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It was a heart-breaking newspaper story that drew my attention to this topic.
Apparently, some homeless folk in Sea Point had used their free time to create a small space, decorated with plants and various objects, at Sunset Beach. In time, this little enclave became known as "The Garden of Hope".
Until, one day, it was destroyed by vandals.
One's first reaction, at hearing this, would be: "it's probably the same vandals that destroyed and damaged some of those pretty sculptures on the Promenade?"
Alas, if only matters were that simple. According to some information I found on The Big Issue’s website, "The Garden of Hope" was destroyed by a gang of no less than ten Cape Town law enforcement officers (yes, it took that many of them to focus on this single task), who maintained that "the action was necessary" and that "countless attempts to get the homeless off the streets of Sea Point have been unsuccessful".
All this goes to show that not all people view art the same way.
The treasure-house
Take me, for instance. I don’t really like poetry (with the exception of the really world-class poets such as Breyten Breytenbach, Pablo Neruda and Johann de Lange). The alarm bells in my mind go off every time someone sends me an email asking me to 'have a look' at his or her amateur verse. Until recently, I associated the genre of poetry with people who eat too much lentils, who wear smelly socks and who live alone in dark little rooms in cheap hostels, constantly feeling sorry for themselves and thinking about all the injustices done to them by society.
This stupid prejudice evaporated (temporarily, at least!) one wonderful day, towards the end of last summer, when I took my kids for an outing to the Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town.
Bored with baby-sitting, I left the kids with my wife and started exploring the gardens on my own, and discovered a treasure-house of art.
In a cleverly designed enclave filled with intriguing modern sculptures and printed paragraphs of prose and poetry, I was struck by a plaque bearing these words:
No one holds the measure
Of their own undoing… no one
The meaning of their dying
Hold what lives
Behind the masks
Of your own making…
The music of your wild name
There were many more snatches of poetry like this. All of them were written by a poet I had never heard of, Ian McCallum. Though I did not fully understand all the stuff he'd written, the juxtaposition of the poetry with the strange-looking sculptures and eccentric architecture had a profound impact on me.
Undiscovered space
When, later that same day, we extended our outing to include a walk on the Sea Point promenade to buy the kids some ice cream, I saw Marieke Prinsloo Rowe's sculptures for the first time. It fitted in beautifully with the lovely poetry I had read in the Kirstenbosch Gardens. By the time we returned home, the rush hour traffic didn’t bother me. I felt invigorated, as if I had been reborn.
Is this not the purpose of all street art: to surprise people, to uplift them, to remind them of a world of magic and wonder lurking just behind the ordinary, the every day? And if street art manages to do just that, should we really waste our time arguing the merits of it? Shouldn’t we just leave it there, to exist in its own right, to extend its quiet influence on passers-by? Do we have to try and label it, or stick an 'ism' to it?
The strange cloth-covered trees and sculpted wild animals in Stellenbosch, cleverly done by artist Strijdom van der Merwe and Dylan Lewis, springs to mind. When I look at Strijdom van der Merwe’s stuff critically, I usually draw a blank. It's meaningless, weird, and I don't get it. But when I switch off my mind and just feel the atmosphere of his creations, it has the same effect as those beautiful creations in Kirstenbosch and Sea Point. It makes me feel more human, it inspires me just as much as the weird and wonderful semi-mythical figures of The Owl House in Nieu-Bethesda. I used to spend hours in that small Karoo garden, just feeling serene and in touch with an undiscovered space deep inside of me.
Whether we agree about the merits of this kind of thing, the bottom line is that street art is a part of our shared humanity. If we do not grant one another the ability and the freedom to share and admire and live and breathe among these objects, we, as a collective organism, could very well run into danger of losing our very soul.
Piss of, you vandals!!!
Apparently, some homeless folk in Sea Point had used their free time to create a small space, decorated with plants and various objects, at Sunset Beach. In time, this little enclave became known as "The Garden of Hope".
Until, one day, it was destroyed by vandals.
One's first reaction, at hearing this, would be: "it's probably the same vandals that destroyed and damaged some of those pretty sculptures on the Promenade?"
Alas, if only matters were that simple. According to some information I found on The Big Issue’s website, "The Garden of Hope" was destroyed by a gang of no less than ten Cape Town law enforcement officers (yes, it took that many of them to focus on this single task), who maintained that "the action was necessary" and that "countless attempts to get the homeless off the streets of Sea Point have been unsuccessful".
All this goes to show that not all people view art the same way.
The treasure-house
Take me, for instance. I don’t really like poetry (with the exception of the really world-class poets such as Breyten Breytenbach, Pablo Neruda and Johann de Lange). The alarm bells in my mind go off every time someone sends me an email asking me to 'have a look' at his or her amateur verse. Until recently, I associated the genre of poetry with people who eat too much lentils, who wear smelly socks and who live alone in dark little rooms in cheap hostels, constantly feeling sorry for themselves and thinking about all the injustices done to them by society.
This stupid prejudice evaporated (temporarily, at least!) one wonderful day, towards the end of last summer, when I took my kids for an outing to the Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town.
Bored with baby-sitting, I left the kids with my wife and started exploring the gardens on my own, and discovered a treasure-house of art.
In a cleverly designed enclave filled with intriguing modern sculptures and printed paragraphs of prose and poetry, I was struck by a plaque bearing these words:
No one holds the measure
Of their own undoing… no one
The meaning of their dying
Hold what lives
Behind the masks
Of your own making…
The music of your wild name
There were many more snatches of poetry like this. All of them were written by a poet I had never heard of, Ian McCallum. Though I did not fully understand all the stuff he'd written, the juxtaposition of the poetry with the strange-looking sculptures and eccentric architecture had a profound impact on me.
Undiscovered space
When, later that same day, we extended our outing to include a walk on the Sea Point promenade to buy the kids some ice cream, I saw Marieke Prinsloo Rowe's sculptures for the first time. It fitted in beautifully with the lovely poetry I had read in the Kirstenbosch Gardens. By the time we returned home, the rush hour traffic didn’t bother me. I felt invigorated, as if I had been reborn.
Is this not the purpose of all street art: to surprise people, to uplift them, to remind them of a world of magic and wonder lurking just behind the ordinary, the every day? And if street art manages to do just that, should we really waste our time arguing the merits of it? Shouldn’t we just leave it there, to exist in its own right, to extend its quiet influence on passers-by? Do we have to try and label it, or stick an 'ism' to it?
The strange cloth-covered trees and sculpted wild animals in Stellenbosch, cleverly done by artist Strijdom van der Merwe and Dylan Lewis, springs to mind. When I look at Strijdom van der Merwe’s stuff critically, I usually draw a blank. It's meaningless, weird, and I don't get it. But when I switch off my mind and just feel the atmosphere of his creations, it has the same effect as those beautiful creations in Kirstenbosch and Sea Point. It makes me feel more human, it inspires me just as much as the weird and wonderful semi-mythical figures of The Owl House in Nieu-Bethesda. I used to spend hours in that small Karoo garden, just feeling serene and in touch with an undiscovered space deep inside of me.
Whether we agree about the merits of this kind of thing, the bottom line is that street art is a part of our shared humanity. If we do not grant one another the ability and the freedom to share and admire and live and breathe among these objects, we, as a collective organism, could very well run into danger of losing our very soul.
Piss of, you vandals!!!
