Shaun de Waal
Norman Catherine’s new show at the Goodman Gallery extends and recapitulates images that are familiar from his work over the last decade or so. This show is mostly sculpture, whereas his 1994 show (his last solo exhibition in South Africa) was chiefly painting, but the two media increasingly overlap for Catherine -his wooden or fibreglass figures are close relatives or indeed replicas of the creatures who have inhabited his paintings for years.
Catherine’s theriomorphic characters have enormous presence, whether they are monumental totems (oh for public statuary like this!) or the equivalent of small household fetishes. Double-headed or two- mouthed, they often seem caught in the middle of some awful Ovidian metamorphosis:hands become heads that loom threateningly, tongues become snakes, humans seem half-transformed into animals, or is it the other way around?
The bodies of Double Talk and In Cold Blood are sliced vertically in half by their own mouths; Double Agent has two heads, one piled upon one another. Among the smaller wooden figures, multiple breasts and lips proliferate, echoing ancient Greek goddesses as much as the curios of a pan-African market.
In the text of the new and gloriously illustrated Goodman Gallery book on Catherine, Hazel Friedman reads his work politically, though acknowledging that his concerns (or at least his drives) are as much metaphysical as political. Yet what Catherine’s art really does is to depoliticise the political, as it were; to make the political metaphysical.
His work, in this show anyway, is not making any fine-tuned political point; it does not enter that realm. Rather, the process seems to work the other way – Catherine absorbs figures from our politics, history and quotidian existence into his personal iconography. They become drained of some of their real-life content as they join the menagerie of his image repertoire.
Sure, there is angst there -the generalised angst of the Western tradition, or perhaps the angst of the personal subconscious (which may come to the same thing). But the overall impression is of jokey dismissal; we are invited to laugh at these cartoon bogeymen. They frighten for only a split second, like an adult playing the monster for a child. Then one’s pleasure at Catherine’s virtuoso way with colour, texture and design takes over. The little, unscary ones are just plain cute.
To over-interpret Catherine is a mistake. He is not an artist of subtle, sometimes puzzling layers like, say, William Kentridge. He’s brash, loud, upfront. Most of what his art is about is on the surface -but what a surface.