Mandela 'tribute' is advertising masquerading as art

There is a well-worn South African anecdote about a certain Mrs Cohen, who lived in a sea-facing flat on Cape Town’s Beach road during the 1970s. Mrs Cohen was known for her frequent complaints about the view from her balcony, from which she was able to see the goings-on at Graaff’s Pool, a secluded enclave accessed via a path over the rocks, and a vestige for nude bathers.

Graaff’s Pool had an inward view too, as a rendezvous for gay men. The pool reached the height of its popularity during the era in which the immorality act amendments made gay sex illegal. Men would tan naked, take an icy plunge, and pursue other activities that scandalised Mrs Cohen, apparently minding her own business on her balcony.

After repeated complaints, the police eventually visited Mrs Cohen’s apartment to investigate, where they discovered that they could indeed see naked men tanning –but only if perched on a table, necks craning. The bathers were not in Mrs Cohen’s direct line of sight. Instead, it was Mrs Cohen who was exposed as the lascivious voyeur.

Fellini meets Fifa

This is a story, partly, about the Sea Point promenade in Cape Town and about its vast potential as a public space and site of encounters of difference. It is also a story about what is illicit and what is permissible; what is private and what is public; and about how the boundaries between these two have shifted over the course of South Africa’s history. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and it is now common to see same-sex couples being openly – and legally – affectionate while taking a stroll down the promenade.

— Calendar Everyday (@LianiWest) November 7, 2014

Friday 7 November, 14:30 - Eye-rolling #art54 #publicart pic.twitter.com/A1rnOV19QT

At the heart of a city rhapsodised for its beauty, the promenade is Cape Town’s most successful public space. In the city’s enclave of privilege it’s easy to feel like an extra in a grandiose production: Fellini meets Fifa. And it is easier, still, for those who do not live in these areas to be alienated by the private security companies that monitor them. Cape Town’s public spaces are few and many of its top attractions that are billed as public – the Waterfront, for example – are privately owned, closely surveilled and quick to eject those regarded as undesirable.

The promenade is located in an area of privilege and is avowedly political, connected to the Cape’s history of dispossession and segregation. Its beaches and its famed public pool, the Pavilion, were reserved for “Whites Only” under apartheid’s separate amenities act, and the space bears this legacy. This fact has been foregrounded by the Social Justice Coalition in its campaign for better sanitation in Khayelitsha. In 2011, the group organised a long queue outside the promenade’s public toilets to emphasise discrepancies in sanitation between affluent and poor residents of the city.

A space of public encounter

But the promenade is not merely a display case for the political legacy of apartheid. It can also be viewed as a place which proves that at least some components of South Africa’s national experiment in diversity and multiculturalism are working. It exemplifies not only what is fixed about the nation’s past, but what is dynamic and progressive about its present.

Official recognition of the promenade as one of the city’s most powerful spaces is the reason for its selection as a pilot site for public art in Cape Town. A collective called Art54 was established to co-ordinate this project between city authorities and participating artists.

The results of this collaboration include numerous sculptures, paintings and photographic installations dispersed along the walkway, beginning with the public toilets. Under the auspices of Art54, a local painter has transformed the toilet walls from bland, beige concrete into a gorgeous canvass: street art meets Rothko.

A mile or so down the promenade, the Soft Walls photographic exhibition provides intimate glimpses into the lives of refugees and migrants to South Africa. Its technique – to give the cameras to project participants and display their images – encapsulates the ideals of participatory art.

In between these two artworks is the Rhino sculpture – an installation making smart use of space to challenge notions of proximity and distance and to confront us, visually, with the disappearance and dismemberment of wild animals.

Not everyone will share my affinity with these artworks. Many who wish the promenade to be left as a walkway – for which the main attraction is the view – will loathe them. These three works do, however, fulfil at least some of the requirements of public art: they seek to interact the environment (through shape and colour) and to focus attention on social issues (in this case, species extinction and xenophobia). Most importantly, however, their objective is not private or corporate gain. The art exists for social good. In this way, at the very least, the works honour their privileged position.

Advertising masquerading as art

Not so the latest addition to the promenade’s public art collection. Disguised as a tribute to Nelson Mandela, this hulking pile of plastic and metal shaped as a pair of Ray-Ban wayfarers is corporate advertising masquerading as public art. Nobody is fooled.

The artist’s claim of a link between Mandela’s vision for democracy, represented through a pair of designer sunglasses, is not just tenuous and trite it is a violation of Mandela’s memory. Pity the researcher who had to trawl through the archive to locate an image of Mandela wearing a pair of sunglasses resembling Ray-Bans, as featured in the work’s mounted explanation.

If the point of the work is to hone the focus on Robben Island, as the explanation claims, it could just as well have been installed outside the Koeberg nuclear plant. As a scion of apartheid military-industrial power, Koeberg was potentially a far greater source of indignation for struggle leaders on Robben Island. But, in reality, the aim of the “sculpture” is not to hone the focus on South Africa’s history of political oppression. Instead, it is to garner as much corporate exposure for Ray-Ban through usurping one of the most popular, beautiful and widely photographed spaces in Cape Town.

It is not an artwork but an advertisement.

— S.A.X (@JustSakh) November 10, 2014

Satirical take on the Mandela Ray Ban statue! pic.twitter.com/Vtpn5gtRFU

In consenting to its installation, the City of Cape Town has made itself complicit in the corporate abuse of public land and in the hijacking of one of our greatest national icons for private gain.

The promenade has long been a site of challenging encounters – visual and experiential. But in offering up its hallowed lands for corporate profit, Cape Town authorities have enabled a new form of illicit engagement.

There are conflicting accounts of the length of time that the Ray-Ban advert will be allowed to remain. My guess is that it won’t be long before the public responds in kind to its treatment by Ray-Ban: with kitsch defacement.