joburg/capetown/pretoria

Three Weeks in South Africa, September-October 2003

Introduction

I visited South Africa for three weeks in September/October 2003, this account was written sporadically in the year that followed. The function of the writing, however, was never fully resolved and uploaded....... because I always had an idea that it should be more than mere reportage.I lived there as a child in the seventies, so it was a big deal for me to go back. I am working on a new animation project which came about as a result of this trip and so the immense experience I wanted to articulate here will be channelled, non verbally, into that. The new work is called Oompie ka Doompie, which means Humpty Dumpty in Afrikaans.
The idea to return to South Africa had been with me for a while.Previously, from various scavenging, I had found an interview with a Johannesburg based artist, Kathryn Smith.She described working in site specific context within a highly malleable city as part of a trio of artists, the Trinity Session. It was one of the three, Marcus Neustetter, I exchanged tentative emails with in the beginning. The Trinity Session became my main point of contact and Marcus generously pointed me in the direction of other elements I wouldn’t have found on my own.
Here, then, is some unresolved writing from an artist research trip to South Africa.

Part One

I lived in South Africa as a child. For three years in the 1970s during apartheid.When we came home(my mum missed Scotland) it was weird and depressing. Later, my self imposed shame of being white and living in Johannesburg during the regime formed a secret backdrop to my teens in the 80s, my earnest attempts at being a radical socialist.

Of all the things that happened to me in my life before I was self determined, being taken to this place as a child was the thing I resented most afterwards. Paradoxically, South Africa shimmers in my memory as the time when my mum and dad were most radiant. Paula and I ran about the veldt catching locusts. We had handbags made of springbok skin for special occasions and long party dresses sewn from African batik.My dad drove a bus, my mum worked in an office, and a black woman, Selina, was our maid.

Although I really wanted to go back to Johannesburg, I wasn’t looking forward to it, I almost dreaded it, I was made afraid by what people told me about how dangerous it was there. And indeed, the city was dangerous but at the same time very exciting. It seemed to me like a city where a significant geological rupture had occurred, like a meteor had struck. A broken sentence of a city, quoted by pale goldmine dumps. I was sometimes scrutinising this writing in New York. Johannesburg is extreme like I imagine New York was. The former New York people still covet, 1980s New York. I was never there then, but when people talk about that time, it sounds, to me, like Johannesburg now. I imagine the two cities as sisters, years apart in age.
It is only ten years since the regime of apartheid was dismantled. Johannesburg Central Business District has been evacuated of commercial and industrial giants. Multi-nationals fled and the remaining wealth reconstituted, fugitive style, in the gilded northern suburbs. Hillbrow, once a cosmopolitan and bohemian-chic area in central Johannesburg is widely considered a complete no go area for whites on foot, as is much of the central business district.
Black South Africans have re-occupied their city and made it their own place to be. People from all over Africa have descended to the South, fleeing civil war, political persecution and famine. Or more simply as economic migrants seeking a better life.

Part Two

"I can’t drive. That’s a problem here."

I was picked up at the airport by a taxi shuttle service. During the drive to the trendy white suburb of Melville, the driver told me that I was safe to walk the five minutes from my guesthouse to the strip of bars and restaurants. But not to venture anywhere else on foot, not to go near Hillbrow and not to carry valuables.She sat in her car till I got inside the locked metal gate of the guesthouse perimeter which was looped with razor wire. On a street with more razor wire, some of it electricified. Vigilant dogs growled and plaques were screwed beside gates to certify that rapid response security agents were on stand by. I cant drive and she said Johannesburg is dangerous for walking. There was, apparently, no public transport system to speak of and the unregulated mini bus taxi system, (combi-vans service inner city routes and ferry people from the townships to work), well people told me it wasn’t a good idea to use them. Marcus from The Trinity Session had said to bring enough money for private cabs.So on arrival at the guesthouse, I walked to the street in Melville with all the cafes, had a beer, spoke to some people, then came home and fell asleep.I woke late in the afternoon thinking "how am I going to negotiate all this, what am I supposed to actually do?"I couldn’t just sit there in a room in the guesthouse. I ordered a taxi to come and pick me up and take me to Bellavista, in Turfontein, where my family used to live.
The taxi came and I told the driver my childhood address.It took twenty minutes to get there, along a huge motorway dissecting the city, the sun starting its way down, the driver talking,pointing out the new suspension bridge dedicated to Nelson Mandela, the Hillbrow tower in the distance. I saw a drive-in movie screen on top of a mine dump, the title of that week’s film spelt out on the slope of the dump in white painted stones so drivers could read what was being screened that week as they passed.
We approached Bellavista and the scheme of small council blocks of flats named, in a mining town, after precious stones. I see Turquoise Court, Opal Court, then Amethyst Court. Our old flat in the corner.
There is our old mailbox, the communal washing lines! The Crawford’s house. Jill Mellville’s flat. For years I’d gone in the car with her and her mum to the nursing home where both her senile grandparents were cooped up.Warren’s house, the Mormon kid we always told tales on because his parents literally scrubbed his mouth out with soap. Bill’s place, Bill who had blackouts causing my dad to ban us from ever getting in his car. Bill who had a wood workshop where all he ever made were the same wooden jewellery boxes with curled legs. Mr.Campbell’s flat at the end.His wife was killed in a car crash. Later he came to our house in tears with an outrageous bill for blood she’d been administered to try and save her life in the hospital.There’s a photograph of Paula and I holding Selina’s hands beside this exact washing line. Selina was from Soweto, the south western township, where Marcus told me the roads were built wide enough to accomodate armoured tanks should they be required. Selina cried when we were leaving. Because she would miss us, I always thought. It later transpired that my dad had written her a reference while he’d been drinking and his handwriting was so slovenly, it was useless to her, that’s why she cried. My mum was supposed to have typed her a letter of recommendation at work. In all the chaos of our imminent move back to Scotland, Selina’s future work prospects as a black woman during apartheid, had been overlooked.

Part Three

"Where does that bus go?"

My second day in Melville, drinking coffee outside, I saw a bus go past completely unexpectedly. I thought there was no public transport system to speak of here? I asked the girl who served me where the bus went.
"To the city," she said.
"Does it go near the Carlton Centre?"
"Yes," she said.
"How frequent are they?"
"Every half an hour," she said.
So I waited for the next one and went to the city.

Part Four

The City. (Third World meat on a First World bone.)

Third World people casually sat down in the shade of an empty multi national sky-scraper, spread out a blanket and sold some cheap cigarettes, some cheesy puffs and some bubblegum.
Third World people are trading spinach and apples next to the OK Bazaar. Twenty women are having their hair weaved and corn-rowed sitting on chairs on the pavement of a city like they’re inside a hair salon with transparent walls.
There are no other white people that I can see, this makes me feel out of my depth from sheer visual disorientation, I have never been 100% in the minority before. I walk at random into a shop, its selling old clothes in piles. I find a dress, the label says it was made in Finland. I pay ten rand for it. The guy takes my money, he goes EAT, and points to a bag of apples, I take one, they are cold. "You had these in the fridge," I say.
A woman points me to where the Carlton Centre is and I go up in the lift to the "Roof of Africa" and survey the city from very high.
From above it looks, again, like an affluent First World construct.

Part Five

The Trinity Session, "We never said we were artists."

Marcus Neustetter came to pick me up from Melville, and we drove to the edge of the city-centre, to Braamfontein and The National Theatre building where The Trinity Session have a studio. In their studio was a sense of urgency, a strident pace. Marcus didn’t have a lot of time,but the time he could spare was spent in a dense and informative fashion. We tramped in tandem through a labyrinth of a building to get to the studio which is located in a sort of back stage portion of the theatre. They negotiated the use of this space from scratch, syphoning from the fountain of cultural regeneration in order to stay there. A gallery extension with glass frontage is currently being built.(At this time the new gallery is established.) We had a lot to talk about and I waited for him in the theatre café while he had to suddenly leave to fix some html on a site that had just gone live for his colleague Stephen’s new show.
The Trinity Session maintain contact with Europe through selective collaboration and personal family history. The digital aspect of their output is symbiotic with the Third World’s relationship to technology. In the Third World, the mobile phone is the ubiquitous communication tool for local and transnational dialogue,Even people who don’t own a phone carry sim cards till they can borrow a host handset.Marcus is passionate about classic digital form and language but doesn’t see this as specifically relevant to the context he works in. We joked about "old school" interaction, he speaks almost wistfully of the potential for artists to engage with Johannesburg at a street level, literally, performatively. The Trinity Session are art-activists, the art is almost a bi-product of grass root socio political process. Aesthetics are of no concern to them theoretically.They also maintain individual practice outside the threesome.
"The first world metaphors of technological networks, they existed here already, you can take a bus from the centre of town to anywhere in Africa. We have people here from all over the continent moving around,making exchanges, many languages coexisting in the same place,people on street corners selling cheap access to hacked phone lines to maintain modes of communication throughout the African nations."Marcus took me on a tour of inner city Johannesburg to show me in situ some of their activity.They have undertaken several major inner-city interventions in and around the central business district, including Joubert Park and the Muthi Market. This astonishing market sells traditional zulu medicine under a motorway in Newtown. It will soon be rehoused in custom built premises designed in consultation with The Trinity Session and traditional artists. After the market, Marcus and I spent a bit of time in Joubert park.Previously, I had asked the taxi driver if the fountain was still there with the beautiful life size brass arc of leaping springbok. We had had so many pictures taken in front of them. The driver said the sculpture had been moved because street kids had been stealing the metal.

Part Six

More about Joubert Park and introducing Daphne.

When I was a kid Joubert park was where we went at Christmas to look at life-size dioramas of Nursery Rhymes, illuminated in episodes along the pathways.
I had completely forgotten about the dioramas until a woman on a train, Daphne, reminded me.Did I remember Joubert park at Christmas, she asked me.She said to me,
"HAVE YOU SEEN JOUBERT PARK NOW!!!!!!!!!!? ITS SO DIIIIRRRRRTTY.DIIIRRRTY DIRTY DIRTY."
Daphne and I had got on the sleeper car at Cape Town for the twenty-eight hour trip through the desert back to Johannesburg, I would travel further to Pretoria. She had a basket with a frilled cover, it looked like a kitten might be in it but it was full of food her daughter had made for her. She gave me a "fatcake" like a doughnut. One of her daughters is currently a nurse in Edinburgh and Daphne had an album of "snaps" from her recent trip to Scotland. Odd to be on a train with a stranger who suddenly produced an album containing recent pictures of herself in my city.
Daphne was born in Stellenbosch, the former heartland of Afrikaans culture and political ideology. Her mother sent her into service in Johannesburg to escape the vineyard where there was no prospects of anything beyond backbreaking toil. Mostly she had worked as a supervisor in a laundry for a big hotel in Gold Reef City, a famous Joburg theme park.
Daphne experienced the world as a binary of clean or dirty, her whole life had been spent transforming children, windows, objects, fabrics from one state to the other.
For Daphne a place was either very clean or very dirty.
In her opinion, Edinburgh was clean and Glasgow was very very dirty.
Now she lives in sheltered accomodation, where everyone has their own little house secure behind some patrolled gates.Daphne is one of only two black women living there. She joked about her elderly white neighbour’s inability to clean.
"Their whole lives they had a maid. She took them to school, she took them home from school, she carried their schoolbooks, she washed their schoolclothes, she made their food, she cleaned their house, she polished their shoes, she put their shoes away. Their WHOLE lives a blackwoman was cleaning for them. So I say to them,
"Look at this house you live in now,you never learned how to clean, you don’t know how."
They say to me "Daphne! Look at your windows! They are so shiny, look at your brass on your door, its all so shiny!"
Sometimes I might go and clean their windows. I am strong.I was always strong. Its nothing to me to clean their windows.They can’t clean a thing in their homes."
Daphne got into her pyjamas and we settled into our bunk-beds. We were joined in our compartment in the middle of the night by a white South African woman, a third generation descendent from early Dutch immigrant settlers. Daphne fussed over her, to try and make her feel welcome, but the woman snapped back, I think from stress at boarding a train so late. The convival atmosphere in the sleeper was disrupted so we all shut our eyes.Daphne sent a lot of text messages in the night, bleep bleep, silence, bleep bleep back. We were brought coffee the next day.
I had a conversation with the third traveller, an economic journalist. She talked about what has come to be regarded as "transitional economics", the state of swapping one political system for another and the financial chaos which can ensue. South Africa currently looks to other models of disrupted economic structures as templates for recovery and ways to reconsolidate. The woman was writing an article on the Polish economy post communism, drawing comparisons between what might actually transpire in South Africa.
The subject of Joubert Park came up again.
"Joubert Park, its so dirrty," says Daphne. "And they don’t even put Christmas lights up anymore in the city."
"Because noone goes to the city anymore, that’s why" says the third traveller."It’s a waste to put them there."
"Johannesburg, its so dirrty."
"I like it," I say, "I liked seeing things I wouldn’t see at home, I liked seeing all the girls getting their hair done in the street."
"Waaaah!" says Daphne "But did you see, right where someone is having their hair done, next to it is someone cooking some food. Its dirrty!"
"They are just trying to make an honest living," says the third traveller, who is reading "Morvern Callar."

So Joubert park is on the outskirts of Hillbrow, in the city centre and its where the Johannesburg Art Gallery is situated. The park is currently a space utilised by rough sleepers and drug users so gradually people have stopped coming because they feel it’s dangerous to walk there or park their cars. The audience for the art stopped coming to look at the art because the art is in what they consider to be an unsafe place.
Marcus had guided me through a glasshouse in Joubert Park where a wedding was being photographed. There are several photographers in the park who take portraits of people for small amounts of money and The Trinity Session have worked collaboratively with these freelancers.
Close to the park on a border with Hillbrow is an inner city access centre for young people, where they can learn new creative and utilitarian skills.The Trinity Session have devised the new media elements of the training options and currently workshop with teachers in how to approach this context for learning.
One of the traditional skills being taught is sign writing. There is a big demand for signwriters in Johannesburg. In any African city, hand painted signs are how most enterprises advertise themselves.The Trinity session worked with young people from the inner city initiative to design a signage system which would direct both pedestrians and drivers within the park to the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
The signs are painted in green and white on oil drums indicating the path to the gallery. The use of the oil drum as a recycled surface for these signs is significant.The oil drum is a commonly recycled vessel in areas of the townships where materials are scarce and shanty homes are built from the most basic materials to hand, like scrap wood and corrugated iron. Oil drums form part of this vocabulary of shelter and storage.These signs then are Third World vernacular indicating the way to a First World art collection.I returned to Joubert park by myself when I got back from Cape Town and Pretoria.The Johannesburg Art Gallery hosts a collection of significant works by international and South African artists juxtaposed with contemporary craft artefacts in traditional South African forms and techniques. It doesn’t seem entirely accurate to describe the craft items as contemporary, their historical position as traditional art objects is non-linear.An incredible trio of beaded Ndebele fertility dolls wearing real children’s running shoes gaze across the gallery at an LED text work by Kathryn Smith.
In the first gallery also a series of close-up photographs, images of an artist’s cheek just after he has pressed small cultural icons/momentos into his skin to make impressions.One of these, a beaded zulu love letter.Many contemporary African artists quote craft forms and techniques as cultural signifiers, but the craft objects in their own right in this context are so powerful. And what they do consistently is geographically locate the imported works or the fine art works in an African city. They contextualise the foreign objects in a host politic. For me the most crucial work to see was the William Kentridge drawings and prints in the downstairs gallery where there are smaller project and installation spaces. Also interesting to me was a whole gallery devoted to tribal dress where individual outfits were illustrated with photographs of them being worn now.

Part Seven

Two Galleries in Johannesburg.

Marcus had kindly driven me to some private galleries, tight elegant spaces close to the massive Rosebank shopping mall. Showing in the Warren Siebrits Gallery on Jan Smuts Avenue was a show called "Witness".

"Witness' traces threads of our South African past; it offers insight into our present, it helps us make sense of the time in which we live.
The model - artist as commentator, narrator, as presenter of 'truth' - no longer anticipates objectivity. Rather, the somewhat paradoxical nature of subjective and affected commentary embodied in any re-presentation has allowed particular (concealed) 'realities' to be made tangible and tactile. In this way, complex visual vocabularies may facilitate the communication of the unspeakable, the elusive and the fleeting. The concept of individual and subjective witnessing, of commentating, situates the maker as first subject of our tangled South African past.
Many of the works engage the aspects and injustices that are now synonymous with our history. In one way or another, various didactic strategies here appear to offer a particular (encoded) message or critique of the past. Identity, race, subjugation as well as personal and political struggle are put forward in diverse historical works which, when read in this context, bear testimony to and ultimately present compelling visual archives in their layered configuration of experience and events."
(Extract from the catalogue introduction.)

In this show, I saw a small Marlene Dumas painting, elastoplast coloured face with gummy eyes, I had actually never realised she was a South African artist till just before my trip when I heard her speak at Glasgow School of Art.I spoke to the gallery owner for a while and bought several catalogues. He was solemn, it was illuminating to talk to him.He pointed out works in the catalogue; the photographer Goldblatt was particularly powerful to him. Goldblatt has documented many subjects, mineworkers and victims of police beatings using acute black and white portraiture to accentuate the detail of heinous wounds or the tin badges of black foremen in the goldmines.
Next day I went to the Central Business District to find the Soweto Gallery. I had the address but it took me a long time to find it. In contrast to the galleries on Jan Smuts Avenue, the Soweto Gallery was in a run down second floor walk up in the city centre, above a level of rooms filled with women sewing on rattling machines. The gallery consists of three adjoining rooms, one small office with a room off either side.
On entering the Soweto gallery you are met by a desk, to the left is a space where works are pinned to the wall, and people were gathered there.There was a small cooker and a woman preparing some meat in a big pot. On the opposite side of the front desk was a room full of plan chests loaded with works on paper, drawings, collage, paintings, in all kinds of media.
After viewing the work on display, I was guided to the plan chests and shown a vast amount of very varied work, all depicting life in Soweto. I bought two pieces, drawings made on the back of cardboard boxes and coloured with felt tip pens. The boy who had made the drawings was in the gallery, he was wearing the most fantastic flourescent pink tracksuit top.The gallery was about to close, half day on a Saturday, so we all left together and two people from the gallery kindly escorted me through the city to the Museum of Africa.

Part Eight

Cape Town, Simon’s Town, Pretoria.

After Johannesburg, I went to Cape Town, then further to Simon’s Town, where the South African navy are stationed. In the navy chapel there was a very arresting mural. I walked for miles to a restaurant that was too far to stay and eat in (because it would soon be dark and I had to walk back). I had a glass of wine anyway and the staff talked about the problem with baboons harassing customers and how an ape had eaten the restaurant cat.They couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen a baboon on the road. The walk back at dusk was profound, the phenomenal ocean and the cliffs and sky at nightfall.From Simon’s Town I sailed out to see whales in a little boat, with some English people, one elderly man heaving vomit over the side his wife holding onto the waistband of his trousers.There was a very good toy museum there.
I wanted to go to Cape Point Reserve but I could only go on a tour bus. I spoke to the woman in the bus office, "can’t I get dropped off by the bus and then picked up later, so I can walk in the reserve by myself."
She said, "You can’t walk around by yourself in there."
I said, "But in Scotland, I walk around in the wild, it’s fine."
She said, "Yes, my dear, but you are in Africa now. We have snakes here."
For whatever reason, we both laughed hysterically at this, we couldn’t stop laughing.

In Cape Town, there was a bar called Joburg, it’s a fantastic bar with a gallery space above it. In the bar they have some contemporary work on the walls and one is a photomontage of a street in Johannesburg during the gold rush. The buildings are dwarfed by the single stride of a giant black man, stepping over the toy town.There was a huge national art show on while I was in Cape town. Some of the pieces by now, I recognised the artists as significant to there, it was an odd amalgamation of too much work, an art flood of good work bobbing along next to bad.

Later, in Cape Town, I discovered the incredible seething toxic strips of Bitter Comix. And Monkey Business, a beaded doll-making collective providing a source of income for women in townships.The Monkey Business dolls are supreme creatures, beaded brothers and sisters it’s agonising to have to choose between them, I literally spent an hour picking one doll to bring home.
In Pretoria, I finally visited the Voortrekker monument. I took a bus as far as I could then walked up to it from the motorway. It sits high on a hill, a huge monolith symbolising the heart of Apartheid. It is uncertain what the future holds for this artefact, the crude iconography on the walls depicting the violent clashes between zulus and dutch settlers, the kitsch mythologising of it all, the absolutism of white supremacy the odious sense of white entitlement sanctioned by god.

An architect at a bus stop.
On my last few days in Joburg, I was again waiting for a bus to the city and fell into conversation with a man who was also waiting. He was an architect, teaching at the university and consulting with the government on architectural issues. He had come home specifically to use his expertise in the new South Africa, having gone into exile in the UK and Europe during the Apartheid regime.Right now, he is working on a design for the courthouse. We spoke briefly about customisation, the fact that so much property was abandoned by commerce in the city and how it’s policy now to try and alter these spaces to suit families. He talked about the difficulties in negotiating the proportions of huge open plan offices, "the spaces are too deep," he said, "it’s hard."

Finally
On beads, pixels and tapestry stitches.
Those tiny stabs of colour which unite to provide us with pictorial planes.

links

http://www.onair.co.za/

http://www.bitterkomix.com

http://www.monkeybiz.co.za/