Chris Roper
As Mark Coetzee’s black and white photographs once again raise their shapely penises on either side of the acrylic painting of a South African monument that constitutes the middle panel of his Triptych, censorship once again raises its ugly little head in the middle of conservative Stellenbosch University.
The last time this happened to Coetzee was at the Stellenbosch-curated end-of-year exhibition at the Bellville Art Gallery. Coetzee’s combination of penis fleur-de-lis and open bibles raised the predictable ire of the religious right. His work was damaged, and eventually taken down.
Last week, at the opening of an exhibition in honour of recently graduated post- graduate students at the University of Stellenbosch’s art gallery, something similar happened.
In meetings with organisers, Coetzee was asked not to exhibit anything too controversial, as the department’s funding was dependent on not arousing the ire of the university administration. He mentioned that his work contained depictions of erections (the head of the department was reported as having later said that Coetzee hadn’t mentioned that the erections were quite so big), but was told that this was not a problem as long as there was no religious imagery displayed. Coetzee made various efforts to gain access to the gallery to hang his work, and eventually did so on the day of the exhibition.
Just before the opening, his work was removed. Catalogues were hidden away, but subsequently discovered by a guerrilla element in the audience and handed out.
In Gus Ferguson’s opening speech, he said he had noticed that in Stellenbosch San figures were used to identify toilets – a man with tumescent penis for the gents’ – and that this marked a healthy change in local attitudes. Various people pointed out that this was an illusion.
In a way this is the sort of irony that should gladden the heart of any politically minded artist. If Coetzee’s work is an interrogation of the phallic power behind nationalism’s monolithic monuments and hard concrete edifices, it is a compliment that he has caused this ideology to swing into motion like the leathery penis of a porn actor having one last stab at virility.
If the obviously fleshly erections in his photographs are intended to deconstruct the physical domination represented by a building like the Voortrekker Monument, he can hardly be surprised if people are offended. But, as usual, the debate is not about who is offended by what, and how they feed off each other in the classic dance of the double mark that is entangled in any binary opposition. It’s about who has the civic power to excise what offends them from the landscape of their perception, a sort of forced removal of ideas into artificially created homelands for the ideologically impure.
Certainly, the Stellenbosch University art department, in the person of its head, Gregory Kerr, does not see this as an act of censorship. Its position is that the work was removed because of tardiness on the artist’s part. It’s not the erection of the work that disturbed them, but that the artist apparently couldn’t get it up in time.
Kerr has asserted that he is willing to defend Coetzee’s work, but that he was not given enough time to do so. The possibility exists that Coetzee’s work would not have been removed if there had been time to go through the “proper channels”. A less charitable interpretation might be that the university was engaging in the sort of tortuous bureaucratic obfuscation that confounds K in Kafka’s The Castle.
One also has to marvel at the power of the lowly penis to offend: there are works at the exhibition that use pictures from Hustler magazine, and nobody seems to care a fig leaf about that.