THE CONTRIBUTION OF BLACK WOMAN ARTISTS TO THIS COUNTRY'S ART HISTORY IS LARGELY UNWRITTEN AND FOR THE MOST PART REMAINS CRITICALLY IGNORED, WRITES GABI NGCOBO, WHOSE CONTRIBUTION HIGHLIGHTS THE WORK OF ZANELE MUHOLI AND NANDIPHA MNTAMBO
Resisting marginalisation has become a point of departure for most South African artists working at the edges of dominant systems of operation – particularly black women artists. As young black female practitioners appropriate of new modes and forms to redefine cultural meanings that once represented, restricted and prejudiced them it is worth recalling the immense history these young practitioners are challenging.
It is a history best retold through a series of questions. What, for example, does Nongqawuse's infamous act of 1856 signify for us today? What are we to make of the Xhosa prophetess infamous for being a leader in the cattle-killing movement that devastated the Eastern Cape during the final frontier wars of the 1800's? What does the behind the scenes power and courage of King Shaka's aunt, Mkabayi KaJama stand for now? Why is it Sara Baartman's story, which begins with a San woman being shipped to London and exhibited as a spectacle of black female sexuality, still provoke such anger and pain? And, why is Brenda Fassie's entitlement to life and audience through her performances on and off stage still relevant? These questions are not new and have in recent times been addressed by feminist scholars, historians and cultural producers, although less so by art historians and curators engaging with works of art. Anne Coombes is one notable exception. In History After Apartheid (2004) she references a protest by a group of Soweto women in engaging with Berni Searle's work. In 1990 a group of women from Dobsonville, Soweto stripped naked in front of police and officials intent on dismantling their shacks. Coombes sites the example as relevant to Searle's use of her body as an act of resisting the consumption of women's bodies as commodity.
Curator Khwezi Gule has evidenced a similar sensitivity for history. In A Lesson from History, a group show featuring artists Nicholas Hlobo, Zamaxolo Dunywa and Zanele Muholi, and shown at the 2005 Klein Karoo arts festival (KKNK), he drew from the story of ingcugce to construct a curatorial framework within which to engage with the three artists' work. The story of ingcugce tells of a group of young women belonging to the ingcugce age-set of girls who flouted Zulu King Cetshwayo's order to marry an older regiment, instead choosing to elope with their lovers. Many of the young rebels were captured and brutally killed. Their actions, though, echo through history and are now celebrated as a sign of tremendous courage in the face of a dominant social order.
Resisting marginalisation has become a point of departure for most South African artists working at the edges of dominant systems of operation – particularly black women artists. As young black female practitioners appropriate of new modes and forms to redefine cultural meanings that once represented, restricted and prejudiced them it is worth recalling the immense history these young practitioners are challenging.
It is a history best retold through a series of questions. What, for example, does Nongqawuse's infamous act of 1856 signify for us today? What are we to make of the Xhosa prophetess infamous for being a leader in the cattle-killing movement that devastated the Eastern Cape during the final frontier wars of the 1800's? What does the behind the scenes power and courage of King Shaka's aunt, Mkabayi KaJama stand for now? Why is it Sara Baartman's story, which begins with a San woman being shipped to London and exhibited as a spectacle of black female sexuality, still provoke such anger and pain? And, why is Brenda Fassie's entitlement to life and audience through her performances on and off stage still relevant?
These questions are not new and have in recent times been addressed by feminist scholars, historians and cultural producers, although less so by art historians and curators engaging with works of art. Anne Coombes is one notable exception. In History After Apartheid (2004) she references a protest by a group of Soweto women in engaging with Berni Searle's work. In 1990 a group of women from Dobsonville, Soweto stripped naked in front of police and officials intent on dismantling their shacks. Coombes sites the example as relevant to Searle's use of her body as an act of resisting the consumption of women's bodies as commodity.
Curator Khwezi Gule has evidenced a similar sensitivity for history. In A Lesson from History, a group show featuring artists Nicholas Hlobo, Zamaxolo Dunywa and Zanele Muholi, and shown at the 2005 Klein Karoo arts festival (KKNK), he drew from the story of ingcugce to construct a curatorial framework within which to engage with the three artists' work. The story of ingcugce tells of a group of young women belonging to the ingcugce age-set of girls who flouted Zulu King Cetshwayo's order to marry an older regiment, instead choosing
to elope with their lovers. Many of the young rebels were captured and brutally killed. Their actions, though, echo through history and are now celebrated as a sign of tremendous courage in the face of a dominant social order.
Looking at Muholi's photographs one gets a sense of a similar struggle. Her photographs depict the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex community, or LGBTI. Muholi actively identifies herself with this community and is a member of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), a networking, empowerment and support organisation for black lesbians in and around Johannesburg. She has previously used her photographs to promote the organisation's objectives, which include "the provision of a safe space, social or otherwise, in which black lesbians can be free to express themselves". "Most of my work is informed by different research that I do in the townships as part of the work of FEW," she says of her photography. "My aim is not to make nice pictures but to crack open the issues."
The extent of this approach was revealed in 2004 when she showed a series of 13 photographs, titled What don't you see when you look at me?, at an exhibition complementing the Gender and Visuality Workshop, held at the University of Western Cape. Her photographs created a stir.
"That is when I realised how uncomfortable people can become around my photography," she explains. "People quoted some scriptures from the bible to me. I have a pack where people said a lot of things – people were angry. Some said I mustn't portray black women like that and why don't I capture white people. I thought it was a great thing. I took my video camera with, and it helped inform me about my next project. I made a film based on my work as a photographer and all the negative response." Titled Enraged by a Picture, Muholi's documentary was subsequently shown at the Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, in 2005. The film further exposed how heteronormative privilege in South Africa is constructed through the bodies of black women, and also revealed how race and gender operate in the construction of contemporary post-apartheid homophobia.
So how does one reclaim the black female body in the context of recent history? Commenting on this, Carol Boyce Davis, director of Florida International University's African-New World Studies programme, has lauded the physical control that women take in attempting to do with their bodies as they please. "But," she asks, "is it what they please or is the female body still doing what it is trained to do?"
Muholi's ongoing Virgins series of photographs seeks to answer this question. The work examines the controversial "revival" of the practice of virginity testing, presently occurring in certain areas of Kwa-Zulu Natal and Gauteng. The practice requires females aged between eight and 25 years of age to submit to genital examination.
The tests, performed by women, aim to establish evidence of virginity. The tests have raised important issues amongst scholars of gender and cultural politics in South Africa. Read in this context, Muholi's project highlights the problematic space black women inhabit apropos the two spaces inhabited by Frantz Fanon's colonised man. By foregrounding this particular 'cultural practice' in her work, Muholi demonstrates how the black female body continues to be pressed and made to yield to easy cataloguing in a capitalist hetero-patriarchal society. Muholi's work also opens up ways of using documentary photography beyond colonial and racist tropes while at same time investigating into the social status of black women.
Responding to a question about the activist sensibility underpinning her work, Muholi states: "I'm an activist dash photographer ... I am pushing a political agenda that is not spoken about ... These pictures need to be shown and people need to process them and learn something out of them."
Like Muholi, Nandipha Mntambo is another artist worthy of note. Her work also represents a shift of the dynamics representation. Currently completing her Masters degree at the Michaelis School of Art, she explains the scope of her research as follows: "I am concerned with the stereotypes associated with the measurement of the quality, value and relevance of the art created by black women ... in contemporary South Africa, and the reasons that may account for the very low numbers of black women graduating from art institutions and occupying significant places in the contemporary art world."
Race, she maintains, is key to understanding the problem. "Race informs appearance, language and geographical locality, which impact on access to educational resources, which in turn influences individual experiences of the South African art milieu." She believes the lack of critical discourse around the work being produced by black women artists highlights the prevailing imbalance in the ownership of "cultural capital", a fact she says further contributes to an ongoing lack of understanding of the work being produced by black
women artists.
Mntambo's artistic production further addresses these concerns. Her sculptural constructions depict figurative bodies in various poses and movements and evoke a sense of beauty and release from physical restrictions. The work both demonstrates and negotiates acts of
freedom. This is apparent in her recent works Purge and Stepping Into Self (2005), which question oppressive notions of femininity, as well as earlier works, such as Balandzeli and Idle (2004). Mntambo's concerns as an artist are cleverly reinforced by her choice of material: cowhide. It is a material variously associated with wealth and power. The literal hairiness of her figures also functions as a distancing device. Hair is one of the trappings of femininity
and female sexuality, and she employs it well in commenting ondominant perceptions and stereotypes. Her work encourages us to critique the politics and aesthetics of femininity and beauty and is suggestive of the ways in which (black) women are re-interpreting their bodies and claiming visibility.
Both Muholi and Mntambo challenge us to rethink the concept of the periphery within South Africa. Their practice provides new insights into the linkages that exist between social issues and artistic discourse. This is particularly important in the context of South African art history, which has largely ignored – and by extension, rendered silent and invisible – artistic production by black women. This article is a response to the situation.
In 1985 postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak asked the question: "Can the subaltern speak?" Her controversial article led to accusations that she was guilty of "phallocentric complicity" because she did not recognise or even let the subaltern speak. This prompted writer bell hooks to suggest that Spivak's question is better reformulated as: "Can the subaltern be heard?" In a society that continues to privilege patriarchal assumptions about gender, as well as favour certain modes of address (I refer here to this issues frame of reference – the "avant-garde"), what emerges as politically important is not where the histories of black women artists are being written but how and by whom.
Gabi Ngcobo is assistant curator at Iziko South African National Gallery
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ART SOUTH AFRICA V4.3
