Going for the jugular has always been a characteristic of Norman Catherine’s work. In the 1980s the target of his searing wit was frequently the State, in the guise of military officials or policemen, generally engaged in some heinous activity of surveillance or punishment. Equally at home in a wide variety of media, from painting to printmaking and sculpture, Catherine portrays a dystopian world in which the laughter provoked by the comic situation catches in the throat as the dark reality of the circumstances sinks in.
In the satirically titled Intensive Care (1986) (the “intensive care” of the security police could end in a funeral), the man is confined to his hospital bed by barbed wire. A mousetrap is at his throat, and his masklike face gazes with wide eyes and bared teeth at a revolving circular saw blade about to reach his crotch.
The scumbled black and white paint of the small metal sculpture makes it look burned—suggesting another layer of abuse beyond the images of pain. The only color in the piece is provided by three touches of red—on the patient’s gaping mouth, the bloody saw blades, and the plummeting temperature chart.
The suitcase standing next to the bed is another recurring element of Catherine’s work from the 1980s and can be read as a political reference. In Intensive Care the suitcase suggests the transience of the anti-apartheid activist on the run, sleeping in a different house every night in case the ubiquitous informers of the era had tipped off the police as to his whereabouts.
In House Arrest, made in the same year as Intensive Care, the dejected little prisoner portrayed has no chance of going anywhere. Silenced and restricted, he has been separated from the world, and the clock measuring out his life has no hands to mark the passing hours.
Working here in a modest scale, Catherine’s work is at once deliberately raw in his swift fashioning of found and recycled materials and extremely sophisticated in his ability to make a profound statement with a light touch.
House Arrest 1986
Oil on wood
46 x 43 cm
Collection: Private
Image courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: John Peacock
© Norman Catherine
Intensive Care 1986
Oil on fiberglass and metal
67 x 57 x 41 cm
Collection: Private
Image courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: John Peacock
© Norman Catherine