Avery Carpenter
THE removal of the work of a Unisa student artist who posed nude from a Franschhoek gallery reinforced its gender injustice theme, said the artist, Celeste Coetzee, yesterday, vowing to repeat the exhibit again within a few months.
“It’s very ironic that my work showcased female submission in a patriarchal society,” she said. “Women were, and still are, silenced in many ways. And then they went ahead and silenced me.”
Coetzee, 53, had her exhibition, in which she posed nude and tore pages from the Bible, pulled from The Gallery at Grande Provence.
Gallery curator Carina Bekker said Coetzee “was trying to be the vulnerable woman suffering under the system. But women are not under that system anymore.”
But yesterday, Coetzee defended her art installation, saying the gallery completely missed the point.
Her piece was a criticism of evangelist and Faith Like Potatoes author Angus Buchan.
“The conferences he holds are called MMCs, or Mighty Men’s Conferences. My research found that 80 percent of the men who attended were Afrikaans. Many had been replaced by their wives as the breadwinners of the family.”
Buchan has held MMCs in the Western Cape at Paarl, in the Overberg and the Karoo. He also held one at the Vaal Dam in Gauteng.
She claimed the conferences were about “reclaiming dominance in a society of increasing female power”.
In Coetzee’s exhibit, she sat in an old-fashioned kitchen, wrapping potatoes in torn Biblical messages and then bottling them, to show that patriarchal sentiments lived on.
“My intent was to preserve. To show that messages of feminine submission are still preserved.”
Coetzee said that the basis of her work had always been freedom of expression. Growing up in Bloemfontein in the Free State, she looked to her artist grandmother for inspiration. “I know my grandmother would be proud of me now,” Coetzee said.
Coetzee’s previous work included an exposé of the Afrikaans education system and a live installation of a transvestite turned bushman, with the attempt to reveal human rights injustices against transvestites, transgenders, and more generally, those who are marginalised by hegemonic society.
“My intent is never to shock, but to expose injustice and exercise freedom of expression,” she said.
Director of the Freedom of Expression Institute Elston Seppie said: “It is sad that her work was removed, since there is no crime in posing nude, neither can tearing pages from the Bible be considered a crime. It might be offensive to Christians, but so is swearing and pre-marital sex. Many artists would do significantly different things to illustrate their points of view. And so should she.”
Coetzee planned on showing her banned work at the Spier Gallery in Stellenbosch in February.