I’d hate to think what would have happened to artist Steven Cohen if he’d waltzed around this year’s national arts festival with his banner decorated with the words: “Give us your children. What we can’t fuck, we eat.” No doubt Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Lindiwe Sisulu would have had him for breakfast.
Conversely, had Mark Hipper opened his now controversial exhibition of child nudes, Viscera, up in Johannesburg, he’d probably have received nothing but critical acclaim.
Sadly, the whole nappies-in-a-knot “child pornography” scandal seems to have stolen the spotlight from what was a far broader theme at this year’s festival.
It wasn’t only Hipper who was brave enough to look at the child as a complex amalgam of emotions and impulses. Under the ambit of the group exhibition Bringing up Baby, artists dared to look beyond our culture’s stereotyped and popularised images of the child.
Take the girl character who weaves in and out of Ftima Mendona’s work. “The play between seduction and rejection, guilt, fear and obsession is what makes this girl’s world go around. Above all other desires is the ceaseless desire to seduce of the girl who can never please her parents quite enough,” writes the artist.
Claudette Schreuders’s sculptures of children, part of a body of work entitled Family Tree, are also unsettling and original. Here, children seem to embody both innocence and, far less conventionally, a hint of malice.
Schreuders looks specifically at white South African children growing up under the old regime. Her work (especially one piece in which a group of white kids toss a black gollywog up and down) poses questions about how that system might have twisted their innocence.
Clive van den Berg’s look at his own youthful sexuality in images of a young boy masturbating under his bed (also part of Bringing up Baby) is another brave and groundbreaking attempt to come to grips with what it is to be a child.
Then there was the South African premiere of Adrian Lyne’s magnificent and disturbing Nineties adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s risqu Lolita (1955). Perhaps most notable in Lyne’s artful piece of eye-candy is the strong sense of Lolita’s culpability. This Lolita is not the innocent victim of Humbert Humbert’s perversion. To my eyes, Humbert was, at times, very much the sad victim of her vampish manipulations. If Lyne is setting out to confuse and unnerve the audience, his film is in itself an intelligent reading of contemporary confusions about childhood and adulthood.
“What we are witnessing in the final decades of this century,” writes American renegade feminist Camille Paglia in her book Vamps and Tramps, under the heading Lolita Unclothed, “is the removal of the line between childhood and adult sexuality. We are now in the centre of a sexual storm. It remains to be seen whether that line, artificial and repressive as it was, was not in the best interests of culture.”
This year’s film programme also featured Czech director Lasse Hallstrom’s coming- of-age tale My Life as a Dog, in which a boy has to simultaneously come to terms with the loss of his mother and his emerging sexuality. A more profound look at the world through the eyes of a child I have yet to see.
Closer to home, Brett Bailey’s Ipi Zombi? was a fantastic narration of the real-life Kokstad witch killings in which the schoolboy protagonists emerged a couple of Omo boxes short of squeaky clean. Bailey’s African witch- hunt is deeply reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, in which childish hysteria has violently heart- breaking consequences.
So across the board at this year’s festival there was a massive departure from increasingly outdated Calvinist notions of the child as passive and wholly good.
Flashing back to my own childhood, I remember that sickly sensation when I first discovered the dreadful truth behind Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosies – that “a- tishoo, a-tishoo, we all fall down” meant death by the plague. It was like the sky had fallen. One moment I was playing an innocent child’s game, the next I was in the thick of an inescapably complex universe. I was depressed for weeks.
But, in those days, kids weren’t meant to get depressed. We were supposed to be jolly little beings who ate our neatly cut sandwiches during lunch break and went to sleep just before Dallas. I’ve subsequently discovered that I was not alone in my unease with what it meant to be a child growing up in Seventies South Africa. Still, the public discourses giving voice to this sense of being at odds with the Victorian notion of the child as pure and clear-cut and hopelessly naive have been limited.
For this reason, it was with a great sense of relief that I viewed Hipper’s exhibition. Far from encouraging a lusty response, it impresses upon one just how small, vulnerable and voiceless children are.
Perhaps even more affecting is the realisation of how small, vulnerable and voiceless we all once were – the maturity and realism in the work speaks directly to our adult selves about a past long assigned to our cellular sub-conscious. In a Freudian sense, it reminds us that we are very much the product of those largely forgotten years.
Large, open, honest eyes stare out from every wall in a kind of testament to how impressionable children are – how delicate and easily damaged. This notion of potential damage is made real by the truncation of body parts, the enlarged heads and the overall fragmentation of the images.
Although the fundamentalists and the media have chosen to focus on the overtly sexual images, there are, in fact, other images on show that point to the possibility of intellectual or emotional scarring.
Take for example the charcoal drawing Good Vision Should Be Maintained, in which a young girl stares out at the viewer from behind a pair of thick spectacles. Above the charcoal portrait are the simple words in optometrist-style lettering: “Good Vision Should Be Maintained”. At what cost, one wonders?