Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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assemblage of desire and discernment.
As a photographer, Goldblatt was drawn to the boring and everyday, ‘to the quiet and commonplace, where nothing “happened” and yet all was contained and immanent’ (Dubow 1998: 24). In the everyday, he saw the conditions of possibility for apartheid’s insanity and brutality, and like the British Marxist art historians, cultural critics and geographers of the 1970s and 1980s who studied the ‘dark side of the landscape’,5 Goldblatt was drawn, repeatedly, to the seemingly innocent landscapes of South Africa. He made it clear that his interest in landscape had nothing to do with being a ‘nature lover’ but rather with ‘the way we act with the land, work with the land, move on it, mark it’ (O’Toole 2003).
The lawn is largely absent from Goldblatt’s earlier work, Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975). The images he captured there are landscapes of no-lawn; the Afrikaners he photographed do not seem to garden, or have gardens, but instead dance, work, farm, flirt, sing. In a later work, The Structure of Things Then (1998), the lawns seem terribly permanent, enduring topographies of apartheid. In Boksburg, his exploration of a segregated suburb, includes as many as twenty lawns. Both in the private garden and the civic sphere, these brittle black-and-white lawns form the grounds for polite, respectable white subjectivities. For instance, At a meeting of the Voortrekkers in the suburb of Whitfield, Boksburg records a team of ‘penkoppe’ (boys) and ‘drawwertjies’ (girls) squatting on the lawn with their leader. In a similar way, Flag-raising ceremony for Republic Day (31 May) at Christian Brothers College, Boksburg. 30 May 1980 depicts an everyday kind of political event, on a bleached Johannesburg lawn. In the domestic realm, Goldblatt observes kidney-shaped swimming pools rimmed with face-brick and lawn, precast concrete fences with neatly maintained grass, and, of course, mowing. In many of his photographs, the lawn is just caught in the corner of the frame. The tiny wedge of grass, bottom left in the photograph Girl in her new tutu on the stoep, is perhaps the most suggestive example of the lawn functioning in a supplementary, apparently unimportant way. Even in Saturday afternoon: bowls, where the lawn is in every practical sense necessary, even fundamental, it exists pictorially and ideologically as part of the background. The lawn seems to just be there.
It is the lawn’s just-thereness that explains, partly, why it has remained largely inoculated against sustained critique, why it has remained almost entirely politically unchallenged and is still ecologically, aesthetically and infrastructurally hegemonic.
While the lawn’s goodness, innocence and neutrality may have been convincing to most planners, artists and administrators, there have always been a small group of dissenters who have resisted the lawn in subtle and explicit ways, foregrounding the politics of its surface, offering alternatives to its dominance and taking a spade to its roots. For instance, in the eighteenth century Uvedale Price famously declared that the lawn was both boring and ugly, and entirely at odds with the picturesque principles that he felt were in good taste: ‘The notion that a lawn, or any meadow or pasture ground near the house, ought to be kept quite open and clear from any kind of thickets, has been one very principle cause of the bareness I have so often had occasion to censure’ (1810: 175).
In twentieth-century South Africa, at the same time that Goldblatt was capturing the long shadows of highveld winter, Mike Nicol’s poem ‘Returning’ in Staffrider (1984: 6) foregrounds the ‘brittle lawns’ of white suburbia:
Who returns to his winter suburb
walks familiar streets in the brown afternoons,
another itinerant passing wide of Alsatian and Doberman.
No-one looks up: children chase their fantasies
across brittle lawns. A year’s growth has thickened gardens
and spawned a new generation for the nannies on the
pavements.
Gardeners lurk behind hedges; a woman
shifts her chair to catch the moving sun.
The air carries intimations of despair:
a shower of ash lodging black in the curtains,
bodies massacred in room after room.6
The vitreousness of Nicol’s lawns is in stark contrast to the discursive softness of the lawns in the literary and technical archive. Apart from the brittle lawns in ‘Returning’ and Lungiswa Gqunta’s glassy installation Lawn 1 (see Plate 16), which I discuss in Chapter 4, the lawn is overwhelmingly and consistently described as ‘soft’, an ‘illustration of the beautiful’ (Jackson Downing 1853: 62; see also Johnson 1979: 154; Martin 1983: 467; Omole 2011; Stapf 1921: 88). The beauty, tranquillity and naturalness of the lawn are ideas that arrived in South Africa as part of the baggage of British empire. Even kikuyu, the lawn grass that has become naturalised in South Africa, was originally from the East Africa Protectorate and sent via Pretoria to Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London to be classified and propagated.
The ideal of the British lawn has been unexpectedly adaptable to the politics of the South African highveld, if not always to its climate. The flat, green lawn has been planted in locations as diverse as Pretoria’s Union Buildings (1913), the Voortrekker Monument (1949) and Freedom Park (2004); elite private high schools such as St Stithians, St Andrews and Roedean; the post-apartheid sculpture installation Long March to Freedom at Tshwane’s National Heritage Monument and the sculpture park at the Nirox Foundation at the Cradle of Humankind; and in Soweto, the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum has a dramatic axial line of lawn connecting the place where Pieterson was shot with the entrance to the museum. The lawn, here, is a peculiar vector from 16 June 1976 to the present.
The encounter between European landscape conventions and the South African environment, what Mary Louise Pratt calls the ‘contact zone’ (1991), is a territory in which scholars have sought to understand the problems of colonialism, dispossession, belonging, land and labour.
J. M. Coetzee set the terms for this debate with the publication of White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988). His approach to the landscape was very much in line with the ‘dark side’ landscape critics from that period who argue that landscape is an ideological concept, a ‘way of seeing’ (Berger 1972), which ‘mystifies, renders opaque, distorts, hides, occludes reality’ (Wylie 2007: 69). Among other ‘dark side’ landscape critics, Raymond Williams (1975), John Barrell (1983) and Ann Bermingham (1986) argue that the landscape represents to certain people their imagined relationship with nature (Cosgrove 1984) and simultaneously hides the struggles, achievements and – importantly – the labour of the ‘inhabitants’ of that landscape (Daniels 1989). Coetzee extended and departed from these arguments in significant ways, particularly his concern with imperialism and racism.
In White Writing, Coetzee describes how South African landscape art and landscape from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century revolved around the question of ‘finding a language to fit Africa, a language that will be authentically African’ (1988: 7). He was concerned with the representational politics of ‘the land itself’ (10); work; visibility and the discourse of idleness; European schemas of thinking Africa, especially through the picturesque and the pastoral; and race, especially by marking and historicising whiteness. Zoë Wicomb and Jennifer Beningfield have pointed out how ‘white writing’ is ‘something incomplete, not fully adapted to its environment, something in transition’ (Wicomb 1998: 372), ‘plagued by doubts and insecurities … conflicts, ambiguities and silences’ (Beningfield 2006a: 18). These conflicts have animated a range of scholars, producing an eloquent and politically attuned body of literature (see Carruthers 2011; Darian-Smith, Gunner & Nuttall 1996; Foster 2008; Van Sittert 2003). Blank____Architecture, Apartheid and After, edited by Ivan Vladislavic ´ and Hilton Judin (1998), marks a strand of theorisation, present also in ‘Naturing the Nation’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 2001), concerned with the question of after: what possible shapes could a post-apartheid and postcolonial South Africa take?
However,