The label of ‘elitist’ has often been the bugbear of the Joburg Art Fair, this year being no exception. Ross Douglas the director of the Art Fair was quite direct in acknowledging that ‘elitist’ was the kind of animal the art fair is. But Chris Dercon of the Tate Modern, in his talk on the idea of audience, suggested that the art zeitgeist was heading away from elitism towards an inclusive museum system. This idea was quickly contradicted in the follow-up panel discussion when Bisi Silva of CCA in Lagos exclaimed that those who are not interested in an art event “don’t have a right to be there.” The discussion of audience was taken further when the interlocutor of the same discussion asked how audiences could become engaged with the curatorial process. It seemed that, for a while, no one wished to tackle the question but then Riason Naidoo, the director of the South African National Gallery, eventually offered the idea that showing artists out of the established cannon was part of the process of engaging with a South African audience.
It seems strange that Naidoo did not take this opportunity to discuss the recent Trechikoff exhibition at SANG. For this exhibition seems to exemplify exactly the idea he was trying to articulate. ‘Trechikoff , the People’s Painter’ did, after all, attract the highest public attendance in SANG’s recent history. Despite Naidoo’s laudable attempts to attract a wider audience with ‘Pierneef to the Gugulective’ it was not this but the Russian émigré that gripped the South African public. If we are to take Trechikoff as the closest exhibition to date to fulfilling South African audience’s demands, then it should also be noted that it only attracted scorn from the critics.
Of course it may be claimed that the critics were merely voicing an elitist hegemony that sought to wrest art away from a popular audience. But the fact remains that the closest we have come in South Africa to having large-scale audience participation with an art exhibition was ‘Trechikoff’. It also seems true though that the ‘elitist hegemony’ may have a point about Trechikov’s over simplified and, by then, outdated art practices. Sadly what seemed to resonate most, with regards to art and South African audiences, in Chris Dercon’s lecture was what he said about his DVD that refused to play ‘it is inside but you can’t see it’ (italics mine).
by M Blackman