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Centre for Human Rights and the subsequent decision to remove them from
the Centre and then from the corridors of the Department of Public Law
sparked debate and reflection on the value of art, on freedom of expression
and on the crafting of a politics within the Faculty that embraces dissent. In
response to this issue, Professors Christof Heyns and Karin van Marle 3 each
delivered conceptions of the kind of commitment to and understanding of
human rights, democratic ethics and tolerance that should inform our
outlook on art and specifically horror art, which often has the effect of
jolting us out of the false sense of comfort that we have been lulled into and
present to us in graphic detail the horrors of life, the realities of injustice,
violence and abuse and essentially, the ‘Disasters of Peace’. 4
In what follows I attempt to show how, even six years on, the artworks
are still relevant. The conditions that reproduce sexual violence, hatred,
patriarchy, neo-oppression, social anarchy and human misery are alive and
well. Diane Victor’s etchings confirm that
among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past — killers
who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have
absolute disdain for the women of our country, animals who would
seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled
and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in the quest for
self-enrichment. 5
This proves, to revise an old adage that pictures speak louder than words.
Heyns and Van Marle went further than only the art works themselves,
to deal with the process of consultation that was (not) followed in the
decision to display the pictures in the Faculty building (whether in the Centre
for Human Rights, the corridors or offices in the Department of Public Law
or anywhere else for that matter). Heyns stresses that ‘a commitment to
democracy and human rights requires that those directly affected should in
one way or another be consulted when strong statements are made through
3
4
5
C Heyns ‘In graphic detail. Freedom of expression on campus’ and K van Marle
‘Art, democracy and resistance: A response to Professor Heyns’ Disasters of
Peace: an exchange (2005) 1 Pulp Fictions 3 and 15 respectively.
This is the official name for a series of artworks by Diane Victor.
Thabo Mbeki ‘I am an African’ (1996) Statement of (then) Deputy President TM
Mbeki, on behalf of the ANC, on the occasion of the adoption by the
Constitutional Assembly of the Republic of South Africa Constitution Bill, 1996, 8
May 1996. Available at http://www.info.gov.za/aboutgovt/orders/
news20220_mbeki.htm.