by Sean Denmark

First assembled at New York's Museum for African Art, "Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa," is currently visiting the downtown gallery of the Austin Museum of Art. The exhibit's curator, Frank Herreman, aimed for a representation of the breadth of South African art since the end of apartheid in 1994. I wondered to what degree the modern art of a country whose apartheid policies kept it in constant turmoil and isolated from cultural centers would be provincial in nature, and I was curious as to what subjects post-apartheid artists would address.

I found that some artists, like Claudette Schreuders, have turned South Africa's situation -- and the clash between white or European culture and native African culture -- to their advantage, while the introversion of the installations of Bridget Baker and Brett Murray and the video assemblage by Penny Siopis came across as evasive. Feelings of guilt and the subject of race are threaded through these personal reminiscences.

Sue Williamson's subject is openly political to great success in her "Truth Games Series." These works combine words and images related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the organization charged by the South African government in 1996 to address human rights violations during apartheid. In each work, there are three images: a grieving survivor, a possible aggressor, and a dead victim in the middle. Fragments of images and words of those who grieve and those who defend themselves are on plastic pieces that can be slid to cover any of the three images; this is the "game" referred to in the title. Accusational words can be sent from one side to the other. To see one person's image, the images of the others must be covered. This is a portrayal of a process that was long, painful, and confusing for all of South Africa and which, to many, offered insufficient closure. Americans will find the subject familiar. Most affecting about the series is that when all the words that overlay the people are cleared away, all that is underneath is a poor grainy photo which reveals nothing of the person's true character or culpability.

Zwelethu Mthethwa's series of photographs of residents in their small makeshift houses in Cape Town is determined to establish the dignity of its subjects. Mthethwa's method is to explain his intentions to those he photographs and allow them to prepare for the camera, making them collaborators in presenting their image. The subjects brace themselves against the camera and face it, not posing but simply showing themselves. The approach and effect are strikingly similar to Walker Evans' photographs of Southern sharecroppers in James Agee's 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

The combinations of wood, cloth, pigment, found objects, and other materials in the works of Sandile Zulu, Samson Mnisi, and Thabiso Phokompe are the pieces most obviously influenced by traditional African art and crafts -- but the effects are sadly tawdry. The range of education, not only between artists but throughout many of their individual careers, is remarkable, and the perseverance the black artists maintained to receive a fine arts education during apartheid is admirable. This variety of experiences seems to have opened Phokombe to a personal style of abstraction where objects are boldly presented on open fields of cloth, creating an interplay of background and foreground.

Claudette Schreuders combines African and Western carving techniques to narrative and figurative effect in her two-foot-high wooden statues. Among these eerie painted dolls is "Lokke," a dramatically lit school girl standing on her desk with -- like all of Schreuders' faces -- an unreadable and haunting expression. The artist makes a simple message insultingly obvious in "Speel Speel," where four white "Children of the Damned" play with a black caricature of a cloth doll.

"The Hero" deals with race and many other concerns more subtly, becoming more symbolic and more personal. It depicts Schreuders' father as a stocky and self-contained young man, sitting astride a leopard, who has left home to make his fortune in Africa. It's a Horatio Alger success story, but the story satisfies only if the colonial system on which it is founded, where whites benefit at the expense of Africa, is ignored. The leopard, unseen by the boy, bares his teeth in anger. The Hero's seat of power is actually unstable, even dangerous. One way of justifying colonialism is to incorporate the natives into nature, such as Conrad making the attacking Africans and the banks of the Congo into one integrated experience in "Heart of Darkness." The leopard may represent the blacks exploited by colonialism in South Africa or any of the other unmentionable aspects of the hero's success, like African natural resources or his own attitudes or social position. It is unsettling that the identity of the leopard does not seem to matter to the story.

Another means of justifying colonialism is to smooth over complexities and wrongs and pretend that master and servant live harmoniously. Schreuders sets the viewer up for that easy pretense, because these dolls are cute, but the leopard's expression disrupts the effect. Her concerns and deep feelings for her father shine through in the work, and the viewer feels her personal connection to the Hero while sharing her distrust toward his actions and his neat story.

Many of the effects of "The Hero" are achieved by its uniform painted surface, but the sadness of both Schruders' "Ma-Trix" and "Marky-Boy" is emphasized by incorporation of wood grains or various imperfections in the wood into the work. Each of the faces and expressions in her "Three Sisters" is similar, yet all are completely individual. Her medium, stocky, wood dolls may at first seem unsuited to complex expression, but her technical command is a delight.

Mbongeni Richman Bethelezi may not have mastered his distinctive medium, but it is even more fun than Schreuders': he arranges and melts thousands of shreds of plastic-wrapper litter into what almost resemble paintings. The resulting surface is surprisingly flat but varied, and the images are enjoyable riots of color that range freely between figurative and abstract art. Bethelezi buys nothing to create these works, and it is a relief -- given the morose introspection of many of the white artists on racism in their personal histories -- to see an artist examine some other current political and social concern. His medium addresses not only pollution, but poverty and social conditions. It also seems to address how post-apartheid lives are assembled from the huge variety of clashing cultures of South Africa.

So, while much of the work in "Liberated Voices" does seem provincial, Schrueders and Phokompe revert to older forms to express very different but very modern messages. Bethelezi and Mthethwa employ poverty-stricken surroundings that celebrate and give dignity. There is no unifying theme to the exhibit, but the clash of cultures in South Africa does inspire new personal expression, and several different currents and commonalties that exist between the artists represented. The range of technical and thematic expression, only slightly different from that which we find in our own country, will strike chords in American audiences.

"Liberated Voices" runs through August 13 at the Austin Museum of Art located at 823 Congress. General admission is $3, seniors and students $2, and Thursdays admission is $1. Call 495-9224 or visit their website for more information.