On Not Reviewing Your Friends
The South African art world is small enough that critical distance is a fiction. So what do we do instead?
Everyone here knows everyone. This is stated as a problem, usually by people who have decided the solution is to pretend otherwise.
The pretence takes a specific form: the writer adopts a voice from nowhere, a view from above, and the reader is asked to believe that the person describing this show has never had a drink with the artist. In a country with this many practitioners and this few outlets, the reader does not believe it. Nobody believes it.
Critical distance here is not a discipline. It is a costume.
So the honest move is the harder one: declare the proximity and write anyway. Not softer. Not kinder. Just visible about where you are standing when you look.
I have written badly about a friend’s show. She has not forgiven me and I would write it again. What I would change is the paragraph where I pretended I had wandered in off the street.
Mbako Kago Moemise Curator.