SOUL SURGERY
Anton Kannemeyer forces us to wade into South Africa’s psychic mire, beyond our charade of sanity, writes Ashraf Jamal
ANTON Kannemeyer’s latest exhibition at the Stevenson in Cape Town, titled Such, Such Were the Joys, is a medley of old and new work.
The title comes from George Orwell who, with DH Lawrence, is a key cipher for the exhibition’s two-pronged focus: politics and sex. In Kannemeyer’s torrid mind, sex and politics are inseparable.
At one level the combination is obvious, but in the hands of this artist something else happens, for he doesn’t only provoke, he also challenges. In his work, politics and sex become a two-headed monster which reveals a deep psychic unsettlement.
Take the case of O is for Oh My God!, a work in ink, acrylic and pencil on paper. The title appears in the work, followed by “OSCAR KILLED REEVA!” Scrolling down, we then see a penitent Pistorius mouthing the acronym: “WTF?”
This piece is not just about a psychotic love drama. Beneath the image of Pistorius, we read: “FROM HERO TO ZERO”, and then the ubiquitous “PROUDLY SOUTH AFRICAN”. If the work addresses the fallibility of celebrity, then, all the more, it forces us to the think of the expiration of any pride in the nation. Here an intimate crime finds its doppelganger in a national catastrophe: the story is fundamentally biopolitical.
If, for Kannemeyer, SA is a failed democracy it is precisely because it remains psychically mired in the ills of its colonial and apartheid history. In his explorations of greed, envy, shamelessness and abuse, the artist seeks not only to understand our pathologies but also to account for their persistence. Disaffected and dissatisfied with the pretence of goodwill or wellbeing, and the constructed values we rig to make up this purported wellness, his artworks return us to a nether perversity that shapes and shifts our received morality.
Kannemeyer’s story begins with Conrad Botes and a battle, in the early ’90s, to break away from the oppressive shackles of white supremacist power. Operating against apartheid, while locked within its pathology, Kannemeyer and Botes made the Bitterkomix series, a series of cult compilations, followed by their brief engagement, via Ryk Hattingh’s Loslyf magazine, with the emergent South African porn game.
Their objective was to renounce the brutal and repressed Afrikaner history which they had inherited. Almost two decades later, Kan- nemeyer remains preoccupied with unmasking the fictions of brute power. No South African artist has more vividly and more toxically distilled the ephemeral shift from apartheid oppression to its current moment.
His argument, through image and text, is highly contentious, and yet there remains an inconsolable and nagging truth which — literally — amounts to a fixation. Kannemeyer wounds and excoriates the viewer of his artworks, thereby forcing us to reappraise our deepseated prejudices.
While Freudian in nature, his psycho-pathological explorations operate as a kind of “Seelenchirurgie” or soul surgery. We are forced to confront ourselves in our misshapen and hateful state. The downside is that he offers no cure. No healing comes out of confession.
So, irrespective of the toxic affront blisteringly evident in Kannemeyer’s shocking artworks — be it the craven fascination with consumerist bling, the traumatic sexual transactions across race, the murderous and obsessive-compulsive neurosis concerning power — what we are left with is an artist who accepts himself as a victim of his own imagining, a victim whose power stems from his unabated disloyalty and treachery.
In a lunchtime talk at the Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town, Kannemeyer remarked: “Drawing comics is the most timeconsuming thing. Making paintings is much easier.” A riposte to the institution that invited him to speak, but, more significantly, it reminds us how demanding — artistically and ethically — the discipline of visual satire is.
The exhibition’s title — Such, Such Were the Joys — is, of course, brimming with irony because in Kannemeyer’s world there is no way back and no way forward. Instead, we find ourselves caught in a nightmarish slamdance; an eternal present as hellish as it is grossly hilarious. It takes an artist purged of delusion, anachronistic yet timely, to arrive at such an unremitting crux. LS