Themba Shibase at the KZNSA Gallery
by Peter Machen
Themba Shibase's 'The Skeptic' explores the relationships between history, masculinity and economics, and the social chasms which open up in their wake. Shibase's terrain covers centuries of colonialism and imperialism, up to and including the contradictions of contemporary post-colonial reality in Southern Africa and beyond. The results, rendered in oil on canvas, leave a strange visual and political dialogue as their residue.
In the diptych Whose Heritage I & II, a large-scale portrait of an extremist Afrikaner nationalist leader is juxtaposed with that of an African advocate of Afrocentrism. Though highly allusive, both characters are kept generic. These apparently opposing figures are given equal weight and a single iconographic element is incorporated into each of them. The black figure - realistically - wears a Zionist star on his lapel, pointing to the syncretic fusion that is Africanised Christianity. The white figure - more surreally - wears Zulu earplug-style earrings bearing the design of the new South African flag.
Here, as in the other four paintings on display, Shibase's content mediates the tensions between the willful naivety of his painting technique and the political weight of his images. But these paintings also reflect an attitude of ambivalence both to notions of purist identity and to notions of fused identity, and to the ways in which identity is channelled through the currents of politics and power.
In Shibase's exploration of these masculine political archetypes, the figures he paints - who are often almost, but not quite recognisable - exist somewhere between the generic and the specific. In We are a Bruised People I & II, we see images reminiscent of Paul Kruger and Eugene de Kock, not in portrait mode but occupying small spaces on large canvases, presumably the canvas of a history broader than they are able to register. Elsewhere Shibase has produced more specifically recognisable portraits, such as Idi Amin. These issues of power, identity, history and masculinity are central to his fractured narrative.
If masculinity is one of the centres of his concern, another is the conceptual narrative of urban dislocation invoked in The Story Of How The Beast Was Tamed. The title is ambivalent: the beast is both the city and the newly arrived rural poor. Shibase's painted urban environment overwhelms a figure in the foreground, literally bleeding into him. The chaotically rendered landscape perfectly captures the pedestrian edges of Durban, spaces that are both liminal - if you are a motorist or a townplanner - and central - if you are one of the city's pedestrian majority.
The head shots that appear in much of Shibase's work reflect, and are no doubt influenced by, the barber shop art that adorns so much of the city of Durban. And indeed one of the works,Economic Ascendance: A New Battleground, presents an interior of one of the portable barber-salons that populate the city's sidewalks. But the economic ascendance that takes place on the streets of Durban exists in a very different economic world from that in which the city's political and business leaders coalesce.
While it is easy to pull narrative strands out of the small but substantial body of work, there is also a certain opaqueness present in the exhibition. Shibase's paintings are enigmatic at the same time as they initially appear to be didactic.
His use of iconography and pseudo-historical figures make his images 'look' like they should be easy to read, but repeated viewings and much consideration didn't crystalise any specific narrative of meaning in the works for me. Rather it just drove me deeper in to my own thoughts about leaders, governments and economics, and the particular spectrum of masculinities that politics allows (regardless of the gender of the politician), which is fine. I don't need to be convinced that I have cracked the artist's head open in order to engage with the work or its meaning.
But there is an overriding feeling in the collective works. My first impulse is to say that is a feeling of disappointment and disillusionment with the political and economic projects of modernity. And that certainly seems the case. But more primarily, there is a sense of loss and abandonment from the structure of powers. And that sense of loss and abandonment, which is probably at its most experientially intense in the lives of rural-urban migrants in Durban and around the world (and reflected in Shibase's painting The Story of the Taming of the Beast) is, I think, increasingly felt by most of the global population.
We feel entirely unrelated to the actions of those we vote into power and the economic and political structures that surround us. The sense of the social project connecting government and nation has largely vanished (or perhaps never existed). Even the idea that a leader and government should have, at the very least, fealty to the populations it rules, seems increasingly irrelevant.
One notion that arises from Shibase's paintings is the distinction between rulers and leaders. Democracies should elect leaders rather than rulers, but in the democracies of South Africa, the US and the UK, as well as many other countries in Africa and around the world, these words, like the leaders themselves it often seems, are pretty much interchangeable.
The lines that Shibase draws - between the fathers of Afrikaners nationalism and other African nationalisms, between politics and economics, between truth and representation - are not lines at all, but more like conceptual join-the-dots with all the numbers missing. In those spaces between the dots our skepticism grows.
Peter Machen is a Durban-based writer, journalist and artist
Opens: September 16
Closes: October 12
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