Given that the offending Rhodes statue at UCT is an artwork, it would be quite suitably cannibalised by artists, says Mary Corrigall.
Johannesburg - During the National Arts Festival in 2012 a number of statues in Grahamstown were toppled. Figuratively speaking statues are to some degree immovable. They function as symbols of power due to this characteristic.
Nevertheless, as the students involved in the #rhodesmustfall campaign at University of Cape Town (UCT) have found, there are ways of destabilising their symbolic significance without toppling them.
During the annual arts event in Grahamstown performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga and artist/architect Doung Anwar Jahangeer created works, which involved modifying two statues that celebrated aspects that were tied to the colonial and apartheid past.
Ruga’s White Woman of Azania performance, concluded with a solo-procession which began in a nearby township and ended in the centre of Grahamstown in front of a statue of an Angel on the High Street constructed to commemorate “the brave men of Albany who died for the empire during the Anglo Boer War.”
It was at this location that he burst his ballooned costume, spraying the statue with black paint.
Jahangeer directed his artistic intervention to a statue titled The Settler Family (created in 1969) nearby the 1820 settler monument. He ground earth in a bowl in the manner of a Zulu custom and smeared the bright orange dust onto the faces of the three figures – the titular family.
When artists create a work modifying a public effigy it is termed an “intervention” not defacement, perhaps because it is the result of a more considered action or because statues in this context become the canvas.
Artists are accustomed to working with seemingly immovable histories.
They are haunted by their predecessors to such a degree that most art is the result of undoing the legacies that define it. Art is protest against art itself. And given that the offending Cecil Rhodes statue at UCT is an artwork, it would be quite suitably cannibalised by artists.
Artists are ideally positioned to tackle history, not only its invisible manifestations but its symbolic legacy that lives on in immovable architectural entities.
And certainly, this week a number of commentators seemed to be calling for such an intervention. One such commentator, identifying himself as a coloured man (feeling his racial identity was significant in terms of his response), suggested removing the Rhodes statue that has been driving the #rhodesmustfall campaign would not erase the colonial leader’s legacy but do the reverse, conceal it.
Rhodes’s heroic stance and the pride of place the statue has on the UCT campus doesn’t exactly draw attention to his shameful legacy, which the lack of transformation at the university appears to imply echoes in the present.
Alterations were required it seemed; either in its placement or the context in which it is displayed.
The debacle might be linked to what it represents about the man and his place in our history but it is also due to the history it obscures – a painful, violent one that led to the annihilation and exploitation of South Africans, our ancestors.
In other words it is not always necessarily what the statue represents that irks, but what it doesn’t. As a result, removing it from the public eye may not achieve the desired objective and in fact may only partially achieve this.
If we intend to expand our critical gaze we will find many cultural artefacts that communicate a celebration of exploitation or at least obscure it. For this reason it is worth considering what approach we should take and whether artists would be suitable for the job.
The results might be unexpected and cathartic. Ruga and Jahngeer embraced quite different approaches. Ruga referred to his public intervention with a statue as part of a purge.
Releasing the black liquid inside the balloons produced a metaphoric release, which fortunately did not carry the stench of faeces.
It is a ritual he enacts in different hallowed places, such as in galleries.
Jahngeer opted for a peaceful gesture.
He wanted to “welcome the settler family home,” he said in a video documenting his work. It is interesting that neither artist opted for erasure or (complete) destruction, possibly because they wanted to avoid arrest, but also due to a recognition that erasure would not necessarily bring a sense of “relief” or release that their unconventional rituals were designed to achieve. Jahngeer suggested that doing so would “force(s) us to negate where we are coming from.”
It may well be the deafening “silence”, the repressed histories, that the Rhodes statue and others like it now symbolise that prompts many of us to call for its removal. Obliterating statues might not bring these histories, or the legacy they have in the present, fully into view and might rob artists of the opportunity to discover different kinds of rituals to counter the silence they embody.
In allowing artists to enact a disavowal of the past, we are also clearing a path for them to question and challenge powerful authorities and dominant narratives, even the patrons of art itself, which is possibly a road our government might not want them to explore.
* Mary Corrigall is books editor and features writer.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Sunday Independent