Charl Blignaut
Of the 29 South African heritage sites declared new national monuments since Heritage Day 1998, not one is a public sculpture or old-fashioned monument. There are churches, terrace houses, Anglo-Boer War forts, nature reserves, caves, struggle graves and even six cannons, but no public sculptures.
Unless you count the bust of Enoch Sontonga situated on his grave or the muscular depictions of Poseidon and Hercules in the gardens of Tuynhuis, South Africa has yet to produce a public sculpture worthy of national monument status.
Which is, all things considered, hardly surprising. South African towns are better known for the mutilation of their sculptures – as happened to a fibreglass model of a proposed new Mandela statue in Brits recently and a Steve Biko sculpture in East London last year – than for exhibiting particular creative flair when it comes to public displays of history.
As a researcher at the National Monuments Council put it: “We are hardly in the business of offering monument status to every old bronze man on a horse.”
Neither is the council in the business of erecting new monuments. The extent of their involvement in this area over the past year has amounted to financial support for the unveiling ceremony of the new Women’s Monument in Pretoria.
All of which pretty much leaves the process of redefining streets and squares up to artists and town or city councils. Yet, if a recent attempt to erect a genuinely humorous and radical cultural showpiece in Cape Town is anything to go by, there’s a way to go yet.
This week – a year and a month after he won a Cape Town City Council-authorised public sculpture competition – artist Brett Murray finally received the go-ahead to continue the casting and construction of his design.
After a monumental struggle with the city council, Murray’s astonishing sculpture of a vast African curio with lurid Bart Simpson heads sprouting from it will indeed be erected on the bandstand in Cape Town’s St George’s Mall within the next three months.
The sculpture competition – the same one that saw a John Skotnes sculpture on an African mythology theme erected in Thibault Square two years ago – is the result of a cultural upliftment bequest by one JK Gross.
Lawyer and executor of the Gross estate, Colin Traub, has, over the past fortnight, had to resort to threats of court action and impassioned pleas by leading Western Cape academics to get the Murray sculpture passed.
The city council, says Traub, condemned the sculpture as “culturally offensive and irreligious”.
Despite a who’s who of cultural academia expressing support of the project and despite the competition being adjudicated by an array of experts, the council simply froze the plans. Its hand was only forced after a presentation before the council.
Interestingly, minutes of council meetings where the intended sculpture was discussed have revealed that only one councillor in particular, the architect Revel Fox, stood in strident opposition to the work – despite Fox having publicly launched the 1998 competition.
Contacted for comment this week, Murray dismisses the council’s fears of offending religious sensibilities as “bullshit”.
“Kids really respond to the piece,” he adds, “and everyone who looks at it has a comment.” Which is, argues the artist, part of the role of public art.
Certainly his fellow artists nationwide agree with him and have decided to take action against South Africa’s dismal public sculptures. Spearheaded by artist Kevin Brand, 60-odd leading artists will be taking part in a project called PTO on Heritage Day on Friday.
They have been commissioned to create and record “living sculptures” and/or “interact with” existing sculptures wherever they live. In Cape Town, for example, 24 artists will be hanging signs from all those men on horses.
The signs will declare themselves present in the name of the “new African renaissance” and will offer some words of wisdom to the effect that “history is always written by the winners”.
Photographs and videos of the works will be collected into a book and a travelling exhibition.
Of course, public sculpture has, for quite some time, been a viable form of cultural protest in South Africa.
Another Cape Town artist, Peet Pienaar, has been posing – often around rugby themes – on boxes for years and artist/activist Steven Cohen has frequently highlighted issues by standing on a plinth in public.
When, for example, Dullah Omar – then minister of justice – opposed the scrapping of archaic same-sex laws in 1997, Cohen and his lover clung to one another on a box outside the local high court and called it The Art of Kissing.
This year Cohen is involved in another Heritage Day lobby. At the request of Johannesburg’s mayor and under the supervision of the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (Glow), he will be highlighting a corner of Hillbrow with a work for deceased activist Simon Nkoli.
Glow and the Gay and Lesbian Pride Committee have submitted a formal request that Hillbrow’s Pretorius Street be renamed Simon Nkoli Street and, with mayoral backing, there’s every chance that by Heritage Day 2000 their dream will be a reality.