Art Attack
Monday, January 28, 2008
This article taken from City Press:
Ed Young, a controversial artist, seems intent on making art out of racist offence and profanity, and of riling black people in particular. His recent exhibition of site-specific murals exhibited around New York and Miami in November last year was a case in point, it had the rather odious title: Niggers (sic) can’t be choosers. Young is white and so unsurprisingly his work has riled many an artist, critic and ordinary person.
Young burst onto the local art scene with an exhibition/concept entitled Bruce Gordon (Found Object) in which he auctioned off local art world personality Bruce Gordon (to Suzy Bell for a donation of R52 000, which went to the South African National Gallery).
The Welkom-born artist instantly became a bit of an uneasy media darling, displaying his work in myriad shows locally (at Bell-Roberts Gallery, he presented Asshole, a one-night exhibition which featured strippers serving Heineken and KFC) and internationally (VideoBrasil in Sáo Paolo, Threat Zones in Texas and, currently, Apoohcalypse Now at London’s Hayward Project Space).
Despite being obviously intelligent and charming (in spite of his almost forced attempt at being insolent and disaffected), this Michaelis School of Fine Art graduate’s work is opportunistic at best – he’s a trickster; a prankster who produces work without depth simply to get a rise out of the easily pleased or easily offended. The motivation for his modus operandi is the concept of persona-as-brand. But there are certain lines that anyone with an iota of self-respect (and respect for others) would think twice before crossing.
For the Miami leg of his exhibition, Young informs me, his title piece Niggers (sic) Can’t Be Choosers, a mural he was to have painted across different parts of either New York or Miami was not chosen. “For obvious reasons,” says Young, making it patently clear that he is fully aware of the potential for outcry this particular work has. Other pieces in the series include I’ll Be Black In Five Minutes and We Are All so Fucking African. The pieces and their overt racist tones are a testament to Young’s arrogance and ignorance in thinking that its cool for a white South African to use his position as an artist to blindly use terminology that has, for hundreds of years, been used to subjugate generations and in the process erode their pride and sense of self worth.
As author, professor and radio host Michael Eric Dyson states, while in conversation with one of America’s most renowned black intellectuals, Cornell West, on Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations, in which West combines hip-hop beats with intellectual dialogue: “There is a specific history and context of suffering and malevolence associated with this word [nigger], and you (as white people) cannot, by pretending, erase that history… The black psyche is so destroyed, so demoralised and degraded by the rapid proliferation of forces that are hurting us: white supremacy, economic inequality and social injustice … that [we are] not yet [at] the point in our culture where we can afford to surrender that word. I am not going to allow (the white community) the ultimate terminological privilege of naming me and fixing me with [their] narrow categories. True enough, we’re using the same term, but we’re not using it in the same way. We’re not giving it the same meaning and we’re not choosing to engage the history of suffering and oppression in the same way.”
When challenged on his motivation in using such loathsome racial epithets, Young’s argument is unconvincing at best. He claims that he’s simply commenting on the topicality of being African and Africanism. In furthering his argument, he asserts that that he too is ‘a nigger’ because he is also an African. The reductionism of this statement borders on the farcical. This flippancy exacerbates the offence.
Artistic frivolity aside, I can’t help wondering if Young would have the gall to recreate the work here, and call it K*ffirs Can’t Be Choosers . I’d like to see Young get away with tagging a wall in a local township with such racist invective. Although, another controversial figure, author Ronald Suresh Roberts donned a t-shirt bearing Young’s Niggers Can’t Be Choosers title at one of his book launches.
In a comment on the website artheat.co.za, a critic states that Young’s work is “like Reader’s Digest does Art Theory, or sad proof of deep self-delusion. Actually, it was the Emperor who was deluded, the crowd were merely too terrified to point out his grand craziness.”
Artistic irreverence is one thing, but, unless backed up by well-thought through, sincere and articulate motivation, this kind of cultural voyeurism by art practitioners such as Young is completely unacceptable. We, the proverbial ‘crowd’ should, for the sake of genuine dialogue, always expose Emperors guilty of the predatory opportunism displayed by artists like Young, who make artistic currency from exploiting the offensive and the profane.
I liked this article, not because I agree with everything that it says, on the contrary, I believe that artists making currency from the offensive and profane is vital. But it criticizes Ed on the content of his work rather than his medium of delivering it, something which much newspaper criticism has failed to do.
On the other hand, a newspaper, would hopefully have paid a little more respect to copyright, and not plagiarised almost directly from an article on Ed on Artthrob:
Ed Young burst onto the scene in 2002 when his work Bruce Gordon, curated by Andrew Lamprecht, hit the media headlines. Bruce Gordon, Jo'burg bar owner and local art world personality, was auctioned at a fund-raising event held by Michaelis as Bruce Gordon (Found Object [concept]). He was bought by Suzy Bell for R52 000 and subsequently donated to the South African National Gallery
Young burst onto the local art scene with an exhibition/concept entitled Bruce Gordon (Found Object) in which he auctioned off local art world personality Bruce Gordon (to Suzy Bell for a donation of R52 000, which went to the South African National Gallery).
Then again, who am I to nitpick.
(Please note: I am unable to edit the comments below, however, someone in the comment section has been using the name "Melvyn Minaar" falsely. These comments are not by him, and do not express his opinions in any way. Please in future respect the reputation and integrity of an individual. Love ArtHeat)Labels: City Press, Ed Young
posted by Robert Sloon at 1:54 PM
16 Comments:
BAH HA! nice. but chaps and chicks, is it because i is black, or is it oyu who are black? any other way, they still other. to you and me that is.
x.
hey hey, who wrote that lovely piece on artthrob you speak of? nudge nudge.
isn't that in the public domain and easily accessable bio infomation. personally, journalists blow, but that's what they do access public infomation and rehash. if they where to go around referencing in would be a hack.
This article is fine by newspaper standards(artheat.co.za made me chuckle)but let's face it, the "K*****s can't be choosers" argument is ridiculous. The writer negates it himself when he includes this line:
"In furthering his argument, he asserts that that he too is ‘a nigger’ because he is also an African".
To hit up the ever-useful Wikipedia, "Nigger is a pejorative term used to refer to dark-skinned people, mostly those of African ancestry".The "African Ancestry" part makes the work a conceptually viable one within the context of the others because it deals with a more global variation of racism and perceptions of "African-ness" (ie-dark-skinned). The ever troublesome K-bomb however does none of these things. As that Michael Eric Dyson guy said in the article, "There is a specific history and context of suffering and malevolence associated with this word [nigger]". Likewise, there's a specific history and context of suffering attached to K*ffir. The one works conceptually in this body of work, the other doesn't. It's got nothing to do with whether or not Young has "the gall to recreate it" as such. They're historically two very different things with racial oppression in common.
Just tossing in hypothetical examples of how the work could be changed to be overtly racist is a poor means of demonstrating that "Ed Young seems intent on making art out of racist offence and profanity, and of riling black people in particular". It pretty much just turns the whole thing into a "Hey Ed, I dare you to write "k*ffirs can't be choosers" on a wall in South Africa. C'mon, I double dare you! I totally didn't just give you conceptual viability within the modus operandi of your art production to go ahead and do it, oh no."
Dear 'Melvyn' - youre a doos, and way too clever for your boots. And a suspeciously racist apologist for Ed's very poor and weak conceptual drivel.
How Ed make me yearn for cock-sure and clever conceptual art, as evidenced in the practice of our whiteboy export, Kendell Geers. Never thought I'd say this.
The problem in this country (more that most places) is if, as a white South African, you make an effort to educate yourself and think and give years of your life working your butt off in disadvantaged communities and be sensitive and keep learning and thinking and being compassionate and respectful and take peoples' suffering seriously, you still get called a racist. White South Africans will always be slurred, no matter what they do. So one is voiceless. Except for those who are such delusional liars that they pretend to understand what it is like to be black, and speak on behalf of black people like a bunch of patronising fucking school teachers. At least Ed is not as repulsive as that.
Firstly, it's spelled "suspiciously". Secondly, it's way more of an objection to an argument presented in the article than me being a racist apologist. Thirdly, you totally missed the point. Just a thought. Keeping these points in mind may help to make you a better person Miss Thandi.
A drunken Ed was kicked out gallerist Meona Makwena's dinner party for calling him a darkie. Ed's lip dragged on the floor all night - I guess artists can't be choosers. I'm not sure if it's Ed's intention to become the next Wayne Barker or if it's simply an irritating side effect of his alcohol and drug addictions.
Zing!
The real Melvyn Minaar has written to me to protest that these comments weren't written by him. For the sake of authenticity, please bear that in mind when reading the above.
Dear Anonymous 11:58pm
I can't believe you are whining that whites get called racists. After all being born into privilege can't all be roses. Hell, fifty years of apartheid so you can afford to "make an effort to educate yourself". take a deep breathe and look at what you've got.
Secondly, white money controls the majority of newspapers, so calling your self voiceless seems a little self-pitying.
Dear 'melvyn minnaar 11:49', thank you for pointing out the typo, which is easier for me to correct, than I imagine for you to do an ideological 180 degree.
On the point of spelling - why did you not pounce on anonymous 10:05am for butchering the name of one of SA's leading gallerists, Monna Mokoena? I cannot imagine anyone doing it with the names of Maikel Stevensan or Linde Given or Brenden Belrobbers.
and as for anonymous 11:38 - i wish you would stop whining about being voiceless, when you are so obviously not.
Back to Ed - he is a big boy now and he should take responsibility for his actions, which I do not think he is. Merely shrugging stuff off or offering lame motivations for unconsidered work is not ok. I think he needs to work a bit harder too.
Frankly I don't think Ed's work is even worth debating nor should art journalists waste their time writing about his work. It simply isn't stimulating or intellectually invigorating art - at least City Press got that bit right. By responding to Ed's work spectators and critics are simply being sucked into the pathetic and facile game that Ed has engineered to garner attention that his art is not undeserving of.
and make me a milkshake....
White people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness needs to be made strange. There is a political need to do this, but there are also problematic political feelings attendant on it, which need to be briefly signaled in order to be guarded against. The 1st of these is the green light problem. Writing about whiteness gives white people the go ahead to write and talk about what in any case we have always talked about: ourselves. In, at any rate, intellectual and education life in the West in recent there have been challenges to the dominance of white concerns and a concomitant move towards inclusion of nonwhite cultures and issues. Putting whiteness on the agenda now might permit a sigh of relief that we white people don’t after all any longer have to take on all this nonwhite stuff.
Related to this is the problem of “me-too-ism,” a feeling that, amid all this (all this?) attention being given to nonwhite subjects, white people are being left out. One version of this is simply the desire to have attention paid to one, which for whites is really only the wish to have all the attention once again. Another is the sense that being white is no great advantage, what with being so uptight, out of touch with our bodies, burdened with responsibilities we didn’t ask for. Poor us.
A 3rd variant is the notion of white men, specifically, as a new victim group, oppressed by the gigantic strides taken by affirmative action policies, cant get jobs, cant keep women, a view identified and thus hardened up by a Newsweek cover story on March 29, 1993 on white male paranoia.
Yes it is really really naughty of white people to claim to be voiceless. How dare they. How dare a white South African ever question the longevity of the guilt we carry. Because the people we have exploited live among us. Unlike white people in the rest of the world. So the fact that we live among those we exploited is proof that we are incapable of ever learning or gaining perspective on what we have done, unlike a white person from Germany or France or England or America, who do not have to live alongside those they exploited, and so nobody can seem to remember that they exploited anyone. They are politically correct civilised Europeans who would never dream of harming a hair on the head of anyone in the third world, so therefore there can not possibly be a racist tinge to anything they do. That special quality belongs to white South Africans alone, who will never be civilised or politically correct or have a grain of sympathy for their fellow humans.
ok. Ed Young is a racist. So what? let the poor oke be... some people appreciate his pseudo-art (which is paraded as conceptual bull**it). Ed being a Maurizio Cattelan inspired conceptualist has not even an iota of the territory he is now bordering on. Words such as Nigger, darkie, etcetera should be permanently void in any white South Africans selective amnesia inspired vocabulary. Art, being a mode of articulation for the mentally retarded yet well-off bastards in Cape Town, should not be used as an excuse to push the racist agenda.
p.s: City Press didn't plagiarise from Arththrob - what you see as similar is evidence of little sh*t being know or said about the skinny art scrawl from Kimberely or Welkom or wherever the hell that racist once resided.
Yours in (F)art,
Joe Blogger
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