South African Art - Contempory Art from South Africa

The Art of South Africa

An Eclectic Mix of Diverse Cultures

Mr. Hermanus The Willie Bester Home

A characteristic that defines our species is the making of art. (Art; from Latin 'ars' meaning worked or formed from basic material.) Art as a medium of exchange is the gift in the hand of its creator, alive in the mind of its beholder, converting the private to a public good, and thereby adding it to the common store of human energy and hope. Art is the creative output by human beings, that allows other people to be infected by the inner feelings of one another.

People say Africa gets into your blood. The fact is Africa is already in your blood no matter where or who you are. Archaeology and genetic mapping confirm that Africa is the birthplace of humankind. The first word ever spoken, the first fire lit, and our first home - all were of Africa. The origins of all art, culture and science is African. As humans - we are able to explore our consciousness and through art, understand our precious world. With art and from it, we feel profound integrity for our own design. South African art and more particularly its contemporary art, brings millenniums of diverging cultures back to their African roots. South African art blends humankinds past with the present and moves forward into time...

Hand Axe dating from 250000 to 500000 Years - Franschhoek South Africa

Long before people first engraved and painted on stones and rock faces, they invested objects of their existence with meaning. Care and thought went beyond mere functionality in stone tools from Middle and Late Stone Age sites.

Blombos Cave - Ochre Tablet - Circa 73000 BC

Dating to 75,000 years, this ochre tablet found at Blombos in the Southern Cape, bears cross-hatched markings. It is thought to be one of the earliest examples of human abstract illustration.

Blombos Cave Shell Beads - Circa 73000 BC

Small drilled snail shells unearthed from Blombos cave show patterns of wear on the shells, revealing they were worn as parts of necklaces or bracelets, making these shells the earliest known objects of African adornment.

Blombos Cave - Archaeologist Chris Henshilwood

The significance of the discovery represents an occurrence of behaviour that communicates abstract information through the medium of a symbolic objects.

Kisalen Grave - Democratic Republic of Congo

Forty thousand years ago, stone and bone pendants, shell ornaments and ostrich eggshell beads were widely traded throughout Africa. Their inclusion in burial graves, confirms people used objects to signal social relations and rank with others.

Paleolithic Rock Art

Drakensberg Rock Painting - Kwa-Zulu Natal

Between 20000 to 30000 years ago, people started leaving more obvious signs of their presence. Detailed cave paintings (so-called Bushman paintings) are found depicting hunting, domestic and ceremonial activates.

Distribution of Southern African Rock Engraving and Paintings.

San rock art is distributed from Angola in the west to Mozambique and Kenya in the east, throughout Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa - wherever cave conditions have favoured preservation from the elements. There is a stylistic unity across the region, which includes the art of the Tassili N'Ajjer region of northern Africa.

Stone tablet from Apollo11 Cave - Erich Wendt

Small portable stones and rock fragments called art mobilier, are the earliest examples of rock art in Southern Africa. Some examples are so small they could be held in the hand. Between 1969 and 1972, Erich Wendt found seven such painted stones in a rock shelter in the Huns Mountains. (Southern Namibia) They were radiocarbon and stratigraphic dated to + - 27000 years.

Twyfelfontein Namibia Brandberg Namibia

Contrary to other first arts of Africa, southern African rock art is not easily slotted into distinct regions. Successive generation of artists depicted similar themes and drew on a shared array of painting and engraving techniques. The gradual representational shifts that occur across a wide landscape, do not tie in with our knowledge of San linguistic boundaries, which were often absolute. What we do find is that the recurring pictorial themes echo what is known of San cognitive systems. In the late 19th century, German linguist Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd and Joseph Orpen began meticulously recording folklore and myths as told by San informants. Together with more recent testimonies by San from Namibia and Botswana, the accounts allow us to track a continuous, albeit fragile thread back through time to the makers of the southern rock art.

Brandberg Namibia

Common San rock painting subjects include hunting, often depicting with great accuracy large animals which no longer inhabit the same region in the modern era, as well as warfare among humans, dancing, domestic scenes, multiple images of various animals, including giraffes, antelope of many kinds, and snakes. The last of San works are emotional in their representation of larger, darker people and even of white hunters on horseback, both of whom would supplant the Bushman peoples.

Brandberg Namibia

Rock paintings associated with peoples belonging to the Bantu language family are comparatively recent and one can link them to specific ethnic groupings, such as the Kalanga of Zimbabwe and Warangi of Tanzania. The predominantly geometric finger painting of central Africa, with its core in Zambia and Malawi, has been shown to have indisputable links to the BaTwa ancestors of modern day Pygmies. The distribution of rock art of the central Kondoa district of Tanzania, tallies with the historical distribution of the Hadzabe and Sandawe peoples. The assigning of these traditions is well supported by archaeological, genetic and linguistic evidence.

The African Era (Bantu Speakers)

Broadly speaking - the art of South Africa can be seen in terms of a rough division into categories, as falling into a two by two matrix: traditional or modern, black or other. Modern South Africa includes a large diversity of races and cultures. Political history was divisive of societies across the sub-continent. It was inevitable that the resulting socio-political upheaval would produce a contrasting variety of art forms.

Traditional African tribal art characteristically has a range of recognizable forms within which the artisans work, allowing for recognition of an objects tribal origin. A few examples include the wall decorations of the northern Ndebele of South Africa (though some would argue these to be modern), the beaded aprons worn by Zulu and Xhosa girls (and other tribes) before marriage, the patterns on the Dhlo-dhlo headband and various other fairly rigid genres showing typical tribal influences. In west - central and east Africa, tribal forms are ever more distinguishable through sculpture.

20th Century Contemporary Art

Alfred Thoba - 1976 Riots Sydney Kumalo - Matriarch

Jump ahead to the present era, when traditional tribal forms were scattered and re-melded by the divisive policies of apartheid. New forms of art evolved in the townships: a dynamic art using everything from plastic strips to bicycle spokes. The mining culture in particular produced characteristic decorated travel trunks, decorated transistor radios, blankets with urban motifs, and the like.

William Kentridge

Art of this era represents a 'modern' black art form less easily recognized as belonging to a particular tribe. Carvings and paintings also recorded urban difficulties, lifestyles and objects, such as queues, bussing, drunkenness, urban poverty, vehicles and the 'dompas,' police activity.

Willie Bester - Forced Removal

Add to this the Dutch-influenced folk art of the hardy Afrikaner Trek Boers and the urban white artists earnestly following changing European traditions from the 1850's onwards, and you have an eclectic mix which continues to evolve today.

Cecil Skotnes 1926 - 2009

White artists have made other art in South Africa, both modern and traditional. Indian and Cape Malay or Coloured traditions, also have recognizable clothing and musical art forms. As with black art, white art has tended to fall into art based on traditional European or white tribal forms, that is - two dimensional oil paintings in the European realist mould 'usually urban artists' and the folk art or rural art of the Boers.

Apartheid Art

The political art of the apartheid era often originated in the universities and large cities. It was usually short lived in the sense of being graffiti, protest cartoons, or similar works published in student publications. Art with a political message was often banned and anyway, was not intended for deliberate preservation.

Delise Reich - Wits University Collection

White artists exhibited works critical of both black and white political behavior. (above and below)

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Zoot Suited Bothas of a Feather (left to right) Fanie Botha, PW Botha, Pik Botha by Sonja Zytkow

Ceramist Sonja Zytkow exhibited Zoot Suited Bothas of a Feather at a solo exhibition at 'Things Gallery' during 1981. The three works were later published in “LIP from Southern African Women" (1983). At the time of the exhibition, three Bothas ruled South Africa and coincidentally, the French movie La Cage aux Folles (Birds of a Feather) was all the rage. Sonja's presentation was meant as a political message to lighten up, as everything was banned left right and center. Even a government official dressed in a flashy suit of extreme cut would have been VERBOTTEN. State President PW Botha's daughter Roxanne came to the exhibition and apparently left in tears. Roxanne Botha would later appear in a documentary called 'Children of Apartheid'.

(The trio of Zoot Suited Bothas of a Feather is for sale. Click image for a larger resolution image or contact us.)

Michelle Raubenheimer - Wits University - 1989

Several exhibitions were closed by government order for their political or obscene content. Alternatively, items within the exhibitions were ordered to be removed from display.

South Africa held its first multi-racial elections in 1994, which the ANC won by an overwhelming majority. The arts flourished and diversified and continues to do so today.

Enjoy the images to follow, representing artists that caught our 'tribal eye'.

Alexis Preller Andre Serfontein Anton Van Wouw Barbara Tyrrell

Cecil Skotnes Don Heywood Dumisani Sibisi Edoardo Villa

Elaine Savage Eli Kobeli Francois Krige Frederick I'Ons

George Pemba Gerard Bhengu Gerard Sekoto

George French Angas Hannes Harrs Irma Stern Jabulani Ntuli

John Muafangejo Joseph Maseko Julias Mfete Karel Nel

Leora Farber Lucas Sithole Lucky Sibiya Mizraem Maseko

Nathaniel Mokogsi Niville Lewis Norman Catherine Ntukwana Hargreaves

Phoshoko Mogano Pranas Domsaitis Sabela Judus Mahlangu Sipho Ndlovu

Sonja Zytkow Speelman Mahlangu Sydney Kumalo Thandaphi Landela

Titta Fasciotti Tienie Tritchard Themba Siwela Vusi Khumalo

Vladmir Tretchikoff William Kentridge Walter Battis

We end this page celebrating an engraved vision of an elephant found in the Northern Cape. The photograph connects the petroglyph to the art of the cameraman's eye, while a South African elephant dances forward into yet another time...