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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