MELEKO MOKGOSI AT MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

PAX KAFFRARIA 

PAX KAFFRARIA (a series of paintings created between 2007 - 2011) is the title of the installation at Memorial Art Gallery; the artist is Botswana-born Meleko Mokgosi.

As I walked through the exhibit at last night’s opening, I couldn’t help remembering ANOTHER BROOKLYN, a novel written by Jacqueline Woodson.  Her story is loosely tied together through a series of vignettes - a young girl’s biography strained from the soup of memories.  It is poetry as memory - or memory as poetry.

Mokgosi’s paintings felt much the same - snippets of memory loosely placed together on huge canvases.  

Do you remember in elementary school or Sunday School as a kid working on story boards?  Figures - people, objects, animals - would “stick” whoever you placed them on the flannel covered board and could be removed and re-applied endlessly.  This was “storyboarding” long before any of us associated that term with cinema. 

That’s what Mokgosi’s canvases remind me of. Figures  - nearly life-sized - float in negative space over wall-sized canvases with sometimes a hint of scenic content (a veranda, a segment of fencing) but most often stranded in mid-air. Like paper dolls, felt backed costumes could be interchanged to further the time and place on flannel storyboards and just so, costuming is equally important to establish time, place and caste in Mokgosi's art.  

In PAX KAFFRARIA, Mokgosi attempts to tell the story of South Africa,  particularly post-1950 after the Population Registration Act when the country’s population was divided and registered into 4 groups - white, natives, coloreds and Indians.  It’s a history of xenophobic attacks on black foreigners, injustice and struggling national identity.

Is he successful? In whose terms? Is Mokgosi a gifted painter technically? Does that matter if the ideas behind the paintings are strong enough to carry the viewer into the maker’s hemisphere? This is a young painter working at a time when the art world is entranced by political statement work - no subject more so than the politics of African experience.  What does this mean for a life-time career?  Is it important to ask these questions at all or is the only thing that matters this: the gallery looked smashing last night.  The place was crowded with a young, diverse audience. Some were even looking at the art! 

(The exhibition runs a Memorial Art Gallery until May 7, 2017.  Another panel of the same series is on view at Rochester Contemporary Art Center.)

A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE

Does each generation of elders think “This is the end! Life as we know it is on the brink of destruction! I’m glad I won’t be around to see the cataclysm!”?  

In PASSAGES, her book on adult development, Gail Sheehy proclaimed the twenties as the time for “breaking away” - a necessary decade of emotional upheaval before finally allowing the individual to stand alone without the crutches of childhood. 

Are the ancient decades - the seventies and eighties - another version of tearing away from the life we’ve known - a preparation for our next passage, the ultimate lonely jump? 

We expect the twenty-somethings to act out, gyrate from wanting total independence back to needing - metaphorically and sometimes, actually - parental protection. By the end of this transformative decade, we hope that our teenager will be an adult ready to take responsibilities of a grown-up. 

Now I am in the epicenter of the aging years and I swing far into despair and it’s often hard finding the counter-swing back to optimism. And for good reason. In the face of the uprising of horrid movements (fascism, nationalism, white supremacy), for self-preservation, I have nearly stopped watching and reading news reports. I make telephone calls to congresspeople and write Senators and sign petitions but when the votes are taken, it feels as though the side of reason loses anyway.  It doesn’t seem to matter; more to the point, I don’t matter!

Jay Griffiths writes in her piece on Today’s Politics of Hate for Aeon Magazine: 

Fascism begins as something in the air, stealthy as smoke in the

dark. It likes propaganda, dislikes truth and invests heavily in 

performance. It is anti-intellectual and champions a Darwinian 

survival of the nastiest: “Might is Right.”  It detests the natural 

world (biophobia), adores machines and considers 

environmentalism as “Public Enemy #1.

Sound familiar? 

But what if identifying the disease is the first step to returning to cultural health? Is that what this is all about? Then I am among the luckiest generation - a front row seat in the arena of seismic change!  The lion tamers are among us.  Don’t you sense a community growing? Do you notice yourself stopping and talking to people whose aura tells you they need acknowledging just as much as you? Do you see expanding empathy? Does it surprise you that more and more people are talking about getting involved in - anything!? Everywhere I go I sense less hand-wringing and more determination - an “enough is enough” attitude.  

Fascism may begin as something colorless and odorless but I’m betting that it’s counter-weight is blowing right alongside.  I may indeed be an old crank, forever looking in the rear view mirror. My eyes are not what they once were but my perspective is better and I’m not turning over the car keys just yet.   

But seriously, couldn’t the anti-fascist army wear something besides those revolting pink hats?

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A few Cy Twombly paintings. If you happen to find yourself in Paris before Feb. 18, go see his exhibit at the Gargosian Gallery. I would volunteer to go with you but my calendar is full all next week.