Impact Of Art Education In Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe Mon 15-06-2009

Impact Of Art Education In Zimbabwe
By: Stephen Gara'nanga

In the African past when the elders were revered and generously kept by their families, age meant knowledge and knowledge meant power.

The old people from the era of the caves and cliffs to villages and compounds were the repositories of wisdom. And these old people were often artists, carving away at their stones, whittling away at their wood, doing what they were used to and therefore doing it best.

The roots of Zimbabwean art, rock paintings emanating from tens of thousands of years, and stone and wooden sculptures of several centuries, have helped innumerable artistic skills to flourish through the passage of time as knowledge has been passed on for generations.

Contemporary Zimbabwean artists have continued to draw inspiration from the impeccable history of their art.

Art work by Lungu

Currently in the country there is much emphasis on the benefits of the arts for the youth and how the arts take up time which otherwise might be frittered away. Art at school is no longer a pleasure, but rather it has to do with examinations.

The arts are classroom not playground subjects, schools in Zimbabwe today contain carefully fitted out music rooms with all manner of instruments and equipment, studios with potters’ wheels, and paint from overseas, and a welding shed any backyard welder would die for.

Institutions of higher learning are tapping into the respectability and prospects of the arts as professions and offering degree courses, master's courses, theoretical courses, and practical courses in the visual and performing arts.

Artists themselves are opening studios and "arts centres" so that young artists can benefit from less formal, more hands-on training. In the minds of the young today, a good pass in art makes an artist; taking time off from school to paint or sculpt makes a failed artist.

The arts as a profession for young people today mean going places. They get people somewhere, to fame, to fortune, to Awards.

Art today keeps young men and women in their backyards, or if they come from a family of sculptors, under the nose of their father and mother, as all chip at their stones.

Young artists who travel do not do so "on spec" so that they end up washing dishes, the elderly or the dog, and return home with nothing.

Young artists who travel give workshops, attend exhibitions, meet other artists, and come home with more abilities and more social skills than they had before they left home.

In Zimbabwe today the arts are the young person’s oyster. Many young people choose carefully - and choose the arts even if they are not 'called' to the arts as a profession.

The arts are now a respectable profession, a rapidly growing industry.

Zimbabwean stone sculpture is one of the world's most respected traditions of sculpture and also one of the most innovative and exciting developments in contemporary sculpture.

It is a tradition of sculpture engaging feelings and emotions at a profound level and has an immediate relationship with the viewer of any background.

It is perhaps for this reason that this sculpture has become the "representative" of Zimbabwe's culture and the firming of its identity in the world today.

The best stone sculptures are refreshed by the passing of time; they take on new meaning as they are subject to different cultural approaches and interpretations.

Some sculpture remains located in the cultural origins of the artist, regardless of his age, but many sculptors today provide modern interpretations of African traditions in their work.

In the background, there has been a respectable number of sculptors working in metal, breaking away from the traditional medium as there is the abundance of scrap metal in urban areas.

Of late, there has been a more noticeable move toward experimentation with various artificial media and found objects.

Exciting mixed media work has been born as artists are constantly pushing their art into new directions in their quest to represent to the world the art of Zimbabwe as a contemporary medium.

Recently the wall has become something to hang things other than paintings, constructions made up of the back fence and what the car wreckers left behind and the old pipes dragged off the walls of houses.

Movement has taken sculptors away from their stones and artists away from reinventing the use of the wall - a movement perhaps based upon the lack of affordability of unlimited stone and the cheapness of the “found materials” which are part of the artists' immediate environment.

Mixed media can mean that an artist can take on stone alone, and a small one at that, not even a very distinguished stone, and, add to it objects made of anything from metal to felt, old pieces of wood, bits of a car, and create a sculpture.

To produce ‘mixed media’ the artist needs to carve, at least elementally, to drive a nail with considerable strength, to tack one thing to another thing and to basically, at least, weld.

So “mixed media” has become an acceptable limit, something which is indeed welcomed as an innovation which is not too daring, outlandish and not too out of synchronization with what has gone before.

In Zimbabwe mixed media can be seen as a trend, a loose embrace of a new way of looking at and making art with artists studiously avoiding the stereotypical work which has dominated previous directions in art.

From backyards rather than mountain-sides, from back lanes, rather than up dirt roads come these artists, hell bent and mind bent on this new approach to their work.

‘Mixed media’ will no doubt create and build up its own controversies, its own debates and dialectics; it will one day become a study, subject to multi-disciplinary interpretations, its critical culture, learned articles and books.

But today it remains borne from what the artists can find, what is within their means and how they operate their minds in a new way.

Another artistic field which has shown a lot of potential and is very popular with female artists is textile art. This type of art is not a new phenomenon, as archeological excavations at Great Zimbabwe have revealed that spinning, printing and weaving of cloth was practiced in Zimbabwe as far back as the 13th century.

Colourful and complex textiles are now an important medium of artistic expression of contemporary Zimbabwean art and are practiced through out the country.

Painting as an old time tradition has continued with painters claiming the largest number of the country's artists. The majority are young artists who have gone through modern art education and are based mostly in urban areas where the market and the accessibility of the materials are better.

Semi-abstract figurative images have dominated the scene amongst the young painters as opposed to their older generation counterparts who practice the more expressive abstract.

Printmaking using various techniques is also widely practiced by the crop of young artists who have access to modern tools in the cities.

The current generation of artists has received some form of art training either formally or informally, although a relatively large number of artists is still self-taught.

The younger generation can be said to be going through a transitional period caused by their training and by exposure to modern ideas and increasing international interaction.

Due to these new influences their work relates easily to international audiences, and continues to improve through such relationships with new techniques and ideas.

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