A
Hide, Brett Murray’s long-
awaited show at Everard
Read, turned its satirical
head to look beyond the mire
of state politics and toward
the chatter of the Twitterverse
VIEW / SPOTLIGHTJUN JUL^38PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF EVERARD READlthough I’ve never met him, I feel
close to Brett Murray. His work
is always an evocation of the
present and future; a prescient
commentary on the beloved country.
But it’s not only for that reason. In 2012, he
and I and City Press, the newspaper I edited
at the time, were umbilically tied. City Press
had published a review of Murray’s exhibition,
Hail to the Thief, and all hell broke loose. The
paper had run an art review of the exhibition
and used the image of ‘The Spear’, featuring
then-president Jacob Zuma as Vladimir Lenin,
but with his penis exposed. It was a local
rendition of the story of the naked emperor,
and produced as the kleptocracy began to grip
South Africa. The country and the governing
ANC went berserk as the image was taken out
of the gallery and into a mass black newspaper.
I thought about Murray a lot this past April
as I reviewed his latest work – at the same time,
parts of the ANC threatened to burn copies
of journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s book,
Gangster State, about the party’s secretary
general Ace Magashule. The burning was
condemned by the ANC high-ups, including its
chief whip at parliament, Jackson Mthembu.
In 2012, Mthembu was the leader of a group
who wanted Murray and City Press artistically
lynched. In the end, under pressure, I digitally
lynched ‘The Spear’ when I had it removed
from the City Press website after Nompumelelo
Ntuli – one of Zuma’s first ladies – burnt copies
of the paper in the streets of Durban.
Things got heated as every leading columnist
opined about the pain the image had evoked
of the indignities visited on black bodies.
TEXT FERIAL HAFFAJEE PHOTOGRAPHS MICHAEL HALL
BEYOND
THE ECHO
CHAMBER