Ardmore Ceramics in the Midlands: Problematic Positioning of "Zulu Artisans"

Today J and I drove to Pietermaritzburg, a city of about 500,000 that is the capital of the KwaZulu-Natal province.  The city hall (rebuilt in 1901 after a fire destroyed the original 1893 building) is the largest red-brick building in the Southern Hemisphere and the largest Victorian building I have ever seen.  In the city we dropped some materials off at the Minister of Culture offices and we picked up V, a painter and fellow Phd student before driving out to the Midlands.  The area lies beyond Pietermaritzburg but in the lowlands before the Drakensberg mountains.  The area attracts tourists for arts and crafts and fresh farm foods produced in the area. 

After we had lunch, we visited Ardmore Ceramics in the Midlands.  Established about twenty years ago by Fe'e Halsted-Berning, the ceramics studio is the largest in South Africa.  The sculptors and painters who work at the studio are all Zulu women and men from the area who have studied under Halsted-Berning or her previous students on Ardmore Farm.  The pieces are striking and beautiful - overwhelmingly the individual pieces for sale represented animals and flowers, but several pieces in the permanent gallery depicted religious scenes, memorialized past Ardmore artists, and promoted HIV/AIDS awareness.

The marketing rhetoric that surrounds the ceramics, however, reinforce an unexamined division between Western and African art practice and suggest the presence of a white, cultural intermediary was necessary for the Zulu artistic talent to be cultivated.  The studio follows a practice common to artists' collectives situated in the "third world" or "global South" - attached to the artistic pieces are biographies of the artisans that attest to their neediness and how the ability for them to produce art within this particular outlet has uplifted their previous living standard of poverty.  The biographies of artists on the website repeatedly invoke the term "good fortune" to refer to the luck these artists have had in landing at Ardmore Farm.  The biographies seem to exist less to explain the creative inspiration and themes the artists explore and more to fit into an act of consumption for the conscientious consumer, appealing to neoliberal "structures of feeling" (to borrow an expression from Raymond Williams) regarding economic uplift.   The biography of Halsted-Berning is even more telling:

Fe'e's merging of western ceramic technology with African art is only part of the story of Ardmore.  Of even more significance has been her encouragement of their imagination based on nature, Zulu folklore and tradition.  Fe'e has been described as 'a creator of artists'.  [...] As she says:  'The Zulu people have a wonderful sense of colour and rhythm and a gift for design and balance, all they needed was opportunity'. (emphasis added)

According to this passage, any agentic capacity the artists' possess seem to originate with their "creator," Halsted-Berning who provided the "opportunity" for the [western] art world to see these ceramics, which will be forever coded as Zulu/ethnic arts.

Comments

[mom]

wonerful art

[ianh3000]

HI. Interesting coincidence. Big weekend out this way. So it’s about that time when prospectives come to see what’s shakin’ out here. We’ve spent the weekend having a good time with one of them who’s from LA and studies South Africa (wants to work w/ AB on colonial masculinities). He was telling me about his 6 months in Pietermaritzburg and how wonderful it was - though he too was robbed.he mentioned some of the landmarks you’ve posted right here. He told me about its status as ‘the last out post of the British Empire’ along with some interesting tie-ins to both Mandela and Gandhi. Anyhoo, i thought of you and told’em you were out that way. If he comes, you’ll have to chew the fat. Hope you’re well. looks like all’s shaping up nicely sans some glitches. Fun reading mdub, fun reading.