The Big Read: A look outside the box

We had reached the bowels of the SABC mothership in Auckland Park and I realised that it wasn't an idle metaphor: these winding, anonymous corridors, dimly lit, full of distant sighs - perhaps stale air being pumped this way and that, perhaps the sound of soul-death - really did feel like intestines.

This was a place in which energy was relentlessly chewed and dissolved and digested and shunted, shunted, shunted, until it was squeezed out of a digital sphincter and splattered all over our television screens.

Our pitch had gone well. The executives hadn't seemed very interested in our show (a thing about weddings) but we had brought an actual wedding cake with us to woo them and it had been mostly devoured with cries of joy. Now we had brought the last few lumps of smeary cake down to the drama department to share the love, and it was here that we were confronted with an astonishing sign, stuck up in pride of place at the entrance.

Laminated, printed in large austere letters, it read: "The only thing worse than having a job is not having a job."

It rather surprised me because it seemed to suggest that the people paid by you and me to nurture the dramatic arts at our national broadcaster had the motivation of defeatist sloths and the creative twinkle of a spit bubble. But perhaps that poster has been removed in the two years since I saw it. Perhaps the denizens of that basement have been inspired by the story of former SABC executive Lulama Mokhobo. After all, she didn't have a job after 11 months in the post but still walked away with R8-million. So perhaps sometimes not having a job is pretty good too.

At the weekend, as I watched a superb performance at the Cape Town Fringe, I remembered those haunted corridors where creative dreams go to die and imagined what magic the Fringe's performers could conjure with a tiny fraction of the money flushed into the great sucking cesspit of despair that is the SABC. I wondered what our television and theatre might be like if instead of getting angry about a soap opera trade unionists got angry about arts budgets in general.

But then I imagined that kind of stuff we'd be watching if the state did in fact pump more money into the arts, and conceded that a lack of funding might have saved us from a host of unwatchable sophistications. For example, under the current austerity we're unlikely to have our tax rands fund a two-month run of a show in which a man in a papier-mâché sarcophagus made of the shredded collected works of Frantz Fanon stands in silence for four hours to protest the hegemony of discourse in post-colonial discourse. And surely this is a blessing.

Of course artists dream about getting more money from the state but none of the ones I know genuinely believes they'll get it or even feel entitled to it. Wishing you had funding is like wishing it wasn't quite so hot today: you don't actually expect the sun to cool to an ideal temperature just for you. Perhaps this is because artists (or at least the ones I know) create their work with a strong sense of the implausibility of it all; of just how unlikely it is that they manage to own their own souls in a world that forces so many of us to rent ourselves to uncaring, destructive tenants. They understand that nobody asked them to be an artist. They know that it is a calling, a compulsion, sometimes a curse - but always a luxury and a self-indulgence.

Perhaps artists also feel instinctively that the state represents power and that power is always deeply ambivalent about art. At its most monolithic and fundamentalist, power can only tolerate art that mirrors itself, and then in only one approved form: it wants one book, one script, one hymn sheet. It is suspicious of creative play because play confronts it with variation and speculation, and once people start speculating, well, it's only a matter of time until you're stuffing the last of the Krugerrands into the helicopter on the roof and screaming at the pilot to forget about the First Lady, she can take care of herself.

So who should support local artists? We should; because they support us when things are bad and because they give us pleasure, and, if nothing else, because it's fun to go out and watch a play or a concert. At best you'll be amazed and if it's a bad one, you'll have something to talk about for weeks. In the end the bottom line, as I learned at the SABC, is simple: the only thing worse than having bad art is having no art.