Courtesy Michael Stevenson Gallery, Capetown

Anton Kannemeyer, "Black Dicks" (2008). Acrylic on lithographic print, 26 x 19½ in.

   November 2008 Field Guide

William Eggleston

The Brussels Dream

Lynne Marsh

Frances Stark

Donald Rodney

Oranges and Sardines

Renzo Martens

Dóra Maurer

Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai

Sharon Lockhart

Stephan Balkenhol

Terence Gower

Jacques Bedel

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“I detest the gay government of the gay United Kingdom,” a speech bubble reads against the Pepto-Bismol pink background that frames a young Robert Mugabe, his fingers entwined, his suit a little too tight. Across his chest is stenciled “M is for MUGABE.” This transfixing work is from Anton Kannemeyer’s “N is for Nightmare” series—in which the work called N depicts a dull suburban home where two black “savages” with huge red lips brandish machetes as a bare-breasted woman serves up the balding head of the home’s white Afrikaner owner on a platter. Although the postcolonial African politics on display here are cohesively delivered, the stylistic choices diverge: M is done in a ’60s-radical graphic style (à la Emory Douglas’s posters for the Black Panthers), while N is wrought in the ligne claire (clean line) made famous by Hergé. Both images exhibit the formal range of the artist (also known as Joe Dog), which he developed as coeditor of Bitterkomix, the comic magazine he started with Conrad Botes at Stellenbosch University in 1992. Since then, Kannemeyer’s works, which encompass prints, drawings, and paintings on canvas, have ushered in a new era of sociopolitical visual critique in South Africa. This solo show of his newest large-scale drawings, which goes on view this month in his hometown of Cape Town, will include pieces from the “Cursed Paradise” series, one of which depicts two white Tintin-like men wrangling what at first appear to be a pair of black serpents. The speech bubble reads “Oh my God!! These black dicks are outta control!” as a pale black-and-white map of Africa rises up behind it.

"Anton Kannemeyer" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.