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The removal of art at UCT: interview with Sharlene Khan

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Hierdie artikel is deel van LitNet Akademies (Opvoedkunde) se universiteitseminaar. Klik op die “University Seminar 2016”-banier hierbo om alle essays wat deel vorm van die gesprek, te lees.

This article forms part of the ongoing university seminar, with new essays continually being added. Please click on the “University Seminar 2016” banner above to follow the ongoing conversation and to read more essays on education, access, transformation, language and the Constitution.

Sharlene Kahn (photo featuring herself, from her 2008 exhibition What I look like, what I feel like)

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.

Sharlene Khan, who lectures at Rhodes University,​ is a South African visual artist and writer whose work often incorporates a range of media that generate installations and performances that focus on the sociopolitical realities of a post-apartheid society and the intersectionality of race-gender-class. 

She 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 of some of its buildings. What was your immediate reaction to the news?

I figured they were “safeguarding” the works. After all, they have insurance to think about and thought they were protecting the works from activists. I then read parts of the statement by the Academic Freedom Committee (AFC) (as communicated by the right-wing publication Art Times South Africa) and wondered how the AFC deemed certain works sensitive or inappropriate. The AFC seemed to have considered a range of positions, but also the wider contextualisation of “art” in terms of its message, its chosen visual strategies, its placement in spaces which are steeped in white imperialism and, importantly, to have contemplated what the cumulative effects/affects of such cultural production has in a white hegemonic space tasked with transitioning to the needs of the wider 90% people-of-colour population. It was obvious that the AFC was downplaying certain racial-monetary concerns that they were now faced with in terms of collection loans and insurance values, and that they were under pressure from a number of constituencies about what the “right” thing to do is, but this is one of the first times an institution has actually considered cultural productions as more than just individualistic expression (products of thought), but jointly as tools of thought, and questioning how those tools, when hosted collectively, might be out of sync with the times. But this is how I would like to read this act by the AFC – in a positive light that this is one very small step towards greater evaluation of how cultural production and space are not neutral artefacts, but tools used to reflect and, at times, reinforce cultural hegemonies.

Do you think it is a case of censorship?

What exactly is “censorship”? This word is bandied about, especially by white liberalists and conservatives alike, as if we all understand it in a most transparent way, namely, all censorship is bad. Censorship, necessarily, happens in a personal and public capacity daily. The fact that I’d like to call many white university staff racist, particularly considering their responses to student activism, does not mean I am allowed to do so. I have to censor myself. And I do. We censor our opinions daily because not only are we not always right, but being “right” does not always lend itself to a diverse inclusive professional environment, nor to great friendships or love relationships. “Doing right” means respecting multiple viewpoints and not allowing personal cultural beliefs to run rampant or be “naturalised”.

In public space we have censoring bodies which police our entertainment industry – yes, we can have allusions to sex but not acts of “real sex” on TV (and certainly not for “children under the age of …”). Yes, you can have real sex on show, but only certain kinds of sex. Yes, you can have partially naked bodies selling everything, but you cannot show these and these parts.

Censorship happens all the time in society. It is a system of surveillance which deems, according to the spirit of the times, what is “appropriate” for or “objectionable” to the cultural-moral values of a particular society (and such values are often challenged and changing). In the UK you can be prosecuted for racist acts. In Germany you can be prosecuted for Nazi utterances. In France you cannot wear any garment signifying religious affiliation, while in a province in Switzerland you are censored from wearing the hijab.

Having come out of apartheid and decades of censorship, as a society we are incredibly wary of any kind of censorship, particularly if it comes from institutions. As we should be. But in almost every case where white South African visual artists have screamed “censorship” I’ve struggled to locate institutional/governmental censorship (unlike with the national television broadcaster, where indeed censorship of everything that is contrary to ruling politics is taking place). Censorship can thus be the censoring of different values, of opposing views. In the Zuma vs Zapiro furore, Zapiro took on Zuma, Zuma took on Zapiro – and lost before the courts could even get to decide. I may abhor Zuma (and I do not use that word mildly), but that was not censorship, but a debate that raged publicly in which many had a say. The trade union protestors marching on Goodman Gallery against Brett Murray’s The Spear was not censorship. That was a public protest against the racial-sexual-gendered coding of the artwork which perpetrated colonial tropes of black male sexuality. It must have felt intimidating, but thousands of people protesting and leaving your gallery unharmed is not censorship.

The Johannesburg Art Fair (JAF) asking for Ayanda Mabulu’s painting to be removed could be seen as a censoring of the artist – a poor decision by the commercial art fair directors. It was, however, not censorship by the government or any of its bodies (or at least no statement to such effect has emerged). JAF could indeed be self-censoring and they need to question whether money and funding is so important that they would cultivate this kind of culture. Self-censoring in the art world is rife. Many of us who are artists despise many curators, academics, culture brokers, gallerists and, sometimes, even the people who buy our artwork, but we nod and smile in order to succeed in a field in which social relations are as equally as important as skill. We self-censor when we hear our works being framed in certain social paradigms which we would like to resist because the people with money would have these boxes ticked. So censorship is a part of the socially inscribed field that we participate in and use, willingly and woefully, to progress locally and internationally.

The problem manifesting with regard to censorship currently in South Africa is when the idea of censorship is used by the beneficiaries of white supremacy to refute any gesture of racial redress or decoloniality that might be proposed, effectively shutting down opposing “non-white” views through what Critical Whiteness Studies scholar Melissa Steyn has termed “white talk”. According to Steyn, white talk frames ideological positions on various societal issues in democratic South Africa around the comfort, welfare and security of white South Africans. Key features of this white talk are Afropessimism, which regards black dictatorship and poor black governance as inevitable; it discusses crime as targeting the white community in particular; makes a plea to victimhood in the new South Africa; charges of reverse racism and an insistence on seeing their cultural perspectives as liberal, neutral, natural, transparent.

Steyn also asserts that such ideological positions are manufactured and maintained in cultural fields like sport and art.

In the debates raging around the burning and covering up of artworks at UCT we see this white talk manifested by many liberal, activist, radical and “independent” white thinkers who are unwilling to let any ground be given to decolonialising acts. I am one of the millions of non-white people in the country who have to actually argue for getting rid of the statue of a white racist (Rhodes), who is then removed carefully and safely to other premises. He could have been hacked and smelted, but no, the privileging of white discourse has meant that we need to respect the history of the minority oppressors – because their history is still more important than the present or the future of the rest of the 90% (and in this case whites are really behaving as censors: “critics”, “fault-finders”, people who supervise the manners and morality of others).

Any act that is not in accordance with the values of the economically dominant white culture – and here Western colonial-modernist “art” aesthetics is implicated – is termed censorship. “Censorship” does indeed need to be examined, because censorship is always tied to particular value systems and structures of the dominant. We can glimpse the hierarchical antagonisms and persistent colonial imaginations towards Islam in its fear of the burqua. We can glimpse the persistence of fascism and Nazism in there being laws that still need to govern Germany. We can view the stranglehold of white European colonial supremacy in South Africa by the policing of all forms of arts by those invested in ensuring that white supremacy is not dismantled in South African culture – be it sport, education, arts or popular culture. These are, after all, as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and bell hooks remind us, the vestiges of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that generates cultural hegemony not only through coercion but also through consent.

Thus, in this vein, when white South Africans cry out against “censorship” and we look into the matter, we see that what has happened is that other White South Africans have taken down some artwork – either from real concern for the cultural climate of the institution to reflect its body or out of fear of escalating insurance values – at a time when students are contesting basic needs, and have to question who is really being censored here.

Looking at the media reports, it seems to me that the very real concerns of human beings demanding access to quality education (and curricula which reflect their geo-political and historical realities), appropriate housing, fair employment, etc, seems to me much more important than paint on canvas. I do not say this lightly. As an artist, I understand that when an artwork is destroyed it is, by all appearances, gone. I think of the investment of time, material resources and creativity that is seemingly erased (the point of erasure is contestable). It appears to be just a memory and no longer a physical historical record of a moment in time.

But since when is a product of the time more important than the people of the time? Is French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) more important than the masses and developing egalitarian system that it represents? I’m guessing if you asked the actual people at that time, starving and uneducated, they would argue otherwise. If art – the human creative impulse beyond the materially functional – is a marker of our “humanness”, then what do we make of art that becomes more important than the welfare of particular groups of humans? And what types of “art” are we talking about here? Certainly not popular cultural expressions, but rather the Western model of visual arts / art history which is a marker of white European humanity, which is also an extension of the white historical and physical body, and must, therefore, never come to harm. We may teach counter-culture and radical, anti-authoritarian theories at university, the need to change society, but still never expect students to apply it to their immediate environment and realities.

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?

Students who “identify […] as black” were never asked if they wanted to be black or not. “Blackness” was a constructed instrument of colonial imagination – as Lorraine Hansberry reminds us – that has been used to render the white European as bodily and culturally superior to “people of colour” across the world. “Whiteness” is the barometer against which such constructs as “non-white”, “black”, “people of colour” have been violently brought into existence. This has not just been done through legislation and bodily violence, but through discursive epistemic violence, ie through the system of white cultural productions being used to promote white supremacy across the world while simultaneously denigrating the creative capacities of Other cultures (unless it fitted into a paradigm of “exotic primitiveness”). When art has been termed “transgressive”, it has been deemed to cause offence and is a rhetoric cultivated under Western modernity as a privilege of white male artists and usually used when that the white body wants to “transgress” its own border constructs of race-gender-class-sexuality-nationality-ethnicity, ie the desire to touch the Other; the right to cause offence against the Other. In other words, the consumption of the Other that the feminist bell hooks talks about, or the right to the denigration of Others in the guise of “transgressivity”. White transgressivity is the right to offend without the burden of “censorship” (often features under the white liberal banner of “freedom of expression”).

If, as the question has been phrased, and the AFC has determined, it has been established that offence has been rendered, then why would that not be taken into account by an educational institution who should be cultivating an environment of tolerance and learning? Is it simply a matter of non-fine art students not understanding art world coding (at a higher learning institute – which then also questions what kind of learning is going on there at all)? Or is it a matter of students getting an education that enables them to read social coding that their bodies are not comfortable and then speaking out? Universities want to educate students, and when they do and they turn against their immediate environment, believing that it should reflect what it teaches, they are no longer “students”. They are protesters, offenders, delinquents, barbarians. Institutions have yet to recognise that even people without “fine art” training also have some learning to pass on and that learning is not just top to bottom. Moreover, some important unlearning has to happen for us to come to terms with the geo-political bodies and spaces we inhabit.

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?

I agree that the entire UCT space (like so many institutional spaces in South Africa) reeks of (continued) colonial-era investment which is willing to allow black bodies in on condition that those black bodies are schooled in white supremacy values, that they learn the values of their European colonial masters and eventually participate consensually in the upkeep of white cultural dominance. The demand to end white supremacy and all its attendant political, cultural and economic values in the country is insultingly reduced to objects: paintings, shacks and architecture. This is not simply about compromising on symbols and their signification. Black academics and artists have called out the absolute dominance of whites in all positions of power in the visuals arts (and many other artistic fields) in South Africa. This is also true of UCT’s visual arts / art history departments, which remain actively invested in white dominance. Michaelis, miraculously, still struggles to find black staff and students.

The UCT visual arts staff lamented the destruction of five works by Keresemose Richard Baholo, “the first Black student to receive a master’s degree in fine art at UCT”.

Fritha Langerman, Director of the Michaelis School of Fine Art, called the destruction of five Baholo works “particularly tragic” because the paintings, produced during 1993, “are part of a valuable archive of a period in our collective histories, and have been used in several courses to teach about ways in which the past is signified in the present. It is ironic that these works that celebrated academic freedom should have met such a fate,” she told GroundUp” (Tony Jackman, 12 April 2016).

I think many of us people of colour would like decolonisation and transformation of the educational and arts sectors to be more than “archival work” and “pasts signified in the present”, but rather a present signified through the actual presence of black bodies in teaching and learning capacities that reflect the demographics of this country and an active reflection of the histories of this continent and beyond. If Michaelis was serious about reflecting our collective histories, then Keresemose Richard Baholo would be teaching there and might well be a professor by now. He would be discussing his works with his classes, where the majority of students came from black communities, rather than having his works mediated by white interlocutors.

Baholo, when interviewed about this “tragedy”, was justifiably upset by the destruction of his work, but still understood and supported the wider significance of the protest action. So much for white ventriloquism.

“Previously white” universities have spent many years actively limiting both black staff and students, restricting “capacity” by crying out there were none, violating the constitution of access that underpins our post-apartheid society through economic gates that could not be opened. What could no longer be kept out by legislation has been kept out by money. But even that attempt is failing, because a minority cannot indefinitely keep the majority at bay.

And once people start trickling in, they get educated, they look around and don’t see themselves represented, but rather the Master’s vision, and they start to ask questions, and when the answers are not enough, they use your language and they discuss, they ask more loudly, they shout, and when they are ignored year after year, they stomp, they organise, they bang on the gates, they burn. UCT as a bastion of whiteness, which is sending up smoke signals of “being under siege”, cannot recognise that their students have sought to burn symbols of colonial whiteness and not the whole project down. The problem here is not the black bodies of activism and their understanding, but how these bodies have been framed in relation to white supremacy, its investments and “access policies”.

White commentators/scholars have actually presented some very insightful hypotheses to people of colour /student activists: use the opportunity for discussion; if a space makes you uncomfortable or alienates you, use it for creativity; if you don’t agree, then that’s okay – we don’t always have to agree; archives are important, but we should evaluate them critically; we must reflect our complexities and diversities; we mustn’t always bow to censorship – after all, freedom of expression is important in a democratic society; we mustn’t succumb to dominant pressure; as we move forward, we must locate common ground.

Indeed! Now, if only they would direct the sanity of their discussions to the white supremacist position of Self from which they speak.

Do you think young people have difficulty in understanding art, that they feel alienated by it, and see it as something that will always be foreign to their lives?

If by “art” you mean visual art, then what we are talking about is a very narrow elitist field of European cultural production. I never grew up with “art”, but I had an interest in it through school, as I did with many other forms of equally relevant creative practices. After having achieved the highest degree of education in this field (a PhD), I still feel alienated from contemporary visual arts and Western art history. This has little to do with “learning” as opposed to accepting the rules of a particular field of production and the economic agents who run this field. “Understanding art” (as framed in this question) embodies the cultural acceptance of particular modes of valuation, production, dissemination and reception of Western art and aestheTics that were actively propagated by Western colonial-modernist systems. So I hope young people in this part of the world do, indeed, continue to demonstrate difficulty in understanding the imposition of foreign cultural values of a specific time and place as “universal” and “natural”. They rightfully should continue interrogating and rejecting why they do not fit into this totalitarian model. They must reduce Western culture to its specificity, while also identifying and engaging various creative modes of cultural production that has issued forth from this continent and others for a few thousand years. Maybe, just maybe, in a few decades the teaching on visual culture and aestheSis will catch up with what these kids already know and are articulating. The focus on “the young people” being a problem is typical of racist structuring. This articulation lays the problem on the raced-gendered-sexualised-classed bodies of these “young people” and not on the system of foreign domination and imposition that is at odds with the bodies of the majority. So, as race-feminist theorist Sara Ahmed outlines, bodies-of-colour, in pointing out the colonial-racist-sexist-heteronormative-classist foundationalisms of discourses, are then made out to be the problem. In pointing out the problems, their bodies become the problem. They are the problem. So if these bodies were not there, then this problem would not exist. But the bodies are not the problem. The bodies are refusing to be the problem. They are pointing out the problem.

Some students say they feel unwelcome on campus, and that this affects their ability to study. The art and general Eurocentric culture on campus contribute to this. Your response?

Which students do not feel affected by the “art and general Eurocentric culture on campus”? And why should their “comfortability” be the paradigm which dominates?

Should a university’s curatorial policy aim at signalling an absence of any censorious attitude, to encourage students and staff who want to push boundaries? 

Which boundaries and whose boundaries? Boundaries are there not only to keep in and keep out, but also to define parameters. Borders are porous for some, impossible to transcend for others. Borders are a real entity for many geo-political bodies that are kept in place by borders that are continuously erected against bodies-of-colours. The emigrant traverses borders at will, the immigrant is controlled and limited by them. Who are the boundary keepers and the boundary pushers? Who put that border there? Who was the censor who created that particular border and who now wants to transgress that border with another’s body or to touch an-Other’s body? Why are student activists censored in their protests? Tear-gassed? Arrested? Brutally violated by white academics, management and students when their demands are for education, for food, for housing, to have a history and culture that reflects their traditions, to ask not to be violated daily by images honouring white colonial violence or artwork that too often reflects a black body in pain. But God forbid when art is censored! Because white discourse must never be censored. The white body must never be censored. I hope the university will then also lead the way in ensuring the dismantling of censorious attitudes to sex work, nudity, breast-feeding, homosexuality, Islam, the genocide against Palestinians, neo-colonial acts by America, China, Russia … and of course the censoring of robust debate on the many actual ways in which white supremacy and privileging is maintained currently in South Africa and particularly at UCT in its staff and student composition, curriculum, investors, etc.

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?

The South African art world does not need to take cues on art movements from overseas. “Visual arts” and “art history” in South Africa were not only founded on European colonisation, but actively propagated as such in the development of white supremacist separate-but-equal ideologies, the identification of the inherent primitivism and inferiority of the natives, the civilising mission of Africans, the almost-but-not-quite mimetic subject. Such foundational positions have not changed in “former” empires either, even as they have taken on neocolonial paradigms.

Can art works be decolonised? Or architecture, as at the University of Cape Town?

If our only terms of engagement are based on the perpetuation of white supremacy via the cultural values of “art” that reinforces its policies via fallacious ideas of talent and meritocracy (which white bodies inherently have as a result of their European heritage and the promotion of Western cultural values and aesthetics), then no, “art” cannot be decolonised – the borders of the field exist and those who are involved in this habitus need to necessarily maintain and invest in such boundaries. Black feminist Audre Lorde stated that the Master’s tools can never be used to dismantle the Master’s house. Maybe, maybe not. Decolonialist theorist Walter Mignolo and the range of academics working on “decolonising aestheTics” advocate not only “decolonial aestheSis” (a critical intervention in spaces of Western/global contemporary visual art / art history production and dissemination) but also in engaging with the huge range of creative practices that exist (and always have existed) outside the narrow specialist field of Western “visual arts”.

But this discussion and debate is not about “art” and decolonising our creative sensibilities, not about a painting or a building. It is about white supremacy (and “art” as its symbol) under attack. “Art” here also signifies “lack” – of the economic, political and cultural transformation that has not happened in this country, and which is disguised as neutral, liberal discourse which wants to divide “THE PEOPLE on the side of the arts” (and all the democratic values that seemingly espouses) and those who are not (the ones who don’t understand, the ones who haven’t learnt how to, the ones who refuse to while basic human needs are not met). The current action of burning paintings is being compared to Nazi-era book burnings which tried to enforce white supremacy values. In the South African case you have white supremacy values protecting their values through the demonisation of acts and bodies which are asking for access, which those white bodies already have. White supremacy can – and will – always change its tactics to naturalise its privileging.

If there is even one student activist reading this, I would like to share the following precept with them as “a visual artist” (someone invested every day in creative practice):

No artwork created in the history of the world is more important than the struggle for human equality. Art will always be made. In times of strife, in times of censorship, in times of dire need and poverty, in times of plenty. None of these times has dictated when the “best” or “worst” art is made. Art has been lost, recovered and obliterated (indeed the creative practices of many across the world have been denied and devalued). “Art” makes us stand in awe of the people and societies who created them, making us marvel at the creative capacity of humans who could, at other times, destroy one another without conscience. “Art” has been made by racists, sexists, homophobes, imperialists, genocidal architects. “Art” is supposed to make us “think” and stimulate dialogue, to push us beyond the superficial and the everyday, to challenge our cores and our conservatisms. Art is also money, knowledge and cultural capital. It is merely a tool in the hands of people – it is not a “righteous” or “good” thing in and of itself – and as such reflects the values of its makers. We must be as wary of those who destroy culture as of those who make it and promote it. In a choice between an object of humanity and humanity itself, may our choices always be each other. May you never accept any discourse that says history and products are more important than you are. History and art may not remember you, and while the human condition loves art, the condition of humans has never been improved by time or things but by the demand that bodies have made to be recognised for their worth.

The post The removal of art at UCT: interview with Sharlene Khan appeared first on LitNet.


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