10 Oct 2007
A sign near the entrance of Spier’s Beam Gallery warns visitors that some of the works on display may be found offensive. Bit of an exaggeration, really, because this solo exhibition by Anton Kannemeyer of Bitterkomix fame is quite innocuous compared to previous events, where huge hard-ons and multiple sexual positions provided highlights of transgression art that tried to uproot the Afrikaans patriarchal society, from father to teacher to dominee to premier.
But then, his one drawing of a black angel performing oral sex with the artist did offend some of the workers at Spier. When they had the chance to ask Kannemeyer questions during a guided tour, they put him in a tight spot. “Usually you have people visiting your exhibition who know about the context and references. This was a very hard one,” says Kannemeyer in his studio in Cape Town’s Observatory.
The workers did have a point though. The Second Coming is by far the most ambiguous piece of the show, and it has a problematic history. Kannemeyer laughs out loud when he recalls the prelude to this work. “Sometimes you do something, and you think it’s interesting. But afterwards you immediately think: God, I made an idiot of myself.”
The Second Coming, he explains, is the result of two drawings he made last year for a previous exhibition. One had his pre-pubescent alter-ego Boetie being saved by a black angel. The other one was called The Ascension, and had a black angel taking the artist to heaven. “When I made that one I thought it was very funny,” he says.
But art-critic Ivor Powell wasn’t convinced. He wrote some scathing remarks, alleging that The Ascension was the worst work on display. Anton nods. “Later I thought he had a point: it doesn’t work. It did sell immediately, but that’s not the point. The thing is: I was struggling with something and I didn’t get it right. I agree with Powell. That’s why I made the Second Coming, with the angel sucking my dick. That work has a specific reference to him.”
It’s those multiple layers of significance that make the work of Kannemeyer and Bitterkomix (which he does with his friend Conrad Botes) so fascinating. And it’s only when you enter the realm of his studio that you realize the full extend of his art and references. The walls are covered with books, underground comics, videos, music and personal journals he has kept since Standard 6, all of them neatly arranged, the signs of an obsessive collector and archivist. Much of it, from the controversial French author/thief Jean Genet to the outspoken Dead Kennedys vocalist Jello Biafra, eventually finds a place in his oeuvre.
When Kannemeyer was still teaching at University of Stellenbosch, students who had heard about this amazing comics collection used to ask him to bring some of them to class, because they didn’t know how to get them. He wasn’t keen on doing that. “They’ll look at it, say ‘whatever’ and go home. They don’t pursue it,” he says, lamenting the digital generation who want everything at their disposal with a click of the mouse, a long shot from the apartheid days when finding underground treasures was a proper quest.
“We were so excited to get any cultural thing that was alien,” he recalls those murky eighties. “When I was twelve, to get a Kiss poster was just amazing. And to hear people say they went to a Kiss concert was unbelievable, that something like that could happen!”
We leaf through the recently published Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook, a coffee table celebration of ten years of maverick and idiosyncratic South African comic art, complete with academic essays that place Kannemeyer and Botes firmly in a tradition of “outrage art”, which runs from Dada, the French Situationists to punk and all its transgressional offshoots.
Bitterkomix was one of those cases where people operated on obscure fragments of information (discovering “outlandish and amazing” comics like Heavy Metal and Epic at Estoril in Hillbrow) and subsequently created something that was truly original. “When Conrad and I started Bitterkomix it was a case of the right thing at the right time. There wasn’t an example of that sort of comic art. It was the first time anyone did it in Afrikaans, and that meant that there was a lot of attention,” says Kannemeyer.
Even though edition 15 of Bitterkomix is in the pipeline, the publication of Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook felt like a break, the end of an era. Both Kannemeyer and Botes have become serious visual artists in their own right. Botes’s work can be found in the New York Museum of Modern Art, while Kannemeyer has deals with galleries in Italy and New York who buy “everything I produce”.
So what’s left? Surely the anger has dissipated by now. The father figure was dealt a decisive blow in the story of Boetie which appeared Bitterkomix 5 and touched upon severe sexual taboos. So devastating was the blow that father and son haven’t spoken to each other for twelve years.
“I never walked around saying it’s autobiographical,” says Kannemeyer. “I suggested it. For me it’s not about putting my father on the spot, but dealing with issues we had. And we resolved it. I mean, he said he didn’t want to know me anymore and that resolved it. One can say it’s a tragedy and very sad. But I think the idea of the family is a bit overrated, and a lot of people will be much happier if the can sort out issues that they have with their family.”
That issue out of the way, will he now go the artist route? Will he be happy with the knowledge that he can churn out ‘typical’ Kannemeyer pieces that will fetch substantial prices? Things aren’t so easy. First of all, Kannemeyer is a comic artist, which is a different species altogether. “Comic artists are very humble people. The ones I’ve met are wonderful. Like Jose Muñoz, who works with (writer Carlos) Sampayo, he’s such a nice guy, just incredible. For me meeting these people is like meeting God. When I encountered him, I could hardly speak. He made several drawings for Conrad, but I was just too embarrassed to ask for any.”
And yes, the anger at the father may be gone, but there are still a lot of issues to be dealt with in post-94 South Africa. “I went back to work that I ended off on a strong note, but didn’t really develop much further,” he says, referring to his Boetie/Tintin character, his 1974 series and his Alphabet of Democracy, all of them featured at the current Beam Gallery exhibition.
The 1974 series refers to a nightmare Anton had as a 7-year old boykie, about ‘die swart gevaar’ entering his house and killing his father and his brother and raping him. The modern version of this horror, spread over three panels, is more subtle, ambiguous and thought-provoking, raising questions about entitlement, guilt and fear.
The Alphabet of Democracy deals with language and racism. Reading Chambers & Oxford dictionaries Kannemeyer decided that B must stand for Black: “adj. opposite of white, dirty, messy, without light, dark, illegal, dim, smuggled, sombre, disastrous, dismal, obscure, sullen, bad-tempered, angry, horrible, grotesque, malignant, unlucky, unhappy, depressed.”
And then there’s Tintin and the controversial Tintin in the Congo, which was recently banned in the UK because of its racist connotations. Kannemeyer has re-drawn the cover, calling it Pappa in Afrika. It features Tintin and his black chauffeur driving through a Sierra Leone-like landscape with of AK-47 toting soldiers, skulls, dead bodies and maimed people. Given Kannemeyer’s contrarian and irreverent past one would think his drawing is a stand against the political correctness that has recently engulfed western society. Instead his explanation is uncharacteristically sentimental.
“When I was in Berlin recently I bought a copy of Tintin in the Congo for my 2-year old daughter Anna. She loved the animals and seeing all the action. But then I realized there are certain stereotypes she cannot understand. Like she calls the black people monkeys. It puts me in a position where I don’t want her to grow up with those stereotypes and the idea that some figures are better than others. It’s very difficult to explain that to her, and find it problematic that that book is available to children without a context where it’s explained to them. So I did a parody of that cover, which triggered everything for this exhibition: looking more broadly at the white colonialist in Africa.”
Heroes:
1) the writer Thomas Bernhard wrote books like "Gathering Evidence" and "Extinction" - he's
brilliant, so much in common with White Afrikaners - his hatred of
Austrians is what really grabs me
2) Herge He just remains brilliant. The best books are King Ottakar's Sceptre,
The secret of the Unicorn and Blue Lotus
3) Mark E. Smith (from the Fall) and Jello Biafra Both innovative musicians (Smith the better musician), both good lyricists, although Biafra's satirical approach is more direct. I also like their musical eclecticism and diversity.
4) There are many others in fact: Fyodor Dostoevsky (everything he wrote is important), Kierkegaard , David Hockney (painter, re-invents himself constantly), Lucian Freud, Jochim Nordstrom (drawer from the
Scandinavian countries, very good contemporary artist), Martha Wainwright (for making the best album in 2005), Bonnie 'Prince' Billy (even though he is inconsistent, when he's good he's outstanding), M.
Ward (only did good things so far)