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.