Arts Now Respectable Profession

Zimbabwe Thu 12-07-2007

Arts Now Respectable Profession
By Stephen Garan' anga

Art Rspectable In Zimbabwe today there is much emphasis on the benefits of the arts to youths 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 back yard 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 are going places, they get people somewhere, to fame, to fortune, to Awards. Stones today keep young men and women in their back yards, or if they come from a family of sculptors under the nose of their father and mother, as all chip away 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 sculptors who travel give workshops, attend exhibitions, meet other artists, and come home with more abilities, more social skills than they had before they left home.

In Zimbabwe today the arts are the young persons oyster and 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 and collectively speaking they are an industry and a rapidly growing industry at that gathering all sorts of professional sectors into their thrall.

After the Kadoma Culture Week celebrations the arts and culture hit the headlines, speeches full print of in the daily press, statements from artists, and the formal launch of the Culture Fund Trust has promised greater opportunities for artists.

For parents concerned with the future of their children, the arts offer "good prospects", stone sculpture a steady income, travel abroad and broadening of cultural horizons.

It has almost reached the stage where every young" Zimbabwean, those with former expectations of being an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse wants to ""make it"" as an artist.

Where do they fare in the arts, a profession surely for the formally trained, the strong, the clear of mind, and the people who look to the future? 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 in village and on compounds were the vessels of wisdom, the repositories of knowledge. 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.

There is no mandatory retiring age for an artist, no year when the artist knows he must clear the office pack the things, attend a farewell party, be given a check and a silver cup and say "Bye Bye".

The artist keeps making art until he or she can no more do. And despite the older generation of artists who has moved on to a better place than the world today, there are those artists of venerable years who keep working.

At Tengenenge there is Aniali Mailola, Yao from Malawi eight six years old, whose hands are gnarled, whose eyes are rheumy bright, but who each morning takes his tools and applied them to his stones so that he make sculptures based on his memory of life on and under Lake Malawi, fish and crocodiles.

His life has not been cut short by impulse or folly, accident or grand designs so he remains a sculptor and his memories remain fresh and it is those memories he imparts in his sculptures.

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