censorship were over?
Brenda Atkinson
As the second Johannesburg Biennale limped into the early weeks of 1998, it seemed for a while that post- international-schmoozing stress disorder might have taken the tart out of art. Fatigued by working, networking, or just plain complaining, contemporary artists countrywide curled into introspection for the first half of the year.
The second half of 1998, however, suggested that all this navel gazing was either a healthy phase in the creative process, or a cunning ruse designed to throw unsuspecting types off the scent of frantic productivity.
Someone who didn’t lie low was Kendell Geers, who kick-started the year’s artworld politics with a “work” that for many seemed to be more hole than doughnut. Armed with the concept of guilt and a sense of cultural legitimacy as a putative Afrikaner, Geers hijacked the centenary celebrations of Pretoria’s Fort Klapperkop, where he aimed to lock himself inside the fort “in the name of art”.
What Geers was doing, as Charl Blignaut wrote at the time, was testing “notions of guilt and the seige mentality”. Needless to say, the ensuing protests – made by everybody from the African National Congress to the Afrikaner Volkswag (with the French Institute sandwiched in-between) -were recuperated by Geers to prove that these people were themselves obviously “guilty or … hiding something”.
The best part was Geers’s observation that recalcitrant right-wingers who objected to his appropriation of their festivities were “trying to unart themselves”.
Steven Cohen, who made a brief but brave appearance at Klapperkop decked out in boeredrag, became the subject of contention when he won the coveted FNB- Vita Art Prize in July this year. Taking crown and cash from such sanctioned local luminaries as William Kentridge and Moshekwa Langa, Cohen remained dignified and unruffled throughout the controversy.
Interestingly, Cohen’s repertoire of abject, anally focused performances has elicited raised eyebrows and occasionally police attention, but has never led to calls for censorship. This despite the fact that he appears in the flesh, regardless of the consent of his public, and violates just about every clause of the 1996 Film and Publications Act.
One would think that Cohen’s work is more threatening to the public than a bunch of reasonably executed paintings, but Mark Hipper’s exhibition of child nudes at the Grahamstown Festival was obviously more visceral than the real thing.
As we learned from Terry Kurgan’s photographs of her own children, exhibited at the Wits gallery last year, responses to art depicting child nudity are seldom void of hysteria (perhaps Geers’s point about guilt has some substance after all). After a headline in The Weekend Post deemed the works “kid porn”, everybody from Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Lindiwe Sisulu to Mail & Guardian columnist Robert Kirby were out for a pound of Hipper’s flesh.
In an emission of bile even more potent than usual, Kirby endorsed calls for “no-nonsense killer censorship” as an appropriate deterrent towards “sleazy exhibitions by third-rate artists”. Hipper, Kirby argued, was indeed guilty of pornographic representation, and the debate rages on.
Censorship of a more insidious kind raised its head when Mike van Graan’s Cultural Weapon, the only publication in South Africa monitoring the government’s arts and culture activities, was discontinued. According to Van Graan’s editorial on Artslink () – written because he couldn’t get the full story published in the print media – the publication’s demise followed an attempt by then-director general of arts and culture, Roger Jardine, to convince the Royal Netherlands Embassy to withdraw funding.
Van Graan accused the department of being “rhetorically committed to arm’s length funding, to non-interference in the allocation of funds to arts practitioners”, and of soiling its integrity by attempting to sabotage a publication critical of its methods. Despite the department’s denials, the affair has led to the loss of an extremely valuable cultural barometer.
On a more celebratory note, Van Graan’s arts consultancy published the South African Handbook on Arts and Culture, an indispensable map to the local artworld.
A different kind of map, this time visual and historical, came in the form of the MTN art collection, a major contribution to local art education and development.
And there was more: William Kentridge’s star shot across international heavens, and a CD-Rom of his work was published locally for educational purposes; Lorna Ferguson took South Africa to the Sao Paulo Biennale despite minimal support from local government; many artists exhibited locally and internationally, and Sue Williamson’s web magazine () kept us informed as to what they were doing and why.
It was an interesting year with great moments, and as I write I’m looking at one of them: Brigitte Mabandla’s Christmas card, featuring an aerial shot of Robben Island. You’ve just gotta love it.
Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999
Alex Dodd
If you thought deciding what to do for Christmas was a crisis, try figuring out your plans for the millennium. What’s it going to be? Catharting the angst of the past millennium at a sweat lodge in the Transkei; a coked-up frenzy on Times Square; a chanting festival in India; champagne and caviar at a castle in Scotland; praying for salvation at your local cathedral or a moment of reckoning with the extended family in granddad’s lounge to the strains of Luciano Pavarotti? One thing’s for sure: if you’re trying to compete with the global Joneses, you might as well just charter a shuttle to the moon.
“The millennium is freighted with immense historical symbolism and psychological power. It does not depend on objective calculation, but entirely on what people bring to it – their hopes, their anxieties, the metaphysical focus of their attention. The millennium is essentially an event of the imagination,” read one Time magazine article back in 1992. And the immense subjectivity of the millennium- teeming with apocalyptic and prophetic significance – is exactly what is likely to get you into a schizoid crisis of choice.
Do you want to be in a situation that clearly marks your presence on the objective time line, so when children of the new era ask where you were on the day you can say, “I was there”? Do you want to look outwards for cues and be in a place that reflects all the modernity and cultural complexity of the fin de sicle moment – somewhere like the Spanish Steps in Rome or London’s Leicester Square, complete with thronging masses, fireworks, balloons, drunkenness and multiple giant video screens relaying parties in public squares across the planet?
Or would you rather see time as circular, endless repetitions of the same complex equation, and take an introspective approach to the moment? If so, you could find some remote place in which to commune with the cosmos and the world within, like a beach in Mozambique, a mountain in the Drakensberg or camping out in the deserts of New Mexico or California.
It is possible to celebrate the millennium more than once by celebrating New Year’s Eve in a country to the west of the International Date Line and then catching a flight on January 1 2000 eastwards, thereby losing a day and arriving in time to celebrate New Year’s Eve all over again.
Popular party spots for two-timing globetrotters include Tonga, Kiribati, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Fiji and Tokyo for the first night, and Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tahiti or the United States for the second night. According to the highly comprehensive and authoritative Rough Guide to the Year 2000, several tour operators are already offering packages of this nature, with parties at top hotels thrown in.
“You could celebrate the passing of midnight three times on a transatlantic Concorde trip: once in London, once in mid-air and once in New York,” says the Rough Guide. “But because you would have to take off just after midnight in London to arrive in New York just before midnight, the first party would probably have to be held in a hangar at Heathrow and the second somewhere within the airport in New York. But there are other problems to overcome – both airports are usually closed at that time anyway, and they’re unlikely to want to open up simply to accommodate a bunch of high- flying party-goers.”
Many people will be celebrating the millennium twice anyway, because there will be celebrations on New Year’s Eve 1999 and on New Year’s Eve 2000 (the real start of the millennium).
If you’ve got a week to spare, try taking a tour of the millennium party sites on the Internet. From New Age groups trying to enlist your consciousness into global meditation groups to the site that boasts that “the Vatican expects more than 13- million tourists to visit the various basilicas of Rome in order to celebrate the Great Jubilee of the Incarnation of Christ as declared by Pope John Paul II and the advent of the third millennium”.
Africa, the cradle of humanity, is likely to be swamped with “significance hunters” from all over the planet. Already the “biggest electronic music festival ever” is being planned for Table Mountain, touted on the Net as the “12th and last chakra of our planet. Nature and technology will blend in an international gathering of great importance for all those who will share the experience of the new era together.”
Already inundated with the hype, my idea is to avoid the millennium altogether and visit my cousin in China where it will be the year 4698.