Michael Stevenson

Sold

2005
artificial marble, imbuia, neon
bust: 95 x 75 x 35cm
cape: 115 x 175 x 60cm
neon: 330 x 235cm
installation dimensions variable

Botha, the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2005, consistently reflects on and subverts the symbolic imagery of power, religion and art history in his complex installations. His touring exhibition A Premonition of War (at Durban Art Gallery until 22 January, then travelling to Bloemfontein, Cape Town and Johannesburg) includes such works as Scapegoat, the crucified figure of a satyr carved from anthracite; the Mieliepap Pietà, a life-size, mirror-image replica of Michelangelo’s original, made from maize meal and resin; and the bronze sculpture Abraham and Isaac, in which the son refuses his own sacrifice and turns on the father.

Memento Mori recalls two works from Botha’s exhibition Cold Fusion: gods, heroes and martyrs, held at Michael Stevenson in April/May 2005. These are the Vanitas painting which formed part of Tremor, a simulated room with a pressed ceiling suspended mid collapse; and Skeletor, the prototype for a bronze action figure with death’s head and skin stripped away to expose the flesh. These works serve as memento mori, artistic reminders of mortality, and in so doing invoke – and bring into question – centuries of ideologies determining attitudes towards life and death.

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia offers the following:

[I]n Classical antiquity … the chief thrust of memento mori was the theme of ‘carpe diem’, ‘seize the day’, which would have entailed the advice to ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ ... But the thought came into its own with Christianity, whose emphasis on Heaven, Hell, and the salvation of the soul brought death to the forefront of consciousness. As such most memento mori works are products of Christian art. In the Christian context, the memento mori acquires a moralizing purpose quite opposed to the Nunc est bibendum [‘now is the time to drink’] theme of Classical antiquity. To the Christian, the prospect of death serves to emphasize the emptiness and fleetingness of earthly pleasures, luxuries, and achievements, and thus also as an invitation to focus one’s thoughts on the prospect of the afterlife. (www.wikipedia.org)

These and other works exemplify Botha’s stated interest in ‘the power that a system of beliefs has over human thought, the blindness that it creates, and the inability to be objective that it results in’ (‘In conversation with Michael Stevenson’, Wim Botha, Cape Town, 2005, p64).