Chapter 1: The 1971 Art South Africa Today Exhibition: Towards a Language of protest art

Overt socio-political protest in South African art, as I have suggested, first made a substantial appearance, in 1971, at the national and biennial Art South Africa Today exhibition in the Durban Art Gallery (17 August - 6 September). An unprecedented number of works (for an exhibition in South Africa) referred unambiguously to the socio-political circumstances prevailing in the country at the time, and several of these won prizes. Omar Badsha, Jochen Berger, Clifford Bestall, Nils Burwitz, Norman Catherine, Malcolm Payne, Cyprian Shilakoe, Timo Smuts, Paul Stopforth, Harold Strachan, Kanu Sukha, Mahommed Timol and Gavin Younge all exhibited works the titles and imagery of which satirise, criticise or refer to the South African government, its practices and its policies. Bill of White Rights, The Hansard Series and Minority Triptych, for example, bitterly parody the government's methods of "real­politik".

Many of the artists listed above had produced and exhibited protest works shortly before 1971. The scattered nature of their exhibitions in a few, small and mostly private galleries, however, suggested to some observers (for example, the Durban critic Marie Francois) that they were merely part of a youthful "underground" trend, rather than signalling a new and potentially important phenomenon. (As can be seen from their birthdates on Page 21, almost all of the artists in question were in their twenties.) Viewed from the perspective of the early 1990s, however, the several one-person and group exhibitions that, together with the 1971 exhibition, around the turn of the decade can be seen to point to an intense and widespread concern at the time among young artists for their socio-political environment. Badsha had a one-person exhibition (his first) at the Artists Gallery in Cape Town in April 1970. The following year, in June and July respectively, Burwitz and Younge had exhibitions at the Lidchi Gallery in Johannesburg, and in Octo­ber Younge had a second exhibition at the School of Architecture of the University of Natal in Durban. Stopforth showed protest works at the Natal Association of Arts (NSA) gallery in December 1971. Andre van Zyl (1951-) and Jochen Berger, both Western Cape-based artists, exhibited at the Association of Arts gallery in Cape Town in January 1972. And Stopforth and Younge exhibited again, in 1972, at the Walsh Marais gallery in Durban, and in the Natal Contemporary Art exhibition, which also included works by Badsha and Bestall. These several exhibitions of protest art in a comparatively short period were note­worthy given the relatively small art community in South Africa. In fact, the proportion was high in relation to the general activity of exhibitions in the early Seventies. (Useful gauges in this respect are the relevant issues of Calendar, a publication of the South African Association of Arts, and UNISA's De Arte, which recorded events in local art circles.)

Other venues with an interest in protest should also be mentioned. As a response to a Black Consciousness call for black people to "go it alone", the Black Art Studios (BAS) were set up in Durban, in October 1972 and exhibited work by artists such as Badsha, Paul Sibisi (1948-) and Timol. This venture, however, did not survive beyond the year. The Dashiki Art Museum, also established by black artists in 1972 (in Ga-Rankua near Pretoria), showed work by artists and activists like Lefifi Thladi (1944-). The African Art Centre in Durban also exhibited work only by black artists, but was run entirely by whites as a project of the Institute of Race Relations, a politically progressive organisation.

Although often cautious, the reception accorded protest art was, as I shall show, generally and even unexpectedly favourable. The feeling amongst critics, exhibition jurors and the art-going public seemed to be that a response from artists to social issues was overdue. Given these relatively positive begin­nings for protest art, however, questions inevitably arise as to why this valuable tendency of socio-political responsiveness in South African art was not altogether sustained. After a year or two, protest art became less frequent and critical commentary less sympathetic, and it took a further ten years for overt political protest in art to reassert itself and gain recognition as a vital and necessary element in a society in crisis. It was only in the Eighties in South Africa, in fact, that artists were harassed or persecuted for presenting dissident views. When action was taken in the Seventies against Badsha, Mnyele and Strachan, it was in their roles as activists rather than artists. (Lionel Davies, who was on Robben Island in the Seventies, had been imprisoned as early as 1964.) As I suggest, however, the reasons for the early promise of protest art not being fulfilled lie not so much in harassment by the State as in the attitudes of the white art community regard­ing the relation­ship between art and politics. Paul Stopforth, for example, recalls an instance in 1971 when these attitudes took tangible form. Jill Addleson, director of the Durban Art Gallery, wished to acquire his award-winning Bill of White Rights for the gallery, but the purchasing committee rejected her sugges­tion. To quote Stop­forth, "It had won an award, but it wasn't art because it had strong social and politi­cal elements" ( D'Arts , 19­86: 7). Pur­chasing commit­tees for public galleries are usually composed of one or two city council­lors and "respected" members of the art commun­ity. Whatever the full reasons for the rejection of Stop­forth's work, the point is that protest art clearly chal­lenged the prevailing view of the committee that art and politics "did not mix".

In tandem with such political conser­vatism, art education as formalist and modernist in universities and art schools also had diffi­culties in relating "art" to "socio-politi­cal realities". In the case of black artists dependence on a white market for a liveli­hood, a lack of theor­etical art education, and a real fear of state reprisals generally served to limit references to politics. (The social commentary in the Sixties of Dumile, Julian Motau and Andrew Motjuoadi, for example, was mostly indirect and "pre-black consciousness" in its imagery of suffering.) For young artists and writers on art, the pressures to conform to prevail­ing norms remained considerable. In an interview with Clive van den Bergh in 1985, Stop­forth described an aspect of this pressure:

For me there were obviously important reasons for working as I did, taking sides.... to establish some kind of social, political ...link to the reality of this country. There have been consider­able objections to this, you know. "No art can succeed in doing this; no art can possibly hope to provide an equivalent." There's a kind of bourgeois complaint against myself and Gavin [Younge] - particularly from those early Durban days - and to some extent against Cliff [Bestall]. I think that what I did was a kind of gesture to prove it was possible: that in terms of the profession I had chosen... it was possible to make an art that could confront issues here". ( D'Arts , 1985: 5)

Despite Stopforth's concerns, however, the Art South Africa Today exhibition in 1971 was striking in encouraging protest art "that could confront issues". What had characterised this par­ticular moment? There is probably no easy answer. If we look in terms broader than art we see a crack occurring in about 1968 in South Africa's "silent" decade of Verwoerdian repression. I have mentioned radical thought abroad and the beginnings of Black Consciousness. Closely aligned to these political movements were cultural programmes. In South Africa the beginnings of black poetry, for example, met with general acclaim by all South African critics, and a "neutral" space was suggested by the fact that the State itself was slow to react to the "political" dimen­sion of these new voices. In retrospect, we realise that the State, emersed in its own Apart­heid thinking, saw Black Con­sciousness initially as a triumph of ethnicity: hence a tri­umph of Apartheid. After a decade of repression, the early Seventies must have seemed to offer a "Prague Spring" and politically conscious writers, artists and critics were quick to respond. Even the art establishment, perhaps emboldened by the lack of state action, became excited by local specificity. The "free mood", however, did not last. Black Consciousness was soon seen as a threat, and, in the art world, the training of ahistorical formalism began to reassert itself.

Modern­ist/formalist views of the super­iority of "allusive" social commentary were not, of course, simply displaced at the Art South Africa Today exhibition of 1971, and before I turn to this key exhibition I should like to look briefly at the important series of exhibitions of which the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition was a part.­ I wish to do so because these exhibi­tions had something of a unique character in South Africa of the Sixties and Seventies, present a paradox typical of the time, and provide a necessary context for the 1971 exhibition.

These exhibitions are also significant for this study because they brought together work from all over South Africa and were, therefore, a useful barometer for gauging the emergence and extent of overt political protest in local art. In Chapter Two I shall pursue discussion of exhibitions after 1971.

The Art South Africa Today exhibitions were held bienially from 1963 to 1975, and at the time were distinguished among major national exhibitions in this country by the rela­tively large entry and inclusion of works by black artists, by the presence occasionally of black jurors on the selection panels, and by the regular appearance of works that in various ways engaged with South Africa's socio-political circumstances. The exhibitions were also unusual in that they were organised by the politically active South African Institute of Race Relations (in conjunction with the S.A. Association of Art and the Durban Art Gallery). National exhibitions such as the Quadren­nial (1956-1968),the Quinquennial (1969), the Republic Festival exhibitions (of 1966 and 1971), and the S.A.Graphic Art exhibitions (1971-1976) that travelled overseas, included the work of one or two black art­ists from 1971 onwards. These exhibitions did not appoint black jurors, however, and showed few, if any, overtly political works.

The character and history of the Art South Africa Today exhibi­tions suggest that while the liberal aura resulting from the involvement of the Institute of Race Relations was conduc­ive to the emergence of overtly political art, it was not enough to ensure that protest art was kept to the forefront of attention. As I have suggested, a unique socio-political climate prevailed around 1971, and this possibly also had an effect on the jurors. The choice of jurors is, of course, important in determining the character of an exhibition, and the liberal inclinations of a significant sponsor would have influenced a selection of "liberal" personalities. What I am suggesting, therefore, is an intermeshing of causal factors in creating a "moment" for protest art around 1971.

In 1969, for example, the jurors were Neville Dubow, A. d'al­poim Guedes, Heather Martienssen and Frank McEwen, and among the works selected were pieces by Badsha, Bestall, Catherine, Harold Rubin (1932-), Stopforth and Younge. Badsha, Bestall and Rubin were awarded prizes. Reviews, however, suggest rightly I think that the work of these artists should not be considered exceptional. In fact, in a perceptive article in De Arte (1969), Hilary Graham wrote:

The Durban exhibition was predictably Pop, with diehard ab­straction showing its tired eye... We in South Africa are in the unfortunate position where artistic styles are sold to us on the international art market, and we meekly accept the canned commodity. (126)

Rita Strey, nevertheless, thought that "...two newcomers to the Durban art scene", Bestall and Stopforth, "deserve watching" ( Natal Mercury , July 1969). The name of Stopforth's work, Space Fire, however, suggests a preoccupation with space exploration rather than politics. (The spectacular phenomenon of the first moon landing by cosmonauts had occurred in July 1969.) Younge's Battleship Potential suggests a similar preoccupation. Only Badsha and expatriate Rubin, in their drawings Birth and Israeli War I and II respectively, addressed socio-political issues. (M.L. Dunbar exhibited Honkies Hole, but I have not been able to trace this work.) Both Badsha and Rubin, however, used relatively indirect means to make their comment. Badsha's black mother experiencing the pain of child­birth is drawn in the language of expressionistic distor­tion and generalisation typical of the work of black artists in the Sixties. And Rubin offers highly stylised modernistic figures in contorted poses, presumably symbolic of the anguish and pain of war. Were it not for the drawing's title, the figures could be read in terms of some undefined human suffering, or as representative of all human suffering. It is works like these, however, that by contrast make subsequent statements of political protest by Badsha, Stop­forth and others all the more unusual and powerful.

By 1969, then, it appears that jurors were reasonably open to the idea of social comment in art, but that the works submitted were more "indirect" than the political statements that were beginning to be made by people like Stop­forth and Younge, and by students at various art schools. A look at critical reviews of exhibitions in 1969 suggests, in fact, that the most exciting works being produced were not always those seen on major exhibitions. The work on the Quinquennial exhibition (organised by the Department of Cultural Affairs), for example, was described by critic Marie Francois as "an anti-climax beyond description" and as "bland, featureless and mediocre" ( Daily News , July 1969). Having seen a number of works on this exhibition, I do not think this too harsh a judgment. (Francois also suggested, however, that the various exhibitions at smaller galleries, in 1969, were equally dismal.) Anxiety about the state of local art was also voiced at a symposium called The Art Scene Today, convened by the Durban Art Gallery Association in August of that year. Nonethe­less Professor Otto Schroder, who wrote the introduction to the Quinqennial catalogue, said of the fifty works on display that they ...reflect the spiritual unrest of our present times, and the ever-increasing dehumanisation of our urban civilisation. They may be partly derivative of the styles of North American and European artists but show talent, which augurs well for the future. (4)

Unfortunately Schroder wants to universalise socio-political specifics into the realm of the "spiritual", while using as a launching point that undifferentiated quantity, "urban civilisation". Social injustice and political conflict too easily become "the unchanging human condition". It is a favourite "bourgeois tendency" in educational and artistic discourse, in its greater interest in preserving than changing a privileged status quo.

Developments in the Art South Africa Today exhibitions after 1971 also help to place "protest" in its context. In 1973 Pauline Vogelpoel, then organiser of the Tate Gallery's Contemporary Art Society in London, was invited to select and judge the works submitted for that year. Among the works accepted were protest pieces by Badsha, Bestall, Burwitz, Paul Sibisi (1948-), Vuminkosi Zulu (1948-), Catherine, Ian Redel­inghuys (1949-) and Younge. The last three artists won prizes. Badsha's Fear-fear itself and Strike clearly relate to events in Durban, in 1973, concerning widespread detentions and strikes, while Catherine's Net Blanke and Redelinghuys's Game concerning aspects of politi­cal loyalty indicate an interest in the wider political crisis of the time. Younge's Compendium of Games deals bitingly with the interrelation of sport and politics in South African life.

As I shall indicate more fully in Chapter Two, however, when the exhibi­tion was opened by Professor Norman Martin (then head of the Department of Fine Art in Pietermaritz­burg) his comments aroused considerable ire. He condemned most of the work on the exhibition as "trivial" and technically deficient. Of the protest works he only singled out Younge's work for praise. Art critic Marie O'Connor, on the other hand, defended the exhibi­tion, and noted with relief that political protest in art, "polemics" as she phrased it, had largely disappeared, declined in quality, or had been successfully superseded by other modes of expression.

Finally, the extreme discontent surrounding the last of the Art South Africa Today exhibitions in 1975 (psychologist David Basckin renamed it Art South Africa 1952 ) prompted the setting up of a "salon des refuses", the Fourteen from Natal . This exhibition showed work rejected by Clement Greenberg (the sole juror that year), and included sculptures by Bestall and Younge . Marie O'Connor, however, described these sculptures as "thinly conceived and forced in quality" and said of the artists that they "have proved themselves capable of much better in the past" (Natal Mercury , August 1975). We are thus hearing scattered comments rather than the beginnings of a "progressive" political criticism.

According to one of the jurors, Neville Dubow, an unusually large number of overtly politi­cal works were submitted to the exhibition in 1971. Many were selected, and part of the reason -as I have suggested - might have lain in the liberal credentials of the panel of jurors at a watershed moment in South African socio-cultural and political life. Walter Battiss, Esme Berman and Dubow - the three jurors - do in some respects represent the art "establishment" because of their professional positions. Yet they were strong, independent "individuals". Like most liberal humanists Berman was, and still is, sympathetic to certain kinds of social express­ion. This does not prevent her from endorsing what might be called the "conservative cause", however, for she tends not to examine the socio-political implications of her own aesthetic preferences. The same difficulty arises with Battiss. Though he was clearly enthusiastic about the 1971 exhibition, and the social concerns of young artists, his own sense of social concern remained somewhat politically amorphous and linked to aesthetic "freedom" (he was opposed to all forms of censorship). On the eve of the Soweto Uprising he celebrated with Norman Catherine their creation of an alternative fantasy world, Fook Island (the details of which I shall consider in Chapter Two). In contrast to Berman and Battiss, Neville Dubow has spent much time trying to articulate his views on the role of art in a politically troubled society. He has written several articles and delivered numerous conference papers on the subject. He also convened the 1979 conference on the State of South Arican Art (to which I refer in my concluding remarks). It is possible, therefore, that Dubow would have encouraged a receptivity in his fellow jurors to overt protest in art, even though Berman and Battiss, as I shall show, favoured politics as modernist allusiveness.

Before discussing the works of protest on the exhibition that I regard as particularly significant, it seems important to provide some sense of the exhibi­tion as a whole. Apart from the protest works, there were, for example, several linocuts by Azaria Mbatha (1941-) (illus. i), ballpoint drawings by Tito Zungu (c.1946) (illus. ii.), large minimalist pieces such as those by Richard Wake (1935-), Norman Martin (19? -) (illus. iii. and iv.) and Trevor Coleman (1936-), a number of colour-field and hard-edge abstracts by people like Olivia Scholnick (1927-), Hans Pot­gieter (1942-) and Gerrit Hilhorst (1945-), Pop-inspired collages such as those by Margaret McKean (1936-) (illus. v.), organic and figurat­ive abstracts by Patrick O'Connor (1940-), Bill Ainslie (1934-91) and Mau­rice Kahn (1943), kinetic "machines" such as H. Andrew Todd's (1947-) I, We, Them, Those , and conceptual works like the Rubbish Box of Jean Powell (1927-) (illus. vi. and vii.). Almost without excep­tion these works have their stylistic and procedural origins in recognisable overseas sources. Wake's environmental primary structures, for example, are clearly derived from the work of people like Carl Andre and Sol Le­witt; Martin's extremely large, shaped and standing hard-edge abstract immediately calls to mind Frank Stella's work; and Powell's box has its precedents in neo-dada gestures.

Significantly, the work awarded first prize on the exhibi­tion, Payne's Swing , as well as the work included by Berman in her book of 1975 as represen­tative of protest art, Burwitz's In Cold Blood , tend to exemplify social content transmuted into modernist forms of "indirection". Works by Badsha and Shilakoe hover between two worlds: part in the "modernist" Sixties, part in the "radicalised" Seventies, and of the two artists it is the less aggressively political Shilakoe who has been accorded serious interest by art historians. I shall thus be taking issue here with the jurors' conception of effective political comment in art. Instead of praising Payne and Bur­witz as having initiated a protest idiom, I consider it to be only Stop­forth, Sukha and Younge who produced works for the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibi­tion that anticipated the social and pol­itical mood of the Seventies and, in conseq­ence, remain crucial to the direction of protest art in South Africa. It is, therefore, appropriate that I­ devote a large portion of this chapter to their work.

But it is worth beginning the examination with Malcolm Payne's award-winning Swing (illus. viii.). This work - a life-size replica of a child's swing - is interesting because while viewers generally ascribed to it a strong­ly political meaning, the artist himself claimed that politics were not his intention. Where viewers thought, "It's so symbolic. The political symbol­ism really strikes you", Payne told a reporter, "It's not political. It's a swing". And Walter Battiss said:

... It is a very powerful work. The artist has thought up something very original. His swing shows up the uncertainty of the age, this big thing we call anguish. (9 August 1971, Natal Mercury )

Payne also told reporters that he would have been happier if his work had been exhibited in a children's park: "It's meant more for children than for adults". What was it, then, that turned a child's swing into a symbol of political and existential significance?

Ascriptions of meaning to Swing might not be able to be separated from its context in the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition. Surrounded by an unusually large number of political works, and puzzled by the purpose of the object - a child's swing in an art gallery - viewers could have associated Swing with what was perceived to be the overall political tenor of the exhibi­tion. Other possibilities arise, how­ever, when one more carefully considers the work itself. An empty swing hovers threateningly high near the crossbar, while twisted metal chains suggest physical force, and the second chair of the swing, also empty, is projected forward in a dislocated way. As viewers at the exhibi­tion probably tended to do, I read states of violent disjunction into the imagery.

It is difficult to believe that Payne was unaware of how far removed the implications of his imagery were from the innocuous comments - a swing in a park - he offered to reporters. This is not simply a child's swing. Nor can expectations be satisfied by regarding it only as a "Pop" or neo-Duchampian found object placed out of regular context in an art gallery to make a point about how objects acquire the status of art. Far from being an example of post-modernist "game play" (Wittgen­stein was fashionable among intellectuals at the time), Swing almost insists instead on literal refer­ence in the context of South Africa in the early Seventies. Newspapers commonly reported instances of petty Apartheid being enforced with zeal in children's parks and in recreational facilities. In fact, reports of whites forcibly evicting black children from swings made a powerful impression on several artists and writers. The image of the child's swing appears, for example, in Oswald Mtshali's poem "Boy on a Swing" in his seminal collection Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971). Despite this, Payne in typical liberal and modernist fashion was prepared to grant his viewers an illusory freedom of inter­pretation, according to which he apparently wants to free himself of subscription to a particular ideology or position. The jurors were evidently impressed, but - from a Marxist perspective - it is legitimate to say that this sort of gesturing to "freedom" is itself ideological and could suggest not "anguish" but satisfaction with the world as it is, particularly for those who do not have to struggle against political obstacles designed to keep them powerless and economically subservient. In his comments about Swing - "the uncertainty of the age" and "this big thing called anguish" - Battiss also evinces a "bourgeois" sliding out of the particularities of history into vague existential cat­egories that ignore the world of material being and political accountability. Against this, a Marxist insistence on the historically specific acquires an ethical and a moral authority.

Thus far I have deviated from the views of Payne and Battiss, and focused on the possible meanings of Swing as political comment. In the Introduction, however, I indicated that I would try to avoid simply imposing my own singular response on works in ways that could circumscribe debate about possibilities of meaning. When granted its status as an aesthetic object, Swing, like many conceptual works of the Seventies, can be seen to "intervene" in our expectations about traditional methods of shaping aesthetic value. Payne evidently twisted and suspended the swings in order to create dramatic effect, and his work has many of the qualities that make it a piece of sculpture. But its tech­niques do not sup­port traditional notions of skill and virtuosity, and the critic Francois possibly had Swing in mind along with other works when she said that the 1971 exhibition...annihilates on a broadscale, a few sacred precepts concerning art hitherto produced in this country, chief among them being the emphasis on technical impeccability. This beauty of technique, combined with a lyrical handl­ing of form has soothed and sat­isfied the art-going public for years. ( Artlook , 1971:46)

This "breaking with expectation" was definitely one of the gains for South African art achieved by the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition. Like overt forms of protest, however, such challenges to concepts of artistic shaping and creativity did not meet with unqualified approval. By 1973 critics like O'Connor were expressing relief that artists had returned to more standard preoccupations with form and technique.

While the jurors would possibly not have gone along with this, their preference for Payne's work over the other more obviously protest works is instructive. Despite being open to express­ions of political protest in art, they were perhaps more comfortable with ambiguity and allusion than with direct and unambiguous state­ment. None mentioned seeing direct refer­ences to petty apart­heid in Payne's Swing , and in displaying a set of values based on adaptations of modernism the assumptions would have been that protest is best when it is covert or "aestheticised".

A work that fulfils this latter requirement is the much-acclaimed painting by Nils Burwitz, In Cold Blood (illus. ix.). As I have indicated, when Berman revised her Story of South African Painting in 1975, she chose Burwitz's work to represent protest art of the Seventies. In Cold Blood appears to confront the ugly reality of police brutality in South Africa. It shows two black people, with their faces bloodied and beaten, crawling­ away from a figure that holds a large and lethal truncheon in its fleshy fist. The immediate effect of the imagery is to provoke a near nauseous reaction from the viewer. After the initial shock, however, rather disturb­ing questions may arise about the work's ideological meaning. What, for example, is the imagery sug­gest­ing about black people? What is the purpose of the anonym­ity of the fig­ures? And what effect is produced by the aes­thet­ically self-con­scious dribbles, touches and sweeps of rich colour that give form, context and ident­ity to the imagery? Read­ings by critics and histor­ians have not raised such ques­tions, and tend to hurry away from political meaning to praise the work's aes­thetic qualities. The critic Marilynne Holloway, for example, wrote in 1973 of the fullscale drawing that was done as a pre­paratory work to the painting: "[it is] outstanding for its uncompromising impact. Solid authority looms over bloodied and cowering oppressed in a splendidly drawn contrast of forms" ( Sunday Tribune , October 1973). And Berman, even as she gives "fact" its due, shifts towards aesthetic "self-containment":

...the painting...is more factual in character than many of his earlier works. The explicit nature of the image was also conditioned by the artistic environment of which it formed a part. That exhibition, entitled Johann­esburg Exposures , and mounted in 1971, sur­rounded the viewer with paintings, sculptures, assemblages and actual impedimenta of the daily scene. In its claustrophobic effect, by means of shock and satire and by repetition of disturbing images, it drew attention to the social and envi­ronmental evils to which society is an unseeing witness. In Cold Blood is one of the few self-contained paintings from the exhibi­tion, and one of the most succinct and economical of Bur­witz's pictorial state­ments of the period. (1975: 239-40)

When shown at the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition, along with two other pieces by Burwitz, In Cold Blood certainly had political impact. But I must return to my own questions about what it conveys to me about oppression and brutality in this country. There is a strong possibility that the work is anything but supportive of the liber­ation of the black oppressed, and could be read as politically reaction­ary. Two things in particular strike me as problematic. Firstly, there are the badly battered figures whom Hollo­way describes, in patronisingly sweeping terms, as the "cowering oppressed". Burwitz's Francis Bacon-like blur­ring of the black men's faces achieves the effect that Bacon himself deliberately sought. It reduces the figures to grotesque sub-human creatures, powerless under the assault of faceless authority. Critic Jill Gowans interpreted the figures as "a black man with features made animal-like with fear and pain [crawling] away from a faceless overcoated man" ( Daily News July 1971). Then there is the figure in heavy trench-coat and boots that stands like an immoveable and offish lump to the left of the beaten men. The figure is seen from a worm's eye perspective, and is shown only as far as its shoul­ders - the viewer is thus invited to share the victim's view of the man whom Holloway designates abstractly as "author­ity". In so doing Holloway, perhaps without my intent, presses home the point I am making: that Burwitz dehumanises the entire situation. The problem is not only that the black oppressed need to have their humanity affirmed, but that after 1968 even a liberal perspective could no longer think of the black person as a cowering victim. Inter­preted in this way, Burwitz's liberalism works against the oppositional thrust of the times, and the images - as I have suggested - could endorse a disturbing conservatism about political change. Inter­estingly, Burwitz's authority figure is clothed in the khaki police uniform reserved in the Seventies for black policemen. Perhaps Burwitz is saying that a brutal system brutalises all of those involved, including black functionaries. But this misses the real crux of Apartheid, and is in danger of following govern­ment propaganda that sets out to persuade whites that black people are uncivilised and brutish. Is such an ideo­logical reading fair to the artwork, which tends to be an evoca­tion rather than an analysis of a politically-charged situation? When images, however horrific in their impact, raise questions about who is human and who is brutish in a society like South Africa, criticism, I would maintain, needs to see more than shapes and colours; rather it needs to provoke thought about real-life speci­fic­ities.

Burwitz's work, nevertheless, won a prize, and critic Jill Gowans described it as "one of the most effective [political] comments" on the show ( Daily News 18 July 1971), while in 1975 Berman, having seen all the works on exhibition, ensured that Burwitz's painting entered South Africa's art history. Has my "aesthetic" judgment, therefore, been clouded by "ideology"? As Hadji­nico­loau might say in Marxist terms, aesthetic considerations cannot be separated from ideological considerations, in which case Burwitz's work could be seen to have struck a chord with Berman's ideology.

An insight into this ideology is to be found, per­haps, in Berman's placing of In Cold Blood between the work of Patrick O'Connor and Judith Mason-Attwood. All of these works are highly evocative and self-consciously painterly, while at the same time being spare or "essentialising" in their imagery (what Berman describes as "succinct and economic"). Content is elusive and ambiguous, but technique and artistic effect are obtrusive. In other words, these works conform to certain modernist assumptions. Like Mason-Attwood's Gabriel (1968) and O'­Connor's Prome­theus VI (1972) (illus. x. and xi.), Burwitz's work also shows many of the characteristics traditionally associated with oil paint as a medium: beauty and fluidity of brushstroke, translucence and richness of colour, and delicacy of touch. In a protest work about oppression and brutality, however, these qualities could serve eventually to undermine "thematic" purpose. The deft touches of yellow down the edge of the policeman's khaki coat,the subtle and beautiful magenta on his boots, the artfully controlled dribbles and thick sweeps of paint on the abstract wall that forms a back­drop to the "drama", all begin to aestheticise an ugly reality. As I shall show, in contrast, the relatively austere works of Sukha, Stopforth and Younge resist the seductiveness of oil paint in favour of materials and repre­sentational strategies that appeal more obviously to the mind than to the senses. Yet it is precisely its concessions to aesthetic effect, I would argue, that ensured Bur­witz's work its place as "protest" in Berman's history.

Another work on the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition, in which aesthetic concerns tended to take precedence over a protest purpose, was Timo Smuts's provocatively titled seri­graph, Cartoon Strip for Security Police (illus. xii.). When I first saw the work in 1971, my reaction was one of both disap­pointment and surprise. In 1971 mention of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) brought thoughts to me of political detainees, deaths in deten­tion, and early morning raids on the homes of activists. The title of Smuts's work in the exhibition's catalogue created expecta­tions of satire, of a biting attack on the security police in the manner of the politi­cal car­toon. This appears not to have been his inten­tion, but on seeing the work I was reminded that the security police also meant cen­sorship to artists and writers. BOSS served to enforce decisions made by the Publi­ca­tions Control Board not only on matters of political incite­ment, but on questions of morality in works of art. In 1971 Aidron Duckworth had his exhibition, in Durban, of erotic Tom Wessel­man-inspired nudes (illus. xiii.) closed by the Board and, interestingly, in October 1975 Smuts himself had his Stellen­bosch exhibition of erotic drawings and paintings banned. Smuts's "cartoon strip" presents in comic-strip form a literal strip: a woman removing her cloth­ing while a line of men wearing trench­coats appears in the lower section of the work. The men look like BOSS flunkies, and the work suggests with humour the voyeurist hypocrisy of the guard­ians of South Afri­can moral­ity. Cartoon Strip for Security Police thus parodies the paternalistic and calvinistic control over people's minds and conduct that the National Party, at the time, made a part of its larger social engineering. The Pop idiom and geometric simplification used by Smuts, however, tend to obscure and, to an extent, trivialise the more serious socio-political implica­tions that I have suggested. Unlike Sukha, Stopforth and Younge, whose work concludes this chapter, Smuts effaces the substance of his content in favour of artistic design and modernist formalism.

Despite its apparent "radical" break with bourgeois moral­ity and aesthetics in the late Nineteenth century, modernist thought and aesthetics have proved over time to have served bourgeois and even reactionary responses extremely well. By insisting that art is at its best when the mythic, the emblem­atic, the symbolic and the abstract replace references to the historically particular, advocates of modernism in art schools and universities have helped remove several generations of artists from the dynamics of socio-political life in this country. Apartheid and commodity capitalism have, as a result, had one less discontented constituency with which to deal. This does not necessarily imply delib­erate collusion with powerful interests on the part of people in the artworld. Most might be described as liberal or as liberal humanist. By liberal humanist I mean someone who believes in equality, justice and liberty, in the effort and talent of free enter­prise and in the sovereign import­ance of the creative, free individual. The history of liberal humanism, however, since its heroic phase in the Renais­sance and Enlightenment has stamped itself as a philos­ophy and ideology of a middle-class, edu­cated grouping which will show concern and charity for the "masses" provided better condi­tions for all are achieved gradually and on terms acceptable to the middle class. According to these norms and values, art should cel­ebrate individualism in all its tri­umphs and heroic despair; the mark of artistic "genius" is regarded as the capacity imaginatively to transform and ultimately transcend the particular and contingent situation into the realm of the universal. In the reception of the artwork, complex and subtle discriminations of judgment are demanded from apparently "free" viewers. In a commodity culture exceptional technical skill, fine materials and professional presentation are prior­ities. In education notions of "excellence", "standards" and "professionalism", furthermore, tend to be spoken about in solipsistic but confident ways.

The trouble with all of this is that it does not take into account the lives and experience of ninety percent of South Africa's population, most of whom have been impoverished by racial and economic laws. In turning from the preferences of the jurors to what I regard as the key protest works on the 1971 exhibition, I hope I am bringing to bear not only my academic understandings, but also something of the temper of oppositional consciousness in South Africa. As I indicated at the outset of the study, I have a partisan purpose. I do not intend simply to praise my own prefer­ences, however, but also to try to be alert to the difficulties experienced by protest artists at the time (they too were historically circumscribed) in finding visual idioms suit­able for communicating a view in art outside that of the "aes­thetic object" and located in the daily details of South African history.

I should like to look first at Omar Badsha's Lament for Look­smart (illus. xiv.), then at Cyprian Shilakoe's Where have you gone to? , among the only works of the thirteen on the exhibition by black art­ists to have made direct or overt reference to South Africa's political circumstances. (I have not been able to trace Mahomed Timol's The Waiting Room. ) In a number of ways Lament for Looksmart belongs to the radicalised political ethos of the Seventies. In its subject matter and in the specificity of its title - Solwan­dle Look­smart Ngundle was the first detainee to die in prison in 1963, the year that detention without trial was introduced - Badsha's drawing is firmly located in Black Con­sciousness attempts to "uncover" black history. When one examines the visual language of the drawing, however, it becomes clear that Lament for Looksmart represents only the tentative beginnings of a black politicised artistic conscious­ness. In its generalised imagery and in the vulnerability sug­gested by the slumped and insub­stan­tial forms of its figures, the drawing harks back to the more covert "social purpose" in art that character-ised the Sixties. In this respect, I think of Motau's Man in Jail (1967) and Dumile's Fear (1966 ) (illus. xv. and xv­i.). Although the elements of carica­ture and agitation of line typical of these earlier works are absent in Bad­sha's draw­ing, Lament for Look­smart shares with the drawings of Motau and Dumile a sense of help­lessness and defeat conveyed in the depictions of the fig­ures. At the time, Black Con­sc­ious­ness writings and speeches were calling for images of black people in states of dignity, defiance and strength. Interesting­ly, early in 1971, the "col­oured" poet Adam Small had given a fiery talk in Durban on Black Consciousness solidarity, and the theatre group, MAD (Music, Art and Drama), had presented "Melt One", a play in which the so-called victims triumph over political detention and solitary confinement.

When he was interviewed in 1972 about his drawings of figures in detention, including Lament for Looksmart , Badsha used meta­phors which straddle the Sixties (alienation as "human condi­tion") and the Seventies (alienation as "social condition"). The reporter wrote:

Most of his drawings, he says, have the same theme - people in detention. They are strange, unreal figures so obviously cut off, nailed down or somehow chained to a bleak environment. "I'm concerned with people in alienation. You get alienation all over the world but here it comes into a more brutal form because of the power of the structure. Detention is an extreme example of what happens. Apartheid brings compartmentalisation to everyday life. This causes fear, and fear causes the groups to further isolate themselves from each other". ( Natal Mercury , 19 July 1972)

These sentiments are especially interesting as Black Consciousness was advocating the isolation of the white community. That Badsha practised what might be called a "selective boycott" of the white artworld is evidenced perhaps in the fact that he continued to show his work at certain galleries such as the NSA, but in 1971 he refused to submit work to the S.A. Graphic exhibition that was to tour Europe. Badsha had had his passport rights denied him the year before, and clear­ly did not want to be one of the "token" black artists on an exhibition that was funded by the Department of Information and, therefore, acted as a form of propaganda for white South Africa. Strini Moodley, Saths Cooper and Thami Mnyele, all central to Black Consciousness initiatives, were friends of Badsha, and would have found the introduction to the S.A. Graphic catalogue a painful example of government-inspired ethnic "officialese":

While the Bantu artists in South Africa, drawing on their strong artistic and cultural heritage, have more or less followed their own direction, we find that the Coloured artists tend to align themselves naturally with the whites in the field of artistic production. (1972: 3)

The ambivalence, even reluc­tance, with which black people involved in the arts took up a separatist position, however, is signalled not only by Badsha, but also by the fact that Cooper was the secretary of TECON, a theatre group that gave readings of African writers' poetry, and claimed to be working towards ...race harmony...contact - a seven-letter word which has been much in the news recently.. a word which everyone talks about but no one puts into practical use. ( The Graphic 2 July 1971)

Even Mnyele, who was most vociferous in his political views, made his drawings available to Ad Donker, the white publisher who brought out the work of Serote and other black writers in the early Seventies. Despite its proclaiming non-collaboration with whites as a necessary strategy, Black Consciousness ideals remained partly rooted in the broader philosophy of African humanism: in a belief - beyond the obnoxious presence of Apartheid - in the innate worth and dignity of all people, irrespective of race.

In Badsha's Lament for Looksmart narrative and descriptive details are reduced to a minimum and suggest none of the cynicism or anger invoked among concerned people by official reports about the deaths of political prisoners as "death by suicide". The white shape that looms near the slumped dark figure at the bottom of a flight of stairs looks as vulnerable, and as much a victim, as the dead black man. Badsha has avoided giving specific identities to the figures in an attempt, I assume, at making his drawing not only an epitaph to all the people who had died in detention, but also to comment on the fraility of humankind. As the political climate became more severe he would struggle towards a greater speci­ficity in his philosophy and technique of historical represent­ation.

Nonetheless, a compassion for human suffering would remain a key part of his response.

Shilakoe's evocative etching, Where have you gone to? (illus. xvii.), also works on the principle of universalisation and, while poetic and visually pleasing as a work of art, it is caught like Badsha's drawing between the needs of statement-making and a more traditional notion of the aesthetic as "evocative beyond history". (Badsha, in 1972, would shift to a more factual and blunt approach in his art, but this is something I shall return to in Chapter Two.) As I am suggesting, protest works in 1971 by Badsha and Shilakoe (who died in 1972) belonged only partly to a new and "radical" political conscious­ness as bringing cultural forms to bear on the facts of political oppression. Shilakoe's spectre-like figures, with their amorphous heads and bodies, are lyrical in the rhythms of their forms and textured patternings. They evoke neither horror nor inspire anger nor action, but convey a sadness and passiv­ity. Shilakoe's title, however, together with his imagery, does suggest that his figures are victims of the forced removals that were tearing black South Africans away from their homes and families, and dumping them in barren and unfamiliar parts of the country not required for occupation by whites. Nevertheless, Shilakoe was more of a mystic than a political artist, in that he translated his specific experiences of suffering into abstract and generalised images of loneliness and despair.

In a memorial article after Shilakoe's death in 1972, fellow artist and friend Dan Rakgoathe wrote:

He was a philosopher in his own right....Biological life he regarded as a shadow of spiritual life, the instrument through which spiritual life manifested itself on the material plane....However, he was not only concerned with abstract idealism, but the everyday suffering of his people had some impact upon him. He saw and felt the suffering of his own people at being victims of a political system beyond their own control. (African Arts, 1973/74: 68-9)

In his mysticism and sense of political helplessness, however, Shilakoe belonged to a world that the Black Consciousness Movement and Marxists of the Seventies were determined to change. Black Consciousness thinking, for example, condemned images of suffering and self-pity, and Marxists insisted on more historically-specific imagery. (One result was Badsha's shift of approach in 1972.) Shilakoe tended to portray black political hard­ship and pain in expressively "real", rather than histori­cally real, terms. His outlook also separated him from black theological thought of the late Sixties and Seventies. Black theology - disseminated via the University Christian Movement and SASO - addressed itself very pragmatically to life's struggles here on earth. According to M. Motlhabi, "Christ was seen as a fighting God, and not a passive God who allows a lie to exist unchal­lenged" (1984: 122). The increasing differences between Shilakoe's work and the protest work of his urban and intellec­tual counter­parts in the Seventies may be seen partly as a matter of temperment; partly reasons may be located in Shilakoe's lack of early education and, even though he apparently rejected religious instruction or affiliation, in his schooling at Rorke's Drift, the Swedish Lutheran missionary school of art and craft in the midlands of Natal.

In comments that could apply to Shilakoe, Black Consciousness adherent Thami Mnyele - admittedly generalising for political effect and impact - wrote retrospectively of black artists trained in various white-run art schools prior to the Eighties:

The art that sprang from this experience was seldom carried beyond biblical themes, African landscapes, wildlife, myths and legends. No exploration of the immediate social political phenomena. Where artists attempt to reflect a political theme, treatment of this issue lacked depth of conviction. Sometimes this type of work seemed too self-involved and was devoid of that outward thrust; it lacked an upright posture, an elevated head, a firm neck, and a tight muscle. To put it another way: the images were totally abstracted without an obvious cause, distortion of the limbs was acute. The subject matter was mystified and to this extent the work lost integration with real things in our life; the work sagged under a heavy veil of mysteriousness. Perhaps this is the essence of the work. The disappointing fact about this approach to art is that the picture is deprived of that essential dynamic element: immediacy of communication with the community, the natural makers and consumers of art....The elements of distortion, mystification, abstraction, are not negative in themselves and can be put to positive and effec­tive use, as in the indigenous idiom. This calls for matur­ity of temperament, clearer social awareness and skill of the working hand. In my opinion we have not been successful enough in maintaining control over these facilities. The same goes for the elements of anguish,pity, shock and surprise. ( Staffrider 1986: 24-27 - published posthumously)

I have quoted Mynele at length because he touches here on a number of important aspects that can be seen to distinguish the art of the Sixties from work produced in the Seventies under the impact of Black Consciousness and Marxist thinking. He also reminds us that not all "distortion" in art need have politically negative connotations. I shall look at examples of Mnyele's own work in Chapter Two, for it is only from 1972 that his work assumes a public profile. It is worth noting, however, that despite the clarity of his theoretical pro­nouncements, Mnyele in the practice of his art would also experience difficulties in "breaking" cleanly from the bowed to the upright posture in his images.

The distortions of modernist form, however, remain problematic in their tendency to remove states of feeling from society's pressures, and it is the Germans, Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht and Marcuse, as well as the French philosopher Sartre, who are among the few to have championed modern­ist experimentation while attempting to use its principles of defamiliarisation to serve a Marxist cause. In the pages that follow, as well as in Chapter Two, I shall draw on the writings of these Marxists because it is largely as a result of their example that three gener­ations of "left­ish" South African intellectuals in the arts have drawn their validation of modernist disruptions of mimesis in a society of on-going socio-political crisis, where mimetic witness might have seemed a more necessary commitment. These philosopher-critics are frequently quoted in Staff­rider, for example, as well as in the comments and arguments of those working in the domain of the universities. In One-Dimensional Man (1977) Marcuse wrote:

Aesthetic form, autonomy, and truth are inter-related.

... The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of the aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as true reality. Art is committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity. The aesthetic transformation becomes a vehicle of recognition and indictment. But this achievement presupposes a degree of autonomy which withdraws art from the mystifying power of the given and frees it for the expression of its own truth. Inasmuch as man and nature are constituted by unfree society, their repressed and distorted potentialities can be represented only in an estranging form. The world of art is that of another Reality Principle, of estrangement - and only as estrangement does art fulfill a cognitive function: it communicates truths not communicable in any other language; it contradicts. (10-11)

Perhaps the key phrase is, "the mystifying power of the given". As a Marxist, Marcuse (like Benjamin and Adorno) shows a remarkable disdain in his writings for "the monopoly of established reality", and the idea of art acting as a counter-image to, rather than as a reflection of, the realities naturalised by corrupt ruling powers is persuasive.

In South Africa, however, Marcuse's pronouncements have been understood as a licence for artists to shift from tradi­tional mimesis to a "radical" abstraction as opposed to using their skills to contrib­ute to the "realism" of examining social rela­tions and practices. In 1971 Neville Dubow said of this tendency: To be specific meant to be realistic and this meant dull. Abstraction came to be regarded as the sign of the avant-garde. And following the lead forged by the genuine pioneers, it came to offer a fashionable haven for those who preferred to hedge their modernity with comforting obscurity....it has recently become too easy to turn out acceptable and fashionably obscure work that amounts in the end to little more than a new academicism. ( The Cape Times , 28 August 1971)

The recent "Albie Sachs" debate, which has Sachs's comment that a five-year moratorium be declared on "culture as a weapon of the struggle", has exposed the eagerness with which artists and writers in this country have wanted to return art to the "fash­ionably obscure" and to shed the demand to be politically respon­sive in their art (For Sach's paper and several responses see I. de Kok and K. Press, 1990). But as I sug­gested earlier in this study, what was anti-bourgeois about modernist art could also be viewed as anti-democratic in its inaccessibility and its privileging of form over recognisable content. The same may be said of a great deal of late-modernism, and of the baroque forms of post-modernism.

Nevertheless, aspects of post-modern­ism - such as appeared in the work of Stopforth, Sukha, Younge and several other exhibitors on the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition - have been found valuable by prominent Western Marxists such as Peter Burger and Fredric Jameson. In an essay in Hal Fos­ter's The Anti-Aesthetic: essays in post-modern culture (1983: 111-125) Jameson makes an especially useful distinction between post-modernism that is "pas­tiche" and potentially reactionary, and post-modernism that is a critique of existing artistic formal strategies in that it is an incisive comment on the socio-political shortcomings of society. This latter type of art he calls "critical" post-modernism. In the discussion that follows about works on the 1971 exhibition, I shall more fully pursue this distinction made by Burger and Jameson. I shall do so because several of the works on the exhibition constitute an interesting, if brief, moment in South African art history when post-modernism, in its pre-baroque form, appeared in the art of this country, and both challenged the prevailing norms of local art and allied itself to a political cause.

In discussing South African "critical" post-modernism, I shall start with a work that to me represents a significant break with the allusive "protest" of Payne and Burwitz. The work is by Kanu Sukha, a graduate of what was Durban's Indian university college in the Sixties, and from 1971 the Univer­sity of Durban-Westville. (Sukha was also an art teacher in the Indian commun­ity until he died in 1988.) The title of Sukha's award-winning pencil drawing is Minority Trip­tych (Illus. xviii.), and it takes the form of a large, over life-size screen in three parts, hinged and very slightly folded to allow it to stand. Unlike Badsha, Shilakoe, Mnyele and other black artists in the Seventies, Sukha was university-trained and had access to a relatively wide range of artbooks and techniques. The choice of form for his work (the triptych), the representational strategies employed, and the size of Minority Triptych clearly link Sukha to the western traditions in which he was trained. The choice of the inexpensive pencil medium, on the other hand,­ links him to the practice and experi­ence of local black artists. It is both its choices of materials and subject matter - important considerations for the Marxist historian - that allow Sukha's triptych to comment on Apartheid politics in distinctive and unique ways.

What I found striking about Minority Triptych when I first saw it in 1971 was its powerful presence. Wherever I walked in the large gallery occupied by dozens of other works on the Art South Africa Today exhibition, Sukha's group portrait of Indian and white politi­cians seemed to catch my eye and thoughts in the clarity and boldness of its simplicity. Here were large inescap­able images of real people about whom, as a result of prominent newspaper reports, I had distinct and nega­tive impressions. President C.R. Swart is flanked by a young Pik Botha and by members of the politically compromised South African Indian Council, such as H.E. Joosub, A.M. Mou­lla, C.M. Paruk, J.N. Reddy and M.E. Sultan. (The SAIC, at the time, was comprised of govern­ment appointees, and in 1968 had been given limited statutory powers.) In contrast to the caricatured and generalised faces of the politicians of Jochen Berger's Senior and Junior of 1971 (illus. xix.), Sukha's enlarged and exact portraits demanded that we atten­d to actual political events. Berger's dis­torted and paint-laden abstract images simply turned politi­cians into large, clumsy buffoons. Like Minority Triptych , Berger's Senior and Junior dealt with the question of minority rule. A vast neander­thal-looking white figure with big, heavy fists looms over an equally primitive, but small figure of a black man who has a sizeable cigar clutched in his fingers. Both resemble comic-book goons because of the blobs that constitute their faces and the throne-like structures against which they are dwarfed. In South Africa, however, where political decisions have seriously affected the lives of millions of people, it is too easy to dismiss our politicians as mere fools, as comic-characters for our amusement. The Marxist historian has to oppose such apparent detachment, and to emphasise that people manifest their convic­tions - spiritual and otherwise - in particular acts and deci­sions according to which they are judged by and made answerable to society. It is as a consequence of its refusal to turn real politicians into mere figures of fun that I find Sukha's protest more challenging than the oblique and witty comment of the work by Berger. Sukha obliges viewers to look at, and think about, the specific people involved in undermin­ing black oppositional politics. And, as I shall show, he does so by using imaginative means that are distinguishable from those of the journalistic photo­grapher or the political cartoonist.

Like Brecht, Sukha seems to have realised the possible dangers of simple reflection theories. As Brecht argued, social realism in art might result in an image that, because of its "mirroring" effect, minimises our view of the underlying social dialectic (in all its contradictions). This could act as a barrier against critical knowledge. In Sukha's work the large, over-life­size hands that occupy the "predella" section of the "trip­tych", for example, invoke a strong sense of contradiction and discomfort. Dark hands, limp and ineffectual, are clasped in the firm grip of white hands, and seem to signal not reconciliation but compro­mise, opportunism and politi­cal powerlessness. Without the juxtaposition of the highly simplified yet striking imagery of the hands, within the realistically drawn group portrait, Sukha's work could have been read as an endorsement of co-operation with the Nationalist Party govern­ment. Other elements of "intervention" also ensure Minority Triptych its critical role. The triptych, for example, is traditionally linked with the medieval Christian altar­piece and with things holy or sanctified. Sukha's use of the form as a vehicle for a political subject, however, serves as an ironical comment on the group of apparently benevolent-looking men, who were part of what many believed was an "unholy alliance". Furthermore, the fragmenting of the group by the dividing lines of the trip­tych allows the lines, in some instances, actually to pass through figures and produce a slight but uncomfort­able fracturing of the image.

It is important to stress that I am taking notice of Sukha's political comment because it was given memorable artistic form. Sukha took a journalistic photograph of politi­cians, enlarged it to life-size, and in re­contextualising the image removed it from the ephemeral and obscuring jumble of the newspaper to place it in the attention-demanding and thought-provoking form of the triptych. The image of politi­cians, how­ever, retained the austerity of the news photograph. The aesthetic dimension of Minority Triptych , then, is not to be ident­ified in the modernist sense of obtrusive signs: in the artist's expressive energies and thoughts regis­tered in the distinctive brushstroke, in the unique use of line, space and colour; or in the emo­tionally-charged distor­tion of fig­ures. Although the triptych won an award, it was mentioned only once in critical reviews, and has not been subsequently recorded in art histories other than in this study.

Sukha's work lies somewhere between the evocative protest drawings of black artists such as Badsha and Shilakoe and - as I shall show - the critical post-modernist idioms of white artists such as Stopforth and Younge. Like all of these artists, Sukha used critical realism as his language of protest. Like his fellow black artists, he employed the relative­ly cheap and readily-available media of pencil and paper. Unlike them, however, he used the pencil medium to produce stark images without expressive distor­tion or simplification, and introduced provocative juxtapositionings of multiple images. As far as this latter device is concerned, he resembled his white counter­parts. Like Stop­forth and Younge he broke the effect of reflection with post-modernist strat­egies of defamiliarisation. Common to all of these artists is a lack of ostentation and an unwillingness to strive after self-conscious aesthetic effect: an apt decision, as the use of extravagant materials for impact could easily undermine the intention in protest art. The aesthetic dimen­sion in works such as Sukha's, by contrast, lies in the delib­erate appeal to the mind as well as to the senses. An austerity of subject has demanded an austerity of form: a repeal (except where irony is evident) of sensual effect.

Nonetheless, as I was confronted with Sukha's powerful imagery and portraits of well