James Sey: The South African Question and the Aesthetics of Disappearance

Twenty years ago the ANC was officially unbanned by South Africa’s apartheid government, removing one of the final political obstacles to a transition to a democratically elected government. At around the same time, in early 1991, Albie Sachs, the struggle veteran who would later serve in the Constitutional Court, and play an active role in establishing the Art Collection at Constitution Hill, published a position paper entitled ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’.

The paper generated much debate, and put forward the view that South African art and literature had been homogenised and to some extent eviscerated by the perceived need to reflect the social ills of apartheid, and to establish political opposition to it. Sachs’ liberal viewpoint was that art and literature should embody diversity in subject matter and technique, and should not be constrained by a reflectionist agenda.

 Zanele Muholi, Being (right triptych), 2007,
silver gelatin prints and a Lambda print, 30 x 22.5cm each

Two decades on, and the most recent burning debate in arts and culture circles in the country concerns the rejection of the work of award-winning photographer Zanele Muholi – specifically her socialrealist fine art portraits of black lesbian couples – by the presiding minister of arts and culture Lulama Xingwana. Ironically, the minister’s walkout from an exhibition she deemed “pornographic” was staged at Constitution Hill, built to embody the new South Africa’s right to freedoms of expression, association, creed and sexual orientation. 

The South African Question and the Aesthetics of Disappearance by James Sey

Rather than tackle the nuances and complexities of the question of the uses of colour in recent South African art, which would have numerous counter-examples for every example adduced, this paper takes a different tack.

The paper argues that the major historical currents in SA art of the last thirty years or so fall into two general streams. Firstly, they were conditioned by protest and reflectionist critique in the apartheid era, which did indeed lend itself to the stark and monochromatic styles and palette of the constructionist agitprop poster, mural and realist scene. Secondly, a range of conceptual and ‘neoconceptual’ styles arose in the latter part of the apartheid era, and the post-apartheid years. Much of this was focused on so-called ‘new media’, characterised in turn by either impressionistic and widely varying video and installation work, or by shades of documentary photography, which carried on the anti-apartheid agitprop lineage.

In the first post apartheid decade, the simultaneous rise of the internet as a graphic and aesthetic medium and the globalisation of capitalism meant that the concept of a national character, and national identity itself, came under pressure.

If the ‘South African Question’ for art, then, is how to understand the colour palette in such a way that the country’s political and racial diversity is productively represented, how is such an ambition to be understood in the context of a globalised ‘aesthetics of disappearance’?

I use Virilio’s term here with some focus – his theorisation of a culture of ‘dromology’, of the realisation of the futurist dream of a culture of ‘speed and dynamism’, has been dramatised by the spread of ‘technologies of light’ – primarily the internet. These technical possibilities have homogenised national cultures and ‘flattened out’ the palette – both in the sense of colour and that of cultural experience – it is possible to have in our era. How is the South African Question – that of a national idea of colour – to be addressed in this context?