Are Collectors Complicit In Erasure Of Black Art?

I am often reminded of Nikolai Gogol’s grotesquely witty novel, DEAD SOULS,  
Chichikov is an interestingly absurd character who effectively comes into a provincial town looking to buy property in the form of names of dead peasants, whom by some administrative oversight were still legitimate entities on formal records.  

His enterprise appears, to me at least, to resemble a form of “purchasing souls of  
those who are dead”, much like what archeologists, fossil collectors, treasure  
hunters (liberators of lost antiquities) and art collectors do with the creative works of  
deceased people. 

Accumulation of cultural artefacts and proprietization of artworks has long been a  
niche for select cabals within colonial families and they continue to have a stranglehold on the contemporary art landscape, even discarding bodies, persons denuded of agency, depicted in various artworks ranging from photographs to portraiture.  

There are vast collections acquired through scrupulous means, during wars as pillaged booty stolen by soldiers in unsanctioned wars ravaging the world’s heritage sites.  

There are wanton destruction campaigns of monumental historical ruins disguised  
as acts of religious valour and conviction, masking illicit trades in antiquities which  
will forever plague a humanity that commodifies even memory. 

Therefore, there is no absolution to white cultural privilege that black poor artists  
can offer, and there is no obligation for such atonement for white people’s sudden  
spurs of conscience when it comes to restitution of stolen artworks and erased  
archives, as well as hidden cultural items. 

There will remain a validated and entrenched mistrust when it comes to black  
communities opening their vaults of memory to any academic and curious collector  
intent on creating archives for future generations, based on past experiences.  

For most families, parting with images of their forebears, as well as those often associated with religions rituals, marriages; and those contested portraits of black lives is akin to dislodging oneself from their spiritual source. 

And their conflicted sentiments towards donating these revered artefacts for preservationist projects has never benefitted their current historical standing. 

And while attempts are being made by varied institutions, not only to repatriate but to redress ideological misnomers employed to discredit these valued items, western preservation institutions require vast non-exploitative resources from those  
communities to which the items belong.

These institutions will require black counter-critical analysis of contemporary artistic  
output, to provide a relational understanding grounded not in the illusion of objectivity but practices of questioning and authenticating memory and its sources. 

Patronising Black Artists To Oblivion? 

When artistic glory calcifies into obligation to market-success demands; the  
incompatibility between genuine art and kitsch expressionistic work is blurred; and  
the creation of artistic works is transformed into regurgitative production of stylised  
replicas.

The hollowness and fragility of reputation enjoyed by a few in the art world tempts  
artists of colour towards unacknowledged corruptibility, a form of decay that affects  
even the most benevolent of makers and collectors of black art. 

Replicating their originality for commerciality, sanitising their rebellious art to  
conform to the chaotically profitable provenance, these artists often exhaust  
themselves before their pinnacle, when the inevitable disappointment inches on  
their transitory fruits of fame.  

As though patrons are vying to subdue all black artists into a permanence of  
banality, the subtle tyranny of critics disguised as learned opinions often leaves our  
artists overwhelmed by the entire sham of reputations that are established and  
venerated. 

No major museum or gallery in South Africa, with their bureaucracies of value, have  
gone beyond commodification of artistic output by artists and people of colour; and  
this also impacts on the dynamics of reciprocity between institutions and  
communities.  

Most of these art institutions’ hierarchies of cultural inertia can’t even humanise the  
inhumane ornamentation of people of colour (Ncome Museum as an example), and the objectification that still continues to be exploited by internationalist collectors who continue to desecrate art that is endowed a social function. 

Exhibitions have become orgies of gossip and congratulatory spaces for inflated egos, where artists make pragmatic decisions at distinct phases of their lives, which in turn affect their future career prospects. 

From the curatorial compromises that intrude throughout their developing oeuvre, to the curiorization many succumb to for sales, undoubtedly these transactions taint the innocence that carries the spirit of their artistic endeavour. 

These artists become complicit in a system that demeans their craft, shifting alliances and resentments, blurring the line between appropriation and plagiarism; while building a legacy that will represent a collective black experience from their own personal anguish.

Retired corporate moguls establish galleries for wives and trusts that spend millions on acquisitions, mansion walls covered with predominantly white artists and their orbiting acquaintances; forging a system where works decanted in hatcheries of white privilege are capital business.  

And having received different responses to their work, many black artists have begun to reject comfort and expectations, freeing themselves to create beyond the silenced rage of consumer-driven exploitation and expectations. 

*** 

In this digital age when social media algorithms have spurred a surge in the  
proliferation of artistic content that verges on artificiality, the question is even more  
pertinent.  

The compulsion for exposure and audiences have nudged artists towards a stream of styles condensed into pictorial wonders that flood timelines like gallery isles, yet many of these artistic masterful works are regurgitated replicas of what the art world has been engineered to appreciate.  

Then one wonders if the art is being produced for art’s sake or motives driven by monetisation prospects patronised by technocratic agents; or is today’s art being  
produced by artificial agents through prompts that scale human sensibilities down to predictable aesthetics.  

When creativity has been tainted by greed it has to re-orient and test its elasticity against social institutions, but this process is in itself a transformative and degenerative to a degree, as quality is often forsaken for quantity. 

But can black artists afford to overlook these persistent urges to produce for an audience  
disguised as bits and digital avatars on computer screens?

On Memories

Like weavers of time eroding  
We ride storms into an unknown each day 
Ever longing to give for 
Those that wrestled with demons and lost 

*** 

Whatever inherited memories are haunting our generation, they are “a contested space” where in stark contrast to the architecture of dreams, are created structures determining what we recall and how we recall it.  

The political and cultural - as unstable agents of memory; are constantly reassembled and disassembled to orient oneself to the tattered reproductions of revered moments and occurrences.  

But memory is both a fool and miser, a jester who conjures objects within a vacuum  
of meaning.  

And travelling like gossip, memory metabolises into an organic entity that is sensed and tasted, seen and heard in hallucinatory chambers of our minds. 

Objects we carry from one place to another, possessed with our souls and charged with our collective emotions and memories; like fragments of what is left behind, they anchor our lives’ memories and their disorienting transformations sparked by dislocations from familiar environments.  

And as mobility continues to shape our living conditions and environments, it also affects our relationships with objects we embed with worth determined by experiences and attachments. 

These objets can bear traces of decay, their eroded beauty generating a newer shifting resonance with memories fading; but still these objects are themselves weavers of times and we forever interact with it through memories continually born. 

In these objects and their surfaces, textures and hues, we find documented days  
and years of memories of those innumerable hands that grasped and used them. 

Into the abyss of dis-remembrance though memories erode and deteriorate, often  
these object outlive those who stored and devoted memories into them; and when  
decay is not resisted beauty looms, when the gravity of memory obeys time’s ravages there rises imperfect yet marvellous reflections that are not flaws by news ways of being. 

Memory mutates, and circulates within bodies, a body that is given being by other bodies; it’s always flirting with the sacred suspended between the living the dead. And yet can memory exists without words formulated to conjure their meanings? 

In my inexhaustible fascination with how memory takes a vantage point within a  
complex assortment of recollections, my video art weaves a veritable assembly of  
ideological commentary that are culturally layered yet rooted in locales of black  
experiences. 

And as places become locations, bodies become information and informants -  
memory becomes resource for exploitation; and I therefore use video art is the allegorical intervention for filling the prevailing blindspots of our socially collective memory. 

And art, like a promise, is the responsibility taken for that which doesn’t exist, and  
this promise is held to be transformed yet preserved like bonds and traces of commitments to be upheld. 

Through art we forge practices of mourning that sharpen our pain also render monuments to events experienced in transience; yet all beings recall and like promises that bind us to the unknown, so does memory. 

***

 

Tuckshop Stories - Narratives From The Township

South Africa is gripped by anti-immigrant sentiments that have resulted in various  
acts of xenophobic impunity against many foreign nationals in recent months.  

Commonly held reasons for these tension are said to stem from disproportionate numbers of foreign owned businesses that are found in townships.  

These grievances are further exacerbated by the dire economic conditions faced by many black South Africans who feel betrayed by their government that has seemingly allowed an influx of illegal immigrants to run rampant on local streets as organised criminal cartels or inform workers. 

 
But are all the stories of foreigners being scrupulous business people and criminals  
escaping justice, validated by facts?  

This documentary delves into stories of foreign tuck-shop operators, asking whether their lived experiences translate into the tale of economic exploitation that has been preached by anti-immigrant movements.  

And this is the first in an episodic series of conversations with various tuck-shop   operators, with the continued effort to document more as time progresses. 

Filmed By 
Paul Zisiwe 

Edited By 
Khahliso Matela 

Production Manager  
Catherine Mthembu 

Featuring 
Ashanti “Abram” Mishumo 
Simon Mantlathi 
Nichola Mohoje 

*** 

NOTE OF REQUEST 

Over the past year, I have produced four documentary films that address the service  
delivery concerns of my home community of Kokosi, and these films are passion  
projects created with an old and failing camera with no professional sound or  
lighting equipment.  

I continue to be confronted by activists and community members with a variety of  
social issues to tackle, and as a documentarian who knows the importance of  
silenced voices, I selflessly pursue these filming excursions without any financial  
support, working with the unreliable equipment at hand. 

It is in this light that EXT Lab Media requests any equipment donations from entities  
who are touched by the work done thus far, for the continued crafting of narratives rooted in lived experience of township based communities. 

To offer any assistance, please feel free to contact the filmmaker at  
tjobolo.khahliso@gmail.com 

Kind regards, 

Paul Khahliso Matela Zisiwe 
Filmmaker/Writer 
http://anirrationaldiary.blogspot.com

On That Rooted Animal Self

In our fictitiously observed hierarchy of living beings, animals and plants have been  
relegated to the bottom rungs of emotional intelligence; this misnomer has  
characterised Man’s disregard, fear and often disdain of the encroachments of  
nature as embodied in these living beings. 

Biologists have proposed that flora birthed fauna in the aftermath of an evolving  
natural life; and whether animals birthed man is no longer a disputed question.  

But there’s an ever growing chasm between man and the natural worlds, an  
alienation that is transcendent and destructive to both in terms of longevity on this  
planet. 

Although the word “culture”, taken from the Latin “colore” has much to do with  
cultivating the soil, perchance it could impugn that the self is cultivated by the soil;  
this cultivation also applies to humans as products of the earth.  

Yet humanity has not become a companion of the earth; inversely humanity has  
rather become a nemesis to all living beings. 

There was another theory that postulated that the plants and animals decided to  
never speak to humankind at some mythic point in time; to forever keep an  
unvoiced life wrapped in a resounding silence and mystery. 

And considering that humanity is a species that does not fit best, can any moral  
definitions and ethics proposed by humanity extend beyond humans themselves,  
and to the whole of reality?  

Can mankind discard the seductive dream of humanity being the summit of a  
metaphorical Mount Insurmountable? 

Is it because we cannot relate tot the sensuous and material presence of plants,  
animals, insects, bacteria and other forms of conscious entities that we find  
ourselves relegated to being mere observers of this indifferent reality around us? 

And what happens when groundbreaking botanical researches challenge notions of  
human exceptionalism, suggesting that there are trillions if not more of other  
consciousnesses thriving across the planet, although threatened by humanity’s  
destructive penchant for territory and resources? 

As humanity, our inner harmony is expressed through innocences of petals and  
branches, in forests of complexity do we find the lessons in the cosmic and etheric,  
like mirror we reflect each other within the pond of time we share.

And when reason can’t prevail on the murky surfaces of these ethical swamps; only  
attuned poets would be able to hear the hymns of flowers and streams, carried on  
winds directed by the earth’s dance around the sun. 

These artists would reference metaphors of plants in the act of blooming, or decay;  
as plants remain true predecessor of animal life on this planet we call home.  

This way, these poets who write or paint about blossoms and petals, streams and  
silent forests, they interest me most, because they cultivate a culture of  
companionship (within humanity as earth’s creation) with all of reality.  

Their often striking depiction of nature, the composed fauna and flora populating  
this planet seek passage into our sacred recollections of the divine spirit imbued  
each plant and animal against the mirages of technocratic worldview worshipped by  
mankind. 

Scents of wild flowers in spring carry nostalgic recollections of varied textures and  
temperaments; yet in these scents mankind has embedded coded hints of joys,  
sorrows or perhaps blood on petals shed during wars long lost between nations and  
kin. 

Mythic creatures and hybrid animals that populate most literary worlds; these divine  
bodies unbound by earthly limitations chiseled in man’s yearnings, are alive without  
any source or fountain of their longevity. 

And if mankind copied nature as a strategy for inclusion within the greater scheme  
of life’s mystery, man might begin to resemble them in sincere innocence and their  
intricate and evolving harmonic relationship all other beings on the planet. 

Mekhukhung - A Place Of Dreams

 

Mekhukhung, is a Sesotho word coined to describe residential areas constructed with corrugated zinc plates or wooden planks; they are squatter camps where many township residents begin their peri-urban experiences and social upward mobility.
 

Yet, most squatter camps appear to have an inter-generational history, a story that is carried forward by younger generations grappling with life in a place designed for stagnation and social dissolution.

99 is one such place, characterised by child-headed households, young man joining gangs and girls prostituting themselves for a meal or a ride on the gravy train of mine-worker wages or a hit from pimps slowly gaining traction in our townships.
 

Here, young people still dream in spite of the squalor and the dreaded drug infestation that makes animals of their peers, they resolve to change their worldview for a better life deprived their parents and grandparents.
 

And faced with the false promise that education under democracy means success,these youths are confronting an uncertain future premised on lack of opportunities in a country still grappling with the legacies of economic inequality and exclusion.
 

This is their story shackled in cold shacks of 99, spoken with words sober and crafted by talent and long-suffering; this is a story of how in the midst of depravity and decay, small flowers can crack the sewage clogged soil and bloom through concrete slabs.

Director
Paul Zisiwe

Editor
Khahliso Matela

Production Manager
Mbalenhle Dlamini

Music
Vuyisile Billy and Monday Mthembu

Featuring
Mondli Mthembu
Sanele Masangwane
Sonwabile Pekula
Lucky Maloka