Battiss’ sale prints offer varied exits from reality
IN 1963, Maurice Sendak wrote Where the Wild Things Are, a kiddie novella centred on a boy named Max who throws a tantrum and is sent to bed without his supper.
Shortly after, Max’s bedroom undergoes an inexplicable transformation into a “jungle” of sorts. Max then sails to an island far far away inhabited by havoc-wreaking critters called wild things. You need not be sent to your room to experience Walter Battiss’ world, his massive oeuvre of art, which pops up in museum shows and art auctions, and offers a sense of being banished to a different dimension, where bodily shame and normativity give way to unencumbered fun.
In their current online auction, Strauss & Co offer this theme of liberation, showcasing some provocative Battiss prints that demonstrate how one can find a true escape via creativity (and viewing and buying art). Strauss will be auctioning off seven of the artist’s later works. From monotone wood cuts of locusts to island deities surrounded by flowers, these works offer several exit strategies from reality.
Particularly outstanding is Man with a Bird Hat, a screenprint with boisterous colours and a childlike simplicity reminiscent of a Quentin Blake character. The titular, multi-coloured man dons a hat worth inhabiting and little birds find solace in their tiny mobile home. This piece has a current bid of R17 000 on just the second day of the online auction.
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home, suggested American dancer Twyla Tharp. For Battiss, growing up in the Orange Free State, he could find solace in a parallel world without ever leaving his Koffiefontein residence. In the vein of the primitivist modernists he drew inspiration for his “fantasy” world from other cultures. The Khoi-San rock drawings appear to have provided him with a way of embracing a time where humankind was “freer” and clothing was optional.
Battiss’ figures defy logic, reality and gravity even. His characters are always in motion, but rarely walking. They trot, fly, romp, jitter, contort and embrace. In Blue Face, Green Cat (date unknown) the titular blue face appears to be terrorising a pea green cat. On closer inspection, the large white spaces around these figures and their objects (what appears to be a smoking pipe, some stripes and a car window) become more significant than their colourful counterparts. Space, in whichever form we wish to imagine, represents an area, be it cosmic, physical or abstract, that allows us to roam, explore and ultimately, escape if need be.
Space, in Battiss’ context, represents freedom and there is nothing more freeing than walking around in your birthday suit. Three Female Nudes is a lithograph pivoting on the fascination with the naked female body and how censorship and shame can be exchanged for freedom. Many have argued that his artworks, chock full of erotic suggestiveness and crudity, parodied and challenged the censorship of alternative sexuality during the apartheid era.
Gender fluidity is a recurring motif in Battiss’ work. In Figures, two human forms face each other, their bodies contorted to interlock in a way that conveys a strong sense of comfort, intimacy and solace. Characters of the Fookian dialect make up the rest of the painting: a combination of indigenous and Arabic symbols that Battiss invented to ensure total sovereignty.
Battiss borrowed aspects of primitivism and took them to new heights when he created Fook Island in the early 70s. “I will make up a concept of an island,” he said. “The concept will become real. It won’t just be a selfish thing that an artist makes and pins onto the wall, but something that everyone can participate in. That will make the island real… (although) it is a fake island.”
Fook Island is a world apart from the real one, which Battiss created and his initiates (Norman Catherine, Esme Berman and actress Janet Suzman) embraced to frolic around in uninhibited. But it is a world that we all can share in, not just one artist’s indulgent fantasy.
The character of Fook island and what it represents can be found in Battiss’ work, from abstract genderless contortionists to parietal art drawings, where the artist shows us his version of the ultimate Utopia, where sexual orientation, global politics and economy hold no power. Battiss’s works can be found at the Strauss & Co’s online auction, which ends on July 17 at www.strauss.co.za.