THE unveiling of a statue of Nelson Mandela at our embassy in Washington DC has been followed by announcements that yet more Madiba monuments are to be erected around the country. Here at the Mahogany Ridge we are filled with foreboding.
An R8-million bronze, for example, of Mandela with outstretched arms is to be unveiled at the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Reconciliation Day, the arts minister, Paul Mashatile, has announced.
At nine metres high - more than three times the size of the work outside the Washington embassy - it seems a gesture of Ozymandian bombast, lacking the humility and generosity of spirit we associate with Madiba.
The City of Cape Town wants to erect its own statue - on the Grand Parade, where Mandela made his first public address after his release from prison. Hopefully, this will be a more fitting monument - but we are not holding our breath. Once local authorities strive to outdo one another in fawning sentimentality, good taste just rolls over and dies.
Remember Port Elizabeth? They wanted a Madiba 110 metres high - a full 17 metres taller than the Statue of Liberty. Shame, but they do try.
Mandela, of course, is worthy of commemoration. His likeness is a dominant icon of our times. Quite literally the poster boy for the democratic South Africa, he smiles out at us from walls and billboards, he's on our money and our postage stamps. He is possibly the exception to the rule that public figures should at least be dead for a few years before the sculptors are commissioned.
But I can't help feeling that if we're going to get all Pyongyang about it - there are currently more than 500 statues of the late Kim Il-sung cluttering up public squares in North Korea - then we should at least erect monuments that we can be proud of.
In my opinion, Marco Cianfanelli's imaginative work outside Howick in KwaZulu-Natal is the best of our public Mandela pieces. Built on the site where Mandela was arrested by security police in 1962, it comprises 50 vertical steel columns, like prison bars. From a focal point of 35 metres, Mandela's face can be seen as a floating image. Step out of that focal point, and the image disappears, creating a moment, according to the artist's website, of "fracture and release". More appropriately, Cianfanelli's piece doesn't overpower the viewer or dominate the surrounding countryside.
Mostly everything else, though, is dreadful. I was working in London when then mayor Ken Livingstone campaigned for a Mandela statue to be erected on Trafalgar Square.
That piece, by Ian Walters, was roundly savaged in 2005 by Professor Glynn Williams, of the Royal College of Art. "My main objection to the proposed sculpture is the quality of the work on offer," he said. "I believe this to be a run-of-the mill mediocre modelling in an attempt to get a mimetic likeness."
What's more, Williams added, Walters was a crap artist. "The sculpture . . . is an adequate portrait but nothing more. In my opinion a sculptor of more originality and inventiveness should have been chosen, so a lasting piece of artistic heritage will be left."
The fact that a work by Williams for another public commission had been passed over in favour of a Walters piece had, quite naturally, nothing to do with the tone of the academic's comments. After much hoo-ha, though, the Walters was installed outside the Houses of Parliament in 2007. Here it stands in dramatic contrast to the statues of Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, Abraham Lincoln and others. Its texture gives the appearance that Mandela has been tarred and feathered.
There is another Mandela sculpture in London, a bust, on the South Bank. It was unveiled in 1985 by the late ANC president Oliver Tambo. At the time Mandela was still in prison and hadn't been seen in public in more than 20 years. It looks nothing like him.
Earlier this month, the critic Melvyn Minnaar drew attention to the apparent difficulty of capturing the likeness, especially in sculpture. "The list of Mandela monstrosities is long," he wrote, "ranging from the first effort on a gold coin to the dreadful caricature, misplaced in the superficial Sandton shopping mall, the Stalinist version at his former prison near Paarl, to the pathetic head in London, and the frankly amateurish incarnation on Bloemfontein's Naval Hill."
Minnaar did, however, suggest that Claudette Schreuders' bronze at the V&A Waterfront was another exception. It had a "quirky sense of humour" and ran counter to the "imperial tradition" of ostentatious pieces in public spaces.
The trick, it seems, is to make them appear human.
This article first appeared in The Weekend Argus.
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