South African artists meet the San Francisco art community.

Diane and I were sitting in the cafeteria of the San Francisco Art Institute waiting for Nandipha Mntambo and Mohau Modisakeng.  They were both critiquing the photographic works of a few students.

Nandipha walked in, tall, elegant and stylish, wearing a bright yellow stole around her neck, red lipstick and a red handbag to match. Mohau followed right behind, casually dressed with his backpack thrown over his shoulder.  After brief introductions, they both sat down and immediately made comments on each other’s way of critiquing . One of them felt  the other was too harsh. Nandi, senior to Mohau in terms of age and career has a tendency to be more direct. Mohau, still fresh out of art school  – he graduated with his MFA a couple of years ago – is still sensitive to the students feelings and generally is quite soft spoken.  Diane and I listened with great interest. Soon the tables would be turned around, as during the next three days Nandi and Mohau would be showing their work to curators at the SFMOMA, the De Young Museum and the Berkeley museum of art.

A few words on the cast of characters:

Diane Frankel:

Diane has been committed for the last 7 years to supporting and promoting African contemporary art and in particular South African artists. She feels strongly that it is important that American institutions show contemporary African art, which is unfortunately underrepresented in most US public and private collections. Because of her many efforts – she has organized trips to South Africa and invited curators to join – a few curators on the West Coast have taken some positive steps towards showing Contemporary African photography but it is far from enough.  As a result Diane decided with the help of PUMA to bring a couple of talented South African  artists to San Francisco and introduce them to the art community in the Bay area where she lives and works. She put together a full program of interviews, introductions, and museum tours and drove us around.

Cynthia Plevin:

She has owned a gallery in San Francisco showing exclusively African Contemporary Art and is now working with Diane on putting together a US traveling show of South African art.

Nandipha Mntambo:

Through the use of various mediums, (sculpture, photography, videos and paint), and materials (cowhide, bronze) and narratives Nandi’s work speaks of what unites us. Instead of highlighting difference she aims for a reconciliation: humans are not so different from animals hence the sculptures in cowhide. She sees the cow as being a unifying signifier since many cultures have some kind of relationship with the cow.  The distinctions between men and women are blurred: two dancers, one the male double of Nandi and the other a surrogate dance the passodoble. The focus is on their legs and feet and gender is only indicated by the costume. In her bullfight series she plays the three parts of the contenders – bull, matador, and red cape – and blurs the distinctions between them all. They are part of a whole. In other words they are the splits sides of herself that she is coming to terms through the process of making her art.

While friendly, warm, and outwardly confident Nandi was somewhat reluctant to speak much about herself and her work during the meetings with curators.  It was something I found puzzling at first. It was only the last day during her talk at the Art institute that she lost some of her reserve and revealed how issues of difference and belonging had impacted her as a child.  She is at a crossroads in her work and while she embraces that state at a certain level because of the potential for new directions, being put on the spot seemed to make her understandably uncomfortable.

Mohau Modisakeng:

While Nandi does not highlight the difficult history of South Africa and references it only indirectly in her work Mohau’s work is anchored in it. The personal has its place but it is the references to colonialism, conflict and the legacy of violence that are emphasized in his talks. He weaves his family history with the history of his country creating a potent narrative that finds expression in his installation and sculptural work, as well as his performances and photographs.   With a flair for the theatrical, and a way of conveying meaning through a layering of materials lading with potent symbolism, Mohau turns to traditional rituals to confront head on this history of violence yet also positing the possibility of an alternative to violence as a resolution to conflict. In his photographic work, Mohau emerges as the sole protagonist (following the example of the artist Samuel Fosso) against a background emptied of all distraction and a palette strongly contrasted and limited to black and white.  Referencing the history of race in landownership, he appears dressed as a laborer wearing layers of materials or other props laden with symbolic meaning while engaging in what appears to my eyes at first as mysterious rituals captured in slow motion. I feel something important is taking place as I watch.

Low key and soft spoken, Mohau was quite eloquent when he spoke about his work and was willing to expand on it while introducing his work to curators.

Isabel S Wilcox:

I am a bystander eager to identify ways to encourage and support the work of talented African artists and promote their work to a wider audience.  Writing about it is one of the ways I show my support in addition to collecting the work at times.

After three days of visits to curators of photography or contemporary art, and quickly touring a couple of museums/galleries Diane and I felt a sense of frustration. The curators were not giving enough feedback and the artists seemed to be uncomfortable with having to present their work repeatedly through out the day. At times Diane and I felt like two mothers shepherding our reluctant kids around.

We did see them being fully engaged when we walked through the outstanding collection of Oceanic and African Art at the De Young . Nandi was very much taken by the Samoan notion of Fa’afafine or third gendered people in Samoan culture. Families with too many boys would chose one boy who was then made to look and live like a girl and help with the traditionally female chores.  The subject found an echo in Nandi’s personal and professional interest in androgyny.  Mohau was walking through the display of the African Art collection in a daze as if he had just discovered Ali Baba’s cave.  Nowhere in South Africa do you see African art of that quality or from all over the African continent for that matter! He shared his frustration with how difficult it is to go from one African country to another African country but how easy it is to go to Europe from anywhere on the African continent. He confirmed an intuition I had had after visiting Ghana. While there are many African artists that are interested in knowing the art of the West there are as many whose interest lies within the African continent, which is rich in a multitude of diverse aesthetic traditions, cultural forms, and histories.  What amazes me is that Africa struggles within its boundaries with major issues of migration and yet it is the migration from Africa to Europe that gets all the press coverage and captures the attention of the European intelligentsia and art community! Eurocentric perspective is hard to shake!

After much speculation – perhaps they were frustrated with the lack of response or with the inherent paternalism in the venture – we decided to get their feedback. It seemed that our understanding of how things should be and theirs was different. We needed to understand how things were going for them; our respective expectations were possibly misaligned, mismatched.

A talk with Nandi confirmed some of our thinking. Used to having curators, or gallerists coming to their studios they were not in the habit of having to “sell” their work in this fashion. The shift in the power dynamics was unexpected and made them uncomfortable.  In a country where it is ingrained in us that we have to sell our ideas whether one is at the top or at the bottom of the pile, this sounded a bit strange to us.

Nandi’s comments shed some light on the possible motivation for Mohau’s stand at the Headlands Center for the Arts the previous night. During our visit there it became evident that Mohau also felt uncomfortable with having to speak repeatedly about his work to a bunch of strangers.  He decided to shift the power dynamics and consequently challenged our expectations. Instead of speaking standing up at a social gathering of supporters of the Headlands residency program he chose to speak about his work crouched on the floor with a glass in his hand. All of us who were standing found ourselves looking down at him. That was unexpected; clearly something was going on. Was he choosing this set up to inject a note of informality and/ or had he taken that position to bring out in the open some inherent power dynamic in the set up? Was he trying to regain some control over a situation that he found belittling at some level?

I liked that he took matters in his own hands and did not accept an uncomfortable situation with passivity. Nandi, more familiar with this kind of situation, accepted the format of the visit with more equanimity and eager to also shift the dynamics had quickly contacted directly the curators that were of interest to her.

Furthermore, most of the time Mohau and Nandi referred to themselves as sculptors yet the introductions had been mostly with curators of photography. Perhaps there was a mismatch, which in part explained the luke-warm dialogue between artists and local curators. Indeed while both artists use photography to capture moments of their performances it is only one of the medium they use to convey their message.  I see them more as multi-media artists like many artists today who do not specialize in any one medium. Categorizing them by medium limits a fuller grasp of the depth and breadth of their work. Currently in Nandi and Mohau’s work, ideas of personal, political and cultural identity and issues of place, and history, in another word: the underlying narrative, supersedes the choice of a particular medium and its exploration and application.

After a wonderful lunch with scholar and artist Allan DeSuza,  the visit culminated with a talk at the San Francisco Art Institute. Both artists felt obviously more at ease surrounded by a community of artists and spoke of their work with greater depth and forthrightness.  The idea of participating in a residency program with contact with the artistic community was clearly very appealing to both Nandipha and Mohau, who are eager to discover and explore the potential of various mediums to better convey their artistic concerns.

This was a great learning experience for all of us and very thought provoking.

I was reminded to check my preconceived ideas based on an implicit assumption that we in the US have the best to offer and therefore a newcomer from South Africa should embrace “that best”. I was reminded to get out of my shoes for a few minutes and open my mind to a different experience while not forgetting that there is the inescapable and unfortunate reality of a hierarchy in the art world.