Beyond Mundane

Abstract

When the studio of South African jazz saxophonist Zim Nqawana was destroyed by copper thieves, he responded by improvising with the wreckage. In ‘Beyond Mundane: Zim Nqawana’s environmental improvisation’, Joanna Ruth Evans studies this performance through the film ‘The Exhibition of Vandalizm’ (2010), which documents the full day and night that Nqawana spent drawing sound from the detritus, and meditating on the psychic effects of South Africa’s colonial past. Nqawana’s creative response to an experience that is at once extreme and commonplace puts pressure on the concept of ‘the mundane’ and its racialized connection to the fantasy of aesthetic transcendence. Evans argues that the shifting connotation of ‘mundane’ (from a sense of worldly belonging to one of dull, repetitive ordinariness) is coterminous with the emergence of the liberal subject as a figure who is in but not of the world. This shift in the word’s association corresponded with a racialized denigration of material embeddedness, and followed upon Kantian aesthetics, which secures the liberal subject’s universality through the transcendence of aesthetic experience. Through a black studies critique of Kantian aesthetics, this discussion tracks connections between material vulnerability, mundanity and art (including the embrace of ‘the mundane’ by twentieth century performance artists and scholars). Ultimately, Nqawana’s experience pushes both ‘the mundane’ and aesthetics to a conceptual breaking point. It begs the question: without access to the regulative framework that secures environmental autonomy and stability, what becomes of art? Faced with this crisis, Nqawana turns to improvisation. Refusing cynicism and reactionary closure, he enters the reality of the destruction with a creativity that does not transcend the material conditions of its emergence, but rather engages the already given creativity of his material environment in all its instability.