live in twentieth-century South Africa was to know, as Arjun Appadurai counseled, that which we identify as “modernity” has always been “unevenly experienced.”29 Twentieth-century South Africa was as uneven and profoundly iniquitous a space as existed for much of the century; yet it was also, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, a “space of possibilities,” a place with limits defined by the “position taking” of those who lived there. Bourdieu assigned special authority to those who work within the possibility of time and space. History “presents itself to each agent as a space of possibilities, which is defined in the relationship between the structure of average chances of access to different positions . . . and the dispositions of each agent, the subjective basis of the perception and appreciation of objective chances.” Artists are Bourdieu’s exemplary agents. Through their “dispositions” and their choices, they work within, against, and through the possibility of their moment; creators create history, and in turn, they, as historical beings, are created by it.30
Bourdieu thus imagined the artist as someone who sifts through the possible, as time unfolds. This is reminiscent of Achille Mbembe’s clarification of African subjectivity “as time,” as unfolding and not complete.31 This is an interesting challenge to the intellectual historian. Most scholars of black South African intellectual history have tended to tell the stories of those great anticolonialists whose thoughts were always on the future. In this way, early nineteenth-century radical resistance is read as a rehearsal for the more rational, reasoned appeals that marked the early twentieth century, as well as the move toward revolution at the century’s midpoint.32 Put differently, if intellectual history is the history of “thinkers and concepts,” African intellectual history has long dwelled in histories of the future, not explications of a series of presents.33 My own work is notably guilty of this: in my first book, I studied dreams and strategies to promote changes yet to come, at the expense of a more finely tuned examination of creative responses for living then.34 The narrative of becoming predicted by the logic of colonial modernity is seductive, yet art students without supplies knew better. They knew that absent tempting narratives, they were living the uneven experience of contemporary life in an unequal world. By watching as they positioned themselves according to their dispositions, we might avoid the trap of “privileging the analytical over the lived.”35
This brings me back to Mbembe and the idea that subjectivities are fashioned from “everyday practices” in time, and thus that the strategies and conditions of a succession of presents are revealed through life histories. “African identity does not exist as a substance. It is constituted, in varying forms, through a series of practices,” Mbembe argues.36 Rarely were the quality and conditions of African identity more overdetermined than during juridical apartheid and the struggle against that system. Few places, therefore, might be as meaningfully explored for the practices that belied both a categorization of this sort and the conviction that art students’ lives were empty, mentally denuded existences. As with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Bengali bureaucrats, the circumstances of Ndaleni teachers’ lives were not of their own choosing, but these individuals still had “to find their livelihood” therein.37 In this way, the strategies of art students and teachers to maintain the integrity of their creative practice tell a story bigger than their relatively small community. Their kiln offers a story of existence-in-time that the art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu describes “not as a closed, historically and geographically situated phenomenon, but as a constellation of . . . strategies”—the potential multiplicity of life lived in moments.38 Time is not an inert medium through which trends and ideologies pass and are transmitted. Rather, time must be understood to be soil, always and everywhere awaiting an artist’s particular, unique seed.39
ART
It is necessary to extend the metaphor. No seed falls on neutral soil; atmospheric conditions always prevail. Artists always labor in dialogue—or contestation—with their surroundings, both material and intangible. South African art historians have long explored the ways in which black South African artists in particular practiced in conversation with their unfolding political realities. Art and politics were often one and were considered as such. Indeed, art history as a discipline has tended to wed black creativity to the story of protest and oppositional action. This was how some artists lived their lives and practiced their art, to be sure, yet it plays only that single, popular note.40 Art historians have tended to focus on art as necessarily oppositional even when it was not articulated as such. Under the art historical gaze, every meeting of white and black artists is recast as a “non-racial aesthetic practice,” each work displayed to a primarily white audience, “a firm line of communication across the iniquitously effective racial divide which kept South Africans apart.”41 Works of art are subject to interpretation; and artists’ lives have been hitched to narratives many artists would not have recognized. 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.”
