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]

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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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