These were the heartfelt reflections performance artist Oupa Sibeko felt compelled to share on Instagram, in response to the wave of hateful comments (to put it mildly) that flooded the gallery's post of his performance Pillowtical, staged at Everard Read's Cape Town space on the opening night of the HEAT Winter Arts Festival in August. Working through his guiding mantra of ‘play,’ Sibeko wore a nappy and overshirt whilst moving his audience through song, dance, foot-tapping, hand-clapping, and the childlike mystery of plucking miscellaneous objects from a pillow. Eccentric? Absolutely. But the explosive hatred it was met with online appears alarmingly disproportionate: "How degenerate." "What the f*ck is this." "I wasted 4 seconds watching this." "And this is called 'art'. What a disgusting mess. Embarrassed." It’s a jarring response by any account. So what, then, can we understand to be the root of these online haters' concerns, and what larger picture does this reveal about the position performance art occupies within the South African contemporary art landscape? 

Performance art, by its own nature, invites a particular kind of discomfort. Unlike static mediums such as painting, sculpture and photography, which can be observed as a finished ‘object’ and exist beyond the moment of encounter, performance depends on a direct relationship with its audience to activate its meaning, whether online or in person. This immediacy is central to its efficacy, and largely to how the medium has come to be associated with acts of protest, as seen in South Africa’s performance art canon. Tracey Rose and Steven Cohen, two of its most significant practitioners, drew considerable acclaim from the late 1990s onwards for work explicitly built around such confrontation. Rose is known for pushing her body to physical extremes and adopting an absurdist, satirical tone, forcing her audience into a confrontation with the intersecting structures of race, gender and power. Cohen, meanwhile, transforms his body through signature costume and riotous make-up, asserting his staged persona in calculated public spaces where the incongruity of person and place becomes the confrontation itself. 

Chandelier 2, ©️ Steven Cohen. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Cape Town and Amsterdam.

However, Sibeko's practice channels that same immediacy toward a different end than his predecessors'. Guided instead by the mantra of ‘play,’ he uses the form as an act of unification, a methodology built, as he puts it, "to break the sense of hierarchy" and "create space for dialogue," one in which "everyone has got a voice." His surrounding exhibition, STRAATMATE, carried this same spirit. Sibeko spent six months in District Six, using the street as his studio and creating the work in situ alongside local residents. On ground still scarred by the history of forced removal, he drew instead on the joy of residents' everyday encounters, meeting that weight with the unexpected yet universally experienced sense of play. Read within this frame of reference, even the seemingly provocative image of wearing a nappy becomes a clear nod to the childlike spirit he seeks to draw out in all of us. In other words, if one took just a minute to read the artist's rationale, Pillowtical reads less as a provocation and more so as an invitation, and the buoyant, spirited, warm, open tone throughout his performance fully reflected this premise. The hand-clapping and unguarded wonder he embodied were uncomfortable only insofar as they demanded active engagement. This is further exemplified by observing the reaction of those in the room. His audience all clap and smile, and where they hesitate, they do so while also seeming curious, warming to his eccentricities as the piece develops. 

But perhaps such a reaction was to be expected. Everard Read may be a public space in name, but attending the event required a degree of intentionality, an interest in walking into the gallery, one could likely assume, already primed with an understanding of the Cubicle Series' premise. As Everard Read's Director and Head Curator, Emma Vandermerwe, puts it, "When we arranged for Oupa to be part of the Cubicle Series, in many regards, that kind of experience is the epitome of what Cubicle stands for: it's an incubation space, a formal space that holds and contains an idea and experience for a period of time, at the least amount of financial commitment on the part of the artist. It gives permission to experiment, play, incubate." Those who attended did so because they wanted to be there, approaching the piece with open-mindedness and appreciation for what a space like Cubicle exists to offer. Online, by contrast, the performance was exposed to a different sort of public, one that happened upon it more so by chance, shaped, additionally, by a format that rewards attention in increments of seconds, let alone minutes. All of this is to say, the fury Sibeko received cannot, by any means, be mistaken for any sort of critical engagement with the performance and its premise. Those commenting denied the artist the time and consideration such judgment requires. What provoked them, instead, seemed to be something felt rather than reasoned, reflecting an instinctive discomfort with a situation rooted in a broader condition it happened to expose. 

SIBEKO STRAATMATE 1 (MICHAEL HALL), Courtesy of the artist, Everard Read Cape Town and Michael Hall.

This largely boils down to a question of economics, made visible by who exactly was flooding the comments with such vitriol. Predominantly, though not exclusively, it was fellow artists who offered none of the critical engagement the moment deserved; their comments instead circled a single, recurring anxiety: the value of Sibeko's work, and why a commercial gallery like Everard Read would give it space at all. "Deeply disappointed in Everard Read," one wrote. "Surely this is beneath them??" Another, perhaps most tellingly: "I have real art, but I never understand how art galleries accept or how they choose work! Been rejected with no valid reasons! Even if you study art, they will still choose nonsense, real artists give up!" The irony lands like a slap, given that Sibeko holds both a Bachelor of Art in Performance and Visual Arts and a Master's degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand, precisely the kind of studied, credentialed practice the commenter insists "real artists" offer and galleries supposedly ignore. 

Performance art has always held an uneasy, at times fraught relationship with market realities, and sustaining a practice within it comes, unavoidably, with its difficulties. A commercial gallery, at the end of the day, is a business where the bottom line cannot be ignored. The practice's ephemeral nature therefore necessitates producing tangible elements, both to preserve the archive and to respond to the less-than-romantic demands of the art market system. Cohen's self-portrait series offers one such example, in which the makeup and glitter that transform his face for each performance are lifted away with tape and exhibited, offering both a record of each intervention and simultaneously (to put it bluntly), something to sell. Whilst Cohen’s longstanding relationship with his gallery, Stevenson, has seen five solo presentations (made up of self-portraits, images, objects, videos and photographs) locally since 2010, one can’t help but notice the artist’s apparent leaning towards an international framework (retrospectives, festival inclusion, critical attention) that is matched by a number of the country’s other leading practitioners, Tracey Rose and Buhlebezwe Siwani among them. The reasons vary, with several of these artists now living and working abroad. But the pattern also suggests that perhaps the infrastructure performance depends on is, for now, more consistently established elsewhere. That includes festivals with reliable funding, sustained critical engagement, and a market willing to collect the archival material performance yields. 

Birthday Face, Lille, 11/08/2024, 2024. Credited to Steven Cohen. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Cape Town and Amsterdam. Photograph by John Hogg.

These are the conditions, therefore, within which Oupa Sibeko performed, and they go a long way toward explaining the anger he received online. Pillowtical was staged alongside a physical, sellable body of work, (of which works did sell), yet the reaction nonetheless reflects a strained market climate, one where presenting a performance inside a commercial space becomes the sharpest concentration of a wider tension, one where the ephemeral and the sellable are negotiating the same ground. This is by no means a critique of the gallery for staging such a piece; on the contrary. With public funding notoriously scarce and private institutions still in their early years of development, South Africa's commercial galleries have historically carried outsized authority, often operating as the leading infrastructure between an artist and the wider public. With that power comes a responsibility to nurture both artists and the new work they seek to explore, and by giving Pillowtical space, Everard Read chose to nurture. Although Sibeko paid a high personal price, that cost should not diminish what he simultaneously achieved. His performance did precisely what he would later describe art as being capable of: disrupting our preconceptions - and it is through these disruptions that our ecosystem ultimately has a chance to evolve. Signs suggest that shift is already underway. HEAT, which dedicated its opening night to live performance across participating galleries, followed Pillowtical with a public conversation, joined by Carin Bester, that reflected on the work and the responses it provoked. Meanwhile, only now, decades into their substantial careers, have both Rose and Cohen received the domestic institutional recognition their work has long deserved. Rose's retrospective Shooting Down Babylon opened at Zeitz MOCAA in 2022, and Cohen's Long Life is recently on show at the Iziko National Gallery. Sibeko's own reckoning, in time, may well follow the same course.

Artworks by Oupa Sibeko: