The subject & the self(ie)
We scrum like paparazzo to snap and send out images of art works, broadcasting proof of having seen the unique real thing.
Among the many, many works gathered on William Kentridge’s astonishing pair of exhibitions in Cape Town is a sculpture of a largerthan-life-size schnozz. The aquiline nose, which balances on a tripod, traces its origin back to a Russian short story about a self-confidant nose that takes leave of its owner.
The context of Nikolai Gogol’s fabulous satire of cosmopolitan manners, The Nose — published in 1836, a momentous decade in the birth of photography — is worth pausing on. Russia was an empire. Exaggerated facial hair was fashionable among late adopters. Petty bureaucrats from the provinces preened like little emperors.
Another striking similarity between then and now relates to the manners of the chattering classes, those people who spend their free time at ritzy museums, art fairs and galleries, snapping and posting. “Everyone’s mind was, at that period, bent upon the marvellous,” writes Gogol.
And so it remains. Like the trendy crowds who thronged stylish parts of St Petersburg to marvel at racy drawings and “the action of magnetism”, last week eminent dandies and respected ladies flocked to Zeitz Mocaa and Norval Foundation to see the “phenomenon” of Kentridge explained “in an edifying and instructive tenor”, to quote Gogol.
Of course, our leisure habits have immeasurably changed since the 1830s, when French-Brazilian Hércules Florence, Englishman Henry Fox Talbot and Frenchman Louis Daguerre all made their pioneering advances in photography.
Everything lived and experienced is now also recorded.
Taking to Twitter after the opening of the exhibition Why Should I Hesitate: Putting drawings to work, billionaire German collector Jochen Zeitz blandly thanked the artist.
But Twitter, like Facebook, is prehistoric technology. Who writes these days? On Instagram, aggregated around #williamkentridge, is a mosaic of photos showing a well-heeled public posing with Kentridge’s works as backdrop. This is how we marvel and wonder nowadays.
Among the many wall texts at Norval Foundation, one is instructive. “Share the experience,” it reads. “Photography welcome.” Over at Zeitz Mocaa, a similar regime prevails, though both have a ban on flash photography.
Both these museums opened after the advent of camera-enabled smartphones and social media, but the will to photograph things predates Instagram.
In 2009, when Banksy exhibited in the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, a fusty regional museum in the southwest of England, photography was encouraged. Looking back at the photographs I took of punters photographing the Bristol-born artist’s one-liner art pieces, what intrigues is the technology. Nokia outpaced iPhone. Facebook was the go-to platform to share images.
In 1991, when the internet in SA meant Rhodes University’s lone IP address, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town developed a policy on photography. As with museums elsewhere at the time, its ban on photography was linked to copyright and profit. Photographers republishing images of art often did so for financial gain.
“We allowed students to photograph and visitors to take snapshots,” recalls Marilyn Martin, who was the museum’s director from 1990 to 2008. “When mobile phones came into the world it became impossible to monitor and the images would at any rate not be suitable for reproduction.”
Similar considerations have prompted institutions elsewhere to relax their policies. In places like the Louvre in Paris and Museum of Modern Art in New York, where photography is allowed, visitors resemble scrums of paparazzo photographers as they vie to snap Da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.
Not all museums are okay with the selfie preening and slack-jawed gawking associated with smartphones. Inside Madrid’s Prado Museum, which houses extraordinary treasures
by Hieronymus Bosch and Goya, uniformed guards ritually blurt: “No photography!”
The same holds at the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, in out-of-the-way Takamatsu, where curators try — but also fail — to police snappers. I saw visitors here sneak illicit photographs, as they do in the Prado.
“The camera has become a prosthesis for looking,” wrote Jonathan Jones, an art critic for the Guardian, in 2015. “We don’t need to concentrate on works of art and remember them: a smartphone can do that for us.”
Well yes, but not entirely an original thought. A year earlier, at Cape Town’s Open Book festival, photo-interested essayist and sometime novelist Geoff Dyer quipped that we have outsourced memory. Dyer was loosely quoting his mentor, art critic John Berger, who in 1978 wrote: “The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.”
It is by all accounts a happy release. Be it in Lagos, Paris or Joburg, looking at art with a fancy-pants camera that you can use to broadcast your sophistication is unavoidable.
But that doesn’t explain why we still choose to gather and look in amazement at instances of singular expression. For instance, a nose on a tripod.