This should probably begin with a truth-in-journalism disclosure. As regards art theory, your narrator relies heavily on Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, which sought to show that the art world was riddled with posers and fakers, and when it comes to art practice, he must confess to being enchanted by the container load of paintings a friend recently brought back from China. The cubist knock-offs looked pretty cubist, the impressionist knock-offs were bright and cheerful, and the prices were staggering — R500 per canvas. This was my idea of a good art buy. I would be perfectly happy with those Chinese paintings on my walls.
It should thus come as no surprise to hear that until just the other day, I was of the opinion that Beezy Bailey’s greatest artwork was himself. As we all know, Beezy is the son of Drum magazine publisher Jim Bailey, who was in turn the son of Randlord Sir Abe Bailey. The Baileys had a sprawling estate north of Johannesburg. They fished, hunted and rode horses, just like real English aristocrats. They had a library full of first editions and ancient Shakespeare folios. They were all good looking, cultivated and eccentric in charming ways. One doesn’t ask aristocrats about their finances, but it appeared that Sir Abe’s labours had spared his descendants the necessity of participation in the daily grind. A Bailey could do more or less whatever he or she wanted, and Beezy wanted to have fun.
He also wanted to be an artist, but one suspects that was largely because artists had more fun than anyone else. Young Beezy materialised in my life in the mid-Eighties, clad in an ingenious ”kaffirkaner” outfit that combined the safari suit with elements of the so-called flat boy uniform. He performed daring fire-eating tricks at trendy parties. Defaced a statue of General Louis Botha, painting the face white in imitation of a Xhosa initiate. Appeared naked in public, groin painted in the colours of the new South African flag. A 1991 prank attracted international attention. At the time, Beezy’s own work was not considered good enough for the National Gallery, but the curators leapt to purchase lino-cuts by a domestic servant named Joyce Ntobi. Once the work was hung, Beezy stepped forth to reveal that he and Joyce were actually one and the same, thereby exposing the art establishment to ridicule.
It irked some people almost beyond endurance that this cheeky counter-revolutionary stunt had been pulled by a playboy from the white robber baron class. They retaliated by saying, ah, Beezy can’t paint, he’s just a rich kid, playing at being an artist. At times, one felt the point was valid, but when it came to style, there was no doubt of Beezy’s mastery. He lived in a grand mansion high above the city with a full complement of servants and a Bentley in the garage, along with a flashy sports car that might have been a Maserati. The ancestral pile was a bit dowdy when Beezy inherited it, but he redid the interior in an outrageous combination of bright colours that caused gloom to lift the instant you stepped inside. And Beezy himself was always a tonic, an irrepressibly cheerful sprite who took a childlike delight in everything from his vegetable patch to lunch. With Beezy, lunch was a varied splendour. One day it would be chop suey in a grimy Chinese joint in dockland. Next it would be, ”Hey, let’s charter a helicopter, fly up the West Coast and eat mussels on the beach.” Or you’d find yourself tooling around in a Mercedes convertible, rock’n’roll blaring, heading towards Kommetjie to catch kreef from a dingy. Beezy presided over these adventures in a panama hat and shades, with a fat cigar in his breast pocket for after-lunch delectation. His life seemed an endless round of amusements, punctuated by the occasional blaze of news-paper publicity.
Beezy loved celebrities. ”Who are the most famous people you know,” he once asked, ”And can I have their phone numbers please?” Coming from anyone else, this would have seemed off-colour, but Beezy’s social machinations were so brazen you had to chuckle. I slipped him the number of a socialite who introduced him to David Bowie, and next thing, the Thin White Duke was collaborating with Beezy in art experiments. X-Files star Gillian Anderson, Patricia de Lille and dozens of others succumbed to similar seductions. Beezy was delighted when these friendships made the press, because that’s part of the art game, not so? You hang out at the right nightclubs, get photographed with superstars, pull outrageous stunts that get your name in the papers and Bob’s your uncle — you are a famous artist, and people are flocking to your exhibitions because … well, because you’re famous.
So Beezy became famous, but was he any good? Cape Town’s chattering classes were pretty evenly split between those who thought Beezy wonderful and those who trashed him. The latter would accuse the former of stupidity, while attacks from the anti-Beezy brigade were often informed by rabid jealousy. Beezy retreated into a sulk for seven years, declining to exhibit in Cape Town on account of the alleged backwardness and negativity of its art community. Ergo, if you didn’t know him, you would have missed the interesting developments taking place in his studio. The playboy was growing more disciplined, taking his work more seriously. About five years ago, his landscapes of Namibia began to capture the mood of the dustlands in a way that the philistine found entirely satisfying. A similar leap took place in the work of his alter-negro, Joyce Ntobi, whose skills have advanced hugely since her 1991 debut. Back then, she was a primitivist. Now she paints what she sees — the way light falls on a township shack, the fatalism and resignation in her domestic worker colleagues’ lined faces. Joyce’s recent work seems to settle most doubts about her creator’s technical facility.
But it is in the larger trademark canvasses that the change is most evident. Beezy likens the process of creating these works to ”throwing myself out of the window”. In other words, he lays a blank canvas on the floor, arms himself with a housepainter’s tools — pots of enamel and broad brushes — descends into his subconscious and just does it, sometimes daubing and slathering the painting to completion in a single, frenzied session. There was a time when these seances were preceded by a joint, but Beezy came to realise that the herb was interfering with his ability to decipher messages from the invisible, so he quit. Soon thereafter, his psychic investigations started yielding strange and magical new fruit.
Consider Space Elephants, one of the stronger paintings in Beezy’s new show at the Everard Read in Cape Town. It shows pink elephants browsing under a moonlit sky in which hang heavenly bodies the colour of peaches. In a way, this is a standard Beezy whimsy, but there is something else there, something new. I fell into a reverie in front of that canvas, trying to fathom why it seemed charged with mystery. Eventually I realised a woman was standing alongside me, also captivated. ”Is this amazing or what?” I asked. ”It’s amazing,” she said. We moved on to the next canvas, which depicted a ghostly ocean liner going aground on some wild shoreline. It too had a strange and powerful psychic undertow. Indeed, the wave welling up under the ghost ship was as foreboding as the dark, heaving seas in Eric Fischl’s famed 1982 work The Old Man’s Boat, the Old Man’s Dog. This is also new — an evocation of dread from a man who has hitherto been the most light-hearted of souls. Is Beezy’s spirit darkening as the Rainbow party peters out and the great powers sink into a Mesopotamian quagmire?
Such questions are probably best left to those who know what they are talking about. Myself, all I can say with certainty is that Beezy is moving on to another plane. His best paintings are eerily dissociated from logic, like scenes from dreams. Dandies prance. Teapots and handbags take flight. Fantastic figures perform ”dances of revelry or dementia” under skies that seem pregnant with signs and omens. Beezys’s enemies will no doubt be gratified to see him getting a good review from a hack who likes Chinese junk, but what can I do? I think the Everard Read show is excellent.
The exhibition of new paintings, drawings and bronzes by Beezy Bailey and his alter ego Joyce Ntobi runs at the Everard Read, Cape Town, until March 4. Tel: 021 418 4527