GETTING a bead on identity is tough. "People are constantly changing their identity; they want modernity, fashion, something new," says Anitra Nettleton, curator of the Wits Art Museum’s new exhibition, Beadwork, Art and the Body: Dilo Tše Dintši/Abundance, running from July 29 to October 11.
The exhibition casts a beady eye, mostly, on how black South Africans adorned their bodies with small glass ornaments.
It also aims to shake up conceptions of art, and the idea that there are differences between various South African tribes, at least when it comes to how they expressed themselves in beadwork.
"We are trying not to go with ethnic categories," says Nettleton.
"We are shaking up that ethnic thing because we want people to realise there isn’t a ‘style’ of Zulu or whatever beadwork that arrived, ready made, in a trader’s store."
In any event, she says, beadwork is not a black thing, as is often implied. "White people used beads certainly as long as black people. Beads have been part of European or white culture for a very, very long time although Africans do things with beads that Europeans would never do."
To illustrate this point, Nettleton points out that Pietermaritzburg’s Voortrekker Museum has knitted items in which beads are incorporated that the Voortrekkers made for themselves, and that Batavians wore "collars like the Xhosa beaded collars … the earliest one I have found record of was made before 1862". The Batavia to which she is referring is the area around the modern city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
For a long time beadwork in SA was collected by ethnographers, and some of SA’s most impressive beadwork collections are "hidden in basements from the Museum Africa (in Newtown, Johannesburg) to the Iziko (South African Museum) in Cape Town", says Nettleton. She is chairwoman and director of the Centre for Creative Arts of Africa at the Wits Art Museum, and her research covers South African beadwork and black South African modernist artists.
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WHILE South African beadwork dates back, at least, to the pre-colonial Kingdom of Mapungubwe (1075–1220), located at the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers in modern Limpopo, the Wits Art Museum exhibition centres on the museum’s large beadwork collection begun in 1979. "That’s not that old," says Nettleton. "The old Natal Museum’s collection goes back to 1890. What makes us different is that our collection is of beadwork as art, not ethnography. There has long been tension between beadwork as a form of dress and as artwork. When we collected it, we recognised it as a major form of aesthetic expression."
In SA’s past, beadwork — and many other so-called cultural practices — was used to establish firm lines between various people. However, Nettleton says it is tough to separate the patterns and colours chosen by one South African language group from those chosen by another.
"Those identities only harden around 1910-1912 or even after the Native Land Act in 1913 as they were frozen by the imposition of colonial boundaries."
Even then, she says, the various language groups were artificial compilations of smaller language groups. Getting these groups to cohere artificially, as the apartheid authorities sought to do, was often fraught with problems.
"Even in the Zulu kingdom, there were divisions the colonial powers exploited as people exploit the divisions in the ANC (African National Congress) today. If you look at Zulu beadwork from the 1940s to the 1960s, there is (a) vast difference. It doesn’t cohere. Sometimes it’s down to an individual maker, or a family. Sometimes it’s because a woman joins the Shembe Church and makes that kind of beadwork and brings those ideas with her."
Beadwork, Art and the Body is focused on beadwork as body adornment, seeking to reveal its historical depth and to show the relationship between pieces and the body "without putting bodies on display". Included are contemporary artists who are inspired by beadwork or who use it in their work.
...
ONE of these is Zanele Muholi, whose self-proclaimed mission is "to rewrite a black, queer and trans-visual history of SA". The Muholi works on display show transgender people wearing beadwork "as a subversion of ideas around identity in so-called traditional cultures", says Nettleton.
Another designer whose work forms part of the show is Laduma Ngxokolo, who used traditional Xhosa beadwork as inspiration for men’s jerseys, at first in response to Xhosa initiates wearing "English" dress after going through the traditional manhood initiation ceremonies because there wasn’t a knitwear brand that had any reference to the Xhosa culture.
Ngxokolo calls his creations "cultural, yet modern", which ties up with Nettleton’s assertion that personal identity is always shifting.
"Identity is all about self-identifying," she says. "Saying, ‘I don’t do that because it’s not Zulu’, that’s a hugely problematic idea. People constantly change their identity … We make the boxes and put ourselves and other people in them. We use all sorts of things to make the boxes, and we can use them to unmake the boxes."
Commissioned specifically for the exhibition are large installations by KwaZulu-Natal arts collective Woza Moya, an income-generation project for the Hillcrest Aids Centre.
"They make extraordinary installations for architectural spaces and they are doing some very large beaded items on commission thanks to generous National Arts Commission funding. We may leave them up for a while after the exhibition closes."
It is fairly recently that beadwork has been seen as art, says Nettleton. "If you went to an art museum you would see pictures on the wall and sculptures on the floor. Things were singular, unique and made mostly by men. Clothing was not there, and African art was pushed into a corner. … We have a fantastic collection of beadwork pieces, so we want people to come and just love them, as we do."
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Mpondo/Gcaleka (Matsuseng village Eastern Cape) Bead panel on pin, Isipeliti, blanket pin beads. Artist unrecorded. Acquired in 1998. Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum). Picture: SUPPLIED
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Zulu apron, Itete (Nongoma district), ca 1950s, bead, thread, seeds. Artist unrecorded. Presented in 2010 by Nicholaas Maritz to Wits Art Museum. Picture: SUPPLIED
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Tie-necklace, Iqhina (Mfengu, Newtondale location: Peddie Ciskei), beads thread, button. Artist unrecorded. Acquired in 1989. Standard Bank African Art Collection (Wits Art Museum). Picture: SUPPLIED
GETTING a bead on identity is tough. "People are constantly changing their identity; they want modernity, fashion, something new," says Anitra Nettleton, curator of the Wits Art Museum’s new exhibition, Beadwork, Art and the Body: Dilo Tše Dintši/Abundance, running from July 29 to October 11.
The exhibition casts a beady eye, mostly, on how black South Africans adorned their bodies with small glass ornaments.
It also aims to shake up conceptions of art, and the idea that there are differences between various South African tribes, at least when it comes to how they expressed themselves in beadwork.
"We are trying not to go with ethnic categories," says Nettleton.
"We are shaking up that ethnic thing because we want people to realise there isn’t a ‘style’ of Zulu or whatever beadwork that arrived, ready made, in a trader’s store."
In any event, she says, beadwork is not a black thing, as is often implied. "White people used beads certainly as long as black people. Beads have been part of European or white culture for a very, very long time although Africans do things with beads that Europeans would never do."
To illustrate this point, Nettleton points out that Pietermaritzburg’s Voortrekker Museum has knitted items in which beads are incorporated that the Voortrekkers made for themselves, and that Batavians wore "collars like the Xhosa beaded collars … the earliest one I have found record of was made before 1862". The Batavia to which she is referring is the area around the modern city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
For a long time beadwork in SA was collected by ethnographers, and some of SA’s most impressive beadwork collections are "hidden in basements from the Museum Africa (in Newtown, Johannesburg) to the Iziko (South African Museum) in Cape Town", says Nettleton. She is chairwoman and director of the Centre for Creative Arts of Africa at the Wits Art Museum, and her research covers South African beadwork and black South African modernist artists.
...
WHILE South African beadwork dates back, at least, to the pre-colonial Kingdom of Mapungubwe (1075–1220), located at the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers in modern Limpopo, the Wits Art Museum exhibition centres on the museum’s large beadwork collection begun in 1979. "That’s not that old," says Nettleton. "The old Natal Museum’s collection goes back to 1890. What makes us different is that our collection is of beadwork as art, not ethnography. There has long been tension between beadwork as a form of dress and as artwork. When we collected it, we recognised it as a major form of aesthetic expression."
In SA’s past, beadwork — and many other so-called cultural practices — was used to establish firm lines between various people. However, Nettleton says it is tough to separate the patterns and colours chosen by one South African language group from those chosen by another.
"Those identities only harden around 1910-1912 or even after the Native Land Act in 1913 as they were frozen by the imposition of colonial boundaries."
Even then, she says, the various language groups were artificial compilations of smaller language groups. Getting these groups to cohere artificially, as the apartheid authorities sought to do, was often fraught with problems.
"Even in the Zulu kingdom, there were divisions the colonial powers exploited as people exploit the divisions in the ANC (African National Congress) today. If you look at Zulu beadwork from the 1940s to the 1960s, there is (a) vast difference. It doesn’t cohere. Sometimes it’s down to an individual maker, or a family. Sometimes it’s because a woman joins the Shembe Church and makes that kind of beadwork and brings those ideas with her."
Beadwork, Art and the Body is focused on beadwork as body adornment, seeking to reveal its historical depth and to show the relationship between pieces and the body "without putting bodies on display". Included are contemporary artists who are inspired by beadwork or who use it in their work.
...
ONE of these is Zanele Muholi, whose self-proclaimed mission is "to rewrite a black, queer and trans-visual history of SA". The Muholi works on display show transgender people wearing beadwork "as a subversion of ideas around identity in so-called traditional cultures", says Nettleton.
Another designer whose work forms part of the show is Laduma Ngxokolo, who used traditional Xhosa beadwork as inspiration for men’s jerseys, at first in response to Xhosa initiates wearing "English" dress after going through the traditional manhood initiation ceremonies because there wasn’t a knitwear brand that had any reference to the Xhosa culture.
Ngxokolo calls his creations "cultural, yet modern", which ties up with Nettleton’s assertion that personal identity is always shifting.
"Identity is all about self-identifying," she says. "Saying, ‘I don’t do that because it’s not Zulu’, that’s a hugely problematic idea. People constantly change their identity … We make the boxes and put ourselves and other people in them. We use all sorts of things to make the boxes, and we can use them to unmake the boxes."
Commissioned specifically for the exhibition are large installations by KwaZulu-Natal arts collective Woza Moya, an income-generation project for the Hillcrest Aids Centre.
"They make extraordinary installations for architectural spaces and they are doing some very large beaded items on commission thanks to generous National Arts Commission funding. We may leave them up for a while after the exhibition closes."
It is fairly recently that beadwork has been seen as art, says Nettleton. "If you went to an art museum you would see pictures on the wall and sculptures on the floor. Things were singular, unique and made mostly by men. Clothing was not there, and African art was pushed into a corner. … We have a fantastic collection of beadwork pieces, so we want people to come and just love them, as we do."
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