What is a political art, I often ask myself when observing various works denoting or depicting political scenes, upheavals and personages either in iconoclastic representations or deviant renditions that speak of an expressed sentiment.
The malaise is further exacerbated when exploring a number of Dathini Mzayiya’s works which, as I believe, provide very living metaphors to the confusion of our dead past and breathing present.
A commitment to blackness, as a form of lived disharmony with purported gains of its liberation or lack thereof, the lurking visages of brute force, symbolized by police brigades greased in blood, are yet other iconic indictment on brutalities experienced at the hands of a law.
His work critiques pluralities of terror against blackness, through layered techniques that express an excess of prohibitions and obstacles within the black experiences in post-apartheid South Africa.
The Saints (2012), also referred to as The Founding Fathers is an emancipatory piece which is not timid in its depiction of a social myths sustained by self-gratifying leaders. Revisiting the work in light of the recent passing of FW De Klerk, one is given untranslatable co-presentation of memory past and present.
As a descriptive, or an interpretative or an explicitly critical approximation of two former leaders, who appear to have painted halos over each other’s heads, the artwork is a crucial as well as a participatory, social activism in light of new form of political communication about our fraudulent past.
Provocative themes of tokenism are hinted in work depicting the EFF as SOLD, or the altered face on an ANC campaign poster, are speaking as political witness where the black body is a constant battleground for exploitation and fetishism and eventual corruption.
And as a long tradition of “urban artivists” have always accepted that no art produced against tyranny and violence is ever in vain, such are the vague and nebulous piece expressing Dathini’s feelings about events such as the murder of Andries Tatane and the subsequent acquittal of the POLICE force that fatally shot him, in a purportedly democratic South Africa.
These pieces form a gloomy chorus of black hopelessness, retracting from established versions of facticity and historical memory, providing a post-political rhetoric devoid of allegiances.
I often stare aimlessly at somewhat destroyed identities fractured on Dathini’s canvases, a mosaic of anonymities exquisitely executed in epic depictions of present histories and believe that the gravity of art is a catalyst in complicating and not simplifying the perceived truth of violations.
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This bravery is evident among many young South African artists and should be commended and lauded, even though there might be an alarming anonymity of social spaces for such visceral art that explores vivid narratives of an immediate struggle, especially in townships.
It is now becoming a concern for galleries prone and accustomed to curate according to market-based tastes that they seem to cater less and less for the ideologically astute citizen who is not interested in utopian escapism, and given art’s interpretive openness, a need for spaces with diversely progressive visions is evident.
Art that is a form of political discourse, is now becoming a norm even in often otherwise conservative spaces where Dathini is working and exhibiting, which could be prelude to the return of art that is insusceptible to traditional political analysis, speaking to current trends and steeped in ideological dissidence and subversions.
And while some of our talented creative practitioners receive their recognition and public acclaim, there still remains a vast majority who are yet to find audiences. This could be because there still exists trends that privilege certain art practices, thus marginalizing by means of epistemic downgrading other forms of expression.
Artists representing political views are not immune to segregation and perpetual lack of resources; and this can be countered by establishing collective art safe zones, where unrestricted creativity is allowed to flourish.
Images sourced from Artist's Pages
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