oil on canvas

Artwork date: 1990
Signature details: signed and dated; printed with the artist’s name and the title on a label on the reverse
Exhibited: Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Norman Catherine Now and Then, 4 August to 3 October 2004.
Literature: Friedman, H. (2000). Norman Catherine. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, colour illustration on p.104. Jamal, A. (2001). Norman Catherine and the Art of Terror. Pietermaritzburg, School of Language, Culture and Communication, University of Natal, p.17.

(1)

89.5 x 149 cm

Notes:

If there is a single work that encapsulates Norman Catherine’s vision within an astonishingly vast visual repertoire it is Negotiator. Painted in 2000, this work reflects Catherine’s unrelenting obsession with distorted depictions of power and his ongoing duels with duality, mediated through a menagerie of anthropomorphic balms for an assortment of psychological wounds.Catherine’s prodigious career spans more than 40 years and has straddled the most formative periods in South African contemporary art. From the 70s through the end of the last century and into the adolescence of this one, he has depicted the frailties of his own psyche. And, simultaneously, Catherine has targeted the machinations of politics, patronage and cronyism - his dystopian vision of an alien-nation mitigated through darkly comical avatars.Negotiator incorporates both archetypal and literal imagery in brash, neon hues. But this painting, as with Catherine’s entire oeuvre, is also awash with subtleties and subtexts, referencing mythology, psychology and the history of art.Initially it evokes the terrifying scenario of a home invasion, suggesting urban degeneration, escalating violence, corruption and the fallout of a society still in the traumatic throes of post-liberation stress. The bare bayonet bulb of the overhead lamp resembles a cyclops and the scene is reminiscent of an interrogation or torture session. As for the cannabis plants, well, they reinforce the psychotropic nuances that constantly infiltrate Catherine’s imagery.In Freudian-Jungian terms, the house symbolises the superego - the shell or the mask. The intruder represents the id and the terrain of repressed desire. But in Negotiator there exists ambivalence about who has intruded on whom and an evident symbiosis between mobsters and monster. Since ancient times the latter has been depicted as an emblem of the collective unconscious and primarily as a powerful, predominantly feminine symbol. But Catherine’s monster is mummified, muzzled, amputated, disarmed and impotent to ward off the slithering serpent– another archetypal representation of sexual temptation, treachery, avarice and vice.It is impossible to ignore the phallocentric symbolism of Negotiator. It speaks of a world where men are beasts and vice versa, of pathological violence, death, drugs, paranoia, psychosis and the occult. It is about the negotiation of power, between domination and subjugation. But it is also about the revelation of suppressed fears leading, possibly, to transformation or transcendence. There might be mobster-monsters lurking within, but Catherine’s irrepressible humour also crouches under the cloaks of gloom in that ineffable space where a laugh and a gasp collide.

Hazel Friedman

Sources:

Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Norman Catherine Now and Then, 4 August to 3 October 2004., Friedman, H. (2000). Norman Catherine. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, colour illustration on p.104. Jamal, A. (2001). Norman Catherine and the Art of Terror. Pietermaritzburg, School of Language, Culture and Communication, University of Natal, p.17.