Donovan Ward: Kevin Murray

Donovan Ward: Ash, Dust & Trade Marks at Bell-Roberts, Cape Town Long Street runs down the middle of Cape Town. It's a sparkling parade of exotic nightclubs, township hustlers, randy backpackers and streetwise undergraduates. Looming behind Long Street are the granite cliffs of Table Mountain. Sometimes, when clouds gather menacingly on its peaks, it seems like a tidal wave about to crash down on this glowing neon strip-as though the whole continent of Africa is about to descend on this merry scene with its gross humanity, its post-colonial pre-renaissance, its angry future. Near the end of Long Street, Bell-Roberts Gallery hosts exhibitions by the new generation of mostly white Cape Town artists. The gallery has also just published the first issue of Art Africa, the continent's only art magazine. Their current show, Ash, Dust & Trade Marks by Donovan Ward, eerily reflects the world around it. A set of wall pieces are painted with the face of Colonel Sanders, which has been rubbed back on one half to reveal an African mask underneath. The second series contains neon centrepieces with glowing faces like Mickey Mouse that are set on top of canvases that have been pasted with dirt, into which has been ground fragmented images of the previous era, including magazine photos and Afrikaans place names. While extraordinarily made, the works are quite sad. The future seems just as alien as the past. As an overseas visitor, I was emboldened to speak with the artist. His response was stubbornly Germanic, and resistant to any praise on my part. Donovan Ward was most talkative when it came to the technical dimension of the works, and his love of making. The fact that art of such intensity could still be made was the only possibility of redemption in otherwise fraught works. Ward seems very much one of his generation. Other Cape Town artists like Brett Murray, Doreen Southward, Jane Alexander and Lien Botha are, to varying degrees, trying to work their way out of the past. Rather than take the bait of global capitalism, they are looking for a place to nurture their pale memories. There's a line in the new TAXI book on Lien Botha-'This city is filled with pillars of salt.' In our relaxed and comfortable Australia, it is tempting to ascribe something like a reactionary insularity to this generation. They could be seen to be building aesthetic enclaves to protect themselves from the threatening reality without. But what they are confronting is something that Australians can only dream about. Imagine if 80% of the Australian parliament was Aboriginal and that you would see scarcely a white face in Sydney CBD. While that would no doubt be considered bushjustice for their dispossession of the land, how would white Australians then place themselves in this new unfamiliar landscape. The Cape Town artists are confronting our reality. And then there are the new black artists in Joburg. Kevin Murray