‘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