Helen of Troy’s beauty, according to the famous lines in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, "launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium". Helen of Cape Town’s Twitter account has launched a thousand think-pieces and resulted in a public roasting that could be career-ending.
I am loath to reproduce what has been said about her latest foray. Much of the criticism rightly aimed at her makes the mistake of accepting the premise of her colonial apologetics: that the artefacts of history can be divided — the phenomena we live with, among and through in the world today — into categories of "good" and "bad".
One cannot simply say: infrastructure is good, violence is bad. Transport infrastructure made possible by exploitative labour practices is neither good nor bad; it is what it is, inseparable from an irreducibly complex South African and global colonial history. Ditto piped water.
Their contested pasts aside, both of her bizarre examples are also linked to anxieties about the future — the consequences of unsustainable consumption, pollution and other forms of environmental damage.
One cannot simply say: technology is good, oppression is bad; or jurisprudence is good, the theft of land and resources is bad; or, universities are good, the suppression of indigenous knowledge systems is bad. These things are mutually constituted — one makes possible the other. They cannot be disentangled.
SA’s legal system for instance was built to formalise and perpetuate structural racism. Whatever is egalitarian or just in SA’s courts today is a direct response to colonial "jurisprudence". Yet the law remains tainted by that historical burden and it is constrained to operate within the material legacies of colonialism and apartheid.
This is cause neither for celebration and pride, nor for despair and nihilism. Instead, it should serve as a reminder to guard against the reductive, moralising language of "good" and "bad".
Likewise, SA’s arts scene has lately been forced to grapple with the inadequacy of perceptions that artistry is automatically on the side of the "good". The conviction of photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa for the murder of sex worker Nokuphila Kumalo is a sobering reminder of this. It is reckless to place Mthethwa in a rogues’ gallery of murderous artists alongside the likes of Caravaggio. The temptation in doing so is to separate the "good" art from the "bad" artist — but this is an abuse of the truism that works of art can be appreciated independently of what is known or unknown about their creators.
Instead, it is important to acknowledge a disquieting reality: art is produced, bought and sold in an international market that valorises and, indeed, monetises notoriety.
Mthethwa’s work may become more highly prized because of, and not despite, his reprehensible behaviour.
With this in mind, artists cannot lay claim to any kind of moral high ground.
A very different manifestation of this ambiguity can be found in the renewed controversy over the Fleur du Cap Theatre Awards that last week were the subject of protest on the grounds that the list of nominees (and eventual winners) showed a minimal commitment to diversity and merely served to reinscribe an already privileged whiteness.
The 2017 numbers seem to confirm as much: more than 70% of those recognised by the Fleur du Caps were white.
Those who sought to defend the awards shifted the blame to the lack of transformation in the Cape Town theatre industry more generally. Insofar as this suggests a modicum of consensus about the problem, what does it mean for the individuals whose work emerged from and was celebrated in such a context? Are they damned? Of course not. Is the institutional recognition of their blood, sweat and talent less gratifying to them? Perhaps. If so, this is probably appropriate.
SA’s artists, like their fellow-citizens, have a responsibility to reject the facile paradigm of "good" and "bad" that would encourage swinging from certainty to certainty: from self-congratulation to guilt.
Rather, there is a need to learn to sit with discomfort — to make this integral to the process of creation.
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