Moments away – Lize Kriel

MOMENTS AWAY1

LIZE KRIEL

FOREWORD

When teaching in an academic institution,2 the semester, the year group, the course, the project – in short, the moment – can often feel quite overwhelming. Of course, the moment is also exhilarating, but all the preparation, marking, critting, correspondence, reporting and keeping abreast with developments in the field tend to be a bit engulfing. And so, while lecturers (in as far as I can speak on behalf of anyone but myself) move in time, we also tend to operate in the moment. After all, the large majority of our “customers” remain in their late teens and early twenties year after year after year. Working with youth is so rejuvenating that it is easy to carry on for some time foolishly forgetting that we do move on in years as students move on in life. Sporadic, awakening reminders are (needless to say) almost always rude in nature. Perhaps there is a bit of hubris (no, let’s call it hamartia) about this tendency to allow the moment to become so all-encompassing.

A sure result of this quixotic energy among academic agents is that the histories of academic endeavours do not write them-

selves.3 It is not as if we (and here, I know, it is not only I) do not appreciate collegial camaraderie. We cherish present and former colleagues. We fondly remember and sometimes revere the mentors of our youth – all those who had left a legacy while working, similarly to us in our now, within equally all-encompassing previous moments. The same applies to students. Lecturers owe an enormous debt to students for what they teach us before they go into the world and do amazing things out there. Every year their names get replaced by new future-alumni on our class lists. It is for and because of students that our moment-to-moment endeav-

ours make sense, so much so that we would like to think of them

as momentous – important, significant, meaningful, historic. When former students then take the initiative to contribute to

the history of their alma mater, it is a rich and generous gift, especially when it is constructed in the very media that they are so capable of as artists, designers, curators and thinkers. Another Time, Another Place is a historical account through making. It is an honest endeavour of self-reflection by a specific cohort about their moment as students in the Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria (UP). There is no pretence in this contemplative reunion. The maturing reverberation of their UP moment into the present is assessed in all its multi-perspectival complexity. In the first instance, it should matter for those whose stories it tells: their

careers, their accomplishments, their challenges, their awakenings, their memories, their anger, their pain, their mea culpa, their creativity, their joys, their legacy.

Would current students in their moment care about now-middle-

aged white people who had once been the sole group entitled to study art and design at the University of Pretoria? That was, after all, another time and another place, and we are in a new moment which should be made to matter for the generation of the moment. Another Time, Another Place does not portend to impose itself on the current or future generations of UP staff and students. But somehow, it affirms the porousness of present moments and the way they are affected by the echoes of pre- ceding ones.

Earlier this year I received an email from the sister of the artist John F.C. Clarke, who succumbed to cancer in January 2021. Clarke had taught at UP and completed his master’s degree here. There were some things, his sister wrote, which he explicitly stated, should be

Figure 1: Pastel drawing of the Old Arts Building by Prof. A.R. Pullen, circa 1935. Figure 2: Pencil sketch of the Old Arts Building by B. Clarke, circa 1937.

donated to Visual Arts at UP. I spent an unforgettable afternoon with Berenice and her husband when they came to deliver the objects to the Visual Arts building. They reminisced about their own connections with UP that runs over three generations. Besides a colour drawing of what we now call the Old Arts Building (Figure 1), we were also gifted a pencil sketch of the same building, made by the artist’s mother when she was studying and later working at UP in the 1930s (Figure 2). A large folder of works created by UP art and design staff members for a UP birthday was also left in my care, in case our university archive does not have copies.4 Clarke’s beautiful book of Nukain Mabuza’s painted rocks published by his Leopardstone Press was generously included. We also received packets of old photographs taken by Clarke’s mother: of rag processions in town and female students dressed up for the centenary of the Great Trek in 1938. For several days these delectable visual portals into another time lay on my desk. We were fresh out of lockdown and students and colleagues came in and out of my office. The objects became conversation pieces. The crowd of young women in their long white dresses and bonnets drew a lot of attention. I had to tell the story of the Commemorative Ox Wagon Trek of 1938; several former students-turned colleagues had to remind themselves that UP used to be Afrikaans.5 I, in turn, reminded them that it had been

English before it officially became Afrikaans in 1980. No one seemed to be aware that there was a time that UP was proudly identifying as the Voortrekker university. We giggled at the fashionable handbags placed behind the stairs, not supposed to be included in the photograph featuring the women in their historical costume. One colleague started talking about an exhibition. How about juxtaposing different historical periods, different ways

of embracing tradition? Another young colleague was intrigued by the strange forlornness of buildings in open fields. We know them now as skirted by tarred roads; their majesty checked in by towering parking garages. This colleague too, brought up the possibility of an exhibition.

Another Time, Another Place, may just be a departure point for further trans-generational conversation. It is a UP history with the university as merely a beginning, emphasising the agency of a graduate. As lecturers we humbly need to be reminded of that – and of our responsibility to teach well.

A heartfelt thank you to Thea van Schalkwyk, Jacques Lange, Jonathan Edwards and Jennie Fourie for involving the Visual Arts at UP in the showcasing of their generation’s arduous journey with their UP moment in their backpacks.

ENDNOTES

1 Title of a song on the Mango Groove album Hometalk, released in 1990 by Tusk Music. It is a love song with lyrics by Kevin

Botha, Claire Johnston, Alan Lazar, and John Leyden. 2 … to me, at least, I should say, and to add insult to injury, I am trained in the historical method … hence, this inclination to

add footnotes.

3 As scholars we do invest a lot in a history of a specific kind: the autobiography in the form of the Curriculum Vitae. Our respectability – and perhaps even our scholarly survival – hinges on meticulously manicuring this genre. What we do, write, make, teach and deliver must preferably, as often as possible,

be something that can be accounted for, or packaged, as: curriculum development, teaching, research, academic administration, or community engagement. But still, a CV only tells a very thin sliver of a story. 4 I still have to check. For a while I just want to revel in the trendiness of the designs. I want to pry for specks of dissidence in the non-conformism – dissidence against what … not conforming with whom? Modernism as escapism or as hubris ….

Or both.

5 UP became an exclusively Afrikaans university in 1932. In 1992 the UP Council instituted a flexible language policy which allowed tuition in both Afrikaans and English. Further changes to the institution’s language policies for tuition and administration commenced in 2001 and has evolved since then,

specifically in the School of the Arts.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lize Kriel is chair of Visual Arts and deputy head of the School of the Arts at UP. She graduated with a BA (Hons), MA and a DPhil (History) at UP. In 2012 she was seconded from the UP department of Historical and Heritage Studies to the department of Visual Arts to teach Visual Culture Studies. She is interested in knowledge production in colonial contexts, and the ensuing cultures of reading, writing and printing. She has a C2 rating from the NRF and is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.