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| City press image - 24 May 2012 |
I had wanted to write about Brett Murray’s show, Hail to the Thief II, wondering what happened
to Pop Art in South Africa. But the security cordon around the Goodman Gallery,
protecting “free speech” against the ANC Government and general black South
African outrage, has obscured, or more like dramatically contextualised the art.
Pop Politics and Pop Art seem to be readily
available in the Star (R6.20), The Independent (R15.50), City Press (R13.00) and
The Mail and Guardian (R24.50 in SA, US$2 in Zimbabwe and US$7.50 in Angola) to
name just four. Andy Warhol might be
impressed.
Nevertheless
freedom is still a complex word in SA, isn’t it? Our Constitution might have come down from a liberal
Northern mountain thanks largely to the international experience of our political
exiles, thoughtful prisoners, and organised popular forces on the ground who worked
at creating reliable civil alternatives during apartheid. Our Constitution
seems to be written in stone but, like other durable art materials, stone is
not necessarily symbolically convincing in a place where it was also thrown at
tanks. The USA lost nearly a million people during their Civil War, arguing
about their symbolic stone. Perhaps finding out what freedom actually means in
our drastically uneven social context is more important right now than the International
post-Modern Contemporary Art Market, reliably predicted to crash within two
years like the speculative global banking system on which it is based?
We
don’t have a democracy yet; we’re trying to make one. We’re pre-modern, not
post-Modern; so freedom is a relative word that has yet to take a definite shape
in the collective South African mind.
As
an “aspiring artist” I was urged to read Delacroix’s Journals. He was a rare beast – a good artist and a
good (honest) writer working during the tumultuous period following the French
Revolution. As the illegitimate son of
Talleyrand, an aristocrat who managed to keep both his head and an important job
in successive post-Revolutionary tyrannies and governments in France, Delacroix
was protected and could get on with his work.
Delacroix
often used the word “taste” in describing his attitude to making art. Taste was a difficult word to come to grips
with in the 1970’s. The Bauhaus Modernist
project in the 1920’s - a utopian cohesion of art, furniture and architecture -
had finally been packaged as “Middle Class Lifestyle” in interior decor shops
like Habitat, and Warhol had produced Trash,
a heroin-kitchen-sink-and-lavatory film that got up the noses of New Yorkers
eager to act “European” and avoid the tasteless Americans on the other side of
the Hudson. The word taste, good or bad, was then as now concentrated more on
the public receipt of art than on the making of it.
To
Delacroix taste was more intimately and thoughtfully tied to the relationship
between the artist and his subject matter. His was a novelist’s approach that called
for empathy with, or displacement into a character or situation rather than a Judgment,
whether formal or moral. Likewise, Flaubert
later abandoned the satirical novel in which he ridiculed faux bourgeois Madame
Bovary, and decided instead, as author, to marry her for better or, in this
case, for much worse, right up to her agonising, self-inflicted death. This
must have been hard for him to write as a natural satirist.
In Liberty leading the
People,
often called the first political painting in history, Delacroix demonstrated his attitude. Although Liberty is heroic, she doesn’t look
it; she’s a somewhat burly working class woman, a bit shabbily dressed with her
tits exposed, holding the Tricolor. The painting is an untidy composition about
an untidy time with an untidy group of Parisian participants on a regular
street. It must have filled rival artist David and his neo-classical model
agency and decorating company with revulsion. Interestingly Delacroix appears
in the painting although this has been disputed by art historians more recently.
It doesn’t really matter who the look-alike model was; the “artist” is an
over-serious and over-dressed guy holding a gun he looks as if he doesn’t know
how to use. It’s a problem with artists; we want revolutions but we usually
prefer being left alone to make art.
The
French Government of the time under “citizen king” Louis-Philippe rejected the
picture because it concentrated more on the freedom of the individuals than reconstructing
an exemplary occasion that the “citizen king” could take credit for. Politicians
in power can’t stand ambiguity; they need straight-forward symbols. But Delacroix’s
decentralisations of freedom were vindicated and inspired further works by
others. Victor Hugo borrowed the boy as a character in Les Miserables; they covered Liberty’s tits with a nicer dress and
stuck her in New York harbour, holding up a torch; and cartoonist, Zapiro, recently
bought her used clothes, probably in a shop on Louis Botha Avenue, and forced a
black woman to wear them in one of his cartoons about the black man, an African
President, as the assumed rapist.
Delacroix’s
characters were not ready-mades or stereotypes. He gave credible life to them
and they went on to have other credible lives. Such is the power of the “ordinary”
in art to define politics without depicting politicians.
During
difficult and often bloody times in the making of the modern republic called
France, both Delacroix and Flaubert seemed to be looking, as artists, for an
alternative to Judgement and its expression often as satire. They seemed to favour
a more modest repositioning that made them vulnerable to the fray, no matter how
difficult it was to read France’s passage into the future at that time.
Judgement
is a particularly difficult thing in South Africa, as we know. Ordinary life
was criminalised during apartheid, and judgements even haunted sexuality and intimacy.
The bedroom was state controlled. Not even Stalin attempted that. Apartheid
made explicit implicit Western attitudes about racial superiority and went on
to cast them in catatonic legislation until the mental disease of racism had
spread to every body, every object and every place. South Africa was a racist
asylum. To think this mental disease has been cured because of the willing and
generous suspension of disbelief by people like Nelson Mandela in 1994 is a
delusion that white South Africans cannot afford.
Murray’s
show comes on the heels of what seems like a resurgence of old-time judgements
coming out of Cape Town. Sure these can be attributed to the rivalry of
political parties with the opposition Democratic Alliance holding onto the
Western Cape, trying desperately to make it exemplary; this is just the usual pretension
of politicians who, unlike artists, cannot afford to express doubt. But since
these judgements are also coming from a hegemony of art managers, critics and
ex-museum directors there as well, they speak of a more serious failure of
nerve and imagination. These judgements seem to be based on the idea that the
past was somehow better and more stable and that art practices should continue
as if ’94 never happened. In Midnight’s
Children, Salmon Rushdie writes of a similar situation in India seven years
after independence, when the certainties of colonialism suddenly seemed more reliable
than the difficulties of the future.
My
sense, though, is that these judgements could be deeply engrained in Cape Town’s
mental geography.
Approaching
Cape Town from the North it looks very like a beautiful island where African
boat people – what DA opposition leader, Helen Zille, calls “refugees” - got
stranded on the sandy flats when the tide went out. Like Gibraltar and Hong
Kong it was protected by the British fleet and gained reassurance that the
tyrannies of Franco, Mao and Vorster would never muddle in the affairs of a
world painted pink that was somehow “free”; you could even smoke weed and buy
Led Zeppelin records there in the late 60’s.
The
British have no taste for politics or manual work; their world is made of
enduring power and privilege and like the DA they relate better to (fellow)
judges than the messy negotiations of parliament and electing temporary
presidents. They keep state secrets for centuries. As the current Duke of Westminster
once said in a BBC interview in the 1980’s, His Family regarded democracy as
just a passing phase. British Prime Minister Cameron was visibly bemused last
year when he failed to convince a single European country that the privileged
bankers in the City of London should be immune from tedious EU regulation that
got in the way of excessive wealth.
In
the enduring British sense of the world, power and aesthetics are closely
allied. The Royal Navy nestled under some of the most gorgeous, photographable
rocks in the world, in Africa, China and Europe. Every day the photographable
British army marches down the streets of central London. In any other country
this would be treated as an alarming sign of militarism designed to intimidate
citizens, which of course it is. But if you give the soldiers cute hats and
snappy red uniforms their real business in Iraq, or Argentina, or Zululand will
be over-looked. This sense of self-assuredness still manifests in British
magazines like The Economist which
feel completely free to judge the world and tell mere Presidents like Barrack
Obama what to do.
The
role of the artist in Britain, as Evelyn Waugh pointed out in Brideshead Revisited, is to charm not to
change. Damien Hirst is the most recent example of the British artist as a desirable
dinner guest of wealthy London bankers, skilfully adopting their techniques. Oscar
Wilde, an Irishman, paid dearly for his naiveté in thinking that his ready wit
at Aristocratic dining tables in London would allow him to reveal the homosexual
truths about his fellow diners. He was given a lengthy spell in Reading Jail in
order to grow up; he died while doing so. If a British artist delved into what
lay beneath Queen Elizabeth’s knickers and dared to reveal her pussy, to show
she had one like any other woman, he or she would also spend a lengthy time in
Wormwood Scrubs Prison in order to grow up. Children, like Africans according
to ex-President Sarkozy who always seemed more British than French, have to learn
manners as the order of things before
they are allowed to sit at the dining table called History.
Beauty is truth, truth
beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know, the English poet Keats wrote
in the United Kingdom around the time of Delacroix. Delacroix, dealing with the
grotty business of making art in mere Republics where everything is always up
for grabs, might have written less surely, truth
might be beautiful, but hang on a minute and let’s see......
What
makes Cape Town different from Gibraltar or Hong Kong - especially after claims
of island freedom against mainland tyranny have become less convincing as they are
increasingly left in a past gone by - is that Cape Town is still the site of
the parliament of the South African mainland. Even during apartheid times, the Boers
had to trek back to the Cape Town they had left in a huff, to enact their
ghastly “democratic” laws under the unnerving eye of the Royal Navy. The charm (and
value) of Cape Town’s aesthetic beauty has been further assured by Kaiser
Wilhelm’s people who found they could get a place in the sun using cheque books
instead of guns. In any kind of equitable land redistribution, gorgeous Clifton
Beach alone would bankrupt the mainland Treasury. As a result, it’s difficult for
Cape Town to treat mainlanders as serious players in “History”; it’s as if Africans
are only allowed temporary visas as super-models or Ministers, to be in glossy magazines
or in the reliable Old Parliament.
Perhaps
it’s because of the collusion between Art Queens and Pompous Diplomats in Cape
Town that Hail to the Thief II meant
little on the island but hit a nerve as it ventured North into the rough and
tumble mainland where everything is up for grabs? In satirising ANC Politicians
acquiring the Trappings of Power - in order to be taken seriously when they
entered the Old Parliament? – so the Artist satirises Pop Art with sumptuous materials,
converting the Model T Ford made for everyone into a Rolls Royce made for a few
– in order to be taken seriously by the Art Queens? It’s become a confrontation
between the corruptions of “popular” in art as well as politics.
In
the furious defensiveness that Murray’s show has caused on the South African
mainland, Hail to the Thief II has
revealed the paucity of the idea of post- in both art and politics, whether
post-modern, post-colonial, post-apartheid or post-communist. All post-s rely
on the merely symbolic to make their case. It’s a game of cards that simply
goes round and round in which nothing new is added in the Casino of Inheritance.
In the post-World the rich simply stay rich and the poor simply stay poor.
Isn’t
it time for South Africa to acknowledge its realities and join the pre-s in the
rest of the world that have nothing to inherit, but a lot to make?
Rodney Place
Johannesburg, May 2012
