Wamuwi Mbao
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A total of 75 works of art have been removed since the fall of Cecil John Rhodes's statue at the University of Cape Town, most of them after the Shackville protest by students in February during which paintings from a hostel were burnt.
The removals were done for a range of reasons, among which were concern for their safety, insurance, their isolation or the fact that they were close to other more controversial paintings, sites or plaques.
However, among these were ten works that were "prioritised" because students in discussions with university authorities since the launch of the #RhodesMustFall movement had identified them as works frequently mentioned among black students as causing offence when they encounter them on campus.
The 75 art works were identified by a special task team set up by the university council alongside other task teams (eg one on changing place names) to look into ways to advance decolonisation that would take into account the interests of all in the university community, also those of artists. Students are members of the committee.
The task team aims to submit a report by the middle of the year, and the works have been taken down on a strictly temporary basis until such time as a proper curatorial policy has been worked out for the whole university. However, it is also clear that much weight will be given to the opinions of students who take offence at certain works.
At this stage the ten works at issue remain unidentified. However, works of Breyten Breytenbach were removed because they were on loan from their owner and the university felt it had a "double curatorial responsibility" towards them.
In the case of some of the paintings the idea had initially been to return them to their places of display, but the university discovered it would incur extra costs that may turn out to be gratuitous should it be decided in the end that these paintings should be put up elsewhere or kept in storage for "non-political" reasons.
Here is the task team's motivation of its approach and actions.
Wamuwi Mbao is an essayist and cultural critic. He writes on literature, pop culture, and politics and is a contributor to The Sunday Times, SLiP, Africa Is A Country and other writerly spaces. He talks to Hans Pienaar about the removal of art works at UCT.
The University of Cape Town has had 75 artworks removed from the walls from some of its buildings. What was your immediate reaction to the news?
I find UCT’s response deeply uninteresting. Once you give up the idea of the university as being anything more than an agent of commodified exchange which makes decisions in the same way a corporation does, then their response strikes me as incidental. They’re guardians of property, ultimately, and what they were doing was protecting the material value of some things we’ve agreed to call art.
Ten artworks were specifically taken down because students said they were causing offence to fellow students. Do you think it is a case of censorship?
There’s an anachronistic panic compelled by the spectre of censorship that tends to invite underthinking. Art is about meaning and audience. So it might be useful, if we’re to think about the difficult question of what constitutes censorship, to understand that censorship involves particular dynamics of power and control (through withholding) of information that has a particular configuration in the world. Removing a work of art from a room because its meaning is unsatisfactory to its audience isn’t censorship. It’s merely changing the configuration of that art in the world. It’s still there. It does strike me as an ill-judged response, however. How an audience rejects or makes use of the art is what gives it that vital dimension, meaning.
Should the offence taken by students, especially those who identify themselves as black, be taken into account when selecting paintings to be displayed in public places on South Africa's campuses?
Curating involves risk, and one of the risks you take is that people, students or otherwise, may object for very different reasons, to the works you present. And that response tells you not that the people who object are “illiterate” or that they can’t read art (which is a stupid thing to say: art doesn’t require special shoes for you to understand it), but that they are not happy with the configuration that art is presented to them in. And in this moment (what other moment do we have or should we be considering?) the fact that the art doesn’t translate when the audience is larger (or inclusive, which it wasn’t necessarily before) means that either the work or its configuration is problematic. How can the placing of “public” art completely ignore that art is deeply and directly about meaning and audience? If public art has to take those things into consideration, then it has to reckon with the idea that public space is never neutral and that hanging, say, a painting which a black audience responds to negatively because the painting represents a set of ideas or views about the world that don’t take them into consideration, will engender risk.
The university's task team states: "The Task Team notes that a number of commentators critical of the campus display practice have pointed out that many of the artworks are displayed in settings in which colonial-era architecture has a predominant, even saturating, presence. This is one of the many environmental factors that affect how the works are apprehended by the public that views them on a daily basis." Would you agree?
Only a stupid person could encounter UCT and not view it as a context whose architecture is limned in the grey hues of colonial-era thinking. For some people, this is a thing of delight, whereas others – like myself – will encounter it as a realm that calls upon a style not drawn from their traditions or systems of knowledge.
Some of the works were by Breyten Breytenbach. Were you surprised by this choice, give that he had served a jail sentence for his anti-apartheid activities, has a Vietnamese wife, and is well-known for his anticolonial writings?
I wasn’t surprised (about Breyten Breytenbach’s paintings being taken down), because the decision was implicated in partly because having a Vietnamese wife is no more a marker of one’s progressiveness than declaring that you have black friends, and partly because the Breyten Breytenbach who served a jail sentence for his anti-apartheid activities is the same Breyten Breytenbach who I watched a few months ago give a quite appalling speech in support of a regressive and imbecilic language policy, a speech that was all the more appalling because he seemed to believe he was being radical. There’s one way of reading Breytenbach as the radical, and that reading takes its material primarily from his work pre-1994. There’s another that says his recent clumsy utterances on public culture are just as important in making any assessment over whether art created by him should be removed. Which should hold sway?
South African art seems often to take its cues from movements and trends in art from overseas. Would this be a form of colonialism, or neocolonialism?
At best calling art colonialist or neocolonialist represents inaccurate and unsuitable descriptions for the economy-of-elsewhere that much South African art partakes in. That South African art so often traffics in ideas received from elsewhere is part of a phenomenon that is neither unique nor some harbinger whose meaning can be accessed only through past experiences. What is it, other than inevitable and historically determined?
Can strands of anticolonial art be identified in the history of South African art?
Yes.
Can art works be decolonised? Or architecture, as at the University of Cape Town?
One way to decolonise objects in a meaningful way is to let go of the Ozymandian idea that art has to last in one form, for all time, in order to have meaning or force. After fire, new things grow.
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