The

Pot Calling the Kettle Black In the first instance, I want to contextualise what I am about to say here. In March this year, the spring number (n 25) of the German magazine Texte zur Kunst published an article by Olu Oguibe enititled 'Bringing the Natives to Graz', a rather acerbic criticism of Peter Weibel's show 'Inclusion/Exclusion' held in Graz last year. The arrow of Oguibe's criticism finally touched me too, for Oguibe ended his piece with an attack on a round-table discussion held during the exhibition 'Don't Mess with Mister Inbetween: Fifteen Artists from South Africa', which I curated at Culturgest in Lisbon in 1996. Oguibe's criticism was particularly offensive to me because he neither attended the show, nor was he present at the round-table discussion: his attitude was informed by word of mouth, and seemed to indicate the camaraderie of a network or a club, with all the inclusion/exclusion that that implies. At around the same time, I began to receive the first E-mails in the polemic that has raged in the South African art world over the last few months, to which 'Grey Areas' is a response. It has been difficult for me, over this time, to tease out the precise chronology (though perhaps in cybertime, chronology is not really important!) of events/attacks/responses, but early on, I wrote to Candice Breitz in some way offering my support to her. In this first letter to Breitz, I sent her a copy of my own response to Oguibe's implicit attack on me. This response has now been published in Texte zur Kunst n 26, and I would like to include it here as an appendix, because I think it tangentially touches on some of the topics raised by the current debate. My initial response to Breitz was fuelled by the fact that I felt incensed by the extremely narrow notion of 'representation' that was being offered as the politically correct stance for South African artists today, and the hidden agendas implicit in the legitimating systems that policed the boundaries dividing the 'acceptable' from the 'unacceptable'. In 'Breitz/Geers in the Weekly Mail' (E-mail of 29 March 1997), Breitz questions the conflation of the idea of 'representation' with that of 'speaking on behalf of' a pertinent distinction. It seemed to me important to support this distinction, as its opposite implied a kind of ethnic and gender authoritarianism that narrowed down the possibilities of 'representation' to a risible paucity. Where were the limits of the kind of purism or fundamentalism that stipulated that the only legitimate voices were those of card-carrying members of a given gender/racial/class group? This whittled down the possible range of representational options to an absurdly impoverished minimum, an act of aesthetic, intellectual and even political reductionism. Contrariwise, I was well aware of the caution that had/has to be exercised in the representation and potential reification of any given 'Other'. This is a fraught area, and to it there are no

easy solutions or quick step-by-step recipes. It is a problem that must be addressed anew each and every time, in each and every representation. In the E-mails that followed, the fact that the intersection of various vectors and lines of force between gender politics and racial politics was being thrown up for grabs seemed to me to stake out an interesting and indeed crucial area of debate. It was particularly succinctly put in Olu Oguibe's critique of Minnette Vari's work, where he underlines the 'continued white licence to the black body', and particularly to the black female body, asking pertinently whether we must 'genderize, as it were, in order to polemicize'. My own 'allegiances' emerged and indeed keep emerging and being transformed as increasingly complex, 'grey areas' indeed. More concretely, however, in response to the crossfire of communications between the various actors in this 'drama', I was struck by the self-righteousness, a breast-beating, attention-seeking petulence whereby all players were thumping for attention. Power-lines drawn and re-drawn. A bunch of male curators dictating the norms, and many personal rivalries and ambitions wrapped up in apparently political talk. It was only fairly late in the day that I actually got to read Okwui Enwezor's piece 'Reframing the black subject: Ideology and fantasy in Contemporary South African Art' which had ignited the polemic. The piece threw me precisely because Enwezor's response was, for the most part, so cogent, so coherent, and because he was justified in so much of what he said. Upon reading this, it seemed to me that in effect, many of the artists were simply getting hot under the collar because their own work was under attack. And more: that getting indignant in this way was an attention-seeking strategy, a way of elbowing into the limelight at a time when, let us not forget, selections for the next Johannesburg Biennale were being made. In his analysis of the 'control of the black body' in South African art, Enwezor quite correctly points to the ways in which the colonial relationship sets up the repressed subject as mute and unable to represent him/herself. This is particularly or doubly true with regard to the representation of the black female body. It is what Robert J.C. Young succinctly terms 'white power: white desire.' Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1) has theorised this area at length, arguing that the subaltern woman, taken always as an object of knowledge by both colonial and indigenous rulers who are 'masculinist', is argued about and legislated for, but allowed no discursive position from which to speak for herself. The three artists who are subjected to the most stringent scrutiny by Enwezor are Pippa Skotnes, Lien Botha and Candice Breitz artists whose work otherwise has no affinity or similarity

whatsoever . Others are mentioned: Wayne Barker, Penny Siopis, Gunther Herbst. Minnette Vari is implicated, though she isn't personally mentioned. Piet Pienaar is (correctly) let off the hook, as is Willie Bester, who in what seems to be a complete lack of aesthetic or political judgement is held up as some sort of paragon of excellence and moral correctness. (Am I in some way misreading Enwezor?). I am less concerned with splitting hairs here than with general points. Indeed, Miscast, curated by Pippa Skotnes, was extremely ambitious, not uninteresting, but also highly problematic in ways underlined by Enwezor. Likewise, Candice Breitz's collaged grafts of white and black female bodies are doubtlessly well intentioned, but 'friezed by both pornographic and ethnographic desire' they invoke problems of spectacle without in any way problematising them; the are descriptive and simplistic, especially when compared to Hannah Hch's photomontages of 1919, which they quite obviously formally evoke. They are callow more than anything else. Be that as it may, her verbal arguments make a finer point. Minette Vari's splicing of images uses the notion of grafting so simplistically as to hardly register as a critique at all. Lien Botha's work is a case apart: she is obviously using images in the public domain in order to work through very bravely, I might add an extremely painful personal/collective history. Wayne Barker's irony cannot be overlooked: his work deals with a kind of white 'tourism' and the consumption of 'curios': without his snatched images of the spectacle of black ethnicity, his whole enterprise would make no sense at all. Then there are others, like William Kentridge, who brilliantly filters the experience of both landscape and the urban environment as the graph/map of history (and hence of colonial history) through layered narratives and personal experience. I am talking here about white artists who are trying in some way to work through their personal (and often collective) histories in relation to the complexities of South African politics and post- colonial discourse. Who are obviously constantly faced with the questions: what can I represent? And what language might I use? Does being white necessarily now mean not having a mandate to speak at all? My objections, then, with regard to both Enwezor and Oguibe, lie not with their arguments per se, but more with the implicit essentialism (racial and gender) that renders only members of given groups (class, racial, gender) as legitimate voices the reasons for which Enwezor champions Willie Bester or Lorna Simpson (not that Simpson isn't an interesting artist), or more problematically still, the reasons why Oguibe champions an artist like El Anatsui, simply, one imagines, for being an 'African', for his work looks like a second-grade imitation of early western modernists like Jacob Epstein or, at a push, Henry Moore. In a recent article in the magazine Third Text (2), Siona Wilson forges an analysis around the work of the English team Jo Spence and Terry Dennett, focussing particularly on the photograph entitled 'Colonization', which works ironically around questions of class, race and gender. Wilson

clearly underlines the complex meanings and mis-understandings generated by the term 'representation', focussing on an argument cogently put forth by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (see footnote 1). The two conceptions of the term 'represent' are mapped out by Spivak/ Wilson as 'speaking for' (for which the German word 'vertreten' is used as in politics, when a leader 'speaks for' the people) and 're-presentation' (for which the German word 'darstellen' is used, as in art and philosophy. Spivak's argument, in turn, is aimed at Foucault and, specifically, at Deleuze, whose "dismissal of the issue is predicated on his supposition that the theorist who 'speaks and acts' ('darstellen') cannot be the representative of ('vertreten') "those who act and struggle" (3). As I understand it, Spivak criticizes Deleuze for reinstating himself as the 'representative' as a theorist, and hence in the political sense, by establishing a complicity between political representation ('vertreten') and re- presentation ('darstellen') in the philosophic/ aesthetic sense of the term. There is no doubt that these two forms of 'representation' are easily conflatable, easily confounded. This is particularly, though not exclusively the case when the image is produced in and for the same system/regime that engenders the conditions it also represents (which, in effect, is NOT the case in the work of Breitz, Botha or Vari, for example). It nevertheless seems to me essential to tease out these two strands of the terms 'representation'. To think of representation as merely 'speaking for' is to reduce any form of artistic or literary expression to a univocity that diminishes the evocative and critical potential of any given work. It is to conflate art with ideology or with politics in the most brute and simplistic way. To police representation, stipulating rules as to who is permitted to 'represent' ('darstellen') what is to remove from a work of art all but its manifest content. Surely if post-modernism as a discourse has taught us anything, it is that to graft an image is not necessarily to 'speak for' that which is represented, but simply to re-contextualise it in ways which are more or less critical, more or less interesting. The fact of such grafting is in itself irrelevant, unless taken holistically, in conjunction with the manner in which this is done. In short, many of Enwezor's criticisms are justified, as indeed are Oguibe's. But the fact that these critics fall prey to a kind of fundamentalism that eradicates the right to all difference other than that condoned or ratified by themselves self-promoted as experts and legislators lands up flattening out the relevance of their arguments and looking increasingly like they are simply staking out areas in some kind of Monopoly game. No doubt, the production of images treads a narrow and dangerous path between two forms of 'representation', and that these two forms have constantly to be re-examined, re-negotiated. But isn't that where the interest lies? We

don't, surely, want to see a bland, uniform and boringly sanctioned form of State Art in South Africa do we? Here, then, as an appendix, is my response to Olu Oguibe's 'Bringing the Natives to Graz' (Texte zur Kunst, n 25, 1997) I read with great interest Olu Oguibe's article 'Bringing the Natives to Graz' in the March issue of Texte zur Kunst (n25). Not having attended the exhibition 'Inclusion/Exclusion' curated by Peter Weibel in Graz last year, I am in no position to comment on how Mr.Oguibe's argument relates to that exhibition itself. However, his article astutely brought up some of the important critical issues around the questions of post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity and racial identity that Weibel's show and many others around the globe over the past decade purportedly address. Mr. Oguibe's comment that 'post-colonialism and migration are in for Weibel in the same manner that electronic art was for him a short while ago. And he is not alone' points to the unfortunate fact that what for some people is a pressing issue (a life-issue as well as an intellectual one) for others becomes a fashion. And that when it comes to being a fashion victim, well, no-one is immune. The unprecedented power invested in the figure of the curator nowadays, allows for many of us in the art business to jump on the trendy bandwagon, and that doesn't exclude Mr. Oguibe himself. Also implicit in Mr. Oguibe's attack on those who use political issues to shape up their own CV's, is the more dubious notion that only a closed circle of initiates, gaining credibility through a self- regulating, self-approving and hence tautological system of legitimation (a club, in other words) is entitled to address such issues as post-colonialism, migration, and the 'Other' question. Following on his criticism of Peter Weibel, Mr. Oguibe notes that in the same week that Weibel gathered 'his natives' in Graz, 'another curator had assembled a panel in Lisbon in connection with a show of South African art, and the topic of the panel discussion was you guessed it colonialism and post-colonialism'. The exhibition I curated at Culturgest in Lisbon was entitled 'Don't Mess with Mister Inbetween', and it gathered fifteen artists from South Africa working around issues that in some way bridged a gap between the binary poles of rationalist (Cartesian) thinking. Not being of the school of believers that art is an illustration of ideology, I used this notion to provide a flexible framework for the show, rather than a rigid programme. It was, for me, a point of personal and intellectual

honesty not to take into account ratio systems or any form of ethnic or racial classification of the artists included in the exhibition. I am not sure what pedigree is, in terms of currently fashionalbe P.C. codes, required of a curator in order for him/her to be legitimised to include/exclude artists from an exhibition. I happen to be Caucasian, just as I happen to be female and Jewish: these things I cannot help. My assistant, Angela Ferreira, is a Portuguese/South African artist. I considered the fact I lived in South Africa for well over a decade, sufficient legitimation for an investment and involvement in such a project. The panel discussion that Mr. Oguibe refers to, was organised around a paper delivered by Penny Siopis, one of the artists in the exhibition, and, well you guessed it, the topic of the paper had nothing to do with post-colonialism. Its title was 'Domestic Affairs: Race and Gender in Contemporary South African Art'. The issues addressed were precisely those dealing with 'the persistence of racial violence against blacks in South African visual representation, issues of censorship and license to the black body' that Mr. Oguibe so authoritatively and condesendingly notes were not raised. Of course issues around post-colonialism came up: this was because the panel discussion was organised not only in order further to articulate issues related to South Africa (those 'crucial cultural and political questions now plaguing South Africa' which, through 'sheer political opportunism' I apparently failed to address) but rather also in order to raise questions relevant to Portugal's own post-colonial position in the light of the exhibition of the work of South African artists, and hence to generate some sort of discursive encounter between the two historical situations, that of South Africa and that of Portugal. This if it needs spelling out because it seemed important to remind ourselves of the politics of hosting certain types of exhibitions. But of course Mr. Oguibe could not be expected to know all this: he was, after all, not present at the panel discussion, nor did he attend the exhibition, and any information he had about the discussion could only have been relayed by personal sources, via word of mouth (presumably that of the 'Spaniard' he refers to in his article: and to set the record straight, I am not 'a Portuguese', I am a migrant in this country. And yes, there were two Portuguese people in the panel they too have opinions). Anyhow, if he had given himself the trouble to read the text in the catalogue to the exhibition, Mr. Oguibe would have noted that the 'post' of post-colonialism was posited as a vexed prefix, not within the closure of the sagital logic of a 'progress' myth, but rather as a problematised term, in relation to the equally problematic 'post' of 'post-modernism'. Mr. Oguibe's argument that 'South Africa, as we know, is not a post-colonial country any more than the United States is, and South African artists have no post-colonial experience' is predicated on a notion that the 'post' of 'post-colonial' is a prefix which simply denotes a

historical positioning within a temporal continuum. In the first instance, anyone remotely familiar with South Africa will know that the authoritarian regime which held South Africa within the stranglehold of apartheid, was always considered by the majority of the population to be one of 'settlers'. To split hairs and try and find distinction between 'settlers' and a colonial power (such as France or England, or indeed Portugal) might be an entertaining intellectual pastime; it seems to me, however, more fruitful to address colonialism both historically and, more broadly, as an attitude of mind. (What other meaning could the exhortation to 'decolonize our minds' have?) It is only the newness constantly and continuously claimed by the ideology of progress itself (implicit in a linear construction of history) that posits 'post-colonial' within the strait confines suggested by Mr. Oguibe ie. as that which comes 'after' colonialism. From the perspective of a Portuguese venue and a Portuguese public, addressing issues of 'post- colonialism' was of primordial interest. Given the generalised amnesia in this country to its own recent past in Africa, it seemed crucial to examine how the issues addressed by the exhibition 'Don't Mess with Inbetween' overlapped with unstated conflicts in Portuguese culture. Whether or not we succeeded is not for me to say; however, Mr. Oguibe's own absence from the event removes from him any mandate to comment upon it with any authority. The assertion that such debates are opportunistic appropriations and 'trivialisations of serious historial experience' must, of course, be given serious consideration. However, the claiming for themselves of such areas of debate by a self-promoting, self-congratulating group of buddies, is an attitude of arrogance that is incompatible with intellectual honesty. What 'personal gain' could I possible have achieved from 'exhibiting the natives' when, in Mr. Oguibe's rather narrow terms, many of those exhibited were not properly speaking 'natives'? 1) Gayatri C. Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Macmillan, 1988; also '|The Problem of Cultural Self- Representation' , interview between Gayatri C. Spivak and Walter Adamson in The Post Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. by Sarah Harasym, Routledge, 1990. 2) Siona Wilson, 'White Metonymy', Third Text, n 37, Winter 1996-7, pp 3-16 3) Ibid., p7

Ruth Rosengaten