With just over 300 views on Youtube (six of which were mine), Brent Meistre’s artistic contribution to the now national Silent Protest seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
With just over 300 views on Youtube (six of which were mine), Brent Meistre’s artistic contribution to the now national Silent Protest seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
"Silent Protest" by Brent Meistre
Published 15 April 2013
00:04:47
Watch it on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olRZonEqjQE
Silent Protest is a short video in which the photographer, film-maker and Rhodes fine art lecturer recites the words of two pop songs to himself in silence, which was exhibited in the Albany Museum for the whole day of the protest and is available to view online.
Taking turns with his superimposed double, Meistre reads the lyrics from Belle & Sebastian’s song The Chalet Lines and The Cranberries’ Analyse from crumpled pieces of paper, subtitles running across the bottom of the screen.
Besides being quite boring, the video also left me with a profoundly uncomfortable feeling about its role in addressing the horror that is gender-based violence.
In it, Meistre assumes the role of "preacher/politician" reading a mournful speech to an absent audience in the desert.
He claims to "evoke the complexities and the depth of issues around sexual violence in South Africa and the impossibility of representation, particularly of the number of victims in isolated and rural communities".
Activists worked tirelessly to organise Silent Protests across the country, educating the public about the myth and stigma surrounding sexual violence in South Africa and providing a safe space for rape survivors to tell their stories.
Meistre has never contributed to the Silent Protest before and published this video just four days before the event.
When questioned about the video, which was apparently made specifically for the Rhodes University Silent Protest, event organisers had not even seen it.
Instead of joining the discussion, Meistre has attached a slap-dash act of parasitic self-promotion (thinly veiled as 'social commentary') to the meaningful, unflagging work that goes into gender activism, living off the strong emotions and worlds of meaning that exist in this troubling sphere.
Although Meistre opens the video with some statistics about sexual violence and The Chalet Lines is a ballad about rape sung from the perspective of the female victim, the survivor’s voice and the South African context are glaringly absent from the piece.
It betrays no engagement with the wide community of thinkers and actors who have rallied around the issue nor with anyone directly affected by it.
This video is made by Brent Meistre, for Brent Meistre, about Brent Meistre.
While I do not deny the role of art in self-expression and the personal journey of an individual artist, it crosses the line when a piece reveals such a lack of concern for the context of its contents and the experience of its audience.
Indeed, as South Africans, we all feel the hopelessness, frustration and anger Meistre unsuccessfully tries to portray in his video.
The difference is, we haven’t all given up. We only grow and learn together, in communication and exchange with other people. We know the answers won’t be found on a self-enclosed odyssey into the Karoo.
