Anton Kannemeyer
Danie Marais, White on black on white
Anton Kannemeyer, aka Joe Dog, is the co-editor of Bitterkomix, the satirical comic magazine he started with Conrad Botes. Since the first issue appeared in 1992 he has been part of an influential new indigenous brand of biting socio-political satire. Over the past 15 years he has become a controversial and influential artist locally, while enjoying critical acclaim abroad. He has taken part in numerous international exhibitions and has been invited to almost every major European comic festival. The success of the recently published Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook (2006) is a clear indication of the impact Kannemeyer and his Bitter partner, Botes, have made on South African graphic design. Their stylistic influence is clearly visible in everything from editorial illustration to book cover design and the skateboard art of a younger generation.
The publication of the Bitterkomix Handbook can, however, also be seen as a milestone and the end of a period for Kannemeyer. The cultural and socio-political landscape has radically changed since Joe Dog began regularly blowing up the holy cows of Afrikanerdom with obvious glee. He is still swimming upstream, but his new work contains different strokes and voices more complex concerns.
His large ongoing work-in-progress, Alphabet of Democracy, of which the first pieces were unveiled in the 2005 exhibition Days of My Lives, sees Kannemeyer employing comic art to hunt bigger socio-political game. He has turned his focus from the sins, perversions and sexual repression of the fathers to the bigger post-apartheid picture. The Alphabet still sharply comments on the madness directly below the surface of the rabidly conformist parts of white South African society, especially the Afrikaans community. But as the title indicates, it is also concerned with the current mutations of bigotry bred by political correctness, financial greed and the hollow rainbow and renaissance rhetoric of a new political hierarchy. The use of the word 'democracy' becomes subversive in the context of this layered artwork which portrays the liberated South African society and its form of government as just another arbitrary social order fraught with moral ambiguity and human absurdity. Kannemeyer tackles a lot of issues politicians and journalists tend to shy away from by using a mixture of the stereotypes associated with political cartooning and combining it with the deeply personal, the irreverent and the surrealism of the subconscious. His idiosyncratic mash-up of allegory, history, existentialist nausea, self-loathing and nihilism makes for a heady brew.
The addition of four new pieces under the heading N is for Nightmare takes political satire a risky step further into the murky depths of white fear. Where the Oscar-winning film Tsotsi was careful to emphasise the humanity of the characters perpetrating violence and crime, the Nightmare pieces paint a nastier picture. Fear and anxiety, like the libido, have never been politically correct. To fear someone or something implies that you believe they mean you harm. The figures stalking the dreams of the sleeping suburbs portrayed here are not the sympathetic victims of poverty and previous disadvantagement. They are deliberately rendered as savages reminiscent of Hergé's depiction of 'the natives' in the controversial Tintin in the Congo. These nightmare images are at awkward odds with the polite noises any progressive white liberal would make during dinner-time conversation.
The use of Tintin as a satirical character, as seen in the parody of Tintin in the Congo, is poignant in more ways than one. Kannemeyer has used a Tintin-like figure to portray himself, or at times the white Afrikaans boy running, before - for example in True Love (Best of Bitterkomix, 1998) and the haunting 1974 (Best of Bitterkomix, 2002). In doing so he pays ambivalent homage to Hergé, his morally tainted comic artist hero, and to Tintin, the hero of his naive white and privileged childhood. He also immediately engages with the ongoing post-colonial discourse and the controversy surrounding highly influential narratives, for example Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which are now seen by acclaimed writers like Chinua Achebe as deplorable proof of the colonial mindset and its cultural imperialism. In Kannemeyer's work Tintin is a white African trapped in his own incriminating skin; a character who cannot escape his colonial past regardless of his personal political convictions.
The exhibition of Joe Dog's drawing books and journals add important elements to the mixture. "It is in the novel that the individual enters history," the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes argues. But it is in the journals and drawing books of Joe Dog that Anton Kannemeyer, the individual, suffers history. Collages of his consumerist and bureaucratic paper trail run seamlessly into musings about everyday life, arts, skin conditions, literature and politics. Readers are deluded into thinking that they are witnessing full disclosure and total transparency, but Susan Sontag's comments on the work of Jean Genet in her essay On Style are equally appropriate for the journals of Joe Dog:
He is recording, devouring, transfiguring his experience. In Genet's books, as it happens, this very process itself is his explicit subject; his books are not only works of art but works about art. [...] It is immaterial that Genet's characters may repel us in real life. So would most of the characters in King Lear. The interest of Genet lies in the manner whereby his 'subject' is annihilated by the serenity and intelligence of his imagination.
Exhibited together these elements become more than the sum of its parts. As a whole Kannemeyer's new work irreverently bridges the gap between graphic and contemporary conceptual art in a combination of mixed media, painting, comic art, journal writing and collages.
Wallace Stevens famously described poetry as "a violence from within that protects us from a violence without." The art of Anton Kannemeyer is clearly a violence from within, but it does not seem to believe in any form of protection but rather the need for individual resistance against the pressures of an unrelenting reality. His work is a head-on collision with the national state of desperate confusion. So don't be surprised if this new collection makes you nervous and then makes you laugh and then makes you nervous all over again.
Reproduced here with kind permission
© 2008 Danie Marais. All rights reserved.
