In the 1997 movie Air Force One, where Harrison ford plays the President of the
United States of America, he is advised by one of his secret servicemen, “[…] sometimes
Mr. President, the best course of action is no
course of action at all.” I first thought that this advice would have been
fitting for our president in the debacle surrounding the painting in question. However
the heightened debate perhaps has two important and useful repercussions. On
the one hand it has possibly worked in Zuma’s favour to galvanise support ahead
of the October congress. On the other, it has raised important issues that have
always been simmering below the surface in this country.
A relatively minor show by a relatively
obscure artist has now been raised in importance beyond its calling. For the
last two weeks, it has occupied an inordinate amount of space in the political
and cultural imagination of South Africa. Due to the call for its removal by
the ANC and the media coverage that followed, the work is now located in a
debate that draws on numerous controversial and pressing issues that are not
new, and will not be resolved in the near future. Freedom of speech and the
right to criticise the ruling party is one such issue. The other is the right
to privacy and dignity. The complexity of debate around this painting is that our
constitution protects both of these rights.
A seemingly glib appropriation has now
become a placeholder, a point of departure for questions of race, masculinity
and political leadership. These signs, while simplified at the level of the
painting, are complex in how they operate across the multiple levels in which
they have been discussed in the last weeks. From shebeens to braais, cocktail
parties to nightclubs, and classrooms, it seemed impossible to get away from
discussing The Spear and I have to
admit a certain amount of phallus fatigue.
To discuss it even further, in this
context or any other, has the danger of reifying the work and lending it more intellectual
and aesthetic value than it perhaps deserves. In any case, since we are here,
and the debate around the work has reached such intense levels, we need to
realise that something important is being raised about the broader context that
frames this painting, the body of work it is a part of, and the larger discourse
on artworks similar in terms of content, politics and perspective.
This present context is one that is
necessarily implicated in a politics of race. The racial politics I would like
to foreground here do not rely on the black body, but rather that of the white
South African artist who created this work and others like it. From this
perspective what is at stake, and what needs to be engaged with is how white liberal South Africa (and
Africans) formulate critiques on political power and what these critiques do in terms of a broader political agenda.
This reading that I am proposing is one that looks at politics and identity
through the lens of power. This is to look not at the penis but at the phallus.
This is to look beyond, or behind the
obvious signs at play. This is to read the work from the perspective of who is
doing or performing the representation, rather than in terms of what is visibly
represented. Readings of the biography or location of the author in terms of
their identity is not new, however it is normally reserved for women, gay,
lesbian or black artists. What I am proposing through my reading here is to
upset this normative gaze reserved for the ‘other’, question it, isolate the
privileged position of white heterosexual masculinity, and problematise it. The
questioning of power through the concept of whiteness and masculinity is a
project much too large to properly execute here. But The Spear, I believe, allows me a moment to explore what such a
reading could look like.
The position of the Jester, or
provocative bad boy artist, is one that has been enacted by numerous white male
South African artists: Neil Goedhals; Barend de Wet; Wayne Baker; Kendell
Geers; Peet Pienaar and Ed Young to name but a few, have relied on provocation,
often accompanied with media outrage to activate their work. While such
subversive tactics were more easily readable in Apartheid South Africa, this
confrontational and iconoclastic polemic, has assumed an ambiguous position in
a democratic South Africa. Peet Pienaar’s 2000 performance where he filmed
himself being circumcised by a black female doctor and then proceeded to
auction his foreskin online, also caused a media ruckus, albeit one that was
minor in comparison to the case at hand. The work itself, its gesture, would
not have amounted to much without the media attention.
In The
Spear, and in the show Hail to The Thief
II more broadly, white masculinity is in performance mode. It is staged
through the proxy of political critique, using the appropriation of anti-apartheid
struggle rhetoric combined with provocative juxtapositions. The overwhelming
idea that comes through in this critique is that the ANC, once a revolutionary
communist aligned entity has sold out to a democracy based on the conception of
a corrupted neoliberal market.
If we take this critique seriously, we
would imagine that the artist would be in favour of the ANC returning to its
more radical past, performing more redistribution, more nationalising
interventions and in effect reducing the power of a white minority that exists
as a structural majority in terms of wealth. The White Liberal is here caught
in a double bind. The critique, if accepted and acted on would lead to an
erosion of the privilege that allows the critique to be staged in the first
place.
It needs to be asked if the critiques
posed in Hail to the Thief II and
other similar works are actually meant, whether the implied consequences are to
be stood by, or if the self-serving rhetorical flourishes performed have
another function. The other function I allude to is salving a paranoia and
neurosis that is deep within white South Africa. The guilt from the spectre of complicity
with Apartheid can be seen as manifesting in a critique of the corruption and
poor governance of the black African National Congress. It forms the basis for
a white liberal position that revels in the assumed ineptitude of the new democratic
government as it says “Look, it is worse now than in the days of Apartheid”.
Of course Brett Murray and many others
would deny this reading. Murray himself has asserted his own Struggle
credentials to justify and contextualise his provocations. However this is not
the point. What is clear is that this paranoia of whiteness, born from the
guilt of Apartheid does not only affect White Liberals, it is an increasingly
present malaise that permeates beyond identity positions because whiteness
still carries an immense amount of power. In this sense, The Spear is not relevant because of what it says of black
masculinity, but how it indicates that white privilege still has the power to
construct meaning, the power to control representations, and to set the agendas
of political debate. In this sense the reaction of the ANC should not be seen
in terms of the black penis, but rather in terms of the white phallus. It is
not problematic because it is an attack on black masculinity, but because it asserts
the symbolic power that is White Liberal and humanist. This unequal power to
represent is one that hits home deep into a post-Apartheid neurosis that
stretches beyond the obvious sign play at work and beyond the artwork in
question.
Zen Marie
The Wits School of Arts
