The Art of Life in South Africa. Daniel Magaziner

Although most art historians would regret the comparison, their discipline has tended to share with the apartheid state the conviction that as black artists, individual creators approached their canvas, wood, or stone with a set of predictable concerns born of their supposed racial identity—to be political or not, to be ‘modern’ or ‘traditional.’ Who they were thought to be determines how we understand their work.⁴² In other words, artists do not live in these studies; instead, they inhabit social categories. Thus, scholarly examinations tend to “naturalize” rather than effectively “analyze” what happened when the artists found the time to create.⁴³

      Figure 1.6 “I Am Longing to Be One of Your Art Students,” Dominus Thembe, ARTTRA, no. 30, May 1975, 6

      The art historian Anitra Nettleton’s study of the famed midcentury artist Dumile Feni pushes back against this convention. She argues that art history needs a good dose of historical method—an insistence on context and chronology, a healthy skepticism toward received categories, including even the most basic assumption that Dumile is best understood, first and foremost, as an “African” artist. Rather, one should start with the latter category—artist—and see what comes from that.⁴⁴ Joshua Cohen has recently echoed this historicism in a new study of the work and life of Ernest Mancoba, who features prominently in all accounts of the pioneering generation of black South African artists. Whereas previous studies—including very recent work, such as the multivolume Visual Century—tended to presume Mancoba and others’ iconic status, Cohen noted the “need to examine African modern artists more as creative practitioners than as cultural icons.”⁴⁵ Attention to the practice of creativity demands that those interested in artists look intently at context. “I cannot, as an artist, work by the light of an historical principle,” John Berger’s Janos Lavin insisted, “I must work by the light of my senses—here and now.”⁴⁶ Berger penned this admonition in 1958, yet as a discipline, art history has tended to focus instead on historical principles—whether non-racialism or the struggle—against the actual practice of art.

      And practice is quite revealing. Ndaleni artists modeled clay; with their own students, they produced pots, bowls, and animals, wood-fired in a hole in the ground, in the twentieth century. Theirs was a multiracial environment, like so many art-producing spaces, as John Peffer has suggested. Surely, however, it is more meaningful to note the labor that went into each modeled object and from that to draw conclusions about the historical circumstances in which these artists lived and that structured their creative practice.⁴⁷ Artworks, produced in time, are “embodied meanings” that “have the style that belongs to that culture,” Arthur Danto explains.⁴⁸ So, too, did apartheid have a style beyond the relatively well-known aesthetics of its architecture and its opposition.⁴⁹ Against theories that opposed art to the rest of life, John Dewey compared works of art to mountain peaks, which “do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations.”⁵⁰ Art is made by people; it is therefore historical—the then-current world “in one of its manifest operations.” Rather than cast twentieth-century South African art practices as always oppositional, we might understand art as apartheid in one of its manifest operations. This is not to say that we understand art according to our received knowledge of what apartheid was—a set of laws and economic relationships, an oppressive system—but instead, that we focus on art as creative practice conditioned by what was possible then and there.

      This is the perspective assumed in The Art of Life in South Africa—that we need to move forward in time with historical subjects, to survey the terrain of the possible and watch the work that went into creating. What Berger wrote of painters is true of all artists: “When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him—these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject manner.”⁵¹ By concentrating intently on one school and one set of practitioners, I am able to access that fleeting awareness and watch as creative beings pick and choose from the possible.⁵²

      Even under apartheid, education was not simple indoctrination: to learn was to develop, to change. This was especially so if the subject was art. Ndaleni’s teachers worked for the apartheid state, but their frame of reference was global, stretching back to early twentieth-century debates about the nature of the creative human subject. Art objects are the outcomes of processes of analysis, selection, and embodiment, in material form. Art is the work of consciousness made manifest; creation is an act that crosses the threshold between the mind and the world. The artist creates by not merely inhabiting convention and context but also moving within it. Context is both “opportunity and restraint,” Berger writes, “by working and using the opportunity [the artist] becomes conscious of some of its limits [and] pushes against one or several of them. According to [the artist’s] character and historical situation, the result of his pushing varies from a barely discernible variation of a convention . . . to a more fully original discovery, a breakthrough.”⁵³ To see artists working through and with time is to open up new vistas about both art and thought in African history.

      Much self-conscious Africanist intellectual history has long centered on the concerns of the anticolonial imagination and the nation. But a significant substratum has considered the same issues that Berger assigned to the artist: what it means to inhabit and move in a particular time and place and how thinking beings manifest their thoughts in the physical, social world.⁵⁴ Recent Africanist scholarship from southern Africa to the Great Lakes and West Africa depicts thinkers as those charged with imagining and making real the community. This sort of thought is often about the fundamental task of getting by, whether in the maintenance and unfolding of political communities in precolonial Buganda; the bringing of rain to parched fields in Tanzania or highveld South Africa; or the maintenance of expansive, beloved families under a sheikh’s authority in colonial French West Africa.⁵⁵ Beyond the box of the nation, African intellectual history abounds with thinkers’ efforts to make life better by making the imagined real.

      Figure 1.7 Daphne Biyela (center) and classmates preparing wood for sculpture, 1978, photographer unknown, Ndaleni Scrapbook 4, with the permission of the CC

      To make the imagined real, through discipline and practice, is the regular work of art.⁵⁶ Asked to define the nature of art, Berger reflects on “the moment at which a piece of music begins.” Art emerges in the “incongruity of that moment, compared to the uncounted, unperceived silence which preceded it.”⁵⁷ Before the music starts, there was only time, undifferentiated and indistinguishable; then, suddenly, human invention crossed the threshold from the mind into history. The eruption of music lays bare the “distinction between the actual and the desirable.” It makes apparent the constant, invisible thinking that is always in the world. Art is thus not an isolated, esoteric concern but social practice, just as Africanist scholars have suggested that intellectual history is concerned not with esoterica but with the real historical demands of life.

      But art is not merely a part of history. To capture in form the style of an era is no superficial task; rather, artists tend a delicate crop, that of beauty and its cognates—related terms such as happiness, contentedness, reflection, and satisfaction. “Aesthetics prime the pump of life,” Michael Taussig argues. Ndaleni artists worked hard without adequate materials because they were convinced, as were many others both in South Africa and elsewhere, that “beauty is as much infrastructure as are highways and bridges.”⁵⁸ They understood that to create was to argue for beauty in the everyday, even under apartheid, even with cast-off paper or shoe polish. For them, to be an artist was not to revel in the distinction between thought and the rest of life; it was to attempt again and again “to define and make unnatural this distinction.”⁵⁹ We venerate works of art to the degree that we raise temples to their glory and charge admission merely to stand in their presence. But the social purpose of the