M.O.L 25
UNPACKING EUROPE Ashraf Jamal
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n an era in which we are quick to indict others for ‘cultural appropriation’, Johannes Phokela, thankfully, has been redeemed from this charge. Is this because he is a black artist re-interpreting European art? Are some accorded liberties, while others not? No matter, this is the subject of another boxing match. What intrigues and delights me here is Phokela’s playful immersion in the artists of the Southern and Northern Renaissance, namely Caravaggio, Breughel, Rubens, among many others. While the artist’s adaptations or reworkings are cavalier, off-the-cuff and deliberately rough in execution, one cannot ignore their allusive power. Standing in front of a Phokela painting, we feel that we are in the midst of a secret, allowed free entry into a playful conspiracy. However, for Storm Janse van Rensburg, co-curator of the show, Phokela’s ‘vision is of a world history drenched in the spoils of violence’. This is true, but it is not the entirety of the story. How so? Because Phokela is not solely perturbed by the absence of black bodies in the European narrative, or their servitude therein, but – through his reworking of the story – their integral role and place within it. He never forcibly reintegrates blackness into white history. Neither does he believe, like Titus Kaphar, that white history must be amended, in the manner, say, of the amendment of a legal constitution. Phokela, unlike Kaphar, is no ideologue or politician.
On entering the show, the first painting one sees is of a black man on the verge of clubbing a white man to death – whether he does or not is another matter. The black man wears a loin cloth, the white man is in 17th century gear. The scene is set on a rocky beach, in the distance, bizarrely, we see an oil rig. Clearly, we are caught in a temporal mashup. Framing the whole in white is the declaration: EATING PEOPLE ISN’T ALWAYS WRONG. Humour is key. This is because Phokela is primarily inspired by a comic perversity. Aware that we are acutely conversant with the devastation of colonial extraction and exploitation – the paintings of the Renaissance are profoundly informed and shaped by Imperialism – Phokela nevertheless seeks not to rub our noses in an incontrovertible historical fact, but, reflexively, playfully, entertain, or edutain, us. His revisionist take is a jolly act of cannibalism. Phokela engages our attention by skewing the received context and culture of reception; and does so without puffed up moral outrage. Comprised of works from various periods, the Phokela retrospective can be seen on our doorstep, Zeitz MOCAA (Museum of Contemporary Art Africa), located at the southernmost point of Africa – Cape Town’s Waterfront – far removed from the hub of European power, and yet, profoundly connected to it. Cape Town, after all, played an integral role in imperial maritime traffic between West and East. As a port-city, it is a construct of empire.
“Phokela nevertheless seeks not to rub our noses in an incontrovertible historical fact, but, reflexively, playfully, entertain, or edutain, us.” Portrait of Johannes Phokela in his studio, Johannesburg, August 2021. Photograph by Anthea Pokroy, courtesy of Zeitz MOCAA
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