Two weeks ago Business Day ran a piece by Hans Pienaar about Africa’s Fearless Girl, the sculpture commissioned by Rand Merchant Bank to join the expanding collection of public artworks at its Sandton headquarters. To use the parlance of arts criticism, you could say that Pienaar damns the statue with faint praise.
His article ends on an upbeat note, affirming that if Marieke Prinsloo-Rowe’s take on a minor American icon encourages South African girls “to brave the very male world of finance, it can only be a good thing”. But the rest of the text suggests that Pienaar is enamoured neither with the sculpture, nor with its companion (an RMB lion that has been through an “egg slicer”), nor indeed with the sponsor’s claims about the “African” and the “feminine” in the banking sector.
I have come to realise that I am less interested in passing judgment on individual works of art and more interested in the wider intellectual, political and aesthetic discussions to which they contribute. So it is with the Fearless Girl.
Coincidentally, since the launch of the African incarnation in Johannesburg a fortnight ago, the fortunes of the original have fluctuated: first it disappeared from its position on the Bowling Green at the southern end of Broadway, then it reappeared a few blocks up in front of the New York Stock Exchange building. The official reason for the move is that hordes of tourists taking photos of themselves with the sculpture were further slowing Manhattan’s already dire traffic.
It may seem like a promotion, but the whole point about Fearless Girl was that she was staring down the enormous Charging Bull sculpted by Italian-American artist Arturo Di Modica and installed in 1989 when the Wall Street district was fuelled by machismo, egotism, cocaine, treachery, self-importance and the support of a public that was wowed by its apparent glamour.
Not much had changed by the time Kristen Visbal completed Fearless Girl in 2017.
Of course, Di Modica took umbrage at the aspersions cast on his artistic integrity and the intended symbolism of the bull. He threatened to sue — so the move to the Stock Exchange building is a victory of sorts for him. Still, the rest of the story of New York City’s Fearless Girl reinforces the truism that intentionality is overrated; the best-laid plains of mice and (especially) men often go awry.
The company behind the Fearless Girl project, State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), claimed that itwanted to challenge gender imbalances in the financial sector, focusing on the paltry number of women on company boards as the most telling measure. Surprise, surprise: SSGA was hardly better than those it was criticising. In October 2017 it had to pay a $5m settlement following a dispute over gender pay discrepancies.
If corporate hypocrisy is too obvious a cliché to dwell on here, it is nonetheless worth considering critiques of the Fearless Girl campaign on the basis of what has been called “corporate feminism”, a feminism lite that does not fundamentally challenge the patriarchal world of finance or the deep-seated misogyny and political or economic inequality of the societies that it props up.
And yet — removed from this context, does the statue’s ongoing popularity among women visiting NYC not give it some credence as a feminist symbol?
As for Africa’s Fearless Girl: given that sponsorship and investment by South African businesses is a major force in keeping this country’s arts (and artists) afloat, I’m inclined to be forgiving of the imperfections in company “messaging” and brand promotion on this score.
A final twist in the tale, however, is the tragicomic bit of agitprop that occurred on the pavement outside our own stock exchange on Wednesday. The police were called in — the question remains, by whom? — to remove serial controversialist Ayanda Mabulu along with his latest work: a variation on the in flagrante delicto theme, this time featuring Markus Jooste.
Mabulu is crass and clumsy, but his anger at the Steinhoff saga is justified. His paintings are on the opposite end of the arts spectrum to RMB’s Fearless Girl. Is this an irresolvable ideological impasse? I don’t think so. There is lots of middle ground.
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