By Salah M. Hassan
To Be Free!, a large-scale retrospective of the Oxford-based South African artist Gavin Jantjes, celebrates the exemplary accomplishments that mark his life and work. The exhibition encapsulates his five-decade career as an artist, creative activist, formidable intellectual and curator. To Be Free! foregrounds Jantjes’ multiple roles, both in and outside of the studio and gallery spaces, by bringing together his paintings, prints and drawings as well as material related to his curatorial work, writing and publishing.
Jantjes’ artistic and intellectual path illustrates the quest for freedom that has been central to the global Black liberation struggle. Formulated during his early years in Cape Town, every aspect of Jantjes’ career as an artist and activist has been shaped by South Africa’s apartheid regime. The freedom struggle in the country came to the fore during the long battle against the much-dreaded legalised system of racial segregation that continued into the 1990s. It symbolically ended in 1992 with the release of Nelson Mandela, along with his compatriots, from their long incarceration. This context shaped Jantjes’ subsequent work.
In the artistic arena of Africa and its diaspora, the pursuit of emancipation has been characterised by two paradoxical forces that have shaped contemporary and modernist African as well as global Black artistic production—‘the quest for artistic freedom’ and the ‘burden of representation’. In his classic 1926 essay, ‘The Negro[i] Artist and the Racial Mountain’, the African American poet Langston Hughes exemplifies this when he forcefully advocates that ‘An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.’ Contemplating what he called the ‘racial mountain’ as an obstacle to any true Black art in America, Hughes argues against the urge within Black artists and creative writers towards embracing whiteness, namely ‘the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization’ and to become ‘the little Negro [African American] and as much American as possible.’[ii] He further counteracts such an urge with his call to Black artists to be as free within themselves at all costs. This is crystalised in his famous statement that reads as a manifesto for the future of Black artistic freedom:[iii]
We younger Negro [African American] artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored[iv] people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
Hughes’ call for artistic freedom is further extended by art historian and writer Kobena Mercer’s famous articulation of the ‘burden of representation’, a dilemma that has challenged artists and creatives agents in Africa and its diaspora, and put limitations on the reception, representation and interpretation of their work across many fields. This situation, he argues, has given rise to a ‘sense of urgency’ because ‘the cultural reproduction of a certain racism structurally depends on the regulation of black visibility in the public sphere.’[v] This, in turn, has imposed further limitations on Black artists’ expectations as well as the reception of their creative production.
As Mercer aptly argues, such a paradoxical situation ‘is by no means unique, but pertains more broadly to an entire structural ‘problematic’ within which black artists have had to work.’ He further explains:[vi]
When artists are positioned on the margins of the institutional spaces of cultural production, they are burdened with the impossible task of speaking as ‘representatives’, in that they are widely expected to ‘speak for’ the marginalised communities from which they come.
Hence, the title of Jantjes’ retrospective, To Be Free!, is symbolic of the determination of many South African artists and writers, including Janjtes, to explore all forms of artistic and aesthetic expression with full freedom, unbound by the Eurocentric gaze and its prescribed roles or assumptions for Black artists. For Jantjes, this has meant a life of itinerant exile in Europe that manifested in his multiple roles in the field of contemporary visual arts.
The ideas of change and artistic liberation are central themes of this exhibition. They connect the transitions Jantjes continues to make as his ideas and studio practice develop and evolve over the years. The trajectory of this retrospective follows Jantjes’ actions inside and outside the studio, revealing his desire to make a societal difference and alter how viewers engage with art and its history. To develop as a professional artist, Jantjes had to face the dual obstacles of race and poverty as well as the pejorative assumptions of the western-European modernist canon that Africans lacked the ability to produce meaningful, contemporary visual art. He faced these issues from his early artistic career, which led to his ubiquitous role as an artist-activist in the international art world.
As an artist-activist, Jantjes has engaged head-on with the tensions between western modernism and classical African art, and the trope of ‘primitivism’ in Eurocentric art historical discourses. This he has done, not only through his public interventions as a curator, thinker and writer, but also as a painter. His engagement with the contradictions of the visuality of colonial modernism moves away from what Mercer argues against, namely the interpretation of the postcolonial as ‘talking back to the discourse of self and other.’ Jantjes, instead, explores in the context of differential power relations between the colonial metropolis and the postcolony.[vii] Hence, the choice of Jantjes’ Untitled (1989), one of the key works that are exemplary of his critical contributions to art historical discourses of modernism, in the context of this exhibition. In this emblematic work, which has been featured in several crucial publications on postcolonial studies, a white umbilical cord emerges from the mouth of a mask whose sharp, elongated contours are reminiscent of the artistic traditions of the Fang peoples of Gabon. The cord—a breath of life—encircles the masked female figure, a fragment from Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), before reconnecting with the source mask through the nostrils. This pairing speaks to Jantjes’ mission to elevate the standing of classical African art, which had been considered an appendix to western modernism. Jantjes, therefore, offers a postcolonial art historical perspective transcending the dichotomy of cultural appropriation and exclusion.
For more than 50 years, Jantjes has worked in the field of visual art, primarily as an artist but also as a curator, arts administrator, lecturer and historian. Internationally, his prints, paintings, curatorial projects and writings are recognised as furthering the discourse and representation of modern and contemporary African and African diaspora art. Seen together in the context of this exhibition, these multiple manifestations of Jantjes’ career affirm the remarkable roles he has played as an agent of change. Whether by making improvements to his own artistic practice or to the attitude of museums, galleries and cultural institutions, or by contributing to the global understanding of African art, his ambition is to make a decisive difference. In the larger context of African contemporary art, Jantjes and his work seem to be in action and in constant motion. They affirm the proposition that African and African diaspora artists have played a role in the discussions and presentation of contemporary art. Reflecting on his career in the international art arena, Jantjes, now in his seventies, succinctly says his life ‘still hinges on the idea of enacting changes that recode Africa’s role in international culture.’
Towards a Curatorial Outline
The focus of this retrospective is Jantjes’ ubiquitous contribution to contemporary art. It covers four distinct chapters of his artistic life, from 1970 to 2019. These can be summarised as follows: Chapter one underscores Jantjes’ success as a printmaker and painter, focusing on his role in the struggle against apartheid in the 1970s to mid-1980s. The second chapter focuses on his role in altering the attitudes of art schools, museums, galleries and national funding bodies in the UK. Added to this is his achievements as a curator and leader at various institutions in Europe. The third chapter spotlights his practice as a painter from the mid-1980s through the late-1990s, where he addressed Black history, its cultural manifestations and its complex legacy in the global arena. Finally, chapter four showcases his recent transition to non-figurative painting, such as his ‘Exogenic’ series (2017), the ‘Witney’ and ‘Sharjah’ series (2021–ongoing) as well as the work he continues to make as part of his ongoing studio practice.
The Screenprints
Jantjes’ early screenprints overturned the normal production methods of printmaking from a single repeated image on a limited number of signed sheets into something more creative. His signature edition, A South African Colouring Book (1974), is in fact designed to be used as a book rather than as a work that hangs on the wall. It includes a reference list for further reading and sets out to change the discourse on South African art in Europe and the west, from an apolitical one to one that is overtly political. By making a radical archive of everyday life in his home country, his prints, reminiscent of Pop art, did not focus on the consumerism of western culture but rather on the politics of race, culture and history. Intended to be used as an educational resource beyond galleries and museums outside South Africa, the series became a tool for political action and change. As a result of this work, Jantjes was made persona non-grata by the state and forced to remain in exile for many years, until the end of the apartheid regime in 1992.
Jantjes relished the new screenprinting technologies international Pop artists had introduced to challenge the conventions of printmaking. Print editions in the 1970s democratised art by flipping the modernist convention of a single and rare ‘master’ work, through the mechanical reproduction into multiplicities, deconstructing the idea of authenticity, ownership and authorship. Jantjes could now exhibit the same image simultaneously in multiple exhibitions, as he often did. The subjects in his screen prints address slavery, civil rights, African anti-colonial struggles, education and cultural identity.
From Figurative to Non-figurative Paintings
After his studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg (1970–1974) and a successful exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (1976), Jantjes began to paint and experiment with other media. With no formal training as a painter, this change in his production method was as much an interrogation of his social ideas about art’s role within culture as it was a test of his skill in a new media. For an artist who questioned the status quo, reinvention held greater relevance than consolidating a style. Sociopolitical change presented a challenge to every aspect of his work as well as the places he lived in.
Jantjes’ first paintings were mostly figurative, the themes in his early canvases echoing those of his prior prints. However, he soon replaced the rhetorical with the symbolic. By the late 1980s, his paintings began to demonstrate a shift away from narrative towards more poetic and metaphoric imagery. Titles that initially played a significant role in the interpretation of his work began to disappear. This greater emphasis on metaphor opened his art to a much broader interpretation. Later on, Jantjes would abandon the use of all titles in his work altogether, realising that they interrupted the audience’s experience of looking with an open mind. His painting method changed accordingly and the scale of the work became important for the presentation of his ideas and aesthetics. He felt that the larger works immersed the viewers in the act of looking, a fact which has enormously influenced the way he painted. He also began to paint in series, developing ideas and themes over numerous canvases. His well-known ‘Korabra’, ‘Zulu’ and ‘Exogenic’ series are examples of this shift in style and approach towards painting.
A Life Beyond the Studio: Itinerancy and Public Intervention
Since the 1970s, he has moved to Hamburg from Cape Town, and later to London and the West of England, where he continued his artistic practice through the 1980s and 1990s. He has also resided in Oslo, between the years of 1998 and 2018, except for 2006 when he returned to South Africa. Jantjes recently relocated to the UK and established his studio in Oxfordshire, near the city of Oxford. It is obvious that Jantjes’ political exile made him something of a nomad who has led an itinerant life in all senses of the word, not only moving between different countries and locations, but entering the art world through various roles, including as a curator and cultural broker in institutions.
By the early 1990s, Jantjes stopped producing prints. In the studio, he focused on paintings and shifted his political ideas towards the maladies of cultural institutions. His prints and paintings initiated a debate about the myopia of western European institutions and their interpretation of art. He became more involved in changing attitudes that prescribed how mainstream institutions in Europe collected and curated art from the rest of the world, more specifically from the Global South. His writings formed a part of the critical voices, particularly from the UK, that challenged established canons of art and art history in Europe and Africa.
To practice what he preached about diversity and internationalism, he turned to curating exhibitions that celebrated aspects of global modernism. Through influential exhibitions for Whitechapel and Hayward in London and Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, he argued for an all-encompassing internationalism. He was appointed as the first Black senior lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art (1986–1998) and served on the board of Serpentine, Whitechapel and Tate during this time. In 1998, he became Artistic Director of Henie Onstad Art Center, Oslo (1998–2004) and was then appointed as Senior Curator for the National Museum of Norway (2004–2014). In each of these positions, his lectures and catalogue essays promoted the idea of cultural difference and diversity.
In 2014, he returned to his studio to continue painting, giving himself a new challenge to rethink his role as an artist. Years of curating, writing and lecturing had altered his ideas about art yet again. At a time of rapid digital imaging and hyper information exchange, his most recent paintings are infused with a radical stillness that arises from the absence of a recognisable subject or visual references. The politics of postcolonialism, identity and cultural difference that once pulsed through his earlier work are now absent and are replaced by images that question how viewers engage with art. The shift in his emphasis, from the cerebral towards the visual, has changed how one encounters his work.
Above all, Jantjes understands freedom of expression to include the viewers’ choice to decide what they take away from a work. He no longer wants to instruct, narrate or depict. Notions of free expression infuse and structure his recent canvases. Echoing Susan Sontag’s challenge to accept paintings for what they are, or what they could become, these new paintings defy interpretation. The change Jantjes’ work has undergone invites us to reconsider our expectations of art in a globalised world. His work interrogates the role and value of art today as well as challenges assumptions that non-figuration is a privilege that African artists cannot enjoy.
Jantjes’ understanding of his role as an artist was set in his formative years in Cape Town in South Africa of the 1960s, when every aspect of his life was dominated by the racism of the apartheid state. Henceforth, as his journey demonstrates, he has questioned, through his work as a painter and activist, not only the incongruities of his life but also what his role as a creative producer means. This has made him an outspoken and imaginative critic of institutionalised racism and other forms of discrimination and made him into an artist who always asks: ‘what if?’ This investigative pursuit has allowed Jantjes to ‘be free’ in every sense of the word.
[i] At the time of Langston Hughes’ writing this essay, this term was commonly used as a form self-designation for Black or African American people.
[ii] Hughes, Langston, ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ in The Langston Hughes Review
Vol. 4, No. 1 (SPRING 1985), 1-4, 1. Reprinted from the Nation (Langston Hughes Society, 1926), 692-694.
[iii] Ibid. 4.
[iv] In 1926, this term was commonly used to describe Black or African American people.
[v] Mercer, Kobena, ‘Black Art and The Burden of Representation’ in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 235.
[vi] Ibid, 235.
[vii] Mercer, Kobena, ed., ‘Introduction’ in Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and iniVA, 2005), 19.
This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the exhibition Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free! A Retrospective 1970–2023, on view at Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah, from 18 November 2023 to 10 March 2024.