Mustafa Maluka at Michael Stevenson
by Tavish McIntosh
In 'The Interview (A Transcript)' Mustafa Maluka has processed the images spawned by the mass culture industry, and, with calculated precision, infused his personal iconography with the vocabulary of the popular. Maluka's vast, imposing canvases document the artist's continued interest in the tradition of portraiture, and this, his second solo exhibition at Michael Stevenson, demonstrates the durability of his iconic style.
Hip hop DJs, R 'n B singers, football players, models and movie stars form part of Maluka's lexicon. Each subject's stance affiliates them with a different form of popular imagery. Throughout the show, instances of recognition rock the viewer. But when Paris Hilton's coy sidelong glance emerges unscathed from beneath the rigours of Maluka's paintbrush in I've decided my fate, the viewer is instantly aware that this is no longer the Hilton we love to hate. Her features are only evidenced by a starkly containing outline, and the insistent come-hither look has transformed into a more general interrogation of our relationship to the celebrated image. In a complex process of appropriation and displacement, Paris' fêted visage has been transformed into an anonymous icon of the global village. She is only one component of Maluka's private drama, an actor in his play.
In a world where icons are in constant flux, where personality is a fashion to be donned and discarded at will, Maluka's paintings exist upon the faultline between motility and stasis. The effervescence of their inspiration is tempered by their weighty traditionalism. Despite the flood of rainbows from the ears of the figure of You'll see that I will give my all, the portraits continually belie the transience of popular culture with their solemn centrality and their iconic immovability. These oil and acrylic paintings are grounded by traditional techniques like massive scale and central composition, calculated to emphasize the importance of the sitter. Maluka deliberately situates them within the canonical heritage of the portrait genre.
Technically, this is a simple maneuver. Maluka repeats his standard modus operandi of an abstract background and a linear description of the subject's features. In a move that almost defaces this, he overlays vast paint washes or thickly scumbles up areas, sometimes viciously jabbing at the canvas with his paintbrush. In this process he variously coaxes and manipulates the image until it reflects more about Mustafa Maluka than the original source. The interpretive lens of the artist is very apparent. The faces are palimpsests burying the original inspiration beneath layers of calculated colour. In You've taken everything sharp contrasts are further enhanced by the juxtaposition of poignantly acid yellow tones with more conventionally warm hues. Throughout the show, Maluka's delight in the dynamic interplay of strictly controlled colours is evident, with abstract colour patterns the vehicle of pictorial depth.
The persistent bricolage that Maluka employs allows him to displace the patterns of high fashion, the features of celebrities and the techniques of graphic designers. In this remove, the seamless consumption of popular imagery is revealed. The celebrated image is assigned personality by the popular press in order to make these personae more palatable and intimately engaging. But repeatedly the moments Maluka transcribes appear like the subject's response to an interrogation. Living in a country where scrutiny along racial lines is all too prevalent, Maluka identifies with the object of the gaze, seeing in these popular images a common response to the persistent visual examination conducted on a black man in Cape Town. Maluka magnifies that moment when the subject is made aware of gaze and unthinkingly responds with passive/aggressive vulnerability.
Maluka's intimacy with his subjects is achieved through the undermining of their independence. He insists upon the anonymity of his sources, their almost random selection from the annals of popular culture. By denying his figures their original context, he refutes the culture industry's dictatorial power to determine how we understand these images and instead insists upon the ability of the artist to interview these images on his own terms. Maluka shows that he is a painter in the old-fashioned sense of the word, insistent upon the autonomy of painting and its potential for enlightenment. He makes evident a new religion of the contemporary, where pop profundity replaces the lofty spiritualism of Modernism. The exhibition is one vast self-portrait, with the insouciant gaze of Either love me or leave me alone reflecting Maluka's bold Modernist approach to the artworld that lies hidden beneath the rubric of Postmodern appropriation. The question is how do we, the followers of Postmodernist orthodoxy, respond to this iconoclasm?
Opens: February 15
Closes: March 16
Michael Stevenson Gallery
Hill House, De Smidt Street, Green Point
Tel: (021) 421 2575
Fax: (021) 421 2578
www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon-Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pm
