Cultural Globalization: Are South African Artists Riding the Wave?

Nicholas Hlobo is Xhosa. He was born in 1975 in the Western Cape province of South Africa. After school, Hlobo went to work at a local cement factory to make a living. Hlobo grew up to be a man proud of his cultural heritage and his Xhosa identity. He kept the reality of his background close at heart everywhere he went. After working at the cement factory for two and a half years Hlobo decided to enrol for a degree at Wits Technikon in Johannesburg. He started creating sculptures that spoke of his childhood, his Xhosa identity and his experiences as a young man in an urban city. Today, Hlobo – also publically and proudly homosexual - sips champagne in art galleries across the globe, looking on patiently as crowds of international art buyers, sellers, collectors admire his work and bathe him with compliments. Galleries in Oslo, Boston, Sydney, New York and Guangzhou (China) – to mention only a few – have all taken honour in representing Hlobo’s work. Hlobo’s life is the personification of the effects of cultural globalization. His art works explain why.

Nicholas Hlobo, 2008 at Akris Gallery, Newbury Street. 

Ingubo Yesizwe, is a work Hlobo first exhibited in 2008. It takes up the surface of an entire exhibit area, hanging from the wall by a narrow strip of material which then protrudes unashamedly across the gallery space as the thin material cord gives birth to a giant, bulgy lump - a seemingly slaughtered body of rubber, leather and pieces of ribbon – spilling its guts across the gallery floor and ending in a thin slither of material that splatters into the opposite corner of the room like a ooze of body fluid. To Hlobo, Ingubo Yesizwe carries an array of metaphoric meaning: First and foremost that of a slaughtered cow – an animal of both traditional as well as socio-economic significance to the Xhosa culture, hence his use of leather; Hlobo’s inclusion of rubber, in return, represents the urban and the industrial - both very relevant aspects to his current life where he travels from one big city to the next as well as the inner city of Johannesburg where he is currently resides and as opposed to his life back home in the Western Cape; Rubber, however, is also a material Hlobo connects to sexuality, sexual toys and condoms. Because of traditional Xhosa culture’s antagonism towards homosexuality, in this art piece Hlobo tries to marry these two divergences within his artwork as a symbolic representation of himself.

This idea of escaping yet clinging on to background, tradition and past is also evident in the way this artwork gets transferred to and from locations. Stored and transported in segments – once it reaches the gallery – these separate segments are zipped-up together, stuffed and draped into its form of display. This reconstruction of the piece calls to mind the memoirs of ‘past journeys, of pain...[and]pleasure’, but it also celebrates the ability to transform and to adapt – a human capacity made compulsory by the globalized world.

Art Work by Nicholas Hlobo, Title: Ingubo Yesizwe, 2008

Ingubo Yesizwe – as is true for the majority of Hlobo’s other works – is clearly aimed at creating a conversation between past and present, traditional and modern, local and global culture. One could argue that – with the onset of cultural globalization - there emerged a question of a discrepancy within the South African as well as the wider African art world: Should we reassert our cultural, geographical identities in our art works as a way of showing our devotion to it and our pride for it?; Or rather break away from tradition and our past and disconnect our cultural and geographical identities from our identities as artists? Some lean towards the latter, arguing that their geographical origins as South Africans is not all that define them. They have other thoughts, concerns, needs and opinions that require a voice and that have very little to do with their South African or African identities. These artist then carries on to argue that the fact that they are South African, like Hlobo, should not overshadow their work or detract attention from the original sober or liberated themes or their art works or deny it its need to be viewed in its own right. This discrepancy poses the question: What is art? Aesthetic proclamation of cultural reclamation?

There might not be any ‘correct’ or valid answer to this question. The Western perception – which automatically has dominated the global perception - of what art is today, is dramatically different from what has traditionally been seen as ‘art’ in Africa. Keeping in mind that originally the West shared Africa’s idea of what ‘art’ might be, with the onset of modernity that idea changed and became what ‘art’ is to the West today. ‘Art’ according to the Western and thus global definition, it could be argued, is a object created with the following three leading aims in mind: Firstly to astonish its audience with is unchallengeable aesthetic beauty, through its use of colour, shape, line, its level of realism, impressionism or abstraction and so forth; Or secondly, profit making – not only for the gallery but also for the artist whom it represents as well as for the future rise in value of that art piece; And last but not the least, as a platform of expression of socio-political points of view, voicing social or political protégés and creating awareness within society of certain social confrontations, exploitations and misperceptions. An example of the latter could be feminist paintings and embroidering flowing from feminist movements in the 1960, or Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, in reaction to the infiltration and consumerism in the West. Ultimately, the Western perception of ‘art’, is that of an object that is suited for ‘the white cube’, or the art gallery – where the crème of society find a place to show off their expensive attire, voice their ‘intellectual’ commentary and spend their money – and therefore of objects of aesthetic proclamation.

‘Art’, in the traditional African sense, is largely removed from this perception. Here, ‘art’  - as was also true for the traditional Western definition of art before Modernity - are objects that were erected with two leading aims in mind: For everyday use or reasons of practicality - such as ceramics, pottery, weaved mats and baskets, etcetera; Or as forms of culturally or symbolically significant objects such as beaded ornaments, sculptures, masks, paintings and costumes. According to this definition audiences, profit and political or social agenda’s are all entirely irrelevant.

Ga Tribe Coffins, Ghana

The west has long confused African objects of real cultural value and traditional significance as objects of aesthetic proclamation. Sculptures, masks, costumes, paintings, shrines and many more have been recruited, bought, exhibited, auctioned or sold as objects that were erected with the sole aim of being ‘art’, to be exhibited within a gallery and to be sold to a potential buyer.  Most of these objects however were never erected for this purpose and were thus misunderstood and misrepresented by Western art rhetoric. Once these African cultural objects entered Western art spheres they became entirely disconnected from their original intents and meanings. A man from Ghana, for example, who makes coffins shaped like cars, shoes, Coca-Cola bottles or fish, never made these coffins with the aim of aesthetic recognition, to be exhibited in a gallery or to be sold for a fortune. His coffins – now simply dubbed ‘Funerary Art’ by western art critiques, were originally intended to be cultural objects, carriers of spiritual value and cultural significance for the families who commissioned that coffin and was meant to transfer the deceased to afterlife in a way that he or she would have been most likely to be remembered – as a taxi driver, hence the car-shaped coffin, or as a fisherman, hence the coffin shaped like a fish. These coffins, to both the ‘artist’ and his community, is seen as symbolic gestures of how they will remember their loved ones and what their loved ones resembled in their lives. But, place these coffins in a gallery and put a price on it – and a world of definitions, aesthetic pleasures and theories can be created around it that totally overwrites it original intent. ‘This’, the curator might maintain, ‘is African art.’

Because so much of the latter has been exhibited and explained through the terms of the former definition of art, a lot of African art has been decontextualized, ripped from its original meaning, misunderstood and devalued. African art’s first introduction to the ‘globalized’ art world has thus been a merciless, one sided and – once again – subordinate experience of which it is, too this day, trying to recover from. South African art critic, Amy Halliday’s, captures this uneasy relationship between African art and cultural globalization in stating that contemporary art from the African continent is “often either excluded from, or uncomfortably assimilated into, an overarching Western narrative”.

This explains why so many African artists have turned their backs on Western art markets and attempted to create a body of literature in which they could articulate the meaning and symbolism of their work themselves rather than it being explained through Western or global points of view. Hlobo’s celebration of Xhosa culture and tradition in his works is evident of form of cultural reclamation found in so many other contemporary art works. Cultural reclamation thus becomes a tool with wish local artist can claim back the right of meaning-making and definitions attached to their works.

Art Work by Zanele Muholi, Title: Being Series, 2007

Other local South African artists, have done the opposite. Being frustrated with the limitations – not only in terms of capacity and opportunity, but also culturally – of the local South African art market, they have decided to turn their focus more towards the global art market. Artists of this kind often have little choice but to expand their markets to international fronts. The reason for this is that their South African audience has on numerous occasions proved to be ill-prepared for the controversiality, unconventionality and the liberal mind-set represent in their work and therefore lacks the capacity for expression their art requires. Tradition and culture still often predominate South African art audience’s interest and critique. And recurrent reference to homosexuality in Hlobo’s works also stands as vulnerable target to the cultural limitations of the local South African art scene. This became evident in the recent local reaction to South African artist Zanele Muholi’s work. Muholi is a lesbian portraitist. An entire collection of her photograph featuring powerful images of black lesbians, guys, transsexuals and biosexuals were stolen from her home earlier this year. The robbery was said to have been rooted in homophobic extremism. In march 2010 South Africa’s former Arts and Culture minister, Lulu Xingwana, was quoted as calling Muholi’s photographs of nude lesbians ‘immoral’ and ‘against nation-building’.

Zanele Muholi, Faces and Phases Series, 2007

It is therefore comprehensible that so many South African artists have focussed their attention on the global market, for that is the only arena in which all shackles on expression are removed and where the more controversial and the more off-beat, the more successful an artist is seen to be.  Art is ultimately form of expression and within a democracy no one person or clause should be allowed to put a leash on that which can be expressed and made public in art. Freedom of speech goes further than media and politics. It also extends to art. 

Hlobo’s work, it could be argued, represents – as do so many other contemporary local art works - this push-and-pull between holding on to the past and giving into the future. Yet, it has to be said that - even though on the one hand of Hlobo’s work strongly clings on to his traditional Xhosa background - the way in which he expresses this relationship is extremely modern and intensely abstract.  It is - unlike so many other contemporary local art works - in the way that his work is not only erected in the name of tradition, but also – and unmistakably so - in the name of aesthetic beauty. And it is exactly this perfect balance between cultural reclamation and aesthetic proclamation found in Hlobo’s work, that makes him so immensely attractive to the global art market. His work captures the dual intent of local art – the pride and power of the traditional or local as well as the excitement and opportunity offered by the modern and global. And this is unique even in the global art world, where most artist have chosen either extreme but failed to mend the two together as Hlobo’s work has managed to do. Hlobo’s unique talent in neatly captured in art critic, Pamela Allara’s words, which states that Hlobo work “...effortlessly adapts the vocabulary of international contemporary art to reference his own cultural assimilation into a globalized culture, while maintaining his Xhosa Heritage ad South African gay male identity.”