It’s the end of a scorching summer’s day in Cape Town; the temperature nudged even higher here at the Iziko South African National Gallery by fiery controversy. By 9pm the mercury is finally dipping thanks to a misty breeze. Outside the arty party crowd is making a serious dent in the wine stock on this opening night destined for the history books.
Meanwhile, in the opposite direction away from the happy mess, a picture of such delicate intimacy: slowly shuffling down the stairs, the frail artist in the middle, accompanied by the critic who calls him his “mother”, and the gallerist who always has his back – the three, Charl Blignaut, Steven Cohen and Lerato Bereng have seen drama over the previous 24 hours.
It all started less than a day before the December 11 6pm official opening of Cohen’s retrospective, “Long Life”. The provocateur’s 200-piece exhibition – installations, performance documentation, objects, images, films and ephemera – offers a chronological survey of his life and work.
Cohen’s radical art has brought to light that which lies on the margins of society, beginning with his own identity as a gay, Jewish, white, South African man.
On Wednesday evening just after 10pm an e-mail from Iziko’s senior management landed in exhibition curator Anthea Buys’s inbox. The museum had decided to remove certain pieces from the exhibition.
To call this an 11th hour intervention is an understatement. Cohen was officially invited to present a retrospective at the museum in a letter dated 1 November 2022. Buys was invited as curator in February last year.
“When I took up my role in the project in early 2024,” Buys says, “I made the contents of the exhibition available for perusal via video files, images, texts, and websites – most of the artworks included in the exhibition are already visible online on Cohen’s website.”
It’s Thursday morning on the opening day. I’ve arrived early for a 10am media tour. There’s chaos in the exhibition space. Bereng and four colleagues from Stevenson Gallery, who represent Cohen, are covering works with black cloths.
A shattered-looking Buys says she and Cohen negotiated that “we would cover the contested works with cloth instead of removing them, because to remove them would have been to capitulate without discussion”.
She adds: “I’ll be honest, it came as a shock to me, and I’ve been very emotional about this this morning.”
Eleven pieces from two bodies of work are concealed:
- Golgotha’s (2007-09) video and photographs;
- feature shoes made from human skulls; and
- depictions of performance works involving the late Nomsa Dlamini, who was employed as Cohen’s family’s domestic worker since his childhood, and who later became his collaborator and co-performer.
An Iziko statement next to the works says: “Following a careful internal review, Iziko has made the institutional decision not to display a selection of works originally intended for this exhibition. These works raise concerns relating to:
- The historical representation of Black women and the legacy of racialised display;
- Cultural principles regarding the dignity and protection of elders;
- Unresolved questions about power, agency and authorship in the depiction of individuals;
- Iziko’s commitments to the ethical treatment and respectful return of ancestral human remains.”
On Friday morning, the day after the opening night, it’s unusual to see Cohen, 63, without his sophisticated make-up. He’s known for staging his face and body and is now dressed all in black with a crocheted beanie.
“I saw quickly on social media last night: ‘Where is the response of the artist?’” he says.
“My job is to do the work, not to work the undo. I would have got lost if all my life I had to worry about what was taken or stopped or censored or broken.”
Cohen got sick the day before the exhibition, so he only found out about the censorship on the morning of the opening.
“I smelled it coming because there was a sudden delegation of officials two days before that I took on a walkabout. And felt like I’d explained from quite a strong position the difficult things for them.
“But then subsequently there was planned a walkabout of the CEO separately. So obviously my self-justification wasn’t accepted by them.”
Cohen says Dlamini was a mother figure to him. They performed together in South Africa and internationally over 40 times in 20 years.
“I can justify all I want about my relationship with Nomsa [Dlamini] … but for some people it’s racism,” he says. “There’s a terrible reduction of Nomsa’s intelligence, agency, decision-making ability … right to speaking for herself. I can’t speak for her, but other people can – people who’ve never met her, who’ve seen one photograph of her.”
Cohen sees the pre-emptive censorship as a disservice to the public.
“The worst part about this is people cannot conclude something from the absence of information. So, covering them up or taking them away isn’t a way of using art well, because art is the area we can discuss those difficult things. I think the museum failed in that respect.”
You can hear the disappointment in his voice. “It’s a pity because I’m proud of the museum for inviting me in, for taking the risk. Then they show their cowardly side by running away when the risk has consequences.”
He believes his radical work belongs in an institution like this. “I always wanted to be here. The work is political – my intentions have always been that. So is this place.”
On the opening night Cohen did a performance work – hunched in a life-size, bubble-shaped sweet dispenser handing out trinkets to gallerygoers, away from the rooms hosting “Long Life”.
“I was tearful when it closed because I did the bubble work so I could keep away from people. Basically, it was seen as generous, but it was self-protective.”
Over at the censored works, South Africans had gone into their best Dezemba mode. Bereng came to fetch him.
“Lerato said, ‘Come and see, I want to show you something.’ And there were the black cloths on the floor. And she said to me, ‘The people have spoken’.”
This article was first published in the Sunday Times.
