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.