Abstract
The article investigates the connection between beauty and justice, by exploring everyday aesthetics through ordinary life, specifically the very concrete reality of contemporary urban South Africa. On the one hand, it delves beneath the statement that apartheid is ugly, by exploring the ugly spaces apartheid created, the devastation of an aesthetic built on segregation, and the distortions of whiteness. It also seeks to explore a theological aesthetic that starts from the ordinary life lived in particular places, arguing that beauty in particular places must be interwoven with humanness in all places, and proposing a theological aesthetic that gives priority to the voices silenced in particular places. Through this, beauty and justice are intimately interwoven in the ongoing work of disruption and transformation of a white racist place.
Highlights
Reflecting on the hills just north and south from where I am writing, we at times proclaim liturgically: Liturgist (L): We lift up our eyes to the hills, to the high places in and around Pretoria; Where does our help come from? Does our help come from Meintjeskop, from the Union Buildings, centre of political power? Congregation (C): Our help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth
Puttick’s (2020) recent photo of an elderly white couple walking down the streets of Hillbrow with their groceries captures the beauty reflected on in this instance. It should not have drawn the eye, but given the history and politics of the place, this normal, everyday activity draws his camera and becomes an image that captures our attention. Their story is not told, but the sense that they are at home in a place where they are not expected becomes a moment of introspection: Why is this not more common? What is it in how we think of and organise beauty that causes this image of an elderly white couple, walking with their groceries down the streets of Hillbrow, to be something that we find ethically, and aesthetically, important? It is, in part, the image captured by a camera that draws our attention; not merely the reminder that there are, some white people who have lived in Hillbrow throughout the past decades
Van Steenwyk’s (2012:68) mystical Christo-anarchist practices draw us to a particular place in the search for justice, which I would argue should underpin our search for beauty: “We need to tell the stories of the places in which we live from the vantage point of the oppressed”
Summary
Puttick’s (2020) recent photo of an elderly white couple walking down the streets of Hillbrow with their groceries captures the beauty reflected on in this instance It should not have drawn the eye, but given the history and politics of the place, this normal, everyday activity draws his camera and becomes an image that captures our attention. Their story is not told, but the sense that they are at home in a place where they are not expected becomes a moment of introspection: Why is this not more common? It is my own “everyday” from which I seek to think
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