The long and short of a 50-year artistic career

Sue Williamson’s new show opens in Joburg and a retrospective is coming soon

It is 2pm on Tuesday and the exhibition’s opening to the public is just four days away — Saturday morning. 

There is a flurry of activity in the adjoining spaces at the Goodman Gallery here in Parkwood, Johannesburg, but Sue Williamson is not flustered.

The celebrated 83-year-old artist has done this before. Several times and across the world. In fact, it is exactly 30 years ago that she had her first solo show at the Goodman when it was still in Hyde Park, not far up Jan Smuts Avenue.

The hum of post-lunch traffic is our faint soundtrack. The winter sun is streaming into the gallery’s coffee shop, where Williamson and I are sitting on a turquoise coach, and we have gone back in our conversation to that exhibition three decades ago.

“Yes, well, of course, 1994 was a pretty important year, and I had been invited to show on the Havana Biennial in Cuba, and Linda Goodman offered me a show in her gallery, so some of the work then was a preparation for that biennale,” she tells me. 

Among others, she had an installation work called The Last Supper Revisited on show. 

It was a glass-top table, with little bricks of resin, with scraps of materials that she had picked up in District Six inside. That was after the brutal forced removals of that community from the white part of Cape Town to the Cape Flats.

“And I remember visiting students from the University of Pretoria looking at the installation, asking ‘What is this?’, ‘How do you sell this work?’, ‘Is this art?’ and ‘Why are you doing this?’” she says, with a smile.

Also on show on the exhibition  — “I think it was just called Sue Williamson’s Selected Work …” — was a large work called Native Life in South Africa, The Screen. 

“It was four door-sized steel slabs with the pages of a brochure that had been published in 1936 on one side, presenting South Africa as this exotic country where you could come and experience all these strange races.

“And on the back of it, it was plastered with newspaper cuttings from Umsebenzi, a Communist workers’ newspaper, covering fights on the shop floor and showing a very different side of South Africa. 

“That is something that I do quite a lot in my work, is try to show the whole two sides of the same thing, without really taking sides, as it were,” Williamson says.

This will also be the approach with this latest exhibition at the Goodman Gallery, plus, again, the use of news media and archival references. 

Titled Short Stories in a Longer Tale, it examines six key moments (the short stories) in South and West Africa’s complex and layered history (the longer tale), using printmaking, photography, drawing, video, embroidery and installation. 

For this show, the artist will share historically significant work from her 50-year career, as well as newer works.

As a journalist, I am interested in Williamson’s approach and the media she uses.

“The distance between journalism and art? Well, as a journalist, you have to write down the facts,” she responds. “As an artist, I have more freedom. You can kind of leave out some things if you want to.

“So, I think it’s more open, in a sense. You’re not trying to encapsulate all the facts for your audience. You’re trying to give them a space to think through it a little bit and perhaps provoke them.”

To me that sounds like good journalism.

It is not surprising Williamson’s work has journalistic elements to it. 

“I wanted to be a journalist in the first place because I was interested in stories and people and things that happened around in our lives.”

She started as a young reporter at the Daily News in Durban, before switching to copywriting, and she went to New York to work as an advertising copywriter.

“It was only there, for the first time, that I started to take art classes in the evening. I started to marry the two careers together. But that interest in people’s stories continues.”

Newspapers have often featured in her work over the past 50 years. 

“I’m still using newspapers. I’m still very interested in media,” she explains. “I’m always interested in subtext. Why has this been written? Who’s writing it? Why is it written in this language? Who are they appealing to? All these questions come up for me.”

Williamson also uses other media in her work. 

There is the powerful For Thirty Years Next to His Heart which was made in 1990. For it, Williamson repurposed the dompas that Ngithando John Ngesi, a dockworker, carried for three decades. 

The artist photocopied its encrusted pages, stamped by bureaucrats of the oppressive system, and recomposed them into the 49 panels of this gridded work.

On the latest exhibition, one of the six “short stories” focuses on the Anglo Boer War, now known as the South African War, in which Britain tried to regain control over her old colony between 1889 and 1902, sending 400 000 soldiers to quell the Boer republics. 

Called Stories for Children, this series consists of embroideries based on the illustrations in My Anglo-Boereoorlog Storie-Inkleurboek (My Anglo Boer War Story Colouring Book), which she bought in the gift shop at the Anglo-Boer War museum in Bloemfontein in the late 1980s.

The pictures and text in the book attempted to explain the horrors of that war to an Afrikaans-speaking child. Echoing them, Williamson’s images are hand-embroidered in black cotton on to white organdie; a labour relating to the handmade toys made by the women in the British concentration camps.

Looking further back on the continent’s timeline, the ink drawing series Postcards from Africa is based on photographic postcards sent in an era of colonial expansion. 

Here, the artist redraws the landscapes and situations imaged in these old photos but the people who once stood so stiffly in many of them are no longer required to be present.

Williamson’s creative ideas of portraying the lives of ordinary South Africans go back to the late 1960s.

“I lived in the States for five years. I came back here in the late Sixties, right at the end of the Sixties. And felt very helpless not being able to do anything very much about what was obviously a very unfair situation. 

“But in getting involved in activist activities through organisations, I began to feel that I had … it’s about the legitimate voice as well.”

But it came with a dilemma.

“You don’t want to tell other people’s stories for them. And it’s always a question in this country about who speaks for who and who has the right to tell this story.

“And it’s something that I get questioned about. Why do you feel that you can tell these stories? 

“But, at the same time, I think the story is important to be told. And I always make quite sure that, if I’m going to tell somebody stories, that they’re totally amenable to that.

“And so it’s about respect. I think respect is really important when you’re working with people’s stories.”

Williamson, like so many left-wing journalists of my generation, has had an activist bent too. The stories that she has been telling do take sides. Even though she portrays, as she said, “both sides”, her focus has been on important milestones in our people’s struggle against apartheid.

Short Stories in a Longer Tale celebrates them.

The brave activism of women in the apartheid years, 1948 to 1999, has been a key focus for Williamson. Taken from her All Our Mothers series is a photographic portrait of struggle stalwart Ray Alexander, known for her lifelong fight in support of the rights of workers.

This is echoed by the installation A Chair for Ray Alexander, which pays homage to Alexander’s reputation for always listening to others. Sitting with her chin on her hand in a listening position, Ray seems to be inviting the viewer to sit down and tell her their troubles.

Across from the Alexander works are 13 photo portraits from the ongoing series All Our Mothers. They include Barbara Masekela, Rica Hodgson, Gertrude Shope, Ilse Wilson, Amina Cachalia, Ruth Mompati and Sophie Williams-de Bruyn, the only surviving leader of the famous Women’s March on the Union Buildings in 1956.

Next to her hangs a picture of Rebecca Kotane, who died a couple of years ago in Soweto.

“I took one photo of her,” Williamson smiles as she recalls the shoot. “And then, when I took it back to show her, she said, ‘No, it made my legs look fat.’

“She was 102 … and I said, ‘Well, let’s do another one then.’ She was such a sweet person. She was lovely.” 

Around the corner in the gallery’s main exhibition space are works focusing on our country’s dark past. With the onset of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, long-hidden truths emerged. Cold Turkey: Stories of Truth and Reconciliation, a forerunner to the artist’s Truth Games series, tells the story of the horrific experiments police hit squad commander Eugene de Kock carried out to test a cassette player that was also a bomb. 

Nearby is Untitled (St James Massacre), which records in low resolution a TRC hearing filmed on a Sony Handycam from an ancient TV set in New York.

I put it to Williamson that it also seems like art as documentaries.

“I think of myself almost as a documentarian in a sense. I think the documenting side is very important.”

She says when she did the Truth Games series about the important cases which were coming before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one of the reviewers said, “Well, she’s just reproducing all the images which we see.”

“And I thought, yes, but it’s not for now. It’s so that 20 years on people can be reminded what those cases were and what this moment was. 

“So, it is about laying down memories of, you know, comments on, things that have happened that are happening now, so that we can remember about it.”

Williamson’s covering of the past is not an exercise in nostalgia.

“I think that memory and archiving is incredibly important because I don’t think you can really understand the situation in a country if you don’t know what the history has been,” she says firmly. 

“You have to know where you’re coming from before you can make a proper judgment about where you are right now.”

And right now has seen the sudden re-emergence of former president Jacob Zuma in the national political arena. His comeback is marked by reshowing Williamson’s 2014 work Pass the Parcel, Jacob, which followed the story of his rape trial through a series of newspaper cuttings highlighting the uneven power dynamics between Zuma and his accuser.

Williamson delved back into her experience as a journalist all those years ago. 

“Well, I was the junior in the newsroom — my first job on the Daily News in Durban was to cut up the newspapers each day and stick stories in what were called guard books, which were used for reference — well, you know, we’re talking about a very long time ago.

“So, I had to cut them out, stick them in these books and stamp dates on them. That habit of collecting press cuttings has stayed with me all my life.”

She did that again in the Zuma rape case. 

“I kept all the clippings, and you’ll see them up, and it follows the case along about how” — she trails off for a moment — “there’s only one picture of the person who’s accusing him but they’re all these ones of Zuma and how his daughter actually saves him.

“So, it’s about how powerful men abuse their roles and how women suffer. It’s about gender violence.”

This Goodman show comes ahead of a major retrospective of her five decade-long career, which will open at Iziko South African National Gallery on 19 February, titled There’s Something I Must Tell You: A Retrospective. 

Surely it doesn’t mean that you’re retiring?

“No, no. Artists don’t retire. I’m working five, six days a week every week. What would I do if I retired?

“What would I retire to? I can’t even imagine.”

Williamson gets a mischievous smile on her face.

“Now I’ve told my studio mates, if I don’t appear after a few days and it smells a bit funny, you’d better come and look. But don’t write that!”

I plead because it is such a nice line, especially coming from a person who is already busy on new work for after the retrospective.

“Okay,” she relents, the smile back on her face.

Short Stories in a Longer Tale is on show until 24 August at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.