And on an art note, I hit the Anton Karstel opening at Franchise last night. His installation, Wild Thing, saw a kind of tiled, floor-based and flattened (steam-rolled?) photo-mosaic (reminded me a bit of those experimentations where young artists were making their own, large-scale, panoramas with cheap disposable cameras a few years back) of one of the notorious Casspirs of South Africa.
For those outside of SA, and possibly not in the know, ‘the Casspir, an anagram of the acronyms SAP (SA Police) and CSIR¬Ý (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) was designed in the late 1970s and introduced into police and later military service in the 1980s. It was at first extensively used by the infamous “Koevoet” police counterinsurgency unit in northern Namibia during the apartheid era and later also by the Southwest African Territory Force’s 101 Battalion and the SA Army’s 5 Reconnaissance Regiment.’ (from Business Day). It connotes brutality, death and racism, even after a decade of democracy.
Ironic then, is the uncanny beauty of Karstel’s installation. We can’t hate it, no matter how hard we try. At some point in the evening, I was asked by an artist named Amy what I thought about the piece, and I said that I had to start writing about it before I knew what I felt (oh, how Derridean). This is true, of course, but at the same time, when do I ever pass up the opportunity to give my opinion, even if I don’t have one yet? (ha)
I realize now that, in this case, I struggled, and I’m still struggling. How can I despise such a beautiful thing? How can I aspire to be that which I abhor? I re-member, in a past life, hearing many proclamations that there could be ‘no more art after the holocaust.’ Perhaps what these ill-fated prophets meant was, how could we possibly imagine anything else now?
What space are we in, and what do we do with it? Atrocity is not something we want to express, but something we have to. This is not my cynicism speaking, but a space of mourning begging to grow.
Granted, Karstel’s work is, by no means, Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog); it does not, cannot, demand respect from us. But it does ask for it; and it got mine, if only for a fleeting moment.
