Art: do motives matter?
Do your motives make a difference when you're making something that a racist would hang on the wall? "Do motives matter?" itself is a fair question when discussing art, I suppose, but the attempt to bias the question with a totally loaded follow-up clause makes me want to answer "no" even when I know it to be true. If your question is legitimate and fair, there's no need to persuade while asking it. About the Hitler teapot guy: if you do a Google search of his name, and look at "images," you will see that he made similar teapots with the faces of Charles Manson, Amy Winehouse and leaders of North Korea and Iran, in addition to Hitler. It made me wonder, is there a coherent philosophy behind this stuff? It seems doubtful. And it made me wonder as well, did anyone ever bother to originally *ask* this guy about his personal beliefs? I'm guessing no. I suspect someone saw a ridiculous teapot, wrote about it, everyone "assumed" it was okay since no one was objecting and voilà, media sensation. Until someone bothered to do some homework. This says more about our society than it does the artist - we challenge racist assumptions, but not our own assumptions about people's belief systems. I did not hear about Kannemeyer until tonight, but a scan of his work shows that much of it is unambiguous - he's angered by apartheid, its legacy and the enduring thuggish attitudes of many Afrikaners - including his own father. However, like many provocative artists, Kannemeyer is not just a simple propagandist for any ideology; he also investigates and raises questions that are troubling. He does this, too, in a sometimes troubling manner. One of his pieces shows a "rich" (fancy dress and hair, pearls) white woman being held down and about to be raped by several black "savages" (drawn in old racist style, each "savage" has the identical face, build and expression.) She cannot see her husband, whose throat has been cut by another "savage" and who is probaly dead already (his pupils are "x"s), but she calls out to him, saying "Do something, Harold! These historically disadvantaged men want to rape me!!" (This picture is shown in the last link of the original post.) It's an intense piece, and while I could see a racist person hanging this on their wall, my thought on that would be, well, racists are stupid by definition already, aren't they? There are a few of Kannemeyer's pieces I would be delighted to own, but this one isn't one of them. It makes me uncomfortable. I know I shall spend a lot of time thinking about it after I finish this post. But I agree with the critic who writes, "[Kannemeyer] doesn’t say how things should be but, rather, ridicules them as they are in an effort to open our eyes a little wider." Having had several perplexing conversations with a South African friend on the subjects of guilt, redress for the crimes of apartheid and a very uncertain future for South Africa, I'm beginning to have just the start of an understanding for what he's getting at, and how issues of guilt were handles differently in Germany after WWII, Bosnia in my life and South Africa, too. Racists tend to be the first ones to talk about the will of God, a country's noble ideals, what's "right" for our kids and whatever else they can dig up to support a fundamentally moronic set of beliefs. I don't much care what silly misinterpretations they make or what manifestations of aesthetic choice their feeble skulls muster. If they hang a Kannemeyer above their fireplace in the mistaken belief that he's "one of them" and stare at it for a few minutes every day, it's just that much longer they're not out in pulic and in my face.
posted to MetaFilter by Dee Xtrovert at 11:04 on April 28, 2013