‍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.