bios

“Hieronymus Bosch was a realist,” claims an old art book on the great Dutch painter of hell. A realist, nah, how can that be? His great innovation was to depict human suffering free of the iconography of the Bible—relying on his own gothic imagination to depict evil as a “monstrous hybrid of insects, reptiles, chunks of human anatomy and bits and pieces of machinery”.

His weird Sadean panoramas of depravity are, as the book puts it, “explosions of meaning, phantasmagorias designed to lay bare the essence of reality”. His singular paintings still have the uncanny ‘jolt of something inexplicable’, and his great modern political power lies in his major theme: ‘the tormenting of the helpless’.

Why does his great theme sound like a rejected early title of J.M. Coetzee’s mighty Disgrace? Why does it fit the logic that determined the fate of the Stilfontein 78, scrounging for runoff specks of gold, left to die in the dark by the ANC? Because conscious cruelty is at the centre of our culture; his world is our beloved country. Ask immigrant shop owners how the Rainbow Nation treats them—is it paradise or the other place?

The active torment of the helpless, those living the perilous ‘bare life’ of Agamben’s homo sacer—someone you can kill without consequence because they don’t quite belong to civil society—is everywhere. There in the slow death of dreading bills, in everyday calamity when you are far from solvent, there waiting in line with you for part-time work, eating bad food and drinking worse water. There when you’re attacked, robbed, assaulted, and moved on, maligned and degraded.

Bare life is a present without comfort, meaning, or support.

Homo sacers pounce on traffic with their hands out, they sleep on cardboard, and cling to their SASSA cards for deliverance from want. Bosch lets them proliferate—like flowers of evil—across his teeming canvases: the helpless, the abandoned, the weak and tempted, the sidelined, fallen, and undervalued. He brings them to life in the afterlife, forcing us to see their suffering for real, to bear witness, so we can never pretend, like the camp guard families in The Zone of Interest, that we didn’t know.

And the present inheritors of Bosch’s vivid empiricism, the heirs of his unflinching probing of the abyss today? GroundUp just as readily records ‘the tormenting of the helpless’—unzipping the structural morass of this spiralling country, letting the muck spill out onto the floor. They bring homo sacers to life every week in their injustice, their poverty, their creativity, and resistance. Accurately reporting the facts on the ground—and what facts! Corruption, neglect, breakdown—the whole scarifying litany of post-apartheid wrack and ruin.

I dutifully read their thankless, tireless, necessary stories in China from afar in the exact same way Bosch wanted his dark visions to work on his audience: to see what’s lost when society goes to hell.