Goldblatt is failing his subjects

20 March 2017 - 10:55 By MARTIN HALL
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SPEAKING UP: Photographer David Goldblatt says the lack of an outcry from the art community about the vandalising of artworks is 'significant and tragic'
SPEAKING UP: Photographer David Goldblatt says the lack of an outcry from the art community about the vandalising of artworks is 'significant and tragic'
Image: ALON SKUY

David Goldblatt has been a witness to oppression since 1948 when, as an 18-year-old, he first started photographing the everydayness of apartheid.

Now he has decided to move his archive of negatives and prints from the University of Cape Town to Yale University, as an act of protest. While Goldblatt’s legal rights are clear, the political ethics are more complex.

When a person’s reputation is built on capturing the denial of rights to others, is there not an obligation to the subject of the artist’s gaze; to their memory and legacy?

Is the artist the sole owner of his work? What of his obligation to his subjects, to their rights in memory? Goldblatt’s career began in the ye a r the National Party came to power with a commitment to enforced racial segregation — apartheid. He describes himself as a “self-appointed observer and critic of the society into which I was born”.

He has won numerous awards and accolades, including being the first South African to have a solo exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The point of principle, and the reason for the potential shipping of his collection to the US, is that UCT is no longer upholding and defending the rights of the artist: in the official announcement, “freedom of expression, artistic freedom and rights of artists”.

While Goldblatt has declined to comment, this is assumed to have been prompted by the notorious incident in February last year when protesting students took down works of art on public display on the campus and burnt them. Since then, UCT has taken down many paintings and put them in storage.

In all its statements on these events, the university has unequivocally condemned the destruction of works of art and infringements against freedom of expression. UCT has an open and unfenced campus that is difficult to defend and police; paintings have been taken down to protect them as student protests have continued. Goldblatt’s own work is a research collection stored in the university archives; it has not been in danger.

All art is a complex relationship between artist and subject. This is particularly so with photography. This relationship is accentuated when the theme is conquest, colony and empire and the ways in which these legacies continue to shape the present. The anonymous subjects of oppression are selected, framed and caught in an instant.

In Susan Sontag’s memorable insight, “all photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

Goldblatt’s formidable reputation has been built on memento mori of the suffering of the oppressed and the incomprehension of the oppressor. He has caught countless subjects in his lens, almost all unnamed, silent and now dead. Seen in this way, the point of principle that leads him to prefer Yale to UCT seems asymmetrical, one-sided — about his rights as an artist, about his right to artistic freedom, his right to freedom of expression. Today South Africa’s universities are caught up in the biggest crisis of a lifetime.

A core issue is: what should be taught and researched? How do outmoded concepts of knowledge perpetuate the legacies of the past? What forms of knowledge are appropriate for the future? A new scholarship will be forged from these debates.

Goldblatt’s life’s work — his witness to the full span of the apartheid years — should be the legacy of the direct descendants of those he photographed and whose participation in his work brought him fame. At Yale, his collection will be a small gem in a vast treasury. At UCT the absence of his work will be an act of erasure and impoverishment.

  •  Hall is emeritus professor in the Graduate School of Business at UCT
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