African artists glorify poverty for white tourist appeal

If you arrived at the Johannesburg Art Gallery today hoping to see the celebration of national progress and African achievement, you would truly be very disappointed.
One of South Africa’s renowned visual artists, Kay Hassan, has mounted his latest exhibition titled Urbanation.

This makes it hold the promise of a rebirth, a renaissance, a new beginning, a rediscovery of ties that bind, nurturing a spirit of unity and building social cohesion, if you like.
In fact, it connotes how, if you are optimistic, the urbanisation phenomenon has contributed to the myth-making for nation-building where total strangers who came to Johannesburg pursuing richness and fame have found ties that bind, are together building a new nation. In this urban nation, strangers have transcended race, tribe, language, religion, culture and what-ever man-made barriers we can imagine, to emerge in an ‘urban-ation’ that is solidly African.

But there is no such. Instead, your spirit is deflated by the lack of change in how African artists, themselves, depict the human experience and material condition of indigenous people. It is time that highly gifted artists like Hassan changed the way they look at the African human experience and material condition. If they do that, the African human experience and material condition will change, too.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing inaccurate about Hassan’s obsession with and depiction of poverty. But much as this is accurate and truthful, it can be quiet depressing coming from an insightful and visionary African artist. This is because we look up to the likes of Hassan for prophecy and transformative truths, inspiring visual expression of the African urban experience. Urbanation, for me, is too much art that imitates life. The art is so much torn from the pages of life that there is more life than art. This is what makes the exhibition bleak, hopeless, frustrating for an African like me. This negative reflection of the African experience hits you right at the beginning.

At the entrance or beginning of the exhibition, you are confronted by a larger-than-life triumphalist archival picture of the shallowly-rooted victory of the apartheid regime.
It depicts the consequences of mass removal of Africans to make way for the Group Areas Act. It is an aerial picture of Meadowlands taken from white supremacist/superior position. It’s taken by someone who, obviously, is looking down on the African experience. What greets you is an image of a sprouting township punctuated by an unending series of match box houses huddled together in monotonous sameness.
Sophiatown, an integrated suburb which was an outward expression of, ironically, “urbanation” has been destroyed and defeated.

If you stretch your imagination, you could console yourself by saying this is the tragic story that Hassan is trying to tell. Yes, he could be saying: without the improvement in the material condition of the African majority or with the destruction of the soul of Sophiatown, there would be no new nation. Of course, there will be romanticists who promote that view about Hassan’s intentions as a politically conscious artist who holds compassion for his people.

But one cannot escape the awareness that much of the exhibition revolves around the African experience and the unchanging material condition of the indigenous people. This obsession with poverty, poverty and poverty, for me, seems to be the crown of thorns that weighs on my mind and head. You are bombarded with images of African suffering with only feeble attempt at projecting African determination, self-help and salvation through baptism, middle class home and jazz. I am not satisfied that an artist of Hassan’s stature and height is giving us these kind of images in the second decade of freedom.

This is not government speak but much, however little, has been done to transform the conditions of African people by the first African government in over 350 years. Of course, apologists for Hassan’s work will tell you that he is courageous to depict the poverty of African people under an African government. They say there is too much denial of the reality that continues to face the majority and Hassan is bringing it into the mainstream.

But is it true that this country is still The Dump piled up with rotten African hopes and aspirations and filled with vulture-like Africans who are rummaging for food, clothes and everything else? This is what is projected in a video installation of The Dump. Where is the hope, the resilience and the spiritual strength of people who refuse to be bludgeoned to the ground by self-pity, resignation, helplessness, poverty and hopelessness? The people who wake up very early to get what they can to make something out of nothing like the miners, squatter camp dwellers and scavengers?

I will understand when apologists for Hassan say that is captured and reflected in the exhibition. But I got the sense that the images portrayed and projected are constructed by a highly politicised artist whose downfall is that he is preoccupied with satisfying white tourist expectations of the image of Africa. In fact, it is disappointing to observe that an artist who is intuitively connected to the plight of his African people does not allow himself to be lifted by their power. Instead, Hassan limits the African experience and its material condition to poverty without taking into consideration or reflecting the spiritual determination and resilience of the African people. I am afraid that if we view the African experience through his lens, we inevitably reduce the image of Africa to a dumping ground.

In fact, the golden thread of thorns throughout the exhibition is an Africa where people are nothing more than cannon fodder for military dictatorships (installation with military music) nameless and faceless victims of corporate greed, consumerism and racial capitalism (Niggertives) or scavengers who not only scramble for Western toxic wastes but eat out of the same dump as vultures (The Dump). Walking through the exhibition, it pained me that I was gnawed by the suggestion that Hassan has internalised white racism and looks at the experiences of his people through the white prism.

I found myself agonising over this portrayal of Hillbrow, South Africa and the continent as a heap of poverty, squalor, filth, frustration, disillusionment and hopelessness. Could it be true that Africa’s visual artists, to satisfy international demands, are expected to give a one-dimensional view of the continent which confirms racist stereotypes and prejudices?
Could it be that Hassan has been forced by market forces to compromised commitment to African self-determination by living up to white tourist expectations? Some of us suspect that many African artists go out of their way to glamorise poverty to appeal not only to European expectations, but to fit into their aesthetics of what Africa represents.

What, exactly, does it take for an African artist to be a huge success in the so-called global village? Clearly, I expected Kay not only to be an artist who is committed to African self-determination but to be a creative intellectual who knows that freedom is more than the improvement of the material condition of the people.

Of course, much of what he depicts is what the majority of the people live daily. I was born in the circumstances of mass removal, myself, and grew up in poverty. But I find it a tragic reality that we have African artists who lack a revolutionary attitude to shatter the myth of what African poverty means. In fact, this image of a poor Africa is an invention of white European racist colonisers of the mind. It is for this reason that I would expect someone of Hassan’s caliber to intervene to recreate a new world where Africans are not just victims.

African artists should recreate an image that reveals that Africans are victors whose triumphant songs transcend their material condition. Yes, African artists should project a resilient people who not only have survived and defeated colonialism and apartheid but, with nothing but hope, continue to carry a country on the brink of self-destruction. It is time that we theorised Africa’s expectations of a Pan-Africanist and Black Consciousness artist who is characterised by clarity of thought and vision. Kay Hassan is such an artist.

Obviously, it is going to be a difficult and complex task that could leave some people confused because of the contradictions of the realities in contemporary Africa. I was socialised in the African world that Hassan captures in his exhibition. I have found myself looking for art in his portrayal of this grim life and I have found more life than art.
Urbanation is a reflection of a tragic reality I am intuitively connected with and … er, want to escape.

It fills me with horror that poverty has become a shrine to sacrifice the human experience of African existence. There is just too much obsession with poverty and nobody cares for the fact that people live here.

I guess I expected something that is transcendental; that would lift me up as an African who refuses to look at the African experience through eyes of pity or white BBC lenses.
Maybe the title conditioned me to see the triumph of the struggle, the emergence of a new nation rising, the nurturing of a spirit of national unity, reconciliation, the building of Nelson Mandela bridge and social cohesion that connects Johannesburg inner city to the exclusive white suburbs.

Also, it could be that I have become the jaded and blasé type, now. For instance, I have spent time waiting for the Ritual Crossing video installation to tell me what I don’t know or understand about Christianised Africans or the Africanisation of Christianity. Ultimately, I was not moved to see yet another image of Africans who place everything in the hands of God when God has placed their destiny and fate into their own hands.
Of course, there is that fleeting magical moment of recreation or rebirth in the bright, colorful clothes.

But I found myself asking: what is new, here? Where is the art? Yet there is something profound and complex about this particular moment. There is an element of magic that reveals that Christianity failed to conquer Africa. Instead, it has been fused with African spirituality and religion to give sense to the absurdity of urbanation. It is just that I was not convinced that it comes through without me looking for it.

Of course, Hassan is righteously committed to capturing and reflecting African Christianity in … er, very dangerous and risky conditions. Perhaps that is what reflects African self-assertion or self-definitive positive outlook.

Often, African artists find it difficult, very hard to “speak” in positive terms about the African experience. In fact, the so-called market forces, white sponsors and gallery owners demand that they give a one-dimensional view of the African experience. There is very little they can do as he who buys the paint brush paints the picture.

This is a very painful exhibition, for me, where the issues we depict and deal with are poverty, dehumanisation, degradation, escapist Christianisation, modern tribal wars, exploitation, betrayal of aspirations and hopes. In a very strange way, this negative way of looking at ourselves, as depicted by the Urbanation exhibition, seems to overwhelm us and makes it impossible for even artists to look for the good, better and best in the African experience.

Of course, I can understand, relate and identify with everything that Hassan has depicted: nostalgic jazz sounds, violence of boxing, the timelessness of oppression, hopelessness, our gloomy African experience and material condition, the madness, the exploited mine workers, the self-destructive inter-tribal wars over material resources.

But I want artists with a new language to “speak” the “black is beautiful” life story. There has been too much horror and cheap escapism associated with the African experience and material condition. Indeed, without taking anything from the factuality, accuracy, correctness and painful truthfulness of this exhibition, I expected something more. Perhaps I wanted to be spoilt and be allowed to forget African suffering for a few moments in the hallowed halls of a gallery.

I guess it is because I have always looked up to Hassan as one of Africa’s prophesying voices. Indeed, his own life is an example of a resilient and triumphant African spirit.
But the challenge of an African creative intellectual is to break the hegemonic modes of seeing, portraying and projecting the African experience and material condition as a horrible and degrading human condition. This is a white European created lie that has been repeated so often that it sounds like a truth. Without this, Africans like me have very little reason to come to galleries where we pretend to be tourists in a depressing reality that our people live every moment of their lives.

You must understand that our artists are our prophets. In fact, it the Hassans who should give us confidence, inspire hope and recreate the African experience in our own image without compromising the truth as they know and understand it.

“Urbanation,” for me, is a profound creative statement that urges us to rethink how we see and project ourselves. In its own way, it is an inspiring and challenging exhibition that forces me not only to examine my response to Africa as I know it but to encourage African artists to be critical of themselves.

I love its simple honesty and truth and I hate its pain, agony and reality. But I believe that if Hassan can change the way he looks at Africa, the continent and how it is seen will also change.

Think about that, my dear Kay.