Brett Murray
Murray’s Africa Maquette was the winning submission to a public art competition. The full-size work stands on a downtown street in Cape Town. Prior to its installation in 2000, however, the sculpture was the cause of much consternation. The collision of a monumental West African figurine with Bart Simpson’s yellow head was intended as a deft comment on global consumerism, but members of the City Council deemed it offensive in its desecration of a ritual object. In his defence, the artist claimed the sculpture was based on a curio, a kitsch replica of an authentic artefact. Detractors conceded or were overruled, and the work installed. At the unveiling, the city’s head of tourism described the sculpture with the careful words of a bureaucrat on thin ice. “What it isn’t,” she said of the sculpture, “is wallpaper.”
b.1961, Pretoria
Playing the part of court jester, Brett Murray’s darkly humorous work pairs pop culture with political satire. Poking fun at South Africa’s imperfect transition to democracy is a long-standing and provocative preoccupation in Murray’s work. Such poking – in a country still marked by apartheid’s legacy – has proved a dangerous game. The artist, however, is no stranger to public outrage. “I know I’ve succeeded,” he says, “when my work is offensive to some.” The laughter his work inspires is more often uncomfortable. There are no easy jokes in the nation’s body politic. His visual punchlines, critic Hazel Friedman wrote, confront “the viewer in that place where a laugh and gasp are indistinguishable.” They also confront defamation lawsuits. Murray became a figure of public scandal in 2011 after his painting The Spear – depicting then-president Jacob Zuma with genitals exposed – was lambasted as obscene, vulgar, distasteful, and indecent. The president complained, without apparent irony, that the work painted him “a philanderer and womaniser.” Shortly after, the painting was vandalised. Murray, shaken but unharmed, suggested his “dick joke” had caused some “prevarication” in the nation’s courts.