The Artful Viewer: April 2009

Once more: a memorial muddle

Monuments. Memorial sculptures. It sounds so old-fashioned, it’s really off the art history pages, isn’t it? Something that doesn’t belong in a post-postmodern, not to mention post-colonial, era. One would have thought so, but, strangely, the concept keeps flying.

And goings-on in the chambers and outside of the Cape Town city council are showing up exactly how uncomfortable the entire idea sits in our time and place.

It seems citizens - make that politicians - have not outgrown the belief that their dead (and some not quite so) heroes and anti-heroes (real or invented) should be ‘honoured’ in outrageous fashion and be propped up in public spaces. No, the lust for monuments/memorial sculptures in bronze, marble and whatever glittering medium, is still churning out there. They want them statues.

One of the follies of this thinking is the conviction that an artist can fashion (or get someone to sculpt) an upbeat, ‘heroic’, if not dramatically eye-catching image of a living person (or one who had lived, at some stage). As any real artist - even great photographers - will tell you capturing a decent likeness, making an acceptable portrait, is one of the most difficult things in the manner of art- and model-making. Add ulterior motives to such endeavours and you land up with kitsch or silliness.

Unfortunately, since democracy, instead of dumping the old colonial construct of statue production, the new powers have joyfully been commissioning more of the nonsense. (Poor Madiba has been on the receiving end of this sad, misdirected enthusiasms - check the bronze near the prison entrance in Drakenstein, for example.)

Of course, public art of highest order is a different matter. But that too, is a tricky business.

The city of Cape Town authorities have waded into this area tentatively over the past year or so. But, like the silliness around the recently proposed ‘graffiti control unit’, the thinking, not to mention the enthusiasm, has not been very adventurous neither clear. And often run into trouble.

At this stage three ‘memorial’ projects are kind of lingering on the council’s agenda.

The restoration of the vandalised Waterwich/Williams memorial in Athlone by Guy du Toit and Egon Tania is obvious, but heaven knowns how they are going to keep the thieves from walking off with the metal again. (According to council minutes, maintenance - and, for that matter, the issue of commissioning it as well - will, for the time being, be the responsibility of the oddly-named Environmental Resource Management department of the city.)

The other memorials officially on the book, are ones to commemorate the founding of the UDF at the Rocklands civic centre 25 years ago last August, and the so-called Langa memorial to be erected on Washington circle in Langa to remember the PAC’s big march in 1960 after the Sharpeville shootings.

The latter memorial, to which the present PAC’s input had been rightly invited, has reached another halt in its slow, very slow, stop-start trajectory. The UDF project is not even out of the blocks. Both had been budgeted for in the last financial year.

In a repeat of the process for the Slave memorial on Church square - when invitations for public suggestions and designs, resulted in a pile of nonsense (oh dear, don’t we need to invest urgently in aesthetic literacy?) - what came from outside, after advertising, was useless. So, like for the Church square project, council officials asked specific artists to come up with idees.

While it is all very much under wraps, two well-known artists, each polished in public art and memorials, were asked for Langa suggestions. Our own Kevin Brand and Durban’s Andries Botha were called in. But, so rumours go, their ideas didn’t find favour with a gathering of decision-makers (the actual names of the judges have not been made known) a few weeks ago. So it’s back to square one.

The only positive, at this stage, is that the city - not traditionally supportive of the arts - has committed money (some R1,25 million for the three projects). But the dead-end where the Langa memorial scheme finds itself is clear indication that the bureaucrats simply don’t known how to handle such undertakings.

On the other hand, it might just prove that the concept of monuments is as dead as a dodo.