Dean Hutton
Artist and photographer
First, Dean Hutton came up against the Freedom Front Plus or FF+, which has accused the artist of “reverse racism ”. Then Hut ton received angsty criticism from a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. And last week the Cape Party defaced the artist’s work at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town by pasting a square “Love Thy Neighbour’’ sign over it.
The cause of the tension is a work that seeks to address the artist’s own whiteness directly and the toxic whiteness of society at large in the context of a local and global society that always centres the feelings, needs and wants of white people.
In the work — inspired by a T-shirt worn by Zama Mthunzi, a black student Hutton photographed during the #FeesMustFall protests in 2016, which stated “Fuck White People’’ on the back and “Being Black is Shit’’ on the front — the artist boldly plasters the phrase “Fuck White People” on the wall and on any objects in the installation.
In a statement released last week in response to the defacement, Hutton says the various works that use the phrase serve “as both a catalyst to start everyday conversations around white supremacy, racism and privilege and as decolonial gesture with an aim to destabilising predominately white spaces, to make whiteness visible, to reveal its centralised position and to perform visible allyship to anti-racism efforts to advance social justice”.
Hutton’s career before taking on the challenge of making cultural work in South Africa has involvedmore than 18 years as a photo-journalist, predominantly working on stories about society’s most underreported individuals and groups.
It was in this industry that Hutton was made angry enough about the social dynamics evident in the social structures of the country to take up the fight formally.
Hutton’s work developed organically from still images into performance art, installations, video work and interventions, such as wearing a “Fuck White People’’ three-piece suit to predominantly white spaces like Cape Town’s Pride celebration.
On top of that, the artist has been an integral part of community organisation and arts display rojects such as the #notgayasinhappy #QUEERasinfuckyou Film Festival in June 2015 and collaborations to “make work that engages beyond aesthetics,” and to “imagine creative strategies for healing so we can shift learning into care-based practices that
build people rather than structures”.
For now and in the future, the self-described dissident is careful to differentiate insular artworld rhetoric and emotional activism from real-world change: “To feel is inadequate; what we must strive for is a complete dismantling of the systems of power that keep white people racist, and on a daily basis reject privilege until we unlearn oppressive behaviour in ways that make us more human ...”