THE controversial painting by Brett Murray which exposes President Jacob Zuma’s genitals cannot be classified as art but a personal attack on a black head of state by a white artist considered by some as a racist.
The painting, titled ‘The Spear ’, is being displayed at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. It is an insult to blacks and their culture and outright abuse of artistic freedom by Murray and the gallery that is displaying it.
South Africa is a democracy and has one of the best constitutions in the world. South Africans have the right to criticise anyone, including the president, but making personal attacks on the head of state and putting such provocative paintings of Zuma with his genitals exposed is just over the limit.
Murray has just gone too far in exercising his freedom of expression. In fact this is outright abuse of the freedom of expression and a violation of the President’s rights and privacy which he is entitled to as a citizen of this country.
Surely Murray’s painting has nothing to do with freedom of expression but a direct attack on Zuma, his family and the presidency itself. I wonder what would happen if Murray had insulted the head of state of an Islamic country or Prophet Mohammad. Moslems would have invaded the gallery and beat the hell out of the artist in question or any official who allowed such offensive painting to be put on display.
The artist would probably have joined British author Salman Rushdie in hiding. Rushdie got carried away while exercising his right as an author. But he went too far when he published his book titled ‘Satanic Verses’.The book sparked worldwide controversy in the Moslem world, leading to the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, passing a death sentence on him on February 14, 1989.
Moslems around the world were ordered to hunt the author down and kill him for insulting their faith and prophet Mohammad. Rushdie was forced to go into hiding and was provided with round the clock protection by the British government.
Well, we don’t want that to happen to Murray but he is also lucky that he lives in South Africa where artists can abuse their freedom of expression and get away with it.
What angers me as an artist myself and writer is that there are some people, especially whites, who have come to Murray’s defence while his backers have ignored Zuma’s rights as a human being, father and citizen of this country.
I am also not surprised by many black people who have condemned his painting. Murray has also been attacked by Zuma’s political opponents who believe that this time, the artist has gone too far and should be dealt with decisively. These are probably times when the ANC needs people like Julius Malema to deal with Murray, men of conviction.
South Africans of all races should unite in condemning the abuse of artistic freedom by Murray and other artists who hide under the country’s constitution. Zuma is a public figure as head of state but he is also a an individual whose rights should be respected by all of us.
You do wonder what would have happened had Murray been living in Zimbabwe or China after attacking the President like that. Your guess is as good as mine. Such behaviour by Murray has become a recruiting platform for those who take the view that leaders like Robert Mugabe are heroes of the African continent. Mugabe does not tolerate nonsense in his country, especially from people who think they are better than other races.
During the apartheid era, white journalists and artists never insulted white leaders using their art. Why are they allowed to insult a black President? I am not a Zuma apologist, but it angers me as a black person to see a white artist abusing his artist freedom to insult a black President.
I was not surprised when one official of the Church of Nazareth, Enoch Mthembu, called on South Africans to kill the artist Murray for what he called “insulting blacks and their culture”.
Mthembu, whose church has embraced African traditions, said Murray's painting was an attack on all black people in South Africa and deserved to be stoned to death.
Source: www.newzimbabwe.com
Painting upside down is a method applied by artist exhibiting in Wirral - wirralnews.co.uk
Source: www.wirralnews.co.uk
Oil painting decorative home add household color happier - OnTheSnow.com
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Choice decorates household hand-painted oil painting skills - OnTheSnow.com
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Bram Bogart obituary - The Guardian
The Dutch-born Belgian artist Bram Bogart, who has died aged 90, had ambitions to be an artist from a young age. But his father wanted the boy to follow him in becoming a blacksmith, or at least go into a trade where he would work with his hands. As a compromise, his parents sent him at 12 to a technical school to learn to be a painter and decorator, and in the evening he did a correspondence course in drawing.
After a spell of house painting, Bogart joined a Rotterdam advertising agency in 1937 as a commercial artist, painting among other subjects portraits of the child star Shirley Temple, before quitting to launch his career in fine art in 1939. Despite the subterfuge needed to avoid forced labour for the German army during the second world war, he managed to produce a sequence of sombre and undeniably Dutch landscapes, solid, low-keyed and with low horizons.
Soon after liberation in 1945, he made a dull portrait of himself with a brush in one hand and the regulation-issue oval palette for wannabe artists in the other. He filled the leftover space behind him with a wall, and it is the wall that holds the attention, with its real wall-like feeling, rough-textured, solid; this and the hands, the hands of a Van Gogh potato eater, of a workman, just what his father had wanted for him.
This sense in his work of the tangible, a coming together of his first job painting houses and his implacably wall-like landscapes, lasted throughout Bogart's lifetime, through to the overwhelming presence of his celebrated late paintings, glowing blocks constructed, quite literally, out of great globs of pigment mixed with cement. Abstract, yes; expressionist, yes; but not abstract expressionist. He was not interested in gestural painting, brushed or poured from cans, not in his mature work anyway. His concern was building paintings.
Bogart was born in Delft, where he spent the last year of the war in hiding. His father bestowed his own name, Abraham van den Boogaart, on his son. It was a 1950s Parisian gallery owner who suggested the switch to Bram Bogart. Liberation for Bogart had meant Paris, and he was one of a number of hungry artists at the end of the war who saw arrival in France as a date with destiny. There, he began life anew by absorbing the discoveries of cubism in organising pictorial space to dispel the leftover space of his early work.
Between 1946 and 1950 he shuttled between Paris and Le Cannet on the Côte d'Azur, and then settled in Paris for almost a decade, painting often in monochrome like Jean Dubuffet, some of the canvases worked edge to edge with figures suggestive of the then recently discovered drawings of the Lascaux cavemen.
In 1957 he showed for the first time in the UK, as part of an Arts Council touring exhibition, and held his own among a group that included Dubuffet, the Canadian abstract expressionist Jean-Paul Riopelle, the French tachiste Pierre Soulages, and Karel Appel, Bogart's compatriot and a member of the Cobra group (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). In 1958 Bogart had his first solo show in London, at the Gimpel Fils gallery, of canvases that were, the Times critic remarked, both sensuous and with the quality of rock faces.
Bogart got on with Appel and his Cobra associates but fell out with the Dutch cultural establishment over what he perceived as its obsession with Cobra at the expense of any other style. It may not have been coincidence that in 1960 he moved to Belgium, first to Brussels, then for the rest of his life to Ohain, in the province of Walloon Brabant. He took Belgian citizenship in 1969.
During these years, he laid on pigment and cement mixture so thickly that he had to arrange for metal stretchers to bear the weight of his work. Bogart's art entered collections all over Europe and he had shows at galleries including the Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Guggenheim in New York and the Louvre and Pompidou Centre in Paris.
No public gallery in Britain picked up on him but there were several exhibitions in London over the years, culminating in two shows at Bernard Jacobson in Mayfair, in 2007 and 2009, showing late paintings of great beauty. The early drawing lessons paid off too. At the end of his life he was said to be still able, like Giotto, to draw a perfect circle, freehand.
Bogart is survived by his wife, Leni, whom he married in 1958, and their children, Cornelia, Inge and Bram.
• Bram Bogart (Abraham van den Boogaart), artist, born 12 July 1921; died 2 May 2012
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
Painting Stirs a Debate in South Africa - New York Times
The tussle over the painting is the latest battle over free speech in a country where the government has taken increasingly firm steps to squelch critics despite one of the world’s most expansive sets of individual rights, enshrined in its 15-year-old Constitution.
At the center of the controversy is a six-foot-tall acrylic on canvas, called “The Spear,” painted by Brett Murray, an artist based in Cape Town. It is part of an exhibition of his work at the Goodman Gallery called “Hail to the Thief II.”
The painting depicts a man who resembles Mr. Zuma in a heroic, Leninesque pose, but his genitals appear to be hanging out of his trousers. Mr. Zuma, a practicing polygamist who has 4 wives and at least 20 children, had been charged with rape before he became president.
In 2006, he was acquitted of raping the daughter of a friend; he said the sex was consensual. He was heavily criticized for his testimony at the trial, in which he argued that the woman had dressed provocatively and that as a Zulu man, he was required to sexually gratify her.
The woman was H.I.V. positive, and Mr. Zuma did not use a condom; he testified that he showered immediately afterward in the hope of avoiding infection, a response that shocked many people in a country grappling with some of the highest rates of H.I.V. infection in the world.
Mr. Murray’s artworks, done in the style of Soviet propaganda, tackle government corruption, an issue that fills newspapers in South Africa every day and has become a major source of disillusionment among citizens of this young democracy.
One canvas features the logo of the African National Congress, the liberation movement that ended apartheid and now governs South Africa, with the words “for sale”; another with the logo includes the word “sold.” One poster uses a popular slogan of the struggle against apartheid, “amandla,” or “power,” to show protesters demanding not freedom but “Chivas, BMWs and bribes.”
In a statement, the A.N.C. called “The Spear” “distasteful, vulgar, indecent and disrespectful,” and “an affront to the dignity and the privacy of President Zuma in all his capacities, but also as a South African whose right to human dignity and privacy is protected and guaranteed by the South African Constitution.”
The Goodman Gallery responded by arguing that the artist had a right to express his views through his paintings.
“The gallery provides a neutral space in which dialogue and free expression is encouraged,” it said in a statement. “In this space, the A.N.C.’s right to condemn the work is acknowledged as much as the artist’s right to display it. This, the gallery believes, is democracy at work. But the gallery cannot give up its right to decide what art will hang on its walls.”
Mr. Murray has declined to talk about the dispute; through the Goodman Gallery, he has said he prefers to let the art speak for itself. But other South African artists have quickly risen to his defense. William Kentridge, perhaps South Africa’s most famous visual artist, said in an affidavit in support of the Goodman Gallery, “Both the work of the artist and the controversy his work arouses are to be welcomed,” and South Africans are “fortunate to live in a country with a Constitution that acknowledges the importance of open debate on all issues.”
Vandals splashed paint on the painting on Tuesday, painting an X over the subject’s face and black paint on the genitals. The Goodman Gallery said it was forced to close the exhibition temporarily.
The painting has stirred passionate debate about the limits of free speech and racism in a society still emerging from decades of white-minority rule.
Gwede Mantashe, a senior leader of the A.N.C., said the painting played into stereotypes of black men as hypersexualized.
“It is rude, crude and disrespectful,” he told reporters in Johannesburg. “It has an element of racism. It says that black people feel no pain and can be portrayed walking around with their genitals in the open. They are objects of ridicule. I can tell you that if you were to draw a white politician in that way, the outcry would be totally different.”
But Mondli Makhanya, a senior columnist at The Sunday Times, a South African newspaper, wrote that Mr. Zuma’s outsize sex life made the topic fair game.
“It will be his sexual legacy that we will remember more than anything else,” Mr. Makhanya wrote of Mr. Zuma. “His sexual endeavors are therefore fair game for artists, cartoonists, comedians, radio D.J.’s and tavern jokers.”
Source: www.nytimes.com
Zuma painting defaced to 'prevent civil war' - Mail & Guardian Online
One of the men accused of defacing the contentious spear painting at the Goodman Gallery said he did so to prevent a civil war split along racial lines.
“It took me 15 seconds to destroy this insensitive artwork. We have a lot more to worry about in South Africa than a painting.
There are people’s lives in danger, the racial tension is there and people don’t realise what this can lead to”, a resolute Barend la Grange told the Mail & Guardian outside the Hillbrow magistrate’s court.The Spear depicts President Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed and forms part of artist Brett Murray’s Hail to the Thief II exhibition.
The artwork caused a national outcry and has been labelled racist by the ANC, who are seeking an urgent court interdict to prevent the painting from being exhibited or published.
Spoilt ballot paper
La Grange admitted to painting a large red X over the genital and facial area of the art piece, before his co-accused Louis Mabokela smeared black paint all over the surface of the image – all the while eNews television cameras filmed the incident on Tuesday.
La Grange also claimed he had never met Mabokela prior to the incident and that both acts of defacing were carried out independently.
He said his act of defacing the artwork symbolised a spoilt ballot paper.
“The first X was against ANC led government, who I believe are going the wrong direction and the second X was against people making a mockery of our president,” he said.
La Grange said that while he didn’t like Zuma, he was still his president and had respect for the office of the presidency.
“I saw the people at the gallery were not there for art, they were there to make a joke of the president.
La Grange also accused the Goodman Gallery of perpetuating the racial prejudices of South Africa’s past by allowing the painting to be exhibited.
“I lived through apartheid, I didn’t govern the system but I benefitted from it. I thought it only right as a white person to destroy this insensitive thing that was also created by a white person,” he said.
Change the Constitution
La Grange then echoed the ANC’s assertion that the constitutional right to freedom of expression cannot be used as an excuse to violate the dignity of others.
“If the Constitution protects people who do thing like this, then the Constitution must be changed. I didn’t diffuse the situation, but the fact that this painting is no longer there makes me feel far better,” he said.
The duo’s case was postponed until June 28 to gather more evidence.
Mabokela refused to comment after the case was postponed but his lawyer Krish Naidoo confirmed he had laid a charge of assault against security at the gallery.
Footage showed Mabokela being roughed up by gallery security immediately after defacing the painting.
“We intend to seek justice in the matter of my client being assaulted at the gallery,” Naidoo told the M&G
The police confirmed security guard Paul Molesiwa had been arrested and briefly appeared in the Hillbrow magistrate’s court on Wednesday, where he was granted R1 000 bail.
Interdict continues
Meanwhile the ANC has vowed to continue its court challenge against the artwork – despite it having been defaced.
“We still believe this painting continues to tarnish the image of Zuma. That’s why we are still going to court to find out if his rights have been violated. This is no longer just about him in any case, this matter needs to be resolved as it is polarising South African society,” ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu told the M&G.
Source: mg.co.za
Trial of alleged vandals of Zuma painting postponed - Business Day South Africa
THE trial of two men accused of vandalising a painting depicting President Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed was postponed in the Hillbrow Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday.
The matter was postponed to June 28 for further investigation.
Barend la Grange and Louis Mabokela are accused of defacing the Brett Murray painting at the Goodman Gallery on Tuesday.
Bail of R1000 was extended for both men. They face charges of malicious damage to property.
The gallery where the controversial painting of Mr Zuma is housed was temporarily closed to the public on Tuesday. It was still closed on Wednesday morning.
Gallery owner Liza Essers said the move was prompted by numerous threats and the defacing incident. The painting was defaced by two people visiting the gallery.
The South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg will hear an African National Congress application on Thursday to have the painting taken down.
A third person, George Moyo, was arrested for spray-painting on a wall outside the Goodman Gallery. He appeared in the Hillbrow Magistrate’s Court earlier on Wednesday.
Ms Essers said the painting, The Spear, had generated a debate that clearly engaged important legal and constitutional issues.
"I furthermore never imagined that this debate would transform into harmful physical action," she said. "This is over and above questions of political power, which formed part of its original dialogue."
The gallery recognised how divided the country had become over the controversy the painting had sparked.
"We must take cognisance of all responses to our exhibitions, and do not value one opinion above another," Ms Essers said.
The painting was defaced with red and black paint, obscuring the face and waist of the figure.
SAPA
Source: www.businessday.co.za
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