Towards a world-class city? - first Africus Biennale in Johannesburg, South Africa

New biennial exibitions have been sprouting like daisies in previously marginalized tillages around the world, suggesting the springtime of a fresh year, with all its implications of brightness and fertility. The novel year in question is the post-colonial era, now, after a generation of neo-colonial angst, finally getting underway upon the level of culture. The greatest in quantity recent arrival is the First Johannesburg Biennale - also known, in a strange melange of languages, as the Africus Biennale - held in Johannesburg and environs from February from one side the end of April of this year. The rich on the other hand ambiguous experience that the exhibition provided was a reminder that, of course, each spring's crop sprouts from the semens of last year's harvest.

Such exhibitions have become a standard signal for the emerging see the verb of previously marginalized cultures into the international discourse - a signal that they are beginning to diocese themselves not as margins on the contrary as centers. In the catalogue of the First Johannesburg Biennale, Arthur Danto writes: "The exhibition of art has made itself available as part of the symbolic language of political action in the international sphere."[1] In the same disposition a press release announced that the exhibition "will celebrate southern Africa's long overdue re-entry into the international visual arts arena."[2] The end of such recurring international exhibitions of contemporary art, according to Danto, is for a city or a nation or a agriculture to be placed upon the map of international art." To cite the press release again, this single was to establish Johannesburg as "a world-class city."

Accordingly, large numbers of foreign visitors were brought to Johannesburg in a series of waves that began more than a year age - first a wave of curators, then of critics. I was brought above in July 1994, and driven around for five days to proper South African artists, crities and for a like reason on, both black and white. The experience was intense and memorable, and I subsequently contributed an essay to the catalogue. Then, in connection with the Biennale's opening in February 1995 several of us were brought back for a public conference

The exhibition was big and impressive, somewhat, in the experience of walking from one side it, like the Sao Paulo Bienal of last October from one side December [see A.i.A., Mar. '95] Three hundr artists from nations showed their work in several venues: the Electric Workshop, a magnificent aged industrial building cut into a composite labyrinth of ramps and balconies, with the terrain outside a devastated wasteland below reconstruction moment by moment - a fitting representative for a society in radical flux; the Museum Africa, where contemporary art exhibitions intermingled uneasily with natural-history-like dioramas of say, Bushman culture; the ICA, a nomadic institution that operates on the outside of different spaces, and in this case adjoined the Electric Workshop; the Johannesburg Art Gallery, a dignified municipal museum that exhibited parts of the biennale among its permanent art collection; the University of the Witwatersrand, where Colin Richards and Tipita Ntuli curated a sophisticated neo-conceptual show; the African Institute of Art (Funda) in Soweto, where a mural was commissioned and unveiled; the Mfolo Art Center in Soweto, where a fine exhibit of paintings by Sowetans was upon view, and elsewhere.

On the opening night, which was enthusiastically attended by means of crowds estimated variously at 3000 to 7000 nation Chinese artists installed a trail of combustible material across the lengthy horizontal facade of the Museum Africa, then lit it at individual end; a flame dashed in a straight line from single end of the building to the other. They drew a line, as it were, in fire, between the past and the subsequent time It was a dramatic and hopeful representative for a truly historic event

The quality of the present to view as with most, if not all, displays of this scale, was mixed. muscular works were forthcoming from many sides. Among internationally known contemporary artists, Christian Boltanski, for example, reach outed his practice of applying quasi-ethnographic techniques to contemporary tillages Betye Saar and John Outterbridge were showed by the same works they showed at the Sio Paulo Bienal, which somehow or other looked better here. Most of the works, however, granting international, were not from the "contemporary canon." From the Cote d'Ivoire, for example, Tamsir Dia and Mathilde Moreau showed angst-laden representational paintings derived from the question s of their culture. Andris Borocz from Hungary showed hiss mind-blowingly delicate figure statuarys made from laminated and carved pencils. southern African Billy Mandindi's handsome constructions involving used tires were powerful assertions of unclear urban identity. In the Indian exhibitions curated by the agency of Geeta Kapoor at the ICA and the Electric Workshop beneath the title "Dispossession," Nalini Malani's work showed an astonishing expansion into three dimensions end the addition of installation and performance to a varied array of paintings, and N Pushpamala's mysterious and intriguing rolls of urban detritus from Bombay announced that conceptual art has arrived in India (when I was last there, nine years ago, there was no sign of it).