the nationality issue: interview with Paul Stopforth

The Diaspora Artist: An Interview with Paul Stopforth

12/09/09

I am still puzzling over the same problem I tried to address in my first posting about national identity. I can’t let go of it. What is it that categorizes an artist as American, or Chinese, or German, or of/from any other country on this globe? I continue to wonder about the rationale for defining artists in terms of nationality when the art world is international, and the power and influence of nation states are declining in proportion to that of global corporations. If an artist has permanently relocated to a given country, does it matter where s/he came from “originally?” With little to support my intuition, I want to maintain that somehow it does: that if an artist has spent formative years in a country other than where s/he currently resides, then I assume there will be some reference to that experience in the artist’s production, or at least some way in which early experiences continue to shape recent work. However, the evidence is often to the contrary: to use the example of artists born in South Africa, neither Robin Rhode, nor Marlene Dumas nor Candace Breitz refer directly to their ‘roots’ in their art. The former do constantly reference the experience of migration, to be sure: the disorientation and estrangement of living in a world where nations no longer have homogeneous populations, and where there is, in reality, no such thing as a homeland or the security it purports to represent. On the other hand, many ‘diasporic’ artists do incorporate notions of hybridity in their work, and seek to contain the often conflicting, contradictory cultural values of different countries or regions in their work. Exhibition labels try to point to this effort by using the keywords ‘born in/lives in.’ Often ‘lives in’ references not a nation but a city, the genuine cultural nodes to which artists gravitate. Obviously, artists resolve or ignore these issues as they see fit, but I am stuck with trying to decide if ‘nationality’ still means anything at all, and if so, how to describe and analyze it.

As I often do, I turned for answers to my conundrum to my friend Paul Stopforth (b. South Africa; lives Boston). The title of this blog is not really accurate: this entry is a summary of his observations, with my added commentary—and his on mine.

Topic One: The decision to emigrate

It is logical to suppose that a decision to leave one’s ‘native’ country would be based either on the danger posed by remaining there or by the desire for greater opportunity (or both). In Stopforth’s case, he had been ‘in limbo’ for several years before settling here. He had come to the U.S. as an artist in residence at Tufts University for a single semester in 1989. After their visas expired, Stopforth and his wife Carol Marks went to Paris, where they lived in an apartment owned by the South African Association of Arts. During that period, they were faced with a major life decision: should they return to South Africa (Paul had applied for a job at Michaelis in Cape Town), stay in France (Carol had worked there for some years and was fluent in French), or emigrate either to England or to the States? Paul felt that South Africa was not changing politically, and in fact could only get worse, so although he wasn’t certain about the best choice, both South Africa and France were excluded (Paul struggled with the language). When Paul was hired by the head of Continuing Education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Don Gray, the decision to return to the States was made because of this very modest offer of job security—and of course, a visa!

The Transition: From Émigré to “Resident Alien”

Like many émigrés, Paul and Carol arrived back in Boston leaving their entire lives behind them. In their mid-40s, they found themselves in a (not very friendly) city without family, friends, history or language (in the sense that the way English was spoken and understood was quite different). Boston has a large South African émigré community, but most have been thoroughly assimilated and no longer identify as “South Africans.” Fortunately, the couple was befriended by Jo and Morrie Simon, whose brother Barney had founded the Market Theatre in downtown Johannesburg, where Paul had co-founded and run the Market Gallery. Their friendship proved to be a crucial stabilizing factor for the couple. Given the tremendous difficulty of starting their lives over again, Paul says that they would have returned to South Africa within those first few years, had they had the funds and a house and a job to go back to. As it turned out, their personal transition coincided with the transition of South Africa—the years 1990-1994—during which Paul was able to establish himself as an outstanding teacher, first at the Museum School, and later at the Carpenter Center at Harvard, and Carol was able to find work as a translator. By the time of the first democratic elections in South Africa, the couple had established a fairly stable, if austere, life in Boston.

Making Art: New Directions

In South Africa, Stopforth had been acclaimed as one of the foremost “Resistance” artists, and his carefully researched and meticulously executed works depicting deaths in detention are still today reproduced in all surveys of South African art. However, by the late 1980s, as the political situation in the country began to change, and activist artists began to shift direction, Paul found himself in the midst of an artistic identity crisis. Not only did he have to start his life over again, but his art making had also to begin from scratch. He did what any sensitive—and reasonable—person would do under the circumstances: he went into therapy. As an undergraduate, Paul was of the generation that was taught that art came from the unconscious, and one of the more influential books from his student years was Jung’s “Man and His Symbols.” According to Stopforth, he like others of his generation believe that the artist’s way of being in the world is to dig into the unconscious, to locate an interior space from which to derive the work. For over two years, Stopforth worked with a Jungian therapist to help heal his psychic distress and his sense of displacement as an artist. As he put it, “My move turned out to be a way to save myself. I was past the stage of the young artist making career moves by making the scene with dealers and curators. In mid-life, you go in your own direction, your own journey, and abandon the art scene and the attempt to cultivate the skill set needed to get ‘a seat at the table.” I think this is true of artists generally; certainly by middle age, an artist has charted a clear path and can follow his/her own direction without having to check the art magazines to see if it is the right way to go in terms of career advancement. However, with Paul, the direction of his art was unclear, and so the turn to examining his dreams and the effort to merge the conscious and the unconscious through Jungian ‘individuation’ was in effect comparable to a sort of graduate program that permitted him to gain confidence in charting a new path for himself, rather than pursuing and refining an existing one, (one that in a previous place and time had met with great success).

So, in the mid-1990s, Stopforth began feeling his way along the new path, trying to find a different way to make work. The work from the last years of the decade can be opaque, as he searched for archetypal imagery and new techniques combining painting and sculpture. Creating new imagery was not a simple matter of reconciling his new identity with the old, as he had never been proud of being a South African; as he said, “I loathed what the histories of successive ‘white’ governments had done to the country and its people, both black and white.” Still, there was much about South Africa—including family and friends-- that he genuinely cared about. In the same way, his feelings about his adopted country during the Bush I and II eras were equally fraught; he applied for citizenship primarily in order to protect his ability to remain in the US. He became a citizen in 2007, and he now proclaims, with deliberate irony, that he is an African-American, a hyphenated hybrid cultivated from a less familiar stock. The term fits perfectly, as identity is always fluid, changing and often inappropriately applied. He is both and neither African and/or American.

In 2003, Stopforth was invited to become the first artist in residence at the former prison on Robben Island, where the ANC ‘terrorists’, including Mandela, had been incarcerated for so many years. In describing his reaction, he quotes T.S. Eliot’s “Little Giddling:” “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” Returning to South Africa, or rather to this specific location, so burdened with history, it was as if he were seeing it for the first time. The subject of Robben Island became a touchstone to which he has continually returned because of its position with respect to the rest of South Africa. The island is, as he says, a synecdoche, a fragment signifying the body of the nation as a whole. To Stopforth, Robben Island was the bedrock, of the nation and of his own unconscious.

And so we have towers and paving stones, speaker systems and water taps, bedrolls and trash cans, all relics of the apartheid era, but also part of the larger history of colonialism, which in their silence demand that we give them voice. Returning to his slow, meditative, intensive process of making paintings, Stopforth transforms objects into archetypes. By returning to objects of history, he has prized himself loose from South Africa’s art history, re-emerging as a contemporary artist in a country where he is no longer a citizen.

And now I must return to my original question. Does one’s nationality matter? Clearly, in Stopforth’s case, it does, as history and memory are the content of his work. But Candace Brietz, whose work addressing racism was severely panned by Okwui Enwezor when she was living in South Africa, has clearly put [her] history behind her, and is successfully mining global media culture from her base in Berlin. However, her bio does state: born in Johannesburg; lives in Berlin.

Re-Negotiating the Terms of African Art

Re-Negotiating the Terms of Contemporary African Art: a reply to Professor Achille Mbembe

In his stimulating discussion “African contemporary art: Negotiating the terms of recognition,” posted to the JWTC Blog on September 8, Professor Mbembe is especially critical of the pernicious influence that Western-funded ‘development’ projects have had on the arts of the African continent. Although acutely aware of the equally baneful influence of the commercialization and privatization of all forms of civic life in the global economy, he singles out development as the primary threat to the continued growth of a vital African culture. I would like to critique his admittedly powerful argument with reference to a recent University of the Witswatersrand doctoral thesis, “Agency, Imagination and Resilience: Facilitating Social Change through the Visual Arts in South Africa” (2009), by artist and activist, Kim Berman.

In his lively conversation with consultant Vivian Paulissen, Mbembe refers to an ongoing collusion between African governments and Western funding agencies in promoting an anachronistic idea of development that lines the pockets of the functionaries while making very little dent in the very real problems of poverty. The so-called ‘humanitarian impulse’ in these (unnamed) development projects is in his view a “vicious ideology that promotes a view of Africa as a… doomed and hopeless continent waiting to be rescued and ‘saved’ by the new army of Western good Samaritans.” According to his argument, these powerful agencies conceive ‘development’ in narrowly materialistic terms, and so are blind to “cultural and artistic critique as a public good in and of itself.” The deplorable result “…is a tendency to conflate African art, culture and aesthetics with ethnicity or community or communalism; to deny the power of individuality in the work of art creation.” And he concludes, “…the function of art in Africa is precisely to free us from the shackles of development both as an ideology and as a practice.” [his italics]. I worry about prescribing any function for artistic practice, but also cannot agree with the basis of this assertion.

In my own view, the commercialism of the international art system of dealers and museums is far more of a threat to the future of the creative arts in Africa, and “the power of individuality in the work of art creation,” than the ideology of development. Despite the supposed success of the Africa Remix exhibition, which only came to Africa (Johannesburg) as the result of a last-minute effort, the work selected for that exhibit fit neatly into the well-established parameters of contemporary avant-garde practice. Although much contemporary art commands respect, all too many artists use technologically-based media to formulate a few sly references to their ethnicities or cultures, without presenting any real challenge to the viewers’ preconceptions or expanding their limited understanding. Whether from the BRIC countries or the Middle East or Africa, the individual creative artist makes work that can be ‘knowingly’ selected for exhibition, and accepted/purchased by a Western viewer. And, despite the very real differences in the contexts from which the artists make work, the art presents a homogenous facade, as a glance through catalogues of non-Western contemporary art will confirm. The discouraging visual uniformity of international avant-garde art production is a direct result of commercialism is therefore a direct refutation of the capitalist-based idea of art as individual expression. If they wish to be regularly included in international exhibitions, contemporary artists must make works that can sell. I suspect that work that truly challenges Western assumptions about a given non-Western region never makes the scene.

Maintaining an art-craft distinction that makes little sense in the South African context at least, Prof. Mbembe argues that “…without a major investment in critical theory, our artistic production will remain in the domain of artisanship. And it will always be left to others to dictate the intellectual, theoretical and political terms of its recognition in the international arena.” Admittedly, I am an outsider, but having taught at various South African universities over the course of the past decade, I have been consistently impressed with the uniformly high standard of academic discourse there. It seems to me that theoretically-based research is both firmly-established and well-supported, as exemplified by the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER) and the newly-established research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg. In fact, I would argue that critical theory is so well articulated and taught in universities in South Africa that, as in the West since the 1980s, much of creative art production dutifully illustrates theory, to its own detriment. Critical theory is neither a panacea nor a bogeyman. It is only problematic when teamed with commercialism and used by artists as a sign for a hip product.

The question that should be asked is whether critical theory has been tested on the ground through practice-based, ‘development’ projects, and if so, whether or not it has generated new knowledge and models for rethinking notions of creativity. Again, I would cite Berman’s thesis as evidence that it has, yet neither of the recent books on contemporary African or South African art give so much as a nod to the innovative community arts projects operating throughout the continent. (see: Sue Williamson, South African Art Now [New York, Collins Design, 2009]; Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art Since 1980 [Bologna: Damiani, 2009]).

But to return once again to the nub of my argument, communalism or ‘lumpen-radicalism’ is not the problem, commercialism is. I would argue that the picture Prof. Mbembe paints of ‘development,’ which is based on his own negative experiences, fails to take into adequate account current approaches to the field. As he certainly knows, ‘development’ has changed quite radically as a result of influential theorists such as Arjun Appadurai and Amartya Sen, as well as the tireless work of artist-activists on the ground in South Africa and elsewhere. Although government policies and procedures justifiably remain open to criticism, the results of these numerous initiatives for the most part have demonstrated that community arts projects have provided its participants with the capacity to “inscribe our voice,” as Mbembe so eloquently phrases it.[1] Unfortunately, despite the vitality of the field of development theory, relatively few community arts projects have been given sustained academic analysis. Contributing to this nascent field, Berman’s thesis places the three major ‘development’ projects she has founded over the past fifteen years—Artist Proof Studio, Paper Prayers for Aids Awareness, and the Phumani Hand-Papermaking Project—in the context of critical, educational and development theory, and demonstrates that individual and collective creativity need not be at odds, but rather can reinforce one another. Rather than attempting to paraphrase, I can do no better than to quote the first paragraph of the first chapter in its entirety:

“The argument that the visual arts can play a positive role in creating social change is based on the premise that a creative collaboration between the community arts and development fields is possible. This thesis argues for a paradigm shift in approaching development in a way that an art educator approaches the facilitation of an artist’s personal and creative growth. Dreaming and imagination facilitate self-expression. Developed further, self-expression is arguably a transforming process of self-creation. Empowerment is the ability to become an agent of one’s own life and to achieve self-actualization. When individual agency is applied as a catalyst to inspire new possibilities, social systems respond to stimulate change.”[2]

Through her case studies, the thesis indeed demonstrates the ways in which change can occur and be sustained. Arguing that seeing beneficiaries as “inert units within a collective…is one of the primary reasons why development projects fail,” (and here she is in full agreement with Mbembe), Berman proposes that when members are seen as individuals with the creative capacity to use imagination and dreaming to envision a better future for themselves, and their voice as a tool to navigate their way out of poverty, they gain agency and their projects can succeed. One of the guiding voices for Berman’s own efforts has been Arjun Appadurai, whose notion of ‘the capacity to aspire’ she has tested with such impressive results. Also referencing Appadurai, Prof. Mbembe concludes that “In circumstances under which millions of poor people indeed struggle to make it from today to tomorrow, the work of theory and the work of art and the work of culture is to pave the way for a qualitative practice of the imagination—a practice without which we will have no name, no face and no voice in history.” (5).

Precisely. I have no problem with this passionate articulation of the function of art! However, to oppose individual creativity and ‘development’ is to sustain an anachronistic definition of ‘art.’ Community arts and individual creativity are not an either/or proposition, either for the artist-activist or for the participants on those projects. The radical paradigm shift in the development studies has opened broader roles for the artist in culture and in society. Because the contemporary museum-gallery system always follows the money, today’s studio artist is ipso facto a commercial artist. [3]At the very least, development projects using the arts are a counterforce to its stifling power.

Pamela Allara, associate professor emerita, Brandeis University

---

[1] To cite but one of numerous examples, see the website http://www.aidontheedge.info

[2] Kim S. Berman, Agency, Imagination and Resilience: Facilitating Social Change through the Visual Arts in South Africa, (2009), Ch. One: Mapping the Journey, p. 1.

Doctoral thesis, the University of the Witwatersrand. Outside advisor: Pamela Allara

[3] A recent article in the New York Times, “Tweaking the Big-Money Art World on Its Own Turf,” (Monday, December 7, 2009, C1, C6) quoted prominent dealer Jeffrey Deitch, who explained the slick commercialism of his booth at Art Basel Miami Beach as resulting from “the collapse between the avant-garde and mainstream pop culture.” A disgusted young artist, William Powhida, whose art criticizes this phenomenon, described Deitch as “a drug dealer in an ice cream truck.” (!)