oil, metal, wood and canvas

Artwork date: 1988-1996
Signature details: signed and dated
Literature: cf. Catherine, N. and Friedman, H. (2000). Norman Catherine. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, similar examples illustrated on p.65.

(1)

175 x 63 x 63 cm

Jeremy Stephens Antiques, Johannesburg.

Notes:

In his 1961 tome on Madness and Civilisation, philosopher Michel Foucault observes that power works most effectively through the language of institutions designed to contain and control, that which is essentially uncontrollable. Fast forward to South Africa circa 2017, with its unfolding true-life tragicomedies of kleptocracy and state capture, and Foucault’s analysis becomes unnervingly prophetic. Norman Catherine’s Speaker (1988) elicits a similar shudder. We’ve watched this meta-series before, another history of insanity in an age, ostensibly, of reason. Directed by king-makers, deal-brokers and gate keepers, it has become a demented, dandified dance of dictators, puppets and apparatchiks, choreographed to the syncopated rhythm of some alternative reality.But this mixed media work was produced, not during an era of speakers of the house of parliament who have become mouthpieces for Luthuli House, nor of puny leaders propped up by political expediency. Catherine’s Speaker was produced during the final, frenzied death rattles of apartheid.Speaker is a wired, crude caricature of a pop-star, a vaudeville performer or a politician. Backed by a ghetto-blaster type PA system, he has speakers for ears and his serrated mouth is agape, as though performing fellatio on the microphone in his hand. Catherine’s technique of rendering this gnashing, grimacing, gyrating, smirking, snarling, shrieking form is deliberately hard-edged and lurid.Yet our response – once we have recovered from the initial frisson of shock – is to laugh. Which is precisely the point of Catherine’s play: laughter is the antidote to anger and Catherine uses it as a distancing mechanism, much like the puppeteer mediates the message through his marionettes, to soften the blow and to make the pain more palatable. His comic vision incorporates multiple mood swings, metaphors and references. For example, the jagged, skeletal form of Speaker pays obeisance to Mexican folk art, in particular ‘Dia de los Meurtos’ – the Day of the Dead – where the skeleton is employed as both metaphysical motif and a symbol of political resistance to tyranny.Furthermore, in Speaker, Catherine includes one of his recurring visual refrains: the Hamsa – an image used both in Ancient Egyptian art and throughout the history of Judaeo, Christian and Muslim religions as a sign of protection against the evil eye. This suggests that within Catherine’s strident, jagged-edged imagery there is at least the hope, the possibility, of transcendence.As cultural analyst Ashraf Jamal observes in his 2002 essay on Catherine: ‘The eye circumscribes, contains, mediates; it is the object and that which defines the object. In the works that make up Catherine's principle contribution the figures are always wide-awake, alert. They glare with a vivid self- possession.’The single eye also represents omniscience, a gateway into the soul, vigilance, moral conscience, and truth. In a country bonded, not by truth, but by the institutionalised language of consensus, Catherine’s work speaks not only to an iniquitous past or insidious present. It provides a portent of a future in which the measured voice of reason - our constitutional democracy - could become muted by the demented babble, full of sound and fury, of corruption.

Hazel Friedman

Sources:

Jamal, A. (2001). Norman Catherine and the Art of Terror. Pietermaritzburg: School of Language, Culture and Communication, University of Natal, p.12. Available at http://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/15250/Jamal_Norman(2001).pdf?sequence=1 [20 May 2017]