“All the contradictions of looking: discomfort, sadness, pain, and radical joy.”
This is a line from the first piece I ever wrote for ArtThrob, a profile of Zanele Muholi that was assigned to me by then-editors Chad Rossouw and Tim Leibbrandt when I implored them to take a chance on me, an American exchange student with some time on their hands due to the Fees Must Fall university shutdown of 2016. More than seven (!) years later, writing this – my final letter as Editor before I step down and hand over to the immensely talented Nkgopoleng Moloi – I am struck by the attitude I have towards this sentence.
On the one hand, I cringe at it, because to me it reeks of inexperience. Discomfort, sadness, pain – did I really need all those words, so alike in tenor, to say what I needed to say? And radical joy – what a student-y phrase! My temptation is to clip it, to whittle it down to its essence, to make the contradiction clear by placing two monosyllables on either side of the conjunctive mirror – pain and joy. Noticing this, I realise how much my two and a half years as Editor have irrevocably altered the way I think. Throughout my tenure, I have often joked that I am less an editor than I am a barber. That is, I am not an editor for whom style or subject matters much. Academic or experimental, lyrical or spare, critical or complimentary – my job is not to judge these variations against a rubric of what I deem to be publishable content, but to take them as they are. My job, as I understood it, was to rinse, to snip, to make the text shine. I am grateful for each and every one of the writers who trusted me in this process, even if at times it seemed like I wielded my editorial hand more like a scalpel than scissors. The essays we worked on together (one hundred and seventy-six, by my count) may not have always lived up to the expectations of the madding crowd – who were seldom shy to tell me what the site could do with more or less of – but to me, they were remarkable in their variety, each writer given the platform to explore their own interests, to hone their voice.
Which brings me to the other hand – the former half of my old sentence – which I cannot help but look upon with fondness: all the contradictions of looking. This phrase seems to me to contain the kernel of what I have hoped to accomplish in a career devoted to writing about art. It is an odd devotion, this world of contemporary art, one that shores up a host of contradictions. Is there any other industry where the billionaire class rubs shoulders with the radicals over complimentary glasses of wine? Where the friction between aesthetics, ethics and economy is so decidedly combustible? Where a single image can be looked at one way as representative of all the world’s beauty – then, from another angle, representative of all the world’s bloodshed? In times like ours, times of fracture, depravity and upheaval – times which are really not that different than any other time on earth, except for the speed and scale at which violence is exercised – I sometimes fail to believe in the value of art. And yet I return to art, and I continue to write about it. I try to sit within all the contradictions of looking.
For that, I have the artists to thank. It’s trite, but true: each artwork I encounter teaches me in some way how to look anew. I have often thought about writing as an act of gratitude in this regard. You, the artist, have lent me your eyes; let me, through these words, lend you mine. My friend Shona van der Merwe once made a remark that I’ve recited often and kept close to my heart: “Writing is what consecrates what we hope to achieve as makers and curators.” It is a way to receive the many layers of care that went into the presentation of an artwork – from conception to production, curation to exhibition, reception to collection, and yes, everything in between – noting all of that and saying, I see you. I see the time and the love. At the very least, I want to document it. At best, I want to honour it – with my own time, my own love. At the risk of sounding fanciful, this, for me, is what it means to write about art.
I am grateful that ArtThrob has been, and continues to be, a home for such a venture. Thank you to all those – past, present and future – who lent their time and their love.
Adieu,
Keely Shinners
