Indigenous Relations: Art and Modernity in South Africa

Julie L McGee
Rockefeller Fellow, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

This paper considers modern and contemporaneous “appropriations” of indigenous cultural forms in South African art. To what end was the interest in South African indigenous art forms by artists of the Amadlozi group an expression of a “modernity” and “Africanness” that was product of European discourse on South African soil? Similarly, can we critically examine Irma Stern’s “African” influences and modernist style without collapsing South African artistic practices into modernist silo of European invention? Can African artists be African after Picasso as Garth Erasmus has asked? This examination is not a recuperative one intended nationalize or indigenize South African artistic praxes that are clearly influenced by European ideologies and colonization. Rather, the question is more about when and how does appropriation of indigenous cultural forms escape the trope of the art historical discourse on modernist primitivism – if at all. More broadly speaking, if artistic modernity within Africa is seen primarily as first a loss and then the reiteration of “native” traditions then is there ever the possibility of escaping the trope of Eurocentric primitivism? In South Africa how are contemporary understandings/perceptions of indigenous bound up in what is or when was South African modernity? Is indigenity still present when one interrogates African modernity or is it a trope of modernity? Without positing a certain outcome, it is hoped that historicizing how indigenous culture has been named and appropriated over time, by whom and to what ends in South Africa will offer critical insight into the larger interrogation of African modernity.