Art and the cultural politics of outrage

Post previously published in the Cape Times, 5 June 2012

Brett Murray’s The Spear has generated an extraordinary amount of media and political commentary, social media twittering, marches and protests, including the defacing of the painting itself. The rage expressed by many in response to the depiction of the private parts of the President seemed to far exceed other media controversies of recent years. One thinks here of a number of Zapiro’s rather unflattering cartoons of the President as well as his depiction of the Prophet Mohammed.  All of these controversies have drawn attention to the tensions between freedom of expression and religiously and culturally inflected conceptions of propriety, respect and dignity. But there is another angle on the latest controversy that still needs to be addressed, namely the question of how leaders and political parties ought to act when, for various reasons, the “raw emotions” of citizens become available for populist mobilisation? Was President Zuma neglecting his responsibilities by remaining silent about the verbal attacks on Brett Murray, the Goodman Gallery and Ferial Haffajee, the editor of City Press? Was the ANC leadership complicit in encouraging dangerous simplications and demagoguery that contributed towards portraying Murray as a diehard white racist, ignoring the inconvenient truth that he had also been an anti-apartheid cultural activist? Finally, what are the longer-term costs and dangers for our democratic political culture of the kind of emotionally charged politics witnessed over the past few weeks?

The politics of emotions and affect is starting to get some serious attention in scholarly literature. For example, a recent book by Deborah Gould entitled Moving Politics has shown how, during the early stages of the AIDS pandemic in the US, gay men initially experienced feelings of shame, guilt and grief in relation to the social stigma, politics of blame, and physical devastation unleashed by the disease. By the late 1980s, activist organisations such as ACT-UP were channelling these feelings into publicly expressed anger and styles of militant protest directed an initially indifferent and unresponsive Reagan Administration. In the case of South Africa, the Treatment Action Campaign also proved itself to be extremely adept at transforming feelings of stigma and shame into collective anger against the Mbeki Administration’s initial refusal to provide adequate HIV treatment. Both these cases illustrate how activists were able to forge an “emotional habitus” or affective disposition through organisational practices such as street protests and demonstrations. In other words, these cases show how emotions are often given shape and direction by activists through processes involving “emotional labour.” Similarly, the anti-apartheid struggle created its own affectively charged expressions of resistance, a political culture that still finds expression in the barricades, service delivery protests, COSATU demonstrations and ANC rallies. The events leading up to the march on the Goodman Gallery revealed how the ANC is still able to channel “raw emotions” for party political purposes.

The examples above suggest that the political mobilisation of emotion can be put to many purposes and, in the case of AIDS activism, these political strategies can lead to constructive democratic outcomes. However, what happens when politicians and leaders deploy and channel affect for narrow party political or undemocratic purposes? What happens when the drumming up of emotions by activists and politicians serves to distract citizens, cloud judgment, facilitate authoritarian populism and undermine democratic rights?  

A problem with emotive politics of the sort generated by The Spear controversy is that it takes on a spectacular form that both simplifies issues and limits the horizons of the political imagination, leaving very little room for nuance, contradiction, ambiguity and creativity. It would seem that the ANC mobilization against The Spear framed the art work in terms of a simplistic binary logic of cultural warfare which pitted a disrespectful and racist artist against the President, the ANC and “the people”. Thereby, parody, irony and satire became stripped of any political legitimacy, and the art work was magically transformed by the ANC’s Big Men – Mantashe, Nzimande and Mtembu – into a cultural weapon in a racist war against “the people.”

The ANC leadership was very successful in transforming genuine grievances about The Spear into a populist politics of outrage. This mobilisation conflated The Spear with histories of racism, and linked both of these to the perceived persecution of the President at the hands of the media. Once again, the predicament of “Zuma the Everyman” elicited widespread popular sympathy and support.

Depicting the penis of a powerful black man in a painting as he did, Murray unwittingly tapped into both a historically produced taboo, and a vast colonial and apartheid archive of racist iconography. The deep histories of racist representations of black bodies and African sexualities provided an entry point for the ANC leadership to mobilise public anger.

But there was also another less obvious source for the channelling of popular anger towards The Spear. The obsession of Christian missionaries involved in the European “civilising mission” in Africa was to cover the naked bodies of “heathens”. Nakedness was seen by Europeans as signs of “primitive “backwardness.” As Jean and John Comaroff note in their seminal account of 19^th century missionaries who worked amongst the Tswana, “colonial Europeans in South Africa had insisted, from first contact, that Africans with whom they associated should adopt minimal standards of ‘decency’; that they should, at the very least, cover their ‘private parts’” (1997: 249). As a result, Tswana women who worked in white households had to hide their breasts and replace their skin aprons with skirts, while men working in similar occupations abandoned their loincloths for trousers. Alongside this Christian “civilising mission,” were the scientists who measured and objectified black bodies. The most notorious of these scientific projects were the anthropometric studies of naked Khoi and San bodies, including of course the figure of Saartje Baartman. These histories of Christianity and scientific racism, and the sense of shame produced by these histories, provided the raw material for collective mobilisation against The Spear. Given these deep histories of race, and the ANC’s effective mobilisation strategies, it is not surprising that thousands marched on the Goodman Gallery.

From the perspective of the largely middle class and cosmopolitan cultural elite that frequent art galleries and exhibitions, The Spear, and the other critical art works in the Murray exhibition, was probably not considered to be all that shocking or offensive. After all, many of the members of this elite have at their disposal forms of cultural capital gleaned from exposure to iconoclastic and irreverent artistic traditions such as Dada, punk, and other counter-cultural movements. However, once The Spear went ‘viral’ through its dissemination in the media, it came into contact with other publics that were not at all comfortable with Murray’s edgy and “no holds barred” style of parody and political critique. It would seem that the artist and the gallery owner did not anticipate how great the distance was between the cosmopolitan art world of the cultural elite and the wider South African society.

The Spear entered a bourgeois public sphere in which it was expected that black South Africans could detach and disassociate themselves from long histories of racism and engage with playful political satire that mercilessly lampooned a heroic black icon of the liberation struggle. This was clearly a big ask for many South Africans. It was of course also a “gift from the gods” for an ANC Leadership seeking to animate a flagging Zuma campaign in the run-up to Mangaung. The Spear controversy quickly became all about the ANC’s attempts to mobilise “raw anger” in order to defend the reputation and dignity of a besieged President, all in the name of “the nation.” The genius of the ANC was its capacity to transform and channel a widespread, but largely inchoate, sense of shame and grievance into carefully orchestrated and contained expressions of collective anger. In this respect, the ANC leadership perhaps deserves some credit for bringing the country back from the brink it helped create, by channelling and containing popular anger and calling for a national debate on these matters. It is, however, still too early to gauge the longer-term consequences and casualties of the strong arm tactics deployed by the ANC against the artist, the gallery, and the editor.

Steven Robbins

University of Stellenbosch

Bad ass white boys and the Liberal Phallus

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

Rodney Place on Brett Murray show

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