending cables to anyone anywhere in the world at any time of day. That was in the 1980s. Today he would be tweeting. For decades M.F. Husain occupied the role of celebrity, swanning around India in a locally made car with the slogan pasted on its boot: They can drag me to college but they can’t make me think, playing out his close resemblance to Charleton Heston if not Michelangelo’s Moses. With his tall frame, stunning, chiseled face, deep sunken eyes that winked with delight at the slightest provocation, with his long white beard, white kurta, or pin-striped suit, he resembled a demi-god who had floated off the silver screen onto the streets of India. A showman to the end, he once painted a mural on the side of a Delhi high rise by being raised to the top of the building on a scaffold which was then slowly lowered while his brush furiously traced out gods and goddesses from the epics—up and down the building again and again until he completed the scene. Hundreds watched from below as the magic was made. Cover material for India Today, Husain was not simply a celebrity; he was a star. Husain adored celebrity, but also carried the aura of a star. His star quality made him a unique artist in the India, and indeed in the art world globally. There are very few; Picasso was perhaps another. Husain’s life wasn’t always one of public acclaim. Born into an orthodox Muslim family in Indore, Husain’s talent revealed itself early on, and his father thought, why not apprentice him to become a tailor, as the boy can draw. Husain responded by running away to Bombay to study art at the J.J. College, a then still colonial institution training Indian artists in British figure and landscape painting. That school’s first report (from the 1850s) written by British art teachers had this to say about its Indian students: our native students have much subtlety of the eye and finger and will probably make excellent copyists, engravers and mechanical draughtsmen … Their tendency is to repeat traditional compositions, which have come down to them from a distant age without refreshing or even glancing at real life. Hence they degenerate instead of improving. The grotesque images with the shapes of men and animals in all parts of the Hindu temple are unredeemably bad. Their sculptured foliage is purely abstract in character.6

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

31

And, It seems that the safest way of attempting to regenerate this defective and artificial manner of design without destroying what it has inherited from European Schools of Art is to set the students to copy faithfully the objects of nature, men and women … Thus a school of design would in time arise, native in the best sense, owing its accuracy, truth and natural beauty to European inspiration but moulding its material into purely Indian types.7

Condescension toward the Indian cultural past could not have been more neatly stated. Later Husain would recall his actual colonial past in his Raj Series, a series painted with whimsy and more than a little sting. While at the school, Husain supported himself by painting cinema hoardings, those oversized cinema posters advertising Bollywood to urban millions. For a while he lived on the streets. And then 1947, the moment of independence, and the desire to create a modern art capable of voicing a nation in formation, would prove essential. The desire for recovery, rehabilitation, and renewal of the Indian cultural past so neatly disposed of by the teachers of the J.J. college. It would prove essential, this recovery, for the vesting of a new nation with longevity, roots, heritage. Working in relative obscurity, Husain, along with his comrades, began the project of creating a national art. The year was that of India’s independence. Husain banded together with Sayed H. Raza, Francis Newton Souza, Ara, Bakre, and Gade, later Chavda, Hebbar, Ram Kumar, and a number of others to form the Progressive Artists’ Group with the declared project of forging a modern Indian art. The British had exerted powerful pressure on Indian artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, training them in the style of the Company school, a transposition of faintly disordered British portraiture and landscape painting to the Indian subcontinent. Husain calls this style the ultimate example of nature mort: it killed off India’s dynamic topography by reducing it to still life, as if Calcutta in all its gritty urban density were but the pale imitation of Constable’s Wivenhoe Park. The Progressives wished to recover a rich and long Indian past of diverse and powerful artistic traditions, alienated under the British, thus rehabilitating the past from colonial condescension and historical atrophy, and vitalizing it as the heritage of the new nation, capable of founding a modern art, a way forward for culture and the nation. And they wished to invest their canvases with the rhythm, energy, physiognomy, and signification of place (a place not the green and pleasant fields of England). This took place in part through a return to the monumental, ancient Hindu epics, the Mahabarata and Ramayana. Husain went the furthest of the progressive artists in painting these epics in larger-than-life/cinematic terms.

32

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Like Gandhi, he simultaneously explored these epics as moral dramas of the self, a self that must face dramatic and difficult choices, purified through action. For Gandhi the Mahabarata and Ramayana were spiritual tales setting a heightened moral and spiritual agenda for modern human, a moral agenda purified through the vast recesses of time and therefore urgent for contemporary life. Following Gandhi, Husain turns these epics into existential explorations of the intensities of the human soul at key moral and historical moments when monumental action is required. They become existential dramas, not simply larger-than-life tapestries, at once modern and ancient. As Karin Zitzewitz puts it in her excellent book on secularism and Indian modern art, the Progressives “saw the epic narratives as civilizational rather than religious texts ….”8 The Progressive Artists Group, formed at this moment, had the dual purpose of reclaiming past traditions and of reaching out to the modern art of the West to discover what global modernism might offer an emerging India. They turned toward cubism, surrealism, abstraction, and German expressionism, while also focusing their lenses on the Chola Bronze, the Mogul Miniature, on fabric, tapestry and ornament, and temple sculpture and architecture. To make the past live again in a new art would, they reasoned, mean finding ways to transpose its color, shape, form, iconic values into the new key of modernism, melding Chola Bronze and Mogul Miniature with influences from cubism and expressionism in a way that simultaneously changed both. The past had to be dynamized to live (again), fused with the artistic materials of the present (European modernism). Herein resides the innovation in the Indian project. Western modernism and the Indian past would both be changed in the whirl of the canvas. This fusion of artistic forms from the Indian past with Western modernisms was a secularizing operation. Some Western modernisms are indeed religious (e.g. Georges Rouault) but the modernisms chosen were mostly secular (Picasso, German expressionism), and even if a religious artist was chosen, the point was the form, color, and expression, not the religious element. I do not wish to exaggerate this point. Certain Indian modernists (e.g. Gulam Sheik) retained deep religious feeling in their works. And it is not that religion was evaporated from the work of the Progressives (although Sheik came a generation later). It is rather that the ongoing presence of religion was now in large part/mostly understood by these artists as what Zitzewitz called civilizational—as a deeply felt cultural legacy—an ongoing moral and spiritual imprint available for all (Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Christian, atheist, and believer): a heritage.

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

33

Figure 2.1  M.F. Husain, Arjuna with Chariot, Mahabarata 15, 1971, Oil, canvas, 75 × 48 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Gift of the Davida Herwitz Fine Arts, Trust, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

34

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 2.2  India, Tamil Nadu, Shiva as Lord of the Dance (Nataraja), Chola period, c. tenth/eleventh century, Bronze, 69.3 × 61.8 × 24.1 cm (27 1/4 × 24 1/4 × 9 1/2 in), Kate S. Buckingham Fund, 1965.1130, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

Indian modernists therefore had very different purposes from the Western avant-gardes. The avant-gardes of the West, Constructivism, Futurism, De Stijl, wished to bury the past in a new and experimental art that would become exemplary for the future. They wanted to radically transform the world through the radically new artwork. Working between the two world wars, with Europe shattered, guided by a fierce vision of world transformation avant-garde politics

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

35

were cultural: use the new artwork as the beacon of what the new world can become. Back it up by the manifesto. Do not degrade the artwork by the aesthetic values of the past. Indian modernists wished to do the opposite: dignify the future by retrieving the past, long devalued under colonialism, and making it live in transformed form for the emergent nation, as the nation’s origin and cultural symbol. The task became how to work out stylistic fusions of past artistic styles with the lessons in form and color taught by the modernisms these artists studied in Europe. The interest Indian artists had in Picasso and German expressionism was in the ability of modern art to capture modern life. But they were also interested in the formal innovation of these artists, in their pictorial composition across multiple planes, their elongation of the figure, their fusion of African forms with Western portraiture, their vivid use of color, their simultaneity. These became in the Indian imagination a repertoire of formal devices, which, when fused with past Indian traditions, could allow the past to represent—that is, embody—the whirl of Indian contemporary life. When approaching the past I have said the Progressives laid claim to its diversity—this in the spirit of Gandhi’s pluralistic and tolerant concept of heritage. Painting as a new Indian citizen Husain appropriated into his canvases Krishna riding the chariot into battle, Hanuman transporting the mountain back to a sick friend, Bhisma sleeping on his bed of arrows in preparation for battle, Draupadi being unfurled, the Pandavas assembling for the decisive battle with their enemies, signature moments from the ancient and long-standing Indian/ Hindu epics which in Husain’s modernist language became epical for the nation. He felt as entitled to paint these epical stories from traditional Hindu mythology as he did painting the whirl of the Sufi, or later Mother Teresa, dressing the wounds of the poor and the dying. All fell under the emporium of his gaze because they were Indian materials. And so he, like many others in the Progressive movement, contributed to the nationalization of the past by scripting what had been local (Bengali, Maharastran, Orissan) or religious into a secularized, Indian ensemble: into the river of the past I referred to at the beginning of this chapter. One could speak of a double consciousness these artists had toward the past, on the one hand, a fascination with its variegated (diverse) aspects, and on the other hand, the desire to script it as a single, continuous river: the source of the new nation. This sense of exploring a differentiated past while preserving difference within a single, homogenized form was what captivated their imagination. Entitling themselves to paint from the diverse past while also perceiving it as

36

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

a single fabric or tapestry, Husain and the Progressives were inventing the past as a new thing called Indian culture. And they were simultaneously creating a space in culture for a new category of being: an Indian citizen who, in virtue of citizenship, could lay claim to this newly Indianized culture in all of its aspects, for whom the entire tapestry would be available. I do not paint as a Muslim; I paint as an Indian Husain said many times. Husain more than any other Progressive painter strove to encompass the range of his subject, focusing his brilliant lens on everything from Indian film posters (which he had painted as a young man while living on the streets of India) to cyclones to village life to the horses which, unleashed from Arjuna’s chariot, were dancing a ferocious/lyrical dance across his canvases. All India, he claimed, was his to paint. This claim is of course grandiose, but it was crucial to the nationalist origins of his art. It also made him what Baudelaire calls a painter of modern life, someone who tracks the contemporary in all of its tangible, transient facets, who lives in the present tense of Parisian train stations, crowds, department stores, boulevards, and country sides, in the Indian temple, on the street corner, stopping by the gods of the byways, working in the forests of Kerala and from the Himalayan mountaintops, jetting in and out of the past. And now it is time to clarify what is meant by “secularization” in reference to Husain and the Progressives more fully. First, Husain’s work is not secular if by that one means the self-conscious doctrine about law that arose in India only in the late 1970s and 1980s, a self-conscious self-concept and legal position. I take the liberty of quoting the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami on this point, whose work on Indian secularism is among the very best. This is from private correspondence: I think that the right view is that Husain was not a secularist at all but a pluralist in the way that Gandhi was and in the way that Nehru (the Nehru of “The Discovery of India”) was. The point here is this. Indian culture was always syncretist and pluralist, in a way that European nationalism destroyed in Europe. European nationalism was founded on creating a feeling for the nation as “ours” by finding an external enemy within (the Jews, the Irish, the protestants in catholic countries, the catholics in protestant countries) and despising and subjugating them. Secularism was introduced as a doctrine to repair the damage of such nation building exercises in Europe ever since the Westphalian peace. Husain, like Gandhi and Nehru, believed that this nationalism was an entirely European phenomenon and had not taken root in India and India never lost its pluralism to majoritarian religious nationalism as European nations did. So secularism was not needed in India for most of the twentieth century. In fact

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

37

it never really was articulated much in India till the late 1980s when it became really necessary because of a serious rise in religious nationalism, mimicking Europe for the first time. Secularism is a self conscious doctrine introduced to correct the loss of an unself-conscious pluralism to majoritarian religious nationalism. It became an obsessive focus of discussion in India only in the late eighties and nineties on. But Husain for most of his career assumed that India never lost that unself-conscious pluralism and in fact exemplified that pluralism in his art all through his life. So all this needs to be spelt out rather than simply tying Husain to secularism.9

BIlgrami adds in an essay for the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy: Nehru in the first three or four decades of his political thought and activism was constructing a political philosophy which had no centrally articulated place for the ideal of secularism … but which, tapping what he took to be the unselfconsciously pluralist traditions of India’s social past and present, was instead re-constructing and re-presenting that pluralism in the political arena as a form of nationalism, and above all, a nationalism that was not only intended to be unlike the European nationalism … but intended to prevent the emergence of that form of nationalism in India …. This strategy was claimed to be, as I said, a re-presentation of the lived and unself-conscious pluralist traditions of India (rather than a destruction of pluralism as in the European nationalist strategy). And so—unlike Europe—there would be no particular focus on secularism to recover from the damage done to pluralism by a form of nationalism that Nehru wanted no place for in India.10

Now these are trenchant remarks and in some ways Husain’s project is exactly that of pluralism (see above). Yet Husain, like Nehru, was secular in his personal life (a nonreligious, nonbelieving, nonpracticing Muslim of Muslim background and cultural identification, as Nehru felt toward his own Hindu roots). Then how was his work secularizing? I’ve said something about this already but it is worth quoting Bilgrami’s essay at more length: To get some clarity on the issue, we must at the outset make an elementary distinction between secularism and secularization. Secularization, a topic first fully explored by Max Weber, unlike secularism, is not a doctrine so much as a name for a process of transformation in society. It has in the sociological and historical literature been described by two quite different rhetorics: the death of God and the quite different rhetoric of the decline of magic and ritual, thus addressing religion as both belief and cultural practice. Loss of belief in God or in the myths of creation on the one hand and the decrease in Church-going or habits of pious dress and dietary restrictions on the other were two distinct

38

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World symptoms of the process of secularization in the European modern, speaking respectively to secularization of religious doctrine and practice respectively. The concept of secularism, by contrast, is concerned less with general historical processes of social and cultural transformation and more concerned instead to describe specific institutions and laws that form a polity, i.e., a polity that seeks to shield the formulation and functioning of its laws and institutions from the control and direct influence of religious practices and belief. This distinctness of secularization from secularism has its proof first of all in the obvious fact that someone can be deeply religious in both belief and practice (thus not secularized) but be deeply committed to secularism (that is, to a secular polity), and second in the equally ubiquitous fact that the same place can be secularist in this sense and yet not much secularized such as, for instance, the United States (especially in its heartland) or it may be highly secularized and yet not secularist (as for instance in a city like Tel Aviv). Western Europe and Australia and China are perhaps the regions of the world where there is most coincidence of both secularization and secularism while Saudi Arabia and the city of Jerusalem are examples of places where there is least presence of either.11

I think Husain’s project was not simply that of celebrating the tapestry of Indian pluralism, although that was very much an aspect of it too. His work was secularizing in exactly Max Weber’s sense. Zitzewitz has already told us that religion appears as civilizational. That is one thing. But it is also to Husain’s bold claiming of the past as “his” to represent and celebrate that we must look in understanding this further. Husain’s claim was not simply a celebration of traditions in the plural, none of which was his, but an active rescripting of its religious traditions into his own voice, by taking traditions over and experimenting with their terms in a modernist fusion of forms from Picasso with those of, for example, Hindu myth. The message of his work is, I think: each and every person has the freedom to represent each and every religion as one’s own heritage in virtue of one’s new status as an Indian citizen, for whom the panoply of the past now belongs to him or her. It is not simply that each citizen belongs to a nation with plural traditions (most of which are not his or her own) and should tolerate and ideally appreciate this tapestry of plural traditions now understood as “Indian” (of the nation). It is that these traditions—each and every one of them—is now understood as mine to appropriate—and this whether I am a practicing Hindu in Allahabad, a Muslim in Kashmir or Sikh in Punjab, a Jain or Parsee in Bombay or Christian in Goa. I think this is the nature of Husain’s bold modernism, his vision of himself as the piston for all India (think of Walt Whitman: “I contain multitudes”). His vision of the Indian past as his own, although not a believer, could only mean

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

39

the freedom to represent religion deracinated from religious belief and spiritual aspiration. Husain is not simply celebrating traditions as part of a pluralistic universe called India. He is claiming they are now his. This is why he resists being called a “Muslim” painter. Not only because that would make him sectarian and religious when he is not but also because he believes all traditions are now his. And when they all become his they are modulated from systems of belief and practice into mythic material that speaks in a national voice, and also with erotic and spiritual power. Hinduism in Husain’s brushstrokes is no longer a matter of who believes it; it is rather a spiritual source for himself, and for all, a river of time that is India, a source to which all belong. This conversion of religion into the “property” of each and every citizen, religious or not, into, that is, national myth whether you believe in the gods, rituals, and other practices or not, seems to me the essence of secularization. To sum up, Husain was himself secular, his work secularizing (in Weber’s sense). He was as a person probably committed to secular law as well (in which civil and political rights trump religious rights), but he believed that was no part of his art. Indeed he had the fantasy that his art could remain “above all that” or to one side of it—until, that is, the fundamentalist attacks, which we will get to presently.

III The underlying dynamic of the work then was to rescript the past in a way that celebrated plural traditions, religious for sure, but also now understood as part of the fabric of the Indian nation, while also secularizing them so that each and every tradition could belong to each and every Indian (whether or not they were a believer, religious, whatever) in virtue of that person’s belonging to India as a citizen. But how, through what process of artistic invention, could this rescripting of the past take place? The question was how to fuse what was learned from European modernism with the traditions of the past, and how to make them live in a coherent and vital canvas. How to make painting make sense, given its purpose? For you cannot simply plaster an image of past art (whether a dancing Nataraj or a Mogul Miniature painting) onto a canvas and call it integrated. It will rather appear anachronistic and alienated. Integration calls for invention of new form. The icon from the past has to change (in form) to live again in a modern way. This became the modernist Indian project, and it emerged only gradually.

40

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

And so the question of style arose. At the pictorial level, Husain and some of the Progressives began to charge their modernist spaces in certain central ways, growing partly from the soil of Indian life and partly from old Indian artifacts. Husain, whose work went furthest in this regard, dynamized and sometimes completely filled pictorial space, casting still cubist planar. He employed brilliant, supersaturated colors to envelop space with symbolic and expressive value while also modeling the human form in distinctly Indian ways, in accord with lessons learned from his study of the Gupta period of sculpture and what he knew of Indian postures generally. Space became the theater of the Indian street corner fused with the museum in live action. The Indian street or village is a place of overwhelming, overcrowded activity, where people wash, work, take counsel, feed children, sleep, or pray—in fact, experiencing every possible facet of living—oblivious to the thousands of cars, bicycles, and passersby. Buildings disintegrate and are recycled for every kind of use; shops spill into the street where people and animals live side by side. All this is cast in searing light and brilliant color. Space in India, moreover, evidences strong juxtapositions and contradictions. Slow-moving animals are counterpoised with the flow of traffic; modern streets abruptly give way to dirt paths, cars to bicycles; ancient temples display their garishly painted upper stories, representing multiheaded and multi-limbed gods and goddesses. Space is crowded and dynamic.

Figure 2.3  M.F. Husain, Ganga Jamna or Mahabarata 12, 1971, Oil, canvas, H: 70 in, W: 120.5 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

41

Those living in such spaces will construe this as naturalized. Those from the outside (e.g. from the American corn belt or the Alaskan wilderness where your nearest neighbor may be miles away) may find it threatening and anarchic. A great deal has been written on the construction of space—the spaces of work, of privacy, of play, of nature, of city life, of crowds and silences, of inner and outer, of time and eternity, of representation and activity—to the point that Foucault has declared that ours is “the age of space.” But what may seem natural to an Indian painter might not be to a Westerner whose sense of spatiality is dramatically different in certain respects. What feels crowded to a Western eye and uncomfortable to a Western kinesthetic sensibility will not be experienced in that way by a person whose internalized spatial grid is that of an Indian city. An insider will rather read “near chaos” as a complex and relatively welldefined cultural geography, and tightly filled spaces will not feel claustrophobic but rather active and alive. The wall, which Leonardo told the young painter to study, will be a wall not of white-and-gray Italian stucco cracked with the sinewy lines of time but rather a wall plastered with layer upon layer of paint, dung, graffiti, drawing, film poster, and soon. For a Westerner to appreciate Husain’s project requires an adjustment to their grid. Husain not only energized his spaces; he split them in accord with street and society. This formal device activates the pictorial space by elaborating simultaneous layers contrapuntally. Husain’s splits as if distinct frames of a film fused together. The split responds to fissures in Indian life, to the many juxtapositions of the street. It also renders pictorial form dynamic, reconfiguring cubist planes, ordinarily rigid and still, into dancing, projectiles. For example, Husain’s Ganga Jamna (see Figure 2.3) takes the stilled masklike intensities of Picasso and sets them in motion through the multiple planes of his fiercely dancing horses, while also splitting the main figure across distinct spatial regions. The series is Husain’s paean to the river of myth, and the impetus to perpetual action that defines the great epics, now understood as civilizational but also contemporary, bringing the past right into the dance of the present, as if the Mahabarata were happening right now, and with an unfinished story. To take another example, Maya (1977) splits the figure of Maya along multiple vertical planes. Maya is the mother of the Buddha, who dreamed she was to give birth to him only to wake and find it true. Husain’s split canvas energizes the figure of Maya even while she remains statuesque. She is after all both dreaming and giving birth. Another way to put this is that the type of statue referenced in the work is classical Indian sculpture (see earlier figure of Lord Shiva). It is set forth in the picture as a recognizable heritage icon,

42

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 2.4  M.F. Husain, Maya or Tribal Girl, 1977, Oil, canvas, H: 76.5 in, W: 44.5 in Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Gift of the Davida Herwitz Fine Arts, Trust, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

43

while simultaneously fused into a system of modernist forms. The heritage icon is both celebrated as a recognizable pictorial source and recast with a difference for new/contemporary times. Heritage is thus celebrated as that which can found the new (as that which can become new). Husain rejected key Western modes of portraying the figure: One reason why I went back to the Gupta period of sculpture was to study the human form …. When the British ruled we were taught to draw a figure with the proportions from Greek and Roman sculpture …. That was what I thought was wrong …. In the East the human form is an entirely different structure … The way a woman walks in the village there are three breaks … from the feet, the hips and the shoulder …. They move in rhythm ….The walk of a European is erect and archaic.12

In many of Husain’s paintings, one will find that the female figure twists to her left or right from the shoulders, but slightly to the opposite from her hips. Maya bends independently from the knees, hips, and shoulders while also assuming a sculptural pose. This mother of the Buddha shares with the Chola bronze its taught/flexible lyricism. Referencing both Indian sculpture and Western modernism, the painting reduces to neither by resisting the hard closure and stillness of a Picasso figure and the overall design of the Chola bronze. It highlights the past as a heritage source of modern India, and modern Indian painting, while also transforming it. The role color plays in India has been important in engendering Husain’s chromatic conception, as Husain himself explains: “Color … [in India] is not light but a symbol of certain emotions [or deities] … a certain mood … if you find a piece of stone and you apply orange colour to it you don’t have to make an eye and nose … the villager will think it is the god Hanuman.”13 This use of color envelops a pattern of details with mood and texture, rather than as a way of opening the picture to a light source. Husain’s treatment of color is closest to German expressionism, to which, for many reasons, Husain and some other Indian painters have felt instinctively close. The employment of color as an opening medium is fundamentally foreign to the Indian conception, not only because in India natural light is so hard and brilliant that it seems naturally to enclose space but even more because Indian paintings do not open through perspective to the world. They establish melodramatic or symbolic worlds. In Indian miniature painting, for example, color is employed both musically and symbolically. Delicate and poetic rhythms are set up in the miniature through combinations of color, theme, and details. Color articulates space as mood and symbolically suggests emotion, as in this Rajput painting, followed by a painting of Husain’s.

44

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

All of these twists on European modernism recalibrate it within the locality and nation-building of India, 1947 and beyond. Husain was once asked by a gallery owner in New York why he did not paint abstract—during the 1960s, the heyday of abstract expressionism. The gallery owner suggested his work would sell well in New York if he would only take the abstract turn. Husain responded, “There is nothing abstract about eight hundred million people” (now over a billion). Indeed throughout his career Husain has believed that a certificate of authenticity is earned when his art reaches “the people”: when villagers and those on the ordinary streets of the towns and not just the cognoscenti recognize his pictorial themes and figures. Husain often used to say that it was important to him that when he brought his huge, monumental paintings of gods and goddesses, and his epic paintings of the Ramayana and Mahabarata to the villages and “exhibited” them in fields and by houses, the villagers got the message. “Here is Ganesh,” they exclaimed, “And here is Saraswati, here the story of Arjuna and the chariot, here Hanuman and the mountain.” For Husain this ratification of meaning by the villagers is part of what authenticated his art— gave it the stamp of “Indianness.” The point is worth pursuing. Because traditional arts were almost always art on site, created to exist in the stream of common life—temple architecture and sculpture, the painted bodies of bullocks, the garlanded elephants of the festivals, the colors splashed by the side of the street to signify gods and goddesses— the postcolonial modernist’s return to the past is sometimes also a desire to participate in the traditions of public art that modernist art finds difficult to sustain because modernist art is made, and exists, within a circle of collectors, critics, cognoscenti, museums, galleries. And so Husain’s simultaneous desire was to have his work exist in the modern art world (from which he was all too often denied entry) and in traditional village life (where he thrived). He wished to incarnate his painting as part of the present and also traditional life. However, Husain’s actual encounters with these villagers were theatrical and episodic. His art never really played a central role in their lives in spite of his deep desire that it do exactly that. It is a general fact about modern art that it exists in an art world so complex, its meaning is so entangled with that world, its form of circulation so central to that world, that it cannot really break out to live both there and also on the streets with ordinary villagers and city dwellers. There is a significant role for public art in modern life but usually in the form of propaganda, murals, monuments, or work decorating office spaces and tiling the sides of high rises. Modern art has simply become estranged from found

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

45

ruins in the desert, or a bullock garlanded with modernist drawing, or a painting that is part of the texture of ancient walls used and reused every day by local peoples. This wish for a double life in which villager and cognoscenti both share the meaning and use of the object is largely a fantasy: the fantasy that art can at once serve as a vision for a modern nation-state in formation, and an ongoing confirmation of tradition, as if modernism could live in the present, the future, and the traditions of the past at the same time. Husain’s vision of painting authenticated by vox populi is the nationalist impulse writ large: a vision of art arising from the river of the past, an art from and of “the people.” As if, like the nationalist politician, he were unproblematically speaking in their name. This desire to speak in the name of the Indian subaltern whose voice is nearly impossible to register within the modern languages of nationalist politics, so central to Gandhi’s swaraj, has been the object of multiple books by that prominent element of postcolonial theory and historiography: subaltern studies.14 The same issue of voice arises when Husain believes he is speaking, that is painting, in the name of the villager, and then demands a certificate of authenticity by the villager who, yes, can recognize the gods and goddesses in his pictures, but, no, is unable to understand, one presumes (and this is a presumption), much of its modernist language and symbolism.

IV The nationalist impulse also had Husain painting Indira Gandhi during the moment of the Emergency. The Indian Emergency of 1975–1977 was a nineteenmonth period, when President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, upon request by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency, effectively bestowing on her the power to rule by decree, suspending elections and civil liberties. At the moment of this political crisis Husain, already a national treasure and celebrity figure, painted Indira Gandhi in the form of a tiger, as voracious and terrifying goddess Durga. This was a highly controversial gesture; he was criticized for giving political credence to her cause. His response was that it was not about politics but rather capturing the intensities of contemporary Indian life in all its conflict, the convulsions of a society where strife is as old as the epics. Indira Gandhi became, in his imagination, deracinated of politics, a larger-than-life figure in the vast tumult of India’s people. This claim to deracinate politics (in the case of the Emergency an oppressive state policy) from the violent rhythm of the “river of India” is problematical enough, but declares Husain’s avowed

46

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

position perfectly. He is a painter to the nation and above its internecine policies: his India is a river of life, not a state with its polity. He is not interested as a painter in questions of the secular state. A dangerous stance, meanwhile Husain’s national fame was on the rise and by the next decade went through the roof with the prices. It had not always been like this. As I said in Chapter 1, in the early days of the Indian nation there was little that could be called an art world: few collectors, fewer critics, little public attention, no corporate sponsorship, and no museum of modern art until the National Gallery of Modern Art was established in 1954. As for galleries: to exhibit in Bombay an artist had to hire a room and sit by the door taking money, and making sure no one ran off with the paintings. Only gradually did the Indian art world grow into the robust and cosmopolitan thing it is today, with thousands of galleries in and outside of India dealing contemporary Indian art, significant corporate investment, many qualified critics and scholars, and huge media attention, not to mention annual auctions around the world and Indian expats buying art in England, Australia, Qatar, and Silicon Valley, California. As for the art centers of Europe and America in the 1950s and early 1960s, they were fixated on abstract painting and sculpture, and certainly on Western art. Modern Indian art was all too often, in a neocolonial attitude, considered inherently imitative and secondary. As soon as signs of influence (by Picasso, German expressionism, or Surrealism) were detected in an Indian canvas it was thought derivative, speaking Western modernism in a funny accent, with too much orange, too crowded spaces, like the company school painter who never quite got pictorial representation right and was a poor excuse for Constable or Joshua Reynolds. A similar attitude was held about Latin American art (with the exception of Mexico), about Africa, and most of the rest of Asia. This is part of the reason why early on Husain encountered little Hindu majoritarian backlash: early on his art (and modern Indian art generally) hardly circulated. This is a function of modern art arising in the absence of a highly articulated and robust art world (see Chapter 1). But throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s the Indian art world rapidly expanded in and outside of India, along with Husain’s public image. The signature moment that the art had come of age was the Christies Auction of 1987, when for the first time the imprimatur of the British auction house was bestowed upon India, in Bombay, where Christies held the thing. This auction became a symbol of India’s arrival in its pursuit of Lakshmi, of wealth. With it prices rose ten times overnight. Contemporary art had risen from obscurity to celebrity status, with

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

47

industry standing in line to profile itself by hanging it on its corporate walls. This helped immensely in legitimating the art to a rapidly globalizing West with rising international interests. With the entrance of the art itself into the celebrity market, artists followed suit, and scores of them hit the pages of the magazines. Husain would soon turn to Bollywood where he would direct at least one film starring his gorgeous celebrity muse Madhuri Dixit. It was Gaja Gamini of 2000. Nothing, it seems, was out of his grasp. The world had become his oyster.

V We can now begin to understand the unique vulnerability of this postcolonial modernist at a moment of Hindu fundamentalist backlash in 1994 and especially in Bombay, his home, where Shiv Sena had a large following among urban, working-class Hindus disillusioned with the state, fed up with the difficulty and drudgery of their tough lives in a leaden city, where bus and train commutes may take hours on overcrowded transport, living conditions are packed to the gills, and buildings collapse even now because contracts are awarded in the back rooms of baksheesh. Social disaffection reactivated religious hatred, fomenting fundamentalism, as if through violent Hindu politics, the disaffected could claim the nation in their image. A Muslim painter speaking in what was now, in the early 1990s, disdained by this new fundamentalist movement as a secular voice, whose work was part of the very formulation of a secularizing and pluralist heritage for India, who claimed the right to paint the sacred epics and reinterpret them as an Indian citizen of whatever stripe, who painted the throes of politics while claiming to stand above politics, who was a media-driven celebrity and member of parliament, and finally, a great talent and a star, would be a uniquely vulnerable target. Husain’s apartment was bombed, and death threats were made against his life. His paintings were slashed. A spate of lawsuits were launched against him after paintings of his done in 1970 were reprinted in Vichar Mimansa, a Hindi monthly magazine, which published them in an article headlined “M.F. Husain: A Painter or Butcher.”15 When he refused to show up in court, a warrant for his arrest was circulated. He then fled the country, taking up residence in Qatar and London, never to return to his country. Husain was adamant that the hatred, the violence, the humiliation was caused only by a few. The majority of Indians remained fans, or at any rate tolerant, of him and his work. But a few can cause

48

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

a great deal of damage in a country of a billion people where a few, percentagewise, is in fact many. All the ingredients of scapegoating and punishment, of public humiliation, are present in this grim story, a story, in the words of Thomas Blom Hansen, which concerns those fundamentalists who believed this interloper had stolen their enjoyment, their right to the pursuit of happiness, their totalizing claim to be unique recipients of Indian beneficence, their very citizenship.16 By dissing him they could, the fantasy was, assert and claim their proper entitlement. We know how often, and to what effect, the turn of Hindu against Muslim and Muslim against Hindu has wrenched the Indian subcontinent. We know how the British manipulated it. We know about the partition and the assassination of Gandhi and the rest. We know about the violence unleashed when religion takes on a political voice, subverting law. Here was its latest incarnation. The claim by the Hindu fundamentalist was that Husain had given offense, defiled their religion by painting Hindu goddesses in the nude, showing these goddesses copulating with beasts. And that this should be punishable both by law and by extra-legal means, that is, by violent attacks on his paintings, his apartment, his own person. Fundamentalism almost always depends on misreading—which is all too often how it finds offence in things— or on the refusal of multiple ways to read the same thing. At the basis of this fundamentalist misreading is a refusal to grasp the modernist project. Husain’s art does not celebrate the degradation of goddesses, but it does graft gods, goddesses, humans, and animals together in a way that captures the rhythm of traditional India. There is a pantheistic reverie in his work at the core of Husain’s connection with village India. Husain shares with Picasso a sense of the fusion of modernity and village life. Both were from village societies where human and animal live in ongoing proximity and a kind of daily intimacy. Village animals have names. They are a kind of companion. Out of this fusion between human and animal Picasso produced Guernica, Husain Cyclonic Silence. Above all the fundamentalist despised Husain’s free, self-inventing enjoyment, the abundant eroticism of his gaze on India, which anthropologically merges woman and animal, animal and god, god and thinker. This gaze is not a desecration; it is a celebration. One can criticize Husain’s portrayal of women, as some of the artists from Baroda of the 1980s have done (see Chapter 3). One must not say he defiled religion. The presumption of Husain’s free gaze, its abundant pleasure taken in all things Indian, challenges the fundamentalist’s claim to control and parcel out enjoyment on the basis of ethnicity, religion, caste, language, or whatever. It is an indelibly modern gaze.

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

49

Figure 2.5  M.F. Husain, Cyclonic Silence, 1977, Oil, canvas, ¼ × 96 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

But as an aside suppose one takes the fundamentalist point of view, which finds nude goddesses and animals inhabiting the same pictorial frame sufficient to prove the work desecrates? On this view, no fancy modernist explanation about people living in proximity to animals, about the animal spirit in the human body or whatever, changes the reality: here are nude goddesses; here are animals; they are touching; what more do you want; this work is offensive. This way of reading and responding to Husain’s paintings cannot be disproven in the way one can disprove a theorem in mathematics or resolve a question of fact. How does one challenge the fundamentalist reading? It seems one must acknowledge that free speech and free expression, central tenets of liberal democracy, may lead to offending others. Central to living in a democracy is that a diversity of things offend a diversity of people. This is to be taken morally seriously. Questions of compromise, respect, resolve, and perhaps even apology may follow—or not. However, acknowledging that others may find what one does offensive and that in some way one should take cognizance of their “right to offense” does not mean one condones the violence of their response. Fundamentalism did not simply criticize: it attacked Husain, attacked his work, his apartment, his legal rights, him. Behind the fundamentalist attack was therefore a vision of a fundamentalist Indian state, which refuses the—and we can now bring this into the picture—secular claims of the state according to which claims of democratic liberty override claims of religious authority. This fundamentalist vision of the state is one which restricts freedom of expression and wishes

50

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

to reassert its Hindu origin above all else: above, that is, civil and political rights. The Muslim is, on this version, an interloper, always “other.” The attack on Husain was a way of making this statement about what the Indian state should be and who should have the right to represent it, much less serve as its icon. To attack Husain the nationalist icon was to attack the entire history of pluralist, secularizing culture through him, and to attack Muslims in favor of majoritarian politics. By actively encouraging traditional forms of Indian toleration, Gandhi and Nehru were trying to short-circuit this kind of Westernstyle national intolerance. By the late 1980s it had, however, arrived to India. And Husain was the fundamentalist’s iconic fall guy—the charges against Husain were trumped up simply to use him as a cipher to make this larger attack on the pluralist state, using a scapegoat in the public eye to do it. I sometimes think he was attacked purely to enforce control over the proper use of heritage. This was one version of heritage attacking another; one principle of the modern state battling another. There is a Web site you can find on the Internet in which pictures from the book he and I did together in 1987,17 and “selections” of the text, are offered as proof of this Muslim desecration of Hindu religion (aided and abetted by Husain’s Jewish friend). Tens of thousands of persons have signed onto the Web site in support of its ludicrous claims. I once offered anyone who signed the Web site purchase of the book at half price, under the idea that they might do well to actually read it, but I have as yet no takers. That doesn’t mean, I am sorry to say, I will offer it at half price to the readers of this chapter (unless you’ve signed the Web site!).

VI Amazingly Husain prefigured his own story two decades before it happened, when in the late 1970s and early 1980s he created one of his most powerful and trenchant series, That Obscure Object of Desire. The series is about terror. Its title comes from a 1977 film by Luis Bunuel, in which the protagonist, played by Fernando Rey, finds himself traumatized by two women, one of whom may be his own unconscious invention. Alternately seduced, adored, and terrorized, he is lost between the two, whom he perpetually confuses. Husain took away from this film the idea that terrorism is bathed in obscurity, its motive and conduct subterranean, its relation to the system or group it attacks and undermines

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

51

equally uncertain, and it may be partly caused by misplaced desire on the part of the victim, or something the victim did which returns to haunt him or her. Terrorism announces itself loudly, and with bullets or bombs. But its causes are obscure, and its motives less certain than it may itself declare as it seeks the headlines after an assassination. Husain began to work on this series during the violence in Assam, when the question was asked if and how the centralized Indian state, the Indian Congress Party, may or may not have provoked it. In the Obscure Object of Desire series Husain paints the province of Assam being ripped apart like a baby lamb. He paints the film star Amitabh Bachchan, the James Bond of India, in the hard colors and tough graphics of a film poster, resembling a criminal. He paints the famous dacoit or criminal, Phoolan Devi, the outlaw who terrorized the area around Delhi with her Bonnie and Clyde gang, committing various robberies and other offences. In his painting, done in tough colors and flat, cinematic space, Devi resembled a Cheyenne outlaw from the American westerns with her headband. From a poor village, Devi had been married off to a much older man who abused her. She fell into disgrace after she left him, and thugs were hired to kill her. One protected her from rape. She married him and joined the gang, which gradually became her gang. In 1983 she gave herself up and spent eleven years in jail awaiting trial. Husain paints the outlaw speaking into a microphone, as if she were a politician. This is simply clairvoyant, this transformation of dacoit into politician. For in 1996, a decade after the painting was done, Phoolan Devi ran for Parliament, where she worked, after having been elected, for women’s rights. She was assassinated in 2001. A special relationship exists between terror, celebrity, and politics, which Husain grasped with prophetic intensity. A terrorist is or may become a kind of celebrity, and then a member of parliament. The role of the media is central in both. Think of Carlos, about whom more than one movie has been made, or Che, whose poster image was on every wall of every university student’s dorm room in the 1970s. Think of Bal Thackery, whose name is an ironic twist on a great English writer, and his infamous politics of right-wing Hindu fundamentalism in India. Terror lives through celebrity, which advertises its cause and contributes to its fame and fortune, therefore political gain. It has been said that the violence in Sri Lanka, and in Peru, lasted so long because terrorists who first began to fund their campaigns by dealing drugs found the temptation irresistible and continued their wars because they were making so much money. Terrorism is, or becomes, a market in its own right.

52

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 2.6  M.F. Husain, Dacoit, made c. 1980–1983, Oil, canvas, 69 × 36 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, reproduced courtesy of the M.F. Husain Estate.

Postcolonial Modernism: The Case of M.F. Husain

53

The media contributes to terror, glamorizing it and circulating its terms, even when it claims to be doing the opposite. My own brother developed the American television show America’s Most Wanted while at Fox TV, which simulates the reenactment of unsolved crimes, murder, rape, violent theft, preferably using the original victims in these roles. It is hosted by a man who lost a son to violence and ends with a telephone number, tweet, and e-mail where anyone who knows anything about the whereabouts of said criminals on the run can make their report to the FBI. In the first ten years of its existence this show was instrumental in catching a thousand putative criminals on the run. After 9/11 it went global, posting the bearded, beady-eyed faces of potential Al Qaeda terrorists on its show with the voice-over: if you know the whereabouts of Mohammad al Mohammad, last seen in Yemen, call this number. Catching terrorists has become global sport. It makes for good audience share, brings financial gain for the network, and ironically, turns terror into mass entertainment. Husain was clairvoyant about the relationship between the media, crime, terror, and politics but could not have known it would descend personally on his head. That he would become the object of fundamentalist rage, and in virtue of his commitment to the nationalist/secular project and his celebrity. Ten years earlier he was painting his own life story without knowing it. He was also painting India’s story through his own. For it is, to repeat, the secular, nationalist project and inclusive Indian, an inclusive Indian democracy, that is under threat by fundamentalism, when the individual artist, writer, or scholar, be he or she, M.F. Husain, Salman Rushdie,18 or Wendy Doniger (whose book The Hindus: An Alternative History of 2009 was dropped in 2014 by her Indian publisher in light of fundamentalist outrage), becomes the object of intimidation, threat, or worse. Rushdie recently cancelled plans to attend the Jaipur Writers Festival after there were threats to his life, and his work has been banned in India—this is in addition to the Iranian fatwa which sent him into hiding for a decade. Indeed public opinion has been less kind to Rushdie than Husain and Rushdie’s travails have been the worse of the pair. This is a curiosity. Perhaps Rushdie suffered the worse (and is less the object of sympathy in India) because, as Bilgrami has suggested to me,19 Rushdie in his postmodernist way rewrote the terms of a religion (the Muslim religion), which is, unlike Hinduism, doctrinal, leading to a charge of blasphemy against him. Such a charge is unknown to the Hindu religion, which is more a practice than a set of doctrinal beliefs. Moreover, there is a profound difference in attitude toward religion between Husain’s many epic, comic, and erotic celebrations of Hinduism and Rushdie’s dark Satanic Verses of 1988, which is an act of postmodernist mimicry and sardonic play that

54

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

really does lambaste the fundamentalist version of Muslim religion (although not the Muslim religion as such). Husain’s is an outsider’s love and identification with the Hindu past; Rushdie’s is an insider’s uncompromising refusal of key Muslim tradition in and for the modern world. Hindu fundamentalism at the end of the day trumped up the charges against the content of Husain’s work because they were offended by the fact of him: he a Muslim presuming to speak for the Hindu past and becoming a national hero because of it. Few moderate Hindus took offense at Husain’s work, which was widely admired by them. But Rushdie’s alleged blasphemy and uncompromising position did offend moderate Muslims (who would not have subscribed to a fatwa against him). Even though he adamantly claims that he was not attacking the Muslim religion as such. I am one reader of his book who agrees. (To me it is a book about being tossed into Thatcher’s England, catapulted from a plane, meaning from the clouds of the past, where as a modern immigrant you end up killing off parts of your past, that is, your Muslim past. But that is another story.) The real question, which I am absolutely incapable of answering, is whether a state and society like India (or Turkey, or the United States, or Israel), in which religious and secular versions of origin and identity are today locked in various forms of combat, can retain liberal values (civil and political rights for all). And related, how fundamentalist populations might be prompted by a better set of state services and rewards, a better dispensation of goods toward them, to think differently about the exercise of civil and political rights? And finally, would liberals become more sensitive to the offence they (inadvertently) give others (who read what they say and do differently), while retaining their freedoms rather than compromising them? Is there the possibility of reconciliation (or at least toleration) between these versions of the nation? These questions about rights and tolerations are fundamental to the fate of modern in many places across the world. They demonstrate that postcolonial malaise—struggles over nationalism and the nature of the nation-state—remains in place even while decolonization is largely over.

3

Postcolonial Critique: Frida and Amrita

I This chapter is about second-generation postcolonial modernism and its critique of national and social life. The chapter focuses on a single Indian painter: Nalini Malani. But through her work it is meant to have wider representative scope, about identity politics, national disaffection, and how art changes from the first generation of modernists to the second, both inside India and outside (close comparators would be Mexico, Brazil, and Senegal, to take a small number of examples). Working at the moment of national birth and in celebration of that experiment, first-generation modernists celebrate the nation, and adulate the precolonial past they graft onto it, lending the nation through that past images of longevity, destiny, common origin, and self-determination (we are and always have been different from the colonizer in spite of our Englishness, Frenchness, whatever). For the second-generation modernist the nation is already old enough (some forty years old or so) to become an object of disillusionment; its failure to deliver prosperity, to engender equality, to solve problems of communal violence and corruption becomes, often enough, glaring. Moreover a middle class arises with the nation-state which wants access to democracy, while many of its subjects—women, minorities, those with sexual differences from the norm, and others—find they have unequal and inferior access to rights, courts of law, to social and economic opportunities, to representation in a representative democracy. This has been the case with India by the 1980s, when the second generation forms from the middle classes and begins to paint of social disaffection, human dislocation, subjectivities yearning to be free of aggression, violence, repression. It begins to rethink the past as a less than monumental and magnificent form, perhaps the very form that has over millennia served to produce the gender, sexual, and religious inequality that burdens them today. It is often among the middle classes in a democratic society (India and Mexico) that identity politics arise, because their new wealth and citizenship brings with

56

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

it aspirations in a society of closed doors. Democratic emancipation often leads to cultural identity politics, since it brings the promise of freedom without the social fabric to deliver it. One can find this disaffection in second-generation artists across Latin America and other parts of Asia, also West Africa and beyond. And in India, which by the 1980s has developed a huge middle class, gotten rich without distributing wealth adequately to the downtrodden, an India which has produced a new class of women and minorities still subjected to social constraint and violence. These are the conditions for an art of critique to arise. So in 1989 the Bombay painter Nalini Malani checkmated the past with her painting Frida and Amrita (subtitled “Old Arguments on Indigenism”). In this painting she portrays two pathbreaking women modernists, both of whom lead lives as disruptive as they were productive. Both Sher-Gil and Kahlo were women who painted directly from their lives, from their emotional turmoil, from their excitements and joys, from the rhythms of their bodies. Amrita Sher-Gil, the Hungarian/Indian painter from the northern Hill Stations of India, painted in the 1930s, a decade before the Progressive Artist’s Group arrived on the scene. She had little hope of exhibition in late colonial India. Her work was terminated by her early death, while still in her thirties, from a hemorrhage. The details of Frida Kahlo’s life are by now well known since she made them central to her work. Her horrifying auto accident with its mutilating effect, the exposure of the most intimate parts of her body to the anesthetizing glare of the male doctor, her incessant pain, her miscarriage in Detroit from which she nearly bled to death: these are matched only by her joy, her creativity in fashioning a Mexican self-image, her exploration of her own fantasy, and her autobiography in an art which made the then (and even now sometimes) “outrageous” claim that women should have the authority to voice the entire domain of their bodies, their feelings, and their autobiography in the form of a visual poetics of self. She painted from her sexual attractions, her self-obsession with her own body, her marriage, from a rare sense of exposure, vulnerability, and from narcissism. She painted from modernist art and from Mexican folk tradition. One almost feels that Frida Kahlo smears the canvas with her menstrual blood, so close is her work to the living sensation of her body. This directness of expression is what counts. In Nalini Malani’s painting of 1989 both Kahlo and Sher-Gil cradle small imagoes of “miniature” persons associated with them. Frida Kahlo cradles an imago of her own mutilated body, complete with the steel shaft that ruptured her sex. The imago is bloody and she will remember. Propped against SherGil’s left hand is a dark woman, whose face is obscured, whose right breast

Postcolonial Critique: Frida and Amrita

57

Figure 3.1  Nalini Malani, Frida and Amrita: Old Arguments on Indigenism, 1989, Oil, canvas, acrylic, 36 × 48 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, Peabody Essex Museum.

is bared, and who wears a white sari (white symbolizing purity). And that is because at the end of her short life this talented upperclass woman began to paint “the Indian people,” Harijans and subalterns, whose faces she invested with archetypal significance, as if the individual disappeared into the archetype of Indian suffering, endurance, and dignity. That is the figure in Sher-Gil’s left hand. In her right is what can only be called a sex goddess, whose buxom figure and dime-store, seductive pose turns her into an ancient Chola sculpture reborn as a come-on. Is this a joke on the (male) progressive artist’s recovery of the Chola bronze in the name of all Indians (who want to find an occasion to tacitly gaze at her big breasts in the name of the nation)? It is surely a statement about how Indian traditions seek to turn women into sights: into pieces of sculpture to be gazed at and touched by the insatiable eyes and hands of the male viewer whose aim is to extort passivity and whose demand is ownership. Witness how a young bride looks during traditional Indian wedding: some would say a cross between a doll, a plaything, and a walking safety deposit box containing all the family’s jewels. She is the spectacle

58

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

of property as well as propriety. Perhaps Malani’s figurine is also a play on the thought that the explicitly sexual representations of classical Hindu sculpture are also voyeuristic icons bought, sold, and worshipped under the guise of religious incarnation—chances for a glimpse of sex in the puritanical culture of India, where full frontal nudity is banned in the movies to this day. So the first thing to say is that Malani still exists, one generation after M.F. Husain and in the 1980s, when the Indian nation is some thirty-five years old, in the domain of the postcolonial. This is because she is invested in the critique of a past upon which the first generation of postcolonial modern painters (e.g. Husain) dwelled like a sacred river of national mythology. For Malani this adulation of the past repeats the gendered character of Indian life which the postcolonial state must overcome. Malani’s relationship to the Indian cultural past is one of critique. Malani is specifically addressing, in criticizing the past for its voyeuristic tendencies, that generation of artists before her, Husain above all and his project of recovering, by reinventing, the Indian past as a common and secular heritage based on, how shall one say, the recovery of sculptures of nude women in sexy postures. Whereas Husain and company glorified the artistic traditions of the past, thought to contain no blemish, the temple sculptures, miniature paintings, tapestries, bronzes, and poems were idealized, becoming objects of national desire which was also, Nalini suggests in her painting, male voyeuristic desire. Malani is part of a second generation of painters, more than a few women, for whom the idealization of the past has worn off. By unequivocally idealizing the past, Husain and his generation, she felt, codified and idealized gender inequality, thus continuing India’s long history of disempowering its women. For women to participate in canons of citizenship, for them to feel they too belong to the nation on equal terms, the past would have to be challenged as well as appropriated. She is a feminist painter of the postcolony. The work of Eduard Manet and the modernist tradition of critique in paint that followed him have now, for the second generation of Indian modernists, become relevant. This is because the nation demands critique in paint, but also because by the 1980s there is a genuine art world which has arisen around the collecting and exhibition of first-generation painters, and which carries forward the canons of the past. India has by the 1980s come to resemble the Paris of the nineteenth century sufficiently to allow the project of the critique arise. And so Malani follows in the footsteps of Eduard Manet, whose Olympia of 1863 lambasted the history of nude representations along with the museum where the pliant Titian nude could be savored under the guise of contemplation

Postcolonial Critique: Frida and Amrita

59

(see  Chapter 1). Malani’s work is a challenge to the past, and through that a challenge to the very construction of citizenship in terms of it: a challenge, through the voice of the past, to the patriarchal character of the nation today. But her relationship to the past is a double one. She is critical, but also deeply alive to the past, wishing to dwell in its forms while also critiquing them. And so she is deeply conversant with the Indian miniature painting whose characteristics can be seen in her work. Her sense of color is traditional, and her panoply of artifacts is culled from the repertoire of Indian tradition, while at the same time critical of the one-dimensional female figures of the miniature painting. This double relation to the past makes her work different in kind and character from even Eduard Manet, and also the avant-gardes of Europe, for neither has much truc with the ongoing desire to paint from the beauties of the past while also critiquing the past. Modern and avant-garde art in Europe has little truc with the past at all. This turn toward the critique of the past is in Malani’s work of the 1980s a way of taking a different path from the paintings of Husain and the first generation, a departure from Husain’s bawdy and possessive representations of women as untamed horses whose very wildness excites the authorial eyes of the male “rider.” Indeed Husain’s anthropomorphizations of women run very deep in his work, on the one hand responding to his authentic sense of the proximity of women and animals in traditional village life and of their intermingling in the premodern generally (Picasso also saw this in Spain), and on the other hand being objectifications of women as thing-like and indeed bestial (as in Picasso, and we have seen in the last chapter what trouble these figures got him into). Malani’s painting is aptly titled for it really does engage in an argument about indigeneity: about the role of the “indigenous” past as a heritage for the nation. By surveying the past and claiming entitlement to appropriate it in a secular way, the new Indian citizen was, the rhetoric of her painting suggests, encoding himself as a male viewer, and unproblematically receiving the gendered messages that came from the past: from art, culture, and, of course, the wider society these are of. The past could no longer be the origin and destiny of the incipient, decolonizing Indian state. It was a thing to simultaneously inhabit and criticize. Malani’s project has been related to a wider disillusionment with the national narrative that was widely felt by the late 1980s, after the Emergency of 1975– 1977, the nineteen-month period when President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, upon request by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency, thus effectively bestowing on Indira Gandhi the power to rule by decree, suspending elections and civil liberties; at a moment of rebellion incipient in the border

60

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

states; and at a moment when the strong armed position of the Congress Party had failed to deliver the social promise for the Indian peoples voiced at the moment of independence. And it was related to the deeply problematical position of women in the Indian society of the 1980s that the postcolonial theory of Gayatri Spivak, and the work of subaltern studies also addressed at that time. Consider for a moment the character of the lives of ordinary women in India, of an Indian woman’s typical day as related by the editor of the magazine Woman’s Era, Mrs. Gulshan Ewing: she—the working woman—she’s up at the crack of dawn, about five, to fill the water for the day. We don’t have 24 hours running water in most houses. Water comes on early in the morning, goes off all day, and returns in the late evening for an hour or a couple of hours. That’s in the lower middle class areas. So when she gets up—tubs, barrels, whatever she can get hold of, she fills. Then she does the morning chores, filling the tiffin-carriers for husband and children, after giving them tea, breakfast, whatever. It’s mainly she who does it. Then she’s off to work herself. A very long train journey in a crowded train, usually. She hardly gets a seat …. She’s away from her children the whole day. She gets off from her office at 5:30 or six. She might first take a bus to the station. Or—this is more harrowing—she might take a bus all the way home. There are mile-long queues for the bus sometimes …. Before getting the bus she would buy her vegetables or whatever she needs. Her vegetables are there, in her little thela, a carrier bag  …  And then she gets home. And before having her own cup of tea, she has to give one to her own lord and master, who’s probably sitting with his feet up, already at the television. Ten to one, in spite of the low earning, they have a television. Then the dinner, then a bit of the children’s homework—if she’s capable of doing that. Her day would end late. She would have to do the washing up. Then she has to think of the water again.1

It is easy to see how such lives can give way to quiet desperation, if there is even a particle of truth in Ewing’s remark that “This is their lot, their destiny. They believe this is how it has to be for them.”2 And one should recall the degree to which women were then, and remain, the object of violence in India. In the 1980s, when Malani was painting works like His Life, thousands of “Dowry Murders” were reported: young brides burned to death because their families had failed to supply the groom’s family with the promised dowry. This mainly urban phenomenon has not ceased, and it is an ironic fact that typically the groom’s mother is the one who commits the act—and in that “woman’s space” called the kitchen. Malani’s work, emerging as it does in the early 1980s, also appeared at the time when a “woman’s movement” began to emerge in India when women from

Postcolonial Critique: Frida and Amrita

61

radical and progressive backgrounds formed Stree Sangarsh (in Delhi), Forum Against Oppression of Women (in Bombay), and Pennuramai (in Madras). Feminist publications like Manushi gained wide readership. The agenda of such organizations ranged from sexual and economic exploitation, to access to education, to divorce and property law. The mid-1980s also witnessed certain key court cases in favor of the rights of women, in particular the Shah Bano case. Shah Bano, divorced in Madhya Pradesh, sued her ex-husband for alimony, and he appealed to the supreme court on the grounds that as a Muslim he did not have to pay maintenance beyond the brief, minimum period prescribed by (his local version of) Muslim Law. His appeal was denied. It is in this context that Malani is working. The art critic Geeta Kapur characterizes her work in the following terms: “As a mark of respect for Nalini’s integrity one must state that … no other Indian artist has yet considered the problem of human relationship at these three levels: taking them to be simultaneously archetypal, intimate and structural paradigms of a specific social order.”3 Although archetypal of modern Indian roles, Malani’s visual forms also grow from traditional Indian forms of life. She states about her watercolor, Of Monsters and Angels: A Fable, that it “is about reinventing figures from the miniature painting traditions and placing them in Post-colonial times, signified by the appearance of the Occidental angel.”4 Such traditions, being far from monolithic, also contain images of women which run counter to standard gendered types, or at any rate expressions of the human which the contemporary painter can transcribe into work about gender. Malani is especially concerned to recover these aspects of both the Indian and the “occidental” traditions. And to recover with them ancient powers of maternal grace. In the swirling ochre and golden background of Frida and Amrita three women in archetypal gestures appear, as if the three graces, or perhaps better: the three survivors. In the picture both Sher-Gil and Kahlo appear with their mothers in the background. Frida Kahlo’s mother gestures to her, while Amrita Sher-Gil’s embraces her in a powerful gesture of comfort and protection. The presence of these mothers in the picture announces Malani’s concern for the recovery of bonding relationships between women, specifically for the recovery of mothering relationships as a source of continuity and power (including, this picture suggests, the power to paint). In all this she has learned from feminist identity politics of the American moment of the 1970s, from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party of 1974–1979 for example, which assembles a free-thinking and independent cadre of women from the American past to the dinner table, setting each one’s place in a way that

62

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

celebrates their particular talent and achievement. This bringing of repressed or marginalized women to the table of history has been, it is well known, a way of creating a new kind of history in which women feature as a collective ensemble and ongoing presence, rather than a discrete set of isolated and related, marginalized individuals who are viewed as a supplement to American history. It is a change in the status quo of representation. By seating these women at the table of history, and together, Judy Chicago also invites the audience to the meal. And so the identity politics of this work combine a revision of history in the name of a women’s collectivity, a pleasure taken in their achievements, a desire for solidarity and for their collective maternal presence. This is what Malani is doing with Frida and Amrita, assembling a history for herself, and for women, that refuses to treat women painters as idiosyncratic, marginal, maverick, each isolated from the rest. In isolation is anxiety; in community is strength. And she is voicing the desire in paint for an ongoing maternal presence that will soothe and empower. This is the basic notion of identity politics: a critique of representation (representations which have historically isolated, disempowered, and disfigured women in this case), a refiguring of history that produces a collective in solidarity, bespeaking the need for community, and a desire for “role models” who will provide psychological and spiritual empowerment. An important influence is also of French feminism on Malani’s work from the 1980s are also the writings of Helene Cixous and ecriture feministe. Cixious begins her essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” important to Malani, with the statement that: Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history by her own movement.5

In her famous and highly romanticized text, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous incants a song which seeks to return to women the knowledge of their freedom, which sings of their capacity to disrupt the law that denies them their desire, which acknowledges their creative capacities and seeks community with them. Self-conscious in its ecstasies, certainly an articulation of “writing from the body” Cixous’ gesture of utopian empowerment brings Malani to the question of the utopian and to the portals of the avant-garde, for if any text ever was utopian, this—with its aim of transparent and unmitigated expression of the body’s desire in a swirl of emotion that will join the community of women and overthrow patriarchal laws—this is it. Its sources in modernist writing (Joyce) and in its own political—that is, spiritual—mission depends on the

Postcolonial Critique: Frida and Amrita

63

avant-garde assumption that innovation in form and experimentation in the art (of writing) can drive utopian/political purpose. Such utopianism is also thought to require psychoanalysis, for, being a way of voicing the inner emotion, desire, and memory of women, it can be expected to meet with resistance. The resistance to acknowledging desire (and acting in accord with desire) is precisely the domain of psychoanalysis. Ecriture feministe has relied on psychoanalysis because it has understood that in a set of social circumstances in which the women have been castrated of their own powers to feel, think, and desire women cannot simply get up and transparently “speak” (their desires). This cannot happen purely through changes in the political and economic order of things (although such changes are crucial) but must also rely on the finding and discovering of inner voices for disempowered/alienated persons. A route to the finding and speaking of desire must then be found, a route through layers of buried feelings, through internalizations of the laws of gender, a route which deals with ambivalence about freedom, which works through fragilities of speech, fears and depressions. The route of working through pain by having it recognized, of internalizing the voice of the one who listens (the therapist) is of course a classic description of psychoanalysis. This was the idea behind ecriture feministe: to work through the body’s inability to voice itself, that is, through its muteness and distortion and self-abnegation. In the writing of this urge and its repression, of this urge and its desperate silence, the self ’s own future becomes idealized, romanticized, and cast in golden light: utopianized. And the idea behind such writing is that a new script of the self is required, and when the script is one of art, then innovation in literary or artistic form is crucial to its articulation. Here is the avant-garde idea, right or wrong, adequate or inadequate, that experimentation in form is demanded by utopian change and presages utopian change through its aura. This aura or beacon is the golden light of Nalini Malani’s Blakean figures. Malani will often turn Blakean angels and Blakean gods from male into female, or exaggerate their androgynous character. The mother who embraces Amrita SherGil, herself a mother in need of mothering, is majestic, powerful, and calming in the way William Blake’s Adamic God is. Blake’s figure of God, itself adopted from Michelangelo’s magnificent figure in the Sistine Chapel, has the grace of an angel and the power of a mighty Titan. In Michelangelo’s chapel, the figure of God soars toward Adam, and is about to make contact with Adam through— unforgettably—his finger. This moment of near-touching, between Adam’s limp finger and God’s mighty one, is among the most moving and inscrutable moments in the high Renaissance. It pictures a moment of contact which is about to happen and thus excites the viewer to feel, that is, imagine, the frissons of its completion: to complete the act of touch in his or her own mind. By completing

64

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

this moment of contact in his or her own imagination, the viewer identifies with both the mighty finger of God, itself an erect extension of God’s powerful yet not excessively stiffened forearm, and also the limp, vaguely passive and soulful body of Adam with its soft finger awaiting a glorious transfer of energy from God that will signify his own completeness as a created being. This moment of creation is (homo)eroticized by Michelangelo, as he so often does. Adam’s small finger, dwarfed by his mammoth size, is a sign of his smallness—smallness in comparison with the size of God the father. Both the size and the flaccid posture of Adam’s finger match up with that of his penis and scrotum, which are equally small in comparison with his massive form. Both God and Adam have fingers of nearly the same size, signifying a kind of equality, yet God’s appears much larger because it is an extension of his outstretched arm—as if it is the tip of an erection. The moment of the creation of man by man is a moment of erotic bonding. And as a kind of homoerotic celebration, it merges the urge for sameness at the basis of classical ideal of beauty with an oedipal drama between the large and the small, between those who need power and those who will transfer it, and between those who require creation and those who have the power to create will appear only at the moment of the expulsion of Adam; here the moment is that of his creation.6 I find both God and Adam, as in the case of so many of Michelangelo’s figures, to be androgynous, suggesting not only homoeroticism but also bisexuality. If Freud is correct, some degree of bisexuality is part of the somatic makeup of human being as such, and is also part of what makes possible the union and mutual understanding between men and women. Certainly Freud romanticized bisexuality as a state in which human beings, by recognizing the full nature of themselves, can open to the full natures of others.7 It is for him the code for a state of sociohistorical as well as personal reconciliation. In other words the erotic message in bisexuality becomes for Freud a code for another kind of desire: reconciliation with a same-sex figure from whom one is estranged. It is a common trope in psychoanalysis that deep and narcissistic desire for a samesex parent to whom one needs to be attached can express itself erotically, even if neither player is “gay,” for it is about the need for attachment and the way this energizes what Freud calls “the erotic drives.” Malani takes Michelangelo’s massive figure of God, remade in miniature by the watercolorist of the fantastic, Blake, and casts him as a her. (In some cases she will have him appear as a him, thus fully exploiting his bisexuality or at any rate, bi-genderedness.) Why does she do this? Whereas Adam required fathering to be created, Sher-Gil requires mothering. This is a question of integration, of power, of what Melanie Klein harped on as the need for attachment. For what those in need of Malani’s utopian figure require is what psychoanalysts have referred to

Postcolonial Critique: Frida and Amrita

65

as the phallic mother, the mother who has power, the power to calm, to comfort, but also to share with the young girl her capacity to make a difference in the world, a mother who is perceived as providing the gift of comfort but also agency. Having identified the utopian urge in Malani’s work, one may now turn to its allegorical character. If there is an interpretive “solution” to Malani’s fragmentary allegories, it resides in her Blakean figure’s mysterious power itself. What this figure will incarnate is psychological transference: the transference of power from one person to another, let us say from the large people in her pictures to the small people in them. One can find this Blakean figure in a number of Malani’s works from the 1980s. In Celebration of Birth (1987) contains such a luminous figure, painted in ochre, who swoops toward a small child on the ground while three men play flutes, two human pairs lovingly unite, and two other figures dance to the music of the flutes.

Figure 3.2  Nalini Malani, In Celebration of Birth, 1988, Oil, canvas, 36 × 36 in, Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, Peabody Essex Museum.

66

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Her Blakean figure—here turned into a powerful woman—is large and luminescent, while two of the flute players are mid-sized and purple. (This figure may be Malani herself, suggesting both self-rescue and rescue by art.) The mother–child pairs are small, because they are not divinities, and the child smaller. The child’s arms are outstretched toward the figure, whose outstretched fingers again almost touch the child. As in Michelangelo, the figure’s power is majestic. Of the two pairs, one is a mother, looking strong and masculine, who cradles the head of her child in her arms; the other is a man engaged in a loving caress of his lover’s head (it could be his daughter rather than his lover). In this transfigured world, the key is the moment of contact between the central figure and the small child, as if that contact is so beautiful as to transfigure the entire world in its wake. (And more recently there are her “Alice” Paintings after Alice in Wonderland, depicting a child’s dreamlike vulnerability before the apparitions and shapes of the world, where the hand and the Blakean figure both appear, although in demur or subdued form.) Her pictorial narratives, initially clear, quickly become dreamlike and unclear, as if to require a special decoding. Their fragmentary character defamiliarizes the viewer who cannot quite assemble the fragments into a whole and who feels that his or her claim on reality is being rendered strange by the intrusion of dreamlike meaning into ordinary life. But unlike the surrealists, the point is not to collapse reality and dreams into a mystical “convulsion of beauty”; it is rather to stimulate empathy and dreaming in the viewer, and related, a desire to make meaning of the whole. If her work suggests allegory, then the precise nature of the allegory is elusive. Compositionally, each painting sketches in a lifelike social setting which gives way—either through montage or through a figure-ground relation—to an opaque and dreamlike space, casting the setting in an unsettling ambiance. The technique is Brechtian, for it renders the social setting at once clear and unfamiliar, habitual and estranged. This technique of defamiliarization within the ordinary is Malani’s connection with the modernism she admires, a modernism which aims to make the familiar look strange, artificial, and internally violent and which she learns in part from the painting of R.B. Kitaj, whose hallucinogenic montage and dreamlike historical narrative she (and many of her cohort) admires. Manet is filtered to them through British figurative painting as often as not, especially through Kitaj (an American-born painter relocated during his most productive years to London). What was natural now must appear as unnatural and constructed, the product of a social order which makes one bristle. But if Malani’s narratives fragment and disturb, if they aim for the recognition of alienation, their underlying drive is the

Postcolonial Critique: Frida and Amrita

67

wish for (to twist a term of Freud’s) the painting cure. Within the space of her fragmentary dreaming, hers is a wish for allegorical wholeness. An example is her disturbing triptych, Golden Mountain. Mythic mountains are traditional settings for allegory. On this mountain one male figure in the nude pulls another (or is held back by the other—it is hard to decide). In the left panel of the triptych is a family drama of suffering, with women and girls jumping, running, or bending away from the viewer in sorrow. At the bottom of the middle panel, and below the mountain, are various tiny figures who are bent into the earth, while in larger size are two older women, both worn, who appear together, with one grasping the other. These women are terrifying in their deflated deadness and intense hostility. They are consumed by some sort of pain which has not been worked out. In the picture’s right is the artist herself, again naked, on her haunches, with her body turned away from the viewer and her head toward him or her. The artist’s haunches are squat, leaving her legs open. Her arms are between her legs, as if she too were trying to hold or hide her body from the viewer’s voracious eyes. Yet her face is not ashamed but penetrating and defiant. Noli me tangere: do not touch me for I am private. This image is of a woman in need of a golden mountain which she might climb in fantasy, an allegory of an undisclosed journey that must be taken into one’s own self. The picture is a space in which memory, autobiography, imago, and dream merge, in which the artist herself is present naked, naked and utterly vulnerable to the script of her interior life which nevertheless remains private, refusing voyeurism and eliciting sympathy and identification. Perhaps the figure (her as a real or fictional person) has been hurt (abused). Yet this dark and who knows if autobiographical character seems to merge into the suggestion of a world—complete with its mountain—in which men and women, and pain and redemption are all simultaneously present. Rather like a psychologized version of Bosch, one is given heaven and hell, and the character of the journey in between. Geeta Kapur puts it thus: In the strictly urban situation where the artist is born outside traditions and outside memory … there are no channels of transmission, and no continuity. Experience presents itself like a puzzle; you fit together the parts according to an abstract ethic and a willed purpose. Narration becomes allegorical …. Now, as a matter of fact, political art in our times has few options outside the allegorical. Used self-consciously and with the requisite freedom and flexibility it should be able to handle quite complex ideological positions. Allegory allows, for instance, insertion of elements from disparate traditions which provide (what Walter Benjamin calls) a “transcendent force” to the contemporary argument.8

68

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

The allegorical can link the personal, the social, the political, and the spiritual by encoding one level of representation with the significance of the next. It seeks narrative meaning overall, even where none or only fragments are there to be found. If the late art historian and cultural critic Craig Owens is correct, the allegorical resides deep in more than one strand of modernism, specifically in that strand which grasps the fragmentary nature of things and seeks their redemption through connecting them with eternity and wholeness.9 As an urge toward wholeness, the allegorical in modern and postmodern art, according to Owens, simultaneously recognizes the loss of things and seeks restoration of their wholeness.10 It is both melancholy and an act of commitment or hope. The politics in Malani’s work from the 1980s are identity politics but also those of utopian writing, that is, fragmentary painting in search of wholeness. The project is emancipation. This work places a new demand on the nation, with its terms of “belonging” turning into terms about the need for “becoming.” For many do not, or insufficiently, or problematically, belong to it. They require empowerment and it has to change along with them for them to become empowered with choice and agency. How much, and in exactly what ways, this means change in the state, public life, marriages, economics, and the workplace, and how much a matter of change in the person (psychology) Malani leaves to the viewer to decide. The point is that the nation is now understood as a problem, the past its problematical symbol. But the past is also that place from which dreaming may take place, and with it, imagination of a better place for people.

4

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

I At moments when the nation emerges from the yoke of colonialism the retrieval of the past becomes a mission for art and culture. South Africa was not entirely exceptional in this regard, because soon after the transition from Apartheid to democracy in the 1990s, a monumentalizing script entered the South African cultural scene with State President Thabo Mbeki in 1996, which continued through his decade in office beginning in 1998. Mbeki’s African Renaissance, articulated in a pompous oratory redolent of the first-generation African postcolonial leaders and before them Churchill and Cicero, proclaimed a new beginning for South Africa/Africa by return to that mythic once-upon-a-time before colonial and Apartheid struggles. Mbeki sought an origin for South Africa and Africa in “indigenous” and African peoples, in their knowledge of medicinal plants, ways of surviving in liminal climates, moral communities, patterns of work, and sustainability that would set the terms for Africa’s twentyfirst neoliberal adventure in democracy and long-term economic growth. Having been nearly eradicated, indigenous peoples were celebrated, their knowledge scrutinized for truth, morality, dignity, their know-how studied for potential market gain (knowledge of medicinal plants, ways of surviving in liminal climates). In accord with the nineteenth-century heritage formula preaching return to origin (usually in Ancient Greece) as the route to finding a new and better path to national destiny, Mbeki believed Africa should immediately claim its place in the world of global capital and tech-transfer by returning to its forgotten storehouse of precolonial knowledge and ethics. Old, communalist values of Ubuntu (“people are people only through being part of the whole village”), work, “justice under a tree,” and the like become in Mbeki’s script a heritage source, like the ever Englishness of green and pleasant fields

70

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

or the linguistic codifications of the Academie Francaise. In precolonial Africa, so mythologized, Mbeki claimed Africa would find origin, its future growth: its destiny.1 Mbeki began to articulate the terms of African Renaissance in 1996 as deputy president, and they became, for better or worse, the guiding ideology of his state presidency from 1998 to 2008. This was a classic postcolonial articulation, about the nation rewritten and empowered by a past downgraded under colonialism, about the critique of the West and the emergence of Africa, and about the turning of precolonial culture into a kind of origin or destiny for South Africa and the African continent. But South Africa is also a settler society, with a substantial population of European descent, and the African Renaissance is not the only discourse, nor cultural mission, which has proved central to the national discourse at the moment of South African transition in the 1990s. And this is because the South African change of state evolved as a transition: from one already sovereign national dispensation—the Apartheid state with all of its racial brutality—to another—an incipient democracy. The South African transition was a shift of terms within a sovereign nation-state where “settler and native” were now mutually charged with finding new forms of human relationship on more equitable terms. And so the cultural politics of national transition have not simply been those of decolonization (the desire to break free of a colonial yoke in part through a retrieval of the values of the precolonial past). They have also been about redressing the wrongs of the recent past, and proposing better, more equitable dispensations of citizenship, diversity, and sociability between populations, about finding and inventing new and more equitable terms of citizenship, not, as in the case of India, about inventing (Indian) citizenship for the first time (which was Husain’s project). In this sense South African culture since the end of Apartheid is less allied with decolonization (from a colonial territory controlled by a colonial power) and is more aptly associated with the transitional cultures of Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and other Latin American countries. These countries, like South Africa, emerged from authoritarian/fascist regimes, built democratic structures, addressed the violent abuses of their past, called perpetrators to account, and collectively tried to work through trauma or failed to do this (I made this point in Chapter 1). Indeed there is an unresolved debate about the extent to which the Apartheid state ever was a colonial state at all. Colonialism was about rule by the European nation. Or a scramble for control of territories such as in late nineteenth century Africa, where the French, British, Belgians, Germans, and

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

71

Portuguese fought over domains that constantly changed hands.2 The Apartheid state was not a territory controlled by the British or Germans; it was a sovereign state, and fiercely so. There are ways to think of it as the last or even ultimate expression of colonial rule on account of what the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani calls its adoption of colonial policies of indirect rule common in Southern Africa during the nineteenth century.3 And so Apartheid has, to the extent that Mamdani is right, a deep colonial structure, taking over colonial styles of “indirect rule” and transforming them into the structures of the Apartheid state. However, it was also a modern state architecture of Bantustans, Homelands, pass laws, and citizenship. Mamdani’s claim remains thoughtful and controversial. After all the architecture of Apartheid arose from diverse sources in modern life, including the European ghetto for Jews, the concentration camp into which Afrikaner women and children along with black Africans were placed by the British during the Boer War, and also the plans of modern architecture and urban design which called for separated regions of cities on the basis of an overall rational idea about who should live and work where and how they should circulate between segregated urban blocks. It is, I think, too simple to call the Apartheid state “colonial” even if one wishes to accept that colonial rule was part of what gave rise to it. Indeed the Apartheid state was in its own bizarre way an anticolonial or even postcolonial state, a people’s ascendency to power—the Afrikaner—who were themselves dispossessed by the British colonialist craving the wealth of their state in the Transvaal—the gold and the diamonds—their farms burned beyond recognition, their womenfolk and children interned in the first concentration camps of modern history thanks to the British, and whose racism was as much the product of a pro-Germanic architecture of apartness as anything colonial. The issue remains unresolved. Insofar as one wants to think of the Apartheid state as the ultimate expression of colonialism in terms of how power over natives was conceived, then there is a reason to think—as Mbeki did—that the democratic transition was also a form of decolonization, and the culture thereof postcolonial. Insofar as one wishes to think of the end of Apartheid as transitional from one sovereign state dispensation to another, then it is not postcolonial. That is what makes South Africa interesting from the point of view of politics and culture. It can be thought in terms of colonial and postcolonial concepts. And it can be thought in terms of transitional concepts closer to Chile, or Argentina, concepts of redress and the creation of new and better forms of citizenship and belonging of a sovereign state which has radically shifted its terms from fascist/

72

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

authoritarian rule to democratic rule, rather than a return to the past in order to achieve Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance. This view of the South African transition (linking it to sovereign changes in politics rather than decolonization) has, in my view, predominated. It is this picture of transitional justice, from a racist sovereign state to a more democratic one, stressing redress and the like, that I believe predominates in the art and culture of the first fifteen years of the South African transition, from 1990 to 2005, in spite of Mbeki’s “decolonizing and postcolonial” African Renaissance. It is the picture that will feature in what follows.

II The South African transition during the 1990s was nothing short of miraculous. Economic collapse and increasing violence had accompanied the demise of the Apartheid state, the signal year being 1985 when State President P.W. Botha (aka “Old Crocodile”) got on the South African television and instead of announcing major reforms (as expected) vowed in his most resolutely biblical voice that South Africa would never “cross the Rubicon.” Almost immediately the South African currency—once among the strongest in the world—devalued by 300 percent vis-à-vis the dollar. Violence escalated in the townships, where resistance was growing in proportion to an increasing spiral of human rights abuses by the South African police and Security Branch. War intensified between the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and South Africa at its northern borders. A state of emergency was declared during which time the number of extrajudicial killings by the state multiplied dramatically, according to evidence which came to light during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings of 1996–1998. By 1987 South African business knew Apartheid was bankrupt and began secret negotiations with the ANC about what would happen after, as did various other sectors of South African society. But it was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which had crucially supported the ANC, that the African National Congress realized it could not win in an all-out struggle with the National Party of South Africa, especially since its Marxist allies Mozambique and Angola were sinking along with their Titanic, Soviet Russia. This collapse of communism eased the National Party into the realization that it would be better to negotiate than fight until it too exhausted its resources in an endless spiral of conflict with its enemy. The Nats (as that party was called) realized that the African National Congress would now—just possibly—willingly negotiate

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

73

rather than fight. And they felt they needed a way out of their spiral of South African socioeconomic collapse. Both sides needed to talk and suddenly events made it possible, indeed necessary to do so. And so war turned into negotiation. The importance of 1989 cannot be overstated for the South African transition. Had the events of 1989 not happened, Apartheid’s end probably would have taken a quite different, and more violent, trajectory. Apartheid was formally ended in 1990. Nelson Mandela and F.W. De Klerk entered a formal state of negotiation/power sharing, to hammer out the terms for a new state. The CODESA Talks between them and their parties (1991–1992) were fraught with instability but continued on. Mandela succeeded in getting his party to drop their demand that the mining industry be nationalized; the National Party agreed to equal rights that two years earlier they would hardly have imagined thinkable for the country. These talks took place in a climate of fear and conflagration: Zulu Nationalists (the Inkatha Party), aiming for provincial autonomy, fought the African National Congress, with thousands dead in the Natal Province, aided and abetted by the Third Force of the South African Security Branch. Key ANC figures were assassinated. And yet the talks led to an Interim Constitution (1994). That Interim Constitution with its preamble about reconciliation mandated the first free and democratic elections in the history of the country, the terms of the Truth and Reconciliation Committees, and the pathway to the writing of a Final Constitution. Even with that document completed, it was widely expected that the elections of 1994 would fail to come off. Whites bought long-life milk and hoarded canned goods in expectation of anarchy, the Inkatha Party boycotted the elections until a week before they took place, and the Pan African Congress refused to participate at all. And yet these elections were a milestone in South African history, a setting of the wheels of democracy in action, the beginning of national democratic process. Madiba (Mandela) was voted the first state president of the new country and so an international moral icon had assumed power. This miracle of beginning continued into 1996 with the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Above the commission each and every day was their banner: Truth, the Road to Reconciliation. The TRC was the first commission of inquiry into human rights abuses that offered the unlikely feature of Qualified Amnesty. Qualified Amnesty emerged from the CODESA talks as a compromise formation: the African National Congress wanted outright punishment for crimes, and the National Party wanted blanket amnesty (as in the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was in certain other respects a model for the South African one). Qualified Amnesty

74

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

for perpetrators was so controversial that it was added only as a postscript to the 1994 Interim Constitution. What was offered was Amnesty in exchange for two things: complete and true testimony by perpetrators (something hard enough to measure) and proof of “proportionality.” Proportionality is in one sense an absurd criterion, since gross human rights violations are by definition out of proportion to their motivating circumstances. But the idea was to allow Amnesty only if the crimes had clear political motivation. Proportionality excluded such extra-political crimes as the rape of children, the killing of old people who happened to be nearby, and so on. Most applications for Amnesty were turned down, although major torturers did manage to secure Amnesty including Jeffrey Benzien, the famous water boarder (who might have had a future working in Guantanamo for the United States). What Qualified Amnesty allowed the TRC to do was formulate itself as a proceeding motivated by forgiveness, reconciliation, and nation-building, rather than the sterner stuff of retribution. There could have been no Desmond Tutu, Alec Borraine, or Bongani Finca in a truth commission of the Nuremberg type, no assimilation of the TRC to the New Testament. The banner of Truth, the Road to Reconciliation could not have been raised above the podium in an aura of the religious. There could have been no stress on building a culture of acknowledgment and of forgiveness as a way of moving on and building a better society. Around these values the best of Anglican and black African religious traditions merged, as if a utopian motto for the future of human relations in that country, as if the investigations of the past were there to set a moral model for future citizenship. This moral model fused with the writing of the Final Constitution in 1996 at exactly the same moment. Beginning from a concept of the dignity of the individual that document goes on to flesh out what human dignity is by establishing among the richest panoply of human rights as yet offered by any state constitution. These include civil and political rights but also substantive rights including the right to health care, a job, and housing. The constitution prescribes primary education in all the eleven official languages of the country. Courts, even the media, must translate and/or program in all eleven languages. This emphasis on linguistic diversity institutionalizes cultural diversity as central to dignity, and therefore preservation through language a right. The principle is admirable even if the domination of English has eclipsed the power of multilingual education (every student who can afford it wants instruction in an English-speaking school so he or she can get ahead in life), even if the media cannot possibly afford the multilingual luxury of broadcasting in eleven

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

75

languages and must content itself by constantly switching languages during the broadcasting of sporting events, insuring that nobody can follow what is being said. There is also a place in the constitution reserved for “customary rights,” although these are eclipsed by individual rights when customary law comes into irreconcilable conflict with individual rights. Of paramount importance is also Statute 39 of the constitution, which mandates that each and every judgment be made with respect to the spirit of constitution as a whole, thus prescribing a regime of continuous philosophical and social reflection on what dignity means and how that notion is to be cashed out in terms of shifting human circumstance. Put another way S39 prescribes that each judgment be a new beginning, not merely an application of cumulative legal precedent to present judgment. The year 1996 was also a moment for a radiant play of images in the South African media, a radiant set of performances by the state president. “Rainbow Nation” was the catch phrase of the day; “One nation one station,” the advert for the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Channel 1. Mandela’s wildly coloristic shirts made him look like David after the defeat of Goliath wearing Joseph’s coat of many colors in a vast biblical extravaganza restaged in Africa. This was how it felt being there at the (then) University of Natal, Durban, at a moment when universities were rapidly transforming, rethinking, and remaking their European heritages, opening themselves to a mass of formerly excluded populations, rapidly globalizing for the knowledge economy, caught in a frenzy of debate about what it was to be an African, and an African university. Meanwhile Mandela was busy taking tea with Betsy Verwoerd (widow of the architect of the Apartheid state), declaring his entrance in Afrikaner life by throwing out the rugby ball at the World Cup Rugby Games of 1995 (which South Africa won by an act of also-miraculous will), and busy being feted by the likes of Lady Diana and the Spice Girls. These events proved critical to the smoothness of transition. A nation in transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy has, it is well known, a unique set of needs. These include the need to punish but also appease those from the old regime so that transition will not be derailed by a coup or other regressive means, to strengthen the new state by building infrastructure and asserting authority, to free the state from the remnants of the past while also maintaining enough continuity to assure order, to harmonize populations formerly in strife, to set legal templates for the future, and also to begin to build economy and prosperity. Since these needs are not consistent a fragile course must be steered between them. Transition requires calm, enthusiasm, buy-in, or at least toleration from broad sectors of the population while also shoring up the

76

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

state. The key events of 1996 with their performance of multicolored ballet and their moral templates of dignity and forgiveness paved the way through a fragile course of transition while the quotidian reality of South Africa remained mired in racial strife, vast inequality, fascist sympathy, mutual disinterest between populations, and a daily unburial of the dead and recounting of political violence as the TRC made its emotionally fraught journey from town to town. And so the politics of transition mandated equality, and equally, redress, and acknowledgment of past wrongs. The past became a field of investigation, not a mythic place of origin. And the past means the recent past (the Apartheid past) not some precolonial world of the once-was that is recruited by a decolonizing society to lend it prestige, identity, longevity, and mission.

III To recap: in South Africa there has been an ongoing tension between two visions of the role of culture, or of cultural politics, in the path to the future. On the one hand, the Africanist politics of decolonization arising with Thabo Mbeki in 1996 stressing, as in Husain and Rivera, a return to a precolonial and somewhat mythologized African past in the name of undergirding the future of the nation with identity, integrity, and power. On the other hand, the politics of redress and reconciliation in the name of democratic transition within a country that had already been sovereign but on vile, racist grounds. Redress came first—and not simply in the domain of human rights but also of culture in its most general forms. The politics of redress were all the more necessary to free art in South Africa from its brutalized past. What had to be overcome in art was an entire culture of Apartheid and colonial monuments, of Eurocentric settler art, and of the repression of black arts by the major museums and in some cases galleries. But the leftist view of art also had to be reformed: that politically correct view that art proved its worth only if it could be fired like a machine gun at the Apartheid enemy; otherwise art was a mere bourgeois ornament or plaything for the ruling classes and their wives— woman’s stuff if you will. In short what had to be overcome was an entire culture in which art was over-politicized in one way or another, and always the wrong way. Put another way, if art had been proclaimed by the Afrikaner Nationalist a monumental celebration of their unbridled state power, it had equally been conceived in incendiary terms by the African National Congress, whose Sovietinspired concepts of art bespoke art as a “weapon in the struggle.” A new cultural politics had to be envisioned, debated, and brought about.

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

77

And so we return to 1990, the year the Apartheid state was disbanded. In that tempestuous year Albie Sachs, freedom fighter, lawyer, and an important member of the African National Congress, presented to an in-house meeting of that political organization a document entitled “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom.” Sachs himself was recovering from a bomb attack in Maputo in 1988 (the bomb had been placed in his car), which had blown off his right arm and destroyed one of his eyes and so in fact he didn’t read out the paper himself but sent it through an emissary. The ANC was in the process of being unbanned, and about to begin its two tumultuous years of negotiation with the National Party. At this moment, 1990, when the African National Congress already knew it would be the first democratically elected government if an election could only transpire, a furious act of reflection was taking place within that organization about policy, politics and culture, education, health, and economic development. Long a Marxist-driven organization with support from the Soviet Union and links to decolonizing and revolutionary struggles across the African Continent, and in Cuba, the ANC was now beginning to think through what it would mean to be the guardian and shepherd of the new democracy, as opposed to a struggle organization in exile across Europe and Africa. At a moment when it needed to think about state policy and the character of the as yet unarticulated democracy (remember this is 1990, and the Kempton Park talks have not yet taken place), its ideological certainties (Marxist) were being placed in question in light of international tectonic political shifts (the collapse of communism). It was at this moment that the still wounded Sachs had his paper presented to the ANC, as a way of intervening in the organization’s ideological thinking about culture, including his own past ideological thinking. His purpose was to contribute to a new way of thinking about art and culture for the new democracy and the African National Congress that would undoubtedly lead it. And so he begins: We all know where South Africa is, but we do not yet know what it is. Ours is the privileged generation that will make the discovery, if the apertures in our eyes are wide enough. The problem is whether we have sufficient cultural imagination to grasp the  …  full dimensions of the new country that is struggling to give birth to itself, or are we still trapped in the multiple ghettos of the apartheid imagination? Are we ready for freedom, or do we prefer to be angry victims.4

And he goes on to say, “The first proposition I make—and I do so fully aware of the fact that we are totally against censorship and for free speech—is that we should ban ourselves from saying that culture is a weapon of struggle I suggest a period of, say, five years.”5 With this bold proclamation Sachs wishes to change

78

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

the politically correct conceptions of art that defined the ANC’s thinking during its long period of struggle. “A gun is a gun is a gun,”6 he writes on the next page, “But the power of art lies precisely in its capacity to expose contradictions and reveal hidden tensions—hence the danger of viewing it as if it were just another kind of missile-firing apparatus.”7 When art is viewed as a weapon, instead of getting real criticism, we get solidarity criticism. Our artists are not pushed to improve the quality of their work; it is enough that they are politically correct. The more fists and spears and guns, the better. The range of themes is narrowed down so much that all that is funny or curious or genuinely tragic in the world is extruded. Ambiguity and contradiction are completely shut out, and the only conflict permitted is that between the old and the new.8

Now while the ANC was wedded to its formulations of politically correct art and culture, there was, during the forty plus years of the Apartheid state, significant art of resistance which was not politically correct but sought to reveal the human drama and impoverishment of that political structure mounted on inequality between the races. Apartheid: that architecture of apartness which sent entire communities from bulldozed homes into waste heaps called Bantustans, defined as separate states or “homelands” for people of color who were denied South African citizenship. Such people were forced to carry the Dompas (identity documents) which grossly restricted their freedom of movement, in what should have been their own country but where they were now classified as strangers, there to work and only to work. The country was then founded on principles of humiliation and exclusion. The story is well known, and appears in intense and brilliant form in the work of Dumile Feni, a friend of Sachs, who lived through the panic-ridden anxieties of Apartheid before going into exile and teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art in the United States. The anxiety and pain which so many endured are captured in his frenetic and brilliantly agile visual lines, all the more so for this panic-ridden, motherless genius from the Cape Province. A master at drawing, Dumile’s famous African Guernica was drawn in homage to Picasso’s masterpiece of 1936, which was composed in a flash of fury and empathy at the moment Picasso heard of the brutal bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War. Dumile’s work is equally adept at soliciting the gargantuan and grotesquely apocalyptic imagination of Hieronymus Bosch and of Goya, with whom Dumile bears comparison in ability. Picasso shares with Dumile (and also M.F. Husain) that experience of

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

79

a world in which human and animal coexist in daily banality and intimacy. All three know in their bones that at a moment of trauma a human is nothing but an animal consumed by cold fright. Human and animal become one in fear and terror. It is because of the premodern village world each emerges from that their sense of human suffering can be so deeply voiced by the bellowing of animals, as if at the moment of trauma one is nothing but a pierced and disfigured animal. Dumile’s work is about the trauma of Apartheid, its state of fear and humiliation, of degradation and insecurity, but it is also not without figures of dignity. While Picasso’s Guernica is entirely about the moment of destruction, with humans and animals flying off into postures of death, at the center of Dumile’s picture is a man sitting at a desk with one arm raised, perhaps the political gesture of the raised fist, perhaps he is pointing to a hidden perpetrator, perhaps his fist is raised at the scenes of pain surrounding him in the manner of a furious witness, perhaps he points to we the viewers, asking, where are you while all this is happening to us? Dumile’s work is an act of defiance. But if Dumile’s work is defiant, it is also poetic in its choices and in the astonishing facility and contour of its drawing. “In respect of the dead, the living and the unborn” pictures a woman with a graceful neck and vessel for a head, a woman mothering the world (from the dead to the unborn) herself in a state of anxious unhappiness, as if it is too much. She holds house implements (fork, hair brush) in her hand, as if in the form of a question mark. Sachs writes, “Dumile, perhaps the greatest of our visual artists, was asked once why he did not draw scenes like one that was taking place in front of him: a crocodile of men being marched under arrest for not having their passes in order. At that moment a hearse drove slowly past and the men stood still and raised their hats. ‘That’s what I want to draw,’ he said.”9 Never the obvious, always the poetically imagined; no mere weapon is Dumile’s art, the point being.

IV Dumile was political insofar as his work voiced the pain of Apartheid. It was in this sense oppositional art. But it voiced no political position (apart from resistance), was not didactic, and had nothing to do with the history of art as a political instrument in the struggle. There was such a history but it was largely one of conception rather than execution, of utopian imagination rather than actual political reality. This is the story of South African art conceived of as a weapon in the struggle.

80

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 4.1  Dumile Feni, In Respect of the Dead, the Living and the Unborn, charcoal, Pretoria Art Museum, photo by Coen C. Oosthuysen, rights courtesy of Marriam Diale.

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

81

It was a history indebted to the avant-gardes that arose in Europe after the First World War, at the moment Europe was in ruins, with millions dead and the course of modern life in despair. The avant-garde goal was to recruit experimentation in art to the purpose of political transformation, to bring the artwork into the realm of history making, to turn it into an exemplar of potential change, thus bringing about that change. In their experiments with new media, abstraction, montage, and representation undercutting rationality Constructivism, Futurism, Bauhaus, Surrealism, and De Stijl sought to make their achievements beacons signifying the utopian future in which the course of European modernity would radically alter. Constructivism formulated itself into a movement in 1917, the year of the Russian revolution, with a journal, LEF, edited by the Russian poet Mayakovsky. This flanking of artists into movements undergirded by journals, proclamations, and manifestos was meant to empower artistic experimentation with political purpose and force through the language of revolution. A visual object, however powerful, cannot really speak articulately to history, politics, and modernity without words behind it (the words of the manifesto). Those words empower it (or seek to) with meaning and even vision. Manifesti were often written by poets, whose words rang with the imagery of change, recruiting the human imagination to the task of seeing in the new art that beacon of change, and turning politics into a utopian vision of the future and the role of art in bringing it about.10 The purpose of art was not merely to signify change, but to wrench the viewer from his or her established and comfortable position, to shock him or her into new and experimental perspectives on reality that would free that viewer from the cement of ordinary conception and cause him or her to experience an elevated sense that reality can become the stuff of astonishing and previously unimaginable perspectives. The point was to raise the viewer’s consciousness about his or her capacity to think reality differently, to experience history anew, as if the present tense were a fungible moment in history, a musical instrument that could be played in a totally new tonal system. When Dziga-Vertov documented the city of Odessa in his splendid Man with a Movie Camera of 1927, he at once deepened the capacity of the viewer to see daily reality and turned that reality on its head through cinematic invention: doubling of images, radical speeding and slowing of duration, sharply unexpected cutting or montage, the entire invention of what he called the Kino-eye or eye of the camera and editor. A viewer could not have imagined seeing the city in that way, modernity in that way, time in that way, as if the entire corpus of reality could be subjected to an equivalent historical transformation by the vast Kino-eye of historical politics.

82

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

The avant-gardes were also in the business of changing the face of the world, of imagining, designing, theorizing, thinking into being the cities, books, art works, buildings, furniture, typeface, clothing, implements of the future. The aim was a complete revision of the materials of life, of the entire texture of things, places, and machines through which modern life existed and breathed. A new material world would mean, in the avant-garde imagination, a new form of consciousness to go with it. And so the Bauhaus wished to recast the cities, buildings, furniture, typeface, and clothing of the world. (In this they followed the lead of nineteenth-century art movements like the Arts and Crafts Movement and Weiner Werkstatt.) Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin boldly announced a complete remake of Paris and any number of other cherished cities, replacing everything with uniform high rises and discrete sectors of work, leisure, and dwelling connected by networks of circulation (the five-lane freeway is born in this dream). Such avant-garde plans were happily not instituted, except in empty third-world locations wishing to announce their ultramodernity (Brazil and India). Ironically it was the capitalist developer who took to modern architecture, producing the dull and faceless apartment blocks found across the world, and the drab corporate architecture of the postwar period. Mondrian was fated to end up as designer wallpaper and Yves Saint-Laurent couture. Constructivist film montage ended up as the algorithm of advertising. So much for the great idea of linking the raising of consciousness to the redesign of the world, all in favor of a radically new history. In spite of the avant-garde desire to intervene in the history of human thinking and perception, it was too radical, too demanding, requiring too much intellectual sophistication, visual intelligence, and preparation for mass publics and politicians. Much of the public was unaware of it, ignored it, or failed to understand it. Most leaders (with the ironic exception of Mussolini) at best tolerated the avant-gardes (Stalin and Goebbels shut them down). So much for the political intentions of the avant-gardes, however noble. And so the paradox of the avant-gardes was that their very terms of experimentalism sidelined them from history; they were simply too intellectual, new, shocking, and difficult to absorb, and too freethinking for the new rulers of nations on the left and the right. Another feature of the avant-gardes was of particular importance for South Africa during the struggle days: the avant-gardes were almost universally against the culture of the museum not to mention all the other institutions of art, which they believed retrograde, elitist, hermetic, and wedded to the aesthetics of the nineteenth century, that is to the cult of beauty, contemplation, and the grand tour, not to mention to the histories of nationalism and the European state, not

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

83

to mention capitalist economy (art markets). Avant-garde art wished to occupy more central real estate, where history was being made, than on the walls of museums or of collectors.11 Of course the fate of most avant-garde visual artifacts (constructivist photos, surrealist paintings) was to end up in museums and collections. But from the start a region of the avant-gardes occupied the streets, favoring demonstrations, and eschewing art objects in favor of events, gestures, and later happenings. The history of these avant-garde tactics, forged in anarchy, undergirded by images of solidarity and strikes, not to mention a religion of the streets, flowed from Dada to the Surrealists, after the Second World War to Beuys and Fluxus, and then the happenings of the 1960s. In these events the power of human congregation was “harnessed” to signify action direct. The model for this was the political demonstration, meeting, or strike. And here we had the birth of the avant-garde as a weapon, an idea transferred to culture from the storming of the Bastille and of the Kremlin, from ten days that shook the world and the strike (later the sit-in). It was an important source of thinking for popular front ideas in South Africa. The transposition of this tactic to anti-Apartheid South Africa occurred in the context of what can only be called the racist/colonialist museum. Only one exhibition of black art was allowed in the Johannesburg Art Gallery until in 1987, on the verge of Apartheid’s demise, when the curator Steven Sack broke the mold and organized an important inaugural show. Earlier on the Polly Street Art Centre was founded in Johannesburg in 1949 as a nonracial school for art students, and many important black artists of the Apartheid period, including Dumile, studied and worked there. The school was mostly run by the great South African artist Cecil Skotnes until in 1957 the government “passed legislation declaring the city centres and places of work ‘white areas’, thus signaling the end of the Polly Street Art Centre.”12 Then there was Rorke’s Drift, founded by a Swedish mission in 1965. Its first Swedish directors were the weaver Ulla and the art teacher Peter Gowenius. The school taught crafts, including woodcarving and printmaking, for which it became famous. (The school is still in existence.) That was it. While one strand of progressivism in the anti-Apartheid art world pushed for integration of the institutions of South African art (the museum, university art programs), another pushed for a new art that would exist outside and in opposition to these, at the center of the struggle, on the streets, in the townships, on billboards and walls, and at the center of political gatherings. Here was the idea of art as a weapon. The idea of taking art to the streets in opposition to official culture and politics was one of solidarity in struggle: artists

84

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

should form a collective, a consortium of workers, producing effective images for the people, that politicized mass abstraction, that idealized unity. By charging the people with images confirming their own solidarity-at-war with Apartheid, art would become a weapon in the struggle, raising consciousness, unifying the people in opposition. This politically driven idea of art remained mostly a matter of conferences and ideologies, of proclamation and pronouncement. Little by way of art actually happened on the streets (any more than it did in Russia, Germany, or New York). During the Apartheid period the streets were the purview of the police and under laws banning political gatherings, it would have meant risking imprisonment to gather. Nevertheless the ideology of art on the streets, subverting the bourgeois museum and art school, and firing its weapons into the struggle, was strongly believed then, especially in the Soviet-backed African National Congress with its deep veins of political correctness. As Steven Sack put it, The only way in which art could regain its social purpose was by freeing itself of the museums, galleries and schools and moving into the streets. This recontextualization of art as a battle for the right to a share of the “real estate” of cultural production. The billboards, hoardings and neon-lights, controlled by government and big business, have in the past decade [Sack is here writing in 1989 of the 1980s] become an important arena for alternative artistic activity. This has often only been possible through artists and street activists working outside of the law and challenging the control of communications and visual media. Repetitive one-look images, images that sell products and insinuate themselves into the social customs and cultural values of people, have been defaced and replaced by graffiti, murals and innovative artworks that have attempted to offer an alternative visual culture, providing another view of reality.13

Sack is speaking of everything from counter art or anti-art (graffiti on walls), to public art to spaces and events like the “People’s Parks” in black townships, created spaces by bricoleurs that dedicated themselves to an art not of individual makers but group expression and populist spirit, designed from the bric-a-brac lying around in such townships. Again Sack states this: The images produced in the streets of these townships were of a diverse nature. In most cases the artists were untaught. There was extensive use of simple patterning; dots and stripes were painted onto rocks, tyres and tree stumps. When an occasional bench was found it, too, was decorated. Old motorcars, or parts of cars, were painted and assembled into sculptures. Old signs were painted over and given new slogans. Whenever walls bounded onto public spaces they were painted with more ambitious images of animals or people.14

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

85

And so the importance of the idea in South Africa that popular art would be about parks, graffiti, big gestural images and trying to subvert the messages of the Apartheid state, the billboards, signage, and other materials of public communication that exist on roadside, streets, and others. The idea of congregating spaces was a fine one, and some did arise, but transiently. Because with the security forces and police, these spaces could hardly have longevity, given that they contravened the Apartheid state’s ban on congregating for political purposes. When during the 1980s youths took to the streets, it was subversive, with real weapons, sticks, stones, home-brewed bombs, guns.15

V Segue now to 1989 with Albie Sachs writing his essay, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” while recovering from his near-death letter bombing. He is sure that the struggle against Apartheid is soon to be over. In the essay he is writing, he turns to envision what a new democratizing aesthetic should become for the South Africa that is about-to-be. He is dreaming before the fact of it what an idealized national culture might look like, one growing from and acknowledging the diversity of his country in new terms of equality. His image of that cultureto-be is one of deep popular support and participation, of mutual respect and comingling. In the course of this imagining he addresses how a struggle organization, the ANC, founded in politically correct solidarity and disciplineat-war, must change its thinking to become the shepherd of this culture, given its shift from being an oppositional force to, he is confident, being the next South African government, and how the ANC must change its views about the purpose and value of the arts. He writes that art can no longer be thought a political instrument: [for the bringing about of a] model culture into which everyone has to assimilate, but to acknowledge and take pride in the cultural variety of our people. In the past, attempts were made to force everyone into the mold of the English gentility, projected as the epitome of civilization, so that it was even an honor to be oppressed by the English. Apartheid philosophy, on the other hand, denied any common humanity, and insisted that people be compartmentalized into groups forcibly kept apart. In rejecting apartheid, we do not envisage a return to a modified form of the British imperialist notion, we do not plan to build a nonracial yuppiedom which people may enter only by shedding and suppressing

86

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World the cultural heritage of their specific communities. We are Zulu South Africans and Afrikaner South Africans and Indian South Africans and Jewish South Africans and Venda South Africans and Moslem South Africans  …  Each cultural tributary contributes towards and increases the majesty of the river of South African-ness. While each of us has a particularly intimate relationship with one or other cultural matrix, this does not mean that we are locked into a series of cultural “own affairs” ghettoes. On the contrary, the grandchildren of white immigrants can join in the toyi-toyi—even if slightly out of step—or recite the poems of Wally Serote, just as the grandchildren of Dinizulu can read with pride the writings of Olive Schriener. The dance, the cuisine, the poetry, the dress, the songs and riddles and folktales belong to each group, but also belong to all of us.16

All this is being imagined under the umbrella of what Sachs calls “the ANC culture,” as if the African National Congress and its “culture” (whatever that is/ was) were the synecdoche of the nation at large, with all the diversity of the nation contained within it. This vision of a struggle organization soon to be a political party as the whole nation—as if the boundaries of the party were those of the nation exactly—is political grandiosity at a moment when the ANC is confident it will play the leading role in the government to be. It is a way of saying: what we are you will become, and we are the future; everything that happens will happen within our ranks and purview. We contain everyone. We are everyone. The ANC had some significant diversity in its ranks (including Sachs himself) and the remark is not entirely fabrication. Moreover Sachs is writing to the ANC in a private meeting of its top brass and trying to convince it to take its own diversity seriously, which is a good thing. But the fantasy that the ANC is the nation must be noted. Meanwhile Sachs’ image of a culture braided out of diversity, of letting a hundred flowers bloom and bloom in consort, is one of historical redress as well, since the Apartheid state was founded on “diversity” understood as superiority and inferiority: separate and unequal destinies for blacks and whites. In the mind of the Apartheid state, Black Africans were close to animals and plants, part of the landscape, fit for merely menial tasks. Similarly Indians and coloreds had their place, and whites, thought of as European, had pride of place, like a pride of lions. Indeed Apartheid preached separate-but-unequal to the point where persons of color were not, strictly speaking, deemed South Africans at all but persons consigned to ersatz citizenship in the Bantustans, those impoverished principalities ruled by clones without resources, designed to whisk persons of color away from all South African rights and privileges and

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

87

send them into these decrepit “tribal homelands.” (As I said earlier, persons of color were then required to hold special documents—the Dompas—to circulate and work in the country.) And so the image of a braided culture of diversity is a democratizing image, and a historically restorative one. What is being restored, and indeed in Sachs utopian dream created, is togetherness in all of its forms: equality, community, and the overcoming of “apartness” between persons so that they may through this shared project of new and diverse culture become more alike and come to know each other. Since Sachs thinks the ANC culture of the training camps in exile was already an example of this comingling between black, Indian, and white, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, Zulu and Xhosa, and so on, it makes sense that he should think of the “ANC culture” as a prototype for the future of the country (however idealized this vision of the togetherness of the “ANC culture” may have been). To dream a nation—or in this case new national dispensation at the moment before it comes into existence—is part of the function of utopian culture, central to providing it with idealized images. This utopian role of art and culture is not just something Sachs put down on paper for the ANC in 1989. It became for a brief time—at the moment when Apartheid formally ended but the new democracy had not yet arisen—perhaps the guiding artistic project of South African art. The art of the moment shared Sachs utopian dreaming, whether or not it had not read his paper. Nobody put it better than the architect and educator Neville Dubow, who spoke of the “cross pollinating effect” of art at that time.17 Artistic experimentation at that moment became profound because it was a way of “trying on” new and idealized relations between persons who would jointly inhabit the as-yet-to-be-formulated new South Africa. It was a moment of experimentation without a single narrative of national unity but instead with a guiding image: that of taking on the culture of the other and, in doing so, drawing close to the other in spirit, becoming more like the other, and creating a common understanding, a shared project, a solidarity, and a community. Artists began to realize that what was wanted for the shared recognition—and the bringing about—of equality was that persons formerly separated by racism and strife who knew too little of each other must not only learn to share but, in taking on each other’s work and tradition, become more alike. Not the same— that would be an Enlightenment fantasy. But more alike, sufficiently alike so that they could better know and acknowledge their differences. The very recognition of diversity requires that people are sufficiently alike to recognize the differences between them. Persons too different cannot see their differences clearly because they lack common ground to come to that recognition.

88

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

And only when people become sufficiently alike can a larger sense of solidarity and community arise between them. This is central to democracy, citizenship, and the conduct of humane society. It is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant believed in the moral importance of communities of taste, in which people take aesthetic pleasure in similar things, thus drawing close. Central to colonialism, it is well known and often written about, were limits in the kind of knowledge colonial powers wanted of their colonial subjects. The colonizer’s interest in the colonized tended to be administrative, a kind of stereotypical and sociological knowledge aimed at control. There were of course many exceptions, of people who broke the mold and sometimes heroically, but especially in daily life the settler or colonizer seldom went beyond the usual terms of knowing his or her maid, factory worker, garden boy even if they lived entangled lives over decades. And while the employee of color was forced to know more about his or her employer in order to survive, knowledge on both sides was profoundly qualified. This is why Chinua Achebe wrote his classic Things Fall Apart of 1958 in English, and for a European/global audience. He wrote the novel in response to Josef Conrad’s famous Heart of Darkness, a masterpiece where, as Achebe had argued in an also famous essay, the black Africans remain mere shadow figures, unknown, under-described, there to serve as mere ciphers for reversal of the picture of the colonizer as civilized. This is in spite of the book’s condemnation of colonialism and reversal of the so-called civility of the colonizer: in that reversal the cannibals turn out to be more civilized than Marlow or Kurtz. The first half of Things Fall Apart is almost an anthropological presentation of the complexity of Igbo village life, as if to say: here is what you need to begin to think about if you want to really know anything about those whose lives you have disrupted and irreparably so. The novel ends with a British administrator suggesting that the failed revolt (against the British colonizers) and ensuing suicide of the book’s main character Okonkwo is a story well worth a chapter of his own book in progress about the Igbo. Well no, the administrator reflects, it’s worth less than that, but certainly a few paragraphs. Apartheid increased the gap between groups, and enhanced the difficulty of genuine conversation between them by enforcing an ideology of apartness and of racialized stereotyping, as if the state knew everything anyone ever had to know about who a Zulu is and their heritage, and life possibilities (limitations more like), even going so far as to design universities for black people on the basis of this so-called knowledge of what a Zulu is and is not capable of doing in life. Of course no Zulu was asked. Blacks and whites lived all too often in a state

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

89

of mutual fear, and this within terms of absolute inequality. Black people (it has often been said) had to know more about their employers than the baas-man had to know about his workers. But both had extremely limited understanding of the other under such conditions. And so for culture at the moment of Apartheid’s demise to experiment with an artistic conversation across the divide was a gesture of national importance before the fact of the new nation, indeed before and during the days of the Kempton Park negotiations, which led to the Interim Constitution of 1994 and the first elections. One could certainly call these gestures acts of redress because of their practice of crossing lines and assimilating styles. Redress was aimed at the epistemological fault lines of the past, the stereotypes, and the refusal of intermingling. In 1992, when I first taught in South Africa, at the University of Natal, crosspollination seemed to me to be very much in place. Nowhere was this early and utopian moment of cultural cross-pollination better exemplified than in the Everard Read Contemporary Gallery in Rosebank, Johannesburg, whose inaugural show of 1992 contained a dazzling cornucopia of painting, sculpture, pottery, and mixed assemblages, and about which I wrote in the British art journal Modern Painters.18 Diversity was certainly present in the manner of Albie Sachs’ request: resistance art (a fine mixed media painting, Riot by Kendell Geers, with a hole in the shape of a bomb blast cut out of its pictorial surface), furniture (made by Stephen Cohen and covered with wild images of dancing and riots), and Joachim Schonfeldt’s “Pioneers,” a carved cow with various heads, set on a pillar, which became a statement about the old roots of “Boer” farm life, and, correspondingly, the framing of black Africans by colonialism. Work by Afrikaan sculptors like Schoenfeldt deeply and critically explored Afrikaner rural traditions, as when Schoenfeldt carved his work from the kind of brown wood one might find strewn about a Boer farm, and on the sides of that wood painted small images of black Africans in suits and ties, done in a style and frame that one would find at an out-of-the-way country auction. The work was both unabashedly nostalgic, and critical. In a similar vein, Guy Du Toit’s sculptural suite, “Shipwreck,” consisted of thirty-six concrete pediments of about one meter and a half in height arranged in rows. On these were placed small commonplace bronze objects from the Boer/African past: anvils, bells, drums, saddles, a goose, and so on. The piece can be seen as an occasion to place on exhibition the objects of that past, objects signifying a harsh, simple, but also beautiful life. But the pediments also look like miniature versions of the huge, cruel, and unornamented concrete slabs that compose fascist and totalitarian architecture of the Apartheid state. They insinuate that South African Boer history has been

90

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

a wreck from the first ships that crashed off the Cape of Storms to the last vestige of the Apartheid state. This was work relinquishing the past in a decisive gesture, while also sanguine about the way that past remains as a trace in the landscape, and also in the actions and attitudes of South African populations (then as now). Then there was Johannes Maswanganyi’s sculpture: “The Rich Man”—a carving in leadwood of an oversized leaden man who is dressed in a suit, a tie (which he also holds), and a yellow shirt. The man’s face is a distended parody of a white man’s face, and the whole work rings with parody. Yet Maswanganyi has given that white man’s face the features of a black African. One sculpts the other—finally—in the image of oneself, and it is oneself, including one’s differences from others, that one must, finally, learn to take pleasure in. Yet the image of oneself projected onto the other (it is also the point of such wooden sculptures and newly composed paintings to show) is never, as it were, cast in stone. Identities were at that moment ready for change, for a perilous intermingling each the other. In this show were black Africans painting in the style of abstract expressionists, fusing their abstract color fields with deep textures from Southern African crafts, while white painters relied on textures and patterns of Ndebele wall decoration. These were artists taking on the style of the other in a gesture of comingling, artists empowered by the excitement that now, finally, persons might become free to publically learn from each other, celebrate each other, become more like each other, fused, as it were, into a new state of utopian belonging. The spark of new forms of sociability essential to transition began in the arts, even if the arts were hardly sufficient to carry the project of sociability through to “conclusion.” That would take the entire work of remaking class, housing, education, media, leisure, and social relations—work still very much unfinished today. Few actually saw this art produced during the early days of democratic transition; indeed the Everard Read Contemporary Gallery sadly closed soon after it opened its doors. Again the usual story: a gallery ahead of its time in a then underdeveloped art world. Nowadays that gallery would have a far better chance of thriving. The utopian moment of transitional art was soon reflected in the events of the political transition: truth and reconciliation, elections, constitutionality, the Mandela years of crossing boundaries to commingle with former enemies and the rest. A new generation of young people, born free into the new South Africa, would begin to think of themselves as closer to others of other skins than their elders. Their relation to art and culture, and to each other, would be different,

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

91

and better (see Chapter 6), although new terms of strife equally have arisen over the decades of transition—all manner of discontent, envy, anger, frustration, and national disappointment. Identity politics in South Africa today are all too often viciously racialized. This was an early utopian moment, in which culture became briefly exalted in its utopian dreaming. But if one has not had the experience of being there at this kind of utopian moment early to a new society, one will have difficulty grasping the brief burst of artistic power that can erupt after years of stagnation, anxiety, disillusionment, disbelief, violence. It is a privileged moment.

VI The cultural politics of redress continued beyond the initial impetus for crosspollination into a larger approach to heritage soon after the African National Congress became the first democratically elected government in 1994. As the archeologist Nick Shepherd tells it, [in post-apartheid South Africa] heritage has been reconceptualised around notions of redress …. Aspects of this programme include an ongoing public process of renaming of sites, towns, cities, streets and public amenities, and the introduction of the Legacy Projects. These include the Chief Albert Luthuli Legacy Project, the … Nelson Mandela Museum, the Constitution Hill Project, and the Khoisan Project. At the same time, a decision was made not to expunge the memorials of Afrikaner National History, but rather to retain them as a record of apartheid, and to set them in dialogue with newer, more critically inclusive sites …. Perhaps the most powerful realization of this approach has been the Freedom Park Project on Salvokop outside Pretoria, opposite the unreconstructed Monument.19

This was the official state position.20 The Apartheid monument had proclaimed the experience of the settler a brash and brutally exclusive form of sovereignty, a destiny above all others.21 After a century of these settler monuments to colonial and Apartheid power, the goal was to de-monumentalize culture at a moment of transition, to eschew monumentality in favor of open, participatory buildings which would spread their arms to a diverse colloquy of persons, thus democratizing culture. Freedom Park was constructed literally across the highway from that cold, implacable edifice built in homage to the Apartheid state: the Voortrekker Monument. To grasp the deconstructive intention of Freedom Park one must understand something more about the settler monument it is seeking to “unsettle.”

92

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

The Voortrekker Monument, designed by Gerard Moerdyk and completed in 1949, one year after the inception of Apartheid, is an art deco bunker-cumradio-tower-cum-Romanesque church whose outer encircling walls are covered with ox wagon reliefs. On the inside a series of paintings depict the trekkers. An inner circle cut out from the first floor allows the visitor to “witness” a cenotaph of fire and funereal stone below, emblazoned with the words Ons vir ju Sud Afrika (We are for you, South Africa). There is a marriage of male and female in this monument, with its rings of encircling “maternal” spaces and the rising, phallic shaft of its central tower, not to mention the upright flame within. Safety and force, nurturance and power converge in a religious gesture. This is heritage (origin and destiny, male and female) with a capital “H.” Moerdyk drew his inspiration for the building from Bruno Schmitz’s Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig, and there is a special “dialogue” between these two monuments around ruination. The Leipzig monument was built at the beginning of the twentieth century to commemorate Germans fallen during the Napoleonic wars. Its construction at the time of the Boer War allowed Afrikaners to fuse their gesture of memorialization with its own. The Afrikaners had been decimated by the slash-and-burn policy of Lord Kitchener during the Boer War, their land burned and salted so that nothing would ever grow on it again, their women and children placed in concentration camps, their rural culture destroyed. Through identification with the passion of the Leipzig memorial (with its memorialization of Leidenschaft/suffering from the German past), the monument claims an origin for the new state in the humiliation of the Boer War—thus converting defeat and hardship into victorious resolve at the moment of the National Party’s ascendancy. Out of tears rise the implacability of stones, and the ironclad rule of the Apartheid state. Moreover the dialogue between monuments allows the Voortrekker Monument to speak in a pro-German voice, right at the end of the Second World War, as if taking over the mantle of the fallen Third Reich and its Aryan, racial politics. Most importantly it asserts that the one true origin of South Africa is in what the Afrikaner did, not merely what he or she suffered. For the monument celebrates the Great Trek of the 1830s, when Afrikaners, dissatisfied with the abolition of slavery in the Cape Province, trekked into the interior of the country, fighting Xhosa and Zulu in the manner of the American battle for the “West,” establishing a Boer State on the Highveld until its collapse and decimation during the Boer War of 1899–1901. By proclaiming this trek as the origin of the new Apartheid state, a uniquely Afrikaner identity is set forth for the South African state, forged in trial by fire as in an historical opera, a sole origin, to

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

93

the exclusion of all others, such as Zulu, Xhosa, and, most importantly, British. This state is ours, the monument says, not yours. We are its piston of energy, its historical source, its heritage, source, and destiny. Freedom Park is built across the highway from this grim edifice, and could not be more different. It is open and airy, set quietly in nature rather than seeking domination over landscape. A single-story high, one can perambulate around it in a spiral without any sense of the closed circular lager keeping the enemies out. Freedom Park is to be walked about freely, almost like in a theme park, or like walking in nature itself, across Veld stones and the small hills or kopjies of the Highveld. Its purpose is to invite everyone to circulate around its spiral walkways in a way that remains within the rhythm of its natural surroundings, rather than imposing will on all around it in an act of domination and to speak of, and celebrate, a freedom for all, a democratic multiplicity. The monument encourages participation. The point of it is to de-monumentalize South Africa, to replace the brutality of monuments with the openness of environments. Freedom Park exists to take back all that the Voortrekker Monument (not to mention the legacy of the Voortrekker) wrought. Freedom Park responds to the Voortrekker Monument by saying: this state is now everybody’s, with no one’s heritage having precedence and no panoptic control over origin, identity, citizenship, the future. Freedom Park sets the tone for the art and building in South Africa of the 1990s, and beyond. It is very much in the spirit of Albie Sachs’ call for an art that is no longer a weapon in the struggle (much less of the state!) but a celebration of diversity and participation by all—this while retaining the best of the idea of populist art that circulated during the weapon-driven struggle days. This call for an art that is public and participatory, open, inviting, and democratic to the core finds its apogee in the Constitutional Court of 2005, designed by OMM Architects. In many ways his essay could have, retrospectively, been titled “Preparing Ourselves for the Constitutional Court,” since the court—the building and the art in it—was fashioned entirely in the spirit of that essay. Sachs was among the first cohort of eleven Constitutional Court judges appointed in 1994 by the first state president of the new/democratic South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Sachs oversaw the open competition for the design of the new court that led to the choice of the Durban firm OMM Architects and played a significant role in the thinking behind its conception, even if the genius of its actual design and construction is due to OMM architects. The resulting design is a masterpiece of openness and transparency, everywhere eschewing the monumental architecture traditionally associated with national courts of law where the constitution is enshrined and final decisions are promulgated.

94

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Usually the hegemonic power of law is associated with enormous, closed edifices, meant to inspire awe and terror, and signal the closed finality of judgment. In this case everything conspires to refuse the monumentality/ implacability of the law, but rather create a building that is meant to reflect the openness of justice to the people, both in terms of access to the court (physically and legally) and in terms of the transparency, flexibility, and concern for human welfare, which are meant to be the central constituents of the court’s decisionmaking process. The building is more fragmented than whole, built of glass, wood, and concrete, with a zigzag staircase leading up constitution hill to its doorways, easing the feet of those making the uphill walk, and celebrating the way Africans carrying pots of water or bundles on their heads would slowly make their way up hills. The pillars of the intermediary waiting hall resemble a tree leading to a glass roof, with glass on the sides, as if one is outside even when in, open to the weather and the people of Johannesburg.

Figure 4.2  OMM Architects, Constitutional Court from the Front, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

95

Figure 4.3  OMM Architects, Constitutional Court from the Side, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

The reigning idea is that of the old African image of justice under a tree, village justice, Ubuntu, which becomes, in this incarnation, a loosely ascribed heritage ideal. Under the umbrella of African heritage the court celebrates, in writing on wall, paintings, and sculptures throughout, and endless ornamental and inventive images, the eleven official languages of the country, and its multiplicity of heritages, all brought together under this tree of justice.22 The building is open to the city of Johannesburg, which is broadly visible from Constitution Hill in Braamfontein, where it sits. In this way it is meant to be open to the people (of the city), but also porous in its judgments to the shifting needs and aspirations of the city. At every point the building cries: this is a people’s court. There is a difficult heritage that the court also bespeaks, a legacy more brutal and tumultuous, and that is a matter of its exact location at the top of Braamfontein hill: the court is built on the site of the infamous Old Fort Prison, where both Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were imprisoned, and where, in the four prisons comprising that site, countless black Africans were thrown in jail for violations of Apartheid law, not having their passes in order, transporting liquor, or simply getting in the face of some minor police officer or authority. Built in 1890 by Paul Kruger to lock up the Brits, the Old Fort Prison has a notorious history in twentieth-century South Africa. Ruth First was imprisoned for ninety days under the dreaded Prevention of Terrorism Act and then immediately rearrested upon release—all without charges being laid. Sachs himself was detained in that Apartheid prison system.

96

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 4.4  OMM Architects, Constitutional Court in Braamfontein, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

Three of the prisons on this site still stand, including the notorious Number Four Prison where black criminals were crammed seventy to a cell, rapists and murderers shoved in with those unlucky enough to have been arrested because, during the Apartheid days of the dompas, their documents were out of order. There the conditions were designed to punish and degrade, from the refuse that was served as food for prisoners to the hundreds of men given half an hour to use but a few showers and only once per week, and given one bar of soap for the lot. The point was to create a battle for the survival of the fittest, degrading to all. These four prisons were racialized: separate and unequal quarters for black and white. Only one of the four prisons has been dismantled—the one for political prisoners—and when it was, the 2,000 bricks and the four staircases were retained, and then embedded within the walls of the new Constitutional

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

97

Figure 4.5  Walls of the Old Fort Prison, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

Court built on that site. The lobby of the court is constructed using these bricks. Formerly prisoners awaited trial on this site until—finally—charges were brought against them. Now one waits for justice. At least that is the idea. But a heritage of injustice in the form of the materials from the former prisons now also stands within the walls of the new South African court: as vanquished ruin, but also persistent historical memory. The thought is that justice requires acknowledgment of this memory. The court openly retains the scar of its Apartheid prison in the way Aldo Rossi spoke of fascist architecture in Italy being retained in the form of memory and heritage. Rossi also wishes to incorporate the wedding cake operatic monuments of Italian fascism into Italian modernist construction and cityscape, fusing them with the elegance of modernist stone and transparent design, thus actively rehabilitating—by reincorporating into the new—this difficult piece of Italian history.

98

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 4.6  Lobby, Constitutional Court, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

The Constitutional Court does a similar thing. It rehabilitates these stones by using them anew. But it does far more. By retaining old walls, the court transforms an old prison system into a heritage. The gesture is heritage creating. It is also ruin creating, since those three still-standing prisons now appear as artifacts from the past, remnants, while the fourth appears as a ruin. And the ruin or remnant of the past speaks within the new court, saying, to be just is always to keep in mind these terrible stones: which are the legacy of injustice. To know where we should be headed in the domain of justice is to know from whence we came. This court therefore creates a double heritage for South Africa, on the one hand refusing to relinquish the dreaded past with which it remains in dialogue (like Freedom Park in dialogue with the Voortrekker Monument), and on the other hand, celebrating a multiplicity of legacies which converge inside its domain and in its very architectural conception.

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

99

Figure 4.7  Lobby with Bricks from Old Fort Prison, photo courtesy of David Krut Publications.

Sachs has also overseen the stocking of this court with diverse art and architectural objects, many of which address the past. There were multiple competitions for murals, ladders, and art works which speak to suffering, remembrance, and acknowledgment. Much of the art is about the recent past, for example, Willem Boshoff ’s granite mural in the area of the court where prisoners awaited trial in the old days, which consists of four shadowy figures and their images who become phantoms of the system, dehumanized, spectral, insubstantial before the brute authority of the Apartheid state where they could have been imprisoned for up to ninety days without even being charged (and now they are waiting to be charged). Then there is Judith Mason’s The Blue Dress, a work of art she thought up while listening to the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to a story of a freedom fighter whose body had

100

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

been found in a shallow grave, the only covering being a plastic bag. Mason went out and sewed a dress out of a similar plastic bag, and with words, covered this disappeared person, providing an image of restitution, the dignity of properly covering her from her burnt nakedness. Hers is literally an act of redress. In the spirit of Sachs’ earlier essay the court celebrates all manner of diverse heritages without monumentalizing any. And it motivates new art from all quarters to exist in conversation, that is, to draw close to each other. It is as if the culture of the court is to set law in a context of this colloquy. These artworks stocking the court then represent the diversity of citizens now all able, in theory anyway, to access the court, to stand before the law. And that the duty of law is to each and every one these citizens. What is this duty? This diversity of objects occupying the walls and chambers of the court also importantly represents the aesthetic compliment of the famous Statute 39 of the Constitution I referred to earlier, a statute mandating reflection on the spirit of the constitution as a whole at every decision-making point. Statute 39 demands that each and every court decision result from reflection on these basic inalienable rights in light of human diversity and changing human sociohistorical circumstance. What is mandated is in effect a continual process of reflection about law in relation to the human beings it is meant to do justice to, and their variegated contexts. And so the multiple and shifting circumstances judges must take into account in making legal judgments find their symbolic expression in the very architecture and artwork of the court: which are icons of multiplicity. Attunement to its many and diverse artworks is meant to help focus the judge on flexibility, imagination, and reflection in light of the country’s diverse and changing colloquy of citizens— or at the very least to be a symbol of that. This preparation of the judge for free and informed judgment is the judge’s perpetual condition. Sachs essay, rewritten in 2005, the year the Constitutional Court building opened for business, might therefore have also been called “Preparing the Judge for Freedom of Judgment.” And so the court’s aesthetics become the mirror of justice: of how decisions should be taken and of the complexity of the human world that is the object of legal decision-making. The physical presence of the court building is the living image or embodiment of what legal thinking should ideally become. Whether the legal judgments made by the Constitutional Court judges in the first twenty years of post-Apartheid South Africa live up to this dignified and imaginative aesthetic is another matter. Dennis Davis, judge president of the Competitions Court, Cape Province, who is a legal theorist, professor, and public intellectual, has argued that all too often when presented with

Preparing Art for Freedom in the New South Africa

101

cutting-edge human rights cases the court has reverted to a formulation of these which allows precedent, rather than imagination and a staking of new and flexible rationales, to take over the court’s thinking.23 And so instead of taking up the challenge of the new, which would require it to weigh precedent (insofar as there is precedent) against the flexibility of constitutional spirit, perhaps dispensing with all precedent, the court defaults to its Apartheid legacy of English-style positivistic jurisprudence, which demanded exactitude of interpretation on the basis of past judgment (precedent). The court becomes conservative, which is hardly what the lively cross-pollination of the building solicits. And then there is the question of corruption and cronyism in the appointment of new judges by the current government—which some have accused of appointing a series of yes-men and women. Aesthetics cannot decree what will happen in the law; it can simply provide a mirror for judgment, a looking glass in which judgment may recognize its spirit, that is, its moral and intellectual demands. And so the art of transition becomes a meditation on the recent past and a symbolization of the imagination required of judgment when it faces the new. This is the way the past enters modern/contemporary art in a nation that is, unlike the India of Husain’s day, not a former colony now become a nation for the first time, but instead a nation in transition from the brutal authority of the past to, it is hoped, a better and more dignified way forward, a way forward demanding reflection on the past in a new spirit. South Africa is, and is not, postcolonial. Meanwhile, writing this in the wake of widespread university unrest, disaffection with government, attenuation of the Constitutional Court through the appointment of party hacks, general distrust of the institutions of the state, widespread government corruption, and the rise of virulent racial identity politics in universities, newspapers, and public life, one has to say the project of transition is either over, or semipermanently stalled. South Africa has so far failed to produce a multiparty democracy and reduce its off-the-charts levels of unemployment, and remains at the top of the list of countries characterized by gross and untenable economic inequality (the United States, my own alma mater being a close second). It no longer seems to be preparing itself for freedom, but rather suffering from blockages in that “vein.” Let us only hope the Sachs Constitutional Court and all it stands for does not become a period piece.

5

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

The rise of modern art outside of the capitals of Europe and America tends to happen courtesy of the diffusion of modernist style throughout the globe, styles which are assimilated and, at best, creatively adopted by being fused with the materials of the past (real or imaginary), and set to the dance of local light, color, physiognomy, and social practice. However, this is not the only way art throughout the globe may be said to become “modern.” There are indigenous traditions in various parts of the world (including the towns, rural areas, and hinterlands of Europe and America) that evolve of their own accord to address the terms of modern life, terms of excitement, dislocation anxiety, and the rest. These traditions evolve organically and with little or no knowledge of the modernisms of Europe and America. They are less clearly postcolonial (although they can be recruited for national purposes by others) for they seem to evince little interest in issues of nationalism, colonialism, or the transcription of a local past into a national one. Such alternative ways through which art becomes “modern,” or makes contact with modern life anyway, have in some instances been closely studied. But their implications for the concept of modern art have been less explored.1 Indigenous traditions and their own relations to modern life demand a revision of a number of concepts, putting pressure on the very idea of modern art to include or at least acknowledge these. And it is finally unclear the extent to which they might or might not address “postcolonial issues.” This chapter is about two such traditions and what happens when they encounter the pressures of the contemporary art world.

I A convenient place to begin if one wants to think about indigenous art in relation to modernism is with two works that closely resemble each other: PH-401 by Clyfford Still (1957) and Warlugulong, also by a Clifford: Clifford

104

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Possum Tjapaltjarri, who composed it with his relative Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri (1976). Both works are painted in rich, swirling acrylics circulating around a bold center. Both have strong horizontals and verticals. Both are ecstatic in their dancing, assertive forms. But they quickly part company. The poetry in Still’s PH-401 is an arabesque of deep and dampened reds that descend from the top of the canvas into its middle like long stalactites from the top of an ancient and undisturbed cave. And it is a lyric of equally strong blacks that ascend from the bottom like stalagmites rising from the bottom of a cave. These jagged red and black shapes descending from above, and ascending from below, meet and interact around pockets of white so beautifully and minutely irregular that they recall crystals or snowflakes under the microscope. The picture is wildly evocative of nature. In its jagged verticals and wide horizontals the painting recalls the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, where Still spent his youth: tall redwood trees, knifelike mountain ranges, cascading water down the sides of steep slopes, long open valleys, craggy peaks. The painting is deeply natural but also anthropomorphic: its reds and blacks interact like dancers in the fury of the dance, or entangled lovers. Time is everywhere in this picture: in the slow geological deposits of stalactite, mountain, and cave, and in the rapid unfolding of the dance, the fierce embrace of lovers. Still’s work is part of the history of abstract expressionism, and in the half century since this work was created one has learned, with the help of critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, to see this work (and others of its genre) as a poetry of shapes whose abstract purpose is also to be about nothing other than the gesture of its creation, and its relationship to the picture support. The picture is in dialogue with its edges: at the extreme right and left are curved shapes (yellow on the right side, black on the left), which nuzzle up against the picture’s edge, as if “declaring” that the picture is stably contained within. At the same time this abstraction seems cropped at the edges, like a photograph sliced from the larger world it is of, as if the lyric could continue in every direction into limitless space. The dialogue between picture and support, or edge, is a contrapuntal one. The Tjapaltjarri’s Warlugulong might also appear to an eye trained on American abstract painting to be of the same genre, with its ornamental, dotted fields of color circulating around a brilliant red center resembling a shooting star, and its sinewy red shapes extending vertically from the top like long roads or serpentine animals. Round its center are traced lines and lagoons of soft purple and greenish-yellow. The work bespeaks a magical landscape, a fairy-

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

105

Figure 5.1  Clyfford Still, Ph-401, 1957, Clyfford Still Museum, rights courtesy of Artists Rights Society.

tale world of river, island, of constellation and galaxy, of earth and world above or below. It mythically compresses ornament into form, or so it would seem, as if the world is stitched together by a magic sewing machine which turns threads into special journeys. Ecstatically expressive, it is as vivid as Still’s, and one might think its way of meaning is of the same sort: the evocation of nature within an abstract format, the “dialogue” with the edge, the absence of representational meaning. Until, that is, we read the Australian anthropologist and art critic Howard Morphy on Warlugulong, which is an aboriginal work of art: [Warlugulong] was painted in 1976, the first of a series of large canvases that the artists produced representing Dreaming tracks across vast areas of land in central Australia. The main theme of the painting is a great bush fire, Warlugulong, that burst into being in the Dreamtime at a place of the same name. The fire was lit by the blue tongue lizard Lungkata to punish his sons for not sharing meat from a kangaroo they had killed. The fire had a catastrophic effect, as it chased his sons, the exploding figure in the centre of the painting … started at a place beyond the right edge of the painting. Most of the sites of the painting are to

106

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 5.2  Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Tjapaltjarri, Warlugulong, 1976, Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, rights courtesy of Aboriginal Artists Agency Limited.

the east of Warlungulong, which suggests that it started at a place beyond the right edge of the painting. Most of the sites on the painting are to the east of Warlugulong, which suggests that it is oriented with south at the top. This might be confirmed by the footprints  …  which lead away from the fire towards the top of the painting: these represent the route taken by Lungkata’s sons as they tried to escape the flames in the direction of Ernabella to the southwest … The serpentine line across the top of the painting represents the great snake Yarapiri, and across the bottom can be seen the track … of the hare wallaby men, Mala. In both cases the overall direction of travel was from south to north …2

We are in a different universe of meaning when we travel from the Pacific Northwest to the Australian outback, a world of aboriginal art which may be,

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

107

to the educated Western eye (mine anyway), more or less indiscernible from abstract expressionist art produced in the United States after the Second World War. The work would seem to fit comfortably in the visual space of the modern or contemporary art museum. But in so many ways it does not. Morphy goes on to say, “Aboriginal paintings can only be fully understood as maps once it is realized that the criterion for inclusion is not topographical but mythological and conceptual; paintings are thus representations of the totemic geography.”3 Warlugulong is about time, cosmological time, not the time of physics or of the dance. Its dreaming (ecstatic, hallucinogenic, ritualistic) is meant to connect the artist with the “Dreamtime”: the primordial time of the ancestors when everything was alive and the world as we know it was created. In this once-upona-time when the universe of all things was created, the world was populated (came to be populated) by animated beings, who were of more potent stuff than the people and animals today, mythic stuff, god-stuff: of a stuff capable of bringing the world of men, women, animals, and land into existence as it is currently known. The land and things in it—the snakes, turtles, and other animals, the plants, rocks, and other inanimate things—are all a product of creation which took place during the dreamtime. That cosmological time of the past when everything was alive, and more powerful than it is today, was a time of ecstatic animation and spiritual intensity. Without this ancestral world of the past, there would be nothing today. The point of life is to return from the present to that moment in the past, thus reconnecting to the deeper meaning of things: to the sources of animal, plant, rock, hill, and desert in the dreamtime. An aboriginal person goes “walkabout” naked throughout this arid world to trace lines of life. Aboriginal people remain hunters and gatherers at heart, if not entirely in practice, and are accustomed (or have been) to such wandering in search of food but the walkabout and the painting have a more spiritual point, which is to retrace the lines of the past in a way that merges self with its origins (in the dreamtime). Space travelled, with feet across rocks and grasslands or with a painter’s brush across a canvas, is contact made across mythic time. This metaphysical merger of present with past, of life with its ancestral spirits, is the point of aboriginal art. One is tracing a route into the past in the medium of paint—as if the brush were one’s feet and the canvas the map and result of one’s journey. Painting is thus ritual, leaping from one time zone to another in an act of homage, worship, praise. It follows that the act of painting is precisely iconographic and narrative, while also ecstatic in its ritualized dreaming. In other words the aboriginal painting is

108

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

really not abstract, even if its presentation of color fields (hallucinatory) does share features with abstract expressionism in the United States. The work of the Tjapaltjarris does not emerge from modern artistic practices, although artists like the Tjapaltjarris are beneficiaries of the moment about fifty years ago when new materials—canvas and acrylic paint—were first introduced to aboriginal communities. Before that the work was painted on bark (which is rough and small) and with naturally produced paints. But apart from the gifting of materials the Western modernist canon had little or no effect on the style of work by many aboriginal painters—nor on their intentions to embody the meanings they do in their works. What the Tjapaltjarris have done with acrylic on canvas pretty much comes down from their culture. It flows from tradition and makes no contact with Manet, Picasso, Dali, Pollock, or Still. There is no diffusion of style from Western modernism to them, unlike the cases of Rivera and Husain. Nor even an attempt to address the throes of modern life. And that is interesting.

II That visually similar works could embody meaning in such different ways, the one poetic, suggestive, and self-reflective, the other highly iconographic, narrative, and symbolic, is something the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto made a central tenet of his philosophy of art. Danto begins his important philosophical work The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) with a virtuoso thought experiment about a number of paintings, all visually identical and consisting of a single red square. In Danto’s story the first turns out to be purely abstract, the next a representation of Moscow’s famous “piazza” (Red Square), the third about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, which has parted to allow them through, then engulfed the Egyptians, the fourth about a bed, the fifth about nothing at all, and on and on. Danto’s lesson is that only when one understands how the visual is recruited within a culture of human concepts to embody meaning can its significance and power as a work of art be established. (Indeed only within such a system of concepts, Danto argues, does a visual thing become a work of art.) If a red square is a commonplace visual form, then its transfiguration into a work of art depends on a theory of meaning or at least cultural schema held by a community of persons, or what Danto calls an art world. This art world is historically evolving, since at any given time the terms for how meaning is to be embodied (and in what) will differ from before or after: in the Renaissance the

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

109

terms would have been iconographic, narrative, representational of the Christian story, and of portraiture and landscape. The Renaissance, Danto tells us, would literally have had no way of processing abstract expressionism, or aboriginal art for that matter. Neither Clifford would have made any sense in Renaissance times. Danto’s eureka moment took place in the Stable Gallery run by Eleanor Ward in 1964 (it is no longer in existence), where he witnessed an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. Reflecting on these comic, surprising, highly provocative exaggerations, Danto noted the obvious: Warhol’s art objects were to all intents and purposes visually identical to the Brillo Boxes one finds in the supermarket. Indeed following his master Duchamp’s Readymades (Duchamp had exhibited snow shovels, bicycle wheels, and urinals in galleries and art shows during the second decade of the twentieth century, and to stormy controversy), at other exhibitions Warhol didn’t even make his own simulations of the Brillo Box (in exaggerated form), but simply purchased Brillo Boxes at the supermarket and transported them to the gallery where he put them on exhibition. And to public outcry: many at the time said this proved these objects were nothing more than the emperor’s new clothes and Warhol a sickly charlatan. But others, including Danto, reasoned that there was no sham here; Warhol’s Brillo Box really was a work of art when exhibited in the gallery, his argument being that Warhol’s gesture of exhibiting theses boxes invested them with the kind of embodied meaning a work of art requires, since suddenly they became comic/ironic meditations on, and celebrations of, the relationship between product, art, and design in American consumer culture, and on the very nature of art. Danto’s point was that since these objects were the same when on the supermarket shelves and in the gallery, nothing immediately visual about them could play the role of defining them as art. Rather, a background set of concepts shared by an art world needed to be in place that would, however controversially, allow these objects, under Warhol’s prestidigitating gesture, to “speak” as art (visually and otherwise). By reasoning in this way, Danto reactivated the philosopher Leibnitz’s problem of indiscernibility. When two perceptually indiscernible things are different in kind, it can only be in virtue of a background set of concepts that their difference is spelled out. In the case of art, it is, Danto reasoned, the cultural background of an art world which puts in place a set of concepts that allow the one thing to be schematized differently from the other, as Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, exhibited on a pedestal, suddenly becomes a play on the very idea of sculpture. When Duchamp exhibits the Bicycle Wheel it becomes a brilliant

110

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

simulation of sculpture, exciting the tactile values of sculpture: you want to spin it, which is not unlike wanting to touch the soft feminine curves of a Canova marble. It becomes anthropomorphic: a head, a torso, a body sitting on pedestal. It loses its instrumental function apart from being seen or contemplated: you can spin the wheel but it doesn’t go anywhere. All of these features of Duchamp’s artwork make it exactly that: an artwork rather than a mere engineering object (a wheel) put on a wooden stand. And it takes, Danto reasoned, an art world with a background set of concepts in order for viewers to see it that way, in order for an artist to exhibit it with that meaning and ironic play. Of course not all will agree that it is art and Duchamp’s work, like Warhol’s, has had its share of insult hurled at it. But only within the context of a modern art world (with its conceptual schemes) could this debate even arise. And so when one looks to aboriginal art like Warlugulong, one must, following Howard Morphy, look to the culture whose concepts (beliefs and attitudes) allow it to embody meaning in the particular ways it does—rather than simply assimilating the work to a modernist art world that would assimilate it (wrongly) to abstraction. And vice versa of course for Still’s work (which the aboriginal artist might just misinterpret as in its own way a celebration of the dreamtime). There are politics in this. That the works of the two Cliffords are visually alike (and in certain ways not so superficially, since both are ecstatic and visionary) is part of what explains how aboriginal art can be easily misrecognized as canonical modernism and especially when it is placed in the modernist museum. Indeed the question of whether it belongs in the modern museum at all, and if so, why, is a question at the heart of the politics of the art world today, especially in Australia. This is a question of what Ivan Karp and his colleagues called “museum frictions” in the title of their edited volume,4 in this case a friction between the culture of the museum and the aboriginal object. Given its difference from modernist art, given its relationship to its own traditions and its refusal to make contact with the modern art of Europe, America, and the globe, given that it is an ongoing version of traditional, ritualistic art and not the abstract art it so resembles, that it is an act of spiritual return within aboriginal culture rather than a thing to be contemplated outside that culture, why place it in a modern museum at all to be contemplated by those outside that ritualistic world, unless one is continuing the colonial act of ripping the art objects of the world out of their natural homes and turning them into mere sights for the contemplating viewer, a museum practice central to the rise of nation-states in the Europe of the eighteenth century, and to colonialism?

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

111

An alternative would be not to exhibit it in a museum at all, since it sits uneasily in the confines of the museum, where it inevitably becomes a “site” for aesthetic contemplation rather than an act of ritual within a culture of the outback—and a “site” largely for non-aboriginal visitors at that. But not exhibiting would also be consigning it to the indignity of silence in Australian society, where for the first time (after centuries) aboriginal peoples have a voice. And it would prevent many Australian schoolchildren and interested adults from learning anything about aboriginal art. Nor does aboriginal art want to be consigned to a museum of anthropology or an ethnic museum, where in earlier times the cultural objects of “the natives” were exhibited in the manner of animals contained in the dioramas of museums of natural history. Such museums still carry that stigma. Placing aboriginal work in art museums is then a question of best practice in a country wishing to repair the indignities of the past, a country wishing to acknowledge its diverse and formerly brutalized populations (Australia) and place them on the same footing as everyone else—hence the importance of placing aboriginal art in the same museum as settler art and international modernism in spite of the mismatch. And so the work becomes of national importance almost in spite of itself. Moreover the work is aesthetically beautiful, and in that sense belongs in a museum of art. And so Warlugulong enters the museum with a difference, since in fundamental ways it is not part of the culture of modern and contemporary art, except by the fiat of inclusion, exhibition, circulation, and marketing. Perhaps the museum also changes by highlighting this art, just as much as the art changes by being put in it. Perhaps there is a twoway street. The museum can become more aware of its own history, legacy, and “frictions” when it seriously seeks to present and acknowledge this art “with a difference.”

III The work of the Tjapaltjarri brothers can be usefully placed alongside contemporary South African art I have earlier written about5: the sculpture of a region in the northeast of the country bordering Mozambique called Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga. Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga carvings are among the few longstanding traditions of black African sculptural carving in the Southern African region, dating back centuries. But unlike the work of the Tjapaltjarri’s, certain strands of Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga carving have sought for some time to make

112

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

contact with modern life, registering its anxieties and demands, ironizing those in power. This has made it a fascinating challenge for the canonical concepts of modern art and culture which were in place in the mid-1980s in Europe and also South Africa, for the work wants to be called “modern art” and also doesn’t. One can do no better than refer to the writing on Vha-Venda sculpture South African art historian Anitra Nettleton published in 1989 in order to familiarize oneself with its content and context, especially her essay “The Crocodile Does Not Leave the Pool: Venda Court Arts.”6 This essay details how Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga carvers recruit traditional styles of carving in the service of deeply felt belief systems. Their guiding belief is that at death their ancestors’ spirits pass into a great lake, where they exist as a carbon copy of what the person’s spirit was in life. Snakes and fish also live in this lake, hence their importance as religious or metaphysical elements in the carving. The great lake (Fundudzi) is seen as a mirror of the kingship and society itself, with the crocodile (a central Venda sculptural form) being also the name for the king, and the python being linked, among other things, to creation: “… when the python within the primordial pool ‘created’ animals and people by vomiting them from his stomach … and, on the other hand … to the perimeter of the pool, where he ‘writhes’ while lying in wait for his prey.”7 The python has multiple associations, including fertility. It is a mediator between the living and the dead; this is like the aboriginal, an ancestor-worshiping society.8 The crocodile and the python together symbolize fraternity between key groups or clans in historical times: they are signs of history and unity. Such traditional beliefs are layered with ideas from missionary Christianity9 about Christ, prophesy, healing, sin, and resurrection to produce a hybridized religious mysticism.10 This is clearly carving which has traditionally revolved around religious belief, rituals, and village life. When Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga work was discovered in late 1970s and early 1980s by the South African art world (Anitra Nettleton published her Ph.D. thesis on the region in 198411 and other art historians began working on this region around the same time), the work caused them to rethink categories of black art in a number of related ways.12 For the work immediately looked modern in its taut and tensile elongated forms, rough hewn wood, and powerfully expressive intensities, especially because of the modernist debt to West African sculpture which is not entirely dissimilar in these features from its Southern African sculptural neighbors.13 Here again was a Danto-like case of two visually similar things belonging to profoundly different cultures of meaning. The South Africans knew better than to carry on the European modernist misreading

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

113

since they were (and Anitra Nettleton is a perfect example) deeply invested in understanding this work in its own context, thus dignifying it at a moment when Apartheid, with all its racist condescension toward the African, was slowly approaching its endpoint. These historians and art critics grasped that Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga work even sits uneasily in the category of art: Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga artists thought of themselves as carvers, not “sculptors,” if being a sculptor meant relating to traditions of European and world sculpture, a world of which they mostly in the 1980s unaware. And they grasped that it could not be reduced to mere anthropology, if that meant focusing on its cultural meanings to the extent that one ignored its evident visual power and mastery of form. Aesthetics had to prove crucial in approaching this magnificent carving. And so a series of attempts were made, as a way of dignifying this tradition of carving, to find or invent new concepts that could denote the specificity of this work: work which both bore a significant affinity to modern art and was totally independent of modern art. South African art historians, curators, and critics of the 1980s began to mark the particular terrain of this powerful work with a new concept: that of “transitional art.” Transitional arts were theorized as neither primitive nor modern but betwixt and between. The goal in introducing this new term was to dignify a wide variety of artifacts produced by (then) contemporary black Africans living in townships, rural communities, and urban peripheries by vesting them this in-between theoretical space. The art critics were right as far as they went. For the term was meant to encompass work that was half-commercial, half-artisanal, half-artistic, and half-traditional, blurring domains of traditional versus modern, inviting entry into what the late and sorely missed art theorist Colin Richards presciently called “the cultural and economic institutions of the dominant art world.”14 Richards went on to say in an essay written for the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford of 1990, “The ‘transitional’ marks the place where migrations of the [semi] rural workers and the cosmopolitan tourist intersect.”15 But the category of the transitional was finally employed to mark too much, meant as it was to encompass a wide range of productions understood through conditions of trauma or hardship. Township and peri-urban art are quite different from their rural counterparts; yet major differences between them were erased by the category, which simply lumped all this work together in virtue of what it is not. Not all productions of the time bore an equivalent mark of social urgency, or of human dislocation. Richards was himself critical of the concept although he also used it, and by the mid-1990s the category was dropped and no further conceptual work was done on Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga sculpture by such persons.16

114

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Part of the point of this category was to include diverse and formerly excluded objects of all kinds under the umbrella of the about-to-be-transitional nation, as a form of what the previous chapter called redress. But there was another purpose as well, which was, I think, to denote that in interesting ways the sculpture or carving of Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga is in its own way also modern, imbued with the rhythm and intensity of modern life. More recent work from the 1990s by the Ndou brothers, for example, is a comic exaggeration of British types in South Africa, a way of sending up, in its own way, Eurocentrism, the cricket pitch transposed south of the Zambesi to the Natal grassland. Then there is Job Seeker, an anonymous work from the area. A single piece of wood from which a running man is carved as if caught in a moment of extreme tension, Job Seeker pitches the figure’s entire body toward an unknown destination. The figure is seeking a job, but the existential anxiety with which the knotted character of the wood and its long, sinewy lines are used to animate his comportment, the sense of his plunging toward an uncertain future, bespeak knowledge of modern life and its crushing anonymity. The sculptor has felt the pressures of modern life, the social anomie of Apartheid, the infusion of modern technology into Vha-Venda/Va-Tsonga, and the need to participate in a modern capitalistic system with limited job opportunities (40 percent unemployment and more underemployment even today). These experiences of a system and a history exist in his nerve endings like anxious, unwanted threats. And here one must mark the difference between the aboriginal painting by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and his relative Tim, and Job Seeker. For Job Seeker really does make contact with the throes of modern life, speaking to “modernity” in its own way and on its own terms and through its own traditions. Warlugulong does not, at least as far as I can tell: its terms of meaning exist entirely within those of traditional aboriginal culture. Job Seeker is both traditional and of modern life, defying the easy oppositions between modern and unmodern, and modern and traditional. Indeed (and this was the most telling point of the analysis of the 1980s) it blurs the art/non-art distinction as well, if by “art” one means work produced within the modern system of the arts and the related consciousness of maker-as-artist that is a legacy of the Renaissance. On the other hand in its artisanal bravura, expressive intensity, and power of engagement with rural South African Apartheid conditions of modernity, Job Seeker is too close to what that system calls “art” and “modern art” to dispense with either term. It would be totally condescending to reduce it to the old aesthetic category of “craft,” opposed as it was to the category of art. For Job Seeker is both.

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

Figure 5.3  Owen Ndou, Gentleman’s Game, Private Collection.

115

116

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 5.4  Artist unknown, Job Seeker, Collection of Daniel Herwitz and Lucia Saks, photo by Peter Smith.

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

117

To repeat: Job Seeker looks modern, in part because of the African origins of modernism (Picasso and the Musee L’Homme). And it voices the registers of modern life in its anxiety. But its terms of meaning (its way of embodying meaning) substantially differ from those of modern art. And there are other ways in which Vha-Venda, Isi-Tsonga, and other South African arts arising through organic traditions are also modern (make contact with modern life), the subject of a recent and excellent book by Anitra Nettleton, Julia Charleton, and Fiona Rankin-Smith.17 Here is the important point: this sculpture makes contact with modern life but is not produced through the diffusion of modern and avant-garde art from Europe and America. In Chapter 2, I discussed M.F. Husain’s appropriation of Picasso as an example of modernist diffusion. Husain goes to Europe with the Progressive artists of India in the late 1940s and studies Picasso, then brings cubist (and German expressionist) style in his suitcase back to India, where he fuses it with canonical forms from the Indian past (the Chola Bronze, the Indian miniature). He also recasts cubism dynamically by splitting cubist planes throughout the canvas, and crowding the spaces with forms and colors in a way that has resonance for the Indian street corner, city, and rural area. And so Husain satisfies his desire to return to and recast forms from the alienated Indian past by indirectly retrieving that past through the lens of the Western modernism he has creatively appropriated. Conversely put, Husain globalizes Indian culture by importing modernism from Europe and subjecting cubism to innovation. It is perhaps the canonical way modernism arises outside of the capitals of Europe and America: by “emigrating” from Europe to Mexico (Diego Rivera, where it fuses with preColumbian forms and the violent pageantry of Mexican history), to Uruguay (Torres-Garcia, where it merges with the dull light and streets of the Uruguayan port city of Montevideo, and with Latin American color), to Haiti (Wifredo Lam, where the Surrealist gaze on “primitivist” voodoo practice becomes more complicated in light of Lam’s close relationship to that tropical culture), to South Africa (where Gerard Sekoto assimilates the expressive use of color by the Fauves and the street scenes of Utrillo to meditate upon the overmodulated light on corrugated urban shacks and the rhythmic physiognomy of people at work and leisure in the once-vibrant urban township/city of Sophiatown), and on and on to India, Australia, Japan, and so on. And yet this is not the only way “modern arts” have arisen across that world. They have also arisen without contact with Europe, out of indigenous traditions, which in their own way have grown modern through contact with the modern world, by becoming the art of the job seeker or cricket player. And so the early conceptual struggles by South

118

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

African thinkers who in the late 1980s tried to find new language to reserve a place for this less well known but equally significant way in which traditional or popular urban arts have become in their own ways “modern” are conceptual struggles of importance today. The domain, range, and meaning of modern art are challenged by these kinds of traditions. The question is how. (Again the idea of “transitional art” proved inadequate because it lumped too much disparate work together and didn’t have a lot of analytical content apart from wanting to mark the integrity of difference.) I myself find it useful to think about this problem of the uncomfortable fit between Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga sculpture and modern art in light of one of my favorite passages from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote in his Philosophical Investigations: “A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words.—Our grammar is lacking in that sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections.’ Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases.”18 It was a technique of Wittgenstein’s teaching to try to find and invent examples of items about which it was too simple to say either that it was or was not a number, was or was not alive, was or was not a human being, computer, or natural or artificial kind. Such examples, he tells us, are of special interest because they allow for the seeing of “connections,” connections between ranges of concepts. They provide entry into the complexity of our conceptual maps with all their intersections and cross-hatchings, as if our conceptual grids were as complicated as the pathways of Warlugulong. Intermediate cases afford purchase into how our concepts are constructed and how they frame the world and also where they break down, or hit the wall of cases they cannot quite handle. Intermediate cases are about the power, and limitations, of our concepts. One might think of Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga sculpture as an intermediate case, about which it is too simple to say either that it is modern art or that it isn’t. Such an example would, on this line of reasoning, tell us something about the network of concepts through which modern art is framed, about the hidden genealogy of the map. That map of modern arts from Paris through Berlin, from Picasso through the avant-gardes to Josef Beuys, Fluxus, Warhol, Kiefer, and, centripetally, through diffusion, to Rivera, Husain, Sekoto is a capacious one with a complex relationship to modernity, to modern history, its excitements and traumas, to science and society, to late colonialism and early socialism and fascism, to nationalism, urbanity, and spirituality, to the future and the past. But the map of modern art, however global, leaves certain other objects unable to

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

119

find clear points of entry. And so relative to this map, it is too simple either to say Vha-Venda and Va-Tsonga sculpture is modern art or that it is not. It remains, within the system of the map, a stubbornly intermediate case. To call Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga carving an intermediate case, about which it is too simple either to say it is or is not modern art, would be one way of marking its special characteristics. It somehow or other “speaks” to the modern world in its way. But it does not arise through diffusion and is unrelated to the modern art of Europe (unlike Husain and Rivera). A concept in wide circulation throughout the humanities and social sciences can help: that of “alternative modernities.”19 The writing on “alternative modernities” approaches global modernity not as a singular thing sourced to Europe and globalized through diffusion but rather as a system of overlapping societies, beliefs, cultures, all in some sense related through the long diffusing arc of colonialisms yes, but also marked by profound differences of history, tradition, culture, state politics, and so on. These differences call for multiple stories of modernity rather than a single arching narrative of modern life. There are many ways to be and become modern, not simply the canonical ones highlighted by most concepts of modern art, and most discussions of it. The voice of the work is at issue; beyond traditional sources in religion, it is hard to tell just how deeply this work intends to speak to modern life, as well as how successfully. Its voice or voices seem to me somewhat indeterminate. Does it intend to speak to the “South African nation”? The Apartheid system? Or is it more simply a set of very finely drawn local gestures (about getting a job, taking ironic jabs at the white settler who probably deserves to be sent up)? These uncertainties are interesting because they raise a central postcolonial question, namely that of the subaltern and how to interpret his or her speech. It was a central innovation of postcolonial writing that it explored the gap in language and understanding between elites and peasants, rural people or indigenous groups with respect to how they conceived of decolonizing struggles, and their own participation in them. Subaltern studies and before it the work of Gayatri Spivak20 interrogated the way such aspirations, and reports, and facts, and stories of the struggle, and visions of national justice were staged by elites in the name of subalterns. And how, within the circle of those representations of the subaltern by the elite, the subaltern’s voice disappeared, becoming incomprehensible. It is very hard for urban elites to understand the thinking of rural peoples when they come to address the modern life and events both “share.” Gayatri Spivak, writing brilliantly about the brutal tradition of Sati (when Hindu brides follow their deceased husbands onto the funeral pyre, burning themselves to death),

120

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

concluded that the subaltern cannot speak within the circle of representations of her by-late colonial elites, British and Indian both. This idea is deep and can be applied to the case of Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga carving, whose terms of rhetoric prove similarly elusive. This proves the relevance of postcolonial theory to the understanding of traditional arts, even if the world they bespeak may not be exactly a postcolonial one. The point is, we do not know for sure what these works are “saying” about modern life. And the explanations of the work by local carvers will not solve the problem, since their way of saying what these works mean will be no less confounding than the works themselves. The question of whether this work is or is not postcolonial could therefore be called a postcolonial question: one demanding the writings of Gayatri Spivak and subaltern studies for its unpacking. I leave it unresolved.

IV The irony is that trying to interpret this kind of work is not simply a conceptual conundrum. It leads to another kind of conundrum: about how establishing contact with this work, bringing it to galleries and museums and university seminars and to the art world in the name of understanding it, may also change it in profound ways. The very attempt to dignify an organically evolving tradition as a heritage inevitably disrupts the tradition (now called a heritage). The recognition of tradition disrupts tradition by placing its objects and artists in a brave new world of contemporary art. It is not simply that the “subaltern”/ rural artist cannot speak and be understood except in our own “translations” and vocabulary but also that the interpretation, accompanied by curation, puts the art in a new world, changing potentially everything about it. It is the art world that is hegemonic, not simply the interpretation, which may well try to understand and acknowledge as best it can. The story of Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga work is a poignant example, about which I have written in earlier work.21 Briefly the story is this. The curators, critics, and art historians who wished to understand and dignify Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga work brought it into the gallery, the museum: the art world. Before you knew it Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga carving was being shown all over Europe, and this was during the 1990s, the Mandela years of the South African political transition, when South Africa was moral flavor of the month and the aura of Mandela cast its beneficent shadow over South African culture, including this body of work. You might say South African carving had its fifteen

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

121

minutes of Andy Warhol fame as a global icon along with Mandela and the new South African democracy. Art always follows politics M.F. Husain used to tell me, and the case of African carving was no exception. At the moment of the South African transition to democracy, when Mandela flew around the world taking tea with Lady Diana and the Spice Girls, when South African rugby won the World Cup, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission captivated the world, Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga carving became imbued with that glory. Collectors wanted it, and did not worry about how to remake concepts in a way that best described it. They saw it as contemporary art worth collecting and that was that for them. The fact that it remained “outsider” art to the system was all the better, given the art world’s love of the outsider as a category of modernist edginess. In the course of becoming part of the contemporary art world, it was not simply that the work was branded and became icon of the month: the lives of the carvers changed. They became contemporary artists. They began to travel outside their rural areas, and visited the museums of Johannesburg, London, and Berlin. They began to read art journals and magazines. They studied European art, including modernism. They visited game parks to see the animals they had long carved from picture books. No longer were they rural carvers selling their wares on the highway between Johannesburg and the Kruger Park along with fruit sellers and weavers of baskets. They circulated globally. All this had the effect of wrenching some of them from their traditions. While certain Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga artists like Noria Mabasa refused to let their new lives change the way they conceived of their art, laughing all the way to the bank (Mabasa was busy making huge sculptural installations for the Johannesburg office mall, but in a way that did not affect her relationship to tradition), this was not true of the Ndou brothers, Goldwin and Owen. The Western sculptural traditions they studied in the course of becoming “famous” profoundly influenced their approaches to sculptural physiognomy. If one studies more recent work by Owen Ndou one will quickly see it is influenced by European modeling of the female form, whose fluent curves (no longer jagged) Ndou recasts into wood sculpture. It is not that his more recent work is less interesting. It is that it is irrevocably different. By an irony of history the very desire of South African art critics in the 1980s to acknowledge and dignify Vha-Venda and Isi-Tsonga traditions as traditions or African heritages led over a twenty-year period to that work’s becoming of global interest, to the globalization of the artists, and the disruption of the very traditions these critics were so desperate to acknowledge. This is the dialectic

122

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 5.5  Owen Ndou, Recent Sculpture, Private Collection.

of the modern: that the very acknowledgment of the outsider makes him or her an insider, thus changing the character of the tradition that the insider wishes to acknowledge. He or she gains opportunity and loses continuity with the past. Such is the price of acknowledgment in a world where globalization is hegemonic, including in the art world. Everything has its price. What is the price? Globalization and inclusion of this work into the system of contemporary art markets has not destroyed the tradition, not at all. But

Aboriginal, Abstract, and Isi-Tsonga

123

it has caused significant friction. Similarly younger aboriginal artists have become part of the system of contemporary art, going to art school, studying the avant-gardes, replacing ritualized painting, and dreaming by politics which represent aboriginal history and rights to a wider audience. For some, ancestral heritage has been channeled into identity politics at the national level, which does make them postcolonial artists. And so Judy Watson, an artist of aboriginal descent, created a series of sculptural installations during the late 1980s about dispossession, intrusion, and land rights, making work which aimed to address the ancestors but also the Australian art world and Australian state politics. Rights claims rather than dreaming became the purpose of this art, which recruited the materials of aboriginal tradition to the purposes of avant-garde installation. Her set of works of powder pigment on plywood called “the guardians” from the late 1980s call on the spirit culture of the dead to watch over contemporary aboriginal politics, and do so for an extended audience. Her etchings from the late 1990s, “our bones in your collections,” “our skin in your collections,” “our hair in your collections,” recruit aboriginal-style dreamtime painting to the purpose of speaking to the (dis)-possession of aboriginal peoples by the museum and the archive, where they have historically been “anthropologized.” These works end up in museum collections where they sit in partial discomfort and in a state of benign protest. But they belong in the museum, because they are speaking to Australia as a whole, on behalf of aboriginal peoples. They are not speaking within the circle of aboriginal ritual. And so tradition has now been fused with the legacies of the European avant-gardes. At this point aboriginal art becomes not only modernist but also postcolonial, since it addresses the Australian nation and its dispossession of the people whose bones it also collected in its then-colonial museums: aboriginals. Watson’s work is one example of a large and variegated field. Many artists continue in the old vein, citing, mapping, and dreaming the ancestors. Others seek to speak aboriginal languages to global audiences—often politically—by melding them with what has been learned from the history of twentieth-century art. The very act of speaking of tradition in the context of a modern nationstate already changes the tradition by re-vocalizing it (placing it in the national art museum for example where it speaks differently). There is no one way a tradition endures or dissipates under such conditions but many. One can make no prediction about what will happen to this or that tradition in this or that context except to say that the pressure to conform to and work within global markets and systems is very hard to avoid, and may be called hegemonic.

124

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 5.6  Judy Watson, Our Bones in Your Collections, 1997, etching and chine colle, 29.4 × 20.5 cm, 30.0 × 21.1 cm platemark, 40.0 × 27.2 sheet, Mollie Gowing Acquisition Fund for Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998, rights courtesy of Artists Rights Society.

6

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

I This chapter is about the globalization of European culture, in the form of grand opera, in the twenty-first century. There is a special question to be raised about the appropriation of cultural forms outside of the capitals of Europe and America when the culture appropriated has had a long and egregious Eurocentric history within the colony itself. Opera has had the dubious distinction of playing a major key in the colony, where it was set forth as a tonic center of settler and colonizer distinction, a piece in the vast apparatus used to distinguish European from native in virtue of its proclaimed superiority and exclusive use by the settler/colonizer. Indeed persons of color had been barred from entering the Cape Town Opera House until Apartheid gave way to the democratic transition. And so it was easy to see that for a South Africa at the moment of decolonization or transition, opera was “tainted goods.” No wonder the decolonizing society wished to remove this historical “left-over” from its new life. By contrast when M.F. Husain and Diego Rivera (see Chapters 1 and 2) turned to cubism and surrealism these were modernist forms that played little or no role in colonialism (which was already in decline when they were invented), even if both cubism and surrealism are tainted by colonialist ideologies (in their visions of primitivism for example). As we have seen (in Chapters 1 and 2) decolonizing societies turned to their pasts in an act of rehabilitation, to old culture and ongoing tradition downgraded under colonialism, now adulated as an identity and origin capable of leading them toward their own modernity. This was a turn away from Eurocentrism, in Husain’s case the turn away from British styles of portraiture he had learned at the J.J. School of Art, Bombay. This refusal of remnants like British portraiture and grand opera in favor of past and tradition often became in the decolonizing society a canon of authenticity: a veritable law about what the proper production of art and culture should be for the new/emergent postcolonial nation. The last thing a postcolonial subject should be singing, it was felt, was more Italian opera.

126

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Colonialism had “gifted” the colony too much of that already. Paradigmatically, Eurocentric cultural forms as flower and landscape painting, classical music, and opera were widely believed to be politically retrograde or—at best— contemporary embarrassments. All of this pushed decolonizing societies in the direction of wishing, in certain moods anyway, to cleanse themselves of their Eurocentric “remains.” And so interesting questions are raised when persons in a decolonizing or transitional society wish to reappropriate these “leftovers from the old days.” The questions are not merely academic. Young people today, in South Africa and in other parts of the global world, are turning to paradigmatically European forms like opera, challenging postcolonial canons of authenticity: raising questions about whether the postcolonial world, understood as that which appeared in the immediate moment of decolonization and nation-building, along with at least some of its corpus of writings and theories, is now out of date in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Are these young persons simply naïve when they pursue Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini? Are they unaware of the larger cultural politics in which they dwell? Those young people busy appropriating the language of the diva do not believe opera requires rehabilitation. They think such a position on opera is a form of censorship, an artifact of the world of their elders restricting their freedom. Opera is simply theirs to use at will. The world is their oyster. This attitude, naïve or otherwise, raises the question of whether they inhabit what could be called a post-postcolonial world where standards of authenticity central to decolonization no longer apply, except as the political correctness old people believe which to the young is milk now past its sell-by date. And whether that world where everyone is free to use whatever they like—globally speaking—is one predicated on the failure of historical memory (and even if it is—then so what?) This chapter explores the voices of young people who are engaged in operatic training and performance in Cape Town and Johannesburg—and also the counter-voices of their young compatriots who fiercely disagree with what they are doing in dedicating themselves to such a European apprenticeship as the grand operatic stage. I am interested in the views of these young people because their experiences of history, and of globalization, are interestingly different from their elders. Their views, and debates, are a window into contemporary cultural conditions and, to repeat, these conditions may well differ substantially from the earlier ones characterizing the postcolonial world. That world, to gloss it (and I rehearse aspects of Chapter 1 here), was characterized by nationalism and decolonization, ongoing cultural exclusion and neocolonial castigation,

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

127

and a need for the postcolony and the colonial centers of Europe and America to pass beyond those intellectual traditions that were central to the ideology of colonialism and colonial superiority. It was a world demanding ongoing colonial and neocolonial critique, and also, as I also suggested above, a world characterized by deeply felt canons of cultural authenticity. The modernism of M.F. Husain, Diego Rivera, and others (see earlier chapters) existed within this ambit. The archive of postcolonial theory was about the critique of colonialism, both as a practice and a system of knowledge. It was about the problems and prospects of nationalism, and the nature of the nation-state at a moment of decolonization. It was about inequalities in the circulation of new knowledge from former colonies to the still then neocolonial centers concentrating knowledge in Europe and America. It was about the critique of the vast intellectual legacies of “the West” because of the way they set the terms for and were recruited into the ideology central to colonial practice. This ideology included the differential and unequal construction of race in relation to character, language, history, culture, and the discriminatory practice of excluding various racial groups from entry and innovation in the modern world. The postcolonial archive, one of the great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century, was about a world still occupied with the distinction West/Rest. This archive addressed a world at the moment of decolonization and nationalism that has largely, as I have said in the Introduction (Chapter 1), given way to a new set of global relations, a new set of priorities and preoccupations, and a decline in the obsession with the nation-state and the role of culture in it. This is not to say that ongoing malaise in the postcolonial nation-state does not demand ongoing postcolonial critique. Nor that the deep and pervasive issue of race in relation to dispossession, a direct consequence of colonialism, is not a poignant and undignified ongoing reality, demanding the writing of Du Bois, Fanon, Mbembe, and others and big changes in social practice. But in spite of those pressing demands of our world the postcolonial archive is in other and equally interesting ways challenged—precisely by being ignored— by the current generation of young people, or some of them anyway. For them questions of cultural authenticity central to decolonization are irrelevant to their lives, or so they believe. I am fascinated by their experiences, which are quite relevant to philosophy. The kind of philosophy I learned as a young person was twofold. It was about the need for philosophy to learn from the past, the archive, the great ideas and historical transformations that have produced its ideas. But it was also about dropping all that in the name of a fresh investigation into things. That

128

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

was the side of philosophy dedicated to starting from what is happening now, from the freshness of new experience and the ability to say “no” to the past. It is this attention to the freshness of new experiences which gave rise to British empiricism, to American pragmatism, and to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Fredric Nietzsche after him: these trends in philosophy contrast sharply with the long recitation of ideas central to the philosophical historicism of Hegel, to the method of education in France, and to that part of Nietzsche having to do with genealogy. We learn from the past and cannot think without it. We have a duty to think in light of it. But we also learn from those who are younger than us, fresh to the future and are dedicated to new beginnings. For young people inhabit a world different from the one that we older people were born into and grew up knowing. And they inhabit the same world differently. Central to how the world has changed over the past forty years has been the way decolonization, and with it nationalism, has in many respects played itself out. And equally central has been—to state the obvious—globalization. Everyone knows that globalization means India and California are part of a system, China and Senegal, the United States and Bangladesh, and so on. There is profound exploitation in these links, in this system, as well as opportunity. And while this set of complex relationships has been much explored in the economic field, they have been less fully explored in the cultural field. And so the question with which I will end is: if opera is no longer grasped in terms of its colonial past but rather as a new global opportunity, how does globalization produce new forms of “operatic inequality”? Perhaps opportunity and inequality are two sides of the same system, which the young people singing opera today should do more to understand and care about. I will end with this. And so I am interested in rethinking canons of authenticity central to the postcolonial in light of these young people’s experiences (as I understand them), and also the contestation between their experiences and those of the also young people who fiercely disagree with them.

II In June 2011 Michael Steinberg, then director of the Cogut Humanities Center at Brown University, brought the Cape Town School of Opera to his university to mount their production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Steinberg sits on the board of the West/East (formerly Israel/Palestine) DIVAN Orchestra,

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

129

has written widely on music, history, and politics,1 and is interested in the globalization of opera. The performance featured singers from the school, and the dazzling Kemal Khan at the piano. The American-born and bred Khan, director of the Cape Town Opera School, took over that position from South African Angelo Gobbato, who steered its transition from a white, Eurocentric outpost south of the Zambezi to a school where the students now reflect the diversity of the country: Xhosa, Zulu, Indian, Afrikaans, English, South Africans all. Before taking up the Cape Town post Khan had worked with James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera Company and pursued an independent conducting career on five continents, also a significant career as a pianist (both still active). He had decades of experience working with singers. His first contact with Cape Town was as a guest conductor of the Cape Town Opera Company. It did not take Khan long to realize South Africa had the goods, that is, the voices: powerful African sopranos, contraltos, tenors, and baritones, whose sometime lack of classical musical education was offset by an equally articulate musical education in local choirs, which trained their pitch and intonation, above all their ability to listen (to the choir) while performing and adjust sound quality to the overall harmonization of the group. Khan also realized that certain Southern African languages (Xhosa in particular) approximated (by some mixture of coincidence and biology) the phonological rhythms of Italian (particularly in the pronunciation of vowels), allowing singers a natural way of adjusting to singing in the Italian language—although not the German or Russian. (Since all were bilingual or trilingual, English was not a problem.) Overwhelmed by the Cape’s efflorescent beauty and enthusiastic about the project of building a new South African culture with a new generation of opera singers at the moment of political transition, Khan emigrated to Cape Town. The production Khan, under the good auspices of impresario/intellectual Steinberg brought north of the Zambezi to Brown University was created by Angelo Gobbato. It redefines South African opera. More on that later: I am in the first instance interested in a sidebar to it, also revelatory, a “conversation” organized between the young singers from Cape Town and some humanities postgraduate students also from Cape Town, who were part of an exchange program of study at Brown, and highly trained and intelligent in postcolonial theory and history. Both groups were from the University of Cape Town. All were South Africans. This south-south discussion staged (like Figaro) in the global north (at Brown) turned out to be tense, enervating, and combative as the postgraduate students challenged the opera performers about why they had sold out, or copped out, or given in to neocolonial pressure, or simply failed to understand their own

130

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

position in the postcolonial world, by staking their lives on that paradigmatically elitist, upper-class, Western, European art: grand opera, with its legacy as an icon of European superiority in racist world politics. How, these students inquired (“pronounced” is more like it), could authentic Africans of multiple racial and cultural heritages take up as their own a plaything of the European well heeled, an exemplar of Germanic grandiosity cum secular religion (with its temple in Bayreuth), an Italian soccer sport of the voice played by amici more than a few of whom believe anything south of Rome is “Africa,” meaning corrupt, degraded, and inferior. How could you, it was urged, as black Africans, or persons of color, or Africans of any stripe, step aside from your own culture(s) to take up this icon of European/Eurocentric power and influence, as if willfully participating in your own ongoing colonization even after colonialism had passed its sell-by date? What was voiced was frustration, disappointment, confusion that such singers of talent had decided to pursue that paradigmatically Western musical form, opera, rather than choir, jazz, dance, or any number of other musical or artistic styles rooted in the African past, the history of township life, in the struggle, or at the very least imported from other regions of the continent of Africa and therefore less tainted by the history of colonialism. Your own African cultures have been downgraded and condescended to for generations. Opera had long been a sign of settler authority in South Africa, of the European claim to superiority and privilege over native populations, an identity badge for rich, elite white culture of the country, an upper crust plaything. The opera houses had been closed in South Africa to people of color, meaning you, until the end of Apartheid in 1990. Why, of the countless African traditions that could be learned and sung, do you pursue duets with the Italian/Germanic/Russian devil? The opera students were flabbergasted. They could not understand how their operatic commitments could possibly represent any kind of cultural, much less political, betrayal, any purported lack of authenticity, indeed anything other than the opportunity in the new, free, and democratic South Africa to do something they wanted to do. They had no notion that their own cultural authenticity should depend on the finding and reinvention of “their own African roots,” as if they had any clear idea of what these even were in the twenty-first century. To them, the singing of Figaro was African because they sang it! The idea that their operatic training pandered to a legacy of Western domination seemed to them false, and a more than slightly rude thing to be said to them by their fellow students. Confused and embarrassed, they remained silent. And so a gap in thinking opened up between two small but fascinating populations from the global south.

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

131

III In the years of African decolonization the first generation of postcolonial leaders and intellectuals would in many instances have stood in solidarity with the postgraduate contingent. Of importance to that generation was Franz Fanon’s famous remark: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with hiding a people in its grip … By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectic significance today.”2 For the first generation of African leaders the dialectical significance of this devaluation of the past under colonialism was to reauthenticate it. On this Africanist point of view, the proper empowerment of the new nation was to rehabilitate devalued past culture by adopting and remaking the arts, ideas, and moral intuitions of the past. There was an attitude of disapproval around participation in ongoing “Eurocentric” traditions through which the colonial subject had been, as it were, molded into a Western lackey, or from which they had been excluded altogether. In Chapter 4, I suggested post-Apartheid South Africa is in certain respects a postcolonial society while in others a transitional society better compared to postCommunist Europe or post-Fascist Latin America. In the South Africa of 2011, when Figaro was brought north of the Zambezi, a clearly postcolonial project remained in force through the legacy of South Africa’s second state president Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki’s doctrine of the “African Renaissance,” a term he adopted from the history and politics of the Negritude movement, mandated return to the African precolonial past as a way of empowering South Africa, and the African continent, to a new and authentic future. The land and soil of Africa synergize, on this Africanist way of thinking, in unique and poetic ways with African peoples, who, to re-empower themselves after long generations of degradation under colonial and Apartheid rule, must return to their roots, rediscover their true origins, and, according to the heritage formula set forth by the European nation-state in the nineteenth century, empower their new nations with destiny, a noble future through this rediscovery of the past and its ongoing traditions. According to the ideology of the African Renaissance opera is all well and good (Mbeki always reserved a place for diversity) but the deeper, truer route to the future is that of finding again the deep cultural roots of the African past and, through the work of research and innovation, setting them forth as moral, social, and intellectual guidelines for the future. The African Renaissance particularly celebrated and continues to celebrate all things indigenous, through a notion of indigeneity suitably expanded (since most indigenous South African

132

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

peoples have either been decimated or merged into the population as a whole through intermarriage and procreation) to include every precolonial heritage in southern Africa. Indeed Mbeki’s concept of the indigenous extends to everyone who opposed British or Boer rule during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, becoming almost a cipher for political correctness. But the general theme is clear: celebrate African traditions as the (suitably mythologized) origin of the new South Africa, and indeed the route to a noble South African future. Learn from them; they will pave the way to a glorious future for the African continent. The language of the African Renaissance is utopian, and deeply European, since it takes over from the cultural politics of the European nation-state the idea that the past, reconstituted as “heritage,” is an origin that is also, thereby, a signpost for the future. Under the African Renaissance a program of scientific and scholarly research was set forth for universities, which would codify, praise, and develop what was (in a term taken over from the World Bank) referred to as “indigenous knowledge systems” (as if indigenous peoples were already systematic scientists avant-la-lettre).3 This included African moral traditions, music, theater, dance, and carving as well as knowledge of medicinal plants and of the natural and built environment. All of this became in Mbeki’s utopian language of heritage the route to reinvigorating the African continent (with South Africa at the helm) for a neoliberal and democratic twenty-first-century world. It is this link between the rediscovery or proclamation of origins (to be found in precolonial culture, suitably mythologized) and the route to future “destiny” that is the classic heritage formula. It was first proclaimed by Matthew Arnold, Fredric Nietzsche and then became part of the ideology of the European nation-state in the nineteenth century. This kind of reauthentication of the past becomes, in the cultural politics of the new postcolonial nation, its way of proclaiming difference from the colonizer’s culture, uniqueness, longevity, unity, and an intrinsic noble mechanism for achieving the future. The African Renaissance acknowledges diversity (including opera) but is all about authenticity: about the (more) authentic route to being and becoming an African: a standard of authenticity. But Fanon’s idea was actually quite subtle. By “dialectical significance” he had in mind in his essay (“On National Culture”) a waffling or alternation between the newly wrought postcolonial state’s desire to empower itself through rediscovering if not mythologizing its past, and an opposing tendency, also found in the postcolonial state, to modernize itself by taking on the aspects of modernity associated with states outside itself, in particular with the global modernity of Europe. It was, Fanon thought, by working through this alternation between the gaze within (toward the past) and the gaze outside (toward European

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

133

modernity) that the state would develop a national culture. But the Africanist ideal adopted by Mbeki stressed the side having to do with reauthentication of the past, perhaps because Mbeki knew that European modernism was already integral to the South African state, economy, and society. The Soweto youths who in 1976 refused instruction in Afrikaans, the language of the National Party and the Apartheid state, at the very moment Mbeki would have been in Swaziland seeking to set up resistance training camps and operations there, would surely have refused the cultural dalliances of Afrikaans culture as well, which included a fascination with German Lieder and opera. Indeed one might think the waffling in South African culture today between reaching out to Europe/opera on the one hand and turning within to the Africanist past on the other hand is exactly the dialectical movement Fanon describes as the path to a postcolonial/national culture. There is something to this, although the concept of “national culture” is somewhat dated given South Africa’s diversity, and also its global frame of reference: where the young generation is as attached to singing in Milan or San Francisco as they are about singing in their own “nation,” in Cape Town or Johannesburg. This is the second point of interest. These singers took neither side of the Fanon equation—neither the side that stresses revaluation of the past nor the side that stresses a reaching out to European modernity in the name of advancing the postcolonial state. This dialectical equation was to them an unknown and unwanted thing of the past—and along with it, the very idea of a “national culture,” as if that could be some univocal project. This young group is interested in freedom to do what they want, not in any grandiose idea of national culture. And so this small sample from the new generation of South African youth believe that The Marriage of Figaro belongs to them as much as to anyone else. They believe that as citizens of the new South Africa they have every right to pursue their interests in opera without any intervening question of authenticity arising. They are not even aware that any question of authenticity arises about performing Mozart. Either these South African students are astoundingly naïve or there is something wonderful in their disinterest in the baggage of history and the proprieties of decolonization, and they signal the fact that we (they) are living in what could be called a post-Eurocentric, cosmopolitan universe where culture is the “property” of all humanity (of the world)—which includes them.4 The answer is probably both. On the naïve side these students seem blithely unaware of colonial history and also the cultural politics of decolonization. Steinberg thinks this is because the humanities and arts are all too separated in the South African university, meaning these opera students have never had

134

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

the chance to learn the lessons of history from a history, literature, politics, or philosophy class.5 He is probably right, if one adds that the advanced study of classical music has always and everywhere been based on the Conservatoire model, in which intensive study of instruments (including the voice) and/or composition is considered so demanding that there is little time for anything else, given the six hours of practice a day required, the endless critique by teachers, and, in the case of opera, also the learning of multiple languages. Every university finds it difficult to integrate humanities with musical study for this reason, although every university should. Furthermore, there is tendency in post-fascist or posttotalitarian youth to want to get on with life and not think about the past, much less continue to bear its daily gravitas, especially when the pursuit of something like opera represents a career opportunity for students born without wherewithal (this as a result of long centuries of oppression). This desire to forget the past and get on with life brings complication: the failure of historical memory. Opera has a Eurocentric history south of the Zambezi just as it has one north of that winding river, and it is a history that requires acknowledgment. To know the story of opera in South Africa is to know that history. This is to know from whence one has come, it is to be sensitive to ongoing residues of that in one’s own culture. There is something naïve about a disinterest in history, and these opera students probably are more than a bit unaware of the larger picture of what opera has stood for in their own country’s past. But there is something equally interesting in their attitudes for exactly that reason, since they are claiming opera apart from any historical baggage. Fredric Nietzsche wrote in his famous essay on history that we have both a need to remake the past for the present (to remember and reconstitute memory through writing) and a need to forget it. Those excessively concerned with history, he felt, cannot live in the present (in the right state of absorption and freedom).6 History produces us, but we must not be imprisoned by the acknowledgment of it. If these students suffer a failure of historical acknowledgment, they are also actors on the contemporary stage singing their own libretto, not Mbeki’s or anyone else’s. It is this exciting new relation to history—one of disinterest—that interests me, in spite of the naiveté. Young South Africans are popularly called “born frees,” students born after the end of Apartheid who know of that system of racial degradation only through stories, family history, and historical legacies of class inequality and racial division. They are the first generation of South Africans born into a free and democratic society where they can vote (although South Africa is yet to achieve multiparty liberal democracy), where their rights are in principle (although not always in practice) guaranteed by one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, where they

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

135

are free to earn scholarships to a School of Opera which a generation ago would not have accepted them (so long as the funding holds out), and where the world is their oyster (scholarships have recently been won by students of the Opera School to study at the Metropolitan Opera School in New York, the Lyric Opera School in Chicago, La Scala in Milan, and a number of other top institutions). Their outlook on life, and especially on the past, is conditioned by a strong sense of their place in the new South Africa. Their relationship to globalization has a young peoples’ ease (not entirely unlike their compatriots in the global north who think nothing about studying in Thailand for a semester, then working on a farm in Mexico, after which they plan to teach English in China before returning to Chicago or Indianapolis). They are like so many first-generation born frees, whether from post-fascist Brazil, Chile, and Argentina or post-communist Poland, Russia, or China: disinterested in the past, ready to get on with the world into which they are born, bored with listening to the sad litany of their parents’ oppressed lives, and less enthusiastic still with the heavy burden of resistance, propriety, and political correctness that went with the old days of struggle.

IV It is worth exploring the colonial mentality in which opera prominently featured in more detail if only to better understand the disinterest these students have in it—and to understand the interest their interlocutors have in it. It was a mentality that operated according to a particular concept of cultural property, and of the gift. Eurocentrism can be glossed as the idea that European culture is understood as a kind of property: the property of the European, the settler, and the missionary who brought heritage to native populations. Culture is the property of the colonizer in virtue of being his heritage. It is not the property of the colonized. The traditions of the colonized are all too standardly (and there are exceptions) deemed inferior by the European settler. For the settler, identification with the European home country and its culture provided him or her with distinctiveness from native populations, superiority, and power. It is this link between heritage and cultural property that is crucial. Because European opera, modern morals, and the modern sciences arose and evolved in Europe and remained traditions central to bourgeois life in Europe, they were believed to be the unique property of European culture. Europeans believed that theirs was the only culture capable of practicing these arts. Heritage conveyed

136

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

character: only people born and bred within these traditions could be capable of grasping and mastering their power and worth. Heritage is a rescripting of the past into a core set of values and traditions which the relevant people (the nation) share, and which is believed to make them the people they are. If a heritage is not yours, you have not been exalted by it, grown into its moral and cultural power, and you lack the relevant “breeding” for mastering it. Breeding is closely associated with “race,” a kind of middle term between historical background and racial characteristic which the Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries widely took for granted: about itself and about those who were not European, lacked the heritage and breeding, and were in all likelihood unable to master such complex and deft heritage. 7 Ownership is inheritance and inheritance is restricted to the relevant family, group, or nation, like some rich kid who is born with a trust fund that only belongs to him and allows him to swan around the world in a state of unearned superiority. The colonizer/owner of Eurocentric culture might then offer his or her culture as a gift to native populations: this is the project of missionary work, of the mission school and colonial church. Like sharing food that one owns with the hungry, the gift of culture is a form of colonial beneficence, Lady Bountiful stuff. Everyone, the great explorer and missionary Dr. Livingstone said, is universally the same before God and deserves baptism, a chance at heaven, and missionary education. This was already an enlightened position in the early part of the nineteenth century when Livingstone, missionary in Southern Africa before becoming explorer of Africa’s great rivers, said and lived it. Finding slavery of all sorts abhorrent, Livingstone believed that the opening of trade routes from deepest, darkest Africa to Europe through the discovery of the Nile would provide Europe a way of ridding Africa of slave traders, and providing new forms of labor and industry. His missionary work was characterized by belief in universal Enlightenment. But this belief was never one of intellectual or cultural equality between native and settler or missionary. Rather it was about raising up the meek, the heathen, the unwashed, and the unbaptized. It was about giving them something, something that was in origin European, the product of uniquely European agency. Few held the conviction that native could assimilate European culture with a capacity for agency and innovation that the European had. The European produced; the native received. Of course things were more complicated in practice, with subversions of the ideology happening in the villages of the Tswana and elsewhere,8 but the ideology was deeply in place and practice nevertheless.

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

137

Indeed the tying of the native to the gift of European culture was also a rope around the native’s neck.9 The native was gifted European modernity while simultaneously dispossessed of his or her own past traditions, which were broken or at least devalued. The project was to attach the native to European modernity, but in a way that placed him or her in a second-class position, like an immigrant to New York driving a cab who speaks with a funny accent and can’t find the way to Brooklyn across the bridges. This is what colonial mimicry is all about. This native who received the gift (and was believed hardly able to use it) added nothing to a cultural form which was already believed complete. In no way was he or she believed capable of innovating within European traditions. The native’s destiny was one of imitation, and bad imitation at that. And so the gift of Eurocentric culture was a way of rupturing the native from his or her own traditions and placing him or her in the position of disempowered imitator, a mere appendage, or supplement, to European culture, a person without agency. The native then suffered the double indignity of having his or her past devalued (by comparison with European heritage) and being told the gift he or she was given of European culture was one he or she could never adequately learn and inherit. Fine art, theater, philosophy, sculpture, and opera were cultural forms offered under these disabling conditions. And they were long known as settler signs of Eurocentric superiority. And so the rediscovery and rehabilitation of the native’s own (precolonial) past became a declaration of independence from the colonizer and a form of national self-empowerment, the recovery of identity and declaration of difference in the name of a new and independent national future. This is what Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance is about: claiming that the African past is a genuine heritage, not just a tradition in fragments but a thing capable of empowering the modern African state with character, dignity, and an authentic future, indeed a destiny. The questions are therefore: Does opera still operate under the logic of propriety, and the gift in the new South Africa? Is it irredeemably tainted by its past life south of the Zambezi? Is it a mere sideline at best, because the project of decolonization is still one demanding return to past African traditions repressed under colonialism? What the young South African opera students have done is instinctively refuse the link between heritage and ownership by declaring it irrelevant or not being interested in it—or because they don’t know anything about it. They do not believe that because opera was invented in Italy it remains owned by Italians, or Europeans, or that it remains Eurocentric. Italy is to be praised for having invented opera to be sure. Opera is deep in Italian culture in a way that

138

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

is impressive. There is a special relationship between Italy and opera as anyone who has been to the opera in Verona or Milan knows. You cannot think Italian modern history without thinking opera. But Italian, Austrian, or German opera is as much theirs to sing south of the Zambesi as it is for an Italian to sing in Rome. The age of Eurocentric formulation has, one might think, died with the born frees who proudly assimilate formerly Eurocentric forms out of their freedom of choice. Opera now, they feel, empowers the likes of them, and the culture of their new country, rather part of a vast ideology that had stamped it down. Their claim is boldly cosmopolitan: opera is a form circulating freely throughout the world and for the world, including them. Here is South African opera composer Sibusiso Njeza speaking on the subject: People tend to think of opera as “not our thing” as South Africans; they think it is for the Italians. Yes, Italians are known for opera, but music and storytelling is part of our history; part of our heritage. If we, as South Africans, are able to tell the stories of our own people in our own languages through music, then why not … Opera is ours now and we need to advance its appreciation so that people can understand it better.10

Now the Eurocentric algorithm stated that natives were incapable of anything but imitation when they took on European culture. Their agency was compromised; they were condemned to imitation, and incapable of innovation. Their mastery of Eurocentric forms would always be partial. I am a believer in the importance of knowing where you came from, including the legacies that formed your forefathers and mothers. Once one agrees that at minimum the young singers should be made aware of the fierce contestations around Eurocentric culture that have been part of their own recent histories of decolonization, that they should learn about the history of opera in their country and understand that opera has been tainted in the past, and that there are reasons for suspicion about their blithe pursuit of the high C, what follows? Should these singers tow some kind of line of authenticity and refuse to do what they believe themselves free to do? Must they prove something to someone, their compatriots for example, that would justify their pursuit? Or should they simply get on with it? The question is not for me to answer, although I am sympathetic to the famous line Cary Grant (aka Roger Thornhill) utters toward the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece North by Northwest: “Nobody has to do anything,” meaning everyone is finally free to do what they want to do. Still, even if you choose to pursue opera (or anything else with an historical taint), you should know what you are dealing with, namely a cultural form with a very checkered past.

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

139

Since the rehabilitation of Eurocentric forms means the ending of the ideology according to which colonials could only use them badly, one wants to find signs that these young opera singers are in full mastery of the form (opera) and do not use it badly. This is easy: graduates from the Cape Town School of Opera are being culled from South Africa to La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera Company, the Lyric Opera Chicago, and to opera houses in Vienna, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, across Europe. (We shall return to this drainage of talent to the north later.) But one wants more proof, I think, than that. One wants to understand how a place like South Africa is producing genuine innovation in the form in a way that makes it a reflection of their emergent selves. And also in a way, sometimes, that provides a new way for anyone to understand what the form is. The question of earlier chapters in this book was to find ways to understand how modernist artists in Mexico, India, and elsewhere achieve similar kinds of mastery, turning European painting into a dazzling new set of arrangements bespeaking themselves, and their life and times. One wants a demonstration that in the twenty-first-century mastery and innovation in opera may happen in South Africa (and elsewhere), that in adopting and appropriating opera new South Africans are demonstrating creativity and uniqueness by fusing it with their life and times (just as Husain did some half century earlier with cubism and German expressionism). This is the proof of cosmopolitanism: that a form can become something new anywhere across the globe (in principle, and sometimes in practice), that it is truly the “property” of the world, meaning no one’s particular property and therefore not really “property” at all, but something else, a legacy, an opportunity, an occasion of expanding culture. This need not happen all the time (for there are plenty of stale performances of opera in Europe and America so why not South Africa too), but at least some of the time. There is no recipe for this. And that brings us to the production of Figaro created south of the Zambezi and brought to Brown. Was it a production carrying the stamp of South African life and times? Did it generate new understanding of the medium of opera?

V Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera of 1786, The Marriage of Figaro, is about relations between master and servant in one of the great households of the Europe of eighteenth-century Spain, where the Count rules, his lonely and isolated wife mourns, Figaro is the servant and Suzanna the maid. Based on the play

140

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

by Beaumarchais (The Marriage of Figaro), which had been banned in Paris because of its reputed licentiousness, it is a progressive and topsy-turvy study of human relations in a system of inequality. Figaro, chief servant to the Count, and Suzanna the maid are to be married; and the day on which the opera is set begins with Figaro measuring the marriage bed in which their marriage will soon be happily consummated. The Count, in a gesture of progressive thinking, has abjured his “right of lordship” to sleep with Figaro’s bride, but this does not prevent him—who is used to having his way with the maids of the household given his position as the establishment’s chief honcho—from persistently trying to obtain the favors of Figaro’s bride-to-be, Susanna. The Count finds innumerable excuses to delay the civil part of the wedding while Figaro, Susanna, and the Countess conspire to embarrass the Count and expose his scheming. The Count then tries to force Figaro to marry a woman old enough to be his mother who, lo and behold, turns out to be his mother. Figaro, jealous to the core, suspects Suzanna of being unfaithful with the Count and it all hangs on a lost pin. Finally, in a magical scene in the garden (the fourth and final act of the opera) Figaro and Suzanna succeed in restoring the Count to his wife, and they to each other. All ends happily. This study of human-all-too-human relations in a closely contained world (the household) where power is unequal (the Count rules) but counteracted by intimacy, scheming, and desire is tailor-made for a South Africa long accustomed to the roles of the master and the servant. Director Angelo Gobbato sets the opera on a Cape wine farm. In the old days the so-called colored laborers on Cape wine farms were paid in the “dop,” that is, in alcohol, their adherence to the “baas” was something between wage laborer and slave. Miscegenation was rife in that world. Some of this is still in place on certain farms in the Cape Province today. The performance brought out the brutality of the circumstance, with the part of the Count being acted and sung with a level of threat, and aggression, that is rarely seen in opera north of the Zambezi. The Count, while forward thinking, was clearly a man accustomed to disposing of his servants as he wished, in the manner of chattel. This contradiction between the Count’s progressive gesture of relinquishing his right (to sleep with the bride) and the thuggish, brutal nature of his treatment of his servants brought a shock to the opera, making one—at least making me—feel this opera became a mirror of South Africa at a sometimesreluctant moment of political and social transition (from the master–servant relationship to a more democratic dispensation). This is enough to say opera became, in South African hands, a medium expressive of that country, an

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

141

acknowledgment of self. But there is more. I think the performance restored the opera to its genuine eighteenth-century context, where the Count would have likely been more brutal than is currently played in refined and aestheticized opera houses today, and where the relations between Count and servants would have been more rough and tumble, more terrifying and more chaotic. It stood as a mirror to Europe of its own past. South Africa seemed a perfect venue to retrieve the intensities of the eighteenth century, which Mozart and Da Ponte would surely have brought to their writing of the opera, since they were wholly of that world. Da Ponte had been cruelly imprisoned in Venice for his dallying around, and nearly executed; he knew firsthand the brutal hand of the law, that is, of power in the eighteenth century. And so, my point is that this production seemed to restore to the opera its tough and implacable relations of power. You learned about the origins of opera in the West by studying it in South Africa. It is this tension between the celestial sound of the Mozart aria and the aggressive world of power in which his operas (Figaro and Don Giovanni anyway) are set that is at the core of the Mozart/Da Ponte composer/librettist project, also at the basis of their progressive, libertine sympathies. But this tension was largely airbrushed during the long nineteenth century when opera was turned into a heroic and phantasmagoric medium with the tenor or baritone in the role of cult figure and the audience in love with the purity and power of voices. This airbrushing of Mozart’s opera (and opera in general) happened with particular clarity to Mozart/Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni. The figure of the Don with his talent for women and his perfect nose (read: perfect pitch) became increasingly understood as a stand-in for Mozart himself, and for the figure of the larger-than-life, the libertine, and the Lebenskunstler: one who lives life with the tempestuous gorgeousness of a work of art, a figure of the romantic for whom women are the material for his art, that is, for his sublimity of voice. This celebration of the romantic hero who breaks the law, is capable of rupturing society, and exists apart from the moral order (so he believes, although he will get his in the end), and whose instrument of seduction is his voice, becomes adulated into a paradigm, his narcissism celebrated, his compulsion emulated, his voice considered an object of cult worship. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, encapsulating this canonization of the Don and the opera (which began with E.T.A. Hoffman and continued through the long nineteenth century), called Don Giovanni the absolute case of opera, believing the opera paradigmatic of the medium, because opera was, to him, about and exclusively about the erotic. The very nature of opera is revealed, unmasked, acknowledged by this tale of the erotic power of voice. For the

142

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Kierkegaard of Either/Or Part I, the Don is the living incarnation of voice, and nothing but voice: the pure embodiment of music. His romping with women, his sequential monogamy (each “marriage” lasting a few minutes or an hour), becomes, in effect, in Kierkegaard’s thinking, a roman à clef for the erotic power of music. With Don Giovanni opera has found its great theme: the relationship between music and Eros. In Kierkegaard’s reading the Don is in effect a stand-in for Mozart, whose ability to charm the pants off of all Europe as a child of eight years old, courtesy of his musical talent, was unrivalled. Mozart, like the Don, chalked up successes opus number by opus number, each more redolent than the next. (I have explored this in more detail in an earlier essay.11) This reading of the Don as an icon of Mozart gives him talent, genius, a genius for women worthy of Mozart’s for music. And makes him virtually divine. And so the true subtext of the opera is opera itself: now understood as a pure aesthetics/erotics of voice. But the Don is not just a voice; he is a powerful and scheming seducer, who has been known to force women, kill their fathers, and storm through the world in a state of insatiable lust powered by money and the sword. He exploits his wealth and position to steal away brides at their wedding, and is not above doing the damage to the same woman more than once (he is a repeat offender). His goal is to lengthen the list (the archive of his phallus) each and every day and “come” what may. His phallic grandiosity is not merely an abundant narcissistic imagination through which he wakes every morning to the thought that the world is his oyster and life beneficent. It is an aggressive power-throbbing desire to own and dispose of women. He wakes the hunter, and then, after the kill leaves the clean-up work to his servant Leporello. It is never clear whether the Don is motivated by insatiable lust, power, or compulsion, but he clearly enjoys the act of love (is in love with his own voice), and demands power over women. Kierkegaard finally believed Don Giovanni morally compromised (as others in the nineteenth century also did) but the philosopher’s admiration for the character, and the opera, remained intact. The Don gets his in the end. He is consigned to the fires of hell by the Commendatore, whom he killed in the opera’s opening moments and who returns at the end in the form of a largerthan-life statue to do the deed. Everyone applauds in the final scene, which the nineteenth century often cut: the Don’s “heroic” refusal to abjure his ways only confirmed his magnificent stature for the nineteenth century and often ended the opera. Eventually he became some kind of god. And so plot and the brutality of the character disappeared into a celebration of his voice; the Don’s criminality became transmuted into that of a rule-breaking libertine with heroic

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

143

force majeur. His depth of devilry became iconic of the deep subjectivity, which this century, the century that invented psychiatry and psychoanalysis, would plumb and celebrate. Opera became aestheticized as pure voice, mythologized as heroic, adored in the way Hollywood films with their special effects are today as the world’s greatest entertainment. All this led to a loss of focus on the brutal social world of the Mozart/Da Ponte plot, and of the brutal times in which they together wrote. Opera became distant from its original sources in the eighteenth century. On my reading of the Cape Town production it restored to The Marriage of Figaro the tough, implacable world of its times. The threatening nature of the Count and his ironclad rule over his domain and the people in it were clearly marked. The depth of inequality in the master–servant relationship was also highlighted, which in turn allowed one new understanding of Figaro’s scheming (not to mention his own patriarchal jealousy) and of the power Suzanna wields courtesy of sensuality, youth, and seduction. Figaro and Suzanna’s power is very real, but also deeply compromised by their positions, and this too emerges with crystal clarity. Both servant and maid can be screwed by the Count at any moment and they know it. The humanity all the main characters achieve by the end of the opera shows that within a system of power and inequality human desire and reconciliation can be achieved, up to a point, but the system of real inequality remains, and this production makes one feel it in one’s bones. Most productions today do not. Most productions cause one to forget just how unequal, and terrifying, the system of power is. They emphasize sublimity of music (Mozart’s) and shared forms of desire between the various characters (to be known and acknowledged, to find love, to live in the balance between manipulation and intimacy, to avoid being found out). They revel in the cult of voices that is the legacy of the long nineteenth century. What the Cape Town opera production does on my reading is not only South Africanize the opera by setting it in the world of the baas and the farmworker, a world of real inequality. In doing so, it also reveals something profound about the nature of the eighteenth century and operas set there then, about the tough world from which opera in the eighteenth century emerged, and about the tension between that and the sublimity of Mozart’s music at the core of his operas. The Cape Town production returned us to the social world in which the opera was written, by providing a likeness of it south of the Zambezi. The production is therefore a contribution to knowing what opera is, a way of removing the refined veil of the aesthetic, which draped opera in the gorgeousness of voice and airbrushed its characters.

144

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

The other thing this performance did was assert the role of youth in opera, something often forgotten when singers are routinely thirty years older than the characters they play. Since the performers were mostly under the age of twenty-five, they brought an energy, wildness, and animation to the opera which is wholly in the music, and in the characters. Cherubino, for example, is often sung, on the German opera stage by a diva of forty-five or fifty, with elegance and refinement, but with the slower movements of a middle-aged person. Cherubino is in fact a crazed youth overwhelmed by the onset of sexual desire. He is out of control, a frenetic body lunging at everything in skirts, an adolescent quickly packed off the army to learn discipline and manners, not to mention as a way of getting him out of the house. In the Cape Town production Cherubino was played by a woman of around twenty, whose youthful voice, electric hair, and rapid kinetic movements perfectly expressed that character’s wildness. This is I think the proof that south of the Zambezi opera is not merely mastered by the new generation of “born frees” but in a way that brought the culture of South Africa to it, and added a new dimension to the medium globally. If this is not a way for South Africans to make opera their own, to break out of the colonial/Eurocentric algorithm, which says, you can only ape the culture of Europe by producing stale and bad imitations, through mimicry, and without innovation, then nothing is. Khan, Gobbato, and their gang made opera their own, enlivening it through the world they are of, and the results were globally revelatory. This production (on my reading of it) illustrates the case for a truly postpostcolonial attitude to culture, namely one no longer caught up in the obsessions of the first generation of decolonizing nations with their notions of cultural propriety and their suspicions of all things that had played a Eurocentric role. Postcolonial studies largely arose as a way of thinking through the predicaments of this first generation, in terms of the social, political, and cultural condition of decolonization and nationalism. But times have changed and Fanon’s brilliant dialectical insights no longer quite apply to this young crowd and their experiences. They no longer, I think, operate under postcolonial rules, prescriptions, or demands of authenticity or responsibility. Indeed the bigger point is that there is no longer a standard of authenticity as to what it is to be an African prescribed by the heritage formula, decolonization, and the demands of nation-building other than a general demand to contribute to one’s place, time, and country however one does this. Proof is in the pudding: in what one makes of what one is free to choose insofar as one is free to choose it.

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

145

VI But I have not finished with the postgraduates and their disappointment with the opera singers. Part of what the University of Cape Town postgraduate students were getting at was the elitist nature of opera. Here they are, these children of the poor, who are performing Figaro for the rich and well heeled—and in a midresourced country where the geni-coefficient (the wage differential between the richest and poorest earners) is among the greatest in the world. How can you— perhaps these postgraduate students were thinking—spend your time working in an art for which your parents could never pay the price of admission, which is restricted to upper-class captains of industry, cardiologists, and heads of state? Most Africans, the thought might have been, can never afford to go to the opera you have put on. So is it right to spend your time in such an elite occupation? Of course most Americans cannot afford to send their children to the opera, nor to Brown University or the University of Michigan, where I teach. American opera and American universities are also elitist. The postgraduates are also afraid, I think—and this is classic postcolonial anxiety—that the diverse flowering of African traditions in the new South Africa (celebrated by Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance it should be said) is fragile and could implode at any moment—leaving the country with opera and little else, which really would turn South Africa (or any related country) into a Eurocentric leftover. Opera is part of a vibrant South African culture that has shaken off colonial and Apartheid powerlessness only if there is also gumboot dancing, jazz, Christian choir, Afro-rock, and many other cultural quarters heard from. It would be absurd to say: perform opera and nothing else! Just as it would be absurd to say in a newly rescripted South African university: Read Dickens and nothing else! That really would be Eurocentric. I still believe in the importance of historical memory: in knowing something about the history of something you are making central to your life, in knowing past damage it has wrought and how and why. But that commitment to historical memory is, as Nietzsche says, debatable like so many issues of responsibility. At the very least a person should be taught that history, whether he or she wishes to forget it or not. But there is also a more insidious neoliberal point to be made, whether the postgraduate students made it or not, which is that the very success of the Cape Town School of Opera is compromised by its global drain of top students to the great opera houses of the global north. The pride that school takes in students who are now at La Scala and the Met is a double-edged sword. For it bespeaks a

146

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

country (South Africa) which cannot keep its best and brightest, cannot provide venues, audiences, and wages for them, but instead flocks to the Metropolitan Opera simulcasts when they are broadcast in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. If colonialism is no longer in place, then neoliberal economy has provided a similar concentration of resources in the global north to the expense of those living south of the Zambezi. South Africa’s school of opera provides resources for those great opera houses of Europe and America which can only get better, thanks to its providence. In the old days of colonialism this would have been a matter of sending of “raw materials” from India to Manchester England, which got rich on them. Now the drain is one of human resources from South Africa to New York. Colonial inequality has given way in the twenty-first century to neoliberal inequality. It is hard to know what to do about this—hard to know how to correct such a dramatic economic imbalance that whisks South African singers away to the first world with its concentration of opera houses and roles (but also lends the school prestige). The point goes way beyond opera to the arts and universities generally. Such are the politics of Figaro today, caught between a refusal to tow the line of the authenticating postcolonial past, while also vulnerable to first-world pressures and drainage. Without the best singers there is also less chance for new South African music compositions to be well performed, less chance, that is, for compositional innovation in opera rather than merely performance innovation. When the best singers are being recruited as the next divas of the European opera houses, their ability to create new and vital conditions for opera in a South Africa is compromised. After a while they are no longer working for Africa, but for La Scala. In our time neoliberalism with its global concentration of talent/ workplace and access to global distribution has replaced neocolonialism as the system of inequality between first and other worlds. But is this entirely right? South Africa is a BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) country, a country of significant wealth should it wish to use it. Were there real interest in sustaining the careers of these young singers within the country—by offering, reducing ticket prices, creating new small theaters, and without, ideally, the usual corruption around tenders and contracts—a culture could be created.12 In a fascinating way this is already happening at the level of operatic composition. The Cape Town Opera company, in conjunction with the University of Cape Town Opera School, the University of Cape Town Faculty of Humanities, and the Cape Provincial Lottery Fund, has in the past few years commissioned two rounds of short works by South African composers: 5:20 (five operas of twenty minutes each) in 2011, and more recently, 4:30 (four operas of

Post-Postcolonial: Figaro South of the Zambesi

147

thirty minutes each) in 2015. Some of these composers live or have lived abroad (in the UK, America, Canada); a number of them have pursued musical study abroad—one in Paris with the great Nadia Boulanger before her death, another in Italy, two at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Most of these composers are young and living in South Africa. The operas they have produced have been as variegated as the country, some written in rapt, over-the-top awe of nineteenth-century European Romanticism, others incorporating African choir, gumboot dancing, Township jazz, microtonal compositional technique, music theater into classical formats. Libretti have ranged from one about a poor maid who can hardly read and applies to Home Affairs (the South African passport, VISA, and registration authority) for a passport to go to England to attend the wedding of a son she pushed out of the country to a better future and hasn’t seen since childhood; another about a blue-eyed English girl who is shipwrecked in the eighteenth century and ends up marrying a Xhosa prince. Some of the results have been outstanding. The importance of these commissions is that they offer performance venues for (mostly) young composers of talent to bring what the composer Sibusiso Njeza, one of the commissioned composers from 4:30, calls (and I quote from earlier on in this chapter) the “music and storytelling” that is “part of our history; part of our heritage”—not to mention the chance to experiment with the invention of form. Commissioning is a global magnet, returning exiles to the country of their origin as well as providing composers who chose to remain in the country more reason to remain. The cost of it has been modest—certainly far less than the cost of maintaining opera companies that could keep top singers employed in the country. For that kind of cost it may be the case that tax structure has to be revised to incentivize philanthropy (as is the case in the United States, where philanthropy brings tax advantage), although a country where less than 10 percent pay tax can perhaps hardly afford to incentivize philanthropy through tax deductions—except at a corporate level. It is likely active coordination must take place between south-south countries, both on the African continent and in Latin America to increase the chances that BRICS and other economies can retain top talent. Imagine a young South African singer being able to Figaro his way between South Africa, Argentina (where the famous Teatro Colon once hosted Caruso), Brazil (an economic powerhouse), Mexico, and so on. It is not that our Figaro shouldn’t measure his bed in Milan or New York, but an economic policy that provided real opportunity for a marriage bed to be created in the global south, if not within South Africa itself, would serve as a serious alternative to ongoing global drain.

148

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

To retain talent the creation of new national culture must become a priority, with interruptions in the global system of finance of which South Africa is a part. Ironically this would return financial planning to the days of postcolonial nationbuilding, with its emphasis on national economy and “third world” economic cooperation by restricting trade relations with “the West.” One thinks of the Bandung Conference of 1955, the first Afro-Asian event (held in Indonesia) in which Afro-Asian economic cooperation was highlighted, leading to the nonaligned movement. One also remembers the attempts, no doubt overstated but certainly important at the time, to restrict “American influence” on the then emergent economy of India under Indira Gandhi in the 1970s—this in the name of the development of India’s national productivity. No one is saying South Africa should opt out of the global economy, as if that were a coherent option. But that its financial planning might require partial revision of the global game of export culture for the purpose of retaining talent and building national culture. Perhaps there is something deeply right about the postcolonial financial position after all. And so neoliberal inequality might not be so ironclad, given the choices countries like South Africa have available to make. Then what should their choices be?

7

Xu Bing’s Archive of the Past

One of the central themes of this book has been the importance of the past for the rise of modern art in the modern art outside Europe and America, which largely takes place at a moment of nationalism and decolonization. When Diego Rivera returns to a violent but also glorified image of the Aztec past and fuses it with the story of Mexican nationalism, he is seeking an authentication of the revolution, and of Mexican independence, in the long arc of the past. This reauthentication of the past as a source, or origin, is central to postcolonial modern art. But as that art has given way to contemporary art in the twenty-first century, this relationship to the past has changed. Contemporary art is largely post-nationalist: it is no longer concerned with articulating a long arc of history for the new nation. With globalized art markets, international, style-speak, and high levels of profiling and marketing, the past has again become recessive, returning to its state of being the long ago and far away, central as a source of tradition to be sure, but also alienated from the texture of contemporary life. I have called this the post-postcolonial condition of life. It has significant implications for the retrieval of the past. How you access the past depends on what you believe its relevance is for the present and future. Rather than a place in which to find the source or origin of the present, in contemporary art like Xu Bing’s, the past evaporates into a luminous spectral presence: important but unapproachable. This shift in the way the past is experienced and imagined almost means it has again become archival if not museological. Not in the way colonialism imagined, as a container or encomium of colonial peoples, a set of perpetually reenacted traditions destined to remain archaic, an object of curiosity, orientalism, fascination, and repulsion for the colonizer. Nor in the way the eighteenth-century European nation imagined it: as patrimony. Rather the past has become a strange thing whose role in the present is no longer assured, and which takes on the aura of lost things. It is of us, and it is evaporated. The past has become a background story for the present, and one that is not easy to tell.

150

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Nowhere is this condition of the past more superbly explored than in Chinese artist Xu Bing’s series of installations called Background Story. Xu Bing was born in Chongqing, China, in 1955. In 1977 he entered the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in 1981 and stayed on as an instructor, earning his MFA in 1987. In 1990, on the invitation of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he moved to the United States. He lived in New York for a number of years before returning to Beijing and maintains a studio in New York. He is, in the full sense of the word, an artist who has lived across time zones. His work is also work across time zones—a dialogue between the past and the present. Consider Xu Bing’s Background Story 7 (2011). Like the others of its genre Background Story 7 is an attempt to re-create the beauty of traditional landscape art while understanding tradition to be artificial in the China, and world, of the twenty-first century. The installation, viewed from the front, consists of a vertical light box (what I will call a museum vitrine) illuminated within by the kind of artificial light associated with Natural History Museums and their day-glow collections of rocks and minerals. What is illuminated is a beautiful scene from traditional Chinese landscape art, in fact a work by the traditional landscape painter Wang Shimin. This work is in the first instance the background story of the installation’s title. The scene is of ascending, craggy mountains punctuated by valleys covered in placid white cloud, almost in the manner of lakes. The play of light and shadow, line and empty space is ethereal, a harmonized, spiritual background inviting slow and meaningful approach by some contemplative traveler. At first viewing one thinks the work, especially the mountains sketched in the background, is done in watercolor or ink, that is, traditionally. But walk around the back of the vitrine and this becomes glaringly obvious. From the front the work is a paradigm of order and beauty—a (more or less) exact replica of the Shimin landscape. This is a matter of how it is lit, like shadow. From the back all you see is a wild conflagration of grass, twigs, and plastic discards. Viewed from the back the simulated image disappears into the materials from which it is simulated, returning it to the disorder of natural and artificial, chaotic stuff. It turns out the work has been composed of these natural and discarded materials: hay, grass, sticks, brush, twigs, and cornhusks, and detritus like discarded plastic, the kind of stuff one collects at the back of a rural property and rakes into a pile for burning. (The artist and his assistant collected these from Kew Gardens, outside London, and from around London, for his British Museum 2011 show.) These materials also appear on the floor at the back of the vitrine.

Xu Bing’s Archive of the Past

Figure 7.1  Xu Bing, Background Story 7 Frontal View, photo courtesy of Shinyi Yangart.

151

152

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 7.2  Xu Bing, Background Story 7 from the Back, photo courtesy of Shinyi Yangart.

To stress the materiality of a work of art has been a central concern of the project of modern art in Europe, from the impressionists with their brush strokes to Seurat with his pointillistic dots, to Van Gogh with his thick impasto layering the pictorial surface like mud on shoes or earth, to the abstract expressionists with their dripping of paint and scratching on the surface with palette knives. Xu Bing follows this tradition. Natural and discarded materials are strewn about the floor, stating to the viewer their role as medium (the equivalent of oil, acrylic, fresco, watercolor)—part of the background story from which the work emerges. Indeed they also appear as mere waste, a bunch of stuff wanting to be swept up by the museum’s cleaning staff. This is Xu Bing’s way of telling the viewer where his materials come from, since he and his assistant in fact collected them from the ground. But the waste on the floor is also in dialogue with what is inside the vitrine in another way. It tells the viewer that the scene inside the vitrine emerges from environmental discards and is in one respect an illusion created from waste—a perfect statement for the built environment of the new China. The last time I visited Shanghai I took a two-hour car ride outside the city to a Buddhist monastery. We drove past nothing but high-rise apartments in various states of construction and/or decay, some mere foundations of raw concrete awaiting steel or concrete pillars. The odd lotus blossom floated aimlessly in a neglected

Xu Bing’s Archive of the Past

153

pond between these edifices, as if a strange remnant of a past where construction and waste seem identical and nature a discard. Materials were everywhere. Xu Bing’s work, whatever else it is about, is about the flow of materials from the natural and artificial environment to naturalistic representation. It is also about the social ecology or economy of the new China where raw materials become the built environment and nature appears alienated in light of waste. In both cases this comes from the relationship between stuff on the floor and the same materials inside the vitrine. Since the new China is hardly the China of fabulous, meditative mountains and beautiful lakes (at least not around its cities), the tradition of naturalistic representation from the olden days has become recessive to this new China of apartment blocks, megacities, construction, raw and discarded materials, and architect-designed buildings. Landscape art is part of the long ago and far away. The work states its distance from the subject (landscape painting) it is animating as well as its intimacy. Here the gaze on the past is one of cool and meticulously wrought distance as well as affection. There is no trace of postcolonial mythology. Now rather than being merely disordered, the materials on the floor are the product of careful planning, inviting a third way of seeing this installation: as an heir to the Museum Diorama of the nineteenth century, where “wilderness” appears in a tamed and orchestrated way within artificial scenes, turning into tamed display. In the diorama wilderness is no organic thing: it is domesticated under glass. The nineteenth-century diorama is about control over nature, subduing it into an inert museological object. Nature makes an elaborately orchestrated, artificial appearance in the glass-encased diorama, usually as a background setting for bird, snake, primitive man with spear, bear, monkey, primitive woman with child. In the vitrine nature naturalizes, turning “primitive man” and primitive culture into a species of nature (thus subduing him). In the nineteenth/early twentieth–century Museum of Science, Anthropology or Natural History the natural scene places the species in its habitat, that is, in its habitat within the display. The protagonist (animal, primitive man) is stilled, the scene mortified; this is the world of taxidermy, bounded by the vitrine and encased under glass. A striking twentieth-century example of this is the Bushman Diorama in the National Museum of Cape Town, South Africa, in which a noble male “specimen” of the Bushman “species” stands arrow ready in a well-wrought scene of grassland, tree, and burnished sun. The figure is romanticized; the mise-en-scène is of the biblical Adam in paradise: all under glass of course, and for the South African viewer whose culture extinguished the Bushman, killed

154

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

him off. In an historical act close to genocide the Khoi and San peoples of the Kalahari were almost permanently erased from their world, only to reappear in this diorama for the colonial viewer. Ironically they are displayed in a lost paradise, as if they were the biblical people of old. At the moment of the South African transition to democracy in 2001 a dialogue about what to do with this anachronistic embarrassment from colonial and Apartheid history took place between noted South African artist Pippa Skotnes and then South African state president Thabo Mbeki. The diorama had by this time been removed from exhibition and was being stored in the museum’s basement. State President Mbeki asked her to think about what would have to be done to the diorama in order to allow it to be exhibited again in the museum. Skotnes suggested some kind of change in the narrative. Mbeki thought for a moment and said the diorama should include a Boer (colonial/ Afrikaans settler) shot with a poisoned arrow—by the Bushman. Not knowing what to do with this colonial representation of the Bushman as part of nature, a noble being like the eland or the elephant, the diorama remains in storage in the museum’s basement, awaiting further decision. There is a well-known critical examination of the vitrine/diorama central to the history of the avant-garde: Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau/2° le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). Duchamp’s installation is situated behind an old wooden door, with a hole in it for the viewer to spy through, like a voyeur. What the viewer sees through this hole in the door

Figure 7.3  Bushman Diorama, Iziko Museums, Cape Town, photo by Pippa Skotnes.

Xu Bing’s Archive of the Past

155

is a young woman curled in a manger. Behind her is a completely artificial scene of nature painted as backdrop (in the Hollywood style). The scene is lit with the kind of brash internal light found in French Baroque painting (Georges de la Tour). This lighting is strident, and dramatizing. The scene recalls images of the crime-ridden streets of Victorian London where Jack the Ripper did his nasty, miserable work by gaslight. The young woman may be asleep, or she may be dead: murdered. Her genitals are directly exposed to the viewer, who is excited and shocked in the manner of a true Peeping Tom. Her hairless sex may be a sign of her innocence (the virgin birth); it may be a sign of her violation; it may be that she is a mere doll tossed into the scene. Duchamp worked for two decades on this elaborate setup, which speaks to everything from Victorian crime novels to the history of painting, from cheap thrillers to Hollywood films to the story of Christianity. Duchamp plays the viewer like a musical instrument by placing him in the position of voyeur, a Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, staring at Janet Leigh through a hole from his office into Cabin 1, and offering him a nude woman with a big breast and legs spread, a direct invitation to the dance, until the viewer realizes the woman’s genitals appear slashed, horrifying him for his lewd moment of excitement. This vitrine—this act of display—uses simulation (of these scenarios) to address a number of related forms of visual culture coldly and from the outside (watching, looking, excitement, voyeurism, killing) whose legacy remains wedded to the contemporary world, but which Duchamp’s display treats as a strange and bizarre thing. Xu Bing is not interested in playing the viewer like Hitchcock, exciting the viewer’s voyeuristic tendencies only to horrify him, make him feel guilty, force him to reflect on how he is implicated in a wide variety of unseemly visual practices and cheap thrills. But he is interested in Duchamp’s technique of defamiliarization, which is how he presents the landscape painting in his vitrine. Xu Bing aims to defamiliarize landscape painting (tradition, the past) by simultaneously re-creating it and placing it on display as a bizarre incantation from rough and raw materials. He aims to astonish and confuse. He wants to cause the viewer to reflect (as he has) on the existential dwelling of the past in the new China. Like Duchamp, Xu Bing puts a visual practice on display: as an object of curiosity and does so by simulating it. His vitrine turns nature similarly into artifice, like the vitrine of the nineteenth-century Museum of Natural History with its snake curled in the bush or around the branch of a (fake) tree or the Bushman in his nature reserve, ready to pounce on his prey. But he also wants the viewer to draw close to the simulated landscape image on display; he wants the viewer to experience some of the contemplative

156

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

pleasure of older Chinese landscape art. He is no mere student of critique. Xu Bing’s point is to raise questions about the possibility of re-creating the beauty, contemplation, nature, and naturalistic representation of landscape painting today, when Buddhist monasteries constructed in the last fifteen years outside of Shanghai proclaim their oldness with a “made in China” label attached, that is, when the new proclaims itself as the manufactured old. And so the viewer constantly changes perspective when viewing Background Story 7: from seeing it as a quiet, spiritual masterpiece to thinking it as pure fabrication, a circus act performed by a skilled magician, to thinking it is nothing more than a tangle of confused materials which should be returned to Kew Gardens. Another way to put this is that the work is a way of reflecting on the archive of Chinese landscape drawing and painting. Through faux reanimation, the question is posed whether this archive is a venerable curiosity, a thing to be displayed in alienated form in the Bushman Diorama, or a tradition with live values today. How does one want to think about the archive of tradition in twenty-first century China: as a set of period pieces, a museological romp, a closed and elegant thing of the past, or a new set of sources? The work does not simply ask these questions; it seeks to reanimate tradition through innovation, asking, and answering the question of what must happen to tradition in order to live a second life now. Clearly the artist invites reflection about the possibilities of authentic landscape tradition today, in postmodern times, about whether it is possible to do it, and how to do it. It has been a central theme of this book that a question of authenticity arises only when tradition is already interrupted, dead, or under threat. The modern/ postcolonial art of Husain and Rivera wished to authenticate the past because it was for so many generations lost. When the past is simply part of ongoing tradition, there is no need to think of it under the concept of authenticity. A live tradition is one in which spontaneity and variation happen without any need for an authenticating standard: the players know how to make the next move without any rulebook. Authenticity comes into play only when there is doubt, or disagreement, or inability to continue a tradition. The players seek a standard of correctness to tell them how to achieve what they have trouble achieving. Paradoxically any work of art which is believed to satisfy a criterion of authenticity is thereby also compromised, because authenticity is like a certificate of genuineness attached to the work, like the well-known “made in China” label attached to my clothing. No traditional work requires such a moniker. Only works seeking to continue traditions interrupted by history which is why the modern/postcolonial artist can only reappropriate the past by

Xu Bing’s Archive of the Past

157

turning it into something else, a kind of myth for the nation. It is for this reason that authenticity so preoccupied the postcolonial world, especially around the issue of return to tradition/the past at a moment of nationalism. Xu Bing’s work raises questions about the status of ongoing traditions today by engaging a dialogue with authenticity. He engages that dialogue by creating a landscape painting in a way that no one could say is authentic! If you want authenticity, then re-create the landscape painting with proper materials (pen and ink, brush and watercolor, the right paper, the right size, etc.). His work is as far from that strategy as could be, which is the point. Xu Bing’s work seems to suggest the following: we do not know how to make genuine Chinese traditional landscapes except ones that carry a manufacturing label of “genuineness” or “made in China” attached, which compromises their genuineness. Traditional watercolor and ink landscape art can be made for the tourist industry; it can be pleasing or kitsch. But were a traditionally made work be put on the international art market, either people would assume it a fake or they would ask, what is this for? What is its point? Perhaps one can no longer claim authenticity in a contemporary market except as a kind of kitsch. Rather the artist must find new ways to reinvent old styles. Tradition can only continue or best continues when modernist invention allows it to live a second and new life. And so Xu Bing’s Background Story 7 renders the beauty of landscape art through nontraditional means, and without a standard of authenticity of the kind the postcolonial world earlier claimed for itself. His installation is a pictorial dialogue about the capacity of contemporary art to (re-)produce traditional Chinese landscape painting. This is why it is post-postcolonial, part of the contemporary global world of discard, waste, the new China, and the culture of global exhibition. There is a specifically Chinese history and cultural politics that is also part of Xu Bing’s background story here, for he is speaking to the generation of Chinese artists before him. I refer to those painters from the late 1970s and 1980s who following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1977) sought to reestablish tradition in Chinese cultural forms. Mao’s Cultural Revolution trampled on tradition, declaring the past a wreck demanding dismemberment in the name of revolutionary social advancement. The museums were closed, art objects sometimes destroyed, the Forbidden City survived but only because of a miracle or fluke of policy, universities were closed, intellectuals and artists sent to the countryside for re-education through labor, and to get them out of the way. During this eleven year period the Chinese government did to its own (Chinese) past what the colonizer had wreaked throughout colonial society, in India for example where the past was systematically devalued as monstrous, orientalist

158

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

and mortified, and Indians trained in the so-called “Company School” of British portraiture, taught to paint the boisterous and teeming cities of India as if the green and pleasant fields of England, all under the condescending paternalism of the home country/England (see Chapters 1 and 2). Mao sought to devalue China’s great and noble past, to shatter it, thus freeing China from its ruinous grip. In doing so he alienated Chinese society from its millennia of traditions, from its heritage, in one nearly fatal stroke. The Cultural Revolution lasted from 1966 until 1976, when a new generation of students entered universities, the so-called class of 77, cherry picked from eleven years of young people unable to enter university during that time. This class became the power brokers of contemporary China. Important politicians, economists, intellectuals, artists, and scientists: including Xu Bing who entered the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts in 1977. At this moment of the late 1970s the generation before Xu Bing immediately returned to those traditions repressed by Mao and his henchmen. Fusing traditional Chinese watercolor and ink drawing with various styles absorbed from impressionism, academic portraiture, Van Gogh and the Fauves, even abstract painters, this generation directly assimilated landscape painting back into their repertory in the 1970s and 1980s. Even portraits of nudes were painted in the jagged sketchy lines and soft clouds of Chinese landscape art. It was as if landscape was making a dramatic renewal as speedily as Mao had tried to kill it off. This moment for the regeneration of the past was politically important as a way of breaking free of the Cultural Revolution and re-dedicating China to its traditions, but in retrospect these paintings of the 1970s and 1980s can seem just a little dated, artificial, and a bit facile in their assimilation of far off traditions from the past. It was a moment in the history of Chinese nationalism akin to Diego Rivera’s in Mexico and M.F. Husain’s in India: A moment in celebration of the past turned into a symbol of lost Chinese traditions now, through the past, partly regained. Indeed I think the regeneration of tradition in postMaoist China was also form of redress characteristic of a transitional society like South Africa’s: a China rehabilitating its own cultural dignity from its own authoritarian destructiveness. The return to tradition was a way of restoring dignity and integrity to a cultural attitude and practice ruptured by totalitarian violence. And now the past has, one generation later, taken on a different valence than it had in the post-Cultural Revolution artists of the 1970s and 1980s. Xu Bing’s generation came of age at the moment of the Tiananmen Square uprising and went to live in New York, London and other major global cities only to return to

Xu Bing’s Archive of the Past

159

China a decade or more later, in the new, capitalist incarnation of China, in the age of China-the-superpower with its superpower art world. And the question explored by Xu Bing is, what does the past have to do with this China, this globalized art world, this moment of neoliberalism for an international artist (himself) who lived a decade in New York City and is part of the world of the biennale, the installation and the logo, not to mention the ubiquitous presence of profiling and marketing which is part and parcel of the contemporary art scene? How can that past prove relevant, in what way can it remain not only an object of desire, but a legacy of use to art today? Access to the past, and the very character of the past accessed, continually changes with the evolution of the present. Xu Bing’s relation to the past has had to change with the astonishing emergence of the new China in the past twenty years, with its highly articulated and global art world, its pounding intensities of growth, its global cosmopolitanism and its industrial waste. In the contemporary art world of Beijing, New York, Basel, Miami and London, the past appears almost as a logo, an advertising moniker, a consumer product, which is how postmodern architects with their Italianate office blocks and “Baroque” townhouse complexes treat it (including in China’s condominium complexes where traditional Chinese architectural elements combine with Spanish and Californian in global developer-speak). Moreover it is a condition of art today that it announces itself as new, innovative, ready for circulation in global art markets, ready to “make a statement” about things,1 as Arthur Danto would put it, rather than waiting patiently to be contemplated. This self-announcement is almost indistinguishable from branding. One has to work as hard as Xu Bing to try to get away from the collapse of artistic statement into brand. The question is the relevance of tradition when filtered through the contemporary lens of all this. The only way to render tradition its due in such contemporary conditions of visibility, branding and global circulation is by playing a game like Xu Bing’s in which tradition is also put on display and becomes an object of play, therefore acknowledging the illusion and artifice in the act. One cannot continue tradition without inventing new terms for its transmission. An artist’s work today will always have the product label “Made in China” attached to it; it will never be as naturalistic as a traditional landscape, even if it is composed from branches, twigs and cornhusks; especially because it is made from those. Indeed authenticity now lives a second life as a brand. I said Background Story 7 is about exchange between natural materials and representation and I want to end by returning to that. Let me revisit the relationship between the materials on the floor and those under glass. The

160

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

materials on the floor are also beautiful. One is reminded of the old philosophical adage that landscape art is only beautiful because nature is. There is an exchange between what happens in life, as one sits before the mountain, awed by its quiet majesty, and what happens in art, where the mountains are drawn at the top of the picture, inviting a similar response. The philosopher John Dewey went so far as to say everything that happens inside art can happen because it is already happening in life outside of art. We are moved by the lake and then moved by the picture of the lake. Then when we next see the lake we feel it resembles the painting of the lake and are more pleased still. The philosopher Immanuel Kant spoke of beauty in this way: beauty is nature appearing in the guise of art and art appearing in the guise of nature. Xu Bing’s work is about the exchange between contemplation of actual nature (the materials from Kew Gardens) and contemplation of art traditions (landscape art). It re-creates those terms of exchange between what is on the floor and what is in the glass vitrine. We are left with a tradition of naturalist representation (Chinese calligraphy and watercolor), which is distant, artificial, a form of taxidermy, a curiosity, a background waiting for a new art to make it live again. Tradition, the past, is alienated. But the past is also quietly incandescent under Xu Bing’s glass. His artistic task has been how to invent a situation in which landscape art can live again. His project shows how hard it is to do this now, and how wonderful it is when it works.

8

The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes

I said in the Introduction (Chapter 1) that humanitarianism has in many ways replaced postcolonial consciousness as the locus where international justice is thought and practiced. At the core of humanitarianism is a belief in universal human rights; basic human dignity; and the justification of aid work, intervention, and arrest on those grounds. Institutionally it relies on the armamentaria of United Nations declarations and covenants, and those of the World Court, to which many nations have signed on, and which are its instruments. Since a signature is worth nothing without the will of the signer behind it, humanitarianism depends upon the willingness of governments to back up its “commitments” with aid (monetary, medical, military). It is a system inclusive of founding documents (the Human Rights Charters and Covenants signed by the members of the United Nations), nongovernmental agencies (Amnesty International, Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Red Cross), aid workers, governmental ministries, and state and private philanthropy (the Gates Foundation). There are, as I said in the Introduction, deep fault lines in this ideological, instrumental, and institutional system, everything from the unwillingness of governments to back the United Nations at moments of catastrophe (the Rwandan genocide) to the manipulation of “humanitarian” intervention for purposes of Realpolitik (power politics). It can be inefficient, corrupt, and all too often ineffective. And its goals are limited: direct action in the face of disaster, and arrest in the face of massive human rights abuses. Issues of long-term stability, economic equality, and state polity are not part of its purview. Humanitarianism is about international pressure, monitoring, showing up in the face of disaster, and then getting out. This limit is built into its approach to justice, which clearly demands many kinds of institutional and economic and political projects that go far beyond it. Humanitarianism is nevertheless the best post–Second World War system of monitoring and response we have in the contemporary world. Without it, there would be little else, except haphazardly and as a matter of luck.

162

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

I also said in the Introduction that when contemporary arts speak in the name of justice they tend to speak in the name of humanitarianism rather than in a postcolonial voice (of nationalism, decolonization, the critique of colonial knowledge, and the like). When art speaks critically today it tends to be about neoliberal inequality, terror, fundamentalism, gender, and other systemic faults in the contemporary world. These may have to do with postcolonial conditions or they may not. The problem for political art today is two fold. First to escape the branding, the marketing, the advertising so central to everything from universities to political life, and that dampens the intensity of truth-telling. To bypass these marketdriven limitations: limitations that are also part and parcel of the media with its daily drenching of the world in images of disaster cut between commercial breaks. The second problem for political art is to break out of the encomium of the art world, which restricts its circulation of work to art world types, in order to speak to a broader audience. These problems, namely, intensity of voice and domain and range of circulation, are very difficult to overcome. One could call them two of the great problems for contemporary culture. Breakout has in fact been a long-standing problem for art, although the terms of the problem have changed. The avant-gardes wished to break out of the confines of the art world—that circuit of gallery, museum, collector, critic, scholar—to intervene in the world more directly, and with more impact, raising the consciousness of the masses and building the cities of the future. They mostly failed at this. The question of action directe has occupied photographers seeking to make visible the pain and dying of HIV/AIDS-affected persons in Southern Africa,1 the battlefields and burial grounds of war, and the devastations of neoliberal inequality. And during the days of the Apartheid struggle (Chapter 4) when the call—mostly unheeded— was to bring art to the streets as a (cultural) weapon in the struggle. Now the idea is not to turn art into a weapon, but a form of address that can reach a broader audience, and a highly jaded one, an audience accustomed to branding and marketing, overwhelmed by a surfeit of images and highly consumerist. This final chapter is about an artist who has dedicated his life to this: Australian artist George Gittoes. It raises the larger question of the hermetic confines of the art world (in spite of its open texture as a market), of its representational distance from the direct events of the world, of the way it displaces politics, even as it might seek sometimes to acknowledge and engage politics. His trajectory is highly instructive. “I never realized Kafka wrote non-fiction,” the Hungarian Marxist and literary critic Georg Lukacs was known to have said as he was being escorted to jail for

The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes

163

his part in the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet state in the 1950s. It was a terrible revelation. Lukacs’ discovery that his own country had a logic which, until history proved it so, he would have thought to have been the invention of a tortured mind. That torture is not finally a property of fiction but of actual persons living under authoritarian regimes—of stateless persons, refugees, dissidents, minority groups, and persons without wherewithal or power behind them—is a fact which modernism tended to avoid (with the exception of Kafka). That the creative imagination of such matters must bow before the rampant, persistent fact of them, that art has the greatest responsibility (like all voices in the public sphere) to bring suffering, violence, and indignity to the human imagination so it stays in mind, may be considered the starting point of the Australian painter and filmmaker George Gittoes. Gittoes’ art is remarkable because it makes human rights violations palpable to the imagination in a world where their combination of distance and excessive circulation threatens them with constant devaluation. Things which happen half a world away—whether on the borders of Europe or in the heart of Africa— are things of blunted power, especially when they flood the television in daily fifteen-second visual/sound bites to the point where we hardly notice them (today’s torture or bomb wedged between Chevy commercials and Reality TV programs). Susan Sontag warned us twenty years ago that photography has the effect of dampening the force of even the most overwhelming images because of their endlessly repetitive circulation in human societies.2 Perhaps this archive fever3 is datable to the stark images from Bergen Belsen of emaciated, wraithlike human ghosts, but fifty years of overaccumulation of images of horror have turned them into a virtual department store of banalities. It is for this reason that Claude Lanzmann, filming Shoah, refused to use any extant photographs of the Holocaust and relied instead on nothing beyond record, survivor, witness, site, and an obsessively theatrical repetition of trains, gates, and stories, thus forcing the viewer to enter into an event whose unyielding power must remain perpetually beyond comprehension. To overcome the deadening effects of images, one must invent an idiom. Lanzmann’s task is to animate a specter from the past, something whose only record exists in the survivors, the witnesses, the perpetrators, and the soft green grass of places often now oblivious to what they were. His gestures are, appropriately, those of retelling, reenactment, and reincarnation. But what happens if the thing is happening now, perpetually now, in one place and then another? What kind of ongoing act of witnessing is capable of breaking through the haze of CNN reports (dead bodies piled up before television cameras and

164

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

journalists reciting with fine, combed hair, wearing khaki)? How can an artist of war find a voice in relation to this rapid-fire circulation of images produced by automatic machine gun cameras and disseminated globally in seconds? What would it mean for plastic art to presume this immediacy of response today? Conversely, what would it mean for plastic art to abdicate this position, this responsibility to witness, hiding in the presumption of studio autonomy? Or worse, what would it mean for plastic art to retain the illusion that by smearing its images and installations with the blood of children and the hair of murderers it has retained (or regained) contact with immediate reality when all it has succeeded in doing is pornographizing itself, turning itself into the poor relation of CNN? These are not minor questions. At stake is Hegel’s larger question of to what extent, and how, plastic art might continue to “voice our deepest aspirations” and speak to the deepest concerns of our time. Over the course of a long career Gittoes has worked in Afghanistan, Gaza, Chechnya, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, South Africa (where I first met him while teaching at a South African university in the late 1990s), and many other places. He sometimes travels with peace-keeping forces or nongovernmental organizations to insure access to disturbational areas of the world. Other times he works alone. He is often in real danger. The map of global suffering has been his terrain. Gittoes draws at the scene of devastation, scribbling notes and taking photographs, which he then brings back to his studio in Australia. There he makes huge staggered oil or acrylic canvases from these materials, exhibiting the entire process. His work thus moves from the position of on-site witness to that of artist-in-studio, and it is only because he starts from the position of witness that the power of his art can unfold as it does. For his work presents the viewer with a way of grasping the formless, contingent power of events at their horrifying sources, and retaining that in all that follows. Since the traces of immediacy are retained in his paintings, the work undercuts the comfort zone of autonomous studio productions to shock us, enveloping with something of the immediacy of suffering. We too become witnesses, confronting his victims as he does. So does the distant draw us near. There is a clarity about this that is astonishing, as well as a feat of talent, for anyone who has actually witnessed human trauma (especially in its larger-scale social dimensions involving hundreds or millions) knows that it is nearly impossible to capture the power of what one has seen without giving into weak stereotype or formulaic emotion. Events literally fall apart when one tries to represent them. It is this position of witness that partly allows him to break through the comfort zones of the art world, in line with the best war correspondents and other journalists.

The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes

165

Gittoes manages to capture the formlessness of trauma while it is happening while retaining focus, and he does this by focusing always on the individual victim, by drawing the victim like lighting. Drawing at the scene, speed is crucial. Artists of war must draw fast or paint fast—while the thing burns before the retina. They must commute it into drawing or painting before it turns to ash, fades into the haunting shadows of mourning, thus becoming spectral. And yet their finished product has to retain this sense of reactivity. It has to look unfinished, carry the framelessness of the event itself, of the terrible formlessness of that now, while also being finished, well formed. The artists who have been capable of reacting with this lightning energy are few and far between: Goya, Husain, and Picasso. Picasso was not literally there at the scene when Guernica fell so you can, sometimes, react half a world away if you retain a deep sense of place and spirit. But Gittoes always is there. He won’t paint otherwise. And this is crucial to the unique moral urgency of his project, to its combination of journalism and subjectivity, to its capacity to take over from television something of the circulation of information, that he always is there, making drawings right in front of the victims, wandering the aimless trajectory of refugee camps and military operations, scribbling on the sides of drawn pages notes about the victim and circumstance. Gittoes’ drawings exist midway between the drawing and the sketch. They have the balance, complication, and refinement of drawing while retaining something of the quick, unfinished, spontaneity of the sketch. His figures fill the frames, indeed pass beyond them. They are bent in suffering, with distorted facial features and tortured limbs, fiercely engaged in the act of endurance beyond all measure of human possibility or collapsed into themselves, staring vacantly, withdrawn into the traumatic blankness of their crushed lives, sometimes even figures of children, momentarily blessed with the fragmentary joys of ordinary lives resumed, other times with oversized, opaque eyes that speak haunting, frozen languages untranslatable into ordinary human experience. He executes them on the spot, right in front of the victims, the children in camps, and the passersby. The people he draws often stare back at the artist as he works and talk to him, and this relationship of person to person becomes central to the drawing. The artist claims he learned to draw fast and spontaneously as a young bohemian living in the New York of Andy Warhol and abstract expressionism (the 1960s), when he supplemented his living as a street artist in Washington Square by drawing anybody and everybody who would sit (and sometimes pay). It was there, he says, that his ability to track reality, to line the particulars of subject and mood, was cultivated in rapid-fire form. It is a quirk of history that

166

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

an art learned in the refined and historical urban jungles of New York should find its deeper communion in the refugee camp and the tented caravan. More amazing still is that an incessant quality of invention should pertain to each and every drawing. For this is above all what counts: the fact that each drawing seems invented on the spot, that no two should be “the same” or “repetitions of the type,” as if the singularity of each person, each event, each horror should call for an attention achieved through the invention of a new variation on the idiom, or even a new idiom altogether. Gittoes never rests on the laurels of his style. And this is his way of marking each figure, each gross violation of human rights as a unique, irreducible event in history that happens to a special someone and not to a merely anonymous “victim” who quickly disappears into the homogenized vale of human suffering, into the namelessness of terrible things. Gittoes’ way of keeping the power of each figure and what happened to them alive is to render each as freshly to human consciousness as each person is—or should be—to the world. This is called, from the moral point of view, respect. This also has to do with the words. Along with drawing, words are scribbled furiously across the page, describing in the manner of a journalist or writer where he is, who he is talking to or drawing, what is happening around him. In a particularly poignant picture, a preacher is preaching to the dying in Rwanda, as they are being hacked to death. This preacher, the words tell us, spontaneously stood up among the slaughter to preach, thus “giving the people back their dignity.” He was soon to be cut down himself, so what we are seeing is a man whose moment in life is his last. Gittoes told me although he tried, he could do nothing, nothing other than draw and write. Too little too late, a record of human strength, but also artistic failure, the true record of a witness. A woman spies Gittoes through a razor wire fence and tries to pass her babies to him but the UN soldiers point their guns at the painter and order him not to take the children as it might cause a stampede of terrified mothers. Later, after the massacre Gittoes finds her with the three dead babies in front of her and a machete wound to her forehead. From his drawing at the scene he produces Eyewitness. He then brings this drawing back to the studio and paints Blood and Tears (1995). Gittoes’ work is a kind of performance: from drawing to painting. The paintings do not merely recapitulate the drawings but remake them through the resources of painting. It is here again that Gittoes parts ways with television. Circulation is not propagation through airwaves; it is recreation, variation, reincarnation. But reincarnation which must retain the urgency of the now, the spontaneity of the witness, the sense of drawing by torchlight under the cover of

The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes

167

Figure 8.1  George Gittoes, Eyewitness, drawing from Rwanda diaries, 1994, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

168

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 8.2  George Gittoes, Blood and Tears, 1995, photography by Silversalt, image and rights courtesy of the artist.

The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes

169

some United Nations tented darkness. The question becomes that of inventing an idiom of painting which retains the intensity of being there but also enlarges it in scope and expression. Thus, the project takes us from the rapid-fire intensity of drawing-at-the-scene to the reinvention of being-there in the slower, thickly layered gestures of paint-in-studio. Now it seems to me that painting has, for the past twenty years, been in stiff competition with television: regarding the immediacy of the image, the spectacle of presentation, the power of circulation, the juxtaposition of the frame, and in many other ways. Gittoes’ project begins from the obvious recognition that the television camera can capture what is happening in the world instantaneously and send it reeling into a thousand television sets without the slightest effort: plastic art will never succeed in gaining this position of power. Between the events of the world and the act of painting there is a time lag built into the creative process which the instantaneousness of the media belies. However, plastic art, given the terms of Gittoes’ project, can therefore be called on to blend the rapid-fire response of the witness with the expressive subjectivity of drawing and painting that the “time lag” allows for, in the hope of retrieving events from their homogenized deadness (the way they strike us on the evening news). In no way do I wish crudely to castigate the media. To state the obvious: bringing the news to the living room TV is a crucial way of connecting people to things, even if it also may paradoxically deaden their responses and turn disaster into a bizarre consumer opportunity. But drawing and painting have the special virtue of molten reactivity brought right into the tracing of lines, the boldness of shadows, the exaggerations of physiognomy, the raw application of paint, the riotous calamities of color, the “fine line” traced between realism, and the grotesque. If, that is, they can overcome the branding and marketing so central to their creation and circulation today, which is the goal of Gittoes. His strategy is to first bring the intensity of witnessing to his drawings and scribblings at the event of violence. And then to transpose something of the formlessness of the event into painting that is intentionally disturbational and lopsided, as if one were in a place where suddenly all hell broke loose. Were Gittoes to draw at every site the same way, it might over time turn into the “Gittoes” brand (Warhol, a hero of the artist, made clear that repetition is critical to brand formation with his Coca-Cola bottles and duplicates of Jackie and Marilyn). To retain the immediacy of the event Gittoes must not repeat himself and his work is molten seldom repetitive. This is both an artistic triumph and a moral rule, that everything in his art must retain the freshness of the encounter, including the painting made in the studio. It takes a rare artist to seldom repeat himself, especially in the postmodern times of routinized mass

170

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

productions disguised under the aura of “studio practices.” Picasso was perhaps the paradigm of the non-repeating artist (until he got old anyway). Suffering, like joy, like contentment, like mythology, like everything, demands a continually new idiom for its appearance. Gittoes’ paintings do exist in conversation with the stark expressiveness of late twentieth–century German painting, the powerful, strident colors of European and American postwar art, the worlds of detritus and death that Kiefer composed, the staggered, tormented figural acrobatics of Clemente, the displaced figures of Baselitz, the cramped, melodramatic spaces of Immendorf, the expressionistic impasto of Van Gogh, De Kooning, and Appel. But their quality of closeness to their subjects and their feel for the people in the pictures as individuals reacting to the closure of their worlds are his alone. His pictures share with Rembrandt one crucial aspect: they begin and end with people and only with people—and not just with people but with their heads, their faces, their expressions, their lips, their eyes, their furrowed brows. Gittoes’ figures lack the luxury of such detailed subjectivity since they exist in collapsing worlds. And where Rembrandt details their subtleties of feeling, Gittoes shows us their striated bodies, bodies which are what Michel Foucault would call the “power points” of systemic atrocity. However, he also marks their subjectivity by expanding and exaggerating their heads, which are in his work typically oversized with respect to the bodies. This exaggeration places the burden of their experience in reactions which are making, literally, their heads reel. A large head in relation to a diminished body signifies weakness, deformation, and perhaps also infancy: all are associatively present. It also signifies the concentration of human emotion—and relatedly, the distended character of time. It is well known that in any traumatic moment, time always flows too fast and too slow, and the instant remains strange, distant, foreign, horrifying, unreal—a point of amnesia and perpetual memory, over in an instance and never over. The witnessing position is also retained through a remarkable feel for the “telling detail.” Often trauma victims will recall an event through exactly that: I had just lit a cigarette when I went outside and saw him lying face down. I remember the cigarette dangling in my hand while I wondered if I was going to drop it. That sort of thing. In paintings of Bosnia there is one of a young woman in fact having a cigarette with her dead brother, one cigarette is in her mouth, the other in the ground next to the fresh flowers by her brother’s wooden gravestone—the heads are doubled. Everything else is distorted, and the heads seem permanently out of focus, like madness. Gittoes’ use of the telling detail also makes individuals unforgettable. A painting of an Orangeman in Northern Ireland enlarges the

The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes

171

man’s sclerotic jowls, pink, flaccid skin, and round face into a grotesqueness further accentuated by the strident palette of orange, pink, and brown colors, the yellow tinted sunglasses, and the blue top hat the man is wearing. In these works the detail is also at the service of the grotesque. Tony Mullingully, a native aboriginal Australian embroiled in the law, is painted with his head vertically doubled, the doubled crowns joined in the middle of the picture as he were a Siamese twin, the two necks reaching toward the bottom, and the top of the frame as if he were upside down to himself. The doubled head is painted in dark purple and the face deeply lined, scarified like hard earth. The oblong head of a Rwandan machete victim with its long, bloody cut can hardly be looked at it. The hideously deformed body of a Philippines torture victim, thrown from an automobile as a warning to others, is held together only by netting and has practically no recognizable head and face at all. These paintings re-create the indelibility of such persons and events through the specific resources of the medium: through furrowed lines, jagged use of impasto, horridly intense color, and a curvature of the anatomy which de-realizes the ordinary relation between body and head, head and face, person and eyes that is the abject relation of torture. When we are presented with a Gittoes’ telecommunications line from initial on-site drawings to paintings done in studio, we are gifted an alternative to processes of circulation controlled by the media (TV images of disaster). The

Figure 8.3  George Gittoes, Tony Mullingully, 1983, photography by Silversalt, rights courtesy of the artist.

172

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

drawing puts us as if on-site, close to the scene, and indelibly so. The painting teaches us that we are in the gallery or studio, far from the event. And so the combination of drawing and painting makes us aware of the encomium of the gallery, of its sheltered distance from the world, giving us a glimpse of the world outside it. This is emphasized by the paintings which retain a kind of roughness, refusing to relinquish the messiness of the actual event pictured. It is as if a Gittoes painting sits just a little impatiently, uncomfortably in its gallery or museum site—as if it itches to say: get out of this place and see what I’ve seen! It carries his eyes. But—and here’s the rub—although the source of the work is in direct encounter with the world, Gittoes’ work has circulated mostly within the confines of the art world, the gallery, museum, human rights, or government organization. Even if its point is to provide a glimpse beyond this rarified, market-driven, semireligious art world space, this constraint on the usual modes of circulation for visual art in the art world, which is largely restricted to art world populations, has always been a central anxiety of Gittoes’ work. (Digital culture where an artist can upload images and send Web sites reeling into hyperspace may be changing this, although it is too soon to tell.) The constraint is part of what caused him to turn to film and video as media, he hopes, will have a greater chance of breaking out of the circuits of the art world into the larger world, and courtesy of distribution, YouTube, the Internet, his Web site. These are media of reproducibility with an endless number of potential copies and no real original, capable in principle of reaching many people all over the world. Soon after 9/11 (September 11, 2001) Gittoes planned an extended visit to New York, during which time he completed a series of photos about fear and violence in that city. What his eye has picked up from the streets of that traumatized city is astonishing, almost derealizing. Fear.com, a photo of a poster advertising a movie, becomes emblematic of his vision of the scars, the rumblings, the aggression of that city. His USA was crazed, brazen, terrified, filled with bravado, uncertain, one-dimensional. I found it accurate. Since that time he has largely reinvented himself as a documentary film and video maker. Among his first ventures was the film Soundtrack to War during the second Iraq war, interviewing American soldiers driving in tanks about the music they blare while on patrol or encountering enemy forces. That heavy metal music blasts like their testosterone, it is the manic beat of a soldier’s hyperanxiety, and, like war itself, the film gradually loses control of its center, spiraling into a kind of documentary chaos. Then there was Gittoes’ Rampage, about another kind of state of war, the Miami Hood and its equally aggressive beats.

The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes

173

Figure 8.4  George Gittoes, Fear.Com, New York City 2002, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

174

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

His most recent film (as of the writing of this chapter) is Snow Monkey of 2015, a documentary film about Afghan street children and their recruitment into the ranks of suicide bombers by the Taliban, including one amazing sequence with a young man who, although trained for such a mission, refused. The film is also about the prospects for these children to make a living in this war-torn country, their ingenuity, street smarts, and ability to remain buoyant in the midst of the threat of life. Some of these children are animated: they love, they seem happy, and/or they are indefatigable. But the world in which they live has a startling uncertainty and intensity. Gittoes’ sequences shot at the moment bombs land have a searing power that no painting, nor CNN broadcast could have. They are accompanied by voiceover from the children we by at this point in Snow Monkey intimate with, making the scenes of unbearable poignancy. TV usually shows us a bystander or two when it documents the bomb blasts, but they are never characters, personages, about whom we have been taught to care (by watching the film up to this point). The filming is shot at medium range to provide the viewing public enough distance on the event to give it form—but within the space of the event. Gittoes places the camera in media res and refuses to edit out the blood, the limbs, the people instantaneously turned into corpses. We are there in all its chaos and

Figure 8.5  George Gittoes, Ice Cream Boys Staring Up at Poster of Snow Monkey, 2015, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

The Persistent Witness: George Gittoes

175

Figure 8.6  George Gittoes, Still from Snow Monkey, Steel with Guns, 2015, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

Figure 8.7  George Gittoes, Still from Snow Monkey, GulMinah on the Street, 2015, photo and rights courtesy of the artist.

176

Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World

Figure 8.8  George Gittoes, Still from Snow Monkey, Steel and Shazia, 2015, rights courtesy of the artist.

formlessness. The film’s ending is a testament to the stubborn ability of life to cling to life, even to dream the future in the midst of the chaos. We see Steel and Shazia, two of the main characters, walking along the pebbly edge of a lake, enduring and alive to the future. There is little like this film in the entire corpus of documentary film history. The issue then becomes distribution. For it turns out that the problem of breakout is that a film like Snow Monkey has to find movie theaters, or film festivals, or be uploaded to YouTube or VIMEO (where I watched it courtesy of a password). Who knows at the end of the day who is watching? This is the gamble of Gittoes’ art. One can only admire an artist who has spent his life trying to capture in drawing, painting, photography, and film the original impulses of the witness, who has restlessly shifted from one approach to another in the name of that. How nice to know, therefore, that in 2015 George Gittoes won the Sydney Peace Prize.

Notes Chapter 1 1

Cf. Fredric Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in tr. R.J. Hollingdale, and Daniel Breazeale, ed., Untimely Meditations (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and London, 1997), pp. 57–124. 2 For a discussion of the link between origin and destiny in the heritage turn central to the rise of the European nation, a turn taken over by many postcolonial nations at their moment of decolonization, see my Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony (Columbia Press: New York and London, 2012), chapter 1. 3 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Jonathan Mayne, tr. and ed., The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Phaidon Press: New York, 1964), pp. 1–40. 4 For a discussion of this, see T.J. Clark, Manet and the Painting of Modern Life (Princeton University Press: Princeton and London, 1984). 5 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin Books: London, 1972), chapter 3. 6 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1986). 7 Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, tr. M. Shaw (Minnesota Press: Minnesota and London, 1984). 8 Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in Patrick Williams and Ian Chrisman, eds., Colonial and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (Columbia University Press: New York, 1994), p. 37. 9 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1984). 10 David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon and Schuster: New York, 2003).

Chapter 2 1 2 3

Fanon, “On National Culture,” p. 37. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso: London, 2006). This is why my recent book on heritage works comparatively between three: India, South Africa, and the United States. Daniel, Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony.

178

Notes

I owe these remarks about Gandhi to Akeel Bilgrami’s fine book, Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (Harvard Press: Cambridge and London, 2014). 5 In writing this I am influenced by the clarity and persuasiveness of Akeel Bilgrami’s important book, Secularism, Identity and Enchantment. 6 Quoted in Dalmia, Yashodhara; “From Jamshetjee Jeejeebhoy to the Progressive Painters,” in S. Patel and A. Thorner, eds., Bombay, Mosaic of Modern Culture (Oxford Press: Bombay, 1995), p. 182. 7 Ibid., p. 183. 8 Karin Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (Oxford Press: Oxford and New York, 2014), p. 9. 9 Akeel Bilgrami, from Private Correspondence. 10 Akeel Bilgrami’s essay, “Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Contexts of Indian Secularism,” in Jonardon Ganeri, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, Online Publication, March 2016. 11 ibid. 12 Husain, ‘Introduction’ to Passages into Human Space, Interview with Chester Herwitz, pp. iv–v. 13 Ibid., p. v. 14 C.F. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (University of California Press, Berkeley) 1989. 15 For a detailed discussion of the attacks on Husain and their complex meanings, see Zitzewitz, ibid., chapter 1. 16 Thomas Blom Hansen, “Reflections on Salman Rushdie’s Bombay,” in Herwitz and Varshney, eds., Midnight’s Diaspora: Critical Encounters with Salman Rushdie (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2008), pp. 91–111. 17 Daniel Herwitz and M.F. Husain, Husain (Tata Press: Bombay, 1987). 18 C.F. Daniel Herwitz and Ashutosh Varshney, eds., Midnight’s Diaspora: Critical Encounters with Salman Rushdie. 19 Akeel Bilgrami, in private conversation. 4

Chapter 3 1 2 3

4

G. Ewing, in V.S. Naipaul, India, A Million Mutinies Now (Penguin Press: New York and London, 1990), pp. 405–6. Ibid., p. 406. See Gita Kapur; “Nalini Malani,” in India: Myth and Reality, Aspects of Modern Indian Art, Exhibition Catalogue of Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, exhibition organized by David Elliott, Victor Musgrave, and Ebrahim Alkazi, published by Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1982, p. 69. Figures of Thought, Documentary film written and directed by Arun Khupkar (Indian Film Institute: Poona, 1992).

Notes

179

Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976), pp. 875–893, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, reprinted in The Rhetorical Tradition, tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, P. Bizzell and B. Herzberg, eds. (1990), pp. 1232–3. 6 The Italian postmodern painter Mariani’s obsession with classical figures who mirror one another and also appear gay or bisexual (it is hard for me to tell which) is in my view a deep interpretation of the latent homoeroticism or bisexuality at the basis of classical ideals of beauty, since in those ideals, sameness and mirroring converge with the drama of desire. 7 Living in anti-Semitic Vienna, Freud at this stage of his thinking dreamed of the ancient days of the kingdom of Akhnathan when bisexuality reigned and social harmony was therefore in place. While Freud never goes quite so far as to say “therefore,” this is nearly what he means. His view of other minds is in many ways the idea that one knows the other because one has the traces of the other’s state of mind in oneself. On Freud’s romanticization of bisexuality, and his encoding of his desire, as a liberal Austrian Jew, for social reconciliation into this romanticization of the bisexual, see Carl Schorske, “Freud: The Psychoarcheology of Civilizations,” in Jerome Neu, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge and New York, 1992), pp. 8–24. 8 Geeta Kapur, “Introduction,” in Contemporary Indian Art: An Exhibition of the Festival of India, 1982, The Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, in two parts: 18 September–5 October and 9 October–October 31, 1982, published by the Indian Advisory Committee, Festival of India, 1982, p. 8. 9 See Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” Parts 1 and 2, in Beyond Recognition, S. Bryson, B. Kruger, L. Tillman, and J. Weinstock, eds. (University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1992), pp. 52–87. Owens’ early death was a loss to the world of art criticism, for which no allegory can compensate. 10 The source of this conception of allegory in terms of mourning and redemption through meaning is in Walter Benjamin’s famous work on the Trauerspiel. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, tr. Osborne, J. (New Left Books: London, 1977). 5

Chapter 4 1

2

For an extended discussion of Mbeki’s African Renaissance and also its relation to Mbeki’s disastrous policy of HIV/AIDS denialism that wracked South Africa (from 1999–2002 and beyond), see my Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony, chapter 5. Cf. Thomas Packenham, The Scramble for Africa (First Avon Printing: New York, 1992).

180

Notes

Cf. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton Press: Princeton and Cambridge, 1996) for among the best discussions of this. 4 Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” reprinting in TDR, Vol. 35, No. 1 Spring, 1991, p. 187, MIT Press. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 188. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 187. 9 Ibid., pp. 188–9. 10 Cf. Daniel Herwitz, Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the AvantGarde (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1993), for more on the role of theory as a piston of politics in the avant-gardes. 11 Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. 12 Elza Miles, Polly Street: The Story of an Art Centre (The Ampersand Foundation: Johannesburg, 2004), P. 136. 13 Sack Steven, “‘Garden of Eden or Political Landscape?’: Street Art in Mamelodi and Other Townships,” in Nettleton and Hammond-Tooke, African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township (Ad Donker: Johannesburg, 1989), pp. 191–2. 14 Ibid., p. 205. See also Lodge Tom, “The United Democratic Front: Leadership and Ideology,” African Studies Institute, University of Witwatersrand, 1987, unpublished. 15 It is worth pointing out that Sack’s description of populist practice also found its theoretical resonance in the clearly postcolonial writings of Third Stream Cinema, a theory which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America and also Africa, and which claimed for third-world film (and for the films of marginalized groups within the West) a potentially liberating, Marxist status. Initially articulated by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, and theorized by Teshome Gabriel and others, the concept of Third Stream Cinema had a number of features linking it to the thought and practice of the oppositional artists in South Africa. This world cinematic movement would gain revolutionary status, so it was thought, by (1) absorbing Western cinematic traditions, (2) criticizing the institutional domination of the Western cinema over world cinema as the latest expression of world imperialism and colonialism, (3) retrieving indigenous traditions by investing the camera and its modes of narration with folk forms, rhythms, colors, and the like, while (4) at the same time criticizing the emerging postcolonial nation (to which it is also giving cultural identity) along leftist lines. The idea behind the third stream as a concept, and to an extent, as a practice, was to unify artistic innovation with popular consciousness in a way that created a cinema that was at once revolutionary and of mass, thus massive, scope. Indeed, it could hardly be revolutionary without being popular, since the conditions for real revolution are 3

Notes





16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23

181

those of mass mobilization. Cinema is of course perfectly suited to reach a mass, while plastic art is, in our century at least, not. Third Stream Cinema theory is about film, not really visual art, which has little chance of reaching the broad audiences cinema has. But the system of filmmaking in place under Apartheid prevented any avant-garde cinema with revolutionary pretentions from emerging. Indeed the global filmmakers most admired by the third stream writers (all quite admirable)—Tomaso Gutierez Alea in Cuba, Ousmane Sembene in Senegal, and the late Ritwik Gathak in India—uniformly failed to reach popular audiences. None had their films participate in mass mobilizations. The films were simply too complex—dare one say it, too original and avant-garde—to reach and move the subaltern mass in the village and on the street corner. As usual, the attempt of the avant-garde to move in two directions—that of formal innovation and of popularist mass effects—mostly fell apart in practice, while being beautifully articulated in theory. Cf. Octavio Getino; some notes on the concept of a “Third Cinema” in Michael T. Martin, ed., New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1 (Wayne State University Press: Detroit, 1997); and Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Dynamics of Style and Ideology. Order No. 8001422 (University of California: Los Angeles, 1979. Ann Arbor: ProQuest). Ibid., pp. 190–1. Neville Dubow, Private Conversation, Cape Town, 1992. Daniel Herwitz, “The Shape of Recent South African Art,” Modern Painters, Fall 1993. Nick Shepherd, Heritage, in Nick Shepherd and Steven Robins, eds., New South African Keywords (Ohio University Press: Athens, 2008), pp. 121–2. Annie Coombes has shown in a fine book, History after Apartheid, that all manner of attempts took place by individuals and groups to reduce, ridicule, stand on its head, and in general denature the power of the Apartheid monument. Cf. Annie Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Duke University Press: Durham, 2003), chapter 1. For more on this, see my book Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony, chapter 4. For a longer discussion of the Constitutional Court, see my Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony, ibid. Dennis Davis, Lecture, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, 2012.

Chapter 5 1

For an example of a book which does attempt to link the understanding of this kind of object to modernist aesthetics, see the fine book by David Doris, Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics and the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects

182

2 3 4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13

Notes in Nigeria (University of Washington Press: Seattle and London, 2011) which links Nigerian spirit-things to modernist anti-aesthetics. Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (Phaidon: London), pp. 105–6. Ibid., p. 106. Ivan Karp, Corinne Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, eds., Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2006). Daniel Herwitz, Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony, chapter 3; and Daniel Herwitz, “The Creator’s Hand and the Curator’s Imprint,” in Carolyn Hamilton and Pippa Skotnes, eds., Uncertain Curature: In and Out of the Archive (Jacana Press: Cape Town, 2014). Nettleton, A., “The Crocodile Does Not Leave the Pool: Venda Court Arts,” in Nettleton and Hammond-Tooke, eds., African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township (Ad Donker: Johannesburg, 1989), pp. 67–89. Ibid., pp. 73–4. Ibid., p. 75. J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago University Press: Chicago, 1991). Rayda Becker, “Visions and the Viewer,” in R. Burnett, ed., Jecksemi Hlungwani Yagani (Communication Dept BMW: Johannesburg, 1989), p. 20. Anitra Nettleton, Traditional Figurative Woodcarving of the Shona and the Venda, PhD thesis, University of Witwatersrand, 1984. C.F. Rankin, Images of Metal (University of Witwatersrand Press: Johannesburg, 1994); P. Hobbs and E. Rankin, Printmaking, Transforming South Africa (David Philip: Johannesburg, 1997); P. Hobbs and E. Rankin, Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints (Double Story Books: Cape Town, 2003). The Africanist origins key modern paintings and sculptures are well known in relationship to modernist ideologies of primitivism. Picasso appropriated the West African mask and sculptural forms he saw exhibited in the Musee L’Homme, reveling in the formal stability of the mask, its dynamic form and fierce eye sockets and nose. These elements he read, or misread, as signs of terrifying intensity, which he then transposed into his canvases (the Demoiselles d’Avignon and other works from around 1906–1908), relying on stereotypes of African sexuality and aggression to invest his canvases with a primitivist energy capable, he hoped, of undercutting the bourgeois norms of European civilization with their direct assault. Africa became the means for the European to break through his veneer of civilization to a deeper and more unconscious field of repressed sex, aggression, and violence: the Africa of colonialist stereotypes that is. It is by now a commonplace that Picasso was disinterested in the actual role of West African sculpture in its place of origin (Benin, Ivory Coast, Gabon). The museum cured him of that interest for in that European institution the African work collected

Notes

14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21

183

and exhibited became dirempted from the site of its making to live a second life as a sight, an object denuded of context for the European to contemplate and make meaning of in whatever way he wished. Picasso’s misreading of the mask does depend on close visual analysis of it: Picasso grasps its solidity, elongation, and physiognomic power. It is just that the way these visual elements embody cultural meanings was of no interest to him. The mask thus became the mere material for his own contemplation and use, rather like the way materials from the colonies are exported to Europe for financial exploitation. Similarly the German expressionists found an “elective affinity” in the long, jagged expressiveness of African sculpture, which stimulated their own creativity and supplied them with material for orientalist dreamlike visions of escape to a benighted, primitive world of peace (from the fires of Europe). And so African work bears more than superficial affinity to the modern art of Europe that emerged from a misreading and free appropriation of it. Colin Richards, Desperately Seeking “Africa,” Art from South Africa, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford Catalogue (Thames and Hudson: London, 1990), p. 36. Ibid., p. 40. Colin Richards, “That Authentic African Look Fades into Glib Cliche,” The Weekly Mail, 28 August–September 3, 1987, Johannesburg. Anitra Nettleton, Julia Charleton, and Fiona Rankin-Smith, Engaging Modernities: Transformations of the Commonplace, essays based on the exhibition of that name at the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, as part of the 2002 Grahamstown Festival (University of Witwatersrand Art Galleries: Johannesburg, 2003). Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. Elizabeth Anscombe (Macmillan: New York, 1968), #123. Cf. D. Gaonkar, D.A. Wachtel, L. Ou-fanLee, and R. Mc Carthy, eds., Alternative Modernities (Duke Press: Durham and London, 2001). Cf. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1988), pp. 271–313. Also Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” The American Historical Review, December 1994, Vol. 99, No. 5, 1475–1490, 1476. And Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press: New York, 2003). Daniel Herwitz, See note 5.

Chapter 6 1 2

Cf., for example, Michael Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity and Nineteenth Century Music (Princeton Press: Princeton and London, 2004). Fanon, “On National Culture,” p. 37.

184

Notes

3

The idea of “indigenous knowledge systems,” formulated by the World Bank, mandated profit-sharing with local peoples when global corporations seek to exploit their local knowledge of medicinal plants, agriculture, and the like for big profits, by describing local knowledge “intellectual property,” a way of “owning” that knowledge. For a longer discussion of how this concept of profit-sharing through intellectual property becomes part of Mbeki’s African Renaissance, see my Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony. 4 For an excellent discussion of cultural cosmopolitanism, see Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton Co: New York, 2010). 5 He made this point in a session on the topic he and I jointly gave at the University of Cape Town in October 2014. 6 Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” pp. 57–124. 7 For more on this, see my Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony. 8 See the work of Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1991), and Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1997). 9 See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, tr. Peggy Kamuf (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1992). 10 Sibusiso Njeza, The CapeTowner, November 20, 2015, p. 4. 11 Cf. Daniel Herwitz, “Kierkegaard Writes His Opera,” in Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds., The Don Giovanni Moment (Columbia: New York and London, 2006). 12 I was very much helped by Lucia Saks and Akeel Bilgrami in making this point.

Chapter 7 1

Cf. Danto Arthur, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard: Cambridge and London, 1981).

Chapter 8 1 2 3

See, for example, the work of Gideon Mendel. Susan Sontag, On Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1977). Cf. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, tr. Eric Prenowitz (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1996).

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Verso: London, 2006). Appiah, Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton Co: New York, 2010). Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, tr. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (Phaidon Press: New York, 1964). Becker, Rayda. “Visions and the Viewer,” in Jecksemi Hlungwani Yagani, ed. R. Burnett (Communication Dept. BMW: Johannesburg, 1989). Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, tr. J. Osborne (New Left Books: London, 1977). Berger, John. Ways of Seeing (Penguin Books: London, 1972). Bilgrami, Akeel. Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (Harvard Press: Cambridge and London, 2014). Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde, tr. M. Shaw (Minnesota Press: Minnesota and London, 1984). Cixous, Helen. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” reprinted in The Rhetorical Tradition, Readings from Classical Times to the Present, tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen and eds. P. Bizzell and B. Herzberg (Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press: Boston, 2001). Clark, T.J. Manet and the Painting of Modern Life (Princeton University Press: Princeton and London, 1984). Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John. Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago University Press: Chicago, 1991). Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1997). Coombes, Annie. History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Dalmia, Yashodhara. “From Jamshetjee Jeejeebhoy to the Progressive Painters,” in Bombay, Mosaic of Modern Culture, eds. S. Patel and A. Thorner (Oxford Press: Bombay, 1995). Danto, Arthur. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard: Cambridge and London, 1981). Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: Counterfeit Money, tr. Peggy Kamuf (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1992). Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever, tr. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1996).

186

Bibliography

Doris, David. Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics and the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria (University of Washington Press: Seattle and London, 2011). Ewing, G. in Naipaul, V.S., India, A Million Mutinies Now (Penguin Press: New York and London, 1990). Fanon, Frantz. “On National Culture,” in Colonial and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Ian Chrisman (Columbia University Press: New York, 1994). Gabriel, Teshome. “Third Cinema in the Third World: The Dynamics of Style and Ideology.” Order No. 8001422 University of California, Los Angeles, 1979. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Gaonkar, D. Wachtel, D.A. Ou-fanLee, L. and McCarthy, R. eds., Alternative Modernities (Duke Press: Durham and London, 2001). Gettino, Octavio. “Some Notes on the Concept of a ‘Third Cinema,’” in New Latin American Cinema vol.1, ed. Michael T. Martin (Wayne State University Press: Detroit, 1997). Guha, Ramachandra. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1989). Hansen, Thomas Blom. “Reflections on Salman Rushdie’s Bombay,” in Midnight’s Diaspora: Critical Encounters with Salman Rushdie, eds. Herwitz and Varshney (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2008). Herwitz, Daniel. Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1993). Herwitz, Daniel. “The Shape of Recent South African Art,” Modern Painters, (Louise Blouin Media: New York, 1993). Herwitz, Daniel. “Kierkegaard Writes His Opera,” in The Don Giovanni Moment, eds. Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz (Columbia: New York and London, 2006). Herwitz, Daniel. Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony (Columbia Press: New York and London, 2012). Herwitz, Daniel. “The Creator’s Hand and the Curator’s Imprint,” in Uncertain Curature: In and Out of the Archive, eds. Hamilton, Carolyn and Pippa Skotnes (Jacana Press: Cape Town, 2014). Herwitz, Daniel and M.F. Husain, Husain (Tata Press: Bombay, 1987). Hobbs, P. and Rankin, E. Printmaking, Transforming South Africa (David Philip: Johannesburg, 1997). Hobbs, P. and Rankin, E. Rorke’s Drift: Empowering Prints (Double Story Books: Cape Town, 2003). Kapur, Gita. “Nalini Malani,” in India: Myth and Reality, Aspects of Modern Indian Art, Exhibition Catalogue of Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, exhibition organized by David Elliott, Victor Musgrave, and Ebrahim Alkazi, Published by Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1982. Kapur, Geeta. “Introduction,” Contemporary Indian Art: An Exhibition of the Festival of India, 1982, The Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, in two parts: 18 September–5 October and 9 October–October 31, 1982, published by the Indian Advisory Committee, Festival of India, 1982.

Bibliography

187

Karp, Ivan, Kratz, Corinne, Szwaja, Lynn, and Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas, eds., Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2006). Khupkar, Arun. Figures of Thought, Documentary Film written and directed by (Indian Film Institute: Poona, 1992). Lodge, Tom. “The United Democratic Front: Leadership and Ideology,” African Studies Institute, University of Witwatersrand, 1987, unpublished. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1984). Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton Press: Princeton and Cambridge, 1996). Miles, Elza. Polly Street: The Story of an Art Centre (The Ampersand Foundation: Johannesburg, 2004), p. 136. Morphy, Howard. Aboriginal Art (Phaidon: London, 1998). Nettleton, Anitra. Traditional Figurative Woodcarving of the Shona and the Venda, PhD thesis, University of Witwatersrand, 1984. Nettleton, Anitra. “The Crocodile Does Not Leave the Pool: Venda Court Arts,” in African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township, eds. Nettleton and Hammond-Tooke (Ad Donker: Johannesburg, 1989). Nettleton, Anitra. Charleton, Julia. and Rankin-Smith, Fiona. Engaging Modernities: Transformations of the Commonplace, essays based on the exhibition of that name at the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, as part of the 2002 Grahamstown Festival (University of Witwatersrand Art Galleries: Johannesburg, 2003). Nietzsche, Fredric. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, tr. R.J. Hollingdale and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and London, 1997). Njeza, Sibusiso. The CapeTowner, November 20, 2015. Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” Parts 1 and 2, in Beyond Recognition, eds. S. Bryson, B. Kruger, L. Tillman, and J. Weinstock (University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1992). Packenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa (First Avon Printing: New York, 1992). Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago and London, 1986). Prakash, Gyan. “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” The American Historical Review, December 1994, Vol. 99, No. 5, pp. 1475–1490. Rankin, E. Images of Metal (University of Witwatersrand Press: Johannesburg, 1994). Richards, Colin. “That Authentic African Look Fades into Glib Cliche,” The Weekly Mail, 28 August September 3, 1987, Johannesburg. Richards, Colin. “Desperately Seeking ‘Africa,’” art from South Africa, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford Catalogue (Thames and Hudson: London, 1990). Rieff, David. A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon and Schuster: New York, 2003).

188

Bibliography

Sachs, Albie. “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” reprinting in TDR, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 1991, pp. 187, MIT Press. Sack, Steven. “‘Garden of Eden or Political Landscape?’: Street Art in Mamelodi and Other Townships,” in African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township, eds. Nettleton and Hammond-Tooke (Ad Donker: Johannesburg, 1989). Schorske, Carl. “Freud: The Psychoarcheology of Civilizations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. Jerome Neu (Cambridge: Cambridge and New York, 1992). Shepherd, Nick. “Heritage,” in New South African Keywords, eds. Nick Shepherd and Steven Robins (Ohio University Press: Athens, 2008). Sontag, Susan. On Photography (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, 1977). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1988). Steinberg, Michael. Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity and Nineteenth Century Music (Princeton Press: Princeton and London, 2004). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, tr. Elizabeth Anscombe (Macmillan: New York, 1968). Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press: New York, 2003). Zitzewitz, Karin. The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (Oxford Press: Oxford and New York, 2014).

Index Note: Locators with “f ” and “n” denote figures and notes respectively. Aboriginal Art182 n.2 (Chap5) aboriginal work of art 103–24 abstract expressionism 44 abstract work of art 103–24 Achebe, Chinua 88 African Guernica 78 African National Congress (ANC) 72–3, 77–8, 84–6, 91 African Renaissance 70 alternative modernities approaches 119 Anderson, Benedict 27, 177 n.2 (Chap2) anti-Apartheid art 83 Apartheid state 70–3, 77 Appel 170 Archive Fever 184 n.3 (Chap8) Arjuna with Chariot 33 Arnold, Matthew 132 art and human rights 21 art for freedom in new South Africa 69–101. See also under South Africa Arthur, Danto 184 n.1 (Chap7) avant-garde art 82–3 Background Story 150 Background Story 7 150, 151f–152f, 156–7 Baselitz 170 Baudelaire, Charles 6, 177 n.3 (Chap1) Bazille, Frédéric 7 Becker, Rayda 182 n.10 (Chap5) Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, A 177 n.10 (Chap1) Benjamin, Walter 179 n.10 (Chap3) Berger, John 8, 177 n.5 (Chap1) Bicycle Wheel 12, 109 Bilgrami, Akeel 36–7, 178 nn.4–5, 9–10, 19 (Chap2), 184 n.12 (Chap6) Blake, William 63 Blakean figures 63 Blood and Tears 166, 168f Blue Dress, The 99

Boshoff, Willem 99 Botha, P.W. 72 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) 146 Brillo Boxes 109 Brucke, Die 15 brushstrokes 7 Bunuel, Luis 50 Burger, Peter 11, 177 n.7 (Chap1), 180 n.11 (Chap4) Bushman Diorama 154f, 156 CapeTowner 126, 184 n.10 (Chap6) Celebration of Birth, In 65, 65f Charleton, Julia 117, 183 n.17 (Chap5) Chicago, Judy 61 Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism 180 n.3 (Chap4) Cixous, Helene 62, 179 n.5 (Chap3) Clemente 170 CODESA Talks 73 Cohen, Stephen 89 colors use by M.F. Husain 40, 43 Comaroff, J. 182 n.9 (Chap5), 184 n.8 (Chap6) Conrad, Josef 2, 88 Coombes, Annie 181 n.20 (Chap4) Cyclonic Silence 48, 49f Dacoit 52f Danto, Arthur 108–10, 159 Davis, Dennis 100, 181 n.23 (Chap4) De Klerk, F.W. 73 De Kooning 170 decolonization process 3, 17 defamiliarization technique 66 Derrida, Jacques 184 n.3 (Chap8), 184 n.9 (Chap6) Dewey, John 160

190

Index

diffusion concept 14, 20 Don Giovanni opera 141–2 Doniger, Wendy 53 Dubow, Neville 87, 181 n.17 (Chap4) Duchamp, Marcel 12, 109–10, 154–5 Dziga-Vertov 81 Ecriture feminist 62–3 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 128 Erenburg, Ilya 4 eroticism 64 Eurocentrism 136–7 Ewing, G. 178 n.1 (Chap3) Eyewitness 166, 167f Fanon, Frantz 13, 26, 131–2, 177 n.1 (Chap2), 177 n.8 (Chap1), 183 n.2 (Chap6) Fear.com 172, 173f Feni, Dumile 78–9, 80f Figaro South of the Zambesi 125–48 Cherubino 144 colonizer/owner of Eurocentric culture 136 Conservatoire model 134 cultural property concept 135 heritage and ownership link 137 indigenous knowledge systems 132 opera Eurocentric history 134 Soweto youths 133 Young South Africans 134 Figures of Thought 178 n.4 (Chap3) Foucault, Michel 170 Fountain 13 Fragmentary allegories 65–6 Frida and Amrita: Old Arguments on Indigenism 55–68 argument about indigeneity 59 background of 61 His Life 60 male voyeuristic desire 58–9 Nalini Malani’s painting of 56 sexual representations of classical Hindu sculpture 58 violence on women 60–1 Fried, Michael 104 Gabriel, Teshome 180 n.15 (Chap4) Gaja Gamini 47 Gandhi, M.K. 27, 35, 95 Ganga Jamna 40f, 41

Gaonkar, D. 183 n.19 (Chap5) Geers, Kendell 89 Gentleman’s Game 115f Getino, Octavio 180 n.15 (Chap4) Giacometti, Alberto 4 Gittoes, George 22, 161–76, 167f, 168f 9/11 attack 172 Blood and Tears 166, 168f capturing formlessness of trauma 165 Eyewitness 166, 167f Fear.com 172, 173f film ventures 172 from drawing to painting 166 nature of drawings 165, 169–70 on-site witness to artist-in-studio 164 power of each figure, maintaining 166 Rampage 172 significance 163 Snow Monkey 174, 174f Soundtrack to War 172 Tony Mullingully 171, 171f Given Time: Counterfeit Money 184 n.9 (Chap6) Gleyre, Charles 7 Gobbato, Angelo 129, 140 Golden Mountain 67 Grant, Cary 138 Greenberg, Clement 104 Hansen, Thomas Blom 48, 178 n.16 (Chap2) Heart of Darkness 2, 88 Heritage, in M.F. Husain works 26–7 Heritage 181 n.19 (Chap4) Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony 182 n.5 (Chap5) Herwitz, Daniel 178 nn.17–18 (Chap2), 180 n.10 (Chap4), 181 n.18 (Chap4), 182 n.5 (Chap5), 183 n.21 (Chap5), 184 n.11 (Chap6) Hindu epics, in M.F.Husain works 31–2 His Life 60 History after Apartheid 181 n.20 (Chap4) Hitchcock, Alfred 155 Hoffman, E.T.A. 141 humanitarianism 161 art and 22 Husain, M. F., works of 2–3, 19, 25–54, 117, 121, 125, 127, 158, 178 nn.12, 17 (Chap2)

Index abstract expressionism and 44 Amitabh Bachchan in 51 Arjuna with Chariot 33f attack on 50 celebrity role of 30 colors use in 40, 43 Cyclonic Silence 48, 49f Dacoit 52f early life 30–1 female figure 43 Gaja Gamini 47 Ganga Jamna 40f Hindu epics 31–2 Hindu fundamentalists against 47–9, 51, 53 Husain 178 n.17 (Chap2) on Indian culture 36 Indira Gandhi 45 Madhuri Dixit 47 Mahabarata 31–2, 35, 44 Maya 41, 42f Obscure Object of Desire series 51 own story 50–1 painting R.K. Narayan 29 Phoolan Devi 51 portrayal of women 48 as postcolonial modernist 29–54 Progressive Artists’ Group 31–2 Raj Series 31 Ramayana 31–2, 44 religion and 37–8 secularism and 36–9 Shiva as Lord of the Dance (Nataraja) 34f space in 40–1 spiritualism in 28 That Obscure Object of Desire 50 treating Indian past as national heritage 26–7, 43 villages in 44 Western modernisms in 32, 43 Images of Metal 182 n.12 (Chap5) Imagined Communities 177 n.2 (Chap2) impressionism 6–7 Indian heritage, in M.F. Husain works 26–7. See also Husain, M.F. indigeneity notion 131–2 indigenous knowledge systems 184 n.3 (Chap6) Isi-Tsonga carvings 19, 103–24

191

Jacob, Max 4 Job Seeker 114, 116f, 117 Johannesburg 126 Kapur, Geeta 61, 67, 179 n.8 (Chap3) Karp, Ivan 110, 182 n.4 (Chap5) Kempton Park negotiations 89 Khan, Kemal 129 Kiefer 170 Kierkegaard, Søren 141–2 Kitaj, R.B. 66 Klein, Melanie 64 Kratz, Corinne 182 n.4 (Chap5) Kruger, Paul 95 La Grand Tenochititlan 5f Lanzmann, Claude 163 Le Corbusier 82 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe 7 Lebenskunstler 141 Leibnitz 109 Levine, James 129 Lukacs, Georg 162–3 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 19, 177 n.9 (Chap1) Mabasa, Noria 121 Mahabarata, in M.F. Husain works 31–2, 35, 44 Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde 180 n.10 (Chap4) Malani, Nalini 3, 55–68. See also Frida and Amrita Blakean figures by 63 defamiliarization technique 66 Ecriture feminist 62–3 eroticism 64 fragmentary allegories 65–6 French feminism effect on 62 In Celebration of Birth 65, 65f Michelangelo’s figure of God remade by 64 male voyeuristic desire in paintings 58 Mamdani, Mahmood 180 n.3 (Chap4) Man with a Movie Camera 81 Mandela, Nelson 73, 93, 95, 120 Manet, Eduard 7–9, 14, 58–9, 66 cultural world and 9 nude tradition and 10

192

Index

Marriage of Figaro, The 129, 139, 143 Mason, Judith 99 Maswanganyi, Johannes 90 Maya 41, 42f Mbeki, Thabo 69–72, 76, 131–4, 137, 154 McCarthy, R. 183 n.19 (Chap5) Mexican Revolution of 1910 4 Michelangelo’s works 64 on God remade by Nalini Malani 64 Miles, Elza 180 n.12 (Chap4) modern art nation building and 17 postcolonial culture 4 Modigliani, Amedeo 4 Moerdyk, Gerard 92 Monet, Claude 7 Morphy, Howard 105, 107, 110, 182 n.2 (Chap5) National Gallery of Modern Art, India 46 Ndou, Goldwin 121 Ndou, Owen 115f, 121, 122f Nehru, J. 37 neocolonialist ideologies 1, 16 neoliberal inequality 146 neoliberalism 18 Nettleton, Anitra 117, 182 nn.6, 11 (Chap5), 183 n.17 (Chap5) Nietzsche, Fredric 5, 128, 132, 134, 177 n.1 (Chap1), 184 n.6 (Chap6) Njeza, Sibusiso 138, 184 n.10 (Chap6) North by Northwest 138 nude tradition 10 Obscure Object of Desire series 51 Of Monsters and Angels: A Fable 61 Of Revelation and Revolution 182 n.9 (Chap5) Olympia 9, 58 On Photography 184 n.2 (Chap8) Opera 125–7. See also Figaro South of the Zambesi Cape Town Opera company 146 colonial mentality in 135 Eurocentric history south of the Zambezi 134 Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera of 1786 139, 141 as sign of settler authority 130 youth role in 144

Ou-fanLee, L. 183 n.19 (Chap5) Our Bones in Your Collections 124f Owens, Craig 68, 179 n.9 (Chap3) Packenham, Thomas 179 n.1 (Chap4) Palacio Nacional 4 Paradise 15 patriarchal characters 58–9 Pechstein, Max 15 peri-urban art 113 Perloff, Marjorie 177 n.6 (Chap1) PH-401 103–4, 105f Philosophical Investigations 118 Picasso 78–9 “Pioneers” carving 89 Plan Voisin 82 Polly Street: The Story of an Art Centre 180 n.12 (Chap4) postcolonial concept 1–2 postcolonial modernism 25–54. See also Husain, M.F. Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, The 19, 177 n.9 (Chap1) post-postcolonial 125–48. See also Figaro South of the Zambesi Progressive Artists’ Group formation 31 Progressive Artists Movement 14 Psycho 155 racial inferiority 2 Raj Series 31 Ramayana in M.F. Husain works 31–2, 44 Rampage 172 Rankin, C.F. 182 n.12 (Chap5) Rankin-Smith, Fiona 117, 183 n.17 (Chap5) Readymades 12 Recent Sculpture 122f religion depicted in M.F. Husain works 37–8 Rembrandt 9, 170 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 7 Respect of the Dead, the Living and the Unborn, In 80f “The Rich Man” sculpture 90 Richards, Colin 113, 183 nn.14–15 (Chap5) Rieff, David 22, 177 n.10 (Chap1) Riot 89 Rivera, Diego 3–4, 5f, 10, 15, 19–20, 125, 127, 149, 158 painting purpose 6

Index Rossi, Aldo 97 Rushdie, Salman 53–4 Sachs, Albie 77–9, 85–7, 89, 100, 180 n.4 (Chap4) Sack, Steven 83–4 Saks, Lucia 184 n.12 (Chap6) Satanic Verses 53 Schmitz, Bruno 92 Schonfeldt, Joachim 89 Scramble for Africa, The 179 n.1 (Chap4) second-generation postcolonial modernism 55–68 Secularism, Identity and Enchantment 178 nn.4–5 (Chap2) sexual representations of Hindu sculpture in painting 58 Shepherd, Nick 91, 181 n.19 (Chap4) Sher-Gil, Amrita 56 Shimin, Wang 150 “Shipwreck” sculptural suite 89 Shiva as Lord of the Dance (Nataraja) 34f Sisley, Alfred 7 Skotnes, Cecil 83 Skotnes, Pippa 154 Snow Monkey 174–6, 174f–175f Solanas, Fernando 180 n.15 (Chap4) Sontag, Susan 163, 184 n.2 (Chap8) Soundtrack to War 172 South Africa 69–101 African Renaissance 70 Apartheid state 70–3, 77 CODESA Talks 73 Constitutional Court 98 Freedom Park 91, 93 Kempton Park negotiations 89 Number Four Prison 96 OMM Architects 93, 94f–96f Qualified Amnesty 73–4 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 73 Ubuntu 95 Voortrekker Monument 92 South Africa, art for freedom in 69–101 African Guernica 78 anti-Apartheid art 83 avant-garde art 82–3 The Blue Dress 99 In Respect of the Dead, the Living and the Unborn 80f

193

Kino-eye of historical politics 81 Man with a Movie Camera 81 “Pioneers” carving 89 Plan Voisin 82 reality perspectives 81 “The Rich Man” sculpture 90 Riot 89 “Shipwreck” sculptural suite 89 trauma of Apartheid 79, 84, 86 Soutine, Chiam 4 Spivak, Gayatri 60, 119–20, 183 n.20 (Chap5) Steinberg, Michael 128, 133, 183 n.1 (Chap6) Stern, Irma 15 Steven, Sack 180 n.13 (Chap4) Still, Clyfford 103–4, 105f Szwaja, Lynn 182 n.4 (Chap5) That Obscure Object of Desire 50 Theory of the Avant-Garde 177 n.7 (Chap1), 180 n.11 (Chap4) Things Fall Apart 88 Third International 10 Third Stream Cinema theory 181 n.15 (Chap4) Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum 103–4, 106f, 108, 111, 114 Tjapaltjarri, Tim Leura 104, 106f, 108, 111 Toit, Guy Du 89 Tony Mullingully 171, 171f township art 113 Traditional Figurative Woodcarving of the Shona and the Venda 182 n.11 (Chap5) Transfiguration of the Commonplace, The 108, 184 n.1 (Chap7) transitional arts 113 Tribal Girl 41, 42f Van Gogh 170 Varshney, Ashutosh 178 n.18 (Chap2) Venus of Urbino 9 Vha-Venda carvings 19, 111–21 violence on women 60–1 Voortrekker Monument 92 Wachtel, D.A. 183 n.19 (Chap5) Ward, Eleanor 109 Warhol, Andy 109

194 Warlugulong 103–5, 106f, 107, 110–11, 114, 118 Watson, Judy 123, 124f Ways of Seeing 177 n.5 (Chap1) Whitman, Walt 38 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 118 women portrayal by M.F. Husain 48 Xu Bing’s archive of the past 17, 149–60 authenticity 156 Background Story 150

Index Background Story 7 150, 151f–152f, 156–7, 159 Cultural Revolution 158 materials used in 152–3 ongoing traditions status, question of 157 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas 182 n.4 (Chap5) Zitzewitz, Karin 32, 38, 178 n.8 (Chap2)