IT is a particularly crude iconoclasm, but because the practice has been with us for centuries, rough protocols have developed over time regarding the destruction of art for ideological purposes.
The thing is, we were wondering here at the Mahogany Ridge, were these protocols in place when the Rhodes Must Fall “Shackville” protest descended into chaos on Tuesday with students destroying historical University of Cape Town artworks?
Were those paintings burnt in a disciplined and principled manner, or were they merely trashed because the art was mediocre and substandard? Were the pictures maybe just ugly?
The first, and perhaps most important of these protocols did appear to be in place; the paintings belonged to someone else. Another equally important consideration concerned strategic objectives. What effect did it have on RMF opponents, how did it advance their cause, and so on.
In this case, the issue seemed to be a lack of student accommodation on campus. But the citizenry out there – bourgeois, privileged, repressed, reactionary, whatever – mostly ignored the justness of the protest and instead could only focus on events in a superficial manner. They couldn’t see beyond the flames, as it were, and there came a great loss in public sympathy for campaigns like RMF.
On the other hand, such was the outrage that, inevitably, social media was seething with denunciations of “these savages”, “stupid animals”, “barbarians”, “primitives” and what have you, that yet again a convincing case for racism and privilege could be made; “whiteness” had once more showed its pudgy hand – the vandalism, ergo, was justified.
And, of course, it’s not strictly true that that all those who destroy art are necessarily uneducated. The Nazis, for example, may have publicly burnt large numbers of “degenerate” paintings by Picasso, Dali, Ernst, Klee, Miró and others in a bonfire in a Parisian park in 1942, but many of them were savvy enough to know which of these looted works they should keep for themselves.
No such pilfering for personal gain was noted at UCT. This may or may not have been due to the rigorous intellectual discipline of the students.
When the burning began, the works were attacked as “symbols of the coloniser”, with one protestor announcing, “We [must] go to each and every building and every problematic white person’s picture we must take down.” Others said it was a “decolonisation project” and the representation of the eradication of “colonial symbols”.
We had some confusion here. Did the “problematic” whites refer to the owners of the portraits, the subjects of the paintings, or the artists?
Two of the paintings, it’s been claimed, were of anti-apartheid protests at UCT by Keresomose Richard Baholo. They were painted in the early 1990s – before the birth of many RMF campaigners, save perhaps politics student Chumani Maxwele, who has become a familiar figure on campus over the years. In fact, he is in danger of becoming a colonial institution himself.
Perhaps this was also why Baholo’s work had to be destroyed. Hang around pictures of white folk long enough, and racial essentialism begins to destabilise. A “coconutting” starts – pigments fade, colours appear washed out, all is a nuanced mess. What hope then for identity?
Besides, they were a bit long in the tooth, those pictures. Which brings to mind the destruction of art during China’s Cultural Revolution. There they had the protocols brutally down pat with their campaign against “The Four Olds” – old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas.
And that’s how they got rid of most of their antiquities and cultural heritage. In the Great Leap Forward, homes were ransacked for anything deemed to be criminally bourgeois or unacceptably sentimental. Families’ heirlooms were destroyed or stolen, books and scrolls burned, paintings torn apart, murals defaced and priceless antiquities shattered to pieces. Tangible history was lost forever.
There is something else, perhaps not as tangible, that is lost in those who destroy art and participate in such vandalism. It matters not whether it’s a huge act of desecration, like the dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001 or the destruction at Palmyra last year by Islamic State, or merely throwing a painting on a fire. You come to be despised.
Eskom boss Brian Molefe, whose son Thumi was among those charged for malicious damage to property at UCT, has said that his son’s arrest “builds character” and that it would “spark intellectual debate”.
“It’s good for his intellectual development, so I hope he learns something from this,” he told reporters outside the Wynberg Magistrate’s Court after paying Thumi’s bail.
We sincerely hope all goes well with the young man’s further development. He should be aware, though, that it seldom ends well for those who would obliterate the culture of others.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
