Finding something missing
by Sean O'Toole
On April 15, 2001 Zvidzai Mutarisi disappeared from home. He has been missing ever since. In his own idiosyncratic way, Peet Pienaar decided to help. The performance artist turned graphic designer started by designing a large missing persons poster for Zvidzai's family, a highly decorative missing persons poster replete with swirling baroque flourishes, soccer balls and a telephone number. Zvidzai, however, is still missing.
Over the last couple of years graphic design has increasingly begun to interrogate its own potential for doing anything useful. Realising that seduction doesn't describe the entirety of the craft's capabilities, graphic designers globally have stopped, paused a while and demanded first things first: ethics before profit. It was in this context that Peet Pienaar recently presented his own creative strategies at a colloquium hosted by the International Design Indaba.
Admittedly a fuzzy brief - 'Design: A force for good' - Pienaar used the forum as an opportunity to voice his dissatisfaction with contemporary art production in South Africa, as well as discuss his recent 'magazine' project, Afro. This beautifully crafted artefact is teasingly confusing, which partly accounts for its pleasure. More fundamentally though, Afro is a curious document of young, white South Africans discovering Africa - complete with all the problems this statement implies.
Bringing his artistic sensibilities to bear on a highly mercantile orientated craft, Pienaar staged a small performance as a preface to his talk. Audience members were invited to walk to the glass viewing deck on the eastern aspect of the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Once there, they were directed to look down at the gravel parking lot, to the stone mosaic image of Zvidzai Mutarisi.
Stoically returning the audience's gaze, the mosaic image said nothing about itself. Nor did Pienaar offer any clues. And then it all sort of just happened. Cue the music, cue a dodgy late 1970s Japanese automobile veering-off towards the mosaic image out of nowhere, cue dust, cue laughter, cue sublime confusion at the pirouetting arcs of the brown stunt car as it destroyed the teenage boy's face.
The briefest of performances, the event was over in a tick. Afterwards, Pienaar offered little by way of explanatory rationale, other than to name the face (Zvidzai Mutarisi) and list a mournful series of statistics relating to children gone missing in Cape Town's impoverished townships. By the time he'd recounted all of this, his presentation was over.
What struck me all about this small interruption to the proceedings of Design Indaba 7 was the noticeable shift in perspective occasioned in the mind of some audience members. Attuned to being wowed by the foreign speakers, some delegates suddenly realised that the spark of creativity they were after was not nested in some show-off foreign portfolio, but in the troubled idiosyncrasies of home.
Peet Pienaar's performance took place on February 26, 2004, at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.
