Another Fake Obituary
In the first of a regular series of reports from South Africa for frieze.com, Sean O'Toole looks at the troubled state of publishing and art criticism
The diagnosis is fatal: art criticism is done for. Hal Foster and Dave Hickey have variously heralded its decline in the US while in South Africa, a 14-hour inter-continental flight south from New York, the withering stature of local art criticism has become a repeat liturgy at various public forums.
‘We don’t have a culture of criticism, just a tradition of bitching,’ intoned poet Lesego Rampolokeng during a fractious exchange at a visual arts conference held in Cape Town some three years ago. Often quoted, his assertion has now acquired the status of a definitive pronouncement.
It being a slow death, however, the subject does invite running commentary. In late March, writing in his weekly Sunday Times column, respected culture critic Barry Ronge quipped: ‘While I was paging through old books of film, drama and literary criticism, I was struck by how namby-pamby critical writing has become. It is so politically correct and so evasive when it comes to expressing negative opinions that it has lost much of its bite.’
This and other similarly glum diagnoses prompt an inevitable question: What happened between now and the halcyon years of the late 1990s?
Addressing an audience at London’s Courtauld Institute in November 1996, two years after South Africa’s transition to democratic rule, expatriate Nigerian intellectual Olu Oguibe expressed great admiration for southern Africa’s vibrant critical culture: ‘Despite lingering difficulties […] South Africa, and to an understandably less extent Zimbabwe, today stand at the very forefront of art criticism in Africa.’ The difference a decade makes.
Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is now a wreck, its chief export – cocksure posturing by its political leadership aside – a bamboozled humanity seeking refuge elsewhere. It is estimated that three million Zimbabweans now live in South Africa, a country itself negotiating a deeply troubled phase in its short democratic history. But this is not a contemporary history lesson.
In his keynote speech at the International Association of Art Critics Conference, Oguibe remarked: ‘In theory, South Africa has the greatest potentials today of nurturing an effervescent and vigorous critical establishment, one that serves the return of confidence to its artists, and the necessary widening of public expectation and understanding of art.’ Of course, he did hinge his proposition on a rider – ‘in theory’. So what’s happening in practice then?
Quite a lot actually. Despite the decline of vigorous art criticism in the mainstream press, the country has in recent years seen the rise of a vibrant art publishing industry. An array of new print and online magazines asides, there has also been a boom in the publication of monographs, catalogues, sales brochures and other bits of printed art ephemera. Much of this output is, however, promotional, carefully annotated essays notwithstanding.
Despite Africa’s impressive canon of literary criticism, nurtured in publications such as Drum (South Africa), Black Orpheus (Nigeria) and Transition (Uganda), it seems that visual art publications, in particular, are unable to similarly function as ‘a blind man’s stick’ – a prescription for a good literary magazine offered by Transition’s founding editor, Rajat Neogy.
The reasons are diverse. Take Transition: first published in 1961, in the heyday of Africa’s postcolonial optimism, after Uganda’s slide into chaos it moved to Ghana, and when things went belly up there, was delivered into the hands of Nigerian literary icon Wole Soyinka. Aware of the contradictions (read editorial impositions) of being largely dependent on grants from foreign foundations and associations, he eventually decided to let Transition brave it alone. The publication tanked in 1976. Nearly two decades later, Henry Louis Gates Jr, an early contributor, revived the magazine – it is now based in Massachusetts, published by Duke University Press.
While still a vital publication, institutional alignment and the exigencies of academic publishing tend to bring with them pronounced downsides. Geoff Dyer, in his quixotic biography of D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (1999), elegantly summarises the problem: ‘Now, criticism is an integral part of the literary tradition and academics can sometimes write excellent works of criticism but these are exceptional.’ It is an insight true of many scholarly publications, including NKA, a key African visual arts journal founded by Okwui Enwezor and currently edited by Salah Hassan (in an institutional capacity).
The increasing prominence of a private dealer market, particularly in South Africa, has also contributed its share of problems. Take the quarterly print magazine, Art South Africa, which I have edited for the past four years. On his recent visit to South Africa, curator Simon Njami, one of the founding editors of Revue Noire, alongside NKA a seminal pan-African art journal, highlighted Art South Africa’s curious publishing arrangement: the publisher also owns a commercial gallery.
Messy? Well, yes. But then again even South Africa’s mainstream print media, which has increasingly had to defend its role in the face of government criticisms, has struggled with the real politick of art patronage and criticism. When Business Day, a prominent daily, criticised murdered mining mogul turned art impresario Brett Kebble, he pulled the plug on his sponsorship of a quarterly art review published by the paper. Even online magazine ArtThrob, arguably the country’s longest running and most sustained resource on contemporary art, has long relied on the patronage of one private dealer in particular to ensure its survival. Weirder still, private galleries are increasingly writing – often with great sophistication and insight, it should be said – art narratives and histories that were once the exclusive reserve of public institutions and academic publishing houses.
This is not to excuse the puzzling circumstances under which art criticism is produced in South Africa; rather, my intention is to highlight the curious conditions underpinning its hesitant public address. Recognising the inevitability of the market, wished for or not, Njami, in an essay published in the catalogue for the inaugural Joburg Art Fair, writes: ‘We simply have to face up to the fact that today it has become difficult to draw a clear divide between the dealers and art historians or critics seeing that some dealers display the qualities often ascribed to critics.’
The situation is not peculiar to African criticism though. In a recent interview with The Believer
Ironically, it wasn’t AIDS – post-apartheid South Africa’s biggest catastrophe – that wiped out a generation of competent critics. Rather it was economics and the country’s intensely parochial art scene in which two cities dominate the local art narrative. Ivor Powell, widely regarded as South Africa’s finest contemporary critic, eventually ditched art reviewing for hard news (and infamy, following his recent arrest); same too with Hazel Friedman. Kendell Geers, who riled many with his partisan views during the 1990s, finally found profit in his frustratingly compelling art production. While an energetic and racially diverse grouping of younger critics have filled the tangible vacuum for informed criticism, the style and content of current writing out of South Africa is generally anaemic. Pose, it seems, is more important than poise for many.
Strangely, while somehow agreeing with the doomsayers I also vigorously disagree with them. Much of the fuss about the death of the critic, in South Africa as elsewhere, is insincere; what is really being mourned in these fake obituaries is the loss of importance. For younger writers confronting the glittering, gated enclosure that is contemporary art, wishing to be a part of its pageantry, this insight is vital. Raymond Chandler put it more bluntly: ‘Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.’
Sean O'Toole