Alfred Thoba; South African 1951-; Vision with a Lover
Provenance : Warren Siebrits Fine Art, Johannesburg, 30 May 2006. The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection.
Exhibited : Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, Alfred Thoba: A Step Becomes a Statement, 13 March to 3 June 2018.
Literature :
Notes : The category of 'Outsider Art' has received much mainstream attention in the last few years, including Lynne Cook's curation of Outliers and American Vanguard Art (2018) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and then a year later, the first auction of "Outside and Vernacular Art" by Christie's New York in 2019 (and followed annually since then by sales in the Outsider Art category). Such is the extent of its mainstreaming that even Christie's own publicity for their auctions invokes the "master" narrative, characterising the work as "masterpieces" and the artists as "self-taught masters".1 In its reach, which is neither easy nor simple, 'Outsider Art' (and its precursor, 'Art Brut') is seen to include artists who are not formally trained, who are 'outside' the mainstream artworld, who create elaborate fantasy worlds, and/or who have a mental illness. While it is not a style, the use of 'naïve' often gets pushed in the face of Outsider Art, and especially in auction sales it often sits in proximity to traditional 'African' and 'Oceanic' art, as well as 'folk' art, with certain implications for what they are understood to share. At face value, Alfred Thoba fits many of the criteria used to characterise 'Outside Art'. He has no formal training as an artist, with his singular early approach to Bill Ainslie for lessons rebuffed by the latter because he thought Thoba had a 'natural' talent.2 In Thoba's own characterisation of the encounter, "I went to them [Ainslie] with [my emphasis] the knowledge; I was actually born with it".3 There are no apparent art historical references in Thoba's work, and in interviews I conducted with him, he never once mentioned another artist of his own accord. This disregard for other art and the art histories that surround them is less about a disparaging of other artists as it is about Thoba's own understanding of the role of painting as a convenient medium, not only to release the messages that thicken and congeal inside his head, but also to travel these messages into public. The vitality of these messages is reiterated in the letters that accompany Thoba's paintings, earnestly written to ensure that whoever buys the painting properly understands its meaning. Oftentimes Thoba seems genuinely unconcerned with the currency of his paintings as art objects, or the place of his paintings in an art historical tradition or canon. Instead, the significance of a sale is as much about the successful transmission of a message as it is about the financial gain. This world constituted by Thoba's messages is a complex fantasy of autobiography, readings, obsessions, trickery, cosmologies, dreams, visions, and morality. While they are highly personal, and often autobiographical, Thoba himself very rarely appears in his own paintings. Thoba's painterly technique has little academic reference and is instead derived from the release he experiences through the unique process of the thickly applied paint, carefully built up into areas of relief and teased into peaks using with a variety of tools. It is obsessive, time-consuming work, and the quality of his attention to detail is clearly reflected in the intricacies and nuances of the finely teased paint. Thoba has fallen in and out with many of the prominent dealers and galleries in South Africa. It created a consequent pattern of him moving in and out of the artworld, but ultimately contributing to a sense of what oftentimes feels like an outsider status. Mention his name inside the mainstream artworld and the response is either a blank stare, or a sketchy reference to his 1976 Riots painting that was shown at the Detention Without Trial: 100 Artists Protest exhibition in 1988, and reproduced in Sue Williamson's book, Resistance Art in South Africa (1989), then disappeared for more than 20 years before being sold at Strauss and Co for close to R1 million in 2012.4 Why isn't 'Outsider Art' a more feted category here and why isn't Thob
Condition_report :
