Out with negotiations, in with snowball combat

Last Saturday evening, as the sun dipped behind the barn roof of the Drill Hall’s Point Blank Gallery and the Plein Street taxi mania subsided for the night, snowballs flew. They were real snowballs — not white tennis balls, not (quite) crushed ice — of the solid, glacial variety produced when a mound of fake snow is left to compress itself for a whole, hot, dry Johannesburg afternoon. And they flew hard, whacking costumed combatants and beer-glugging observers alike at close range.

This unlikely shower of artillery was the first South African episode of Last One Standing (LOS) in action. LOS is a new “international sporting event” that takes the Euro-American tradition of the casual snowball fight to a new level. Teams of six hurl snowballs at each other according to strict rules drafted by the Official Snowball Fight Association as part of a knockout tournament that lands the longest-surviving team with a fancy trophy.

On Saturday, the event was held at the Drill Hall, the first tournament location where very little snowball fighting takes place organically. Ultimately, the reason for the organisation’s holding a snowball-fighting tournament here is incidental: Anthea Moys, again, fought bravely in a LOS tournament in Sierre, Switzerland, while on an artist’s residency nearby, came back to dusty Jo’burg and turned the Joubert Park Project on to the idea of hosting the same event here.

You can read more about the details of the event here, in an article I wrote for last Friday’s edition of the Mail & Guardian. For now I want to think about the execution of this tournament, whether it in fact mediated tension between groups of people who “have stakes in the inner city” and highlighted the commoditisation of natural resources, as it set out to do.

The teams, as promised, comprised Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) representatives, artists, taxi drivers and soapie stars, among others. Now, it would have been tremendously exciting if the artists had been concentrated in one team and the JDA representatives in another, or, say, the maniac Noord Street taxi drivers grouped against the Joubert Park ward councillor and friends. This would track how teams are typically structured when the event takes place in Switzerland.

Instead, the teams were mixed. The taxi drivers, ordinarily cursed by motorists sojourning near the Noord Street taxi rank, were allied with middle-class suburban kids and TV stars. Artists were conniving with hairdressers against rugby players. The JDA, easy to spot by its burly director Paul Arnot-Job, strategised with trolley pushers — an alliance especially unlikely to form naturally outside this highly contrived scenario. Louw Venter, or “Corne” of Corne and Twakkie fame, was meant to be the referee, but instead of aloof arbitrator he progressively slipped into the role of theatrical pseudo-Swiss dictator, subverting the meticulous efforts of the snowball-making minions to provide each team with 250 snowballs each per game by inviting the audience to the court for a free-for-all now and then.

As for the ecological critique that the event was supposed to provide, the snow itself was meant to be a commodity — this is why each team was supposed to be limited to 250 snowballs per game — but the excess slab of snow left to melt as the games progressed undermined this effort entirely. The snowballers were instructed to axe the counting and just give the teams as many snowballs as they wanted. There was still way, way too much snow, so children from the crowd came and drenched themselves with what was now becoming a tightly packed block of ice. Savvy audience members cooled their tepid beers in it. Mayhem ensued.

This morning, when I read Cris Chinaka’s article titled “Zim Parliament to be sworn in next week” on the M&G Online, I began to wonder about possible ways out of the deadlock in Zimbabwe’s post-election talks between Mugabe and Tsvangirai. If Last One Standing had worked as it purported it would in the beginning — as a fairly harmless way of managing a squabble between conflicted parties — perhaps it would offer a model solution to the MDC and Zanu-PF’s stand-off too. Imagine: Tsvangirai stands in the firing zone in luminous orange and black, armed with his 250 snowballs, and begins to hurl them — not too hard, though — at his opponent. Mugabe, in bright green and playing by the rules, hurls his 250 back, and by the end of the game the two have worked out their differences and are ready to get along and establish a power-sharing government.

The only problem is Last One Standing didn’t work in Southern Africa the way it usually does elsewhere. It was just not practical to replicate the international model, the organisers told me, which is also precisely why a snowball fight would never work to mitigate Zim’s political conflict (even if snowball fights were the way of solving real problems elsewhere).

We all know Mugabe would secretly be siphoning snow off the giant slab behind the backs of the neutral snowball-makers. Hell, he would have his own ally army of snowball-makers bringing him special bionic snowballs from the Far East. We also know that he would be dissatisfied with remaining in his quarter and would kick Louw Venter off the referee/dictator’s seat, making himself player and boss at once. He might invite the audience to join in the fun, but only to convince the Official Snowball Fight Association that he is benevolent and democratically minded. But then they would all have to be on his team. And they wouldn’t be allowed to use any of his snowballs. They would have to use stones or empty bottles.

During half-time, or between rounds, Tsvangirai would call up the referees and players in previous LOS tournaments and invite them to the game to heckle Mugabe on his behalf. They would be too busy and in other countries, so Tsvangirai would go back to the game, his helmet suddenly nicked from the spot where he had left it, and get pummelled. After the game, at the award ceremony, an angry Georges Pfruender, chair of the Official Snowball Fight Association, would reprimand Mugabe and tell him to share the Southern African Last One Standing trophy with Tsvangirai. Mugabe would oblige, but only after a few months of driving around with the trophy dragging from the back of his Bentley. Once the trophy resembles a reject Louise Bourgeois sculpture, Mugabe would allow Tsvangirai to stand under the podium and pretend to hold it for a photograph. Later that day it would go home with Mugabe, and Grace would have it melted down for a new belt buckle.

Although LOS was loads of fun, for a while, if you disregard the billows of dust it created, I have a problem with silly art events that purport to be able to offer a model for the resolution of serious problems. It is noble and reasonable to suggest that your crazy sports-cum-art event serves the people of the Johannesburg inner city by entertaining them. Also, I have absolutely nothing against silliness. But the point of my Zim illustration is that all too often artists feel compelled to infuse their work with Utopian social theses that, when tested in the context of reality, are absurd.

Of course, there are always financial motives for artists having to justify their projects socially, especially in South Africa where resources are limited. On the positive side (for artists), if you can pull off an institutional snowball fight in Joubert Park there’s probably nothing, short of pulling of a snowball fight in Zimbabwe, you can’t do.