The Johannesburg Art Gallery is a strange oasis in a sea of throbbing energy: downtown Jo’burg. I’m sure many, many people have written about this before, this grand old lady who is rumoured to have been built the wrong way round, but did the architects ever think that she would be cushioned by thousands of commuters, daily, relentlessly, like an island in a wild Zambezi where you must take command of your passage, on foot, or in vehicle? Years ago Kendall “Cock” Geers did an installation in one of the big rooms and placed absolutely nothing in it, from what I recall, or it may have been a small brown suitcase, a comment on the luxury of space within these walls whilst outside people are crammed into every square meter.
It’s a bastion, solid, impenetrable, skirted by 20ft steel fencing, in some areas doubled up. I went in the back door, after a brief reconnaissance to the front where I saw no security and felt better about leaving the car round the back, which turned out to be a great idea as it is where the cops hang out. So in I went through the one official non-public entrance, and the first line of rooms was empty. The magnificent wooden doors with the elaborate brass hinges and studded brass work, exquisite and picture enough on their own.
I snuck in another door and was suddenly right next to Irma Stern, then the various grandes dames of South African art. Jane Alexander’s dark and creepy work (does she ever see light?), and all of a sudden I am surrounded by the works of Dali, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Lichtenstein, Warhol, I guess the usual national gallery fare to some, but this gallery was practically deserted, so I had heaps of time and space to giggle and delight about where I was and how I came to be there.
Most of my friends would be horrified that I went there alone, even A, who, during my last visit, gave me an ultimatum – “Either you stop being afraid of we’re going to attract the wrong kind of attention.” Even she was a bit taken aback that I had gone downtown alone. Naivety is a great passport, but to be honest, I can’t even say that I own that one. My friends C & D worked in Joubert Park for twelve years, and they said they just saw people, and that’s what it is, just people, trying to get someplace or else watching others get someplace. Of course there are the skollies; the beautician I saw earlier this week who lives in Dobsonville, Soweto, says that every two weeks someone tries to take her bag in this area. She has got sick of it so now shouts at them, and they seem to leave her alone.
M, who cleans the house I’m currently staying in, agrees, and says that no-one will help you, so you must SHOUT. Eish, its terrible, that no one will help you, she mutters. To that she adds, “Eh, Jo’burg is fucked up,” I am mildly surprised to hear this grandmother curse so softly.
There is a room with the Gerard Sekoto’s, soft, rhythmic pictures of longing and life as usual. The massive Jackson Hlongwane sculptures are in the same place they always were, with Jesus playing Soccer there too. I met Mr. Hlohgwane in the early nineties, when I was working with the BBC; we went to interview him in Venda, one of the most magical trips of my life. He kindly gave me a carved spoon, which I have in my treasure chest. We sat in the veld and listened to his lengthly religious expounding, Danielesque tales of apocalypse and life beyond.
There’s a Judith Mason, strange dark creature pencilled in delicate, deft strokes. My university friends and I used to visit her in her beautiful Simonstown home, with its stone walls and central fireplace, views to the other side of False Bay, drawing dark Dante forms.
The doors to the sculpture garden were locked, so I couldn’t go and say hello to my old friends there, Andries Botha and some others. But I did make a new friend in the gallery shop, N, and we chatted about the woes of the country for twenty minutes. I’d spotted a beautiful photographic poster of a man in deep bliss, hand on his heart and a sublime smile on his full lips. The picture is titled Amen, and declares that, “In Africa, football in not a religion. But it is everything a religion should be.” I bought it for the unavailable man, but I bought it for me too, not sure how to navigate these uncertain waters when one delicious being is not as open to the other, as the other.
This morning, on my way to the gallery, I bumped into M, the cleaning lady and her granddaughter, whom she rescued from her son’s errant lover and brought to Jozi to raise. N is a lovely shy little thing who has just started school. M told me that N was so excited about school that she was up and dressed at 5am on the first day. She loves it so much!
I took M into the city as I was going to the gallery, and we had the conversation that I have with so many black people who don’t have or use cars. On average, they spend between four and six hours a day commuting. Four and six hours a DAY???? Isn’t that outrageous?? I am shocked that there hasn’t been a revolution based on this alone, that the taxi bosses have everyone so subjugated that there is nary a protest. What a fucking disaster … I cannot imagine having to wait and deal with the tedium of getting to and from home every single day. THIS is a political issue, THIS is oppression, when people have no choice but to waste their lives in queues and at the mercy of dangerous drivers in dangerous vehicles. To have your day thus devoured ….
I left the gallery from the front entrance, and made my way round the side. I wish I could convey the noise of the city by words or by picture, but it’s not possible. Its loud, a mixture of many different stereos dancing out their tunes, a thousand engines revving through dense pedestrian traffic, everyone fighting for their right of way. Voices, sirens, trains, a multi-track audio bouncing round the city, off the huge apartment blocks, almost visible in its thickness.
In the vacant parking lot on the east side of the gallery are two police vehicles, I think they were known as Ratels in the bad old days, or maybe Hippos, I can’t be sure. Next to them is a trailer of coiled razor wire, waiting, silently under a jacaranda tree, and it makes me wonder about all the news we never hear about. All the horror stories that haven’t a hope in hell of making it to any newspaper, the incidents that in any other place would warrant a front page spectacular. But here, In Jozi, its like the ocean, there are big fish, small ones, careless ones and predators. And there’s a rose garden at the north entrance to the gallery, just over what looks like a moat, with pink and white blooms set against the emerald green lawn where lovers hold each other, and others lounge about, enjoying the heat and the spectacle of the blustering slate coloured storm clouds in the north.
Today, Egypt is burning, Yemen too. The SABC pronounces that the people in north Africa have had enough of dictators, of the widening gap between between rich and poor, of not having access to resources, of corruption. As the announcer speaks, I think that these words apply here too, and I wonder what might spark from distant Arabia, if anything. Or if people will simply continue to wait, and to wait for their journey to continue.
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