See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329866268 The mirror and the square —old ideological conflicts in motion: Church square slavery memorial Chapter · January 2017 CITATIONS READS 0 35 1 author: Gavin Younge University of Cape Town 4 PUBLICATIONS 0 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Short article for De Arte Journal View project Book on public art in South Africa View project All content following this page was uploaded by Gavin Younge on 06 January 2020. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. The Mirror and the Square Old ideological conflicts in motion: Church Square Slavery Memorial Gavin Younge Citation: The Mirror and the Square--Old Ideological Conflicts in Motion: Church Square Slavery Memorial. In, K. Miller & B. Schmahmann. Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), pp. 53--70. ISBN 978-0-253-02992-8. isitors to Cape Town often remark on the concern that the general public would have difficulty Vvineyards stretching up to beautiful Cape in accepting an abstract approach. Contestants for Dutch manor houses from the seventeenth century. the commission were drawn from all parts of South Low white-painted walls surround these buildings Africa, and judging by some of the unsuccessful and each ensemble seems to follow the same pattern proposals,3 a highly figurative approach had been – an H-shaped manor house featuring gables, a favoured by most. Such works were in the tradition jonkmanshuis (Afrikaans and Dutch for ‘young of Karl Broodhagen’s Bussa Emancipation Statue man’s house’), a former slave lodge, and a slave (1985) in Barbados which features a large man on a bell. Elsewhere, and most often out of sight, will high pedestal, legs astride, and with broken chains be a row of workers’ cottages. In the case of Groot hanging from his manacles but also a more evocative Constantia, one of the most celebrated of these memorial in Zanzibar: in her Memory for the Slaves historic farmhouses, the former slave lodge is now (1998) Clara Sörnäs created a cement pit containing given over to wine tastings and the jonkmanshuis is five cast-concrete figures, three of which are chained now a restaurant.1 by the neck to the walls of their den. Often overlooked by visitors and omitted from Pain, suffering or personal loss, pose huge marketing and publicity narratives is the fact that problems for representation. Jill Bennett, an more than 60 000 women, children and men were Australian academic who has written extensively on brought to the Cape to be sold into chattel slavery transnational trauma, suggests that ‘the traumatic during the period 1652–1807. These were the people event is beyond comprehension’, that it is ‘inimical who built much of Cape Town: they built the Castle, to description within normal language.’4 Bennett they built jetties and they dug furrows to grow addressed aspects of the author’s artwork for the vegetables for the VOC and for the so-called vrye 1997 Memorias Intimas Marcas5 project, stating that burgers (literally ‘free citizens’, the Dutch name for she focused on my work because I was less concerned officials who had left the employ of the VOC and with recording verbal testimony than with processes started farming on their own account). Vrye burgers of inhabitation – of what one might call ‘remaking were also permitted to keep their own slaves.2 the world’.6 The work in question is calledForces In late 2007, Cape Town announced a competition Favourites and is a video installation comprising for the creation of a memorial that would symbolize ten, vellum-clad bicycles carrying ten video screens. the indomitable spirit of the enslaved and the Playing simultaneously on the screens is a video contributions that they made to the economic I shot on the killing fields of Cuito Cuanavale in and cultural development of the city. Wilma Southern Angola. In this sense, she noted that I had Cruise and I entered the competition and were entered what the anthropologist Veena Das calls a awarded the commission unanimously, although ‘scene of devastation’ – on one level a ‘real’ space that the adjudicating panel did express some concerns. permits of an outsider’s visit, but also a psychic space Central to these was the number of blocks of granite in which memory, guilt and pain is worked through. that we proposed including in our memorial – For Wilma and myself, we recognized the seventeen. While this was the number of slaves in complexity and elusiveness of our subject. We could Jan van Riebeeck’s household, the panel felt that it never grasp the fullness of suffering experienced could mistakenly be read as a tribute to the Heeren by captured people, either on the middle passage, XVII, the seventeen directors of the Dutch East or after being sold-on into slavery on the farms at India Company (VOC). There was also the unstated the Cape. We had to guard against attempting to contain, or fully represent, this suffering. Worse still, abstraction avoids showing bodies in states of could either of our ancestors been involved in the degradation - and thus in some sense avoids repeating a trauma.10 slave trade, or in slave-ownership? As it happens, our The attack on the World Trade Centre in New York investigations suggested this is not the case. in September 2001 killed 2996 people including the Pierre de Vos, a constitutional law expert and nineteen suicide bombers. It is a ‘red letter day’ in frequent blogger commented on the parole of modern history and has led a number of artists to apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock on 30 January wrest meaning from a politically inspired atrocity 2015. De Vos writes that if De Kock and his Vlakplaas that targeted civilians. The artist Stephen Deo is death squad had not existed, white South Africans represented on the Legacy Project and he used would have had to invent him to absolve us of our photographs of his hands as ‘the healing part of the complicity in the system of apartheid. In thinking art, intended to shield the viewer from the event and through his own possible complicity, De Vos suspects rebuild the towers - to push them back into the sky’.11 ‘that it is exactly when you contemplate the possibility The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s infamous that you too – given different circumstances – might statement to a group of journalists that the bombings have been capable of doing something unthinkably were ‘das größte Kunstwerk, das es je gegeben hat’ (the horrible, that you may be best placed to ward off the greatest work of art there has ever been)12 provoked inhumanity that stalks the world’.7 an outcry and a boycott of some of his performances. It is tempting to think that wider atrocities, In a so-called clarifying press release, Stockhausen the concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, slavery claimed that his original statement revolved around – lie beyond ‘normal’ language. Clifford Chanin, Lucifer as ‘the cosmic spirit of rebellion, of anarchy. the initiator of the Legacy Project in New York,8 He uses a high degree of intelligence to destroy remembers Theodor Adorno’s statement that ‘to creation. He does not know love.’13 Robert Hilferty, write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ He argues who writes on classical music and who penned that artistic representation of the death camps was an article entitled ‘The Greatest Work of Art in not simply misguided, it was a barbaric reversal in the Entire Cosmos’ (without a question mark), which the aesthetic takes precedence over the moral. defended Stockhausen by saying that he was not in He writes “in this reversal there would be faint fact legitimating the bombings, and wondered what echoes of the crime itself”.9 the fuss was about given that others (the playwright Brenda Schmahmann follows this line of thought: Dario Fo) are on record as saying ‘regardless of When I was teaching public art memorials on the Holocaust, a question I would always focus on – who carried out the massacre, this violence is the and which I think is pertinent – is how do you legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger represent something so enormously terrible that and inhumane exploitation’.14 In conclusion, Hilferty it is almost beyond representation? Some writers goes on to say that ‘the magnitude of the catastrophe, argue that you can only understand the horror of the Holocaust by showing it mimetically. an artful work of non-art, has rendered much so- Hitler did not kill in the abstract’ is the type of called “art” irrelevant, worthless, silly or tasteless’.15 argument forwarded by people coming from this But has it? At a lecture presented at the University position. The opposite argument is that when one of California in Los Angeles16 Karina Eileraas asked is dealing with something so huge, it belittles the scope and scale of the horror to show one dead what it meant to think about lesbian participation or suffering individual or even ten, one hundred in AIDS activism in New York alongside the ‘bigger’ or a thousand such individuals. Following such issues of slavery, the Holocaust, political violence an argument, only abstraction is appropriate. in Chile, and the event I have just been discussing, Only abstraction can potentially heal. And only 9/11. She answered by saying that personal or private Blaauberg in 1805-6.) By 1653, Van Riebeeck he kept feelings do matter in global contexts, and that they 17 slaves for this purpose, most of whom were from do so without ‘presuming to equate them[selves] Angola and Guinea.