In his fine essay in the catalogue to Brett Murray’s White Like Me exhibition, Ivor Powell talks about ‘an uncanny self-portrait” running through the artist’s work. I can’t resist asking Murray if this refers to his bubble-headed sculptures, small male bodies with enormous exploding heads. Given all his successes of the past few years — Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year 2002, winner of the Cape Town Public Sculpture competition in 1998, co-winner of the competition to build an installation at the new Cape Town International Conference Centre, to name just a few — Murray could be forgiven for being big-headed. Murray finds this tremendously funny. ‘Haha! With the nature of the art world in South Africa, this is my little 15-minute blip on an otherwise parched landscape. Soon, it’s back to selling lights to make a living for me. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve somehow managed to sell some of my art, and I’m grateful for that. But it won’t last forever.”
Murray’s current exhibition at the South African National Gallery, White Like Me, is funny, astute and provocative. The title (which the gallery managed to omit from the invitation) encapsulates many of the concerns of the show. If Black Like Me — the brandname for a hair product targeted at black consumers — means that your blackness is artificially constituted, market-driven, badly packaged and synthetic, then Murray’s art parodies and interrogates that in the ways in which it deals with aspects of white identity. ‘For me it was important to work from a very specific perspective or point of view. Post-1994 satirical targets are a little bit merged and amorphous, and the good and the bad aren’t easily identifiable. I wanted to tackle the notions of white South African identity in both comic and tragic ways. Talking about issues of whiteness is almost a hushed discussion and I wanted to open up that debate in an unapologetic way. ‘When I started this body of work, I perceived a strange racist sense about whites from the media. Which obviously one can understand, but I’m not going to be quiet, and my whiteness isn’t going to make me quiet. I’m lucky enough to have a platform, and I’m going to get on it and shout as loud as I can. I might be talking shit, but I’ll use my platform as I see fit.”I take this to mean that Murray wants to use white as one of many ideological categories in debates about South African identities, rather than allowing it to be the base against which all other categories are read. It’s a brave standpoint, because the hidden danger is that problematising our understanding of whiteness also calls into question definitions of blackness. The two are inescapably entwined, with neither having a pure originary ground to build from. It’s an uncomfortable realisation for some people, probably best expressed in that most oxymoronic of terms, the ‘African renaissance”. In Murray’s oeuvre, it’s most perfectly figured by his famous Africa statue that stands in St George’s mall in Cape Town, an African figurine spouting Bart Simpson heads.
To state the obvious, there’s a massive political dimension to Murray’s art (he winces when I ask him if he’s one of the few remaining struggle artists), but it’s more the satirical sniping of a Zapiro, rather than the portentous figuration of a Kentridge. At the opening of White Like Me Zapiro hinted at the uneasy status of the cartoon as fine art when he modestly declared himself out of place giving a speech in a gallery devoted to ‘real” art. It was pointed out that one of his works graces the collection of the South African National Gallery, but this is hardly a convincing argument. Just because the gallery owns a cartoon, it doesn’t make cartoons art.Murray’s work has been accused of being one-dimensional, and even painfully trite. His parodies of New Yorker-like cartoons do skirt the edge of obviousness at times. In one, a traditionally cloaked and bearded god addresses a middle-aged arrival at the Pearly Gates: ‘Some of my best friends are black too!” The work is saved by a certain weightiness given by its large-scale execution in perspex, and also by the fact that its triteness is painful. As Zapiro put it, ‘it takes a second to look at one of Brett’s works, but a long time to absorb it”.Murray is very aware of the delicate balancing act he’s trying to pull off. ‘I specifically wanted to use the popular culture of the one-liner. One of the tenets of satire is that the imagery must be recognisable. There has to be an understanding by the audience. So you’re limited to what people are familiar with so as to bring them into the conversation you’re trying to have with them. My intention is to make them feel uncomfortable with that familiarity, rather than comfortable with it.”I ask Murray about the rumour that he had to personally paint the walls at the gallery for his show. ‘Ha, not quite. But apparently a significant amount of the gallery’s budget was cut, and part of the fallout was that I’d have to put my stuff up in the big grey shadow of Kentridge, which sure, I’m already in, we are all in the shadow of Kentridge, but I don’t actually physically want to be in the shadow. It would have looked like shit.”Happily, the Kentridge show came down, and White Like Me doesn’t look like shit. It’s beautifully hung, and uncluttered. Perhaps the best review of it was provided by the people at the opening. Most were laughing. Sure, after a while they looked a little puzzled, even hurt in some cases. But that’s what happens when a Brett Murray one-liner whacks you on your funny bone.