The spear of filth and stench

AN ARTIST does not need the permission of the subject that he-she depicts. An artist's works are as a result of the visitation by a muse that inspires the great artistic feat.

A work of artistic beauty and marvel could be what the artists tell us it is. The unsuspecting public assigns to the artist the role of a god. An artist can make and un-make things. An artist can create and recreate reality at will.

An artist can impose his or her view of the world as the best possible Utopia to which we must all aspire.

Followers of the Italian Renaissance guru Giorgio Vassari became known as artists. It is to these followers that I wish to address this article.

There are, in the main, two types of artists. There is a crop of artists that inspire awe through their artistic depiction and pictorial narrative.

These artists compel humanity to ask new and searching questions about what is accepted as reality, truth or tradition.

Dumile Feni and Picasso belong to this category of artists. Feni, through his work, was able to produce great artistic pieces.

Feni's two bronze works entitled the Study for the Portrait of Albert Luthuli comes to mind.

Seized with the task of representing the greatness of Luthuli, Feni ventured though art to depict not only the naturalist's attributes of Luthuli but his human side or frailties.

Such is the role of the artist to tell us what we may not wish to hear and make us see things we my least accept they exist.

Gerald Sekoto was one such an endearingly gifted artist whose unconventional depiction of reality or matter was profound.

Sekoto and Feni were artists who were opposed to apartheid and their work of art exhibits such denunciations.

However, even if they were opposed to the racist regime, they never sought to depict its leaders in an inhuman and callous light. I don't recall a picture of John Vorster with his penis protruding or even of Adolf Hitler.

There is another type of artist. This is the type who operates outside the acceptable bounds of artist decorum.

They have carved an exalted niche for themselves in their space of filth and stench.

These are the followers of Marcel Duchamp who argued that anything that an artist produces is art.

This licentious stance has invariably invited a horde of lowlifes to enter the veins and soil the sinews of the artistic tradition dating back as far as the times of the San and the European Renaissance period.

Loads of garbage have been funnelled out as art. These artists will even put cow dung in a frame and call it a work of art in their false erudition.

They will paint human excretion and pass it as art because some mind-twisted art collector affirms and shares their nefarious and devilish sense of art for art's sake.

Their work is hollow, cold, self-serving and loaded with huge doses of malice and verbiage.

Brett Murray's work belongs in this category. Instead of provoking our thoughts, he succeeds in enlisting our disgust. Instead of challenging our sense of aesthetics, he stirs up negative emotions of rebuke.

Even the worst tyrant and dictator under whose sway and watch thousands have been killed and tortured, cannot and has not been depicted with his human genitalia exposed.

Surely, we are taken for a great ride and our national patience and tolerance is tested to the limits. Surely the reconciliation project to which we have committed ourselves, is gradually teetering on the brink.

The European fascination with African bodies and genitalia dates back to the years of colonial conquest.

The fact that Saartjie Baartman's body was displayed to huge cheering crowds of nobles and aristocrats in many European cities and shebeens bespeaks of a primordial European barbaric instinct that is now lurking in our midst.

Europeans will travel thousands of kilometres to peek into the African frame and capture it in picture evidently showing its physical vitality and agility with its pronounced contours.

But the issue at hand is not just any quintessential European infantile fascination with African bodies. Here, a descendant of Europe, has crawled back to his ancestral favourite infatuation with Africanness and depicts the siting head of state in a bizarre and unspeakable fashion.

There is no way we cannot factor in the race issue in this entire unfortunate episode. The hatred and disrespect of Africans and their display as objects of ridicule is abundantly evident in this so-called work of art.

Surely, we are increasingly becoming polarised as a nation and the former beneficiaries of apartheid are regrouping.

We see evident signs of the opening of the laager albeit ceaseless attempts to foster continued reconciliation.

In 1994 we opted for reconciliation and committed ourselves to building a non-racial unitary state. We have put behind us the sins of the racist past that were perpetrated against us and elected to settle for peace.

We carved a new constitution that respects the rights the rights of all of our citizens without regard to class and its attended economic differentiations.

However, we are constantly reminded that we are lesser humans.

We are reminded by our fellow countrymen that they regard us less and spit on our face every time they are accorded an opportunity to do so. We too are human and we pray that our patience must steer us forward.

• Ka Plaatjie is director of the Pan African Foundation