Is it art? Or an optical illusion, seen with blinkers?
Tymon
IWAS going to leave you and your so-called artwork on the Sea Point promenade alone. After all, everyone and their graffiti can has had a go at you this past week, and a fierce debate about public art and how it’s commissioned has raged.
I’ve been on your website, seen your list of degrees obtained at institutions in London and Paris and assume that this means you can’t be stupid.
However, when you got hysterical about an innocuous Facebook comment and started shouting on radio that you feared for your life, were laying charges against those responsible for cracking a joke and compared the hysteria around your work to that which leads to things such as the Rwandan genocide . . . I choked on my green tea and decided that whatever intelligence you might possess is, if you’ll excuse the pun, myopic.
There’s a YouTube clip in which you talk about how you like to make work that expresses happiness and promotes social cohesion, but by taking your oversized tchotchke (as my grandmother might have said in Yiddish for “trinket”) and trying to promote it to the status of a serious piece of art intended to reflect on the legacy of Nelson Mandela, you’ve sown social division and pointed out the flaws in your city’s public art policy.
A policy that allows second-tier, self-obsessed tinkers like you and that other fool responsible for the oversized Christmas tree decoration on Signal Hill to pretend that all it takes to turn a knick-knack into a piece of art is to simply make a dubious connection to Madiba.
It must be your complete lack of irony and insistence on seeing the world through rose-tinted, rainbow-reflect- ing spectacles that makes you completely unable to understand why your Ray-Ban Nation piece has caused so much offence.
It must also be for the same reasons you couldn’t tell it was a joke when artist Hermann Niebuhr posted a comment in a thread on fellow artist Candice Breitz’s Facebook page calling you a charlatan and saying that they were going to send “street fighter” Stephen Hobbs down to deal with this.
I mean, Hobbs is an artist with plenty of experience in public art in his own right and to believe that he’s an actual brawler commissioned by the art mafia to inflict bodily harm on your fragile person is almost as ludicrous as believing that Perceiving Freedom has anything to do with Mandela.
As has emerged in recent articles, the piece that you ROBBEN HOOD: The 24m-high Christopher Swift on Signal Hill were given funding to create was a fun, kid- and familyoriented installation intended for Camps Bay beach and involving rainbows — one of
‘Sunstar’ sculpture by your favourite motifs.
It was also remarkably similar to a 2011 piece by Swiss artist Marc Moser in which a pair of oversized pink-lensed spectacles were placed on a beach in Denmark, but that’s just fashionably postmodern on your part, I’m sure.
What made you decide to relocate your specs to the Sea Point promenade, point them at Robben Island and link them to a picture of Mandela wearing sunglasses . . . only Andy Warhol knows.
The intervention made by the Tokolos Stencil Collective may have given your piece more importance than it deserves, but it does point out to people like you, living in your world of white privilege — a background that apparently precludes you from making any black friends, according to an interview you gave to City Press — that you can’t just inflict your poorly thoughtout visions on the public and expect them not to do anything.
This is the age of the Economic Freedom Fighters in parliament and, like Peter Finch’s character in the film Network , people are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more. Something you might have been more attuned to if you bothered to look around once in a while and take off your oversized designer sunglasses.
It’s your reputation rather than your personal safety you should be worried about and the best way to deal with your work is to relocate it to Camps Bay, where children can play on it and frolic in the rainbows or it can burn the occasional hole in the swimming trunks of holiday beach
It’s your reputation rather than your safety you should be worried about
rugby players.
Failing that, it might be a good idea for those appalled by the lack of thought going into Cape Town’s public art policy to go up to Signal Hill, push over Christopher Swift’s Sunstar (seemingly saved from irrelevance by the inclusion in its structure of pieces of the Robben Island fence) and watch it roll down through the city, before reaching the promenade, sweeping up your RayBans and landing both of these eyesores in the sea, where they can float towards Robben Island.
Thanks for nothing.