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Sep 14, 2010 - (Giorgio Agamben 1999: 8). It might reasonably and broadly be argued that prior to 1994, art in South Africa sought, in a multiplicity of ways, ...
The intimate violence of Diane Victor’s Disasters of Peace Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

Abstract Examining two classical explorations of the meaning of violence, as well as the recent analysis by Achille Mbembe in his book On the postcolony (2001), in this article I consider the structure and representations of violence in post-1994 South Africa, with particular reference to Diane Victor’s ongoing series of etchings, Disasters of Peace (2001–). I suggest that in the past two decades South African artists have represented violence not in ideological or political terms, but as an intimate and domestic disruption of life, and that Victor’s series is a searing and unflinching mediation on these forms of violence. Keywords: Achille Mbembe, Diane Victor, Jean-Paul Sartre, post-colony, violence, Walter Benjamin

Introduction All violence presents itself as the recuperation of a right and, reciprocally, every right contains within itself the embryo of violence. (Jean-Paul Sartre 1992: 177) How can art, this most innocent of occupations, pit man against Terror? (Giorgio Agamben 1999: 8)

It might reasonably and broadly be argued that prior to 1994, art in South Africa sought, in a multiplicity of ways, to address violence as a political tool or an expression Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is a Research Fellow in the Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg. [email protected]

ISSN 0256-0046/Online 1992-6049 pp. 418–437 © Critical Arts Projects & Unisa Press

24 (3) 2010 DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2010.511876

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of ideology, while art in South Africa since 1994 has sought to understand violence as endemically human. Our perception of violence has, like our perception of other instruments of repression (political and psychological), shifted from the public to the private, from the external and impersonal to the internal and domestic. We are able, since the demise of apartheid, to think about violence as peculiarly intimate, closer to home, not ideological but personal and criminal. I am not suggesting, of course, that the experience of violence under the apartheid regime was not, for most South Africans, profoundly personal – families lost children, brothers and lovers disappeared, funerals became war zones. I am referring, rather, to various representations of violence, and to the way in which these are treated in public discourse. Ivor Powell, writing in an essay published in 2007, observed that the work of Jane Alexander, long engaged with the violence of the apartheid regime, ‘began gradually to metamorphose. The implicitly external violence that is registered in the earlier work gives way to a more internal process no longer carrying immediacies of violence, but instead are [sic] born out of a traumatized and tainted reality’ (2007: 37). In response to some of the work on the 2007 Spier Contemporary exhibition, Deborah Posel argues that the drawings of Elizabeth Gunter, like others in the exhibition, ‘form part of the post-apartheid oeuvre of works that have broken from the telos of struggle and liberation. But they have also gone beyond the confessional moment and its yearning for redemptive healing. … there is a gesture towards another version of freedom, a different self-positioning in relation to the weight of the past and the challenging complexities of the present’ (2007: 27). This is not to say that the forms of violence that we are experiencing now in South Africa did not exist before 1994, but only that we address such forms more openly. It is also not to say that we no longer concern ourselves with political forms of violence – indeed we do, and we also often acknowledge the relationship of the kinds of violence that now preoccupy us, to their antecedents in the broadly political and social violence of the former regime. We also recognise the institutionalisation of violence as a direct result of the state-sanctioned violence of the past. Indeed, speaking broadly of the postcolonial moment, Achille Mbembe identifies the ‘postcolony’ as comprising ‘societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves’. The postcolony is both ‘chaotically pluralistic’ but also possesses ‘an internal incoherence’. More importantly, however, the postcolony replaces or transforms the violence of the colonial relationship: it is ‘made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitutes a distinctive regime of violence’ (Mbembe 2001: 102). Concurring with Mbembe, Colin Richards (2008: 258) writes: ‘Certain European intellectuals … cannot come to terms with a reality familiar to most of the

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postcolonial world. They fail to grasp the omnipresence and intricately discursive dance of physical violence. They also seem to avoid full recognition of the relation between violence and the origins and perpetuation of democracy.’ Richards’ argument recognises what I would term an intimacy of violence, locating it in a broader argument about the evolution of an African humanism – or humanisms: A dynamic, unstable, contingent form of humanism, one that faces violence in an aesthetic of an insistent materiality, has become an increasingly visible thread in contemporary South African art. Many works stage ‘humanness’ in a way that does not deny the violence that conditions such works, their production and reception, their modes of representation, and, importantly, the violence out of which such powerful desires for the human are born. (ibid.: 265)

It also is not to say that what we count as political forms of violence, what Mark Sanders calls ‘extraordinary violence’ – torture, imprisonment, and death – were not accompanied by ‘the day-to-day violence of apartheid’ that, Sanders reminds us, ‘in some of its forms, survives the official demise of the system’ (2007: 75). And, finally, what one might consider a ‘domestic’ or ‘intimate’ form of violence does not preclude the political, as witnessed by the waves of xenophobic attacks that have beset South Africa in the past two years, or the devolution to violence of many workers’ and service-delivery strikes, though these are complicated by the influence of criminal actions, from which the trade unions and other organising bodies routinely distance themselves. In point of fact, the repeated tainting of political action with criminal violence lends credence to the arguments of Mbembe and Richards. The steady escalation in violent crime in South Africa since 1994 – as seen in the alarming growth in the rates of murder, assault, armed robbery, hijacking, rape, and child abuse – has given rise to an agonised search for its causes and the positing of a variety of theories that address such issues as HIV/AIDS, the continued economic disenfranchisement of most of the population, growing drop-out rates amongst high school children, teenage pregnancy, the relaxation of immigration controls on all of the country’s international borders, and, ironically, the empowering of women. In seeking to understand this shift in the meaning and reception of violence, I would like to co-opt two seminal arguments on the structure and devolution of violence. The first is Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay ‘Critique of violence’ and the second is Jean-Paul Sartre’s provocative and complex investigation of the subject in the posthumously published (and incomplete) Notebooks for an ethics. The Notebooks appeared in French in 1983 and then in English nine years later, but Sartre wrote them in 1947 and 1948. This is a critical historical juncture for the understanding of Sartre’s thinking, given the devastation of World War II still fresh in the European collective consciousness, and the relationship of France and other European powers to their colonial subjects in Africa. In addition to these influences was Sartre’s

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thinking about slavery and oppression in the United States and his reading of authors such as Richard Wright, who was living in Paris and had published Black boy: a record of childhood and youth in 1945, which Sartre cites in the Notebooks in his essay on slavery. Both Benjamin and Sartre are concerned with violence in relation to its ends, but also in relation to law, justice, and, in Sartre, rights and ethics. In his attempt to answer the question of whether violence is justified if it is in the service of just ends, Benjamin begins by distinguishing two kinds of law – natural law and positive law. In terms of the former, ‘[i]t perceives in the use of violent means to just ends no greater problem than a man sees in his “right” to move his body in the direction of his desired goal. According to this view … violence is a product of nature, as it were a raw material, the use of which is in no way problematical unless force is misused for unjust ends’ (Benjamin 1997: 236–7). In terms of positive law, however, violence is viewed not as a ‘natural datum’ but a ‘product of history’ (ibid.: 237). Both kinds of law, notwithstanding, ultimately come around to judging not so much the rightness or wrongness of violence, but rather its relation to its ends. Natural law guarantees the rightness of violence if the ends are just; positive law seeks to ‘guarantee’ the justness of the ends through the justification of the means’ (ibid.). For Benjamin, then, it is a question not so much of meaning, but of emphasis. Benjamin goes on to explicate the difference between violence at the hands of the legal entity that is the state, and violence at the hands of individuals. The law regards the latter as a ‘danger undermining the legal system’, but dangerous not so much because it is a violence that cannot be controlled but rather dangerous by the very fact that it is outside of the law. In this sense, then, the law monopolises violence, takes ownership and regards any violence outside of what it sanctions as perilous: ‘ … the law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-à-vis individuals is explained not by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by the intention of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it might pursue but by its mere existence outside the law’ (ibid.: 239, emphasis added). This principle is beautifully illustrated in lawyer Peter Harris’ remarkable recent book, In a different time, and is worth examining at some length. Harris was hired in 1987 to represent Jabu Masina, Ting Ting Masango, Neo Potsane and Joseph Makhura, known now to history as the Delmas Four. The men had been charged with a number of ‘crimes’ including murder, possession of weapons, sabotage, assassinations and, most damningly, high treason, which was punishable under the apartheid regime by death. The crux of Harris’ legal dilemma is that the men had decided, following his outlining of the various legal avenues open to them, to choose the ‘prisoner-of-war

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option’. In a meeting with Govan Mbeki and then with Chris Hani to seek advice on behalf of the prisoners, Harris explained that they would reject the jurisdiction and authority of the court. This means that they will not participate at all in their own trial and will, in all likelihood, receive the death sentence. The accused hope that such a stand will bring a new dimension to the way the ANC approaches treason trials. They will also place into question the legitimacy of the entire judicial system. (Harris 2008: 70)

Their decision rested on the fact that they had admitted culpability, under interrogation, for all the charges brought against them. This meant that the state regarded them as criminals who had confessed to their crimes and therefore would have no alternative but to impose the harshest sentences. But the four men, Harris explained to Hani, ‘don’t believe they are criminals and they refuse to be tried as criminals, and while this is not a conventional way to handle a trial, these are not conventional times’ (ibid.: 80). Harris realised, with dismay, since he understood the dire consequences of their decision, that he was handling the case of four men who did not recognise the law of the apartheid state and who would, therefore, for all intents and purposes, be on trial but, at the same time, not be on trial – at least not in their own minds, since they would not recognise the legal system that tried them. The state had far greater difficulty with their refusal to follow the course of the law than it did with their actual crimes. Even high treason, which implies a recognition and then a rejection of the state, is better and less dangerous than an utter failure to acknowledge the state. This operation ‘outside of the law’ has its equivalent in the policing system of the repressive state, in which ‘the separation of lawmaking and law-preserving violence is suspended’ (Benjamin 1997: 243) and the power of the police becomes ‘formless, like its nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states’ (ibid.). Lawmaking, Benjamin explains, pursues as its ends, with violence as the means, what is to be established as law, but at the moment of instatement does not dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power. Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence. (ibid.: 248)

This is clear in the case of the trials of the Delmas Four and other South African political detainees from the 1960s onwards. As Harris pointed out to his clients, ‘your stand on non-participation will prevent you from doing anything other than making a statement, and I am not even sure a judge will allow that as he may think that you are making a mockery of his court and his authority’ (ibid.: 62).

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After his complex analysis, Benjamin concedes to the problematic nature of all forms of ‘legal violence’, which seems, in the end, to be the very condition for the maintenance of anything like a modern democratic state. Twenty-five years later, Sartre extends this discussion of the relationship between means, ends, and the law by considering the place of rights and ethics in the nexus of terms. Parts of his argument are particularly apropos to what I have suggested vis-à-vis the shift in our experience of violence in South Africa, since what he argues has to do with who and how one has access to the rights of property, shelter, and so on. He points out that rights would not exist without the presence or a ‘situation of force’, because if we lived in a completely harmonious and egalitarian society, rights would not be necessary – they are only necessary at exactly the moment in which they have to be enforced. Or, put differently, rights ‘never appear except when they are contested, therefore in periods of injustice’ (Sartre 1992: 141). But how may we consider this argument in relation to our current situation which, in principle, if not in reality, is a moment of justice, freedom and equality for all before the law? How do we respond to the continued presence of the kind of violence that we cannot justify, either legally or politically? Sartre does not have an easy answer; instead he points out: Crime is defined negatively by the positive right. It is a form of violence against the material situation and, consequently, a refusal to limit oneself to the right. The right of property is universal. But if someone has no property this right is derisory. If this person wants to change something in this factual situation, he may use violence in relation to the property of others. At this moment, he attacks the right and treats a person as a means, not as an end. He has committed a crime. (ibid.: 142)

And if, to complicate things further, beyond the right to property is the right to freedom, since ‘man is by essence juridical, that is, he is not just a force but a freedom,’ then that means that ‘what he brings about by force must also be considered as an expression of his freedom’ (ibid.: 143). Put differently, ‘all violence presents itself as the recuperation of a right and, reciprocally, every right inexorably contains within itself the embryo of violence’ (ibid.: 177). Both Sartre and Benjamin recognise an unsolvable conundrum within all definitions of violence, revolving around the recognition of what it means to be human. Sartre demonstrates that the exercise of violence upon another human being is the assertion of a freedom. It also suggests that the one committing violence must, at some level, acknowledge the other as freedom: ‘Since I require something of him, I recognize him as free.’ But it does not end there, since to commit violence upon another is ‘to declare him purely determined. That is, to consider him both as essential and inessential.’ Ultimately, violence ‘founds itself and affirms itself in terms of the destruction of the Other, it denies him the right to judge’ (Sartre 1992: 178).

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In his analysis of the African postcolony, in particular as it is expressed in post-independence Cameroon, Mbembe deploys part of this argument when he remarks on the history of Western civil society as being premised, even before the Enlightenment, upon the resolution of conflict through systems of civil law; in other words, the maintenance of order through violence (2001: 36). But what Mbembe brings to the arguments of Benjamin and Sartre is not so much a disagreement about the forms of violence and control in the West – rather, he draws attention, as Benjamin and Sartre do not (because their interests lie in understanding the philosophical structure of violence in relation to rights), to the forms upon which civil society is founded, the institutions (and not necessarily state institutions) that maintain civil society. Mbembe points out, then, that even considering its complex evolution in the West, civil society cannot be conceived of without the ‘autonomous institutions, sites, and social coalitions capable of playing an intermediary role between state and society’ (ibid.: 38). Nor can it be understood without reference to ‘particular forms of constructing, legitimating, and resolving disputes in the public domain’ (ibid.). Through the ages, these forms have been determined variously in the West by organisations such as the church (although the history of the church in the West is complex and often aligned with a history of the state), and eventually the ‘juridical sphere’ which ‘became demarcated and its originality, distinctive value, and autonomy from state absolutism asserted [sic]’ (ibid.: 37). Mbembe adds to his assessment of the development of Western civil society the influence of what he calls ‘manners and vices’ – codes of public behaviour that determine the way in which civil society is defined and managed. These might comprise ‘respect for rules, censorship of feeling, and control of spontaneous impulses and drives’ (ibid.: 38), all of which lead to a society in which ‘self-control and the exchange of good manners … replace raw physical violence … vulgar brute force’ (ibid.). Mbembe’s argument, therefore, while it follows on the classic assessments and descriptions of violence in relation to law such as may be found in Benjamin and Sartre, adds a vital dimension to the debate about violence and society, drawing attention to the forms – feelings, even, but certainly codes of conduct evolved over time, such codes as provide citizens with clear guidelines about the ways in which they may behave in public, codes encompassing etiquette, manners, ‘appropriate’ responses – underpinning such structures as the state and the judiciary. Clearly, when such an investigation is brought into the discussion about the formations of political and juridical power, we begin to realise that to comprehend civil society (in its Western, predominantly European Enlightenment iterations) in relation to countries in Africa without understanding their social institutions and mediating sites, is to misread the meaning of African society (in its many and varied formations), especially in its response to the formation or imposition of the state, and beyond this to the ‘indigenization of the state’ (ibid.: 41). One must, in other words, consider

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he intimate violence of Diane Victor’s Disasters of Peace [t]he indigenous categories used for thinking politically about conflictual and violent relations, the special vocabularies in which the political imaginary is expressed and the institutional forms into which that thought is translated, the anthropology that underlies both issues of representation and issues of unequal allocation of utilities, the negotiation of heterogeneity, and the refinement of passions. (ibid.: 39).

These indigenous categories or ‘social bases’ upon which African state entities have come to be based, are not monolithic. Instead, they vary from region to region and country to country, and ultimately determine the nature of the relationship of African states to international trade and capital (ibid.: 40–41). What I have done up to this point in this article is to pave the way for a discussion on the ways in which violence has come to be represented in South African art since the official demise of apartheid, with special reference to Diane Victor. I now leave behind the trajectory of Mbembe’s argument since his analysis, after his laying the groundwork of his argument, focuses on Cameroonian society and its particular forms of representation, expressions of power, and deployments of violence to sustain its distinctive version of the postcolonial. Clearly, the history of South Africa has followed a somewhat different trajectory and it is perhaps too early in this history to provide anything like the comprehensive exploration of post-independence Cameroon that Mbembe offers. What, for example, are the particular and indigenous forms of the fetish (as it relates to power) in South Africa and how will these determine the future shape of the state and its watchdog, the judiciary?1 And how, in particular, are the kinds of violence that now seem to have left behind any political meaning, to be understood and, more than this, eradicated from society? Does this kind of violence have the same self-sustaining nature as the violence that upheld the apartheid regime, or are we to understand it in completely different ways? Of course, part of the deeper problem of our discussions of the violence that seems now endemic in South African society is how much this violence is a child of the apartheid system. Does criminal violence have its roots in political disenfranchisement? And is it only through the application of state- and judicially sanctioned violence that we will quell the waves of crime that threaten to overwhelm us? What indigenous codes of conduct will save us? Or will such codes replace one form of violence with another, one kind of violation with another, one set of constraints on our freedom with another? What, apart from pure, brutal state power, will turn the river aside? I do not propose an answer to these questions, since I lack both the hindsight and the historical/anthropological expertise to address them in any comprehensive way. Perhaps the most that is to be hoped is that art in South Africa can, as Giorgio Agamben suggests, fulfill its architectonic potential and, in doing so, break ‘the continuum of linear time’ so that man can recover, ‘between past and future, his present space’ (1999: 102).

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I do think, however, that clues to the ways in which we regard violence (if not to the ways in which we think we might change our violent society) are to be found in the work of a number of South African artists. Again, I am not qualified to describe in any comprehensive way the ‘anthropology that underlies … representation … the negotiation of heterogeneity, and the refinement of passions’ (Mbembe 2001: 39). I can only suggest ways of beginning to understand this anthropology, these negotiations. I also do not think that artists necessarily set out to provide answers to some of the questions I have raised here but they do – through representation, description or translation – offer us if not a simulacrum of our society, then at least a mirror in which might see and understand our own impulses. There are a number of iterations of the broad theme of violence being explored in South Africa, in a variety of media. For some, the roots of the problem lie only indirectly in the political, but more properly in the patriarchal order, the structures of power that, while they certainly operate on the level of the broadly political, begin in homes and communities – Jacki McInnes, Penny Siopis, Leora Farber and Senzeni Marasela can be cited here. For others, violence is concomitant to ongoing discrimination: racial, sexual, and, latterly, on the basis of nationality. But responses to prejudice take a variety of forms and are certainly not heterogeneous. We might, for example, cite Nicholas Hlobo’s work as an exploration of gay, black, male sexuality. His is not so much a protest against discrimination as a decisive staking out of a terrain for his identity. Similarly, Berni Searle and Minnette Vári inhabit worlds that blur boundaries between geography and psychology – they seek, in the case of Vári, to throw back upon the world their own internal musings or, in the case of Searle, to take the landscape into the body in an act of appropriation (but appropriation quite different from its political formations some years ago). Searle’s performances of the self, in particular, are not, however, without deep political meaning. In her reflections on the body in relation to a social and psychological landscape, Searle contemplates skin colour as being critical in the formation of her own (coloured) identity. There are, however, two mediums to which we continue to look for a specifically documentary representation of the world, and this despite enormous changes in the way we view and make photographs, and the many new experiments in printmaking that have lent it some impetus in the past several years. Printmaking in particular (at least in its South African iterations) has a history located firmly within the discourse of protest and political representation, as witnessed by not only the poster movement of the 1970s and 80s, but also by the growth in printmaking studios at a time when it was extremely difficult for black artists to gain access to any other institutions for training in the arts. Foremost amongst these was the Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift in KwaZulu-Natal, which became home to a number of artists who went on to have successful careers and exert a significant influence on South African art. Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin,

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whose two books Printmaking in a transforming South Africa (1997) and Rorke’s Drift empowering prints (2003) remain seminal texts for artists and historians interested in printmaking in South Africa, account not only for the extraordinary success of Rorke’s Drift, despite the many challenges facing it, but also for the place that printmaking has come to occupy in the South African art canon as a result, in part, of the work done there. They cite Peder Gowenius (one of the founders of the centre) who argued for the ‘relevance of printmaking as a pictorial language, which is in itself democratic, as it removes the practice from the pursuit of the “unique” and valorised artwork’ (Hobbs & Rankin 2003: 161). The teaching methods and collaborative ethos at Rorke’s Drift, while not formally devoted to ‘political’ work, nonetheless encouraged the ‘inclusion of reflective subject matter’ and thus the production of prints that ‘engage social issues and carry an implicit political message’ (ibid.: 163). Given its geographical location, Rorke’s Drift attracted some artists who had a profound and personal interest in Zulu history and culture, and sought to explore this, often in narrative format, in printmaking (though the emphasis on these visual narratives may also have been a result of Peder Gowenius’ attempts to encourage themes other than the religious ones that dominated many of the prints). But whether the themes were religious or cultural, a strong narrative trend – in the form of tableaux, or of series of prints that tell stories – is evident in much work from Rorke’s Drift. It is at its most technically complex in the work of artists like John Muafangejo, William Zulu, Judus Mahlangu and Paulos Mchunu, and its most conceptually compelling and expressive in works by Cyprian Shilakoe, Vuminkosi Zulu and Eric Mbatha. The work of Diane Victor – in particular, the strand of work represented by the series Disasters of Peace (begun in 2001, and now comprising roughly 38 prints, some still in process at the time of writing) – owes something, if only indirectly, to this tradition in South African printmaking. The series is grounded in the impulse towards narrative, though it does not tell a continuous story. Rather, it functions as a series of stories or tableaux within a larger framework, and it follows, blow by blow, the vicissitudes of life in post-apartheid South Africa. Disasters of Peace makes a number of specifically political points, but it is not motivated by an overt political agenda. Its focus, as I suggested in my opening paragraphs, is the domestic (in the broad sense of home and hearth), the intimate, the private. It is also not an internal musing in the vein of Vári or Searle, nor does it provide any outlines of a purely personal psychology (however much it might reflect the psychological or emotional state of the artist). By domestic, I mean, rather, that its focus is on the extent to which the broad idea of home (family, community, and, finally, country) is desecrated (a good word for Victor, who frequently addresses religious themes in her work) by violence that is, largely, criminal. Indeed, Disasters of Peace might

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well be described as a series of desecrations, since it takes as its underlying premise the sacredness of home and kin and examines, in mortifying and unflinching detail, the agonising undoing of those two primary sites of identification and safety. Disasters of Peace can be seen, then, as an extended meditation on violence as intimate aggression. The allusion to war in the title of the series (through the invocation of its opposite, peace, as well as through the direct reference to Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War, 1810–1820) situates the work within what we might call a ‘post-’ rhetoric: post-apartheid, post-political, post-Truth Commission. Goya’s Disasters (Los Desastros) has been an important touchstone for a number of South African artists, including William Kentridge, Robert Hodgins and Deborah Bell, but also for many international artists. In 1924, the German artist Otto Dix published a series of 50 prints simply called War, based on his own experiences as a soldier in the German army. In 1970, the American Nancy Spero completed a series of 150 drawings called The War Series: Bombs and Helicopters. Robert Storr wrote an introduction to the series, in which he likened the drawings to Goya’s etchings in their direct, dire and accusatory presentation of the horrors of the Vietnam war that Spero, like other Americans, experienced through the bombardment of images on television (Brandon 2007: 79). More recently, brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman have turned to Goya for a number of works, but most obviously for their series Insult to Injury (2003), in which they ‘desecrated’ Goya’s Disasters of War by adding elements like clowns’ heads to an original set of the prints. In his photographic tableau, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Australia) (2008), Yinka Shonibare MBE has also directly quoted Goya’s Los Caprichos, a series completed in the 1790s that established if not the subject matter then the form and method for the later Disasters. In Disasters of Peace, Victor follows Goya’s lead in representing quite literally the horrors she sees around her. Where his Caprichos had been fantastical and allegorical, Goya’s Disasters looks directly at the horrors of guerilla warfare and the famine following on the heels of armed conflict. Victor is equally unflinching. Her subject matter comes from newspaper and television stories about various crimes being committed daily in South Africa. The Man, The Lion and the Fence (2006) (1),2 for example, represents a sensational story about a farm labourer who was beaten up by his employer and then thrown over a fence into an enclosure of lions who then devoured him. The print, like all the others a combination of etching and aquatint, is extraordinarily detailed. Victor uses a combination of fine lines and delicate cross-hatching to create the ominous, fleshy volume of the men who throw their fellow human being over a fence – the victim’s body is limp, his head thrown back and his mouth open. Victor is an extraordinary draughtsman and her skill in the etching medium can be clearly seen in this print. She draws in minute detail – the barbs on the wire, the hairs on the chest of the victim, the gathering darkness in the background – to arrive at a

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Figure 1: Victor, D. The Man, The Lion and the Fence, from Disasters of Peace (2006). Etching and aquatint. 28 x 32 cm. Edition of 25. Courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery

kind of horrid similitude. The print becomes almost photographic in its rendering of the scene, so excruciatingly detailed that we imagine, for a moment, that someone was present at the event to make this picture. This is important for a number of reasons: in the first instance, Victor’s style of drawing reminds us that the use of photographs in newspapers essentially replaced prints or drawings as the preferred method of representing news. The first photographs only appeared in newspapers in the 1890s, and well into the 20th century illustrators were still being used to provide drawings to accompany news items. When the photograph replaced the print in newspaper, it was to make more real what was already accepted as representing actual events and people. The print had achieved verisimilitude; and indeed the job of the engraver was to make the image look like the original, in the case of the copying of painting, and, in the case of newspaper illustration, to make the engraving show or set before the reader what had actually happened. The last remnant of this requirement of newspaper illustration is in the case of court drawings – the court artist stands in for the photographer when the latter is not allowed to be present at a case. Concomitantly, we understand that a cartoon in a newspaper represents a person or event only in a caricature or visual simile.3

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Victor’s prints (and this series in particular) draw not only on an important tradition in drawing and painting, but also on the long history of illustration. Disasters of Peace seeks to represent, but it is not illustration in the conventional sense. The additions to the main action in each of the prints (here the tossing of a body over a fence) such as various textual elements and smaller drawings on the edges of the images, draw attention to Victor’s overarching thematic bent, a narrative impulse, and strong conceptual undertow in the series. The result is that there is a kind of push-pull in the prints of Disasters of Peace. On the one hand, a very clear representing impulse, a desire to show the event in all of its horror: in The Man, The Lion and the Fence, the perpetrators have tossed a coat over the barbed wire fence so that the man’s body does not snag on the barbs, in the manner of housebreakers who use towels and blankets to climb over electric fences in the suburbs of Johannesburg. But on the other hand, and true to her mock-satirical form, Victor adds an element of dark humour in the top left corner of the print: a seated lion in profile with the words ‘safety matches’ scrolled beneath it recalls the iconic packaging of Lion Matches,4 and the reference to safety is echoed in the words on a sign tied to the bottom of the fence – ‘safety gevaar ingozi’5– often found nailed to the walls of power substations or to strands of electrified security fences. All of the textual elements allude to the mantra of ‘safety and security’, no longer a reference to the state of emergency of the 1980s, but to the increasing failure of the government to guarantee, or to enforce through the police, what opposition parties insist is a right for all citizens. This particular case aroused interest in part because although the main perpetrator of the crime was a white man, his co-accused were the victim’s black co-workers on the farm – a situation that made a simple ‘racist’ motive difficult to pin on the perpetrators. Three other works in the series follow the theme of safety and security, but also deploy some of the methods I have pointed to in my discussion of The Man, The Lion and the Fence and carry further some of the intentions of this work: Down on the Farm (2001) (2), Graphic (2006) (3), and Cluster Complex (2006) (4). All three incorporate the tension achieved in The Man, The Lion and the Fence not only through representation, but also through internal commentary, a graphic selfreflection that is a function of the juxtaposition of the hyper-real drawn elements of the prints and other ‘fantastical’ or textual elements. The first of these is a densely drawn image of a farm murder in which two bodies lie stricken in front of a typically South African structure, with its zinc roof and pillared stoep.6 The farm animals are herded together in a tight-knit group on the left of the image, their dark, massed bodies in stark contrast to the open space on the bottom right corner of the print, empty except for a dead dog that seems to lie in the path that the attackers have taken in their escape from the farm. Although the eye is drawn at first to the cosiness of the small house with its rainwater tank and tractor nearby, first impressions give way to the realisation that we are looking at a scene of death and horror, suggested by the ominous crowding of the animals even before we notice the dead bodies

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flung in front of the house. The entire scene suggests the disruption of harmony, a literal and metaphorical darkening of the rural idyll. Again Victor’s intense drawing style (very difficult to achieve on the reflective copper plate, and evidence of her immense skill in this medium) lends a feeling of claustrophobia to the image, which is only relieved by the lightening of the image on the right and Victor’s reliance on the white of the paper to create space. The darkness of the story contained in the tight frame of the print is heightened by the strong reliance on elements of romantic landscape painting – the suggestion of light that is almost reminiscent of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s paintings in the top right-hand corner, the depiction of open fields beyond the house, but cut off from the house by the ubiquitous razor wire – as though the rural idyll is not simply disrupted by a murder, but is, in fact, an illusion, entirely beyond reach.

Figure 2: Victor, D. Down on the Farm, from Disasters of Peace (2001). Etching and aquatint. 28 x 32 cm. Edition of 25. Courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery

Graphic, on the other hand, is drawn as a comic-style narrative of closely crowded storyboard boxes. But this is not comedy; rather several hijacking and murder scenes play themselves out in quick succession. The boxes get narrower and narrower towards the end, almost as if there is neither time nor space to tell every story of

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murder and rape, and the words ‘to be continued’ betray a terrible resignation. The story is punctuated, in three panels, by an image of a payphone, seen at first from a slight remove and then, in the second and third images, closer and closer, as if an imagined narrator is trying to telephone for help. Right at the end, outside of the frame of the comic strip, a telephone receiver dangles from its cord. Cluster Complex, the third in this grim trinity, is a bitter meditation on the withdrawal of the affluent behind the walls of their gated communities. The ‘complex’ in this print resembles partly a medieval castle and partly an Italianate villa – an impression reinforced by the name at the top of the entrance, ‘Tuscan Vales’. The structure is a monument to bad taste and paranoia, with its phony coat of arms (made of golf clubs) and its pastiche of Mediterranean architecture offset with electric fencing, a boom gate and retractable spikes on the ground at the entrance. Outside, a shantytown crowds the landscape and encroaches on the walls of the complex, against which Victor has drawn a series of medieval ladders and scaffoldings, like the kind used to breach the walls of a castle. In the frame around the image she has incorporated the words ‘every man’s home is his castle’, ‘nevermore’, ‘the walled citadels of Midrand Part I’, ‘exclusive clusters’ and, finally, in the bottom left corner, the wry and ambiguous phrase ‘artist’s impression’.

Figure 3: Victor, D. Graphic, from Disasters of Peace (2001–ongoing). Etching and aquatint. 28 x 32 cm. Edition of 25. Courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery

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I have drawn attention to these four works – The Man, The Lion and the Fence; Down on the Farm; Graphic; and Cluster Complex – for two important reasons. The first has to do with Victor’s treatment of her themes across the trajectory of the series. As I have suggested, she moves from a straightforward (though certainly not schematic or stylised) representation of historical events to a more generalised contemplation of violence and its effects on South African society. She signals these moves through a methodology that includes intense attention to detail and a strong realism rendered in small and careful drawing motions on the one hand, and a set of satirical moves, coupled with a ‘doodling’ looseness on the other. She deliberately sets up a relationship of representation and commentary, figuration and interpretation, moving from one to the other across the plane of the image.

Figure 4: Victor, D. Cluster Complex, from Disasters of Peace (2006). Etching and aquatint. 28 x 32 cm. Edition of 25. Courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery

This ‘movement’ in the prints is a kind of seesaw, from showing to interpreting, that characterises the entire debate around violence in South Africa: South Africans (probably not unlike people in any violent society) go from expressing horror at certain crimes to a kind of resignation or acceptance of brutality – ‘nothing surprises us anymore’. But at the same time, we spend a great deal of time thinking about the reasons for the violence of our society. This brings me to the second reason for my

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focus on these works (from a series of immensely complex prints): they raise one of the most difficult elements of the nature of violence, as it is explicated by Benjamin and Sartre, particularly for an emerging economy like South Africa in which the majority lag far behind the middle and upper classes in the acquisition of wealth. This element in the structure of violence plunges us into a circular argument from which it is very difficult to see a way forward, unless there is a break in the cycles of unemployment and poverty. Rights, both Benjamin and Sartre tell us, are premised upon violence, and violence in turn is the disruption of the rights of the other. The stealing of property means the violation of the rights of one, but by one who, in many instances, does not have access to the same rights. The implication of this is that as long as there are those who do not have access to the right to shelter, food and education (and not simply access in theory), violence will remain. This argument, however, introduces two fallacies against which we must guard. The first is that poverty, lack of education and unemployment inevitably lead to violence (which is tantamount to saying that all poor people will eventually commit crimes) and the other, the flipside of this, is that those with access to property, education and wealth do not commit crimes. Clearly both of these are untenable arguments. Cluster Complex, in particular, seizes upon the problem presented here: those who live behind the high walls of ‘Tuscan Vales’ have the right to be safe from all forms of crime, and their choosing to live in a gated community is a way of guaranteeing this right when the state and society have failed to do so. Those who live outside the complex have the same right to safety, but lack a whole host of other rights that would help ensure their safety – education, which might lead to employment, which in turn would lead to wealth and, along with it, access to safety. What this work illustrates, finally, is that while rights are, in theory, guaranteed in the democratic state, in reality they are what you are able to pay for. A right is hollow unless the state can guarantee it, and the state can only guarantee it through force, through violence. This means that the state is, from the outset, implicated in a violent relationship with its citizens. Its health, its guarantee of access to all of the promises of democracy, is premised upon violence. The clearest illustration of this in Disasters of Peace is in two prints that, on the surface, depict scenes of child abuse. In All for the Right Price, a handcuffed figure, pictured only from the thighs down, stands, bruised knees knocking and clothing around the ankles, while a man in uniform approaches from behind and another stands in a doorway in the background appearing to count money into his hand. The textual embellishments are bitterly ironic: ‘fleischmark’ and ‘fleash trade’ [sic] on the bottom border, ‘all for the right amount’ and ‘Oh Sharky boy!’ in the top frame. Sharks, suggesting predation, adorn the left frame, giving way to a series of fish skeletons which in turn become the kinds of marks that prisoners make on walls to signal the passing of time – a series of lines and numbers. In the space beyond the doorway, Victor has drawn a vast interior scene of columns and steep staircases, rising in an Escher-like infinity and conveying people to and fro. This

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bizarre structure suggests a kind of architectural terminus – something between a prison and a railway station. In Sheep’s Clothing is perhaps the most sinister and terrifying image of the entire series, in which a child, seated on the edge of a bed, wearing a lamb’s head in place of its own, is being subjected to sexual abuse by a large, hairy man. His face is buried in her crotch and his trousers are open and falling down. Above the bed, the figures of a naked man and two wolves, rendered as spare line drawings, cavort as if they are the manifestation of the child’s nightmares. Her slippers stand forlornly beside the night table and several small creatures that look like little dogs, or stuffed toys come to life, peer from beneath the bed, watching the terrible desecration of the lamblike child. The text in the frame around the image is part of the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep. It stops ominously at ‘one for the master’ and adds the ironic ‘daddy’s girl’. Beyond their literal representation of a form of violence which daily plagues communities in South Africa, these two prints (All for the Right Price and In Sheep’s Clothing) suggest a failure on the part of the state, as represented by the police, and by the father figure in the latter. The child is without protection and has no guarantee of safety, and this not in the street, but in the sanctity of the home. Mbembe describes one key element of the postcolony in his long chapter on the ‘aesthetics of vulgarity’ that has to do with the internalising of ‘authoritarian epistemology’, especially evident in the way in which children are treated by the bureaucracy of the postcolony (2002: 126–129). Victor is hinting at the danger of this, suggesting that the question of child abuse does not begin and end with the simple, brutal facts of one case after another, but rather that the blame for the escalation of this crime may be laid at the door of the state and its functionaries. This is indeed a strong position to take. Rankin, in her essay in TAXI-013 Diane Victor, describes how Victor gathered the material for this series from a number of stories in the media that ‘do not necessarily attract a great deal of attention … both because of the tragic frequency of such aberrations, and because people would rather not think about them’ (2008: 43). As the violence represented in these works becomes more and more pervasive we no longer have the luxury of innocence, ignorance or silence, as Victor insists in these images. But we also must look deeper than the obvious to find answers to the problem. Mbembe remarks that power ‘in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main modes of existence’ (2001: 133). It is here, he argues, that research into expressions and representations of power must go beyond institutions, beyond formal positions of power, and beyond the written rules, and examine how the implicit and the explicit are interwoven, and how the practices of those who command and those who are assumed to obey are so entangled as to render both powerless. For it is precisely the situations of powerlessness that are the situations of violence par excellence. (ibid.)

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As he draws to the end of his argument in On the postcolony, Mbembe arrives at the inevitable question: ‘how does one get from the colony to “what comes after”? Is there any difference – and, if so, of what sort – between what happened during the colony and “what comes after”?’ (ibid.: 196). Things do not change as if by magic, and ‘changing time is … not really possible, [and so] we must firmly place ourselves in another space to describe our age, the age and space of raw life (ibid.). This is not unlike Agamben’s hope that the ‘continuum of linear time [be] broken’ (1999: 102). He bemoans what he calls the ‘aesthetic enjoyment’ of art, the alienation of art from ‘man’s original historical space … the very space of his world, in which and only in which he can find himself as man and as being capable of action and knowledge’ (ibid.). Victor’s Disasters of Peace is, in this age of the alienation of art from history (and a history which is rife not only with human triumphs but with terrible degradations and unspeakable forms of violence), a work of immense courage. It is also an outrageous series of works, since it refuses to turn aside or to look away from the present. What it seeks to do is contemplate, if not fully understand, the intimate nature of violence – the extent to which it taints everything by virtue of the fact that it has crept into the house, whose walls, despite spikes and fences, cannot keep it out. At the same time, and perhaps most startlingly, Victor suggests (in tacit agreement with Mbembe) that the notion of an intimacy of violence does not mean that violence has become a kind of a private affair (that which happens on the other side of walls and fences, in bedrooms, in motor cars, things that are not public). On the contrary, what is suggested in this series is that forms of violence that engage the intimate, that violate bodies in close quarters, are to be guarded against in the most obvious ways (the police must catch the criminals who commit rape and abuse children) but are also to be guarded against within the very body of the state and its power-wielding auxiliaries. The postcolony must examine the extent to which it both inherits and creates the conditions for violence. In this sense, Victor’s Disasters of Peace is a profoundly political work.

Notes 1 This is a pressing question in South Africa where the independence of the judiciary has, in several recent cases, been seen to be under threat. The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) party and several prominent individuals in the legal fraternity have accused the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party and its Youth League of interfering with the processes of justice and of using the judiciary for political ends. 2 Disasters of Peace is an ongoing series begun in 2001. Victor does not date the prints separately, but rough dates can be assigned to them as she produces them in batches of eight at a time. Almost all of the prints have been shown at Victor’s Johannesburg gallery, Goodman Gallery, and Victor dates the works to the time of their showing.

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he intimate violence of Diane Victor’s Disasters of Peace 3 This line of investigation is extremely interesting and merits further discussion beyond the scope of this article, particularly in relation to the depiction of violence or criminal activity (even court illustrations make rare appearances in newspapers). There has been a good deal of scholarship on newspaper illustration and on the appearance of photographs in newspapers. See, for example, Benson, R. 2009. The printed picture. New York: Museum of Modern Art. 4 Lion Matches, with their trademark lion profile, signature black-and-yellow box, and slogan ‘box of friends’, have been manufactured in South Africa since 1905. They have become an iconic South African product. Another infamous association is Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s statement made in a speech in 1985: ‘ … with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.’ The ‘necklaces’ she is referring to are car tyres that were used in lynchings in the townships. Suspected informants and collaborators had a tyre placed around their necks, and then were doused with petrol and set alight. 5 Gevaar and ingozi mean danger in Afrikaans and Zulu respectively. 6 A stoep (Afrikaans) is a wide verandah on the front of a house, typical of traditional Afrikaans architecture.

References Agamben, G. 1999. The man without content. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, W. 1997. Selected writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Benson, R. 2009. The printed picture. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Brandon, L. 2007. Art and war. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Harris, P. 2008. In a different time. Roggebaai: Umuzi. Hobbs, P. and E. Rankin. 1997. Printmaking in a transforming South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers. . 2003. Rorke’s Drift empowering prints: twenty years of printmaking in South Africa. Cape Town: Double Storey. Mbembe, A. 2001. On the postcolony. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Posel, D. 2007. Vulnerabilities. In Spier Contemporary 2007, ed. J. Pather, 25–27. Cape Town: Africa Centre. Powell, I. 2007. Inside and outside of history. Art South Africa 5(4): 32–38. Rankin, E. and K. von Veh. 2008. TAXI-013 Diane Victor. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing. Richards, C. 2008. Aftermath: value and violence in contemporary South African art. In Antinomies of art and culture: modernity, postmodernity, contemporaneity, ed. T. Smith, O. Enwezor and N. Condee, 250–289. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sanders, M. 2007. Ambiguities of witnessing: law and literature in the time of a truth commission. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sartre, J-P. 1992. Notebooks for an ethics. Trans. D. Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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