The Art of Public Space

Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City

Kim Gurney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137436900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A journey through Johannesburg via three art projects raises intriguing notions about the constitutive relationship between the city, imagination and the public sphere- through walking, gaming and performance art. Amid prevailing economic validations, the trilogy posits art within an urban commons in which imagination is all-important.

1

Re-imagining Johannesburg: Nomadic Notions

Inhabiting the city

A manual labourer strides across a busy street on the eastern end of Johannesburg’s inner city.¹ Head wrapped in a scarf, he disdains the tumultuous traffic and is seemingly another pedestrian making his way home at dusk. Utility vans and minibus taxis dice the dual-lane thoroughfare past scores of similar walkers shaving the road’s edge. The only question mark in this typical daily street scene is the audience, seated on either side of the road on plastic chairs, who eyeball one another and wonder what is going on. They politely wait, averting their noses from the rotten stench of an open drain fouling the March summer air.

The labourer returns. The reverse of his red jacket reads HOUSES FOR SALE. The distinctive colour evokes the city’s eviction team, dubbed ‘red ants’, summoned in extreme cases to remove tenants from illegally occupied inner city buildings that, in local parlance, are hijacked. His recurring presence signals that he is a performer, Sello Pesa, and the audience becomes more alert. A towering trolley bulging with plastic for recycling, pushed by a passerby, now seems vaguely familiar. The man in the blue sweater has also walked this way before. A pedestrian holds an umbrella in one hand and a bucket in the other, a casual incongruity that takes on gravitas. Another passerby precariously balances an oversized plastic bundle on her head. It is suddenly not altogether clear which part of this city is consciously enacted and which part is not, who is on stage and who is watching. Amber street lighting flickers on to add a theatrical glow as an edginess hovers among viewers of Dance Umbrella 2011, a week-long performance event in this South African metropolis of the global South.

Inhabitant, by Ntsoana Contemporary Dance Theatre, goes on to test ideas around risk in an everyday urban environment. The performers roll their bodies across this noisy rush-hour street, closely timing lulls with traffic, attracting casual hoots from passing motorists and drawing slack jaws from the plastic chairs. The intensity builds: a man drags his helmeted head against a rough wall to emit the urban equivalent of nails down a chalkboard while Pesa works himself into an apparent fit, lying in a disused metal oil drum at the kerbside. The denouement, when it comes, is like a slowly lowered volume dial. A speech broadcast behind a high wall cites Johannesburg’s patterns of demolition and development. The invisible orator quotes the City of Johannesburg’s 2030 vision statement, peppered with references to its current official tagline of ‘world class African city’,² as the performers in contrast work themselves into sated collapse and the audience into conflicted attention.

Inhabitant is a key entry point for this book because it is emblematic of a growing group of contemporary visual artists³ in South Africa’s economic hub working in a performative mode. This is also true of the book’s case study to follow, New Imaginaries, which is a trilogy of art projects that explored public space in Johannesburg with different curatorial ends; they shared the key performance art⁴ trait of ephemerality along with a nomadic sensibility. These qualities run counter to the concrete world of the built environment in which these artistic interventions are set and contrary to more monumental public art that takes permanent, material form. They celebrate the temporary, fleeting and diffuse – an anti-memorial, if you will, that speaks to developing notions of counter publics rather than shoring up collectivist identities. They signal instead the shifting nature of the city’s multiple modalities and a broader ‘performative turn’ acknowledged in theory more generally and by human geography specifically in the 1990s (Dirksmeier and Helbrecht, 2010). As James Clifford writes in his book Routes, ‘Everyone’s on the move and has been for centuries: dwelling-in-travel … a view of human location constituted as much by displacement as by stasis’ (1997, p.2). It is not solely those who have travelled for one reason or another, good or bad, who inhabit the migrant life, writes Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, ‘it is all of us whose lives are being shaped in visible and invisible ways by the fat of so much human translocation’ (Barstow and Law-Viljoen, 2011, p.3).

Moreover, this trend towards performative, ephemeral and intangible art has larger stakes because public policy takes the opposite direction: South Africa’s arts strategy validates the sector through an economic lens, taking its cue from a broader creative economies discourse. This chapter thus sketches recent performance art cousins to New Imaginaries as a contextualising prelude, with sound art as its apogee, focused upon the project’s key footprint of Johannesburg inner city. Such artistic practice, which in its evanescence resists financial and other modes of capture, is threaded through subsequent chapters as a riposte to instrumentalisation of the arts to contribute instead to an emerging discourse on the urban commons.

Performing Johannesburg

In South Africa, the relationship between space and power is particularly poignant because of its apartheid history of urban racial segregation and its current replications. The racial geographies determined by the Group Areas Act (1950), which among other things forced people of colour from urban nodes to the peripheries of towns, is still very much apparent 20 years into democracy. ‘At a macro-level, the post-apartheid geography of the South African city has simply morphed into a neo-apartheid spatiality since both urban sprawl and intra-class divisions have worsened since 1994,’ writes Edgar Pieterse (2009, p.13). He says the macro-economic and institutional reasons for this are complex and go beyond the two key problems of limited state interventions in land markets and the unforeseen negative consequences of the public housing programme. Pieterse flags up the importance of also exploring ‘the rich practices of living, livelihood, becoming, imagining and invention that pulse through African cities’ as relevant (p.13).

Johannesburg inner city, where this chapter and much of New Imaginaries are set, has its own compelling spatial twist. It was formerly the central business district (CBD) of Johannesburg and the economic hub of South Africa, but during the latter end of apartheid (early 1990s) the area was subject to capital flight as the majority of businesses moved to newer, more fortified, enclaves. Some buildings were abandoned and others repurposed and turned into residential units for the many city residents who continued to seek out its convenient location. Similar conditions of decentralisation, inner city decay, demolition and rebuilding have been a feature of other cities including in North America, Europe and Australia, writes Sally Gaule (2005, p.2335). Today the inner city is a diverse mashup of formal and informal networks, repurposed sites and a hub of activities that remained, from trade to manufacturing, residential to retail as well as a growing creative sector, in a broader province characterised by increasing numbers of internal and cross-border migrants.⁵

This spirit is represented by its central transport hub, Park Station, which incidentally features in all three New Imaginaries projects. It is an arrivals hall into the city as well as a commuting node that hinges Johannesburg to its other disparate geographies. A new government plan, called Corridors of Freedom, is under way to address this fractured nature of the city – to narrow the current large distances the majority of people have to travel between home and work and to better integrate communities. A pedestrian bridge is planned, for instance, to link up Alexandra township, which shoulders the upmarket business district of Sandton in the northern suburbs. This joining act was prefigured in a performance artwork in 2011 called Borderless by art collective Trinity Session. Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter worked with ten artists from Alexandra and six from Zimbabwe and Mozambique to look at issues of xenophobia, border-crossing and value systems. In the work, goats were herded from the township to the upmarket business district of Sandton concluding at an exclusive hotel. The doorman dressed in formal regalia spontaneously got involved and led the goats to drink from a nearby fountain. The artistic projects of this book’s case study arguably perform a similar kind of connective function, creating an archipelago of possible meaning from socio-spatial islands to ultimately emulate what Paul Chatterton has termed ‘urban commoning’ (2010, p.3), which Chapter 6 sets out to demonstrate.

Johannesburg is a potent mix for artists who work in its threads. Pesa, one of the New Imaginaries curators, began exploring public space partly from necessity. His approach, however, runs deeper than that – it is a shared identification with informal street practices borne from the margins. He says:

Going outside makes us really look at what is happening around us, what are the changes and what do they mean for us … We see common things in terms of vendors on the street, coming with options because they can’t afford to have a shop or a structure … so they find necessary things that have to be done because there is no other way.

‘We find ourselves also to be in that situation – we also need to survive on what we have’ (interview 31). He adds: ‘We also don’t have a traditional way of exchanging or “determined performance” – it’s always recreating space, finding different meanings, and what could fit in that space.’ One of his colleagues, Brian Mtembu, says they study a particular space ‘to heart’ before responding to its dynamics.

For instance, in teka munyika (‘take and give’), Ntsoana Contemporary in February 2012 quietly critiqued a newly gentrifying block of Johannesburg’s east inner city. Dubbed Maboneng precinct, this area in Jeppestown has over the past few years refurbished a number of buildings for a hipster-type clientele as part of a broader, culture-led renewal strategy. The various performances – a barbecue, a hair weave, a suntan – juxtaposed social practices that pre-existed in this working-class area against those being introduced with the influx of newer, middle-class residents. Vaughn Sadie, who often collaborates with Ntsoana, explained their artistic language as ‘being in the space, not the head’ and then shifting the tempo up or down slightly of what is already there, making elements more or less visible. One of Sadie’s recent projects uses street light mapping as a way to explore socio-spatial dynamics.

In a very different register, but sharing a similar thematic, the works above recall the far more dramatic Chandelier (2001–2002) of Steven Cohen. A decade earlier, he walked through a forced eviction at the other end of the inner city in Newtown in a chandelier-style dress of wrought iron with precarious heels, bare body and made-up face. He wandered among shack-dwellers as the so-called red ants cited above evicted them to make way for formal development. The timing was coincidental; his performance reflected different kinds of violence and vulnerabilities.

Mohau Modisakeng also explores violence as a mediator of history. His performances often use its instruments, specific to the South African context, to re-enact its symbolism and turn the performative nature of the city back on itself. In 2012, he hosted a performance along the inner city’s End Street that formed part of a series of public interventions. This particular manifestation occurred on the site of a collapsed building that had earlier been gutted by fire, leaving behind a stark frame of heritage architecture.⁶ In its first partial collapse, two scrap recyclers inside the building at the time were killed. Its subsequent razing left a pile of fenced-back rubble. The work comprised a dozen men positioned on this site, each holding a sjambok, which is a traditional South African weapon akin to a whip. They synchronised their movements, creating ‘a rich sonic environment in combination with rough choreography and music’, according to the artist’s statement.

Malose ‘Kadromatt’ Malahlela also privileges ambient sound in his work, in what he describes as an emerging theatre for the ear. He created in 2011 There’s Hillbrow for You, an artwork that takes ‘soundscrapes’ of an inner city street in Hillbrow, a diverse and densely populated suburb. Malahlela approaches sound as a kind of aural paint that he layers into a unique composition. This particular work derives from a novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, by Phaswane Mpe. Malahlela reworks the timbre of life in nearby passageways, alleys and streets together with musical notes and spoken words from an academic seminar that dealt with Mpe’s novel. Malahlela also collaborates closely with Rangoato Hlasane, otherwise known as MC Mma Tseleng. Together, they have coordinated a group of independent Johannesburg musicians that assemble to reimagine the hits of kwaito, a 1990s popular music genre of South African youth. Mma Tseleng also conducts artist-led walks through Hillbrow playing definitive kwaito tracks at key geographical sites to give a potted tour of the suburb that arguably birthed the genre, as detailed in Chapter 3.

Swiss artist Mario Marchisella mimicked the role of the conductor, a man who coordinates informal taxis in one of Johannesburg’s busiest intersections to try reduce a log-jam, by similarly standing at this intersection in black tuxedo playing the violin. His 2008 performance The Conductor’s Fear of the Soloist, created together with Marianne Halter for the Joubert Park Project, was filmed and re-screened at the Drill Hall, not far from the actual taxi intersection, in a concert using self-built instruments. The recorded performance and the real-time sound of rush hour outside intermingled in a dual projection that powerfully evoked the rhythms and serendipities of city life and staged its misinterpretations and absurdities.

Such engagements offer a novel affective mapping of less visible aspects of the city by leveraging the everyday language of the streets and the performativity of the city itself as a key medium of artistic production. In the process, a new reading is evoked that sensitively factors in the often liminal lives and sensibilities of many urban dwellers and the related socio-spatial dynamics. As Kathleen Stewart writes, this kind of practice concerns the commonplace, labour-intensive process of sensing modes of living as they come into being. She states: ‘It hums with the background noise of obstinances and promises, ruts and disorientations, intensities and resting points. It stretches across real and imaginary social fields and sediments, linking some kind of everything … the rhythms of the present as a compositional event’ (2010, p.340).

It’s also about how today’s realities engage with the past. For instance, Hlasane’s kwaito ‘city walks’ read the present in terms of the past, and the band is also a way of fusing temporalities. As Hlasane says:

Kwaito itself was a move away from bubblegum, from politically charged explicitly produced music in the 1980s to something more celebratory – that was itself a political statement. But after 2004, there was a move to house [music]. So that particular genre, for us it is now historical. It is now a marker of time that speaks about a lot of things in our country.

(Interview 15)

Pauline Theart uses her classically trained voice as medium to respond to the built environment with sound, understanding the venues in which she performs to have a rich aural history that layers itself onto the walls, floors and ceilings. She partly conceives of her performances as addressing this accumulated backstory, adding a contemporary layer. Theart performed in 2012 a one-hour loop of an emotive lullaby in her home language of Afrikaans in a defunct children’s hospital in Braamfontein, a Johannesburg inner city suburb that joins educational, business and residential sectors. She chose the memorial room, built to honour World War I soldiers, and performed hidden in the wings. The experience of finding this obscure and quite oppressive location was part of the work’s meaning. Listeners had to traipse through long-abandoned passages that incongruously blended security iconography with signage for children to create a strange and fragile mood.

Another recent engagement that traverses past and present was a series of performative interventions curated in 2011 by the artists’ collective Center for Historical Re-enactments in a memory project entitled Na Ku Randza (‘I love you’; Figures 1.1–1.3). The centrepiece was a graffiti mural by Breeze Yoko commemorating musician Gito Baloi who was shot dead on that street corner (Kerk and Nug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Re-imagining Johannesburg: Nomadic Notions
• 2. Curating the Ephemeral City
• 3. Walking the Footloose City
• 4. Playing the Cyborg City
• 5. Performing the Spectral City
• 6. Silo-Breaker: Art and the Uncertainty Principle
• 7. Towards an Art of the Commons
• 8. Living the Everyday City
• Afterword: Capturing Art in Common
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index