o-o-o

I meet Bonolo Kavula in her studio - a tidy white box in a confused building of many faces, located in the formerly industrial part of Woodstock, Cape Town. If this sentence sounds chaotic, it is because it is. Depending on which entrance you use, you might find yourself winding down the curved spine of the driveway, into the cavernous darkness of a parking lot. Using the other access point, you’ll walk past a high-end rug store with heavy, black signage and a popular coffee chain franchise; faux Cape Dutch architecture painted in garish, gaudy brights. There’s something about this place that just doesn’t make sense. Harshly-lit furniture, decor and design stores scream desperately against the red-brown face of exposed brick. Grim fluorescence is sucked into pillars and balustrades, coated in the grey of times. It’s a dreary reminder that the world is going ashen. Industrial minimalism has become a prison for the intellectually indolent. According to an analysis of a selection from the Science Museum Group Collection, the world is being desaturated of colour.

Over 7,000 photographs of objects from 21 categories were examined. The categories were selected on the basis that they contained everyday or familiar objects. These categories range from “photographic technology to time measurement, lighting to printing and writing, and domestic appliances to navigation”. Of the 7,083 objects analysed, the most common-occurring colour is a dark charcoal-grey.

It’s only when I enter Kavula’s studio that my shoulders slide away from my ears. It doesn’t feel like I’m standing in some spasmodic fever dream conjured around a colonial-era biscuit factory. In 1914, John Pyott establishes Pyotts’s biscuit factory on Albert Road in Woodstock, on a site now known as the Biscuit Mill. Later, John Pyott’s Durban-based competitors, Baumann/ Baker’s inaugurates their own operation five blocks from their confectionary rivals. Care has been taken to maintain the facade of these historic buildings, but only the facade. Cape Town, like the rest of this country, is more interested in maintaining the appearance of historicity. It doesn't want to sully its hands with the inconvenient mud of truth. But here in the studio, wall-to-wall windows invite a glory of light. An antidote to the greying of the world, squares of colourful printed fabric hang on a collapsible laundry rack. Wooden pegs pinch the polychromatic shweshwe blocks onto its outstretched arms, reaching towards the sun.

“I don’t really want to start with my trauma story,” she separates sheets of paper from their blue plastic sleeve and arranges them on a large table in front of us. “Let’s start here: I didn’t really want to be an artist”.

There is always trauma.

o-o-o

-o- -o-

About 956km’s from her Cape Town studio lies Kavula’s hometown of Kimberely. For years, the Diamond City (although city becomes a strong word when applied here) has been primarily known by the notable crater carved by early-settler diamond miners into its belly. The largest hand-dug excavation in the world, it runs 214 meters deep with a surface area of 17 hectares and a perimeter of 1,6 km. 2722 kilograms of diamonds were unearthed and stolen from this site, including the Star of Africa – a diamond said to be the size of a human heart, appropriated by the English monarchy. But Kimberly is producing other treasures now. Thebe Magugu. Kimathi Mafofo. Bronwyn Katz. Bonolo Kavula. “I think it’s because of the diamond Queen Elizabeth stole,” she laughs over a static of multi-hued fabric discs. “It’s not really payback, it's something like…”

“A restoration?” I suggest. A studio assistant places a minuscule amount of glue on the unprinted side of a fabric disc, precarious between the thin blades of a tweezer. The praying arms of a silver mantis. It is delicate funambulism, the balancing of discs on threads pulled tight.

-o–-o-

-o-o-o-

“All memory, collective and individual, is by nature selective and changeable, evolving in a constant transaction of acts of recovery and processes of suppression or forgetting.” – Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, I Saw a Nightmare

-o–-o-

The polemic Hennessy Youngman is a persona invented and performed by New York-based artist Jayson Musson. Using a Youtube series tilted “Art Thoughtz”, Youngman takes on the role of art and/or cultural critic while speaking to topics concerning art, race, gender, and pop culture. In Youngman’s first viral video, his number one tip for success is simply, “be white”.

“Being white helps in the art world because, I don't know, white makes the world go round. That’s why I filmed this video in my white antechamber. My alabaster alcove” he says of his white cube. The second tip is to be a white man. “If you’s a white man and you want to paint a flower, people see the painting of the flower and say ‘oh, that’s a pretty ass flower. A n*** paints a flower and it becomes a slavery flower. Flower De Amistad or something.”

“How to be a Black artist” also takes on the form of an instructional. It marks itself by exposing the success of black artists to be reliant on conforming to stereotypes as hyperbolically as possible. Youngman asserts the white art consumers do not want to be able to relate to works created by people of color. He suggests that in order to appeal to the white art world, one must cultivate “this angry exterior” by maybe watching the Rodney King video over and over again. Or the prophetic scene from Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” where Radio Raheem is choked to death by a policeman.

12 years after the publishing of this video, its a lot easier to consume black trauma. Just go onto social media to see the latest viral brutalisation, updated regularly for your convenience. “White people, they want to consume the ‘exotic other’, right? Cause even though they wanna come see your artwork and see you as an artist, they don’t real wanna understand you because if they understood you, you’d be just like them. And white people dont want the n**** artist being just like them.”

o-o-o

After the loss of her biological mother, the absence of her father, a young Bonolo is adopted by her nursery school teacher to keep her from entering the foster system. At 17, after winning a local art competition, her other mother decides to enroll her at Michaelis, UCT. “So she literally like fucking forced me into this thing. I love it,” adds Kavula. “But it wasn't really my first choice.”

At Michaelis she decides to specialise in printmaking. It’s an artform that manages itself in the way she does. There are layers, systematically applied in a regimented manner. It’s clinical. Ordered. “What I wanted to do with printmaking was viewed as anti. People perceive printmaking as a picture-making medium. As black and white. A black and white picture in a frame. Done. And I knew that I wasn’t going for that.”

She knew she wanted something other than what was presented to her, and searched through the library to find examples to pattern her method on. There she discovers Black South African artists she hadn’t encountered in her classroom. “I started to wonder, what influences the success of Black artists? Like, what does it mean to be a successful Black artist?” And like any reluctant anti-hero, the journey inwards requires a journey home.

Dumisani Mabaso was painter, printmaker and musician who lived in Kimberely at the time of death. A defacto mentor to Kavula, she speaks of him carefully, untangling the words to find them on the wet of her tongue.

Mabaso who learnt the world of print from his father, turned away from the commercial print world and began to explore original printwork at Rorke’s Drift. Ominously, his final series of works is a lithograph that focusses on shrines. Every print features a protection talisman; porcupine quills woven into some kind of hide. Strikingly, they resemble the grids created by Kavula. She met him in her final year of high school at a printmaking workshop Mabaso was facilitating and they established a friendship.

“I think he was well-known and successful, but he didn't really get the same fame and notoriety as everyone else. And not to say he was bitter. He wasn't bitter. But I think he struggled a lot. He was underappreciated.” So she meets with him and he pieces together his story, one of quiet rebellion. Of conspiracy. He tells her that Rorke’s Drift wanted to keep artists trapped. They were discouraged from playing, from experimenting with the medium. Rorke’s Drift wanted flat black-and-white mediums. That every teacher who came in with new ideas would be replaced with someone more compliant with the Rorke’s Drift vision of South African Black Art. Mabaso believes they were delibarelty boxed in, squeezed in by the ideas a limited imaginary reduced them to. She heads back to cape Town and the conversation follows her. “I go back to my paper, my writing and I’m asking myself ‘if that was me, a black woman printmaker in the 70’s, 80’s, being told what to make, what would I do? How would I resolve it? So that’s how I started approaching my print-making.” She was away from Mabaso but his words were sailed on in the synapses of her mind. “Everytime we spoke about the art world he’d quote Biko; ‘Black man, you are on your own’.”

Bonolo would not have to time-travel to experience her own flattening. Deciding to marry conceptualism and print-making for herself, she presents her work to a visiting lecturer and receives a resounding “no”. “And I was so used to seeing white artists come up with abstract work,” she adds. “I knew if a white guy had presented it, they’d have loved it. But she couldn’t engage me. She couldn’t engage with me past the literal.”

-o-o-o-

-o–-o-

“The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art as art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art.” - Ad Reinhardt

-o-o-o-

Family Constellations, also known as Systemic Constellations is a therapeutic method drawing on elements of family systems therapy, existential phenomenology and isiZulu family and spiritual beliefs. In a single session, a Family Constellation attempts to reveal an “unrecognised dynamic that spans multiple generations in a given family and to resolve the deleterious effects of that dynamic by encouraging the subject, through representatives, to encounter and accept the factual reality of the past”.

Practitioners believe that present-day difficulties may be influenced by traumas suffered in previous generations of the family, even if those impacted have no knowledge of the preceding trauma.

-o–-o-

o–--o

Kavula insists that her work is not auto-biographical but she names it for people she loves. She speaks to them. Letsego. I’ve been needing you. Mothusi. Love will find you. She creates delicate veils of possibility, puzzling her family back from obliteration. Familiar favourites from home. The gesture is more than mnemonic. It is transformational.

However, the new position of the black artist is to resist “identity politics”. Having witnessed centuries of our objectification, the black artist now refuses uncomplicated understanding; easy history, location, and time-space dimension.

In Donald Trump’s America, it’s citizens are banning books and memory in an attempt to fight “identity politics”. The South African art world beat them to it. For the last decade, the push has been to move Black art beyond identity politics. Commenting on the work of William Kentridge in 2014, at a time that the art world began to re-evaluate and critique their relationship to his work, David Krut says that the “artist's work should actually be regarded outside the kind of identity politics and their related controversies that are emerging in the country's post-Apartheid era.”

There is a resistance to consumption and critique through the lens of historicity and fact, that white artists are allowed to sit in. They are allowed to create work free from the burden of their identity, free from the burden of self. It is, in part, an exercise of white privilege. Hennesy Youngman reminds us that when a white man paints a flower, the value of the resultant work is derived from its formal attributes. But when a black woman paints a flower, it becomes a metaphor for her vagina.

Frank B Wilderson is a professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, and is one of the founders of a philosophical school called Afropessimism. Afropessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement including the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality.

According to writer Vinson Cunningham, “The term espouses no orientation toward the future, or gives much of a damn about social fortunes. Rather, Afropessimism sketches a structural map of human experience. On this map, Black people are integral to human society but at all times and in all places excluded from it. They are in a state of “social death,” a concept that Wilderson borrows from the sociologist Orlando Patterson.”

Blackness will always be misread by those who refuse to know, who are uninitiated in their knowingness. What happens when we accept that social death? Who benefits when we no longer write ourselves into our worlds?

-o-o-o-

It is alchemical what Kavula can do with a circle and line. She creates a new iconography in the language of the ethereal. Constellations. The earth spinning on its axis. Multiverses that slip into each other. An abacus. The matrix. A grid. A flag. A pressure system. A topographical map of trauma and treasure on the body of a child. Join the dots.

-o-o-o-

“When an artist uses a multiple modular method he usually chooses a simple and readily available form. The form itself is of very limited importance; it becomes the grammar for the total work. In fact it is best that the basic unit be deliberately uninteresting so that it may more easily become an intrinsic part of the entire work. Using complex basic forms only disrupts the unity of the whole. Using a simple form repeatedly narrows the field of the work and concentrates the intensity to the arrangement of the form.

This arrangement becomes the end while the form becomes the means.

Conceptual art doesn’t really have much to do with mathematics, philosophy or any other mental discipline. The mathematics used by most artists is simple arithmetic or simple number systems. The philosophy of the work is implicit in the work and is not an illustration of any system of philosophy.” - Sol Lewitt

–-o–-

-o-o-o-

Sol Lewitt also says that irrational ideas must be pursued logically and absolutely, or something like that. Using this to collocate her thinking, Kavula’s sparking point wass to ask herself the most basic questions about print-making. Like, “what materials do we associate print with? Paper. What materials do we associate paper with? The office. I gathered a punch and office paraphernalia. And I challenged myself to do something basic with the materials in front of me. But then the objective was to always use the techniques of printmaking - these materials that had nothing to do with printmaking but were associated with paper. And then to use printmaking to turn that into art. I started using the punch.”

The punch is still present in her work today. She uses it to force space into the shweshwe fabric she now works with. She uses the parts that one would throw away. The fabric that was pushed through, forced outside of itself in pieces. Kavula claims her work is not biographical, but I see her, her mothers, her grandmothers in the negative space. Holding space.

–-o–-

-o-o-o-

This is the work of counter-memory. In her studio, she begins to unwrap a large rectangular work that she has not looked at in a long time. Even wrapped, she keeps it against a wall, facing away from her. “I’ll never make work like this again,” she says, almost embarassed. This is the work that won her the painting award in high school, that carried her to Michaelis and now here, this studio in old bread and biscuit factory, with a statue of the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize on a coffee table. It’s a painting, but already you see her working in a kind of collage. A piercing of things in order to piece them together. Rough brush in dark colours cut through harshly-shorn newspaper clippings that scream of murder. A policeman with a gun. A woman, wife, a mother, a daughter perforated with bullets. A five year old without parents.

“Keep the energy” in an instagram acount dedicated to keeping a record of the war against women in this country. When I walk into her studio, she aks me what I think about it. “I don’t really like it,” she responds, answering her own question.

–-o–-

-o-o-o-

Sewedi. Sewedi. Your daughter displays your red sishweshwe dress in places of honour. She keeps your name sacred and turns you into constellations.The earth spinning on its axis. Multiverses that slip into each other. An abacus. The matrix. A grid. A flag. A pressure system.

Sewedi. Sewedi. Your daughter is bringing you back to wholeness.

The earth spinning on its axis. Multiverses that slip into each other. An abacus. The matrix. A grid. A flag. A pressure system.

–o-o-o-

-o-o-o-