David

Goldblatt:

No

Ulterior

Motive

The literal meaning of the Afrikaans word apartheid is “separateness.” This was the guiding principle of the white supremacist regime that dominated South Africa from 1948 to the 1990s, according to which strict structural segregation between “White,” “Bantu” (Black), and “Coloured” South Africans was imposed through forced relocation and control of movement. It was under this system that photographer David Goldblatt, currently the subject of an extensive retrospective at the Yale University Art Gallery, grew up and came to maturity as an artist. His sympathetic portraits and scenes of everyday life expose the very idea of such “separateness” as a self-serving delusion, one reliant on the fiction that clear categories exist and firm boundaries can be maintained—whether between self and other, between one social group and its neighbors, or between one patch of land and the next.

As much as Goldblatt’s work reveals the cracks in apartheid’s supposedly rational and structured racial order, so too did his own social position and background. As a white man, Goldblatt enjoyed legally-enforced privileges that were denied to Black, Asian, and multiracial South Africans. But as the grandson of Jewish immigrants who fled Lithuania to escape persecution, he was acutely aware that his status was at best provisional under an Afrikaner nationalism closely linked with Nazi sympathizers and even the Nazi party itself. He knew that he lived in “a police state, a fascist state, an anti-Semitic state, and of course a racist state.”1 This knowledge is never far from the surface of his photographs, despite the fact that they avoid the dramatic protests and clashes with police most immediately associated with South African photography during apartheid.

No Ulterior Motive is divided into seven sections organized loosely by topic rather than chronology, but as a visitor moves through the Yale University Art Gallery’s circuitous exhibition space, these categories bleed into each other. Not only are black-and-white photographs from the apartheid era and more recent color images intermixed throughout, the boundaries between one group of works and the next are made porous in ways that often feel intentional. There is one conspicuous exception: upon entering the show, a small room is tucked away to the left, entirely separate from the rest of the exhibition. This gallery contains a group of works gathered under the rubric “Near/Far” that focuses specifically on the dispossession and relocation of Black and Indian South Africans to create spaces reserved for whites. As is typical of Goldblatt’s work, the slippages take center stage in photographs that document the inevitability of continued contact between supposedly separate racial groups, such as The son of an ostrich farmer waits with a labourer for the day’s work to begin, near Oudtshoorn, Cape Province (Western Cape) (1966). It is both telling and appropriate that this examination of apartheid’s attempt—and failure—to impose a specifically spatial register of “separateness” is itself kept distant from the flexible and continuous flow that characterizes the rest of the show. The spatial organization of the exhibition itself is as thematically pointed as the works it contains.