The Art of Being Public In Johannesburg, public art is its best when it reveals the hidden strata of a city with a fraught and varied history, writes Alexander Opper Public art, a singularity often used to describe a massive field of art production, is a problematic and misunderstood term. In its broadness it comprises a range of work that infiltrates and inhabits urban, peri-urban and rural sites (and the various landscapes in between), mostly outside of the commercial or institutional spaces of galleries or museums. By virtue of its almost endless scope and potential contexts, it is pluralistic and multi-layered in the range of readings it enables, and asks of its diverse public(s). The focus of this essay is the place referred to as Johannesburg, whose geography consists of many Johannesburgs1 – many versions of the city characterised by their fragmentary and dysfunctional relationships to one another. It is an assortment of parts stitched together by trajectories of carand taxi-infused asphalt, a collection of dislocated territories consisting of surfaces making up a politically and economically segregated collage. This ostensibly taut surface begins to give way to reveal its extreme depth – of meanings and narratives – once one starts tugging at and cutting through it. In this context, public art becomes a vehicle for revealing the multiplicity of hidden, silenced and removed strata of the city’s various histories. Art in public space is able to vocalise the absence and loss that are the direct results of the discovery of the stratified core of this city’s original reason for being. At its best, public art is able to revisit and challenge readings of the surfaces and depths that make up what we refer to as Johannesburg. Two recent artistic contributions to the urban surface of Johannesburg use the city in different ways as support for their expressions. These are: Fire Walker,
an ambitious public art collaboration between the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) and intermediaries, The Trinity Session; and a project showing the work of Mary Sibande, as the first iteration of the Joburg Art City initiative – steered by Art At Work! Art Project Management (AAW!) and sponsored by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund. I initially had my doubts about Fire Walker, a collaboration between William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx, not in terms of its presence, but because of its site. Revisiting my original scepticism, however, I have come to see the piece as a successful and revealing part of the urban texture of its surroundings. At eleven metres in height it does not lack scale. Its size is nonetheless downplayed by the urban “noise” of its visual backdrop to the south, a mixed bag of concrete-andglass volumes of built form that reduces the sculptural figure’s visual impact. The result is that the work almost camouflages itself, attaining an embeddedness that is ultimately its strength. It is an excellent example of what might be referred to as economic-kinetic sculpture: it does not try to impress by literally moving, but requires the movement of the city’s users around it to unlock multiple potential readings. Its placement on a large roundabout-like piece of land – a triangular leftover space or uitvalgrond – results in the city carouselling, as it were, around it in a 360-degree exchange of mutually considered projection and perception. The result is a tango-like partnership between the viewer and what is being viewed: the fragments comprising the work require the participation of the passer-by in order to “assemble”
Joseph Gaylard and Urban Inc, map showing public art sites in the inner city, Johannesburg, 2009/10. Courtesy JDA and Department of Arts, Culture and Heritage artsouthafrica
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