After the Bell: Should we just sell the art in the Johannesburg Art Gallery?

Daily Maverick and Currency this week published articles on the state of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). It almost goes without saying that the JAG is that very South African thing: an obvious disaster on its way to becoming a bigger disaster. 

Read more: Johannesburg Art Gallery ‘can’t survive’ another season of ruin and rain, heritage experts warn mayor

And so we wait for the larger disaster as the public attention moves on to some other disaster that is seemingly more important at the time. At some point, someone will ask: What happened to that previous disaster? And a journalist will write, “Oh, that disaster has become a bigger disaster.” Which will create no incentive to do anything about it. But we knew that already. 

How does one describe this situation? Actually, I know how; we describe it as surrealistic. And then (bang!) someone sends in a photograph of just one aspect of the disaster that is the JAG. Amazing, and I mean this literally. It is a photograph of Salvador Dalí’s much-lauded 1930s work called Lobster Telephone (White Aphrodisiac), which consists of a rotary dial phone with a plastic lobster on top of it. I absolutely love that telephone. It’s about 100 years old, and it’s worth, rough guess, about R20-million. There are only six of them in the world, and the most recent sale was to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,  which paid £853,000 for it in 2018.

So obviously, the JAG has this classic piece on prominent display, right? Not so much. A reader sent a picture of the telephone in its current position: situated on an old, crumbling piece of foam rubber, in a cheap, metal cabinet, above a random pile of paper, in the basement. I am not making this up.

What would Dalí have thought of this farcical situation? Article author Sarah Buitendach speculates that he would have laughed. “A maniacal laugh, his crazily tapered moustache twitching, eyes bulging. The surreal juxtaposition of his unimaginably valuable and rare work stuffed into a random cabinet pretty much encapsulates the entire spirit of the art movement he is synonymous with. It’s just damn surreal – at once, playful and menacing.”

But the rest of the story is not so funny. A fairly recent tour of the JAG suggested the exhibition venue is in dire straits, which as I say is no surprise. At the time of the tour, of 15 exhibition halls in the JAG, only two were operational, while almost all the gallery’s 9,000 works of art were in storage. Only 1% of the collection is actually visible to the public.

These storage rooms are susceptible to leaks, flooding and black mould. During heavy rains, the art collection has to be routinely moved around to makeshift storage sites, including the JAG’s old coffee shop. Turns out a whole bunch are very seriously damaged.

Johannesburg art lovers have now had enough. A body called the Friends of the JAG and the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation have enlisted Webber Wentzel to try to force the city to move the gallery’s works of art somewhere safer. Former curator Christopher Till says the gallery, which happens to be situated in Joubert Park, one of the city’s most crime-infested areas, is “dead”.

About 5,000 people visit each year, which is less than 3% of the 189,003 visitors who descend on Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. This is Africa’s premier art collection we are talking about. 

It began with a 1908 donation from Florence Phillips, wife of mining magnate Lionel Phillips. The gallery was entrusted to the city as the custodian of the art collection, but there is a twist; the art itself belongs to the people of Johannesburg.

Both Daily Maverick and Currency bent over backwards to get the city to respond. Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero eventually did respond to the Friends of the JAG, saying the city was “on the verge of signing an agreement with Ditsong [a public museum in Tshwane] that will guide the relocation and storage of the works”.

Read more: How inaction, corruption and theft in the City of Joburg are destroying Africa’s most valuable art collection

The city has, obviously, got bigger problems to deal with. Morero pointed out that last year the city was running an operating deficit of R4-billion a month. Doesn’t that therefore suggest that things like highbrow art that only a small sliver of Johannesburg residents really care about would be an ideal thing for the city to get off its agenda. 

My instinct would be to just sell the stuff - or at least sell the 8,900 works of art that the public never sees. But the plan is to move the unused works of art to the mint, which will ensure its safety and security. But how would that square with the ideal of educating and elucidating Johannesburg’s residents about local art?

If that’s not possible, then hand it over to another gallery or galleries and split the income. But there is a suspicious oddity here. Not only has the Johannesburg Council neglected to respond to detailed questions, it won’t even provide a list of the contents of the gallery, which all galleries around the world maintain in great detail. You know what that means, right? Some of the art is not there any more.

From an economic point of view, art galleries are a conundrum. For the JAG to display only a small percentage of its collection is not uncommon in the world of museums. For instance, the world’s premier art collection in the Louvre contains about half a million works of art (some 482,000 of which have been digitalised - hello, JAG) and it displays only 35,000. 

A problem is that art galleries’ mandates intermingle with an odd supply-demand profile. Given that the job of art galleries is partly to preserve artistic heritage, this provides them with an opening to do the fun stuff: buy art. But the result is the curious situation where there is much, much more product than available space to display it. Storing and caring for art also makes the sale of art from public galleries tricky, so lots of art galleries around the world have enormous holdings but no conceivable way to monetise their investments. 

Perhaps ‘investments’ is the wrong word here; the works are certainly not viewed that way by the city, given it is uninterested in protecting them. But, you know, they should be IMHO. One way to preserve art is to - and I’m being very blunt here - leverage its snob appeal. That means jettisoning the idea that residents of Hillbrow are ever going to get excited about (or choose to afford) seeing portraits of, say, a Lady Brethnell of Witherspoon in her riding gear, even if it may be a fabulous example of Edwardian naturalism. 

It’s contrary to the notional democratic ideal, I know, but could we please be moderately realistic here and move the stuff to a nice modern building in Sandton and charge a respectable but not ridiculous amount for entry to pay for maintaining an actual roof that doesn’t let the rain in. 

Then we can all move on to the next disaster. DM