/ 25 October 2006

A silent but savage war on the artist

The news of Johannes Kerkorrel’s demise struck me with a similar chord of anguish, anger and empathy as did that of James Philips, alias Bernoldus Niemand, Mahlatini of the Mahotella Queens and the many unsung heroes of as many unsung genres of the arts who never quite make it into the economic and social terra firma that gives wings to their work through recognition by peers and public. I wonder who is next.

Witnessing the wiry frame of brother writer James Matthews, black beret and trademark leather jacket tightened against the southeaster, struggling to make physical ground while walking his walk of independence and marketing his books in a Cape Town that gloriously ignores him, I wonder who will be next. Sitting in café society in prettily deluded Cape Town, while joking with tired hacks from Independent Newspapers with their innate brand of cynicism, we listen to the multiple talents of street musicians, township choirs and a hive of arty wannabees too numerous to mention, and I wonder who shall be next.

Old Joe, the quixotic drummer and virulent entrepreneur, who ceaselessly makes the tourist pay whether they like the drumming or not? The Rasta selling his wire artefacts with the constant threat of confiscation or removal by the city police? Emmanuel, who has turned shoe-shining into a vocal art as he elicits customers? Or Beezy Bailey of the quote, ‘My art is my currency”?

There exists a palpable struggle for art and artists to survive, so I would say they that are in a continual state of war that manifests itself through grand apathy perpetuated by fellow citizens with a poor fund of knowledge as to what it is that makes, and breaks, the backbone and spirit of the arts. Struggling to present meaningful theatre, Fred Abrahamse and Charl Johan Lingenfelder, proprietors of the Warehouse, are saddled with a magnificent venue and the ocean of mediocrity that personifies the dramatic domain most manifest by the stand-up comedy routines and its cretins passing as entertainers.

In our discussions we trawl the past and enter into the minefield of what The Space and People’s Space Theatre personified in its heyday. We end up flabbergasted by the less than innovative ways used by the nation at large who are free to express themselves by dint of multiple clauses guaranteed by the blood of soldiers, children, women and activists who died in the pursuit of these noble goals.

We stand aghast at many of the so-called art practitioners and supporters who are firmly ensconced in the middle-class domain of comforts that lead to couch-potato flatulence offering lip service without real physical support. This apathy is the silent war that slowly erodes and kills the spirit of practitioners in need of a challenge that allow their outsider perspectives to be brought into the mainstream without the concomitant sycophancy endemic of so much sponsorship.

My show, Hotnotsgot, sponsored by Pro Helvetia, was an exhibition of coloured humour, and survival through humour, beyond the continual stereotyped hype as seen in shows like District Six, yet it only had a fraction of the support it truly deserved. Ivan Lucas in Die Strondloper didn’t fare much better, yet Meet Joe Barber and its sequel eventually played to an audience of thousands, 99% coloured, who asked for fish and chips during interval and brought in their two litre Coke with plastic mugs bought at the 7/11 across the way. The power of advertising on Radio Good Hope, but what a price to pay for success and full houses.

Two dyke friends went to the Baxter to see Wole Soyinka’s grand epic while sitting amid the sea of white patrons who regularly attend shows at this bastion of English theatre. They came away frantic at what passes for theatre and wondered if they’d ever return to be that monstrously bored.

A ballet show at Artscape to which my wife took our daughters became comedy by default as we witnessed oceans of mummies bring their tutu-clad aspirant ballerinas. The show was sold out as middle-class Cape Town came out in force to support the ‘world of arts”. I sat in the foyer of this great edifice of mediocrity and wondered what had happened. It was here where I had started my theatre career in 1979 as an assistant stage manager and worked on productions such as Faust directed by, German wünderkind of the time, Dieter Reible.

Here I witnessed the skewered Cape Performing Arts Council of old staging productions impossible to produce without state support. Useless as the bloody Afrikaner nationalist elite were, at least the dumb cretins understood the importance of supporting the arts for ‘their” people, and there were some peach productions that allowed the artistic landscape so much room in which to breathe, exist and survive.

The Space, with productions that were banned regularly, never gave up. The Market, with its struggle theatre, soldiered on and stayed a pinprick in the conscience of the nation. The Black Sun rose from the ashes of inner-city Joburg and presented new work, launched careers and gave wings to the dreams of prophets and madmen alike.

I mention them and this nostalgic history to make you understand that they did not dumb down. They did not cave in. They did not allow the rampant rise of commercialism to rape the credo of their dreams, which is, was and always should be to be unencumbered as the court jesters of society. To flay and conscientise with whatever chosen medium of the arts they choose.

Mediocrity is the bane of the arts and the frontline spear that kills the ideas merchants in their infancy as expediency, advertising and consumerism wage war on all that’s truly individual to leave us with the dribbling snot of sycophancy as personified by the National Arts Council and the Department of Arts and Culture. Art and culture are forces driven by motivated individuals who set the precedent, and need no interference from bulbous, cretinous scumbags in the employ of government with bucolic flatulence and no understanding of artistic licence.

John Kani was an individual once as he, with Winston Ntshona, embarked on Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, The Island, Waiting for Godot, and so on, to make inroads that made carvings on our subconscious, which allowed us to delete the monstrosity of living with the demon apartheid. Who is there, through the arts, who deals with the demons of globalisation, rave culture, label consciousness, MTV bullshit and the continual rape of our conscience by that fucken whore America, her bestial friend England and their acquiescing counterpart Europe, who ply us with exchanges, bursaries, and so on, if we fit the mandate of their cultural desks.

Yes, there are exceptions, but still the greater issue of creating a volatile landscape through the arts remains an elusive ideal as the politically correct hold sway in many arenas where true thought-provoking shit should be hitting the proverbial fan. Our cultural heritage, flavour of discussion by persons with dumb political agendas, finds time to resuscitate the vagina-less corpse of Saartjie Baartman and spend an inordinate fortune on this long dead soul who’s left behind her sack of bones, so that she might find a home. Give me a fucken break! This in a country where death is as ignominious as having a shit.

Many cultural edifices are now propped up as reminders of our past, and political agendas ply them with sycophantic saliva as they waste breath and time in what is dead and gone while their children, our future, are assailed by a tsunami of mediocrity such as the SABC and many concomitant strands of what personifies the media at large. Yes, Marc Lottering has been axed. Thank you. Enough already! Now do the same to the epiphany of mediocrity that is Felicia, Phat (Flat) Joe, Generations or is it Imitations and so on and so on.

The oceans of real talent, not prepossessed of the sycophancy required to survive as artists, are as multifarious as the network of bullshit parading as kwaito and needs to be recognised for their innovation and groundbreaking attributes. Our country so easily sells its soul to Big Brother, Popstars and Idols in the vain pursuit of creating stars, who invariably become fuck fodder for wanking company executives. This is not an artistic endeavour.

It is, as Peter Tosh sang, ‘the day the dollar dies, people shall be free”. The war of the dollar, through globalisation, is wreaking havoc with the sensible undertaking of finding our post-apartheid self through the arts because, in so many arenas, through the medium of church and state, media and desire, the people are kept enslaved to the notion of mystic saviours, be they religious or Snoop Doggy Dog. Yes, mediocrity wages war through the dollar in an incessant rain of banality like The Bold and the Beautiful, CNN, The Young and the Restless, Oprah, ad infinitum!

The war on the arts is not simply the lack of funds, as is borne out by the wily, amazing and innovative productions done in times of intense duress by The Space, The Market, and so on, without any state support.

More than anything it is propelled by the laziness of a nation not prepared to explore different opinions. It is propelled by the church and other organs of religion that thwart self-discovery in order to keep the masses enslaved so that they might earn their tithes and be hosted as authorities on the word of God and gods, thus decrying anything and everything that offends their point of view, hence blackmailing the arts into producing work that feeds the stomach and churns the soul into emptiness void of substance. It is motivated by sycophantic politicians who should really be tilling the land somewhere and speaking sensibly to their cows who will moo in kind agreement.

The war on the artist is savage as is proven by the suicide of Johannes Kerkorrel and the impoverished deaths of James Philips and Mahlatini who, though well known, still struggled to make a living. Freedom is to find the essence of economic empowerment without having to be a beggar at the door of the corporate universe, which does not understand that patronage of the jarring voices, exhibiting freedom of expression with scathing works attacking the conscience, are as necessary as ploughing the fields of mediocrity inside sport, and so on.

The war on the arts is embodied by the disembodied nation trying to find its feet, while treading the path of comfortable enjoyment, and only supporting that which is known, thus relegating an entire spectrum of thought, ideas and dreams to the dump yards where the flies who bask in arrogance without substance are wont to buzz deliriously while downing the next Charles Glass.

A luta continua!