colour lithographs

Artwork date: 2008
Signature details: both signed, dated and numbered 2/35 in pencil in the margins; embossed with the Attwood Press chop mark,
Exhibited: Another example from this edition exhibited at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, The Haunt of Fears (solo show), 17 April to 17 May 2008. Another example from this edition exhibited at Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Anton Kannemeyer: Fear of a Black Planet (solo show), 16 October to 22 November 2008. Another example from this edition exhibited at Johannes Stegmann Gallery, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, Representations of Otherness and Resistance, 21 May to 19 June 2015.
Literature: Botes, C. and Kannemeyer, A. (2008). Bitterkomix 15, Johannesburg: Jacana Media, another example from this edition illustrated in colour on p.52. De Jesus, J. ed. (2015). Representations of Otherness and Resistance. Bloemfontein: Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery, University of the Free State, another example from this edition illustrated in colour, unpaginated. Perryer, S. ed. (2008). Anton Kannemeyer: Fear of a Black Planet. Catalogue. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson, another example from this edition illustrated on p.18-19. Tyson, J. (2012). Anton Kannemeyer’s Tactics of Translation as Critical Lens. Synthesis. Summer (4):121-148, another example from this edition are illustrated in colour on p.126.

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sheet size: 57 x 44.5 cm each

Notes:

From his series Alphabet of Democracy, the lithographs devoted to the letters B is for Black and W is for White illustrate the unhappy division of South Africa along colour lines. But there is more, because the satire does not merely draw on the result of apartheid brainwashing, but on the mindset that put it there in the first place.

As cofounder and artist of the hugely successful Bitterkomix, started in 1992, Kannemeyer is a chief protagonist when it comes to stoking the fires of derision. But in these works, the question is, who and what exactly is being derided?

Is it the legacy of neo-colonial dictionary making that has reinforced the virtue of whiteness over blackness? Is it the apartheid schooling system that Kannemeyer obviously grew up under, that is under satirical attack?

Although the work is intended to raise our chagrin it also refers back to a romanticised era in the production of European comics when Hergé’s Tintin ruled supreme over the bedrooms of little white boys.

Kannemeyer’s work, it has always been claimed, is autobiographical. So perhaps this is his apology for being born into a discipline with heavy baggage. In the series, the Black man monumentalizes all those who were painted as “opposite” in the popular art of the colonial era.

In his introduction to the book Alphabet of Democracy, comic artist Andy Mason tells us, “In a context where the notion of ‘objectivity’ seems increasingly flawed and impossibly compromised, autobiographical truth-telling becomes a bulwark against the failure of History as an objective discipline (2010:5).”

Although he may be indebted to it, it is likely that this is Kannemeyer’s growl to comic book history.

Matthew Krouse

Sources:

Kannemeyer, E (2010) Alphabet of Democracy. Cape Town and New York. Jacana, Michael Stevenson, Jack Shainman Gallery.