Chris Roper
The saga of censorship at Stellenbosch University took a new turn last week when students exhibiting at the university’s gallery took down their work because the show had been tampered with. A triptych by Mark Coetzee, featuring erect penises, was removed from the exhibition by Professor Greg Kerr, head of the Stellenbosch art department.
Strangely, it was the same Professor Kerr who later suggested to the exhibiting students that they remove their work in protest. This shows how censorship in South Africa is not a simple case of oppressor and oppressee, and that those who are compelled to make the unpopular decisions are often greater victims of prevailing ideological conservatism than the censored artists themselves.
Kerr, of course, was the unfortunate figurehead who had to endure months of harassment
from demented rightwing Christian groups as a result of his anti-censorship stand over the controversial Bellville Gallery exhibition last year – an exhibition he didn’t even curate, and which was organised entirely by students.
Then, it was another Coetzee work, featuring bibles and penises in conjunction, that was deemed offensive. Kerr put himself and his department firmly behind the students, refusing to have the exhibition shut down. Radio Tygerberg encouraged parishioners to complain,
and Christians for Truth campaigned to have him fired. As Kerr bemusedly remembers,
“They referred to me as the Anti-Christ. I thought you had to be more important to be the Anti-Christ.”
Sponsors of the university “indicated that they would be removing funds”. The rector supported Kerr, but asked that in future the PR department be informed of any possibly controversial exhibitions in advance. Kerr agreed to this: “Maybe that was a mistake, I don’t know.” Kerr also undertook to remind the students exhibiting that it wouldn’t help them if the work on show “gets the forces of righteousness against” them, which he now considers
“probably a tactical mistake”. Coetzee was told that he could put “as many cocks on the show as he wished”.
The crux, though, according to Kerr, was the understanding that the work be up in time so that PR could be informed. Coetzee’s work was not up in time for this to happen. When Coetzee did arrive, the curator of the exhibition got Kerr’s permission for the work to go up: “This was a big mistake, because I bent my own rule.”
When Kerr saw Coetzee’s work, he tried unsuccessfully to get hold of the PR department.
He was then confronted by a dilemma: betray his undertaking to the rector, and risk damaging his department’s relationship with the administration, or chance being perceived as a tool of censorship. “I was sitting outside on the pavement thinking, whatever I do I’m fucked.”
Kerr took the work down, despite knowing it would be “a fantastically bad decision for my career. I knew the moment I did it, it would go down in black and white, and that people aren’t well disposed to looking at the subtle moral dilemmas underneath that decision. But it would have been just as dishonourable to have left the work up under the circumstances. It doesn’t happen often in your life that you have to make a choice that is so absolutely awful.”
The irony, of course, is that neither Kerr nor Coetzee should be typed as the villain or victim. As Kerr says, “The university should have an articulated policy regarding the protection of freedom of expression.”
The debate should be about identifying the forces that still make the exhibition of supposedly controversial art a site for public censure and institutional interference.