The baby boomers are getting it in the neck at the moment. Millennials and Generation Z have coined the ultimate put-down in “OK, boomer” . As the Urban Dictionary succinctly puts it, this retort comes in handy when someone over the age of 55 has said something patently incorrect and “you can’t even begin to explain why he’s wrong, because that would be deconstructing decades of misinformation and ignorance, so you just brush it off and say OK”.
At this point I should add that some of my best friends are boomers. Two of them are my parents. But as a member of Generation X, I incline towards the anti-boomer brigade. Baby boomers are defined as those born between 1946 and 1964. Donald J Trump was born in 1946, and Boris Johnson in 1964; need one say more?
Well, yes — because, though most of the people who brought these dangerous idiots to power and continue to support them (and others like them around the world) are in the same age demographic, the boomers too were young once. In the US, they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. In Britain, they swung the sixties. In SA, they fought against apartheid. The Class of 1976, lest we forget, were all late boomers; if Youth Day signifies anything today, it should be intergenerational solidarity.
Boomers must surely recall the words of their great troubadour, Bob Dylan: the times they are a-changin’.
Yet, as we know all too well, struggle credit doesn’t last indefinitely. Just ask uber-boomer Helen Zille, whose attempts to cite her anti-apartheid credentials as a means of claiming postapartheid authority continue to backfire because she has so little understanding of the country today. Boomers must surely recall the words of their great troubadour, Bob Dylan: the times they are a-changin’. They haven’t stopped changin’ since 1964, when that famous album was released.
Dylan, though not a boomer himself (born in 1941, he is technically one of the so-called Silent Generation), is an admirable model for those who are prone to complain that things ain’t what they used to be. The enigmatic songster has morphed and shape-shifted many times over the course of his career, which has lasted more than half a century. He has been, by turns, behind the times and ahead of his time, but there is no doubt that he has shaped the global cultural landscape as few other musicians have done.
At art.well gallery in Chartwell, north of Johannesburg, Dylan’s influence on dozens of SA artists is on display in Oh Mercy. This exhibition is the third in a series curated by Gordon Froud, forging unexpected links between iconic North American singer-songwriters and local visual artists (the previous iterations were Tom Waits for No Man in 2013 and, before that, the Leonard Cohen tribute Altered Pieces in 2011).
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Froud’s curatorial method was simple: he presented an open brief to artists to select a song that inspired in them a conceptual or aesthetic response. In some cases, the interpretations are literal and, indeed, material — such as Tanisha Bhana’s Blowing in the Wind 1 and 2, suspended resin compounds that catch the light exquisitely and render something of the sad, beautiful mystery in Dylan’s best-known tune.
Other works attest to the more explicit and specific forms of protest registered in albums of the 1960s and 70s. Froud’s own contribution to the exhibition, a pair of sculptures from his “Masters of War” series, evokes the horrors of the military-industrial complex against which Dylan directs such powerful bitterness in his song of that title.
Ruhan Janse van Vuuren’s sculpture Hurricane captures a moment of poise in a grotesque ballet: a hobbled Atlas-like figure stands, broken but not bent, holding up the impossible weight of a hippopotamus. Is this a vivid allegory to match Dylan’s depiction of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the black boxer who was wrongly imprisoned by a racist judicial system?
A number of the artists produce portraits of the singer himself. Though he has been a campaigner for social justice, Dylan has also — whether through the egotistical cultivation of a persona or simply as an inevitable consequence of his success — become something of a commodity. By acknowledging this, a handful of the works in Oh Mercy gesture towards a necessary iconoclasm.
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