Beyond words: Brett Murray’s latest show Brood, which is on at the Circa Gallery in Johannesburg, consists of 24 sculptures and reliefs, devoid of the text with which he has come to be associated.
Critics, they can make you cry. One of South Africa’s most in/famous artists, Brett Murray, has an exhibition that has just opened at the Circa Gallery in Johannesburg. It is his first that has none of the text work that he enjoys using in his art.
The self-deprecating Murray tells me, on a Zoom interview earlier this week, the story of an encounter with one of the country’s most respected artists, academics and curators, Karel Nel.
“He said he thought that my strength lies in the three-dimensional work, the marble work, and the bronzes. About the text works, he just said, ‘Those are like subtitles,’” Murray says with a chuckle.
“Yeah, so I kind of laughed — and then I went home and cried because he just made two-thirds of my practice … obsolete.”
Over his 40-year career, Murray has always engaged with words.
“Since I can remember, I worked with language — language and image — and sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly,” he says.
His striking new 24-piece show is called Brood. And while Murray has let the simplified forms and materials of silent animal avatars do all the talking, he still seriously plays and works with language.
“The idea of ‘brood’ was a double meaning: one’s brood, your family, and to brood over something. So, it was sort of working between those ideas,” he explains.
Created during the hard lockdown at the onset of the pandemic, Brood is a body of sculptures and reliefs; among them marble elephants embracing, a family of bunnies titled Witnesses, and groups of sad-looking bronze monkeys huddled together.
It is clear that the artist was thinking of his own spouse, their two young sons and their lives. And the lives of others.
“They are kind of avatars … which enabled me to try and articulate my relationship but, potentially, our shared relationship with our family and with our friends in times of catastrophe, in times of stress, in times of struggle.”
It is not a radical change for the artist who was mired in controversy 12 years ago over his work The Spear. It parodied Jacob Zuma, who was then president, in a Lenin-like pose with his genitals exposed and unleashed an angry backlash.
It formed part of the Hail to the Thief II exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.
“Brood,” he says, “continues with themes established in my previous body of work.
“Although, historically, most of my work metaphorically aims satirical arrows at perceived ills in society, and while this is certainly cathartic, I have only recently worked out that the process of making is independently therapeutic.
“Where before my animal sculptures might symbolically mock predators, policemen, politicians, oligarchs, sycophants, the corrupted and the like … during lockdown I felt impelled to look closer to home for my subject matter.”
I ask whether he has gone soft or more subtle with the almost melancholic Brood.
“No, it’s not a question of subtle, I don’t think,” Murray replies. “People have responded … there’s almost an emotional response to the work, which is great, because it seems to have resonated in this age, even though I’m so cynical about my own stuff…
“And, you know, no longer the sort of … Che Guevara of the southern suburbs [of Cape Town],” he says with a giggle.
“I’ve hung up my beret. So, yeah, there is a softness, but I’m 62. I’ve come to an age that I don’t care what people think anymore. You know, I’m making stuff.”
Before our interview Murray sent me a lovely reflective note.
“What I thought I had produced was a single-issue body of work,” he wrote. “A response to the pandemic reflecting our mutual fears. A fragile tenderness. Our collective breath had been held for a few years.
“However, on seeing the works installed post-Covid it seemed a broader reading was possible. Implicit rather than explicit.
“We are currently gripped by uncertainties; global warming, nationalism, xenophobia, a failed state, the refugee crisis, the rise of populist right-wing agendas, wars, genocide … and more.
“These weigh heavily on our ‘families’. The new works extend the themes of familial intimacies and brooding contemplation. They describe a world of trepidation and vulnerability. Melancholic by default. Hopeless yet hopeful.”
I prod him about the contradictions we are experiencing. On the one hand, there’s the gentle intimacy of his brood, his family, that is so beautifully reflected in the work at Circa. On the other hand, there is the daily horrors of children being killed in the genocide in Gaza.
“We live in a world of contradictions. I mean, living in South Africa, the contradictions of living in a house with a car and a full fridge where most of the country don’t have that and will never.
“That is the country of contradictions that I was born into.
“Similarly, the contradictions of the horrors of war, in all the wars that are happening all over the world, and in Ukraine, Yemen and Palestine.
“It’s therapeutic for me to come to a quiet space, come to my studio, whether I’m making these objects or other objects. Because it’s horrific when you see the images of kids and families,” he says.
It is just a brisk 10-minute walk from Circa down Jan Smuts Avenue to the Goodman Gallery, where Murray’s The Spear was hung in 2012 but it will transport you back to a tumultuous time of controversy with the artist right in the raging centre.
The painting was vandalised, it prompted protests. The ANC went to court to have it banned and wanted the image removed from public view, including on newspaper websites.
It was ironic, because Murray was actively involved during the anti-apartheid struggle, using his art as a tool for left-wing organisations in Cape Town. He experienced censorship in his earlier life as an anti-apartheid art activist in the 1980s.
He designed posters, logos and T-shirts for the Community Arts Project. They printed their T-shirts at Community House in Cape Town, which housed various trade unions, the United Democratic Front and other left-aligned organisations.
“We used to print T-shirts and stuff for funerals — like ANC guerrilla Ashley Kriel’s funeral — and marches,” Murray told me in a previous interview.
“One of our members designed the Food and Allied Workers Union logo which is still in use now.”
Murray and his comrades had a particularly narrow escape one night. They had just left Community House after a workshop when a limpet mine rocked the building.
“I’d say that’s an attempt to censure and censor but you kind of forget that history,” Murray said with a wry chuckle.
“Much of the language of the 2012 exhibition at the Goodman was kind of Soviet propaganda, the sort of posters that I designed for the struggle during the 1980s,” he said.
He used the language of Soviet iconography, for this exhibition, “with a rejig in the South African context”.
One of them was an iconic image of Lenin done in the Fifties, “so I put Zuma’s head on it. And I thought that was in fact enough as a painting — sort of taking the piss out of the new elite.”
At the time, he was focused on social commentary and “you have a devil and an angel sitting on each shoulder, and you get some time to listen to it, and sometimes you go, ‘Fuck it!’ and you listen to the devil”.
As he admits, “I like to be transgressive, you know, I read Foucault and Derrida, but I also like slapstick and I like funny one-liners. So, I painted a dick on [the Zuma painting].
“And then I thought this may be a bit much,but I just kept carrying on working … and then, more out of laziness than anything else, I’ve decided to keep it — it was a one-liner dick joke.”
Murray’s name and address were in the phone book and people started to gather outside his studio, at his house. The spokesperson for the Shembe Church said at a rally he should be stoned to death.
“I had to leave my studio to take my family to a safe house. So, it was a pretty uncomfortable time,” Murray told me.
“I wasn’t used to it; I wasn’t used to the spotlight. That was very uncomfortable. And scary.”
It is not surprising that the artist is relieved that is all in the past. As Brood shows, his artistic work has also moved into a different direction, and, as he tells me this week, “My interests had been shifting from perpetrators to people and I had been wanting to transition from an accusatory position to one that is more compassionate and empathetic.
“Something intimate and kinder,” and his mischievous chuckle again. “Not exclusively though … I remain a stone thrower at heart.”