Making a strong case for importance of the arts

When President Cyril Ramaphosa announced his “transitional” cabinet in February (with the promise of a more substantial restructuring of portfolios to follow) he did not read out a new name for minister of arts and culture.

The view that this is not an important ministry was thus confirmed; when Jacob Zuma wanted to send Nathi Mthethwa to the naughty corner, it was to the arts and culture ministry that he was consigned, and there he remains.

When the much-touted reduced cabinet is presented (probably only after the national elections in 2019), arts and culture will likely be combined either with sport and recreation or with science and technology.

While the bloated Zuma-era cabinet needs some drastic cutting, such a move would undoubtedly leave arts and culture playing second fiddle to a much better funded partner.

It would be a cheap plywood fiddle, with a broken string or two, and a bow made of plastic and the hair of a retired carthorse.

The country’s arts practitioners are feeling more anxious than usual about funding and the infrastructural environment in which they work. The closure of the Dance Umbrella and Gauteng Opera (after 30 and 18 years, respectively) is being mourned not only for the sake of these two institutions but because it might be an ominous sign of things to come.

There is, it seems, now greater urgency to the perennial need to make the case for the arts. Two recently launched books present this case in terms of the visual and plastic arts by affirming anew the connections between creative expression and unquestionably desirable socioeconomic goals: justice, equality, fairness, opportunity, redress and progress.

Of course, the “fine arts” world is one in which the air can be too rarefied, one through which large sums of money flow.

Because purchasing works of art is a prudent form of investment that can yield not only long-term financial rewards but also short-term social capital, wealthy people and firms spend generously; not all artists benefit from this lucrative ecosystem, but those who enter it are generally in a much less precarious position than their poor cousins in the performing arts.

Paradoxically, then, it can be difficult to match this world with the lofty constitutional principles listed above.

This was the task undertaken by Bronwyn and Ben Law-Viljoen in producing Art and Justice: The Art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the second edition of which was recently launched in Cape Town after the book was first published by David Krut in 2008.

The presiding spirit and guest speaker at the event was Albie Sachs, whose vision drove the development of the Constitutional Court’s art collection from its humble beginnings in 1994. As Bronwyn and Karel Nel point out in the book’s central essay, Sachs is fond of describing how — when the iconic building was still being planned — the court had a budget of “R10,000 for decor”.

Sachs’s frequently recounted story, they write, “has acquired all the humour, tension and pathos of the well-told tale”; it foregrounds “the tenuousness of the collection’s relationship to the market and to the unspoken rules governing the sober gathering together of artworks to form a public collection”. In this instance, sobriety was apposite to “remembering the colossal injustices of our past to which, for all its warmth and vibrancy, the court building would bear witness”. Ben LawViljoen’s photographs depict many of the artworks in their vivid architectural context. Yet the book is not simply about art as adornment or as visual complement to the court’s symbolic status. It also seeks to explore “the more subtle, less tangible relationship between art and justice”. In this aim it echoes Kim Berman’s Finding Voice: A Visual Arts Approach to Engaging Social Change (University of Michigan Press).

Berman, the co-founder and director of The Artist Proof Studio in Newtown, Johannesburg, has decades of experience as a teacher and community arts mentor.

Finding Voice not only expresses her conviction that “hands-on work in the arts can contribute to economic stability as well as enhancing public health and gender justice”, but provides concrete evidence to support this.

Is it too much to hope that a copy of the book is circulated at a future cabinet meeting?

Book cover picture courtesy of: Art and Justice/The Constitutional Court Trust and David Krut Publishing.