Conclusion: artistic thinking

How can knowledge be embodied or represented by a work of art? James Elkins, in a published interview, thought this was one of the largest unsolved issues of 20th and 21st century art theory (Anon, 2011). Elkins suggested, among the many possibilities, that either art embodied knowledge but it was necessary to produce accompanying texts in order for that knowledge to be articulated; or art embodied knowledge that cannot be translated into words, and must be considered alongside linguistic, propositional, logical knowledge (Anon, 2011: 88). In a public presentation, Elkins (2017) elaborated on this dilemma: few researchers say whether art is knowledge or art embodies it, he said. My own research into August House atelier suggested neither of these binaries. Instead, contemporary art was itself a vector of value. Its meaning was performative, which will be expanded upon in chapters to follow. The respective journeys of the tracked artworks highlighted different mobilities as examples of detour: transformation (Buthelezi), improvisation (Selibe), migrancy (McInnes), and the viral fractal (Froud).

The physical space in which the artworks were made became part of the work’s genome, making linkages between space and imagination evident. Buthelezi created everyday scenes partly inspired by the ‘Live TV’ outside his window and quite literally created paintings from scrap material collected from local supermarkets.

Selibe created a situated call and response that took the material realities around him into account. McInnes created artworks that dealt with the socio-economic realities plainly evident in neighbouring surrounds. And Froud brought along subversive wit into his re-combination of everyday objects that travelled virally from place to place.

What truly surfaced linkages between space and imagination was the disruption to artistic practice caused by the sale of August House – the key catalytic event. This revaluation had multiple roots: the immediate precinct itself was changing and sending property values higher; more people were looking for homes; manufacturing was being increasingly sidelined; and disinvestment through decentralisation was still evident. The building was also revalued because of its artistic character but as Chapter 1 has already pointed out, it is very difficult to discuss the politics of imagination and

production of space without first grasping what it is that artists do and how they do it, and then considering the circuits of capital and infrastructures of the artworld. It is also important to begin such an investigation in the studio because productive labour is sometimes forgotten altogether, following Henri Lefebvre, and this ‘forgetfulness’

makes possible the fetishism of commodities; it was never easy to get back from the object (work) to the activity that produced or created it but doing so was the only way to illuminate its nature and reconstitute the process of genesis and development of its meaning (Lefebvre, 2012: 151). All other ways, he said, just generated an abstract model instead of an object in its entirety of forms, structures and functions. This research study thus deliberately starts with the making of the work, and privileging this starting point has implications for the observations and findings.

Most strikingly, it was the artists’ responses to the prevailing condition of uncertainty that characterised this case study, as evident in their strategies of resistance, that were key to research findings. Buthelezi was at first in a state of artistic refusal but ended up leveraging the situation into a technical and creative breakthrough, evidenced by the new use of negative space. This manifested visually in the final portrait series that he produced during this time of precarity; the series carried this revelation in its formal composition. Further, his very medium of melted plastic mimicked his strategy of transformation – extreme heat converting plastic into a new form with a new

‘memory’ as the plastic reshaped. And, when he relocated, Buthelezi turned his new space to collective ends. Selibe performed the uncertainty out in a new collaborative work that used improvisation as a way of moving forward, to fashion a creative response of conceptual to and fro. The ephemeral nature of the work posed a provocation in its lack of physical form to consider other kinds of value beyond a saleable artefact, and towards collectivist responses that were resilient yet immaterial in nature. McInnes responded by focusing upon a productive output, a solo exhibition, to hedge against the continual flux. Her subject matter of migration or displacement was also a form of detour, or response to a disguised situation of oppression. Her studio demonstrated a place of working things out, with trial and error, until a new resolution gained traction. Froud took the opportunity to re-organise his practice and leverage his new studio space towards collective ends on the principle of a

collaborative social economy. His viral artwork represented in materiality and form the principle of never-ending transfigurations and innovations that were also scalable.

What these strategies amounted to was collectivity in self-organised solutions (see

Chapter 6). Artistic thinking is evident in the multifarious ways the artists coped with the hiatus they found themselves in as uncertainty around the atelier’s sale permeated their working conditions. The self-inventive strategies they ultimately devised

simultaneously pointed towards larger systemic failures that the next case study is designed to address.

Artistic thinking was also an approach, a way of seeing the world or a visual

knowledge that the artworks made evident. And the key participants at August House all had different ways of thinking about what mattered (value). For Mazibuko, it was all about family and living a godly life (“Only God knows”). For Khumalo, what mattered most was the work you were doing. Venter spoke about value in terms of space and creative thinking. Buthelezi thought it was about creating an artwork that said something new. Selibe demonstrated that value came through a collective identity. For McInnes, it was about inhabiting ambivalence. Froud sought a surprise moment to help shift perspective. These ways of thinking were also ways of doing that were embodied in their work – whether ritualistically sweeping the basement with an industrial broom every morning, playing the bamboo flute in an improvised composition, or sending viral-shaped cone sculptures into the world. Observing this artistic thinking was part of the delight in the research study. As Mariapaola McGurk, the director of a consultancy called Coloured Cube, told delegates at a public space seminar, artists added value to society and that needed to be acknowledged and used to a larger extent. “What artists do in their process is sorely lacking in other

institutions – this is the key value they bring … Artists must realise how valuable we are in how we do things and how we think” (McGurk, 2017).

Eve Chiapello (2004: 585) uses a term akin to artistic thinking, ‘artist critique’, to synthesise “the many forms of critique first levelled against the new industrial, capitalist, and bourgeois society of the nineteenth century, largely by artists in the name of freedom and individual fulfilment”. She goes on to identify this critique as being in crisis, co-opted by the business world of neo-management, driven by increased influence of service activities, and thus losing poignancy: “This

convergence dramatically decreases the possibility of declaiming an artist type of critique” (2004: 592). Chiapello adds that “the development of flexible neo-capitalism can be seen as the result of the co-optation of proposals of artistic critique by business interests, such as the individualization of performance evaluation and carriers,

reduction of direct hierarchical control, and so on” (2004: 593). She concludes despite this crisis that ‘artist critique’ continues to call attention to unresolved problems. “It embodies a discussion as to the value of things and stands opposed to the

commodification of other forms of values which money will never be able to take into account: artistic value, aesthetic value, intellectual value, and what Benjamin called

‘cultural value’. It draws attentions [sic] to the existence of unprofitable activities that cannot be sustained by market forces alone, but whose value must nonetheless be acknowledged” (Chiapello, 2004: 593). Each artwork constructs an inexhaustible world that it is, however, able to question – an act of resistance, “vested with the mission to manifest the desire for an enchanted and enchanting world, ultimately defying all analysis” (Chiapello, 2004: 594).

Such a vision of contemporary art as a site of resistance as well as re-enchantment is increasingly evident in South Africa, in particular in public art contestations. One of the latest examples of this capacity was the public sculpture of Cecil Rhodes, a colonialist, which was removed in April 2015 from the University of Cape Town’s upper campus (a public heritage site) to interim storage. This disappearing act helped trigger a new sociopolitical movement protesting structural inequities from the past that continue to inflect the present. Its empty plinth remains at time of writing an ongoing site of re-imagination, from graffiti to performance to installation. Without going into further contested details here, the protest ignited by the statue arguably helped recalibrate the public sphere and make a discussion about decolonisation concrete. In doing so, it demonstrated how art has the capacity to enact shifts in the public realm. This lays more emphasis upon understanding how art could act as such a vector in the first place. The mobile meaning of the artwork begins in the studio;

this case study set out to discover how artworks became matter by following their genesis as a way to understanding artistic practice and process – or artistic thinking. It also took note of where the artworks travelled, to see how their embodied meanings transfigured across the threshold of the studio door. In so doing, the case study also explored what was august about August House.

August House was ahead of its time in 2006 when artists first moved in to a

repurposed factory, before inner-city rejuvenation set in. Almost 10 years later, the building started another life under new ownership – in surprising return to artistic form rather than residential conversion. The fate of August House and its diaspora

may speak to the metropolis of the future and new cultural forms. Interestingly enough, a factory has always been present at August House. Previously, a cut-and-trim company was an anchor tenant while under new management an embroidery firm moved in. What comes after the reconfigured factory? Manufacturing itself has

entered a new age of production, according to Arup’s report Rethinking the Factory (Hargrave & Goulding, 2015); it finds a collective consequence of a range of advances is a shift towards fast, open, collaborative and responsive design and innovation processes. Post-industrial cities like Detroit have been compared to Johannesburg, recently in the fictive writing of Lauren Beukes. In Broken Monsters,

Beukes partly drew upon the inner-city borough of Hillbrow in her evocation of a failed artist and broken man. A post-factory future is differently evoked in

Commonwealth, where Hardt & Negri suggest “the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class” (2009: 250, original emphasis).

Moreover, Hardt & Negri (2009: 250-1) saw the metropolis as a factory for the production of the common – beyond a natural common to include an ‘artificial’

common of languages, images, knowledges, affects, codes, habits and practices. They held that production of the common was nothing but the life of the city itself. If the post-factory world is indeed the metropolis, then the reconfigured fate of August House from factory into atelier could indicate something about urban forms to come.

In closing, Koyo Kouoh runs an independent platform in Senegal called Raw Material Company that she described as operating on principles of subversion, experiment, horizontality, vulnerability and interdependence.³⁹ In a public lecture, Kouoh

advocated for alternative art spaces and models where theoretical, practical and local knowledges could meet an international outlook. “Through the practices of these spaces, it provides pathways to understand the particular reality and forms we should embrace again somehow” (Kouoh, 2015). Chapter 6 and the Conclusion make some propositions along these lines. But first, the thesis turns to the second case study to address more systemic issues that affect the trajectories of artworks beyond the studio door.

39 In 2019, Kouoh was appointed as Director of Zeitz MOCAA.

Chapter 5: The collection