paul stopforth yesterday and today

fig. 2 Bethesda, 2004

fig. 1, Elegy for Thomas Kasire, 1983

Paul Stopforth has long been recognized as one of the most important Resistance artists in South Africa. However, even he has lived in the United States since the late 1980s, and continues to make powerful images based in history and memory, recent publications on Contemporary South African art continue to reproduce the early work only. What must it be like to have made what art historians and critics consider iconic images that in turn obscure the significant work that he continues to make? This is an effort with my first blog to pose a question that has bugged me.

What constitutes the art of a nation in a post-nation, networked, diasporic world? I guess one related question might be: why do publishers still publish national surveys? What qualifies one as a South African artist? Stopforth is now an American citizen, but the content of his art is South African. In contrast, Candace Breitz, who is included in Enwezor's book,(see below) may have been born in South Africa, but her work is about western media---and I doubt she would identify as a South African today. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that most books and catalogues on South African art gloss over the issue of the criteria used to select the representatives of a nation's art.

Stopforth may have relocated to Boston, but there is a strong continuity in his work from the 1980s to the present. I will support my argument by the pitifully simplistic device of comparing two works that both feature the subject of rocks. (In my defense, rocks are a consistent motif in his work, and he happens to be a virtuoso in depicting them...) The first, one panel from a triptych, "Elegy for Thomas Kasire," 1983, who may or may not have been a member of SWAPO, the South West African People's Organization. As an 18-year old prisoner, he hired out to a young white farmer, who beat him to death over the course of three days. According to Stopforth, "I wanted to pay homage to those people like Thomas who were murdered by agents of the apartheid regime, and who because they were not recognized as leaders...would be forgotten after the attention of the media shifted to more recent outrages." (email, 11.23.09). Like his well-known "Elegy (Steve Biko)", this work is meant as a visual monument, one so powerful that even though the medium is graphite, it cannot be erased.

The works that resulted from Stopforth's artist residency on Robben Island in 2004, use the island's rocks and the stone walls of the political prison as a metaphor for the restructuring of history and the rebuilding of a nation. Bethesda refers to the stone pool at the edge of the island in which the female lepers, also incarcerated on the island, bathed. No longer the healing pool of the Bible, it is now an unintended and untended cemetery. Only the name, in rusted letters, floats by on the barren rocks, as if to indicate the shifting meanings the place will assume over the course of history. (I cannot seem to make this image appear in second place). Again, the work is an elegy for people washed from the historical record, a profound meditation on the meaning of the past for the present.

A new book on Stopforth by art historian Leora Maltz (Rhode Island School of Design) will be published in the new year by David Krut Publishing in Johannesburg, as part of the excellent Taxi Art Book series. My hope is that that publication will help shed light on the question of 'national identity', and who is selected to qualify as a South African artist. In any event, it will help compensate for the important work the artist has consistently created since settling in the United States in 1989.

Some recent publications on South African art include: Art and the End of Apartheid (Peffer), South African Art Now (Williamson) and the broad, continent-wide survey: Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu).

pam allara