Mine Trip (review)
than high art. This disregard is not unique to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, but rather permeates through the entire South African art world. It is a desire to turn back the clock to a mythical "Golden Colonial Age" where good art was appreciated according to its embodiment of good, old-fashioned Calvinist values like laborious, pain-staking technical virtuosity. The current exhibitions by Stephen Conroy at the Everard Read Gallery and Keith Alexander are both good examples of artist and galleries who through their art attempt to evoke the past by turning their backs on the contemporary. In our current age of saturated mass media spectacle and proliferation of mechanical reproduction, the traditional technique of realism will by virtue of its nostalgic qualities appeal to a more conservative sensibility, to those people who find it difficult to live in the present. It is ironic that the Johannesburg Art Gallery has looked across time and geography in order to solve the problems that originated in their own backyard, problems that historically are directly connected to the artworks they have introduced as an antidote. The curator missed a rare opportunity to submit art to a "Truth and Reconciliation" type trial, exposing the relationships between art and power, economy and history, demonstrating how art can be used to mask social prejudices and political injustices. The Colonial "Golden Ages" have long since ended and all attempts to mask their demise will only serve to cripple our futures. If we are to create our own South African renaissance, our own "Golden Age", we are going to need the support of every gallery, museum and collector in the country, to live in the present with courage, that our artists may grow from that support, writing and creating their own histories, according to their own needs and not that which has been fed to us for too long by our former colonial masters.