Jeremy Baskin
Fine art
A large tapestry in three panels by Marlene Dumas was recently donated by the Dutch government to the Constitutional Court. It was a gift rich with symbolism, weaving modern Holland with post-apartheid South Africa.
The highly acclaimed Dumas has a foot planted in both countries. She was born and raised in the Cape and studied fine art at the University of Cape Town. But in the dark years following the Soweto uprisings she left for Holland.
The tapestries, titled The Benefit of the Doubt, similarly span two continents. There is an identical set in the Court of Justice in the Dutch town of Den Bosch. The South African edition is likely to occupy a prominent place in our Constitutional Court once the new premises have been completed.
The tapestries were recently on rather cramped display in the gallery of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre. And what magnificent pieces they are. Each panel contains three isolated faces, race and gender ambiguous, pensive and thoughtful, set against a two-colour yellow background. This is art in the spirit of our Constitution. Its texture is soft, it has been beautifully crafted and it avoids all the traditional, obvious images of justice.
“I like the idea of access rather than possession,” Dumas has said in another context. And it is a sentiment repeated here. There are no blindfolded goddesses holding scales, no marble columns, no certain truths. Her tapestries elevate the ordinary and avoid images of authority. Their sensibility is female.
“If I go into a magistrate’s court I feel guilty,” says the Constitutional Court’s Justice Albie Sachs, who played a major role in soliciting this donation. “The rectangular, hard shapes tell you, ‘Watch out. We are powerful. Beware.’ The Constitutional Court can’t be like that. It is there to say, ‘Welcome, whoever you are, your rights and dignity will be protected.'”
The Dumas tapestries are the most recent addition to the growing art collection at the Constitutional Court. The collection is eclectic, even idiosyncratic. There are works by artists great and small.
A bold, colourful piece by Cecil Skotnes and Budaza hangs at the entrance to the court’s temporary premises. There are sculptures and weavings, even unweavings, and the corridors are lined with art works in every conceivable style. Many are quite striking. Most have been donated by South African artists.
“The pictures chose themselves,” says Judge Sachs. “We had to rely almost exclusively on the generosity of artists and their enthusiasm for the changes in this country and the work of the court.” The result is a mixed collection by artists who have lived through the transition to democracy.
The collection adds warmth and soul to the Constitutional Court and makes it refreshingly different from any other courtroom in the country … entirely appropriate given that our Constitution encourages free cultural expression.
Judgements are literal by their very nature, says Judge Sachs. The word is everything. With artists it is the emotion, the sensation. And yet it’s the same human universe we are dealing with, he says.
The existing collection has grown haphazardly, organically, even serendipitously. And it will be extended and developed in the new court premises, currently being planned on the site of the Old Fort.
One of the oldest buildings in Johannesburg, the Fort has housed rebels and prisoners of all types including, most notably, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. Thousands of pass law offenders also passed through its holding cells.
The new precinct will be known as Constitution Hill. In addition to the court, it will also be home to the Commission for Gender Equality and the Human Rights Commission.
Over the next two years there will be a range of opportunities for artists to be involved in refurbishing the new building and its surrounding precincts.
An architectural art works committee has been established to work with the architects. If fundraising goes according to plan, it hopes to raise R16-million, mainly foreign donations. The committee is coordinated by local artist Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa and includes the architects, people from the arts community including Karel Nel, as well as Judges Sachs and Yvonne Mokgoro.
Some of the funding will go towards commissioning art works and establishing a gallery to house the existing collection and future acquisitions. But the bulk is intended to finance the fabric, textures and decor of the building.
The aim is to involve local artists and craftspeople, often in collaboration, in working on mosaics, ponds, wall finishes, floors, murals, doors and screens, even the bench for the judges. An extensive set of ideas has been developed, including banners, mobiles and metalwork. In some cases proposals will be solicited. In others there may be public competitions.
The idea, according to Judge Sachs, is for artists, architects and members of the court jointly to envisage the building’s ambience and final look. He is especially keen to see skills transferred and to get artists from different traditions working together.
The briefs will specify materials and expense. A strong emphasis will be placed on the durability and quality of the work. To ensure that all citizens feel at home in the court, the advisory committee is likely to avoid works that are too confrontational or that make any section of the population feel out of place.
Some artists may feel restricted by the briefs that are being developed. Others will undoubtedly jump at the opportunity to have their work incorporated in the structure of this historic site.
The precinct will include a public art gallery, visible from the steps leading up to the courthouse. A sculpture garden is also being mooted. The challenge will be to capture the beauty and diversity of our contemporary arts while avoiding pastiche and retaining the overall visual coherence of the site. Another challenge will be to get scores of artists to work together on one project, and to break the mould that art is sometimes regarded as predominantly white and crafts predominantly black.
The new court aims to preserve aspects of the Old Fort. The so-called “Native Gaol” will be kept as a museum and the new court chamber will be built using rubble from the bricks of the old while presenting a new structure for a post-apartheid environment. Perhaps some of the graffiti and drawings carved by prisoners into the walls and doors of their cells will be retained, palimpsest-like, to be viewed alongside the commissioned finishes and the loose art works.
For obvious reasons the Dumas tapestries made me think of our links with Holland. The first Dutch settler, Jan van Riebeeck, concluded “peace” with the indigenous Khoi people after a series of skirmishes. But still they remained aggrieved.
Van Riebeeck’s diary recorded their complaints about the appropriation of their land “which had been theirs all these centuries”. They told him to go back home because he was intruding on “their Holland”. As we all know, the Dutch stayed. But the term “Hottentot’s Holland” stuck.
Three hundred years later Dumas was born on a farm in that mountain range. She now lives in Holland and it is perhaps fitting, if ironic, that her work should weave a new type of link between post-colonial Holland and post-apartheid South Africa.
The Constitutional Court collection can be seen by arrangement. Tel: 082?685?6927 or 082?839?5602
@Total recall
Chris Dunton
THE LAST OF THE QUEEN’S MEN: A LESOTHO EXPERIENCE by Peter Sanders (Wits University Press / Morija Museum and Archives)
One of the last administrative officers to be posted to the British African Empire, Peter Sanders served in Lesotho from 1961 to 1966. Later he researched the country’s history and oral heritage; more recently he has headed Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality.
His background was unusual for an imperial officer, coming as he did from a strong non-conformist tradition: educated at a state not public school, voting Labour, priding himself on his liberal outlook.
Early chapters of his memoirs cover the learning process: the novice administrator’s voyage out, adjusting to a life with servants and gardeners, coming to terms with the working habits of a colonial bureaucracy that seemed relaxed to the point of being sclerotic: “One senior officer gave me serious advice on how to deal with correspondence that had been outstanding for some time: more than three months, he said, and I should apologise for the delay; more than six months and I should apologise with regret for the delay; more than a year, and I should apologise with deep regret for the long delay.”
The cast list, white and Basotho, divides into saints and strongmen, eccentrics and ogres. Faced with the prospect of Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency, the wife of one colonial official screeches: “The lips that have tasted human blood will kiss the hand of the Queen!”
Sanders’s fine sense of principle, his commitment to Lesotho, his absorption in the place, are obvious. All the same, in the first part of the book the succession of anecdotes on blunders, fiascos and absurdities wears thin. You’ve heard one story about a drunken chief, you’ve heard the lot.
The last 80 pages of the book are the most durable, I think, beginning with an account of Sanders’s work on the 1963 Constitutional Commission, through to the run-up to independence. There’s a memorable portrait of Congress Party leader Ntsu Mokhehle, his anger at British colonial rule and at his “unremitting and implacable” experiences in apartheid South Africa. The ironies of shifts in party-political strategies are skilfully traced. Though it’s brief, this is a valuable account of the historical process, from the point of view of a highly astute participant.
Finally, Sanders details his work as a historian and on Sotho praise poems. There’s a thoughtful discussion here of the way oral poems are transmitted, with Sanders teasing out ideas of “memory”, “source” and “text”. Is an oral text really passed on from one generation to the next; or is each successive performance a fresh thing, newly invented; or does the real case represent a synthesis of these two notions?
An oddly structured book, then, and uneven, but worth it for its alertness and insight (the author seems to enjoy total recall) and for its sincerity.