Malcolm Payne at the UCT Irma Stern Museum
by Lloyd Pollak
Last week all was ooh, aah and wow at the Irma Stern Museum where 'Illuminated Manuscripts' provided the 'shock of the new'. Viewers were gob-smacked by the originality of Malcolm Payne's computer-generated imagery and his novel technical accomplishments. The artist deploys digital manipulation to bravura effect, and his photographic prints achieve an impressive luminosity and chromatic brilliance.
'Illuminated Manuscripts' seemingly ushers us into an alternative universe, another dimension, where space, light and matter obey different laws. Here gravitational pressures pull every which way: objects are yanked into mind-boggling new forms; and the patterned grounds of gyrating line shimmy and jive with astonishing momentum.
W/Flora, one of Payne's most grandly scaled and ambitious compositions, is placed immediately opposite the entry to the exhibition space where it monopolises an entire wall. Such pride of place indicates that Payne deems it one of his most significant achievements. Like the rest of 'Illuminated Manuscripts', it combines visual glut and profusion with dizzying movement to create an overwhelmingly strange and phantasmagoric effect. A seething proliferation of myriad superimposed images and patterns swirl around like Catherine wheels, or boomerang out at us, and the result is delirious retinal overload.
Ceramic ornaments like quaint gnomes and cute snoozing babies; plastic and cuddly soft toys in the form of winsome teddy bears; grimacing monkeys; big, bandanna-clad, black mamas and pert teeny-boppers in billowing 50s skirts jostle for space with roses in naturalistic photographic images that ooze a cheap, but irresistible, nostalgic charm. Our first reaction is enthralled delight, but then ominous overtones register.
Stylised magnifying glasses suggestive of crime and detection, and infestations of beetles and spiders swollen with venom, strike a sinister note. Some dolls are subject to such drastic ananmorphic distortion that they resemble thalidomide freaks. Diagrammatic representations of bombs and grenades with sizzling fuses, and toxins sounding alarm, occur along with the conventional danger sign of the skull and crossbones.
Slowly meaning emerges from this welter. Payne addresses the clash of ethnicities and faiths, and the violence this provokes in the contemporary world. The thick-lipped black, winsome white and slit-eyed Oriental dolls redolent of racial stereotyping and prejudice, are interspersed with religious symbols. There are sprinkles of stars loosed from the Islamic symbol of crescent moon and star, present in so many of Payne's other images. There are also serried rows of stars of David and crosses. The latter obviously represent Christianity, but they also recall the sea of crosses in the French graveyards built on Second World War battle sites, and thus represent the carnage of war.
A crumpled map of the Middle East, which associates these conflicts with the Arab/Israeli impasse and Yankee aggression in Iraq, dominates the centre of the image. Fundamentalism, fanaticism and the post 9/11 ethos of gung-ho militarist onslaught are Payne's themes. Mickey Mouse, a supremely American icon, reigns over the image, and he identifies the USA as the foremost transgressor. Terrestrial globes can be seen reflected in his eyes, and these indicate Bush's lust for conquest and domination.
Each successive image enriches this macabre iconography of dread. Objects acquire symbolic resonance as emblems of blight, summons and alarm, and constant shifts of style and scale create a sense of fragmentation and division. Immaculately pristine, computer-generated design brings a world of galactic fantasy into being, and Payne intersperses this with grotesque and ghoulish elements to provide an alarming scenario of our future. The domestic overtones set up by endearing dolls, toys and china bric-a-brac bring this menace close to home.
Naturalistic photographs of militaristic toys, armed soldiers, tanks and fighter planes; diseased faces, dice and alarm clocks sit side by side with anamorphically distorted photographs of skulls, limbs, wristwatches and terrestrial globes. The mix includes simplified iconic representations of sirens, loudspeakers and explosives; purely abstract imagery of spheres, random striped shapes and targets; and finally decorative strapwork entrelacs of scrolling lines.
This pullulating mass is arranged in multiple superimposed layers placed upon a ground formed of miniaturised rows of crosses, ribbons and stars of David. Axonometric distortion creates the illusion that these rows occur upon spherical surfaces: they appear to overlay a field of bulging convexities and receding concavities. These seemingly three-dimensional ovals and spheres are arranged in parallel lines to form Payne's pictorial architecture.
Sunbursts of diagonal lines conduct the eye outwards towards the framing edge, and inwards towards these central ovals or rounds which act like vortices, sucking us into the picture space. Further moiré, marbled and feathered patterns of spiraling lines and spinning concentric circles hype the image up with bang, wallop and wham-bam.
The disruptive impact of this movement is arrested by Payne's rigidly centralised, symmetrical and frontal compositions of half-circles and half-ovals arranged around the dominant central circle or oval or, in the largest prints, triple central circles or ovals. The vertical axis is strongly emphasised, and the configurations on either side of it, balanced, so that verso and recto virtually become mirror images of each other despite variations in detail.
Each image phrases two statements, a comment on the condition evoked by the title, and a second, far more significant statement which emerges from reading the entire suite. Thus Troth (faith, fidelity, betrothal) presents a witheringly cynical and misanthropic view of marriage. At base, a goofy-faced groom and his inamorata, a skeleton enveloped in bridal couture, splay heraldically outwards from centre in an arrangement reminiscent of the dead spouses crowning Gothic funerary monuments. Emblems of injury, in the form of medical photographs of bandaged, bloodied heads, prompt thoughts of the nuptial vows 'for better or worse, till death do us part', and suggest connubial assault and battery. Payne's bachelor status comes as no surprise.
At a deeper level Troth expresses the same political and social anxieties that emerge from W/Flora, and as one peruses 'Illuminated Manuscripts' so the images acquire increasingly complex ramifications. The photographs of injury and deformity seem to express apprehension at the potential consequences of genetic engineering and nuclear fall-out, just as the animal skulls convey misgivings about endangered species and global warming.
However diffusion of focus mars the impact. Everything is grist to Payne's mill. The twists of ribbon seen in a great many images introduce the themes of HIV/Aids, cancer, and violence against women which bear little relation to the artist's political concerns.
Although 'Illuminated Manuscripts' demonstrates immense visual é'clat and technical address, Payne fails to emotionally involve the viewer, or do full justice to his concerns. His intimations of catastrophe fail to perturb us because their visual manifestation appears far too unreal to lend them substance and actuality. By making Noddy, golliwogs, pixies, elves and gnomes stand in for humanity, Payne infantalises mankind, and so reduces its stature, that it becomes difficult to take it seriously or fret over its fate.
His love of period toys and campy Deco ornament causes his visual language to degenerate into modish retro kitsch and playpen knick-knackery. Such stylistic whimsy hardly seems appropriate to the solemn themes of apocalyptic war and nuclear disaster which consequently lose much of their weight and urgency. We must applaud Payne for inventing a startling new visual language, and hope that further experiment will give it emotive potency and sharper focus.
Opens: February 23
Closes: April 2
Irma Stern Museum, Cecil Road, Rosebank, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 685 5686
www.irmastern.co.za
Lloyd Pollak is a Cape Town-based critic
