25 Years at Caversham Press: A feast of visual archiving

Caversham Press, home to a dynamic portfolio of programmes, recently curated and presented a series of exhibitions to celebrate 25 years of creative practice. A marriage of the visual, social and discursive, the prints collectively trace Caversham’s biography through a rich and diverse archive of a tumultuous past.

The history of printmaking shows its use, since invention, as a political tool to stimulate thought and garner action, two requirements for effecting change. Originating in Western Europe centuries ago, the print process was used, with runaway success, in religious pamphleteering. Closer to home, in South Africa, the medium gained its full agency in the 1980s in calls to mass action. Medu art ensemble, the ANC’s cultural arm in Botswana, brought their poster prints to South Africa, and so partly encouraged large-scale mobilisation. These prints and their language of visual symbolism – the clenched fist; the colour red – were a call to arms.

After the dismantling of apartheid, and the gradual degradation of socialist ideals in favour of further rampant capitalism, poster prints continued their work though the Treatment Action Campaign in a series of highly effective health rights interventions that placed humanist concerns resolutely back on the table. That was a dynamic time in South Africa; a period of nearly three decades accompanied, intimately, by the making of prints.

It is this context within which Malcolm Christian – lecturer and master printmaker – established the Caversham Press in 1985, the Caversham Educational Trust in 1993, and the Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers in 2000. Raised in a deeply religious family, and still today nurturing that spiritually, it seems apt that he chose to house Caversham in a decommissioned 1878 Wesleyan Methodist chapel. On the slope above the Lions River, in the Balgowan valley of the gentle KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, Christian and his partner Roz Davey have, over the years, transformed the chapel into a print studio, built a stone home buttressed to a chapel wall, and designed and constructed a series of free-standing studios for resident artists. The chapel’s original graves and their headstones are tended as part of the garden.

In an interview with art historian Elza Miles, Christian outlined the principle that has come to define the centre’s programmes: “Spiritual matters are intrinsic to me, providing a structure of which the sole purpose is to amplify individual uniqueness whilst reinforcing our universal search for meaning and relevance. It is bound within the notion of dialogue, giving value to life through sharing our stories.” By following in the footsteps of the Polly Street and Rorke’s Drift centres, Christian sought to establish a creative nucleus that counterpoised apartheid’s attempt to decouple our sense of seeing from the ability to act upon what we see.

The history of the centre is intimately woven with the history of printmaking in this country. The list of collaborations reads like a who’s who list of South African artists. Deborah Bell, Peter Clarke, Paul Emsley, Robert Hodgins, Gabi Nkosi, William Kentridge, David Koloane, Colbert Mashile, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Bonnie Ntshalintshali, Derick Nxumalo, Walter Oltmann and Penny Siopis are some of the artists on People, process, prints, the exhibition that celebrates 25 years of Caversham’s practice. The exhibition was most recently seen at the National Arts Festival (iGrahamstown, 2011), before that it showed at Boston University Art Gallery and the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.

In the exhibition, the collection of work demonstrates the shifts in South African contemporary art over the past two and half decades, from the literal political work of the 1980s, through an increasing criticality in the 1990s, up to the integration in the new century of a new kind of politics that draws upon the poetry of individual lived experiences. Visible through this period is the shift from white to black artists, and from a Western canon to that of a more inclusive art history.

When the centre was first formed in 1985, it was artists Robert Hodgins, William Kentridge and Deborah Bell who demonstrated art practice as visual critiques of apartheid. It was these three artists who also first responded to Caversham’s model of collaboration, and the group would continue to work together for a period of ten years and produce Hogarth in Johannesburg (1986), Little Morals (1991–92) and Ubu Tells the Truth (1996–97). These three portfolios would, in retrospect, come to define a period of intense politicisation of South African contemporary art that accompanied the major political shifts.

The influence of Malcolm Christian, and his ability to attract important artists to Caversham, saw the centre’s birth and early years celebrated and encouraged by meaty commissions. The Johannesburg Centenary Print Portfolio (1986) was an auspicious start, followed by Decade of Young Artists: Ten Years of Standard Bank Young Artist Awards (1991) and Art Meets Science: Flowers as Images (1993). It was also during this period that Christian established, in the minds of fledgling art collectors, the possibility of the print as affordable and desirable.

Toward the end of the 1980s the Trust started printmaking workshops in townships around Caversham. By drawing on established Zulu forms of artistic expression, teachers were able to incorporate printmaking and visual literacy into a process that culminated in, amongst others, The Spirit of our Stories portfolio in 1994. By studying the relationships between ancestral stories and their own lives, artists were able to bring forward issues that defined contemporary African experiences and, in this way, became exponents of the field of African identity politics. Another significance was the growth of a critical engagement with gender equality, a focus that still, today, continues to guide the centre.

This period of 25 years – a time of experimentation and production through open collaboration – has allowed Christian to refine a working method which claims, as its cornerstone, the creative practice of mutual inspiration. Marion Arnold writes that “The result is not the singular production of an artefact – a print – but the development of multiple skills, creative, technical, and social, which embed and affirm the individual in the group.” This is a practical philosophy Caversham now uses in its CreACTive centres in rural parts of KwaZulu-Natal, where clusters of creative energy are applied in a myriad of productive ways.

The Caversham collection is masterfully printed using various combinations of a wide range of techniques with seductive names like intaglio, relief, aquatint, hard ground and soft ground, collage, drypoint, halftone, mezzotint, stone print… The titles of the works themselves offer intriguing glimpses of real world weirdness: Night Shift, Entirely Not So, Make a Fire Without Matches, Incident, You Really Must Come Sometime, Act of Testimony, Don’t Let It Go, Sleeping on Glass — Adaptability Compliance…

This collection appears to be more than just merely part of the centre’s history. It warrants closer viewing, engages in self-analysis, requests conversation and invites expansion.

This suggests that the collection of prints may be thought of, additionally, as a collated archive with a history, a biography and a back-story. It does reveal evidence of archival processes. Its life is evident in the marks of production stages and times, and in its provenance. The shifts in emphasis, away from print production and towards people development, are traceable. The collection continues to evolve, while artists and facilitators continue to build a systematic document of perspectives of South Africa.

Further, because the processes and prints are used as constant reference in all the centre’s work, the archive itself plays an active role in its own surroundings. In other words, the archive here acts as an agent directly active within its field. This may be an important root of its power as an archive.

The Caversham archive also highlights that many issues that were pressing 25 years ago have still not been resolved. It may be a stretch, though, to imagine this as the archive transcending its fixedness to the past; choosing instead to condense the temporalities of past, present and future into a “single, perceptual instant”. However, if we do imagine it, the next logical step would be to see the potential for applying archives directly, within the contemporary.

Final evidence of the status of the Caversham archive may be in the mature way it uses its own material – textured and embossed paper, layered ink, the image and its aura – as curatorial tools. In other words, this archive seems to have an agency, influences its context, and assists in its own curation.

Brenton Maart is an Archival Platform correspondent

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