The Art of Murder

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SOUTH AFRICAN ART CRIME GROWS UP

Recent thefts range from the sophisticated to the expedient and bizarre.

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CAPE TOWN—According to the latest statistics, a total of 18,487 South Africans were murdered between April 2007 and March 2008. It is the lowest murder rate since the country abolished Apartheid in 1994 but still nearly eight times the world average. The enormity of the number is perhaps best explained by example: In 2003, South African sculptor and conceptual artist Willem Boshoff showed a trio of black granite slabs tabulating the days three anti-Apartheid leaders each spent in jail. Excluding Walter Sisulu (9,269), and adding together all the prison hacks for Nelson Mandela (9,377) and those for Govan Mbeki (8,548), the father of ousted president Thabo Mbeki, the sum still falls short of last year’s murders.

This violent trend has claimed the lives of numerous artists and collectors, and for the country’s art press, it has entailed the writing of many premature obituaries. In March last year, painter Madi Phala was murdered during a robbery at his home in Cape Town, while the 2005 execution-style murder of controversial mining magnate and flamboyant art patron Brett Kebble remains a compelling whodunit laced with political intrigue.

More recently, in June of this year, printmaker Gabisile Nkosi, who worked at Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers in the rural province of KwaZulu Natal, was murdered at her home in Lidgetton by her former boyfriend, who then turned the gun on himself. Nkosi, whose collectors included Oprah Winfrey, is best remembered for her bold, graphic work that celebrates the quotidian experience of African women.

A few months prior to Nkosi’s murder, in January, prominent Johannesburg businessman and much-liked collector Sheldon Cohen was shot dead by a robber intent on taking his mobile phone. Seated in his car, Cohen was speaking to his father, Jack, founder of Amalgamated Appliances, while waiting for his 16-year-old son to finish soccer practice. Cohen’s contributions to the art world, as both a collector and patron, have been widely acknowledged since his death: Art dealer Warren Siebrits has committed himself to wearing a hat everyday for a year as a memorial gesture, while, more recently, sculptor Joachim Schönfeldt dedicated his latest exhibition, which just closed at Johannesburg’s Gallery AOP, to Cohen.

With violent crime so pervasive in South Africa, it is hardly surprising that it also figures strongly in the content of contemporary art. For his debut solo exhibition at New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery in April, satirical artist and comic book illustrator Anton Kannemeyer presented a selection of brightly colored paintings that are very literal illustrations of violence, including depictions of a murdered farmer and two victims of mob justice. In a favorable review in the New York Times, Ken Johnson noted the “jarringly funny contrast” between Kannemeyer’s “cheerful, seemingly innocent style” and his “reflection of the hideous underbelly of South African politics and society. ”

For his recent study of crime and punishment in South Africa, Magnum nominee Mikhael Subotzky eschewed humor, offering instead an at-times harrowing account of life in the dustbowl town of Beaufort West, located 500 km northeast of Cape Town. Subotzky, whose series is currently on at MoMA as part of their annual “New Photography” showcase, and who is currently on an artist's residency in Umbria, told ARTINFO that the theoretical starting point for the project was the local prison: It is located on a traffic island in the center of a busy national road.

The prevalence of violence in recent South African art, while marked, is not without a historical basis. Perhaps because of the country’s tumultuous past, art and political turmoil have been inextricably linked, as in the case of Thami Mnyele, an exiled artist and poster maker. Mnyele was assassinated in June 1985 by Apartheid operatives in a cross-border raid on an African National Congress base in Botswana. Fittingly, Mnyele, whose meticulous drawings are devoid of violence, is the subject of a large-scale retrospective exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery that opens in November.