Writing Past The Present

Writing about art, about writers and their literary works, and even writing about musicians within treacherous social, artistic and literary circles can be a dire choice of a vocation without patronage of the traditional support from established enclaves of power.

Reviled by criticism, many contemporary black artists disregard or shy away from any literary exploration of their works, in the vain hope that their artistic “indulgences” are beyond social scrutiny, whereas the same works are steeped in analysis of the same society.

But how can writers dread being vocal or actually writing about their living peers, as opposed to crafting posthumous laudatory articles for more patronised mainstream publications?

Does appreciating other artists, questioning and analysing their craft, and often comparing their work to others, seem threatening to many practitioners within the current South African artistic milieu?

I recall Jack Kerouac’s ragtime beat poetry infused with Jazz at its purest improvisational metamorphosis, Amiri Baraka’s recitals drenched in sound and unburdened rhythm; and many other poets who wrote about paintings and sculpture, scatting on music; their words naming and strengthening all forms of creation.

Many foundational writers have jotted poems, prose and essays dedicated to their compatriots; take for an example Mongane Wally Serote’s CHILD OF SONG (written for poet James Matthews). Mothobi Motloatse edited an incredible monograph on the photography of Bob Gosani accompanied by an eclectic array of notes and essays that celebrated the vibrantly lucid depth of the images.

The literary documentary work that Phehello Mofokeng published in memory of SANKOMOTA is among the few that still carry the tradition of commemorating legacies, and these efforts and many others have given contemporary researchers and scholars a compendium of critical analysis of black artists by black writers, rooted in a collective memorialisation and celebration of our socio-cultural identities.

Eugene Skeef, is another poet writing archives that celebrates his peers in a way that is both admirably documentarian, as it is premised on the concept of immortalising their craft contemporaneously, using words as a form of sculpting the souls of each artists, writers, musicians encountered as living entities in the process of being deified by the sacred human condition.

As such, writers are archivists in a three part tale steeped in the past, recalled in the present to set in motion guide posts for future explorations of the meaning of life; each story becoming an accumulation of losses steeped in the undying past, with which writers as memory-keepers grapple.

Writers therefore untangle the hidden meanings that lie between the alphabets, the words that form complex emotional portraits of univocal memories and emotions.

And through a language not bound by the language of writers of antiquity, can we unmask letters and their sounds as they tremble in our throats and pens.

Artist Thokozani Mthiyane often writes poems about his paintings and sculptural installations - an uncanny transposition of self-excavated meanings, more so as the text and the canvases purport to enter a chaotic dialogue, a dialogue full of varied and subtle echoes of things not represented in neither words nor oils.

These artists have realised that “a poetic line can be a cry, like a saxophone playing a line, riffing on…”, as Joy Hard once put it. They embody our only organic archives of the past and present memory; these writers and poets are documenting an uncertain future faced with technological erasure and obfuscation.

These art writers must consistently provide unsparing examinations of literature, art, cinema, music and performance; subtly bringing these mirrors in whose gaze we see versions of ourselves, where artworks are treated as mirrors of that which we would rather deny or leave unseen.

Their stumbling awkwardness in search for new meaning seems futile at times, but as writers weaving words around other art forms, new meanings can be threaded into being.

And as we watch the obsolete machinery of colonial literary alliances and allegiances grind to a slow trample, when heritage becomes a prison of the mind, when writers cling to forms and protocols determined by colonial puritanism, the quality and substance of local literary art comes into disrepute.

As society lives on the verge of an evaporated substance of truth, even though truth is a subjective perspective, we watch the obsolete machinery of colonial literary alliances and allegiances grind to a slow trample, and a new breed of writers not bound by colonial linguistic architecture needs come to the fore and created a new kind of urgency of reform.

A disruption of the formalistic reverence to all traditional forms of criticism is the first step in an art world built on secrecy and hypocrisy, considering that this art world is full of contradictions, from glorification to demonisation of artists and frauds.

The performed success enjoyed by most young black writers also leaves them vulnerable to reflexive self-immolation on the alters of patronage and unrequited self-censorship, responding to demands of patrons and trendsetters within a business-like climate of cultural plunder.

Armoured against the rotten edifice of civilised society, writers as critiques need confront white privileged art markets, literary critiques and classicism with secure knowledge researched and practiced to conserve and preserve the present for the unknown.

And walking hand in hand with ghosts of African literature, are white writers within South African literary landscape who receive continued critical analyses and reviews in mainstream publications, which in turn supports their unprecedented exposure and reader engagements.

These writers in essence have formed a sustained culture of collective appreciation of white cultural output, attending music festivals and art exhibitions, operas and orchestral performances and writing (archiving) about these collective cultural experiences, while patronising museums that preserve white history for posterity.

Although excluded from mainstream legitimacy, black literary and art critics/writers must continue to carve a space for free and unobstructed critiques of society, analysing varied disciplines in a multidimensional dialogue that is rooted in historical continuity.

Especially poignant at this moment in the development of an Afrocentric aesthetic, are these reflections and cultural analyses, engaging the tensions between the acts of creating and somnolence of a consumerist society.

In a world where routinely sanitised analysis isn’t scarce, where art appreciation seems ceremonial rather than lived, there seems to be a prearranged lack of public debate about the role of contemporary art in socio-cultural cohesion.

But from an archival perspective, this art oriented writing is significant because it documents transitional moments in contemporary history, events articulated as mysteries inherited for future contemplation.

And as we observe how elitist art consumers are relying of simplistic and reductive analyses of African artistic expression, writers must, however, remain alert to cultural biases that inform art consumption and its effects on creative practices.

Whites love art that panders their own convictions and labour to ratify imperialist tastes driving the art world today, they cannot escape their euro-typical outlook that is sustained by their macabre and snobbish assumptions about black art.

Those common tropes of “the starving and tortured artist” are instrumental in gaining trust from artists who would otherwise never submit to the asset oriented market appreciation of their art.

Spelling a potential disaster for African art and its relevance to black collective memory, lies in the lack of deep thought around technique, compositions and motifs that are cultivated by artists working of different mediums.

Although the “art scene” employs concerted distractions and juvenile trends, the lack of art education and visual literacy among spectators often leaves them prey to curatorial “dumbing down” for purposes of palatability.

The confessional intensity of black art, the entanglements of black art and spiritual practice, encouraging the role of the recluse as mediator and all elements of introspective reflection must resonate in all writing about art, to counter the chasm between the observed and the imagined, when censorship erodes independence of artists and their work.

Approaching their practice as a social score, artists therefore face more backlash when their unfiltered opinions about social conditions rub the powers that be, wryly and uncomfortably.

And with the onslaught of modern social media and ChatGPT, authentic writing about art is becoming non-immersive and devoid of the spiritual dimensions imbued into each work.

In a political climate of continued division, where the multiculturalist dreams of a nation in denial are shredded on the alters of consumerism and commodification of art; the isolation and desperation it produces among artists leaves many with mental dysfunctions that imperils their continued influence on the future of artistic expression in South Africa.

I am therefore calling for the urgency to reclaim narratives that re-conceptualize black artistic output with critical intimacy, that functions and takes practicality at the intersection of art, theory and politics; literary works that pose new ways of engaging with emerging approaches emerging through creative expression beyond boundaries of specific disciplines.