Caliban in the Haus

C A L I B A N I N T H E H A U S THOMAS MULCAIRE Cab. You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse. -William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1,11 W hat can usefully be said on the occasion of yet another attempt at "Magiciens de la Terre"? "Colours" a recent exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, in a localized mimesis of its 1989 progenitor, placed objects produced by South African artists trained and working, albeit subversively, within the canons of a western tradition together with objects produced by South African artists whose training and ideological impetus can be said to be outside of that tradition. Curated as it was with varying degrees of remote control by Alfons Hug and Sabine Vogel, "Colours" exhibited tactile and visual by-products of South African culture, seemingly without recourse to an ideological framework which would privilege one aesthetic over another. Quasi-neoconceptual work by Minette Vari and Leora Farber squatted next to standard-issue polychrome wood sculptures by Johannes Segogela and the Ndou brothers. Willie Bester's painted bricolage, Apartheid Laboratory, became sister to Freddy Ramabulana's Madonna and Child. And so it rambled on. The curatorial premise appeared to be that there was no curatorial premise. No premise. No problem. And gosh, look at all those colors But where "Magiciens de la Terre" as Thomas McEvilley has noted, was perhaps innovative in its attempt at opening the doors of the "long insular and hermetic Western art world to non-Western artists," positing value judgments as necessarily relative in its attempt to find a postmodern , post-colonialist way of exhibiting First and Third World objects together, "Colours", by employing more or less similar strategies in relation to the microcosm of South Africa, tended only to show its redundancy. Everyone knows that the most useful thing we can say now that post-modernity has had its way, is that different things are defined differently by different people at different times. And once said, there's not a lot more to say. And so we moved mute through the procedures of vernaissage. But as I watched the people and forces of Berlin prepare for the opening of Contemporary African Art • Fall/Winter 1995 address by Nelson Mandela, I rather perversely started memo-tripping on a reading of Aime Cesaire's Une Ternpete, which recast Shakespeare's Tempest in the context of colonialism. Riot police abound as Caliban instigates a slave revolt through an act of cannibalism, consuming and triumphantly transforming the language of Prospero, co-terminously affirming his otherness as constitutive of his relation to the world. Although "Colours" can be said to be of minor philosophical import as an exhibition in its own right, what Hug and Vogel did manage to achieve was to bring to Berlin the work and the persons of Moshekwa Langa, Pat Mautloa, Kendell Geers, Kay Hassan, and Wayne Barker, five South African artists whose in situ contributions and interventions here were, within the logic of cannibalism, more than a little significant. Carlos Basualdo has recently described the logic of cannibalism as "the assimilative devouring and subsequent transformation of foreign influences". And further, "...if we remember that devouring is, first and foremost, a metaphor for the process of identification...we could then speculate that...cannibal artists are no longer a part of the periphery, but have become what they have eaten, denaturalizing the binary relation between margin and center. The center, in cannibal terms, is no longer then, the site of power but a pure event". Pat Mautloa and Kay Hassan's Mkhukhu - Shack installation can be seen as one such pure event. Mautloa and Hassan strategically arrived in Berlin with next to nothing and immediately set about looting the slummier streets of the metropolis, picking off prime pieces of the modern ruin as building material for the transformation and reduction of the institutionalized public domain bricks in a critique of the idea of the urban wasteland as the exclusive territory of the Third World. The media-saturated image of the other came home to roost, so to speak, and the fact that Mkhukhu resembled its generic...