The day the fountain turned red
by Robyn Sassen
Sunday April 25, the fountain in the newly named Nelson Mandela Square turns red. The shock, horror and taboo that this evoked was socially interesting, if not a tad predictable. The kids loved it, but security turned it off within a few seconds, for fear of poison and the other things that a red flowing fountain threatens. But the gesture evoked a whole rash of discursive interrogation.
Behind the scenes, this was an intervention by Marco Evaristti, one of three Danish artists participating in Sted//Place, an exhibition curated by Doris Bloom which opened toward the end of April at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and is enjoying a concurrent run in Bloemfontein.
While engaging with the issues associated with the sacrosanctity and of feeling comfortable in a particular place, Evaristti's motivation was not only central to the body of work he is currently developing, but a bit of a publicity stunt to spark interest in the arts in South Africa.
Its success remains interestingly debatable, and this is not so much an indictment of Evaristti's mischievous gesture, but perhaps of the local art aficionados and the general press. The 'so what?' response of so many publications is perhaps an indication that no one gets shocked by this kind of thing anymore.
In the mid 1990s, Steven Cohen strutted his stuff here with a work called Dog. The work comprised a costume which sarcastically made reference to many different kinds of dog who are subject to similar kinds of prejudice to humans. Like many of his other works, it was a pant-less piece and entailed him flick-flacking across the fountain's platform, somersaulting and otherwise showing his bum and other rude bits. People smiled weakly, some laughed excessively, some were even put off their expensive meals. Most, however, weren't even vaguely affected.
The question then remains: is interventionalist art passé, in this age of suicide bombing and other types of civil violence? Is the lay public no longer shocked by gestures which are surprising but do not directly touch their lives?
I went to the Square as much in response to an urgent press call as a sense of curiosity. When I arrived, it was all over, and the 'naughty' miscreants were having drinks. The artists pushed me, as I had a press card, to insist that the fountains be switched on again.I felt horribly uncomfortable diplomatically bullying one Frans Ledwaba into diplomatically bullying his own boss into doing this. I knew they wouldn't budge: the public's interest is closer to their hearts than the whims of an odd little stranger, who might have a destructive agenda under the surface. Of course, the question remained: Did the person who put the dye into the water have permission to do so?
Does it all boil down to legalities and bureaucracy? Had Evaristti asked for permission, would the gesture have been celebrated with more delight? Or with commercial pizzazz? If the colour wasn't red, would the turn of events have been less sudden and official? Evaristti told me that this gesture was in response to South Africa's ten years of democracy and that he was celebrating by constructing an image of pink beauty around that oddly proportioned new statue of Nelson Mandela, after whom the Square is now named.
Evaristti's current work is about dyeing all sorts of unforeseeably red things, red. The tip of Mont Blanc, a glacier in Antarctica. The red is food colouring called carmen. It's not poisonous, but is quite intense in its undiluted state. It does make things unequivocally yet transiently red. Part of Evaristti's gesture reveals a curious moral conundrum: he wanted to paint an elephant red in Bloemfontein. People showed indignation, outrage, and fury at the suggestion but still asked him to pay R50 000 for permission to do so.
So where does the line get drawn, and are we confronting a world where taboo is too common to be taboo any longer? Where people take things very seriously and are just not amused by surprise? The other question of course also remains: within a few minutes, the fountain was vomiting pink stuff and then translucent red stuff. It was potent and there was nothing subtle about it, but was it a radical gesture?
Red (even dark pink) immediately connotes blood to most of us. And blood brings with it a whole host of meaning and value. Thinking back to radical feminist gestures, I cannot help but wonder if anyone would bat an eyelid at someone like Carolee Schneemann these days (Schneemann, an American, performed a piece in the mid 70s entitled Inner Scroll which found her unravelling and reading a text that she'd rolled up and inserted into her vagina.
So yes, Evaristti's gesture was news, but none of the dailies wanted to publish the image and it didn't even appear on national news, even after the artists had delivered the .mpeg to the news studios by hand. This is not because it's too scary, but because the perception remains that the South African public has other fish to fry.
