Chapter 06 - Love and Gender in a Time of AIDS

CLIVE VAN DEN BERG Leak 2000
Wood, light bulbs
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery
Photographer: Wayne Oosthuizen
© Clive van der Berg

“There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa.”

Alan Paton wrote these lyrical opening lines for his famous novel Cry the Beloved Country (1948), a literary masterpiece that described the cruel effects of racial segregation and poverty on rural communities like those of the Valley of a Thousand Hills in KwaZulu-Natal. Today the traveler taking that lovely road will encounter deserted villages of grass-covered huts, where their former inhabitants experienced the misery and desperation caused by a new terror: the pandemic of AIDS. The disease has wiped out entire communities and left children with no living adult relatives. In that area more than 40 percent of the population is living with HIV/AIDS

Highways are believed to harbor a main cause of the rampant spread of AIDS across South Africa. At every truck stop sex workers desperate for money receive and pass on the virus when clients refuse to practice safe sex.

Veteran photographer David Goldblatt has traversed the length and breadth of the country on the highways, capturing the AIDS crisis in a remarkable ongoing endeavor. An observer of the South African landscape for almost fifty years, his series “In a Time of AIDS“ (2003–05) documents the conscious but probably ineffectual efforts of communities to keep the dangers of HIV/AIDS in the public eye. These include large versions of the looped red AIDS ribbon stuck onto a lamppost or a tree, sometimes right next to the sex workers.

Finding ways to bring healing to her community, Cape Town artist Jane Solomon led a group of thirteen HIV-positive women from one of Cape Town’s townships in the Body Map Project. Within a drawn outline of her own body, each woman mapped her life, her fears, her history, her dreams for her children’s future. This series, documented in a book called Long Life (Double Storey, 2003), has now been exhibited in many parts of the world, but perhaps its greatest significance was the sense of pride and affirmation it brought to the participants.

ZANELE MUHOLI
Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuto, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg 2007
Lambda print
76.5 x 76.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
© Zanele Muholi

Churchill Madikida’s Status exhibition at the Michael Stevenson Contemporary in Cape Town (2005) strikes a sad and contemplative note with its row of eighteen white plaster casts of faces, each taken from the face of a terminally ill AIDS patient. KwaZulu-Natal artist Mlu Zondi acts out with his theatrical partner Ntando Cele the kind of disrespect toward women that can suddenly turn a seemingly courteous lover into a brute in his performance Silhouette (2006).

“AIDS is part of our landscape, part of the world we are in,” says William Kentridge, talking of his film Tide Table (2003), in which the action of the film is centered on a beach with little wooden bathing huts, one of which morphs into the AIDS ward of a hospital in one scene. “The way that AIDS comes into the film is more a note, or a marker.”

If the apathetic attitude of the South African government toward the extreme seriousness of the problem of AIDS has shocked the international community, in other issues South Africa has been more progressive. In November 2006 South Africa became the fifth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.

It would be gratifying to say that the passing of this law had engendered a new spirit of tolerance, but the truth is that angry prejudice against gays and lesbians is still very prevalent. Black males seem particularly threatened by loving relationships between black women. “Despite legal commitments to equality for all, lesbians in South Africa are still targeted for rape and murder,” says Jessica Stern of the U.S.-based organization Human Rights Watch, citing the case of a friend walking with a woman who was killed in Cape Town in 2007. The friend reported their male attackers called them “tomboys” who “wanted to be raped.”

Young Johannesburg photographer Zanele Muholi is in the forefront of activists for gay rights, and her strikingly beautiful studies of black women in affectionate domestic relationships seek to force recognition that love between members of the same sex is to be celebrated, not denigrated.

For Nicholas Hlobo, too, his homosexuality is an integral part of his identity and of his work. His artistic mission is to share his clarity of vision about the pleasures and responsibilities of being a gay Xhosa man with his audience through his extraordinary sculptures and installations in which the artist fuses materials like black leather and pink ribbons and organza. All are titled with Xhosa names, which challenge Hlobo’s audience to interpret and understand the underlying cultural message.

Although Hlobo makes costumes for performances at his openings, for sheer flamboyance no one can match the outrageous outfits devised by Steven Cohen, often worn in the most inappropriate situations. These occasions include macho rugby matches or right-wing political meetings where the testosterone level of the audience is likely to be sorely challenged by the flouncing, skimpily dressed Cohen.

The national armed forces also come under scrutiny in Hentie van der Merwe’s Uniforms, for which the artist spent months taking low-light photographs of handsome dress uniforms in Johannesburg’s Military Museum, reflecting both on the sexiness of the tightly fitting jackets and on the brutalizing effects of war on men that such jackets disguise.

If uniforms can be a cover-up, on the naked body there can be no such protection. Clive van den Berg’s continuing theme is the permeability of skin in a time of AIDS. His drawings of male bodies record past experiences of love, small marks, scars. And his sculpture Love’s Ballast, made especially for the Personal Affects exhibition in St. John the Divine Cathedral, New York (2005), is a figure of a naked man lying on a plinth, arms upraised, as if a lover has just been taken from him.

In these many ways the country’s artists explore the manifold issues around gender, same-sex love, and AIDS. Through their work they attempt to inform their audience of the damaging effects of intolerance, calling for a generosity and a humanity that, sadly, too often can be lacking.