For a while, just a little while, the dust in-between my toes belonged to me. For just that little while that dust caked in-between my toes was home, my only home. It was my sanctuary, the deluge of my existence.
Humanity is, has and will always be a fragile thing. Maybe that is humanity’s ultimate status: fragility. How corrupt we can be and ultimately are, is perhaps what makes us most human. The good is defined only by the bad. I battle to see any good in humanity anymore, let alone in art. Turn on the news, turn the leaves of the daily paper, turn the corner of the gallery and what you’ll find is decay. Decay of the human condition.
Art has become an unwitting vehicle for this decay. It has become the metaphorical mirror that artists hold up to the world. Yet there is something sinister about the reflections we see before us. The metaphors are jaded; jaded by our own narcassitic compulsions to look and see and finally to be seen.
Artists, at the same time as they show us our humanity, our failings, they also issue something of themselves into the frame. That’s the drive of art. Why do people create? Perhaps it is to externalise some feeling, some thought, or just to externalise the self. A desperate plea to some kind of identity other to the ‘I’. Some ‘thing’ beyond the trifling being, some kind of memorialised sentiment that, once created, will have a life independent of its master.
Yet this life will never be independent of its referent. Even when art takes as its subject matter itself, it is never free of its shadow; the object that it creates.
I came across this shadow, this object, twice during the past week. Lets call it the other for convenience. I was confronted, explicitly, with the other at the VANSA 20/20 during Dan Halters presentation. Rather than speaking himself Halter chose to present some twenty Zimbabwean refugees to tell their tales of coming to South Africa. As the tales of rape, extortion and death followed I was emotionally bewildered at the desperation of humanity on display.
This too bothered me. Humanity on display. What is the everyday reality usually circumvented by the present audience was suddenly inescapable. It was glaring in its actuality. Feeling uncomfortably like spectacle, I questioned the ethics of listening, wondering on the effect of these testimonies, finally questioning Halters intentions. The applause after each account sending shivers down my spine.
But here there where no objects. Each tale was imbued with personality. As some read and others joked about the ‘easy way through’, some told of leaving behind mothers and sisters who packed the last foodstuffs in the house for the journey. Here the everyday was the haunting shadow of the subject. The object resigned to the bitter human experience being conveyed.
This stood in sharp contradistinction to Ashleigh McLean’s presentation on the new show ‘The Status of Greatness’ at Whatiftheworld by muso fashion photographer extraordinaire Xander Ferreira. Embodying the persona of Gazelle, Ferreira inserts himself into the frame as a mock Mobutu wannabe, clad in the ‘recourse to ethnicity’ regalia of the former dictator. Glancing at the images and then to the faces of the previous presentees I shuddered at the twist of the knife that this satire presented.
There was nothing of the benevolent testimonies before. They had been replaced by a mocking assertion of the self, which addressed the other only through direct appropriation. The narrative of power in Ferreira’s project became glaring apparent in all its brutality. Suddenly satire here was revealed to be a cruel weapon, a double edged sword on which it’s easy to fall.
Getting home I washed the dust off my feet, wondering if I ever truly possessed it or if maybe I was just borrowing it.
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