On an Artist - Samson Mnisi

A Samson Mnisi I Never Met

Social media networks inundating cyberspace have created an insidious breed of colloquial, voyeuristic critics of Art. This is the case more often for "politics" – but of late, “ART”, in any consumable form. I suppose, foremost an acceptance of my cyber-affiliations and addictions is essential because my initial acquaintance with Samson Mnisi’s work is from a vantage point of a digital art gazer. I could be a groupie. “Liked” a picture of a painting he posted on the web – a hybrid or organism and machine fidgeting with connections in a “world” that can be termed a “hyper-reality” for the post-humanistic milieu. So, my interactions with the phantom artist were those resultant from “an explicit stalking” normalised by lack of physical involvement so obvious in all digital interactions. Perhaps for now; since holographic reality is a postulation still quite confined at research stages, what I imagine him to look like is a fiction not to be entertained.
 

Self-reflection through someone’s mirror can be suicidal. The creative plurality of art, I feel, lies at the integration of the spiritual introversion of its creator and technique through which the art-object is externalised. In part, all traits of the creative entity can be identified in the seasoned personification symbolised by the art-object of their creation; but I dare not assume that the works pictured here are a reflection of Samson, the man. Undeniably, as in some special instances, such traits do transpose beyond mere genetic connection to their source, and become independent yet dependent on appearance to observation and perception by others.

A filmmaker, academic and writer – he seems to me himself a hybrid of historical consequences; collectivised or personal. This hybrid or hybridised perspective of the world is clearly inscribed in pencil sketches that tell of life gone past; yet wailing for a final reclamation by a generation that could save even the spirit world. Like cultural esteem recuperating from a stifling chrysalis – his art becomes synonymous with the joviality of a new language from a tongue cut out centuries immemorial.

Perhaps analysing an artist’s work is more an act of self-analysis. Scaling through one’s own inner debris confined in spaces that define our likes and dislikes, repulsions and attractions – in order to determine a moment of self-observation. It could well be like laying all gonads of one’s malformed awareness on a surgical table and dissecting responses perceived in reaction to that which is observed. And as Feud had impugned – self-analysis is a fatalistic exercise. This little analysis of his work  is becoming more of a visit to a psychiatric ward where I am the lobotomist of my own brain. Now a personal shock at the new spaces inside reflects my own unknown; archaeology of memories sacred to constructs of my own self.

All history draws from a past – or as memory would ‘imagineer’; ART could possibly BE ‘planet past’ – articulated through representations, symbols and silent strokes of caked brushes and blunted pencils. But these artworks treat their messages like prophecies, and in the very nature of the prophetic not relegated to the obscurity of most mystical experiences – instead –  a self-conscious process of reinvention and realignment with the eternal present. At this precise space at Art On Main, a distinction between the emitted and me the recipient seem to vanish, the artworks pinned against pallid walls eradicating the chasm that is between creation and observation (interpretive reception).

But would it be fair to assume that Samson (considering South Africa’s political history) is engaged in a compression of historical reality within the surrealities of his own memory? I wish to ask him... but as I said, I wouldn’t even recognise the man in this gallery of the cultured even if were standing naked next to a crucifix; a sketch pad in hand.