The danger arrives when politicians start to use moral culture to dress up their immoral ideals.
— Antjie Krog, 2009

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Some art soothes the soul. It makes you feel warm and tingly; you’d be at ease bringing your ouma or gogo to view it. But other types of creative work can roil one’s sensibilities, intrude in your face and burrow beneath the skin, irritate like a pesky speck of food lodged behind a rear molar.

These contrasting forms of expression have been at the core of the practice of the Russian-born conceptualists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. Their Double Self Portrait mirrored sycophantic Soviet homages to Stalin and Lenin in a mock socialist-realist style. It so provoked government officials that their work was literally bulldozed in 1974, alongside that of fellow dissident artists. Later as émigrés to the West, the pair were swept up with the headiness of expanded personal freedom and the opportunities unleashed by an emergent postmodernism. The targets of Komar and Melamid’s send-ups changed, even if their tongue-in-cheek attitude did not. As part of a series called People’s Choice (1994–7), they hired international pollsters to gauge the general public’s preferences in art. And here’s what consensus generated in the specific example of America’s Most Wanted, as dutifully rendered to spec by Komar and Melamid: a realist landscape, executed on a large scale, boasting a slight human presence and a bit of wildlife – Bambi, that is, but certainly not Carcharodon carcharias, the great white. Totalitarianism severely corseted their art. But democratic opinion did, too.

This is not that startling: artists have long bristled at attempts to control them. Consider Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (c.1788) by the court painter Francisco José de Goya, for instance. At first glance it is the tender portrait of a young boy, the embodiment of innocence. But it contains an ominous quality as well: the child holds a string that tethers the leg of a magpie, while three wide-eyed cats lurk close by. The boy may appear to be guileless yet he is, in fact, complicit. Moreover, the bird holds a card in its beak that bears Goya's name, dramatising the risks and restrictions of his professional life.

South African artists, both pre- and post-democracy, have cosied up to the powers-that-be or have pricked them, have flirted with egalitarianism or spurned the sentiments of ‘the people,’ to varying degrees. Each of these imaginative stances embodies inherent dangers.

Brett Murray staked out his artistic turf early in his career and has doggedly cultivated it ever since. He is impish but earnest; considered a trickster by some, a traitor by others. Governments may have changed, and controversies have flared up around him, but he has not allowed sacred cows of any breed to graze tranquilly within his creative domain. Murray felt as ethically compelled to condemn injustice and official excesses before1994 as he has done to unmask official corruption, malfeasance, personal extravagance and the ineffable persistence of inequality in the present day. His moral compass does not drift from true north.

Throughout his career Murray has charged intrepidly into heavily landmined symbolic territory that many artists would be scared to set foot on. He skewers racial complicity and culpability, the accelerating pace of commodification, and conventional notions of decency and propriety, in both the art community and the world at large. Most notably, he has been exploring the oscillating volume of social and cultural capital accruing to one’s racial status in South Africa, long before neo-tribalism became a modern-day cultural bludgeon and defence, or ‘whiteness studies’ became an academic fashion. One critic approvingly noted his ‘schoolboy flippancy’ and floridly remarked, ‘Murray thumbs his nose at the tokenism that bedevils South Africa and his unregenerately [sic] impertinent creations function like an impeccably administered enema flushing all this crapulous posturing and cant out of our bowels.’^[1]

In his exhibition ‘White Boy Sings the Blues’ (1996), for example, he ‘Africanised’ himself, alongside iconic figures such as Richie Rich and Colonel Sanders. I Love Africa (2000) included caricatured metal cutouts of tribesmen bearing shields with the likeness of Bart Simpson; Bart being boiled alive in a trio of metal pots that read ‘Guilt,’ ‘Guilty’ and ‘Guiltiest’; and two metal cartoons, one called Crisis of Identity and the other Shack as Metaphor, featuring a classically stereotyped native confronting a pith-helmeted white chap. In one image the native declares, ‘If another white artist brings me a portfolio of guilt, crisis of identity and memory, I’m going to throw up.’ In the other he pledges, ‘If your work romanticises poverty or uses the shack as metaphor, you’ll be on my next show in London.’ Murray’s impatience with political correctness, and disgust with the constraints imposed by artistic gatekeepers, have scarcely been disguised.

Furthermore, his 2003 exhibition ‘White Like Me’ spun off the Black Like Me product line to confront the social construction of whiteness. It also featured a work where three space aliens declared, ‘We are from the Congo – we want your women and your jobs.’ Employing a type of squirm-in-your-seat jesting, this work found amplified resonance with the xenophobic violence that murderously erupted in South Africa in 2008 and continues to simmer and boil over.

While these works were barbed and sly, in a basic respect they were aimed at a knowing crowd of art-world insiders, people who are inclined to be similarly self-reflective and self-critical rather than culturally benighted. But when Murray’s work has been thrust before a broader audience, controversy has ensued. A notably disputed piece was Africa, a 3-metre-high bronze sculpture that was installed on the hectic St George’s pedestrian mall in central Cape Town in 2000.

Africa features an enigmatic but distinctively African figure, with more than half a dozen brilliantly yellow Bart Simpson faces bursting out of its head and torso. It is the postmodern equivalent of fetishes that traditional people drove nails into, in order to release evil spirits and thereby cleanse and renew their community. It is audacious and irreverent, singular and sensational, embodying a collision of cultures, economies, value systems and iconographies. Whether this represents a positive instance of syncretism or a regrettable case of parasitic imposition of one culture onto another is left to the viewer to decide.

Africa has been well received by critics. One noted its ‘insouciant wit and uncanny grasp of urban geography’, and observed, ‘It may not be a comforting vision, but it is a lot closer to the real throb of Cape Town’s streets than some smug mantra of ethnic and cultural harmony.’^[2] But Africa has met a mixed reception by the public and by public officials. In fact, the project was nearly unrealised.

Murray beat over fifty other entrants in an open competition. But his proposal ran aground after members of the city council balked, objecting that it was culturally offensive and irreligious. The sort of cheekiness that is acceptable in a gallery made local officials queasy when they thought about it being permanently displayed in a heavily trafficked and highly visible public location.

The council was willing to move forward only after it solicited expert testimony and received positive academic evaluations. After that, all excuses were exhausted. The deadlock had stalled the venture for well over a year, subjecting it to a scornful (and fearful) critique. A reporter for the Sowetan shrewdly isolated the critical potential as well as the challenge inherent in Murray’s slant on the post-apartheid world: ‘At a time when most people are scared to articulate themselves despite freedom of expression being enshrined in our Constitution,’ he wrote, ‘Murray’s work grapples with issues that are [just] below the surface.’^[3] It was an amazingly prescient comment.

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Just over a decade later, Murray produced a painting that brilliantly demonstrated the coalescence of the politics of race and representation, the ways in which the constitutional rights of freedom of expression and protection of individual dignity can grate against one another, and the politics of diversion. The furore it aroused in 2012 propelled The Spear into becoming the most vilified work of art ever produced in South Africa. But as extraordinary as this occasion was, the manner in which the polemics unfolded recapitulated many of the key features of art controversies from the country’s past; it also paralleled kerfuffles originating from Chicago to Copenhagen, Tunis to Tehran. It was a watershed moment.

Murray’s exhibition ‘Hail to the Chief II’ opened in Johannesburg on 10 May 2012. The Goodman Gallery’s press release stated, ‘This body of satirical work continues his acerbic attacks on abuses of power, corruption and political dumbness … a vitriolic and succinct censure of bad governance … [and] his attempts to humorously expose the paucity of morals and greed within the ruling elite.’ The works also included sculptures, etchings and silkscreens, and were a mash-up of the ANC logo and insignia, iconic struggle posters and Soviet propaganda. Liberation heroes were morphed into tenderpreneurs, idealistic freedom and resistance slogans converted into cynical materialistic mottoes. The Struggle, for example, altered the final words that MK cadre Solomon Mahlangu uttered before he was hanged by the apartheid regime, changing a familiar placard from that time which originally read ‘Tell my people that I love them and that they must continue the struggle’ to ‘Tell my people that I love them and that they must continue the struggle for Chivas Regal, Mercs and kick-backs’. The works were both uncommonly insolent and uncomfortably insightful.

The exhibition was reviewed by City Press on Sunday, 13 May. The journalist singled out The Spear, based on a 1967 poster of Lenin by the Soviet artist Victor Ivanov, with this prophetic musing: ‘Of all the work on show, it’s this depiction of the president that will set the tongues wagging and most likely generate some howls of disapproval.’^[4] Murray’s version presented embattled President Jacob Zuma in a heroic pose, genitals fully exposed. A reproduction of the painting accompanied the article.

A cascade of indignant reactions ensued over the following two weeks. The ANC filed an emergency court injunction to have The Spear removed from display. A leader of the Shembe Church called for Murray to be stoned to death; additional threats were directed against the gallery and its staff, as well as City Press. The SACP general secretary and Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, called for a boycott of City Press because it had posted the painting on its website. Large protest marches took place: in Durban, led by one of Zuma’s wives, and in Johannesburg. The artwork was defaced with paint in two separate incidents at the gallery in one afternoon, and subsequently was taken down.^[5] And in an unprecedented expansion of its powers, the Film and Publications Board rated an artwork, restricting viewers to those 16 and older, even though the image was by then widely available on the internet (the board’s action was later overturned).

Murray was branded ‘provocative’, ‘subversive’, ‘sardonic’, ‘bitter’ and an ‘angry young artist’. And those were relatively mild appellations. He was accused of ‘sexual deviancy’,^[6] ‘liberalistic bullying’,^[7] of bearing a ‘plain low class scum mentality’,^[8] and denounced as ‘the money-making pot calling the money-making kettle black’.^[9] ‘Klip gooier’ [stone thrower]!^[10] ‘Unyana ka Strijdom’ [child of J.G. Strijdom, the racist prime minister]!^[11] And, echoing a schoolyard chant, memorably labelled ‘Brat the Moron’.^[12]

The Spear transfixed the country, dominated the news and public discourse, and triggered a painful dialogue around the enduring legacy of colonial and apartheid injustices in a democratic South Africa, the politics of reconciliation, the status of traditional culture and beliefs within the contemporary world, and censorship. The country was brought to a fever pitch. A full-scale race war seemed a distinct possibility.

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‍The Spear controversy is a classic case of the politics of diversion. Or, as Goodman Gallery director Liza Essers characterised it, this was an instance of ‘manufactured rage’,^[13] while Murray branded it ‘manufactured flag-waving and politicking’.^[14] To wit: in the run-up to the ANC’s national conference scheduled for later in the year in Mangaung, where beleaguered President Jacob Zuma hoped to be renominated to lead his party and secure a probable second term in office, attacking this irreverent depiction provided a rich opportunity for his supporters to deflect attention from the incumbent’s shortcomings. This was a proxy battle, fought over a work of art, but about much deeper matters.

Social context is of utmost importance in such instances, and Zuma’s problems were manifold at this juncture. He was being buffeted by administrative and personal scandals, subject to fault-finding by an increasingly critical, probing press, and his credibility was at stake because of his botched efforts to meet the public’s expectations of the government generating positive changes in their lives. The president was under considerable pressure to demonstrate effective leadership and he was ever more vulnerable; his foibles and failures had left his arse exposed, along with his putative penis. Two newspaper headlines – one appearing before the controversy, and one as it was quieting down – capture the sense of imminent crisis: ‘Zuma forced to put out too many fires’ and ‘President Zuma is under siege’.^[15]

As a backdrop, the state of the economy was a key concern due to persistent unemployment and the escalating cost of basic necessities. Education was earning a failing mark: graduation rates remain dismally low nationwide and a crisis persisted in Limpopo Province where learners enrolled in several grade levels were without textbooks well into the semester, signalling a significant breakdown in ministerial operations.

This was simply one indication of deficient service delivery, a problem which has fuelled raucous protests throughout the country. A corollary was the rise in vigilante activity within communities gatvol with spiralling crime rates but lacking faith in the police. Moreover, scandals removed the nation’s incumbent top cop from office twice in succession (Jackie Selebi and Bheki Cele), and charges of corruption, cronyism and nepotism became commonplace.

Zuma married for the sixth time in April 2012 in a lavish ceremony. Murray quips, ‘Some people have an Achilles’ heel; he seems to have an Achilles’ dick.’ Widespread snickering over the president’s not-so-private private life turned into a tangible backlash: there were calls for cutting back the government’s annual support of (compound) spousal benefits.

Moreover, a court ruling earlier in March that year determined that the National Prosecuting Authority’s decision to drop corruption charges against Zuma stemming from 2009 was ‘reviewable’. And a persistent thorn in the president’s side has been Julius Malema, the rowdy former head of the ANC Youth League who was suspended from the ANC for five years owing to ‘acts of indiscipline’. Not surprisingly, Malema joined the critics of the party’s campaign against The Spear.

Murray’s painting provided a convenient target upon which the president and his supporters could deflect criticism, a scapegoat for all this politician’s deficiencies, an occasion for political opportunism par excellence. That said, controversy was by no means a sure thing in this instance; it was the confluence of art and atmosphere that clinched the deal.^[16] An editorial noted, ‘Zuma, 70, is not about to waste the Viagra-boost The Spear has administered to his re-election drive.’^[17] This remark was simply one example of the playful, sexually based humour that pervaded the media’s coverage of this sometimes farcical episode.

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Both Essers and Murray were blindsided by the uproar. Essers was on maternity leave and relaxing with a new baby when she received an urgent call from her staff: the ANC was seeking court intervention to have the painting removed, and news crews were besieging the gallery. Although an ANC stalwart had sent a complaint to Essers regarding an earlier version of the exhibition that appeared at the Goodman Gallery’s Cape Town branch in 2011 – before The Spear was even created – Murray had set aside any concerns that the painting might cause problems, thinking, ‘It’s an art work; it’s in the gallery. I had no idea it was going to implode.’

In fact, The Spear that is now familiar to a broad swathe of the South African public very nearly did not exist. Murray explained, ‘I painted it without a dick, I thought it was interesting enough, in the context of the other work looking at Soviet memorabilia and the pseudo-Soviet kind of rabble-rousing that happens here in the name of the people, but actually it’s for the few, the chosen few. So it was in the context of that I thought it was interesting sans dick. And then I kind of, as is my nature, I just wanted to make something a little more provocative.’ Upon reflection, Murray notes, ‘I just decided to, rather than didn’t. It’s in the nature of making work, that’s what happens, you make these decisions and then you stick with it [sic].’

To be sure, South African artists in the past have been scorned, and even threatened, over what they’ve created. Steve Hilton-Barber was menaced over his photographs of Northern Sotho initiates in 1990, as was Beezy Bailey for his temporary transformation of a sculpture of General Louis Botha into a Xhosa initiate in Cape Town in 1999. Similarly, Kendell Geers and the Goodman Gallery were intimidated because of his Fort Klapperkop intervention in an Afrikaner-led celebration outside Pretoria in 1998, as was painter Yiull Damaso, whose imagining of a Madiba autopsy in 2010 brought forth accusations of witchcraft and calls for the artist’s death.

Even so, no South African artist has been subject to such a sustained and vicious campaign of threats as Murray. One letter-to-the editor writer proclaimed, ‘[Murray] must be prosecuted and tortured in a ferocious manner.’^[18] Twitter, Facebook and radio shows were additional sites where there was braying for blood, including suggestions of necklacing.

At one point Murray closed his workshop, and he and his family fled Cape Town. Essers felt compelled to hire a personal bodyguard: she received calls declaring, ‘A white person has to die for what’s happened’, and someone wrote ‘traitor’ all over a car owned by one of her black staff members. Murray reflects that these comments were ‘screaming and vitriolic and violent and threatening’. He sadly reports that his assistant of 16 years, a respected elder within his home community, was intimidated where he lived as well as within the presumed relative anonymity of the train: ‘So as is typical of South Africa, who would feel the most heat actually in the context is my assistant because he lives out in an area where lots of people are unemployed, where violence is palpable and real, and so the threats against him were going to be profoundly more focused than against me or a gallery owner or [City Press editor] Ferial Haffajee.^[19] My first real concern prior to my own was actually his, when this whole thing blew up, is what is going to happen to Shadrack and his family?’

But nothing rivals the following declaration by a woman – one of a few thousand marchers in an ANC-orchestrated demonstration at the Goodman Gallery on 29 May – for its bone-chillingly precise, passionate and uncompromising assessment of the situation: ‘This [Zuma] is an old man …  he [Murray] is a young boy [sic] … he doesn’t have manners. I’ll kill him.’^[20]  Some people at that protest carried signs reading ‘Whites Hate Blacks’, and another woman asserted, ‘We’re supporting Zuma because he’s like our father, and the country’s father. The portrait was inappropriate and [Murray] must get on a ship and go back to Europe, or wherever he’s from’ (for the record, that would be Pretoria).^[21]

Racism, xenophobia and blind fury were churned into a poisonous and explosive brew. Liza Essers was stunned by the ANC’s support of such a tactic: ‘They haven’t marched since 1994 – did you know that?’ The possibility of constructive dialogue was also truncated by numerous invocations of the legacy of Sara Baartman, simplistically comparing Zuma’s naughty depiction by an artist to the tragic circumstances of this grossly maltreated nineteenth-century woman.

Moreover, the notion that ‘dignity’ was compromised by an artwork surfaced as far back as 1996 in the controversy over Kaolin Thompson’s Useful Objects (where the student’s award-winning ceramic work was condemned as a derogatory allusion to a black woman’s vagina). This general theme emerged as well in Jacob Zuma’s multiple lawsuits against political cartoonist Zapiro’s biting depictions of him, particularly the now-familiar imagined showerhead sprouting from Zuma’s scalp (a reference to an offhand comment the politician uttered regarding HIV prevention during his 2006 trial for an alleged rape).

Many commentators embraced an essentialism which could only interpret The Spear as a racist portrayal, fullstop. ‘To be South African … is to have a soul that instinctively resonates with the sound of Shosholoza,’ one man declared.^[22] Comedian Loyiso Gola stated, ‘As modern as we are and we go and eat sushi and what not, this is still Africa. Black people will always interpret something like that in a different way.’^[23] Public Works Minister Thulas Nxesi, meanwhile, deplored what he perceived as a profound inequity in the way in which different types of expression are treated: ‘Our culture, our freedom songs, are declared as hate speech. But their insults are declared as freedom of speech.’^[24]    

In the ANC’s bid to have The Spear removed from the gallery, and throughout much of the public dialogue that followed, Murray felt ‘emasculated’, ‘voiceless’, ‘profoundly humiliated’ by the painting being called racist, and, by extension, his being labelled as such. Prominent poet and cultural activist Wally Serote, for instance, ‘said the painting was ‘no different to labelling people kaffirs’.^[25]

For Murray, who had been a cultural activist in the 1980s, using his artistic skills on behalf of labour unions, the End Conscription Campaign and other progressive causes, this was a stinging allegation. He reflected on the irony of being propelled from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other: ‘[In the past] the white “brethren”, including my father, would call me kaffirboetie because of my support for change. So I was labelled a kaffirboetie then and now I’m labelled as someone who would come out in public and call people “kaffirs”.’ Both Murray and Essers rejected the claim that The Spear was racist, but he understands that some people could interpret it in this way, and Essers admits that she’s ‘conscious … that for some people there has been a real hurt and humiliation that has been brought to the surface’.

While the ANC’s playing of the race card and flogging the alleged assault on Zuma’s dignity may have seemed like shrewd gambits at the outset, the party’s court case quickly collapsed. Both sides agreed to a settlement after the ANC presented its arguments, a drama that was televised live to the nation. The judge determined that The Spear was not racist; the gallery’s rebuttal to the ANC’s position was postponed, but ultimately never aired in court; and City Press agreed to remove the painting from its website, to the dismay of those who felt that this set a bad precedent for media professionals in the future. Ferial Haffajee countered that her actions as a journalist had overtaken the real story.

In truth, the ranks of proponents and detractors of the artwork cut across racial categories: ‘Zulu culture’ is no more monolithic than ‘black culture’ or ‘white culture’ is. As one man reflected, ‘To Murray and most other South Africans, Zuma is not Baba, to whom one submits as a child does towards a parent … Ethnocentric culture is not a defence for a president against public critique by a citizen.’^[26] And a Facebook post by another black African the same day condemned Zuma as ‘a moron of an uneducated tribalist who hides behind culture as though blacks are that stupid’.^[27]  

However, culture wars such as these are not about constructive dialogue; they are about showboating and political one-upmanship. ANC senior administrator Gwede Mantashe’s motives could not have been more transparent than when he proclaimed, ‘What the ANC cannot win in the courts it will win in the streets.’^[28] Threats of mob action such as this, issued by a major public official, are potentially much graver in their impact than anything an artist might produce.

The Spear emerged at a moment when the cultural and political climate was highly combustible. A match – either intentionally or inadvertently dropped under such conditions – held tremendous explosive potential.

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Culture wars generate various consequences. On the positive side, they may propel discussions forward that might not otherwise occur. But they become extremely taxing to those who are directly under attack and can also exert a chilling effect on subsequent cultural production. The ramifications of such dust-ups reverberate widely and deeply, often-times in quite a stealthy manner. One of the most serious complications, of course, is the emergence of self-censorship, whereby artists anticipate and fear potential consequences, second-guess themselves, and then err on the side of caution in what they produce. An editorial published just as The Spear controversy peaked captured this possibility: ‘A tone has been set. Artists beware.’^[29]

Interviewed less than two months after the firestorm broke over his painting, Brett Murray was alternately chastened, funny, frustrated, fearful and wounded. Reflecting on what had occurred, he stated, ‘100% I wouldn’t do it again, and 100% I would. Because I think I have a right to do what I do, say what I say, think what I think, and I think every poet, playwright, thinking person, non-thinking person has a right to air their views as they see fit.’ Murray concluded, ‘If I say that I wouldn’t do it, then the bullies have won, basically they have silenced dissent, they have silenced criticism.’

Murray has been left with an acute dilemma. Should he decide to branch into new artistic territory in the future, he runs the risk of being accused of capitulating and ‘copping out’. But if he continues to work in the same vein he courts further denunciation. In a humorous moment Murray teased that he ‘should have painted daffodils and portraits of my friends’ pets’. Ironically, influenced by the fact that he has two young children, Murray had been imagining his next body of work to be innocent and fun-filled, reflecting his kids’ perspective on the world. As he states, ‘Political expression’s been the monkey on my back since the 1980s, it’s been something I’ve fed and it’s been fed by the twists and turns of this place.’

But such a potential creative U-turn has been brought to a standstill: ‘And now unfortunately my cards have been dealt, I’ve been given a hiding and my fear’s sort of slowed and anger is slowly returning, and I can’t not respond. Well, I can, but I just, I can’t do that playful stuff anymore. And I’m quite angry about that in and of itself because it feels like it’s an unnatural progression of where I really wanted to take my work. It’s more than likely I’ll carry on doing what I do, carry on taking potshots.’

And so how has he, in fact, carried on artistically? As the chaotic winter moved into spring in 2012, it became clear that Murray would not assume a tail-between-the-legs, acquiescent stance. He premiered Dissent at the Jo’burg Art Fair. A deceptively simple work, it featured large three-dimensional letters spelling out ‘Silence’. A couple of months later, Murray used a surfboard to replicate one of his re-workings of a political struggle slogan into a private demand for branded merchandise, for the annual Wavescape festival. And that was followed by the painting Rainbow over Nkandla, part of the series Made in China, featuring a gigantic multi-coloured arc encircling Zuma’s controversial sprawling rural homestead (‘Zumaville’), which has been substantially bankrolled at the public’s expense. Murray could have been referencing the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; or what appears to be the steady dissolving of the notion of a rainbow nation; or even the type of ‘pretty picture’ that he mused about making after The Spear controversy and that politicians try to create when they resourcefully spin the facts. But one thing is certain: Murray shows little inclination of reversing his career-long trajectory. Just have a look at Political Persuasion, a pair of silver-plated knuckle dusters, bearing the motto ‘Thug Life’ and signalling the artist’s staunch determination to continue to go mano-a-mano with those who have become bloated with the sense of power and intoxicated by the spoils of self-aggrandisement.

The explosion over The Spear dissipated as quickly as it was detonated. But the episode has secured an important place in South Africa’s democratic history. Certain people, including Murray, are disappointed that the court case did not continue: it could have resulted in a clearer sense of vindication for him, as well as potentially provide clarification of the respective limits of the constitutional rights to individual dignity and freedom of expression. Such precedents await future clashes of interests, thereby stranding creative people in a murky no man’s land where they must tread carefully.

Some members of the public complained that with the exhibition of The Spear, ‘Democracy has gone too far this time.’^[30] Until there is a legal interpretation of the precise limits of artistic expression, such purely emotion-based judgements will very likely continue to be aired.

The Spear meteorically attained iconic status in South Africa; it joins the ranks of strongly political works as diverse as those executed by Goya or Komar and Melamid. It has also generated multitudes of spoofs. One painting, The Shield, created by an unnamed group of offended black artists, recalls the Ernest Cole photograph of African mineworkers submitting to a full body inspection. But in this instance a row of five naked whites is being examined by a black doctor, ‘to check whether or not these people were suitable to stay in the new South Africa’.^[31] Liza Essers, General Koos de la Rey, Helen Zille, Eugene Terre’Blanche and Zapiro made up this miscellany of racial miscreants, with questionable status in today’s world.

As Murray projects the future, he envisions going forward ‘not less cautiously but more informed, possibly, and hopefully it won’t be fearful, and hopefully it won’t be with some idea that you have someone looking over your shoulder. If the lesson is that I must be cautious, that I must be fearful,’ he concludes, ‘then I think it’s a problem.’ As to the future of creative expression in South Africa, Murray hopes that ‘I’ve maybe blown down the walls a bit’.

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The foibles of politicians nourish a perpetual spring for artists to dip into, sip from and then spit out, allowing officials’ misdeeds to boomerang back into their smug, sanctified faces. The French artist and publisher Charles Philipon hit the bull’s eye when he caricatured King Louis-Philippe; his series of drawings Les Poires (1831) metamorphosed the sovereign's face from a solemn, jowly chap into an absurd, scowling pear (the appellation was also slang for ‘simpleton’). The artist’s relentless reworking of this unflattering metaphor contributed to a steady erosion of the sovereign’s authority. Closer to home, Evita Bezuidenhout excels in turning the self-satisfied utterings of the country’s leaders into ridiculous, humorous self-incriminations, and Zapiro’s persistent send-ups of President Jacob Zuma crowned with a shower spigot are indelibly incised into the collective consciousness of South Africans. Without doubt, Brett Murray has secured a place amongst this time-honoured assemblage of creative souls with his portrayal of Zuma ‘hanging loose’.

At the end of the day, did The Spear hit its mark and bring the president to book for his failures and misdeeds? Or did it unintentionally confirm Zuma’s status as a soft target for disgruntled constituents and a victim of political intrigue, thereby boosting his popularity? Like so much contemporary art, The Spear spawns multiple interpretations.

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Notes

[1]  Llyod Pollak, ‘Cocking a snook at sacred cows’, Cape Times, 31 May 2000, 6.

[2]  Aska Wierzycka, ‘Africa says eat my sculpture‘, Mail & Guardian, 14 August 1998.

[3]  Eddie Mokoena, ‘Murray’s no walk in the park’, Sowetan, 5 July 2002.

[4]   Charl Blignaut, ‘White noise’, City Press, 13 May 2012, 12–13.

[5]  Moreover, a clergyman spraypainted Steven Cohen’s Pope Art (1995) and Christians stole a bible from a Mark Coetzee work that also included a penis (1997). In addition, a man spray painted a Bittercomix image of fellatio exhibited in Durban (1995), and vandals stole the bulk of photographer Zanele Muholi’s professional electronic equipment, thereby making off with much of her archive of controversial photography featuring lesbians (2012).

[6] Songezo Zibi, ‘Time now to show our true colours’, Sunday Independent, 27 May 2012, 16.

[7] Hans Pienaar, ‘ANC itself un-African in the way it handles art furore’, Business Day, 28 May 2012, 9.

[8] R. Myburgh, ‘Zuma must sue artist’, Business Day, 24 May 2012.

[9] Pienaar, ‘ANC itself un-African’.

[10] Hazel Friedman labelled Murray this way in a 1996 article, and it was repeated during the 2012 controversy.

[11] Palesa Morudu, ‘Let’s be clear: Zuma is no Saartjie Baartman’, Business Day, 5 June 2012.

[12] Oswald Mtshali, ‘The Spear a mere prick in history’, The Star, 2 June 2012, 15.

[13] From an interview conducted by the author with Liza Essers in Johannesburg, 4 June  2012. All subsequent unattributed quotes derive from that interview.

[14] From an interview conducted by the author with Brett Murray in Woodstock, Cape Town, 6 July 2012. All subsequent unattributed quotes derive from that interview.

[15] Chandré Prince,‘Zuma forced to put out too many fires’, The Times, 29 February 2012, 2; Mpumelelo Mkhabela, 2012. ‘President Zuma is under siege’, Sowetan, 20 June 2012, 13.

[16] To further demonstrate that point, artist Ayanda Mabulu exhibited two paintings which also featured Jacob Zuma’s exposed genitals: Ngcono ihlwempu kunesibhanxo sesityebi (Better poor than a rich puppet), 2010, and Umshini Wam (Weapon of Mass Destruction), 2012 – one before, and one after, the controversy over The Spear. But neither work sparked a public controversy. What could explain this? Mabulu does not have as high a public profile as Murray does, he was not exhibiting in as well-known a venue, and in the first instance the larger political environment was not so tumultuous, and in the other the communal energy necessary to generate and sustain drama over artistic expression had dissipated. Moreover, Mabulu is black, which neutralises the possibility of racialising the debate. This is, therefore, a prime example of the social construction of acceptability: the same sort of expression can trigger outrage in one instance but be ignored in another. It’s not just about content, but context as well.

[17] ‘Pity Zuma won’t heed this advice’, The Citizen, 1 June 2012, 12.

[18] Mzukisi Lento, ‘Democracy is a fine art’, Mail & Guardian, 25 May 2012, 32.

[19] Haffajee has been embroiled in controversies before, such as when she published one of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad in 2006 while she was editor of the Mail & Guardian, and when she was condemned as a ‘black snake in the grass’ for City Press’s 2011 inquiry into the financial dealings of Julius Malema. In fact, one journalist argued that the attack on City Press was partly motivated by an ANC vendetta against the paper because of its penetrating investigative reporting: ‘It is ironic that The Spear exposes Zuma’s most painfully private parts at the same time that the press has succeeded in exposing his inner core’ (Mandy de Waal, ‘Battle goes far beyond controversial painting’, The Star, 31 May 2012, 19).

[20] Quoted in Janet Smith, ‘Making the most of a forgiving crowd’, The Star, 31 May 2012,19.

[21] Amukelani Chauke, Andile Ndlovu and Roshan Nebhrajani, 2012. ‘Blade: destroy Spear painting’, The Times, 30 May 2012, 5.

[22] John Lamola, ‘New’ Africanness is lala-land’, City Press, 10 June 2012, 10, emphasis added.

[23] Nickolaus Bauer, ‘Freedom vs dignity in art debate’, Mail & Guardian, 15 May 2012, 6.

[24] Quoted in Marianne Merten, ‘Cosatu says yes to call to boycott Spear purveyors’, Saturday Star, 26 May 2012, 3.

[25] Quoted in Bauer, ‘Freedom vs dignity’.

[26] Mondli Ndletyana, ‘We should be encouraging our artists to tell it like it is’, Sunday Times, 3 June 2012, 4.

[27] Reported in Lulamile Nxopo, ‘What you said on Facebook about …’, City Press, 3 June 2012, 30.

[28] Quoted in ‘When mob rule shouts down the rule of law’, Sunday Times, 4 June 2012, 4.

[29] ‘Pity Zuma won’t heed this advice’, The Citizen, 1 June 2012, 12.

[30] Quoted in Sameer Naik, ‘Kunene will pay thousands to burn Spear’, Saturday Star, 2 June 2012, 5.

[31] Shown in Nomzamo Ngcobo, ‘White private parts on display!’ Daily Sun, 25 May 2012, 2.