Heading to stay in a rural area without internet until October 4th. Can't wait to share everything I experience when I get back!

“Postcard to My Sister: American perceptions of African Culture”

Dear Coree,

I’m showing you this image of an Ndebele woman and her painted house because to you, and most Americans, it seems authentically “African”. This woman is the exotic “other,” untainted by the west. Although tradition has its place in the South Africa I’ve experienced so far, it has little to do with South African culture at large.

I think I have subconsciously wanted South Africa’s painting to look like Ndebele walls, its music to sound like drums, and its dancing to move like traditional Zulu dance. I wanted to pin these arts to a board like butterflies. I wanted to look at and be inspired by them. I even made a series of work based on Ndebele paintings. I wanted to use imagery that most would recognize as “African.”

When I got here, I wanted to see dance that was “African.” Of course I was thrilled when I got to see a performance of traditional Zulu dance at Cato Crest Community Center my second week in the country. The place was packed for the Jambo Dance Festival’s Youth Performance. At least a hundred young dancers crowded the edges of the room waiting to perform, and about a hundred more people, myself included, sat in folding chairs facing the stage. We watched kids stumble through modern moves thrown together to inspirational songs. One highly sexual number performed by twelve year olds was especially jarring, but overall I was delighted to see that young people were working together and being creative outside of school. The Zulu performance, however, stole the show. The group of young men who took the stage were dressed in cow-skin anklets, headdresses and ibeshus around their waists. Their wiry muscles became possessed with a wild machine gun rhythm from calfskin drums. Their legs flew into the air in signature Zulu high kicks, and they each performed funny individual pantomimes for the audience. I thought of you, Coree, and your studies of African dance in Boston. This, surely, was as authentic as African dance can get. I regretted not having my video camera to capture the show and bring it back for everyone in the States to marvel at. Luckily I saw them perform a second time this past weekend outside of the Workshop. I pulled out a video camera and recorded some of the show.

A week later I met another African dancer. Her name is Lolo and she’s a senior at Cato Crest High School. Although her mother teaches African dance at a University in New York, she knows little of traditional styles. Lolo dances hip-hop and pop-and-lock. She visited New York in December 2009 through January 2010. She told me, “In America they expected me to know African dance, but I’m a new generation. My parents grew up with that but I didn’t, so I don’t know it. I wear my swag (brand name clothing) and kicks and Americans are surprised.” She talked about seeing a lot of crump and hip-hop dancing in the streets and taking some of their quick sharp movements back to her dance group here. When they asked how she came up with the new moves she, being a joker said, “Oh I’m just clever.”

Lolo talked about how American style and culture is what this generation of South Africans consider desirable. She seems caught in between the old and the new. “It’s like I don’t know what my culture is…it’s like I’m lost” she told me. She explained that people come from America to Africa hoping to see “traditional” African dance, but no one really does that. The exceptions are the few who get paid to perform it (what I saw at the community center and in town), and the young people who live in rural areas like Zululand, where Zulu dance is still practiced often on the homestead farms. Lolo does wish this part of her culture were more accessible to her generation. She feels entitled to the old, while charging forward into the new. African arts are obviously a hybrid of many things, and rarely what westerners anticipate. I, as an artist, have the ability to change American’s perceptions of South African culture, but how to do this? I’m now critical of the video I recorded of Zulu dance, the work I’ve made from Ndebele patterns, and this postcard I send of the Ndebele woman. Are these images just servicing American entertainment at the expense of the Zulu people? Have I objectified Zulu culture with my work? Have I used Ndebele patterns to legitimize my artistic practice as intercultural and international? Is it okay for other cultures to be my material? Am I justified when my intent shifts from entertaining to educating through art? I fear I might accidentally portray African culture in a way that perpetuates so many American’s clichéd notions of Africa. The only solution I can come to now is to find the hybrid styles of dance, music and especially visual art that most precisely represent the current moment of South African culture and bring them back to the states.

Review of "Art and the End of Apartheid"

Living with one foot in the studio art world and one in academia, I've often wondered, "What does the path of an African scholar look like? Where do they begin? How could a college student like myself come to publish a scholarly work?" Because of this, I appreciated John Peffer beginning "Art and the End of Apartheid" with an explanation of how he became interested in South Africa in high school. His trips to study in South Africa were funded by Columbia College and Fullbright Fellowships, and much of his research after 1994 was done stateside. This book was published in 2009, and contains his research on art-making trends in South African communities in the two decades leading up to the end of separatist rule in 1994. The text's nine essays focus on various themes including representation of the tortured body during apartheid, the history of photography in South Africa and artist community-building around abstract art workshops. The author documents the politics of art in South Africa from an individual's perspective in a chapter about the art of Durant Sihlali, and covers the relationship between art and politics more broadly in chapters about activist art, images of township violence, and the overturning of apartheid's monuments. The two chapters I read involved grey areas in black art and artist communities centered around abstraction.

After giving a brief history of the country, Peffer beginning his collection of essays with "Grey Areas and the Space of Modern Black Art," which establishes that black art is, by nature, amorphous and hybrid. This is an important foundational lens through which the rest of his essays should be read. The reader also must remember that Peffer writes from the perspective of an American observer. Peffer also sets up the context for his discussion of modern art by defining modernism as a "self-conscious break with tradition and the past in an ongoing search for novel forms of expression by experimentation with non-traditional media." After a century of industrialization and colonialism, the modern artist is a unique individual in a global society. South African artists often don't fit this mold. Under apartheid, informal training and the need to support oneself with a marketable style results in repetitive, self reflecting work that could be seen as the opposite of modernism. Lack of access to art historical knowledge, advanced education, art world influence and exhibition venues also shaped the career of the South African artist. However, some early black modernists like John Koenakeefe Mohl prevailed. After a privileged art education, he said his art would make "the world realize that black people are human beings."

Peffer moves on to offer a well thought out perspective on modern "traditional" art, using the bright abstract wall paintings of the Ndebele as an example. This was a brilliant choice, as Ndebele painting possesses the infinite grey areas and layers of meaning inherent in almost every "traditional" African art form. Because Ndebele paintings were highly visible and accessible, they became a marker of ethnicity in South Africa. Ndebele art was promoted by the government, who, in 1953, gave the Ndebele people acrylic paint and set up tourist villages in order to capitalize on the popular, attractive culture. Tourist agencies promoted this stereotype of the "ethnic other" in their brochures and advertisements. Tourists who wanted to salvage a traditional art bought their goods on roadsides. But Peffer makes the point that "what observers thought they were salvaging, they were in fact helping create." Ideas of black ethnicity are often at the service of white leisure in South Africa. This point was a red flag to me, an artist who works with Ndebele prints. Am I also perpetuating stereotypes of South African art? Am I looking to a rural vernacular for legitimacy in my visual nod to South Africa? Are major U.S. institutions like the African Art museum in D.C. guilty of portraying ideas of black ethnicity at the service of white leisure? During apartheid, a number of white South African artists who formed the New Group pulled the culturally distinct imagery of the Ndebele into their work with the intent to show in international galleries. Peffer sees these artists as objectifying Ndebele culture even as they promote it. In this chapter Peffer also gives, with a touch of cynicism, a thorough description of everything "African" art is expected or assumed to be. He continues to name some of the rare workshops and schools that were created to give black artists experience and an art education. In these contexts the color bar did not exist, and multiracial art proposed the parameters of a post-apartheid world in advance. These areas of cultural hybridity, however, didn't always "invert all the abuses and colonized mind sets of apartheid." I appreciate how Peffer explains both the accomplishments and downfalls of community art movements in chapter five, "Abstraction and Community: Liberating Art during the States of Emergency."

The main artist communities discussed in chapter five are the United States-South Africa Leadership Exchange Program (USSALEP) and the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA). In 1985 these two organizations combined to create the FUBA-USSALEP Workshop, which later changed its name to "Thupelo." This two week workshop allowed for international artists to join with South African artists in the country to explore abstract expressionist painting. For South African artists, this was a kind of vacation, a time where they didn't have to worry about daily survival and were given the material resources and space needed to paint. This workshop created a network of artists that in turn facilitated other workshops around the globe. It was also a "historic point of intersection for a number of local and international aesthetic, philanthropic, and political interests." Peffer is also critical of the workshop. Did abstract art speak at all to South African society and background? Was the emphasis on abstraction cultural imperialism? Did artist participants know anything about the South African art scene, which was intrinsically connected to the politics of the time? The voice of the local Medu Art Ensemble spoke critically against one American Thupelo participant Anthony Caro:

"[Caro] says: 'Anyone who tries to make a political statement through art generally ends up with propaganda instead. No one who eats art for breakfast would dream of trying to make statements through their work. I am interested in mastering form, light, and colour."

But as we have said: our people eat poverty for breakfast; we live in the light and color of political oppression; and our art cannot ignore that and remain true to our own realities. For us the real propaganda lies in the art that pushes an abstractly pure "form, light and colour" instead of our own experience. This is not our direction: it can only be pursued by denying the aesthetics of our own lives."

Overall, Peffer offers a well rounded critique of the politics of abstraction from the U.S. One of the motivating factors behind his study is his belief that "research into South Africa's earlier art history ought to be a critical component of a more inclusive, global history of art, one that expands on and even challenges the Eurocentric assumptions about art and modernity common in books on the history of art." I think the author could have further challenged Eurocentric assumptions about not only art history, but about the definitions of early African art as well. Maybe that is best done by a South African researcher. From an American perspective, Peffer does achieve a history of pockets of South African art with great detail. I was especially impressed with the Ndebele photos he has included, which I have never seen in my thorough research of Ndebele painting. This book has adequately established the importance of South African art under apartheid in the global narrative of art history. Peffer's research would be helpful to SIT students interested in a more holistic picture of the country's steps towards a new South Africa in the years leading up to 1994.

The Lecturer, Zamo and the Artist

Reflecting outside of my house in Bonela, the neighborhood of Cato Manor that I live in, just outside the city of Durban, which is shown at the end.

From "Art and the End of Apartheid" by John Peffer

(Some artists say): "Anyone who tries to make a political statement through art generally ends up with propaganda instead. No one who eats art for breakfast would dream of trying to make statements through their work. I am interested in mastering form, light, and colour."

(But South Africa has said): "Our people eat poverty for breakfast; we live in the light and color of political oppression; and our art cannot ignore that and remain true to our own realities. For us the real propaganda lies in the art that pushes an abstractly pure "form, light and colour" instead of our own experience. This is not our direction: it can only be pursued by denying the aesthetics of our own lives."

day 1 - 8/27/10

In a small prayer room, the mother Mary statue reminds me of one in the old St. Wyslecan Center in East Baltimore. I am at a Catholic retreat center in Joburg, South Africa, where students in the SIT program are staying for the weekend. All of the keys are old fashioned and the owner's seven year old grandson, Matthew runs around the halls. His skin looks like it could belong to any nationality in the world.

8/28

As Fred, our minibus driver, and I walked down the steps into the Apartheid Museum in Joburg, I asked him if he'd been before. He said, "Many times," but this was the first time he'd been in it. He usually drove around the city while the students visited the museum. When I asked him why, he said "Everything in here, I already know."

I was impressed with how the museum's architecture embodied the sadness, anger and seriousness of apartheid. The most memorable part for me was seeing footage of bodies being flung over barbed wire fences and shot into during the police raids of the eighties.

All of the American SIT students are brilliant. Last night a group of us had a conversation that began around economy and ended around God (as late night conversations usually go). Whitney thinks that everything is interconnected and leads to one central thing. She thinks the central thing has something to do with the golden rule - treat others as you would want to be treated. I think it's our nature to be "self-interested," Rachel's word, which is better, I think, than selfish. Kathryn brought up that Jesus is a great man to model a life after because he teaches how to be self-sacrificing over self-interested. We all agreed that a self-interested mentality is the root problem in failing economic and political systems. We also talked about Truth, a word plastered across a shirt sold at the Apartheid Museum. Questioning is imperative to truth. Maybe questions are more important than answers, in the same way that the process of painting a mural is more important than the final piece. Yet, we always thirst for answers and completion. Maybe there's a well of truth that everyone can walk to by asking questions. We all want to know who we really are and what is best to do with our lives. Are we capable of having that answer for ourselves? Would we lead ourselves astray? Is it our nature to follow the golden rule? I was glad that Josh did at one point lay down a bottom line - we can talk all night and never convince each other anything - we just have to live.

8/29

Annie and I started making up a song to memorize our zulu greeting to the tune of Taio Cruz's song "Dynamite."

At the Soweto Museum, a photo of a boy holding a dead Hector Pieterson reminded me of a series of works I made for two years on people holding each other. Cried in public. Hector's death and his sister's account helped make the struggle personal - what if my younger brother had been shot and killed?

Late night convo round two: "We're not a capitalist society, we are a corporatist society" -Rachel.

8/30

Drove for 8 hours from joburg to durban.

Arrived at another mission where the German nuns are really kind.

8/31

I go running in the mornings, and the sunrise this morning was so orange it was almost red. It popped through trees with fuscia flowers. An old man has been staying at this mission for 25 years, and when a nun asked him why, he motioned to the porch facing the sunrise and said, "Where else in the world can you see this?". That nun told me that yesterday morning a monkey jumped up onto the porch in attempt to get food. He picked a little white petunia, put in in his mouth, and stared straight at her with his grey face.