Are SA’s cultural institutions trying to get rid of Kannemeyer and Botes?

Towards the end of 2019, I had an opportunity to speak to artist Conrad Botes of Bitterkomix fame. His attempts to release a new book, The Erotic Drawings of Conrad Botes, were being thwarted.

While he’d had more than his fair share of state censorship at the tail-end of apartheid, he’d recently encountered a new culture of censoriousness that seemed to be suppressing his work. It wasn’t censorship in the traditional sense of a direct affront to the freedom of expression enshrined in the constitution. Rather, this was a vaguer but nevertheless pervasive type of suppression that worked through “strange channels”, as he put it, but was proving alarmingly effective.

He first got in touch when the book had already been rejected by four printers and the fifth was about to pull the plug. Not publishers, mind you, but actual print factories, which had turned down the job because they did not want to be associated with the book’s content. “Moral issues,” explained Botes wearily when I interviewed him at the time of the book’s eventual launch, by which I took him to mean hypocrisy or fear, or both.

Things had ground to a halt at the fifth printer because workers on the factory floor objected to one of the pictures in the book, which they considered blasphemous.

The image was a parody of the kitschy, sentimentalised depictions of Christ as the Good Shepherd, but cradling a phallus instead of a lost sheep. “Around that image [there were] penises [represented] as little characters killing each other or [a] type of violent chaos,” Botes explains.

Before I interviewed Botes, I spoke to University of Johannesburg (UJ) professor of art Karen von Veh, who has written extensively about the use of transgressive religious imagery in contemporary South African art. She also curated an exhibition in 2014 that included a version of Botes’s The Good Shepherd. In her interpretation, the image represents Botes exploring Afrikaner masculinity’s loss of status in postapartheid SA and the crisis of identity that followed.

She suggested that you might read the image as posing a question: “If that [type of] macho masculinity is being promoted everywhere [including popular images of Christ], what are you supposed to do?” To paraphrase Von Veh in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, how do you reinvent masculinity from a new perspective?

The book, for the most part, contains works retrieved from sketchbooks Botes had filled over the years. He thought some of the drawings worthwhile and interesting, and a book seemed the best vehicle for them.

Anton Kannemeyer, his Bitterkomix co-founder, had published a volume of Erotic Drawings in 2014, so Botes’s volume was produced as a companion piece, styled to match its precursor, while his publisher, Soutie Press, simultaneously released a second edition of Kannemeyer’s book in softcover.

The Erotic Drawings of Conrad Botes includes some eye-wateringly explicit drawings based on pornographic material, albeit in Botes’s well-known cartoonish style. It’s not the sort of thing you want your children taking down off the bookshelf, but it’s also not strictly speaking pornographic (or erotic, for that matter).

It might seem obvious, but it’s worth saying: artworks about porn are not necessarily pornographic. If you can’t tell the difference, consider that back in the 1990s, when Botes and Kannemeyer created a series of sexually explicit cartoons for Loslyf, SA’s first Afrikaans porn magazine, readers wrote in and complained. “Men simply did not find them sexy,” writes Kannemeyer in the introduction to Botes’s book. They could tell the difference ...

What people find offensive about Botes’s drawings is more complex and morally murky than simple prudishness, as are their reasons for wanting to suppress it. In the case of the printers, the censoriousness was probably a simple case of religious fundamentalism.

In the end, Botes and his publisher came to an agreement with the printer. “At that stage we still had a deadline for an exhibition [and] the clock was ticking, so we replaced the image,” he says.

The new image was a self-portrait of the artist naked and on fire, holding a lighter. It’s captioned with a quote from young-adult fiction author Laurie Halse Anderson: “Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”

“Two days later there was another image they wanted taken out,” Botes says. This time it was a picture depicting Christ as a well-hung porn star kneeling on a bed, bearing the inscription, “Jesus is back ... (and he’s packing meat)”.

Botes and his publisher dug in their heels and called their lawyers. The printers eventually agreed to produce the book, as long as their name didn’t appear among the credits.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The launch of The Erotic Drawings of Conrad Botes was originally planned to coincide with an exhibition. When Botes sent his gallery some of the works he’d prepared — new pieces worked up from sketches in the book — it cancelled the book launch and exhibition.

With the exhibition scrapped, Botes decided to launch Erotic Drawings at the bookshops where he would ordinarily have held Bitterkomix launches, starting in Cape Town. Again, he was stymied.

One bookshop told him its launch schedule was fully booked, but Botes tells me that when he checked it, there were plenty of gaps. (The book was eventually launched at Love Books in Melville, Johannesburg, where I interviewed him in front of an audience, discussing his views of censorship, among other things.)

Systematic deplatforming

What was going on? Why the near-wholesale stonewalling of a project by one of SA’s art heroes? Sure, some people have always found Botes and Kannemeyer’s outrageous cartoons hard to stomach, but they are among those SA artists who became household names and even earned a substantial international following. They frequently provoked outrage, but by and large were embraced by the SA art world, defended in the press and even included in university courses.

Kannemeyer points out a number of other recent instances in which his work and that of and Botes have been “deplatformed”.

In 2019, for example, the University of Cape Town (UCT) cut Bitterkomix from the SA comics module in a history of art course, apparently because students found it offensive. Bitterkomix was also conspicuously absent from the Art of Comics exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Last year, several works by Kannemeyer were removed from the catalogue of The Artists’ Press, a local print studio and online shop, as well as from online retailer Superbalist’s site. A statement released by The Artists’ Press said it had grown “increasingly uncomfortable with the caricatured depictions of Black people in the prints”, but that it would nevertheless make the works available “for research purposes”.

It was referring specifically to Kannemeyer’s attacks on the racist caricatures in early Tintin comics, in which he reproduced some of their racist tropes, but obviously to critique and subvert them. Sometimes he would slyly insert these anachronistic images into contemporary contexts to flag racist subtexts. Kannemeyer’s last local solo exhibition, in which some of these works appeared, was in 2015, after which he and his gallery parted ways.

Looked at together, it is hard to deny, as Kannemeyer suspects, that there is an almost “systematic” or “thematic” attempt in SA’s cultural institutions to “get rid of them”.

Giving offence

A major part of Kannemeyer and Botes’s work has always been offensive and tasteless. That was part of the point.

From the start, when they began working together in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were interested in breaking taboos and were as keen to affront the more subtle oppressions of good taste as they were the more obvious oppressions of puritanical Afrikanerdom.

As JM Coetzee wrote in his essay on censorship, Taking Offence, in 1996: “If the strong can be made to take offence, they thereby put themselves at least momentarily on the same footing as the weak.” This was, at least in part, their approach.

As the old regime’s censorship apparatus was dismantled, Bitterkomix revelled in being able to depict all sorts of things that apartheid’s strictures and prohibitions had hidden.

Botes, Kannemeyer and co rode roughshod over the secret and sacred recesses of the conservative Afrikaner psyche. They exposed, exaggerated and ridiculed its fears, hatreds and hypocrisies, depicting them in graphic and grotesque detail. They are particularly well remembered for wreaking gleeful havoc with the culture’s horror of interracial sex.

But it was an insiders’ attack. Self-portraits often appeared in their work as the artists implicated themselves with unflinching honesty. Bitterkomix created an aesthetic that represented a generation of young Afrikaners wrestling with the ghosts of their cultural heritage, while simultaneously forging a new type of cultural identity and aesthetic. It could seem grim and nihilistic, but out of transgression grew the potential for transformation.

Arguments that Bitterkomix and its reckoning with Afrikaans cultural heritage have grown irrelevant (and wincing suggestions that their pictures of black penises are now passé) miss the point. From Lady Skollie and Igshaan Adams to Nicholas Hlobo and Nandipha Mntambo, and so many more important local contemporary artists besides, the ongoing importance of creative engagement with your own cultural heritage is as clear as it is pervasive. It’s important for everyone.

Taking offence

Perhaps what has changed is that the groups taking offence are no longer those at which Botes and Kannemeyer aimed their satirical attacks. Now, with conservatives and fundamentalists, it’s art gallery visitors and students studying history of art. The galleries, with publishers, fellow artists, bookshops and the press — people and institutions whose indulgence or goodwill they could once take for granted — are complicit or silent.

Botes suggests that one of the reasons they’ve been ostracised is that individuals and institutions tend to self-censor before there is “a major outrage”. Kannemeyer concurs: “I think what’s happening now is that publishers and galleries, and I guess everybody, is scared of the type of reaction that they’ll get on social media. I do understand that people are afraid. You have people clinging onto their jobs and they’ll say anything to keep [them], it seems.”

This turn of events resonated with international debates on institutional and cultural reform. “The Harper’s Letter”, as it became known — an open letter to the US literary and cultural magazine signed by 153 writers, thinkers and academics ranging from Malcolm Gladwell and Noam Chomsky to Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood — usefully illustrates the terms of the debate.

On the one hand, the letter’s signatories argued that necessary reform in US cultural institutions and the clear need for greater inclusivity and equality had resulted in “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism” that led to a “stifling atmosphere” that enforces a type of “ideological conformity” and “risk aversion”, which ultimately threatened freedom of expression.

Ripostes to the letter critique it for its conflation of freedom of speech with the freedoms of the particular elite that the letter’s signatories represent. They characterise the rhetoric surrounding freedom of speech as simply perpetuating existing power relations, while being disingenuous about their ongoing access to the world’s most privileged platforms and continuing to deny the lived experience of other groups that have hitherto been silenced.

The result is a stalemate between reason, the “unframed frame” as Coetzee called it, which “is a form of power with no built-in sense of what the experience of powerlessness might be like”, and the lived or subjective experiences of those who have been hurt or offended.

Kannemeyer sees moral cowardice, not to mention intellectual and educational dereliction, in the way he believes UCT, for example, has let the students set the curriculum by dictating what is excluded. But what if people do feel real pain and humiliation when confronted with Botes and Kannemeyer’s work, and take real offence even if, rationally speaking, they shouldn’t? How do you judge whether there has been harm except in the experience of harm? But the question remains: in suppressing these artists, has anyone been spared any pain?

So what now?

It may be possible to argue that Bitterkomix, Botes and Kannemeyer have always been opposed to racism and sexism, but in the current climate their intentions seem to count for less than the offence or outrage some people experience when they encounter their work.

The suppression of their work can’t be addressed in an appeal to the law — there’s no censor to fight. Besides, Coetzee, again, points out that artists who seek to break taboos run into contradictory territory if they simultaneously wish to claim the protection of the law. The legitimacy of their art as transgressive; the fact that it does break a taboo depends on its being outside the law.

At the same time, it is hard to believe the galleries, universities and bookshops that have capitulated in deplatforming them have taken a principled stance. They’re caught in the stalemate.

So what now? A right such as freedom of expression is meaningless unless it is being exercised, so that’s what Botes and Kannemeyer have done. The Erotic Drawings of Conrad Botes came out. But without any other platforms available, Botes and Kannemeyer have resorted to the fundamental form and origin of their practice: they’ve put out another edition of Bitterkomix.

Once again, it feels like the little underground cult publication it was 30 years ago — with a whiff of contraband about it, created by artists excluded by mainstream institutions — but it has had its subversive potential returned to it, along with its power to offend.

The Erotic Drawings of Conrad Botes, The Erotic Drawings of Anton Kannemeyer and Bitterkomix 18 are available at a few brave bookstores and via soutiepress.com