Sasol Supports Art.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Chronic hangover now past, I'm back in action. Here's a great piece from Hayibo.Thanks Kirsty and Renee for the tip.
JOHANNESBURG. Oil giant Sasol says it remains committed to supporting South African artists but has urged them to create work more in line with Sasol's ethos of complete corporate subjugation of free will. The statement follows weekend revelations that the winner of this year's Sasol New Signatures art competition had upset the company's employees by showing a glimpse of a penis.
Familieportret No 2, a photograph by artist Richard Strydom, also featured a young woman baring one of her breasts. However Sasol spokesman Pieter-Willem Botha said that staff had had no problem with the breast.
"We at Sasol accept that all art is ultimately about looking at naked women," he told the media this morning.
"There is nothing more natural than a nice big breast pinned up on a cubicle wall or in a workshop, or slipped into your desk drawer."
He added that he was "obviously talking about a picture of a breast and not a real breast" as it would contravene health and safety regulations to pin a real breast to a cubicle wall.
However, he said, the penis featured in the photograph had been too much for many at Sasol's head office.
"For most of our male employees the penis represents frustration, disappointment and failure," said Botha.
"And for our female employees it pretty much means the same."
He said that Sasol would continue to sponsor the New Signatures competition to help identify and nurture artistic talent, but hoped that artists would enter more appropriate pieces next year.
"Obviously we're not going to dictate form and content," said Botha. "But if entrants are unsure, perhaps a useful guideline might be to aim at the sort of thing that the members of our Board have in their homes."
He said these included bronze sculptures of leopards drinking at watering holes, photo-realistic paintings of lovable black urchins playing soccer, "and obviously lots of stuff by the doyen of bespoke domestic art, Carol Boyes".
"In fact we are hoping that Carol enters Sasol New Signatures next year," he added. "Maybe with a big set of salad spoons that can represent the past and the future of South Africa, coming together to load the lettuce of harmony and the feta cheese of forgiveness onto the Boardmans crockery of democracy.
"Or something lekker arty like that."
Labels: contemporary art, richard strydom, sasol, south african art
posted by Robert Sloon at 10:42 AM
6 Comments:
ahhahahahah wonderful.
Industrial accident ?
As an expedient creation of the apartheid regime Sasol has absolutely no moral high ground to occupy aside perhaps from standing on the bloodstained coffers that contained the development capital, tossed their way by 1970's Nationalist administration, to build Secunda. No amount of associating with or distancing themselves from the fine arts will ever launder this aspect of their history.
Never-mind the fact that the Fischer-Tropsch process that Sasol use to turn coal into petrol was perfected by the Nazis in the second world war to fuel the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe because of commodity isolation, another case of aping of the Nazi fascists by an organ of the apartheid regime? (ref: http://www.slate.com/id/2152036/)
If you look at this extract from Sasol's current website you can see how they have tried to whitewash over their expedient genesis in this glib piece of PR copy
... because South Africa did not have crude oil reserves,the country's balance of payments had to be protected against increasing crude oil imports. After many years of research and international negotiations, the South African Coal Oil and Gas Corporation was formed in 1950. (ref: http://www.sasol.com/sasol_internet/frontend/navigation.jsp?navid=700006&rootid=2)
The sentence in bold should read 'it's fascist regime had to be protected from commodity isolation so that it could remain mobile and continue killing people whose opinions were at odds with it's own'
While there is transformation at management level at Sasol today, there is still an unacceptably high human cost in industrial accidents as part of it's production. As such Sasol remains a symptom of apartheid, that is not yet entirely cured, and not a moral authority of any sort.
We wait with baited breath for you to tell us who has clean money, anon. 1.19. Spier/Hollard? ABSA? MTN? The government? All voracious cesspools for whom art performs a thinly-veiled PR function.
But, point taken: Sasol, with ABSA, represents the worst kind of corporate involvement in the arts: their exhibitions are unabashed attempts at sanitising their history, their human rights/safety record and their ecological profile.
The fact that a neo-conservative black elite now runs Sasol changes little about its politics: the 'transormation at management level' serves only to mask their function, which is ultimately to pour money into government coffers.
Check this out: www.mg.co.za/article/2008-07-04-sasol-the-tax-cow
The art scene is better off without them.
We wait with baited breath for you to tell us who has clean money, anon. 1.19. Spier/Hollard? ABSA? MTN? The government? All voracious cesspools for whom art performs a thinly-veiled PR function.
But, point taken: Sasol, with ABSA, represents the worst kind of corporate involvement in the arts: their exhibitions are unabashed attempts at sanitising their history, their human rights/safety record and their ecological profile.
The fact that a neo-conservative black elite now runs Sasol changes little about its politics: the 'transormation at management level' serves only to mask thecorporation's function, which is ultimately to pour money into government coffers.
Check this out: www.mg.co.za/article/2008-07-04-sasol-the-tax-cow
The art scene is better off without them.
Good old Kebble had the last of the clean money, didn't he? Isn't that why they shot him.
anon 1:19 (verse 2)
Haha, penis
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