Texts

Brett Murray has long been one of South Africa’s sharpest, most subversive visual artists. Known for his biting wit, iconic sculptures and fearless commentary, he’s also a man of music, mischief and meticulous pool maintenance (and one of Currency’s favourite creatives too). Here, he lets us in on everything from bodyboarding to the emotional power of Nick Cave.

What’s the best book you’ve read in the past year – and why?

Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan’s Faith, Hope, and Carnage. I’m not a huge fan of Cave’s music, but I am learning. My wife Sanell is a huge fan. I booked tickets for us to see him in Madrid for Sanell’s birthday a few years ago – but then came Covid and lockdown. Fok.

I found his Red Hand Files website a few years ago. On the site he answers questions from his fans. His writing is funny, insightful and scarily honest. Often about what inspires or moves him: religion, death, spirituality. Both his sons have tragically died. He speaks so eloquently about this loss and his grief and what he calls “communal vulnerability”.

The book is in a way an extension of the Red Hand Files. It documents 40 years of his life in conversations with the critic and writer Seán O’Hagan. In his words, the book offers “ladders of hope”. Brave stuff.

One of my favourite quotes, for obvious reasons, is: “Humour is the merciful oxygen that can envelop seriousness and prevent it from becoming a grim contagion that infects ourselves and those around us. True humour is the antidote to dogmatism and fanaticism, and we must be cautious of the humourless who cannot take a joke.” Hell yeah …

How do you keep fit?

I bodyboard with my sons from time to time. It might be a midlife crisis. I play tennis every Wednesday evening in Pinelands. This transgressive stone-throwing pretend-pretend iconoclast has obviously thrown in the towel. I’m told Pinelands is the suburb where the middle classes go to die. I’m 63 so I am eyeing out the bowling club next door to the tennis courts … next to that is a church … and that is a fart away from the cemetery. It’s a slippery slope. Done then dusted …

Weeknight, low-key restaurant go-to?

Willoughby & Co – the sushi place at the V&A Waterfront. Bond the house first … but you can do some last-minute shopping for the kids’ lunch boxes and go to Exclusive Books for a quick perusal as well.

What is the one artwork you’ll always love – and why? (You needn’t own it!)

That would definitely be Claudette Schreuders’ Mother and Child. I saw this work again with my family over the weekend. It’s currently in the show titled Motherhood: Paradox and Duality at the South African National Gallery.

I met Claudette when she was in her first year at Stellenbosch. I was her lecturer. I was establishing the sculpture department at the university at the same time she was studying. It was so exciting to see her blossom. I like to pretend that I nudged her on her way … but her obvious skills and talent would have shone through inevitably … of that, I am sure.

This work was one of an incredible series of carved wooden sculptures she produced in her fourth year. Sublime. She was 21 years old! I wanted it badly … but a friend got in first.

Do you have a hobby? What is it?

Hobby? Not sure. My work is my pleasure, my trade and my hobby. Music is another pleasure, I suppose … a hobby of sorts. I sometimes crank up the sounds in my studio and accompany this on my bass guitar.

The one unusual item you can’t live without?

I had to beg Sanell for 20 years to get a pool built in our back garden. It took me seven years to convince her to have kids. I don’t know if she is stubborn or if I am persistent. So now we have both pool and kids. A good mix, I think.

The pool filtration system runs a UV light to nuke the algae and other shit out of the water. It pulses copper and silver into the system when needed as well … it is attached to an automatic hydrochloric acid drip feed … and is monitored online.

All I have to do is take a copper test and register it online once a week. No hunky pool cleaner for Sanell needed, I’m afraid. I have become one of those dull people who gets a kick out of pool banter. #sad. So, my copper testing kit has to be the unusual item that I can’t live without.

Who was your high school celeb crush?

Too many to mention, but Bianca Jagger. Shelley Duvall. Sophia Loren. Patti Smith. Jane Birkin. Chrissie Hynde. And all three of the original Charlie’s Angels. I might be a slut.

Three songs that you’d take to a desert island?

Have you come across the radio podcast Desert Island Discs? It’s a BBC radio production and has been going since the late 40s. They interview people of interest – musicians, writers, scientists and the like – who talk about their lives and choose eight significant tracks to take to a desert island.

To choose my favourite three songs is a cruel and unkind punishment.

My parents were hooligans and social reprobates. Brandy and Tab. Box wine. Braais and music. Complaining neighbours. And plenty of jazz. Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Oscar Peterson, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck, Herbie Mann et al. These were cranked up while they burnt the meat and danced to Les McCann and Eddie Harris’s Compared to What, which is my first choice.

We take the education of our kids seriously. As a result, their DJing skills are impeccable. On our drop-offs and travels, Cat Power, Alt-J, Suzanne Vega, The Police, The Clash, The Beach Boys, Astrud Gilberto, Elvis, Bowie, The Cure, Earth, Wind & Fire, José González, The Gorillaz, The Beatles, Kool & the Gang, Sade, Feist, The Kinks, Kraftwerk, Daft Punk and Michael Jackson, among others, blast us on our way.

One morning Kai, aged four, piped up from the back seat on the way to nursery school and requested: “What about a little bit of Moby?” Their education is complete …

This morning Kai put on Elvis, The Gorillaz and Daft Punk. Lo put on Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto’s Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars), which is my second choice.

My final choice is impossible. Anything by Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix or Prince. Anything produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry. Ali Farka Touré. Talking Heads. Fela Kuti. James Brown. Chet Baker. George Clinton. Leonard Cohen. The xx. Portishead. Massive Attack. I have various Amapiano sounds on rotation when I work. Bongeziwe Mabandla. 340ml. And on and on …

Two artists who I discovered fairly recently are Jacob Banks, the Nigerian-born English singer whose song Slow Up is a contender, and Beth Hart who belts out blues and rock-tinged songs … and has got some heavy-duty pipes. She has thankfully survived serious addictions. I saw her live a few years ago – her version of Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit is haunting as shit – but my final choice will have to be Hart’s song, I’d Rather Go Blind.

The satirist speaks to the FM about his exhibition titled Brood and the new sense of tenderness and vulnerability in his work

“I’m not going to stop throwing stones,” artist Brett Murray says as we walk through his latest exhibition at Circa Gallery in Joburg, as if to reassure me.

For most of his career, reaching back to the 1980s, a steady stream of satire has run through Murray’s work. At first it was aimed at the apartheid government, taunting and mocking the authoritarian state and its officials. In the post-apartheid era, as he sums it up, his work has explored “notions of identity, geopolitics, fascism, corruption and the like”.

As much as he self-mockingly interrogated his own place in the country’s emerging new social order, he also aimed his satirical slings and arrows at the new political elite’s vices: greed, corruption, hypocrisy, pretension, power lust and so on.

Perhaps most famously — or notoriously — in 2012 a piece called The Spear broke out of the rarefied context of the art gallery and into the public consciousness as few artworks manage to do.

Murray’s depiction of then president Jacob Zuma in the style of a Soviet poster of Vladimir Lenin, genitals bared, touched a nerve. The ensuing furore involved protests outside the gallery, picketing outside Murray’s home and death threats. The president wasn’t above going to court to try to have the picture taken down (even after it was reproduced online countless times around the world). Ultimately, the artwork was vandalised by members of the public.

The Spear referred to Zuma’s 2006 rape trial, drawing parallels between predatory politics and sexual exploitation. It involved an accusation that Zuma was coercing narratives of liberation for his own political posturing and self-aggrandisement. It hinted at a strain of Soviet-style authoritarianism running through the government’s character that was at odds with its democratic principles. It was also, as Murray has put it more simply, “a dick joke”. (Umkhonto we Sizwe, or MK, the ANC’s military wing, means the Spear of the Nation.)

But the artwork was also accused of treating the issues surrounding representations of black male sexuality and black bodies in general insensitively, and even perpetuating damaging stereotypes. The main force behind the popular objections (rather than the rarefied art world commentary), however, was that it was disrespectful to Zuma.

At one point in our interview, Murray grumbles: “Can you believe that people still want to talk about this?”

The debates surrounding the artwork were indeed done to death. The Spear became a bit like the hit song that makes a band famous, but which they begin to loathe for the way it comes to define them.

It turns out, however, that The Spear has ongoing currency. First, the disgraced former president is in the news again for his involvement with a new political party named MK. Russia’s violent and autocratic president Vladimir Putin grinds on with an ideological war. A sexually predatory populist leader threatens to assume the US presidency once again. No wonder people still want to talk about it.

The last thing to say about The Spear is that it is perhaps the most prominent example of Murray’s uncanny ability to capture the mood of the moment and concentrate it in a deceptively simple, immediately comprehensible image. He’s a lightning rod; a capturer of the zeitgeist. (It’s an ability that has also seen him accused of being superficial, of making artworks that amount to little more than zingy one-liners — but some one-liners last hundreds of years, and a simple image can end up being emblematic of an era. Perhaps The Spear came close.)
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"That moment of panic and fear … forced me to seriously look down at family and children rather than look up and out at [other] people"

Brett Murray

New directions

If part of Murray’s artistic ability involves distilling the temper of the times in an image, what to make of his latest exhibition, Brood?

It is made up mostly of tender, emotive animal figures, some alone, others in pairs or groups, dealing with themes such as fear and anxiety. They’re not exactly humourless, but they’re more likely to elicit a sympathetic smile than a derisive snicker. They tug at the heartstrings.

This is not satire. These works are not argumentative, they’re meditative. They’re not subversive, they’re introspective. They’re not about intellect, they’re about emotion. They’re not about politics, they’re about relationships.

Brood refers both to family and to a kind of worried thoughtfulness. Murray explains that the shift began with lockdown and a project he wasn’t sure he’d even exhibit. He’d set up a studio at home, and carried on working as a kind of therapy or meditation. His subject matter was what was immediately around him — his family. He created a portrait of one mischievous son as a monkey; the other — “wise beyond his years”, says Murray — as an owl. He made a portrait of his wife as a rabbit, after her love of rabbits and the Japanese tradition of placing a rabbit sculpture outside one’s house to bring good fortune.

Something resonated and he carried on making these family portraits — he uses the word “avatars” at one point — exploring feelings that seemed pervasive at the time such as anxiety, isolation and fear, but also intimacy, tenderness and hope.

There was a fundamental shift from depicting what he calls “perpetrators” — the politicians and public figures who represent certain evils and vices, and who have traditionally been his targets — to the people close to him. “That moment of panic and fear … forced me to seriously look down at family and children rather than look up and out at [other] people,” he explains.

Those pieces did eventually come to form an exhibition called Limbo, referring to that particular in-between time. But that might have been a slight misnomer. When Limbo showed in London in 2021 and in Cape Town in 2022, he noticed that, despite the period of limbo being over, people nevertheless “responded to [the works] in an emotional way”.

“I realised that the kinds of anxieties that were specific to the pandemic [still] … resonated,” he says.

A post-pandemic global climate — he mentions “global warming, the rise of [the] right wing, xenophobia, the refugee crisis, the Ukrainian war” — also manifested, he found, in a nonspecific sense of doom without a clear target or symbol for satirical attack.

Murray also mentions a certain saturation with news and politics. “I just look at the pictures and the headlines and I can’t go any further because it feels like we’re stuck in Groundhog Day,” he says. He sees “the same stories ... as 15 years ago”.

At the same time, not unlike the lockdown experience, the apocalyptic global political climate really brought home the importance of family and the things that really matter: relationships. “Those experiences determine who you are,” he says. “I think this [exhibition] continues to reflect that and celebrate it in a sort of melancholic way.”
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"[Covid] was a reminder that we are all, as human beings, literally breathing the same air … across the world."

Brett Murray

Portraits of a family

The cute and cuddly forms of his animal sculptures might once have been deceptive — expressing, as he puts it, “a weird paradox that these things that are comfortable and playful to look at actually aren’t”. They’re designed to draw you in and then “pull the rug out from under you” when you discover that they’re describing, for example, “patriarchs and war criminals”.

In Brood, he’s used a similar lexicon to express tenderness and affection. These figures are not so much symbols as characters — they’re portraits of himself and his loved ones. As much as he talks about cartoon characters familiar to him and his children — Dumbo, Curious George — influencing these works, he’s also become fascinated with netsuke, Japanese miniature sculptures, for their simplicity and expressive character.

He goes into raptures about marble, which he’s taken to working with recently, in addition to bronze. “At the risk of sounding pretentious, it’s got a different soul to it. I don’t know what it is. It’s the quality of it … the actual life of the veins,” he says. “So it was almost through a different material that I gained confidence to make things more sentimental [and] personal.”

But that’s only part of it. It is testament to Murray’s skill as a sculptor that he can pack so much expression into such pared-down forms.

So, what might Murray’s sea change tell us about the zeitgeist? What, if anything, does it mean that one of its most sensitive barometers has shifted his perspective so dramatically?

It’s not quite a symptom of political disengagement, but what he terms “melancholic withdrawal”. Of the pandemic, Murray ventures: “I think it was a reminder that we are all, as human beings, literally breathing the same air … across the world.”

In the uncertainty and our awareness of our fragility, Murray’s new work returns to familial bonds. Paradoxically, withdrawal into the private realm also reminds us of our common humanity. “We’re all the same,” Murray puts it simply. And in that, perhaps, is a shred of hope.

Critics, they can make you cry. One of South Africa’s most in/famous artists, Brett Murray, has an exhibition that has just opened at the Circa Gallery in Johannesburg. It is his first that has none of the text work that he enjoys using in his art.

The self-deprecating Murray tells me, on a Zoom interview earlier this week, the story of an encounter with one of the country’s most respected artists, academics and curators, Karel Nel.

“He said he thought that my strength lies in the three-dimensional work, the marble work, and the bronzes. About the text works, he just said, ‘Those are like subtitles,’” Murray says with a chuckle.

“Yeah, so I kind of laughed — and then I went home and cried because he just made two-thirds of my practice … obsolete.”

Over his 40-year career, Murray has always engaged with words.

“Since I can remember, I worked with language — language and image — and sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly,” he says.

His striking new 24-piece show is called Brood. And while Murray has let the simplified forms and materials of silent animal avatars do all the talking, he still seriously plays and works with language.

“The idea of ‘brood’ was a double meaning: one’s brood, your family, and to brood over something. So, it was sort of working between those ideas,” he explains.

Created during the hard lockdown at the onset of the pandemic, Brood is a body of sculptures and reliefs; among them marble elephants embracing, a family of bunnies titled Witnesses, and groups of sad-looking bronze monkeys huddled together.

It is clear that the artist was thinking of his own spouse, their two young sons and their lives. And the lives of others.

“They are kind of avatars … which enabled me to try and articulate my relationship but, potentially, our shared relationship with our family and with our friends in times of catastrophe, in times of stress, in times of struggle.”

It is not a radical change for the artist who was mired in controversy 12 years ago over his work The Spear. It parodied Jacob Zuma, who was then president, in a Lenin-like pose with his genitals exposed and unleashed an angry backlash.

It formed part of the Hail to the Thief II exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.

“Brood,” he says, “continues with themes established in my previous body of work.

“Although, historically, most of my work metaphorically aims satirical arrows at perceived ills in society, and while this is certainly cathartic, I have only recently worked out that the process of making is independently therapeutic.

“Where before my animal sculptures might symbolically mock predators, policemen, politicians, oligarchs, sycophants, the corrupted and the like … during lockdown I felt impelled to look closer to home for my subject matter.”

I ask whether he has gone soft or more subtle with the almost melancholic Brood.

“No, it’s not a question of subtle, I don’t think,” Murray replies. “People have responded … there’s almost an emotional response to the work, which is great, because it seems to have resonated in this age, even though I’m so cynical about my own stuff…

“And, you know, no longer the sort of … Che Guevara of the southern suburbs [of Cape Town],” he says with a giggle.

“I’ve hung up my beret. So, yeah, there is a softness, but I’m 62. I’ve come to an age that I don’t care what people think anymore. You know, I’m making stuff.”

Before our interview Murray sent me a lovely reflective note.

“What I thought I had produced was a single-issue body of work,” he wrote. “A response to the pandemic reflecting our mutual fears. A fragile tenderness. Our collective breath had been held for a few years.

“However, on seeing the works installed post-Covid it seemed a broader reading was possible. Implicit rather than explicit.

“We are currently gripped by uncertainties; global warming, nationalism, xenophobia, a failed state, the refugee crisis, the rise of populist right-wing agendas, wars, genocide … and more.

“These weigh heavily on our ‘families’. The new works extend the themes of familial intimacies and brooding contemplation. They describe a world of trepidation and vulnerability. Melancholic by default. Hopeless yet hopeful.”

I prod him about the contradictions we are experiencing. On the one hand, there’s the gentle intimacy of his brood, his family, that is so beautifully reflected in the work at Circa. On the other hand, there is the daily horrors of children being killed in the genocide in Gaza.

“We live in a world of contradictions. I mean, living in South Africa, the contradictions of living in a house with a car and a full fridge where most of the country don’t have that and will never.

“That is the country of contradictions that I was born into.

“Similarly, the contradictions of the horrors of war, in all the wars that are happening all over the world, and in Ukraine, Yemen and Palestine.

“It’s therapeutic for me to come to a quiet space, come to my studio, whether I’m making these objects or other objects. Because it’s horrific when you see the images of kids and families,” he says.

It is just a brisk 10-minute walk from Circa down Jan Smuts Avenue to the Goodman Gallery, where Murray’s The Spear was hung in 2012 but it will transport you back to a tumultuous time of controversy with the artist right in the raging centre.

The painting was vandalised, it prompted protests. The ANC went to court to have it banned and wanted the image removed from public view, including on newspaper websites.

It was ironic, because Murray was actively involved during the anti-apartheid struggle, using his art as a tool for left-wing organisations in Cape Town. He experienced censorship in his earlier life as an anti-apartheid art activist in the 1980s.

He designed posters, logos and T-shirts for the Community Arts Project. They printed their T-shirts at Community House in Cape Town, which housed various trade unions, the United Democratic Front and other left-aligned organisations.

“We used to print T-shirts and stuff for funerals — like ANC guerrilla Ashley Kriel’s funeral — and marches,” Murray told me in a previous interview.

“One of our members designed the Food and Allied Workers Union logo which is still in use now.”

Murray and his comrades had a particularly narrow escape one night. They had just left Community House after a workshop when a limpet mine rocked the building.

“I’d say that’s an attempt to censure and censor but you kind of forget that history,” Murray said with a wry chuckle.

“Much of the language of the 2012 exhibition at the Goodman was kind of Soviet propaganda, the sort of posters that I designed for the struggle during the 1980s,” he said.

He used the language of Soviet iconography, for this exhibition, “with a rejig in the South African context”.

One of them was an iconic image of Lenin done in the Fifties, “so I put Zuma’s head on it. And I thought that was in fact enough as a painting — sort of taking the piss out of the new elite.”

At the time, he was focused on social commentary and “you have a devil and an angel sitting on each shoulder, and you get some time to listen to it, and sometimes you go, ‘Fuck it!’ and you listen to the devil”.

As he admits, “I like to be transgressive, you know, I read Foucault and Derrida, but I also like slapstick and I like funny one-liners. So, I painted a dick on [the Zuma painting].

“And then I thought this may be a bit much,but I just kept carrying on working … and then, more out of laziness than anything else, I’ve decided to keep it — it was a one-liner dick joke.”

Murray’s name and address were in the phone book and people started to gather outside his studio, at his house. The spokesperson for the Shembe Church said at a rally he should be stoned to death.

“I had to leave my studio to take my family to a safe house. So, it was a pretty uncomfortable time,” Murray told me.

“I wasn’t used to it; I wasn’t used to the spotlight. That was very uncomfortable. And scary.”

It is not surprising that the artist is relieved that is all in the past. As Brood shows, his artistic work has also moved into a different direction, and, as he tells me this week, “My interests had been shifting from perpetrators to people and I had been wanting to transition from an accusatory position to one that is more compassionate and empathetic.

“Something intimate and kinder,” and his mischievous chuckle again. “Not exclusively though … I remain a stone thrower at heart.”

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Brett Murray made a name for himself with his controversial – and rather revealing – painting of Jacob Zuma. Now he’s turned his sharply satirical eye to the world of finance.

Cast your mind back to 2012, when Jacob Zuma supporters protested outside Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery in anger over artist Brett Murray’s, should we say rather revealing, painting of their boss, titled The Spear.

Remember how the artwork was later defaced by two of these acolytes and that the ANC, when it still liked Zuma of course, briefly took the artist and gallery to court in defence of its great leader, who was president at the time?

What a difference 12 years makes. It’s hard to imagine the current iteration of the ruling party doing anything but smirk over that piece of cultural criticism. How leadership changes, politicians pivot and artistic taste wavers with such ease.

Murray might be a decade older and now represented by Everard Read, but he is lightyears more consistent than the flip-floppers running SA Inc. This is certainly true of his career-long knack for societal commentary through art.

Murray is wont to say that he’s softened in his “old age”. He spent the Covid lockdown and the time since crafting a world of animal-like sculptural avatars that underscore the importance of family, love and looking after each other, so perhaps there’s some truth to his claim of being softer. Bunny broods aside, there’s still a satirical self-reflective court-jester energy to the work the Cape Town-based artist now produces.

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Comments on capitalism

Take his latest works, titled Fiscal Cliff and Wealth Management. In both, Murray has turned his critical gaze on the world of capitalism and finance. Where the first work, a sculpture, is concerned, it doesn’t get more metaphorically obvious than copulating hyenas. They’re smiling maniacally as one nudges the other over a cliff.

What average South African wouldn’t identify with that image? Taxes, the cost of living, our desire for fine things, unemployment – it’s a constant entanglement at the edge of the economic precipice.

Characteristically, Murray doesn’t take his own work too seriously, though the message is piercing. “Are they playing or fucking? Well, that depends if you want to get the work for your kids’ room or if you want it for your office,” he says with a laugh.

“The image is basic and crude but it’s a commentary on us fornicating at the trough of indulgence and greed and avarice,” he says – though he’s quick to include himself in the capitalist miasma. “I suppose I’m in the privileged classes. That doesn’t stop me from pointing fingers with full understanding that four fingers are pointing back at me,” he says.

Murray says he understands that he is part of the problem, at least in the context of the chasm between the rich and the poor in South Africa. “But at least having some level of self-reflection keeps you honest. I think if it was just flag waving and throwing stones without that and understanding, then these works might just be insults,” he says.

Wealth Management is more literal in its treatment of the financial realm and with its playful use of only words. It is vintage Murray: “selling climax”, “rising bottoms” and “naked options” are all in the mix.

“I bought a book of terms used in the investment and banking industries published by Business Day almost 20 years ago,” he says. “I’m not sure why. I know nothing about either industry but thought that if I put the publication under my pillow, perhaps I’d take on some of the financial nous by osmosis. It didn’t work.”

The book floated around Murray’s studio and after paging through it, he came across a few terms with hilarious double meanings. A glance at this salaciously suggestive list is revealing of banking’s instinct for subtle insurgency. (Ed’s note: could you explain, simply, what all these financial terms mean? No googling).

Unlike the ANC in 2012, we doubt the stockbrokers, bankers and Reserve Bank economists are going to be picketing outside Everard Read anytime soon – for one thing, you’d want to believe they’ve got better art sensibility and take themselves less seriously than our politicians.

Either way, instead of laughing all the way to the bank with their piles of moolah, perhaps they should pick up a highly collectable Murray. Next year there’s a retrospective of his sculpture at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, and that’s bound to do great things for their value.

* Fiscal Cliff Bronze, 2024, Edition of 6, R285,000 each; Wealth Management, 2024, Edition of 8, R40,000 each. Everard Read

This group of sculptures continues with themes established in my previous body of work.I hadn’t finished yet. I suppose you never do.

During hard lock-down and at the onset of the pandemic I set up a studio at home. Although historically most of my work metaphorically aims satirical arrows at perceived ills in society, and while this is certainly cathartic, I have only recently worked out that the process of making is independently therapeutic. I am a slow learner. I just need to keep busy to stay sane. I titled the show LIMBO. The state of us then.

Where before my animal sculptures might symbolically mock predators, policemen, politicians, oligarchs, sycophants, the corrupted and the like… during lock-down I felt impelled to look closer to home for my subject matter. My interests had been shifting from perpetrators to people and I had been wanting to transition from an accusatory position to one that is more compassionate and empathetic. Something intimate and kinder. Not exclusively though…I remain a stone thrower at heart.

I have been researching the small Japanese Netsuke kimono fasteners for a while. Deliciously refined and paired down decorative mini sculptures carved in stone, wood, or ivory. Sometimes cast into metals and mostly of animals. In my inquiries I came across the Japanese tradition of placing a to- scale wooden sculpture of a rabbit looking heavenwards outside houses and businesses as charms that might bring prosperity, good luck, and fertility.

This seemed like a good place to kick off my lock-down therapy, so I started by making small symbolic portraits of the four of us at home as animals. My partner, our two young boys and myself. We have an odd collection of small animal sculptures and toys around the house. These inspired. As do the Ghanaian Asante king’s linguist’s staffs: exquisitely carved wooden figurative finials, finished in gold leaf, that describe through visual proverbs each king’s strengths and visions.

Sanell loves rabbits and we certainly needed the good fortune, so she was portrayed as a rabbit. Lo is wise beyond his years and was represented as an owl. Kai as a mischievous monkey. All three are looking to the heavens for guidance or as witnesses to an impending calamity. I hold my hands and look down anxiously as a monkey and a father. In hope and in fear.

These first four seemed to resonate effectively…so I extended the series, describing the intimacy and anxiety of isolation and of social separation that has been a universally shared experience and somehow paradoxically binds humanity together. Hopefully.

What I thought I had produced was a single- issue body of work. A response to the pandemic reflecting our mutual fears. A fragile tenderness. Our collective breath had been held for a few
years.

However, on seeing the works installed post covid it seemed a broader reading was possible. Implicit rather than explicit. We are currently gripped by uncertainties; global warming, nationalism, xenophobia, a failed state, the refugee crisis, the rise of populist right-wing agendas, wars, genocide…and more. These weigh heavily on our ‘families’.

The new works extend the themes of familial intimacies and brooding contemplation. They describe a world of trepidation and vulnerability. Melancholic by default.

Hopeless and hopeful.

The creatures gazing outward to some imminent event, exemplify a state of innocence, not still, but thrust headlong into the experience and therefore capture something, a mere flash, of the rush of a soul from itself.

pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.
— John Keats, On a Dream  

Over a video call Brett Murray speaks to me in a Cape Town accent I haven’t heard for a long time. He sits at his computer, surrounded by children’s things – many recognisable from my own childhood memories:  action figures, two large and slightly deflated golden birthday balloons say “11”, Halloween decorations, puzzles, Lego constructions, brightly coloured children’s books. He tells me that when he’s in a bad mood, Sanell – that is, his wife, Sanell Agenbach – says to him, “for fuck’s sake Brett, go and make something”, and he disappears into his studio for a couple of hours. He explains that his working progress, like this, is quite basically cathartic. He’s in a discoloured T-shirt, which gives him the appearance of having just come out of one of these therapeutic sessions.

I ask him if it was at all difficult to use these same “tools” used on politicians as he has on his family. Namely, the same reduction of form, the same methods and techniques, which in previous exhibitions have been used to ridicule, mock and parody.

“In this latest exhibition of bronzes these techniques are used rather to represent loved ones,” I say to him. “What was used to attack in this work is now used to express love; so it feels like mockery becomes something endearing, like the silliness of an inside joke, a kind of teasing.”

Murray’s new bronze works – which were exhibited for the first time in the UK at the Everard Read Gallery in London in November 2021 – seem to move inward, towards silence rather than towards speech. Even the titles of the works are single monosyllabic words (such as Loom, Witness, Shield, Omen), showing an awareness of the weight of language rather than the readiness to speak out that characterises his earlier work.

The same hands used in the past to caricature the powerful are used, in a manner of speaking, to tickle the child-feet of his sons, to be playful and tender and peel the fruit of love to its pulpy interior. But he seems uninterested; what seems to me to be a contradiction or a difficulty is, for him, completely easy and natural, an organic process:

“For a while now, I’ve been looking for a different material. I was finding the stark, very black patinas of my bronzes had a particular language… It was almost always about perpetrators rather than about people. The same animals that I am using now were the targets of my vitriol. They were the patriarchs, they were the predators, etc. And I had been wanting for a while to do something that was about people, that was more human based,” he says. “You know, that was about my family perhaps, and about my friends, and about us; so what you were saying – to rather look internal, and look inside.”

His eyes close in concentration as he speaks, emphasising with easy gestures that remind me of my father’s hand movements.

“It came to me when I started working with marble on my last show. I had made a series of maquettes. They are light grey in colour, a much lighter material that I make in preparation for my bronzes.

“I had half a dozen of these in my studio and the tone and the colouring, and what they started resonating was a vulnerability even though they were about perpetrators. And it was that I was looking for. And on the same day, Sanell walked into my studio and she looked around and she said, ‘these would look great in marble’. I didn’t know what marble would do to these forms. And actually they have made them much more intimate, much more sensual, much more quiet,” he notes.

“There’s silence,” I say.

“In the marble specifically,” he agrees. “Whereas before, in the bronze, you might reference military things and shields and armoury. In the marble, there is a totally different resonance. And it’s the physical nature of the marble that encouraged me to loosen up, actually, for these same forms to be more intimate and private and able to talk about vulnerability. Even though there is only one marble in this show, which is from the previous show. It was what the marble brought to my forms which I decided to pursue.”

My earliest experiences of art, like most, came from my parents. Both artists themselves, our home was full of images on the walls, objects cluttered the surfaces. A large framed replica print hung in my parents’ room: a black-and-white photograph of a woman leaning her head into the embrace of her own folded arms. It was beautiful, but I was too young for such serious ideas. To me, the photo was simply there in the same way the mahogany wardrobe was there; or the way the wooden carved angel missing an arm was there; the way mom’s dresser on which the angel stood was simply there. The picture was so still. It preceded my own existence, in a sense, was already in the world, or more precisely it made up the world around me, my notion of home, gave me a context, held me in this environment, as my mother would hold my head to her in an embrace so familiar that it could dispel all troubles and all thoughts and allow my own presence to be felt within myself slowed to the tempo of her stroking hand.

I left the house to go to school, to play in the street or the garden, while the picture stayed stationary, reliable and ever-present in the recesses of my mind, as a synecdoche of that home. There it hung, day after day, undemanding of my attention. I did not wonder who the woman was or why she was photographed in such a peculiar way, a white aura around her.

On occasion, I simply stared at it, sometimes at the fine dust particles that had accumulated in the corners adhering to the glass. And like this, the vague animals of my thought stirred, moved slowly at first, not around the picture, but from it, held by its familiarity, they wandered aimlessly through my consciousness, through the recollections of my day, perhaps, my week, school, friends, family, and even deeper into memories no longer attached to clear images but just the impressions, fragments and sensations left behind.

This all seemed to arrive as if directly from the surface of the photograph itself like spindrift or as light emanates from the filament of a light bulb.

It was only many years later that I even heard the name Man Ray, and another 10 or so years before I came to associate his photography with someone I had fallen in love with, and so came to appreciate his work with some intelligence.

A photographer herself, she lived in an old, rundown sweet factory in Limehouse near the Thames which had been turned into ramshackle artist studios, graffiti covering every wall. And it was from there that I took the Underground, in a marble-coloured fog, to Chelsea to see Brett Murray’s exhibition. That was the last time I visited her there, and so it was to her that my mind bent as I entered the gallery.

Murray is a close friend of my parents and his own work was among the many objects around our house. His pop-art wall lights especially, which, my father told me, he made for years to pay the bills: a penguin in a tuxedo serving a martini hung in my bedroom; a pink panther with an Afro, was in the lounge; and two hearts with the Afrikaans word liefie, “my love”,  hung also in my parents’ room.

You could imagine Murray’s exhibitions to be family affairs, and in many ways they have remained so, the exhibition in Chelsea being the first I’ve seen without my family present. In this way, despite the explicit political content of his work, Murray’s presence in my own imagination has always belonged, like the Man Ray image of the woman resting in her grey-pale arms, to my ideas of home and the warm interiority of childhood.

In fact, I felt for a long time stupefied by the political content, which always escaped me as a child, but which also remained like a shroud, or rather like a vapour of mystery and importance around the sculptures, prints, paintings, posters. At these exhibitions invariably there would be a discussion about the current political situation and, not understanding, I listened attentively for a name I might recognise – the playful double syllables of Tutu or Winnie – and mouth these quietly to myself as though this was the key to adulthood. “Politics” came to represent to me everything that was secret, important and difficult about art and art, in turn, came to symbolise growing up.

Murray’s show at the Everard Read Gallery in London consisted of about a dozen small plinths, each with a small bronze sculpture, arranged in a kind of grid to cover the room so that one must walk between them to see each of the works. A deep-red-painted wall as a backdrop, a Scorsese red rather than a communist red, which in itself seems to mark a movement from Brett the agitation-propagandist to Brett the aesthetician.

The sculptures appear to be of animals – rabbits, donkeys, birds, gorillas, monkeys – rendered in a playful, stylistic manner, like children’s soft toys or cartoons. Some are alone, some are in a tender embrace, others seem alienated from one another, contemplative. They were illuminated reverently by spotlights, in which they seemed confused and lost, even blind, I thought. They reminded me in this way of a man I had seen one evening peering strenuously out of his brightly lit apartment, cupping his hands to his eyes, trying to make out the street below. All the passers-by, including myself, could see him illuminated perfectly in his lightbox, but he, surrounded by light, was completely blind to everything outside his little world.

Each sculpture seemed also alone on its own lightbox, what Murray described to me as “awkward, isolated islands”, blind to the other’s existence, blind to me and the other gallery visitors. Most of these animals look upward as though at the sky, in anticipation for something to arrive, happen, for an answer, for meaning.

Heartbreak, according to Roland Barthes, renders the world thunderstruck: “various objects – whose familiarity usually comforts me – the gray roofs, the noises of the city, everything seems inert to me, cut off, thunderstruck like a waste planet.”

These animals around me are like Adam and Eve, suddenly aware of their nakedness and shame, awaiting the fall: a sculpture of two donkeys called Tether, isolated from the world in their embrace, look up as if they have just heard the first crack of thunder.

Writing now, from a few notes and memories, Murray’s small sculptured creatures reveal to me something of my state of mind at that time.

Lost and frantic, identifying with the émigré protagonists of the novels I was reading, it seems to me now that I was living in a kind of mist. I can only describe this as a fugue state in which my previous life, my previous self, lived only in my memory. Fugue from fugere means “to flee”: a fugitive from love, from childhood, and from home. The sculptures, so intimate and anxious, made from the same eye, the same hand, as those objects of Murray that hang in my parents’ home so very many kilometres away, where I used to sleep to the sound of the ocean in the distance, felt like ghosts of the past. The colours of these sculptures, their earthy, soft patinas, represented the landscape of that home, the colours of the dry soil that the protea emerges from, the rocks and caves damp from mountain springs, the fynbos scorched by seasonal fires.

Beset by memories and history, I felt their sad comfort turn to something that reminded me of the mushrooms in Derek Mahon’s famous poem, who beg us to remember them, the lost people of Pompei and Treblinka. Under scrutiny, these memories, my own and the entire terrible history of South Africa even, seemed increasingly fictitious, like I had created them myself. Rather than comforting me the deteriorating memories now represented by these small, wide-eyed creatures threatened to derail my entire sense of self.  

“An image that came to mind, when I saw all those figures looking fairly scared and terrified, I mean this sounds fucking pretentious, but it reminded me of – in Pompei and in earthquakes and sandstorms, you have skeletons that have been exposed in poses of intimacy. There is a beautiful mother and child, literally like my sculptures, looking up at impending doom. Then they’re exposed, and I suppose as a human being you relate to that there is a kind of relationship you have with that. The kind of intimacy and pathos. It was a surprise,” he explains.

I think of Barthes, who in Camera Lucida gives an account of mourning through photographs. He becomes frustrated by the many photographs left behind of his mother’s image because, to him, none of these images captures her essence. Eventually, he finds one that does this for him, but curiously, it is one of his mother as a child, before Barthes has been born. He writes however that in this photo a certain pose or gesture brought forward the realisation that the light which came off her summer dress literally is the light which impressed itself, imposed itself, or exposed itself to the strip of photographic film, the same light literally which Barthes receives with his eyes. He says that contrary to the photograph as merely a fiction as Susan Sontag would say, what is recorded by the camera, however rehearsed, set-up, fictionalised, has without a doubt for a moment paused, posed, still, even for a split second, in front of the lense.

Murray’s sculptures are not photographs, but he frequently refers to them as “exposed”, like the ash figures of Pompei. Through the zoomorphism, through the stylistics, what Barthes calls the studium (“more or less stylised, more or less successful”), a certain posture, a certain essential characteristic particular to his child, his wife, to himself, is held in the sculptures.

This is what is captured, exposed as though swerving toward me. The secret intimacy of a family that is not mine, but also the secret intimacy of being (Barthes’s frustration that even this photograph is in fact, under his scrutiny, blurred, uncertain and foreign to him). It is at the same time from where I am pricked, made to feel moved toward and away like the vertices of the hyperbola (“to throw beyond”) swerving in and away from each other.

The punctum, Barthes’s word for that which pricks me in the photo: punkt, the German word for “a point, a full stop”, but also a small hole, puncture, an ordering and a rupture, an asymptote. “The punctum is a kind of subtle beyond,” Barthes says, “ – as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see […] toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together.”

If the little face of this bronze monkey, gazing up at the viewer, were even a fraction lower, or its posture a little straighter, a little happier, it would not have captured the playfulness of Murray’s son so accurately. A little sooner or a little later, this perfect pose would have been missed; it is exposed at the right degree, the right angle, the right moment in time.

The bright little rabbits looking skyward, Witness and Protect, are inspired by the formal precision of Netsuke button fasteners. The capture of the sculptures, the eidos, is so slight, so deft, so quiet, so seemingly natural, that its contradictions – what seem to be the impossibilities of the execution – are overcome with the naturalness and ease of a breath, the naturalness with which Sanell could say “these would look great in marble”.

I return to the image of the two monkeys in their moulded embrace named Shield. As I had once stared at the Man Ray reproduction in my parents’ room, and like the anguished eyes of the philosopher who pores over the image of his mother as a child, my stare was full of hands, full of mouths. It leached to the light they fed me which rose to meet me faster than my eyes could drink. And here, myself floating just above this sculpture, I experienced a strange stasis, my breathing slowed to the pulse of their slow, undulating postures, arriving. And somewhere inside me, beneath the troubled surface of my consciousness, I felt calm.

My desire to flee from my own loss of identity to one which seemed to me held, fixed, pure, within the frozen bronze postures of these animals, was an attempt at surrogation, a nostalgia for meaning, a lonely rage. But in fact, the creatures gazing outward to some imminent event, exemplify a state of innocence, not still, but thrust headlong into the experience and therefore capture something, a mere flash, of the rush of a soul from itself. In this way, like a pencil hovering above the image it draws, like a strange moon above a planet, I experienced these bound figures as a kind of map of my own way.

My earliest experiences of art, like most, came from my parents. Our home was filled with artworks and pictures on the walls. Collectable objects cluttered the surfaces of the shelves, the piano, the tabletops and bookcases. Among these many objects, tastefully arranged, were Brett Murray’s cartoon wall lights. I was told by my Dad that he made these for years to pay the bills as a young struggling artist. For those who haven’t seen them, they are made of colour tinted perspex and metal frames, simple and rough like graffiti stencils. And they have the mischievousness of graffiti too: tongue-in-cheek, self-reflexive, indulging in ‘bad taste’. A penguin in a tuxedo serving a martini hung in my bedroom; a pink panther with an afro in the lounge; and in my parents’ room, above their bed, two hearts with the word liefie, ‘lovey’, written in calligraphy on a ribbon in the style of a second-rate tattoo parlour.

Our home was not the only one adorned with Murray’s lights. They have become something of a signifier of taste for a whole generation of the South African intelligentsia. For example, when I first arrived in London I stayed for a period with a friend of my parents, a musicologist who had relocated years ago. On seeing two of Murray’s lights in the kitchen, I was compelled to say with feigned surprise, ‘–Ah, are those Brett Murray’s lights?’, which was met with such enthusiasm from my host that you would have thought I had just declared that I shared her love for Schostsakovich and Mahler.

Despite the explicit political content of his work, in my mind Murray’s sculptures, wall texts and posters, have therefore kept these associations of home, of my parents and their friends, their ironic love of kitsch, their intellectualism. As you can imagine, Murray’s exhibitions were like family gatherings for the art world of Cape Town. At these openings there would be an inevitable discussion about the political situation in South Africa. Being a child, I couldn’t follow the conversation, but I would wait with large eyes like a little owl for a name I might recognise – the playful syllables of ‘Tutu’ or ‘Winnie’ – and mouth these to myself quietly and hungrily as though they were the very marrow of meaning.

So it was on the one hand that Murray’s political satire totally escaped me as a child, while on the other its obscurity and complexity intrigued me. It covered the artworks in a kind of radiance, a promise of growing up, an anticipation for knowledge. ‘Politics’ came to represent to me everything that was serious, important and difficult about art, and art in turn came to symbolise life proper, without fairy-wheels and child-locked car windows. My pleasure, wandering around the galleries as a child while my parents and their friends conversed heatedly, was derived simply from this radiant obscurity, as flummoxing to me as hieroglyphs.

I felt that life – life proper – had not-yet begun for me, that I was in a sort of waiting room; the meanings of things were not actual but mediated through a veil of the future which would eventually be lifted. But this veil, like streetlights in a heavy mist, gave everything a wonderful glow; my naive idea of the future gave my reality to me spangled. It was a glow that concentrated around art especially, but which lay over everything, authenticating the world around me, heightening it, like when you have been swimming for hours in a chlorinated pool and emerge into a summer evening that smells of jasmine, and the gentle fairy lights, the candles and lanterns in the garden look huge, beautiful and blurred and you feel warmly detached from the lovely visions of your life passing in front of you.

To be confident or sure of one’s knowledge, to say ‘I am right; you are wrong’, is to put an end to the fantastic glow, to put an end to the firework display of imaginative and speculative thought. To call it ‘the light of knowledge’ is not the most accurate metaphor then, because it is the acquisition of this knowledge that rapidly diminishes this glow of the possible until it disappears almost entirely. I think that artists – artists like Brett Murray – are those individuals who never recovered from the diminuendo of that melody which played throughout childhood.

As an adult I can now understand the political meanings of Murray’s work. I can sense the artist’s anger and relate it to the broken promise of a new democratic South Africa, for example; I can draw connections now between Murray’s formal interests, and the formalism of Jean Arp and Constance Brancusi. I can see the work now in its historical context. I can detect Murray’s apparent disillusionment in art-for-art’s sake for a direct and political art. (What role does beauty have in the face of the brutal realities of apartheid?) I could relate this to the neo-conceptualism of Jenny Holzer and the YBA’s who were working contemporaneously to Murray. I can understand the content now and interpret it, but also I can feel something deeper that is not as clear or straight-forward. What I know now, as an adult looking at Brett Murray’s work, is what in many ways obstructs me from seeing it for its complexity. What I am interested in now is complicating my familiarity and folding the single plane in on itself.

In Brett Murray’s 1996 show, White Boy Sings The Blues, among the exhibited pieces was a striking photograph of a young Brett taken from a family album and titled, ‘The Artist as a Zulu, aged 6’. The boy in the photo is dressed up as an African, a Zulu warrior perhaps. The whole of his already then stocky physique is painted black – from his face to his feet – making the whites of his eyes shine. The boy looks serious, totally committed to his role. There is a look that seems embarrassed or even guilty and yet something tells me this may be my own projection, my need to reconcile the image. It’s a very difficult picture—difficult to come to terms with because we can see the innocence of the child but looking from our 21st century stand point, we also cannot unsee the manifestation of racist ideology. As viewers we experience a schism between these two signifiers: child and black-face, innocence and racism.

The result is an endeavour to peel the child from his political context as one would peel a fruit from its skin or the content from its form; we try to stage a rescue, recover the boy from the historical and political codes of the photo: the whole ghastly history he seems thrust into and will have to grow up folded inside of. Brett Murray exhibited this photograph again a year later in his exhibition Guilt and Innocence, shown inside of the Robben Island Prison, in which it was featured beside other family photos: one shows the artist’s family standing patriotically beside the old South African flag; another is of a young child wrapped in it like a blanket, literally this is a child folded into this emblem of ideology. Brett Murray wrote of this exhibition:

I was born in December 1961, a few months before the Rivonia trialists (Nelson Mandela and his compatriots) were imprisoned. Being born in Pretoria, into a half-Afrikaans, half-English family, where my father’s heritage extended back to include both Paul Kruger and Louis Botha (Boer presidents), disguised by my grandmother re-marrying a Scottish Murray and my mother’s history reaching back to the French Huguenots, I am a white, middle-class cultural hybrid. This was and is my comfortable and uncomfortable inheritance. The political and social forces beyond the confines of my family formed a system which protected and infringed on me, empowered and disempowered me, promoted and denied me. When I looked beyond my private experiences of loves and relationships, family and friends and of boy becoming man, the contradictions in this system, which divided my life from others, resulted in a cross-questioning of responsibility and complicity. […]

The contradiction to be reckoned with in ‘The Artist as a Zulu, aged 6’, the difficulty and complexity, is in the imaginary act of the boy’s play. Because, it is the act of play that is at once the foundations of the artist’s creative life and the very product of a racialized subjectivity. A theme, even perhaps, the theme, of Brett Murray’s work is this: his vitriol, his whole arsenal of cartoons, satire, wit seem to me in the purpose of an aggression drive directed at a Master Signfier, which changes names: Apartheid, Zuma, Authority, Self. The fight for a recovery, reconciliation, rehabilitation of the image of the child innocently playing a Zulu warrior, is an attempt at unknotting the complicated/implicated [plicare ‘to fold’] child in a systematic legacy of racism, but with full knowledge of its failure. The work is not here to make new claims of grandeur but to simply, pathetically, to fail and fail again to show something of this frustration of being bound by subjectivity.

Murray’s practice is fiercely anti-ideological, and yet, following Althusser’s thought that there is ‘no outside of ideology,’ it cannot be escaped. What becomes the target of Brett Murray’s vitriol is not only the hypocrites, the political elite, the moronic inferno, but the artist himself folded within this system. The work in a sense tries to wash the black paint from the child’s face, to remove the adult, and revive the pure imaginary state of the child, but is fully aware of the impossibility of this task. This Sisyphusian labour must be performed repeatedly in every exhibition, every sculpture. What has given the gift of imagination and creative life is implicated/complicated in ideology. I’m reminded of what Spivak says, that “we are folded with the other side.”

Perhaps this is why The Child features throughout Murray’s work in various manifestations. We could imagine it as a kind of hidden image or watermark to be recovered by the viewer. Whether the image of the child appears as a self-identification with cartoon characters like Bart Simpson, who becomes a kind of alter ego appearing and reappearing in the early work; a bubble-head in short pants; the child-like physique of the fat sculptures (mirroring and mocking the short stocky physique of the artist himself) ; the black-faced Richie Rich in ‘Rich Boy’ who holds a bag of money in one hand; the self portraits of the artist in diapers and a baby’s bonnet; and the bronze and marble sculptures which are like huge children’s plush toys showing the influence Jeff Koons’ balloon dog or flower-bed puppy. In Koons too we have an artist whose love for cartoons, toys, and sweets show an imaginary life linked to a notion of The Child. In this sense, I think, Murray’s work is only ‘completed’ when it is experienced by a viewer who retrieves the watermark, the image of the child, which carries with it something of an essence. Only once the artwork is apprehended, experienced, once this essence is impressed on us, does the work lead towards a completion.

Over a video call, Brett Murray speaks to me in a Cape Town accent I haven’t heard for a long time. I have been in London now for almost a year. The last time I saw Murray it was Easter and he was following his children into a swimming pool looking exhausted after extensive egg hunting. Now he sits at his computer in a room, behind him are many high shelves packed with children’s things: legless action figures; two slightly deflated birthday balloons, which say ‘11’; old Halloween decorations stuffed into a corner; Lego constructions and fluffy toys fallen out of favour. He tells me when he’s in a bad mood, Sanell—that is, his wife, the artist Sanell Aggenbach—says to him, ‘for fuck’s sake Brett, go and make something’, and he disappears into his studio for a couple hours. He tells me his working process, like this, is quite basically cathartic. He’s in a discoloured t-shirt covered in paint marks, which gives him the appearance of having just come out of one of these therapeutic sessions.

We are having a conversation about his latest exhibition, Limbo, a series of small, highly stylised, bronze animal sculptures that were shown at the Everard Read Gallery in London, and which I have been fortunate to see recently. I ask about the stylistic shift these new sculptures might signify, being smaller, formally softer and more introverted than previous work. He tells me it was a natural process, that he doesn’t regard these sculptures as a whole new phase, but rather as an inevitable step in the evolution of the work.

I ask him about his childhood. He tells me how he liked cartoons and comic books. And while he talks I become strikingly aware of the fact that this Brett Murray, who is reduced in size to fit digitally on my laptop screen, is a kind of cartoon version of himself as we speak, which has the bizarre effect on me of an urge to caricature him. I make a silly little doodle in my notebook while he continues to speak. I don’t do a great job of capturing his personality: not much more than a stocky little stick-man with a big smile. After all, to reduce someone to a stick-man one is forced to kill off many physical characteristics.

“Did you find it at all difficult,” I ask him, looking up from my ridiculous doodle as though it were a serious and pertinent note, “to cartoon your family? – I mean to use the same reductive ‘tools’, or the same stylisation as you’ve used on politicians as on those you love?”
In previous exhibitions of Murray’s this reductive quality is very distinctly used to ridicule, mock and parody; in the Limbo sculptures the antagonism, the demonic quality of the cartoon is quietened or refined to a deftness of capturing a likeness rather than exploiting physicality for polemics. So this violence is tempered to a playful chiding of his family; the same hands, the same techniques, used in the past to crudely caricature the powerful, are used here, in a manner of speaking, but to tickle the child-feet of his children, to be playful and tender and peel the fruit of love to its pulpy interior.

‘For a while now,’ he says to me, ‘I’ve been looking for a different material. I was finding the stark, very black patinas of my bronzes had a particular language.’ He pauses for a moment to arrange his thoughts. ‘It was almost always about perpetrators rather than about people. The same animals that I am using now were the targets of my vitriol. They were the patriarchs, they were the predators et cetera. And I had been wanting for a while to do something that was about people, that was more human based,’ he says. ‘You know, that was about my family perhaps, and about my friends, and about us; so what you were saying – to rather look internal, and look inside.’

His eyes close in concentration as he speaks, emphasising with easy gestures that remind me of my father’s own hand movements.
‘It came to me when I started working with marble on my last show,’ he continues. ‘I had made a series of maquettes. They are light grey in colour, a much lighter material that I make in preparation for my bronzes. I had half a dozen of these in my studio and the tone and the colouring, and what they started resonating, was a vulnerability even though they were about perpetrators. And it was that I was looking for. And on the same day, Sanell walked into my studio and she looked around and she said, “these would look great in marble.” I didn’t know what marble would do to these forms. And actually they have made them much more intimate, much more sensual, much more quiet.’

‘There’s silence,’ I say.
‘In the marble specifically,’ he agrees. ‘Whereas before, in the earlier bronze works, you might reference military things and shields and armoury. In the marble there is a totally different resonance. And it was the physical nature of the marble that encouraged me to loosen up actually, for these same forms to be more intimate and private and able to talk about vulnerability. It was what the marble brought to my forms which I decided to pursue in bronze.’

Limbo consisted of about a dozen plinths displaying small bronze animals. These were arranged in a kind of grid pattern to cover the room, so that I had to walk among them to see each one individually. There was a red painted wall as a backdrop, a Scorsese red rather than a communist red, which in itself seemed to mark a movement from Brett the agitation-propagandist to Brett the aesthetician. The sculptures – rabbits, donkeys, birds, gorillas, monkeys – were rendered in a playful stylistic manner, like children’s toys or cartoons. The poses of the sculptures characterised them, giving them almost recognisable personalities, so that these two could be Brett and Sanell, this one, Kai, that one Lo, their children.

Some were by themselves, alone, some in a tender embrace, others seemed almost alienated from one another. They were illuminated reverently by spotlights, in which they seemed confused and lost, even blind, I thought. They reminded me in this way of a man I had seen one evening peering strenuously out of his brightly-lit apartment, cupping his hands to his eyes, trying to make out the street below. All the passers-by, including myself, could see him illuminated perfectly in his light-box of a room, but he, surrounded by light, was completely blind to everything outside his little world. Each sculpture seemed also alone on its own plinth, what Murray described to me as “awkward, isolated islands”. Most of these animals look upward, in anticipation for something to soon arrive, happen, give clarity.

In a John Ashbery poem from 1956 the poet writes: ‘soon / we may touch, love, explain’ – a line, which has stayed with me and its relevance has changed with time. For example during the pandemic its meaning changed to incorporate my longing for those commonplace things then removed from us, a period when something as simple as touch became taboo. Murray’s sculptures too, created in isolation, express this anticipatory anxiety of the pandemic. And like Ashbery’s line, the meaning of the sculptures have broadened as time progresses. For example with the war in Ukraine having broken out since the exhibiting of these sculptures, they have incorporated into their expression of loss and separation the connotations of the refugee crisis. Images of mothers torn from children, families huddled in shelters or in camps, all this seems now to be silently preserved in these bronze creatures.

I think this ability for art to outgrow the moment it was made into, is to exemplify total contemporaneity. The contemporary is mistakenly thought of as a ‘now’, but in fact to be contemporary is always a temporal disjunction. It is a dislocation from time, not an obsession with the new. To be contemporary means to hover just above the things happening, drawn to the present but only bearing witness to it, always about to come into being soon but not just yet. The titles of The Limbo Sculptures seem to speak towards this: ‘Witness’, ‘Tether’, ‘Pause’, ‘Loom’ etc. The gentle humour of these creatures, their almost smiles, their forms and postures are folded with fear, worry, sadness; but perhaps there is also a calm acceptance of contradiction and turmoil as though they were floating stilly, as Keats says, ‘about that melancholy storm.’

The apparent ‘blindness’ of the sculptures seems related to the experience of living through an event that has ‘not-yet’ taken place but is still emerging into being. There was especially in the beginning of the pandemic a perpetual feeling that something had happened or was about to happen, but no one could say where or in what manner because it only ever revealed itself to us as its symptoms: the actual virus, microscopic, invisible, travels in obscurity. We only ever saw the symptoms of its being. We experienced the pandemic as non-real, non-actual, like an unbelievable subplot that goes off on a tangent and derails the legitimacy of the novel completely. But the pandemic was also hyper-real, beyond real, fulfilling cringe-worthy cartoon realities of apocalyptic computer games and sci-fi films. The ‘soon’ of the pandemic, the soon-it-will-end, soon-we-may-touch, was also a desire for the stable authenticity of the past. Every one of us constructed, fabricated an ideal future in which our banal lives before the pandemic were imagined as halcyon days to be recaptured. Though we knew this was not possible, the past lay over our eyes like scales obstructing our ability to see the present.

The name of Murray’s exhibition, Limbo, gives the sculptures the same irrealis mood of the pandemic. Limbo is a non-actual and liminal place, the inhabitants of which, frozen outside of time, await, indefinitely for the coming of Christ who will redeem them. They are caught inside of a ‘soon’ or a ‘not-yet’, which is the same untimeliness that post-colonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty called ‘the waiting room of history’. In this way the perpetual labour of tracing the folded child opens up into an allegory for contemporary South Africa (post-apartheid/post-Zuma), for the the pandemic, and even, as new catastrophe’s mount, of Ukraine, and of the demolished, dying earth. The sculptures are quiet, not revolutionary, they advocate nothing new, even the idea of ‘newness’, they seem to say, is an old worn out trope, another ruin for tourism. The creatures only gaze mutely in the direction of the ruins, that is both the way forward and the way back to childhood.

Arriving in London, from lack of money, I spent most days in bed listening to a crow bark over the terraces, the whisper of time in the draping leaves, bird songs smudged by the wind. I scraped my rent together piecemeal through various haphazard jobs which made my days feel blurred and frantic. I fell in love with a beautiful girl from Hungary who lived in an old run-down sweet factory in Limehouse near the Thames. And it was from there that I took the underground, in a marble coloured fog, to Chelsea, to see Brett Murray’s exhibition. And so the devastation of heartache and longing tinted my experience of the work.

Heartbreak, according to Barthes, renders the world thunderstruck: “various objects – whose familiarity usually comforts me – the gray roofs, the noises of the city, everything seems inert to me, cut off, thunderstruck like a waste planet.” Murray’s work is so familiar to me. And yet, seeing the small creatures in a gallery space in London, the opposite of South Africa in so many ways, is experienced by me as a disreality. I find it distressing, to be in the unfamiliar landscape, made aware of an unredeemable past presented to me by these artworks. A sculpture of two donkeys called ‘Tether’, isolated from the world in their embrace, both look up as if they have just heard the first crack of thunder.

Writing now, from a few notes and memories, Brett Murray’s small sculptured creatures reveal to me something of my state of mind at that time. Lost and frantic, identifying with the émigré protagonists of the novels I was reading, it seems to me now that I was living in a kind of mist. I can only describe this as a fugue state in which my previous life, my previous self, lived only in my memory, which seemed totally unreliable. Fugue from fugere means ‘to flee’: a fugitive from love, from childhood, and from home. The small, child-like sculptures, so intimate and anxious, made from the same eye, the same hand, as those objects of Murray’s that hang in my parent’s home so very many kilometers away, where I used to sleep to the sound of the ocean in the distance, felt like ghosts of the past. The colours of these sculptures, their earthy, soft patinas, were representative of the landscape of that home, the colours of the dry soil that the protea emerges from, the rocks and caves damp from mountain springs, the fynbos scorched by seasonal fires. Beset by memories and history, they reminded me of the mushrooms in Derek Mahon’s famous poem, who beg us to remember them, the lost people of Pompei and Treblinka. Under scrutiny, these memories, my own and the entire terrible history of South Africa, seemed increasingly fictitious, like I had created them myself. Rather than comforting me, the deteriorating memories now represented by these small, wide-eyed creatures threatened to derail my entire sense of self.

Looking at the child-like forms I wondered about Brett Murray’s own childhood, if his love for comics and cartoons had inspired the stylisation of these forms. So I fabricated in my mind an image of a young boy-Brett watching cartoons on a television set. On the screen he sees the hilarious violence of cartoons: Bugs Bunny blown up with dynamite, Mickey Mouse hit over the head with a baseball bat. They seem indestructible and plastic because one can revive them after immeasurable damage, unscathed in a second. Then again, TV was only available in South Africa in the late ‘70s, and Murray would have been a teenager. So perhaps the young boy is not watching cartoons but reading comics, in short-pants, cross-legged on a carpeted floor, his elbows on his knees, his head supported by his hands, his eyes as big as moons on his face. This boy we could imagine would be too young to consciously understand the immensity of what would be taking place in South Africa. But perhaps it operates in other ways, indirectly, on his psyche. A cartoon doesn’t represent in a direct manner either; it is by nature an unrealistic illustration.

We could imagine this young Brett’s quickening heartbeat, as something below his conscious thought connects the absurdity of these cartoons and their violence, with the scenarios of everyday life in the pristine, white’s paradise of South Africa. The violence of the manicured lawns and clean, ‘crimeless’ cities where the oppressed majority of the country is barely present.It seems to me that something about the violence of cartoons is integral to Murray’s practice and so demands some kind of theoretical attention.

Firstly, what is a Bart Simpson? What for example is at play in a character who is yellow, who has four fingers and whose hair is not distinguishable from his cylinder head? What are its constitutive parts? What makes a cartoon? and what kind of movement is the move of a cartoonist’s hand toward exaggeration, hyperbole and reduction? In the cartoon world everything is stripped to a grotesque surface essentialism. It says, ‘this is unequivocally the nature of this’: Mickey Mouse epitomises a mouse more than the actual rodents we occasionally catch a glimpse of behind skips and bins. Although in a sense this ‘glimpse’ is what the cartoon recognises as the real, this is what it captures and exploits. If we catch a glimpse of someone who steals a handbag, for example, and are asked to describe their features, we say it was a man, he had a balding pate, small eyes, a wooden leg – the police cartoonist renders us this image of the glimpse. This is the move of the cartoonist, always towards an abridgement, a best-of-compilation which eclipses the real thing.

In this sense the glimpse is something essential, a physical determination, a reduction of being to a singular physical aspect: strange head, big nose, no chin. In this sense it shares a constitutive similarity to the bad selfie. An unsuccessful selfie is one that is unused, unposted, deleted, the reasons for its discardment are based on a criteria of aesthetics one associates to oneself: this is my good side, I look best in this pose, the camera at this angle. So, implied in this aesthetic evaluation is an imaged understanding of the self. We tend to believe we know what our selves look like. The bad selfie is repulsive, because it shows us how we are seen beyond this image repertoire.

Isn’t this related exactly to the timely capture of the glimpse, isn’t this the move of the cartoonist’s hand? A move that is always an ontographical reduction to the essence as manifested in physical appearance. The cartoon, like the exoskeleton of an insect, is a complete externalisation. There is nothing elliptical, no psychology. The outrage caused by ‘The Spear’ was the outrage of reducing the president to a penis, to an image of himself beyond that which he projects. It is this forced reduction to crude physicality that makes the cartoon so ridiculous, absurd, exaggerated, and cutting: there is a subversive power in reduction. We fear cartoons, as we know they can reveal our greatest fears to us, that we are not the projected sample selves we present ourselves as.

I guess it is this power, this ontographical violence which made me ask if Murray had found it difficult to reduce his loved ones to cartoons. But The Limbo Sculptures do something more than the bad selfie and the cartoon, something which Murray’s earlier work, being more polemical, never needed to attempt. Firstly, they are not simply cartoons of his family; there is not a 1:1 ratio of family member to creature, these animals are and they aren’t his family. They are my family and yours too, they widen to incorporate us, they move a distance away from Murray. It’s this distance, comparable to Rauschenberg’s ‘I work in the gap between art and life’, which is so generous, which gives us the sculptures. So maybe it is not so much something these sculptures do that Murray’s previous work did not, as it is something which is added or embedded or folded in, something which is not only political pop art cartooning. And perhaps it’s in this gap that the folded child resides. Where meaning recedes.
Towards the end of the video conversation with Murray he said to me, ‘An image that came to mind when I saw all those figures [the Limbo sculptures] looking fairly scared and terrified, I mean this sounds fucking pretentious, but it reminded me of – in Pompei and in earthquakes and sandstorms, you have skeletons that have been exposed in poses of intimacy. There is a beautiful mother and child, literally like my sculptures, looking up at impending doom. Then they’re exposed, and I suppose as a human being you relate to that there is a kind of relationship you have with that. The kind of intimacy and pathos. It was a surprise.’

This reply reminds me so much of Roland Barthes, who in Camera Lucida gives an account of the process of mourning through photographs. Barthes becomes frustrated by the many photographs left behind of his mother because, to him, none of the images captured her essence. Eventually, he finds one that he believes does this, but curiously, it is one of his mother as a child, before Barthes had been born. He writes however that in this photo, a certain pose or gesture brought forward the realisation that the light which came off her summer dress quite literally was the light which impressed itself, imposed itself—or, I should say, ex-posed itself— to the strip of photographic film, the same light, or its physical impression at least, which Barthes receives with his eyes. He says what is recorded by the camera, however posed, mannered, rehearsed, set-up, fictionalised, has without a doubt for a moment paused, passed, still, even for a split second, in front of the lens.

Murray’s sculptures are not photographs, but he frequently referred to them as ‘exposed’, like the ash figures of Pompei, as though he really were capturing the light, or the essence, the glimpse of his family  inside of their  smooth forms.  If the little face of this bronze monkey called ‘Pause’, who gazes up at me, were even a fraction lower, or its posture a little straighter, its smile a  little happier, it would not have captured the playfulness of Murray’s child, Kai so accurately. It would not allow me either to recall the calf-like face of the woman I’d fallen in love with – see how this monkey drifts, hovers above the personal and becomes a universal. A fraction  is all that would be required to tilt the work into kitsch or cute. A fraction, a less-than-one  (x < 1), an almost nothing, a barely there, is all it would take! And wouldn’t this be the weight of a soul?  Without this glimpse this perfect pose would have been missed, it is exposed at just the exact degree, the exact angle, the exact moment in time. This is the timelessness not only of the contemporary, but  of the cartoonist who, a few hours after a political scandal, can produce a drawing that perfectly captures the moment. And I know this timeliness/timelessness has everything to do with the ‘soon’, the veil, the glow and the folded child, that they are all connected, but in what direct sense I couldn’t say.

But isn’t the perfection of this capture almost a minimalism in its economy, almost Japanese? And it’s no surprise then that Murray’s bright little rabbits looking skyward, are inspired by the formal precision of Netsuke button fasteners. The capture of the sculptures, the eidos, is so slight, so deft, so quiet (it weighs as much as a soul!) so seemingly natural, that its contradictions – what seems to me to be the impossibilities of this execution – are overcome with the naturalness and ease of a breath, the naturalness with which Sanell could say “these would look great in marble”, the complete chance encounter with the uncanny, with the rodent, the virus, the bad selfie, and not to reject it, but to tarry with the negative.
When I stand in front of two bronze monkeys, ‘Shield’, a mother and child in a close embrace, they seem to advance towards me, or am I drawn closer to them? Like a camera, my attention becomes myopic, singular. I see only these two creatures; but the more I look the more I am drawn into what they do not disclose to me. I want to immerse myself, not in the image of their embrace, but in the actual bronze forms, the substanceless geometry constituting that embrace: the roundness and smoothness, the cylinders and spheres of their tenderness and their sadness. But even if the geometric shapes had overwhelmed me completely and my eyes had dropped big cartoon tears there’d still be something more I couldn’t touch behind the physical symptoms of the creature’s being.

I feel this falling into abstraction, this tunnel vision, nonetheless plays out the theme of a return to the child, and to the home, to a lying in the garden with the sunlight dimly red through the membrane of my closed eyelids. Again, as in my childhood, just as those words ‘art’ and ‘politics’ held from me the mysterious world of grown-ups, these sculptured animals perched on their pedestals, keep a secret from me. They connect me, in this way, to my childish state of anticipation for a world I felt apart from. A world which, to my frustration, is never where I am at any present moment. Always between me and this world-of-grown ups, between me and the meaning of these sculptures for example, is an interposed ‘soon’, which pushes the “now” – the arrival of that world of meaning – slightly farther off. Like a sentence one writes in which a sub-clause opens out into another set of commas so that the final conclusion of the sentence is yet again put off ‘till later.

I returned again and again to this image of the two monkeys in their moulded embrace. As the anguished eyes of the philosopher who pours over the picture of his mother as a child, my stare was full of hands, full of mouths. It leeched to the light they fed me which rose to meet me faster than my eyes could drink. And here, myself floating just above this sculpture, I experienced a strange stasis, my breathing slowed to the pulse of their slow undulating postures, an arriving. And somewhere inside me, beneath or maybe above the troubled surface of my consciousness, I felt an emotionless calm, which I can only describe as the experience of my experience. The creatures gazing outward to some imminent catastrophe exemplify a state of innocence thrust headlong into experience and thereby capture something, a mere flash, the eidos of the rush of a soul from itself. In this way, like a pencil hovering above the cartoon image it draws, like a strange moon above a planet, I experienced these immobile figures as a kind of map of my own way.

Working in satire, Brett Murray's work has been cause for controversy with the most well known incident being his painting of Jacob Zuma, The Spear (2010). Considering his current exhibition he talks to Arts24 about the ways his focus has shifted from an outward accusatory one to one informed by an inward focus.

Review of Hide, 2021 on news24.

To make satirical art in a period of political uncertainty is tricky. As awful and catastrophic as the Zuma years were for South Africa, at least we were certain about who and what the enemies were: a corrupted political class, its obvious maladministration, and an almost comical indulgence of the collective id. It seemed obvious at the time that the role of artists such as Brett Murray (with his slew of imitators) was to use incisive humour to ridicule the most ridiculous excesses of power. But the jester can only jest so long as there’s material: the very nature of satire is that it upends the logic of its target; if that logic is not so clear, the satirist must readjust.

The post-Zuma years have been marked by a strange confusion, as the public seems engaged in an on-again/off-again relationship with the incumbent, President Cyril Ramaphosa. And while CR certainly has lapses of judgment, he is not given to the same idiocy as his predecessor. As such, he is less likely to be fodder for satirical portrayal.

So, Murray, whose entire career has been marked by a kind of compulsion to speak truth to power, has grappled not with a figurehead and an obvious visual language, as 2012’s ‘Hail to the Thief’ did, casting Jacob Zuma and the phraseology of perverted Sovietism in the role of kleptocrats (2010’s Now Playing at a Town Hall Near You illustrates this). Instead, in ‘Hide’, a show he has been working on for 3 years, he cautiously approaches the nebulous cloud of impulses that is contemporary social media. For someone previously so strident, Murray now perfectly captures the self-censorship and fear that attend public forums: Doubt, a gilded text piece reading ‘ummm…’ makes this indecision palpable, as if one can hear him mentally battling the forces of political correctness and outright uncertainty. As Lucienne Bestall says in one of the catalog essays, ‘the artist questions his convictions, appears distrustful of his own moral certitude.’

Of course, what is immediately interesting about criticizing the hegemony of the ‘Twitter Nostra’, as Murray terms them in Twitter, is the fear of immediate censure, and the fact that to criticize the tendency to be so easily offended is instantaneously deemed offensive. The irony-free po-facedness of it all is something that must bring Murray great glee. But, beyond reveling in the ease and joy of poking fun, the work asks a more serious question about the source of the online mafia’s authority. Do we give this new beast its power by capitulating, by surrendering our freedoms willingly at the slightest hint of threat to our reputations? Or does the power derive from its sheer scale, hinted at by the multiple silhouettes in Navel Gazing and its Perils and Protection, two acrylic paintings from 2020.

Some tropes from previous bodies of work reoccur in ‘Hide’: for one, the deceptively simple junior animals, most notably and beautifully represented by White Elephant, populate much of the show. This mid-sized solid marble sculpture weighs in at over a ton; something in that heft reads like a latent power, and of course, a gravitas, despite the cuteness of the figure. In this uncanniness, Murray continues his interest in making infantilized figures that nonetheless demand us to consider the seriousness of their implications. Similarly, the spirit of the onanistic gorilla in One Party State (2010) reappears, but this time it’s as the two furiously rutting birds of 2018’s Fucking Twitter. My sense of this bronze of two identical birds copulating wasn’t so much of it being funny, or even dirty: rather, that it was about the fervour with which online forums must maintain their homogeneity. The loop must close, we must have consensus, and dissent must be viciously censured.

It was perhaps easier to think about censorship on the occasions of previous exhibitions of Murray’s work: ‘Hail to the Thief’, when it arrived at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery, was met with censorship on many levels. Politicians called for the show’s closure, and managed to astroturf some rather frightening protest action outside the gallery, while two unconnected private citizens, one the same day, famously daubed The Spear painting out of a very odd impulse to right the country’s moral compass by destroying art. Even the otherwise venerable Ferial Haffajee, then editor-in-chief of the City Press, buckled under pressure to remove the painting’s image from the online imprint of the paper, and apologized for the offense caused. Likewise, Murray’s satirical work from as far back as his Master’s degree days drew the ire of the state and conservative elements in society, as he gleefully sent up the dumbest elements of the apartheid state and its apparatuses, the police and the army. So, whether it was Zuma in power, or the death-throes of the Nationalist government, the mechanisms of Murray’s satire often followed the same lines: identifying a point of sensitivity, making the work to test the limits of free speech, and using the resultant censorship to gauge the climate of the time.

What is rather more difficult to pin down is the mechanism of self-censorship: how does it operate? Woke, a text piece rendered in marble and gold leaf, might have the answer. The work plays with language in Murray’s characteristic way: the words ‘woke, woker, wokerer’ appear in a vertical list, a kind of absurdist ‘degrees of comparison’ exercise. The work reveals that our contemporary reality is more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four: social media has engendered a compliance with self-censorship far more effective than any external surveillance model ever could. Murray’s hellish vision of competitive wokeness invokes the kind of ‘virtue Olympics’ in which many of us are engaged online, shoring up our credibility as participants in the culture by signaling our virtue and avoiding controversy. And like the late Alan Crump’s text piece Lull, which similarly used text engraved into a marble plaque, Woke seems to be engaged in recording, even faux-memorializing, the indefinable moment, the invisible forces that shape current discourse. Though it’s not the largest work on the show, it is, for me, the fulcrum around which much of this body of work turns.

‘Hide’ is a powerful exhibition, important in this moment as a record of how terribly wrong the experiment in mass access to public speech has gone. Murray’s own battles and doubts reflect those of a culture punch-drunk from divisive rhetoric and social fracturing. We want to giggle at the laugh lines, but it’s telling that even this reaction is preceded by looking around the gallery space to see who will see us.

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Matthew: I was thinking about your use of marble in ‘Hide’ and why you chose to use it. It seems to bring something very different to your work, perhaps even a new voice. What do you think it brings and have you ever thought of using it before?

Brett: I have been wanting to make works that are more personal and empathetic for quite a while. To shift the focus from an accusatory one…where there are obvious targets of my vitriol… to a more private and intimate internal focus. Although I feel I am always embedded in my 3-dimensional works…as you pointed out in your essay…where my sculptures are short and squat…like me…and this shared presence ambiguously presents me as being both satirist and satirised…the materiality needed a shift. I had produced a series of original sculptures to cast into bronze…these originals are light grey in colour…and was wondering how I could marry the different visceral tone that the lightness brings to my forms and figures by introducing a different material. My dark black and often sinister bronzes, where the material and patina are hopefully effective in counterbalancing the playful forms and irreverent subject matter, needed to be displaced and reconsidered. I was considering casting in white bronze or aluminium…or using a light alabaster stone. Sanell’s studio (Editor’s note: Brett’s wife) is next door to mine. She intuitively suggested marble. Otto du Plessis…who owns Bronze Age and has been casting my work for about 20 years …he has a studio nearby as well … also popped in for a visit. He texted me later that night and also said I should consider resolving the new works in stone. It made sense as the warmth and intimacy of a lightly veined stone could bring the kind of tonality I was looking for. So, I jumped into the unknown and sourced a few studios in Carrara and Pietrasanta in Italy and innocently inquired about producing my works in white marble. All treated me very gently and pointed out that there are literally dozens of different white marbles. So, I had to visit the studios and quarries of the region. Which was an unbelievable experience. I also couldn’t help myself with the first collaboration. We produced a large marble, commingling this exquisite, noble and possibly pious material with a monument to an immoveable redundancy: The White Elephant.

M: Before Covid-19 restrictions set in I went to a talk on Ernest Mancoba and how he and his wife, who was a sculptor, interacted artistically. His estate also uncovered audio tapes of his young son asking him hundreds of questions about his life and work. This family interaction seems to have been a large influence on his later production. Do you think perhaps the same is true of your work now? That is, do you think that your family life is more and more influencing your artist thinking and what influence has this had on your more overtly political themes?

B: Definitely. With children you start to wrestle with the contradictions of a macro and a micro vision. If you know what I mean? The larger global picture…climate change…violence…wars… the rise of right-wing fascism… identity politics and an embedded uncertainty…these are now experienced through the lens of a parent…in granular detail. Things shift from the bravado of an angry young man shouting at the world…to that of a protector. Public vs private. Your concerns are the same…but the impact is more intimate. It’s about The Family. The title piece Hide was born out of ideas of privacy, protection, sanctuary and concealment. I had wanted to clothe my two kids in ghost like sheets…and take reference photos for that work…but they are hooligans and wouldn’t have stood still … so I draped the cloths over paint tins instead. The marble work Solace is basically a portrait of Sanell and I seeking comfort with each other, embracing as the world unravels while trying to bring up our children. This might have resulted in a Cardies-like sentimentality…but I am hoping that the sculpture resonates with others empathetically. But at this stage of my life I really don’t care! The politics of the day is still never far away though. The need to hunker down is a direct response to the unfolding local and global dramas. Hopefully I describe two conjoined tales…reflecting what is happening both out there…and in here… simultaneously.

‍M: That’s interesting. I have been sitting trying to think of other examples of contemporary art that that are influenced by the emotions of solace and compassion. So much of the last fifty years of South African art, in particular, has been about protest and so little about reaching out and connecting. Perhaps it is, as you say, seen to be Cardies-like, perhaps even self-indulgent. But I am reminded of the last moments of art historian Kenneth Clark’s now very unwoke series ‘Civilization’. There he offers his personal views, stating that he is sure ‘that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology’. We seem to be back in a period where people place ideology before sympathy, that sympathy is, in some cases, deemed offensive. That is, that being woke is far more important to online activists than trying to communicate and understand. What are your feelings about this and do you think your work is now beginning to swim in the opposite direction to this developing culture? It seems like a strange question to formulate, but do you think your more intimate sympathetic work now might be deemed as ‘offensive’ to woke culture, as your political was to some people? Is it a kind of protest against protest?

B: Short answers to your three questions. Don’t know. Don’t know and No. But it seems like these are speculative insights rather than questions. And interesting ones to develop at that. My work has often pushed up against prevailing ideologies…and ironically in so doing has presented itself as coming from a particular ideological position. I’m too conflicted and too confused to work out what that ideology might be…and then to deny it…just don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. It’s anyone’s guess what work might or might not be offensive… and to whom. Inevitably, someone somewhere will be offended… the woke or the dead…so I just carry on as I see fit. Beyond this Hide exhibition …I am wanting to continue to make intimate works…more so as we are currently in the throes of a global pandemic…not as a protest against anything…. rather because it feels right for me now. I am reminded of work that was done in the 80’s by friends and artists who embraced a more personal and intimate narrative…going against the protest canon of what should and must be expressed…you had to reflect the violence and brutality of the Apartheid regime…something I chose to do…and only now, almost 40 years later, do I understand the impulse to focus and embody the private and personal within the cacophony of upheaval. Anyway…this is how I feel now…this Monday morning… this could change tomorrow. At heart I remain a stone thrower…

M: I wanted to ask you about the 80s and where your practice came from. I know that Bruce Arnott was your teacher/mentor. How did your work develop from his, what were your other influences and how has it been changing over the years? I also wanted to know about your text pieces. Who influenced those and how do you formulate them? Do you sit down and write a whole lot out or do they just pop into your head while you are doing other things?

B: Yes, Bruce was a significant influence on my work. I studied under his guidance while doing my Master’s degree in the late 80’s. He set up the bronze casting unit while we were there…and that certainly hooked me into bronze making. He employed me from time to time during university breaks as his assistant. I got to file, fettle and sandpaper his roughly cast bronzes to a mirror finish. Exhilarating and tough. He was old school…no electric machinery touched his works…so his forms are deeply imbedded in my muscle memory. I’m surprised the callouses on my hands have healed! He re-introduced me to Brancusi and Botero as well. Other work I was looking at was the German art of the Weimar period between the two world wars…particularly George Grosz…the Dada movement and John Heartfield’s anti -Nazi collages amongst others. This period seemed pertinent to the South African context…the rise of fascism…decadence…and resistance.

I looked at a lot of West and Central African figurative sculptures as well. Baule work from Côte d’Ivoire and the Makonde masks from southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique caught my attention. But particularly the painted wooden “Colon” sculptures of West Africa. These figurative sculptures portray colonial civil servants with pith helmets, in police and army uniforms, on bicycles, nurses and doctors and the like and are brightly painted. They are deceptively simple and elegant caricatures of colonial life in Africa and resonated strongly with me then, and still do now. I had also come across the Japanese Netsuke utilitarian kimono fasteners as well. Deliciously refined and paired down decorative mini-sculptures carved in stone, wood or ivory. Sometimes cast into metals and mostly of animals. These were some of the formal influences. The content of my work was driven by the last violent twitches… (we didn’t know it at the time) …of the Apartheid regime. The barbarity of the state, the militarised nation guided by a supposedly God ordained doctrine of divide and rule were all targets of my discourse. More so as I was supposed to be conscripted into the States armed forces as part of the brutal suppression of legitimate forces for changes. Studying bought me 9 years of freedom… I eventually had to leave the country. So, it was for me a fight against an illegitimate state…but also…a personal battle for my own freedom. Much of my artwork in the 80’s within the academic arena reflected on this struggle. One thread linking my work from then until today is this merging of the personal with the political.

Regarding the text works…it seems I have never not used text in my work! Trying to recall so far back I am sure it was the influence of Pop art and advertising in general, the work of Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Ed Ruscha. Roget’s Thesaurus was also my friend then. The first text works I produced parodied suburban house signage. The vernacular and pithy celebrations of parochial comfort such as” Kani-Klani” and” Lekker By Die See”. To this day my studio remains littered with words and statements. Sentences clog my head as potential one-liners. These to enhance my more layered and nuanced works and themes. Recently the curator/artist Karel Nel said to me that my bronzes and marbles are where my strengths lie…and that the other wall works are “mere sub-titles” to these. I went to my naughty corner and had a cry…as he had virtually knee-capped a large chunk of my practice.

I’m still trying to win him over…one word at a time.

M: One of the elements of our new age of political correctness is to do with language and the restriction of certain words and ways of expression. Do you ever think of a text piece or a work now and think that you just can’t say that, that it would cause too much trouble? Your work in ‘Hide’ is in part to do with pushing against political correctness but do you feel it is also restricting you?

B: How long have you got?! As a result of my Spear painting saga that saw attempts being made to censor my work by the state, the President and the ruling party, where bullying and death threats abounded… I will always look at political correctness and censorship with a keen, if not jaundiced, eye. That the state’s legal case fell apart spectacularly gives hope… I suppose. Dogma ate their homework…

It is up to each artist, playwright, poet, stand -up comic and the like to determine how far they want to push the envelope. It is not up to political parties, factions, religious groupings and tribal elders to determine who can and what can be made, written or thought. I spoke about this a few years ago at the launch of a book of my work in the context of the Spear debacle:

“ Oddly enough, and tellingly I think, artists do reflect and change their minds and grow and fine-tune. Ironically, there were two works that were on the original Hail to The Thief show in Cape Town that, after putting the works up and listening to various responses to them, seemed to me to fail in tone and were ineffective in reflecting what I was trying to articulate. The first was directly aimed at Zuma and after considerations came across to me as a cheap shot about education and culture. This is ironic in light of the unfolding events. The second work could be read as misdirected and metaphorically over reached musings on venality. These were, in hindsight, failed works, so I decided not to show them in Joburg on the show that caused all the problems. This is the natural way to hone your craft. To present and to reflect and to cull and to shift. To pull the various threads together, and to tighten. Like a stand -up comic’s routine, my own assessments and presentation of my work is always shifting and changing. This remains the privilege and sanctuary of the artist producing the work, and the potential cullings and distillations that these reflections might effect must be the exclusive domain of the artist, certainly not that of government organs and institutions or current political parties or factions.”

A position I still firmly hold.

The current Facebook Fascists and Twitter Nostras are acting as self-appointed cultural arbiters and McCarthy-lite determiners of what can and can’t be said, made, filmed and joked about and are attempting to further silence and censor. The past is being “cleansed”, Gone With The Wind is no longer being streamed because it apparently “celebrates slavery” …Faulty Towers, Monty Python and Little Britain…the genre shifting comedy programmes… are being censored and cut…sombreros are only allowed to be worn by Mexicans …and eating sushi is perpetrating racism and cultural imperialism… one mouthful at a time. White people wearing corn braids is now deeply offensive…a position I reject intellectually…but in my heart of hearts …it is wrong on so many levels…but each to his, her or their own I say. Musical explorations and hybrid collaborations fly in the face of these trumpeted postulations of the evils of cultural appropriations. For me these attempts to sanitise and separate culture smacks of a balkanised view of the world. This is an apartheid-like exclusivity and return to ideas of “separate development” , a project that thankfully and inevitably failed in South Africa. It’s an insanity to think you can tell culture to sit still and behave in a policed echo-chamber of sameness.

In these current narrow and short- sighted prerequisites would Ry Cooder be allowed to hook up with Ali Farke Toure, the Malian multi- instrumentalist, for fear of accusations of exploitation? Cooder’s travels to Cuba resulting in the formation of the incredible ensemble of Cuban musicians …The Buena Vista Social Club…would today be seen by the newly woke as culturally arrogant and offensive. David Byrne’s first post Talking Heads project…the lithe and goofy South American flavoured Rei Momo album would be dead in the water. And inversely, can Benin born singer Angelique Kidjo re-invent the entire Talking Heads album Remain In Light, which she has recently done with stunning effect? Billy Holiday would not have sung the haunting song Strange Fruit, now referred to as “a declaration of war” and “the beginning of the civil rights movement” in America, a song based on an Abel Meerpol’s moving poem against the violent inhumanity of racism…because the poet was a white middle class man…and apparently should have no right dabbling with the experiences of “others”. According to the later day cultural commissars, preferring, as they do, a protected, ethnically cleansed and pure vision of the world…this is now all verboten.

I am all for hybrid views and cross cultural reflections and interventions. Everyone can make, think, write and do anything about anything and anyone. You will succeed or fail depending on how effective you are in articulating yourself. How this is received will be determined by your skill, craft, your empathy, your humanity and conscience. Your work might also reflect a rude, brutal, taboo ignoring, hurtful and abrasive in your- face vision. That’s the nature of the rough and tumble world of satire, comedy and social reflections. There are, thankfully, no sacred cows. Salman Rushdie has insisted: “ The freedom of expression includes the freedom to insult.” He should know. Take it or leave it. Go next door if you don’t like what you see. It’s as simple as that. In any case the freedom of expression includes the freedom to fail. That’s how you learn and refine. Make mistakes…and take the criticism. Not through proscription and censoring. What is demanded now is pre-censorship. A kind of institutionalised monitoring of ideas that lock in and insist on an industrial strength self-censorship, resulting in the slow death of transgression and the flattening of satire. Being restricted by these sanctimonious self- anointed enforcers who insist that artists and writers etc. be allowed to reflect on and have as their subject matter people only who look like themselves will collapse imagination into a closed, bleached and humourless narcissistic enterprise. It also assumes that everyone who looks like you thinks like you. Thank god that’s not the case…believe me. Lionel Shriver, the author and cultural critic, has said that this insistence on a patrolled and strangled inventiveness would be the death of fiction.
This is not a world I want to live in… because it is not the world I live in.

Nick Cave, the lanky singer and writer, has reflected: ”Humour is the merciful oxygen that can envelope seriousness and prevent it from becoming a grim contagion that infects ourselves and those around us. True humour is the antidote to dogmatism and fanaticism, and we must be cautious of the humourless who cannot take a joke.”

Amen to that…

As an artist who came of age during the tumultuous final stages of apartheid, ‍ combines rigorous craft and pop aesthetics with provocative political commentary, bravely exploring power, populism and identity within South Africa as well as far beyond it. A graduate of the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Art, he also established the sculpture department at the University of Stellenbosch and was recognised as the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year in 2002. Murray’s sculptures, prints and other works are contained in a multitude of collections in his home country and around the world.

Motivation: What makes you get out of bed in the morning?

Before kids, it was the tug of a good coffee and whatever was going on in the studio that got me out of bed. Now it is having to get the kids up and out of bed for school, fed and clothed, with brushed teeth… delivered to school… and then it’s the tug of a good coffee and whatever is going on in the studio that motivates me. I’m fortunate: my work is my pleasure.

What is the biggest mistake you’ve made?

Driving absolutely pissed into a lamppost in Mowbray in my parents uninsured Golf without a license… very lucky to have survived both my parents’ rage and an early end. One of the many reasons I have been sober for 20 years now…

The hardest thing you’ve ever done?

Parenting. Or trying to parent… it is also the most rewarding. Funny that.

In what period or location have you learnt the most?

From my friends and peers at art school… where I spent 10 years. And certainly, through travel: Malawi, Mozambique, Vietnam, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Portugal, Chile, UK, USA, Botswana, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, Indonesia, Thailand… and all the other places I have ever travelled to.

What’s your favourite ritual?

If there is no real studio pressure, late on Friday afternoons I go down the YouTube rabbit hole, discovering new music and finding old favourites. I throw myself at the mercy of the interwebs’ algorithms.

Is work personal to you: do you keep your work separate from your personal life?

My work is intimately connected with my personal life. It’s also deeply therapeutic. I can’t help combining the political with the personal. Where I do separate work from life is over weekends…I prefer to hang with my family and friends. So I try to structure my timetable so that the weekends are free from studio time.

What taboo subjects should we be discussing more, and how should these conversations be ignited?

Political correctness should be blown apart. The suppression of debate and cyber bullying of contrary viewpoints on all internet platforms should be confronted. Notions of  “cultural appropriation” should be exposed for its shortsighted and balkanised view of lived experiences. The monitoring and censure of how individual experiences can and can’t be expressed and shared should be debunked.

In this divided world order… Ry Cooder could never have rediscovered the old Cuban crooners and put together the magical Buena Vista Social Club… Wim Wenders would not have been allowed to make a documentary about this journey… David Byrne would not have been able to segue into Rei Momo, his first solo album post Talking Heads, full of delicious Latin and South American sounds… and similarly, more recently… Angelique Kidjo would not be allowed to have made her recent gorgeous album of Talking Heads covers. In the current climate, Billie Holiday would not be allowed to sing Strange Fruit, a song based on Abel Meeropol’s haunting poem protesting against the inhumanity of racism, because he is a white middle class man. In the literary world someone called this “the death of fiction”. Not a world I want to live in… because it’s not the world I live in.

Which things would you like to include more in your life, what would you like to include less of?

More kindness and less cynicism…

In Brett Murray’s Hide, the artist invites a novel hesitancy into his work. Familiar with the uncertain charge of giving offence, Murray now considers the censorship offence inspires. There is little of the polemic tone that previously characterised his work, few brash jokes and damning declarations. Instead, the artist questions his convictions, appears distrustful of his own moral certitude. With the lasting UMMM… of the text work Doubt (2018), Murray approaches his subject with something like apprehension.

“The punitive gesture of censoring finds its origin in the reaction of being offended,” JM Coetzee writes in his essay Taking Offence (1996). “The strength of being-offended, as a state of mind, lies in not doubting itself; its weakness lies in not being able to afford to doubt itself.” Doubt is then the antidote to the certainty that justifies outrage. Though founded on such certitude, the offence is seldom specific, more I-know-it-when-I-see-it, yet no less intolerable for its indeterminacy. Being-offended is a profoundly unpleasant state of mind – it demands an action that it might be made exterior, might guard the psyche against the object of outrage. Censorship alone offers itself as defence. In taking offence – Coetzee again – “we feel any or all of a miscellany of states of unpleasure, including but not limited to disgust, shame, hurt and anxiety; also a measure of resentment against the one on whom this unpleasure is blamed.” That this measure of resentment can have menacing consequences is well known to the artist. In the story of Murray’s The Spear (2012), giving offence sent him not only to the nation’s courts but to the court of public opinion, which was less given to rigour and reason, less concerned with the ideals of free speech. Indeed, the echo chamber of the internet proved no uncertain foe – the accusations levelled against him as numerous as they were nebulous.

Where political satire has long been Murray’s primary preoccupation, in Hide he turns his attention inward. Poking fun at South Africa’s imperfect transition to democracy has proved more tragic than comic a pastime, a dangerous game with few rewards. There are no easy jokes in the nation’s body politic. The artist withdraws to the intimacy of his home, to the comforts of family life. But the political cannot be kept out. It slips in unwelcomed, leaks from the light of cellphone screens, illuminates the nights of our discontent. White nights; insomniac, unsettled. He cannot sleep, nor does he want to – sleep being “a metaphor for moral paralysis and the atrophy of conscience,” as Lloyd Pollack wrote of Murray’s work. The sleep of reason, we are reminded, produces monsters. Murray’s Hide is populated by many such monsters, by things that go bump in the night. Bats, owls, nagapies, even Koko the Clown, all populate the artist’s nocturnal imaginings. Yet by his wakefulness, the artist resists sleep’s metaphoric import. His stimulant of choice? The burden of consciousness.

For all Murray’s material and conceptual eloquence, Hide is a curiously conflicted body of work. It appears caught between two opposing desires – a longing for quiet complexity and a growing outrage against censoriousness; the wish to be silent and the impulse to join the fray. That the personal and political proves to be inseparable lends the exhibition its lasting pathos. Intimate reflections are broken by inflammatory tweets, images of innocence shot through with red dots. The spectre of violence – both real and symbolic – pervades these collected works.

The sculptures in Hide are an unusual offering from an artist given to loud assertions and more agitprop aesthetics. There is to these works a shared sense of fragility, regardless of their stolid forms. In his material shift towards marble, Murray finds a medium more empathetic than metal. It is softer, he suggests, even kinder – more forgiving and poetically pliable – than bronze. Yet here, both find a childlike expression; the sculptures’ rounded forms evocative of storybook characters and plastic toys. Most appear quietly fearful, some sinister. All are formally seductive and materially elegant. Where earlier sculptures, like The Fundamentalists (2015) and Emperor (2015), were distinctly aggressive in tone, the sculptures in Hide are more veiled in their invocations. Their titles speak to a desire for comfort – Solace, Protect and Us (2018) – and a growing uncertainty. Some are supplications for safety, others portents of coming crises. Such is Boiling Frog (2018), carved from black and red marble with polished precision. With its quiet threat and immoveable form, the work reads as warning. The frog, insensible to its predicament, will soon succumb – slowly, ineluctably.

While the sculptures in Hide have about them a shared ambivalence, the many wall pieces read as unambiguous accusations. With such titles as Instagram Revolutionaries, Snowflakes and Facebook Fundamentalists, the works in the Disney Suicide series (2018) respond to social media’s illiberal tendencies. Murray is not alone in his criticisms. Many have opined, with growing concern, the spreading censoriousness in liberal society. Dissent is increasingly discouraged, opposing views punished. Where blinding moral certainty is upheld, nuance and complexity are silenced. Public shaming offers examples of the retribution measured out to those who cross the capricious line; intolerance abounds, perceived transgressions are punished. Nowhere does this play out more clearly than the internet – where online discourse has been largely reduced to symbolic signalling. Armchair activism, however ineffectual, has become the single claim to moral virtue. Murray demurs:

‍ONE FANON QUOTE – a marble plaque reads – ONE BIKO POSTER AND THE PUBLIC LOVE OF JAZZ DOES NOT A REVOLUTIONARY MAKE.

If free speech is to be upheld, transgressions are to be tolerated. Contested, debated, but above all allowed to stand. “Freedom of expression,” as Salman Rushdie said, “includes the freedom to insult.” And if not to insult, then to dispute, to challenge the status quo. As such, so-called ‘cancel culture’ only highlights the limits of liberalism. It is the misguided response of real grievances, a protest against the apparent lack of accountability in national and private institutions. But to those who query the means, those who defend free speech, the radical right-wing is held up as counter-example of unregulated freedoms. Either thought and word must be policed, the argument stands, or else devolve into toxicity. Murray, however, is sceptical. His Disney Suicide series offers a dark reflection on the evils of censorship metered out by the offended – where censorship becomes less an external act of suppression than a suicidal gesture of self-silencing. That one among them is titled Me (2018), perhaps reveals something of Murray’s new reticence. It is too an acknowledgement of his own outrage in the face of this censorial impulse. Yet the artist remains critical, watches his reactions with cool detachment. FUCK THE TWITTER NOSTRA he carves into marble, the letters coloured with gold leaf. Even in anger, Murray is meticulous.

It is too easy to indulge the state of being-offended rather than question its effects, to articulate what it is that one finds so morally repugnant. This the artist does to cutting effect, subjecting, Coetzee writes, “these insipient feelings to the scrutiny of sceptical rationality.” Yet as to the offence Murray’s past work has given, one finds no clear explanation, only vague assertions and the evasive claims against him. Here the title Hide – as in conceal, as in skin – proves compelling in its contradiction. To be white in South Africa is to be everywhere conspicuous; to be, as Ivor Powell wrote in his essay on the artist, “inescapably morally suspect.” There are few hiding places here. The country’s history has stained white identity an indelible shade of iniquity. And it is this stain – the colour of our inherited failings – which lends Murray’s work the offence it gives. It is not that the criticisms he offers are untrue, that he more often provokes uncomfortable laughter, but that he is the wrong messenger. TOO MUCH WHITE SPACE, a marble plaque reads, evoking past judgements held against him as both accuser and accused. In answer, the artist absents himself from more direct political satire, if only for the time being; resigns himself to few comments on the current dispensation. Instead, he turns inwards and looks upwards, to the unseen clouds of the internet gathering above us.

The night is long, the Twitter feed longer still. Intolerance and hostility glow darkly from bright screens. But something other than outrage now hangs in the air – something more sneaking and subtle, which cares little for the opinions of people. Murray’s bats have found a new significance, have grown ever more ominous. The artist, having withdrawn into his home, now finds himself confined to it. Foreboding pools like shadows in corners. The monsters, multiplying, draw closer. WHERE ARE THE ADULTS? Murray asks, as a child afraid of the dark. Who will turn on the lights?

As the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, and Brett Murray discovered during The Spear incident, “power, repression and authority never speak in the language of laughter.” Bakhtin went further stating that the single exclusionary language of a ‘world view’ goes hand-in-hand with the laughterless political forces of all official cultures. And it is precisely this idea that Murray’s work in ‘Hide’, having moved on from that mid-Zuma moment, is engaged with.

It is not difficult to understand that one of the things Bakhtin meant by ‘world view’ was communism – the belief that all the people of the earth could exist under one ideological imperative. Of course, Bakhtin, in his philosophy of the carnival, would not have said as much directly. For by the time he wrote his work on Rabelais and the history of laughter, Stalin’s regime had already exiled him to USSR-era Kazakhstan for his ‘thought crimes’ and ‘heretical texts’.

But what Bakhtin was doing, by writing about Rabelais and talking of a ‘world view’, was ‘hiding’ under a thinly disguised veil. Bakhtin lived in a time and place where perhaps one of the most violent attempts occurred to force diverse cultures, races and classes into speaking and believing as one. (Perhaps it should be noted that colonialism and apartheid have run similar projects of instruction with dominant official cultures). For many living in the USSR the only source of protection was, as Murray puts it in his text piece, to Make Me One With Everything.

Communists had after the Russian Revolution enforced a whole new austere singular language system on its citizens, imposing certain words on them to align with its political beliefs. The most obvious change was that from Mr and Mrs to the citizen greeting of ‘Comrade’. The forces of our new Woke Woker Wokerer culture may be different but the imperative that we must all use a uniformly new lexicon is not. (Here one can’t help but remember the students of Soweto rose in 1976 because they were forced to learn in the official language of Afrikaans.) Woke’s punishment if you slip up or refuse to speak woke’s words – rather than that of the Gulag or exile or bullets and teargas – is to suffer ‘cancelation’. The force used may be (very) different but the motive of removing and exiling the heretic from the Echo Chamber is the same.

I have tried in the above passages to breathe life into the similarities between Bakhtin and Murray with the use of the titles of Murray’s works. But there are numerous other likenesses. Their belief in laughter and satire as a voice of engagement is one, a second, as Bakhtin put it, is a love of the body’s “wonderful orifices and protrusions”. Murray’s work is synonymous with protruding pudenda and corpulent bodies. The official culture, Bakhtin once wrote, demands that the representation of the body be an “unresponsive surface, a flat plane.” This Murray, since his graduation work of 1988, has never produced.

Murray has always confronted official systems from apartheid, to white puritan ‘leftyism’ of the 90s and naughties, to Zuma’s corruptions, to our current period of wokeness, in a very Bakhtinain way; with, irreverence and the ‘responsive’ line and forms of the carnival’s laughter. Of course another commonalty between Bakhtin and Murray that should already be apparent is the two also shared a desire to hide from comrades (although a difference in their comrades methods should be noted). Murray too knows something of being socially exiled and threatened by the powers that be – what is now of course called being ‘cancelled’.

The idea of cancelation culture is the centre of Murray’s body of work in ‘Hide’. Here he, almost counterintuitively, is attempting to engage with the notion of cancelation. Counterintuitive because the very idea is to silence and to stop the other from engaging. Murray seemingly wishes to ‘hide’ by placing large, almost immovable, bronze and stone objects and memorialising plaques into the public sphere, objects that jest and tease at the culture that wishes to exclude them. For Bakhtin the only way to negate ‘cancellation’ and exile, is to continue to place objects in the way, the objects of speech and laughter. Laughter Bakhtin argued was the bulwark against the oppression of the dryness and dullness of an official culture. The laughter of the carnival he suggested is a method of hiding in open sight.

But this is not the whole story. For Bakhtin, an inherent aspect of laughter is what he calls its ‘double voice’. The jokes, satires and word plays that Murray has produced for over three decades have a plurality of meanings and multiple internalised voices. They can be both silly and serious, both officially compliant (in Hide he knows he needs to cover up that toxic white masculinity!) while at the same time mocking. This plurality in satire’s meanings has troubled all authoritarian regimes and official systems. And it is exactly this, the second voice in the Echo Chamber, that internet-based official culture shrieks at. Shrieks, because it wishes to negate the voice that is not theirs, the other’s voice that corrupts, poisons and infiltrates the safe space – or what Bakhtin called the ‘monologic’ space.

But the laughter of the carnival, of satire, Bahktin suggested is not a shrieking back nor a simple mocking of authority. Laughter he argues does not speak with a single ‘monologic’ voice. Satire is, he wrote, also a “representation of oneself and one’s life” as much as it is a depiction of others. Nowhere in Bahktin’s theories does ‘the self’ operate without the presence of ‘the other’. Where the singular authoritarian voice of the nation state, the artist, the author, exists, he argued, there is only corruption, meaninglessness and death. Meaning and truth exist for Bakhtin in the inconclusive spaces between voices, between the self and the other. In ‘Hide’, perhaps more obviously than in his other bodies of work, Murray has included pieces of the self, pieces of autobiographical reference in works like Solace, White Elephant and Self Portrait. (As he admitted in his studio the influence of his children’s toys and interests are slowly making a bigger impact on his visual and imaginative world).

Self Portrait reveals the above connection most openly and expressly. The large wide open eyes and pursed lips display a sense of the fear, surprise and helplessness at the world in front of him, but also in the animal figure there is a playful mocking of these responses. Of course in Murray’s work there has always been a sense of self-parody. As he has admitted many of his figures in his sculptures have also referenced his own short stocky body. This is precisely what Bakhtin would refer to as the ‘double voice’. That both the self and the other are present and operating within the artwork.

But where there has been a shift in Murray’s work in ‘Hide’, is that there are fewer obviously carnivalesque forms. The cock and rounded overindulged bodies are shrinking. But these have been replaced by those other forms of the carnival’s laughter: the clown and the fool. These tropes, which have been the embodiment of the ‘double voice’ in art and literature for thousands of years, are now, in Murray, forced to enter the single-voiced world of wokeness. And their response in the Disney Suicides series seems to be a desire to leave this ‘world view’ with the aid of a bullet to the brain. The ‘double voice’ of the fool that has spoken for centuries from ancient Greek and Islamic cultures, to Cervantes’ Sancho, to Lear’s fool, to Disney’s versions seemingly have no place in the puritan and austere world of the populist, identity politics and the ‘twitter nostras’.

And with this one wonders just quite where art and laughter will fit in to a progressively more intolerant and cancelling world. That older forms of inclusion and expression are under threat seems evident. And we may have to soften our voices to be heard. Something that Murray in some ways is doing with his use of the softer tones of marble that are replacing his more usual blackened bronzes. But whether this is an effective method against cancelation is not clear. What it has produced in Murray is a gentler voice. One, which like in Solace, reminds us of those softer kinder interactions between humans, beyond the rantings of social media. It is a reminder, as Bakhtin suggested, to all those who live in the depths of misunderstanding, those exiled, cancelled and excluded voices, who have lived in the “tyranny of the present” that they can find an “addressee”. A human they do not need to hide from. They will find that “significant other” and there will be no need to ventriloquize.

The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape.
— Franz Kafka, quoted in Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka [i]

‍

The shadow of the ancient Roman figure of Janus looms large throughout Brett Murray’s ‘Again Again’. Typically depicted as having two mirrored heads facing left and right – one looking to the future, the other to the past – Janus encompasses the present as a moment of transition or becoming (to go Deleuzian at this early stage of the game[ii]). As a country wherein 1994 marks a rupture between the past and present; Janus is, in a sense, the ideal mascot for a post-apartheid democratic South Africa in the process of trying to to find its feet.

However, as the dark tone of this body of work attests, that endeavour is not going particularly well.

Murray’s central thesis for ‘Again Again’ is that Janus’s righthand head is glancing backwards, that in many ways, the present-in-transition bears a striking resemblance to a past that it is trying to move away from. There are obviously limitations to this kind of comparison (especially in the South African context), but Murray wisely roots his critique in the transcendental ideas of populism, fascism, corruption, and state-sanctioned violence.

He invokes Janus via a number of strategies throughout the exhibition. The most immediately striking of these is the towering Again/Again, a massive 2.5 meter identical pair of idiosyncratic bronze bulls hunched back to back who are either – depending on your interpretation of their stylized anatomy - navel-gazing or reaching in vain with stubby appendages at their bullhood. The pair (who I dearly want to pun as oxy-morons) reflect the overbearing stranglehold of oppressive patriarchy on the South African past and present, with clear implications for the future.

The twin heads are directly channelled through Murray’s other, smaller-scale cast bronze animal sculptures such as the swinely profile of Replicate and the headbutting gorillas in The Fundamentalists. The latter inverts the Janus relationship by depicting the future and the past as clashing directly. Other allusions to Janus splits are evident in a number of mirrored acrylic on canvas portraits, large metal recreations of playing card royalty, and a tweaked still from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, 1940.

Moving beyond twinning and mirroring, the ‘Janusian’ idea of fusing opposing temporal states into one concurrent entity is enacted in decidedly more complex ways in artworks such as the Somnambulance series and Murray’s recurring depictions of the monster from Frankenstein. Taking a cue from Schrödinger's titular feline[iii], there lies a decidedly necromantic synthesis of past and future in the contradictory figure of the undead; simultaneously both dead and alive.

In this regard, the plodding zombie hoard of the Somnambulance series are a curious bunch, complicated by the fact that they include in their ranks, the artist himself, and his friends and family. Arguably the most pervasive variant of undead critters in popular consciousness at the moment, zombies are notorious for instinctively – but mindlessly – wandering the streets en masse in search of living flesh and brains to devour. With his army of somnambulants, Murray appears to repurpose that sense of gormlessness to point to a loss of personal and political direction. It’s no coincidence that ‘White Like Me’, Murray’s Standard Bank Young artist Award exhibition in 2002, examined the mirrored Janus figure in relation to the identity crisis of whiteness in the new South Africa through a series of fleshy pink ‘mutant’ heads[iv]. Here, that crisis is shifted from one of belonging to a seemingly futile sleepwalk, spurned by the absence of something in which to place one’s faith in South Africa today. This is an idea which will be returned to later on.

Another symbolic take on reanimated corpses lies in Murray’s recurring use of Frankenstein’s monster as a visual motif. He is seen sporting a shiny red clown nose in Potentate I and Potentate II, appears in The Resurrection as a portrait rendered in acrylic paint, and goes on a rampage in the oversized comic panel of The Demagogue flinging tables and terrorising villagers. Important to our reading of these works is the fact that it is the iconic Universal horror movie version of the character –and Boris Karloff’s portrayal in particular –which Murray has depicted rather than the creature from Mary Shelley’s original novel.

Frankenstein’s monster represents a particularly frightening incarnation of the reanimated ‘Again’ in that he is stitched together from a number of previously deceased individuals and forced into life by a malevolent mad scientist creator (whose motivations fluctuate depending on which depiction you go with). But there’s a deeper and more fruitful interpretation to be unearthed here by turning to Shelley’s original text, which was first published in 1818.

In Literature, Culture and Society Andrew Milner makes the case that the monster in the novel can be seen as a representation of the treatment of the working class - and the Luddites in particular- at the hands of the English bourgeoisie at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Noting the influence of Shelley’s parents’[v] support for the French Revolution at a time when the British government was vehemently opposed to it, Milner reads Frankenstein as an allegory for class conflict:

Frankenstein was written in a time of great class conflict, by a writer whose close circle of friends and relatives had been acutely aware of and concerned about precisely those conflicts. Her monster knows of ‘the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty’; he knows too that a man with neither ‘high descent’ nor riches becomes ‘a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few!’[vi]

Unlike the grunting killing machine of the horror movie Frankenstein, Shelley’s monster is extremely intelligent and articulate. The wretched being’s existential conflict derives from an awareness of his status as a monstrosity abhorrent to so-called civilised society. This crisis is made exponentially worse by his creator’s shunning and refusal to take responsibility for him.

The connection between Frankenstein’s monster and the proletariat therefore becomes clear. Created by forces of industrialisation and the escalation of technological progress which refuse to take responsibility for their existence, the working class are increasingly placed in a precarious position and alienated. The Luddites of 1811 -1816 (when Shelley was writing the novel) responded to their potential unemployment at the hands of machines by destroying them. According to Paul O’Flinn, the novel’s central thesis is that “Luddite violence was not the result of some brute characteristics of the nascent English working class, but an understandable response to intolerable treatment.”[vii]

Shelley’s monster is therefore an infinitely more complex and sympathetic being than the Boris Karloff monster, whose murderous behaviour is attributed to the fact that Dr Frankenstein’s assistant accidentally dug up a sadistic killer’s brain for use in the monster. Via a decidedly scenic route, this brings us back to Brett Murray’s usage of the Karloff Frankenstein in his work.

While largely a pop pastiche of the complexity of Shelley’s monster, the Karloff Frankenstein is infinitely more recognisable and iconic. By connecting its usage to the idea of a demagogue, Murray satirises political leaders fond of abusing populist rhetoric through appealing to the passions and prejudices of the masses. The point is general enough to have application in a wide variety of political contexts (take a bow Brexit and President Trump[viii]), but read as part of a continuum of Brett Murray’s works, the intent is clear. Red nosing the monster here serves to remind us that it is a figure of satiric ridicule.

The red nose Karloff Frankenstein channels the beast created by what Ronnie Kasrils refers to as the ANC’s ‘Faustian pact’[ix] wherein the party agreed to an IMF loan on the eve of the country’s first democratic election with strings attached that precluded a genuine radical economic agenda and the fulfillment of many core principles of the Freedom Charter. (Incidentally, Brett Murray has previously described the Freedom Charter as his preferred ideal for South Africa.[x]) In Kasril’s view, it marked the point where the party’s commitment to the poorest in the country was backbenched in favour of appeasing market forces.

Communist buzzwords backed by contradictory action was a core focus of both incarnations of the infamous ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibitions; including a work depicting a Lenin cosplay wardrobe malfunction[xi].‘Radical Economic Transformation’, ‘White Monopoly Capital’, and ‘The Land’ (as an abstract entity which somehow grants economic freedom of its own volition) all come to mind. This is certainly not to imply that spatial apartheid, income inequality, and access to education and land are not pressing concerns for the country, far from it. Rather the point is to condemn the callous flinging about of these ideas as empty hashtags to score political points, manipulate the sentiments of those who are suffering so intensely, and to divert blame.

As encompassed by the extreme bronze sheen of the snail which Brett Murray has entitled The Golden Revolution, the harsh truth is that 24 years into post-apartheid South Africa, no political party is meaningfully displaying any interest in practically addressing the inequality which plagues the country. The “Hustle Hustle Hustle” of Murray’s series of The Quest for Economic Freedom works applies to the Democratic Alliance’s appallingly neoliberal handling of the city of Cape Town as much as anything else. Any of the references to populist demagogues also encompasses the medium of choice of Julius Malema and the recent land grab exploits of the EFF (where the red nose takes on a new meaning).

While this is of course referring to events which occurred after the completion of this body of work, nowhere is the paucity of political moral fibre more apparent than in the identity crisis which the South African political landscape finds itself in at this particular moment in 2018. On the 14 February 2018 (Valentine’s Day nog al), having been unseated as the party president in December the previous year and facing an impending ninth vote of no confidence and recall from his own party, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma announced his resignation as President of the Republic of South Africa. As a parting gift, Zuma left behind an estimated R1-trillion worth of damage to the economy[xii], untold devastation to a number of governmental departments and a legacy of corruption, cronyism and greed.

Zuma had served as an effective unifying agent for the opposition, who essentially staked their entire political identity on being antagonistic to him and the ANC, rather than on any policies or ideological positions. The toppling of the Big Bad has resulted in a subsequent identity crisis where parties suddenly have to stand for something besides shouting about Zuma’s ample misdemeanours. The results have not been pretty.

Coincidentally, the online encyclopedia TV Tropes – a wiki which collects and expands descriptions and examples of various plot conventions and devices – contains a reference to a trope appropriately named ‘Joker Immunity’. Taken from Batman’s arch-nemesis, Joker Immunity refers to a villain so influential to the fabric of the franchise, that “killing him off would essentially rob the series of a big part of its identity”.[xiii] The description is certainly apt here.

If anything, this moment emphasises a conceit in ‘Again Again’ which was somewhat obscured during the blinkers of Zuma’s reign: Murray’s despair and frustration extends to the entire political sphere of the post-1994 South African democratic project. The promise of a Cyril Ramaphosa-lead ‘New Dawn’ (which to its credit has attempted to purge many of the inexcusable sins and lingering accomplices of Zuma’s rampaging final years) offers the prospect of a recalibration of Never Again Again. But these are still Dark Days, the toppling of the oversized joker card of Mr Charmer (heh heh heh) has simply exposed the scope of lying pigs, acrobatic elephants in the room, and Schrödinger's rats scurrying about the halls of parliament.

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Foot Notes

[i] Janouch, G. 2012. Conversations with Kafka [2nd edition]. New York: New Directions. 120

[ii] In an extreme nutshell, ‘Becoming’ for Deleuze (especially in his collaborations with Félix Guattari such as A Thousand Plateaus) points to a continuous state of flux and change in response to various influences which are encountered. There is never a fixed end point, only continuous becoming.

[iii] Continuing our nutshell explanations, Schrödinger's Cat is a paradoxical thought experiment, proposed by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, in which a cat is sealed in a chamber with various chemistry paraphernalia and a radioactive substance. After an hour, the cat will either be dead or alive depending on whether a single atom of the radioactive substance has decayed or not. There is an equal probability that this will and won’t occur, so mathematically, Schrödinger's cat can be considered to simultaneously be both alive and dead until someone actually checks in on the poor kitteh.

[iv] My younger grade 9 self missed the point completely and assumed these were hippopotami or sanitary pads.

[v] Political philosopher William Godwin, and philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft

[vi] Milner, A. 2005. Literature, Culture and Society. (2nd Ed.) London, New York: Routledge. 227.

[vii] O’ Flinn, P. 1986. ‘Production and Reproduction: the Case of Frankenstein’. in Humm, P., Stigant, P. and Widdowson, P. (eds.). Popular Fiction: Essays in Literature and History. London: Methuen. 211

[viii] Murray calls a spade a spade in the 2017 wall sculpture Trump

[ix] Kasrils, R. 2013. How the ANC’s Faustian Pact Sold Out South Africa’s Poorest. Available: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/anc-faustian-pact-mandela-fatal-error]

[x] See: Brett Murray’s answering affidavit presented during The Spear saga, available: [http://www.brettmurray.co.za/the-spear-legal-documents/]

[xi] I am of course wriggling around the notorious Spear saga here. I’ve deliberately avoided opening that can of worms due to its monolithic stranglehold on readings of Murray’s work post-debacle. Nutshell: Exhibited as part of his ‘Hail to the Thief II’ exhibition in 2012, Brett Murray’s portrait of then President Jacob Zuma as a freeballing Lenin prompted a defamation lawsuit by the ruling party, mass uproar, vandalism, death threats to the artist and his family, immortilisation of the offending image through attempts at censorship, and meager discussion on the role of critical art in society.

[xii] Steyn, L. 2018. Budget 2018 is Zuma’s Costly Legacy. Available: [https://mg.co.za/article/2018-02-23-budget-2018-is-zumas-costly-legacy]

[xiii] TV Tropes. n.d. Joker Immunity. Available: [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JokerImmunity]

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Perhaps the artwork that most aptly sums up where Brett Murray is at is Call and Response, two panels featuring schoolboyish cursive admonishments. On the left, repeated over and over, is written, "I must not make political art". On the right, "You are a corrupt f**k!" The controversy about The Spear, a painting depicting President Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed, has faded away like a bad dream over the past five years. The ANC’s backlash to this satirical work "was a profound eye-opener", he says as we chat in his sunny studio in Woodstock, Cape Town. He regards the debates that emerged as "positive" and carefully followed the "vibrant conversation" and believes "that can only inform me and whoever looks at making similar works or works around uncomfortable, difficult issues going forward". "Hopefully, it’s made me a bit wiser; not scared. And I don’t think it has," he says. Being a white South African means "you are in an uncomfortable position of privilege that you always h...

Kicks and pricks aside, can Brett Murray’s work ever be read ignoring the brouhaha his Spear painting caused? The short answer: Maybe.

Okay, so maybe Brett Murray’s new exhibition, Again Again, has a few suggestive protuberances. Some are merely belly buttons, but one is definitely a tottie as they say in Afrikaans. But comrades fearing the slings and arrows of Murray’s outrageous sense of humour need not worry.

There are no gratuitous sexual appendages added to his swollen animal bronzes and steel reliefs depicting comic book characters. And definitely none in his outsize figure paintings of dead tyrants. Nothing in fact that is likely to require a rent-a-crowd outside the premises of the Goodman Gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town.

This begs a question. Has Murray, a self-described “Che Guevara of the suburbs”, been chastened by his experience following the uproar over his 2012 painting depicting President Jacob Zuma with his penis exposed? The short answer: maybe.

Where his previous two shows, both titled Hail to the Thief, shot satirical arrows at the ruling party, Murray’s latest solo sees him return to a more generic brand of political satire.

Take his gold leaf encrusted steel relief Masked, which shows a naked cherub bearing a panga and sporting a thief’s mask. Who is this boy with the small penis? He could be anyone who has ever illicitly dipped a hand in the honeypot for personal gain, be it a politician, a tenderpreneur, a benefits cheat, or even a pavement hoodlum using a xenophobic chant to excuse brazen theft.

Ditto Murray’s anthropomorphic bronze depicting a cartoon pig with Pinocchio-length nose. He, or for that matter she (I checked, no penis), could be anyone who has ever told a lie. This sculpture is also a nifty update of Porky Pig, a pop icon birthed in Depression-era America.

In a show that sees Murray revisit his love of comic book iconography, the meaning of both these works is, however, not entirely generic. Political power, and its “venal abuse” as Murray put it during a speech at his book launch last year, lingers like an eMalahleni smog over his show.

Our collective passivity in the face of this perceived abuse is also noticeably skewered. Entering Again Again, one encounters Somnambulance: Harry, a steel relief depicting a bespectacled zombie figure, his arms outstretched in classic B-movie style. Is he a citizen? A voter?

Upstairs, there are seven more of Harry’s friends, adult zombies representing both genders. And much more. Like the first iteration of Hail to the Thief, Again Again includes a number of Murray’s formalist bronzes, seductive pieces that loop back to his late-1980s graduate work at the University of Cape Town.

They include a Janus-faced pig with two of the same face, a dwarf gorilla with its face planted in the wall, and a pair of bulls standing back-to-back, belly buttons protruding.

Speaking at the launch of his self- titled monograph early last year, Murray admitted that his infamous “dick joke” prompted some “prevarication” afterwards. Was he racist? Was he an arrogant white? Were his jokes no funnier than Leon Schuster’s?

Conundrums matched but lots of double guessing. During his talk Murray also remarked: “It’s just a pity that all the work I have produced up to The Spear, and all the work I will make going forward will always be seen in relation to this event.”

At its core, the debacle around The Spear replayed what are now defining features of contemporary South African politics: ritual noise and political irresolution. In a departure from his usual media, Murray essays this impasse, and the substantial noise it continues to generate, in a sober two-channel video work.

Triumph, as it is titled, shows two male actors – one is black, the other white – interpreting the same political script. Wearing exactly the same suit, they gesticulate and raise their voices.

Long live the nation!” they chime as this nearly seven-minute work reaches its shouted crescendo. “The Party is me! I am the nation, just as you are the nation. And together we are the chosen people!”

Sure it’s unfunny and didactic, but the punchline is easily comprehended. Much like in another work, Call and Response, where Murray lays bare his current temperament. “I must not make political art,” reads a mantra-like sentence on black panel. The sentence is repeated row after row.

Like Bart Simpson, who forever writes out his punishment at the start of The Simpsons, Murray is a refusenik. The corresponding panel to his mantra contains only one sentence: “You are a corrupt fuck!”

THE title of artist Brett Murray’s latest show at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town — Again Again — has the whiff of combat fatigue. Repetitive, concussive, numbingly familiar, it’s as if the artist is telling us that life is bog-ridden, repetitive, implicitly futile.

Nietzsche’s spooky notion of the “eternal return” springs to mind. Or as Murray wryly puts it, “much to his own irritation and amusement” he “continues to feel the urge to expose the absurdities of the powerful with biting satire”.

Murray’s mission throughout his long career has been to speak truth to power. This is often forgotten in the light of the absurd and depressing circus that was the “outing” of President Jacob Zuma in his painting The Spear. Without excessively regurgitating the Spear debacle, what it did teach us is that art, because it can be inflammatory, can also inflict a profound wound.

Therein lies the power of Murray’s work. However, to now interpret the artist in-and-through the Spear debacle is to distort what has proved a long and rich career in which art has consistently been deployed as a weapon of struggle. Murray’s core gripe has been against corruption and the betrayal of the democratic vision for change. Scandal, however, was never his objective. Rather, intent, as I understand it, has been to capture in as singularly punchy a way as possible the root of discord or falsity.

By titling his show Again Again, Murray reminds not only that history hurts but that it’s proving to be a stuck record. His “love-hate relationship with SA” is a “familiar” one. It seems that no one can escape this bipolar fascination and disgust. It is this very morbid psychic wiring which defines us; a wiring which Murray’s art exposes. Outrage, however, need not come in the form of a pornographic expose.
To give Murray his just due, we must also begin to value the dimensions of his art which operate beyond a public craving for outrage.

Having defrocked Zuma, or, having exposed the emperor in all his hubris, it seems that for the general public there was very little left to do. However, if his art matters it is also because it is more than the split reaction it generates.

A poster boy for resistance culture, Murray is also its blithe counter — the local celebrant of pop culture. His public sculpture depicting an exotic African figurine parasite by multiple Bart Simpson heads captures the artist’s prevailing interest in matters local, continental and global.

It’s the mix that matters; a mix which allows the artist to be both agent provocateur and fatalistic comic. Therein lies the pathos, and, dare I say it, the depth of the artist’s oeuvre.

In Again Again a series of metal cut-outs is called Somnambulence. Echoing Albie Sachs’s indictment of dogmatists and sleepwalkers, as well as the growing taste for the zomboid and walking dead, Murray reminds us of the need for wakefulness.

Wary of fundamentalists, whom he sculpts as morbidly twinned pack animals; distrustful of deceit, which his conjures as a pig with an abnormally long nose; acutely aware of uncomfortable contexts, which he captures as The little Elephant in the Room, Murray in effect renders the viewer both ironic and vigilant.

In a striking twinned work, Call and Response, Murray reminds us of the constant threat which lies at the core of our society.

Because we live within an oligarchy and not a democracy, we are compelled to censor ourselves. Hence the split screen in which the one panel obsessively and compulsively reads, “I must not make political art”, while the neighbouring panel reads, “You are a corrupt fuck!” By splitting the focus Murray exacerbates the existing societal tension, because for the artist the “state of emergency” is by no means over. Rather, the threat is omnipresent, meaning we are perpetually at risk. And the very fact that Murray and his family received death threats following his painting of Zuma serves only to remind us that our Constitution and the freedom of expression it supports is a mere ruse. It seems that like Murray’s Frankenstein figure we all carry an “uneasy crown”.

In working one’s way through Murray’s gratingly amusing exhibition, one is left with an undeniable taint, a sense of having willingly been sullied, forced into a heightened ethical conscience. Horror, it seems, lurks everywhere; nothing is sacrosanct

Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz springs to mind and with this brutal protagonist the phrase “the horror, the horror”. For what Murray seems to have captured is the darker side of political commentary. If his artworks “speak” then what they seem to be saying is that satire has become insupportable in an increasingly brutal and brutalised society. Witness the recent xenophobic attacks and murder of a Mozambican man in plain view.

It seems, despite the buzz of Murray’s pop aesthetic, that the artist’s work is far more tragic than comic and that he is far more than merely “irritated” and perversely “amused”.

I am sitting in Brett Murray’s kitchen at his home in Woodstock, Cape Town. It is late autumn; sunshine and warmth seep in from the yard. Murray makes me a coffee and joins me at the Formica-covered table. In front of us is his book: a Brett dressed up in blackface and a wig stares impassively at us from the cover.

Showcasing the artist’s work from his university days to the present, Brett Murray offers a rich visual narrative of his work and the satirical critique that has come to define it. Murray was born in Pretoria, but moved to Cape Town in 1976. He remembers watching the Soweto Uprising on TV. It was a pivotal moment for him; it proved “people were wanting change from within”—the apartheid regime’s justification that it was simply defending itself against an external rooigevaar “was an absolute lie”. “School kids my age — 15-year-olds — were being shot at by police and soldiers. The students were black, the soldiers were white.” There was no way he was going to be coerced into shooting “my neighbours”, so, to avoid conscription after school, he enrolled at Michaelis, the University of Cape Town’s art school. His master’s thesis, a series of sculptures, explored the military’s impact in SA, using often child-like figures inspired by West African sculptures and also influenced by the “round, inflated forms” of the pieces created by his supervisor, the renowned sculptor Bruce Arnott.

“Pre-94 there was one subject really,” he says — it was therefore inevitable that the turmoil of the time would impact his art. His generation was “conscientised socially and politically through all the upheavals that were going on and the forces for change” that were fighting apartheid. Together with some friends, he formed the Gardens Media Group, “an ad-hoc graphics company” which designed posters and T-shirts for church groups, trade unions and other anti-apartheid groups such as the End Conscription Campaign. “You were just a tiny cog in a huge machine that was wanting to dismantle apartheid. I always called us klipgooiers — we were just throwing stones.” While he says “we certainly didn’t aggrandise what we were doing then”, he says, “retrospectively I’m very proud that I was a little part of that whole movement”.

Varsity life contained the “bizarre contradictions of going to art school, getting drunk, having a party, taking drugs, growing up, boy becoming man”, while at the same time toyi-toying with thousands, running away from tear gas at an endless succession of funerals. It was a tense time. The security police waged a dirty tricks campaign against activists — Murray recalls how they placed used condoms under people’s beds or tampered with their cars. One night they set off a limpet mine in a toilet at the Community Arts Project’s offices in Salt River, where Murray’s then-girlfriend, the artist Jann Cheifitz, had helped to establish a T-shirt printing operation.

Murray recalls the relief he felt when democracy arrived in 1994. It was a period of cathartic celebration — for a moment it felt like he could “take your foot off the petrol and relax and almost throw the baton to the new dispensation”.

But the urge to continue to make political work remained — “to make sense of where you are, your context, your place within that context”. A consciousness of social inequity and injustice forged in the 1980s didn’t evaporate. “The societal constructs that were in place then are still in place now. The haves have more and the don’t-haves have less.”

“Why do I do political stuff? I wish I didn’t. My life would be much easier; I would probably be a more content individual if I just did seascapes and portraits of my friends, pets. Who knows how life goes. Maybe one day I’ll just give up the fight and do other stuff — make surfboards, whatever. But at the moment I’m just driven by a deep disappointment and a deep fury.”

This fury stems from a sense of “being sold out” by a rapacious elite more interested in enriching itself than in tackling stubborn inequality. “I don’t want to be lied to,” he says. “The apartheid regime lied to us. And similarly the new crew are a perpetuation of what went before.” Murray doesn’t deny the “remarkable changes” that have occurred, and acknowledges that “in 20 years you can’t undo what was done for 350 years”. But he believes, “you have to ask questions about where we’re going”. He finds the answers discomforting to say the least.

Coming up with an idea for an artwork can take 20 seconds; the sculpting or painting that follows takes a lot longer. And it is in these processes that Murray says: “I get enjoyment out of abstract notions of craft and manufacturing and formal skills, and that for me is a therapy.” Honing his craft is not just about being a master satirist, but expressing this “in a way that is full of craft and formal considerations. It’s not just about the ideas, it’s about the medium that you’re working in, and the execution.”

His work is a way of releasing “your thoughts about stuff and to try and share that with other people”. He aims to “concretise images and ideas”; to “articulate that which you are feeling as effectively as possible”. But Murray believes his work isn’t just an outlet. He defines satire as “critical entertainment” which he hopes challenges “the comfortable platitudes that people take up around issues of race, power and political correctness”. “I quite like pulling the carpet, unsettling that within myself and within an audience, so that you don’t quite know where I’m coming from.

“I don’t want to tell a racist joke — that’s not my intention. But you’re dealing with race and class, you’re dealing with your own white privilege; there are all these layers that inform your craft and your storytelling.”

Throughout Murray’s oeuvre, there is a frequent reference to, and subversion of, familiar cultural references: a collision of pop and parody, from a recurring Bart Simpson in his I Love Africa exhibition (2000) to the Baroque iconography of 2008’s Crocodile Tears.

His sculptural works, such as the two fornicating poodles that make up Power and Patronage (2008), offer a quite startling “contradiction of menacing images housed in quite a playful form” inspired by plastic Asian toys.

Murray’s works often employ humour to give “an audience a better understanding of themselves and the context in which the joke is being told, and a better understanding of the person who’s telling the joke”, he says.

“To laugh is a release. It’s a way of coping.”

The Hail to the Thief exhibitions (which appeared in the Goodman Gallery’s Cape Town space in 2010 and then in Joburg in 2012) involved revisiting the very posters Murray and his friends had made in the 1980s, as well as exploring the Soviet iconography and designs that had inspired so many of them. His work had “come full circle”, he says.

“It was difficult for me to parody things I respect historically… these kinds of posters were in the heart of the memory of the Struggle; the iconographic heart,” he says. “Everyone knows what you’re talking about, everyone knows the context in which these struggles were fought and real people died.”

The point made was devastating — contrasting the sacrifices made by Solomon Mahlangu and others in their struggle for freedom with the culture of corruption and kickbacks that became pervasive in apartheid’s aftermath. Murray doesn’t care if his work is seen as too political or didactic. “I can stand on my little box and shout and wave as loudly and as inaccurately or accurately as I see fit.” He admits that “sometimes you miss” — indeed, two pieces that were shown at Hail to the Thief I did not appear at the exhibition’s sequel two years later because he felt they were uncomfortably “off-colour”.

“But it’s up to me to cull, hone, craft what I do — it’s not up to Blade Nzimande and a faction within the African National Congress (ANC) to tell me what I can and cannot do,” he says. “I’m going to be informed by my own consciousness and also by sharing it with an audience.”

The response to The Spear, a painting depicting President Jacob Zuma with exposed genitals shown as part of Hail to the Thief II, still casts a shadow. Death threats deluged in as ruling party politicians branded Murray a racist and apartheid apologist; legal proceedings were launched by the ANC in a bid to remove the painting, and Murray’s legal team’s phones were tapped.

“To have the entire state and all its apparatus come down on you — it felt insane. It felt grotesquely heavy-handed and chilling, coming so close after the apartheid regime’s attempts to do the same,” he says.

I ask him if he feels he can still produce provocative work, and he responds: “Yeah.”

He feels that the ANC’s reaction (which included orchestrating a march on the Goodman Gallery) was born more out of political expediency than out of a concern for the painting’s contents. Its “desperate and aggressive” bid to obtain an out-of-court settlement, he feels, shows its legal team knew it wouldn’t win the case.

“If someone else comes along with a provocative, hard statement… I doubt whether they’ll be taken on,” he says. “The office of the president is fair game; it’s part of the political discourse in a democracy.”

Murray says he was fascinated by the responses to The Spear. “I wanted to listen; I was informed by all of it, by the vitriol, by the people who supported me, by the people who didn’t support me, by the huge grey area in the middle. I found that interesting.”

I ask him how this will shape his future work. “I don’t know,” he replies. Only time will tell.

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As I have explained to some of you already, in all honesty this book represents nothing more than the end result of a massive mid-life crisis. It was either do this book or get a Harley Davidson and a grow ponytail and trawl the bars on Long Street. I am still not sure I made the right decision.

The myth where I place myself outside of conventional cultural paradigms, David throwing stones at Goliath, should have been exposed for the fraud that it is a long time ago. Ultimately this should have become apparent when I discovered that my work was being taught at high schools, as part of the syllabus. I should have realised then that
I am no longer a dissident, a young anarchist, a subversive agitator rattling the cages of the establishment. I am the establishment!! I have been bought by the Palace! The Ché Guevara of the Suburbs. Have I sold out or just bought in?

I am not sure, but I now represent the old folks boogie. The ageing Barry Manilow of the visual dancefloor. Hopefully with this book, the young and edgy might find something to remix and catapult me onto the 21st century’s dance-card. I can only dream.

Growing up I would always look at the older generation of artists and say to myself, with the arrogance of youth and after many beers: “What wankers!” With this book I have become one of those wankers. So indulge me a bit as I savour and share with you my few final dribbles. And, who knows, there might be something left in this aging, pretend-pretend iconoclast’s last dying twitches that could still drizzle on a few parades…

A few years ago I might have called Jacana and asked if they were interested in publishing a coffee table book of my work. They would have asked” Brett who…?” And this would have been an appropriate response. I was… you see… massive only in Woodstock. So it is with deep irony that I have to thank the current custodians of our democracy for the leg up they have given me in terms of name recognition… if anything.

A few months ago I was having my blood taken by a large grumpy and officious looking Xhosa woman for a middle age prostate issue when…and I am petrified of needles thanks to a few lumbar punctures I received at an impressionable age… she plunges a needle into my arm and asks me sternly if I am “That Brett Murray?”

What would you do? My poephol puckered and I denied… denied… denied…. She wasn’t convinced… and asked me repeatedly… “Are you sure you are not That Brett Murray?!?”… Until I finally faced my ultimate fear like a man and sheepishly confessed… “Yes it’s me… I am him!”

She guffawed, smiled broadly and said that she had just been talking about the Spear thing with her nursing friends that very morning…and invited them all in to my bloodletting for introductions. They were delighted to meet me and we went on a sad and funny tirade against the powers that be, all wishing me good fortune and a peaceful future, with huge bosomy hugs, nogal! A close call. Thank God I don’t live in KwaZulu-Natal.

The idea for a book came from many threads and thoughts. A part of it might be to mark an end of a period of production… or maybe to contextualise the recently contentious events. Or just something to make my mother proud. The comic darkness that I often attempt to mess with in my work is not nature… rather nurture. My family make The Simpsons look like The Swiss Family Robinson.

My parents can take full responsibility for the cover pics of the book, both back and front. For the back cover: I was 6 years old and I was cast as a Zulu warrior for a school play, as were a few of my friends. Being at an all white school in Pretoria our parents had to transform us from lily-white to Zulu black. This was done with no irony or reflection …rather as a matter of course. Troubled times indeed! Deeply problematic and tragic… but also comic in hindsight.

Regarding nurture: Dress-up was always interesting at the Murray household. I went to the Jewish Menorah Nursery School, also in Pretoria. I am as Jewish as the Pope. Purim is an annual celebration where Jewish children dress up: often in masks as Princes and Princesses and the like, for a holiday that commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from a plot to destroy them. My mom, in her dark wisdom, dressed me up as an Arab and ushered me in. Politically shrewd and challenging… or just plain insensitive? Not sure. Needless to say… I was hurled out.

Many years later I was travelling with Sanell, my wife, in Italy researching my Crocodile Tears show. This body of work commingles the pomp and ceremony of European High Renaissance with that of the Mbeki era of sycophancy and cant, where the overriding question still remains: Do we own or storm the Bastille? I was imagining a kind of failed African Renaissance flavoured with the sanctimoniousness of the shameful era of Aids denialism. On the show I presented many ostentatious images of the privileged and the powerful. The figures were in full Renaissance finery, but now the white faces of expediency where transformed into the black faces of entitlement.

I was refining these themes when I remembered the images of myself in black face as a Zulu warrior, one of which I had previously used as an invitation to the show called White Boy Sings The Blues. I wanted to return the favour and now dress my parents up in black face and take a few pics of them watching rugby on their double-bed in a small flat in Fish Hoek. A confused pseudo-African Royal Family of the New South Africa… with Brandy and Tabs in hand-not sure where it was going- but an image I couldn’t get out of my head. My father once astutely said to me, with a sprinkling of racism, apropos his sad economic state of affairs and related to the privileges he had received in South Africa, that he…quote… “ was a waste of white skin…” where his colour just barely allowed him a foot- hold into the middle class. While visiting Florence we received an email from a friend saying he was sorry to hear that my dad had passed away.

It was the Tab that finally got him, I am sure. Bad news travels quickly… so by the time I called home it was only two hours after his passing. I got through to an informal wake. We are not religious. My Dad was an architect and thought he was God. I had a very teary conversation with my remaining family.

After a while, grieving with my mom on the phone, she related to me that everyone was around my dads body… talking to him… crying and laughing at the retelling of the many colourful stories that followed him wherever he went, when there was a reflective silence in the room. Maybe for once the TV was off. My mom noticed a change in my dad… he was a big fellow… the Tab didn’t do anything for his huge girth… My Mom notices he is changing colour… going a bit yellow and asks everyone present: “Guess who dad looks like now?… Homer Simpson!” At which point everyone cracks up and roars with laughter… as do I in my mom’s long distance retelling.

Sick and wrong or sick and right? I am not sure… but this is my genetic make up. Using humour to get through. So in memory of my father, and of both my parent’s guilt and innocence in turning me into a Zulu warrior years earlier, I black-faced myself instead. And this is the front cover.

Choosing the cover was difficult. More so with The Spear Saga being still so close and hanging over me. This image had been used on the cover of Art South Africa a few years ago. I was, and still remain, confident of both its awkward nuances and my intentions with this photograph, particularly in the context of the rest of the works I produced for the show. But what The Spear Saga has unveiled is a self-consciousness, a cross questioning and a doubt in my practice, an acute self-censorship which is exactly what the current crop at the helm would want. Pre- censorship. Not that I am ignorant of the complexities of images of blackface.

I mailed Jacana with a few of these misgivings:

“The cover, as you know, has been a worry for me. My default setting is to be provocative… so me in blackface ticks this box. My concern is that it will be read as proof to the naysayers of my innate racism. Much of my prevarication is definitely post Spear, which is of deep concern for me going forward. I had no problems with this image being used a few years ago on the Art SA cover. Although the blackface trope is deeply problematic… I am the butt of the joke in this work. It will, in any case, be seen by some as the continuation of postcolonial arrogance. Is it not a bit Leon Schuster?”

Jacana ignored this cry for help! Thanks Bridget.

It is this double guessing that I need to challenge vigorously going forward. Oddly enough…and tellingly I think… artists do reflect and change their minds and grow and fine-tune. Ironically, there were two works that were on the original Hail to The Thief Show in Cape Town that, after putting the works up and listening to various responses to them, seemed to me to fail in tone and were ineffective in reflecting what I was trying to articulate. The first was directly aimed at Zuma and after considerations came across to me as a cheap shot about education and culture. This is ironic in light of the unfolding events. The second work could be read as misdirected and metaphorically over reached musings on venality. These were, in hindsight, failed works, so I decided not to show them in Joburg on the show that caused all the problems. This is the natural way to hone your craft. To present and to reflect and to cull and to shift. To pull the various threads together, and to tighten. Like a stand up comics routine, my own assessments and presentation of my work is always shifting and changing. This remains the privilege and sanctuary of the artist producing the work, and the potential cullings and distillations that these reflections might effect must be the exclusive domain of the artist, certainly not that of government organs and institutions or current political parties or factions.

That a few sarcastic t-shirts put together by high school students have recently offended the current crop in power
is telling.

Transgressive ideas and imagery push and shift boundaries and if effectively used and charged can result in cathartic understandings and fresh reflections. Works and ideas that divide and challenge are interesting to me. I am drawn to this thin edge of the wedge, but not exclusively. With these works the possibilities for discussion are often effected.

A while ago, in 1997, the Italian stand up comic Roberto Benigni imagined and directed the beautiful and uncomfortable parable, the film, Life is Beautiful. Set in Italy at the time of the rise in fascism and the incarceration of Italian Jews into concentration camps, the film reflected on the true story of Roberto’s father’s concentration camp memories.

In the film, when a family is sent to the concentration camps and the family is split up, Guido, the father figure, uses a game to explain features of the concentration camp that would otherwise be terrifying for his young son: the guards are vicious only because they want to win a tank for themselves; the dwindling numbers of children (who are being killed by the camp guards) are only hiding in order to score more points so they can win the game. He puts off his son’s requests to end the game and return home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank, and need only wait a short while before they can return home in it. Despite being surrounded by the misery, sickness, and death at the concentration camp, Joshua does not question this fiction because of his father’s convincing performance and his own innocence. Gripping… gruelling and darkly funny.

The film caused massive ructions within the Jewish communities. It seriously offended some liberal critics and the reception to it by various holocaust communities was divided. Some thought it was an effective metaphor and a story hauntingly told through humour and allegory, others were disgusted that the horrors of the Nazi’s could be so insensitively portrayed and ultimately debase the memories of the deaths of their loved ones. Marches and boycotts were the order of the day. There are no right opinions. I loved the film. It won the Best Foreign Film of the year
at the Oscars that year.

The point is, it is up to artists and playwrights, filmmakers and poets and the like to attempt to tell these uncomfortable stories, or these stories uncomfortably, to invent, to re-imagine, to construct metaphors and to be able to do this without fear and without the added burden of an abusive government with its attempts to censor and sanitize these and, by proxy, all ideas.

As the author Hanif Kureishi has written: “You can never know what your words may turn out to mean for yourself or someone else; or what the world they make will be like. Anything could happen. The problem with silence is that we know exactly what it will be like.”

I am my own worst critic. I am as battle weary as all of us are regarding the meta-narratives of this troubled country. I so don’t want to see another film about the B-I-G issues in South Africa, see a play about apartheid oppression or read a book about the continuing poverty of many South Africans or, as one of my recent press statement reads: “Murray’s bronzes, etchings, paintings and silk-screens form part of a vitriolic and succinct censure of bad governance and are his attempts to humorously expose the paucity of morals and greed within the ruling elite”… Don’t you just want to run screaming and go and see Shrek in 3D? I do. But this is the uncomfortable monkey on my back.

It is what I do and have to do and will return to again and again. And although it might seem that what social commentators are producing, are reflections of what is happening “out there” exclusively, pointing accusatory fingers, and to some it might look like a gallery has been lambasted with wet newspapers leaving behind only traces of current headlines and popular graphics, all the work we do is driven by an internal, almost therapeutic and private process.

In reflecting on what is unfolding we hope to articulate a very personal understanding and an idiosyncratic psychological sense of place, and we begin to describe who we are with this anomalous vision. Paradoxically through this critique and comic exposure, we actually begin to define a preferred ideal in which we would like to live. Autobiographical by default. As there should be: in this process there is a constant re-calibration and fine-tuning of who I am, where I am, my privilege, my class and inevitably, I suppose, my whiteness. And this is all good.

More than 40 years ago, in Pretoria, I was busy in an art class with a paper folding, origami type project. I keenly set about making a paper figure. I produced what I thought was a great example of the possibilities of folded paper and shared this with all and sundry. This was many, many years before the internet… but my work and copies of it spread through the school corridors and from classroom to classroom, jumping from suburb to suburb via lift clubs and bus routes and into neighbourhood schools and finally arriving at family homes with a speed equal to the copy and paste of currently shared files.

(I showed the audience an approximation of what I had made many years before… a paper cut out figure of a man in a suit… when you pull on his legs an oversized penis folds out.)

My piece looked like this…I was 8 years old…. another dick joke.

Needless to say the authorities tracked this down to source… me… and I was beaten by the our class teacher. He had special canes with hosepipes covering sections of cropped fishing rods, fitted with bicycle grip handles. I am sure that if I really concentrate hard, I have memories of seeing the indications of a flange twitch in his trousers with every lashing he gave me. Nice job if you are into that sort of thing.

Years later when a book was published revealing the membership details of the Broederbond, it came as no surprise to me that our class teacher’s name was amongst the other apartheid beneficiaries listed. Ironically, I can now hardly differentiate between the ANC’s Chancellor House, a kind of official avenue for state sanctioned corruption, where huge deals favour the cronies within the new predatory elite, and the Broederbond, which functioned similarly and achieved indistinguishable corrupt ends.

Humour comes in different packages and sizes. Arthur Koestler wrote a great book called The Act Of Creation that basically looks at scientific discovery and compares this to humour and the invention of comedy. He postulates that scientific discovery is often the chance conjoining of two separate scientific paradigms, the unexpected merging of previously unrelated sights of enquiry. At the moment of this scientific insight is the cry of “Eureka”. Similarly, comic invention applies the same principle with the unexpected fusion of unlikely scenarios being celebrated through laughter or sniggers. These humorous inventions run the full range from the one-liner to the metaphorical novel, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

The more critical might view The Spear as probably the least sophisticated of all of these constructions. It is a dick joke after all…

They might add that The Spear, which appears wide in girth, at the end of the day, lacks real conceptual depth… and is probably short of staying power.

The critical are a well-hung jury. And depending on my mood… I might or might not agree with them.

That the work hit its mark is not in doubt though.

It’s just a pity that all the work I have produced up to The Spear, and all the work I will make going forward will always be seen in relation to this event. This could be an albatross around my neck going forward… or just an irritation… depending on how I deal with it, I suppose.

It nearly didn’t see the light of day. I was ambivalent about adding the dick to the painting. I thought then, and still do now, that it might have been a stronger and a more layered work without it. Specifically in the context of the rest of the show where I was parodying the pseudo- Soviet iconography and Comrade-Viva-Viva language of the new pigs at the trough. MasterCard Marxists, at best. But I stuck with it once it was painted more out of laziness than anything else.

If I had given the painting an erection, which I was considering, I am not sure I would be here to tell this sorry tale.

I have made a few dick jokes along the way. Years ago, in about 1983, I did a sculptural portrait of a friend. His testosterone levels were legendary. We all loved him for it… mostly. He wore, with honesty… how can I put it nicely? … his balls on his sleeve. I did a portrait of him as a set of such balls, in high-gloss pink, with a dick as a nose so that the whole set up, with a ginger hair arrangement, looked like a face. Funny… maybe… a bit harsh … definitely…but hey?! I was probably channelling my jealousy of his formidable success rate. He didn’t sue me or beat me up. Our friendship has lasted.

In 1986 I produced a sculpture called King for a body of work looking at patriarchy and the military. I sculpted an image of implied onanistic pleasures, where a young king simultaneously sucks on a pacifier while hosting a small erection, metaphorically answering the call to “Go and fuck yourself”. In 1989 I produced a work called Voortrekker. A direct translation would be “front puller” or rather “wanker” in English, of a monkey with a gun on his back playing with his dick. I revisited this image recently, without the gun, and called it One Party State. What goes around comes around, it seems. I have given a sunburnt Bart Simpson an erection in a work with the moniker I love Africa. There is an intended ambiguity in its reading. Is this cultural relationship about rape or about consensual pleasures? I have recently done two French poodles nobbing each other called Power and Patronage… two pigs rutting away called At The Trough. A poodle with an erection called Mr. Entitled. A poodle with large boobs called Mrs. Entitled. And on and on… There are hundreds, if not thousands, of explicit sexual metaphors in the history of art… I certainly didn’t invent this wheel.

The Kafkaesque events that unfolded regarding the Spear seemed to have been scripted by the Marx Brothers on acid. That is not: Harpo, Chico, Groucho and Zeppo… but rather Jacob, Blade, Jackson, and Gwede.

The script included a court case.

I can easily deconstruct and expose my own craft as that of a devious racist right wing apologist’s. These self-critical insights are the devils I listen to when I make my work and which I need to listen to when some of these works balance unsteadily on the satirist’s paradox, where there might appear to be contradictory celebrations of what you are actually attempting to expose. So I was apprehensive… to say the least.

I received the State’s legal documents from our attorneys. These included amongst others a file containing full colour images of The Spear and all of the Hail To the Thief works on show. With a combination of fear and delight I saw that Number One had to go through my entire show, work for work, and sign each page and image in his prepared affidavit.

Talk about “Speaking Truth To Power”… directly.

As it turns out the State’s lawyers could have benefited from my insights. The case, which was set out at the onset to last three days was given short shrift by the three judges and ended rather dramatically. We watched this unfold live on TV at Zapiro’s house. He was a sounding board for me throughout this saga. He had been down this absurd rocky road before… court cases and death threats. We also shared legal teams. He had a few Zuma court cases pending and was interested to see how this fight panned out.

Watching this mini drama on TV I had my first whiskey in 12 years. Purely medicinal! It was a large jug.

As the court case unfolded I was receiving SMSes from our legal team from inside the court room: “Did you hear that… the judge says your works are powerful” and “Their case is falling apart and we haven’t even started our arguments yet” and on and on.

Nazeer Cassim, one of Zuma’s personal lawyers, had been trying behind the scenes, to get the ANC to withdraw the case, but with no luck. On the day of the court case he approached the ANC protagonists and said that Zuma wanted to settle. It seems that, for whatever reasons, Zuma didn’t want the case to go ahead.

A faction within the ruling party could see an opportunity for political gain and pressed on despite this.

We can only speculate why Zuma wanted out: The fanning of the flames of racism by a faction within the ANC and the resulting threats of violence was unhinging the country and this was becoming unmanageable. Maybe because the state had a weak case and Zuma had better legal opinion. Maybe Zuma didn’t want his dirty laundry publicly aired, again. Or he is a very, very weak president and that the seat of power lies at Lithuli House. Probably a combination of all… Whatever.

Just before the start of the trial there was another call made, apparently to Zuma, by the ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu insisting that the ANC were going ahead with the case despite the president wanting out.

Interesting. Especially in the light of the preceding court events where it was quickly pointed out by the judges that neither The Office of the President nor The ANC as an organisation could be part of the legal arguments in the unfolding case as it was ultimately between the artist, myself, and Zuma as an individual, not even as the president! So with those institutions playing no further part in the proceedings and with the knowledge that Zuma, in his personal capacity, did not want the case to go ahead at all and with the ANC’s Advocate Malindi being dropped in the legal deep end by the conflicting ANC factions, and not presenting arguments that the work or my intentions were racist, which should have been the cornerstone of their arguments… Malindi buckled under the pressure and broke down in tears. It wasn’t going to be easy for him. He had conceded after some tough questioning by one of the judges that “It is not a racial issue.”

The court was adjourned and both legal teams where immediately summonsed into the Judges chambers to discuss a way forward.

Our legal team where demanding to be given an opportunity to present our arguments before the close of the days proceedings… but the ANC where running scared and would have none of it.

I felt for their attorney. He was caught between a rock and a hard case. He has my utmost respect for the sacrifices he made on all of our behalves. He spent two years on Robben Island. Advocate George Bizos, one of our few remaining heroes, describes him as a gentle spirit. The subsequent racially driven, face-saving spin by the ANC that it was for Malindi a reminder of his court case when he was on trial as one of the Delmas Treason trialists, where he was cross-questioned aggressively by a white Afrikaans judge, was only half the truth. If that.

And then in the inimitable words of the Secretary General of the ANC Gwede Mantashe: “What we can’t win in the courts we will win in the streets!”. So much for our constitutional democracy.

Death threats against the protagonists escalated. Lisa Esser, the gallery owner, received threats from people claiming to be MK veterans that her gallery would be bombed. She employed bodyguards because of personal death threats as well. A call was made for the boycott of the City Press… a strategy that was used as a tool during “the struggle”. Ferial Haffajee ultimately capitulated under the pressure and took the image off the City Press website as demanded by the ANC. She would later say that she, and all of us, where played and with hindsight would never cede to the bullying tactics of the state again.

Journalists were then, and are still now, scathing of her decision. In her defence… we were all incredibly vulnerable and it’s difficult for others to comprehend the pressures and fears that had enveloped all of us at the time. I always thought that the press was the cornerstone of this battle and should have taken centre stage. An unhindered and free press is crucial for our democracy. Artistic freedom of expression, although obviously important, seems like a sideshow in our context. So although I was as disappointed as others, I understood where Ferial’s decision came from.

That the painting was used for expedient political ends was obvious, and the State’s legal team virtually conceded this to various protagonists. The whole saga was 90% politics and 10% art.

Following the unfolding saga in the media, I was encouraged to see commentators come out immediately in support of the painting and in favour of an unfettered freedom of speech, as is constitutionally enshrined. Mondli Makanya, the Sunday Times columnist: Pierre de Vos, the constitutional law expert: Anton Harber, the journalism professor and founding editor of the Weekly Mail, Justice Malala, a sharp political and social commentator and also Ferial Haffajee. They were all scathing about the State’s reactions to the painting.

I remained silent throughout the ordeal because I instinctively thought that this would be wise. I also just wanted to listen. An out-of-context and angry soundbite would not further our cause either… and certainly appearing with the shrill Napoleon wannabe Blade Nzimande and Debora Patta in a debate, live on 3rd Degree… which I was invited to be part of… would have been fatal. I would rather have brain surgery with no anaesthetics.

I was, at the time, vacillating between tears of frustration and a potentially violent anger… things that do not come across well on TV… so I declined this, and many other local and international media invitations from New Delhi… Helsinki… New York… London… Sydney and many, many other requests for interviews.

So for the idiots in the art-world who have said that this was nothing more than a publicity stunt…I have no words.

I was as interested as everyone was in the various debates and positions that were discussed and taken regarding the painting. The more measured conversations ultimately came down to where freedom of expression ends and the right to dignity begins. I am well aware of our shameful history that necessitated this right to dignity to be included in our eloquent constitution. The arguments that the work perpetuated postcolonial visions of oversexed black males are equally important. We all have to be constantly reminded of these issues and our context.

Ironically I was busy with another work at about the same time as The Spear that articulates some of these issues. This is a text work and ventilates what has been called elsewhere: “Poor-nography” and the post-colonial gaze and reads: What is it about photographs of black men, centrally framed, looking back at you from desolate surroundings, that gives you a neo-colonial half-lazy?…

Again the sexual innuendo…I can’t help myself!!

So I didn’t go in blind. Knowing these issues I decided to bite the bullet and express directly what I understand
to be musings on the venal abuse of power in a patriarchy that accommodates a president’s well-documented carnal curiosity.

I found it informative that once the states propaganda machine had been amped up, and once the calls of racism had been sparked and fanned, and in the tinder dry context of poverty stricken South Africa, these flames would catch… this was populist propagandising at its very core… I found it interesting that all of those commentators who had unequivocally supported the painting to begin with, started to hedge their bets and were now calling for a freedom
of expression with added caveats and provisos. The right to dignity, and the like.

J.M. Coetzee wrote in his essay Taking Offence, and rather appropriately in the context of The Spear: “ A censor pronouncing a ban…is like a man trying to stop his penis from standing up. The spectacle is ridiculous, so ridiculous that he is soon a victim not only of his unruly member but of pointing fingers, laughing voices. That is why the institution of censorship has to surround itself with secondary bans on the infringement of its dignity.”

You don’t find a cure for cancer in the comments section of newspaper websites. However… I did find it informative to read what the general public was saying on these, and other platforms. And although there was much vitriolic flag waving and threats of violence, there were equal amounts of support. This was also enlightening in that the fault lines of these debates and discussions were not based on race. This despite the State’s attempt to colour the saga accordingly.

A social media message, which ruffled a few feathers when it was sent out by Tselane Tambo, the late ANC President Oliver Tambo’s daughter, read:
“So the Pres JZ has had his portrait painted and he doesn’t like it.
Do the poor enjoy poverty?
Do the unemployed enjoy hopelessness?
Do those who can’t get housing enjoy homelessness?
He must get over it. No one is having a good time. He should inspire the reverence he craves. This portrait is what
he inspired. Shame neh!”

Harsh words indeed.

Two of South Africa’s senior artists, who I share a gallery with and whose work and political positioning I respect and admire, both are white, had conflicting positions on The Spear issue. One called me and said he thought I should take the work down, that my point had been made… and the other thought I should not buckle under the pressure and succumb to the bullies and that we should take it to the Constitutional Court.

The support I received and the hate mail I received through my website were equally divided between the various race groups.

There is a now huge gray area and this can only be positive going forward in our new democracy.

It’s just a pity that there was not a more measured response by the State and a call for discussion rather than the attempts to brutally suppress the freedom of speech through anger manufacturing and political grandstanding.
But in all honesty… surely the powers that be have a country to run.

Education in crisis, unemployment…housing, health…and lest we not forget …rampant corporate and government driven corruption.

The Marikana slaughter was around the corner. These are the issues of the day. Not a small rant by a disillusioned and angry artist. Shrug this off and do what governments do… govern.

I believe the defacing of the painting was staged. At the time it happened I was actually relieved — it seemed to lower the temperature considerably. I was concerned that there might be violence and possible killings that I didn’t want in any way to be associated with, or a victim of. And although a settlement was finally agreed to, I still believe, fundamentally and to my core, that there are no compromises with regards the freedom of expression. This, unfortunately, would include us having to listen to the views of Boere Volkstad blogs, old school apartheid believers, Orania separatists and the like, spewing out their racist nonsense… and all of us having to defend their rights to do so.

Noam Chomsky put it succinctly when he said: “If we don’t believe in the freedom of expression for those who we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

As I have said earlier, I was keen to see the case go to the Constitutional Court. I articulated this to our lawyers through a haze of industrial strength tranquilizers. We were also all anxious to get out of the hell that this relentless public scrutiny had become for us. Our legal team received information; I am guessing from someone within the state, that all of our phones where being tapped in order to monitor our legal strategy. We were warned to use safe phones. Sound familiar? (Those in power were not uniform in the condemnation of the painting… but all were silent…) My assistant of 17 years and his family were receiving unpleasant and continued violent threats from some members of his community in Khayelitsha. The spokesperson for the Shembe Church, representing five million worshipers, publicly called for my public stoning to death… it was serious. We had to leave our house and studios for a safe place. We were terrified.

I had started planning to move my family out the country if the case was to drag out and go to the Constitutional Court. The eventual settlement, however disappointing from a principled perspective, was pragmatic and allowed us all to get on with our lives as best we could.

The march on the gallery was nothing more than the protagonists saving face after a brutal beating in the High Court. They insisted on going ahead with this march while seemingly scrambling and desperate to negotiate the settlement. The march was nevertheless unbearable for me to watch. I was deeply troubled by the message that was being sent out about our country, both locally and abroad…but more so on a very personal level. Those images were deeply scarring and remain so.

The more cynical would say that bussing in 4500 unemployed people from Limpopo, at the drop of a hat, with promises of a T-shirt, a placard and a lunch voucher is more an expose of the new elites inability to generate employment for our people and the cynical exploitation of these vulnerable citizens for political agendas, than anything else.

A few months after the saga came to an end I had an interesting conversation with retired Constitutional Court Judge Albie Sachs. He argues for a culture of nation building and celebration. I argue that criticizing bad governance and questionable leadership is as patriotic and builds nations equally. Senior Council Jules Browde, who was a founding member of the Lawyers for Human Rights in the ’80s was also part of the conversation and summed it up cogently: He said: “If you can write it… you can paint it”.

That the State’s apologists can’t decipher irony was made beautifully clear when they were set up in front of my artwork called Manifesto at the Goodman Gallery for the public announcement of The Spear settlement.

The work spells out in large red and gold letters:

PROMISES PROMISES PROMISES

It’s my favourite memory of the sorry saga…

Where I felt we had capitulated, Albie said that the settlement should be seen as a victory for us and for the freedom of expression. I was not so sure. A few months later, the night before Zuma’s cases against Zapiro were to start,
a settlement was fashioned and agreed to by the state. I think that the State, on this issue, has been silenced… for now… however which way they want to spin it. So Albie might be right.

Surely part of the presidential manual is that you will be up for public scrutiny from society and that this would include lampooning and uncomfortable comedic satire, accurate or not. In all democracies this is grist for the mill. The cabinet should get out more often. They would see and hear across the country scathing and tasteless jokes being told about them by all and sundry. Ayanda Mabulu’s paintings are but one example. Trevor Noah, the stand up comic, does a sketch, which predates The Spear by a few years and has him on stage mimicking the Presidents faltering reading speech patterns, hauling out his, that is, Zuma’s metaphorical dick… and slapping the faces of cabinet ministers with it, much to the hilarity of a packed and demographically accurate audience. Now that is a transgressive image if ever there was one! Clinton got the treatment. Berlusconi gets the same, as did Prince Charles. Those in public office will continue to suffer the consequences of an exposed Achilles Dick. Look at the troubles it has caused Vavi recently. For satirists a president’s sexual peccadilloes are manna from Heaven. A bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

So, finally, regarding the sorry saga…. It was with equal measures of anger and disappointment that I have expressed my contempt for some in the new regime who are undermining the victories that have been achieved through their corruption and guile and who are effectively desecrating the graves of our struggle heroes. Political correctness and self-censorship are not cornerstones of effective political satire. If they were it would not be called satire, rather “Ironic Praise Singing.” Parody is part of the satirist’s arsenal and it is often through this that I hope to expose the new pigs at the trough. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on where you stand, nothing is sacred.

That some faction of a political party saw fit to jackboot through a gallery space and call for the burning of an exhibition and suppress a newspaper editor’s independence and by proxy attempt to censure the ideas of artists, playwrights, poets, film makers, social commentators, stand up comics and the like, and coming so soon after the apartheid regimes attempts to do the same, this was eye opening, short-sighted and ultimately chilling.
The silence of those within the echelons of power when there were public incitements made for the killing of some of us, and when private death threats were made public, renders them all complicit in the attempts to subvert the constitutionally enshrined freedom of expression and in the brutal suppression of dissent.

I have received many bits of correspondence from many quarters. Two stand out.

A Supreme Court of Appeal Judge sought out my email address and wrote to me. It must be noted that the author in question is no apartheid lackey. The judge is not white either, and had this to say to me:

“Because your case is no longer proceeding – and there is no danger of my having to recuse myself for expressing my solidarity with one of the protagonists in the litigation over the Spear – it would not be inappropriate for me to express my solidarity with you.

The basic idea that you convey in your ‘Goodman exhibition’ – the decent of the governing party into venality – is felt by many of our compatriots and I have to say that the conduct of some of the temporary custodians of the governing party over your painting was nothing less than shameful. They, not you, have lost their way.

By contrast your contribution has been consistent – from you’re principled opposition to Apartheid to living by the values which that struggle taught you.
I wish you well and salute your courage.”

As we seem to be living in a script that embraces simultaneously both tragedy and farce, here is another bit of correspondence I received at about the same time that reads:

“Dear Mr. Murray
We do much of our work globally in 25 countries in brand strategy, events, PR, sponsorship and digital content management.

We are exploring the idea of partnering with you as part of a new product packaging for a lifestyle intimacy brand. This is part of a global campaign that is geared towards changing and improving attitudes towards sexual intercourse as a pleasureful and a natural human endeavour. We hope to drive positive behaviour towards not only the brand but sexual intercourse as a human experience.

The idea is to brief you to design the new product packaging for condoms, lubes and other associated intimacy products, which will be revealed in September 2012.”

I cried laughing.

We seem to do this quite a lot.

Thanks for coming.

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When Jonathan asked me to open his show I had mixed feelings. I was delighted as I am a huge fan of his work… like all of us here … but apprehensive as well. I am not a devotee of obscure verbal meanderings at exhibition openings and I am always suspicious if the text is superior to the work.

When the scholastic pitch is so high that only dogs with academically tuned hearing can grasp what it’s all about, I want to run a mile. So speeches at openings are not my favourite. I might have to consider throwing in a few erudite words …a LIMINAL here, a POTENTIATE there… or what about an ANTAGONALITY?… This done to lift and confuse the tone of the night.

Here are one or two art speak sales pitches:
“…a group of sculptural works that aims at a void that signifies precisely the non-being of what it represents…”
What about this one…?
“His work explores the relationship between the Military-Industrial Complex and midlife subcultures. With influences as diverse as Derrida and John Lennon, shifting derivatives become reconfigured through frantic and personal practice and the viewer is left with a testament to the darkness of our condition.”
And finally this peach:
“My practice examines hesitation as part of the process of decision-making, where the object is neither the object of objecthood nor the art-object. It is rather the oblique object of my intentions. ”

Heaven help us.

As they say in the classics “ You can’t polish a turd”.

Thankfully Jonathans work needs very little by way of introduction, and certainly none of that art-puffery.
It speaks for itself, clearly, articulately and is brazenly accurate. Any text that might be needed to expand his concerns can be read in the work itself. Its how I like it!

In the art world we might spend a year or two working on 5 new ideas, dress each of these up into a series so that now there are…hey presto… 25 new works, and go through excruciating angst when delivering these to the safety of a compliant village, which is the art world. A small, cloistered but mildly bitchy crowd.

Jonathan on the other hand cranks out, with graphic and conceptual acuity, dozens of cartoons monthly. He delights and pisses off an anonymous, massive and sometimes volatile audience every day and every week…. He produces between 20 and 25 each month. He does this month in and month out. Year in and year out….more than 4500 thus far.

When Jonathan confirmed these numbers by SMS recently…I could actually hear my brain Fizzle and then Explode at the gargantuan scale of the enterprise…looking back at what has been done…and then more so looking forward at what still needs to be done!

How does he come up with all his ideas? How can he possibly generate so many?
We might ask him…” When is the well going to run dry?”

And he answers us with persistent and hilarious regularity…. and if you are like me …it’s the first page you go to wherever his cartoons appear…The Times…The Sunday Times…The Mail and Guardian …etc etc.
The offshoot of his work seen here …The puppet animated programme ZA News, which he co-founded and which the SABC and E.TV shamefully refused to flight, is an added delight to his output. It has won 6 SAFTAS including this years Best TV Comedy.

Jonathan …we have to ask you…” Do you ever sleep?”

He has produced 18 of his yearly annuals of cartoons, besides a number of other themed collections, such as the new one DEMOCRAZY. I have bought most of them…but his popularity is shared by my friends and extended family, all with nimble fingers…so my collection has dwindled substantially over the years. I have to forgive them. I understand. He is that popular and his annual’s that coveted.

Looking at his early work is grimly nostalgic. You kind of long for the obviously defined “Goodies Vs Baddies” that these cartoons describe. It all seemed a lot clearer then. I suspect some of the anger of the present is fuelled by the bitter disappointment with the new political powers that be, and this results in a harder and more focused comic attack. Good. We share your sentiments. This is as it should be.

He has the skill to articulate through visual prompts and absurdities, exaggeration and invention, and through images which when rendered seem to echo what many of us are thinking and trying to articulate. He in effect provides us with visual icons or hooks on which we can hang our collective displeasures at South Africa’s unfolding social and political dramas. And importantly, he does this with a disarming humour. We are able to share in his mirth only because his renderings resonate so accurately with our own understandings of the complexities of our lives. With his cartoons he gathers around a band of like-minded compatriots who laugh and cajole collectively at the dumbness, the tragedy and the comedy of these shared experiences. He is able to distil and translate current affairs into images with powerful provocations and reflections, and these are always legible, cogent and more often than not memorable.

Zapiro is by far South Africa’s most loved, and might I add, most vilified cartoonist. Loved…because his is our collective voice of reason…and vilified…well… because his is our collective voice of reason.

He has a set of balls…if the feminists excuse the metaphor…that I certainly don’t have. My recent brief interlude with the state during The Spear saga and the accompanied threats of violence is something that Jonathan has had to deal with over many years. He is an old and seasoned campaigner. He is not afraid to stand up to that pressure either. His notorious 2008 cartoon metaphorically reflecting on the rape of justice by Zuma, that shows Lady Justice being held down by leaders of the ruling alliance while the president unzips his trousers in preparation, has become legend. This and others he drew became the focus of legal battles between the ANC and the Office of the President, on the one side, and Zapiro and the various newspapers that he supplies, on the other.

These Million dollar lawsuits that the State and Number One threatened him with did nothing but fuel his fires, it seems. In 2011 he revisited this iconic cartoon… but now he draws a ravaged Lady Justice shouting “ Fight Sister Fight” to another women being held down by the ANC Secretary General, our good friend Gwede Mantashe. The victim is draped in a sash that spells out “Press Freedom”, if I remember correctly, and is an apt comment on the proposed Protection of Information Bill and the Media Appeals Tribunal. Hard hitting to say the least. But always persuasive.

The unfolding events around my own small battle with the sate and the president included a court case. Jonathan was curious as to how this legal drama would play out. What had been hanging over him for many years came down on us like a quick ton of Kafkaesque shit. His case was finally going to be heard a few months after our court date. We also shared legal teams and this court case would give us all an indication of the way ahead for him. He was obviously concerned and curious. And was also very supportive…

As you might recall my legal drama ended farcically when the intended 3 -day hearing was abandoned an hour and a half into proceedings…with the ANC’S legal representative bursting into tears after being grilled unceremoniously by the 3 Judges in the high court. The ANC’s advocate had conceded that my work was not about race nor racist…and he would now have a battle going forward arguing that this was indeed the case. So he crumbled…as did the ANC’s case.

We watched these legal shenanigans live on TV at Jonathans house…and apart from feeling that, like Alice in Wonderland, we had dropped through a rabbit’s hole into an absurd parallel universe…it also gave me the opportunity to witness Jonathan at work.

I can only describe a kind of frenetic activity…TV blaring in his studio downstairs while he maps out ideas…calls to and from Nic Dawes the current Mail and Guardian editor…the cartoon was for the following day’s edition…sketching out a few ideas at the same time …sharing these with us…gauging our response…watching a bit of the TV with us upstairs…showing us various text options…and running back to his drawing board.

His uncertainty…his quickness and his doubt is evident… as he skilfully puts together a very current cartoon. I think it is this uncertainty and this self- reflection that tempers and balances his craft. This and the doubt. I know that there are one or two works out there that once done and published, Jonathan has reflected on and reconsidered their effectiveness and tone. They might have pushed beyond his own barometer of decency, if you will.

But this reflection and culling is the domain of the artist, and the artist alone. Certainly not that of a political party, or a censorship board, for that matter. And with the long shadow cast by the history of the apartheid regimes attempts to purge ideas and censor dissent being so recent and present, we all have to be vigilant going forward. It is quite easy to insult…to insult for effect and attention… and even though, as Salmon Rushdie has said…” The freedom of expression includes the freedom to insult”…Jonathan’s work is mediated through this processing and cross- questioning, and is ultimately guided by his conscience… and in a sense his doubt. The limits to freedom of expression will, and should be, guided by each individuals conscience, rather than be determined by an arbitrary political faction of the current custodians of our constitutional democracy. No matter how difficult the ideas expressed may appear to be. It is this particular consciousness that is ultimately reflected in his work shown here, and will be reflected in the work of other film- makers, stand up comics and the like. Each will push the boundaries and limits of this freedom of expression as they seen fit… and as is protected by our eloquent constitution.

Jonathan’s final victory in this fight for freedom of expression came when the state, after many years of resisting a battle in court… because they knew they were probably on a legal hiding to nothing… the state withdrew all charges against him and the various newspapers the night before the case was to be heard by the high court. Cynical, scared and a waste of tax payer’s money. It still seems like a hollow victory against a cowardly state. But victory nonetheless.

Jonathan’s development of the iconic and ubiquitous Shower Head has become part of South Africa’s popular culture. An icon. I recently watched on TV with great delight, Malema berating Zuma and doing the shower head sign… Hilarious.

Going through his back catalogue it is impossible to pick out favourites. There are just too many…My favourite will always be the next one…

Jonathan…your ability to concretize sometimes complicated social and political nuances into visual metaphors, and to do so with humour, is a delight for us…your audience. The eloquence in the way you are able to express your position, your anger, and your humorous take on this sad and hilarious country is fresh, insightful and cathartic. But this is almost always done with a profound celebration of humanity. It is this thread that runs through your work that might set it apart from others in your field. There is very little sanctimoneousness and flag waving and there is an equal ness with which you let your arrows fly. It is possibly this humanness …a mentschlekheyd… if you excuse the yiddish term…that tempers potential vitriol and grandstanding, and as a result your underlying message is not bitter.

Paradoxically, it is through these focused satirical attacks that you actually begin to describe for us your preferred ideal … your vision of a world that you would like to live in. I almost hope we don’t get to there too soon… we would be deprived of your uproarious provocations if we did.

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The danger arrives when politicians start to use moral culture to dress up their immoral ideals.
— Antjie Krog, 2009

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Some art soothes the soul. It makes you feel warm and tingly; you’d be at ease bringing your ouma or gogo to view it. But other types of creative work can roil one’s sensibilities, intrude in your face and burrow beneath the skin, irritate like a pesky speck of food lodged behind a rear molar.

These contrasting forms of expression have been at the core of the practice of the Russian-born conceptualists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. Their Double Self Portrait mirrored sycophantic Soviet homages to Stalin and Lenin in a mock socialist-realist style. It so provoked government officials that their work was literally bulldozed in 1974, alongside that of fellow dissident artists. Later as émigrés to the West, the pair were swept up with the headiness of expanded personal freedom and the opportunities unleashed by an emergent postmodernism. The targets of Komar and Melamid’s send-ups changed, even if their tongue-in-cheek attitude did not. As part of a series called People’s Choice (1994–7), they hired international pollsters to gauge the general public’s preferences in art. And here’s what consensus generated in the specific example of America’s Most Wanted, as dutifully rendered to spec by Komar and Melamid: a realist landscape, executed on a large scale, boasting a slight human presence and a bit of wildlife – Bambi, that is, but certainly not Carcharodon carcharias, the great white. Totalitarianism severely corseted their art. But democratic opinion did, too.

This is not that startling: artists have long bristled at attempts to control them. Consider Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (c.1788) by the court painter Francisco José de Goya, for instance. At first glance it is the tender portrait of a young boy, the embodiment of innocence. But it contains an ominous quality as well: the child holds a string that tethers the leg of a magpie, while three wide-eyed cats lurk close by. The boy may appear to be guileless yet he is, in fact, complicit. Moreover, the bird holds a card in its beak that bears Goya's name, dramatising the risks and restrictions of his professional life.

South African artists, both pre- and post-democracy, have cosied up to the powers-that-be or have pricked them, have flirted with egalitarianism or spurned the sentiments of ‘the people,’ to varying degrees. Each of these imaginative stances embodies inherent dangers.

Brett Murray staked out his artistic turf early in his career and has doggedly cultivated it ever since. He is impish but earnest; considered a trickster by some, a traitor by others. Governments may have changed, and controversies have flared up around him, but he has not allowed sacred cows of any breed to graze tranquilly within his creative domain. Murray felt as ethically compelled to condemn injustice and official excesses before1994 as he has done to unmask official corruption, malfeasance, personal extravagance and the ineffable persistence of inequality in the present day. His moral compass does not drift from true north.

Throughout his career Murray has charged intrepidly into heavily landmined symbolic territory that many artists would be scared to set foot on. He skewers racial complicity and culpability, the accelerating pace of commodification, and conventional notions of decency and propriety, in both the art community and the world at large. Most notably, he has been exploring the oscillating volume of social and cultural capital accruing to one’s racial status in South Africa, long before neo-tribalism became a modern-day cultural bludgeon and defence, or ‘whiteness studies’ became an academic fashion. One critic approvingly noted his ‘schoolboy flippancy’ and floridly remarked, ‘Murray thumbs his nose at the tokenism that bedevils South Africa and his unregenerately [sic] impertinent creations function like an impeccably administered enema flushing all this crapulous posturing and cant out of our bowels.’^[1]

In his exhibition ‘White Boy Sings the Blues’ (1996), for example, he ‘Africanised’ himself, alongside iconic figures such as Richie Rich and Colonel Sanders. I Love Africa (2000) included caricatured metal cutouts of tribesmen bearing shields with the likeness of Bart Simpson; Bart being boiled alive in a trio of metal pots that read ‘Guilt,’ ‘Guilty’ and ‘Guiltiest’; and two metal cartoons, one called Crisis of Identity and the other Shack as Metaphor, featuring a classically stereotyped native confronting a pith-helmeted white chap. In one image the native declares, ‘If another white artist brings me a portfolio of guilt, crisis of identity and memory, I’m going to throw up.’ In the other he pledges, ‘If your work romanticises poverty or uses the shack as metaphor, you’ll be on my next show in London.’ Murray’s impatience with political correctness, and disgust with the constraints imposed by artistic gatekeepers, have scarcely been disguised.

Furthermore, his 2003 exhibition ‘White Like Me’ spun off the Black Like Me product line to confront the social construction of whiteness. It also featured a work where three space aliens declared, ‘We are from the Congo – we want your women and your jobs.’ Employing a type of squirm-in-your-seat jesting, this work found amplified resonance with the xenophobic violence that murderously erupted in South Africa in 2008 and continues to simmer and boil over.

While these works were barbed and sly, in a basic respect they were aimed at a knowing crowd of art-world insiders, people who are inclined to be similarly self-reflective and self-critical rather than culturally benighted. But when Murray’s work has been thrust before a broader audience, controversy has ensued. A notably disputed piece was Africa, a 3-metre-high bronze sculpture that was installed on the hectic St George’s pedestrian mall in central Cape Town in 2000.

Africa features an enigmatic but distinctively African figure, with more than half a dozen brilliantly yellow Bart Simpson faces bursting out of its head and torso. It is the postmodern equivalent of fetishes that traditional people drove nails into, in order to release evil spirits and thereby cleanse and renew their community. It is audacious and irreverent, singular and sensational, embodying a collision of cultures, economies, value systems and iconographies. Whether this represents a positive instance of syncretism or a regrettable case of parasitic imposition of one culture onto another is left to the viewer to decide.

Africa has been well received by critics. One noted its ‘insouciant wit and uncanny grasp of urban geography’, and observed, ‘It may not be a comforting vision, but it is a lot closer to the real throb of Cape Town’s streets than some smug mantra of ethnic and cultural harmony.’^[2] But Africa has met a mixed reception by the public and by public officials. In fact, the project was nearly unrealised.

Murray beat over fifty other entrants in an open competition. But his proposal ran aground after members of the city council balked, objecting that it was culturally offensive and irreligious. The sort of cheekiness that is acceptable in a gallery made local officials queasy when they thought about it being permanently displayed in a heavily trafficked and highly visible public location.

The council was willing to move forward only after it solicited expert testimony and received positive academic evaluations. After that, all excuses were exhausted. The deadlock had stalled the venture for well over a year, subjecting it to a scornful (and fearful) critique. A reporter for the Sowetan shrewdly isolated the critical potential as well as the challenge inherent in Murray’s slant on the post-apartheid world: ‘At a time when most people are scared to articulate themselves despite freedom of expression being enshrined in our Constitution,’ he wrote, ‘Murray’s work grapples with issues that are [just] below the surface.’^[3] It was an amazingly prescient comment.

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Just over a decade later, Murray produced a painting that brilliantly demonstrated the coalescence of the politics of race and representation, the ways in which the constitutional rights of freedom of expression and protection of individual dignity can grate against one another, and the politics of diversion. The furore it aroused in 2012 propelled The Spear into becoming the most vilified work of art ever produced in South Africa. But as extraordinary as this occasion was, the manner in which the polemics unfolded recapitulated many of the key features of art controversies from the country’s past; it also paralleled kerfuffles originating from Chicago to Copenhagen, Tunis to Tehran. It was a watershed moment.

Murray’s exhibition ‘Hail to the Chief II’ opened in Johannesburg on 10 May 2012. The Goodman Gallery’s press release stated, ‘This body of satirical work continues his acerbic attacks on abuses of power, corruption and political dumbness … a vitriolic and succinct censure of bad governance … [and] his attempts to humorously expose the paucity of morals and greed within the ruling elite.’ The works also included sculptures, etchings and silkscreens, and were a mash-up of the ANC logo and insignia, iconic struggle posters and Soviet propaganda. Liberation heroes were morphed into tenderpreneurs, idealistic freedom and resistance slogans converted into cynical materialistic mottoes. The Struggle, for example, altered the final words that MK cadre Solomon Mahlangu uttered before he was hanged by the apartheid regime, changing a familiar placard from that time which originally read ‘Tell my people that I love them and that they must continue the struggle’ to ‘Tell my people that I love them and that they must continue the struggle for Chivas Regal, Mercs and kick-backs’. The works were both uncommonly insolent and uncomfortably insightful.

The exhibition was reviewed by City Press on Sunday, 13 May. The journalist singled out The Spear, based on a 1967 poster of Lenin by the Soviet artist Victor Ivanov, with this prophetic musing: ‘Of all the work on show, it’s this depiction of the president that will set the tongues wagging and most likely generate some howls of disapproval.’^[4] Murray’s version presented embattled President Jacob Zuma in a heroic pose, genitals fully exposed. A reproduction of the painting accompanied the article.

A cascade of indignant reactions ensued over the following two weeks. The ANC filed an emergency court injunction to have The Spear removed from display. A leader of the Shembe Church called for Murray to be stoned to death; additional threats were directed against the gallery and its staff, as well as City Press. The SACP general secretary and Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, called for a boycott of City Press because it had posted the painting on its website. Large protest marches took place: in Durban, led by one of Zuma’s wives, and in Johannesburg. The artwork was defaced with paint in two separate incidents at the gallery in one afternoon, and subsequently was taken down.^[5] And in an unprecedented expansion of its powers, the Film and Publications Board rated an artwork, restricting viewers to those 16 and older, even though the image was by then widely available on the internet (the board’s action was later overturned).

Murray was branded ‘provocative’, ‘subversive’, ‘sardonic’, ‘bitter’ and an ‘angry young artist’. And those were relatively mild appellations. He was accused of ‘sexual deviancy’,^[6] ‘liberalistic bullying’,^[7] of bearing a ‘plain low class scum mentality’,^[8] and denounced as ‘the money-making pot calling the money-making kettle black’.^[9] ‘Klip gooier’ [stone thrower]!^[10] ‘Unyana ka Strijdom’ [child of J.G. Strijdom, the racist prime minister]!^[11] And, echoing a schoolyard chant, memorably labelled ‘Brat the Moron’.^[12]

The Spear transfixed the country, dominated the news and public discourse, and triggered a painful dialogue around the enduring legacy of colonial and apartheid injustices in a democratic South Africa, the politics of reconciliation, the status of traditional culture and beliefs within the contemporary world, and censorship. The country was brought to a fever pitch. A full-scale race war seemed a distinct possibility.

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‍The Spear controversy is a classic case of the politics of diversion. Or, as Goodman Gallery director Liza Essers characterised it, this was an instance of ‘manufactured rage’,^[13] while Murray branded it ‘manufactured flag-waving and politicking’.^[14] To wit: in the run-up to the ANC’s national conference scheduled for later in the year in Mangaung, where beleaguered President Jacob Zuma hoped to be renominated to lead his party and secure a probable second term in office, attacking this irreverent depiction provided a rich opportunity for his supporters to deflect attention from the incumbent’s shortcomings. This was a proxy battle, fought over a work of art, but about much deeper matters.

Social context is of utmost importance in such instances, and Zuma’s problems were manifold at this juncture. He was being buffeted by administrative and personal scandals, subject to fault-finding by an increasingly critical, probing press, and his credibility was at stake because of his botched efforts to meet the public’s expectations of the government generating positive changes in their lives. The president was under considerable pressure to demonstrate effective leadership and he was ever more vulnerable; his foibles and failures had left his arse exposed, along with his putative penis. Two newspaper headlines – one appearing before the controversy, and one as it was quieting down – capture the sense of imminent crisis: ‘Zuma forced to put out too many fires’ and ‘President Zuma is under siege’.^[15]

As a backdrop, the state of the economy was a key concern due to persistent unemployment and the escalating cost of basic necessities. Education was earning a failing mark: graduation rates remain dismally low nationwide and a crisis persisted in Limpopo Province where learners enrolled in several grade levels were without textbooks well into the semester, signalling a significant breakdown in ministerial operations.

This was simply one indication of deficient service delivery, a problem which has fuelled raucous protests throughout the country. A corollary was the rise in vigilante activity within communities gatvol with spiralling crime rates but lacking faith in the police. Moreover, scandals removed the nation’s incumbent top cop from office twice in succession (Jackie Selebi and Bheki Cele), and charges of corruption, cronyism and nepotism became commonplace.

Zuma married for the sixth time in April 2012 in a lavish ceremony. Murray quips, ‘Some people have an Achilles’ heel; he seems to have an Achilles’ dick.’ Widespread snickering over the president’s not-so-private private life turned into a tangible backlash: there were calls for cutting back the government’s annual support of (compound) spousal benefits.

Moreover, a court ruling earlier in March that year determined that the National Prosecuting Authority’s decision to drop corruption charges against Zuma stemming from 2009 was ‘reviewable’. And a persistent thorn in the president’s side has been Julius Malema, the rowdy former head of the ANC Youth League who was suspended from the ANC for five years owing to ‘acts of indiscipline’. Not surprisingly, Malema joined the critics of the party’s campaign against The Spear.

Murray’s painting provided a convenient target upon which the president and his supporters could deflect criticism, a scapegoat for all this politician’s deficiencies, an occasion for political opportunism par excellence. That said, controversy was by no means a sure thing in this instance; it was the confluence of art and atmosphere that clinched the deal.^[16] An editorial noted, ‘Zuma, 70, is not about to waste the Viagra-boost The Spear has administered to his re-election drive.’^[17] This remark was simply one example of the playful, sexually based humour that pervaded the media’s coverage of this sometimes farcical episode.

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Both Essers and Murray were blindsided by the uproar. Essers was on maternity leave and relaxing with a new baby when she received an urgent call from her staff: the ANC was seeking court intervention to have the painting removed, and news crews were besieging the gallery. Although an ANC stalwart had sent a complaint to Essers regarding an earlier version of the exhibition that appeared at the Goodman Gallery’s Cape Town branch in 2011 – before The Spear was even created – Murray had set aside any concerns that the painting might cause problems, thinking, ‘It’s an art work; it’s in the gallery. I had no idea it was going to implode.’

In fact, The Spear that is now familiar to a broad swathe of the South African public very nearly did not exist. Murray explained, ‘I painted it without a dick, I thought it was interesting enough, in the context of the other work looking at Soviet memorabilia and the pseudo-Soviet kind of rabble-rousing that happens here in the name of the people, but actually it’s for the few, the chosen few. So it was in the context of that I thought it was interesting sans dick. And then I kind of, as is my nature, I just wanted to make something a little more provocative.’ Upon reflection, Murray notes, ‘I just decided to, rather than didn’t. It’s in the nature of making work, that’s what happens, you make these decisions and then you stick with it [sic].’

To be sure, South African artists in the past have been scorned, and even threatened, over what they’ve created. Steve Hilton-Barber was menaced over his photographs of Northern Sotho initiates in 1990, as was Beezy Bailey for his temporary transformation of a sculpture of General Louis Botha into a Xhosa initiate in Cape Town in 1999. Similarly, Kendell Geers and the Goodman Gallery were intimidated because of his Fort Klapperkop intervention in an Afrikaner-led celebration outside Pretoria in 1998, as was painter Yiull Damaso, whose imagining of a Madiba autopsy in 2010 brought forth accusations of witchcraft and calls for the artist’s death.

Even so, no South African artist has been subject to such a sustained and vicious campaign of threats as Murray. One letter-to-the editor writer proclaimed, ‘[Murray] must be prosecuted and tortured in a ferocious manner.’^[18] Twitter, Facebook and radio shows were additional sites where there was braying for blood, including suggestions of necklacing.

At one point Murray closed his workshop, and he and his family fled Cape Town. Essers felt compelled to hire a personal bodyguard: she received calls declaring, ‘A white person has to die for what’s happened’, and someone wrote ‘traitor’ all over a car owned by one of her black staff members. Murray reflects that these comments were ‘screaming and vitriolic and violent and threatening’. He sadly reports that his assistant of 16 years, a respected elder within his home community, was intimidated where he lived as well as within the presumed relative anonymity of the train: ‘So as is typical of South Africa, who would feel the most heat actually in the context is my assistant because he lives out in an area where lots of people are unemployed, where violence is palpable and real, and so the threats against him were going to be profoundly more focused than against me or a gallery owner or [City Press editor] Ferial Haffajee.^[19] My first real concern prior to my own was actually his, when this whole thing blew up, is what is going to happen to Shadrack and his family?’

But nothing rivals the following declaration by a woman – one of a few thousand marchers in an ANC-orchestrated demonstration at the Goodman Gallery on 29 May – for its bone-chillingly precise, passionate and uncompromising assessment of the situation: ‘This [Zuma] is an old man …  he [Murray] is a young boy [sic] … he doesn’t have manners. I’ll kill him.’^[20]  Some people at that protest carried signs reading ‘Whites Hate Blacks’, and another woman asserted, ‘We’re supporting Zuma because he’s like our father, and the country’s father. The portrait was inappropriate and [Murray] must get on a ship and go back to Europe, or wherever he’s from’ (for the record, that would be Pretoria).^[21]

Racism, xenophobia and blind fury were churned into a poisonous and explosive brew. Liza Essers was stunned by the ANC’s support of such a tactic: ‘They haven’t marched since 1994 – did you know that?’ The possibility of constructive dialogue was also truncated by numerous invocations of the legacy of Sara Baartman, simplistically comparing Zuma’s naughty depiction by an artist to the tragic circumstances of this grossly maltreated nineteenth-century woman.

Moreover, the notion that ‘dignity’ was compromised by an artwork surfaced as far back as 1996 in the controversy over Kaolin Thompson’s Useful Objects (where the student’s award-winning ceramic work was condemned as a derogatory allusion to a black woman’s vagina). This general theme emerged as well in Jacob Zuma’s multiple lawsuits against political cartoonist Zapiro’s biting depictions of him, particularly the now-familiar imagined showerhead sprouting from Zuma’s scalp (a reference to an offhand comment the politician uttered regarding HIV prevention during his 2006 trial for an alleged rape).

Many commentators embraced an essentialism which could only interpret The Spear as a racist portrayal, fullstop. ‘To be South African … is to have a soul that instinctively resonates with the sound of Shosholoza,’ one man declared.^[22] Comedian Loyiso Gola stated, ‘As modern as we are and we go and eat sushi and what not, this is still Africa. Black people will always interpret something like that in a different way.’^[23] Public Works Minister Thulas Nxesi, meanwhile, deplored what he perceived as a profound inequity in the way in which different types of expression are treated: ‘Our culture, our freedom songs, are declared as hate speech. But their insults are declared as freedom of speech.’^[24]    

In the ANC’s bid to have The Spear removed from the gallery, and throughout much of the public dialogue that followed, Murray felt ‘emasculated’, ‘voiceless’, ‘profoundly humiliated’ by the painting being called racist, and, by extension, his being labelled as such. Prominent poet and cultural activist Wally Serote, for instance, ‘said the painting was ‘no different to labelling people kaffirs’.^[25]

For Murray, who had been a cultural activist in the 1980s, using his artistic skills on behalf of labour unions, the End Conscription Campaign and other progressive causes, this was a stinging allegation. He reflected on the irony of being propelled from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other: ‘[In the past] the white “brethren”, including my father, would call me kaffirboetie because of my support for change. So I was labelled a kaffirboetie then and now I’m labelled as someone who would come out in public and call people “kaffirs”.’ Both Murray and Essers rejected the claim that The Spear was racist, but he understands that some people could interpret it in this way, and Essers admits that she’s ‘conscious … that for some people there has been a real hurt and humiliation that has been brought to the surface’.

While the ANC’s playing of the race card and flogging the alleged assault on Zuma’s dignity may have seemed like shrewd gambits at the outset, the party’s court case quickly collapsed. Both sides agreed to a settlement after the ANC presented its arguments, a drama that was televised live to the nation. The judge determined that The Spear was not racist; the gallery’s rebuttal to the ANC’s position was postponed, but ultimately never aired in court; and City Press agreed to remove the painting from its website, to the dismay of those who felt that this set a bad precedent for media professionals in the future. Ferial Haffajee countered that her actions as a journalist had overtaken the real story.

In truth, the ranks of proponents and detractors of the artwork cut across racial categories: ‘Zulu culture’ is no more monolithic than ‘black culture’ or ‘white culture’ is. As one man reflected, ‘To Murray and most other South Africans, Zuma is not Baba, to whom one submits as a child does towards a parent … Ethnocentric culture is not a defence for a president against public critique by a citizen.’^[26] And a Facebook post by another black African the same day condemned Zuma as ‘a moron of an uneducated tribalist who hides behind culture as though blacks are that stupid’.^[27]  

However, culture wars such as these are not about constructive dialogue; they are about showboating and political one-upmanship. ANC senior administrator Gwede Mantashe’s motives could not have been more transparent than when he proclaimed, ‘What the ANC cannot win in the courts it will win in the streets.’^[28] Threats of mob action such as this, issued by a major public official, are potentially much graver in their impact than anything an artist might produce.

The Spear emerged at a moment when the cultural and political climate was highly combustible. A match – either intentionally or inadvertently dropped under such conditions – held tremendous explosive potential.

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Culture wars generate various consequences. On the positive side, they may propel discussions forward that might not otherwise occur. But they become extremely taxing to those who are directly under attack and can also exert a chilling effect on subsequent cultural production. The ramifications of such dust-ups reverberate widely and deeply, often-times in quite a stealthy manner. One of the most serious complications, of course, is the emergence of self-censorship, whereby artists anticipate and fear potential consequences, second-guess themselves, and then err on the side of caution in what they produce. An editorial published just as The Spear controversy peaked captured this possibility: ‘A tone has been set. Artists beware.’^[29]

Interviewed less than two months after the firestorm broke over his painting, Brett Murray was alternately chastened, funny, frustrated, fearful and wounded. Reflecting on what had occurred, he stated, ‘100% I wouldn’t do it again, and 100% I would. Because I think I have a right to do what I do, say what I say, think what I think, and I think every poet, playwright, thinking person, non-thinking person has a right to air their views as they see fit.’ Murray concluded, ‘If I say that I wouldn’t do it, then the bullies have won, basically they have silenced dissent, they have silenced criticism.’

Murray has been left with an acute dilemma. Should he decide to branch into new artistic territory in the future, he runs the risk of being accused of capitulating and ‘copping out’. But if he continues to work in the same vein he courts further denunciation. In a humorous moment Murray teased that he ‘should have painted daffodils and portraits of my friends’ pets’. Ironically, influenced by the fact that he has two young children, Murray had been imagining his next body of work to be innocent and fun-filled, reflecting his kids’ perspective on the world. As he states, ‘Political expression’s been the monkey on my back since the 1980s, it’s been something I’ve fed and it’s been fed by the twists and turns of this place.’

But such a potential creative U-turn has been brought to a standstill: ‘And now unfortunately my cards have been dealt, I’ve been given a hiding and my fear’s sort of slowed and anger is slowly returning, and I can’t not respond. Well, I can, but I just, I can’t do that playful stuff anymore. And I’m quite angry about that in and of itself because it feels like it’s an unnatural progression of where I really wanted to take my work. It’s more than likely I’ll carry on doing what I do, carry on taking potshots.’

And so how has he, in fact, carried on artistically? As the chaotic winter moved into spring in 2012, it became clear that Murray would not assume a tail-between-the-legs, acquiescent stance. He premiered Dissent at the Jo’burg Art Fair. A deceptively simple work, it featured large three-dimensional letters spelling out ‘Silence’. A couple of months later, Murray used a surfboard to replicate one of his re-workings of a political struggle slogan into a private demand for branded merchandise, for the annual Wavescape festival. And that was followed by the painting Rainbow over Nkandla, part of the series Made in China, featuring a gigantic multi-coloured arc encircling Zuma’s controversial sprawling rural homestead (‘Zumaville’), which has been substantially bankrolled at the public’s expense. Murray could have been referencing the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; or what appears to be the steady dissolving of the notion of a rainbow nation; or even the type of ‘pretty picture’ that he mused about making after The Spear controversy and that politicians try to create when they resourcefully spin the facts. But one thing is certain: Murray shows little inclination of reversing his career-long trajectory. Just have a look at Political Persuasion, a pair of silver-plated knuckle dusters, bearing the motto ‘Thug Life’ and signalling the artist’s staunch determination to continue to go mano-a-mano with those who have become bloated with the sense of power and intoxicated by the spoils of self-aggrandisement.

The explosion over The Spear dissipated as quickly as it was detonated. But the episode has secured an important place in South Africa’s democratic history. Certain people, including Murray, are disappointed that the court case did not continue: it could have resulted in a clearer sense of vindication for him, as well as potentially provide clarification of the respective limits of the constitutional rights to individual dignity and freedom of expression. Such precedents await future clashes of interests, thereby stranding creative people in a murky no man’s land where they must tread carefully.

Some members of the public complained that with the exhibition of The Spear, ‘Democracy has gone too far this time.’^[30] Until there is a legal interpretation of the precise limits of artistic expression, such purely emotion-based judgements will very likely continue to be aired.

The Spear meteorically attained iconic status in South Africa; it joins the ranks of strongly political works as diverse as those executed by Goya or Komar and Melamid. It has also generated multitudes of spoofs. One painting, The Shield, created by an unnamed group of offended black artists, recalls the Ernest Cole photograph of African mineworkers submitting to a full body inspection. But in this instance a row of five naked whites is being examined by a black doctor, ‘to check whether or not these people were suitable to stay in the new South Africa’.^[31] Liza Essers, General Koos de la Rey, Helen Zille, Eugene Terre’Blanche and Zapiro made up this miscellany of racial miscreants, with questionable status in today’s world.

As Murray projects the future, he envisions going forward ‘not less cautiously but more informed, possibly, and hopefully it won’t be fearful, and hopefully it won’t be with some idea that you have someone looking over your shoulder. If the lesson is that I must be cautious, that I must be fearful,’ he concludes, ‘then I think it’s a problem.’ As to the future of creative expression in South Africa, Murray hopes that ‘I’ve maybe blown down the walls a bit’.

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The foibles of politicians nourish a perpetual spring for artists to dip into, sip from and then spit out, allowing officials’ misdeeds to boomerang back into their smug, sanctified faces. The French artist and publisher Charles Philipon hit the bull’s eye when he caricatured King Louis-Philippe; his series of drawings Les Poires (1831) metamorphosed the sovereign's face from a solemn, jowly chap into an absurd, scowling pear (the appellation was also slang for ‘simpleton’). The artist’s relentless reworking of this unflattering metaphor contributed to a steady erosion of the sovereign’s authority. Closer to home, Evita Bezuidenhout excels in turning the self-satisfied utterings of the country’s leaders into ridiculous, humorous self-incriminations, and Zapiro’s persistent send-ups of President Jacob Zuma crowned with a shower spigot are indelibly incised into the collective consciousness of South Africans. Without doubt, Brett Murray has secured a place amongst this time-honoured assemblage of creative souls with his portrayal of Zuma ‘hanging loose’.

At the end of the day, did The Spear hit its mark and bring the president to book for his failures and misdeeds? Or did it unintentionally confirm Zuma’s status as a soft target for disgruntled constituents and a victim of political intrigue, thereby boosting his popularity? Like so much contemporary art, The Spear spawns multiple interpretations.

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Notes

[1]  Llyod Pollak, ‘Cocking a snook at sacred cows’, Cape Times, 31 May 2000, 6.

[2]  Aska Wierzycka, ‘Africa says eat my sculpture‘, Mail & Guardian, 14 August 1998.

[3]  Eddie Mokoena, ‘Murray’s no walk in the park’, Sowetan, 5 July 2002.

[4]   Charl Blignaut, ‘White noise’, City Press, 13 May 2012, 12–13.

[5]  Moreover, a clergyman spraypainted Steven Cohen’s Pope Art (1995) and Christians stole a bible from a Mark Coetzee work that also included a penis (1997). In addition, a man spray painted a Bittercomix image of fellatio exhibited in Durban (1995), and vandals stole the bulk of photographer Zanele Muholi’s professional electronic equipment, thereby making off with much of her archive of controversial photography featuring lesbians (2012).

[6] Songezo Zibi, ‘Time now to show our true colours’, Sunday Independent, 27 May 2012, 16.

[7] Hans Pienaar, ‘ANC itself un-African in the way it handles art furore’, Business Day, 28 May 2012, 9.

[8] R. Myburgh, ‘Zuma must sue artist’, Business Day, 24 May 2012.

[9] Pienaar, ‘ANC itself un-African’.

[10] Hazel Friedman labelled Murray this way in a 1996 article, and it was repeated during the 2012 controversy.

[11] Palesa Morudu, ‘Let’s be clear: Zuma is no Saartjie Baartman’, Business Day, 5 June 2012.

[12] Oswald Mtshali, ‘The Spear a mere prick in history’, The Star, 2 June 2012, 15.

[13] From an interview conducted by the author with Liza Essers in Johannesburg, 4 June  2012. All subsequent unattributed quotes derive from that interview.

[14] From an interview conducted by the author with Brett Murray in Woodstock, Cape Town, 6 July 2012. All subsequent unattributed quotes derive from that interview.

[15] Chandré Prince,‘Zuma forced to put out too many fires’, The Times, 29 February 2012, 2; Mpumelelo Mkhabela, 2012. ‘President Zuma is under siege’, Sowetan, 20 June 2012, 13.

[16] To further demonstrate that point, artist Ayanda Mabulu exhibited two paintings which also featured Jacob Zuma’s exposed genitals: Ngcono ihlwempu kunesibhanxo sesityebi (Better poor than a rich puppet), 2010, and Umshini Wam (Weapon of Mass Destruction), 2012 – one before, and one after, the controversy over The Spear. But neither work sparked a public controversy. What could explain this? Mabulu does not have as high a public profile as Murray does, he was not exhibiting in as well-known a venue, and in the first instance the larger political environment was not so tumultuous, and in the other the communal energy necessary to generate and sustain drama over artistic expression had dissipated. Moreover, Mabulu is black, which neutralises the possibility of racialising the debate. This is, therefore, a prime example of the social construction of acceptability: the same sort of expression can trigger outrage in one instance but be ignored in another. It’s not just about content, but context as well.

[17] ‘Pity Zuma won’t heed this advice’, The Citizen, 1 June 2012, 12.

[18] Mzukisi Lento, ‘Democracy is a fine art’, Mail & Guardian, 25 May 2012, 32.

[19] Haffajee has been embroiled in controversies before, such as when she published one of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad in 2006 while she was editor of the Mail & Guardian, and when she was condemned as a ‘black snake in the grass’ for City Press’s 2011 inquiry into the financial dealings of Julius Malema. In fact, one journalist argued that the attack on City Press was partly motivated by an ANC vendetta against the paper because of its penetrating investigative reporting: ‘It is ironic that The Spear exposes Zuma’s most painfully private parts at the same time that the press has succeeded in exposing his inner core’ (Mandy de Waal, ‘Battle goes far beyond controversial painting’, The Star, 31 May 2012, 19).

[20] Quoted in Janet Smith, ‘Making the most of a forgiving crowd’, The Star, 31 May 2012,19.

[21] Amukelani Chauke, Andile Ndlovu and Roshan Nebhrajani, 2012. ‘Blade: destroy Spear painting’, The Times, 30 May 2012, 5.

[22] John Lamola, ‘New’ Africanness is lala-land’, City Press, 10 June 2012, 10, emphasis added.

[23] Nickolaus Bauer, ‘Freedom vs dignity in art debate’, Mail & Guardian, 15 May 2012, 6.

[24] Quoted in Marianne Merten, ‘Cosatu says yes to call to boycott Spear purveyors’, Saturday Star, 26 May 2012, 3.

[25] Quoted in Bauer, ‘Freedom vs dignity’.

[26] Mondli Ndletyana, ‘We should be encouraging our artists to tell it like it is’, Sunday Times, 3 June 2012, 4.

[27] Reported in Lulamile Nxopo, ‘What you said on Facebook about …’, City Press, 3 June 2012, 30.

[28] Quoted in ‘When mob rule shouts down the rule of law’, Sunday Times, 4 June 2012, 4.

[29] ‘Pity Zuma won’t heed this advice’, The Citizen, 1 June 2012, 12.

[30] Quoted in Sameer Naik, ‘Kunene will pay thousands to burn Spear’, Saturday Star, 2 June 2012, 5.

[31] Shown in Nomzamo Ngcobo, ‘White private parts on display!’ Daily Sun, 25 May 2012, 2.

‘It’s not money the rich are afraid of spending, but calories, which are worth more than money.’ So said Richard Klein in his 1996 book, Eat Fat, in which he sent up the ridiculous paradox of material excess alongside the aesthetics of thinness in Western societies. But Klein hadn’t factored in the new South African elite, a class which the artist Brett Murray has been ably satirising in his oeuvre for the last two decades. Klein’s separation of excess wealth and power from excess body weight just doesn’t hold in South Africa, where the silhouettes of our ever more corpulent members of parliament are echoed in Murray’s growing army of tragicomic bronzes. And while Klein’s celebration of fat has a thin veneer of fashionable contrariness slavered over it like the shellac on your M&M’S, Murray’s chief concern seems to be to remind us of the almost pornographic nature of surplus. Whether it is flesh, property or power, having enough to flaunt in a country where in 2009 26.3 per cent of the population were estimated to live on or below the ‘food poverty line’ (i.e. were unable to buy enough food to satisfy basic energy intake requirements) seems fundamentally immoral.

But like all good parties, no one wants you to spoil it. Resistance to satire seems to be the hallmark of the new ruling class, a resistance that veers towards the violent and litigious at times. The response of the wealthy when poorer citizens point out their excesses is, predictably, to suggest that the citizenry have only silence and obeisance as options. Satire stands firm against this stupidity, a functional, necessary and often very entertaining endeavour, the small voice at the back of the town hall saying, ‘Hang on there, how come the dog and pony are both better fed than any of us?’

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System error: shutting down

Instances of government attempts at censorship abound in present-day South Africa. In 2010 the Arts and Culture Minister, Lulu Xingwana, stormed out of an exhibition that contained tasteful images of black lesbians embracing. The works, by the KwaZulu-Natal-born artist Zanele Muholi, were called ‘pornographic’ and ‘against nation-building’ by the Minister.

In 2012, all hell descended upon a usually quiet address in Parkwood, Johannesburg, as news of a satirical painting exhibited by Brett Murray at the Goodman Gallery leaked through the media to powerful ears. The work, which went on to gain a place in the global popular imagination, depicted President Jacob Zuma as flabby and flaccid. Ire and indignation spread like khakibos, and the work was eventually, in effect, self-censored by the populace, amid growing calls for its banning by political leaders most closely associated with Zuma. The painting’s opponents seemed to cohere behind the idea that the work transgressed a barrier of dignity, as if the president, who has hidden behind his title more than once amid the onslaught of both slings and arrows, was suddenly divisible from his office and stood alone, just a man, vulnerable to Murray’s attack.

In 2013, a film entitled Of Good Report was ‘banned’ from screening at the Durban International Film Festival by the Film and Publications Board, because of its depiction of an adolescent girl (played by a twenty-something woman) engaged in sex acts. Festival director Peter Machen, speaking on Talk Radio 702, decried what he called increasing attempts by the government to dictate morality to the country’s citizens whom it should be serving.

The default position of the current political power-holders, when faced with challenges that involve free speech issues, seems to be to try to shut down free speech, to invoke the concept of a larger morality than freedom: one of protecting certain interests, almost always cast as the public interest.

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A productive climate of censure

A similar response targets the work of satirists working today in South Africa. The laundry list of lawsuits against the political cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro (‘Zapiro’) brought by an apparently oversensitive President Zuma leaves little doubt that this is an insecure, paranoid administration with a hair-trigger resort to litigation. Exactly where that leaves the satirist is exactly where he or she does best: having one’s right to free speech threatened is precisely the sort of position in which most acerbic social commentators love to find themselves, professionally speaking. The threats by those in power only confirm their assertion that, given the choice, the powerful will choose political expediency and easy domination over real engagement with the populace.

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Forgoing dignity

The political scene in South Africa, some two decades after the first democratic elections in 1994, is a curious one. A struggle movement that fought doggedly for dignity has produced two out of three administrations that seem intent on forgoing that dignity. After the halcyon days of Nelson Mandela’s leadership between 1994 and 1999, the administrations of Thabo Mbeki and Zuma have taken brought their share of embarrassment and scandal to the ruling party: including the arms deal (which saw South Africa purchase from Sweden a number of fighter jets that, according to Terry Crawford-Browne, were designed for Arctic conditions, and are anyway useless in this country because of their short range); innumerable instances of corruption (including the so-called Travelgate scandal and the bribe paid to the National Police Commissioner by a crime syndicate boss); and a general climate of impunity around such cases. (While Zuma’s financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, was convicted of soliciting an annual bribe of R500,000 for Zuma in return for his political support of the arms deal, Zuma himself was never convicted and the charges against him were eventually dropped.)

At the Trough shows Murray taking on this mire of corruption in title as well as form. A bronze from Murray’s 2010 show, ‘Hail to the Thief’, it features two pigs in flagrante delicto. The amorous pigs formed a companion piece to the vaguely unsettling The Party vs The People, in which one gorilla sexually dominates another. But At the Trough operates on another level: the porcine love-fest is amusing because of the rotund figure cut by the whole, one of super-smooth limbs and torsos, as if their skin was strained tight by the excess flesh and fat beneath. Crucially, it’s not just simple, pig-like abandon being depicted here; what pushes beneath the surface, crying to be revealed, is an understanding of how the pigs became so fat in the first place. In Murray’s work, fat is never just fat. Nor is it the signifier of social stigma that Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville explore. Rather, fat is about excess, about self-indulgence, and not just indulgence in the fruits of corruption, but rather an indulgence in bare-faced obfuscation, the shutting down of any efforts to resist it.

In context of the generous swipe that ‘Hail to the Thief’ (and its sequel, ‘Hail to the Thief II’) took at the political elite in democratic South Africa, the fucking and the flesh were hugely symbolic. In The Party vs The People one imagines the domination alluded to by the title: a very particular show of force. The pigs, on the other hand, both appear to be revelling in it.

The title sets the work up as imaging an altogether more combative embrace. The huge gorilla at the back, to put it terms of current internet memespeak, is thoroughly owning the smaller primate in the front. His bulk protrudes from every angle that one views the bronze, his paunch especially prominent in the profile. Here, heft is not an unintended consequence of excess, but rather a key part of the game, part of the reason for the dominator’s dominance.

Of course, the sculpture is an incisive comment on the nature of the relationship between the democratically elected government and its citizens, who have chosen this party to lead them. The lot of the citizenry in South Africa seems to be to exercise their right to select exactly who gets to own them, metaphorically of course; and the concern of the party seems to be to maintain dominance, at the expense even of the people who put the party in power. Elsewhere in the show, another work shows a similarly proportioned gorilla engaged in onanistic self-love. It’s title? One Party State …

It is worth noting that similar tropes have existed in Murray’s work since early on in his career. In 1989–90, he produced a resin sculpture of a similarly masturbatory ape, titled Voortrekker. This was an obvious, yet no less cutting, reference to the Afrikaner nationalist habit of lionising of the Dutch Voortrekkers (pioneers), whose forays resulted in the white settlement of South Africa’s interior. In fact, save for the gun on his back and the replacement of his phallus with a phallic shotgun cartridge, Voortrekker is a dead-ringer for One Party State. In the wake of the debacle over The Spear, it is often forgotten (often deliberately so) that Murray was as sharp a critic of the Caligulan excesses and wastage of the late apartheid regime as he is of the ANC-led government.

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Limp members and expanding waistlines

Perhaps the most overt gestures Murray made in ‘Hail to the Thief’ I and II to the expanding waistlines of the new political elite came in the form of The Spear and Cash is King, an acrylic painting and a silkscreen respectively. The penis in The Spear has, by now, received more column inches than John Wayne Bobbitt’s did twenty years ago; less often mentioned is the huge gut on the Zuma figure, another thing that separates him from the rather more austere Lenin in Ivanov’s work. Together with the flaccid penis, the torso area becomes the locus of the work’s satire: the president, with his many wives and growing cohort of children (including some rumoured illegitimate offspring), seems to have carved out for himself the public persona of a virile working-class ladies’ man, a conqueror of inequality and maidens in equal measure. What was seldom mentioned in the fracas around the work in 2012, which culminated in an orchestrated series of ‘protests’, with the secretary-general of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe leading the charge, was that the insult The Spear really delivered was to show Zuma as a bit pathetic, exposed as being paunchy and soft, in both senses of that word.

In Cash is King, an exceedingly rotund Zuma reaches out an ineffectual hand, seeming almost paralysed by his own bulk. Rendered entirely in Soviet red save for a few highlights of white, the figure is a satirical embodiment of how far this administration has strayed from the ‘selfless struggle’ which the ANC chose, some might say ill-advisedly, to foreground in its 2012 centenary celebrations. Enough, a small text work from the same show that seems to speak directly to Cash is King and work as a riposte to this slogan, asks, ‘When is enough enough?’ In Militant Youth the head of the hammer from a communist emblem is replaced with a dollar sign.

Murray’s 2008’s exhibition ‘Crocodile Tears’ mined a similar strip: Praise Singer is a bronze of the sort of chubby, overfed poodle one is likely to find in a retirement home; a kind of proxy for human love, a dog whose lonely mistress will feed him until his skin pops. Power and Patronage shows a pair of similarly overweight poodles engaged in coitus, appropriately doggie-style. However, which dog represents ‘power’ and which ‘patronage’ is not made clear, and perhaps deliberately so. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, who is fucking whom in a patron–patronised relationship is in question. The implications for a polity beset by the clandestine relationships already mentioned are crystal clear.

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Mini-monuments to excess

At the heart of Murray’s intention with many of his sculptures is the use of bronze as a medium. The most durable of all casting metals, bronze has historically and traditionally been reserved for works that were made to last for centuries. As such, it confers significance on the subject; it is, along with marble, the medium in which politicians, leaders and other luminaries are most likely to want to be immortalised.

The bronzes that Murray makes, in effect, immortalise not the glories of the ruling class, but rather the foibles of the post-liberation democratic government and party. They are, thus, important statements of the independence of art from the whims of political power, despite attempts to swing things another way. In 2012, presumably as a response to The Spear and the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition as a whole, the South African Communist Party (a member of the Tripartite Alliance of which the ANC is the dominant part) called for the introduction of a ‘Presidential Anti-Insult Law’ to protect Zuma from attacks on his dignity.

Murray plays an interesting game with the powerful: on the one hand, he delivers the art which the ruling classes so often seem to want, a detailing of their lives and achievements for posterity; on the other hand, he is rather too honest and faithful a depicter to ingratiate himself with them. Beyond the humour of couples of portly animals shagging, Murray seems to be saying with his choice of bronze that these follies are the singular achievement of this post-liberation moment. However fleeting their pleasures, they need to be recorded in a permanent medium. The work of art becomes a monument-as-cautionary-tale, rather than a selective snapshot of national glory which the elite would have its populace lap up.

The author William Gumede wrote in an article entitled ‘Why liberation movements make bad governments’: ‘At the heart of the governance failures of many African independence and liberation movements is their inability to effectively transform from resistance movements into effective governing parties. Many African liberation movements, just like the African National Congress, because of their history of opposing colonial governments or white minority regimes come to power with an extraordinary amount of legitimacy. This comes from their leading roles in the independence or liberation struggle and gives them a much stronger political, economic and moral mandate than in other developing countries … However, this means that they can also get away for a long period with service delivery failure, autocratic behaviour and wrongdoing, in the name of advancing the liberation or independence project. Many argue they have the right to rule forever, based on their struggle legitimacy.’ [International Portal on Corruption and Governance in Africa, www.ipocafrica.org]

Against this backdrop one starts to sense the immense gravitas of Murray’s humour, its importance in registering the moments when the liberation movement starts to fail its country and takes on the pallor of previous, oppressive regimes.

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Textual intercourse

‘What would Oprah say?’ What, indeed? The queen of early-evening lowest-common-denominator television has amassed a veritable empire by peddling a late-capitalist blend of confessional interviews and consumerist commodity glut. ‘Doing Oprah’ has become a pop-culture catchphrase denoting that a celebrity has given himself or herself over to the emotionally vampiric style of chat and questioning. The celeb usually also promotes the release of his or her latest book, movie or CD for good measure. It’s complete pop-cultural indulgence, often masquerading as philanthropy. The phrase ‘look under your seat’ has entered the popular imagination direct from Oprah Winfrey’s lips, as she would often surprise her audience members with free books, CDs or vouchers hidden under their seats: neat tie-ins, closed loops. Oprah’s ‘giveaways’ reached a climax of hysteria during an episode in 2004 when she gave each member of her studio audience a new Pontiac G6 car.

In Murray’s 2006 show ‘Sleep Sleep’, the text work Mediated Morality, made in metal and fool’s gold, wonders what Oprah, a kind of contemporary Jesus figure to whom the straying and strayed confess their faults, would say: about what, we’re not sure. In the context of the show, we could presume that Murray was directing our collective disbelief at the farce of leadership that South Africa was then experiencing. Shown in the middle of Thabo Mbeki’s time in office, the title ‘Sleep Sleep’ could conceivably have been referencing the culture of denial that Mbeki purveyed. On the crucial issues of the relation between HIV and Aids, and the socio-political implosion wrought in Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe, the Mbeki government often seemed to be asleep at the wheel. Mbeki’s claimed ‘Aids scepticism’ turned out to be a pernicious set of half-truths and anti-colonial claptrap that marked his years in office as synonymous with Aids denialism. His dealings with Zimbabwe saw him coining the phrase ‘quiet diplomacy’, an explication of his foreign affairs philosophy in handling the implosion of the Zimbabwean economy and social structure. It turned out to be as effective as it sounds: not very.

Interestingly, in 2012 Murray revisited Oprah with the work Little Bubble, stating, with tongue firmly in cheek, ‘Oprah says live life deliciously’. It seemed she remained fertile ground for Murray’s satire, again touching on excess and luxury. But with this work, Murray considers how the economic elite vindicate their indulgence, how the new frontier of liberation has at its vanguard a class of pampered figureheads, living their lives deliciously in accordance with Oprah’s pop-cultural mandate.

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Disapproval as our only weapon of defence?

Six wall-based works from ‘Sleep Sleep’, titled Lullaby, show pairs of eyes, crimson on white grounds, progressively widening in horror. The works keyed into Murray’s frequent redirection of comic-book and animation images into acerbic political commentary. The same show saw him use versions of Casper the Friendly Ghost in Red Sea and The Christians Were Here!; in 2000 he used multiples of Bart Simpson’s head as nasty outgrowths on a stoic, oversized curio sculpture in Africa. In ‘Sleep Sleep’ the Lullaby works added a note of opprobrium, registering the horror of an attentive populace at the increasingly commonplace abuses of power and mismanagement of a fledgling democracy. In these works, Murray deviates from the satirist’s pattern of sending up the abusers, and turns his attention to the abused.

But perhaps it’s not as simple as simply registering disapproval; it’s also about raising questions. Firstly, why wasn’t more of the population horrified at what was being done in the name of revolution? And secondly, is disapproval the only weapon of defence against an amoral government? The first was a relevant question to ask: no demonstrations demanding a referendum were forthcoming as details of the arms deal began to surface or as thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, perished in the wake of the delays in the antiretroviral drug roll-out caused by Mbeki’s controversial stance on HIV/Aids. Possibly struggle-weary, possibly gun-shy from apartheid’s ravages, the majority of the people of South Africa remained committed to voting for the ANC.

The second question is bittersweet in Murray’s mouth: is disapproval the only weapon that remains, the only possible response to the heist of the spoils of liberation which the ANC government has pulled off? Bittersweet indeed, given Murray’s credentials as an anti-apartheid artist, who agitated for greater human rights through works such as Policeman and Propaganda, both from 1985.

In the wood-and-plastic wall-based text work The Untouchables, shown at the exhibition ‘Hail to the Thief II’ at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery, Murray gives the phrase dramatically receding perspective, as if it was the title from a superhero movie poster. Crucially, though, he also modifies the two e’s, the a and the b to resemble Cyrillic script. Murray subtly evokes the broad use of communist- and, particularly, Soviet-inspired rhetoric that still holds currency in the post-liberation Tripartite Alliance. No matter how wealthy certain members of the alliance become, it is commonplace for politicians to retain language like ‘cadre’ and ‘comrade’, lending a certain aura of asceticism to the chicanery and manoeuvring that characterise party politics in South Africa. Thus in this work, Murray seems to be saying that the ANC, its credibility bolstered by its association with the South African Communist Party, has become apparently untouchable, like ’90s New York mobster John Gotti, the so-called Teflon Don to whom, for a while at least, no charges or allegations stuck. Not so much beyond reproach as beyond the reach of due process.

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Satire as engaged citizenship

But maybe the notion that disapproval is the only weapon available against the systematised corruption and maladministration of this ‘kleptocracy’, as Murray has termed it, is too limiting. Maybe another way is through satire itself. As the famous poster from the Paris uprisings states, ‘Mai ’68: début d’une lutte prolongée’ – ‘the beginning of a prolonged struggle’. Maybe the position of the satirist, with a keen eye for bluster and bullshit, represents a form of engaged citizenship. A prolonged resistance through images, as has characterised Murray’s oeuvre, is a worthy riposte to political and social stupidity. And importantly, Murray’s work over 23 years has been an effective denunciation of the trend of white liberal whining in the post-liberation moment. A citizen who males specific critiques of the more disquieting aspects of a society is an active citizen, an involved human being who makes it difficult for power to hide its tracks. Satire as prolific and as engaging as Murray’s is the opposite of paralysis. It is the means by which a broader, deeper understanding of human folly is derived.

As Jonathan Swift wrote, satirically of course, in A Modest Proposal in 1729, ‘Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients … rejecting … foreign luxury … introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and temperance … learning to love our country … quitting our animosities and factions.’ It is precisely these reforms rejected by the narrator of Swift’s controversial sequel to Gulliver’s Travels that the writer is advocating. And it is exactly the order of abuses of office upon which Murray has dwelt, and to which he has returned throughout his career, that he is pushing toward reform. Murray said to me, in an unpublished interview about some or other controversy surrounding his work, that his overriding emotions when making ‘Hail to the Thief’ were of deep sadness, deep disappointment at having to revise the righteous tone of struggle art. And yet sadness reflects concern, and concern involvement. Murray’s work, seen as a whole, moves beyond disaffected opprobrium and becomes a vital form of agitation for a more just society.

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‍Michael Smith is a Johannesburg-based writer, teacher and artist, and is the Gauteng editor of ArtThrob

Thinking of Brett Murray as the artist who made The Spear is a bit like remembering Ludwig von Beethoven as the composer who wrote the tune for Ode to Joy. It’s not untrue but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

In the trajectory of Murray’s artistic articulation, The Spear is not a particularly significant or definitive work of art, and, in point of fact, it very nearly did not make it onto the 2012 ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition in the first place. There were other pieces – in the artist’s own assessment – that seemed to fit as well with the overriding themes, and, as Murray recalls, it was little more than an eeny-meeny-type selection that saw it, finally and fatefully, hung on the walls of the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in early 2013.

Let me hasten here to clarify: this is not a judgement about quality. I am not saying that The Spear is inherently bad, flimsy, or even unfocused or unresolved. Nor, for that matter, am I intending to say it is particularly good. The issue is different: simply that The Spear stands at something of an angle to the dominant stylistic logic running through the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition – what one might think of as its cutting edge.

This cutting edge is most definitively present in two sub-groupings of work on the show: a series of faux-heraldic emblems that Murray has made in a satire of the aspirations of South Africa’s new political elite, on one side; and a series of savage parodies of revolutionary-type political slogans, on the other.

The first can trace its genesis at least as far back as the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibitions of 2007 and 2009. In these Murray developed a register of irony in which decorative frivolities and incidental curlicues, evocative of the pre-revolutionary French court at Versailles, morph into quasi-heraldic devices, featuring motifs like preposterously manicured (and sometimes lewdly coupled) poodles, ignobly substituted for the griffins, phoenixes and stags of medievalising heraldry.

To similarly parodic – and ultimately bathetic – effect, though in a different register, Murray deploys iron pyrites (colloquially known as ‘fool’s gold’) along with paint and silver leaf as a material in groups of intricate metal cutout portraits. Here the traceries of elaborately rendered periwigs – the effect sometimes abetted by extravagant millinery creations – play off against mask-like simplifications, in blackface, of the human visage. This is Versailles rampant but pointedly transposed to darker Africa: a world in which the frippery maketh the man.[1] In Marie Antoinette’s world the filmsiest and most decadent of whims becomes the motive force of history: the fous fous maketh the woman.

It adds up to a pretty devastating critique of the political history of South Africa under the governance of the ANC. Very explicitly in two sequences within the exhibition – titled Now and Then and Continuity and Change – Murray rehearses – but this time with subjects in blackface – portrait images recalling the pre-revolutionary French rococo in order to lampoon an outrageous new elite that has bedevilled and despoiled the transition to democracy. [2]

It comes down to the meta-political imponderable: ‘To storm or to own the Bastille?’ – as Murray asks in a metal text on the wall of the exhibition. This is the question that post-democracy history in South Africa poses. The answer, for Murray, is given in 4X4s, BMWs and designer labels, Breitling watches and rare-blend whiskies that cost more per bottle than many people earn every day. More than this, in the realpolitik of praxis, the answer is given in ownership of the means of production and, more particularly, in keeping a grip on the reins of power to ensure the continued flow of unequal privilege. It is a realpolitik that increasingly has seen government at loggerheads with the lumpen masses of the people, and had the police firing live bullets at striking workers at Marikana.[3]

Such simmering class tensions – de-racialised in the democratic South Africa – raise very pointedly the question posed by the existence of the Bastille as a place of incarceration sustained by the self-serving apparatus of the ancient regime’s law. At the end of the day the question is one of political philosophy. Must the institutions and the intentions of state be transformed if they are to be experienced in qualitatively different ways by the populace? Or is it enough – in order to avoid the same difficulties that were experienced previously – that different hands hold the keys?

Murray does not pronounce directly on the issue. But the range of imagery he invokes throughout the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition, and indeed beyond it too, especially in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ shows, is articulate enough – and replete enough with ironies, absurdities and obscenities enacted through the overlay of the imagery of Versailles on gritty twenty-first-century South African realities.

In an expressive tactic – which finds Murray’s point of artistic engagement riskily close to the precipice of poor taste, if not outright racism – the elaborate periwig, at one and the same time the vanity of the royalist European upper classes and the universally inherited symbol of judicial authority, frames stereotyped blackface visages. The effect is uncomfortable, not least because the silvery profusions of curls that make up the standard wigs are culturally very specific. They were designed for wearers of Teutonic complexion and are encoded with a very specific set of conventional signifiers to assert and embody a set of class relations. Against African skin tones, physiognomy and social codes, they tend inevitably to the deconstructive and read as simply ‘wrong’ and frankly bizarre.

Murray exploits this lack of fit to satirical ends, of course, in his corrosive depiction of the new black elite – whether the self-important new-order potentate, or the matron with more false hair than face. But at the same time there is an oddly haunted and alienated quality in Murray’s subjects. It is partly because of the extreme stylisation of gesture and expression that one reads the figures as essentially non-volitional tokens of a real life that is happening elsewhere – in the writhing of the incidental detail, to be precise.

In this mode, Murray turns his scrutiny to his own image in two photographic self-portraits on the theme of the Renaissance Man, with the periwig turned to metaphor: Murray as heir to fripperies and the vanities of Versailles; as heir to the ideas of the Enlightenment; but, equally, in evocation of former President Thabo Mbeki’s much-vaunted but ultimately flawed and woolly African Renaissance. The images have Murray in blackface to offset the elaborate coiffure, though ‘white’ from the chest down. In the first he looks directly and confidently at the camera. In the second, he is tending his ‘land’ – wielding weed-eater on handkerchiefs of lawn.

He is a ridiculous figure, part inheritor of the European tradition, part African, part white, but, as a white who identified with the cause of black South Africans during the struggle, also the inverse of the so-called coconut of racial stereotyping: Africans perceived as black on the outside but ‘white’ in their values and life experience. He is also the figure he explored in sculptures both before and after the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition, which has stylised African-sculpture proportions in the body and a spherical vacancy – or as, in Citizen, a large outdoor piece made in 2013, five spherical vacancies, to be filled by history and circumstance, piled in a tower on the shoulders.

What is highlighted especially in the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition is the artist’s alienation from, and disgust with, the course of history in the new South Africa. These are not new themes, either for Murray or for progressive artists in general, but the particular strategy – the shadowed vanity that Murray highlights as the satirical reference in the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition – is as crucial to his expressive language in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibitions as the homily painstakingly written to President Jacob Zuma in the framed wall text:

Every time
I hear you sing
The machine gun song
I want to find one
And stick it up
Your fat arse

The immediate stylistic references in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition are overwhelmingly not those of the decadence of the Versailles court, but rather of the narcissistic excesses of Soviet-style socialist realism. Even so, there is one group of works that develops the theme of the grand wig and its diminished wearer. Cued in by a wall relief entitled Legacy, the series moves on to four nearly identical images of ‘His Wives’, namely Mrs Amandla, Mrs Comrade, Mrs Kickback and Mrs Viva-Viva. All are done as depersonalised cartoons, dominated by a stylised schoolgirl version of a coiffure.

The old world of the ancien regime is recalled in almost plausible classically heraldic devices – griffins, lions rampant and the like, insistently counterpointed with crowns in reference to the new royalty of the post-struggle. But the force of such signification is systematically undercut by the protrusion of details like phalluses or the referencing of savagely inappropriate slogans. Thus Traditional Weapon has a club-wielding stylised lion cutout in which the hindquarters have evolved into a massive penis-and-testicles arrangement. In Glory as well as Morning Glory and Crown Jewels, a crowned griffin terminates in a cruciform and decoratively developed phallus, disembodied somewhat like the Sacred Heart, in sustained ridicule of Zuma’s notoriously priapic presidency.

At the same time the heraldic theme as played out in ‘Hail to the Thief’ is enriched by the evocation of communist-style party badges in stylised iconography recalling, and simultaneously undercutting, the galvanising imagery and sloganeering of South Africa’s recent revolutionary past.[4] In one of them, intricately stylised sheaves of corn or grass – conventionally symbolic of plenty – frame the rays of a rising sun above the revolutionary rallying call ‘Amandla’. But lurking over all is the dollar sign transfigured in triumph. Another, similarly composed, aligns the single star of socialism with the ubiquitous dollar and the stridently galvanising cry of ‘Viva Viva’. Another again, this time playing off gold leaf and Stalinist red, has the map of Africa superimposed on a light burst and a hovering socialist star above the emblematically developed double entendre: Mine.

Other pieces on the show are more specific in their reference and hardly less damning in their critique. Chancellor House is styled as a kind of corporate logo for the ANC’s investment arm of the same name. It has some leonine mythical beast prancing in triumph as it licks its lips amid droplets of blood falling from tooth and claw. In a matched pair of works, the ANC logo is treated as real estate, one marked ‘For Sale’, and the other ‘Sold’.

In parallel with these concerns, Murray develops a body of work that parodies more directly the revolutionary posters that once galvanised the revolution. This enterprise – referred to above as the second aspect of the exhibition’s cutting edge – is one that Murray has explored and honed since the earlier 1990s, but it came especially to the fore in his eccentric interrogations of the role of talk-show host Oprah Winfrey in the exhibition ‘Sleep Sleep’ and the group of works named Golden Truths. Here, language is treated as object, deconstructed, interrupted, alienated from its usual condition of communicative virtuality by being given form and dimension on the gallery walls. In this way the heroic banality of such pronouncements as ‘Oprah says live life deliciously’ or ‘But Oprah will cry for us’ is transfixed in deconstructionist acidic focus.

In ‘Hail to the Thief’ , however, Murray goes further, developing a typographic aesthetic dimension, with idiosyncrasies in lettering sometimes loosely evocative of Cyrillic script, sometimes of Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood and sometimes of the rough-and-ready lettering of do-it-yourself mass mobilisation woodcut printmaking. In this way The Kleptocrats is heroically advertised, along with The Untouchables, as a blockbuster coming to a theatre near you, as it were. Chillingly, the heroic sentiment of the usual ‘Biko lives!’ is brutally inverted in the thud of ‘Biko is dead’.

By means of both these tendencies in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibitions, Murray maps out an abstract terrain in post-modern register – one in which languages of communication, both visual and verbal, rather than mere appearances, are rendered as zones of signification rather than simple carriers of conventional communication, becoming in this way the deeper subject matter of his artistic enterprise.

At the same time, and in the same process, Murray engages a virtuality – the ghosting presence of remembered images (his corrupted texts and propaganda images in their pristine incarnations) – in our reading of his works. We need to be familiar with the Johnnie Walker ‘Keep Walking’ advertising campaign, and indeed with the copyright jaunty walker logo of the brand, to appreciate the ironies in Murray’s appropriation of the revolutionary exhortation ‘Forward Comrades’, attributed by implication to a new South African elite much taken with conspicuously expensive consumption. By the same token we need to recall the hanged freedom fighter Solomon Mahlangu’s poignant message to ‘Tell my people that I love them and they must continue the fight’ to understand the sarcastic force of Murray’s substitution of ‘the struggle for Chivas Regal, Mercs and kick-backs’.

It is especially in these groupings of work in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibitions that the centre of gravity and identity of the shows reside, and the developmental logic of Murray’s practice as an artist in the twenty-first century is to be discerned.

A series of bronze sculptures, familiar in their bulbous and cartoonish simplifications of form, do little more than revisit, from the perspective of a new set of dominant concerns, an already familiar set of plastic solutions. They do not extend the language of Murray’s art-making. And then there are two pieces at an angle to the dominant tendencies, in that they are more specifically targeted in their mockery, both featuring the (more or less recognisable) visage of President Jacob Zuma. In one – which interestingly escaped protest by the defenders of Zuma’s dignity – the President stands gesturing out over a stylised industrial cityscape under the merchant’s credo ‘Cash is king’ – echoed in a signage piece on the same show reading President & Sons (Pty) Ltd.

The other is The Spear, where the (not very closely observed or convincingly rendered) face of Zuma is transposed on the familiar heroic sculptural image of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin striding into the future and a thousand poster variations of the same. Fatefully, the image is further modified by a drawing, so crude as to be virtually a graffito, of a penis appended to the shadowed area of the crotch. As I have pointed out before, the portraiture on the basis of which the image has been connected to President Jacob Zuma is not particularly convincing, [5] and indeed some observers have suggested it looks as much like Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi as Zuma.[6] Regardless, possible misattribution was never offered as a defence in relation to the artwork, and there was never much doubt in the public mind about who was being referred to – certainly not in the collective mind of the ANC and its allies.[7]

My point here is that if the claimed impairment of dignity had gone to court, Murray might well have argued that the connection to Zuma was more specific to the mind of the beholder than the maker intended – and the complainant would had his work cut out to prove the association on the basis of what was actually given in the artwork. Such recourse – though notionally available in a court of law – was, in the event, however, not open to Murray in his pleadings before the court of public opinion, particularly as orchestrated by the ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu and the man who would emerge as prosecutor-in-chief, SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande.

There was no doubt in the Nzimande’s mind – or that of the dominant faction in the ANC’s Luthuli House – that the President’s dignity had been near-fatally impaired, and Zuma family members were trotted out in a procession to express outrage and distress. Church leaders queued to comment on the erosion of social values. And, perhaps most distressingly of all, a subtext came into focus in which The Spear was seen as an icon of unregenerate and deviously subversive ‘whiteness’: the race card, the populist trump of all trumps.

The ANC was, according to a 27 May press release (more passionate than grammatical), ‘extremely disturbed and outraged by the distasteful and indecent manner in which Brett Murray and the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg is displaying the person [sic] of Comrade President Jacob Zuma’. It went on to talk about ‘this disgusting and unfortunate display’ and to indicate it had instructed lawyers to approach the courts to compel Murray and the Goodman Gallery to remove the ‘portrait from display as well as from their website and destroy all printed promotional material. We have also detected that this distasteful and vulgar portrait of the President has been displayed on a weekend newspaper and its website, we again have instructed our lawyers to request the said newspaper to remove the portrait from their website.’ Justifying the intervention, Mthembu continued: ‘It is our view … that the image and the dignity of our President as both President of the ANC, President of the Republic and as a human being has been dented by this so-called piece of art by Brett Murray at Goodman Gallery.’

Though Zuma himself did not pronounce on the subject,[8] his spokesman, Mac Maharaj, was ‘amazed at the crude and offensive manner in which this artist denigrates the person and office of the President of the Republic of South Africa’.

For his part, Nzimande, seemingly on a latter-day Stalinist high, called initially for an outright boycott of City Press, in which a photograph of the image had appeared, and for the enactment of special legislation to criminalise such assaults on the dignity of El Presidente and his exalted office. So damaging was it, according to Nzimande, that the only recourse was to destroy the work once and for all – this after a mismatched pair of self-appointed vigilantes had already essayed a more cosmetic censorship, attacking the artwork with broad brushes and tubs of industrial paint, and the unnamed German collector who bought the work in pristine condition had indicated he was still prepared to take it in modified form.

From the boycotting of City Press in its entirety, however, Nzimande backed down after meeting with City Press editor Ferial Haffajee, softening the call to one of averting the public eye from the offending edition. For her part, Haffajee – no doubt under pressure from the management of the newspaper owners, Naspers, not to mention the very real threat posed by the ANC alliance’s threats of rolling mass action – was led, after initial defiance, to reconsider her stance. ‘As an olive branch to play a small role in turning around a tough situation,’ she wrote, ‘I have decided to take down the image.’ She also made mention of threats to the safety of her editorial team and said that, as a ‘great fan’ of the country, she had been compelled to take stock of the fact that her newspaper had been forced into a divisive role rather than ‘bridge-building’.[9]

Meanwhile, Nzimande’s call for special legislation to protect the dignity of the President – of the kind that would have brought constitutional South Africa into line with such paranoid regimes as those of Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea – apparently failed to find traction in the ANC, and was mentioned again only to indicate that the intentions behind the call had been misinterpreted.[10]

And so it went around and around – with the South African National Editors Forum and academic commentators like University of Cape Town constitutional law authority Pierre de Vos insisting on the inviolable right to free speech and robust satire in democratic South Africa – and fellow satirists having a field day. One memorable take in this vein was given in a Zapiro image of the Union Buildings – distinctive Herbert Baker turret now terminating in a swollen glans penis – with a speech balloon reading: ‘On behalf of my four wives, 22 children, my 13 other children out of wedlock (… or is it 14?) … and my numerous mistresses, I am outraged at being painted as a philandering womanizer!!’ So, too, involuntary satirists like the Film and Publications Board also added their two bits to the real-time surrealism, clearing the work for public consumption, but slapping a 16-year-old age restriction on it.

There is a good deal that is instructive in all of this, but picking it over for nuance falls beyond the scope of the present essay. What interests me here is a more general point: that once the Alliance weighed in, it stopped being about art. The Spear entered the compromised space of political discourse, a space in which things or propositions are as they are used, or as they are held up, and not in any definitive way as their makers intended them. In this register The Spear becomes a site for polemical play, and its identity is a kind of aggregate of the ways in which it has been used rather than of the intentionalities inscribed or structured by its maker within the context of his (or her) practice as an artwork.

To an extent, of course, this process is not unfamiliar within the canon of contemporary art, and is emblematically naturalised in Marcel Duchamp’s designation of selected everyday objects as ready-mades. What distinguishes Duchamp’s snow shovel, hung from the ceiling and titled In Advance of the Broken Arm, from one that is used for shovelling is essentially three things: the fact of its designation as an artwork; the gnomic title; and the fact that it has been removed from its original usefulness. Perhaps a fourth is that it becomes the site of its own history – the conundrum in real time that it poses for the context of art – a history which unfolds in real time rather than the hypothetical time of art-making.

The difference, though, is that Duchamp in his designation of ready-mades is presenting the art world with objects that are mute as repositories of the artist’s significant choices in making them – those differential gestures wherein ‘meaning’ is inscribed in the traditional forms of art-making – whereas the second half-life of The Spear is the result of what is essentially a semantic hijack operation.

Whatever Murray’s original intentions, and whatever ambiguities the work might manifest when considered within the context of art and in terms of its position within the discourse essayed in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition, in its appropriation by the ANC and its allies it is crudely but inalienably reduced to being a cipher for a debate around Jacob Zuma’s presidency. As the hijack happened, this second identity played out literally in the deliberate defacement of the work – leaving a final product bearing the significant marks of other hands than Murray’s and a work irredeemably transformed. But even if it had survived in its original form, the real-time uses to which The Spear had been put would still have been determinant of its public identity.

I have in the past (with little regard for the meaning of the phrase in the context of atomic physics) referred in this context to such real-time adventures vis–à-vis the identity of the work in the virtual time of art-making as a ‘half-life’. The point here is that, in general, when the artwork is taken up in the real world, it develops a history over which the artist has little or no control, and in this process becomes the site of a semantic collaboration, as it were. On one level the observation is both obvious and trite and – though sometimes leading into interesting questions around value and meaning, as for example when a formerly nondescript Dutch interior is discovered to be a Vermeer – does little to enrich our understanding of the identity of the work. However, sometime last century it came to be somewhat more to the point, especially as artists came increasingly to work explicitly with scandal, outrage and provocation within their conception of a work of art. To put this slightly differently, the changed theoretical perspective has the artist, to a greater or lesser degree, operating in real time and encoding himself or herself into the artwork as created.

Murray is a particularly interesting study in this regard. While it needs to be emphasised that his work is possessed of a strong internal logic and an impeccable integrity of expressive syntax, it is also true that there has been a consistent preoccupation in Murray’s work with locating the artist himself within the framework of production. As discussed earlier in relation to the ‘Crocodile Tears’ exhibition, he casts himself ambiguously as the inheritor of the European Enlightenment and of an Africanness, but the engagement with identity as a theme within his art is far more thoroughgoing than that. I have commented in the past on a quirky recurrence in his oeuvre of a physical type that gives a satirical take on his own appearance – a theme that runs from the stocky figuration of his student and post-student sculptures; through the self-reflective imagery of the ‘White Boy Sings the Blues’ exhibition, where his inversions of racial stereotyping are cued in by a photograph of The Artist as a Zulu, Aged 6 used on the invitation; to the memorabilia he collects and locates in relation to the metaphor of Robben Island in the 1997 exhibition, ‘Guilt and Innocence’.

The effect in all of these interventions is to bring himself and his own lived identity into the frame of his output as an artist – and ultimately into the problematic of his art-making, as a real-time rather than a merely meditative element. In this way too, he occasionally goes into a very direct first person in his gestures in the domains of art – rather than the mediated languages of symbolism, persona and reference. Thus, for instance, in the ‘Crocodile Tears’ show, the generally abstracted imagery is interrupted by two wall pieces bearing the same text I quoted earlier: Every time / I hear you sing / The machine gun song / I want to find one / And shove it up / Your fat arse.

Now, as artworks go, this is about as elegant as a ripping fart in public – and, out of context, has about as much artistic merit. In context, however, that is to say as a token of Murray’s presence within the process of art-making, it serves to wrench the viewer back into a real-time engagement with what the work is really and ultimately about.

And here is the point. Murray is a highly skilled and intellectually formidable practitioner, as capable of layering reference and association in his imagery as he is of cutting unkind metals into the finest of filigrees. But at the same time it is central to his project that he exists, as a feeling and sentient being, in the time and space in which he is making the work.

Provocation is not all, but neither is it accidental. As any number of commentators have pointed out, The Spear is far from being (obviously at least) the most provocative work on the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition. Even the ANC’s Jackson Mthembu objected in passing to the presentation of the ANC logo with the legend ‘Sold’ crossing it. He might as well have singled out the simple negation of provisions regarding security, work and freedom contained in the Freedom Charter, or the designation of Joseph Stalin as a Tribal Elder.

And in the face of such provocations, the appropriate response certainly is to take offence and to experience the criticism in a direct and real-time kind of way. In short, while the vehemence of the ANC alliance’s response was certainly not appropriate and threats of doing damage to the artist and his family, and for that matter the hosting gallery, are not to be either condoned or entertained, there is a case to be made that Murray asked for it – at least courted the circumstances in which his artwork was wrenched into the real-life and real-time political fray.

It is the task that now lies ahead for him as an artist – if he is to maintain the trajectory of his work thus far – to look that particular tiger in the eye, and develop his languages as an artist, so that his engagement with the knotty problematics of art and real-time engagement becomes syntactic within his post-modern practice.

I note, in conclusion, that subsequent to the debacle of The Spear, Murray made a seven-metre-high sculpture for Telesure Investment Holdings’ headquarters in Midrand. It is of a generic figure in the African traditional register with five empty spheres piled up for a head. In this it reprises and develops an enigmatic blankness earlier essayed in the ‘White Like Me’ exhibition of 2002.

The question is: what will move in to fill the brittle vacancy?

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Footnotes

[1] One is reminded of former Labour Minister and Reserve Bank governor, and one-time trade union activist, Tito Mboweni taking offence when his rustic Limpopo retreat was described as a farm, insisting it was a ‘country estate’; extolling the virtues of the ‘curved driveway’ for conveying the gentleman to the front door; and declining to attend any social gathering where a selection of top-end single malt whiskies was not on offer. All this as he and his cronies in the bank voted him a R3.8 million annual salary around the middle of the 2000s.

[2] A theme addressed head on, of course, in the ‘Hail to the Thief’ exhibition via a series of naive images in wood and wood veneer, reminiscent of the kind of posters produced by community organisations in the 1980s, where Murray has done nothing more than add a negative to passages from the Freedom Charter, the ANC’s sacred text, so they read, for example: ‘There shall not be work and security. The wealth of the country shall not be shared by all.’

[3] On 16 August police opened fire on striking workers affiliated to an upstart, non-Cosatu affiliated union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, at Marikana in the platinum-rich North West Province, killing at least 44. The mine at the centre of the protest action is owned by British miner Lonmin, whose South African empowerment partner is headed by deputy ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa, a former general secretary of the rival Cosatu-affiliated union, the National Union of Mineworkers.

[4] In this vein the striding worker grasping the future in Progress – where membership of the ‘Tender Party’ is advised as a means to that end – is a stock figure from a generalised cultural memory of a struggle theoretically underpinned by the Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

[5] ‘Outrage is the Medium’, Weekend Argus, 26 May 2012.

[6] There is a possibly instructive irony here: Vavi has consistently been one of the more vocal critics of Zuma’s alleged philandering ways, but in late July 2013 he himself got caught up in a sex scandal, finding himself accused, so to speak, of failing to keep his penis on the right side of his trousers.

[7] This requires some qualification. In fact, we are not talking here about the ANC as any kind of monolith, but as an organisation deeply fractured precisely around the presidency of Jacob Zuma. While many senior ANC (and for that matter Cosatu and SACP members) privately expressed themselves appalled at what was widely perceived to be an assault on key freedoms of expression, as well as on the appropriateness of Murray’s satire in the first place, the question facing such critics, as the populist juggernaut bore down, was whether this was a battle worth fighting.

[8] Zuma is reported to have been initially amused when the image was drawn to his attention, commenting only to the effect that ‘it’ was bigger than that, but in the event he was counselled to express outrage for strategic reasons.

[9] In point of fact, Haffajee later – when it was too late, one fears – went back on her initial decision to back down. Delivering the annual T.B. Davie Memorial Lecture on press freedom, she said the experience had turned her into a ‘fundamentalist’ for press freedom.

[10] Nonetheless, the impulse is instructive in itself. The nagging questions around the response to The Spear arise not so much from the ANC outrage provoked by Murray’s satire as they do from the singling out of what was one of the less confrontational critiques as the focus for that outrage. The answers, I believe, lie in an analysis of the nature and history of Zuma’s presidency, which from the start – a start where Zuma, dismissed as Deputy President in the face of well-documented corruption charges, fought back by presenting an alternative version of reality in which he was the innocent victim of a personal conspiracy. From such beginnings it was orchestrated and swelled as a cult of personality rather than of idea, one in which loyalty rather than truth came to figure as the ultimate good. In this way Julius Malema – latterly, and ironically, now Zuma’s critic – was prepared to ‘kill’ and to ‘die’ for Zuma (note, not for Zuma’s ideas, which to this day remain mysterious) and his followers defined themselves as ‘100% Zuma’. That Zuma himself was defined as ‘100% Zulu Boy’, while it complicated the intentionality somewhat, also served in part to decode the populist surge in the history of South African democracy and its essential appeal to traditionally African, but essentially fuedalist, structures of authority.

Murray’s sardonic silkscreen print Amandla, first exhibited at the Goodman Gallery as part of ‘Hail to the Thief’ in 2010, gives vent to mordant disgust at the venal abuses of the ruling party. Ripping off Jonathan Shapiro’s 1986 iconic struggle poster ‘Asiyi eKhayelitsha’ (We won’t go to Khayelitsha), which promoted the Freedom Charter slogan WE DEMAND HOUSES SECURITY AND COMFORT in the context of urban forced removals, Murray retorts with the slogan AMANDLA! WE DEMAND CHIVAS, BMW’S AND BRIBES.

Is this racist Afro-pessimism? Or is this anger generated by a sincere and deeply felt disappointment? I suspect the intensity of resentment apparent in the critique of the ruling party betrays the extent to which the artist bought into an idealistic vision of an egalitarian post-apartheid democratic society. Murray was in the very workshops in Community Arts Project where ‘Asiyi eKhayelitsha’ was produced, and where I took my first job after university, making agitation propaganda and printing posters and t-shirts in the same genre as Shapiro’s poster. Now, twenty years later, he is using the commercial art gallery to make rhetorical political art for an international art market, with the archive of struggle media as his critical point of reference.

It is something of a full circle – a return to the agitation Murray engaged in before being swept up in the activism brought on by the political confrontations that overtook us all towards the end of the 1980s. Murray’s undergraduate work critiqued ignorant white South Africa, using a pop/punk sardonic style: a chimp’s head wall-mounted in a tyre with crown and text reading ‘Dim King’, or the three heads of grinning white Mom, Dad and blond Son separated by little swastikas with the text ‘Happy | Family’. This practice critiques white power and hints at impending disaster in a similar way to the work in ‘Hail to the Thief’.

The process of politicisation that Murray and others of our group experienced in the 1980s may have been prompted by our position as white art students, but was layered with a range of influences that unfolded alongside dramatic, sometimes violent, events. As young white men whose life choices from age sixteen had been dictated by compliance with, or avoidance of, military conscription – in a period of escalating conflict on the country’s borders and in its townships – many were eager for confrontation with the patriarchal systems that had controlled our lives since high school.

This was a generation that came of age during the counter-commercial ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos of punk rock, influenced by the likes of the Sex Pistols, Crass, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and The Clash, as well as the anti-colonial messages of reggae music, highlighted by Bob Marley playing at Zimbabwe’s Independence Concert in 1980. In the early 80s Murray played bass in James Phillips’s post-punk band Illegal Gathering, named after a law preventing public gatherings without state sanction. The live music, the nightclub scene and reggae gigs in the townships were a core part of the counter-culture of this period, opening the way for new identities challenging racial and sexual discrimination. For artists on the progressive edge, the equivalent of this independent thrust in dance-floor culture was a trend toward group shows in temporary locations, often combined with performances, entirely autonomous from the public or commercial art circuit.

Professor Neville Dubow taught a progressive theory course on Art and Power at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Arts during the 1980s. His visual presentations tracked Nazi aesthetics of power and patriarchy and drew parallels between National Socialism in Germany in the 1940s and South African Christian National education and values. His passion for Dada and the Russian avant-garde inspired young minds to build new visual languages to confront a repressed and revolutionary South Africa.

The year 1983 was key in the mobilisation of civic organisations against the state. The same year that Peter Tosh played in Swaziland, the End Conscription Campaign was established to challenge military conscription of white males, and the United Democratic Front was formed. Murray and a handful of art students were in the 10,000-strong crowd at the launch of the UDF in Mitchell’s Plain. We felt the revolutionary momentum gathering and glimpsed the enormous potential power of a broad front of civic, labour, church and student organisations, but had little idea what was coming. Within four years the townships had become ungovernable, there were two States of Emergency granting executive powers to police and military, mass arrests of civic leaders, spies reporting on our actions, and friends in detention without trial, in hiding or exile.

When the universities ignited with political activism in 1985, a small group of art students, Murray included, took a lead in producing agitation propaganda in the spirit of the Russian Revolution poster books, well thumbed in the university library and communal houses. They soon found their skills in high demand. Averse to participation in student politics per se – which represented an elite of white youth, historically forced by the confrontation of Black Consciousness politics in the 1970s to organise separately from black students – this core group serviced a range of civic, labour and political organisations, across the political spectrum, which fell into the ambit of what became called the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM). Bored by endless meetings, this visual production group elected a member to attend important meetings and bring back a brief for the group to work from, or invited a person from the larger group to brief them with a mandate from their organisation. In a mocking gesture to the endless list of acronyms emerging for new political and civic organisations, the group decided to call themselves LAG – the Loosely Affiliated Group. Perhaps the lefties were not comfortable telling their comrades that they entrusted their propaganda to such a loose and cynical crew. They somehow changed LAG to stand for Liaison Action Group. Over time we became known as the Gardens Media Group.

A very powerful network of communication was generated by the organisations within the MDM. Legitimate civic, church, student and labour groups networking together in the country were in communication with banned organisations in exile, which in turn were informed of the underground activities taking place. As a result you could not get certain information from your local organisation before the state was aware of what was happening or being planned.

Murray took an active role when the Gardens Media Group designed and produced multiple screen prints for paste-up banners supporting campaigns for such causes as the release of political prisoners on hunger strikes, the release of the Treason Trialist Govan Mebeki, as well as media for labour unions and posters for the ECC. We curated the photographic show South Africa in Conflict, which brought together 300 images of state violence and popular defiance. This ran concurrently with the ECC’s anti-war film festival held in Cape Town, for which Murray designed the poster. He was also the chief designer, with Jane Solomon, for the poster and logo for the nationwide Save the Press Campaign, in response to the state’s draconian censorship laws. We worked with Cosatu designing worker diaries while Jane Solomon designed the Food and Allied Workers’ Union (FAWU) logo which remains in use today. In 1989 we assisted in media design for the Towards a People’s Culture Festival, which was to be held in Cape Town. The festival was eventually banned under State of Emergency legislation.

With Jann Cheifitz, another member of our collective, we established the t-shirt printing wing of the Community Arts Media Project. Our job was to facilitate workshops and design and print t-shirts for many organisations, including unions, church groups and detainee support groups, for May Day celebrations and International Women’s Day events. We produced t-shirts for crowd marshals at funerals, for striking workers, to celebrate May Day and Women’s Day, to celebrate the memories of assassinated comrades such as David Webster, Ashley Kriel and the Gugulethu Seven, and for many other events and organisations.

The designs and posters produced by the Gardens Media Group were undertaken in communal situations and no single author was credited. Production was not confined to the workshop but sometimes involved illegally sourcing materials and getting the work up on the street. Late nights were occasionally spent wheat-pasting large multiple silkscreen prints on highway bridges and stadiums or using university printing facilities to make illicit media with materials we had stolen from a military base.

During this period of sustained civil unrest we were subjected to powerful experiences that galvanised our senses and sharpened our resolve. Attending funerals of slain activists was a regular occurrence. On the occasion of the funeral of the murdered underground military activists known as the Gugulethu Seven in March 1986, police blocked off the township to prevent media and activists from attending the event in solidarity. We were among those from the city (including the banned Communist Party poet, Jeremy Cronin) who slept the night before the funeral in the homes of township activists, grateful for their generous hospitality. Putting oneself as a white person on the other side of the barrier, beholden to your hosts for your safety, was a powerful trust-building experience. It was exhilarating to be part of an enormous crowd of activists united in song, dance and militant salutes, evading police teargas and shotgun pellets. On another occasion we found ourselves, acting on a tip-off from a photographer friend, at the onset of riots in the suburb of Athlone. Within an hour the calm streets were transformed by a group of youth activists into a battle zone, with dozens of commercial vehicles on fire across several streets and police and military streaming into the area with heavy weapons. This public eruption came a few days after the Trojan Horse incident, in which policemen hid on the back of trucks and lured youngsters to pelt them with stones. This resulted in the shooting and killing of three youths and the serious wounding of another thirteen. In 2005 ACG Architects were commissioned to design and construct a memorial to this event, which was erected by the City of Cape Town on the site in Athlone. Murray assisted with the design, the metalwork and the installation of this memorial.

As violence escalated in this period our positions became increasingly insecure. Workshops we had set up or worked with were raided by police and closed down. A fire destroyed most of the workshop at the Community Arts Project in Chapel Street. A while later a bomb was detonated in the replacement workshop at Community House in Salt River, destroying the facility, fortunately without injuries. Spies working for the police infiltrated most organisations. Friends were often detained. The security police approached an art-school friend and, armed with a suitcase of cash, tried to entice him to spy on us. He declined. Others spied on us of their own accord. Phones were bugged. A trusted friend approached Murray to hide weapons at the art school. Though Murray considered and then declined, it was not long before the friend was arrested. She had assisted an MK unit on a sabotage mission that had been infiltrated by police spies. After a long period in prison without being charged, she was then tried alongside thirteen co-accused, including the military leader of MK in the Western Cape responsible for the unit, Tony Yengeni. Yengeni and his co-accused were granted amnesty in 1991 as part of the political transition process. On his release he was elected ANC secretary for the Western Cape.

Yengeni went on to serve as ANC chief whip and chair of the joint standing committee on defence in the first democratic parliament ­– where he was at the centre of corruption allegations in the arms deal of the late 1990s. Yengeni, perhaps more than any other leader, represents the fall from idealistic goals to self-serving, base venality which has become the target for Murray’s acerbic art. After Yengeni’s conviction on fraud charges in 2001 for receiving a luxury Mercedes-Benz from sources linked to successful German arms dealer ThyssenKrupp, he served only four months of a four-year sentence, shortened no doubt owing to political meddling. He was re-elected to the ANC’s National Executive Committee in 2007, though hard evidence of corruption continues to surface from the German investigations into the multi-billion-dollar arms deal which has destabilised the South African government for over a decade.

When the Cold War drew to a close and apartheid finally crumbled, we felt an incredible sense of relief and took some pleasure in the knowledge that we had asserted pressure at sensitive points in the political system at the right time and in some of the right places. Murray’s cynicism is certainly fuelled by his experience of having taken risks alongside a number of cadres who have subsequently dropped their ideals for personal gain.

The following paper is an extract from the thesis titledWhiteness and Authenticity in South African
Visual Culture. JessicaDraper is a doctoral student reading a practice led D.Phil. in Fine Art at The
RuskinSchool of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford.

A Spear of Contention

by Jessica Lindiwe Draper

Ideological whiteness1 has been differently framed in aSouth African context, largely because it is a
minority-whitesociety. In contrast to majority-white societies where ideologies of whitenessexist
forthe most part unconsciously, the apartheid regime in South Africa ensured thateveryone was
acutely aware of whiteness via mechanisms such as ‘whitesonly’ signage2. If whiteness has
generally been confronted andsubverted by being made explicit, then what would it mean to go
aboutexposing something that is already so categorically present? Apartheid devotednearly fifty
years to making whiteness visible, and it would thereforeappear that in South Africa, this strategy
of revelation reaffirmsracial difference rather than opposing it. Hence the dilemma of the white
SouthAfrican artist: ignoring whiteness perpetuates invisible advantage, andacknowledging it
reifies a claim to apartheid’s visible advantage.

The way in which these ideologies are translated into thevisual arts is contested, with critics such as
OkwuiEnwezor claiming that white South African artists possess an overly determinedfantasy of
identification with the black subject3. Because suchreadings are usually reduced to accusations of
racism,they dismiss any further analysis. For example, once judged to be racist (aswill later be
seen in the discussion of Brett Murray’s The Spear), anartwork is no longer allowed to participate
in what might beconsidered as contemporary artistic dialogue; that is, its voice is silencedand
consideredredundant. This type of situation generates an artistic pressure to accept andreify
normativeconstraints. In other words, if white South African artists want to remainactive
participants in the dialogue as part of a validated groupof South African artists, it appears that they
mustadhere to a particular set of rules and regulate their expression.

A similar but more subtle pressure affects black SouthAfrican artists. Stereotypes first provided by
theWestern classification of African art, and then by the documentary-stylephotography so widely
practised during apartheid4, havegenerated an expectation on the part of international (and local)
artmarketsof seeing these images reproduced. In this way, Whiteness has contributed tothe artistic
pressure to conform to such stereotypes, which are now soestablished that they function as valid
ideas of Africa andAfricanness. Considering the recent nature of apartheid, it seems that many
SouthAfricans are reluctant to relinquish these stereotyped yet triumphant imagesthat were
necessarily internalised and internationalised during thestruggle and therefore continue to hold
much emotional andpolitical currency. Addressing race outside of these archetypes thus becomes
intermingledwith feelings of anger, guilt and trauma, and therefore elicits subjectivelyextreme
responses as will be demonstrated in the writing to come.

These long-standing and still current public debatessurrounding the validity of particular rights to
historyand heritage “demonstrate the health and vitality of a political culture ofcritique and
counter-critique that was forged under the most difficultof circumstances and whose main
protagonists have often paid dearlyfor their beliefs” (Coombes 2003: 6). This culture of critique
continuesas an important part of South African society, and has been an important toolin
rebuildinga national social imaginary, but is it possible that this productive discussionhas reached a
point where it is inhibiting progress?

Negar Azimi (2011) speaks of the trend in contemporary artto follow such conventions. She argues
that, in an environment steeped inpolitical correctness, some artists begin to create art that has the
appearanceof protest art as a pre-emptive strike. In this way, artists succumb to thepressure of an
international market that calls for the repetition ofhistoric conventions. Azimi describes how acts
ofprotest in contemporary political art have become less performative and moresymbolic, and uses
the idea of a “Radical Chic” to illustrate how manyprivileged people in societies around the world
relateto subaltern causes. It has become fashionable to support a cause, though thisseems to
manifest itself in a way that is “dislocated from reality”as people can be seen “raising [their] fist
from the safe distance ofthe computer, the cinema or the art gallery to ardently declare, that war
sucks!”(Azimi 2011). She goes on to accuse institutions of playing out their obsessionwith boxticking
rather than concerning themselves with what might beclassed as “good art”, saying that
“rarely is the work of artists whosepolitics we don’t like featured” and that “these exhibitions
favoursimplicity over complexity: they are ‘politically correct’” (Azimi 2011). Herargument is
that following such normative constraints allows for theconcept of easy listening art that reflects
societal fads, creatingan opportunity for back-slapping and fist-raising in token protest.

Although Azimi is speaking about art at an internationallevel, this applies directly to the South
African context where itmight be argued that the cultural pressure of political correctness threatens
totake precedence over freedom of expression5. The corollary is that an artistwho is perceived to
have pushed against these constraints runs the risk ofbeing rejected and excluded. The reflexive,
fluid moment that thecountry now finds itself in is what should make it possible for preconceived
archetypesto be questioned and eroded, but the culture of critical reflection that hasproved so
historically effective has now become a cause for anxiety,both in the case of social interaction and
artistic production.Brett Murray is one example of an artist who has attempted to work against
theseconventions by confronting issues such as race, identity and authenticity.

Murray looks beyond race by first interrogating the verynotion of what it means to be an ‘African’
(in the ideological senserather than in a geographical or racial sense), and then what it means to be
bothwhite and South African. The concept of a multiple identity is a dominant themein his work,
perhaps beginning with the exhibition White Boy Sings theBlues (1996, Rembrandt van Rijn
Gallery, Johannesburg). This dialoguearound identity is first raised with the photograph on the
exhibitioninvitation card. In it, Murray (age six) is covered in black pigment anddressed to
emulate a Zulu Warrier6. Although in its original contextit was an act of youthful naivety, the
clarity that comes from hindsightreveals a deeper existential crisis for South Africans. At the age
ofsix, it would not have been Murray’s own initiative to dress in such a way – heexplained in an
interview that he he was taking part in a school play thatrequired the presence of Zulu Warriers,
and due to therestrictive societal conventions of the time there were no actual blackchildren to
fulfil this role (Interview with the artist, September2012). In this sense, the act of painting would
havebeen done to him by his parents or another authority figure. One could arguethat, in this way,
he was being constructed and initiated into his parents’social universe of meaning. Considered on
its own, the imageviolates post colonial codes of representation which would rightly argue thatit
perpetuatesreductive stereotypes of the ‘Other’. The artwork here, however, lies in hischoice to
publicly expose this private moment in his personalhistory. By playing with the boundaries of
acceptable representationand racial categorisation, he highlights the absurdity of placing such
emphasison arbitrary physical attributes – something to which he will return in justover a decade
when he makes this gesture his own.

In the exhibition itself, several Westernised commercialicons (such as America’s Colonel Sanders,
Pink Panther, Richie Richand the South African phenomenon that is the Oros Man7) make guest
appearancesin a series called Black Like Me. In this work Murray constructs flattened,simplified
black and white replicas of these characters out of woodand plastic, embellishing them with a halo
of evenly spaced coins.The signature features of the characters are intact allowing them to remain
instantlyrecognizable despite a few liberties. Murray then adorns each of the cartoonheads with an
unmistakable ‘Afro’ hair do – commonly associated with astereotyped black person and also seen in
the wig worn by the youngMurray of the invitation card. By merging seemingly contradictory
stereotypes,he re-presents them to the viewer as one amalgamated, meta-stereotype. Thisapparent
contradiction is also visible in the title, which isshared with two opposing items: a South African
hairproduct used to straighten curly hair in accordance with Western values ofphysical beauty, and
a book of the same title written by journalist John HowardGriffin, who narrates his journey through
the racially segregatedAmerican South of the 60s disguised as a black man. In this way, the work
successfullyoscillates between the local and the international. By juxtaposing popularimagery
with cultural signifiers and simplified methods ofrepresentation, Murray alludes to the stereotyping
andfetishization of identity.

From an optimistic point of view, the works celebrate amultiple cultural identity which takes its cue
fromthe embryonic Rainbow Nation. A cynic, however, might take a differentposition. The ideals
of the Rainbow Nation may have encouraged diversity, butthey also inspired an intentional and
calculated social movement for theAfrican continent to enter a process of reclamation – a process
laterrealised in South Africa by Thabo Mbheki’s campaign for an African Renaissance.

Consequently many cultural practices and signifiers deemedtoo European or too Western, were
seen as contributing to ideologiesassociated with whiteness, and therefore with apartheid. From
thisperspective, Murray’s work addresses the agitated compulsion to paint societywith an African
brush, giving colour to things previously whitewashed by ahistory of European domination.
Although it offers playful parodieson the one hand, on the other, Black Like Me contains a coded
ambiguitythat simultaneously questions and counters any attempt at interpretation.

Displayed alongside these satirical interpretations ofpopular culture were more cerebral works such
as Land (1996). In thiswork, a simplified profile of a face is cut out of wood, and the negative
spaceinside the face forms another, smaller profile. While the outer profile bearsthe features
commonly associated with that of a white person, theinside profile exhibits features that are
commonly associated withthat of a black person. At the centre of both heads is a jar of earth. The
simplificationof human features into generally accepted stereotypes invites the viewer to
automaticallyassume race. Those viewers who make this assumptive leap, particularly thosewho
mighttake pride in not buying into generalisations, catch themselves in anuncomfortable moment
where they have allowed certain mainstream stereotypes orprejudices to surface. Whether Murray
attributes this to the accessibilityof media imagery, or presents it as proof that ideologies of
whitenesscontinue to function at an unconscious, invisible level in South Africa remainsunclear.
Considering the Western monopoly on media broadcasting, itwould not be unreasonable to say that
either reading demonstrates theembedded nature of historical whiteness. Here Murray takes
acceptedrepresentations and re-packages them in such a way that they present anuncomfortable
inner battle for the viewer. Murray’s choice to pose thisparticular conundrum might be seen to
demonstrate his commitment todestabilising any power that may be lingering unnoticed – an
attemptto force viewers to examine the extent to which their own minds and thoughtshave been
shaped by previous processes of disempowerment.

The introduction of earth evokes ideas of ownership, accessand control – all of which have been
responsible, sometimes jointly andsometimes separately, for the majority of bloodshed in African
andSouth African histories and continue as a major theme of conflict in thecontemporary South
African dialogue8. In Griffiths and Prozesky’s theorisingof the South African sense of dwelling9,
land also alludes to asense of belonging that was destabilised by the political change and is now
oftenleft fractured for many white South Africans. If one contemplates theseunderstandings of
land as juxtaposed within two simplified racial profiles,then this work also points to the
construction of a social imaginary –a manufacturing of a socially acceptable identity. The layering
ofprofiles points to the ability of identity debates to be both internal andexternal. What we now
see beginning to emerge in Murray’swork is a nuanced ambiguity that allows it to function
simultaneouslyon many conflicting levels.

Murray deploys similar themes over a decade later in theexhibition Crocodile Tears (2007, The
Goodman Gallery Cape, Cape Town),also exhibited as Crocodile Tears II (2009 Goodman Gallery,
Johannesburg)with minor changes. In it, caricatures of French aristocrats with their faces
‘blackened‘10appear around the gallery walls among satirical coats of arms, copulatingFrench
poodles and altered reproductions of paintings well knownto every Art History student exposed to
the Eurocentric narrativeof art, such as Fragonard’s The Swing (1767), while cut-out metal phrases
makeendless puns on famous proclamations. Most striking in the context of thisdiscussion is
Murray’s return to themes of a racial fluidity where oneidentity masquerades as another, as
Renaissance Man (2008) and TheRenaissance Man Tending his Land (2008) sit regally on the
walls.In light of the discussion of the Africanising of self and of others, these twopieces together
seem to embody all angles of this debate. In RenaissanceMan Murray uses make-up to darken the
skin on his face, neck and shoulders,while leaving his chest and arms uncovered in contrast. His
wigfollows the the style of eighteenth century French aristocracy, where it wouldhave signified a
high social standing, which now replaces the ‘Afro’ style.The frame extends beyond Murray’s
shoulders to reveal a bear, unpaintedchest. In The Renaissance Man Tending his Land (2008),
Murrayis featured in the same wig and face paint, only he is standing in the middleof his garden,
shirtless in shorts and scruffy shoes, poised to ‘tend’his patch of lawn with a weed-whacker. The
appearance of the term‘Renaissance’ here sets the stage for a parody of Thabo Mbheki’s presidency,
ascan be seen in His Legacy (which parodies Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe(1968) and
references Mbheki’s penchant for his pipe) and therecurring use of the phrase “I am an African”
(which is borrowed fromthe title of a speech given by Thabo Mbheki at a ceremony celebrating the
passingof the New Constitution in 1998). Murray satirises the concept of the AfricanRenaissance
by setting it alongside the European Renaissance, whichwas in fact a product of an elite European
aristocracy, finallydestroyed by the French Revolution in 1789. By doing so, he insinuates that
thereis a similarly elitist aspect to Mbeki’s Renaissance.

The practice of white people painting their face black has avery particular history, dating back to
the theatrical traditionof blackface in the American minstrel shows (a kind of every-man’s opera)
beginningin the early 1800s, where white performers used black make-up to indicate the
caricaturedstereotype of a black person11. When a group of travelling minstrels visitedthe Cape
Colony in 1848, this tradition was absorbed into the localEmancipation Day celebrations which
were the beginning of what today iscalled the Kaapse Klopse or the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival12.
Baxter(2001) identifies a number of problematic themes that contribute to theideology of the
Kaapse Klopse, such as differentiated gender roles andclass distinction, which there is neither time
norspace to do justice here. Many people, in fact, stand in strong opposition tothe carnival,
“believing it to epitomise and reinforce a negative andridiculous stereotype of coloured identity”
(Baxter 2001: 89), thusperpetuating and substantiating the apartheid ideologues of race
construction.But the carnival has also been a platform for resistance. Although the songssung at
these events, ghoemmalidjies, were often frivolous andcelebratory, Vivian Bickford Smith (2009)
points out that thesesongs also have a history of opposition, and sometimes contained coded
satirisingof the colonial ruling elite13, such as this parody of Rule Britannia:

Kom Brittanje, jy beskaaf,
Maak die nasies tot jouslaaf…
Jou dwinglandy sal gou verneer
Diewat hulle land eige noem.14
Come Britannia, the civilizing one,
Makethe nations into slaves …
Your tyranny will soon humble
Thosethat call this land their own.

This stands as a striking example of the wilfulappropriation of Western stereotypes in order to
protestthem from within. The blackface tradition in the Kaapse Klopse has become mutedover the
years, and today the painted faces usually consist ofbright coloured designs (with very little to no
appearanceof black) which match the gaudy, elaborate silk costumes – that is, if theparticipants
even choose to paint their faces at all.

South Africa’s history with the tradition of blackface istherefore convoluted and contradictory,
standing on the one handfor racist stereotyping, and on the other for an alternative narrative of
changeand cultural pride. The face-painting of the carnival may have originated as acrude
manifestationof colonial stereotypes, but continues as a celebration of the ability of SouthAfrican
culture to be at once singular and multiple. Murray’scontemporary application in Renaissance Man
therefore references thisaptitude for pluralism, as does his Africanising of Western stereotypes.
Thefact that the artist’s race is revealed as white by his choice to extend theframe of the
photograph beyond the borders of the make-up potentiallymakes this work uncomfortable to
contemplate, particularly in a SouthAfrican context. Is Murray suggesting that black people are
actuallywhite underneath, or that enterprising white South Africans are trying to alignthemselves
with the black majority in order to generate a sense ofpowerful victimhood?15 Or is this a critique
of the affirmative actionpolicies that foster the habit of organisations to appear inclusive? The
RenaissanceMan Tending his Land is equally illusive, only this time Murray relatespossible
questions to the historically problematic relationshipwith the land already discussed. When
combined with themes of role-play andmake-believe, of fluid or concealed identities, the ambiguity
thataffords these works their strength is deepened.

Reception of Murray’s work has been mixed, though mostcritics feel compelled to address this
unresolved dialogue between subjectpositions. In a review of White Boy Sings the Blues, Geers
(1996)insists that attempts by white South African artists such as Murray toAfricanise white and/or
Western subjects (where the subjectis quite often the artist him/herself) “communicates a latent
desire[of] so many white artists to be black themselves, a desire born out of whiteguilt” (Geers
1996). I argue that while interrogating ideas associatedwith authenticity, Murray’s work functions
quite differently. Thevery idea that culture has the ability to be plural stands in direct oppositionto
thepurist ideology of whiteness. The meanings that his work evokes are oftenamplified by the
potential for the viewer to experience a sense ofdiscomfort, particularly in a South African context.
At itsbest, his work functions beyond this specificity as well by quoting the ongoingand historical
discourses of cultural traffic through ideological desire,as was particularly evident in Black Like
Me.

O’Toole (2009) says that Murray’s brand of creativeproduction “includes a restless conversation
with the self”. The useof his own body as subject is what allows him to explore his own
relationshipto the invisibly visible forces of whiteness, while simultaneously offering acritique of
these forces. His attempt to expose the wilful abuse ofpower therefore simultaneously exposes his
own frustration that theidealism of the Rainbow Nation has not yet been realised. In this way
Murraydoes more than simply “explore the exchange of one evil for another aspolitical power
shifts from the oppressor to the oppressed” as noted byShaman (2009) – he fights for the right to
freedom of expression andrefuses the international pressure to fulfil stereotypes, or the local
pressureto glamorise the new leadership and demonise his whiteness. In this way, hiswork can be
as difficult to digest for white South Africans as it isfor black South Africans. It implicates all
parties instead ofplaying into what Azimi would call the “Radical Chic”. Again, it is this all
encompassingambiguity that allows the work to resonate through and beyond the politics of
misrepresentation.

A narrow interpretation sees Murray’s work as a thinlyveiled, self-indulgent display of poor-me-ism
(a term coined by Dyer in1997) that betrays an inculcated belief in white entitlement. Indeed
Enwezor’sreading of art by white South Africans would suggest that by expressingdissatisfaction
with the new order, he lobbies for a resurgence of whiteauthority by claiming the powerful position
of victim.16 Given hisinvolvement with the protest art movement of the resistance, however, it
seemsmore likely that his artistic investment in political issues springs from adetermination to
continue the struggle for freedom and ensure that so muchloss of life was not for nothing.17 He
intimates through his art that it isnot your birth place or your skin colour, but rather your behaviour,
yourdisplay of ubuntu, that makes you an African.18 When asked to define his senseof what might
make an African African, Murray remarked:I suppose I’mquite contrary. If someone tells me I’m an African
I’llsay I’m not. If some tells me I’m not an African, I’ll say I am. Maybe I’m justcontrary, maybe it’s
because I don’t know. I know that I’m from this place – Icertainly don’t feel comfortable anywhere else.
(Interviewwith the artist, September 2012)

Lisa van der Watt has said that part of the problem withbeing white in post-1994 South Africa is
trying to resolve thewitnessing of trauma on the one hand, and being intimately complicit to that
traumaon the other hand, even if only by doing nothing. Murray’s exploration of afractured South
African identity is as much a symptom of his context as ofhis past. There is an implied guilt within
particular discourses inSouth Africa, and whiteness often becomes ‘the elephant in the room’, which
pointsto the ability of race (and specifically whiteness) to be both present and notpresent, known
but not discussed while nevertheless affecting thepositioning of everything else in that ‘room’.

Murray (in a specific vernacular that one has come toexpect) uses irony to cut through such
expectations. In this way, his mannerof exposing his whiteness first subverts the South African
societalconvention of speaking around a subject to the point that the conversationrisks being lost in
politically correct translation. However, in some casesthe viewer is alienated by the initial impact
of the work, and themessage is obscured. This was the case in one of Murray’s recent exhibitions in
whichone work overshadowed all the rest.

Hail to the Thief II opened at the Goodman Gallery inJohannesburg on the 10th of May 201219. As a
whole, the exhibition wasa potent critique of the ANC (South Africa’s Ruling Party), providing a
parodyof some of the serious issues that face the new democracy such as corruptionand
entitlement.For example, the title itself is a pun on ‘hail to the chief’, whichsimultaneously
references the current South African president, JacobZuma’s well known claim to being a
traditional chieftain and the manylegal allegations of fraud that have been made against him.
Althoughthis exhibition was riddled with highly charged subject matter, what caught themedia’s
eye was one particular work: The Spear (2011). Thispainting depicted a man recognizable as Jacob
Zuma, while the heroicstyle and pose in which he is painted quotes a famous propaganda poster of
theMarxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. In Murray’s version, however, Zuma isdepicted with his
zipper open and his genitals on display. As those familiarwith South African history and politics
will know, the titlealludes to Mkhonto we Sizwe which translates into English as ‘spear of the
nation’and refers to the armed wing of the ANC that battled inequality at a highlyorganised
military level20. The exposure of Zuma’s manhoodreferences the presidents reputation for
infidelity, as well asthe rape charges brought against him in 2005 for which he was tried and found
notguilty. The colour pallet (black, red and yellow) mirrors that of the SouthAfrican Communist
Party21, again emphasised by Murray’s use of theLenin-esque pose.

The ANC began legal proceedings against the artist, claimingthat the painting and its connotations
were an infringement of Zuma’s humanrights, which exceeded Murray’s right to freedom of
expression.Social tensions ran high with several public threats reported in the news, suchas that of
Enoch Mthembu, spokesperson of the Shembe church, whocalled to have Murray stoned to death.22
The painting was defacedby two separate parties (Barend la Grange and Lowie Mabokela) on the
22ndof May, less than two weeks after the exhibition opened. Both men werecontained by Gallery
security (though Mabokela believed his treatment to bemore severe than that of la Grange and
subsequently began legal proceedingsof his own) and charged with malicious damages to property.
Theywere released with suspended sentences – a comparative walk in the park whenconsidering
the two year sentence that awaited Wlodzimierz Umaniecafter he defaced a Mark Rothko painting
at the Tate Modern,London in October last year.

The chronicles of The Spear received extensive presscoverage, but the reportage seemed to focus
on the sensationalsoap-boxing, rather than the very real repercussions of the frenziedanti-Murray
campaigns. Although death threats were mentioned, the factthat Murray had to move his family to
a safe location in order to protectthem against the protesters lingering in the streets outside his
studio,150m from his home, was not reported. The ANC finally dropped their defamationcase
whenthe painting was removed from the gallery show room following its defacing.23

The notoriety that followed the exhibition prompted the(black) artist Ayanda Mabulu to unveil his
own painting of Zuma,which sees the president dressed in full traditional Zulu attire, performing a
highkick characteristic of Zulu cultural dancing, and therefore also exposing hisgenitals. The title,
Umshini Wam, refers to the popular struggle song ofMkhonto we Sizwe which called members to
arms. Zuma was head ofMkhonto Wesizwe’s Secret Police and very senior in the armed struggle.
Thesong has become integral to Zuma’s public image, and is regularly sung on stageby Zuma and
his contemporaries to great applause at ANC rallies.Mabulu had previously depicted the South
African President’s penisin the painting Ngcono ihlwempu kunesibhanxo sesityebi (2010) which
translatesinto English as ‘better a fool than a rich man’s nonsense’. Is it the fact thatMabulu is black
that allowed these paintings to fly under the radar, beingreported only in relation to The Spear? In
an article for the DailyMaverick, Rebecca Davis quotes the journalist Unathi Kondile, who argues
thatit is the artists’ race that led to the painting’s different receptions, butnot for the reasons one
might think: the reason AyandaMabulu’s artwork didn’t cause ripples is because as far as art is concerned
ablack artist is intellectually incapable of producing a complex work – blacks(sic) are
incapable of satire – until they are verified by theirwhite counterparts.…It is only when the
African story is toldthrough the white lens that newspapers and the general public will pay
attention.(quoted in Davis 2012: dailymaverick.co.za)

Although reductive, this comment shows how deeply theunequal power relations of the past
continue to be felt. The painting andthe events it triggered caused many heated public
conversations.Among the themes was the usual suspect of racism, but given the recent attemptby
theruling party to pass a bill that would have severely compromised the freedom ofthe press, the
right to freedom of expression was particularly topical.24It is also interesting that two unorchestrated
defacingsoccurred on the same day, at the same time, by two people at fairly opposite
endsof the societal spectrum - La Grange middle-aged, white and Afrikaans, andMabokela a
young, black member of the ANC Youth League. Perhaps thetriumph of the work lay in its ability
to offend without prejudice acrossracial divides.

With so much outrage and debate focussed on The Spear, mostof the other artworks in the
exhibition were largely ignored. Takefor example Murrays’s appropriation (or what critic O’Toole
wouldcall misappropriation) of iconic protest posters. In one such work called TheStruggle, he
distorts the famous dying words of Solomon Mahlangu (“Tellmy people that I love them and that
they must continue the struggle),such that they now read “Tell my people that I love them and that
theymust continue to struggle for Chivas Regal, Mercs and kick backs”.25 Murraydescribes his
research at the Mayibuye Archive (where the originalposters that he parodies are housed) before
making the artwork, andhow meditating on these posters in light of the current socio-political
climatewas morally disquieting. This might at first appear somewhat facile, but byrevisiting such
posters ironically, Murray attempts to draw attention towhat the struggle rhetoric is being used to
justify today. In thissense, he remobilises the posters for their original purpose, to oppose theabuse
ofpower. In his own words - “I am not shitting on the graves of the heroes”, buthe feels that it is
important for people to understand that “their graves arebeing shat on” (interview with the artist,
September 2012).

Ironically, Murray’s Crocodile Tears was arguably morecontentious than Hail to the Thief as it
pointed not only toapartheid, but right back to colonial rule as well, equating such ideologieswith
thecurrent government and addressing such issues as identity and authenticity inthis frame. The
reaction, however, was not nearly as extreme. Whenconsidering this incongruity along with the
focus on The Spear inparticular, it is not outrageous to assume that the indignation has more to do
withMurray’s decision to make Zuma identifiable in the work. As we have seen, thiswas by no
means the first time Murray had provided a scathinglycritical comment on the post-apartheid
presidency, but it is the first timethat he attacked the president as a person instead of simply in his
roleof nation-head.

O’Toole’s use of the word misappropriation to describeMurray’s use of commercial (and political)
lexicons, rather thanreappropriation or even simply appropriation, is apt. In his own words, he
“thievesaround from all over” (interview with the artist, September 2012), findingsymbols and reanimating
them. In doing so, he gives them theability to simultaneously mean something other,
sometimesthe opposite, of what they have come to represent. As we have seen, however, itis
Murray’sunapologetic use of African cultural lexicons that is most often problematisedon the
grounds that he is white. In doing so, Murray claims thepower of the appropriated symbols and
asserts himself as very much engagedwith and part of a contemporary African and South African
socio-politicalculture and discourse.

The use of African iconography by white artists will alwaysbe, to some extent, a form of
appropriation, but Murraydemonstrates that the possible power of the work lies in the reanimation
ofthese symbols. He accesses particular sets of symbols, often appropriating themto portray his
contribution to the developing national narrative, and indoing so has generated his own language,
or as Mary Corrigall putsit in her review of Crocodile Tears, an “iconography of his own
making”(Corrigall2009). Perhaps, tough, this is a symptom of being an engaged member of
contemporarySouth African society, rather than a particular artistic intentionality. Whatemerges
now is a crude framework for analysing Murray’s oeuvre –he appropriates and then reanimates
existing symbols, and in doing sogenerates a visual dialect of his own.

Corrigall’s review goes on to call Murray’s work“unambiguous, confrontational and vitriolic”
(Corrigall 2009). Hiswork could be considered vitriolic in that it sometimes clearly stems from a
placeof anger, and it is most definitely confrontational, but it should by now beevident that at its
best, the real potency of Murray’s work lies in itsunexpected ambiguity. Perhaps this is where The
Spearfalls short. Although it contains many references that extend beyond thegallery, it does not
offer the same potential for conflicting interpretationthat was evident in works such as Black Like
Me and Renaissance Man.Murray himself has no qualms in admitting that he would not have
chosenit as the work on which to hang his reputation. His piece at last year’s FNBJoburg Art Fair
brings this discussion to an appropriate finale. TitledDissent, the piece consists of the word
‘silence’, all in blockcapitals sitting heavily on the wall . The very word ‘silence’ is itself a
contradictionas to speak it is to do the opposite. The question is whether it should beinterpreted as
a verb (to describe what the ANC tried to do to him), anoun (to describe his position on the subject)
or asa command. Murray offered very little public voice during the contentiousperiod and
perhaps, considering the title, this piece stands as hisfirst and last word on the matter – a silent
protest if you will. Heseems to insist that the old cliché is right, and silence does speak louderthan
words.

Given the current socio-political climate in South Africa,and the country’s not so distant past, it is
not surprising that awork of art can cause such unrest. The provocative manner in which Murray
choosesto confront governmental abuse of power is on occasion mistaken for patriarchal
didacticism.If we return once more to Griffeths and Prozesky’s claim that a sense ofdwelling is
crucial to the construction of a social imaginary, thenMurray addresses notions of authenticity in
order to gain access tothe place in which he wishes to dwell.

An important aspect of Murray’s work is his ability tofrustrate expectations, notably in his refusal
tooffer the authorising gesture of white guilt. His particular method of exposureowes much of its
success to his ability to turn the gaze back on himselfand question of his sense of selfhood; that is,
heinterrogates the mechanisms which allow him to feel a sense of identity, suchas his (and
everyone else’s) ‘Africanness’, and the racialidentification that is a product of societal
performativity. Whatallows Murray to escape categorisation as a polemicist is his ability to offer
notjust a white perspective, but a critique of that perspective. He attempts tounite South Africans
through a shared uncertainty and an acknowledgement of thecultural ambiguity that underpins
South African society. He visuallyarticulates the shared frustration felt by most South Africans on
therealisation that the international stereotypes that we have been working sohard to escape are not
just external – they retain somelevel of internalisation regardless of the sincerity of the struggle to
befree. Exposing this internal duality allows Murray a humanity that mightotherwise be difficult
to see amongst the satire.

To end, I leave you with an appropriately succinct butironical comment of Murray’s:
“I remain committed to the freedom ofexpression, absolutely”.

List of References

Azimi, Negar. 2011. ‘Goodintentions’. Frieze Magazine, 137: March. Accessed at
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/good-intentionson 25/06/2011.
Baxter, Lisa. 2001. “Continuity and Change in Cape Town’sCoon Carnival: The 1960s and 1970s”. African
Studies, 60:1, 87-105
Bickford-Smith,Vivian. 1995. “Black Ethnicities, Communities and Political Expression in LateVictorian
Cape Town”. The Journal of African History, 36, pp 443-465
Coombes,Annie E. 2003. History after apartheid: visual culture and public memory in ademocratic South
Africa. London: Duke University Press.
Corrigall,Mary. 2009. “Brett Murray’s Crocodile Tears at The Goodman Gallery”.
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/mary-corrigalls-crocodile-tears-review/,December 2012
Davis, Rebecca. “From The Spear to Umshini Wam, a tripless ordinary”. Daily Maverick.
http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-09-04-from-the-spear-to-umshini-wam-a-trip-less-expected/,
February2013.
Durrheim,Kevin, Mtose Xoliswa and Brown, Lindsay. 2011. Race Trouble: Race, Identity andInequality in
Post-Apartheid South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Universityof KwaZulu Natal Press.
Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London:Routledge.
Enwezor, Okwui. 1997. ‘Reframing the black subject:ideology and fantasy in contemporary South African
representation’.Third Text, 11:40, 21-40.
Frankenburg, Ruth. 1993. White Women,Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minnesota:
Universityof Minnesota Press.
Garner, Steve. 2007. Whiteness: An Introduction. London:Routledge.
Geers, Kendell. 1996. ‘Singing the Post-Apartheid Blues’.The Star, Friday August 1996. Accessed at
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/kendell-geers-white-boy-sings-the-blues-review,December
2012.
Griffiths, Dominic and Prozesky,Maris L. C.. 2010. ‘The politics of dwelling: being white/ being South
African’.Africa Today, Vol.56, No. 4 (Summer), 22-41.
Hecker, Judith B. 2011.Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now: Prints from the Museum of Modern
Art.New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art.
Marschall, Sabine. 2001.“Strategies of Accomodation: Towards an Inclusive Canon of South African Art”.
ArtJournal, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Spring), 50-59.
O’Toole, Sean. 2009.‘Distinguishing the bull from the bullshit’. Pages 4-17 in Crocodile Tears,exhibition
catalogue. Goodman Gallery: In-house publishing.
Shaman,Sanford s. 2008. ‘Review: Crocodile Tears’. Art South Africa.http://www.artsouthafrica.com/?
article=617, December 2012.
Peffer,John. 2009. Art and the end of apartheid. Minnesota: University of MinnesotaPress.
Snyman, Gerrie. 2008. “African Hermeneutics’ ‘Outing’ ofWhiteness”. Neotestimentica, 42.1, 97-122.
van der Watt, Liese.2008. “Making Whiteness Strange”. Third Text, 15:56, 63-74.

Notes
‍
1 As it is theorised by authors suchas Frankenburg (1993), Dyer (1997) and Garner (2007), whiteness is generally
consideredto have three prominent tropes – normativity, invisibility and the socialnature of its construction. In
White Women, Race Matters, RuthFrankenberg (1993) defines whiteness as an expressive power that has theability
to shape the lives of white people: “First whiteness is alocation of structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it
isa ‘standpoint’, a place from which white people look at [themselves], at othersand at society. Thirdly, ‘whiteness’
refers to a set of cultural practicesthat are usually unmarked and unnamed.” (Frankenberg 1993: 1).
2 SeeSnyman (2008).
3 See Enwezor’s seminal and much debated text ‘Reframingthe black subject: ideology and fantasy in contemporary
SouthAfrican representation’ (1997).
4 Until the late 1970s when theSoweto Riots forced a higher level of public awareness, Western and Eurocentric
canonshad been the most prevalent devices against which African and South African artwas judged. The
postmodernist tendency to question “hierarchically orderedbinaries” and its “critique of dominant Western culture”
(Marschall2001: 52) then led to the questioning of the art/craft divide in the late1980s. Although boundaries were
being constantly questioned, it wasalso during this time that new canons were in formation. Peffer (2009) explains
howit was the media coverage and photojournalism of the struggle years that firstbegan to construct the visually
stereotyped image of black resistancein South Africa. Photographers used extreme zooms to highlight and capture
themost violent and therefore the most dramatic moments for the purpose ofmaximising effect , thus the archetypal
image of the struggling,pained, tortured black subject resisting white domination entered theinternational
consciousness through the world press. This was amplifiedby the fact that the cultural boycott (which began in the
1960sand ended in 1991) had effectively starved the market for almost three decades,making such photographs the
only imagery available forinternational consumption.
5 It is important here to note thatalthough the Bill of Rights in the South African Constitution provides for it,
freedomof expression can only really function where there is a broad societalacceptance of its values.
6 Note that he is not just rendered‘black’ but is dressed as an nkosane (a “little chief”) with a beshu, which is
asign of adulthood. Consciously or unconsciously he is being constructed as anadult. In his later work, such as
Renaissance Man (2008) which will beaddressed in the discussion to come, he begins to recognise the significance
ofthis moment and adopts it as a major theme.
7 The Oros Man is thecartoon face of Oros, an orange squash made and sold in South Africa. Hisappearance
resembles a bright orange Michelin Man.
8Take, for example, the land claims that have been instituted in an attempt toredress the European appropriation
of tribal land, and the large scaleapartheid removals. Such policies are continually contested and adapted. This
debateand its continued destabilizing effect is highlighted by the recentgovernmental decision of the Mongaung
conference in 2012 to revoke the‘willing-buyer-willing-seller’ principle for land distribution and to invoke
compulsorypurchase at the government’s determined price.
9Griffiths and Prozesky (2010) claim that white South Africans now feel thatthey must choose between being white
and being South African. They use thephilosophical language of Taylor and Heidegger to account for this, arguing
that“a social imaginary informs the way in which one dwells”(Griffiths and Prozesky2010: 31), and that during
apartheid, an artificial sense ofdwelling was built on a flawed social imaginary that privileged white peopleand
boreno reflection to the reality of South African society. The fracturing of asocial imaginary so ingrained is held
by Griffiths and Prozesky as theforemost cause of emigration, even if the official details are documented ascrime,
affirmative action, or other surface concerns.
10In Sanford Shaman’s review, he notes that Murray’s figures have been“transformed from white European
colonials into black Africancolonials” (Shaman 2009).
11 This popular nineteenth centurytradition spread to other parts of the globe, and is largely responsible forthe
propagationof stereotyped representations of black people found in other forms of popularculture, such as cartoons,
comics and advertising campaigns.Although in the USA, blackface was brought to an end by the Civil Rights
Movementof the 1960’s, it is recorded as late as 1978 in the popular British televisionseries The Black and White
Minstrel Show.
12Kaapse Klopse is literally translated as “Cape knockers” or “Cape hitters”, butmore accurately as the Cape
Minstrels. I have deliberately chosento exclude the cruder term ‘Coon Carnival’ used by Baxter because of it’s
derogatorynature. The celebrations span the first two days of the calender year andconsist of “a street procession
through Cape Town’s city centre”. Theprocession is made up of groups or troupes who wear matching costumes.
Thefestivities culminate with competitions at various different venues where thetroupes perform dance routines,
sing and play instruments, andtrophies are awarded for a number of different categories(Baxter 2001: 87).
13This is an apt example of the postcolonial concept of mimicry, whereambivalence leads to a longing for and often
an adoption of theculture of the coloniser by the colonised – mostly because such culturalsignifiers come to stand
for power.
14Both this extract and the translation are quoted in Bickford-Smith 2009:448-449.
15 Richard Dyer (1997) identifies this as one of thedangers of speaking about whiteness in that it might be used as a
platformto claim the power of the oppressed, of the minority, as a ‘new victim group’who are the target of ‘unjust’
affirmative action policies.
16Again, see Enwezor (1997).
17 Murray was actively engaged in theprotest art movement of the resistance, first with The Loosely Affiliated Group
whichlater became the Gardens Media Project. This improvised group worked togetherto produce posters, T-shirts
stickers and graffiti, and organisedprotests as a means of conscientising people and drawing them into the
conversationof resistance. According to Hecker 2011, the guiding principle of the groupwere “to work for a
democratic South Africa, to oppose racism and sexism, tounite visual artists and establish cooperative ways of
working,and to form links with progressive organizations and put resources at theirservice.” (Hecker 2011:
18 Ubuntu is the Zulu philosophy ofhumanity epitomised by the African proverb “umuntu ngumunte ngabantu”, or
“ahuman-being becomes a human-being through other human-beings”.
19 Aswith Crocodile Tears the exhibition had already opened at the Goodman Gallery’sCape Town branch in 2011,
though this first version did notinclude The Spear.
20 The group was categorised as a terrorist organisationby the then South African government and banned in 1961.
21SACP is a member of the Tripartheid Alliance, together with the ANC and COSATU(Congress of South African
Trade Unions).
22“This [public threat], persistent and very threatening e-mails, and a call fromJonathan Shapiro (a friend who has
also been on the receiving end ofdeath threats) who said he has never seen anything like what was happening
regardingthe Spear and was worried for my safety [because of] the unbelievable silencefrom the state, the police
and the powers that be…in fact thetacit support [implied by this silence] gave the perpetrators [a] kind of fatwa
againstme, my assistant, the gallery owner and their staff and the editor of The CityPress and her staff, [and]
necessitated that I take my family toa place of safety.” (email correspondence with the artist, March 2013)
23This is most likely because they would have lost in the constitutional court.
24The legislation has not been abandoned by the ANC, though it has beencontinually watered down because
COSATU, for the moment, is opposed toit.
25Solomon Mahlangu was the first member of Umkhonto we Sizwe to be tried andhanged by the apartheid
government in June 1977.

‍

‍

A reincarnated Hans Christian Andersen may have painted The Spear for those denying the testimony of their eyes

‘The Emperor’s New Clothes” is one of the most enduring tales by Hans Christian Andersen. It tells the story of a fashion-obsessed Emperor who has no time to govern his country, care for his people and show leadership.

With a coat to show off “for every hour of the day”, he spends all his time and money on clothes.

One day two swindlers come into town posing as master weavers. They claim to make clothes out of the most fabulous fabric. The clothes made from this fabric became invisible to anyone “unfit to hold office” or who is “unpardonably stupid”.

Such clothes, the Emperor reasoned, should enable him to discover not only those in his service unfit for office, but how to distinguish the clever from the stupid.

Without hesitation, the Emperor advances huge sums of money for this wonderful “fabric” to be manufactured.

Soon, through astute marketing, the weavers ensure everyone in the city knows of their wondrous creation. The entire population is curious to see who among them will be found unfit for office and stupid, nogal!

It isn’t long before the Emperor wants to satisfy his own curiosity. He starts out cautiously. Despite feeling pretty sure of himself as clever enough and fit for office, he sends an old and supposedly honest minister to check things out first.

The minister finds the swindlers busy “at work”. But where are the looms? Where is the cloth? Yet curiously, the swindlers’ hands are “weaving” furiously.

“Look at this wonderful work!” the swindlers tell the minister. Bewildered, the minister decides he cannot risk being thought unfit for office and stupid.

“Extraordinary!” he exclaims, nodding in praise.

When the swindlers ask for more money, it comes.

After a second minister vouches to the Emperor for the fabric and designs of miraculous quality, the Emperor feels confident it is time for him to go see the fabric himself “while it is still on the loom”. He takes along his two ministers and a company of other courtiers to see the precious cloth that is now the talk of the city.

This time the swindlers do not have to do any marketing; the two enthusiastic ministers did it all: “Is this not magnificent? Your Majesty must admire the astonishing colours and patterns!”

Despite the evidence before his eyes, the Emperor, who does not want to be thought of as stupid and unfit for office, tells the swindlers: “Your cloth has the most gracious approval!”

Indeed! Everyone present emphatically agrees.

The Emperor immediately appoints the swindlers as “imperial court weavers”. They are now to begin to make the Emperor’s new clothes.

Soon the clothes are ready and the day is announced on which the Emperor will stride out into the city to show off his new clothes to his people.

Both swindlers assist him, while mouthing the most flattering compliments, as the Emperor takes off his old clothes. They then “dress him” in his new outfit.

“A magnificent suit of clothes!” everyone present approves, confirming what the Emperor is apparently seeing in his reflection in the mirror.
Who among them would risk others knowing they did not see anything other than a naked man?

But as the Emperor struts out in public, only a child sees the reality: “The Emperor is naked!”

In a most uncanny manner, Hans Christian Andersen was recently reincarnated in South Africa. He was reborn in the form of Brett Murray, who painted an image of a South African Emperor. A carnival of outrage ensued with many citizens, including some of the most prominent, making every effort not to be seen as unfit for office and as idiots, nogal.

To crown it all, not in his wildest dreams would the 19th-century Danish storyteller have guessed when he died that in his reincarnation he would be declared a racist in South Africa. Somewhat bemused, he must console himself that the habit humans have of denying the testimony of their eyes is indeed a universal phenomenon.

The public space in South Africa recently displayed vividly the kinds of diversion and obfuscation that Andersen contemplated so well in his timeless story.

Said President Jacob Zuma, reminding us that he was speaking on the anniversary of the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910: “In those days,” he quoted Selope Thema, “the black man . . . was not allowed to travel first, second or third class on the trains. He travelled in trucks almost similar to those used for cattle and horses . . . ”

The president forgot to update Selope Thema: “Today,” he should have added, “the ‘black man’ can travel to New York in three trans-continental jets on the same visit.”

The Emperor is naked!

Said Gwede Mantashe, declaring the streets as the site of validation of public sentiment: “What the ANC cannot win in the courts, it will win in the streets.”

But the Emperor is naked! He is naked in the streets; he is naked in the courts. He is naked!

Said Blade Nzimande, galvanising Lenin’s masses: “It is our democratic right not to read City Press. Let us use this weekend to call on all our shop stewards’ councils, our churches, our branch meetings, our stokvels, our calls to radio stations to say human dignity, especially black dignity, must be respected in this country.”

But the Emperor is naked!

Said Jackson Mthembu: “Please apologise to the people of South Africa, the ANC and everybody . . . This pain has been so deep-seated.”
But the Emperor is naked!

Said David Makhura: “I would defend anyone who was insulted in the name of art.”

But the Emperor is naked!

Said the Cabinet: “This depiction also showed disrespect for the office of the president and the culture that he shares with millions of people.”

But the Emperor is naked!

Said Mathole Motshekga: (Mosiuoa) Lekota treats Parliament like a shebeen.

But the Emperor is naked!

Said the Film and Publication Board (FPB) in a submissive preamble to their classification report: “We mark child protection week this week and as the FPB we are closely linked to government’s programme of promoting the safety of children under the theme ‘working together for protection of children’.

Child protection is at the heart of our mandate and we exercise our duties with interests and needs of children in mind.

A classification of ‘16N’ has been decided upon by the classification committee for the artwork by Brett Murray titled ‘The Spear’ in its uncensored form.”
But the Emperor is naked!

In the foreground to all the public statements and engineered drama he started in his bid to secure public sympathy as victim of a racist attack, President Zuma conducted himself “normally”.

There he was on television among school children with one on his lap; there he was among the aged, bearing gifts to cheer their hearts; there he was announcing that Nkandla was on its way to being a city; and there he was turning the tap to “deliver” water to a woman in Hammanskraal who had written to him in desperation. The president was taking care of his people.

But the Emperor is naked!

Exactly what did I feel when I first saw The Spear (Umkhonto) in The Times on Friday, May 18?

I was jolted, but definitely not offended. I dug deep into myself to find out why I had this mixture of feelings. This got me looking at other artworks by Brett Murray on exhibition with The Spear.

I saw the broader context and understood why I was not offended.

My capacity to be offended had been eroded cumulatively and decisively by Zuma’s conduct before he became president of the ANC and president of South Africa, and ever since.

Numbed by disbelief at a string of disconcerting epi

sodes, I found myself struggling to turn numbness into outrage. Hail to the Thief II, Murray’s exhibition, I had to admit, expressed my outrage.

What kind of president of a country is not ashamed to be known to have brought political pressure to bear on his police services to have serious charges of murder and fraud dropped against an individual who does not inspire public confidence, so that this person can be reinstated as the head of crime intelligence?

Such conduct by the president is neither professionally nor morally justifiable. It does not “promote the unity of the nation which will advance the republic,” as the Constitution enjoins.

Prior to this, the president did nothing to reassure an anxious public when John Block, chairman of the ANC in the Northern Cape and its MEC for finance, was arrested and charged with tender fraud. Hazel Jenkins, the province’s premier, even stood in firm support of Block.

President Zuma comes across as being highly tolerant of criminality. In the context that criminal charges against him were unsatisfactorily withdrawn, his conduct in this respect should not be surprising.

ANC party members caught on the wrong side of the law are likely to receive active support or admonitory leniency. This presents an image of the president as not being committed to upholding, defending and respecting “the Constitution as the supreme law of the republic”.

Recently in Parliament, Zuma also declared that there was nothing wrong with politicians doing business with government. This implies he can be deemed to be permitting himself to do business with a government of which he is the head.

President Zuma doesn’t seem to have a clue about the fundamental conflict of interest.

Chancellor House is the most prominent, most visible and most disconcerting symbol of this.

Is it any wonder then that tender fraud has spread like a contagion across the country? The president of the republic has accorded it parliamentary tolerance.

The import of all this permits one to ask: just how far has South Africa gone down the path towards becoming a full-blown gangster state?

What about the spate of senior public appointments made, only to be challenged successfully before the courts? What about attacks, some by ministers and senior ANC party officials, on the courts and the Constitution?

What about threats to the sovereignty of the republic as a result of highly suspect, undeclared favours granted to either the governing party or, by extension, the government, by powerful foreign interests?

How much of our country has been given away in this manner? How much of our national dignity, respect and prestige have been lost as a result?
Who is running the country right now? Is it the ANC?

Or is it Cosatu or the SACP, neither of which has been voted into office?

Or has the “Tripartite Alliance” become the means by which they can exercise power after having avoided the rigours of winning an electoral mandate?

Are these organisations just two among many other interests, invisible-cloth swindlers who exert a powerful influence on the president and his party? Can they be deemed to have achieved the status of de factocontrol?

Are we in the throes of a benign coup d’état? Has the ANC become an empty shell, traded on the stock market of tenderpreneurship? Hail to the thief!

These questions should send a chilling message to all South Africans that it is time to begin to take their country back. The cumulative effect of it all is strongly suggestive to me: President Zuma seems eminently impeachable.

But a probable impeachment is not the point of this reflection. The point is to amplify why I was jolted by the courageous sensibility that composed The Spear and yet was not at all offended by it.

It was to point out the history of the corrosion or erosion of presidential dignity and respect as a result of consistent, even predictable, and questionable presidential conduct.

The Spear did not cause the disrespect and the loss of dignity; it simply reflected it. The Emperor is naked!

I watched with admiration as Zuma announced the removal from office of National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele. It seemed just right – until I remembered the Emperor.

The question was inescapable: would President Zuma survive the same investigative processes that led to the downfall of Cele?

What if the president put himself up for a Public Protector investigation? After all, he has nothing to fear. It would be far more healing than the announced conference on social cohesion.

The Emperor could stride into the streets wearing the most beautiful clothes ever, fully visible to the eyes of proud South Africans.

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Ndebele is a writer and research fellow of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, and a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.

Chris “Hush Money” Hani.  Walter “The Sweetener” Sisulu.  Joe “Mr Ten Percent” Slovo.  Steve “Kick-Back King” Biko.  Oliver “On The Take” Tambo. Embedded in five separate plaques, one below the other, these inscriptions and the image as a whole were what most stayed with me from Brett Murray’s provocative exhibition – Hail to the Thief - which closed at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town last week.

One’s first reaction to these – and I imagine, that for some, it will be the only reaction – is that the artist is dishonouring the memory of these struggle icons.  There will be many who play the tiresome race card and shoot the white messenger artist for his “racist attack” on black struggle heroes. When the emotional dust settles, and the politically correct (or rather, the politically opportunistic - where blackness is appropriated as a smokescreen under which to pursue and justify dubiously-gotten gain) knee-jerk reactions subside, the realisation dawns that Murray is but giving artistic expression to what even the ruling party’s closest political allies have been vociferous about.

Murray’s “President and Sons Ltd” or his “Hail to the Thief” iconography echoes COSATU’s Secretary General  Zwelinzima Vavi’s anger last August when he was particularly scathing about the ArcelorMittal Sishen mine deal in which family and friends of President Jacob Zuma received shares worth millions.  “We’re headed for a predator state where a powerful, corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas are increasingly using the state to get rich” said Vavi and continued that just like the hyena and her daughters eat first, the chief of state’s family eats first in a predator state.

Vavi’s anger, frustration and disappointment expressed in “We have to intervene now to prevent South Africa from becoming a state where corruption is the norm and no business can be done with government without first paying a corrupt gatekeeper,” reflects the anger and frustration themed through this exhibition.   Murray was a participating artist in the Arts Festival 86: Towards a People’s Culture of which I served as coordinator and which was banned before its start for constituting “a threat to the national security” of the apartheid state.  Little did the artists in that event believe that less than 25 years later they would have to raise a flag again in protest, in anger and disillusionment against those in the new political and economic elite who now dishonour the struggle against apartheid injustice and the heroes of that struggle, with their corrupt, scandalous behaviour that spits on the half of our population who continue to live below the poverty line.

Solomon Mahlangu, an ANC guerrilla who was hanged in 1979, and who was posthumously awarded the Order of Mendi for Bravery in Gold for bravery and sacrificing his life for freedom and democracy in South Africa in 2005, has his words on the day of his death reshaped by Murray in a poster “Tell my people that I love them and that they must continue the struggle for Chivas Regal, Mercs and kick-backs”.  There is now a school and a square in Mamelodi named after Solomon Mahlangu, as there are streets, parks and buildings named after Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Walter Sisulu, Joe Slovo and Oliver Tambo  - monuments to honour their dedication to a better life for all, and to remind us of our unjust, institutionally violent past so that we do not repeat it.

And yet, here we are, nearly seventeen years into our post-apartheid democracy, and we are the country with the world’s widest gap between rich and poor, with the worst indictment of the ruling party being average life expectancy for black people which now stands at around 50, twelve years less than in 1992 before it took over the reins of government in 1994.  Contrary to the ANC’s election promise of “a better life for all”, the reality has been “an obscenely better life for an elite, and a shorter life for most”.

What, then, is the point of such monuments, streets and public buildings named after fallen struggle heroes?  Did the numerous holocaust museums prevent subsequent genocides?  Did the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein commemorating thousands of Afrikaner women and children who died in British concentration camps prevent the apartheid government from assigning millions of black women to insufferable living conditions in bantustans?  Has the Baragwanath Hospital significantly improved access to public health care for the majority of our country’s inhabitants since being renamed the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital?  If anything, such memorialisation simply provides those who once were victims the “right” to abuse others in their attempts to ensure that they are never victims again, or that they prosper – even at the expense of others - from once having been victims of injustice.

Perhaps, then, we should have living monuments that challenge those in power and us as citizens on a daily basis to confront the injustices in our midst and truly to transform the lives of all so that we all enjoy in practice (not simply on paper) the rights and freedoms contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in our own country’s Constitution. Imagine, for example, every street being given a second name – that of person who’s died of AIDS-related causes under the Mbeki regime (that would provide more than 300 000 street names) and only as health and educational interventions succeed in reducing HIV infections and average life expectancy increases, are these names removed, one-by-one until we have an average life-expectancy of at least 70.

Or imagine, in big public spaces – the Waterfront in Cape Town or Sandton Square in Johannesburg – two walls, one listing (on a weekly basis) the millions of names of people who have lost their jobs after 1994, and the other listing the people who have been employed.

Or imagine every school being renamed after a (particularly, black) matriculant who actually found a job after completing school: how many schools will be left unnamed?

Perhaps these living monuments will drive us to action, whether through shame, guilt or real commitment to a better life for all. It is in how ordinary, particularly poor, people’s lives have been transformed after 1994 - fundamentally and sustainably - that our honouring of struggle heroes and icons will proved, rather than in how many streets, buildings or parks we name after them. While the political and economic elite – “predatory hyenas” - continues to indulge at the expense of the majority thereby dishonouring the struggle against apartheid’s injustices and mocking the sacrifices of the icons of that struggle, the work of artists like Brett Murray is not only necessary, it is imperative!‍

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Mike van Graan is the Secretary General of Arterial Network, a continent-wide network of artists, activists and creative enterprises active in the African creative sector and its contribution to development, human rights and democracy on the continent.  He is also the Executive Director of the African Arts Institute (AFAI), a South African NGO based in Cape Town that harnesses local expertise, resources and markets in the service of Africa’s creative sector.  He is considered to be one of his country’s leading contemporary playwrights.

Mike’s website
Arterial Network website
African Arts Institute

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Murray’s latest solo offering at the Goodman Gallery is everything one would expect from an artist who has spent over two decades bouncing three-dimensional tirades against authoritarianism and corruption off gallery walls. Falling neatly within this established line of attack, 'Hail to the Thief' is directed at the capriciousness of South Africa’s current political elite. The irony of Murray’s chosen subject, namely the coincidence of pseudo-socialist sloganeering and the spoils of privatized capital all exiting and entering the same set of mouths, has become a common butt of certain brands of South African humour and is difficult to miss.

The show follows on formally and thematically from Murray’s previous Goodman offering, 'Crocodile Tears' (2007; 2009). But while the list of ingredients is similar the palette has soured considerably – corporate maroons and deep soviet reds have replaced pastel blues while anger has replaced bemused astonishment. Populated by satire, sarcasm, and a major dose of disillusionment, the show is made up of a series of mocking screen prints, wall-mounted sheet-metal cutouts of populist insignia, badge-styled resin and aluminum reliefs, perspex cutouts and wooden collages, a take-away lithographed poster (featuring the ANC logo with the words, 'FOR SALE') and two freestanding bronzes. The bronzes, one party state (a seated, smoothly polished and chubby ape with both hands gripping and proffering his penis) and the party vs. the people (a larger ape mounting another from behind) are the subtlest of the works. Tellingly, one party state is an adaptation of a similar work Murray made in the 80s titled voortrekker.

The large hand-cut sheet-metal cutouts, gleaming of gold and silver leaf, sandwich socialist imagery (think sheaves of wheat, athletic sickle-bearing youths and beaming sunrises) and catchphrases (‘viva viva’, ‘amandla’ and ‘ubuntu’) with giant dollar signs. Others feature monarchic heraldry, eagles and lions, with bloodied claws and large hanging penises. The point is driven further by the screen prints, perspex cutout collages and a hard-hitting set of oversized nametags (titled the grave turners) for Steve ‘Kick-Back King’ Biko and Chris ‘Hush-Money’ Hani, Walter ‘The Sweetner’ Sisulu, Joe ‘Mr 10 Percent’ Slovo and Oliver ‘On the take’ Tambo. The screen prints, iconic posters exhumed from the '80s and edited to suit present day ideals, are probably the major dampening point. Solomon Mahlangu’s ‘tell my people that I love them and that they must continue the struggle’ is appended with ‘…for Chivas Regal, merc’s and kick-backs’, and the last line of ‘now you have touched the women you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed’ reads ‘you will be president’. In the back gallery, a set of wood and veneer collages assert statements from the Freedom Charter in the negative, ‘there shall not be houses and security for all’, ‘the wealth of the country shall not be shared by all’ etc.

For the most part, the tactic is predictably offensive and questionable – yet, as with much of Murray’s work, it's a simultaneously heartfelt and scathing response to an ultimately confusing set of circumstances made spectacular by popular culture and the media. While certain works falter in their impetus, the basic logic of ‘same trough different pigs’ or ‘same shit different flies’ (an appropriation of a comment by Breyten Breytenbach offered by the artist and a viewer at a walkabout) holds considerable weight. What pervades however is confusion. Breeding between disillusionment and anger, two perspex collages occupy alternate ends of this ultimately sentimental spectrum; the first titled killed twice states ‘Biko is Dead’ while the second simply spells out its title, Fuck all politicians.

And then there’s the blackface – red, yellow and brown perspex cut into the shapes of several figures triumphantly holding up a placard with a dollar sign, their mouths stretched into that unmistakable rubber smile. Although it’s subtle, the work (titled Cash) crosses and makes visible a thin and tense line strung up among all of the works. In a brief review of Murray’s show, Sean O’Toole mentions writer, critic and curator Khwezi Gule’s comment on Anton Kannemeyer’s work being racist (Gule made the comment within a Mail & Guardian review of Kannemeyer’s latest book ‘Papa in Afrika’ published in 2010 by Jacana). The book features a miscellany of extreme racial stereotypes from golliwog styled politicians to politically correct white liberals. It is unmistakably racist. Just like this. And although Murray has probably come the closest to finally creating a whiteface (the bubbleheads of his 2002 ‘White Like Me solo’ in Johannesburg) the inclusion of this scared white response to politicians that are the same as the old ones, just a different colour, is difficult to accept. It's not shocking, critical or funny, it’s naïve and problematic. But at least it’s honest.

It may be prudent to clarify here since the odds are, as usual, stacked at a slant (white artist, white cube, white director, white reviewer, white editor) – that unless we South Africans, all of us, can start being honest about our racism and the conditions that perpetuate it (like a 5-step program where admitting that there is a problem is the first and most important step) we will all remain stuck in this naïve and problematic space. Or maybe I’m just naïve.

Murray deals in race and identity along with politics and his work functions voluntarily as an emotional register. It’s a gut and a pop response to the action-packed media-driven tableau of the state of the nation and his position within it. While the shift of his gaze from internal to external (which does not necessarily mean from pink to brown) seems at first to create a less nuanced, less subtle and less complex rendition of the given state of affairs, the consistency of his honesty remains as a redeeming critical factor. Once again taking up the position of the child throwing rocks at a tank, or even sand, or bubbles – an image which seems divisive in terms of innocent and guilty but still sees violence coming from both sides – Murray does little to disguise his anger and his naivety.

Nevertheless, if this is how we are (in Murray’s words) to ‘scratch at the soft underbelly’ of the ruling party, the political elite, the despots and the kleptocrats, we may have to sharpen our sticks.

Brett Murray is back with a new body of satirical work that continues his acerbic attacks on abuses of power, corruption and political dumbness

Brett Murray, left, and his bronze sculpture One Party State, 2010 CAPE TOWN Nov. 19, 2010 — By his own admission, Brett Murray is as disgusted by the language of his own press release as he is with the status quo of governance in South Africa. Speaking at a press walkabout at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, the artist read an excerpt from a statement announcing his new solo exhibition, Hail to the Thief, which opens tomorrow.

Tipping his reading glasses onto his nose, the Michaelis graduate and former University of Stellenbosch sculpture lecturer honed in on one particular bit of text. “Murray’s bronzes, etchings, paintings and silk-screens,” he read, “form part of a vitriolic and succinct censure of bad governance and are his attempts to humorously expose the paucity of morals and greed within the ruling elite.” The reading was followed by a number of sharp expletives. Installation view of Hail the Thief, with The Party vs. The People, 2010, in foregorund Underlying this self-conscious putdown is the artist’s genuine anger at what he views as the failure of the post-1994 dream. Active in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, Murray describes the current status quo as “not a dream deferred, but a dream shat on”. He was explicitly referencing Mark Gevisser’s 2008 biography, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, the book’s subtitle drawn from the title of a poem by Langston Hughes. Brett Murray, Viva Vavi, 2010, metal, gold and silver leaf, 149 x 147 x 13cm While the messaging animating many of his works is often unambiguous (“Biko is Dead”), provocative (“Oliver ‘On the Take’ Thambo”), and inviting of rote displays of outrage (a repurposed ANC logo features only the words “for sale”), Murray repeatedly spoke about how he found consolation in the process of making. Meticulously crafted, two bronze statues on display speak of his formal inclinations as a sculptor.

A close view of the surface of his parodic crests also offers its own pleasures — the gold leaf detailing has been overlaid onto rough, untreated metal surfaces. It is at the level of detail, one senses, that Murray’s anger and “default setting” as a satirical moralist is modulated, tempered, perhaps even reconciled. Take home graphics featuring the ANC’s “for sale” logo During the walkabout, after discussing the pros and cons of registering protest and public discontent in the rarefied context of a gallery, Murray revealed that the title for his current show was suggested by a piece of graffiti he had seen in New York last year, while on an Ampersand Foundation residency.

Asked about his impressions of younger artists working in either a satirical and/or poltical mode, he favourably mentioned Stuart Bird, Michael MacGarry and Dan Halter. He is also said, when asked about the recent criticism of Anton Kannemeyer’s work by Khwezi Gule as racist, that he admired Kannemeyer’s provocations.”I am Enid Blyton in comparison,” he said, referring to the English author of the popular – and not entirely uncontroversial – Noddy character.

I think in the construction of Wayne Barker’s catalogue recently published by SMAC Gallery, the decision to present him as a “personality” who makes art is a disservice to his art making. It is an easy mistake to make as it presents, in catalogue form, the colourful enigmatic cliché of artist as enfant terrible…the Romantic notion of the delinquent creative struggling with life’s hard questions… seeking solace in the bottle late into the night, fighting his and our demons. The perpetuation of these myths of the tortured creative soul should be laid to rest. This is fine material for cheesy novels but ultimately unhelpful in the context of his catalogue as it clouds a more precise reading of his work, his intentions and his craft.

When thinking about Barend’s work, my initial impulse is to heed this warning…and steer clear of the personal, the character, and the flamboyant and ever present presence of Barend in his work and in our lives. I find this difficult. His work and the packaging of himself and his collections of things as artworks necessitate an integrated reading. His art school quip that “Art is what you make it” resonates. This neat, if not innocent, presentation of “All that I am and all that I do is Art” underscores much of his practice. As a result you have to start looking beyond the more formal displays of his craft and begin to amalgamate this with an examination of other aspects of his life. His collections of clothes, yo-yos, hats, fishing paraphernalia and other things that are out of sight need to be perused. You need to look at the particularity in the design of his rooms, houses and studios. His spatial architecture, as it were… and his pens and his knives and his tattoos as well. His friends and associates must also be seen as part of this collection.

When thinking about his work I consistently go back to the object. Whether it is this personal collection of things or his manufacturing and crafting of new objects. By specific choices he shines a light on the uncomplicated things around us, things overlooked. These choices are made with an eye for simplicity, design and popular history and driven by an idea that in choosing them (or making them) he imbues each with a coolness and profundity. They are presented as extensions of himself. A world is created which reflects himself in all his stylish wonder. He is a playful narcissist where all roads lead to Rome. All of which communicates an incredible self-belief, a confidence that is evident in all that he does. What usually inverts this indulgence and manifests in cathartic release is the often self-effacing humour that runs just below the surface of almost all of what he does. A facetious, if not arrogant exuberance is always evident. Tongue-in-cheek… if it’s not in your ear. This is Planet Barend.

So to remove the personality from the artwork, in this instance, is difficult. More so as all these investigatory prompts are implicit in the artworks themselves. His distrust for “academic readings” of his works, which exist in a world where “What you see is what you get”, should be recognised. The objects and performances themselves spark possible conceptual narratives but almost always refer back to themselves. Whether he presents them as Art with a capital A or as knitted caps or as a display of yo-yo tricks or as tattoo artists drawings there is always a clear, precise and unyielding consistency binding all of his practice. A playful Zen like approach to his creative decisions might appear obvious in the development of his personal lexicon. Obvious, not in its pejorative sense but rather in the sense that this describes the simple and profound effortlessness of his conceptual and formal constructs and the clear linear extension of a formal language and of personal iconographies, obviously.

“Its not who does it first but who does it best!” is another Barend art-school truism so it won’t hurt to mention some artists who might help inform us of precedence, both stylish and conceptual, and could bracket some of his practices. Erwin Wurm and his odd photographs of absurd performances spring to mind, as do his sculptures. Piero Manzoni’s ironic conceptual art is a helpful guide. Clause Oldenberg’s monumental celebration of the banal would need a nod. Alexander Calder’s sculptures and his home spun tools and jewellery might have some resonance. Miro’s formal language and lyrical lightness might be evident in some of the early metal work and his later bronze and plaster-of-Paris collages. Fichli and Weiss’s haphazard balancing acts are apt in this context as well. Always present in Barend’s work are low-art references and celebrations. Knitting, embroidery, glass drawing, tattooing, and yo-yo tricks are all assembled in a sophisticated yet simple flower arrangement of things and performances. An urbane lampooning of the seriousness of high art is constructed with intelligence and humour which revels in the mundane.

If Tom Waits was called Tiaan Wessels and was sitting in a bar in Welkom he would be singing a boozy song about the circus act that just pulled into town…about a tattooed man who sat around naked, knitting hats, watching porn…about “The Man who Drank His Wife”.

Now if that is not perpetuating myths, nothing is.

Brett Murray
August 2010

(Kathryn Smith has compiled a monograph of Barend’s work for The SMAC Gallery. She asked a few of his friends and colleagues to put down their thoughts regarding his work to assist her in this endeavour…)

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Post-apartheid South Africa prides itself on the freedom that the arts enjoy within a democracy that supposedly provides fertile ground for such freedom. However, where there is power there is manipulation and control and an attempt to curtail freedom of expression in the arts when it outrages or criticises the state. South Africa is no exception. Harrisson expresses herself succinctly on this point in the following quote:

The international, although by no means universal, appeal of art is mirrored by its ability to provoke controversy the world over. Significantly, the catalysts for outrage and censorship seem by and large to be the same; countries that take pride in their liberality and support for freedom of expression react in ways remarkably similar to those they perceive to be repressive. (Harrisson, S. 12-09-10: http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/art/overview.php)

In recent years there have been disturbingly frequent cases where the South African government has over-stepped boundaries in order to attempt to suppress art and freedom of expression. This applies not just to the arts, but also to the media; journalists from newspapers and news channels have been threatened too with the recent discussions surrounding the implementation of a media tribunal which would restrict journalists’ media coverage . Such drastic measures threaten to silence critical voices in the art world and elsewhere and compel me to examine the work of a South African artist who addresses thorny issues that directly confront and caricature such forms of hypocrisy in his mixed-media artworks. Brett Murray is an artist who has managed to maintain a certain level of sharp and relevant critique of current events without provoking censorship from the government.

The aim of this research paper will be to examine Brett Murray’s work in terms of its controversial nature, its ability to provoke critical responses, and to consider the importance of such an artist in the current atmosphere of control over freedom of expression. In doing this I also wish to explore how Murray problematizes the issue of his own identity. He does this by both confronting his audience through a debunking form of caricature, while at the same time confronting his own persona and experience and inserting these into his work. As Ivor Powell points out: “What is particularly noteworthy in Brett Murray’s work […] is that the artistically crucial question of identity – the creative and self-definitive position in consciousness out of which the artist operates and from which the work derives its significance and effect – remains far more a problem than a given” (2002: 6). Murray’s self interrogation and self portrait seen through his use of caricature and the use of his own image, manages to interrogate his position in the world and his identity as a white, privileged male living in South Africa today. As Powell further points out, Murray suggests a caricatured self-portrait that runs through his work as a kind of leitmotif and “takes us emblematically into a world made as it were in the image of the artist. It takes is into a realm of discourse where experience is questioned in terms of its conditioning and partialities, and where the underpinnings of the discourse are integral to the force and the significance of the work” (Powell, I. 2002: 7).

Murray grapples with his place in the world as a kind of “white middle class cultural hybrid”, being a white male who was formally “unfairly advantaged” and who carries “anxiety, guilt and opprobrium” because of the shame of apartheid, as Ivor Powell puts it. (2002: 7-9). As a person and an artist he is greatly influenced and affected by his place in the world and the way in which he exists in the body that he is in. He does not shy away from touchy subjects and he says: “My objective is not to insult, it is to provoke” (Williamson, S. 2009: 174). Murray does not go out of his way to offend the public; his works are carefully thought out and constructed to provoke debates and discussions instead of emotional outcries. Murray can thus be seen to work in a very satirical way or in a “critically entertaining” way, as Sue Williamson has said, getting his audience to think critically through an unflinchingly frank but also humorous approach. (http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/sue-williamsons-sasol-wax-award-2009-interview/)

Murray has an impressive record of achievements. He was awarded his Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town in 1989. Between 1991 to 1994 Murray newly established and taught in the sculpture department at the University of Stellenbosch and curated the show Thirty Sculptors from the Western Cape in 1992. In 1995 he co-curated, with Kevin Brand, the exhibition titled Scurvy, at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. That year Murray also co-curated Junge Kunst Aus Süd- Afrika for the Hänel Gallery in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1997 he organised, with Robert Weinek, the show Smokkel as a fringe event for the second Johannesburg Biennale. In 1999, Murray and seven colleagues, Lisa Brice, Kevin Brand, Bruce Gordon, Andrew Putter, Sue Williamson, Robert Weinek and Lizza Littlewort, co-founded Public Eye which was a non-profit company aimed at initiating and managing public art projects in Cape Town. They initated outdoor sculpture projects which included the Spier Sculpture Biennale and Homeport, which involved 15 artists who created site specific text-based works in Cape Town’s waterfront precinct. They also initiated projects on Robben Island, worked together with the city health officials on aids awareness campaigns and they hosted multi-media events and parties across the city that were funded by cultural bodies. (http://www.brettmurray.co.za/biography/)

Murray often works with images and ideas taken from popular culture and contemporary society. He works predominantly in sculpture but also creates drawings and works in photographic processes and print media. His ability to shift between these various media enables him to articulate his ideas fluidly and according to the medium that would best support his ideas. The many popular characters that he uses, including Bart Simpson, Richy Rich and other cartoon characters or even animals, all form part of a commonly recognised language. Murray comments on this by saying: “If you want to satirically comment about what is happening around you, if you want to make an impact, you have to have a framework, a point of reference which is understandable. These are familiar images, which draw them [the audience] in, you can then pull the rug out from beneath them…” (Murray, B. 2002: 145)

Murray’s first solo show at the Johannesburg Market Gallery in 1989 is a perfect example of Murray as an uncompromising critic. South Africa at this point was in a state of emergency as the end of apartheid was imminent. The show upset a group of right wing extremists as it included a selection of small-sculptures of fat, rotund figures made in fibreglass and resin in a cartoon-like style that Murray has continued to pursue in his work. The sculptures depicted, for example, a white policeman who was quite literally too big for his boots in that his shoes far outsized his body and another work depicted a pig’s head wearing a helmet . (O’ Toole, S: http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/brett-murrays-dark-comedy-sean-o-tooles-essay/)

Powell points out that,

[t]he series rests essentially on a caricaturing technique of psychotic exaggeration, but at the same time, Murray has emblematically taken the subject matter and the socio-historical critique within his own consciousness. And he has done this by locating his figuration against a source caricature- that of the artist himself. (Powell, I. 2002: 7)

By depicting a caricatured, short and stocky male figure, Murray can perhaps even be seen to position himself in relation to the characters that he portrays as he himself is quite short and stocky in stature . This becomes more evident in later works where he identifies, for example, with the anti-hero cartoon character of Bart Simpson in his work. There are many other examples, too, where Murray’s own image is used to express his dissatisfaction with the way things are, notably in his photographic series depicting himself in various guises . Murray’s first show was his step into the world as a satirical sculptor and was a clear marker for things to come. Throughout Murray’s work so far, he has continued to use his own image as a source of his biting critique on the world.

In 1999 Murray exhibited an installation of photographs that documented and exposed his childhood, called The Rivonia Years: Guilt and Innocence . Williamson writes about this work: “Murray showed photographs from his family album, by implication contrasting his own white suburban upbringing with the experience of those incarcerated on the island”. (http://www.artthrob.co.za/00may/reviews.html) This installation is a very clear and concise example of how Murray has analysed his own identity to express his own dissatisfaction with the way things were at the time. The installation included a photograph of Murray as a 6 year old child dressed and made up as a black African child. His body was painted black and he wore a loincloth, a perfect stereotype of the humble savage seen through the warped lenses of apartheid . Powell points out the “fortuitous but inescapable hauntedness of the expression on the young Murray’s face” (2002: 8). This photograph, together with others of his family and poses with the old South African flag, create an idea of how and in what kind of social environment he grew up . Murray explains that he grew up in the apartheid years and comes from a family that is half-English, half-Afrikaans. He talks about how he was born a few months before Nelson Mandela and other Rivonia trialists were imprisoned and states that:

this was and is my comfortable and uncomfortable inheritance. The political and social forces beyond the confines of my family formed a system which protected and infringed on me, empowered and disempowered me, promoted and denied me. When I looked beyond my private experiences of loves and relationships, family and friends and of boy becoming man, the contradictions in this system, which divided my life from others, resulted in a cross-questioning of responsibility and complicity. (http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/guilt-and-innocence/)

Murray has constantly and courageously confronted that which he disapproves of, in himself.

Satirical artists seem to be grouped together with caricaturists and cartoonists as they jointly set out to meaningfully poke fun at those in power . Murray has referred to his work as satirical and has explained that within satire there are different ranges, from the one-liner to a more layered kind of humour that is more metaphorical. Murray works with all of these ranges of satire, as is clearly evident in his work. Many of Murray’s text pieces could be called one-liners in that they are short, punchy text pieces that resemble a cartoon punch-line or a billboard headline. (http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/sue-williamsons-sasol-wax-award-2009-interview/)

Within this mode of art creation, Murray manages to put into words his frustrations or opinions in a way that encourages a response through a very pithy and direct form of address or comic expression. The text piece, Our Religion Must Win (2006) , for example, is a kind of dramatic one-liner that intends to strike the viewer powerfully in its assertively self-righteous voice. Its simplicity and directness is unmistakeable and it is a message that sticks with the viewer because of its touchy subject matter, that of religiously inspired dominance. It simultaneously critiques that which it asserts by providing a space where the viewer realises its irony and the power that religions have over cultures and therefore whole groups of people and countries. The thing that I enjoy most about the piece is that it accuses every religion equally. It is simple and open-ended enough to point at diverse people equally.

The exhibition White Like Me (2002) is a perfect example of Murray’s intention to not side with any one cause, much like he does in his Our Religion Must Win text piece. For the White Like Me exhibition, roughly named after the hair products Black Like Me , Murray uses a cartoon style to pinpoint exact places of sensitivity in social mores and behaviours and pokes them very sharply by incisively capturing moments that illustrate and foreground such fundamental values of a group or society. My favourite of the cartoons, Black Fascism , which are made out of profile-cut perspex and metal, shows three children playing and the text below reads: “We’ve played white fascist, white fascist, now let’s play black fascist, black fascist”. The cartoon evokes an almost ‘laugh out loud’ response and has a relevance to our society today in that it projects the idea that perhaps apartheid and its practice of racial stereotyping could be reversed. The humour is unexpected too, coming from a picture of children playing, i.e. situating the question raised at the level of ‘innocent’ play but simultaneously at the root of social development, namely childhood. In this way it hits the viewer even harder in that it posits the question of the effects of power to each race equally. He may be saying that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” .

Another piece that, for me, sums up the conceptual thinking of the exhibition very succinctly is a piece called Us and Them . It consists of two identical illustrations of aliens that are framed and hung next to each other on a wall. Both are depicted as white silhouettes against a black background. They are cartoon-like figures with large noses and a weirdly long antenna protruding from the tops of their heads - it is an image of an alien as popular culture has created. Whilst the images of the aliens are truly identical, the one is labelled Us and the other Them. Although much of the show consisted of one-liners, this piece managed to drive Murray’s point home in its simplicity and directness. In their identical guise he wittily underscores the point that our perception of aliens and the ‘other’ is usually something that is not different from our own image, as during the apartheid years when black people were ‘othered’ because of the colour of their skin and other cultural differences that distinguish them from the ‘norm’ or ‘ideal’, i.e. white people. This piece thus forces me as a viewer to think of the context of apartheid, but also more broadly and generally of attitudes amongst different people in the whole world, and even beyond. As Virginia McKenny puts it: “Instead of skirting the issues, Murray engages them with characteristic wit and humour- calling a spade a bloody shovel and treating us all as equal aliens.”(2002: 145)

The critic Hazel Friedman once remarked: “The raw power of Murray’s work lies in its ability to strike the viewer in that place where a laugh and a gasp are indistinguishable” (O’Toole, S: http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/brett-murrays-dark-comedy-sean-o-tooles-essay/). Friedman could not have put it more accurately in pointing out the merging of humour and pointed critique in his work. Murray’s ability to combine these two emotions is what makes his art edgy. As Colin Richards has put it:
Hurt is serious. Humour, a slightly bland word, but no other serves, is not usually spoken in the same breath as hurt. To seek humour in historical hurt – whether it be the violence of poverty, or the insults and injuries of war and genocide – is profoundly risky. To do so is to give humour a hurtful edge, and make it a provocation. (http://artsouthafrica.com/?news=45.)
Murray combines humour and hurt to create a sweet and sour combination where the result becomes exactly such a form of provocation.
Murray’s work is also strikingly simple in its ‘objectness’ or the way in which it is presented to the viewer. Figures are simplified to cartoon-like forms that take on a generic character and texts are also presented in cartoon-like simplicity. His text pieces are often physically accentuated by way of jutting strongly off the wall or hovering in front of it. This sculptural treatment is obviously very different from a cartoon in a newspaper and it lends a certain physical punch which is different from the ‘throw-away’ newspaper status of a cartoon, giving the work a more serious and legitimizing edge. Much like a billboard demands attention due to its size and clarity and directness of text, Murray’s works plays with similar means to engage the viewer’s attention. Often his very simple sculptures and text pieces ‘develop’ with further or repeated viewing in the sense that the initial message that is brought across in Murray’s work may at first appear to mean one thing but may subsequently take on a deeper and more meaningful edge once such layers of meaning have been identified by the viewer. In this way his works display a sophisticated play with irony and ambiguity.

Essays and discussions about Murray’s work help to engage with the meaning of works that could otherwise be lost or written off as simple one-liners. It is as if Murray intends for the work to be talked about and discussed instead of merely being viewed. Murray has said that he “desires to prick consciousness” (O’Toole, S: http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/brett-murrays-dark-comedy-sean-o-tooles-essay/). Pricking consciousness implies a sharp and almost unpleasant action that provokes the mind to continue thinking about it. As Powell puts it: “Murray himself put it very nicely, talking about seeking through the humour in his work, not so much as to amuse as to hit the funny bone. It’s not funny , it hurts, when you hit the funny bone” (Powell, I. http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/ivor-powells-i-love-africa-catalogue-essay/). The effect of humour, in the way that Murray uses it, allows for many kinds of reactions. To quote Colin Richards again:

Humour is protean. It enjoys intimacy as much as spectacle. It can be acid, gentle, lyrical, bombastic. It can be a barb, a balm, a bomb. It can be monstrous and unfunny. It is always embodied; a smile that bites, a laugh that explodes, a grim grin. (http://artsouthafrica.com/?news=45)

Our Religion Must Win has a pricking reaction in that it simultaneously provokes the viewer on a personal as well as a more broader level in that it speaks so clearly about ‘them’ and ‘us’, their religion which is supposedly ‘wrong’ and our religion which is supposedly ‘right’ according to certain values set in society. At the same time it leaves an ambiguous space open enough to apply to all religious groups. If the text piece was read by a Jew or a Muslim, the same insult would apply- wars are fought where both sides believe that their religion is the right one. The viewer is then forced to think of the reaction of people of other religions and their reaction to this statement and thus confront the hard-headedness of it that it throws back at the viewer. It is thus able to provoke critical self-reflection in the viewer from a very simple and direct starting point. The simplicity and boldness of the statement encourages a reaction not unlike the direct address of a billboard or, for example, a warning on a box of cigarettes. It presents itself as fact or pronouncement but then becomes quite humorous on reflection.

Murray’s desired confrontation is captured in what he once said: “I know I’ve succeeded when my work is offensive to some.” This playful but also somewhat transgressive confrontation is most interesting to me in its somewhat ambiguous pronouncement. It is as though Murray is playing a game with his viewers in that he doesn’t, yet he also does to an extent, want to offend. This tells me that Murray creates work with the intention of provoking a reaction, not merely to have his work appreciated as art, but also to be interacted or engaged with as a form of ‘activism’ or shaking up. The kind of laughter produced by Murray’s work has been describes as “difficult laughter” by art writer Sean O’Toole. (http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/brett-murrays-dark-comedy-sean-o-tooles-essay/). This hurtful humour allows the artist certain freedoms from constraints. It allows the truth to be present even when it at first may not be apparent. In this context, Colin Richard points out:

Humour and art share much in common in enabling access to a world of freedom and intuition. Both find absolute values alien. Both ignore all barriers, permit contradictions and constitute an experimental space where human concerns are introduced to us in all their relativities, with one’s own failure always in view. Manifest in this kind of humour is a preparedness to test its own identity and put it on the line, at that moment where humour becomes painful. Then, in the deepest consciousness of humanity, the subversive truth comes knocking. (Richards, C. http://artsouthafrica.com/?news=45)

Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro) is definitely the most well know newspaper cartoonists in South Africa. He produces cartoons that are biting and shocking at times, but mostly extremely clever and witty in the way in which they address and caricature current political and social news events. When looking at an example of Shapiro’s work one can tell that little is held back. Character assassination through exaggeration and even nudity takes place in a very funny and cleverly crafted way. Shapiro’s work also aims for a reaction similar to Murray’s, however a lot less tactfully most of the time and with a different intent and approach. In South Africa there have recently been many headlines about art offending powerful people. Unlike Jonathan Shapiro, who specifically creates cartoons for newspapers to critically satirise the government and push the boundaries as far as possible, Murray has managed to avoid scrutiny and scorn from the government. Perhaps this is due to the less public nature of his work or due to the fact that his critique of the government hasn’t been as directly insulting as Shapiro’s. Shapiro as cartoonist, but also other artists like Yiull Damaso, have not been as lucky . This does not, however, mean that Murray’s work has not created a stir.

An example of the controversial and visually effective nature of Murray’s work in rousing public response can be seen in one of his early public sculptures. In 1998 Murray won the Cape Town Urban Art Competition which resulted in the erection of a 3,5meter high bronze sculpture called Africa (2000) . The sculpture is a large-scale bronze recreation of an African traditional wooden figurine, with several bright yellow Bart Simpson heads protruding from it as if to imply a form of intrusion by Western commodification or viral take-over. The replica of an average tourist statuette is smoothly modelled and has a dark, wood- like quality in its bronze patina that is highly contrasted against the harsh, bright yellow of the Bart Simpson heads .

Murray got the inspiration for the piece from a walk he took through the area which features several flea market stalls where people have been selling African curios and adjacent shops sell mass-produced items such as Bart Simpson key rings. He says of his intention that “I wanted to celebrate the cultural marketplace and the weird cultural hybrid which is all of us South Africans” (Murray, B. 2000: 15). Murray continued his exploration of his own identity in this piece too. “What am I? Who am I? I am a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I wanted to celebrate that uneasy relationship and also to make something entertaining and provocative” (Murray, B. 2000: 15) The use of Bart Simpson is a recurring character in his work and perhaps, as I have already pointed out, Murray sees a lot of himself in the bad- boy, outspoken, revolting teenager persona. As Murray has said: “Bart Simpson is a little white male who says things he shouldn’t. He likes to make things provocative and in-your-face, to get people talking.”(2002: 145)

The sculpture caused quite a bit of controversy because of its subject matter and the idea of African culture being depicted as commodified or taken over. Some felt that the sculpture was offensive to West African communities (Williamson, S. http://www.artthrob.co.za/00may/). Protesters had even threatened to be present at the opening to prevent the erection of this sculpture that they thought to be offensive. The Cape Town City Council initially deemed the sculpture culturally sensitive as they thought it might offend those who found the sculpture spiritually significant. Prof. Kole Omotoso, a well know Nigerian academic, wrote an article claiming that the sculpture was not offensive or spiritually significant. On the topic Murray said: “I started making it and was three-quarters of the way when officials said they believed it would insult sensibilities or peoples’ religious beliefs. But these were just excuses.” (Underhill, G; 2000: 15). Murray was even preparing to go to court over the matter to ensure that he could complete the statue and erect it as it was agreed (Underhill, G; 2000: 15). After much deliberation, the Cape Town City Council allowed Murray to continue working on the sculpture and it was then erected without difficulty in St Georges Mall (http://www.artthrob.co.za/99sept/news.html#murray). The public had mixed reactions to the work, two thirds of Cape Argus readers, who responded to a phone-in poll during the week of the sculpture’s erection, hated the sculpture while the other third loved it. (Underhill, G; 2000: 15)

The controversy surrounding the artwork Africa can be largely ascribed to its ambiguous nature. It can be read in many different ways and the public’s readings of the sculpture were quite insightful too. While some thought the work commented on the incursion of a colonising Western culture labelled American, (which could be seen as a fairly ‘obvious’ reading in the intrusion of Bart Simpson heads), others felt it was about a syncretistic African culture, where a positive cross-pollination is taking place (Roper, C. 2000: 20). The multiple readings of the work show how Murray successfully creates works that allow for various layers of meaning to evolve or to be brought to the work. This work certainly gives rise to a number of speculations as to the exact meaning of the sculpture, and as Joyce Ozinsky said in her launch speech: “The mixed message will provoke and stimulate. What it isn’t, is wallpaper. It will never fade into the background”. Ozinsky “went on to laud Cape Town for being the first South African city to adopt an outstanding piece of contemporary art as a public monument. (Williamson, S; https://www.artthrob.co.za/00may/review.html)

More recently, Murray’s work has created even more unexpected controversy, this time from a gallery where it was to be displayed. In 2007 one of Murray’s works Brotherhood was made for inclusion in a show at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town. The text piece read OSAMA BIN COHEN in large golden letters projecting from the wall, referring to both a Muslim and a Jewish name being combined to make one incongruous sounding name. Further obvious ‘insult’ arrives from the conjoining of the name of the Al Qaeda leader, widely considered a terrorist opposed to the Jewish state, and a common Jewish name. The Goodman gallery decided that the piece was too potentially offensive to exhibit seeing that the gallery is located in a Muslim section of Cape Town and many of the gallery’s clients are Jewish (Williamson, S. 2009). When I asked Murray about this incident in an interview he said he felt that the exclusion of the work from the show was a short-sighted decision by the gallery. Murray believes that art like his piece Brotherhood has the possibility of opening up debates and discussions and so should not have been censored. The Goodman Gallery had many meetings with Murray to discuss the withdrawal of the piece and Murray said that this work had really “touched a nerve”. Murray goes on to say that he achieved what he wanted from the piece because it was exactly those preconceived notions of culture, religion and identity that the work was addressing that was exposed in the reaction to the work by the gallery staff and he considers it “a job well done” (personal communication, 2 August 2010).

From Murray’s reaction to his censorship from the Goodman Gallery one can tell that although he was disappointed with the exclusion of the work, he still felt that “it was a job well done” because it had “touched a nerve” and created the reaction that he would have wanted from the audience anyway. As he puts it: “There are profound similarities between the Jewish and Muslim religions. What was interesting was that the internal discussions around showing the piece were exactly the kind of discussions that I would have liked to have encouraged publicly”. This tells me that Murray thrives on exactly that reaction and does not shy away from negative reactions to his work. The controversial nature of his work obviously suggests that not everyone will agree with everything he is saying. He has created a platform from which he can voice his opinions and freely express himself and that platform is the work that he creates and the risks that he takes. Negative reaction from a few may mean that the work is creating its desired effect. When asking Murray about the withdrawal of his work from the Goodman Gallery, he stated that the censorship was a one time thing and that if it ever happened again he would be forced to withdraw from the show. Murray went on to say that it is easy to make offensive works and that if he was looking for media attention he could produce a few slanderous works and be labelled a “media slut”. Clearly Murray strives for his work to be talked about and engaged with on a much deeper level than for the shock value or provocation aspect alone (personal communication, 2 August 2010).

Murray’s 2008 exhibition at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, was titled Crocodile Tears, so named perhaps to express an insincere display of grief either by the artist or by corrupt politicians who feel no remorse for exploiting the country and its money. The exhibition was clearly about wealth, money, excess and power and explored political themes relating to current events in South Africa. For example, a text piece aimed at Jacob Zuma reads: “Every time I hear you sing the machine gun song I don’t know whether to laugh or cry”. The piece is called Tragi-com. The machine gun song or Mshini Wam is a song that was sung during apartheid and the lyrics mean: “Bring me my machine gun.” It was sung during the struggle to motivate people against the white apartheid government. Today, 20 years after the fall of apartheid, many people are asking if the song still has any relevance for the ANC as a call for arms. Murray’s text piece manages to pose a prying question waiting to be asked in response to the government’s seemingly oblivious attitude towards the calling for arms whilst we are experiencing one of the highest crime rates in the world. In commenting on this hard-hitting exhibition, Mary Corrigall puts it succinctly by saying: “It’s a rare occasion but, every so often, an artist or cultural producer creates a product that taps into the prevailing Zeitgeist with such accuracy – unearthing the underbelly of present-day conditions with such precision – that it makes one’s skin tingle and crawl.” (http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/mary-corrigalls-crocodile-tears-review/)

Crocodile Tears visually addresses opulence and wealth most obviously in the use of bright gold-leaf applied to the text pieces and some of the works and there are also allusions to Renaissance dress and high society mores. Sculptures of copulating dogs and direct text pieces point fingers to our government and its corrupt dealings. Crocodile Tears IV (2008) is a cut-out image in mild steel of a woman dressed in an elaborate, frilly dress with an extravagant headdress. She has a dark skin colour and is crying a long line of blue tears down to a puddle on the floor. The opulent gown and headdress with its details are all covered in gold leaf and recalls pre-revolution French aristocracy. The image speaks directly of the accumulation of wealth and the excess of it, i.e. decadence – with oblique reference to the luxurious lives of many politicians in South African ruling circles.

Much like the French revolution, in fact, recent strike action by public service workers have pointed fingers at the wealth of the government and even blamed corruption for the fact that they are paid so little while the elite few live in the lap of luxury. Unlike a cartoonist who would represent a likeness of the character being caricaturised, Murray hardly uses distinctive faces of specific individuals, but prefers to use metaphors.

In conclusion, Murray’s interrogation of his own identity and his place in South Africa today has resulted in a body of work that is both highly critical of the current government but also highly critical of most forms of power in general. Murray speaks broadly and effectively in a way that is accessible to most people because of the simple and popular language that he has developed. The importance of artists like Murray can be seen and measured by the responses that he has received from the public and his critics. Murray’s uncompromising criticism of the world around him expressed through shocking and funny artworks that utilise the power that humour has to break down boundaries and subtly encourage change by pointing out obvious faults in a new and exciting way. His use of a combination of hurt and humour are seamless. A comment by Colin Richards encapsulates the power of humour neatly as follows:
Humour seeks to make light of a dark world, or vice versa. It is part of our incessant, courageous struggle to create an imaginative space in which to live more fully. Where hurt and violence can feel generalised and indifferent to the particular, humour always seems ineluctably particular and individual. The sense of humour also distinguishes the human animal from the purely animal. Humour may even be a sign of what it means to be fully human. (http://artsouthafrica.com/?news=45)
Murray’s particular use of humour together with a biting critique transcends the boundaries of caricaturing as carried out by newspaper cartoonists and displays a sophisticated level of intellectual grappling with issues that pertain to our politics and society. In South Africa today, fragile lines are being crossed that will inevitably erode away at our constitution and it is artists and thinkers like Murray who give a voice to the rest of us who may often feel voiceless.

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Footnotes
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1) The proposed “media tribunal” and the Protection of Information Bill is an attempt at regulating what can be reported on and what constitutes a state secret. The tribunal could have serious repercussions on the media in terms of freedom of expression. The government believes that it is necessary to limit the amount of ‘damage’ that a reporter can do to an innocent party by publishing false or damaging information. Helen Zille of the Democratic Alliance has said that “If passed, the Protection of Information Bill will criminalise investigative journalism.” Zille furthermore said of the draft Act described by the Freedom of Expression Institute as a bid to cover up wrongdoing and silence criticism of the government: “Just like under apartheid, the government will invoke the national interest to cover up every abuse of power.” (http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/295523)

2)See addendum 1a for image
3)See addendum 1b for image of Brett Murray
4)See addendum 1c for image
5)This work was first exhibited on Robben Island in 1997 in an exhibition titled Thirty Minutes. Nelson Mandela, and other political prisioners, were imprisoned on Robben Island for decades during the apartheid era.
6)See addendum 2a for image
7)See addendum 1d for image.
8)One might also recall here the response of Nelson Mandela to Jonathan Shapiro when the cartoonist apologised for any offence he might have caused with his depictions of the then-president. ‘that’s your job, Zapiro’, Mandela replied, laughing, ‘That’s your job.’”(Williamson, S: http://www.artthrob.co.za/00may/reviews.html).

9)See addendum 2b for image
10)See addendum 2c for image
11)See addendum 2d for image
12)“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” has been a popularised saying from the book Animal Farm by George Orwell. The move of power from humans to animals in the book shows this power shift results in the same mistakes being repeated by the animals too. The saying refers to the dangers of absolute power and the corruption that inevitably follows.
13)See addendum 2e for image
14)Yiull Damaso’s painting has been a hot topic for debate recently. His painting is a take on Rembrandt’s 17th century masterpiece “The Anatomy Lesson Of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” portrays Nelson Mandela as a corpse in a loin cloth being autopsied by Nkhosi Johnson, a well known South African AIDS activist who died at the age of 12. Nkosi Johnson points to Mandela’s arm that has been stripped of its flesh. Other politicians like Jacob Zuma, Helen Zille, Thabo Mbeki, Trevor Manuel, F. W. De Klerk and Archbishop Desmond Tutu are all gathered around the body watching intently. Many responses were of outrage and disgust towards the painting and the representation of Mandela as lifeless. The ANC referred to the painting as an insult and compared it to witchcraft. “The ANC is appalled and strongly condemns in the strongest possible terms the dead Mandela painting by Yiull Damaso,” party spokesman Jackson Mthembu told the Guardian. “It is in bad taste, disrespectful, and it is an insult and an affront to values of our society.” Mthembu also went on to tell the Guardian that the work is racist because in African society it is an act of ubuthakathi (bewitch) to kill a living person in a work of art . According to the artist, Yiull Damaso, “We have Nelson Mandela, one of the great leaders of our time, and the politicians around him are trying to find out what makes him a great man. Nkosi Johnson, the only one in the painting who’s no longer alive, is trying to show them that Mandela is just a man. So they should stop searching and get on with building the country. ” Damaso argues that he is trying to make people confront death and that although Mandela is a great man, he is still just a man. He believes that the eventual passing of Mr. Mandela is something that we will have to face, as individuals, as a nation. See addendum 3a for images
15)See addendum 4a for image.
16)Bart Simpson is a character from a popular American TV show called “The Simpsons”. The show is a fictional, animated look into the lives of a typical family in an American town called Springfield. It is a humorous caricature of American society and a well-known symbol of American culture.
17) See addendum 4b for image
18)Jacob Zuma is the current President of South Africa and of the ANC, African National Congress.
19)See addendum 5a for image

Bibliography:

• Corrigall, M. 2009. http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/mary-corrigalls-crocodile-tears-review/
• Harrisson, S. 12-09-10. http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/art/overview.php
• McKenny, V. 2002. Celebrating Standard Bank Young Artist Awards 25 years. Classic Feel Magazine. Page 145.
• Murray, B. 2002. Celebrating Standard Bank Young Artist Awards 25 years. Classic Feel Magazine. Page 145.
• Murray, B. Website. http://www.brettmurray.co.za/biography/
• Murray, B. (http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/sue-williamsons-sasol-wax-award-2009-interview/)
• O’Toole, S. 2009. http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/brett-murrays-dark-comedy-sean-o-tooles-essay/)
• Ozinsky, J. 2000. https://www.artthrob.co.za/00may/review.html
• Roper, C. 2000. “Bart for art’s sake”. Mail&Guardian. 2-6-2000.
• Powell, I. http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/ivor-powells-i-love-africa-catalogue-essay/
• Powell, I. 2002. Exploding Heads: Brett Murray and the Aesthetics of Whiteness. White Like Me, Brett Murray: Strandard Bank Young Artist 2002. Page 4- 15.
• Underhill, G. 2000. “Bart Artist gleeful about heated debate over statue”. Cape Argus. 3-6-2000. Page 15.
• Williamson, S. 2000. http://www.artthrob.co.za/00may/reviews.html
• Williamson, S. 2009. South African Art Now. Harper Collins Publishers: New York.
• Williamson, S. 2009. http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/sue-williamsons-sasol-wax-award-2009-interview/

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One gets the impression that Brett Murray would really rather be on the streets graffiting than making art for comfortable galleries. But there he was dutifully giving a walkabout for his latest exhibition, Hail to the Thief, at the Goodman Gallery. Then again, Murray reckons he is too old for the streets. It’s the lure of the immediate and the reaching of large audiences that does it for him. He speaks almost wistfully of cartoonist Zapiro’s massive audience appeal. The title, Hail to the Thief, was inspired by a piece of viral marketing Murray spotted on a street in New York that fitted perfectly with his comment on our kleptocracy (or a rule by thieves).

The exhibition is a comment on corruption among the star-studded firmament of our current leaders. By invoking Soviet kitsch, bling and memorabilia it provides a chic, sharp criticism of the powers that be, all stylistically colour-coded in revolutionary red and black, with lots and lots of gold. There’s a massive Soviet insignia centred with a dollar sign, a poster of the ANC’s logo with a For Sale sign across it and one of the dapper walking figure synonymous with Johnny Walker whisky, with the words “forward comrades” instead of “walk on”. And so on.

We laugh at Murray’s cleverness, the way he hits the nail on the head. But it’s a bit too close to the bone. And underneath the laughter we sense Murray’s anger and the pain of seeing the failure of a society that you had hopes for. Right from the start Murray does not shy away from acknowledging who he is in the scheme of things. He is sees himself “right on top of the shit pile”. He agrees with Breyten Breytenbach’s criticism of the ANC that the playing fields have not been evened out. Things have been renamed and colours have changed, that’s all. There is a sense of Murray’s anger and impotence, too.

At least back in the 1980s, in his poster-making days, there was sense that there was a struggle towards something. The ANC, as far as Murray is concerned, is “pissing on the graves of the heroes” of the struggle and not living up to its ideals. “They pretend to be what they are not,” he says. This underpins the exhibition. Take the mutated protest poster that reads “Amandla” and below, instead of the original demands, it reads: “We demand Chivas and BMWs and bribes.” Murray is on a roll. President Jacob Zuma’s Achilles heel is not his heel, he says, “it’s his dick”. Followed by “he has good ball sense, but he dribbles too much”.

The artist enjoys the formal aspect of his craft, and he does it masterfully. For him the process of production is therapeutic. It’s here that he relaxes. Murray’s concerns may be the same, but the way in which he conceptualises them is always refreshingly new. His power lies in the marriage of images and words. He grapples with the contradictions implicit in his work – his own self-censorship, for example, and the fact that even if he wanted to paint landscapes, his own default position is social commentary.

There is a bronze sculpture of a thickset, low-browed primate who is broodingly and single-mindedly involved in onanism. The ape is familiar. In the late 1980s it was called Voortrekker. In Hail to the Thief, it’s the same beast, with a different title, One Party State, but the same concerns. We get its pointed socio-politico thrust and the ramifications of calling someone an “aap” in this climate.

We are a thin-skinned, but brutal society. You can’t say this and get away with it, but you can do worse and get way with it. You couldn’t say anything or do anything under the previous regime either. Murray’s approach is pertinent to a specific climate and people. The author of The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands, has a wider, even scarier implication for the inner ape in the man versus the wolf within. Rowlands writes: “The ape does not see its fellow apes; it watches them. And all the while it waits for the opportunity to take advantage… In the end, the ape will always fail”. Hail to the wolf. Go see.

Crocodile Tears, Brett Murray’s latest exhibition of bronze sculptures, two-dimensional cut-outs and works on paper, extends the crocodile tears metaphor to comment on the current political situation in South Africa where public and performative emotional displays are commonplace. Against a backdrop of corrupt practices, governmental inefficacy and ethically dubious political practice, Murray’s satiric commentary is both refreshing and sophisticated.

In Shakespeare’s classic dramatisation of the dangers of emotional manipulation in the play of power, Othello, the title character laments the tears of his wife when he accuses her of adulterous behaviour. “O devil, devil!” he cries. “If that the earth could teem with woman’s tears,/ Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile./ Out of my sight!” Othello refers to the myth of crocodile tears, where the creature weeps falsely as a means to lure its prey to slaughter. Crocodile Tears, Brett Murray’s latest exhibition of bronze sculptures, two-dimensional cut-outs and works on paper, extends the crocodile tears metaphor to comment on the current political situation in South Africa where public and performative emotional displays are commonplace. Against a backdrop of corrupt practices, governmental inefficacy and ethically dubious political practice, Murray’s satiric commentary is both refreshing and sophisticated.Using imagery from the renaissance and baroque periods, Murray employs key themes and associations of those periods for confrontational critique. Thabo Mbeki adopted the idea of the “African Renaissance” as a progressive and idealised vision for the newly democratic South Africa. His “I am an African” speech (1996) heralded a patriotic and proactive approach to Africa’s problems. In Murray’s arch response, a painted aluminium diptych titled I am an African Too (2008), he conjoins an image of Robert Mugabe with Mbeki’s words. Elsewhere, Murray shows how the concept of the African Renaissance has become shorthand for capitalist gain. ¬¬¬Far from simply taking the piss, Murray’s witty one-liners present an uncompromisingly scathing attack on political hypocrisy. The two steel-cut figures in Shame (2008), rendered in a baroque style, evoke Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV. The tears that stream endlessly to the floor obscure their vision in a superfluous display of emotion. In Let Them Eat Pap (2008), a play on Antoinette’s infamous phrase “qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (loosely translated, “let them eat cake”), the scenario of blind excess in the face of poverty is blatantly clear. The graphic flatness and sheen of his mild steel portraits, overlaid with “Fool’s Gold”, suggests a persona fixated on image – a fake patina of perfection.Power and Patronage (2008), a bronze sculpture that shows two bulbous, coiffed bronze poodles going at it with regal gusto encapsulates the satirical tone of Murray’s exhibition. Similarly, The Faithful Sycophant (2008) and Praise Singer (2008), both show dogs balancing on their hind legs in a debased and sycophantic display of servility and fawning. It is easy to read works like Power and Patronage as emblematic of political interactions of the current day, but in many ways Murray’s bronze sculptures can also be viewed as commentary on the power dynamics inherent in the making and marketing of art. Often the art scene is prey to pandering and performative gestures between artist, dealer and client, a work such as Power and Patronage recasting our understanding of just who is doing who.

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Sue Williamson: For the Sasol Wax Art Award 2008, you are making a very large scale text piece, to be installed on the outside wall of the Gallery This reads ‘Power to the People!’ and in 2008, it has obvious references to the fact that the people very often do not have power – electrical power, that is. This is typical of the way you have consistently worked with ideas, and in this case, with text to give what you have referred to as a ‘tragi-comic insight into events’. Would you agree?

Brett Murray: I realize when I look across what I have done and what I intend to do, is that there is a kind of consistency. That consistency is critical entertainment…which is basically the definition of satire. But within satire, there is a range from the one-liner to something more open-ended, more metaphorical, where the humor is more layered. I try and work within all of these.

SW: When I first met you, in the mid-eighties, you were quite politically involved. Were you ever personally involved in graffiti actions?

BM: Ja, everyone did graffiti at that time. But to physically go out there and spray-paint student leftie slogans like ‘Free Mandela’ and ‘Viva ANC’ meant you could go to jail. One can look at it as innocent now but it was pretty serious at the time. We all put up posters that might have been banned as part of a kind of street consciousness or street culture of graffiti and posters. I produced a lot of stickers and T-shirts. There was the idea that culture was in the street or part of the street

SW: I would say that phase has seen you right through to this current ‘Power to the People’ piece that you’ve done.

BM: It has. There is definitely a thread between them. I enjoy public art: working within the public arena and the constraints of that arena. And this piece, although it is on the grounds of the university, it is on a public-facing outside wall. I enjoy making things that are within the contested public domain. I enjoy the constraints of legibility when I work in these areas.

SW: You also enjoy using cursive script, don’t you?

BM: Yes, this hand written script has a personal immediacy to it. I used that script for a piece called Continuity and Change for the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale fringe show, in 1997, ‘Smokkel’.

SW: The text for that piece read: History is Always Written by the Winner! It has a direct link to this new piece. It was made just after the first elections, and you used old silver ten-cent pieces welded into script.

BM: This work for Sasol has a similar motivation: to come up with a one-liner that is challenging, ambiguous and goading. When I was first approached as a top ten finalist, the first thing I thought of was candles and the first thing I thought after that was power outages, if you excuse the Orwellian term ‘outage’. Immediately I knew I was going to do something related to those two ideas, somehow. The phrase ‘Power to the People’ came to mind.

SW: That has a very different reading here to the one that we were used to in the 80s. ‘Amandla Ngawethu’. ‘Power to the People.’

BM: Exactly. So, I’m reflecting quite harshly on the new dispensation.

SW: You have taken the essential slogan of the struggle, and twisted it very nicely to give it this new meaning: calling on the government to get their act together.

BM: Absolutely. It’s a kind of a challenge. A protest, I suppose.

SW: Why did you choose red for the candleholders that make up the slogan?

BM: The candleholder that I always use when there are power-outages is a red one. So it’s anecdotal. I’m always cursing while the power goes and I must use a candle. I am imagining that across the country people are lighting their candles and cursing. A collective annoyance. In getting six hundred of these red holders together there is a hint of a kind of a collective protest. Also red is a very popular colour for graffiti. It just made sense.

SW: Your work makes perfect sense conceptually, visually, and within the brief of the Sasol Wax Art Award.

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TECHNICAL BACKGROUND

For his large scale text piece, Power to the People, Brett Murray chose to use as a basic unit the candle holder rather than the wax object it is designed to hold: the ordinary household white wax candle. The candles themselves are conspicuous by their absence.

The task of obtaining the six hundred saucer shaped painted metal candlesticks required to form the letters of the text turned out to be unexpectedly difficult, a time consuming problem which Murray had not anticipated. Candlesticks were sold out everywhere, pointing to the aptness of Murray’s piece: it seemed as if the entire population of South Africa had stocked up with candles and candlesticks to cope with regular power outages. Pep Stores in Cape Town had sold out. So had Makro, and other trading centres and wholesalers. Eventually, Murray tracked down a Johannesburg company which had just brought in a replacement shipment from China, and he was able to buy the quantity needed for his artwork.

The ‘P’ of Power is three metres high, and the entire piece measures 29 meters long. Murray is a highly experienced and skilful sculptor, and generally speaking, his works are expertly fabricated for permanence. In the case of the work for the Sasol Wax Art Award, however, rather than weld together an indestructible support structure for the text, Murray will attach each candleholder individually to the wall with industrial strength double-sided tape. Thus, the piece will be technically related closely to the protest poster stuck to the wall, rather than to a flawlessly crafted and structurally strong museum piece which can be moved from one art venue to another. Murray also wished to work within the tradition of the readymade or found object rather than the tradition of sculpture. Should one of more of the candlesticks be dislodged from or fall off the wall during the run of the exhibition, again, this would be in the nature of graffiti, in which letters get defaced or rubbed out over a period of time.

Although the candlesticks come in a number of colours, including a bright turquoise and a bottle green, Murray chose red, the colour of his own personal candlestick, and the colour of flame, and heat. Stuck on the wall to stand slightly away from the facebrick surface, the candleholders will cast a moving shadow as the sun moves through the day, giving the words a dropshadow, or three dimensionality.

Says Murray, ‘It is ephemeral. It is a temporary response. It’s not a monument to the idea. It just goes up.’

[Catalogue interview with Tracy Murinik]

Brett Murray: I‘ll be including two works at Nirox: one is a single bronze donkey, and the other is a text piece.

The donkey forms part of a group of ongoing sculptures of animals that poke fun at the dispensation, and was made for a show called Sleep Sleep, which looked specifically at violence and war. Those animals were weirdly mythical, slightly menacing, kind of innocent – the weird disjuncture between things where you are not sure what you are looking at.

The other piece is a text piece. When I visited Nirox for the first time, I just saw this beautiful Arcadian landscape, fantastically manicured – a kind of island within Gauteng, South Africa, Africa, the World – this beautiful Arcadian, pastoral, lush, rich context. And I thought I wanted to look at that, in a humorous way – which is my bent, I suppose, my default setting.

In terms of time constraints, I was looking at coming up with something which could be managed in quite a short period of time. I saw a structure which I thought I might use to hold a text piece, and ideas began floating around that. I was reminded of the eighties, and the dichotomy [in South Africa] between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, between white and the black – those kinds of disjunctures. And we always used to say, to remind ourselves, “Pass me the cucumber sandwiches darling … we are having a revolution” – like these white voyeurs with binoculars looking at what is happening out there. It was engaging the oddness of being removed from what is actually happening, and your existence within it as someone of privilege, I suppose. While driving towards this Arcadian landscape [at Nirox], you notice a squatter camp you pass, and it is the context of South Africa. And this work is an opportunity to look at that – but it is also difficult, because you do not want to piss on someone’s parade. And that obviously is not the intention. But it is what it is, to ground you. Hopefully one day I will not have to do that – I think I would love to just do something in the landscape and just engage with it formally or on an abstract level. But as I say, my default button is set to do something else with it. But the motivation is a bit broader than that. It is about using the context to look broadly at where we are living.

Tracy Murinik: And that broader context then includes the context of the heritage site that is the Cradle of Humankind – an area that has recently been massively invested in; that inspires idyllic and optimistic notions of what the “cradle of humankind” could mean – but which still features examples of the extreme poverty that you’ve described.

BM: Yes, it is kind of a Utopia and a dystopia.

TM: How much thought have you needed to give to the area itself, while conceptualising the work?

BM: I am aware of all of those other sites and I have been there, but I did not consciously reference or think to reference that. It was pretty basic. Sometimes my works are easy to talk about – there are one-liners, which do not need to be articulated and unbundled or unpackaged. It is a bit like a comic, starting with a punch line and working to the beginning of the story.

I think this is an instance where it is a bit like that. I continue to use text in my smaller works and sometimes in bigger works like this. Sometimes you get a layered reading of it, and sometimes it is something which is not as layered, it is more obvious – not pithy and not necessarily profound. It just depends on how you articulate it formally and how it sits in the context. But I often find it difficult to try and unpack my work, because my instinct is to want to meet the audience or the viewer more than halfway. And that is not necessarily being populist or dumbing down what you are doing, it is about articulating an idea and presenting it.

It is also not politically driven in that I want to change things necessarily. My intention is to shift people’s ideas and to do that formally as well as conceptually. But then you have to give an audience enough information to realise where you are going.

TM: What will the structure will look like?

BM: There is a structure like a walkway, onto which I’ll be hanging a deli-type awning – those green deli canopies with the scalloped edges. There will be nine of them, so it is quite long, and with huge text, declaring, “Pass me the cucumber sandwiches darling … we are having a revolution”! As simple as that.

It is said that the crocodile weeps false tears to lure his prey. This idea is the underlying theme that runs through Brett Murray’s new exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape. Seizing upon crocodile tears as a charged motif, Murray has created a body of new works that explore the exchange of one evil for another as political power shifts from the oppressor to the oppressed. A concept that Murray frequently touched upon in earlier works, this was perhaps most clearly first articulated in a work from his 2002 cartoon series that characterized democracy in South Africa as “the replacement of … white fascism with black fascism”.
Murray now pushes that idea further with a group of works built around one of the most charged symbols of Euro-centricity – the colonial. In these new works, which appropriate Dutch and Austrian seventeenth century imagery, Murray introduces “crocodile tears” as an iconographical element designed as a satiric reference to the guilt of the “newly landed gentry” vis-à-vis those “who are less fortunate”. Within this body of work, the women, appropriated from seventeenth century Austrian copperplate etchings, do a good deal of the weeping. These images like others in the exhibition have been transformed from white European colonials into the black African colonials. Although Murray employs the same twist of irony with a group of male images, unlike the woman, their sins - the Seven Deadly Sins - are more clearly defined. A group of seven “gold” (mild steel, acrylic, and fool’s gold) reliefs that evoke official portraiture, the Seven Deadly Sins quote the quintessential colonial icon – the seventeenth century Dutch portrait. Here the newly arrived colonial takes on all the attributes of European colonialism including the sins that accompany power and wealth. And although they do not weep as heavily as their female counterparts, they nevertheless are shedding tears.

These works with their crocodile tears are grounded in Murray’s on-going interest in questions of power, patronage and sycophancy. This is a subject that came up frequently, albeit less subtly, in his 2002 cartoon series, with captions like: “Is that brown-nosing the president?” In Crocodile Tears, Murray now addresses this theme with greater subtlety through a group of toy-like poodles representing subservience, sculpted in bronze, and rendered in two-dimensions in aluminum, paint, and resin. The strength of the irony of these works becomes evident in Power and Patronage, a bronze sculpture of two copulating poodles. Here we are given to ask which poodle represents power and which one represents patronage. This brings deeper ironic meaning to Murray’s explorations into power and role reversal.

Murray has, in fact, been long interested in issues of racial identity vis-à-vis role reversal. In the catalogue from his 2002 exhibition, White Like Me, Ivor Powell discusses a photograph of Murray as a Zulu warrior at age six in body-paint: “…the image has about it something of the icon. In the context of the present socio-politics of South Africa, it embodies a psychic crisis built into the form of its subject. It images the white as the black and in this enacts in the framework of doubt, the struggle of the South African white to discover or create an African identity, some kind of inner reconciliation with Africanness.” What is particularly relevant about this image in regard to Crocodile Tears, is its striking similarity to a recent photograph in the exhibition, The Renaissance Man Tending his Land. Here is Murray several decades later, once again photographed as a black - this time as the black colonial in his powered wig. Together these images make a powerful statement that indeed Murray’s oeuvre is deeply grounded in “…the struggle of the South African white to discover or create an African identity, some kind of inner reconciliation with Africanness.

Murray nevertheless explores these issues in Crocodile Tears with his characteristic humour and wit. More subtle and coded than much of his earlier oeuvre, these pieces display a slick and ironic aesthetic that imbues this satiric exhibition with a curious perfection.

Towards the end of 2007, when “Polokwane” was on everyone’s lips, South Africans – both inside and outside the ANC – found themselves presented with a choice: Mbeki or Zuma? The ways in which that apparent dichotomy has affected subsequent developments in local politics are manifold.But, judging by Crocodile Tears, artist Brett Murray is one of many who reject both these post-apartheid strongmen. Or, to put it another way, Murray suggests that (nuances of character and ideology notwithstanding) there is little fundamental difference between an SA under Mbeki and an SA under Zuma.This is made explicit by a triptych that greets visitors as they enter and exit the exhibition. Each of the three panels in “Change: Pre-Polokwane, Polokwane, Post-Polokwane” presents the same hedonistic scene; life’s a party if you have a senior position in the right party.

On the wall facing this work is Murray’s dedication to a “Most Gracious King and Sovereign Lord” who achieved “the prized victory at Polokwane”. This imitation of a centuries-old tradition of artists praising their patrons could be read as an unctuous, fawning tribute if it weren’t laced with sarcasm.Clearly, the object of satire here is the culture of deference that seems to be endemic in the ANC – with a glancing reference to the difficulties of raising financial support from government for arts projects that don’t ‘toe the party line’. Yet this is not specific to the personality cult surrounding Zuma; if anything, it was more evident in the cronyism that tainted the Mbeki era.Mbeki’s promotion of an “African Renaissance” and his celebration of diversity in the all-embracing “I am an African” speech receive short shrift from Murray. A noble concept is reduced to a marker of capitalist self-interest as a business sign on a wall (also the unofficial title of the handsome exhibition catalogue): “THE RENAISSANCE PTY (LTD)”.Indeed, this has become a pattern under BBE, BBBEE, GEAR, AsgiSA and other initiatives for economic development that have been unable to prevent greedy individuals from profiting enormously in the name of transformation. Accordingly, Murray’s “Eyesight to the Blind” is an optometrist’s chart which, if you read the (obvious) fineprint, equates U-BU-NTU with a dollar sign.

There is also, in the form of a clever allusion to the work of Belgian surrealist René Magritte, a critique of the rhetorical and intellectual flourishes that covered glaring practical errors during Mbeki’s presidency. Magritte famously placed the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) below a painting of a pipe to emphasise that art merely provides images of objects – the objects themselves are elsewhere. Murray has reproduced the pipe but changed the wording to “Ceci n’est pas un president”: Mbeki’s pipe created the image of a philosopher-king, but that image in itself was not enough to make him a good president.
The “I am an African” speech is also dismissed by placing an image of Robert Mugabe alongside the words “I am an African too” – Mbeki’s stance on Zimbabwe, like his HIV/AIDS denialism, undermined whatever inspiration SA’s citizens might have taken from him.Murray’s frustration with both Mbeki and Zuma produces a scatological response. An ornate black-on-white pattern is dubbed “The President’s Arsehole in Renaissance Style”; here, Murray is the court jester, with licence to subvert the mighty using their own discourse. But a more bitter, personal response is expressed in “Umshini Wam”: “Every time/I hear you sing/the machine gun song”, the artist declares, “I want to find one/and shove it up/your fat arse.”

Like the king’s fool, however, he also lampoons himself and his background. A three-dimensional, glittering sentence reading “I HAM AN AFRICAN” is given the title “WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Cry for a Place in the Sun”. What does it mean for white people to “ham” being an African – to act (badly); to pretend; to mock? Likewise, “The Old Identity Chestnut” lists those variations-on-a-theme so often heard from white South Africans: “I am/was/should be/demand to be/will never become/should not be/might be/will be” an African.This syntactic play is echoed in “The Battle of the Tenses”, which presents a series of emblems or insignia for different sectors of the population who are ‘battling it out’ for material success: the haves, the have-nots, the never-hads, the want-to-haves, the never-will-haves, and so on. Endless warfare over access to wealth is, really, the socio-economic reality that drives the exhibition’s biting satire. It is explicit in those pieces that depict the “crocodile tears” of the title – large steel figures, appropriately covered in ‘fool’s gold’, who are the picture of elegance and opulence even as they weep floods of tears.

Like many of the carved metal works, these metal pieces have silkscreen equivalents (this is a multimedia exhibition, also incorporating lithographs and digital prints) in the “Shame” series. The ironic label – to be rich in SA is often to be ‘shameless’ – also gestures towards that empty South Africanism, “Ag shame”; after all, it seems that neither nouveau riche black nor always-have-had white really cares about the poor in this country.“Crocodile tears” can also be associated with false contrition: apologies for corruption, for abuse of office, for incitements to violence flow thick and fast through SA’s media, but do they really carry any meaning?The anthropomorphism implicit in attributing ‘human’ motives such as deceit to an animal like a crocodile also complements Murray’s penchant for exposing the folly of people by depicting them as animal cartoons or caricatures: one poodle mounting another in “Power and Patronage”, or the idiot-king “Nagapie in the Headlights”.

There is a curious sense of anachronism in the exhibition. Murray invokes “the Renaissance” to point out the failure of Mbeki’s vision – SA in the twenty-first century, like Renaissance Europe, has a social spectrum ranging from wealthy dandies to the neglected masses – and there are, indeed, versions of Renaissance paintings on display. For instance, “100%”, presumably an allusion to T-shirts proclaiming “100% JZ”, adapts Raphael’s “Adoring the Golden Calf” to criticise SA’s idol worship.Many of the works, however, are reminiscent of a later, Baroque European period in which rococo aesthetic excesses matched extravagant lifestyles. In this context, Murray’s reformulation of Mary Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” into “Let them eat pap” implies that post-apartheid SA is all-too-similar to France before 1789.

In “Conundrum”, Murray presents the dilemma facing SA’s disenfranchised: “To own or to storm the Bastille?”But, if the former is an option available only to a fortunate few, does that mean we are heading for another revolution?

It’s a rare occasion but, every so often, an artist or cultural producer creates a product that taps into the prevailing Zeitgeist with such accuracy – unearthing the underbelly of present-day conditions with such precision – that it makes one’s skin tingle and crawl. Recently, a number of artists have sought to represent the current sociopolitical conditions in the country but this exhibition is remarkable in that Murray’s expression is so succinct.

He employs the shorthand of the political cartoonist, but he is more inventive, drawing from a broader lexicon, which stretches back into art’s canon, and eventually establishing iconography of his own making. That is not to say that his art is coded and requires an astute observer to unravel his statements.Murray’s expression is unambiguous, confrontational and vitriolic. If Pieter-Dirk Uys or Mike van Graan were visual artists, this is the kind of art they would be making – a sharp brand that cuts through duplicitous political posturing like a hot knife through butter.

It is political satire translated into imagery. And, as is the case with this genre of expression, there is a crudeness to it, although it is not crude in its execution – Murray’s art is the embodiment of technically and ideologically polished expression. It is crude in that Murray doesn’t shy away from ugly truths.The debased actions and greedy materialism of the new political and social elite are expressed through works dripping with faux gold and the reoccurring motif of copulating dogs.

He presents a sort of hyper-reality in which the moral character of the ruling party (or the whites who remain powerful) are presented in a concentrated form – Murray doesn’t rely on hyperbole.Some of his work probably appears offensive, but the humour he employs destabilises the sincerity of his accusations. Besides, the conditions that Murray represents are unpalatable and depraved – the democratic era has ushered in another form of corrupt governance.Copulation proves a succinct metaphor for this state of affairs. It is not depicted as an erotic act but as a frantic animalistic act that is driven by base impulses. Showing it taking place between dogs – well-coiffed poodles at that – also underpins the act as one enacted in the public realm. The copulating dogs motif, therefore, comes to represent a range of illicit political shenanigans. It also subtly references white ascendancy. In a tongue-in-cheek declaration engraved on a shiny gold plaque, Murray dedicates his exhibition to the victors of Polokwane but, like the irreverent court jester, his art serves to reveal the duplicitous nature of his “patron”.

It is not an imbalance of power that Murray addresses – as has been customary with art in the post-apartheid era. His focus is the flagrant misuse of influence.This is personified by his references to Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV, the French royals who lived a life of excess while nonchalantly neglecting their impoverished subjects. Let Them Eat Pap (2008) cements this analogy between the French aristocracy and the ruling party. It is the motif of a supposedly remorseful Marie Antoinette pictured shedding tears that embodies a false parade of repentance. The ruling party’s repeated apologies for corruption and inefficiency, the remorse of the old apartheid fiends such as Adrian Vlok and exploitative white madams all come to mind. The tears that flow from Marie Antoinette are stylised, thus inferring premeditation.

Murray translates this motif into lithographs and steel sculptures, or should one say, frames, because that is what his sculptures are – one-dimensional skeletons of human effigies. In this way, he not only shows the Marie Antoinette persona to be vacuous but all the gestures of remorse to be empty. Showing remorse for past misdeeds has become a staple part of South African culture. Murray proposes that its ubiquity has divested the sentiment of any import. The Antoinette effigy could represent either the current ruling power or the previous white authority, forging a connection between the past and the present and a link in leadership style.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow – lessons in corrupt governance have been passed on to a new generation of leaders. A stainless steel phrase that reads “To own or storm the Bastille?” articulates this connection between the old and the new order. Similarly, the ironically titled Change: Pre-Polokwane,Polokwane, Post-Polokwane (2008), which features three identical 18thcentury paintings of a group of inebriated men feasting, defies the notion that transformation is automatic.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely is the maxim that Murray embraces.

Most of Murray’s work appears to be droll one-liners offering naive perspectives, but that is the point of his art – he is concerned with surface appearances.He is fascinated by mediated realities – the world of façades and images, signs and symbols that the mass media purveys. After all, for most, the realm of politics is a remote and mediated actuality, an imagined sphere.

It could be a sympathetic portrait, although saying this I can’t be sure. I’m also not so sure what the sympathetically rendered subject at the centre of Brett Murray’s steel cutout work is. It could be a gorilla, or a chimpanzee, maybe even a gibbon, so ape it will have to be. This generic ape portrait, framed by a lavish growth of Rococo finery, crystallises in a single image the workings of this essay: lots of frilly adornment with some confusion about the ambiguous subject at the centre. But I’m getting ahead of myself; I hadn’t planned to say this so soon. As it is, while composing this essay, mostly in the shower, sometimes on my bicycle, I kept reassuring myself that it would be a good idea to mention a book I read a few years ago, Kafka on the Shore. It doesn’t feature any apes, sadly, only a speaking cat.

I won’t bore you with the details of Haruki Murakami’s fantastical book, which is notionally set in contemporary Japan, mostly on the island of Shikoku. I will though mention some of the characters. Kafka on the Shore is centrally about prophecy and memory, although Murakami cloaks these abstract ideas, which seem pertinent to Murray’s exhibition, in human form. Representing the former is a young adolescent runaway, Kafka Tamura – yes, he is named after that famous German-Czech writer whose most compelling fictions involve characters apparently depressed because of their inability to get laid. Then there is Nakata, a visionary old simpleton who is able to converse with cats; he may, or may not, have murdered Kafka’s father, a famous sculptor, this at the goading of Johnny Walker, a well-known brand emissary in a top hat who makes a brief cameo in the novel.

There is one particular scene in Murakami’s book that strikes me as relevant. It involves Hoshino, a baseball loving truck driver who offers Nakata a lift to Shikoku; Hoshino is having a conversation with Colonel Sanders, an embodied likeness of that global icon for southern fried chicken.

“Tell me something.”
“What?”
“Are you really Colonel Sanders?”
Colonel Sanders cleared his throat. “Not really. I’m just taking on his appearance for a time.”
“That’s what I thought,” Hoshino said. “So what are you really?”
“I don’t have a name.”
“How do you get along without one?”
“No problem. Basically I don’t have a name or shape.”
“So you’re kind of like a fart.”

The conversation pushes on, Hoshino prodding and poking at his spirit world interlocutor as he attempts to discover his real identity. Hoshino’s incredulity, which you could liken to our own disbelief when confronted with Brett Murray’s pantheon, or rather bestiary, of familiar gods – Homer Simpson (with an afro), the Pink Panther (brandishing a Zulu shield), Marie Antoinette (in blackface) Mr and Mrs Entitled (rendered as a crest) – eventually prompts Colonel Sanders to clarify himself.

“I’m a very pragmatic being,” he offers. “A neutral object, as it were, and all I care about is consummating the function I’ve been given to perform.”

I read Kafka on the Shore while on a cycling trip through rural Japan, quite serendipitously while in Takamatsu, a provincial city that is the setting for much of the book. Aside from an abundance of sanuki udon shops, a regional noodle delicacy, Takamatsu also has loads of junk food outlets, many of them American, KFC included. Intrigued by the proposition that Colonel Sanders could be a character in a fantastical fiction, I set off one evening on my bicycle to find him.

It didn’t take long before I found him. Predictably, the Colonel was standing outside an outlet, hustling passersby. I went up and said hi. As much as I wanted it to happen, the avuncular old man, or at least one of the many millions of fibreglass likenesses of him, offered me nothing. (In Murakami’s novel, he states: “It’s like I told you, I’m neither a god nor a Buddha, nor a human being. I’m something else again – a concept.”) Nothing. Still, after a fascinated few minutes staring at the Colonel, I didn’t feel the least bit disappointed. Hiking my leg over the bicycle, I returned to my hotel, smiling.

Brett Murray’s work makes me smile too. If I told you why, it would most likely not make you do the same thing, smile. (Critics, even though many think it their duty, are not meant to explain the punch line.) Which presents a central difficulty. If Murray’s rib tickling jibes and teasing political satire have a self-evident quality, what, reasonably, is there left for me to say? Not much, it’s true, so I’ll be concise, in a manner of speaking.

For a long time now, Murray has misappropriated and retooled (for his own ends) the beaming icons of global capitalist culture, attaching to them a distinctively vernacular gloss. Aside from those already mentioned – Homer Simpson and the Pink Panther – Murray has also fiddled with Colonel Sanders, Richie Rich, Homer’s son Bart Simpson, Casper the Friendly Ghost and that home-grown oddity, the Orosman. As in Murakami’s novel, he denudes these signifiers of their received function, making them say, do and mean things entirely alien to our apprehension of their being. Admittedly, I struggled with this for a while; it was symptomatic of a larger struggle.

What are the limits of the imagination? For many years, decades in fact, I was very literal in my answer to this question, placing over-much faith in chrome-plated newness and fatherless originality as the defining hallmarks of imagination. In other words, the imaginative act was ahistorical. My point here is this. While long familiar with all that jive around the readymade and its centrality to the modern canon, what I missed – and I mean really missed – was the fact that in art, fiction, poetry, music, whatever, all creativity is, perforce, historical. Perhaps a gentler way of phrasing this is to say that creativity, that often purposeless search for form, involves a purpose-driven conversation with many protagonists, amongst them close friends, imagined rivals, old teachers, the famous men and women we read about in magazines, even the dead ones whose lives are celebrated in books. It also, unavoidably, includes a restless conversation with the self.

The open-ended character of Murray’s ongoing conversation with himself is obvious and manifests itself in the many familiar tropes in his new exhibition, both formal and thematic. I want to spotlight his habit of using cartoon characters, human archetypes and, especially, animals to quantify human folly. I’ll start with a pedestrian observation, a listing of all the animal types that have appeared in Murray’s art: mouse, crocodile, French poodle, gorilla, tortoise, sausage dog, pig, nagapie (or lesser bushbaby), rhino, steenbok, kudu, adder and gemsbok. When I read this list to the artist, he sighed. “Clearly I should open up a shop near the Kruger Park.” Clearly.

It is an obvious fact that animals have long sponsored a fecund tradition, one that in literature encompasses everyone from Aesop to T.O. Honnibol, as well as in art, where the lineage is equally bizarre, extending from medieval monks to Jeff Koons. “Animals have only their silence left with which to confront us,” offers J.M. Coetzee’s fictional alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, in his treatise The Lives of Animals. I won’t dispute the clarity of this insight, although maybe Red Peter, Kafka’s talking Gold Coast ape from 1917, put it best when during his earnest report to the academy on his ability to mimic humans, he offers: “It was so easy to imitate these people.”

So easy in fact that sometimes Murray, the jester on the sidelines, doesn’t even need to use animal stand-ins to drive his point home. Animals and cartoon figures aside, his make-believe artistic universe is populated by a host of familiar human archetypes: a president (a very necessary personage, you’ll agree), artist (ditto), policemen (also very necessary, especially given the insecure social geography of his imaginary republic), minister (the long nose is telling), bureaucrat (so you can apply for licenses and stuff), dandy (in a powdered wig), even a citizen, a bubble head who can’t make up his mind (sometimes he wears long pants, other times short pants, sometimes just his underpants).

Relooking the entirety of these creatures, which encompass everything from an exulted nagapie to an artist in a nappy, a ripped Captain America (with Catholic inclinations) to a poodle with human aspirations, it struck me that Murray’s universe of imaginary beings and hapless moegoes deserves to be quantified. Otherwise put, it would seem that the artist has unwittingly illustrated a long overdue South African bestiary. A brief digression might help fully explain this statement.

As Christianity began its slow, unrelenting takeover of Europe, a Greek scholar, likely based in Alexandria, compiled a book of stories about animal lore that distilled Indian, Hebrew and Egyptian sources, also the teachings of various classical philosophers, amongst them Aristotle and Pliny. Known as The Physiologus, this feted book collects stories about fictional beasts and living animals, also birds, even stones; the allegorical nature of the stories was meant to elucidate Christian dogma. Many versions of The Physiologus were produced in middle ages, classical sources slavishly copied and productively improved by medieval monks and scribes.

The importance of The Physiologus, as a prototype of allegorical storytelling involving animals, was long ago credibly explained by classical scholar Richard Gottheil, in 1899: “The little that monkish writers and their readers knew of zoology, in Europe as well as the Coptic and Abyssinian Christian communities of Africa, and the Syriac church of western Asia, hardly went beyond what this book taught. Even Arabic writers accepted in good faith the stories of the habits and peculiarities of certain animals which are to be found in The Physiologus.”

The point of this olden day stuff is not without relevance to Murray, whose habit of working with pre-existing character types, animals and commercial icons I’ve already elaborated on. According to Michael Arnott and Iain Beavan, the current keepers of the famous Aberdeen bestiary, sources for illustrations in medieval bestiaries were largely derived from lost classical originals, the illustrations often also adapted to reflect contemporary fashion. While I doubt Murray likes to think of himself as a monkish copier, there is an obvious parallel between the flagellators of old and the Woodstock-based artist. Take Africa (2000), Murray’s famous public sculpture in Cape Town’s St George’s Mall: the artist updates the post-apartheid vogue for African décor by presenting Bart Simpson as the yellow acne erupting from the beneath the surface of the sculpted African totem figure. Murray’s big-eyed nagapie evidences a more recent example of his habit of re-encoding use of sacred forms, in this instance the crest of Louis XIV, the munificent Sun King.

While the habit of telling human stories through animal figures is still commonplace in our literature and art, bestiaries are not. In 1897, French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec commenced work on one of the few modern bestiaries, Jules Renard’s book Histoires Naturelles (1899). Perhaps the most famous modern bestiary is the Book of Imaginary Beings (1957). Written by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, it contains 120 descriptions of mythical creatures from folklore and literature. I particularly love his descriptions of the animals dreamed by Kafka (“A kangaroo-like animal with a flat, human-like face and a very long tail”), C.S. Lewis (“An animal that sits upon its haunches like a dog, but appears more like a horse. Its toes are camel-like, and, unable to produce its own milk, it raises its young by weaning them on the milk of other animals”) and Edgar Allen Poe (“A small, flat animal with pure white fur and bright red claws and teeth”).

Reading these, I was prompted to construct my own description, which in honour of Borges and in deference to the artist, I have named “An Animal Dreamed by Murray”. Here goes: “Poodle-like, but obese, this dog has no fur, merely a naked skin that gleams like polished bronze. Its ears are the shape of tears, while its tail resembles an antique doorknob. It has the feet of an elephant, but no toes. From its rear, it could easily be confused for one of the three little pigs hiding behind a burka – a predicament any white businessman in a Dashiki would appreciate.” Murray’s work invites this sort of idle game playing. (Art that solely relies on serious thought for appreciation, select at random almost anything from the conceptual genre, inevitably belittles its viewer, never mind the headaches.)

Let me end with a bit of factual nonsense. Two years ago, shortly after the festive season, the SPCA got into a public spat with Tony Yengeni, who like Robert Mugabe, Jacob Zuma, possibly Pieter Marais, Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Carl Niehaus, definitely not Tony Leon and Julius Malema, is also an African. Yengeni had recently been released from prison after serving four months of a four-year sentence for fraud; while visiting his parent’s at their home in Guguletu he slaughtered a bull as part of a cleansing ritual. Nee vok, gasped the SPCA, prompting labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana to assert, “I want to assure our detractors that we will continue to practise our traditions and follow our culture.”

The bull, and indeed its many-sided defenders, is the McGuffin in this story. What’s really at stake, as Murray demonstrates in his exhibition, is continuity and change, ideology and dogma. To phrase this differently, in a time of poodle power and crocodile tears, as distinct from those other times when unfriendly Caspers and groot korkodils roamed the landscape, it is not the bull that matters but the bullshit.

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Sean O’Toole is editor of Art South Africa and author of the collection of short stories, The Marquis of Mooikloof

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Art in Fine Arts, in the faculty of Humanities, Development and Social Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.
December 2009

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Juliette Leeb-du Toit, for her unending patience and her insightful supervision. The National Research Foundation for their much appreciated funding for the duration of my research, without this my paper would never have even started and to Professor Juliet Armstrong for her help in arranging my funding. Brett Murray for allowing me to interview him and for his warm and hospitable nature. Marilyn Fowles for her untiring support over the years. Vulindlela Nyoni, his guidance as an intellectual and a friend is greatly appreciated. My partner, Sarah, whose emotional support is beyond comparison. My parents, Pam and Alan, whose patience and confidence have allowed me to realise my potential.

Abstract

The white male artist whose self-interrogation attaches to his whiteness, difference and former centrality, inevitably exposes himself to the critical scrutiny of current discourse on race and whiteness studies.
In this dissertation I examine the concept and emergence of whiteness as a dominant construct in select socio-historical contexts, more particularly in the colonial sphere. While colonial whiteness has often failed to acknowledge or foreground the faceted nature of its composition, this became particularly marked in a South African context with polarisation in the political, cultural and linguistic spheres. However in encounters with the colonised, unifying pretensions of whiteness prevailed, reinforcing difference along racial lines.

I examine the work of white South African male artist Brett Murray, in which the interrogation of whiteness and associated marginalization and invisibility is again foregrounded, but predominantly in a postcolonial context. As Murray cautiously navigates his satirical gaze at the culturally and conceptually flawed hybridity of South African (male) whiteness, he inadvertently exposes a nostalgic gaze at erstwhile racial centrality. I further consider whether as a postcolonial other Murray has in fact been able to transcend racially based self-interrogation by addressing more polemic issues associated with power, corruption and inhumanity that transcend race.

Chapter 1: A theoretical and historical introduction to Whiteness
i) Race, Ethnicity and Identity Politics
ii) The Historical Context of Whiteness
iii) Post-Colonial Whiteness

Chapter 2: Aspects of Whiteness in the South African Context
i) Some South African Particularities
ii) Post-Apartheid Euphoria
iii) Afrikaner and English Whitenesses
iv) Diaspora
v) Whiteness and Africanicity

Chapter 3: An overview of Murray’s body of work in relation to Whiteness
i) Formative Years
ii) Post-Liberation Introspective Satire
iii) New Beginnings

Conclusion
Bibliography

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Introduction

I seek to expand upon the existing discourse of whiteness studies in order to shed light on the perceived existential crisis of white South Africans. In outlining contemporary theories of identity construction, I discuss the historical development of race and thus whiteness and review contemporary literature surrounding the study of whiteness in order to gain a better understanding of the concept of whiteness. This knowledge is then applied to the South African context and in particular to the art of Brett Murray situated within this context.

In highlighting the notion of whiteness an inevitable racialization process takes place, and in this dissertation Murray is racialized as a white. The question remains then, is it worth revisiting race in a country where the topic is sensitive, contentious and a social reality. Ratele suggests that an investigation of whiteness is an endeavour that will inadvertently revert to the propagation of racist thought and recentre white ideology (Ratele, 2007: 431-436) Ratele further suggests,
“Making whiteness unconscious is a better way through which fundamentally different friendships, loves, education, thoughts, and other facets of a beautiful, psychoculturally healthy life of the indigenous person can be carved out, less pained by the trauma of the long and brutal history of white and colonial regimes” (Ratele, 2007: 436).

Ratele’s view is in opposition to what this dissertation and whiteness studies in general are aiming to achieve. Although Ratele’s concerns about a re-centring of whiteness are valid, the reality is that by rendering whiteness unconscious, whiteness as a tacit norm is inadvertently recentered (Steyn 2001, Lopez 2005). Whiteness achieves its power as ideologically centred by remaining unconscious, without scrutiny and invisible to white people. Any attempt to investigate, scrutinize and critique whiteness must inevitably critically conserve the category of whiteness and utilize ‘race thinking’ (Taylor, 2004). That is the acknowledgement that race effects and shapes peoples existence and therefore critique and scrutiny should be directed at all the facets of the concept of race. Sullivan suggests that to rehabilitate whiteness is more a fruitful endeavour than to deny race completely (Sullivan, 2008: 249).

Furthermore she asserts that white guilt produces a “self-focused, emotional wallowing that distracts white people from political struggle while making it seem as if they are doing something to counter racism” (Sullivan, 2008: 252). In essence Sullivan contends that whiteness should not be abandoned because of its violent history, instead she suggests a reinvention of the concept, so as to retain a movement towards anti-racism. This dissertation then aims to make whiteness visible in the critique of Brett Murray’s work in order to engage in a discourse that is cognisant of Murray’s race and the complexities that lie therein.

I have chosen Brett Murray as the artist of enquiry for two main reasons. Firstly he openly acknowledges his whiteness and explores the concept in his work. This is important because his work and the aims of this dissertation attempt to undo racist thought by explicitly acknowledging and critiquing whiteness. Secondly he is an ethnic amalgam, both Afrikaans and English speaking, allowing for an intriguing reading of his work as the work of a hybrid whiteness.

However this dissertation is limited by the fact that Brett Murray is only one person, one point of reference against which the perceptions of whiteness will be compared and contrasted. This is not an attempt to make broad generalizations about whiteness in South Africa. Instead it is a work of interpretative research that takes as it’s starting point the broad generalizations of whiteness studies and applies this to Murray’s work, thus enabling a possible, if only small, expansion of the subject. By situating
Murray’s work within the discourse of whiteness studies, this dissertation regards whiteness as complex and heterogeneous, making the study of an individual’s work relevant in relation to a perceived group.

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Chapter 1 A theoretical and historical introduction to Whiteness

i) Race, Ethnicity and Identity politics
ii) The Historical Context of Whiteness
iii) Post-Colonial Whiteness
i) Race Ethnicity and Identity Politics

Race and ethnicity are terms that have become diffuse and problematic through overuse and misapplication (Lopez, 2005). The constructed nature of these interrelated terms will be integral to an understanding of issues to be addressed in this dissertation. In this chapter I will discuss race and ethnicity and the slippages between them, the development of the modern racial order and the contemporary location of whiteness in particular in a South African context. In keeping with Epstein (1998), I will use the term ‘ethnicity’ to describe “communities which see themselves as different by virtue of history, religion and/or language but which, in South African terms, might be described as being of the same race” (Epstein, 1998: 51).

I further concur with Samson’s assumption that, “People make race. Differences in skin colour and other physical attributes exist, but on a spectrum rather than in neatly apportioned categories” (Samson 2005: 3). The idea that people make race is a core assumption in the critical study of race as a sociological phenomenon. However in order to understand this fully, a discussion of race and what is involved in its making will be addressed. Ratcliffe maintains that much of the world’s population regards race as an empirical truth. However, “To some, it may be little more than a convenient set of descriptors; to others it represents something considerably more sinister. It is away of ordering groups hierarchically and deterministically, that is the inferiorization of certain groups is deemed to apply in all places and for all time” (Ratcliffe 2004: 27).

The term race is essentially a generalization, referring to a phenotypically distinct group of people regarded as similar. As a term it is used by theorists and racists alike, the only difference being that modern theorists generalize in order to shed light on the effects of a racialized social order, while racists perpetuate racial hierarchies in order to secure positions of power. Debra Naills maintains that although individuals can be conscious of their racialized existence, “a race (like a state) can be severally conscious of the existence of the whole but has no distinct consciousness of its own” (Naills in Valls 2005: 64).

For the purposes of this dissertation, race will not refer to the genetically based reality of phenotypical differences, but instead to the symbolic meanings attached to those bodily differences (Brunsma & Rockquemore, 2002. p340). Thus, “the fact that a person is born with “white” skin does not necessarily mean that s/he will think, act, and write in the “white” ways I’ve described. Nor does the fact that a person has “brown” or “black” skin automatically guarantee that s/he will not think, act, and write in “white” ways” (Keating, 1995: 907).

Ethnicity is a term often used interchangeably with race, due to the fact that the two terms co-construct each other historically. Racial categories often refer to large groups of people with no historical bond or ethnic connection; hence the concept of race has brought many groups together by virtue of their racialization. MacDonald claims that, “ethnic groups are defined by perceptions of common descent” (MacDonald 2006: 17). In this sense race and ethnicity are synonymous. He notes further that, “communities are ethnic because their members believe they are associated by common ancestry” (MacDonald 2006: 17). Racial categories have generated a perceived common ancestry, thus ethnicity and race are inextricably entangled.As racial hierarchies have permeated the identity construction of individuals and groups, an historical racial identity relates in a reciprocal manner to ethnic identification.
Avtar Brah argues that ethnicity is used to refer to “a set of processes through which relational differences between groups are constructed and held in place” (Epstein, 1998: 49-59).

While Brah acknowledges the constructed and changing nature of ethnicity, other ethno-theorists such as Ratcliffe feel that a more fluid model, based on specific socio-cultural situations, is required in order to understand the shifting nature of ethnicity. Ratcliffe says of his situational approach to ethnicity, that there, “exist highly complex and multi-dimensional ethno-cultural identities. Essentially different aspects of our identity (not necessarily rooted in heritage) emerge in different social contexts” (Ratcliffe, 2004: 28). Ratcliffe further suggests that a post-modern sense of ethno-cultural identification, one that is useful when acknowledging a racial basis for interpretation, regards “ethnicity as constantly changing, not permanently anchored in history, either ‘real’ or imagined. As with the situational variant, it arises from social interactions of various kinds, and draws inspiration from global, national and local contexts” (Ratcliffe, 2004: 29).

Ratcliffe maintains that this perception of ethnicity is a key to understanding cultural hybridity and diaspora, two key aspects of post- colonial social theory (Ratcliffe, 2004). This perspective of a fluid, hybrid and plural ethnic identity that is under construction is reified by post-colonial discourse.

Race and ethnicity, therefore, cannot be conceptualized as an essentialized, unified system of meanings (James, 2003: 28). Instead they should be discussed and analyzed as heterogeneous, plural and replete with contending discourses. Power relations are key to understanding this multi-faceted view of cultural development and dynamics. Just as culture is subject to the centres of cultural production and reception, so too is an individuals’ ethnic identity. This is not to say that ethnic identities are pre- determined by the power centres, or located in an individual’s access to power. Rather authority lies in individual ability to exercise agency and determine the extent to which ethnicity holds sway as a conscious or unconscious influence on identity construction.

In discussing the work of an individual, as this paper does, identity construction becomes integral to an understanding of the reciprocal relationship between the artist and the social structures within which he works. This is illustrated by Brewer who accepts that the notion of a social identity has been invoked throughout the human sciences when the need for a conceptual bridge between individual and group analysis is required (2001: 115). Brewer maintains that social identity provides a link between individual psychology and the structure and process of social groups within which the individual is located (2001: 115).

If one defines social identity as an aspect of the self, the management of multiple identities is like an internal juggling act (Brewer, 2001: 121). Brewer further suggests that this management of identities occurs at both a conscious and subconscious level, and that the individual may be aware that differing identities may have conflicting implications for their behaviour. Thus while the individual’s enactment of identity is bound to a certain extent by their social context, the process remains one of accessing performances from an internal canon of identities or self-representations (Brewer, 2001: 121).

Acknowledging that the self draws on multiple identities in varying social contexts, Deaux (1996) provides some insight into the uses of social identity theories in the human sciences. He considers group identities as identities that are utilized when referring to a social identity located within the individual self-concept, in which identities are regarded as aspects of the self that have been influenced by membership of a social group on the other hand relational social identities are role identities, in the sense that they are identifications of the self as a certain kind of person. They differ from individual based social identities, because they define the self in relation to others (Stryker, 1980).

Whereas these forms of social identification privilege the importance of the influence of the group on the identity construction of the self, group-based social identities refer to the perception of self as an integral or interchangeable facet of the larger social unit. Brewer maintains that group social identity influences the self-concept in two ways; the first is when the construal of the self transcends the individual to involve a more inclusive social unit. In this instance the boundaries between the self and other group members is overshadowed by the more important boundaries between ingroup and outgroups. In the second instance, the attributes and behaviours of the individual self are merged with the representation of the group as a whole, highlighting the features that make the group distinctive from others and simultaneously enhancing uniformity and cohesion within the group (Turner et al in Brewer, 2001: 119). In a work such as Bubblehead Underpants (2002) Murray highlights some of the features of whiteness, such as it’s seemingly blank façade, bear in mind that the Afrikaans term for white people (blanke) has an etymological connection to blankness or transparency.

Not dissimilar to group based identities, collective social identification involves a shared conception and representation of the group based on perceived common interests and history. However the impetus of a collective social identity is an active effort to forge the group collectively, to change what the group stands for and how others will view it. Therefore collective social identity represents goals achieved collectively, above and beyond what individuals initially had in common. The concept of collective identity therefore provides a critical link between social identity (at both individual and group levels) and collective action (Gamson in Brewer, 2001: 119).

Social identities are not only diverse within the sphere of social discourse, but are also built of many facets of a group or individual’s identity construct. Race is an important facet in this construction, because groups are not only ethnicized by their cultural practices, but are also racialized. The constructed nature of race has influenced, and been influenced by the not so distant past. Still race persists beyond the colonial era as a testament to the collective memory of the groups affected by its enactment. Phenotypical differences have existed as long as people have lived in varying environments and have identified observed differences. These physical differences have been useful to groups that seek to differentiate themselves from the ‘other’, for what are usually power-related reasons. When these physical differences are not present, they can be constructed. For example the wearing of the Magen David (Star/Shield of David) in Nazi-controlled Germany, was enforced to visually differentiate Jews from their Christian German counterparts. Since the beginnings of modern human exploration, groups of differing phenotypical traits have come into contact with each other. The modern order of racial hierarchies however, soon began to foreground and racially align it’s perceived others.

ii)The Historical Context of Whiteness

As noted above, ethnic and racial identities are aspects of social identification that are in process and contingent on a collective history. In order to understand whiteness as a racial identity and metanarrative of self identification, an understanding of it’s historical development is necessary. According to Samson (2005) by the Middle Ages Europe had already moved away from the relatively tolerant polytheisms of the ancient Mediterranean. Muslims (the ‘Moors’ as they would be known) from North Africa invaded Spain in 711. The Moors where later overthrown in the eleventh century by Christian leaders from the northern parts of Spain. However Moorish power remained in some coastal areas. While religious difference had occurred in the past, religious rifts now began to assume a racial aspect as well. After the reconquest of Spain, “royal and aristocratic families became increasingly concerned with ‘purity of blood’, praising whiter complexions as evidence that particular families had not intermarried with Moors or Jews” (Samson, 2005: 12). Although difference between groups was still essentially located in religion, physical attributes were now a signifier of that difference, and in the Iberian Peninsula the notion of whiteness was further attached to superiority. Samson suggests that this was the beginnings of the modern racial order and in particular the beginnings of the concept of whiteness (Samson, 2005: 12).

However Stevens suggests that in most colonial contexts the initial constructions of whiteness were in a defence of a “normativity that was perceived to be under threat from the ‘heathen’, the ‘barbarian’, the ‘Saracen’, the ‘primitive native’, and so forth” (Stevens, 2007: 427). Thus whiteness was positioned at the apex of the hierarchical structures and connotations of physical difference, a concept that would much later come to be known as race.

In 1492 Columbus’s inadvertent discovery of the Americas led to a new and unexpected phase in the understanding of human difference. The goals of Spanish and Portuguese colonisation in the Americas were, economic exploitation and religious conversion (Samson, 2005: 14). Initially debates about issues of equality and indigenous rights ensued. Unable to decide on a verdict the eventual outcome was arrived at due to fear that the Spanish colonists would rebel against Spain if their freedom to abuse the indigenous people of the Americas was curtailed (Samson, 2005: 15).

Subsequent development of a hegemonic racial hierarchy was reflected in the implementation of slavery in newly discovered regions of the world. Slavery is a human phenomenon that existed long before Europeans endeavoured to explore the world and in particular continental Africa. Although the European slave trade would, “vastly exceed earlier precedents in both scope and brutality” (Samson, 2005: 19). Samson suggests that the act of slavery compounded already existing European prejudices (Samson, 2005: 19). By enslaving others, a sense of European superiority existed, enslavement serving to further perpetuate and aggravate the multitude of perceived and real inequalities.

This was to gain momentum with a shift in European power in the seventeenth century, when the English defeated the Dutch in numerous naval battles and began a slave trade of their own, soon becoming the dominant European slave traders and later imperial political power. Due to a unique style of colonial management, new forms of self-identification started to emerge in the English colonies, “From initially the most common term Christian, at mid-century there was a shift towards the terms English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of self- identification appeared – white” (Jordan, 1974:52 in Samson, 2005: 22).
The English had developed an enmity towards many other nations since the crusades, however at the time of colonial advancement the Irish were their closest foes. The Irish were perceived as primitive and savage by the English, these views were to be institutionalised and would form part of the public’s understanding of the other. The hatred of the Irish was a form of extreme ethnocentrism, that reached it’s peak in the sixteenth century, the same era in which the English were settling Northern America (Allen 1994; Canny 1973; Liggio 1976 in Smedley 1998: 694).

The hallmarks of English racial oppression were by now obvious and constituted “The assault upon the tribal affinities, customs, laws and institutions of the Africans, American Indians and the Irish by English/British and Anglo-American colonialism [and] reduced all members of the oppressed to one undifferentiated social status, a status beneath that of any member of any social class within the colonising population” (Allen 1994: 32).

By the time Britain envisaged greater expansion into South Africa, America was already in the process of claiming its independence from Britain. The British were entering into an industrial age and its colonial ambitions were largely determined by new capitalist markets and strategic positions in case of war (Samson, 2005). The nineteenth century challenged traditional ideas about imperialism, new ideas of the imperial mission assumed a slightly more evangelical and humanitarian edge. Henceforth a new strategy of civilizing the uncivilized and converting the heathen developed in order to maintain and expand a territorial empire (Samson, 2005).

Coinciding with the British colonial endeavour, academic concerns with race and human difference in the form of the emerging discipline of anthropology arose. Due to the colonial attitudes at the time this science was tainted by the aims of colonialism and ended up serving colonial interests, rather than academic pursuit. Ratcliffe highlights the value of the discipline of anthropology to the colonists, “The key was that it was possible for scientists to describe, categorize and then formally classify the world’s human population” (Ratcliffe, 2004: 17). This categorization was then ordered hierarchically, based on the hegemonic norms that had been in development since the middle ages. However there was resistance to a scientific racial order, such as Blumenbach’s view that distinct ‘races’ was a purely hypothetical position (Ratcliffe, 2004: 17).

However Blumenbach’s perspective was short-lived, as notions of a racial strata served the goals of colonialism better. Positivists like Cuvier suggested in 1805 that humanity comprised of three races; ‘white’, ‘yellow’ and ‘black’ , with ‘white’ at the apex and ‘black’ in the “lowest position” (Ratcliffe, 2004: 17).

As the physical anthropologists devised more sophisticated ways of positioning the world’s peoples, few ever questioned the underlying logic, even when the data they collected failed to confirm their theories. In the process, race effectively became a world-view; an incontestable ‘fact’ about the way the world was ordered (Ratcliffe 2004: 17). As Ratcliffe suggests, through history and eventually through science a worldview of racial hierarchies was established that would permeate the lives of all who experienced different races, whether conscious or unconscious of its influence.

iii) Post-Colonial Whiteness

In the contemporary post-colonial era, whiteness has loosened its grasp on the physical spaces it had conquered and dominated through colonization. Lopez suggests that, postcolonialism represents “a critique of the West’s historical domination of its others, the corresponding assumption of its cultural superiority over those others and especially the discourses that enable both” (2005: 7). Correspondingly Frankenberg regards whiteness as the “production and reproduction of dominance rather than subordination, normativity rather than marginality, and privilege rather than disadvantage” (Frankenberg, 1993: 236). Thus in history and the contemporary moment, whiteness and colonialism are inextricably linked.

While Lopez contends that the end of colonialism should have brought about the end of the dominance of whiteness, whiteness persists as a latent ideal (2005: 1). Theorists such as Henry Louis Gates (1986) and Kwame Appiah (1992) regard race as a malignant fiction, whilst others such as Richard Dyer (1997) and Ross Chambers (1997) argue for more scrutiny directed at whiteness as a tacit norm (Lopez, 2005: 2). Whilst these two views approach race from different perspectives, their ultimate goal is the same. The first group aims to do away with the fiction of race entirely, whilst the other wants to place whiteness as a racial category - one amongst many others. Although seemingly incompatible both groups share in common a scrutiny of the power structures that hold racial hierarchies in place; and this in the end is the ultimate goal of critical race theory (Lopez, 2005: 2). Whiteness studies is a recent, post 90’s development in the critique of race. Its purpose has been to foreground and scrutinise the concept of whiteness. Through illuminating the concept, the field of whiteness studies then aims to deconstruct the power centres of white supremacy.

This would entail critiques of cultural, political, economic and all other knowledge based institutions. Whiteness studies are divided by what Sullivan refers to as “eliminatavists” and “critical conservationists” (Sullivan, 2005: 237). The eliminatavists, such as Gates and Appiah, aim to dismantle and undermine the concept of whiteness in order to negate potential for abuses of power. Eliminativist theory is based on the notion that as long as whiteness exists, so does racial oppression. Beyond this, eliminativists aim to undo the fiction of race entirely. Critical conservationism on the other hand, in the case of Dyer and Chambers, wishes to reinvent whiteness as an anti-racist category. As oxymoronic as whiteness and anti-racism seem, critical conservationists posit that whiteness could become more than just the oppressive racist force it has been forged from. Furthermore, Sullivan suggests that, “since lived existential categories like whiteness cannot be merely or quickly eliminated, white people should work to transform whiteness into an anti-racist category” (Sullivan, 2005: 237). Although these views seem to be ostensibly paradoxical, their core beliefs are essentially the same, that is to focus on whiteness as a racial construct and therefore enable critique of the concept to challenge the hegemony of whiteness.

As discussed earlier, in the history of imperialism and colonial expansion race has been utilized as a justification for the domination and oppression of others. This domination came in multiple forms, located in perceived superiority ranging from the technological to the religious. Through dominating other groups, and by utilizing race as a means to legitimate domination, whiteness became ideologically centred. By controlling several pedagogical, ontological and epistemological structures, whiteness was able to control most systems of knowledge. Through this control of knowledge, whiteness was able to define and change its others to suite the model of humanity which was regarded as the norm by European and white standards.

Because all structures of knowledge production and critique were controlled by white power structures, whiteness itself became incapable of being scrutinized as an active force in the development of cultural norms and identities. Instead, through the long processes of control and domination by whites, whiteness itself has become somewhat of a tacit norm, a hegemony that until recently has been beyond criticism, and will remain beyond mainstream criticism until the white centres relinquish their power to new centres of ideological discourse.

To contextualise the application of a theorized post-colonial whiteness I refer to one of Brett Murray’s artworks. Murray’s work, Dance Routine of the White Male Psyche (2000), shows the subaltern icon of white masculinity, Bart Simpson, avoiding his own gaze in a mirror. Whilst there are multiple readings of this work, it can be subject to a range of interpretations allied to post-colonial literature theorizing whiteness and the Euro/American west. Race theorist Henry Giroux has suggested that whiteness, invisibility and domination are closely related (Giroux, 1992 in Keating, 1995: 905). The so called invisibility of whiteness is revealed in Murray’s work, Dance Routine of the White Male Psyche (2000). In a post-colonial reading of this work, an understanding of dominant hegemonic whiteness is discernible. The major themes of dominant hegemonic whiteness are; its invisibility and by virtue of this, it’s inability to recognise itself. However as is suggested by Murray’s work, hegemonic whiteness is complicit in avoiding its own gaze, suggesting it is not so much an invisible whiteness, but a whiteness that is unwilling to acknowledge itself. This is further reified by the notion that whiteness is in fact visible to those who are not white and have had to struggle against its dominance. Keating, in keeping with Giroux, suggests that the power whiteness gains from its invisibility lies in its ability to make the other visible, “whiteness operates as the unacknowledged standard or norm against which all so-called ‘minorities’ are measured” (Keating, 1995 :905). In relation to the work, Morrison highlights the isolationist stance of hegemonic whiteness, possibly shown in the rigid borders of the mirror at which Bart gazes. Morrison associates whiteness with an insistence on purity, self-containment, and impenetrable borders (Morrison, 1992 in Keating, 1995: 907).

Ironically relatively few theorists of colonialism and post-colonialism have focused on whiteness. Lopez maintains this is because of the post-structuralist sensibilities of much post-colonial writing that avoids critiques of the sociological and focuses on the literary or linguistic. Lopez maintains that because colonialism and whiteness both signified the same thing, hegemonic power and imperialism of body, mind, culture, land and so forth, that the discussion of whiteness was left out because of it’s similarity to the discussion of colonialism (Lopez 2005). Not only this, but as Dyer contends,“For most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general. Research … shows that in Western representation whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard” (Dyer, 1997 :3).

Psychoanalysis is a useful device in the understanding and deconstuction of the location of postcolonial whiteness, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis. However it is far from a perfect mode of interpretation. Derrida takes psychoanalysis to task for it’s aspiration to a universal narrative and implies a latent colonial impulse in this desire. (Derrida, 1998: 66-67) However to Lopez the benefit of psychoanalysis is that the praxis of psychology is to serve its object, meaning that the method is always self- reflexively informed by the subconscious (Lopez, 2005 :155). In this psychoanalysis is perfect in the analysis of trauma, colonial and post-colonial trauma in particular, due to its acknowledgement of the fluidity of the object and recognition of the vast differences and heterogoneous nature of society and its individuals (Lopez 2005 :156). The assumption that art is a symptom of the society in which it is produced, results in the politicizing of the psychoanalytic process which is useful when attempting to understand the work of art as a symptom of race amongst other influences.

Most studies on whiteness in the post-colonial context and associated critique are located within Euro-American post-colonial discourse and leave little room for subaltern, plural or hybrid whitenesses that exist in many post-colonial regions. Failing to acknowledge the multiple sites of whiteness has narrowed the field to a critique of dominant hegemonic whiteness and to a discussion of how to undermine its power structures. However whiteness comes in multiple forms and not all of these are invisible or omnipotent. Erickson asserts that there is no problem with acknowledging the dominance of the American situation and “allowing for multiple ‘inventions’ of whiteness in different times and places” (Erickson 1995 :175). I will take account of the dominant hegemony of whiteness, whilst bearing in mind that whiteness is not a homogenous or nebulous entity. Instead it is fractured and multiple. For the purposes of this paper, the dominant whiteness of the Euro-American West will serve as the background to the fractured and in process whitenesses of the South African context.

Chapter 2 Aspects of Whiteness in the South African Context

i) Some South African Particularities
ii) Post-Apartheid Euphoria
iii) Afrikaner and English Whitenesses
iv) Diaspora
v) Whiteness and Africanicity
i) Some South African particularities

Given that whiteness is not a homogenous concept, and that it’s driving force was located in colonialism, each subsequent colony has it’s own plural interpretations of what whiteness is, or was. In the context of South Africa, this concept is based in the tradition of prevailing colonial hierarchies, but was further reified by the apartheid system. This re-inscription of race has had consequences that have caused a divergence in the globally theorized whiteness of Europe and America, from that of South African whiteness. Apart from apartheid’s re-inscription of race formally, the fact that no other country in the post-colonial era has had a numerical minority dominate for such a lengthy time has inevitably affected race relations (Schutte, 1995: 3).

However the racial stratification in South Africa is infamous because of the apartheid system that had been implemented (MacDonald, 2006: 7). Originally in the white centres of Europe and America, the notion of whiteness as superior had become entrenched as a tacit and hegemonic norm, invisible to critique and scrutiny. However in South Africa apartheid formalized what in the West was a hegemonic norm. Thus identity was far more consciously arranged around conceptions of race because as Epstein states, “In the South African context, it is obvious that the state, historically,has had differential impacts on people’s lives depending on their social, racial and class position (and remembering that these are irretrievably interlinked)” (Epstein, 1998: 49)

McDonald underlines the contemporary nature of apartheid in relation to the development of white supremacy, “Apartheid, by contrast, was not instituted until the second half of the twentieth century, which is why apartheid is not reducible to simple white supremacy. Apartheid was a version of white supremacy, one among several competitors, and what distinguished apartheid from its rivals was not racism, which was common to all of them” (MacDonald, 2006: 7). The defining nature of apartheid that MacDonald is alluding to is its legal structure. As Schutte writes, “One of the most striking features of white-dominated South African society until the last decade of the twentieth century was its structuration by legal means” (Schutte, 1995: 68).

This legal stucturation of race caused perceptions of race to be foregrounded, a break with the way in which white supremacy had previously been constructed. This legal structuration meant that whiteness was no longer an invisible norm, but a highly visible and legitimized race group. The visibility of whiteness is something that in South Africa is experienced by all races, not just whites, as Matsebula et. al. suggest, “whiteness has not been invisible to black and indigenous peoples and that it has been part of the long history of resistance by black people in South Africa” (Matsebula, Sonn & Green 2007: 437).

The visibility of race and more specifically, whiteness, is addressed in an alternate reading of Murray’s work Dance routine of the White Male psyche (2000, refer to page 17). When analyzed with reference to theorized hegemonic post-colonial whiteness, the work highlights the invisibility of the tacit norm of whiteness. However when re-read in the South African context, it conveys a different meaning altogether. The meaning is shifted towards one of shame, loss, insecurity and a shift from the ideological centre to the periphery of political power. Bart signifies the white male’s yearning for icons that can guide his now defunct cultural influences. However never quite being able to fully see the image of Bart, the white male dances, seeing only a fragment of an elusive white icon. The white male tries to identify with a foreign whiteness, a whiteness perceived to have more legitimacy than his own.

The whiteness represented by Bart is however a resistant, rebellious and anarchic whiteness. Bart represents an aspect of whiteness that is flawed, marginalized and anti-social. The work tries to deconstruct the idea that whites, reinforced by the latent power structure located in masculinity, are now in a process of re-identification, having lost aspects of what was once certain and an ideologically centred ethnic and racial identity.

Whiteness in the era of apartheid and particularly in the last decade of apartheid was most obviously ideologically centred, and unlike conceptions of whiteness’s in the rest of the world, it was visible (Steyn, 2005). The historical construction of apartheid was full of contradictions, uncertainties and lapses in control; however the system prevailed for more than forty years, reflecting the powerful and intimidating nature of the apartheid state. Thus, force was not the only tool at the disposal of the apartheid state, as Posel suggests, “it also had a lot to do with the systematic bureaucratization and normalization of race. With the advent of apartheid (which built on white supremacist foundations laid decades earlier), South Africa became one of the most thoroughly racialized social orders in the world” (Posel, 2001: 88).

The use of bureaucratic systems to normalize conceptions of ‘race’ and thus generate or further reinforce the existing racial hierarchy was an important aspect of the apartheid system. Whereas white supremacy in previous eras, such as the colonial, relied primarily on force and intimidation, the apartheid state built on the existing western racial norms, utilizing bureaucracy to ingrain the apartheid racial order in the minds of all who were subject to it. This shows, according to Posel, that apartheid’s social engineers drew deliberately on a conception of ‘race’ as a socio-legal construct instead of a scientifically measurable essence (Posel, 2001: 88). Murray reflects upon this with Bureaucrat (1985) and satirizes the notion that bureaucracy was one of the major instruments of the apartheid regime. Murray’s satirical art at this time was politically engaged in that it lampooned all facets of the apartheid state. This rampant satirical attack, on the ideological centre at the time, shows surety in his choice of target. Murray acknowledges that the targets at the time were obvious (Murray, 2009). However this is not to say that the apartheid systematization of race was sufficient to generate a racial hierarchy on it’s own. Instead the apartheid system built on the myths of white supremacy that had been in development since pre-colonial times. These myths added to the notion that ‘race’ was a tacit norm, a notion that permeated South Africa throughout apartheid. (Posel, 2001: 88)

ii) Post-apartheid Euphoria

In the post-apartheid era political power is in the hands of the African National Congress, a previously banned political party whose members are predominantly black. The state now uses a constitution heralded as one of the most liberal in the world. However as Epstein asserts, social inequality persists in the ‘new’ South Africa, the poor are still poor, while the rich retain their wealth. Furthermore, the poor are still mainly black and the rich are predominantly white, making it impossible to disentangle race and class (Epstein, 1998 :49). Although Epstein’s statement is demographically accurate, the classes of South Africa are heterogeneous and an emerging black middle class is beginning to complicate what were clear race/class boundaries.

Although political power has changed, undoing forty years of legal racial stratification and centuries of subversive white supremacy is a task that generations to come will have to grapple with. As in the recent past, not only were white identities normalized as superior of its others (as in the rest of the Western world), but in apartheid era South Africa, the superiority of whiteness was legally enforced. Steyn maintains that in the present South African situation, “whites have lost political power. They largely maintain economic power, and because Western cultures are held in esteem as the believed key to internationalism, they still hold cultural power” (Steyn in Lopez 2005: 122). This cultural hierarchy can be seen and reinterpreted in the artworks to be discussed later, as South African cultural institutions privilege Western or white cultural practices and in turn the entire cultural praxis. The cultural goal of achieving whiteness is thus normalized and made invisible as whites and Western culture maintain the age-old hegemony of white supremacy. However, as suggested earlier, Steyn maintains that, “Even before April 1994, white South Africans were acutely aware of their whiteness - that it was a position of privilege, the absolutely defining factor in their life chances” (2001: 163).

South African whiteness and its shifting racial order is therefore comparable to that of Western white supremacy and the overarching narratives of whiteness. However the racial dynamics here are fundamentally different from those in America or Europe, because whiteness has been visible and upheld in South Africa for more than half a century. The awareness of white South Africans of their own whiteness is what distinguishes them from a homogenous, globally theorized whiteness. Although whiteness and white supremacy has built upon centuries of subversive racial stratification, the South African white recognises their own whiteness, initially by being legally centred through apartheid and more recently by being democratically decentred. Epstein expands on this point by suggesting that, “where it used to be the common sense of white South Africans that they were superior to their fellow countrymen and women, this feeling is now not acceptable, even though it may persist in some (maybe many) cases” (Epstein, 1998: 50).

iii) ‘Afrikaner’ and ‘English’ Whitenesses

Whiteness in South Africa is also different to a mythologized global whiteness, because of the perception of a massive disjuncture that lies within the narrative of South African whiteness. Whiteness in the South African context is comprised of two major cultural groups which are delineated by language. Steyn (2004: 143-169) asserts that in the South African context whiteness has been defined in terms of the struggle between English and Afrikaans subjectivities. The perceived and socially constructed rift between Afrikaners and white English Speaking South Africans has been constructed out of an historic rivalry and battle for control over the country. The distinction between the two is vital to understanding the constructedness of whiteness in the South African context. Furthering Steyns distinction of a dichotomous whiteness, Foster and Salusbury similarly define contemporary South African whiteness as two distinct, though inextricably entangled, groups. The English speaking white is of concern for Foster and Salusbury and they refer to these whites as ‘White English Speaking South Africans’, or WESSA’s (Salusbury & Foster in Distiller & Steyn, 2004: 93). While they may share many common traits and assumptions of privilege; “there are also significant differences in how their whiteness is being reframed in post-apartheid South Africa” (Steyn, 2004: 144).

When looking at the discourses within South African whiteness from an historical perspective, Gabriel (1998) feels that Afrikaner whiteness could be regarded as a subaltern form of whiteness. It is a whiteness that has “shifted over time”, but has generally “remained prey” to the more dominant discourse of specifically British whiteness (Gabriel, 1998: 184). As a result of the subaltern nature of Afrikaner whiteness, the whiteness of the Afrikaner has been heavily tied to ethnic and nationalistic discourse (Steyn, 2005: 143). It is widely regarded that the rise of extreme Afrikaner nationalism in the early twentieth century is a reaction to the defeat of the Boer at the hands of the British in the South African War of 1899-1902 (Dubow, 1992; Fredrickson, 1981; Porter, 2000; Vail, 1989). As a result the divide between the Afrikaner and English ethnic groups has been perceived to be deep enough to be untranslatable (Steyn, 2005: 147).

In comparison to their Afrikaner counterparts, far less literature is to be found on WESSA’s. Foster and Salusbury attribute this to the fact that WESSA’s are comprised of such a vast range of ethnicities that many theorists would argue that the group is too diffuse for study (Salusbury & Foster in Distiller & Steyn, 2004. p 93). They comprise of a multitude of ethnic histories, including Portuguese, Irish, British, Dutch, Greek, Jewish and even Afrikaner ancestries. However it is not only the diffuse nature of the groups that has made them difficult to study, but also the fact that, “The use of English as the main official language of academia, business, and politics further strengthens the reproduction of whiteness in post- apartheid South Africa. It offers unfair privileges to mostly white people who have access to this language to monopolise the production of ideas about society” (Green, Sonn & Matsebula, 2007: 401).

Salusbury and Foster suggest that the only reason the group is considered as distinct by theorists, is that it has been borne out of a resistance to other more clearly defined social groups, in particular a more clearly defined whiteness in the Afrikaner (Salusbury & Foster in Distiller & Steyn, 2004: 93). Furthermore, they suggest that WESSA identity is diffuse and unarticulated because of this resistance to other groups. WESSA’s define themselves not by who they are, but in resistance to who they are not, which as the White and English in the name implies; they see themselves as not Black and not Afrikaans. Foster and Salusbury’s categories are integral to an understanding of whiteness, however the term Afrikaner is too broad to be fully discussed in this paper. Afrikaner as an ethnic group may have been founded on language and ‘race’, however in the present the perceived racial exclusivity of the Afrikaner is being dismantled.

The relationship between the white English and white Afrikaner are of importance to a discussion of whiteness in the South African context, and of importance to a discussion of Murray’s work. If one is to locate Brett Murray within an ethnic group, his would be a hybrid of both English and Afrikaner ethnicities. In South Africa multiple ethnicities exist alongside each other and assimilation and hybridization are inevitable, which is true for groups that identify themselves as both along ethno- cultural and racial lines. Afrikaners and WESSAs are theorized as distinct, however the boundaries between the two have been blurred through interaction and racial polarization. The fact that whiteness is a core attribute for both groups has brought them together and any perceived rift is bridged by racial commonality. Steyn does acknowledge this commonality between the groups, however she points out a key difference in how whiteness has been utilized by each group. Steyn maintains that English-speaking whites are reliant on a whiteness that is dominant and international; the post-colonial whiteness referred to in chapter 1. However she feels that white Afrikaner are unlike white English South Africans, whose whiteness has an international ideological centre that gives their identity a stable continuity (Steyn, 2004. p153). Thus the post-apartheid White Afrikaner is contending with a profound existential crisis (De Klerk, 2000; De Lange, 2001; Louw, 2001; Slabbert, 1999).

Steyn’s 2001 publication, Whiteness just isn’t what it used to be, identifies ‘white talk’ as a characteristic of South African whiteness. ‘White talk’ is a heterogeneous discourse that in it’s multiple guises serves to legitimate and reinforce various aspects of white supremacy and ideology. Steyn suggests that white English South Africans utilize ‘white talk’ in ways that serve a maintenance function. Afrikaans ‘white talk’, on the other hand, performs a much more active constitutive role rehabilitating and reinventing a space for itself in the new society (Steyn, 2004: 162). The position of the Afrikaner according to Steyn is experienced as weak in relation to both the African other who possesses demographic power and their English white counterparts, who’s whiteness associates itself with the dominant Western brand of whiteness (Steyn, 2004. p162).

In the post-apartheid context of South Africa white Afrikaners have had to attempt to relocate their identity. This is in part due to the idea that their identity was so vehemently structured around notions of Calvinism, patriarchy and of course whiteness. To continue with white supremacist attitudes in a society ruled by a black majority and a liberal constitution, would mean isolation and the group would be rejected and regarded as counter-revolutionary and racist. That said, one must acknowledge that English ethnic identification is also in a process of change, maintaining their whiteness through international, Eurocentric allegiances is no longer an acceptable form of ethnic identification. How these two ethnic strains of whiteness are morphing and adapting to a ‘new’ South Africa, where their legitimacy has been undermined, is of primary concern to this paper.

The type of whiteness shown by WESSAs, is referred to by Steyn (2001 & 2005) as diasporic, while Paton reinforces their cultural and linguistic association to Europe (Paton, 1981 in Distiller & Steyn, 2004: 94). In contrast to Afrikaners, whose language is of Africa, the WESSAs clung to the British dialect, upholding its correct use. All this suggests that whilst the Afrikaner is regarded as experiencing an existential crisis in the post-apartheid context of South Africa (De Klerk, 2000; De Lange, 2001; Louw, 2001; Slabbert, 1999; Steyn 2004), then WESSAs are experiencing a post-colonial crisis of identity. As Butler suggested in the mid seventies, “they feel a lack of purpose, of direction; they want to feel they belong; and they are afraid of belonging: they don’t know what to belong to” (Butler, 1976: 11).

In the following section I will discuss a major trait of South African whiteness, namely diaspora. This is usually used in reference to English whiteness, however as Green et al. suggest “while the white population in South Africa is by no means homogeneous, whiteness is an overarching identity” (Green, Sonn & Matsebula, 2007: 404). In contemporary South Africa English and Afrikaner whiteness are becoming more and more inextricably entangled, as Murray himself evidences.

iv) Diaspora

When referring to South Africa in the post-colonial paradigm, diaspora is a concept that cannot be ignored. Colonization and subsequent de-colonization of spaces resulted in the fracturing and spread of many groups across the former British empire. Admittedly colonization is not the only reason for there being diasporic populations around the world. Diasporas borne out of labour, culture and victimization are some types of diaspora presented by Cohen in his five part typology of diaspora (Kenny, 2003 :42). The fourth and fifth parts of his typology are known as ‘trade’ and ‘imperial’ diasporas, which are types of diaspora that will be of importance throughout this dissertation. An imperial diaspora is a diaspora borne out of the conquest of land or imperial expansion. In the South African post-colonial context these types of diaspora would be associated with the British empire. The diasporic subject according to Kenny, seeks to transcend the boundaries of the nation state within which they exist, they search for reciprocal sensibilities found in globally scattered communities (Kenny, 2003: 135).

Whilst the term diaspora has traditionally been utilized in describing groups that have experienced a dispersal from a homeland for multiple reasons, both voluntary and involuntary, diaspora has referred to groups that also manifest a collective myth about their previous homeland and who show a commitment to its maintenance and desire to return home (Kenny, 2003 :142). Kenny also asserts that diasporic communities experience alienation and isolation in their new homelands. However the term diaspora is now widely used in reference to migrants, expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, and ethnic and racial minorities, along with a wide range of processes connected with decolonization, transnationalism, and globalization (Anthias, Safran, and Clifford in Kenny,
2003 :142). Dayal refers to the negotiation of dual homelands experienced by diasporic groups as double consciousness (Dayal, 1996: 47). He regards double consciousness as a state of mind that is to be striven for by a diasporic population. Double consciousness gives the diasporic individual an interstitial perspective on what it means to be South African, which allows for multiple interpretations of the concept of ‘belonging’ (Dayal, 1996: 47). Thus for the purposes of this dissertation I will assume Clifford’s stance as evidenced in Kenny, “rather than constructing typologies that run the risk of being arbitrary or exclusive, avowedly ‘postmodern’ approaches such as Clifford’s are concerned with how ‘hybrid’ forms of identity and consciousness are constituted and represented and how a new ‘diasporic space’ that transcends the nations of origin and settlement is created” (Kenny, 2003: 142).
The concept of diaspora is one that is rarely applied to groups of people that are deemed white. However as evidenced earlier, South African whiteness and in particular English speaking South African whiteness is diasporic in nature. Martin suggests that most white South Africans would reject the notion that they form part of a diasporic population or community (Martin, 1996:14).

This is as a result of nationalist propaganda and the ambition of many white South Africans to ‘belong’ in South Africa, most people regard diaspora and belonging as mutually exclusive concepts. Under apartheid identity was fixed, now South Africans can access multiple identities (Martin, 1996: 14). It is this ability to access multiple identities that reinforces the notion of whiteness in the contemporary moment as being diasporic in nature. Samir Dayal refers to the ability of choosing multiple identities as double consciousness ( Dayal, 1996). The white diaspora of South Africa will be discussed not in terms of a geographically specific ‘Mother Land’, as the cultural influence of Britain and Europe in the modern globalized world is too diffuse and entangled with other cultural sources of media to be referenced or ‘chosen’ as Martin puts it. Instead the diasporic referent in the case of white South Africans is a reference to dominant, hegemonic whiteness, which I will refer to as Euro-American whiteness in order to provide a space to legitimize the theoretical diaspora. In interrogating South African whiteness by locating much of it’s cultural reference as being outside of itself and in particular from a theorized Euro-American centre, and I will show this as a trait of whiteness in the work of Brett Murray.

Murray’s work has often assumed the vernacular form of the ‘popular’, re- appropriating ‘popular’ icons to be used for his own iconoclastic visions. The term ‘popular’ however is not without it’s complexities and is by no means a universal term. Instead Murray’s use of the ‘popular’ is an example of the diasporic tendencies discussed above. Murray reaches out to and deploys the popular signage of a Euro- American whiteness located in the popular media in order to foreground and reflect upon the position of whiteness in South Africa. An example of this would be his frequent use of Bart Simpson as a motif within his work, as a metaphor of a rebellious and subaltern whiteness, a viewpoint that is not dissimilar to his own. The use of Bart Simpson has been discussed with reference to the work, Dance Routine of the White Male Psyche (2000, refer to page 17), however the use of this American Icon of childish and anarchic rebellion within the setting of white suburbia is a recurring element of Murray’s attempt to both represent himself and whiteness through the strategic employment of a subaltern resistant white icon.

The work Guilt, Memory and Identity (2000), from the I Love Africa (2000) exhibition, is one example of Murray’s use of Bart as both a metaphor of himself and of whiteness, both local and Euro-American. The image shows three images of Bart with erections, standing over emblems that hold within them the text; guilt, memory and identity, as in the title of the work. The general interpretation is that Bart is aroused by notions of guilt, memory and identity. However, when conflated with the idea that Murray is utilizing Bart as a metaphor of the self and of the various manifestations of whiteness, multiple readings emerge. Murray, as in a number of other works; Artist: Self Portrait (1985), New Beginnings: the Artist (2006) and Renaissance Man Tending His Land (2008), has tempered the didactic nature of his satirical attack by placing himself within the artwork. Dance Routine of the White Male Psyche (2000, refer to page17), situated within the same body of work, acknowledges Murray’s referral to whiteness when utilizing Bart as a signifier, where Bart is also a reference to himself. Murray suggests that mainstream Euro-American whiteness is aroused by its own guilt, memory and identity that is built out of oppression and subjugation of Africa.

However as I have suggested, Murray is not only focusing his gaze at Euro-American whiteness as his target, but is simultaneously referring to his own identity and the collective identity of South African whites. This dual reference is an example of what Dayal has termed diasporic double-consciousness of a diaspora (Dayal, 1996). Murray has accessed the canon of Euro-American whiteness in order to articulate his own position on the subject.

Murray utilizes the strategy of engaging a state of double-consciousness in numerous works, referencing simultaneously himself, his perceived group collective (see Brewer, 2001), and a foreign imagined Euro-American whiteness. Renaissance Man Tending His Land (2008) is perhaps a more literal example of his inclusion of himself as the object of satire. Again, as in Guilt, Memory and Identity (2000), Murray layers his conception of whiteness. He situates himself within the construct of the imagined colonial subject, yet the overall effect is one of an incongruous amalgam of cultures, a reflection on what Murray regards as an absurd diaspora. Whilst situating himself within the context of a globally theorised historically specific whiteness, he also references the contemporary moment, by incorporating the ‘weed-eater’ as the tool with which he tends his ‘land’.

The land to which he tends is in fact his own garden, further problematising the notion of a diaspora and the individualistic priorities of many white South Africans, suggesting that his garden is a piece of renaissance Europe here in South Africa. He further confounds the issue of ‘race’ by having himself, from the neck up, painted black. The reasoning for this will be discussed with greater depth in a later section. The blackness of his face contrasts both literally and figuratively with his whiteness, highlighting the complexities of the diasporic condition of whiteness. Constantly in a state of ambivalence, between a performance of blackness and whiteness. As Dayal suggests, “diasporics may position themselves as resisting assimilation, liminally situated on the borders or fault lines, alive to the play of contradiction and to the unregulated possibilities of such a positioning” (Dayal, 1996: 52).

The 2002 exhibition White Like Me, reveals much insight into the notion of a white diaspora. The work, African Parts (2002), shows two white men at a bar and the one asks, “What parts of you are from Africa?” Firstly, as is common in Murray’s work, the visual style is one of Euro-American origins. This use of the ‘New-Yorker’ cartoonist handelsman (Murray interview, 2009: 19:45) style comic functions as a way of generating nostalgia for a whiteness lost and is an acknowledgement of a whiteness that is diasporic in its cultural references. The text in the work further reifies this concept, as the one white man regards the other as fractured, possibly having some parts from Africa and some from the same place that generated the visual style of the piece, namely Euro-America. The work also generates a fear of a fraudulent whiteness, suggesting that none of the parts of whiteness are from Africa.
Continuing in the same vein (and from the same exhibition) the work White Africans (2002) shows St Peter at the gates of heaven calling for whites who think they are African to stand to one side. This work covers many of the points raised in African Parts (2002), but utilizes another of whiteness’s multiple guises, that of Christianity.

By utilizing Christianity and the notion of a judgement by God to highlight the insecurities of white South Africans, Murray is moving beyond nationalism in the debate surrounding whiteness and Africanicity. According to Kenny this is a diasporic approach to the subject that seeks, “to transcend the nation-state as the primary unit of historical analysis, searching for reciprocal interactions and the sensibilities they nurture among globally scattered communities” (Kenny, 2003: 135). By referring to a global entity such as Christianity, and whiteness, Murray highlights another aspect of diaspora, the sense of accountability. In this sense Murray is suggesting a fear within white South Africans that they might be judged by Euro-American whiteness and be found to be frauds or race traitors by claiming to be both African and white simultaneously.

Another example of this fear or acknowledgement of Euro-American judgement, is the work Mediated Morality (2006), from the ongoing series Golden Truths. The work is a wall mounted golden text piece that reads, “What would Oprah say?” The irony in terms of this dissertation, is that according to physical anthropology Oprah is not white. However, as this paper has discussed, whiteness is not merely a physical attribute, but a site of privilege, power, and ideological centeredness and one need not necessarily have white skin in order to be white (Keating, 1995: 907). Mediated Morality (2006) highlights the strange diasporic nature of whiteness, acknowledging that the cultural sources are propagated by the media producers of the world. Thus what has been regarded as cultural imperialism when referring to the traditional colonial ‘other’, is regarded as diaspora when referring to white South Africans.
The motif of a cowboy is utilized by Murray in his 2001 exhibition Hero.

In the context of a white diaspora, the imagery of the cowboy refers to multiple sites of cultural production. The cowboy hero has been sanctioned as an archetypal protagonist of the history of America (Gray Sweeney, 1992: 67), somewhat of a mythic persona in an historical vision of Americas pioneer past. Murray plays on notions of cultural commodification, acknowledging in works such as God (2001) the reverence that South Africans and in particular South African whites have for the myth of the white ‘western’ hero. The play on the word western is no coincidence, as Murray highlights not only a fascination with the traditional western film genre, but
acknowledges the upholding of the west, in this case a specifically American west, by white South Africans.

One of Murray’s most literal references to a white diaspora is the work W.A.S.P Cry for a place in the sun (2008). The work is the words ‘I Ham An African’ made out of a mild steel armature and coated in “fools gold”. The W.A.S.P in the title refers to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, a racial and ethnic group that comprises of most English speaking whites in the United States of America. The title suggests that this is a cry for help, a call from white Anglo-Saxon protestants for a place in Africa. Again the notion of a white diaspora that claims it’s identity not necessarily from European heritage, but from whiteness as a whole, is complicated. In this work Murray highlights the idea that many white South Africans claim much of their identity from WASP culture.

Thus Murray is alluding to the idea that white South Africans claim more of their culture from America and therefore becoming African is problematic. Murray undermines this call for a place in Africa, by using the text ‘I Ham An African’, a reference to Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech of the 8th of May 1996. Murray is suggesting with this work the fears of many white South Africans, by using the word ‘ham’ instead of ‘am’, Murray highlights further the idea that white South Africans (English speakers in particular) are making a mess of their attempts to become African. This is primarily because they keep their diasporic bond open to Europe and America and (unlike common perceptions of their Afrikaans counterparts) they have yet to reject Europe and become African. This is further amplified by Murray’s use of fools gold to coat the text, implying a further falsity in the W.A.S.P’s claim for Africanicity. Alluding to the notion that English speaking whites built their power through gold and now in the present, they can only masquerade as valuable to Africa. This work relates closely to my final section on Murray’s most dominant theme, whiteness in Africa and attempts to attain indigeneity.

v) Whiteness and Africanicity

“Migration and dispersal have always been a part of human history, exploration, trade and a growing population have lead to a globally interconnected world. The expansion of empires has been a recurrent theme throughout history, from the Romans, through to more recent times with the advent of European and more specifically the British colonial project. These migrations have brought about an enmeshment of both the colonizer and colonized” (Steyn in Lopez 2005: 123).

Despite this enmeshment, South Africa in recent history, through Apartheid, sought to keep colonizer and colonized apart. “The transition to democracy disentangled citizenship from race, opening citizenship to all South Africans irrespective of race, but it did not disentangle class from race” (MacDonald 2006 :126). Mbembe regards the postcolonial situation as embedded within two primary concepts, ‘Displacement’ and ‘Entanglement’. Displacement refers to the postcolony’s impermanent status, suggesting its temporality and an interlocking of its pasts, presents and futures (Mbembe in Terretta, 2002 :161).

A major theme in Murray’s work is the notion of being a white in an African context. Similar to the notion of a white diaspora, however the concept of being white and African entails a process of becoming. This is not the maintenance of whiteness through a diasporic link, instead this is an attempt at whites to become African, through a number of means. The decentring of whiteness in South Africa, although not absolute, can lead to many possible versions of whiteness (Dolby, 2001: 14). As has been illustrated, whiteness can reinvent or rehabilitate itself by referring to an imagined local heritage, or retain its diasporic links to the centres of Europe and America. However these are but broad examples of the possible paths of a future whiteness.

Another path which is inextricably linked to the former is the quest for white inclusion, to become indigenous and thus, African. Mbembe suggests that for whites in a country with a majority that is black, ‘becoming African’ is a conscious act on the part of whites (Mbembe, 2001: 10).Through the historical narratives generated out of colonialism, ‘race’ and territory have become conflated, the ‘dark’ continent (Africa) is the land of black people. Thus anything that is not black is automatically out of place and cannot call for any kind of Africanicity (Mbembe, 2002. p256). This notion of whites being out of place is exemplified in Renaissance Man Tending His Land (2008, refer to page 35), where Murray shows himself to be feigning Africanicity. However the work highlights the incongruous nature of whiteness and Africanness, suggesting that any attempt to be African will be problematic. The notion that previously oppressed postcolonial groups should reinstate an identity denied by colonization is regarded as a political necessity in the postcolony. (During, 1987: 29) However as shown by Murray in (amongst other works) Renaissance Man Tending His Land (2008, refer to page 35), the former settler has no previous identity to return to in the post-colonial context, and is thus caught between multiple identities that are incongruent (During, 1987: 29).

According to Mbembe, to attain Africanicity as a white, one must engage in an identity performance that undermines the norms through which race has been materialized (Mbembe, 2001: 10). However Steyn counters this by suggesting that it is not an undermining of race that is required, instead it is a commitment to place that will secure a stable African identity for whites (Steyn, 2001: 147). This is exemplified by the white Afrikaners rehabilitation of their ethnicity and ‘race’, and reinforced in part by Jacob Zuma in his pre-election campaign, suggesting that Afrikaners are the only white Africans.

Murray grapples with these notions in multiple ways. African Parts (2002, refer to page 37) from his 2002 White Like Me exhibition, suggests a cynicism towards the concept of indigeneity. Murray again utilizes the visual vernacular of the ‘New- Yorker’ type comic, in order to present his visual one liner. The use of a traditionally Western style of presentation is the antithesis of the hybrid white African identity that Steyn is calling for. However the use of this visual style highlights Murray’s point, that there is nothing African about this artwork, or the two white men depicted in it. In the same exhibition Murray complicates the issue of white Africanicity, by proposing a means of achieving it in the work, Tribal Elders (2002). In this work, the visual style lies still in the diasporic, however he shows a satirical alternative the Eurocentric whiteness that Steyn and Mbembe strive to move away from. By utilizing terms like ‘tribal’ and ‘elder’, Murray highlights the problematic position of the former settler.

As earlier suggested by During (1987), the former settler has no legitimate pre- colonial identity to return to, thus Murray satirizes the possibility of claiming a pre- colonial African identity for whites. Murray highlights this conundrum, by suggesting that whites take on the pre-colonial identity of blacks in order to legitimize their place in Africa. Whilst these works are humorous by virtue of the incongruency of the image associated with the text, it is this very juxtaposition that Murray feels is representative of whiteness placed in Africa. (Murray 2009)

Earlier examples of this in Murray’s work include Identity (1995), a work that superimposes a ‘smiley’ face onto the body of a Zulu warrior. The smiley face was and still is an icon of Western popular culture and a symbol of a generic western identity. Murray could not have known the implications of the smiley face for the future, as it is now an active part of shorthand SMS language that symbolizes various moods to the recipient. The smiley face represents happiness, the work is a play on the notion of the happy native, a patronizing Western view of tradition not dissimilar to the colonial notion of the noble savage. Whilst referring to the other of whiteness, the work refers to whiteness in South Africa as an emblem of the West placed over a stereotypical African identity.

Chapter 3 An overview of Murray’s Body of Work in Relation to Whiteness

i) Formative years
ii) Post-Liberation Introspective Satire
iii) New Beginnings Formative years

Brett Murray is an artist currently working in Cape Town, his works are predominantly sculptural, however painting and drawing are forms that he utilizes in his sculpture and on their own. Brett Murray’s earliest works engage primarily with the political climate of South Africa in the mid to late nineteen eighties. The targets of his satire at the time were obvious, namely the apartheid government with the various associated government institutions and social acceptances of hegemonic power structures at the time. In his Masters exhibition he satirizes the structures of the then apartheid government, through the use of fibreglass and resin sculptures that lampoon situational and ideological institutions and structures. This collection of rotund sculptures is both humorous and solemn, an ambivalence that is reflected in much of Murray’s work. The exhibition comprised of a number of painted fibreglass and resin sculptures which “announced Murray’s engaged, agitprop style, this during an extended state of emergency, apartheid’s demise imminent but, then, still unthinkable” (O’Toole, 2005: 1).

As O’Toole reiterates, Murray’s works at the time were both politically aware and satirical. At the time many other white South African artists where engaged in the use of satire to debunk and transgress the boundaries instituted by the apartheid government. Works such as Bureaucrat (1989, refer to page 23), highlights the ineffectual nature and helplessness of bureaucratic systems in place at the time. These early works of Murray’s don’t actively engage with his own ethnicity or consciously acknowledge his own whiteness, instead they highlight traits of whiteness that are synonymous with maintaining privilege and hegemony. His

work at the time was a rejection of the apartheid system without the overt acknowledgement of cultural identity, instead a focus on the ills of the apartheid system and in this avoiding a critique of the self. This lack of ethnic interrogation at the time, has resulted from the notion that apartheid was built upon presumed ethnic and racial solidarity, manifest most prominently in aspects of Afrikaner nationalism. At a time when a struggle for democratic principles and independence dominated, investigating an understanding of the self and notions of identity would have been regarded as self-absorbed and bourgeois (Murray, 2009). Murray chose to be a part of a resistant response to apartheid domination and as a result his earliest work does not satirise his own constructed identity, but the farcical nature of structures associated with apartheid. According to Barnett, examples of this expectation can be found in white novels of the time, “They are positioned on the margins of Western literary canons as representatives who can speak of and against a racist system, in the name of universal values of justice and equality. They are asked to represent life under apartheid, and present a principled resistance or refusal to it” (Barnett, 1999:94)

Policeman (1989) again reflects upon the ineffectual and hopeless situation whilst simultaneously challenging the dominant apartheid structures of the time. The work regards the institutional structures of government in the late eighties, showing a policeman whose boots are literally too big for him. This could also allude to the idea that the task at hand for the police and structures of oppression was too great. The use of caricature was employed not to identify incongruency within white identity, but to highlight the farcical nature of the values upheld by the apartheid state.

Pissarra suggests that, “Murray ‘universalised’ his subjects, while retaining enough specificity to mock Apartheid and its icons” (Pissarra, no date: 1). The ‘universalised’ subject Pissarra refers to exemplifies the white artist of the late apartheid era, intent on avoiding engaging the self as subject whilst attempting to be both critical of the local whilst appealing to the ‘universal’ values referred to by Barnett, above. Ironically it is this claim to universalism that is an aspect of whiteness reflected in Murray’s work at this time. The universalized subject to which Pissarra refers is inevitably a white European or American subject.

This said, Murray was not, at the time, naive enough to completely neglect self critical engagement. The work, Artist: Self Portrait (1989, refer to page 33) which shows the artist as an infant holding a paint palette and an enema, in this a self critical gaze alludes to the artist as being just as ignorant and talentless as the icons he satirizes. His use of self–satire here is not a reflection on his identity, but a mode of satire that softens its didactic nature. Through satirizing himself in Artist: Self Portrait (1989), he undermines his position and counters the morally dichotomous nature of the body of work.

This notion of the satirized and caricatured self is suggested by Ivor Powell to be a kind of leitmotif throughout his career (Powell, 2002: 3). Although throughout his career the use of self satire changes, at this point it is used as an academic counter balance to the overt attack on the multiple facets of the apartheid system in place at the time. The self portrait of the artist enables Murray’s work to be both an assault on apartheid, whilst simultaneously situating the artist within the very system he criticizes. Powell reiterates this notion in the catalogue essay for the exhibition, suggesting that the series rests on “psychotic exaggeration, but at the same time, Murray has emblematically taken the subject matter and the socio-historical critique within his own consciousness. And he has done this by locating his figuration against a source caricature – that of the artist himself.” (Powell, 2002: 4)

Murray exhibited again in 1992, his exhibition ironically entitled Heritage. The exhibition used popular wildlife as containers for African curios and cultural objects. With the end of the apartheid regime imminent, Murray sought to deconstruct the legacy that apartheid would leave on South Africa. Murray engages with Eurocentric perceptions of Africa, and the notion that in a globalized world, the culture industries are dominated by an overarching containment by and subscription to the Western centres expectations of marginal groups, as suggested above this includes white South Africans. This move away from the attack on bad governance, as seen in his Master’s exhibition, is the beginnings of a search for new satirical targets. The departure from the art of his Masters show, that was resistant to apartheid oppression, was brought about because by this time the apartheid government was preparing to relinquish control of the country to the ANC. Instead Murray chose to reflect on possible futures that might emerge.

The work Heritage: Artefacts (1992) exemplifies this, showing an antelope made of a metal cut-out containing a Tanzanian curio and a plastic Oros Man juice bottle, it cynically investigates notions of cultural heritage and the constructed nature of these heritages. In the centre of the antelope together with other ‘artefacts’ is an exclamation mark, read as a critique of Western perceptions of Africa, one might see this work as illustrating how an amalgam of commodities presented to the foreigner under the guise of African authenticity is legitimized through subscribing to the colonial desire of an exotic and wild Africa. There are elements of Murray’s acknowledgement of his own Westerness or whiteness, understood in terms of the glissement between critique of the foreign gaze and becoming the foreigner, as Chapman indicates, “Under apartheid whites were given a political-racial identity which (coterminous with superiority) utilized to its advantage either its Western European inheritance or its long African rootedness” (Chapman, 1998: 89).
In Heritage: Corruption (1992) a metal hyena surrounded by coins containing a butchers knife, alludes to the notion that as a collective, South Africa will inherit the heritage of apartheid corruption. The exhibition engages with the possibilities of an imagined post-liberation future and the bitter legacy that apartheid would leave, in 1992 the end of the era was in sight and Murray was on hand to provide insights into the possible after effects of the change in dispensation.

In Heritage: Memory and Tears (1992) an elephant, mythically renowned for a long memory, contains ‘tears’ made of bank notes and a blank container in it’s midst, alludes to the pain of the past and the possible forgetfulness of the future. The irony is not wasted on an audience either local or foreign; the myth of the legendary memory of the elephant provides insight into the metaphoric nature of this work. The symbolism of the ‘tears of money’ suggest a commodification of memory, the idea that money can be thrown at the problem and that memories of the past can be erased through the financial trials and tribulations of the future. All the works on the Heritage exhibition use the same stylistic presentation of the animal containing objects, allowing for multiple open ended readings of each, however the overall theme would be one of pre conceived perceptions of Africa and how South Africa might influence these misconceptions.

ii) Post-Liberation Introspective Satire

The exhibition Scurvy opened on 16 June 1995, now officially Youth Day. The significance of this day is to honour of the children of Soweto who rose against their apartheid oppressors and died in 1976. The exhibition was co-curated by Murray with Kevin Brand and seven artists took part in the exhibition, Wayne Barker, Lisa Brice, Kevin Brand, Barend de Wet, Kate Gottgens, Brett Murray and Andrew Putter. These artists occupied The Castle (of Good Hope, in Cape Town) and created site-specific works in which they questioned, lampooned and flagellated the past, (Martin, 1996: 13) in a satirical take on recent and former sites of power. Not unlike the satire deployed to debunk the myths of the apartheid system in Murray’s Master’s exhibition, Murray’s work showed a shift away from the political satire of the late eighties and showed a move towards questions of heritage, memory, comodification and personal and collective identity, themes that had been touched upon in Heritage (1992).

In the work Sell (1995) the artist has employed a similar visual style to that used in Heritage, showing a group of traditionaly clad African men with the Shell petroleum logo embedded in their torsoes. This work engages with the commodification of labour, resources, culture and cultural hybridity. Oil off the coast of Nigeria and Shell and other petroleum conglomerates’ investement there is highlighted in this work by Murray, this association with other African groups (such as Nigeria) suggest that Murray is speaking for others, a trait heavily associated with whiteness.

Murray’s work focuses on identity construction in his percieved others, the highly culturaly imperialistic nature of the globalized world, acknowledging South Africa’s re-entry into world culture and the effects of this on the identities of African peoples. Identity (1995, refer to page 48) similarly deals with cultural comodification, the work shows a Zulu Warrior constructed out of metal, with a large emblematic ‘smiley face’ in place of his head. The work critiques the ascribed nature of culture, the notion that happiness will be attained through acknowledging ones roots or culture, whilst also criticizing the colonial assumption that the ‘natives’ are happiest when left to their own traditions which in many cases are a form of income, in the tourist industry for example. Notions of ascribed and inherited identities are critiqued in Scurvy as an unhealthy mode of identification. Murray’s concerns with globalization are primarily negative, a resistance to dominance and hegemony that is persistant throuhgout his career.
Popular iconography is used for the first time extensively in Scurvy. Warrior (1995) shows the Pink Panther holding a traditional Zulu shield; again the work criticizes cultural commodification, whilst acknowledging global cultural hybridization.

In his catalogue essay, Pissara suggests that the work “pokes fun at those who wear their Africanness as an accessory. However in the South African context it can also be seen as sharply political, as the Zulu shield is a (tourist) icon representing (pre-colonial) Zulu military might” (Pissara, no date: 2). It may also be the beginnings of Murray’s own investigation of white ethnicity, the struggle between Africa and the white centres of cultural production. This work shows again Murray’s use of self-satire, if one reads his use of western cultural iconography as a self-critical appraisal of himself situated within the black body and African culture. We see an ambivalence in his work that suggests he is doubly conscious of the effect of the Western centres on the traditions of Africa, but he situates himself as both African and Western. However the exhibition was not without its critics and pitfalls, as Martin suggests,This lack of inclusion of the other as a participant is an aspect of this exhibition that cannot be overlooked, as it undermines much of the impetus of the works on display and the flagellation of the past is reread as possibly an unreflexive self flagellation. Especially in Murray’s work which at this stage utilized the image of the black ‘other’ to illustrate conceptions of ascribed Western identity onto that of the African subject. In this regard Murray is the benevolent voice of whiteness that speaks for and claims to protect its less fortunate others. If read as neo-colonial and un-reflexive, as Martin (1996) has suggested, Murray’s work appears to subscribe to the very culturally imperialistic notions he critiques. However if read as a conscious choice to display “There was one serious shortcoming – that the occupation of The Castle (of good hope in Cape Town) was executed by five white men and two white women. The spectre of internal neo-colonialist practices loomed in
the mysterious spaces and narrow stairways. Nelson Mandela’s image
was ubiquitous, but black artists were left on the other side of the moat”
(Martin, 1996: 13).

In 1996 Murray had an exhibition entitled White Boy Sings the Blues, the title itself summarizes much of what the exhibition dealt with. Murray’s own race and the conundrum facing white artists in South Africa, ‘singing the blues’ is a multi-layered concept in the case of this exhibition, acknowledging cultural imperialism and racial stereotypes, whilst at a base level commenting on the percieved crestfallen feelings (although satirically adressed) of whites regarding the state of post 1994 South Africa.

The exhibition was Murray’s first foray into the highly charged realm of racial identification and the exhibition deals with both racial hybridity and resistance to it. Geers notes that Murray’s racialy charged exhibition engages the concept that “Young
white artists are the most disenfranchised, caught as they are, between producing objects that continue to subscribe to Eurocentric prejudices, while living in a country that is becoming increasingly prejudiced against anything foreign, and in particular
against anything European” (Geers, 1996: 1). The image used on the invitation is a picture from a family album which shows the artist aged six at the time covered from head to toe in brown body paint and dressed as a Zulu warrior, probably in preparation for a party or even a dress up day at school.

Geers notes that, “The playful naivety that the image was originally constructed with is now eclipsed by the political climate of post-apartheid society” (Geers, 1996: 1). The image is a condensation of what the exhibition tries to achieve, a sense of the artist trying to recompose his identity to that of an African, however this sense of identity searching and reformulating is created with humour and a touch of Murray’s self critical cynicism. Works in the exhibition expand upon themes of racial identification through juxtaposition, building upon the aesthetic utilized in Scurvy (1992), Black Like Me: Colonel Saunders (1996) is an example of Murray’s humorous take on the cultural hybridization taking place in South Africa, by placing an ‘afro’ on Colonel Saunders, he references the notion that for many white South African artists the status of a morally questionable heritage is answered by projecting “an idea of the world through the eyes of black African subjects.

This is in part a cathartic legitimization of the artist’s existence in Africa where the indigenous subject becomes the object of the artist’s fantasy” (Geers, 1996: 1). The irony in Murray’s work is that he uses foreign signifiers to denote both blackness conveyed through the ‘afro’, a signifier of African American identity and whiteness, colonel Saunders of K.F.C. Although primarily utilizing humour to lessen the emotional burden of racial acknowledgement in his viewer, in works such as Land (1996) there is a far more earnest attempt at revealing the hierarchichal and complicated relationships between blacks, whites and the land.

Using the motif of two heads, one ‘white’ and one ‘black’, arranged in a hierarchical way, the work shows the dominance of the ‘white’ head over that of the ‘black’, both in a struggle for land, which is shown as soil in a jar. In 1997 30 Minutes, a group exhibition held in the Robben Island prison, Murray’s piece Guilt and Innocence comprised of 200 family photographs that coincided with the period of time that Nelson Mandela was in prison. The exhibition dealt with the notion of separateness based on race. Murray’s work acknowledges the naiveté of his privileged white upbringing in comparison to the existence to that of Nelson Mandela.
The protected seemingly utopian lifestyle that was Murray’s experience is shown in juxtaposition to that of the stark prison that housed Mandela for so many years. The title of the exhibition highlights notions of accountability and raises the question of
who was or wasn’t innocent or guilty.

Murray’s catalogue entry was this, “I was born in December 1961, a few months before the Rivonia trialists (Nelson Mandela and his compatriots) were imprisoned. Being born in Pretoria, into a half-Afrikaans, half-English family, where my father’s heritage extended back to include both Paul Kruger and Louis Botha (Boer presidents), disguised by my grandmother re-marrying a Scottish Murray and my mother’s history reaching back to the French Huguenots, I am a white, middle-class cultural hybrid. This was and is my comfortable and uncomfortable inheritance. The political and social forces beyond the confines of my family formed a system which protected and infringed on me, empowered and disempowered me, promoted and denied me. When I looked beyond my private experiences of loves and relationships, family and friends and of boy becoming man, the contradictions in this system, which divided my life from others, resulted in a cross-questioning of responsibility and complicity. This uncertainty challenged the understanding of what became ambiguous life experiences. The photographs document moments of my life within this context, and date from 1962 to 1990, when most of the political prisoners were released from Robben Island.” (Murray, 1997: 1)

The questioning of his own inheritance as a white person was becoming an integral aspect of Murray’s work by this time. In Guilt and Innocence, Murray’s focus moves away from cultural hybridity to a reflection on his own history, through artifacts, in this case family photographs. The work sheds light on the plurality of existance throughout Mandela’s imprisonment, critiquing apartheid notions of separate but equal development, white privilege and the racial hierarchy of the day.

An example of Murray’s merging of the populist and conceptual in one piece is The Dance Routine of the White Male Psyche (2000, see page 17). As discussed earlier, the piece shows a subaltern white male icon, Bart Simpson avoiding his own gaze in the mirror. This is symptomatic of much colonial and post-colonial ethnic investigation, the inability of the centre to identify and engage fully in understanding itself, instead it is only able to identify itself through creating ‘others’. This inability for whites to reflect and criticise themselves is a facet of whiteness usually associated with the Western centres, and not entirely accurate in the South African context, as it has been sugested by Steyn (2005) that in South Africa whiteness has always been an intergral part of her identity, highly visible and a concious site of power.

In the context of Brett Murray’s development as an artist, this work can be regarded as the beginnings of a conscious and open white self-reflexivity. Whilst other exhibitions, like White Boy Sings the Blues (1996), acknowledge whiteness in a way that is not necessarily conscious of the location of whiteness, instead treating the concept of whiteness with a sense of guilt and shame through merely attempting to undermine it through juxtaposition. However in this work Murray uses the imagery of Bart Simpson to allude to both the white centres inability to be self-reflexive as well as the pervasive nature of the centers conceptions of whiteness to permeate our own conceptions here, in a hegemonic manner. Keating suggests that, this invisible omnipresence gives whiteness a rarely acknowledged position of dominance and power. Suggesting that whiteness, domination, and invisibility are intimately related and the dominant culture’s inability or reluctance to see it as such is the source of its hidden authority (Keating, 1995). “Whiteness is an unrecognized and unacknowledged racial category that secures its power by refusing to identify itself” (Keating, 1995: 905). Murray at this point of his career was beginning to investigate the state of being of whites, and the complexities within that, that are not reducible to privilege, power and racism.

The work Protect and Serve (2000) shows a group of Zulu warriors with the Simpson family covering their shields, investigating as in earlier exhibitions a sense of cultural hybridity, whilst at the same time using the Simpsons as a metaphorical icon of whiteness. Here whites are attempting to attach and disguise themselves as a parasite on traditional cultures. The effect is not unsimilar to works such as Identity (1995, see page 48) in which Brett Murray’s whiteness becomes somewhat of a surrogate voice, a voice to the supposedly voiceless other (Nuttall, 2001: 133). This superimosition of popular Western iconography onto the African other complicates notions of contemporary whiteness, whereas in the apartheid era, whites were writing to the European centre as a surrogate voice to the other, in the post-apartheid context the voiceless have regained a position from which to represent themselves. In this situation “what, then, is left to the white voice in this new context? Perhaps what is left is the capacity or the responsibility to write within and not beyond whiteness” (Nuttall, 2001: 133).

On the same exhibition, but displayed four years later, The Shack as Metaphor (2004) utilizes a simplistic ‘New Yorker’ or ‘punch magazine’ style (a stylistic feature incorporated from 2002 onwards) single frame cartoon to criticise the art industry, highlighting ideas of Africa as a creation of eurocentric fantasies. Appearing as part of the I love Africa exhibition, but four years later, there is a shift from Murray’s integration of western power and hegemony through popular culture, to the hybrid amalgam of popular culture and fine art institutional discourse. This is a trait that would become more prevelant in years to come.

The exhibiton Hero (2001) investigates archetypal heroes, a move away from the specificity of local cultural hybrids and into the realm of universal humanism. The work, Us and them (2001), is both a comment on the subjectivity of othering and a note on where his cultural cues for the othering process emerge from. The visual pun is all too apparent, using two sets of identical cowboys to illustrate the non-difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The fact the cowboys are iconic of the western film genre is a further visual pun that eludes to the hegemony of the west in influencing our conceptions of us and them.
The exhibition White Like Me (2002) is a show that actively engages with Murray’s own white identity, whilst acknowledging and challengeing governmental and economic institutions, as Murray has noted, ‘White Like Me’ merges the thematic concerns pursued in two of my past shows - satirical attacks on bad government (pre- 1994) and attempts to define an often discombobulated sense of identity” (Murray, 2002: 1).

Using ‘New Yorker’ style comics as a visual aid, the work White Africans (2002, refer to page 38) uses St Peter as the ultimate judge in deciding the fate of whites who think they are African. In utilizing St Peter, Murray locates and situates whites as being
judged by the locus of their religio-cultural belief system, namely Christianity revealed in St Peter the mythical first pope of the Catholic church. This ambivalence shows the hybrid nature of the South African condition, by alluding to the notion that
Africa has been hybridized to such an extent that its cosmology has morphed into one of Western design. Not only this, but the work reflects on the diasporic nature of ‘white’ South Africans, commenting on the notion that whites are eventualy judged and choose to be judged by Western ideals and standards. Murray’s work utilizes humour to engage with contemporary issues surounding debates about the authenticity of white ethnicities. The Work African Parts (2002 refer to page, 37) shows two white business men, one asks the other, ‘so which parts of you are from Africa?’. Funny, but also multi-layered, requiring the white viewer to rethink the written pun and bland visuality of the piece and question the authenticity of their Africanness.

iii) New Beginnings

Murray’s 2002 exhibitions New Beginnings is a collection of photographs showing the artist dressed as an infant. Standing on what appears to be a stage with a small chalk board in each photograph labelling who the artist is in that moment. Titles ranging from the Artist (2002, refer to page 34) to the President (2002) suggest a broad and sweeping interpretation of all aspects of life as a performance. This performative process is enacted by the artist who satirizes himself and the institutions he performs by depicting himself in infantile attire. This collection of work can be read as a personal rebirth for Murray as he investigates the various positions that he has criticised through new and apparently innocent eyes. He gains a satirical ambivalence by placing himself as the target of his own satire.

Moving away from his earlier critiques of self in terms of his ascribed white identity, Murray’s show Sleep Sleep engages with the discourses of power in a global context, utilizing the imagery of primarily Western descent. This exibition could be read as an
aspect of whiteness, as it draws on the popular cultural imaginary of the white centres of America and Europe. This can be seen in works such as Religious Narcissism (2006), which show the cartoon icon of Casper the friendly ghost, being crucified and looking down at a dark reflection of himself. Although a work like this does not overtly acknowledge whiteness, it acknowledges and scrutinizes an aspect of hegemonic whiteness, located in Christianity. The exhibition also has a three dimensional (as opposed to wall mounted) sculptural content, engaging in what seems to be a comical minimalism, almost Brancusian. The sculptural pieces include a Gorilla (2006) and a Little Pig (2006), both are shown as smooth, sleek, comical and depraved simultaneously, as Smith notes, “These bulbous,
patinated black bronzes are hybrid figures, somewhere between human and animal, and are at once comic and threatening, like edgy castoffs from a Pixar storyboard” (Smith, 2006: 1).

His visual vernacular is set in the western tradition, something that has always been apparent in his work; however the shift lies in his subject matter and his primary focus of inquiry. Earlier exhibitions ( White boy sings the blues 1996, White like me 2002, Guilt and innocence 1997, Heritage 1992) focused on the hybridized and commodified nature of his own race/ethnicity and others. Recent
exhibitions like this one and Hero, show a shift from the particular; to attempts to define and scrutinize the hegemony of the global centres of whiteness and power. The work They’re here (2006) is an attempt by Murray to universalize difference, this is not a culturally or racially specific work. Instead he is attempting to point out a humanist trait of ‘othering’ and differentiating oneself from another, usually out of fear. Clarke suggests that the racial or ethnic other is built out of fear of difference,
arguing that “what appears repellently alien is the manifestation, a reflection, of fantasy in some other. In this way, that which is familiar turns to frightening and produces feelings of hate” (Clarke in Sullivan, 2005: 140).

However in the South African context this work cannot help but be read as a comment on the fears of white South Africans of the ‘swart gevaar’ (black danger) that was a theme all too prevalent before the 1994 elections. Smith observes that Murray’s show challenges the viewer not only because it makes one question when or if to laugh at the sad state of global
and local politics, but that the “entry point to subversion often lies in pointing out the ridiculous deeply embedded in the rhetoric of power” (Smith, 2006: 1).

Thurman suggests that Murray’s most recent exhibition is a move back toward the more overtly political, something he had not engaged with since the transition to a democratic country in 1994. “Between then and now an autocritique of his own identity and ‘whiteness’ had ensued. The change back to the critique of the political economy of the new South Africa has its roots in Polokwane 2007, and the recent politicaly charged elections” (Thurman, 2009: 1). Although as Thurman suggests, Murray has moved more overtly into the political sphere with his exhibition Crocodile Tears, he has engaged in political discourse actively as a ‘white’, acknowledging his
own race and ethnicity whilst criticising himself and the political powers he pokes fun at.

Politically overt works such as I am an African too (2007) uses an image of Robert Mugabe to undermine Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech by highlighting his political silence on the topic of Zimbabwe’s many social and economic failures, are
countered by works that satirize his own whiteness and henceforth his position of privelege and ambivilence in the situation. Works such as W.A.S.P Cry for a Place in the Sun (2008, refer to page 43), which through the use of text, autocritiques Murray as a white Anglo Saxon Protestent, and suggests he ‘hams’ being African, in other words does it badly. Works such as this again soften the didactic nature of his satire, by placing himself within the target area of his satire. Countless comparisons are drawn between the political climate of contemporary South Africa and that of pre-revolution France, the most blunt of these is the work Let Them Eat Pap (2008), which satirizes the rich, powerful and still predominantly white of South africa and compares them to the gentry of pre-revolution France. Here he suggests that like Marie Antoinette, the wealthy and powerful are out of touch with the harsh realities faced by the majority in South Africa.

This point is reified by Corrigall who suggests that Murray’s focus is not the misuse of power as has been popular in post-apartheid art, but his focus is the heinous misuse of influence. “This is personified by his references to Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV, the French royals who lived a life of excess while nonchalantly neglecting their impoverished subjects. Let Them Eat Pap (2008) cements this analogy between the French aristocracy and the ruling party” (Corrigall, no date: 2).
There is a sense of duality in the intended targets of his satire in this exhibition. Murray’s work both criticises those who have political power and those who have financial power and privilege, Corrigall goes on to acknowledge this duality, “He presents a sort of hyper-reality in which the moral character of the ruling party (or the whites who remain powerful) are presented in a concentrated form – Murray doesn’t rely on hyperbole.Some of his work probably appears offensive, but the humour he employs destabilises the sincerity of his accusations” (Corrigall, no date: 1).

For some time Murray has retooled the icons of popular global capitalist culture, attaching to them a distinct visual and satirical vernacular. Murray now moves away from the popular capitalist and engages with popular art icons and the colonial connotations inherent in them. In post-apartheid South Africa Green et al, suggest that an attempt to unify different groups has been attempted through the sharing of national symbols; however whites resist these symbols as they regard the symbols as reflective of the black majority (Green, Sonn & Matsebula, 2007: 402). Murray’s insistence throughout his career of utilizing foreign, western symbols and visual styles as a vehicle to portray his message is reflective of his own whiteness,suggesting an aversion to the local and an acknowledgement of his lack of African authenticity. Shaman suggests that the exhibition is, built around one of the most charged symbols of Euro-centricity, namely the colonial. Murray’s works appropriate Dutch and Austrian seventeenth century imagery, Murray introduces “crocodile tears” as an iconographical element designed as a satiric reference to the false guilt of the whites and wealthy blacks and the false tears wept for those “who are less fortunate” (Shaman, no date: 1).

Murray’s use of himself as the source caricature is again utilized in The Rennaisance man tending his land (2008, see page 35) a work that literally situates Murray within the target area of his own satire. He references his own ambiguous stance and the lunacy of the position he is taking; that of criticising whiteness and wealth whilst he is both. The photograph is strikingly similar to that of himself as a Zulu warrior (page 62), seen on the cover of White Boy Sings the Blues and in his Guilt and Innocence exhibition. Shaman notes that, although this is several decades later, Murray is once again situating himself within the black body. These images according to Shaman suggest that Murray’s work is grounded in “the struggle of the South African white to discover or create an African identity, some kind of inner reconciliation with Africanness” (Shaman, no date: 2).

Conclusion

This dissertation has investigated the concept of whiteness through research into the historical development of the concept, contemporary research on the topic and through the application of this literature to the work of Brett Murray. In utilizing Murray’s work to examine aspects of whiteness in South Africa, this dissertation has shed light on the perceived dilemma facing whiteness in this country and expanded on a discourse that enables an understanding of postcolonial and post-apartheid whiteness in South Africa.
The research has shown that Murray contends with a double consciousness (Dayal, 1996) that renders him diasporic. It is the perceived dichotomy between diaspora and Africanicity that often results in a defensiveness among some white South Africans. To be perceived as other for many contemporary white South Africans is a sobering reality. In the context of whiteness studies the perceived need to construct oneself as African is deconstructed and criticised by Murray through his use of satire and seemingly incongruent signifiers of culture. Murray’s use of globalised icons to foreground his ideas is evidence of his cultural fluidity, his hybrid status and his double consciousness in that he criticises and deconstructs the perceptions of where his own cultural iconography is located. Ranging from the ‘smiley’ face superimposed on the other in Identity (1995, on page 48) representing the reciprocal nature of mainstream whiteness and its others in co-constructing each others identities, to the use of cowboys as a means to reflect upon perceived differences between groups in the Hero (2001) exhibition, Murray uses specific popular forms that enable him to reflect upon the local through engaging in a globalised and dominant Western visuality.

Through discussing not only Murray’s diasporic nature, but also his historical development, this dissertation has shown how Murray constantly reflects on the changes that the country is experiencing. His work addresses the vicissitudes of an evolving democracy in South Africa, satirical targets changing as the political and cultural environment does. Murray’s work has shifted from his earliest critiques of the apartheid regime as the most obvious target, moving into the post-apartheid context with criticisms of culture, ascribed identities and heritage. Beyond this early and apparent shift in subject matter, Murray’s work further acknowledges his own whiteness from the mid to late nineties, satirizing whites as hedonistic (White Boy Sings the Blues 1996) and acknowledging his own position of privilege (Guilt and Innocence 1997). Later appraisals of whiteness in White Like Me (2002), although satirical, suggest a more frank investigation into the complexities of his own existence as a white.

In much of Murray’s work he attempts to erode conformity to oppressive systems, whether it be apartheid, nationalistic or global identity constructions or class struggles. His work reflects his own hybrid ethnicity entangled with a subscribed racial identity symptomatic of his own diasporic location.

Beyond this, his work develops an open-ended critique of the politics of class and identity. Crocodile Tears (2007) is an amalgam of Murray’s concerns about white identity as diasporic, combined with a return to the criticism of political ineptitude and economic inequality that marked earlier works such as Policeman (1989, on page 51). By situating his work in relation to class issues and political agenda, Murray further complicates notions of whiteness and diaspora. Suggesting that his whiteness should not prevent him from scrutinizing any powerful institution or personage in the post-apartheid context, Murray upholds a liberated whiteness that is specifically located in Africa. Thus in Crocodile Tears (2007) a confident Murray, who regards himself as an African and feels he can criticize anyone, regardless of race, confronts state ineptitude, personal greed and highlights the complexities within conceptions of Africanicity. In this there is a return to the goals of Murray’s early career, that is to undermine structures of oppression, while acknowledging his unique and complex position of being a white African.

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Chapman, M. (1998) The Problem of Identity: South Africa, Storytelling, and Literary History. New Literary History, 29, (1) pp. 85-99. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057469 [23/08/2009 10:08]
Corrigall, M. (no date). Crocodile Tears review. Brett Murray [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/mary-corrigalls-crocodile-tears- review/ [June 2009]
Dayal, S. (1996) Diaspora and Double Consciousness. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 29, (1) pp. 46-62. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315257 [08/06/2008 07:45]
Epstein, D. (1998) Marked Men: Whiteness and Masculinity. The New Man?, (37) pp. 49-59. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/4066174 [19/08/2009 10:34]
Erickson, P. (1995) Review: Seeing White. Transition, (67) pp. 166-185 Published [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935265 [24/09/2009 08:18]
Gilly, M, C, and Jensen Schau, H. (2003) We Are What We Post? Self-Presentation in Personal Web Space. The Journal of Consumer Research, 30, (3) pp. 385-404. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/3132017 [06/11/2009 02:52]
Geers, K. (1996). White Boy Sings the Blues review. Brett Murray [Online]
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/kendell-geers-white-boy-
sings-the-blues-review/ [June 2009]
Gray Sweeney, J. (1992) Racism, Nationalism, and Nostalgia in Cowboy Art. Oxford Art Journal, 15 (1) pp. 67-80. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360489 [06/11/2009 03:03]
Keating, A, L. (1995) Interrogating “Whiteness,” (De)Constructing “Race”. College English, 57, (8) pp. 901-918. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/378620 [19/08/2009 10:35]
Kenny, K. (2003) Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study. The Journal of American History, 90, (1) pp. 134-162. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/3659794 [22/09/2009 16:04]
Mbembe, A. (2001) Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism. African Studies Review, 44, (2) pp. 1-14. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/525572 [29/10/2009 15:27]
Meskell, L. (2005) Recognition, Restitution and the Potentials of Postcolonial Liberalism for South African Heritage. The South African Archaeological Bulletin, 60, (182) pp. 72-78. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/3889120 [29/10/2009 15:08]
Murray, B. (1997). Guilt and Innocence catalogue text. Brett Murray [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/brett-murrays-guilt-and-innocence- catalogue-text/ [June 2009]
Murray, B. (2002). Notes from the White Like Me catalogue text. Brett Murray [Online] http://brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/brett-murrays-notes-from-the- white-like-me-catalogue/ [June 2009]
Nuttall, S. (2001) Subjectivities of Whiteness. African Studies Review, 22, (2) pp. 115-140. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/525577 [19/08/2009 10:31]
Posel, D. (2001) Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa. African Studies Review, 44, (2) pp. 87-113. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/525576 [19/08/2009 10:42]
Seidman, G. (1999) Is South Africa Different? Sociological Comparisons and Theoretical Contributions from the Land of Apartheid. Annual Review of Sociology, (25) pp. 419-440. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/223511 [06/06/2008 10:24]
O’Toole, S. (2005). Brett Murray’s Dark Comedy. Brett Murray [Online]
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/brett-murrays-dark-comedy-sean-o-
tooles-essay/ [June 2009]
Pissarra, M. (no date). Mario Pissarra essay. Brett Murray [Online]
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essaays-and-texts/mario-pissaras-essay/ [June 2009]
Shaman, S, S. (no date). Crocodile Tears review. Brett Murray [Online]
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/sanford-s-shamans-crocodile-tears-
review/ [June 2009]
Smedley, A. (1998) “Race” and the Construction of Human Identity. American Anthropologist, New Series, 100, (3) pp. 690-702. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/682047 [06/11/2009 12:33]
Sullivan, R, E. (2005) Review: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Racism by Simon Clarke. Contemporary Sociology, 34, (2) pp. 139-140. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/4147175 [07/11/2009 07:54]
Terretta, M. (2002) Reviewed work(s): On the Postcolony by Achille Mbembe. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 36, (1) pp. 161-163 [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/4107414 [15/10/2009 09:20]
Vestergaard, M. (2001) Who’s Got the Map? The Negotiation of Afrikaner Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Daedalus, 130, (1) pp. 19-44. [Online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027678 [23/08/2009 09:51]
List of works by Brett Murray (in the order they appear in the text) Bubble Head: Underpants. (2002) page 10. [online]
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/white-like-me/ [June 2009]
Dance Routine of The White Male Psyche. (2000) page 17. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/i-love-africa/ [June 2009]
Bureaucrat. (1985/9) page 23. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/masters-work/ [June 2009]
Guilt, Memory and Identity. (2000) page 32. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/i-love-africa/ [June 2009]
Artist: Self-Portrait. (1985/9) pager33. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/i-love-africa/ [June 2009]
New Beginnings: The Artist. (2006) page 34. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/new-beginnings/ [June 2009]
The Renaissance Man Tending his Land. (2008) page 35. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/crocodile-tears/ [June 2009]
Smith, M. (2006). Sleep Sleep Review. Brett Murray [Online] Available:
Http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/michael-smiths-sleep-sleep-review/
[June 2009]
Thurman, C. (2009). Crocodile Tears review. Brett Murray [Online]
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/chris-thurmans-crocodile-tears-review/
[June 2009]
African Parts. (2002) page 37. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/white- like-me/ [June 2009]
White Africans. (2002) page 38. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/white- like-me/ [June 2009]
Mediated Morality. (2006) page 40. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/golden-truths/ [June 2009]
God. (2001) page 41. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/hero/ [June 2009] W.A.S.P Cry for a Place in the Sun. (2008) page 43. [Online]
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/crocodile-tears/ [June 2009]
Tribal Elders. (2002) page 46. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/white- like-me/ [June 2009]
Identity. (1995) page 48. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/scurvy/ [June 2009]
Policeman. (1985/9) page 51. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/masters- work/ [June 2009]
Heritage: Artifacts. (1992) page 54. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/heritage/ [June 2009]
Heritage: Corruption. (1992) page 55. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/heritage/ [June 2009]
Heritage: Memory and Tears. (1992) page 56. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/heritage/ [June 2009]
Sell. (1995) page 58. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/scurvy/ [June 2009] Warrior. (1995) page 60. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/scurvy/ [June
2009]
Black Like Me: Colonel Sanders. (1996) page 63. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/white-boy-sings-the-blues/ [June 2009]
Land. (1996) page 65. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/white-boy-sings- the-blues/ [June 2009]
Guilt and Innocence. (1997) page 66. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/gult-and-innocence/ [June 2009]
The Artist as a Zulu, aged 6. (1996) page 62. [Online]
http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/white-boy-sings-the-blues/ [June 2009]
Protect and Serve. (2000) page 69. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/i- love-africa/ [June 2009]
The Shack as Metaphor. (2004) page 70. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/i-love-africa/ [June 2009]
Us and Them. (2001) page 72. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/hero/ [June 2009]
New Beginnings: The President. (2006) page 74. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/new-beginnings/ [June 2009]
Religious Narcissism. (2006) page 75. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/sleep-sleep/ [June 2009]
Gorilla. (2005/06) page 76. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/sleep-sleep/ [June 2009]
Little Pig. (2005/06) page 77. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/sleep- sleep/ [June 2009]
They’re here!. (2005/6) page 79. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/sleep- sleep/ [June 2009]
I Am An African Too. (2008) page 80. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/crocodile-tears/ [June 2009]
Let Them Eat Pap!. (2008) page 82. [Online] http://www.brettmurray.co.za/work/crocodile-tears/ [June 2009]

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‍I have a confession to make: of late I've found it increasingly difficult to keep the objective distance necessary for writing reviews. As my role in the art world has become more and more entwined in practice - in collaboration, in disguise and as curator - if you scroll a few reviews down you will see my dear friend Ed Young's review of a show I curated, on which he was in fact one of the artists. Perhaps in our little art world, critical distance is an old fashioned idea; instead it is exactly this 'critical closeness' that makes us as critics/artists answerable for everything we say and do. Walking into the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town for Brett Murray's 'Crocodile Tears' was no exception.

Murray's solo show bears an interesting relation both to my critical dilemma and to the gallery itself: both are struggling in some way to find an identity. The opening of the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town was perceived to be something of a territorial struggle, with several local galleries sharing artists signed with the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. This tension between galleries also meant that the Goodman Cape Town would need to develop its own identity, both in opposition to these galleries and as independent of the Goodman Johannesburg. Even with accomplished, often daring, curators Storm Janse Van Rensburg and Emma Bedford at the helm, I feel the Goodman Cape Town is only just beginning to develop its independence.

However, I felt the show could have been more strongly curated. Murray's work is witty and well made, and he is an artist we've come to know for his professionalism and delivery - hence he installed the entire show himself. This is where a little curatorial editing may have been important, and the decision to fill the entire space, however, gives one the sense that the gallery becomes a sales outlet for a large body of an artist's work, instead of host to a solo show with a curatorial signature.

The show's theme continues Murray's satirical, often self-deprecating critique of the place of 'whiteness' in the African Renaissance, or perhaps its non-place. As we've come to expect from the Dark Prince of Pop, witty political satire is balanced by Murray's sense of materiality. While he occasionally outsources work to laser cutting services, Murray cuts most of the mild steel wall reliefs himself, covering them with fool's gold, to achieve a sort of imperfect, fake gold-leaf finish. Mostly female figures in Renaissance dress line the gallery walls, and they all cry large blue metallic crocodile tears. The show's title 'Crocodile Tears', complemented by a wall installation of powder blue tears cast in polished resin (certainly a stellar moment on the show), is essentially a critique of the politics of transformation, whether in the form of white guilt or the political corruption around empowerment. This comes with satirtical references to Robert Mugabe and Thabo Mbeki (in Murray's this is not a president playing on Mbeki's characteristic pipe smoking and Magritte's famous Ceci n'est pas une pipe from 1928). Murray's bronze sculptures, somewhere between poodle and Buddha, poke fun at bourgeois privilege and corruption, with titles such as Mrs Oligarch.

Seven Deadly Sins, busts of white men, possibly bearing some resemblance to apartheid political leaders, employ a simple inversion of 'whiteness' with brown faces/fool's gold wigs. This could perhaps be compared with Kendell Geers' work of the same name shown at the Africa Pavilion at Venice last year. Geers' work is a series of neon signs that play against visualising the word, such as 'gluttony', making it an uncomfortable experience for the viewer. Geers' work is perhaps less easily located, reflecting more of a general struggle with conscience as opposed to Murray's specific parody of white guilt, or perhaps even a satirical response to Geers' work. Murray has explained his love of the one-liner, and the necessary accessibility of the satirical one-liner. But, particularly in these layered wall reliefs, I felt that there should be another layer, one that questions the position of the viewer.

Certain works come closest to a surrealist aesthetic that I felt contained moments of ambiguity, and self-reflection, which is productively at odds with this one-liner ethic. This is particularly true of Murray's text works, such as Eyesight to the Blind, which sees an eye-test made from the word 'UBUNTU'. The artist playfully put some of the strongest works in the bathroom, such as a wall-mounted stainless steel cut-out of a boot next to the phrase 'let them eat pap'. My favourite work of all was a 16 piece set called The Battle of the Tenses in aluminium, paint and resin. This set places crest-like symbols, meaningless in themselves, next to mutation of popular phrases such as 'the haves', 'the never wanteds', 'the never gets', 'the must haves'. Apparently here Murray used the same company that manufactured badges for the National Party, and which now does so the same for the new government. For me this small detail concerning the history of this badge company reflects the difficult position for an artist like Murray, adding that layer of complexity I was searching for in the wall reliefs.

Is Murray's work only about 'whiteness' trying to speak against itself - in the same materials that constituted it, and that now speak for a new power? In this vein I also enjoyed Murray's playful constructed photographs, placing himself in the picture in Louis XVI wig, mowing his lawn, his shirt shamelessly removed. The frankness of these shots begins to open up a new language of satire, playful, candid and self-deprecating - somehow reflexive of my own strange position as white artist and critic, both in and out of the 'picture'.The Battle of the tenses, the text pieces and even Murray's self-ironic performance are layered, subtle explorations of how privilege speaks itself. They are exactly the kind of confession 'we' need to keep making.

I always enjoy the Michaelis Art School’s end of year show, it seems to kick in the summer season and, having spent the entire eighties there myself, is quite nostalgic. When I was asked to be the external examiner for one of their master’s candidates last year, it was with a certain amount of reluctance that I agreed. The art pond is a very small pond indeed. I had done this once before a while ago and had to endure unpleasant “chats” with the candidate as to why I had decided what I had when we subsequently bumped into each other out on the town. I wanted to enjoy my pool and beer rather than talk art…you can imagine. I had declined further invitations since but thought it might be an interesting exercise for this jaundiced art lover. My own lecturing experience had taught me, to a large extent, the ability to engage with and encourage and discuss with students their work and intentions which might fall outside of my comfort zones.

This soft approach had hardened since I left the lecturing game …I needed to loosen up.

This proved quite easy. My holier- than- thou approach to students and lecturing was unnecessary. The works of Andrzej Nowicki hit me in four of the seven chakras that I can remember, and in percentages that I found more than pleasant. Not too much head, at the end of the day who gives a Foucault how you spell Derrida, a lot of heart, gutsy and just enough groin action. A lot of his references and influences fall outside of the traditional highbrow art context and there is a playful engagement with ephemera from popular culture. You see the influences of contemporary editorial illustration, narrative graffiti and the odd quirky style animation and drawings which remind me of the awkward doodles that we all did in the back cover of our standard 8 Geography books. I was having fun.

Not that the influences of the more traditional lexicon of art references are absent though. The work of Neo Rauch’s, which Alison Gingras describes as ” the painter of the failed Utopia of the Eastern Bloc”, is present. When first looking at the works, there is an awkwardness of palette and an oddness of spatial construction which seems untrained, clumsy and a little wooden. After spending a little more time with the works, particularly the smaller oddly framed drawings and watercolours; this ham-handedness dissolves into what I see as an intentioned, directed and conscious effort to describe odd disjunctures and ” events” through awkward inventions. These weirdly constructed vignettes begin to play with notions of time, space and historical dating. All traces of ochre, yellow and earthy reds have been reduced to what appears to be a cold Northern hemisphere palette of bleached whites, blues and blacks. The African Identity (whatever that might be) is refreshingly nowhere to be seen and an exotic description of Northern ” otherness” is embraced.

His fabulous ectoplasmic squid, out of date computers and Eastern European architecture are reminiscent of 50’s and 60’s comics and Boys Own Annuals. Sci-Fi and B-Grade movies are not far away either. The staged events and peculiar constructions are reminiscent of what is loosely referred to as Outsider Art. The kind of power of intention and drive of expression which is immediately felt in the work of these artists is felt in Andrzej’s work. There is an undertow of violence which follows the characters within these narrative non-sequiturs and, unlike the work of Laylah Ali, is understated and implied. There is a quiet humour which runs through the work and a kind of ” noir” deadpan delivery. The surrealist tradition is coupled with a thrift-store art sensibility, which mocks these highbrow references in a style where contemporary illustrators graphic artists and designers are equal partners with the big name establishment heroes of Contemporary Art.

In the end the effect is a Buster Keaton- like story board from the 50’s described through the eyes of a lonely MTV addict, on acid, in drawing and watercolours. Mike Kelly, a great artist and quite a clever eggy, describing himself as a Sunday -curator, wrote in the catalogue essay for his show called The Uncanny, held at the Liverpool Tate in 2004, “The uncanny is located in the uncomfortable regression of a time when the ego was not yet sharply differentiated from other persons. When something happens to us in the “real” world that seems to support our old, discarded psychic world, we get a feeling of the uncanny. The uncanny is an anxiety for that which recurs, and is symptomatic of a psychology based on the compulsion to repeat.”

I hear Andrzej has relocated to New York after a sell out show at David Krut in JHB. It will be interesting to see how he does there where the pool is much bigger and his references much closer. I look forward to seeing further results of his compulsion to make uncanny things.

Brett Murray

P.S I just remembered a 5th chakra…its in the pocket. I walked out of the assessment and asked him if I could buy a few of his works.

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Motorists short-cutting to De Waal drive and red-eyed medical students alike will know Anzio Road well, although neither will probably have given it much thought. Running between a newish shopping centre, the old graveyard and a collection of buildings which make up part of the University of Cape Town’s Medical School and Groote Schuur hospital, the road is little more than functional. Until now that is, since Brett Murray has completed a commissioned work on the wall of the Medical Research Unit that you won’t fail to notice.

Staking its claim on the building’s streetside corner is Murray’s Specimens, which comprises 48 red oxide square steel panels. Each of these panels, installed proud of the wall, features a cutout shape through which is visible a series of coloured backgrounds. The cutouts are bilaterally similar shapes, suggestive of human faces seen from the front. Well, not quite human, but we do recognize bits of ourselves in the images – ears, hairdos and jowls for instance. Of course these are rendered with Murray’s characteristic wit and irreverence, flavoured by his penchant for the pop and the satirical, and produced in his succinct, confident manner.

While the work takes a gentle poke at just what goes on in a medical research facility, its forms are not foreign to Murray’s oeuvre. His Standard Bank Young Artist show of 2002 included two works which are most certainly its forbears. Pale Mutants and White Like Me both featured similar forms, and both explored the nature of classification and generalisation. These are of course very serious subjects, particularly in South Africa, where both are fulcrums on which many balancing acts are daily performed, but Murray is most certainly having a laugh here. (In the catalogue accompanying the show, he lets on that the each of the Pale Mutants represents a friend or acquaintance, so while he may have been having a laugh at our expense, it was an affectionate one.)

Sixteen different heads, eight different background colours and 48 units in all result in a fair but finite number of variants amongst the Specimens. Is Murray suggesting that, while there certainly is the possibility of some variety among us, we can’t avoid classification completely? Or is the spectre of Eugenics and genetic manipulation raising its head here, proposing that some combinations are more equal than others?

Murray’s Pale Mutants could well have been cut from these same sheets of steel as the Specimens units, leaving their negatives for this later work. The earlier piece, however, was painted in the colour formerly known as ‘flesh tone’. In Specimens Murray introduces variety, but not that much of it. Of course one cannot forget that he was probably having some fun with colour here too – you can quite easily picture him flipping through paint samples at his local hardware store.
The aesthetically pleasing is never far and Murray’s pop and graphic sensibilities always precipitate somewhere in his work, but while one can’t forget this, one shouldn’t dwell too long on it either. His sculptural sensibility comes to the fore in the way the work possesses volume, definitively taking ownership of the building’s corner, suggesting even that it occupies some of the interior. This is perhaps a measure of its seriousness, a reminder of the sensitive spots Murray’s work inevitably needles – the issues he picks up on here are ever more pertinent in the country’s shifting cultural and racial landscape. The work’s location in the University’s Medical School, where the most rigorous, rational and scientific enquiry takes place, signals his intention.

Murray has produced a number of public works in Cape Town, the tone and nature of which varies widely. Even the appearance of the works and the visual language he employs has changed and been adapted to the various sites and contexts his works occupy. These earlier works – principally Africa, which is to be found in Cape Town’s St George’s Mall, and Baobabs, Stormclouds, Animals and People which he produced with /Tuoi Stefaans Samcuia in the city’s International Convention Centre – are very different in tone. The former was cheeky, even celebratory, looking at the complex marriage of modernity and tradition that often comprises the continent’s lot. The collaborative work at the Convention Centre looked at aspects of our cultural heritage in a much more reverent fashion.
The closest public relative to Specimens, visually at least, is possibly 2005’s Yesterday and Tomorrow which is installed in the Parliament buildings. Here Murray suspended a series of naturalistic cutout profiles. Inside each of these was a negative cutout of another profile facing in the opposite direction. The fractal-like self-similarity of the works allows you to extrapolate this interpenetration to infinity, but this delight is offset by the serious nature of the images Murray has chosen and the place in which they are sited. In today’s political landscape, as we settle into life in our new democracy, the ideas of cyclical progress and political succession gnaw at one’s perception.

Specimens was commissioned through a programme at UCT whereby one percent of the cost of any new building or significant renovation is allocated to either the commissioning or display of works of art. This is administered by the UCT Works of Art Committee, members of which are appointed by the UCT Council and include Pippa Skotnes from Michaelis School of Fine Art, Anna Tietze from the Department of History of Art, Christopher Peter from the Irma Stern Museum, along with a widely representative collection of academics and professionals in various fields.

In addition to Murray’s work, a mosaic piece was recently completed by Lovell Friedman in the old library entrance a short distance from Murray’s on Anzio Road. Another commission, to be realised by Friedman and Lynne Lomofsky, is planned for the supporting columns of the pedestrian bridge which spans the road there.

In Sleep Sleep Brett Murray tackles Goya’s themes of the sleep of reason and triumph of evil, ignorance, prejudice and superstition, transposing them into the context of the global resurgence of racism, chauvinism and terrorism orchestrated by Washington, its allies and adversaries. Sculpture, photography, painting, prints and plastic cut-out drawings deck the gallery out as a pseudo temple – or memorial – ironically dedicated to the gospel according to Saint George and the cult of militarism, materialism, fundamentalism, jingoism and conformity he sponsors.Massive bludgeoning text-works, reminiscent of the Mosaic tablets of the law, serve as a catechism propagating the faith. Presented in gilded lettering and thus elevated into holy writ, ringing presidential injunctions like “Our religion must win!” act as battle cries, whipping up gung-ho triumphalist fervour. These mock scriptural citations conduct us to the high altar where brazen effigies of a gorilla, a donkey, and a pig, form a trinity of idols in the tradition of the golden calf.Like the nightmarish bats, cats and owls that whirr forth in Goya’s The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters, these monsters issue from some dark substratum of consciousness and represent regressive psychic forces such as greed, covetousness, idiocy and rampant brute force. Sleep becomes a metaphor for moral paralysis and the atrophy of conscience in the plastic cut out drawings arranged around the sculpture in triptychs. These portray a vast congregation of dozing worshippers, stupefied by propaganda, resolutely closing their eyes to the iniquities perpetrated by the imperium.This templar concept dictates that the art-works form a progression, like the Stations of the Cross. The bronze effigies of zoomorphic gods bring the circuit to a dramatic climax, and ensure the whole adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. Inspired by toys, comics and cartoons, the sculptures have been simplified and abstracted into a few smooth, sheer, rounded volumes that achieve an iconic Brancusian economy rather than a flip Koonsian inconsequence.Frozen poses of a strictly frontal, balanced and symmetric type immobilise these false gods, and their strength and ferocity is undermined by the manner in which their comic book origins peep through, domesticating them and hinting at feet of clay. Their stance – with paws concealed behind their backs – points to shiftiness and deceit. The bronzes are the most aesthetically satisfying component of Sleep Sleep. The style of the other exhibits reflects the hollow mendacity of the Yankee pledge to safeguard freedom and democracy, by wedding amplified scale to an aesthetic of gloss and expressive nullity. The panels portraying sleeping electorates impress through their monumental dimensions and gleaming, pristine surfaces, but the line drawing, like street signage, is deliberately featureless and void of emotive resonance. Murray appears to be parodying the hyperinflation and bombast that typifies presidential oratory. His execution is so big, broad and bold as to achieve numbing blandness.Paradoxically this very blankness serves as cogent satiric comment upon the empty and inhuman values of our jittery, paranoiac post-9/11 world which interprets reality in dangerously simplistic political and moral terms. The wall-piece, Blood is the Opiate of Power, juxtaposes flat heraldic crowns with stylised drops of blood in order to explore imperialist aggression, propaganda and the insouciant sacrifice of human life. The sleek lustrous scarlet and gold crowns create a momentary illusion of wealth, power and legitimacy that soon reveals itself as outright imposture. The benign symbolism of the crowns is appropriated from a defunct royal political system, and these dynastic regalia are fraudulently applied to the nuclear force de frappe of America and other contemporary states. Gold and gemstones, simulated in patently cheap, ersatz materials, reek of spuriousness, and thus function as eloquent symbols of the hollow, duplicitous rhetoric emanating from the Capitol, the White House and many other seats of power.
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{H}

In his fine essay in the catalogue to Brett Murray’s White Like Me exhibition, Ivor Powell talks about ‘an uncanny self-portrait” running through the artist’s work. I can’t resist asking Murray if this refers to his bubble-headed sculptures, small male bodies with enormous exploding heads. Given all his successes of the past few years — Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year 2002, winner of the Cape Town Public Sculpture competition in 1998, co-winner of the competition to build an installation at the new Cape Town International Conference Centre, to name just a few — Murray could be forgiven for being big-headed. Murray finds this tremendously funny. ‘Haha! With the nature of the art world in South Africa, this is my little 15-minute blip on an otherwise parched landscape. Soon, it’s back to selling lights to make a living for me. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve somehow managed to sell some of my art, and I’m grateful for that. But it won’t last forever.”

Murray’s current exhibition at the South African National Gallery, White Like Me, is funny, astute and provocative. The title (which the gallery managed to omit from the invitation) encapsulates many of the concerns of the show. If Black Like Me — the brandname for a hair product targeted at black consumers — means that your blackness is artificially constituted, market-driven, badly packaged and synthetic, then Murray’s art parodies and interrogates that in the ways in which it deals with aspects of white identity. ‘For me it was important to work from a very specific perspective or point of view. Post-1994 satirical targets are a little bit merged and amorphous, and the good and the bad aren’t easily identifiable. I wanted to tackle the notions of white South African identity in both comic and tragic ways. Talking about issues of whiteness is almost a hushed discussion and I wanted to open up that debate in an unapologetic way. ‘When I started this body of work, I perceived a strange racist sense about whites from the media. Which obviously one can understand, but I’m not going to be quiet, and my whiteness isn’t going to make me quiet. I’m lucky enough to have a platform, and I’m going to get on it and shout as loud as I can. I might be talking shit, but I’ll use my platform as I see fit.”I take this to mean that Murray wants to use white as one of many ideological categories in debates about South African identities, rather than allowing it to be the base against which all other categories are read. It’s a brave standpoint, because the hidden danger is that problematising our understanding of whiteness also calls into question definitions of blackness. The two are inescapably entwined, with neither having a pure originary ground to build from. It’s an uncomfortable realisation for some people, probably best expressed in that most oxymoronic of terms, the ‘African renaissance”. In Murray’s oeuvre, it’s most perfectly figured by his famous Africa statue that stands in St George’s mall in Cape Town, an African figurine spouting Bart Simpson heads.

To state the obvious, there’s a massive political dimension to Murray’s art (he winces when I ask him if he’s one of the few remaining struggle artists), but it’s more the satirical sniping of a Zapiro, rather than the portentous figuration of a Kentridge. At the opening of White Like Me Zapiro hinted at the uneasy status of the cartoon as fine art when he modestly declared himself out of place giving a speech in a gallery devoted to ‘real” art. It was pointed out that one of his works graces the collection of the South African National Gallery, but this is hardly a convincing argument. Just because the gallery owns a cartoon, it doesn’t make cartoons art.Murray’s work has been accused of being one-dimensional, and even painfully trite. His parodies of New Yorker-like cartoons do skirt the edge of obviousness at times. In one, a traditionally cloaked and bearded god addresses a middle-aged arrival at the Pearly Gates: ‘Some of my best friends are black too!” The work is saved by a certain weightiness given by its large-scale execution in perspex, and also by the fact that its triteness is painful. As Zapiro put it, ‘it takes a second to look at one of Brett’s works, but a long time to absorb it”.Murray is very aware of the delicate balancing act he’s trying to pull off. ‘I specifically wanted to use the popular culture of the one-liner. One of the tenets of satire is that the imagery must be recognisable. There has to be an understanding by the audience. So you’re limited to what people are familiar with so as to bring them into the conversation you’re trying to have with them. My intention is to make them feel uncomfortable with that familiarity, rather than comfortable with it.”I ask Murray about the rumour that he had to personally paint the walls at the gallery for his show. ‘Ha, not quite. But apparently a significant amount of the gallery’s budget was cut, and part of the fallout was that I’d have to put my stuff up in the big grey shadow of Kentridge, which sure, I’m already in, we are all in the shadow of Kentridge, but I don’t actually physically want to be in the shadow. It would have looked like shit.”Happily, the Kentridge show came down, and White Like Me doesn’t look like shit. It’s beautifully hung, and uncluttered. Perhaps the best review of it was provided by the people at the opening. Most were laughing. Sure, after a while they looked a little puzzled, even hurt in some cases. But that’s what happens when a Brett Murray one-liner whacks you on your funny bone.

Originally published in Art South Africa V5.2

In Sleep Sleep Brett Murray tackles Goya’s themes of the sleep of reason and triumph of evil, ignorance, prejudice and superstition, transposing them into the context of the global resurgence of racism, chauvinism and terrorism orchestrated by Washington, its allies and adversaries. Sculpture, photography, painting, prints and plastic cut-out drawings deck the gallery out as a pseudo temple – or memorial – ironically dedicated to the gospel according to Saint George and the cult of militarism, materialism, fundamentalism, jingoism and conformity he sponsors.

Massive bludgeoning text-works, reminiscent of the Mosaic tablets of the law, serve as a catechism propagating the faith. Presented in gilded lettering and thus elevated into holy writ, ringing presidential injunctions like “Our religion must win!” act as battle cries, whipping up gung-ho triumphalist fervour. These mock scriptural citations conduct us to the high altar where brazen effigies of a gorilla, a donkey, and a pig, form a trinity of idols in the tradition of the golden calf.
Like the nightmarish bats, cats and owls that whirr forth in Goya’s The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters, these monsters issue from some dark substratum of consciousness and represent regressive psychic forces such as greed, covetousness, idiocy and rampant brute force.

Sleep becomes a metaphor for moral paralysis and the atrophy of conscience in the plastic cut out drawings arranged around the sculpture in triptychs. These portray a vast congregation of dozing worshippers, stupefied by propaganda, resolutely closing their eyes to the iniquities perpetrated by the imperium.
This templar concept dictates that the art-works form a progression, like the Stations of the Cross. The bronze effigies of zoomorphic gods bring the circuit to a dramatic climax, and ensure the whole adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. Inspired by toys, comics and cartoons, the sculptures have been simplified and abstracted into a few smooth, sheer, rounded volumes that achieve an iconic Brancusian economy rather than a flip Koonsian inconsequence.Frozen poses of a strictly frontal, balanced and symmetric type immobilise these false gods, and their strength and ferocity is undermined by the manner in which their comic book origins peep through, domesticating them and hinting at feet of clay. Their stance – with paws concealed behind their backs – points to shiftiness and deceit.

The bronzes are the most aesthetically satisfying component of Sleep Sleep. The style of the other exhibits reflects the hollow mendacity of the Yankee pledge to safeguard freedom and democracy, by wedding amplified scale to an aesthetic of gloss and expressive nullity. The panels portraying sleeping electorates impress through their monumental dimensions and gleaming, pristine surfaces, but the line drawing, like street signage, is deliberately featureless and void of emotive resonance. Murray appears to be parodying the hyperinflation and bombast that typifies presidential oratory. His execution is so big, broad and bold as to achieve numbing blandness.Paradoxically this very blankness serves as cogent satiric comment upon the empty and inhuman values of our jittery, paranoiac post-9/11 world which interprets reality in dangerously simplistic political and moral terms.

The wall-piece, Blood is the Opiate of Power, juxtaposes flat heraldic crowns with stylised drops of blood in order to explore imperialist aggression, propaganda and the insouciant sacrifice of human life. The sleek lustrous scarlet and gold crowns create a momentary illusion of wealth, power and legitimacy that soon reveals itself as outright imposture. The benign symbolism of the crowns is appropriated from a defunct royal political system, and these dynastic regalia are fraudulently applied to the nuclear force de frappe of America and other contemporary states. Gold and gemstones, simulated in patently cheap, ersatz materials, reek of spuriousness, and thus function as eloquent symbols of the hollow, duplicitous rhetoric emanating from the Capitol, the White House and many other seats of power.

Brett Murray’s May show at the Goodman Gallery cements his position as SA’s foremost satirist working in visual art. It seems that Murray is the one of the few SA artists to fully grasp Italian writer and theorist Umberto Eco’s insight, ‘Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth’. Called ‘Sleep Sleep’, Murray’s show is challenging because it asks just how hard we should laugh at the frequently awful truths that make up African and international politics. Yet for the individual faced with a monolithic spin industry calculated (as Chomsky would have it) to manufacture consent, the entry point to subversion often lies in pointing out the ridiculous deeply embedded in the rhetoric of power.

Though Murray himself points out that text is less dominant in this show than previously in his output, it is the text-based ‘one-liners’ that first catch your eye. One work declares, in bold, golden 3-D letters, ‘Our Religion Must Win’. While undoubtedly referencing the sort of Southern States yank zealotry that gave impetus to the ‘war on terror’, the dramatic spotlighting of this work lends it an uncanny resemblance to the Voortrekker Monument’s ‘Ons Vir Jou Suid Afrika’ epitaph. On another wall, the ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ phrase from bumper stickers and lanyards is perverted into a more relevant and more telling ‘What Would Oprah Say?’. Looking across to the Zen Portraits of My Favourite Politicians’ Arseholes(2005/06), I wondered what, indeed, Oprah would say.

Sculpture has always been the mainstay of Murray’s output. Even his wall-based joke works, and the cut-outs made in collaboration with Conrad Botes, were essentially sculptural. This show is something of a departure, as it sees Murray experimenting with all manner of visual forms, from inkjet prints and black-and-white photographs to paintings. Numerous works on the show employ a new technique that marries rudimentary block printing with painting. Yet his caustic wit and sniper’s eye serve to unify the body of work and ensure that it retains focus.The most overtly sculptural works on exhibition, Little Pig, Donkey and Gorilla (all 2005/06) anchor the show and serve as reference points for much of the wall-based work. These bulbous, patinated black bronzes are hybrid figures, somewhere between human and animal, and are at once comic and threatening, like edgy castoffs from a Pixar storyboard. The pig is frankly cute, its ineffectual little arms thrust backwards as if it were about to dive into something. Yet in the context of this show its association with Orwell’s Animal Farm is inescapable. The gorilla is altogether more menacing, yet at just over 60cm high, comically so. Its stylised features make it resemble something Brancusi would have produced had he moonlighted for Dreamworks. What becomes interesting is the way the curation of the show creates interactions between these sculptures and the 2-D works. Gorilla is positioned gazing at a trio of identical canvases bearing the image of a 50’s-style movie monster, red eyes ablaze. These are titled ‘Theyíre Here!’(2005/06), and while deliberately trashy, go right to the heart of the post-apartheid, post-9/11 paranoia that now passes for normality.

Elsewhere, Murray makes use of familiar visual conventions to undermine African narratives of religious zeal and their accompanying violence. Digital prints of sappy watercolour works (found images reworked with text), with titles like Amen, Bless Us and Dear Lord, make a joke of the style and imagery favoured by Church repository artists. Yet the intent is serious: the connection between organised religion and military aggression in Central and North African countries is clearly the topic. Rather than banal (as has often been the vogue in contemporary art recently), evil is shown as insidiously aestheticised, disguised as easily digestible scenes of ‘sacred’ familial interaction. The text on these works, however, is grave, alluding to rape, genocide and xenophobia.

The stylistic shift in this show is not the only one. Significantly, Murray speaks about ‘allowing myself to not be funny’, as if he is aware that an exclusive mode of hailing the audience through pop iconography and one-liners, while effective as the cornerstone of a populist programme, can ultimately prove limiting. Series like Sleep Sleep and Lullaby suggest a far more intuitive exploration of ideas, and are decidedly unfunny. Consisting of heads in attitudes of sleep or rest rendered in elegantly economic line, the works ask, ‘Are these heads of the dead? Or just asleep? Are they guilty? Innocent?’. The details of the narratives from which these images are culled are not shown, only the heads isolated on fields of beige, heightening their ambiguity. Murray calls them a ‘tragic antidote to the one-liners’ in other parts of the show. It is as if the complexity of post-liberation violence and paranoia sometimes warrants a more nuanced approach. While hardly navel-gazing, the interpretive latitude these works afford the viewer subtly balances the directness of much of the other work.

In a 2004 essay in Artforum (November edition), writer David Robbins defined comedy as ‘our flexible strategy for scraping from our lives the thin film of shit produced by human society’. While Murray’s strategy has begun to resist simplistic definition as ‘comic’, there remains a sense that he is still interested in scraping away layers of shit to make clear that which we would often prefer remained opaque. As long as the 7 o’clock News continues to be, in Murray’s words, ‘the magnificent soap opera’ that it is, we will need artists like him to highlight the greed and stupidity of those in power. A second work with the phrase ‘Our Religion Must Win!’, this time in spindly cursive and repeated seven times like a dogmatic mantra, is an open series, with Murray reserving the right to produce more at any time. Like he knows there will always be a need for incisive satire.

“In fair Banana Land we lay our scene –
South Africa, renowned both far and wide
for politics and little else beside …”
Roy Campbell, from The Wayzgoose (1928)

In a country still invested in reckoning the extent of its dark inheritance, Brett Murray’s art plays a provocative and dangerous game: it stirs laughter. Commenting on the satirical drift of his work, critic Hazel Friedman once remarked: “The raw power of Murray’s work lies in its ability to strike the viewer in that place where a laugh and a gasp are indistinguishable.” That breathless gasp she speaks of is important here.

In an interview, Murray once said that he “desires to prick consciousness”. His choice of verb, desire, which is so much more forceful than its everyday alternative, want, is interesting. Far from simply wanting his art to annoy viewers, Murray desires confrontation. The artist himself has admitted as much, declaring: “I know I’ve succeeded when my work is offensive to some.”

Widely regarded as one of South Africa’s foremost sculptors, Murray’s output is characterised by its bold pop language and uncompromising directness. The affront offered by his body of work, which includes painting and photographic installation, spans nearly the entirety of his artistic career. An early highlight dates back to 1989, the time of his first solo show, held at Johannesburg’s Market Gallery.

Comprising a selection of plump, painted fibreglass and resin sculptures, the show daringly announced Murray’s engaged, agitprop style, this during an extended state of emergency, apartheid’s demise imminent but, then, still unthinkable. His mordant wit, encapsulated in sculptural works showing, for example, a butcher, his legs neatly hacked off, and a policeman, quite literally too big for his boots, struck a chord. Notably, a group of white, right wing extremists were incensed by his mocking gestures.

More recently, his acclaimed public sculpture, simply titled Africa (2000), and installed in Cape Town’s St George’s Mall, caused upset for its rendering of African sculptural forms as commodified, high kitsch. Dutifully, important people were offended. The key point in all of this is to recognise that Murray’s work straddles an equally momentous and awkward period in South African history.

As such, it is important to appreciate that Murray’s biting satire is modulated by his “sustained interrogation of identity”, as critic Ivor Powell has characterised it. Sometimes this interrogation is generic and sweeping, as a satirist must be to achieve affect. Good examples of works produced in this mode include, his steel cut-out cartoons, such as Zulu Heaven (2002), and his Bubble Head (2002) series of painted bronze sculptures, which humorously comment on whiteness, a prickly subject in contemporary South Africa.

Set against these broad enquiries into identity in a postcolonial context, Murray has also produced works with a more self-reflexive pitch. In his photographic installation, Guilt and Innocence: 1961-1989 (1997), he exhibited an archive of personal family photographs that poignantly demonstrated his own involvement in the subject of his art. One photo particularly demonstrated this, showing the artist aged six, dressed in loincloth and wearing blackface.

The difficult laughter his work prompts has often singled Murray out as a quirk or anomaly in an art community given over to anxious interrogations of self and subjectivity, a view that seems to suggest that South Africans are incapable of self-mockery. Not so. Although somewhat overlooked, South Africa has a rich satirical tradition. Murray is keenly aware of this, having previously expressed his indebtedness to Derek Bauer and Jonathan Shapiro, political cartoonists whose work has mercilessly pilloried all aspects of South African public life. Also Conrad Botes, a comic book artist whose sinister pop vision is receiving increased attention.

In the final analysis, though, it has to be said that Murray’s dark comedy is not the singular reason for his enduring appeal. His work is equally compelling for the occasionally wilful detours it makes into abstraction, the artist purposefully working by subtracting, allowing forms their own voice. And, of course, there is Murray’s pop aesthetic. Working with few peers, Murray has fashioned a colloquial version of a globalised pop tradition, one that tentatively calls itself African, but only to expose the comical absurdity of such a claim.

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‍Sean O’Toole is a journalist with the Sunday Times and editor of Art South Africa

I thought it would be informative to include a few notes about this show which might help to define the formal and conceptual framework within which I have been working. ‘White Like Me’ merges the thematic concerns pursued in two of my past shows - satirical attacks on bad government (pre-1994) and attempts to define an often discombobulated sense of identity. The comic and the tragic walk hand in hand in this sad and hilarious country.

The works on this show are mostly flat metal and plastic wall sculptures which take, as their starting point, single-frame cartoons from old ‘New Yorker’, ‘Spectator’ and ‘Punch’ magazines. The working title for this show was ‘The New Yorker does Benoni’ and I intended using only the familiar comic leitmotif of two navel-gazing (white) drunks at a bar. By inventing new dialogues between them I hoped to articulate my own ironic take on the South African social landscape. The idea of changing the text of existing images reminded me of a weekly competition that ran in the ‘Pretoria News’ when I was younger. Readers were provided with an image and invited to supply “funny” copy. I entered a few times but my text was probably a little rancid for publication. The pieces on exhibition also recall the work of Glen Baxter as well as the 80’s comic ‘BIFF’. Richard Prince’s comic non-sequiturs provide a more highbrow reference.

My show, ‘White Boy Sings the Blues’ marked the beginning of a shift in my work. My concerns moved from external issues of bad government, power abuse and the like, to a concern with notions of identity, memory and to defining a psychological sense of place. All the works used head-shots or silhouettes as a defining locus within which the external conflict becomes an internal debate. ‘Land’ looks at ideas of ownership, and the self-portrait ‘White Boy Sings the Blues’ attempts to articulate a sense of self within the hegemony of power relations and concomitant stereotypes. Other works attempted to unpack shifting notions of truth and memory. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had just kicked in, and in a later work, ‘Crisis of Identity’ , I look cynically at this process of self-analysis. Identity seemed to have become the mating call of many artists and intellectuals at the time. Despite my cynicism, I have returned to this pursuit and have attempted to re-draw those battle lines in this new body of work.

The often critical and hopefully entertaining explorations of cultural identity described above look back to even earlier works of mine, such as’ Warrior’ and continue in ‘White Like Me’. The title of ‘Black Like Me: Colonel Sanders’, which extends the thematic concerns described above, was inverted to give me the title for this show. Here, a patriotic limbo-land is described where language is seen as a defining divider and the cultural disjunctures I explore are intended to provoke. ‘Mantra’ an earlier work, began this investigation while ‘Rich Boy’ was a warning shot. The white face of capitalism is apparently legitimised by the black face of capitalism.

This sense of continuity is presented in ‘White Like Me’ where I hope to articulate, amongst other things, a simple warning: fascism and, ironically, racism are not colour-specific.

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UNBLACK

In the welter of contemporary academic analyses of experience, there is a theoretical perspective on the notion of “whiteness” as an overriding determinant of the way the world is constructed within the individual and collective consciousness. In one way the guiding insight here is a responsive and reflexive one, riding on the back of understandings of experience as being predicated on notions like “blackness”, “negritude”, and, on a more specifically political level, “black consciousness”.

If, the question seems to be implicitly asked, blackness can be understood to overlay the qualities of experience and relations with the discourses of history, then what is specific to “whiteness”? The answer given by film critic Richard Dyer, author of seminal texts on the subject, is that it is hard to say just what it is that is specific to whiteness as an ethnic category - and that the reason for this difficulty lies precisely in the dominance of whiteness in the discourses guiding the globalised economies of thought and value within which we live today.

Dyer writes in the essay, White:

…white domination is reproduced by the way that white people ‘colonise the definition of the normal’… It is the way that black people are marked as black (are not just ‘people’) in representation that has made it relatively easy to analyse their representation, whereas white people – not there as a category and everywhere everything as a fact – are difficult if not impossible to analyse qua white. The subject seems to fall apart in your hands as soon as you begin.
(In Carte Blanche/the White Papers, published by Panchayat with the Lethaby Press/Central Sanit Martins College of Art and Design, School of Art, 1999)

And in another place in the same essay, Dyer notes:

Power in contemporary society habitually passed itself off as embodied in the normal as opposed to the superior. This is common to all discourses of power, but it works in a particularly seductive way with whiteness, because of the way it seems rooted, in common sense thought, in things other than ethnic difference.

Dyer’s point is essentially that, given the overwhelming hegemony of Western thought, value and economy, whiteness has ceased to present itself as an ethnic and historical category in the same way that blackness does. Its epistemological status, as he compellingly observes, is rather like that of white as a colour in relation to the colours of the rainbow: white is the mixture of all the different frequencies of light making up the spectrum, and, in this, “white is not anything really, not an identity, not a particularising quality, because it is everything – white is no colour because it is all colours”.

In terms of ethnic experience, by Dyer’s lights, then, whiteness is not properly an experienced category precisely because it is the notional ground against which the categories of ethnicity are figured. Its values provide the determinant against which ethnic difference is measured.

This is the globalised intellectual framework in terms of which “whiteness” is to be understood. Agencies such as the history of colonialism, Hollywood film, television (notably CNN), relief aid, capitalist economic imperialism, the United Nations and western-style democracy – to list but a few and heterodox determinants - have seen to it that the values underlying this notion of whiteness and its implicit power relations have become naturalised through most of the world – with only branches of Islam and maybe aspects of Chinese culture coming readily to mind to challenge its hegemony in discourse.

I don’t really want to argue this point out in this place: further reflection will inevitably layer complexities and caveats and nibble away at the buttressing of the white Western discourse. I only want to register the basic argumentational structure – largely, and maybe perversely, in order to note that in the context of South Africa at the present time, it only makes partial sense: the idiosyncrasies of post-Apartheid South Africa have led to a situation where the hegemony of “whiteness” is not without ambiguity, poignancy or qualification.

Indeed, after apartheid - and contra Dyer – whiteness in South Africa, far from being a neutral and invisible ground for value and the self-naturalising of the dominant discourse, has been foregrounded as an ethnic category that is not only all too identifiable, but also fraught with anxiety, guilt and opprobrium. The recent history of this country, especially after democratic elections in 1994, has been such as to stand Dyer’s categories (seen as they are from the citadels of global white power) upside down. Here and now, as the machinery of political pre-eminence gives shape to the aspirations of the black majority and seeks to redress the past, the position of the country’s whites is undergoing a substantial revision. While, to be sure whites continue to dominate South Africa economically and in terms of access to resources of knowledge and education, it is nevertheless also true that whiteness is an ethnic category at risk. To be white is to have a share in the shame of the apartheid past; to be white is to have been formerly unfairly advantaged; to be white is to have much to exculpate and, not to put too fine a point on it, to be inescapably morally suspect, having been a beneficiary of apartheid; to be white is also to be on the wrong end of social engineering and to be excluded from processes of redistribution.

I note these things not in order to whinge. Such processes of history are not only understandable, but also inevitable, and (even speaking here as a white) to the broader social good, however crude and alienating the mechanisms whereby they are achieved often may be. Nor is any sense of unfairness directed against those whites who really did embrace democratic ideals and resist apartheid much to the point here. What is interesting in terms of the notion of whiteness, however, looked at from this angle at least and in the specific context of South Africa, is that it is indeed a category of difference and a category under often baleful scrutiny within the growing hegemony of a largely black-dominated political discourse. Even that underlying sense of the normality of whiteness that Dyer invokes is tainted in the South African context and frequently subject to critique – no less real for being generally uncompelling, emotionally rather than rationally driven, and frequently inconsistent and incoherent – by Africanist intellectuals.

It is also true that a specifically South African whiteness in the global scheme of things is, to a significant extent, a special case, construed, or manufactured, as an aberration (something so to speak, beyond the pale) rather than something partaking of the logics of global whiteness. One might speculate that there is, in important ways, a large measure of scapegoating here; that a useful, but in the end specious, disjunction has been fostered by European and American heirs to the discourse of power between the specifically South African conditioning of apartheid and the wider history of colonialism.

This is all on one side of the coin of whiteness in the South African context. On the other side, the sense of whiteness invoked by Dyer certainly does continue to hold sway. The new South Africa, for all the lip service of African National Congress politicians to African traditional customs and values, continues to be as powerfully underwitten by the dominant global white discourse as ever was the old. We buy into American economic and cultural values and aspirations as enthusiastically and unreflectively as we do into the compromised values of Westminster and United States democracy, not to mention abstract notions like justice and fair play. We educate and define knowledge and achievement almost exclusively in terms derived from the imperialist hegemony of the Western “white” powers.

In this sense then, as opposed to the other sketched in above, the notion of whiteness developed by Dyer continues to be determinate of “normality” and the seemingly unalterable order of things.

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE WHITEY

White like Me. Beyond the flip and deliberately provocative inversion of a political slogan cheapened by its commodification in a somewhat downmarket product line (Black like Me), there is a complex socio- and psycho-political knot snagged up here for the artist as cultural mediator to untie. What is particularly noteworthy here though is that the artistically crucial question of identity – the creative and self-definitive position in consciousness out of which the artist operates and from which the work derives its significance and its affect – remains far more a problem than a given.

Identity is also, in its vicissitudes, a key source of subject matter and aesthetic meditation in Brett Murray’s work. It is a concern that has long been discernible and has consistently been dramatized by the iconographic or virtually iconographic insertion of the artist’s own persona and experience into the work.

For instance, there is an early body of sculptures, dating from the mid- to late-1980s, in which rotund, resin-cast figures debunkingly caricature historically embedded South African archetypes and experiential masks. Figures evoking the virtual myth of the Afrikaner Voortrekkers – Volksvader and Volksmoeder - play a sexually charged leapfrog; a policeman, sticks of dynamite inserted in his ears is about to self-destruct in a militaristic ecstasy; a manic, legless butcher figure brandishes knives after using his own flesh as the material of his trade. The series rests essentially on a caricaturing technique of psychotic exaggeration, but at the same time, Murray has emblematically taken the subject matter and the socio-historical critique within his own consciousness. And he has done this by locating his figuration against a source caricature – that of the artist himself.

This (often almost uncanny) suggestion of a caricatured self-portrait running as a kind of leitmotif throughout Murray’s work, takes us emblematically into a world made as it were in the image of the artist – but less as a manifestation of the artist’s will than as a manifestation of his doubt. It takes us into a realm of discourse where experience is questioned in terms of its conditioning and partialities and where the underpinnings of the discourse are integral to the force and the significance of the work.

Thus, for instance, in Oros Goes Ndebele, Murray welds the advertising icon of a white childhood with not only the essentially debased stylization of Ndebele “African” patterning in constructing the post-modern iconic portrait. In doing this he also brings his white suburban childhood into a kind of interpretive risk by overlaying it with what was signally excluded from that childhood.

Where this leads is to a sustained interrogation of identity that lies at the heart of Brett Murray’s practice as an artist. But it is also a deferred interrogation, one that plays out through the confrontation of symbol systems and discourses implicit within them. Hence, in a particularly controversial piece – so controversial that city officials nearly prevented its planned installation in St Georges Mall, Cape Town – Murray cast a generically African figure sculpture in bronze, violently disturbing the integrity of its surface and identity by appending little manic models of the head of the cartoon character Bart Simpson on its surface.

More explicitly in terms of the interrogation of whiteness and blackness, in one of the framed photographs included in his installation Guilt and Innocence 1960-1990, Murray presents an image of himself aged six, dressed in a loincloth and wearing blackface.

The image is one of a group of more than 100 culled from family photograph albums to record Murray’s life in counterpoint with the incarceration of Nelson Mandela (as evoked in the dates included in the title). As a whole the collection of images provides a chronicle of a peculiarly South African half-life, shadowed by, but hermetically sealed off within its white suburban world, from the broader life of South African society. As Murray himself noted in the catalogue to the exhibition, entitled Thirty Minutes, where the work was installed at the Robben Island Museum:

The political and social forces beyond the confines of my family formed a system which protected and infringed on me, empowered and disempowered, promoted and denied me. When I looked beyond my private experience of loves and relationships, family and friends and boy becoming man, the contradictions in this system, which divided my life from others, resulted in a cross-questioning of responsibility and complicity.

In this context of a meditation on “whiteness” in South Africa, the picture of the artist as a six year old Zulu warrior – particularly in the light of the (fortuitous but inescapable hauntedness of the expression on the young Murray’s face) becomes an arrestingly South African image. In one way it records a kind of innocence in respect of the complexities of race. In another it shines forth as hubris against the gods of political correctness - a token of the historical arrogance of whites in what was a virtual institution of the white childhood, a dressing up as a “little savage” in drollery.

But beyond such basically visceral responses the image also has something about it of the icon. In the context of the present socio-politics of South Africa, it embodies a psychic crisis built into the form of the experiencer. It images the white as the black and in this enacts in the framework of doubt, the struggle of the South African white to discover or create an African identity, some kind of inner reconciliation with Africanness.

ALIENS

This notion of a psychic crisis of Africanness is perhaps the key thematic explored in the Standard Bank exhibition. As is Brett Murray’s postmodernist wont, the tensions and contradictions that determine this crisis are explored through disjunction, disruption and paradox at the level of stylistic charge, iconography and the languages of visual representation – in other words at the level of visual discourse – rather than by any kind of literal depiction.

There is a series of three small painted bronze sculptures under the title of Bubble Heads- after the generically “African” carvings made specifically for the tourist market - that can be taken as a virtual emblematisation of the concerns referred to above. Though cast in bronze (rather than polished wood, the three figures are, from neck to toe, executed in the proportions and formal volumes identified with West and Central African tribal art, or, more generally and less fastidiously, with African curios. But topping the neck of each figure, there is what looks like a kind of painted bronze balloon – referred to by Murray as an “exploding head”. What is visually significant at least is the way the head “explodes” – evoking the symmetries of Western mechanics in the form of the perfect sphere, standing at odds with the folksy organic traceries in the way the figure is carved.

In one way the image has an almost morbid or pathological quality, the sense of an unhealthy mutation, and one that supplants the human visage – what above all we relate to in the work of art – with something that is mute in the face of physiognomic interrogation. In another way, the specific disruption of the figure suggests no interpretative closure. The sphere as a form is quintessentially silent; it is a single geometric tendency creating itself in all directions; it relates to nothing except itself; it holds its interior wholly within itself. At the same time, the sphere is also a globe, a planetary sphere transposed onto the human torso; and also a customary symbol of the mysteries of creation. A point, as it were, in “big bang”.

All of this is built into the presence of the work, and the ambiguities and the denial of the interpretative urge are precisely what determine the identity of the figures almost as genii loci of the exhibition as a whole.

There is something almost, albeit perversely, mystical about the Bubble Head figures,and human figuration as a vehicle for manifesting identity is explored and developed in mainly more pessimistic vein in the exhibition. A series of blank pink shapes, cartoon variants of a head – some zoomorphic, other more evocative of the vegetable - are arranged in a grid formation on a burgundy background and titled Pale Mutants. The basic import of the work is pretty much inescapable – the pinkness of the image inevitably evokes the so-called “white”; the basic form is presented as essentially unstable, implicitly subject to genetic mutation, the result of processes of natural or unnatural selection; the absence of any featuring or the suggestion of a consciousness as well as the basic cartooning style within the mutant forms renders them as metamorphic objects rather than subjects; and so on. However it might be worth recalling here that in the preparatory stages, Murray had planned to label the individual mutant heads (or at least to provide a listing of those of whom these were putatively portraits as part of the work). The names in the list included his own with those of close friends.

Equally blank and essentially mute in terms of direct human communication is another series of “mutant” heads, this time three in number. These are indeed accompanied and offset by pieces of text, reading, respectively, as follows: “If I can’t throw stones at bad government because I am white… what can I say?”; “If I’m a racist because I think Mbeki is an arsehole… what can I say?” and; “If I can’t wipe my arse with the flag of black fascism… what can I say?”

There is a curious kind of aphasia here, between the anodyne blandness of the representation of the heads themselves, and the gritty, confrontational quality of the text - an aphasia echoed in the misalliance in the title, Mbeki, Mugabe and Me. Like the Pale Mutants, these heads occupy a curious position between visual assertion or suggestion of the human visage and mere pattern.If there is a kind of threshold at which the eye psycho-optically constructs a physiognomy, bringing the brute marks that are received by the retina within the framework of human interpretation, then these images only barely cross that threshold. They carry virtually no affect nor assertion of identity: considered as evocations of the human consciousness they have been robbed in their mutation of all their humanity and more particularly their force. They are, above all, images of pathos and impotence, and, as such, sit uncomfortably with the in-your-face rhetoric of the script.

THE COLOUR WHITE

Describing the current exhibition Brett Murray told me he wasn’t trying to create some kind of magnum opus or meisterwerk in deference to the gravity of the Standard Bank Young Artist award, nor even to effect any kind of closure on his oeuvre thus far. Instead, he said, he had simply allowed himself to carry on with what he was doing anyway, in some cases making works that he had had in mind, but on the back burner, for some months or years. He also spoke of the works being planned and executed at the time for the pending exhibition as visual “one liners”.

Many of course also have, literally, the quality of verbal one liners, with single lines of directly quoted text appended to drawings derived from and echoing a somewhat dated and generically “white” cartooning style most closely identified with the New Yorker magazine of the 1950s and 1960s.

“Are we… the other or the other other or another other?” a caricatured businessman, drawn in this vein, asks his colleague over pasta and wine served on a gingham checked tablecloth. Everything in the drawing of the image works towards achieving the effect of visual blandness. The checks on the gingham create an excessively dull visual effect, only emphasised by the mirroring of creases in the fabric; equally drolly symmetrical is the positioning of two wine glasses, a salt and pepper set, and the two businessmen themselves, seated in identical forties or fifties chairs on either end of the composition.

In terms of the internal logic of the New Yorker cartoon genre of course, the non-committal quality of the drawing is intrinsic to the humour – characteristically playing between outrageous paradoxes, ironies and whimsies in the text, and a severe suburban primitivism in the style and the subject matter in the accompanying image. In a way it strives towards a no-style of artistic representation, a common and lulling sense of visual normality to be offset against the explosion of humour in the text. (One is reminded in the cartooning style and the way it has established itself as a kind of absence of style in the Western aesthetic consciousness of Richard Dyer’s characterisation as the colour white being a mixture of all the colours but seeming to be no colour at all.)

Murray of takes the drollery of his stylistic quotation to a whole new level however by rendering his images in heroic mode. By rendering his cartoons in relatively monumental proportions and hanging them on the wall, he draws our attention to the image in a different way, a way essentially disruptive of the naturalisation of the style within consciousness. What comes to the fore is the set of relations that position the style and the image within a discourse, its oddity rather than the “normality” which is its discursive currency. Part of this oddity depends on the slightly archaic quality of the manner that Murray has adopted, the historical remove at which the sense of normality has been placed. At the same time, all of these interruptions are enhanced by the technique, the way that in one series of cartooning works on the exhibition, Brett Murray has taken what is essentially a short-order and fluid sketching style and rendered it by means of painstakingly cut out dark plastic embedded in a perverse kind of mosaic to a white perspex background.

In another series, to more or less the same philosophical effect, though with a different kind of aesthetic charge, Murray has cut his line drawings out of single sheets of metal, reprising a substantial body of earlier metal wall reliefs around such subjects as African wildlife, nationalist propaganda and tourist ethnography. As with those works, here the virtual line thrown by shadows is activated as both a monumentalising and formally disruptive mechanism.

WHITE LIES

In this climate of formal alienation, Murray’s one-liners, even when they are funny – and some are very funny – are also presented in such a way as to disturb, and burn in consciousness rather more hotly, rather than merely amuse.

“Send my greetings to your tribal elders,” one businessman, briefcase in hand says in parting to another.

“What parts of you are from Africa?” a characteristically bemused businessman punter earnestly asks another at a bar counter.

“On Wednesdays I’ll be doing ancestor worship in phonetic Xhosa”, an ingratiating curate informs a parishioner couple after the service.

“Say… I want to go to heaven… in Zulu”, St Peter, at the Pearly Gates asks a recent arrival before admitting him.

“I must learn to speak Xhosa!” a captain of industry, earnestly on his knees before going to bed at night, resolves in his nightly prayers.

It is not my intention here to interpret the cartooning works individually; the task is thankless and the jokes speak pretty much for themselves. But it might be worth noting a few points in passing.

Several, like those mentioned above, rely on a simple transposition of South African politically correct cliché into a foreign setting. They confront, as it were the milieu of “whiteness” a la Dyer as a seeming normality with the idiosyncratic concerns of South African political correctness and in that confrontation a kind of potential difference is generated - and the explosive release of the joke.

Other pieces in the series rely on scatological, sexual and political double entendres. In this vein, two businessmen before a fire; one, pipe in hand, wonders: “Is brown-nosing the president in the Kama sutra?” And in a related piece, a husband and wife are, postcoitally, in bed, with shocked expressions on their faces; “Is that brown-nosing the president”, the wife wants to know.

It is maybe worth noting that the humorous charge depends, in a relatively convoluted fashion, on a certain discomfort generated by the making literal and the foregrounding, as though this were an accepted political practice, of the notion of “brown-nosing the president”. In a way the real point here lies in the insult to the institution of the presidency more than it does in any kind of wit, and personally, while I have no objection to the bathos, I don’t find the two pieces particularly “funny”.

FUNNY PECULIAR

I note the above especially in order to bring home the point that funniness in the cartoon works is only partially, and only sometimes, the desired effect. The very first time I met Brett Murray – nearly 20 years ago – he made an observation about his work that has stayed with me ever since, and is of particular relevance here. We were talking about a series of sculptures he had made debunking the mythologies of the Boers (still in power at the time), and Murray noted that his intention was not to amuse, but, as he put it, to “hit the funny bone”. To spell it out: when you hit your funny bone (whatever that actually is anatomically), the sensation is jolting, distinctly unpleasant, and only just short of painful – far from anything one actually associates with humour or amusement. On this metaphor, what Murray is looking to achieve in the confrontations he generates in his works, is an almost visceral and reflexive kind of shock, something that shorts the essentially rational circuitry of thought and discourse.

This intention also underlies the affect in cartoon pieces with children. In one the kids are playing a board game, which, we can see, is called “Overkill, The Game”. About to throw dice one says: “We’ve played white-fascist white-fascist… now let’s play black-fascist, black fascist.” In a sense, the sentiment expressed presents us with a kind of historical analysis-by-numbers of South Africa in the current political climate. It is not a particularly subtle, complete or thoughtful one, but neither is it meant to be: the point is to debunk and remove historical underpinnings, to reduce, in provocation, the complexities of history to simple stupidities.

Or maybe not so simple: in the reductions and the bathos of the texts – played out heroic amplifications in the presentation, there is also a deconstruction effected. What is thrown into relief, through removing it from its effective context, is not so much the sentiment expressed in the texts as the nature of the text itself – in a word the discourse within which it is operating. The point then is not merely the basically unregenerate white – almost what one would think of as “Rhodesian” – attitudes that are being presented on the surface, but rather a manifestation of the determining structures of discourse and mythology.

WE ARE NIGERIANS

This impulse towards the debunking of the dominant South African discourse is given a somewhat different cast in a series of wall pieces whose protagonists are cartoon aliens. In one two identical aliens are figured in separate vertically composed panel. One bears the legend “Us”, the other “Them”.

Another, in very similar vein, presents the same alien figure in the same tall format, with a series of African nationalities – Algerian, Somalian, Namibian, etc.- crossed out to leave only “South African” at the end of the sequence. Though it is hardly needed to nail down the point about the mythologies of heroic national self-identification, the piece is entitled “Proud Nation”.

And so the series, using aliens, as humans inevitably do, to highlight and ironise the specifically human condition, continues. In one piece, an alien, just disembarked from his flying saucer and presumably wanting to give shape to the shadow world of his pre-mission briefing, asks a dispirited looking white: “Are you… the other”.

Another group of aliens decide not to disembark at all. They turn their flying saucer away from a presumably poisoned planet expressing their prejudice: “To many whites”.

Aliens, like prejudices, come in many shapes and shades, as Murray reminds us in another piece in the series, playing here on another sense of the word alien. Three antennaed aliens have disembarked and are surveying the new land. The text reads: “We are from Nigeria… we want your women and your jobs.”

As Murray noted, this particular exhibition is not designed as a tour de force. What it does is something that is maybe far more important though if less ego affirming, than the Big Show. It presents, and forces the viewer to engage with, real and present contradictions in the discourse and the experience of our time and place.

This on a general level. More specifically, what Murray hangs out, like so much dirty washing is his own prejudice, his own position vis a vis the dominant discourse. He locates himself as a white in South Africa, reproducing (or at least standing in some identifiable relationship with) many of the visceral responses common to whites in South Africa at this juncture in history. And beyond the politically confrontational charge of the exhibition, and more meditationally, he structures an aesthetic dynamic in the layering of the presentation whereby these are deconstructed and made available to scrutiny.

To be sure, one of the impulses behind the work is a sense of betrayal and dislocation. Murray, like many (though not that many) other whites in the 1980s and early 1990s, actively identified himself with the struggle for democratic values in South Africa. And like many such whites, he experiences and expresses a sense of disappointment and anger with the fruits of that struggle – the replacement, as Murray puts it in the mouths of babes, of white fascism with black fascism. Like few however, he takes those responses and places them at a kind of aesthetic remove, to speak about their own position within the discourse at the same time as they express the sentiments of which they are possessed. The head, so to speak is not something fixed, but… exploding.

This “white [male] middle-class cultural hybrid’, as he has described himself (‘Guilt & Innocence’), has made some of the most strikingly original post-colonial sculpture you can find. Deceptively light in tone, he can make you laugh like no other, but like the best cartoonists his work can be read at several levels, resonating long after the initial punch.

Murray’s first mature body of work emerged during the repressive 80s, while sequestrated at university (he spent nine years there, like many other war resisters who became ‘perpetual students’). By situating his early work within the history of caricature, Murray ‘universalised’ his subjects, while retaining enough specificity to mock Apartheid and its icons. He was an artist in the tradition of Goya, Daumier and Grosz, not an anti-apartheid upstart. Referencing historic (artistic) precedent is a familiar device for satirical artists, especially in times of censorship, and has resurfaced in some of Murray’s recent work. An example of this is when he adopts the staid, allegedly neutral look of a New Yorker cartoon, while making references to “brown-nosing the president”, which in the contemporary South African situation can take on a much more specific identity than implied by its (deceptively) conservative rendering.

To call Murray’s work since political change ‘post-colonial’ is to do more than dennote a historical period, it is to recognise that he grapples with a central notion, that of ‘Africanness’, and that he breaks a taboo by taking it on from a ‘white’ perspective. As the critic Ivor Powell has noted, there is a “sustained interrogation of identity that lies at the heart of [Murray’s] practice as an artist.” (White Like Me, 2002, p7) With exhibition titles such as ‘White Boy Sings the Blues” and “White Like Me” Murray has fun with a deeply existential issue, with apparently flippant ease, provocatively asking “What parts of you are from Africa?” (African Parts). Yet there are no easy answers, as Powell has noted: “identity…remains far more a problem than a given” (Powell, p.6)

Indeed while the ‘problem’ of whiteness has been expressed humorously in some of Murray’s work, such as through analogies to aliens (eg Where?) and mutants (eg Pale Mutants), in some cases he articulates a blandness verging on non-presence, whilst contrasting this ‘shapelessness’ with very specific statements that express frustration and impotence (eg Mbeki, Mugabe and Me). As Powell has noted: “one of the impulses behind the work is a sense of betrayal and dislocation. Murray….actively identified himself with the struggle for democratic values in South Africa…and expresses a sense of disappointment and anger with the fruits of that struggle…” (p.15)

On a formal level a constant feature in Murray’s work is his appropriation of sources from mass media and popular culture such as cartoon characters (eg. Bart Simpson, Richie Rich, Pink Panther); capitalist/consumerist icons (eg. Col Saunders, Oros Man); Afrikaner icons (eg. Voortrekker monument); touristic imagery (eg. postcards), and visual stereotypes (as rendered in cartoon styles, eg. Tintin & The New Yorker); and snap shots (eg. his own family album). Paradoxically his use of external sources (‘popular’ imagery) has resulted in the development of a very distinct personal style, making Murray one of the most easily identifiable of South Affrican artists. A key part of his approach to his source materials is to disrupt their original context, exagerate their sense of scale and juxtapose them with apparently contradictory elements, throwing up a third, hybrid, synthesis, that is often more open-ended than conclusive.

Another, less visible feature of his work is the “suggestion of a caricatured self-portrait, running as a kind of leitmotif through Murray’s work” (Powell, p7). This strategy runs through much of his work, and was first evident in the 80s. However it goes beyond formally referencing a particular ‘body-type’, and includes the appropriation of (cartoon) icons which personify an anarchic spirit that the artist has some affinity with (eg. Bart Simpson, Pink Panther). Seen in this light his public sculpture Africa, (where an enlarged figure, modelled on west and central African sources, is ruptured by a series of Bart Simpson’s heads) is not only a jarring representation of two cultures in conflict, but also an expression of how the artist ‘sticks out’ as a ‘white African’. That Bart is in fact yellow simply adds to the absurdity of ‘white’ in the same way that Murray sometimes uses pink and brown when dealing with notions of ‘black’ and ‘white’.

Warrior, where the Pink Panther holds a Zulu shield, is another example of how Murray’s work can be read at different levels. Superficially it makes a similar point to Africa, an apparently incongruous justaposition of discrete elements, and it pokes fun at those who wear their Africanness as an accessory. However in the South African context it can also be seen as sharply political, as the Zulu shield is a (tourist) icon representing (pre-colonial) Zulu military might, and is closely aligned with the Inkatha Freedom Party of Gatsha Buthulezi. Read in this way ‘Warrior’ can be seen as mocking the IFP as an essentially ‘Zulu party’ with some conservative whites occupying strategic positions. It can even be seen as a ‘portrait’ of one of these ‘pink Zulus’. On the other hand it condemns the IFP for having betrayed the black majority by collaborating with the Apartheid Government, including on the military front. That it could have been a ‘black panther’ is hinted at by the black ‘shadow’ that covers one side of its face. The shield, held rather limply, does nothing to protect the otherwise exposed panther. That Warrior defies one conclusive reading, whilst being almost emblematic in its form, explains why a ‘cheap joke’ can retain intrigue long after the initial shock (or giggle).

Aother important feature of Murray’s work, and one in sync with his iconoclasm, is his neo-dadaist use of materials, which in turn is countered with an almost conservative emphasis on craftsmanship. He has painted bronze to make it look like the painted wood of tourist oriented, colon sculptures from the Congo (the Bubble Head series). He has also painstakingly recreated the look of black ink on paper using wood and plastic in one series (eg. Another Other), and cut out sheets of metal in another (eg Crisis of Identity). That he relishes innovative approaches to materials is evident, and the decision to task him to set up a sculpture department (at the University of Stellenbosch) was clearly an inspired choice.

The missing link between popular cartoons and ‘fine’ art, Murray has also made many functional works, including some of the funkiest lamp shades ever, making his works accessible to a wider market. He bravely goes where others may fear to tread, and is fast becoming recognised as a national treasure, finding his way into virtually all the prominent public and corporate collections in South Africa, and finally receiving recognition as Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year. International curators are increasingly taking note, and the world will see much more of the other Bart.

In much of West and Central African Sculpture the male erection, in the same way as the motif of bulging eye sockets, is associated with heightened states of consciousness, possession and passage between this world and the conditioning realities of the spirit world.

I don’t think Brett Murray’s image of Bart Simpson with boner should be emphasized too much, or at least not too solemnly. Murray’s art is too humourous, too irreverent, too much in your face for that: only the most hopelessly and irredeemably academic would be insensitive to the liberation in the low humour running as a discomforting leitmotif throughout Murray’s work. Murray himself put it very nicely, talking about seeking through the humour in his work, not so much as to amuse as to hit the funny bone. It’s not funny , it hurts, when you hit the funny bone.

It is a kind of spasm, whose semantic counterpart Murray finds in almost-but only almost- bland and disingenuous quotations of received imagery, format and style. It all works on the device off affront, a deliberate and very inappropriateness of the shock generated thereby- in fact precisely the kind of discomfort that Freud was wanting to define in his understanding of laughter. In the disjunctions that are generated-the parody of South African patterns of acculturation in the rendering of black dudes in sociological transition as refracted through the eyes of the Simpsons: the unmistakably sexual implication that Murray reads into the platitudinous ”I love Africa” when it is being said by a figure with an erect penis and a certain look in his eye: the earnest exchange between Western and traditional culture represented as postcard dialogue between an explorer and a cannibal-with the caricature cook considering spicing options in the background.

Of course it is partly about the aesthetics of shock. But it is not only that. There is also a kind of recognition or transfiguration that is affected in the semantic spasm. In an almost visceral aversion that Murray’s upended and discomposed narrative scraps and stereotypes provoke, we physically experience the deconstruction , the overbright illumination, of the vanities and utilities in the way we make up our world.

We are frozen between discourses, between the worlds, almost possessed by recognition.

The 30 Minutes exhibition took place in the visitors block on Robben Island. Nine artists, Willie Bester, Kevin Brand Lisa Brice, Lionel Davis (an ex-political prisoner on the island), Tracey Derrick, Randolph Hartzenberg, Brett Murray, Malcolm Payne and Sue Williamson, were invited to create installations in the small cubicles where the political prisoners sat when visited by their family or friends. Most prisoners where allowed one 30 minute visit a year. Some were not allowed this ‘privilege’.

The prisoners had no physical contact with their visitors and spoke with them through a rudimentary intercom system.

“I was born in December 1961, a few months before the Rivonia trialists (Nelson Mandela and his compatriots) were imprisoned. Being born in Pretoria, into a half-Afrikaans, half-English family, where my father’s heritage extended back to include both Paul Kruger and Louis Botha (Boer presidents), disguised by my grandmother re-marrying a Scottish Murray and my mother’s history reaching back to the French Huguenots, I am a white, middle-class cultural hybrid. This was and is my comfortable and uncomfortable inheritance. The political and social forces beyond the confines of my family formed a system which protected and infringed on me, empowered and disempowered me, promoted and denied me. When I looked beyond my private experiences of loves and relationships, family and friends and of boy becoming man, the contradictions in this system, which divided my life from others, resulted in a cross-questioning of responsibility and complicity. This uncertainty challenged the understanding of what became ambiguous life experiences. The photographs document moments of my life within this context, and date from 1962 to 1990, when most of the political prisoners were released from Robben Island.”

Brett Murray,
Thirty Minutes
Catalogue

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Published in The Star, Friday August 1996

While the photograph in Brett Murray’s invitation for White Boy Sings The Blues may have been taken over two decades ago, it is somehow more timely today than ever.In it the young (white) artist has covered his entire body with a black pigment as an attempt to transform his identity into that of an African warrior. The playful naivety that the image was originally constructed with is now eclipsed by the political climate of post-apartheid society.

White Americans caught in an extremely complex and contradictory state where their historical cultural beliefs are no longer considered legitimate, as a result of the Eurocentric prejudices that they were built upon. Young white artists are the most disenfranchised, caught as they are, between producing objects that continue to subscribe to Eurocentric prejudices, while living in a country that is becoming increasingly prejudiced against anything foreign, and in particular against anything European.

For many the solution has become to project an idea of the world through the eyes of black African subjects. This is in part a cathartic legitimization of the artists existence in Africa where the indigenous subject becomes the object of the artist’s fantasy.Murray is on the other hand one of only a handful of artists who speak through ethnic subjects, rather than on their behalf.

More than anything else White Boy Sings The Blues communicates the latent desire so many white artists to be black themselves, a desire born out of white guilt. Not only does Murray “Africanise“ his own features but also that of popular icons like Richie Rich and Colonel Sanders. These particular pieces echo Minette Vari’s postcards and newspaper clippings where she has superimposed her own features onto that of black subjects.

White Boy Sings The Blues is an extremely seductive exhibition, perfectly tailored for the local market. While the subject of each work is drawn from the painful moments in the legacy of Apartheid, the actual articulation is in the form of beautifully crafted Perspex and plastic veneers. The confrontational nature of Murray’s earlier work now gives way to a passive almost kitsch play between the subject and the object.Both politics and history are reduced to shadows or caricatures that function more as generic signs than referring to the specific histories they quote.

Issues of pressing political importance are alluded to without at the same time elaborating on the underlying, ideological and philosophical debates they are informed by. This makes the work popular through a non-confrontational accessibility.Murray is at his weakest when he slips into moralizing didacticism. Most of the works on display fall pray to tacky and literal puns as titles. In Ownership for instance the Joshua Doore logo supports bottles of copper coins. Similarly the title Land, which frequently accompanies a bottle of earth, becomes an unnecessary and obvious tautology repeating exactly the same information already extant in the work itself.

In a city that all too often loses itself to fashionable bandwagons White Boy Sings the Blues is refreshing in it’s simplicity, engaging in its beauty. Without solving the entire country’s problems, it attempts to find an individual expression for the schizophrenic existence of young white liberals who are now singing the post-apartheid blues.

Scurvy, an exhibition at Cape Town’s Castle, penetrates the heart of that archetypal symbol of colonial authority. Interesting things are happening in the Cape Town Castle. Currently it is the site of an outbreak of Scurvy. Its pathology is concerned not so much with tenderness of the gums, but a subcutaneous eruption of another kind. Scurvy is the name of an exhibition by the self-styled Secret Seven in collaboration with the William Fehr Collection at the Castle, whose curators deserve credit for allowing this stretching of the military mind-set. The Secret Seven? What does this conjure up,a visual equivalent of the Dead Poets’ Society? High jinks and iconoclasm behind the castle walls? Well, that’s partly so, but there’s more to it than that. The seven (Wayne Barker, Kevin Brand, Barend de Wet, Andrew Putter, Kate Gottgens, Lisa Brice, Brett Murray) were all Michaelis students in the 1980s , the so-called protest decade, when lines of difference between “them” and “us” (state and opposition) were clearly defined. And when an art school was the one place that provided a supportive environment to allow you to line the enemy up in your sights and let rip. It is one thing to do that within the protectiveness of an art school womb. It is something else to get out into the world and continue rocking the boat. Which is more or less what all of them went on to do. Though they share no common style, a gutsy irreverence linked them then, and continues to do so now.

As a group show, Scurvy contains more spunk, wit and visual energy than any comparable show I can think of in a long time. On its own terms it makes vast tracts of the Johannesburg Biennale look tame. In effect it takes off where the Biennale Laager ended. That circle of containers, conjured together by Barker, was, of course, on the fringe of Newtown. This show penetrates the heart of Cape Town’s Old Town, its archetypal symbol of colonial authority, the Castle itself. 
Locating the show in the Castle carries with it a double-edged irony. The one edge is more obvious than the other. Here is the bastion of power penetrated by an artful Trojan horse out of which seven iconoclasts have spilled to question and lampoon the whole colonising process, its hierarchies, its stereotypes its icons, its sacred cows. Here is the guardian of that very vegetable garden that was meant to provide the means of combating scurvy (the debilitating disease which, among other things, impeded maritime empire building), breached from within. 
The other edge cuts more subtly, perhaps even more sharply. It brings home the paradox of site-specific art installations of this kind. The signals coming from the works question the value system symbolised by the Castle as institutional guardian. Yet were these works to be seen anywhere else, in a commercial gallery, say they would lose much of their point, and a lot of their power. 
 The Castle has provided some superb spaces which the artists have been quick to exploit. Thus the paradox.

The material culture which the Castle represents, in all its spare, military elegance, gives resonance to the very work which seeks to undermine the value system that caused the Castle to be built in the first place. This is not to say that the Castle space neutralizes the barbs in the work; rather does it set up a kind of creative tension. Thus seeing Barker’s huge floor installation in one of the earliest sections of the complex (B Block, originally a church and restored in the 1840s as the British Officers’ Mess)gives the experience a certain frisson that it would not have had in a neutral setting. Barker calls his piece World; it is nothing less than a giant world map with the continents defined by bottles, the Cape by a neon VOC sign, and, this is the point, the oceans by surplus army uniforms. In its context the uniform metaphor. 

You reach the map by way of an antechamber containing Barend de Wet’s resin-cast of himself in the nude. Sculpture of the Artist as a Sculpture. It is the same one that we saw at the Biennale in its shipping container. Here it stands, heralding the scurvy theme, set in a sea of oranges. It has a different kind of impact here, an installational Jonah Lomu stopper, where the oranges perform the role of spiked naartjies.
Immediately below this, in the basement, is the most affecting installation of the show, Kevin Brand’s Boys. This consists of 17 identical papier mache figures,life-size, but volumetrically stylised, laid on wooden racks or propped up against the walls. They look like victims of a bomb blast, excavated from the ruins of some undetermined disaster. Their number may refer to the 17 Heeren who ran the Company, but their provenance seems linked to another kind of running — an earlier piece by Brand called Nineteen Boys Running; the effect of Brand’s installation is stunning in its economy of means and immediacy of impact.

On an upper level Lisa Brice and Kate Gottgens take on the notion of castle as metaphor. Gottgens, who has, since her student days, knowingly walked the thin edge of kitsch as kitsch and kitsch as parody – presents, in her words, “visions of castles using the language of the dispossessed”. Brice takes her texts from the Yellow Pages where suburban paranoia is catered for by the burglar-bar industry, “Make your home your castle …”, “Your home is your castle … protect it”. Her objects probe domestic angst as one would an aching tooth, embroidered cushions with flying squad telephone numbers, burglar bars that spell, depending on whether you are inside or out, “Relax” or Voetsak”.
Andrew Putter, in a darkened room, focuses on the homoerotic gaze and the “secret (sometimes dangerous) ways we’ve found to take our sexual pleasure in a homophobic society”. His presentation centres around hidden inserts of male pin-ups in hollowed books. We’re in the Castle, remember.

When I visited the show, there were indications that official homophobia was beginning to surface. But tolerance seems to have prevailed. The artist, disarmingly, claims to find ambient army uniforms sexy. Finally, Brett Murray, an accomplished ironist, employs cross-cultural references (pink panthers in Perspex with Zulu shields) towards an understanding of shifts in power and celebrations of change. Shifts in power. This is where the problematics of the Secret Seven’s Scurvy really come into focus. Here we have a group of gifted artists who were schooled in the 1980s when the enemy was clearly identifiable. It hardly needs to be spelled out that the situation in the mid-1990s, when even the president,especially the president, wears a Springbok rugby cap, has somewhat changed. Symbols acquire different meanings. What remain of the sacred cows of apartheid South Africa have become instead the Aunt Sallies, or Oom Sarels, nicely lined up in the post-colonial shooting gallery. Sitting ducks, to mix the metaphor. In these terms, then, the Scurvy show may be seen as a kind of celebratory shoot. Fine and good. This is unique moment when we can join in the deflation of the cows, the celebration of the toppling of the icons of past authority. But that does not mean there are not other targets that will demand the attention of socially critical artists in the politically correct new South Africa, or that the targets are going to remain, as they are now, conveniently static. I have the feeling the Secret Seven know this, and will keep their critical vision sharp, their weapons primed, and their powder dry.