A few years ago I wrote a column in which I borrowed a few thoughts about Moshekwa Langa’s Fugitive from a friend of mine, a Jesuit priest, with whom I’d visited the exhibition.
At the time, my companion professed ignorance about the visual arts but proceeded to offer a series of remarkable insights into Langa’s collages. He did this by the combination of careful observation and inductive reasoning that comes from 15 years of training in the philosophical methods of Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius of Loyola.
Now, no longer anonymous, Father Matthew Charlesworth of the Jesuit Institute of SA has outed himself: he is an arts critic dressed in clerical clothing. In an essay for Spotlight.Africa, he has written a detailed response to Guy Ferrer’s sculptural series T.O.L.E.R.A.N.C.E., now installed outside the chapel at St Stithians College in Johannesburg.
The work consists of nine large bronzes that each depict a letter in figural form. The sculptures are presented as “emissaries”, which French artist Ferrer was moved to create (or perhaps receive) in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and which appeal for “brotherhood, reciprocal respect and kindness” between people who have different beliefs.
Since then, casts of T.O.L.E.R.A.N.C.E. have become permanent installations in Paris, Montpellier and Abu Dhabi. The series that has been loaned to St Stithians was brought to SA by the Everard Read Gallery and was previously displayed at the Hilton Arts Festival and Rand Merchant Bank’s headquarters.
I was fortunate to attend the recent unveiling event at which Charlesworth and gallerist Mark Read presented contrasting approaches to the work.
Charlesworth gave a close interpretation of the sculptures, drawing on a variety of religious iconographic traditions to identify possible connections between the different faiths that they invoke.
Read cautioned against seeking categorical associations, but having obtained Ferrer’s reluctant permission to share the artist’s personal views, he nonetheless identified Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Shinto-Confucian and animist resonances.
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It seemed very easy — under a rising crescent moon, on a beautiful still evening, on the immaculate campus of one of SA’s best schools — to affirm the value of tolerance. Who could be more tolerant than me?
But then I learnt that there have been pockets of mild complaint about the sculpture. An intolerant rejection of an appeal for tolerance, you might say. We’re in tricky territory here. How to respond? The spirit of T.O.L.E.R.A.N.C.E. demands that one tolerates even the intolerant.
Fortunately it isn’t up to me. The best school principals, like the best members of the clergy, have infinite reserves of patience. They see their role as pastoral, which means attending to all the members of the flock and finding ways to love even the unlovable ones. It helps if one’s sense of vocation is primarily pedagogical; in an educational context, ignorance is not a burden but an opportunity.
Indeed, when I put my own teacherly hat on, I can accommodate all opinions, world views, belief systems — including those that tend towards or emanate from whacko conspiracy theories, narrow self-interest and even bigotry. Because the contract that frames my relationship with a student places me, the teacher, in the position of guide and companion on their road to enlightenment.
But outside the classroom? As I get older I have less and less capacity to deal with people who have idiotic, indefensible and frankly dangerous political or ideological stances. Trump supporters, Brexiteers, xenophobes, racists, sexists, homophobes, religious fundamentalists, climate denialists …. I have no desire to listen to their perspectives, to “understand” them, to be compassionate, or to attempt to persuade them from their views. Let them dwell in their folly, let them eat their own tails, let them die out slowly as a new world order is built by the young and the progressive and the open-minded.
Just, ahem, one problem. The long, happy-sad story of human history shows that this strategy has never worked. There is no utopia on the horizon; there is only the prospect of dystopia if we allow the already-intolerant and the barely tolerable to have their views confirmed and weaponised by Big Men, microphones, money and media manipulation.
T.O.L.E.R.A.N.C.E. It’s our only option. I’ll try it if you will.
