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ON LOOKING AND NOT LOOKING
Dear Minister Xingwana
Gabeba Baderoon This article was written in response to Arts and Culture Minister Lulu Xingwana’s comments about works by Zanele Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo on the Innovative Women exhibition at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, in August 2009
To place yourself before a work of art is a complex and potentially transformative experience. Sometimes that means looking at something you’d rather not see. But as the Minister of Arts and Culture, you preside over a realm in which that line between what you’d rather not see and what you need to look at is an ever-present factor, and a theme of much art. Minister, I invite you to look at art that challenges you, like that of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi. That looking is an active and complicated experience that includes all the discomfort, shock, unsettling of established notions, new ideas and feelings that you appear to have had at the Innovative Women exhibition, and that together can amount to illumination. That is what art does. The problem with walking out of an exhibition is that you miss the many meanings that the works evoke, both separately and together. You miss what they create and unsettle, and therefore the possibility of transformation. Immoral, offensive and going against nation-building … there were children as young as three years old in the room … where do we draw the line between art and pornography. Minister, where does this language come from?