Barend de Wet: Witty artist who stripped down to send up
1956-2017
BAREND de Wet, who was killed in a car crash in the Western Cape last week, was an artist whose favourite exhibit was himself.
He adorned his body with tattoos, including his penis. It was designed, as he demonstrated to whoever happened to be sitting round the lunch or dinner table when he unveiled and stretched and kneaded it, to resemble a piece of wood.
Fear of the banal never held him back.
His performance art invariably involved him standing or sitting naked on a plinth or stage while guests, most of whom had seen it all before, sipped their wine and murmured speculatively about his meaning.
No one, including his closest friends, really knew.
To his credit, he didn’t pretend to know either. The first time he went naked he said he was paying homage to all artists who had stood as sculptures. Thereafter he admitted that he just couldn’t help it. Stripping off was something he’d done since visiting Cape Town’s once famous nudist beach, Sandy Bay, after arriving from Boksburg to study art.
From then on the two seemed to go together.
His lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art further sold him on a multidisciplinary approach to art, which admitted of no barriers.
The notion of art as life, and life as art, became De Wet’s guiding philosophy. It wasn’t new but he took it further than any other South African artist.
He turned whatever he did into art, be it making surfboards in Plettenberg Bay, flyfishing, keeping bees, bodybuilding, modelling for Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, wielding a yo-yo (he won a world championship in the US), shaving, knitting, dressing up and, of course, dressing down.
“Anything and everything is art,” he said. “It can be applied anywhere in any form, so I just do what comes up next, basically.”
He knew what he wanted, however, and that was to be noticed. He was brilliant at attracting media attention. Some felt it was this rather than the value of the work itself — no matter how eye-catching the objects he made out of stainless steel and the bronze collages that graced the façade of the National Gallery — that made him one of the most famous and fawned-over artists in the country.
In 1996 he put on a white chef’s uniform, made fresh pasta and hung it out to dry on lines he stretched across an empty store front in Troyeville, Johannesburg. He was immediately hailed for this “iconic work”.
The jury will always be out as to how much he was, as a close friend and fellow artist put it, “taking the p**s”. Certainly he believed that a lot of so-called art was pretentious rubbish perpetrated by people with no real talent.
His performance art and installations were usually characterised by sharp wit and pithy comment on the oddities of South African life. One installation was a toilet on a plinth inside a glass case with a knitted seat cover.
It owed a bit to Duchamp, he said, but was also a statement about life in South Africa. “In South Africa, if you have got a toilet, you have arrived.”
Another installation involved a black person with albinism he met in Cape Town. He called it Two White South Africans. Shortly afterwards, the black person was murdered.
A relatively recent passion was knitting, which he learnt from his mother. He knitted strikingly colourful “paintings” out of wool.
He preached the virtues of knitting to anyone who would listen. He was sending himself as well as lot of other stuff up when he dressed as a dominee and gave a sermon, roaring to an imaginary congregation that God’s purpose for them was to “brei, brei, brei [knit, knit, knit]”.
As a living art exhibit, his own purpose was to be noticed, and he did what it took.
At an exhibition opening he slapped Nadine Gordimer’s biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts, so hard in the face for being intellectually pretentious that he fell over.
He got himself attacked with a bottle after arriving at a goth club in Cape Town dressed in short pants with bovver boots, Hawaiian shirt and light-blue leather jacket.
He turned everything, including personal setbacks, into art with an undercurrent of grim or wry humour.
When he heard that a woman he’d just broken up with was pregnant, he reconciled and was there to support her for the birth. He said he knew something was wrong when a black baby emerged.
He claimed not to remember if this inspired his wood sculpture, Die Regte Piel vir Sannie (The Right Cock for Sannie), a dark, vertical figure with a massive horizontal protuberance which he first exhibited in the 1980s.
He revamped the piece to suit the new South Africa for an exhibition in Cape Town. He changed the colour of the organ in question from brown to pink, and renamed it Die Regte Piel vir Thandi.
De Wet was born in Boksburg on January 4 1956. His father was a pilot for SAA, his mother, Christene, an actress who starred in the popular TV show Nommer Asseblief.
After studying architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand for two years, he went to Michaelis.
His first of a long list of group exhibitions was at the Market Gallery in Johannesburg in 1984. Others included New York, the Tate Modern in London, Dubai, The Hague in the Netherlands and the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil in 1994.
His first of 13 solo exhibitions, Toying with Art, was in Woodstock in 1985. His most recent was Black, White and Everything in Between at the SMAC gallery in Cape Town in 2016.
He won numerous accolades, including the prestigious Zollner prize and the Volkskas Atelier Award by the Association of the Arts in Pretoria.
In 1990 he won top honours in the Volkskas National Art Prize, earning an eight-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
He is survived by his third wife, Diana Cilliers, and his son, Ben. Cilliers was badly injured in the crash that killed her husband outside Caledon. They were on their way to their holiday house in Napier. — Chris Barron
He knew what he wanted, however, and that was to be noticed