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Respect for everyone's worldview, the cow's worldview, the squirrel's worldview, and so forth. In the end it leads to total intellectual paralysis. You spend so much time respecting that you don't have time to think.
J.M. Coetzee (1999:47)
Durant Sihlali died suddenly in May 2004. Born in 1935, he was, until his death, one of the few living South African artists whose career coincided with the entrenchment of formal apartheid (c. 1948), the formation of the "white" Republic of South Africa in 1961, the long years of apartheid repression (c. 1961-1990), and the remarkable achievement of democracy in 1994 (Figs. 1-2). This alone makes him an artist worth investigation. But there are other reasons, as compelling.
Sihlali is central to a founding generation of black South African modernists. He experienced first-hand many of the key institutions that informed the experience of modern black artists in the decades of apartheid and just before, including Polly Street Art Centre (c. 1953), the Thupelo Project (c. 1982), FUBA (The Federated Union of Black Artists (c. 1982), and the FUNDA center in Soweto. In the 1960s and 70s his work, like that of many of his compatriots, was branded pejoratively as "township art." The romantic sensibility and racist paternalism of this attribution closed his work off from a fuller appreciation of his engagement with different artistic media and modes, his sense of his artistic identity or agency, and his sophisticated responses to the conflicted world in which he lived. It blocked a more complex reading of his creative project, dealing as it does, for example, with the contending energies of recording history "directly" and an allegorical impulse under the sway of complicated human desires.
This makes Sihlali's contribution to the development of modernism in South Africa distinctive and important. Neither ahistorical formalism nor social history of art, which risks reducing art to an epiphenomenon of larger forces, is adequate for appreciating this distinctiveness. The relationship between art and the social domain, between specific art objects in their integrity and the larger world in which they are embedded, between an artist and his or her imagined audience, are vital to any real understanding the development of modernism in South Africa. The challenge is to affirm the specificity of individual works,...