We are not having any visual art in the Constitutional Court chamber. Someone said the judges don’t want any competition — they want the public to look at us. But that’s not the reason. The chamber will be more abstract, but everywhere else in the building there will be art and artistic finishes.
In the beginning all the artwork was donated, except for one item. I bought work with money I made from doing broadcasts. Artists would also donate one work — and I would buy two.
We received money from the Finnish government for installation. We got money from the Getty Foundation for a conservation survey. It was during the survey that we discovered problems about light, which we have to counter. There is too much light. The very transparency of the building — the inside/outside effect — which is marvelous for the ambience, is deadly for artwork.
I think some people might be a little surprised at first to see that the building has strong South African art in it, and not safe traditional pictures of Roman columns and a blindfolded woman with the scales. People have adapted very quickly, though. I think it’s important, not just for our building but for all public buildings, that they should benefit from the diversity of imagination of our artists. We have a very powerful artistic capacity in this country and if the Constitutional Court can show this, in a sense it becomes a flagship for other public buildings. Why should the banks have all the best artwork, and usually hidden where the public can’t see it?
The public response has been tremendous — very positive. We as judges have felt quite affirmed by the response. I think it prepared all of us for an imaginative building. It has to compete in the public imagination with the Union Buildings and Parliament — to be a major work that represents our age and not a copy of another age, not a building imported from elsewhere. Not the United States Supreme Court in Africa, or the Old Bailey in Africa.
The emphasis of the collection is on human beings, and most of the artwork has figures in it. When it started it was mainly art about people — the subject of the Bill of Rights. Once that had been established we could take on abstract works, but we didn’t want it to be too abstract to begin with.
We also didn’t want work that would be repellent to anybody. There is scope for anger and denunciation in art and it must be part of art. We can’t censor that out. But this is a building that is a court for everybody, whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, whoever your parents were, whatever they’ve done. Whether they were prisoners or guards, it’s a building for the nation.
You can’t have artwork that tells some people, “You are not welcome here, you ought to be ashamed.” But that wasn’t a form of filtering the artwork that came to the court.
Normally you have a procurement committee that’s given money and it goes out to the studios and it buys. Early on we didn’t have a committee; we established one later. We had no money so we couldn’t buy the work. It came in through love, passion, donation and emotion.
And that’s the quality that unites a very diverse range of pieces.
The very first icon of the new court was a plaque that President Nelson Mandela was going to unveil at the opening in February 1995. It was the result of about 30 people contributing different ideas. Cape Town designer Carolyn Parton came up with many designs. We gave her themes and she couldn’t choose between people and the concept of the tree, which was the place, organically rooted, where justice was undertaken in traditional African society.
Eventually someone said, “Why not have people under the tree?” And it was so obvious afterwards.
Originally we had R10 000, it was the total budget for art. And with that we bought a tapestry by Joseph Ndlovu. It conveys a sense of the Bill of Rights, of humanity protecting itself. In terms of fundraising money, we couldn’t go to the private sector because some might be litigants before us, and that’s been a very limiting factor. Eventually when we did raise money it was from foreign governments — the Dutch government was the first to help, the Norwegians and eventually the Ford Foundation.
The next item was by Cecil Skotnes, who has done a lot for public art and public buildings. I met him in a bank in Cape Town. I bumped into him and I asked whether he had any ideas, could he guide us? And he very shyly said there was something that might interest us. He was working on a wood panel: it was his response to the achievement of democracy, and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. When he asked whether the court would like it I jumped at the chance.
The art dealer Linda Givon has been a great support of our whole project. She donated a Willie Bester tapestry — two women speaking on a bench in front of the kind of township where Bester grew up. It conveys so eloquently what we feel our constitutional justice is about — the fairness, the openness to everybody, the rationality of it all.
Givon also gave us the choice of two William Kentridges after consulting the artist. I think she was surprised at the one we chose, which was from one of his video series — a nude reclining portrait of a man. I think she thought we would take a landscape.
The Kentridge family connection with our court is very strong. William’s grandfather was locked up in the Fort prison. He was with the Labour Movement in the 1920s. Sydney Kentridge was an acting judge on our court. So we’ve got three generations of Kentridges connected with the new building.
The one major work that I bought and spent quite a lot of money on was a landscape by Eric Laubscher. It is a hard almost pitiless, but romantic landscape of the Little Karoo.
I’d known Eric from the days of Die Sestigers in Cape Town. He and his wife lived in the same building as Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace in Greenpoint. In between my detentions I would go there and Marjorie painted a portrait of me.
Channel 4 in Britain had asked me to comment on their elections, whether they were free and fair. It was their kind of English joke. They offered me a fee and I said triple it and send it to the Constitutional Court Trust, and that’s how we got the money for the Eric Laubscher.
The Blue Dress by Judith Mason, I think, is one of the great artworks of the 20th century, worldwide. Judith was listening to the truth commission on the radio. She heard a story narrated by the killer of an African woman guerrilla, whose body was found in a shallow grave with a bullet wound through the skull. The body was naked except for a plastic bag that had been converted into panties. Judith assumed that the dead woman had covered her nakedness with a bit of plastic bag. So she sewed a dress from blue plastic bags and she wrote an inscription, something like, “This is not the armour of God, it is all I can give to my deceased sister.”
Judith was living on nothing. Then, in Cape Town, Nancy Gordon wanted to have a little memorial for her late husband, Gerald Gordon, QC. He had supported civil rights, defended political prisoners. I suggested Nancy support this installation. So we had a ceremony up here and she gave Judith a little more money.
It turned out that [Judge] Pius Langa had been in the trial, defending the accused in which the state had said the prosecution witness had run away. In fact the state had murdered her and Pius realised the connection and told us the story on the spot.
In other words this is an art collection that collected itself. It came to the court. There’s a story about every picture.