South Africa: the Art of a Nation, exhibition review – Magic from the land of Madiba

From the prehistoric era to the Boer wars to Mandela’s struggle against Apartheid — this show encapsulates the powerful narrative of South Africa’s history
Fearsome and ethereal: The Battle of Rorke’s Drift, 1981, by John Muafangejo
Matthew Collings26 October 2016

In the past few years archaeologists in South Africa have unearthed some of the world’s oldest artworks. The British Museum’s new exhibition shows us some examples as well as art from the periods of South Africa’s history that are more well known: rule by the Boers and the British, the period of struggle against Apartheid, and post-Apartheid — the past 20 years, which have seen the rise of a black middle class and the marginalisation of whites.

The fascination of the show is not with individual artistic achievement so much as with the curators showing you, in a series of clever play-offs between past and present, how artists in different eras of this country’s existence — and of course for a long time it wasn’t a country — have expressed their sense of reality, inevitably from conflicting points of view.

For each of the seven stages in time the show looks at there is a contemporary art comment. One of the displays from the colonial era includes a decorated British soldier’s tunic from 1902 — a touching object with inked scenes of daily life, cavalry, buildings, ships, dead animals and termite mounds distributed within carefully organised flowing rectangles across the back of the jacket — and a magnificent patterned plate from 1900, made by an inmate in a British concentration camp. The awful thought of the camp, the knowledge that such places were actually invented by the British in South Africa, the sweet sensitivity of the drawings on the jacket and the sheer beauty of the plate create a mixture of emotions typical of the show as a whole. It disarms you, and makes the present-day art in the show, which isn’t immune to the shallowness of much contemporary art, entirely sympathetic, if only because of its contribution to the powerful narrative content of the show.

The contemporary element of this particular display includes Francki Burger’s photographic print, The Watchers (2014), part of a series exploring landscapes whose terrain has been affected by battle. The method is to fuse and overlay old and new photographic images. In The Watchers we see the site of the battle of Spion Kop where 8,000 Boers defeated 20,000 British soldiers. A blurred 19th-century face turns out to be a child at a station waiting to be transported to a concentration camp. We’re seeing pride in a significant victory and appalling trauma at the idea of children dying in the camps, but also a delicious visual richness captured in the present-day landscape.

Contemporary element: a custom-painted BMW
BMW Group Archives

An example of rock art in the show, discovered in the 19th century — scientific examination has yet to determine when it was actually made and it might be thousands of years old — demonstrates not only the visual intensity but also the multi-layered meaning of this kind of expression.

Observation and belief go hand-in- hand as the artist, whoever it was, pictures the highest aspirations of the society of the time. Animals herded by naked men appear in earth colours on a grey surface. The figures are elegant. They come in and out of focus. The cattle are in their own register, in yellows, reds and whites. The men seem to emerge and disappear again, as if they’re partly painted and partly cut into the rock. There are strange streaming lines issuing from the noses and mouths of the animals, which we learn are stylised mucus and blood.

You’re being let in on the mythology and rituals of early African peoples. This kind of streaming happened when shamans went into their trances, they drooled and their noses bled as they communed with God. The idea is that God is synonymous with the crowd of beasts, while the artist is summoning up divinity.

On the whole you go with the occasional flat bits. The explanation for Karel Nel’s Potent Fields, for example, two squares in muted colours, is that it symbolises South Africa’s colour divide, and the pigment is actually ochre collected from Nelson Mandela’s ancestral lands in the Eastern Cape.

Modern touch: Candice Breitz’s Extra!, 2011

Also, in the same year Nel made this work, 2002, a 75,000-year-old artwork was discovered at Blombos Cave in the Western Cape, consisting of cross-hatched ochre. Significance piles up but the work itself only looks blandly tasteful. A linoprint by John Muafangejo, from 1981, on the other hand, is visually fresh, and explores power and heroism in a witty way. The battle of Rorke’s Drift, made famous by the movie Zulu, is shown to us as feeble would-be oppressors righteously menaced by fearsome and ethereal warriors.

A work from five years ago by the white South African video artist Candice Breitz shows her incongruously inserted into the South African TV soap opera Generations. Set against a background of the advertising industry this daily show, watched by millions, is about the lives of middle-class black families and features only black actors. In Breitz’s video we see attractive characters interacting (chatting away rather fascinatingly in a mixture of three languages) and carefully ignoring the artist, who might be walking across the screen in the background, waggling her fingers over the backrest of a chair a character is sitting in, or perching herself on the edge of a sideboard in a dining room while a full-on domestic row is in process. (She managed to do all this by obtaining permission from the producers — she’d initially hoped it might be aired one week but it was felt it would alienate viewers.) The soap opera is compelling, the video screen’s rush of energy in a quiet gallery is hard to ignore, and also Breitz executes her concept efficiently, with cleverness and humour.

Arts picks of the week: 24th-30th October

1/10

Evaluating the relative merits of rock art in a visual tradition lasting thousands of years and today’s conceptual art gags is tricky. Rock art makes you marvel at different kinds of beauty and achievement: how we organise ourselves, what we find to believe in, how we ritualise it, how we celebrate life. It tells you about exquisite aesthetic refinement, and awe at humanity’s compulsion to observe and record, but also measure itself by something higher than itself. Curiously, with an open mind one could say all those elements are there, too, in Breitz’s video.

South Africa: the Art of a Nation is at the British Museum, WC1 (020 7323 8000; britishmuseum.org) from tomorrow until February 26

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