POST-VICTORIAN CULTURE
FROM ISOLATION TO SUBVERSION
AND TRANSFORMATION
by Graham Dominy,
Director of Arts and Culture at the Department of Arts,
Culture, Sport and Recreation for Mpumalanga
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POST-VICTORIAN CULTURE by Graham Dominy, |
What is culture? A well known South African museum director claims that culture is everything you cannot eat, drive or sleep with. This definition is as good as any, although cultural or religious rituals often precede or accompany these acts. The Victorians in Natal would not have agreed with this definition of culture. Culture, with a defined Capital C, was a refined activity, something you ‘respected’, as Gwen Raverat has said in Period Piece: a Cambridge childhood.
During the Victorian era Cultural activities included: reading ‘improving’ literature (another Victorian concept), including poetry (although care had to be taken not to let the young be unduly influenced by Oscar Wilde); the dramatic arts - both acting on stage and attending plays (once more there was always the risk of the risqu); music - both performing and appreciating; possibly dancing (although this activity was conducted according to well defined social rituals, including the presence of chaperons and the avoidance of physical contact - which made the waltz so scandalous - it was too enjoyable and too widespread to be a serious Cultural activity); and ‘fine arts’ - painting and drawing (sculpture was not an appropriate activity for a Cultured person) and attending exhibitions.
Already we can distinguish areas of difference between the end of the nineteenth and the end of the twentieth centuries. There was the emphasis on participation in Culture: the Victorians painted, wrote poems, read books, played musical instruments and performed on stage. But which Victorians? Certainly not the ‘lower orders’. They were entertained by military bands playing in the park and by the music hall where risqu numbers were performed. Culture was an activity for the upper classes, usually the women, or rather, the Ladies. Ladies wrote poems, painted or sketched and played the piano in the evenings. So, for an elite, there was gendered participation in Culture. On the other hand, for some men, usually military or naval officers, a Cultural activity such as drawing, had a utilitarian value in an age before a photographic record was easy and convenient. This introduces us to the most crucial vehicle of difference: technology. Photography destroyed widespread drawing and sketching, and television turned Culture into an isolated activity undertaken through observation rather than participation. World wars and the contraceptive pill released women into the job market and redefined their roles in relation to family and Culture. Today’s Cultured people distinguish themselves from the common herd by attending performances and exhibitions. They no longer act, paint, perform or write, they observe.
From within the Victorian era itself, when there was wider participation, there was the potential for subversion, from Wilde to women of the elite who became suffragettes. Perhaps, even though society opened up more in the twentieth century, some of the potential for subversion was lost because we became cultural observers rather than participants. You will note that a small ‘c’ is creeping into Culture at this point. This is because culture has always belonged to everybody and Culture, a false paradigm, belongs to an elite which no longer commands respect and deference.
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the shaping of knowledge, has aptly described museums as “secular temples” and this exhibition, the DASART COLONIAL MUTATIONS installation, is an attempt to introduce culture into what was originally conceived of as a temple of Culture. This makes it important because, as Flora Kaplan says in Museums and the making of “ourselves”, museums are a “potent force in forging self consciousness, within specific historical contexts and as part of a political process of democratization”. Gillian Berning and I, in our article “The presentation of the industrial past in South African museums: a critique” extended this concept by examining the nature of museum communication: ‘The power to the museum’, we have said, ‘lies in the fact that it offers an open, not a closed, experience’.
But this is putting the cultural cart before the historical horse. What was Culture in Pietermaritzburg? The city began as a Voortrekker creation on African soil, but it rapidly became a centre of British influence and culture. This change took place as the result of military victory, diplomatic negotiation, economic activity and cultural dominance. Victorian culture, as opposed to Culture, dominated in Natal. The original mechanism for this was the British army at Fort Napier. The troops introduced military band performances, amateur dramatics, public libraries and sports such as cricket, polo, rugby and soccer. The officers patronised learned societies devoted to the study of the flora and fauna of the new colony and also to study, as scientific curiosities, its indigenous inhabitants. This, as Annie Coombes has pointed out in Reinventing Africa, was seen as part of the Victorian “civilising mission”. The growth of the Natal Museum was part of the ‘civilising’ mission, the spirit of ‘scientific enquiry’ in terms of which specimens of natural history and indigenous material culture were captured and displayed.
The Tatham Art Gallery had a slightly different genesis. The development of an ‘Art Collection’ for Pietermaritzburg was more part of an attempt to develop Culture, rather than part of the spirit of ‘scientific enquiry’. The activities of Mrs. Ada Tatham and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Whitwell, the founders of the original collection of Victorian and post-Victorian British and European painting, bear testimony to the desire to create in a colonial capital, an outpost of ‘Home Culture’, rather than a centre of scientific investigation. Lorna Ferguson, in John Laband and Robert Haswell’s Pietermaritzburg 1838-1988, describes the foundation of the gallery as a typically Victorian, “high-minded and idealistic” project. This was a shrine before which an emerging settler civic elite could celebrate their cultural hegemony over their less-Cultured compatriots and the ‘lesser’ Afrikaners and Africans. The Natal Museum was a shrine to the conquest of the wilderness by science. Both, in different ways, were shrines to colonial conquest by the British of African and Afrikaner. The Natal Government constructed the Natal Museum building in 1903, a year after the conclusion of the Anglo-Boer War, and the same year that the City Council approved Mrs. Ada Tatham’s art gallery initiative.
The two museums provided Pietermaritzburg with centres where Culture and Learning could be admired and observed. They were possibly the first places where distance began to be placed between people and culture, thus beginning a process of cultural isolation. They marked a new approach to Culture in a city where the settler culture had been lower middle class and participative. Neither paid any attention to African culture as Culture. The material culture and artistic expressions of the Africans of Natal were ignored by the Tatham Art Gallery until the 1980s. The Natal Museum, early on, displayed the material culture of south eastern Africa as curiosities. While the approach has improved at the Natal Museum, the improvements in exhibitions still lag far behind.
The beginning of indigenous cultural material into museums is beset with problems. At one level it provides opportunities for cross-cultural contact and understanding, at another level it is an act of appropriation and even conquest. George Stocking, in Objects and Others, explains the dilemma: Western technology has removed much of the functional with an aesthetic value. The original spiritual values of objects of ritual are lost in museum context, but, in Stocking’s words, are “respiritualised (in Western terms) as aesthetic objects”. This spiritualisation has a flip side, because in the process the objects also acquire a market value!
All in all, the identities and meanings of art and museum objects are not permanent, they shift and can be subverted. Often the identity becomes more static, paralyzed even, when art and material culture is entombed in unchanging exhibitions. The DASART exhibition offers the opportunity, at a time when South African identities are being reconstructed, to challenge meanings of Victorian Culture and to bring new life to the artifacts in the changed context of the new South Africa.
REFERENCES
BERNING, Gillian & DOMINY, Graham, The presentation of the industrial past in South African museums: a critique SAMAB 19 (1992- for 1990): 1-14.
COOMBES, Annie E., Reinventing Africa: museums, material culture and popular imagination (New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1994).
HOOPER-GREENHILL, Eilean, Museums and the shaping of knowledge (London, Routledge, 1992).
KAPLAN, Flora E.S. (ed), Museums and the making of ‘ourselves’: the role of objects in national identity (London & New York, Leicester University Press, 1994).
LABAND, John & HASWELL, Robert (eds), Pietermaritzburg 1838-1988: a new portrait of an African city (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press and Shutter & Shooter, 1988).
RAVARET, Gwen, Period piece: a Cambridge Childhood (London, Faber & Faber, 1960).
STOCKING, George W. (ed), Objects and others: essays on museums and material culture (Madison, university of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
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