But removing the image is an act I regret
because I gave in to bullies. To make up for
it, one day I will follow the ruined painting
(daubed over in black paint by a madman at
Goodman Gallery) to its home in Germany,
where a buyer has exiled the work.
In the meantime, Murray has gone on to
dizzying heights. I’ve followed him through
art fairs and, one year, was dismayed to see
that he’d repainted ‘The Spear’ as a border
with nothing in it. You couldn’t find a more
evocative way of capturing censorship.
Now there’s Hide, his latest exhibition.
It hasn’t had much mass media attention,
but perhaps it should, for the cutting
commentary it provides. Or perhaps we
have grown more tolerant of satire, which
warns you of danger before it arrives. After
all, Murray pinpointed the state to which
SA would descend with Hail to the Thief.
This time, Murray excoriates Twitter.
The blue bird that symbolises the social-
media platform that has become the
foremost medium for information and
disinformation gets his treatment as he
refashions it into a half-pig half-bird in
bronze. ‘Echo Chamber’ is a cluster of bird-
pigs, signalling the way Twitter can create
and recreate viral echo chambers that
narrow the news agenda to the tiny trending
topics of an often ill-informed elite.
As the world begins to cotton on to how
disinformation can misshape societies,
Murray’s work captures the new narrative
that has moved beyond the ‘miracle’ of
social media to begin the investigation of
the platforms that now define how we think.
In short, Hide is an endless commentary
in mixed materials, with one particular
image reflecting another story being
replicated in politics: ‘Populist Cock’.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF),
whose party colour is red and which is
led by cocky men, is a phenomenon of
populism that we will come to understand
better in later years. Using Twitter as its
stage to communicate to a nihilistic urban
electorate, the EFF has proven to be a
disseminator of disinformation campaigns
as they’ve created viral echo chambers.
And what is Murray’s response to the
populists and thieves? A metal piece that
aptly reads, ‘TSEK!’. O everard-read.co.za
THIS SPREAD, CLOCKWISE
FROM OPPOSITE PAGE
‘White Elephant’; installation view of
Hide at Everard Read in Johannesburg;
‘Ventriloquist’s Troll I’; ‘Hide’ (foreground)
and ‘Doubt’ (right); ‘Boiling Frog’; ‘Portrait’;
‘Populist Cock’; ‘Self Portrait’; ‘Echo Chamber’;
‘Solace’; all by Brett Murray (2018).