Die Antwood’s  (the answer) music video “Enter The Ninja” is the newest South African sensation to hit the “interweb”.   Comprised of angry white guy lead man Ninja (born Waddy Jones), über blonde vixen Yo-Landi Vi$$er and DJ  Vuilgeboost (aka HI-TEK JUNIOR who occasionally subs for DJ HI-TEK), the group has adopted colored (racially mixed) hip-hop and transformed it into their own “zef” (redneck) music.  This has led to all sorts of discussions concerning the appropriation – or misappropriation – of culture, and the inevitable question, Who owns South African culture?

In other words, What color owns South African culture? Or, for that matter, what color (race) owns what culture?  Can the slave story be told by a white narrator?  Can the Aboriginal story be told by a black narrator?

While history dictates that it cannot, at least not without prejudice, misconception, and omission, South Africa is, if not a melting-pot, a cultural stew.  If anything, the close proximity of cultures cannot help but spill into one another.  Add globalization and multi/trans-culturalism to this mix and “original” or “copyright” become difficult concepts to navigate.

Perhaps K’naan answers the question of who owns what best.  In the video “young artists for Haiti”, K’naan says “what started as my song became their song”.  “Enter The Ninja” is bold, different, a strange intermingling of performance, contemporary commentary, graffiti art, comedy, and anger.

So perhaps the question, Who owns South African culture is moot.  In fact, it could be argued that South Africa’s history of apartheid, post-apartheid, inter-racial, cross-cultural, mish-mash of everything and everyone dictates that the question be moot.  After all, how can you appropriate something that has surrounded you for so many generations?  If anything, Die Antwood pushes the boundaries of race/color and ownership of culture beyond the narrow confines that culture should belong to any one group in particular.  “Enter the Ninja” (Ninja=Japanese) proves this just by the fact that it has become an international sensation – maybe Die Antwood’s international audience doesn’t get every reference, but something is reaching them at some level and forming some form of connection.

Meschac Gaba's braided wigs in action - Tresses 15 from the Street Series, 2008- Michael Stevenson Gallery

To date, the [GLOBAL ART] format has involved looking at the art-scene of a different country every week, but the truth is that there are way too many great artists doing really great things in any one time or place to cover in one week, so while I’ll continue my global exploration, I will also be revisiting cities, countries, continents, studios… again and again and again. So we’re back to Africa – West Africa.

Our connection to migration is as old as our species.  We are the descendants of hunter-gatherers and explorers.  For many of us, migration – be it for food, water, adventure, fame, opportunity, or escape from war, strife, and poverty – is either an unwanted or a pursued reality.  For the destitute, migration assumes the form of homelessness, makeshift homes, refugee camps, or shanty towns.  For the poor, migration occurs through the pursuit of domestic jobs in other countries.  For the middle class, migration promises opportunity and adventure.  For the small minority of billionaires who can afford it, migration means various residences across the globe with perhaps a stopover on the international space station.  Migration is a state of mind.

Migration is also a primary theme in Beninese artist Meschac Gaba’s The Museum of Contemporary African Art.  Consisting of 12 “museum rooms”, the project was begun in 1996 and finished in 2002.  Examples of rooms include the museum restaurant, the museum library, the museum shop.  Each room was presented in a different city.  The project took a critical look at how the Western world perceives art as a commodity, to be boxed within the sealed walls of its established institutions – otherwise known as museums.  In contrast, Gaba’s rooms have no walls and no permanent home, a reality echoed in the notable absence of a permanent home and exhibition space for contemporary African art.  Art doesn’t need four walls to confirm its existence or legitimize its sale.

Another case of cross-national influence appears in the sculpted wigs of Gaba.   Inspired by a stay in New York City – Gaba is quoted as saying that he felt as if the skyscrapers were on top of his head – Gaba produced his Tresses Series in 2007.  This inspiration allowed him to use traditional hair braiding, always an art form, as a vehicle for his expression.  Created out of synthetic fibre, Gaba had the wigs braided in his Cotonou studio.  They were braided according to his specifications.  The wigs mimic various iconic architecture in South Africa and though they are not meant to be worn literally, the reference to their mobility is obvious.  It is, in a way, the physical re-enactment of the internet – anyone can can walk around with one of Gaba’s wigs and “share” their information.  As such, the landmarks of South Africa (or any country for that matter) no longer belong to South Africa alone.  By “traveling” and through exposure, they become familiar and one has to wonder whether Gaba intends any reference to appropriation and colonization.

Gaba's Museum of Contemporary African Art - The Library Room

The wig motif is again used by Gaba in his Street Series, 2008.  Cars – Mercedes, school buses, army tanks, jeeps, Citroëns – replace architecture.   In an interesting juxtaposition, Gaba creates cars – the product of technology and innovation – by using an ancient African art – braiding – that has been passed down from generation to generation.  The irony – whether intended or not – is further explored in the unexpected commonality cars and braiding share – both have historically signaled social status and age group affiliation.   And yet, for both, this is no longer as true as it once was.   Thanks to credit, pretty well anyone with at least the semblance of an income, can own a fancy car.  Similarly, anyone can walk into a hair salon and get a braiding (albeit not as complicated or meaningful) proving once again that nothing  stands still.  Everything – be it art, architecture, cars, hairstyles -migrates.

As Williamson points out, however, the last ten years has witnessed a new understanding and embracing of South African art not as one homogeneous voice, but as a vibrant, globally relevant movement that is as diversified as its artists.  Amongst the many South African artists who belong to this group are Robin Rhode and the 2007 winner of the Michealis Prize (the top prize awarded by the Michealis School of Fine Art to one of their graduating students), Rowan Smith.

Born in 1976, the South African-born, Berlin-based artist Robin Rhode uses a variety of media including photography, drawing, and animation.  His tools are deceivingly simple, often involving no more than chalk, a wall, and himself – a sort of graffiti art meets performance.  His Park Bench, 2000, is a life-sized bench drawn, in chalk, on the wall of the Parliament Building in Cape Town.  On its own, the image appears harmless, almost child-like.  The narrative changes the moment Rhode steps into his art.  No longer is the wall just a “canvas” to draw a bench.  The wall belongs to a building in a part of town that, until the end of Apartheid, no black or colored person could enter.  Wearing a dark hoodie (a piece of clothing immediately associated with “trouble” and “youth”), Rhode proceeds to “sit” on the bench and look furtively around – a suspect action the police call “loitering”.  The hoodie doesn’t help.  Nor does the fact that Rhode isn’t white.  It doesn’t take long before he is arrested for defacing public property.

The themes of perception, prejudice, and control are further explored in some of Rhode’s videos (the YouTube video above gives short clips of three of Rhode’s videos).  In Colour Chart, 2004-06; Candle, 2007; and Promenade, 2008, the videos were shot from above with the subjects lying on their side.  The word “colour” immediately invokes race, especially when connected to a South African artist.  Colour Chart, however, also alludes to the German artist Gerhard Richter’s Colour Chart paintings executed in the late 60’s, early 70’s – a play in contradictions given the political strife in South Africa during this time juxtaposed against Richter’s carefully calculated colour applications.  Against the cracked cement wall, the colour white – a multi-layered metaphor for white skin tone as well as elitist sports such as tennis and croquet – fights various colours (only medium blue is shown in the clip).  White holds a white canvas “shield”  – a possible metaphor for the coloured voice in art to be heard amongst the white ruled art establishment.

Rowan Smith 'Dot-Matrix Loop,' 2007 Mixed media Dimensions variable (Courtesy of Whatiftheworld / Gallery, Cape Town)

We see the same urban backdrop in the next clip, Candle, in which Rhode tries to light a two-dimensional candle.  There is something incredibly naive and hopeful in the simplicity of this act of faith that again assumes political undertones as the light flickers on and off and we become uncertain as to what/who is black and what/who is white.  Promenade was done in collaboration with Norwegian pianist Lief Ove Andsnes.  In this video, Rhode assumes the role of Master of Ceremonies who cannot control his own animated creations suggestive of the fight to own one’s belongings – both physical and spiritual.

A child-like belief and simplicity coupled with uncertainty are, perhaps, two commonalities that Rowan Smith’s art shares with the art of Rhode.  Leaving politics and skin tone aside, Smith’s conceptions explore a futuristic world with wonder and trepidation by looking towards the past for clarity and understanding.  Obsolete technology, such as the three printers in Dot Matrix Loop tell the story of how we got from there to here.   Suspended as they are from the ceiling, they seem to float mid-air, like three wise story-tellers whose human history (there are little figures printed on the paper) they print on the stream of paper that intertwines from one printer to the next.  This is how stories get passed down and this is how they become altered as each story-teller adds their own imprint.

In the end, what the art of Rhode and Smith explores – albeit through very different means and artistic concerns – is the frailty of our world and ourselves;  themes that are as universal as they are relevant to our present reality.