I’m not a theorist,” says artist Johannes Phokela, ‘I’m interested in the immediate effect of objects and their immediate connective value … When you see Jesus Christ in The Last Supper, you don’t immediately think of church, you think of the image in front of you.
‘I’ve often tried to bring an object’s meaning forward in relation to the life that we are living: so you play with the familiar to address that unfamiliarity — and that territory requires a lot of thinking in terms of iconographic values.”
Phokela’s work has been characterised by an insouciant treatment of art history’s iconography — of, in the main, 17th-century masters of the Dutch and Flemish schools. His work often appears as mischievous out-takes of familiar images — humorous, yet with the visceral, interrogative power of a passage from one of Dambudzo Marechera’s books — succeeding in bringing new allegorical import to the old image.
Clown noses are incongruently placed in 17th-century scenes. Phokela’s fascination with this particular iconography began years ago when he bought his first red nose for Comic Relief, only to discover it didn’t stay on his ‘flat African nose”. It has since become an enduring motif for the ‘West’s attitude to charitable intervention in Africa”.
In one work Phokela reinterprets the 1930s entertainer Josephine Baker’s Banana Dance with a lissom sexuality. In another, the tryptych Regarding [Lucio] Fontana, an AK-47-wielding Palestinian boy (with the prerequisite red nose on the barrel of the gun) emerges from the piece.
In Beanfest, Phokela’s reinterpretation of Jacob Jordaens’s The King Drinks, the scene of peasants feasting assumes a more garrulous edge. The painting Say Cheese, meanwhile, says as much about concepts of racial superiority and colonialism — the hidden/ignored histories of the Dutch/Flemish Golden Age — as it does of the British tabloid press’s rapacious hunger for the mundane. In it Phokela has inserted a black servant in the background, while a baby having his bum wiped in the right-hand corner becomes a symbol of a mega-rich, unreconstructed footballer.
Walking through the KwaZulu-Natal Society of Arts Gallery as his exhibition, Compendium, is being hung, Phokela says of the football boot painted on the floor: ‘It was painted just before the 2002 World Cup when the British tabloids were infatuated with David Beckham’s broken toe.”
The artist sees his use of the old masters’ work as ‘an essential vehicle” that allows him to ‘subvert the expectation”.
‘When you’re an artist of non-European origin you’re expected to work in a certain way, to reflect your cultural background … I’m sure that everybody would like to ‘represent’, but in a way it is a bit of a fallacy, its a very selfish thing to ‘represent’.
‘For me you represent with the hope of becoming the master of that representation, rather than covering the whole field or your background,” says Phokela, who also admits to being ‘uncomfortable” with terms such as black artist, black background, colonial or post-colonial.
Born in 1966, Phokela studied at the now-defunct Federated Union of Black Arts (Fuba) before leaving for the United Kingdom in 1987, where he studied at the Central St Martins College of Art and Design. He completed an MA in painting at the Royal College of Arts in London in 1993. He has won several awards, including the UK’s BP National Gallery Portrait Award and is a three-time winner of the John Moore painting prize.
His work has been included in the South African National Art Gallery and the Smithsonian National Museum for African Art in Washington and solo exhibitions include the 2005 Landlord and the Lion at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in London.
Based mainly in the UK, Phokela manages to split his time between South Africa and Britain and has spent the past 18 months in South Africa researching various projects, including Dream Home. The exhibition is still in its infancy, but the idea is for it to be mobile and housed within a ‘typical shackland structure” that juxtaposes human notions of virtues and sins.
When asked why he chose to return to England in 1993, rather than wait for the imminent shift to democracy, Phokela says it was ‘a matter of survival” both in terms of the volatile socio-political situation and of his survival as an artist. ‘When I graduated I was on top of my game, with several offers of residencies, exhibitions and free studio space. I’d also grown to know London more than I did South Africa when I left, because at that time in the 1980s every day was different in terms of the political situation and society.”
Johannes Phokela’s Compendium runs at the KZNSA Gallery until November 11