Introduction

“It just feels like an uncomfortable room that doesn’t have a clear purpose” – Survey Respondent

Otto Beit building: Entrance hall left side

Otto Beit building: Entrance hall right side

If you were to walk into the entrance hall of the Otto Beit building at the University of Cape Town today, in April 2018, you would find a fairly unassuming room. If you were a student or lecturer, you might rush in and out of this entrance hall a number of times a day on your way to seminars, or to the library. You might enter in between lectures to use the bathrooms that are adjacent to the hall, or to buy yourself a packet of chips from the vending machine. While waiting for your change to come tumbling out the machine, you might not notice the mosaic on the floor, or the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, or the tables and chairs against the walls where students can often be found working between lectures.

Context

To begin to understand the absence of Richard Keresemose Baholo’s artwork we need to look back at certain events. In fact, this story goes back a very long time, to the beginning of British colonialism, “the establishment of the Cape colony” in South Africa, and the embedding of a segregated schooling system in which schools acted as spaces for the “socialisation” of enslaved and colonial children, and their “respective roles within the colony” (Xaba, 2017: 97). During this time, “White schools and universities were the most resourced while Black schools and universities were deliberately under-resourced” (2017: 97). This cultural embeddedness precipitates the events and discussion in this project to a profound extent. This project, however, focuses on a few major events that are much more recent, and much more localised: all occurring at the University of Cape Town between 2015 and 2016. They include the #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, and #Shackville student protests.

#Shackville

Roughly one year after #RhodesMustFall, a group of students closely associated with #RhodesMustFall initiated the #Shackville protests, the name having “an overt intertextual reference to the Sharpeville massacre” (Oxlund, 2016: 9). So entwined are the #Shackville protests with the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, that they can in many ways be seen as a progression rather than as separate or static events. During #Shackville, which occurred between 15-16 February 2015, student activists protested against a lack of university accommodation for black students. The students “erected a shack on University Avenue to demonstrate the reality that often confronts black students who have not been allocated university accommodation and do not have the finances to pay for off-campus lodging” (Mudavanhu, 2017: 22). The protests informed part of the greater “de-colonisation project” (Students cited in Jurgens, 2016), which had been initiated by Rhodes Must Fall. Specifically, the students aimed to put into focus the fact that “white students were given preferential treatment” (Jurgens, 2016) over black students.

During #Shackville, “activists petrol-bombed the vice-chancellor’s office, threw human feces at students who were writing exams”, and “burned down four vehicles” (Oxlund, 2016: 9). Significantly, on the second day of the protest, 23 artworks were taken from various residential halls at the university campus, and publicly burned. Two of Baholo’s artworks are confirmed to have been burned during these protests (Jurgens, 2016). Soon after #Shackville, more than 70 artworks were removed from the university campus, a number of which were by Baholo.

History of the Art Removals

“[W]hile total removal of a[n] [art]work associated with ideologies that have fallen from favor raises a host of difficulties, it is surely also highly problematical to continue to exhibit and display such an object without critical mediation or contextual explanation of it. Lack of any intervention to such an object may well be construed as suggesting that it continues to be venerated, and overlooks its capacity to promote feelings of exclusion as well as offense. A question arises, however, about the kinds of interventions that are likely to be most productive” (Schmahmann, 2016: 101).

Precipitated by the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, an Art Task Team (ATT) was set up in September 2015 “to evaluate the institution’s symbols with a view to enhancing transformation and inclusivity” (Art Task Team, 2017). The ATT’s mandate, as presented in its interim statement to the Council in March 2016 was “to conduct or commission an audit, an assessment and an analysis of statues, plaques and artworks on campus that may be seen to recognize or celebrate colonial oppressors and/or which may be offensive or controversial” (Art Task Team, 2016). In this statement, the ATT advised that a core group of artworks had been identified as problematic, and they advised that they be removed from their current locations and stored temporarily.

Defining Absence, Dematerialisation, and Discontinuity

In considering the Baholo art collection as a feature of the evolving cultural topography on campus, it is useful to consider the artworks from a few key perspectives.

Absence: Being, artwork and society

The concept of absence is inextricably linked to that of presence; and, indeed, for something to be viewed as ‘absent’ it is necessary for it to have had some prior form of agency or presence. The term may therefore be said to mark a state change, i.e. from being ‘present’ to being ‘absent’. In considering these two concepts in relation to art, artist and artwork we start to deal with the question of being-in-the-world, or how the nature of being manifests through absence / presence as a mode of representation.

Following Heidegger’s discussion in his essay titled “The Origin of the Work of Art” (2006), we may say that the act of creating an artwork imbues the work with something additional to merely combining the materials to form a composite. The workliness of the work is necessarily connected to the role of the artist in the production of the artwork such that the work so created acquires a form of presence-in-the-world that can afterward be recognised as its essential meaning above the materiality, or thingliness, of its substance.

This form of the artwork’s presence-in-the-world differs from ordinary objects in that it establishes a relationship between what it represents and what it is (i.e. It has a mimetic function) to the extent that we may discern a discomforting disjunction. In seeking to represent an aspect of the world, it can do so only by not being as such – that is to say, by presenting an absence in place of the presence it seeks to represent. The more powerful and effective its portrayal, ironically, the more powerfully the disjunction is felt, even at the very moment of its apotheosis.

Baholo’s Work on Exhibition

Richard Baholo’s paintings have featured as an absence well before they were seized from off the walls of the Otto Beit building. They were initially hung on the university’s Senate Room wall, and were progressively demoted, first to the Molly Blackburn Hall, and then later to the entrance hall – itself a kind of inter-space, or conduit, rather than a venue per se.

Some of the history of the relocation of the artworks can be gleaned from the account given in a recent master’s thesis on the subject:

“This equivocating process continued to unfold when the UCT Student Affairs department donated six Baholo oil paintings on canvas to the university art collection in 1994, which were gratefully accepted… The sequence of paintings was swiftly hung in the Senate Room (while the portraits remained in the foyer), but were relocated in 1997 to the Molly Blackburn Hall in the Otto Beit building, and then again to their current location beside the restrooms in the University Avenue foyer, in the face of renewed opposition” (Brown, 2015: 155–6).

Brown’s account unfortunately does not offer a reason for the relocation of the artworks, stating simply that the collection was moved “in the face of renewed opposition” (q.v., 2015: 156). We are thus left to speculate about the underlying motivation. The university administration’s approach both to its internal management of the campus and associated cultural accoutrements, and to its dealing with the challenges vis-a-vis transformation, has been one largely driven by an evident desire for conflict avoidance at all costs. In seeking to disengage itself, however, the administration has found itself increasingly mired in the very controversies it seeks to avoid.

Artists Respond: On Art, Censorship and Curation

Many artists who are connected in various ways with the ongoing dispute believe the university’s removal of the campus artworks to be censorship of the worst order. Chief amongst these are Breyten Breytenbach and David Goldblatt who have delivered damning comment on the action that the university has taken. Their objections are multifold but coalesce around the accusation that the university administration has displayed a profound lack of courage in facing up to the challenge being presented by the threat of further destruction of the art collection.

Compounding this accusation is the fact that the university administration has disingenuously tried to cast its “executive decision” (UCT Newsroom, 2017) to remove the artworks as a concern for the integrity of the works themselves, on the one hand, and as an act of emergency curation aimed at promoting political transformation on campus on the other. There has been almost no consideration about the question of academic freedom on campus, and the importance of mediating the call for de-curation of the university’s colonial assets in a way that does not summarily deny access to the artworks. In all of this, mention has also been made of a concern about insurance liability (Meersman, 2017), also on several levels.

Interview with Sven Christian

1. What do you think is implied by the concept of ‘absence’?

SC: The concept of ‘absence’, to me, implies that something material or physical is at a remove, out of sight, missing. It’s linked to an awareness that said ‘thing’ is no longer there, and a desire for it be made tangible once more. You anticipate or long for the its return. It also implies that what was once centre stage has temporarily stepped off. Whether intentionally or through force, there has been a transition, which I think is where, at least with regards to the latter, trauma steps in — there is an uncertainty about whether or not it will ever return.

2. In the context of curation, what are some of the reasons why anyone would choose to frame or portray absence?

SC: From my understanding curation is a lot like editing in the sense that you have to be selective about what does or doesn’t get seen, based on whatever story you are trying to tell. Often you construct a narrative based on pre-existing or commissioned objects, which, like words, have their own (albeit varied and subjective) associations.

Over time there is a collective understanding that forms about what these objects mean. It’s a product of seeing something in a particular way, over and over again. The more we associate an object with a specific story, the more that object takes that story’s form. This process of seeing (or not seeing) creates blindspots that solidify with time — big, unaccounted gaps in the fabric of history.

The choice to frame or portray absence is often linked to an urgent desire to tell a story that hasn’t been heard before, that has been forgotten, or that has been intentionally or forcibly erased from the ‘authenticated’ version. It’s an attempt to rectify these processes of erasure and account for the complexity of your own experiences.