kagablog

MISS BEAUTIFUL
SOUTH AFRICA IN PAGEANTS
STAN ENGELBRECHT & tamsen de beer
DAY ONE

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology gives pageant as a late medieval word of unknown origin meaning a “scene acted on a stage, esp. in the open-air performances of the miracle plays” or, alternately, with less reference to specifically Biblical sources, ” a series of tableaux, a brilliant spectacle”.

The brilliant spectacle of the miracle of the Rainbow Nation repeated ad nauseum like a mantra would appear to inform Stan Engelbrecht’s latest investigation into South African identity.

Miss Beautiful follows on the runaway critical and commercial success of African Salad, a book whose recipe was revealingly simple: South Africans are what we eat.

An appropriately glib slug line for Miss Beautiful might be “South Africans are what we aspire to look like”.

But who is “we”? Of course Engelbrecht has been very careful to cover all the politically correct bases - we have black, white coloured and indian pageants, not to mention moffies, bikers, transvestites (Miss Gay Disco Queen Chedino Rodriguez: “I look better than most women in a bathing costume.”) and even AIDS sufferers (Mr. HIV/Aids-Awareness). This inclusivity is laudable but the photographs themselves reveal that all is not quite what it seems on the stage where these scenes are being acted out. The repressed has a way of revealing itself, of returning.

The photograph is of Calvinia Meat Festival Queen, Rika Van Zyl and her family in their kitchen. Rika is smiling broadly, the “Feeskoningin 2008″ sash worn on top of her green jacket is obviously a very good reason to smile. Her left arm is raised in order to hold her two sons who are both pre-teen, both smiling equally broadly. On her right is Rika’s hubby, Mr. Van Zyl who has his left hand on her left shoulder, his smile is somewhat different from those of Rika and the kids in that it doesn’t display as many teeth but he certainly does look very proud. Thus far nothing strange.

But the an Zyls are standing behind the kitchen table which is strewn with raw meat. A huge pile of lamb chops, as many as fifty choice cuts. It is in this strange, surrealistically perverse juxtapostion of the celebrating pageant queen and her family next to the evidence of the slaughter that will become the feast, that Engelbrecht manages to go beyond registration, beyond mere docucmentation, and provide the possibility of autoptic analysis of the beauty pageant phenomenon.

Miss South Africa Megan Coleman describes herself as “another blonde white girl” and you can’t miss South Africa. It’s that direction without a name on the bottom of the continent. Engelbrecht has gone in search of the elusive grail of South African identity only to discover that the scene enacted on the stage has been a charade instead of the much-hyped miracle of new nationhood. All we really have in common is our love affair with meat.

Aryan Kaganof

this review was first published in art south africa vol 07 issue 03 summer 09