This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

1st March 2008

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Visitors to “Being Blown Backwards into the Future” may be confused about the connections between the two artists whose works are on display. The flights of fancy of Beezy Bailey dominate this exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery, while only one room has been set aside for a handful of pieces in more realist mode by Joyce Ntobe. 

Those who are familiar with the ongoing relationship between these two characters, however, will not be surprised. As suggested by the (one assumes deliberate) slip in Bailey’s textual contribution to the catalogue – he refers to his fellow-exhibitor as “Joyce Notbe” – there is no Joyce Ntobe. This domestic worker turned professional artist is a persona, an alter-ego dreamed up by Bailey to allow him to explore other facets of his artistic self while acknowledging the problematic racial and economic dimensions of representation.

While some might say that Bailey, as a white man, has no ‘right’ to depict the experiences of black South Africa, through Ntobe he is able to do just that. The façade is not entirely effective. In Ntobe’s preamble to the catalogue, the ironic tone is clearly Bailey’s, such as when we read that s/he made paintings from photographs taken of flooding in Gugulethu and Khayelitsha: “The floods are terrible, our children become sick, but I know what the Madam likes to hang in her lounge.”

Indeed, township art (that is, art of the townships, not art from the townships) has become passé, given that it is now sold to passing tourists on street corners and in curio shops. Bailey seems to know this – and to know that there are ethical complications in aestheticising material need by making shanty scenes into ‘beautiful’ artworks – which is why Joyce Ntobe is a useful foil. She offers a counter-argument: “After the floods the reflections and the colours and shapes are beautiful yet the people there suffer so much. It is like heaven in hell. This is why I make art, to turn something ugly into something beautiful.”

When one confronts a painting like “Floods at Gugulethu”, a large canvas that invites you to stare into the deep blues of water and sky, it’s hard to find fault with this desire. Here, as in “Gogo and the Little Girl”, the image reflected in a still puddle is almost clearer than the ‘real’ scene; the lines are sharper, the geometry neater, and the effect – even though we know that the water is probably contaminated – is undeniably beautiful.

Ntobe/Bailey has also produced four portraits, head-and-shoulder paintings of people who share her fate (as s/he outlines it) of being given an English name by whiteys who couldn’t pronounce her proper name. “Cynthia”, “Thomas”, “Mavis” and “Virginia” are all dressed in white, and could also share her previous occupation of domestic worker or gardener for a suburban Madam. But their griselled, weary faces have a kind of stoic dignity, and they won’t tell us their stories.

Bailey-as-Bailey, on the other hand, has a different project: exploring the conundrum of white men. The presiding metaphor that he uses is ‘the fallen angel’ – “the demise of the white male in South Africa who thought he was higher than the Almighty” but who has “now fallen from grace” and “is forced to search his soul”. It is an effective analogy; conceiving and sustaining apartheid required no small amount of hubris, and a concomitant amount of humility would seem to be required of post-apartheid pale males.

But while Bailey mentions Lucifer when referring to a yet-to-be-unveiled bronze sculpture, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, his fallen angels are far from being virile Satanic figures like the anti-hero (favoured by Milton and Blake) who, having been ousted by God, declares it “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”. Rather, they are by turns feminised, anthropomorphised and even made comical.

Stilletto heels and pumps are ubiquitous in Bailey’s work, whether worn by men or women or androgynous figures. In “Angel Rising”, an ostensibly male visage sits awkwardly on top of a dress that covers a waif-like body; in “The Red-Shoes”, “Three Fallen Angels” and even in the large bronze “Fallen Angel”, the thin legs of the feminine ‘angels’ make them seem more like insects.

Other ‘angels’ are more obviously men – whether in a dull trenchcoat, cricket bat in hand (“I Don’t Like Cricket, I Love It”) or naked and in motion, penis swinging like a small pendulum (“Running for the Lost Ship”). The latter work, in which the figure’s wings flap while he glances backwards and forwards, a ship at sea in the background, is richly suggestive: perhaps a commentary on emigration, or a Biblical allusion – the Ark before the Flood, echoing the notion that white men have “brought God’s wrath upon them”?

Certainly, any form of machismo seems to be laughable. In “Cock a Doodle Sky” a naked male angel is surrounded by an array of floating four-wheeled vehicles and a bright orange-red cock (as in a male chicken). Here as elsewhere, birds seem to be used as mocking and often false correlatives to ‘flying’ angels. In “Chicken Run” and “Runaway Chicken”, the viewer’s eye is confused as to what is an angelic human form and what is a (wingless, featherless) plucked chicken. Likewise, “Papageno in Africa” shows the bird-catching character from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute to be woefully out of his element.

If the intention here is to indicate that the white South African male is ultimately a humorous phenomenon, this assertion is foregrounded when subjects are dressed in the motley outfits of a court fool or an acrobat. Many figures are out of proportion, with long torsos or legs that stretch as if made of rubber (certainly, this is what allows “Soutpiel” to stretch like a trapeze artist across the ocean – and, by implication, straddling two continents, dangle you-know-what in the brine).

The jester-figure is central to pieces such as “Our Cup Runneth Over”, “Clown with Cockerel”, “The Fire Room 2”, “Clown on Fire” and even “Kick Dancer”. There is an inevitable association between this subject and the artist himself, whose job it is to entertain and to demonstrate skill. At the same time, as a white male, he has lost the crown of authority and replaced it with a jester’s cap (compare the paintings just mentioned with the bronze sculpture “King and Queen”; Bailey’s crowns look like fools’ hats, and vice-versa).

The angel thus becomes linked to the clown – in “Dark Horse”, the figure of a white man seems to float or fly, knees impossibly bent, over the body of black angel, lying supine on the ground.

"Missionary Position", on the other hand, presents a figure whose motley outfit fuses with a chief's (feathered?) headdress. Staring out of gothic windows at the lush jungle beyond, either holding court or holed up in some fortress-church, this figure reminded me of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness: a European "gone native" who is lonely, isolated and deeply ambivalent about his presence in these suddenly unfamiliar surroundings. A companion piece is "Lost Gods", in which another feminised insect/angel confronts "the horror" of an untamed landscape.    

To complicate matters further, some of the angels are in fact the white man’s ‘other’ – his doppelganger, or more accurately his guilty conscience – as suggested in “Food on the Table”, in which the angel is a haunting, child-like (black) figure looking longingly at a few food items on a crisp white tablecloth.

This contrast is made explicit in Bailey’s “Romulus and Remus” pieces, which make use of one of the founding myths of the Roman Empire: the twin brothers were abandoned and raised together by a wolf, but Romulus killed Remus, setting the tenor for Rome’s military might. Bailey depicts the infants in their archetypal suckling pose, but whereas the white infant is clothed and comfortable, the caricatured black infant is naked, with a stomach swollen from hunger.

Nevertheless, few of the works in “Being Blown Backwards into the Future” are emphatically ‘political’. There is, moreover, a visual continuity across many of them that addresses broader existential themes: dark purples, starry night skies and distant city or forest backdrops hint at the alienation and cosmic loneliness experienced by citizens of modernity.