Grey Matter...

So as it happens, covering yourself in clay slip and marching through the streets of Cape Town attracts a surprising amount of attention. Honestly, I’ve seen stranger things happen in this city on a daily basis. There’s a man in Greenmarket Square who spends the day speaking animatedly into a dead telephone. Behind the High Court live two elderly women who, for R2 and a cigarette, will tell anyone who cares to listen a detailed and elaborate history of alien abduction in the Cape going back a century. There are people who live above the city and in it and beneath it. It’s a strange place. On Wednesday 7th October, however, 29 second -year Fine Arts students made it just that little bit stranger.

It started as a small-scale city intervention exercise. We were supposed to pair up and produce an “impermanent and socially- conscious” performance or public sculpture piece at allocated sites around the city bowl. Inevitably, no-one did a thing until two weeks before the project was due, because we’re art students and that’s how we roll. When people finally began thinking about the project in late September, though, a few common threads emerged in class conversation. Firstly, what realistic difference can two people really make to the space of Cape Town? If the point of pairing up was ostensibly to increase the impact of the final product, wouldn’t four people be better than two? At that, wouldn’t 29 be even more powerful? And secondly, we were beginning to come to terms (as all would-be artists do, I guess) with our total inability to produce something original. These ideas fed off one another: why not do something entirely unique; something grand and enormous that allowed us to combine our energies and interests and crush our growing end-of-year apathy?

Fighting against the pervasive emphasis on individual art practise (and individual ego) bred in contemporary art circles, our collective met for the first time to democratically discuss a direction for the project. After battling it out over almost a week, we settled on the protest march as a recognizable form of action that allowed for both the integration of a large number of people and the communication of a message. South Africa presents a countless range of causes to champion, but the very act of choosing one particular struggle effectively excludes all others. Faced with that reality, we decided to leave our march open-ended, rather than subscribe to a specific ideology. That way, the audience could bring their own set of beliefs to the table. For us, complete silence expressed that open-endedness. Being silent and still in the bustle of the city sets one apart, but also encourages the public to invest in the piece by filling up that silence with words both spoken and unspoken. On a technical level, we needed to display some kind uniformity to identity us as more than just an eclectic tour group. Grey- bearing none of the political connotations of black and white, and also the colour of the city itself- was eventually decided upon by democratic vote. As a neutral colour, it also appealed to the ambiguity of our “cause”.

Unsatisfied with a mass silent protest, we wanted to take the project even further. Operating outside the framework of city life- silent in the noise, grey in the colour, still in the busyness etc etc- we chose to take on the unquestioned traditions of that same day-to-day life. The noon gun, as a symbol originally used to mark the city as safe during of warfare and later as a mode of timekeeping, is an outdated colonial mechanism. It serves no purpose but to recall a distant past, and shout that same past to the city on a daily basis. It’s rather sad, when you stop to think about it. We chose to challenge that shout with silence. The act of attempting stop the gun from firing with only the weapon of silence at our disposal allowed us to reclaim agency over the canon as a now-obsolete city intervention. A lot of people moaned that we were just being a nuisance, but why the hell not. Just because something has always been done, doesn’t mean it should continue happening. That sort of attitude gets you nowhere.

The first stage of our final intervention was advertising. If you’re going to do something in a big way, people need to know in advance. 190 screen-printed posters bearing only the dates of our interventions were distributed across greater Cape Town, and the wall of Cape Town High School also played host to a set of our dates. Most people didn’t know what they were. It didn’t really matter. We just wanted to make the public pause and think, even if only to be mystified. That doesn’t happen enough.

Wednesday kicked off with a silent bang, as we painted ourselves grey with clay slip outside the National Art Gallery. The Art Gallery was the first of 16 sites in Cape Town that addressed over the course of the six and a half hour long march. Each space was 'choreographed' by the original pair to whom it had been allocated. The bodies of the collective were oriented in the space according to its historical or contemporary significance. Mostly, it went off with out a hitch. We gathered crowds at every space, people followed behind us with phone cameras in hand, Japanese men in tinted sunglasses posed next to us for photographs and cars hooted as we passed.

Of course, some spaces caused problems. Inspector Loodt of the SAPS was not too keen on our intervention outside the police station, for example. Apparently 29 people leaning against the wall in the execution position- or executive position, as she would have it in her increasingly fragmented English- could be read negatively in the press. The police hate negative press. They get enough flak as it is. The director of the Standard Bank on Adderley wasn’t that impressed either, when we lay down in long row across her pavement. Perhaps we were distracting the money?

I suggest everyone lie down in a busy street for ten minutes of absolute silence at least once in their life. It's surreal. People shout and threaten, flower-sellers harass, beggars beg... and you do nothing. The world falls away. Time stops. It sounds cheesy as all hell, but it is simultaneously one of the most unpleasant and rewarding experiences I have ever had. It changes the way you see the city, and understand yourself within it.

The project was, as whole, kinda successful. The noon-gun still fired, but it was confronted by a horde of silent grey art students and probably got the surprise of its life. The march made it into the Cape Times and the Durban Times, and certainly attracted the attention of an uncountable number of city dwellers. We certainly accomplished what we set out to do: we painted the town grey.

http://http//www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=2934&art_id=nw20091007171541881C341013

[Photo cred, from top to bottom, goes to Kelly Berold, Rachel Kelly, and Niklas Zimmer)