Tracy Murinik On show in CapeTown
I was sold, and then so was the painting. It said: “Narcissus daarling, it’s time to go home” . and the message on the back clarified, “dearest daarling, I love oysters. Yours forever . sign here”. And for the moment all I wanted was to sign. And then there were 499 others…
When Johnny Golightly arrived at the opening to his exhibition at the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet, it was after at least three round trips already made by his chauffeured white limousine depositing various members of his entourage to precede him. There was the coy sailorboy, the beautiful drag queen, the old French(ish?) man sitting on the stair singing Parisian- mode, the two French-chambermaid- uniformed women graciously serving fountains of pink champagne and elegant savoury snacks complete with caviar, shrimp and olives.
And then, at last, there was Johnny Golightly, gorgeously elegant in a pin-striped suit, holding a bouquet of red roses.
But this isn’t just me indulging in some social reportage. The performance aspect of Johnny Golightly’s work is crucial. It encompasses and challenges the tensions and pretensions of gay representation and self-definition; of “camp, kitsch, banality . puffs and powders in the make-up box, free- weights in the gym, money in the bank, bullets in the guns, tools of the project of making and naming the self and the community”. Golightly, as a persona, is a master of glamour, melodrama, sophistication, trashy socialising, witty repartee, devastated innocence, intense beauty and desperate tragedy.
The Innocence of a Broken Heart – 500 Pretty Postcards from the Edge (and three large murals) is a moving account of personal hurt, loss and disappointment framed within the outline of a smiling face, and momentarily obscured behind a facade of nonchalance and cool “golightness”. These small acrylic accounts, plastic- wrapped and ready for the picking, are “cash-and-carry”, “take-one-home-with- you” splinters of a shattered idealism.
They are also searing insights into the devastation of the human heart. Employing empathy and sadness and playful disguise, and occasional self- flagellation, Golightly comments on loss of love, self-respect and dignity. He invokes aphorisms that describe the hurt and frustration of unquenched or slighted desire.
He comments on feelings of inadequacy, self-denial, self-indulgence, and insecurity. He looks back nostalgically to a time before trust was violated: a fantastic (fantasised?) naivet.
“I loved being fabulous”. The “postcards” are written like childhood notes in a jotter; the drawings are executed in a style which is child- like, bright and sparkly. But their messages do not speak of childhood knowing. And the types of visual and semantic games that occur – with words that seem to be arbitrarily either crossed out or circled – evoke a knowledge of sophisticated mind-play, often brutal and perverse.
These works sound both their fraught desire and their abandonment: their authors long urgently for innocence, protection, warmth, acceptance and affirmation. “A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.” “Filling a room with all the flowers she can find she commits the ultimate erotic suicide. Sweet, dying, her hands held tighter to her heart, searching . for the last kiss that was to smother her.”
And Johnny is still being fabulous!
The Innocence of a Broken Heart: 500 Pretty Postcards from the Edge, an installation by Johnny Golightly, is on at the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet, 120 Bree St, Cape Town. Each piece costs “100 bucks” and all the work will be sold on a cash and carry basis. Tel: 24- 1667