21Sunday Argus December 13, 2015 Arts

THE WONDER of it is that,after 23 years ofBitterkomix and associatedpublications, AntonKannemeyer has lost none

of his trenchancy or urgency. Hiswork remains as uncompromisinglyand salutarily obscene as ever – andevery bit as offensive.

In Kannemeyer’s world offensiveis good. It means he’s getting hispoint across.

And the point is: to precisely theextent that he makes his viewer feeluncomfortable and out of sorts,Kannemeyer achieves his purpose.Characteristically, when his stuffworks best, he contrives to make youfeel on edge, as though you areintruding on or witnessingsomething you have no businessseeing, something from which, indecency, you ought to be avertingyour eyes. At his best, he makes youfeel somehow complicit in an act ofpsychological violence from whichthere is no escape.

Pappa in Doubt is a follow-on tothe satiric Pappa in Afrika (2010), alook at the paradoxes of life in thepostcolony.

So we have a pair of drawingstitled (with dripping irony) “FairMaidens from Africa”. The imagescall to mind a fairly well-developedgenre of tourist kitsch in which themaidens are shown semi-naked in“traditional attire” – beads andhardly anything else.

They are presented in celebrationof innocence and childlikesimplicity, caught up in a timelessbubble, where tradition endlesslyrepeats itself and the passage oftime does not stamp itself indevelopment or change.

In this seemingly benign andindulgent gesture, however, therelurks a discourse of the mostterrifying historical toxicity. Byreducing native Africans to thestatus of children, the colonisers setthemselves up as the responsibleadults and to inscribe a version ofreality in which it was it was nomore and no less than a boundenduty to guide, to lead them into thedomain of history, that is to say to“civilise”, to save their heathensouls. All this was largely throughlearning the benefits of hard work,of course, but also through asurrendering of human agency andby (in the colonisers’ imagination)accepting the destiny of havingEuropeans controlling every facet oflife for their “improvement”.

Indeed, the narrative of Africans– incidentally those same Africanswho, in the European Middle Ages,boasted one of the great centres of mathematical learning atTimbuktu – as children, in need ofguidance, discipline and the wiseintervention of the colonisers,proved the key notion justifying andlegitimising the entire colonialproject and allowing Europeans toescape responsibility for therapacity they proceeded to visitupon the colonised.

As this colonial metatext playsout in the “fair maidens” genre,there is – ironically – another,altogether less rarified, subtext. Inthe colonial and post-colonialversion of things, Africans werenatural creatures, not fully humanin the sense as “Europeans” – andtherefore not subject to the samerules of modesty and concealmentthat became the lot of humans withEve’s disgrace in the garden ofEden. And thus it came about, evenin the most repressed times in SouthAfrica’s repressive and puritanicalhistory, there was in the postcardgenre of the fair maiden andethnographic photography ingeneral, an unacknowledgedsubcategory of soft porn available tothe youth and manhood of whiteSouth Africa.

Such considerations, of course,yet further confound the sickeningdiscomfort provoked by

Kannemeyer depicting “fairmaidens” – far from some timelesstradition – as caught up, in the mostbrutal way possible, in the unfoldingof African history. Their hands havebeen chopped off – as by rampagingdrug-crazed militias in west Africa,most notoriously in recent times inSierra Leone – as a tactic of waraimed at debilitating the enemy’ssupply lines and sowingdemoralisation.

The image – the violence that isdone through the electric fissure ofopposed versions of reality is bothsickening and arresting, and

Kannemeyer’s audience is left with asense that such realities demandsome kind of response from us asfellow humans that has not yet beenforthcoming.

Just when you think you’veintegrated the jaggedness of yourresponse to Kannemeyer’s maidens,you turn the page to an illustrationof: “Nsala, of the district of Wala,looking at the severed hand and footof his five year old daughter, Boali, avictim of the Anglo-Belgian IndiaRubber Company militia”.

A lot of what Kannemeyer does ismore conventionally

confrontational. In this vein –recalling the brouhaha surroundingartist Brett Murray’s The Spear –Kannemeyer shows a group ofworshipful, middle-aged, white menpaying homage to the vision of agiant erect phallus.

In Papa in Doubt, Kannemeyercontinues to push offensivestereotype to new levels ofoffensiveness, much of whichcannot be reproduced here.

Balanced against this, however,he has begun to explore portraitureand likeness in his strips andgraphics. Along with relatively

careful likenesses of Zuma andvarious cabinet ministers, there is aseries on African “despots” likeAngola’s Eduardo dos Santos and(the dead) Jonas Savimbi, as well asSudanese president Omar al-Bashir,and Thabo Mbeki (his Aidsdenialism, for Kannemeyer, gainshim membership of the despots’club) where humour and thecomedic convention are dispensedwith entirely – and the commentatorfocuses on “telling it like it is”.

His stock in trade, however,continues to be Tintin-from-Hell –nothing short of breathtakinglyreductive in its stereotyping ofAfricans: thick-lip, woolly-hair,entirely devoid of any humanisingdetail. Kannemeyer devotes twopages (24 panels) to a highlyidiosyncratic set of definitionalexcursions of words either derivedfrom or connected to the “K-word”.

In one panel he has God callingdown from the heavens, addressing amiserable assortment of victims ofthe often seemingly mindlessviolence of man upon man –amputees, cripples, corpses and thelike, and using extreme language tosuggest holy fellatio.

There is, it must be admitted, atemptation to respond to suchextreme provocations with akneejerk rejection – to dismissKannemeyer as a cheapsensationalist rather than theserious and philosophical artist Ithink he is.

This would be to commit the mostbasic of critical fallacies – to confusethe artist’s perspective on realitywith what he is uncovering andmaking plain through his work.

Kannemeyer’s alienation of hisviewer is calculated to offend againstgood taste.

There is an argument to madethat in Kannemeyer’s world, tasteand restraint are nothing more orless than cop-out – excuses to acceptthings the way they are and fail toacknowledge our own guilt or doanything to make things better.

There will, be no hiding from theuncomfortable truth, nor from theresponsibilities the truth lays uponus if Kannemeyer has anything todo with it.

It is this that makes him, despitethe relatively ephemeral medium inwhich he works, one of the mostchallenging and important artistsworking in South Africa today – notto mention one of the sharpest, mostinsightful and, yes, funniest.

NURTURING artists at themargins is the passion ofWoodstock curatorMegan Theunissen,

whose Space Between (SB)Gallery in Albert Road seeks toshowcase up-and-coming talentsand stimulate wider interestamong art buyers in work that’sengaging, challenging andaccessible.

The upper-floor gallery, which forms part of Side StreetStudios, was established a yearago, but has already achieved areputation as a space for newwork emerging or evolving fromthe more or less subversivesector of street art and graffiti.

Theunissen describes herambition as being to “give acentral platform to emergingartists and street-related andurban practices, and to under-score the value of urban art”.

Street art, the 27-year-oldgallerist explains, straddlesmany divisions, though mostartists start out with graffiti,later branching out into othermedia or forms ranging fromillustration to photography andsculpture.

They are, typically,practitioners who have not hadopportunities to exhibit, as theyoften don’t match theconventional fine-arts mould, yetwhose work “meets internationalstandards of production”.

This much is true, she says, ofthe gallery’s end-of-year summerexhibition, co-curated withintern Alexandra KreuzGoldberg, which runs at theAlbert Road gallery untilDecember 19.

Part of Theunissen’s missionis to introduce new buyers intoan art market that tends to bedefined by expensive work inhigh-end galleries.

Cape Town, she laments, is, incontrast to Joburg, a city whoseleisure interests dominatespending patterns.

“I know people who’ll spendR2 000 on going out and havingfun at the weekend, but arehesitant about spending thatkind of money on a work ofart,”she says.

“But we enjoy training thenew buyer. Most of the work weexhibit is accessible and we seeour exhibitions as a way to getyounger people excited aboutbuying art.”

Much of it is also art thatreflects young people’s interestsand their experiences ofcontemporary urban life.

Theunissen, who grew up inCape Town and graduated inpainting at Michaelis in 2009, isengaged in a master’s degreethrough Unisa, on the theme ofhuman transience.

“Running the gallery anddoing my master’s at the sametime has meant I don’t havemuch time for myself... but I amdetermined to stick my neck outfor artists I care about and thegallery gives them an oppor-tunity to develop their careers.”

Theunissen picked out someemerging artists to look out for:

Nardstar is a Cape Town artist

whospecialises ingraffiti art.Her uniquestyle involvesthe use ofradiant colourschemes andthe decon-struction ofletters, animals and faces into aharmonious balance of shapes,colours and patterns.

She is not restricted to givinglife to plain walls but alsoexperiments with mediumsincluding digital work inks,acrylics and printmaking. Sheenjoys using art to creativelyuplift and add beauty toneglected and overlooked places.

Russell

Abrahams , 22,is a freelanceillustrator andartist fromCape Town.Aftergraduatingwith a diplomain graphicdesign, hebecame a full-time illustrator. He makes workthat is relevant to the youth oftoday. Last year he was a DesignIndaba Emerging Creative. Thisyear, he was one of theWoolworths x Pharrell WilliamsT-shirt design winners, took partin five group exhibitions, andwas selected for EssieLetterpress’s 2016 ArtistAlmanac calendar.

Alexis

Aronson,born in 1985,is a self-taughtartist andillustrator inCape Town.Her subjectmatter is acollective of “beasts”, somewhathuman, somehow animal,sometimes spirit-being. Theseare the “strange ancestors” (asshe likes to call them), who shefeels she has met rather thancreated. Alexis’s primaryinspiration is drawn from thenature and her love for thenatural world.

James White

is a 27-year-oldemergingartist with abackgroundin graphicdesign andpainting. Heproduceswoodcut installations as anextension of his passion forgraphic design. In 2016 he willcontinue exhibiting andcollaborating with new artists.

Damn

Vandal

(ShaunOakley) is a28-year-oldgraffiti artistand illustratorwho grew upin Durban. Hehas a degreein VisualCommunications, and 12-yearbackground in graffiti.

He describes his style as afusion of vector illustration andgraffiti style and says much ofhis work represents theurban/street lifestyle “and theworld around me”.

IT WAS hard not to be movedwhen IFP MP Dr Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, ill with cancer andwearing a suit too big for his

shrunken frame, pleaded inParliament for the legalisation ofdagga for medical purposes.

He disclosed that he had beenusing dagga: “I was supposed to diemany months ago and I am herebecause I had the courage of takingillegal treatments... here in SouthAfrica in the form of cannabis,marijuana or dagga.

“Otherwise, I would be pumpedwith morphine and I would not beable to speak to you, Mr President.”

He said it was “a crime againsthumanity” to deprive medical

marijuana to people who needed it.But just six months after his plea

in Parliament in February last yearand in the terminal stages of lungcancer, Ambrosini was dead,apparently as a result of suicide.And the Medical Innovation Bill he tabled is still languishingwith the parliamentary portfolio

committee on health.Dagga, marijuana, ganja, bhang,

or cannabis sativa and indica, togive it its botanical names, wasused by South Africans well beforewhites settled here in 1652. Sativameans cultivated and dagga isbelieved to be one of the world’soldest cultivated crops. It has beenused medically, mystically and forrecreation.

Grahamstown-based artist andnovelist Hazel Crampton cites theVenidad, a Persian religious textdating back to the seventh centuryBC, as listing dagga as the mostimportant of 10 000 medicinalplants. It has been used as ananaesthetic, a painkiller, an

aphrodisiac, to treat hypertension,chest problems and glaucoma, anappetite stimulant and for thepromotion of “great mentalcheerfulness”.

In various countries in the 20thcentury, including South Africa, itsuse was banned, often because itwas lumped in with opiatesincluding heroin, morphine andopium. She provides someinteresting facts, such as a WorldHealth Organisation report ofNovember 1971 which said youngdagga users “were less likely toshow aggressive behaviour thanjuveniles who preferred alcohol”.

She says not all dagga is thesame and the weed smoked in

Europe and America is high inlevels of cannabidiol or CBD, whichblocks feelings of anxiety, whileSouth African dagga is low in CBDlevels and therefore can causemuch anxiety.

She says by last year the cost ofarresting and convicting a single“low-level dagga user” hadballooned to R240 000, money whichshe argues could be better spentfighting high-priority crimes.

Crampton is not impartial in the debate over dagga – sheclearly believes it should bedecriminalised, licensed andcontrolled – but she makes an interesting and often compelling case.

“The story of the demonisationof dagga is – to borrow a phrasefrom a slightly different context –‘one of shaky science, misjudg-ments and misunderstandings,media scares, and once-importantbut now long-dead politicalagendas’,” writes Crampton.

Her book is not intended to be a comprehensive take ondagga, but merely, she says, aconversation piece to provide somebackground and ignite debate onissues such as licensing,legalisation and taxation.

It is an issue that’s not goingaway – even the African ChristianDemocratic Party has supported itsdecriminalisation for medical use.

Book Corner

This Pappadon’t preach

IN YOURFACE: Detailsfrom images in Pappa inDoubt byAntonKannemeyer –African‘despots’ club(left and belowright) and fairmaidens(below, left).

Space where artmeets the heatof the street

Weeding out misunderstandings of marijuana use

DAGGA – A SHORT HISTORY

HAZEL CRAMPTONJacana

Vivien

Horler

Michael

Morris

Artful

Ivor

Powell

Graphic Point

It is 23 years since Anton Kannemeyer and then-sidekick Conrad Botes first scandalised readerswith the in-your-face, risqué satire that was the hallmark of ‘Bitterkomix’, their core publication.Brutal and unflinching in its telling of truth, this graphic art held up a mirror that, althoughshocking and shameful in what it revealed, remained all too recognisable to South Africans.