Picturing Change

Curating Visual Culture At Post-Apartheid Universities

Brenda Schmahmann

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781776141203
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Since South Africa's transition to democracy, many universities have acquired new works of art that convey messages about the advantages of cultural diversity, and engage critically with histories of racial intolerance and conflict. Given concerns about the influence of British imperialism or Afrikaner nationalism on aspects of their inherited visual culture, most tertiary institutions are also seeking new ways to manage their existing art collections, and to introduce memorials, insignia or regalia, which reflect the universities' newfound values and aspirations. In Picturing Change, Brenda Schmahmann explores the implications of deploying the visual domain in the service of transformative agendas and unpacks the complexities, contradictions and slippages involved in this process. She shows that although most new commissions have been innovative, some universities have acquired works with potentially traditionalist – even backward-looking – implications. While the motives behind removing inherited imagery may be underpinned by a desire to unsettle white privilege, in some cases such actions can also serve to maintain the status quo. This book is unique in exploring the transformative ethos evident in the curation of visual culture at South African universities. It will be invaluable to readers interested in public art, the politics of curating and collecting, as well as to those involved in transforming tertiary and other public institutions into spaces that welcome diversity.

1

Negotiating works from the early twentieth century

The 25th anniversary celebrations of the founding of Grey University College (now the University of the Free State) in Bloemfontein took place on 29 September 1929, and included the unveiling of a sculpture of Marthinus Theunis Steyn outside the institution’s Main Building (FIGURE 9). While the decision to represent Steyn may, on one level, have been because, as one of the publications celebrating the centenary explains, ‘he had worked so diligently for an indigenous Free State university during the republican years before the Anglo-Boer War’ (Barnard 2006: 92), it was also clearly tied into Afrikaner nationalist agendas. Steyn (1857–1916) was the sixth and final president of the Orange Free State. He had actively participated in organising Boer resistance during the South African War, and was a founding member of the National Party, which was established in Bloemfontein in 1914 and which came to power in the Union of South Africa under the leadership of the staunch Afrikaner nationalist, James Barry Hertzog, in 1924. Further, the £2 500 used to pay for the monument was secured through the fundraising efforts of the Afrikaanse Studentebond (Afrikaner Student Union), an organisation with an Afrikaner nationalist agenda that broke ties with the more liberal National Union of South African Students as early as 1933.

The representation of Steyn is by Anton van Wouw who, after being commissioned to create a statue of President Kruger in 1896, emerged as a prominent sculptor of Afrikaner statesmen and heroes. Van Wouw had also created the sculpture that forms part of the Women’s Monument, completed in 1913, just outside Bloemfontein – an important initiative that was, in fact, a brainchild of Steyn’s. While his work on the Women’s Monument made it fitting that Van Wouw be called upon to create a memorial in honour of Steyn, the choice doubtless also had much to do with his capacity to meet the requirements of the commissioning body. Representing Steyn with a sense of stoical self-righteousness and immutability, the artist also glorified the former president through the scale of the sculpture (it is about twice-life-size) and by elevating the figure using a storey-high stone pedestal.

Figure 9

Anton van Wouw, Marthinus Theunis Steyn (1929), bronze, University of the Free State.

The statue of Steyn is one of a number of monuments that testify to the influence that Afrikaner nationalism began to exert on universities by the late 1920s. This reached fever pitch in 1938, when the centenary of the Great Trek was celebrated through a symbolic trek to the site of the future Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. But Afrikaner nationalism was certainly not the only ideology to spawn sculpture in South African tertiary institutions during first half of the twentieth century.

A conceptualisation of the South African university as a type of would-be Oxbridge, gleaning influences and direction from Britain, emerged as a guiding paradigm at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘After the South African War’, Paul Maylam (2005a: 14) observes, ‘the British High Commissioner, Milner, strove to “reconstruct” the war-torn country along “English” lines. His anglicisation policy rested in part on the promotion of “English-style” education.’ This had a particularly enduring impact on those universities that used English as their language of instruction and communication, and it involved venerating individuals whose conduct, careers and discourse manifested their allegiance to Britain, as well as the promotion of values developed under British influence. For Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town, no one seemed to epitomise the British imperialist project more than Cecil John Rhodes and, as discussed in this chapter, each institution acquired a keynote sculpture representing him.

Some regard the art objects and memorials that resulted from the influence of Afrikaner nationalism or British imperialism as somewhat troublesome for universities that are now keen to transform and to welcome a diverse range staff and students. But simply placing these objects in storage or giving them away is not necessarily an appropriate way of dealing with such concerns. Speaking about public art in South Africa as a whole, rather than specifically at universities, Sabine Marschall (2010: 142) observes that a range of white South Africans – and not only those of right-wing persuasion – tend ‘to be defensive about and emotionally attached to the symbolic markers of their past’. This is not, she notes, ‘because they identify (or ever have identified) with the role models, values and intended “message” each of these monuments conveys’, but rather ‘because they have an increased sense of alienation and anxieties over black domination and perceived threats to their sense of cultural identity and their future in the country’. Likewise, for many white staff, students and alumni of South African universities, the removal of artworks or objects of visual culture can seem portentous signifiers of their own impending marginalisation.

But concern to avoid eliciting the fears of some white South Africans should clearly not be the only reason one might be circumspect about clearing campuses of troublesome visual objects. A crucial point to note is that those mooting the removal of these objects do not necessarily always have transformative agendas. As I show in this chapter, the removal of a ceremonial ox wagon from the University of Pretoria prior to South Africa’s first democratic election may have been done in the interests of enabling diversity on campus, but it may equally have been informed by concerns about whether such an object would be treated respectfully in the post-apartheid dispensation. During the early transition period, it was feared that acts of iconoclasm such as those that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union could well take place in South Africa, and that arrangements might need to be made to protect symbols of Afrikaner culture from desecration.

Sometimes, too, removing an object from display can, in fact, be directed at suppressing oppositional viewpoints. For example, a bust of Cecil John Rhodes that Rhodes University acquired early in the twentieth century was shown in such a way that it created the impression of an association between the man and the institution bearing his name. Its placement in storage in the late 1990s was not, as one might assume, motivated exclusively or even primarily by an aim to distance the university from imperialist figures but was, in fact, largely a means of suppressing a left-wing argument about a pressing need to rename the institution.

There are also broad matters of principle that should discourage institutions from simply removing dated works from view. For example, one might argue that, if the university is to be considered a body that directs itself towards the creation of new kinds of discursive understandings, then it should make readily available and conspicuous any objects and memorials that have the potential to edify – even if this invites critique of decisions it has made or actions it has taken in the past. In a paper on the early history of Rhodes University, Maylam (2005a: 14) indicates that, rather than denigrating the institution, his text was offered ‘in the belief that disclosure about the university’s past and an honest appraisal of its place in South African society can have a positive liberating effect, and remind us to always be on guard against complacency’. Likewise, it can be argued that exposing an institution’s past via images and objects, no matter how unpalatable, is more likely to develop viewers’ commitment to justice and equal opportunity than hiding the works away. Yet leaving such art objects or memorials on display undoubtedly presents its own set of challenges. If viewers are to recognise that an object has been left in place as the outcome of critically informed discussion, and not as a sign of any on-going allegiance to outworn ideas and ideologies, one or other form of curatorial intervention related to that object is likely to be necessary. But what forms of intervention are appropriate and effective?

I examine strategies that the University of the Free State has deployed to negotiate its sculpture of President Steyn as well as a centrally placed monument to the centenary of the Great Trek. As shown below, the introduction of a ‘conversation’ between symbols of the old and new dispensations in South Africa has become a popular strategy for invoking transformative agendas. Similarly, I explore the ways in which a large sculpture of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town has been negotiated. In this instance, written discourse and performances involving the work have provided fora for some critical engagement with the institution’s history and the art it has inherited.

While it is common to find memorials and sculptures that, although highly valued when first acquired, were made under the influence of ideologies that no longer enjoy currency, one example from Stellenbosch University inverts that scenario. As discussed in this chapter, a sculpture of reformist minister, Johannes du Plessis, first unveiled in 1944, challenged Calvinist ideas, not only through the sitter it commemorated but also through the form it took. The work was marginalised and neglected until the post-apartheid era when it was restored and reinstalled outside the Faculty of Theology. The renegotiation of the sculpture was intended to function as a gesture of reconciliation towards Du Plessis’ family, and to symbolise the institution’s growing tolerance of diverse religious traditions and viewpoints.

Memorialising Afrikaner histories

The introductory speech at the unveiling of Van Wouw’s sculpture of President Steyn in 1929 was by the newly installed rector, Prof Daniël Francois Malherbe. The first chair of Afrikaans at Grey University College (now the University of the Free State), and language advisor for a group tasked with translating the Bible into Afrikaans, Malherbe was fiercely committed to ensuring that Afrikaans be favoured over English, and to ensuring that the institution orientate itself firmly in favour of Christian nationalism. Ninety years later, in 2009, the task of facilitating the transformation of these attitudes on campus has been a crucial challenge for the institution’s first black rector, Prof Jonathan Jansen. It was thus not surprising that Van Wouw’s sculpture – commissioned when Afrikaner nationalist ideas had begun to manifest themselves as an influence on campus – became a topic of concern soon after Jansen took office.

On 8 March 2010, within months of his inauguration, Jansen sent a short letter to staff at the university in which he indicated that he was receiving an increasing number of comments suggesting that the sculpture of President Steyn be moved. While observing that some argue that the sculpture is ‘an architectural disaster, blocking the beautiful path…to the Main Building’ or is ‘one-sided; that it communicates a symbolism that is partial to the hist...