The Artful Viewer

Melvyn Minnaar

Why is Madiba so Difficult?

Capetonians with aesthetic sensibilities should count their blessings.

For years now, there has been pressure - especially by those politicians who don’t think beyond the length of their noses - to put up a bronze statue of our great statesman in the precincts of parliament. But thanks to a few art-sensitive operators around those corridors, so far, we’ve been spared that. And so has the embarrassment to Madiba.

Fact is that the world still has to see an even half-decent three-dimensional portrait of Nelson Mandela anywhere. Everyone that tries, simply make a mash of it. Failed Madiba statues are everywhere, big to small.

Starting small: the five-rand coin that the South African Reserve Bank sent into circulation to honour Madiba on his 90th Birthday is awful. Apparently designed by an SA Mint employee, Natanya van Niekerk (whose initials are forever affixed next to the famous face on the coin), the snazzy-dressed bank governor couldn’t have launched a more unattractive, inelegant birthday gift.
That great late local engraver Mauro Pagliari, who established the great art of such metal mastery in South Africa, is spinning in his grave. Ugly is the word for the portrait, never mind accurate.

Aiming very high (too high): luckily we’ve not heard much more about the R50-million statue of Mandela that Port Elizabeth was to build on a special island in the city’s harbour. The foolish plotters wanted it to be 22 metres taller than New York’s Statue of Liberty. With some luck it’s not to happen.

Unfortunately others have. The tallest so far in South Africa is the monstrosity that stands amongst the fumes of the steakhouses on a shopping square in Sandton. Bad sculpture and lopsided like a lollipop man, it is bathed in vulgarity. Some say it is an insult to Mandela.

At least the 2.7-metre bronze sculpture on London’s Parliament square, which was unveiled with such pomposity last August, looks a little more dignified - even though those outstretched metallic hands, elegant as they are, is simply, in a sculptural sense, offering a parcel of (hot) air.

(Talking about Mandela hands: as part of the sometimes sad commercialisation that seems to dwell in the great man’s aura, a bronze cast of the birthday boy’s right hand was made by Hout Bay’s Paul du Toit and sold at the fundraising birthday dinner auction in London in June. According to reports, a flashy 3.5 million dollars were paid for it. At least the purchaser got something that closely resemble part of the real man.)

Of course, Cape Town does have a Mandela in bronze. Down in the docks - or what remains of this ever-increasingly Sandton-shopping-by-the-sea area - there is the Nobel foursome that the provincial authorities and Waterfront business decided some three years ago to put up.
In a process that still takes the cake for ‘consultation’ (and also as subject matter for a doctorate in local arts history!), the ace wood-carving artist Claudette Schreuder was commissioned to make figures for casting in bronze the four South African Nobel Peace prize winners, Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk. As part of the convoluted process, a clay piece by the great Noria Mabasa was also cast in that metal.

Even admirers of Schreuder’s sculptural suss will agree that the cast versions of her quirky, somewhat tragi-comical characters don’t quite pull through. And the Mabasa piece comes across exactly as the tokenism it represents.

Both Schreuder and Mabasa make great art in wood; the latter also in clay and former is a fine drawer. But the jump to the grandeur and pomposity of bronze is where the problem seems to lie.

Perhaps this is what is to be expected. A monumental sculpture of a hero in bronze, placed in public places, is very, very much a colonial tradition. It simply ain’t Africa.

And this is where the joke so badly misfires on these recently-emboldened African politicians who have their heritage and cultures mixed up. We don’t need more bronzes.

One can understand that those who traipse around parliament and the Company gardens get an eye-full of the colonials-in-brass on their pedestals, and feel the need to do something.

(Poor arrogant old Rhodes with his self-assured outstretched arm recently got another blast from an arrogant young politico. And the battle between the two ugly Jannies in the Avenue still make good dinner conversation. Curious though that no-one objects to Tant Victoria and her royal spanspek, but then she’s well camouflaged among the clivias.)

Of course, the presence of these puppets of history represents an imbalance. But what to do? Adding new ones is playing their game; we need our own. From our African perspective the very concept of monumental bronze sculptures should be outdated. (Let the capitalist wheeler-dealers of shopping palaces play with it if they wish.)

A delicious, subtle subtext of Guy Tillim’s Avenue Patrice Lumumba exhibition at Michael Stevenson is that of old colonial statues broken in gardens and those of new heroes equally dilapidated.

But getting back to Madiba: why, one wonders, is it so difficult to make a decent three-dimensional image of the man? He has such specific features, body language that portraiture should be a delight. But the opposite is true. Maybe just as well.