This is Not a Brick

A 1993 exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery displayed a mounted brick titled ‘THIS IS NOT A BRICK’. On the wall behind it was a blown-up photograph of a young man, arm behind his shoulder, poised to launch this same brick at police officers pointing rifles at anti-apartheid protestors. The brick was, most likely, manufactured by Corobrik, the oldest private brick manufacturer in South Africa. Founded in 1902 the company supplied building materials to the preapartheid, apartheid and post-apartheid governments. The company describes its current mission thus:

Embodied in that brick, in that company, is the brutal history of apartheid and colonial occupation. Founded in the early years of Johannesburg's expansion on the back of gold mining, its bricks built the apartheid city with its separate development and zoning, its violent processes of dispossession, the registration of land as property, and the remaking of earth into standard sized bricks. The young man doubtless picked up the brick in anger. Did he consider what it embodied as he remade it in to a weapon to hurl at the apartheid police? Even before he refashioned its physical properties to different ends, the brick was a constellation of relations including politically engendered property rights, the economic and racial divisions constitutive of apartheid, the labour of men and women forced off the land by colonial violence and the legal order that legitimised expropriation and violence. Stolen from a building site, launched into the air as a weapon, the brick may have injured a police officer. It most likely ended up on the dusty road, after the gathered bodies were dispersed with tear gas, rubber bullets, dogs and sjamboks. The artist picked up this piece of rubble, this relic of protest – like the bricks from the Berlin Wall sold online in the very earliest days of the internet – and framed it with a photograph and that title, ‘THIS IS NOT A BRICK’ – echoing Magritte, but painfully so.