VUSI BEAUCHAMP

PRESS | VUSI BEAUCHAMP

Masego Panyane for IOL, 18 October 2017

The thought behind the art

For Beauchamp, the naming of the exhibition was important because it brings together their vastly different styles into one conversation.

“When it came up, I was shocked at how the works talk to each other. The one voice is loud, while the other is slightly toned down, which creates a circus,” he explained. The idea behind working together, Beauchamp said, came from a meeting of the two artists about three years ago at the FNB Joburg Art Fair, where people frequently mistook him for Mabulu. And there, the birth of this exhibition took place.

He explains that at the heart of this exhibition is the desire to raise alarm at the glossed-up country we’re in. “The context of South Africa, especially now, things are glossed-up but underneath things are burning. People aren’t happy. And we all know why,” he said.

“The utopian view of how we should be, the exotic imaging of black people at the moment - in the arts scene that’s the in thing. All you need to do is pose there ka lepona(naked) next to flowers. These galleries are pushing these types of work. That’s why this exhibition is important: it’s about time that we cut this thing of glossing over truth,” he said.

For Mabulu, making these political statements in his art is part of his activism. He considers himself not an artist, but an institution, whose primary aim is to conscientise the masses. Explaining the artwork he said:

“We have here a pimp (Jacob Zuma), a prostitute (Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma) and a whorehouse. The whorehouse is Luthuli House. It’s b#lls*it. We can’t beat about the bush. It takes a certain eye to see a whorehouse, a pimp and a prostitute because they put up certain facades that make them seem like us.

“We had that wolf (Zuma) and now he’s bringing in his alpha female from the pack to do his dirty work. Bear in mind these f*#kers understand the power of feminism and femininity. They are capitalising on this.They understand that right now what we need because patriarchy has done the biggest b*%llsh8t ever in the politics of the land, we need a female leader, but not her. Not a prostitute like that.”

“With all her accolades, there’s one thing that makes her who she is, she is the ex-wife of this bastard (Zuma). We have on this ballot box someone who is using her femininity as a flag.”

While Mabulu’s work maybe uncomfortable to deal with, having voices so bold and unapologetic through the exhibition may just be what the country requires at the moment to have an honest conversation.

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Racism in Art is sometimes Okay? The artist challenging current understandings of Blackness, Mxolisi Vusi Beauchamp

By Motlatsi, ART&CULTURE, Bubblegum Club, 2017

Artists are the mirror to the wonders and horrors of our society! They reflect the state of ideas and beliefs in 2 dimensional forms. Yet, when this mirror becomes an act of controversy, very often artist’s freedom of speech are not enough to protect the artist from being silenced by the very society that they are meant to serve. South Africa’s new speech bill might even make it illegal to “make fun of” the president, making artists like Zapiro guilty of hate speech.

An example of such artistic induced controversy is of Kanye West’s use of the confederate flag on the jackets that he designed. For Americans the confederate flag suggests a past where black people were justified in being dehumanised as slaves. For Kanye his use of such a racially embedded image has been incorporated into his politically driven fashion line to change its meaning for his benefit:

“React how you want. Any energy is good energy. The Confederate flag represented slavery in a way. That’s my abstract take on what I know about it, right? So I wrote the song ‘New Slaves.’ So I took the Confederate flag and made it my flag. It’s my flag now”.

Are artists ever justified in using images that pertain to a racially injustice past?

This would be the question that I asked myself when first coming across the controversial works of Mxolisi Vusi Beauchamp. His works feature the constant reference to the racially loaded image of Coons and gollywogs on his colour and politically infused canvases. With their oil black faces and exaggerated white or red lips, these loaded images have historically been used to degrade and insult black people. They do this through the use of racial characterizations that serve a white supremacist understanding of ‘the other’ as inferior thereby pushing an anti black sentiment .

Yet through his works I would also see a more nuanced message at play. The black and white image of a boxing Nelson Mandela, beside him are floating coon heads and the graffitied word ‘terrorist’ with a question mark below is characteristic of Vusi’s style.

His works are not just simply the degradation of a black self but are also speaks to the contradictory nature of the black experience and under a white supremacist gaze we can easy move from ‘swart gevar’ (‘black danger’) to leader of a nation. Yet his works also speak to the contradiction of black life in South Africa. With our globally praised constitution that grants all peoples in this land equal human rights there are still black people being subjected to racist treatment and are still being referred to as ‘Kaffirs’ in our so called ‘new’ and racially liberated South Africa.

I would get to speak to Vusi and get to hear his explanation of his works and the South Africa that we are living in today.

Motlatsi Khosi (MK): Please could you tell the Bubblegum readers a bit about yourself and how it was you become an artists.

Mxolisi Vusi Beauchamp (VMB): I was born and raised in Mamelodi. I studied printmaking and painting at the Tshwane University of Technology. I then studied Graphic Design at Damelin and have since worked as an artist, art director, and multimedia designer.

MK: On the Kalashikovv website you describe your works as being a “comment on social issues and on the politicians and events that make up the south African social landscape”. Please can you explain some of the issues that your work address as well why choose to use your current art medium to express these issues?

VMB: My recent solo Exhibition titled “Terrorist” comments on the frequent occurrence of grammatical errors on national protest placards in the new dispensation. In my understanding, this phenomenon speaks of a shift in protest culture, as opposed to demonstrations organized just before the ANC was inaugurated. Protest was deliberate, organized, mandated and depending on which political left you belonged, it was generously funded, and was therefore, carefully considered. New and young protest voices today are sometimes misguided, lack responsible leadership, and continue the culture of, “we have nothing to lose but our lives.”

MK: When visiting your exhibition what first caught my eye was the use of “coon” iconography. Please explain the use of such imagery that represents a racist stereotype of black people?

VMB: Once more I return to the controversial and outrageous usage of stereotypical renditions and interrogate the new readings of the binaries of civilized and uncivilized. This is demonstrated in the recurring images of monkeys and its association with key political leaders in my work Philanthropist, by using exaggerated ‘negroid’ features in the colonial tradition of the Enid Blyton’s books that feature golliwogs. Yet, unlike Zapiro, I remain accountable and mindful of a derogatory interpretation of raced and gendered politics.

MK: In using such anarchic images of ‘the coon’ are you not perpetuating an understanding from the past of black people that many black struggles have worked hard to overcome?

VMB: The “coon” imagery is still very much alive today, you see it in music videos from the likes of “Die Antwoord” Fatty Boom Boom where he darkens the skin of black actors and more recently the Chinese detergent advert, a black man walks in and gets ‘washed’ a different colour. My works continue to use use the image of the ‘coon’ so as to take away the power it has over black Africans and expose its legacy that continues to this day.

For more work by Vusi visit Kalashnikovv Gallery website. He will also be doing a solo exhibition at the Johannesburg art Gallery in 2018 so keep a look out for him there.

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Sean O’Toole for Times Live, 26 May 2015

Spray Painted: Bang goes the president

Mxolisi Vusimuzi Beauchamp, whose new solo exhibition Paradyse of the Damned is on at the Pretoria Art Museum, has painted many unflattering portraits of President Jacob Zuma. The struggling public museum is also hosting the group exhibition Twenty: Art in the Time of Democracy. Curated by Gordon Froud, it includes another of Beauchamp's satirical Zuma portraits, Kaboom , which depicts Zuma with a mouthful of dynamite. First exhibited at Appalachian State University in North Carolina last year, this portrait won't be travelling to the Beijing International Art Biennale this year with the rest of Twenty. The Chinese organisers, who placed a blanket proscription on work with a political or sexual theme, rejected Beauchamp's portrait.Beauchamp is no stranger to controversy. In 2012 he produced a portrait of slain right-wing leader Eugene Terre'Blanche in tender embrace with his murderer, Chris Mahlangu.It got his face splashed across a right-wing hate site.Beauchamp first became acquainted with the power of satire at art school when painter and comic-book artist Anton Kannemeyer gave a talk to his class. Shortly afterwards he and friend Eric Rintisi launched a comic book titled Kaffer Paradys (2006) at Froud's defunct gallery in Melville, Johannesburg.For his Pretoria exhibition Beauchamp, whose family name can be traced back to Flagstaff, Eastern Cape, has experimented with new techniques. Most of his colour-saturated portraits were created using spray-paint and a perforated kitchen pan. He likens the grainy quality of his paintings to the pointillist style of Georges Seurat and the granular silkscreen paintings produced by Andy Warhol.But it is his subject matter rather than his technique that will stand out for viewers. Aside from Zuma, Beauchamp's latest exhibition includes portraits "inspired by African dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko and Idi Amin" and paintings of cartoonish figures drawn from 19th-century American comic books. He redeploys these racist stereotypes to parody South Africa's new black elite.Although it is easy to get mired in the politics of Beauchamp's figure studies, the works are first and foremost paintings."Painting is an experience that encapsulates my ideas, my thoughts and inspirations," said Beauchamp."I have been working on storyboards, scripts and producing sketches for sculptures, but the process always stems from my paintings.