USA Africa Dialogue Series - ASAI Introduces New Research on the Art of Lionel Davis

Awakenings: Impulses and threads in the art of Lionel Davis
Mario Pissarra
http://asai.co.za/artist/lionel-davis/

Lionel Davis is a significant figure in South African art circles.
Core elements of his personal biography are well known, and his
contribution as an artist is integral to accounts of seminal art
organisations such as the Community Arts Project, Vakalisa, and the
Thupelo Workshop. His early history as a District Six resident and
political prisoner has made him an invaluable resource for post
apartheid heritage projects, such as the District Six and Robben
Island Museums. An articulate, charismatic and sociable personality,
Davis is popular and respected, with an active public life and media
presence.

Despite his prominent profile, Davis's art has still to receive
adequate attention from art historians, critics, and curators. For
while many of his works have been published and exhibited since the
1980s, you will be hard pressed to find anything that can be described
as a considered reflection on his art. The absence of a critical
analysis of Davis' art is partly due to his tendency to situate his
practice as part of broader networks, as well as because of his
decision to pursue employment from ngos, mostly as an educator, rather
than to work full-time as an artist. Aged seventy-eight, and active
since his late introduction to art making in 1977, Davis has held only
one solo exhibition, and used it to feature recent work. The task of
surveying his art as a body of images produced over forty years
remains to be done, along with a proper assessment of his contribution
and value as an artist. This short essay, along with the online
galleries published by ASAI, aims to begin this process, one that will
hopefully find fuller fruition with a retrospective exhibition that is
in the early stages of being planned.

In beginning to make sense of Davis' career there are some obvious
entry points. A quick glance suggests that his oeuvre reflects
chapters in his life. There are narrative stories of District Six,
images depicting imprisonment and the history of Robben Island,
'political' graphics and posters and social comment from his long
association with CAP, and abstract works from Thupelo. With his unique
biography providing a thread to interpret his art, illustrating his
personal narrative presents one obvious way to curate his work.
Alternately one could begin by sorting his output by media: graphics
(silkscreens, mostly but not exclusively for posters, linocuts,
woodcuts, and mono-prints, along with a fair number of etchings and a
few lithographs), paintings (mostly acrylics, on paper, board and
canvas, and some watercolours), drawings (pencil, charcoal, pastels,
crayons), collages and mixed media works.

While biography and media present two frames to organize and present
Davis' art, it is more rewarding to go deeper, to search for the
underlying concerns that motivate Davis as an artist, and to explore
ways in which these interests intersect with each other, sustain
themselves, or are more present at particular moments.

For instance, the very idea of distinguishing between themes and
materials deserves comment. A common feature in Davis' work is his
healthy disregard for the sanctity of individual media. He has no
qualms drawing or painting on a print, drawing on newspaper or the
pages of a printed book, tearing and collaging drawings and prints,
and incorporating words, from short phrases through to whole
paragraphs. What is privileged here is the creative act as an
exploratory process, one in which intuition and play are constantly
present. This approach, as many will know, is central to the original
principles informing one of Davis's artistic 'homes', the Thupelo
workshop- lest we forget Thupelo is a Sotho word meaning 'learning by
doing', incidentally also the original guiding principle for CAP.

The idea of learning that operates here is only partially concerned
with 'technical' questions, it is less about traditional ideas of
skill than it is about growth. Titles such as The Awakening and New
Dawn suggest a link between the creative act and a quest for
consciousness. As ideas they resonate simultaneously at the personal
and social levels. These works, along with most of Davis' abstract
works are strongly evocative of organic forms, of movement, of
generation.

The growth that Davis' abstract forms evoke project into the future,
affirming life as dynamic but they also provide evidence of their
nurturing and sustained investment. Many artists who choose to work in
related fields, such as education, inevitably suffer a decline in
productivity. In Davis' case drawing regularly has been important in
maintaining a creative momentum. Informing the aesthetic qualities of
his abstract works is a command of drawing; between the discipline of
looking and the freedom offered by an emphasis on process there is
fertile ground for Davis's command of line, form and colour to assume
its own momentum and assert its distinctive character. What these
works reveal is that the binaries between observational drawing and
expressive, intuitive abstraction can dissolve, in the sense that
these two tendencies feed off each other.

Drawing also informs Davis' mono-chromatic linocuts, where the
narrative impulse is strongly evident. In the case of those recalling
District Six, there is an almost illustrative realism, presented as
depictions of concurrent or sequential settings, and augmented by
generous use of written texts. However, the dramatic juxtaposition of
multiple settings and viewpoints introduces a fragmentary 'whole' that
is as much a reminder of the incompleteness of memory as it is a
visual simulation of rupture and displacement.

The District Six works resonate as implicitly 'political' works
through their reconstruction of a community displaced by apartheid,
and more explicit political content features in works chronicling
violent conflict between apartheid's enforcers and its militant
opposition, as well as in much of Davis' output of posters. But mostly
Davis' politics are manifest through his empathy for people dealing
with the challenges of being alive, being hungry, being depressed, or
just coping, passing time, waiting… This concern is most evident
through his long-term interest in imaging train commuters. A life-long
commuter himself, Davis has produced numerous works on this theme.
Arguably the most powerful are not the composed and 'finished'
paintings or prints but rather the sketches produced on-site where his
discreet observation of individuals and groups is ably translated
through modest means, typically pencil or pen on small formats. These
are intimate, ostensibly unremarkable moments that affirm human
presence and express a profound respect for the lives of 'small'
people. They also chronicle an existential, liminal space between
destinations, spaces fraught with uncertainties, sites of hope and
fear, community and alienation. That these works date back to the
mid-1980s, a time of serial states of Emergency, informs their often
desolate tone, and underlines the displacement that the train journey
rehearses with its shuffling between the city, off-limits to the
majority, and the desolate locations to which many were forcibly
relocated. It is a mark of Davis' skill that deceptively simple
drawings can summons up the trauma of daily struggle that permeate
everyday life for 'ordinary' people.

It is instructive to consider Davis' approach to his train subjects
with what was likely to have been one of his original sources of
inspiration, the painting Third Class Carriage by Honore Daumier, 19th
century French realist and satirist. Daumier conceived of this work as
having a companion piece, The First Class Carriage, in order to
didactically highlight the gap between the elite and poor. Davis shows
little interest in visualizing a world of privilege that he is not
part of , using his art to situate himself socially and politically,
he not looking in on an alien experience, he is visualizing a world
that is familiar with.

The use of his art to situate himself socially and politically also
informs a number of works that reveal Davis' recurrent interest in his
identity. Classified 'coloured', Davis has addressed the denial of
African heritage that marks many communities that have embraced the
notion of coloured identity. At times Davis' dissidence takes the form
of claiming an African identity for his work, typically expressed
through titles, a trend most visible in many of his abstract works.
Elsewhere, he directly addresses the prejudice towards looking too
black, as with his Flat-nosed people series. And when Davis
incorporates rock painting motifs into his work, he troubles fixed
notions of coloured and African identity, highlighting the absurd
exclusion of the descendants of the first people from legal and common
classifications of African identity. Similarly, his poster
commemorating the history of Robben Island reminds us that it was
three prominent 'hunter-gatherers' who were the first political
prisoners banished there.

Davis' unsettling of coloured and African identities as separate
recurs in his Masks series. In these works Davis entangled the
painted, minstrel face conventions of the Cape Town minstrel (klopse)
carnival with those of west African masqueraders, at once drawing
attention to questions of what constitutes masking traditions in
Africa as well as marking the presence of West Africans ion the
cosmopolitan mix of District Six, which conservative interests have
ethnically cleansed as a 'coloured' site. Once again, identity,
culture, history and politics know no boundaries.

Viewing Davis' work, one cannot but be struck by the convergence of
skill, pleasure and introspection. Over the last forty years, he has
produced a rich archive free of any pressures to be anything other
than meaningful for his own journey of self-discovery and
socialisation. Through this committed approach to his practice, Davis
affirms the potential of art as a means of making sense of the world
and one's place in it.

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