The Voice of the Nation
Art is the voice of the nation. It expresses the state of the soul, the state of the spirit of a people. It is, this art thing, a record of the past, present and future of the people, articulating their culture and the culture of the nation....Art expresses the spirit and state of civilizations. In other words, when generations have...come and gone, what remains of who they were, what they did on earth, and what we should remember about who they thought they were (and who they really were) are enshrined in and engraved by their art.
Mongane Wally Serote, 1999
Under the Apartheid regime, formal art education was inaccessible to black South Africans. The art system was run by whites, influenced by European art movements, and emphasized European techniques, styles, and art history. Blacks were prohibited from actively participating in the visual arts, except as practicing artists. There were no black art teachers, administrators or gallery directors. Many individuals in South Africa realized the need for change and were determined to do something about it. Without their hard work, courage, and perseverance, the democratic country we see today would never have come to fruition, and nor would this exhibition, A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa. In this essay, I focus on one such individual—and the people associated with him—who dedicated his life to art and to making art accessible to all, across the color barriers that were firmly in place during the height of Apartheid. He believed that art was the foundation of society, the "voice of the nation." This person was my father, Bill Ainslie.
In 1979, the South African Association of Arts in conjunction with the Apartheid government's Department of National Education invited forty-five local artists to participate in an exhibition entitled Renaissance 11. My father, Bill Ainslie, together with the renowned South African painter Robert Hodgins, refused the invitation. At a conference titled "The State of Art in South Africa," hosted at the University of Cape Town shortly afterwards, my father explained his position. "The State wishes to be identified with the end product, the works of art, yet there are virtually no facilities for blacks to involve themselves seriously in the arts on either educational or professional levels. Aren't the white artists participating aware of the really desperate condition of black artists? It is my belief that serious art in this country is unlikely to emerge unless artists make it their business to immerse themselves in the full predicament of the people living here, particularly the deprived and the disenfranchised."
Bill Ainslie received his M.F.A. degree summa cum laude from the University of Pietermaritzberg in 1958. There he had met Selby Mvusi, the first black artist with whom he had ever come into contact. Selby had an enormous influence on Bill. He introduced Bill to the African National Congress (ANC), in the years before Nelson Mandela was arrested, and he opened Bill's eyes to the needs of the country and the neglect of black art. Through their discussions, Bill formulated his vision for the future: to help people find their voice and express it in their own way, to create an environment conducive to this expression, and to educate the society on the importance of this expression.
"Bill was politically astute, and politically involved—a necessity rather than an option in South Africa. His aspirations for the country were wholeheartedly behind the African National Congress (ANC). But his aims were always human, not political, or rather, aimed at the maximum human result through, or more often in spite of, politics. [To him] art was far more than making images or illustrating belief; it was the point of growth where human creative energy found its touchstone...His vision of art was as a means of growth and communication, ultimately of reconciliation, between the races" (Williams 1990 2-3). To my father, being an artist in South Africa entailed being a liminal person who rejected society's norms, opened society's eyes to the surrounding inequities, and reminded society of the perpetual human quest for meaning while offering possible answers. Bill believed that artists had a calling to express something given them, and he became the instrument through which others found their voices.
Bill's mission began in 1964. These were the dangerous days of the Group Areas Act and the Immorality Act, which gave the police powers to arrest any black person who failed to produce a passbook with a permit to be in a "white area," and rendered illegal sexual relations across the color bar. When Bill invited the black artist Dumile Feni to live with us in our Jubilee Road home in Parktown, in the heart of Johannesburg's white suburbia, he was defying this legislation and the mores of Apartheid society. This opportunity allowed Dumile to work on a larger scale than was possible in his cramped home in the Soweto township. In defiance of the separation that Apartheid legislation attempted to enforce, it also gave both artists the chance to work side by side as equals, engaged in discourse about the expression of the work, the politics of the country, love, and life.
Soon other artists came, including Esrom Legae, Ben Arnold, Lucky Sibiya, and Eric Mbatha. Several of these artists were self-taught professionals who exhibited at Gallery 101, where they met Bill. At this time galleries opened their doors to both blacks and whites. They were meeting places, and social events followed the openings, including dinner parties at our home. Bill realized that these artists all needed space and facilities, but as word spread the demand for teaching became apparent. Part-time classes were set up for anyone, irrespective of race, age, education, gender or religion, who wished to learn about the making or appreciation of art. By 1972, Ainslie's Studios, the first multiracial art school in South Africa, had begun in our home.
My mother, Fieke, was an integral aspect of Bill's life and work and of the evolution of the school. With very little money, she made the school—our home—a warm and welcoming place. The door was always open, irrespective of language or race, and she was known to make up a bed for anyone who needed a place to stay. Since all the houses we lived in were rented, we ended up moving with the school quite often.
For the first decade of its existence, the school kept a low profile to stay below the radar of repression. Socially prominent lawyers, business people, and academics who were not afraid to stick out their necks supported the project, and advised on how far the school could go without inviting trouble.
The state's security police spied on our house continually. They sat in "undercover" cars "reading" newspapers on our street, itching for an excuse to arrest Bill and close the school, but the informality of the school made it difficult to incriminate anyone. Bill and Fieke never panicked. They carried on living their lives when their privacy was invaded through phone taps, their mail being opened, and midnight police searches of our home. David Koloane recalls spending a night at our home when he was a student at Ainslie's Studios. A neighbor noticed him through a window and called the police, who arrived in the middle of the night and demanded entry to locate the black person illegally present in a white home. Bill calmly said that he had no idea what they were talking about, that the room they pointed toward was an art studio. Bill never lied.
During the early days, students' fees funded the school. Those who couldn't afford to pay bartered their services by modeling for art classes or organizing the slides in the library. Additional intensive workshop programs helped bring in extra funds, which were invested back into the school. As the school and the number of poor students grew, extra funding came through the generosity of friends.
In 1982, when we were living with the school at 6 Eastwold Way, Saxonwold, the Johannesburg City Council, which owned the house, decided to sell it. Bill approached four longstanding patrons, Ian Haggie, Clive and Irene Menell, Harry Oppenheimer, and Bill Wilson, who purchased the property and vested it in a trust. The school was registered as The Johannesburg Art Foundation, a non-profit association. A multiracial board of trustees and supporting council administered the school through its governing council. By 1989 more than five hundred students had enrolled.
The Johannesburg Art Foundation (JAF) filled a vital gap in providing formal art education, particularly to black students of all ages, but it was equally important as a forum—a place of dialog, discussion, and debate that demonstrated that democratic process could exist despite racial differences. JAF constituted, therefore, more than just an artistic force, it had a political voice.
JAF provided a developmental teaching program to meet the needs of students of all ages and backgrounds and for those who did not fit into the academic or commercial art spheres. No prior academic accreditation or portfolio was required, just the desire to learn. Students could stay as long as they wanted, provided they were still learning. In a newspaper interview, my father remarked, "In a sense students at university and technikon are captive…if they want a diploma or degree they have to study for a certain time, fulfilling certain requirements. If our students want some kind of diploma from us, we give them one, but more important, we help them build their portfolios" (Davimes 1984). My parents felt it was important to provide an environment that was conducive to creativity, where the worries of the world could be blocked out to concentrate on learning. The goal was to locate the individual vision of each student and nurture it. "In keeping with the modern movement, the teaching is not academic in the sense of stressing technical skill and reproducing conventional art models. Instead the Art Foundation promotes the workshop concept, emphasizing the importance of the example of the master, the immersion in the tradition, the significance of the individual vision, and the challenge of the new. Exposure to the best artists and the greatest examples of art work is an essential part of the process" (Ainslie 1986).
The Johannesburg Art Foundation employed its first black teachers in the early 1980s, Dumisani Mabaso as head of printmaking, and Tony Nkosi, who taught painting. They had both studied at Rorke's Drift in KwaZulu-Natal. As the number of indigent students grew, my mother focused on fundraising. She secured significant funding from such local corporations as Oppenheimer Trust, Nedbank, Standard Band, and Gencor. Because the Cultural Boycott declared by the ANC required opponents of Apartheid to isolate South Africa in all cultural, academic, scientific, and sports endeavors, no funding could be received from foreign countries during this time.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, many leading figures in the arts became concerned with the lack of viable art centers to cater for the ever-expanding artistic needs of Johannesburg's black community. Bill's vision of making art in South Africa accessible to all resulted in him being instrumental in helping launch and fund several community art centers, which were usually township-based alternatives to the whites-only, state-run set-ups. They were autonomous, often racially integrated cultural projects, run by and for the local community to develop art skills and employment opportunities. Bill helped found FUBA Academy (Federated Union for Black Artists) in 1978, which gave rise to the African Institute of Art at the Funda Center in 1983, followed by the Thupelo Art Project in 1985, and the Alexandra Arts Centre in 1986.
The founding of FUBA began in1976, when Bill convened a meeting of representatives of the African Music and Drama Association, the Market Theatre, and Ainslie's Studios, where it was agreed that an interdisciplinary arts center be established. A multiracial committee was formed to evaluate ways and means of forming the center, and the writer Sipho Sipamela was nominated as coordinator. This was a bleak time for multiracial endeavors. Race relations had reached a nadir that year. Thousands of Soweto schoolchildren, some empowered by the Black Consciousness writings of Steve Biko, took to the streets to protest being educated in Afrikaans, the language of the oppressor. Police reacted viciously and shot dead twelve-year-old Hector Petersen on June 16th, which today is a national holiday in South Africa. A national protest erupted. Hundreds of students were killed, many under the age of eighteen. Steve Biko was arrested and beaten to death in prison.
In 1978, with the blessings of the committee, Sipho Sipamela began discussion with a Soweto group of artists that was investigating similar objectives. Based on the concepts of these two groups, FUBA was established, a constitution formulated, and Sipho nominated as director. FUBA accepted funding from the Urban Foundation, a government-run organization that funded culture, education, and building in black communities, but with the instrumentality of regaining foreign support for the government, drawing foreign funding away from the ANC, and controlling where and how funding was spent. Although the money was "dirty," FUBA was able to employ fulltime teaching staff. Esrom Legae and Ben Arnold were two of the well-known artists who joined the teaching program. FUBA was the only interdisciplinary center of its kind in South Africa. It was extremely well received, and through its success such others centers as Funda and Alexandra Arts Centre arose, with the financial backing of supportive corporations and of individuals willing to invest their time.
In 1983, the government held a referendum to establish what it called a tricameral parliament with separate parliamentary chambers, or congresses, for whites, "Coloureds," and Indians, and with none for blacks. The United Democratic Front was founded to oppose this system, violent protests escalated throughout the country, and a state of emergency was declared in 1986, which lasted four years. During this period, Bill Ainslie and David Koloane were the first Africans invited to participate in the annual Triangle Artists' Workshop in New York, which was founded by Anthony Caro, the famous British sculptor, and Robert Loder, a British collector and supporter of the arts who had spent time in South Africa. The artists' workshop was a two-week period in which artists working in disparate mediums and ideologies come together from all over the world to live and work. "Both culturally and artistically, this diversity fosters a rich interchange of ideas and opinions. Each artist is enabled to develop his or her own identity in relation to other artists" (Edwards 1993 1). The atmosphere is one of experimentation. It is like a pressure cooker. Developments that might have taken months, or might never have happened, occur quickly during a workshop.
On their return in 1985, Bill and David initiated the first African workshop, Thupelo—a Sotho word meaning to teach by example—on the premises of JAF (see Koloane in this volume). My father viewed the art workshop as "a place where one concentrates on the work, where distractions are eliminated, where one learns to detect the traps that inhibit creativity. The traps are the predictables, the patterns of habit, the unthinking and unquestioned thought or action, which close us into a structure that becomes a prison for us and others, who through law and custom, insecurity and false manners, the desire to please and the desire to keep the peace, have identified themselves with the external demands transmitted to them by the secret guardians of their fate" (Williams 1990 1).
Although Thupelo had huge successes, with overwhelming attendance year after year and the creation of opportunities for participants, and even though the concept continues to mushroom all over Africa, it was criticized by many white academics as being a means of forcing the abstract expressionist movement onto African artists. The Thupelo Workshop was based on the Triangle Workshop, which in the early1980s had a formalist flavor and Clement Greenberg as visiting critic. Many of the materials provided at Thupelo encouraged abstract work—huge metal scraps, welding instruments, power tools, and buckets of gel medium and acrylic paint donated by Golden Paint in New York to support black artists. Thupelo never stressed, however, that this was the only direction the work could take. David Koloane believes the hostility toward Bill and abstraction was because the motive of broadening the scope of expression was not understood. Rather, South African academics and critics wanted to dictate artists' expression, resulting in many black artists being stuck in a stereotypical, albeit representational, manner of working— making saleable but not individualistic work.
Abstraction opened up a means of understanding painting as a language that could become meaningful as an expression in itself. Thupelo liberated the artists to see how abstraction could free their work. "The irony is that it is only Black artists...who are insistently reminded at every possible occasion about their own identity, and how they should be conscious of it, by specialists who are descendants of settlers. One is reminded of Chinua Achebe's comment about the stranger who sheds more tears than the bereaved. The expectation does not appear to apply to White artists. The fact that White artists can quote and assimilate wide and varied sources and cultures without qualm, and with no fear of being accused of appropriation or misappropriation, or of losing their identity, insinuates that Black artists lack the capacity for creative diversity" (Koloane 1999 333).
Bill's own work moved from figuration toward abstraction between 1960 and 1970. Through his discovery of Douglas Portway he began to realize "that he had never thought truly profoundly about the anatomy of a painting—that what and how he painted was as yet only descriptive of fairly superficial experiences—and he began to explore less obvious functions of form and colour in artistic communication" (Berman. 1970 29). By 1968, his monumental figures of black domestic workers had merged with his landscapes, creating non-figurative shapes. By 1970, the image was virtually dissolved into colourfield painting. Bill's own artist's statement from 1968 reveals his take on abstraction:
I have become conscious of an imagery emerging, which seems to derive chiefly from Africa, although in evoking it I have deliberately used methods derived from the East as well as the West. The sense of space is of Eastern derivation, as opposed to the receding-size perspective that dominated Europe from the Renaissance up to the turn of the century. The calligraphic nature of line is an Eastern thing as modified by contemporary American abstract expressionism. The floating image...also derives from America, but works further back to cubism and surrealism. But the imagery is African, because of the dust, dung, rock lichen, mud, stains, spoors, bone carvings, masks. It is frequently and deliberately ambiguous—a brushstroke may evoke lichen or rock for one focus and a head for a different focus; similarly, crusts of mud emerge as the suggestion of human forms.
Critics of Bill's abstract work accused him of being a sellout to American cultural imperialism at a time when Resistance Art was promoting the revolution in South Africa. Bill was interested in the language of painting and the process of making a work. His revolution was making art accessible to all.
Bill focused on making JAF a place of' normality where those who really were living in the revolution, in the townships where lives were torn apart daily, could escape and focus on something else, a place of relief where the individual voice was heard and encouraged and the possibility of a future existed. The oppressor's hand was present in every aspect of a black South African's daily life; abstraction was a means of eliminating the oppressor by concentrating on life. Those who took to it used it as a means of cleansing the slate, of removing the barriers, of seeing things in a new light, of metamorphosis, and of discovery of fresh paths that led into new contexts.
Many of today's leading South African artists and teachers came through the doors of the Johannesburg Art Foundation or somehow were affected by Bill's work, and here I can mention only a few. David Koloane, internationally renowned artist, curator, writer, and African art historian, was a student of Bill's in the early 1970s. He started out attending classes on Saturday mornings. He soon found that he needed more time for his art, and left his job to become a fulltime student. As far back as I can remember, David has always been around as a colleague and friend. William Kentridge, internationally renowned artist, began as a student in the late 1970s and then taught in the printmaking department. Anthusa Sotiriades, sculptor and teacher, became a fulltime student in the early 1980s, moved into teaching at JAF, and after Bill's death became director of JAF between 1994 and 1998. Others include Kay Hassan, Helen Sibidi, Bongi Dlomo, Sarah Tabane, and from this present exhibition, Tumelo Mosaka, Rudzani Nemasetoni, Colbert Mashile, Alison Kearney, Andrew Tshabangu (Alexandra Art Centre), and Thando Mama (Thupelo).
On August 26, 1989, Bill was killed instantly in a car accident on his way home from helping with the set-up of the first Pachipamwe International Artists' Workshop at Cyrene Mission in neighboring Zimbabwe. It was the first time he had returned to Cyrene since he and Fieke had rekindled the art program at the mission almost twenty-five years before. His funeral marked one of the first times in the history of South Africa that the Zulu African National Anthem was sung in a white church by a multiracial congregation. It presaged the emergence of a democratic South Africa. On this day, Calvin Cook, the pastor who had married Bill and Fieke Ainslie, came to send Bill off.
With the 1994 inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected president in South Africa, many things changed in the country. The education system opened to all races, and the Community Art Centers closed because they had served their purpose and funding became difficult given the country's needs in other sectors. The Johannesburg Art Foundation closed in 2001.
Bill's vision was to create an environment where all South Africans could work together as equals. Through Bill's determination, his dream became manifest. What he created in the field of the visual arts was a microcosm for the macrocosm he sensed South Africa could achieve but which he did not live long enough to witness. His pre-democratic dream and exploration became prophecy; it paved the road for others to imitate.
I know: a generation after me will perhaps be witness to a moment when art from my country will be art from the African continent. It will be free from being "black" art, or "township" art, or "tribal" art, or "craft." But this can only happen when Africans themselves free it and themselves…It is when this art contributes to liberation, to a rebellion, to a reawakening of the African, and when the African claims and freely creates an art that expresses this freedom, that art will be liberated.
Mongane Wally Serote 1999
Works cited
Ainslie, Bill. 1986. Art Foundation Newsletter. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Foundation.
Berman, Esme. 1970. Art and Artists of South Africa. Cape Town: Balkema
Davimes, Stephen. 1984. "Where Art's Ugly Ducklings Shed Their Feathers," Sunday Express, Feb.12.
Edwards, Veryan. 1993. Thapong International Artists' Workshop. [n.p. Botswana.]
Koloane, David. 1999. "The Identity Question," in Reading the Contemporary, p.333. eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Serote, Mongane Wally. 1999. "Liberated Voices," in Liberated Voices, eds. Frank Harreman and Mark D'Amato. New York: Museum for African Art.
Williams, Pat. 1990. Last Paintings by Bill Ainslie: 1934-1989. Oxford: Wolfson College.
Copy right: Sophia Ainslie
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