Fears of collateral damage from Shakespearean political tragedy lend poignancy to Bystanders
Idon’t know about you, but the absurd daily pageant of political-criminal manoeuvring in SA has turned me into a passive spectator. At the very moment that should be most driven to action, to critique, to protest, I am instead paralysed by the bizarre, disorienting twists and turns of our national plot – it’s like watching a cross between a complex Shakespearean history play, a pantomime and a soap opera.
The tale is replete with obvious scoundrels and redoubtable heroes, but it is also full of characters of ambiguous moral standing: those who used to be the enablers and underlings of the arch-villain but are now changing their colours, or those who are patently not to be trusted but who seem to be serving a useful purpose in opposing the wicked puppeteers pulling strings behind the scenes.
While watching, we are waiting. Waiting to see what will happen in Parliament. Waiting to see what will happen in the courts. Waiting to see what will happen on board that ship of fools called the ANC. Waiting. We are witnesses, bystanders, rubberneckers, voyeurs — desperately hoping we won’t become part of the collateral damage caused by the battles that so entrance us. But as we try to discern the contours of this very public conflict over the future of our country, we become passive spectators of our own private lives. We hold off on important decisions. Or we make impulsive decisions, driven by a rash sense that our fate is out of our hands. Family ties and bonds of friendship are strained, sometimes broken.
Communities turn in on themselves, becoming defined by accusation and counteraccusation. These blame games are ultimately just sideshows, curtain raisers for each instalment of the main event.
Such a climate lends a particular poignancy to Claudette Schreuders’s The Bystanders (at Stevenson Gallery Johannesburg, until August 11). There is a strong autobiographical impulse behind Schreuders’s work; the figures she depicts in wood sculptures and in lithographic prints are often portraits of the artist, her family, her neighbours. And yet, racial demographics aside, in their stasis — their stuckness — they seem to stand in for members of a much wider, albeit fractured, collective: South African society.
There is something childlike about Schreuders’s subjects. A few are boys and girls, but they are mostly adults whose poses and slightly stumpy bodies give them a tragicomic vulnerability.
Recurring visual motifs hint at childhood fantasies and fears but facial expressions betray dreams gone wrong and hopes dashed. Disillusionment and melancholy seem to be the defining characteristics of these child-adults.
Given Schreuders’s interest in Olive Schreiner, one is tempted to invoke the pathosridden representation of children suffering under the tyranny of older generations in Schreiner’s novel The Story of an African Farm. “The barb in the arrow of childhood’s suffering,” affirms the writer, is “its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.”
Young Schreiner experienced protracted loneliness throughout her adult life. Isolation, according to the archetype, is both a curse and a necessity for artists.
The notes to the exhibition emphasise that the central sculpture, The Guilty Bystander, emerges from this traditional view of artistic detachment. This bystander, presumably approximate to Schreuders herself, is “an observer, separate yet very implicated in her surrounds … set apart from the ‘mess’ of life, the entanglement represented by families, relationships, babies”. Yet a number of the lithographs on display attest to the impossibility of avoiding entanglement. Figures merge with one another, making love or giving birth; they stare at, or past, each other. Ultimately, however, they must tolerate one another, for “there is no such thing as separation from others, from society”.
What Schreuders presents us with, then, is more than a mildly self-satirising view of the artist’s contradictory desires to engage and to escape. It is the plight we all face.