ZWELETHU MTHETHWA. GALERÍA OLIVA ARAUNA
Anyone who has read the novels by the South African author J. M. Coetzee will have noticed that he never describes his characters in racial terms (“black”, “white”, “Indian”, etc.), preferring to insert this information in the social, family and professional circumstance of each character. It could be said, therefore, that any “nomination” in Coetzee’s stories is outside the field of vision, as a result, essentially, of an ethics and a scrupulousness which does not allow for the brutal act, even when it is well-intentioned, of referring to someone depending on the colour of their skin. One of Coetzee’s black compatriots, Zwelethu Mthethwa, takes photographs of fellow black South Africans, inside their modest homes, or “exposed to the elements” (we’ll examine this issue further later on), as they carry out their precarious and equally modest jobs. Both Coetzee and Mthethwa display the same respect and scruples towards their protagonists. Where the white South African highlights (and informs) without quoting, the black South African informs from his most radical significance, almost as if it were a tautology which, despite being obvious and insistent, contains, like the tortuous and complex characters in Coetzee’s novels, a secret dimension, an unspeakable reluctance and an uncompromising ethics.
If, up to now, we knew about Mthethwa’s interior portraits, where those portrayed posed (an essential and defining feature of almost all of his work) inside their extremely modest homes –in works which, we should mention, when seen from an Africanist perspective, were not without a certain baroque quality (lights, shadows, a range of mannerisms), reminiscent of classical western art–, in the two series currently on display in Madrid, Brick Workers and Contemporary Gladiators, he has chosen to leave his subjects at the mercy of the elements, achieving not just another variable in the minimal differential found in any equivalent form (inside / outside) but something much more complex, profound and overwhelming. Let’s see: the interior subjects were (how could they not be?) “prettier” in the colourful staging of their representation. However, the question which emerges here is the following: In the visual arts, specifically photography, where should we position the limits of beauty when what is sought is a protest against and a critical questioning of a certain social situation? On the basis of these issues, or, rather, this vertigo, it could be said that Mthethwa has opted for undermining that representation of calm and accepted misery, even if it includes shelter and countless posters and kitchen implements, in order to situate that same misery in sad scrub- and wastelands in the suburbs of Cape Town. They are the same, yes, but these new series do not offer the supporting elements which succeeded in calming our gaze (and our mood) when we watched the interior images, where a simple, brightly-coloured blanket played the role of punctum postulated by Barthes.
The series currently on show do not include any such punctum for us to rest our gaze. It is not that the work is “another”, although it is, but that Mthethwa is another artist. Let us look at a “theatrical” example, so that we can explain this better. A stage director wants to produce a new version of Waiting for Godot, set in one of the frenzied halls of the Palace of Versailles. Okay. Another director, on the other hand, decides to show the same clochards in a filthy barrack in Auschwitz. Both works, of course, belong to the same playwright, Samuel Beckett, but each stage director has opted for his “own” Beckett. It is a similar case to Mthethwa’s, where we are speaking about the same artist, but for these series he has decided to be his own (and “another”) stage director. In the interior images, the Barthesian punctum nominated humans and things, but now, the workers and fighters who Mthethwa shows us are, directly, and continuing with Beckett, The Unnameables.
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