During the Cape Town Art Fair Mary Corrigall published a piece assessing the fair. Within the text, she made a point that Steven Cohen’s Chandelier piece read as a work of white privilege. Corrigall can be a brusque critic, no doubt. Perhaps one of the most uncomfortable things was seeing Cohen react on her Facebook page, including some vicious ad hominem attacks. Criticism can be awful, but contemporary art is only successful if it keeps itself open to interpretation. Art is polysemic, and artists can’t control the meanings of the work. That is the best part, and the hardest part.
And yet I felt a sympathy for Cohen. In 2001, ideas around white privilege were still nascent in the popular consciousness. Is it possible to think about a work in terms of both the context it was made in, and the current intellectual climate? It’s a tough question.
This spat, small as it was, serves to illustrate some of the issues at play around art at UCT. This piece could be considered a response of sort to the three letters (two from Breyten Breytenbach and one from Kenneth Hughes) and one opinion piece the Daily Maverick published, and the little stub of vitriol in the South African Art Times which I won’t link to for aesthetic reasons. A common denominator in all these pieces was an accusation of censorship and a disingenuous comparison to either the Nazis, the Taliban or the Nazis, the Taliban, ISIS and Boko Haram.
I want to deal with this rhetoric first, because much like ad hominem attacks it serves to flatten out and deflect argument. This particular rhetoric works by taking something that is universally reviled (at least by your intended audience) and then using that as an analogy. The result is a quick moral judgement where the complexities get elided in the comparison. Analogies are an important part of language, and even Nazi comparisons must have a use, otherwise we would have nothing to learn from the past. The problem here is that there is an imperfect correspondence between the actions of the university under pressure from a politically-unaffiliated movement of economically disempowered students, and the actions of a student movement affiliated to a right-wing party in power. There is a power difference. I don’t think that censorship can work from the bottom up. I think it might not be censorship at all, but actually the conversation that everyone is asking for. Just not in a form that is comfortable.
Having your work reassessed in light of contemporary politics must be painful. Having to rethink an entire collection is awful. And trying to untangle UCT’s legacy from colonialism daunting. The process of transformation might be the hardest thing the University will do. The only other option though is dismiss the students as irrational, to belittle their anger and alienation. It would be looking at terms like “offensive” and “black pain” as weak emotions from immature students, rather than students’ ways of making systemic racism visible. This seems to me at worst a racist position, and at best a favoring of the broken status quo and a deep lack of empathy.
That said, I am an artist and an art critic, and I can’t condone either burning works of art nor hiding them behind wooden panels. I am hoping the former will be a catalyst, to deeper thought about art on campus and the cumulative effect of UCT’s visual culture. The latter seems more and more to be a bureaucratic tangle between UCT’s council and the pressure they are experiencing to transform, the Works of Art committee and their interests around safety, and the Artworks Task Team with their recommendations, than a policy of censorship. I have hopes that these things might be the beginning of conversations and not the end, and certainly not the apocalyptic end alluded to in the Daily Maverick letters.
On the other hand, as an art professional, the things that I value are being given a primacy in political conversation that I haven’t experienced before. It feels exciting and challenging. One of the most powerful moments of Rhodes Must Fall, was Sethembile Msezane’s performance as the Rhodes Statue was removed. As she rose her wings, it spoke of new possibilities of art making in the ruins of the old. It also made me think that the only way that older art can be contextualized is not through captions or verbal explanations, but in the context of new things.
Let’s make new things.