Dildos, foreskins and matric art: should Cohen and Pienaar have been dumped?

Ah, the universe works in mysterious ways. Just the other day a South African friend and colleague and I were wondering what on earth happened to Steven Cohen. And lo and behold, here he is again, complaining because, along with Peet Pienaar, he has apparently been dumped from a list of artists recommended for inclusion in the matric art syllabus.

The memories are flooding back. Those were the heady days of the 1990s, when South Africans wriggled out of the shackles of apartheid-era censorship, chucked off their clothes and ran naked down the street — metaphorically speaking, for most of us at least.

Those were the days when Steven Cohen put penises on plates before moving on to sticking dildos up his bum, when Steers ripped off Thelma and Louise to sell burgers and Kaolin Thompson, the chick with the name that’s an ingredient in diarrhoea medicine, who sang in that band first became famous for her art project, which featured an ashtray moulded to represent the pudenda of a black woman.

My graduation in 1997 was mildly disrupted by a sociology student — he had previously had his penis pierced in front of an audience — who showed up in drag, much to the consternation of the ushers. He was eventually allowed to walk up on stage to greet Justice Richard Goldstone, complete with a huge, purple, toilet-shaped wig on his head.

I’m feeling so nostalgic, I’m almost tempted to write an essay about Luce Irigaray.

The revelation that Steven Cohen is still with us, and is performing in France, intrigued me no end. How interesting that he should re-emerge in a context like this one. Art was one of my matric subjects; we studied Cecil Skotnes, William Kentridge and Penny Siopis with a nod to a couple of others without going into great detail. Art was my favourite subject — it was very popular at school because it was an opportunity to listen to The Doors and draw for two hours — and I learned a lot from art history. In fact, of all my matric subjects, it is probably the one I remember best, largely because it turned out to be the most relevant over the years. (Yes, yes, I know I went and did drama and then ended up in advertising, so my case is an unusual one.)

So, I have an interest here. But mainly an awful lot of questions, to which, in most cases at any rate, I lack the answers. To at least try to work this out, I have addressed the situation from three vantage points.

Firstly, are the works of Cohen and Pienaar worthy of study because they are extreme, or because they are good? Do they have genuine artistic merit? Are they outstanding beyond the issues that they highlight? Elsewhere in the syllabus, art students study Giotto, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Monet and Picasso because they are considered great; they do not study their more obscure contemporaries.

If an understanding of performance art in South Africa is left wanting by the exclusion of Pienaar and Cohen then yes, there is a problem. If not — if there are other artists just as worthy of study — then no.

Secondly, are Cohen and Pienaar suitable subjects for study by matric art students? During my master’s year I encountered the work of a New York performance artist who stuffed candied yams up her bum. There was also Annie Sprinkle, who is famous for inserting a speculum up what Heat magazine and others have taken to referring to as her “vajayjay” and inviting audience members to have a look. All par for the course in a postgraduate gender studies course, but I am not sure I would inflict that sort of thing on seventeen-year-olds from a variety of cultural backgrounds, who have not had the benefit of several years of Freud, Lacan and Foucault.

Just as I would think twice about having them study Andres Serrano’s latest exhibition. The artist notorious for Piss Christ has spent time photographing various types of faeces (including his own), blowing the resulting images up to eight feet high and apparently including the smell for the elucidation of viewers. Just the thing for the living room wall, then.

So, finally, is this a matter of censorship in the strict sense of the word? If you are a student at a school that elects not to write to your classmates’ parents for permission to teach Cohen or Pienaar, then from your point of view, it is. Then again, just because it’s out there doesn’t mean it has to be in the matric art syllabus.

In closing, I will confess that, when it comes to conceptual art, I have long since lost the ability to tell the difference between the Emperor naked and clothed. Now, if schools could teach their students that, they will have given them something really useful.