“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” It’s a startling opening line, penned by George Orwell in 1941 while pent up in a small, rickety cottage in Wallington, a few miles north of a shell-shocked London. His point? That despite there being no animosity between him and his would-be executors, it is all too easy for “kind-hearted law-abiding” citizens to do things in the name of duty that they would otherwise find unconscionable. “Most of them, I have no doubt . . . would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil” (2019).

Ever cognisant of our capacity to sleep-walk into a future we would rather avoid, Orwell soon turned his gaze inward, asking what makes a French person French, a Spanish person Spanish, a British person British. Not discounting the nation state as construct or the vast singularity of individuals who identify with the latter umbrella, what is it that makes the beer in Britain “bitterer,” the coins “heavier,” the grass “greener” (2019)? How does one account for England’s peculiar flavour, which is “somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red-pillar boxes” (2019)?

If Orwell is cognisant of breathing a “different air” when returning to his country of birth — if, in the moment, he notices that “the crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd” — he is also aware of how quickly such a singular impression can dissipate, swallowed up by the “vastness of England” and the diversity of its inhabitants, who, despite their differences, will consistently “swing together” in moments of crisis, “like a herd of cattle facing a wolf” (2019).

Self-preservation no doubt has its perks, but for Orwell this involuntary impulse also has a habit of selling the British populace short. “In the 1931 General Election, for instance, we all did the wrong thing in perfect unison” (2019). Brexit is a more recent example, but at the time of writing, Orwell was trying to ascertain what makes the British tick, frustrated by the failures of capitalism and the ineptitude of those in power to face-up to the impending threat of Nazi occupation. “What had happened was that the whole monied class, unwilling to face a change in their way of life, had shut their eyes to the nature of Fascism and modern war.” The result, he writes, was business as usual:

Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were tumbling over one another in their eagerness to sell Germany tin, rubber, copper and shellac; this, in clear, certain knowledge that war was going to break out in a week or two. It was about as sensible as selling somebody a razor to cut your throat with. But it was ‘good business’ (2019).

If I begin my reflection on Arnott’s Citizen (1986) in this way it is because, for me, his two-metre-plus bronze — commissioned by the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1985 — embodies so much of this spirit. With his head in the clouds, Citizen is not only at odds with his environment, but oblivious to it. Like a tragic comedy he moves full-steam ahead into an unknown future, possessing both the air of Winston Churchill and the foresight of Edward John Smith.1

After Jung, one could say that Citizen represents something of an attitude; that he “stands for the principle and motive force behind certain views, judgements, and actions of a collective nature” (2014: 103). The term “zeitgeist” springs to mind, if only for its reference to foam (gischt) and yeast (gäscht) — something “frothing, effervescing, or fermenting” (Jung 2014: 104). Yet, as attitude, one would be hard-pressed to root Citizen within a particular time and place. Notwithstanding the irony of his title, he is as much a part of yesterday as he is tomorrow; as bound up with the “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays” of Orwell’s England as he is with the street vendors of Joubert Park (from whom, Arnott happily remarked, the work has “acquired a patina of grilled sausage”),2 the scrap-metal collectors of Johannesburg (who, on occasion, have liberated Citizen of his cane),3 and the humid, ice-cream-clad beachfronts of Durban (where, as a child, Arnott was first introduced to the Punch and Judy show).

This and that

The difficulty of trying to pin Citizen down can, in part, be attributed to the presence of Mr. Punch, on whom the sculpture was modelled. While true that this figure has become synonymous with popular British culture of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries — inflected with its peculiar flavour — Mr. Punch belongs to a much older stream of cultural influence. He is couched in the Atellane theatres of ancient Greece, and was a frequent figure in the form of the saturnalicius princeps (“Lord of Misrule”) of ancient Rome, required to dress up, make mischief, and terrorise guests during the saturnalia festivals (Jung 2014: 161). Much to the clergy’s disdain, he is also present in the fester asinorum (“ass festival”) and the festum stultorum (“fools’ feast”) of the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries France (2014: 165).

Although such festivals “vanished from the precincts of the Church” around the early sixteenth century, squashed by numerous decrees, Jung writes that they could not be altogether stamped out, reappearing “on the profane level of Italian theatricals as those comic types who, often adorned with enormous ithyphallic emblems, entertained the far from prudish public with ribaldries in true Rabelaisian style” (2014: 165). Included among these was Pulcinella, a figure said to have originated in the town of Acerra in southern Italy, following the Turkish invasion of Constantinople in 1453 and the introduction of Byzantine mime. Dressed in a pointed cap and contorted mask, Pulcinella soon made his way north, acquiring a new persona and fresh garbs in almost every European culture he encountered. In France he became known as Polichinelle, where he bore a “high hat . . . ruff and big buttons . . . hump back, hook nose, fat belly and pointed chin” (Maris 1987: 24). To the Germans he was Kasper. In Hungary he went by the name of László Vitéz; in Turkey, Karagöz; in Russia, Petrushka.

Despite the variety of guises in which he appears, one constant is his appetite for food, drink, sex, and violence; so engrossed in his excesses and the “reproduction of his own image” that he remains all but “oblivious of the total mess and disorder surrounding him.” Jung considers such attributes characteristic of the trickster, regarded as a “collective shadow figure” (2014: 168). Much like the Mercurius of Greek mythology, he writes, Pulcinella is prone to “sly jokes,” “malicious pranks,” “self-imposed sufferings” and “senseless orgies of destruction” (2014: 161), yet for Jung, it is his “unconsciousness” which is his defining trait, so unconscious is he that his “two hands fight each other” (2014: 169).

This description takes on a more literal form following Pulcinella’s arrival in England, where he underwent a gradual transformation from marionette to puppet, acquiring the title of Mr. Punch. Permanently fixed to the “showman’s right hand” (Maris 1987: 24) this metamorphosis enabled the introduction of new stock characters — Judy, Toby, the doctor, policeman, crocodile, et al — but it also necessitated their perpetual demise, with the “well-known sequence of beatings and hangings used as a means of ending the scene with one left hand puppet” (1987: 24) being knocked-off before the next could enter the fray.

Of course, one could ask why no puppeteer ever thought to dispense of Mr. Punch — how different the show might have been if only he failed to slip the noose; if the policeman called his bluff; or if, from the get go, he decided to soothe the crying baby — but what interests me is the understanding that the trickster has been “actively sustained and fostered” (Jung 2014: 171) throughout the ages, not only because of its historical significance — a crumb left over from the feast — but because it continues to serve a particular function. Based on the understanding that “nothing is ever corrected in the unconscious,” Jung writes that the trickster continues to “[haunt] the mythology of all ages” so that we might subject it to “conscious criticism” (2014: 165).

For Jung, such a phenomenon reflects a double-bind, which has to do with “the desire on the one hand to get out of the earlier condition and on the other hand not to forget it” (2014: 174). For this reason, he writes of the trickster as central to the so-called civilising mission, yet it is important to acknowledge that Jung’s perspective is but one of many, developed through the lens of a particular tradition. As shown by Yomna Saber (2017), the variety of guises in which the trickster can be found and the variety of functions it performs is far reaching. Among others, she points to the presence of the trickster in the Yoruba pantheons (Eshu-Legba), in West African folklore (Anansi), American folklore (Brer Rabbit), and in the worlds of contemporary writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde, who not only adopted features of the trickster in their work but lived them. As described by bell hooks, “Hurston perceived herself always as knowing how to ‘work’ white people, i.e. manipulate them for her own ends. Often she did this by playing the role of faithful caring darky, all the while believing in her power to subvert the situation without ever being found out” (Saber 2017).

Where Jung points up the trickster’s dark side, all the better to subject it to “conscious criticism,” Saber chooses to foreground its liberatory appeal. She leans into the idea of the trickster as a “slippery” semiotic sign — not “this or that, but this and that” — which is able to generate “a third space” that might transcend “our conformist ideological boundaries” (2017). Drawing on the writing of Paul Radin, she emphasises the fact that the trickster “possesses no values, moral or social,” adding that “he is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being” (2017).

Without discounting Jung’s influence on Arnott, the moral corrective that the Swiss psychoanalyst ascribes to this figure appears out of keep with Arnott’s own writing about the work, which appears to align more closely with that of Saber. “The sculpture is not intended to be didactic, nor is it moralistic,” he explains. “It is neither an artful celebration of capitalism, nor is it a crafty leftish ploy to discredit big business — both of which (to my amusement) it has been accused of being. Perhaps it is a view from the radical centre?”4

In short, Citizen is not “this or that, but this and that.” As a “captain of commerce”5 he carries in his wake all the attendant contradictions of class, power, and politics, yet is not reducible to any of them. As will be shown, this ambiguity matters, not only because the absence of moral values might expose those that we bring to the table, but because the concepts that we use to understand and navigate the world — concepts like “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “bad” — are themselves products of an abstractive process. This is something that I will return to. For now, I mention it simply to draw attention to the possibility that Jung’s emphasis on the darker aspects of the trickster and the moral corrective he ascribes to it may be more specific to the Pulcinellas, Pollichinellos, and Mr. Punchs of our time than he would have us believe — a product of the cultures that produced them. If Mr. Punch can be regarded as a corrupt, self-serving figure — his unfortunate cohort of victims perpetually blind to his shenanigans — then perhaps it has to do with the kinds of corruption one finds in Britain, which, as Orwell points out, are almost always a matter “of self-deception, of the right hand not knowing what the left hand doeth” (or in this case, the left hand not knowing what the right hand doeth). At the same time, one could attribute the widespread appeal of Mr. Punch to Orwell’s understanding that most British loathe “the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots,” observing how, during World War I, the songs which soldiers sang of their own fruition “were not vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist.” Thus he writes that in England, “The only enemy they ever named was the sergeant-major;” that “all the boating and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities;” and that “The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction” (2019).

One can see this sensibility echoed in Citizen, for while all the “flag-wagging ... ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff” is certainly present, it is mostly felt in the manner of self-deception — as an illusion of grandeur or an inflated sense of self-worth. Some of this has to do with Mr. Punch, that master of deception who Arnott described as recognising “no authority whatsoever,”6 yet for me it is most acutely felt through the sculpture’s reference to another tradition that has become synonymous with empire the world over: that of the heroic monumental statue.

Intended as a parody of “civic statuary” — “an ironic gloss of the genre of the heroic monumental statue”7 — Arnott writes of Citizen as being neither “celebratory nor propagandist,” but rather, “an individualistic sculpture within a polemical tradition,” adding that it “is part of an old dialogue between ‘culture’ on the one hand and ‘civilization’ on the other.”8

Importantly, Arnott names Anton van Wouw’s statue of Paul Kruger as Citizen’s “obvious antithesis.”9 With a top hat, coat tails, a cane in his right hand, and a rolled up parchment in his left, the statue of Kruger is a clear departure point, yet where Kruger is depicted as a “mighty and broad shouldered” figure, “the master of all that he surveys”10 — in the manner, say, of Caspar Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) — Arnott’s figure is mock-defeatist, self-described as a “modern day condottiere, without a horse.”11

By positioning Citizen within the tradition of equestrian statues, Arnott draws on a history dating back to Greek mythology; the horse being viewed as a product of the union between Demeter and Poseidon, for whom offerings were made in the form of small “bronze statuettes of horses and horsemen” (Duffey 1982: 1). Geared towards the celebration of gods, military leaders, statesmen and the like, the equestrian statue has, since antiquity, represented humanity’s mastery over nature, with the figure of man (and such sculptures are usually, although not entirely, of men) depicted to have control over the “powerful horse” while “looking down on his fellow men from his elevated position” (1982: 1). Andrea del Verrochio’s glorified bronze of Bartolomeo Colleoni (1467), a condottiere “hired by the Florentine rebels to wage war against the government of Piero de’ Medici,” is exemplary in this regard. With his “face contored in rage,” the figure thrusts his “heavily armoured left shoulder forward as though driving by force of will his magnificent war horse through a hostile crowd.”

Since their inception, one important characteristic of such statues is that horse and rider are not considered separate entities, with the horse used to denote the character of the rider. Thus, “A restful horse” is intended to evoke “a sense of authority and dignity while a prancing horse implies a man of action” (Duffey 1982: i). As for being “a modern day condottiere, without a horse” — what does this make Citizen? A “jack” of all trades, master of none? If so, where does he derive his confidence? Did he not get the memo, or are horses simply outdated markers of wealth, status, and power, replaced by the top hat and cigar? After all, the condensation of horse and rider also extends to hats, cloaks, batons, laurel-burches and the like, all of which compress into an idealised image of the subject.

During the Roman Empire, Alexander Duffey writes, riders were depicted in a toga, with one arm “raised in an imperial greeting or bearing an eagle-tipped spectre,” so as to convey the “emperor as triumphator” (1982: 71). You can see this in a number of the coins produced during this period — yet another marker of the important role that equestrian statues played in matters of the state — but it is worth mentioning that many of these features were born out of the technical difficulties that sculptors of different ages faced, most notably the question of how to support the weight of both rider and horse on four (and then three) spindly legs and to resolve “the empty space below the belly of the horse” (1982: 163).

As Citizen is a figure without a horse, what is of interest to me is that Arnott did not need to contend with these difficulties. He could have placed the legs of Citizen together or done away them, as with his earlier sculptures Punch I and III (1979), where Mr. Punch (as jester and policeman, respectively) takes on an almost ghost-like quality. In a strange balancing act, all 900 kilograms of bronze are made to rest on tiptoes, thereby imitating the “slender limbs of the horse” (1982: i) which gave the sculptors of old such a headache. So doing, Arnott grounded Citizen more firmly within the tradition of the equestrian statue, conjuring the desired effect of a “tank-like” figure on the move. At the same time, Citizen is blown out of proportion, resembling something of a modern-day Hindenburg — more tragic than magnificent.

It is perhaps for this reason that he writes of Verrochio’s Colleoni as being “too ripely Renaissance for [his] theme”12 — that in all of its idealised realism, it is too successful in its elevation of the individual as the master of all things. Instead, he turns to Paolo Uccello’s earlier fresco (1436) of Sir John Hawkwood, a condottiere who would not blink an eye before selling himself “to the highest bidder,” and was notorious for playing both sides. Hawkwood’s self-interest alone provides ample metaphoric fodder for Arnott’s “captain of commerce,” yet he was also drawn to the idea, expressed by James Beck, that the fresco was “not so much a portrait of a warrior as a portrait of an imagined bronze monument.”13 Consequently, Arnott writes that his aim in citing the fresco was “to draw attention to a consummate sculpture encoded in painterly conceits.”14 It is the idea invested in the figure — the figure as projection, as attitude — that appears uppermost.

If Uccello’s fresco is better-suited to Arnott’s aim, it is because the work does not quite live up to the honorific status of a statue in the round; because in its unresolved, aspirational form, it is able to point up the ghost in the imperial machine. By depicting the pedestal from below, Uccello elevates both horse and rider, yet to maintain the illusion of man’s mastery over nature he is forced to do away with a naturalistic view and depict horse and rider from the side, so that the former does not obscure the latter. In other words, Uccello needed to twist the world out of proportion, to rely on abstraction, in order to render Hawkwood master of the universe. The collision of these two ancient traditions — Mr. Punch and that of the equestrian statue — is by no means unintentional: the former self-effaced, dispersed, without a singular identity to call its own; the other buoyed by the bravado of the nation state. Rather, Arnott uses the former to unmask the latter. As with Mr. Punch, deception is key.

The edifice of empire

It is true that, during the so-called golden age of the British empire, settlers who arrived in the colony-to-be relied on all manner of deception to transform their new environment into one that looked, smelt, and felt like home. Buildings were erected to mirror those back home, and when there were enough, towns and streets were given new names that resembled the old. Today there are people in the Eastern Cape, New South Wales, and Tasmania who all call Bathurst home, yet the application of a one-size-fits-all imagination was not without its difficulties. As Raqs Media Collective (2017) have observed:

The early epoch of the ascendancy of the English East India Company . . . in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century India is full of English, Scottish and Irish adventurers turning their backs on Albion and embracing, to the horror of their superior officers, what were called ‘native ways’: converting to Islam, renouncing the world and becoming itinerant holy men, or thugs, cohabiting with Indian women (and on occasion with Indian men), siring ‘half-caste’ children, endowing temples and mosques, wearing turbans and tunics after the prevailing Mughal fashion. Sometimes they even forget the English language.

At the same time, “their counterparts within the ‘native’ populations” made “moves in the other direction. Young men full with the heady intoxication of strangeness” learnt “to wear hats and clothes that make little sense in humid weather, break dietary taboos, cross the seas, become fervent Christians, learn to write sonnets, fall in love with English women (and occasionally men), becoming in every way possible, ‘sahibs’” (Raqs Media Collective 2017). Such exchanges were a facet of early colonial life that is often overlooked, if not by virtue of the sheer weight of what followed, then perhaps due to the assumption that, when it comes to the formation of cultural identities, “roots always precede routes” (Clifford 1997: 3).

James Clifford has challenged this perspective, highlighting how the development of culture is as much a product of “movement” as it is of “stasis.” Drawn to the idea that “cultural centres . . . do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them,” he complicates the belief that the process of European expansion was a “simple diffusion outward — of civilization, industry, science, or capital,” recognising instead that the “region called ‘Europe’ has been constantly remade, and traversed, by influences beyond its borders” (1997: 3). Arnott understood this too, having written a thesis on the formative, albeit undervalued, role that African sculpture played in the construction of European modernism (Arnott 1961). Nevertheless, it is telling that the influence of the continent in the production of Europe has by and large been written out of the grand narrative, which paints Europe as the proverbial blesser and safeguards this image. As writes Clifford (1997: 7):

The currency of culture and identity as performative acts can be traced to their articulation of homelands, safe spaces where the traffic across borders can be controlled. Such acts of control, maintaining coherent insides and outsides, are always tactical . . . Stasis and purity are asserted — creatively and violently — against historical forces of movement and contamination.

Similarly, Stuart Hall once wrote that “the very notion of Great Britain’s ‘greatness’ is bound up with empire;” that “Euroscepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth” (Jeffries 2014). Culture, he observes, is not something that we are simply born into, but something that we actively sustain and produce. It is how we ascribe meaning to an otherwise meaningless world. Despite having our own singular experiences, our own ways of understanding the concepts we ascribe to the world, the role of culture is constitutive, as much dependent on the “maps of meaning” or “frameworks of intelligibility” that we share with others as it is on their circulation, or lack thereof. The more common a particular concept, the more ingrained.

Thus, write Raqs, “the edifice of Empire” not only relied “on the adventures of impostors to lay its foundations” but “also required their marginalization” (2017). For what good would it be if those tasked with maintaining power in the colonies soon gave up their cultural identity in favour of another? If such frameworks fall apart, so too do the illusions they sustain.

The normalization of the state of power requires new garbs, even a new dress code; a new script and new persona that can help better distinguish the rulers from the ruled. It required new impostors, broken from a different mould. George Orwell speaks of ‘well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm’ who, sitting in Whitehall, could rule the world with their mastery of the global network created by the telegraph. They had made the earlier phase of empire building, the adventurous career of going east of Suez to discover a new self, redundant, ridding the world forever of the confusing ‘White Mughals,’ and situating in their place, clones of themselves whenever it became necessary to impose ‘their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.’ With the ascent of the man in the hat, the Empire may have lost something by way of its shine, its élan and its energy, but it gained a great deal in staying power (Raqs 2017).

Orwell’s description of “well-meaning, over-civilized men” who, dressed in all the accoutrements of bourgeois civility, rule the roost from Whitehall, is precisely the “mould” from which Citizen (1986) was cast. In it, one senses not only the absurdity and danger of custom but the fear of contagion — a kind of willfull ignorance that enables one to bury one’s head in the sand when faced with a change in one’s way of life or to commit atrocities in the name of country or any other such abstraction. The top hat, coat tails, cane, parchment and cigar are an ineffective armour against the shifting reality of our world, a “brilliant but flawed deflection” (Arnott 2011: 156). Through Citizen, Arnott presents the emperor’s new clothes, but the task of seeing the wood from the trees remains ever-present.

NOTES

1. Edward John Smith was the captain of the RMS Titanic, who is said to have declared it "unsinkable."

2. Arnott 2011 (see page 157).

3. Ibid.

4. See Arnott 1987.

5. Ibid. Also see page 271.

6. See Arnott 1987.

7. Arnott 2011 (see page 157).

8. See Arnott 1987 (also see page 271).

9. Ibid.

10. See Arnott 1987.

11. Arnott 2011 (see page 157).

12. Ibid.

13. Beck in Arnott 2011 (see page 157).

14. Arnott 2011 (see page 157).

Arnott, Bruce. “Ten Large Bronzes: Major commissions, 1977–1987.” Unpublished notes, 1987.

–––––, "Shaping ideas: The visual forming of meaning." In Under the Baobab: Essays to Honour Stuart Saunders on his Eightieth Birthday, edited by Phillipe Salazar. Cape Town: Africa Rhetoric Publishing, 2011: 153–69.

Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Jung, Carl G. Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972; London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Orwell, George. “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.” Orwell (29 December), 2019 [1941]. https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/#google_vignette.

Raqs Media Collective. "Dreams and Disguises, As Usual." ART AFRICA 7 (March), ed. Kendell Geers, 2017.