South African Art Now

LAWRENCE LEMAOANA

The digitally manipulated photo is a curious object: at once inviting belief in its integrity via its seamless visual construction, yet at the same time denying this through the obvious illogic of its content. Playing with images that figure large in the country’s consciousness, young Johannesburg-based artist Lawrence Lemaoana challenges fixed notions of nationhood and culture.

If white South Africa is obsessed with a single sport, it is rugby, once almost exclusively the preserve of white players. The coming of democracy has brought frequent calls from black sports administrators to reconstruct the national team on demographic lines. The old white rugby establishment has resisted this, arguing that this will weaken the playing strength of the still largely white team.

Lemaoana sidesteps the whole argument by constructing a team photograph in which, dressed in pink rugby attire, his fellow artist Nkosinathi Quwe appears as every player. The result is as incisive as it is humorous: In one fell swoop, Lemaoana pokes fun at a national obsession, revisiting and questioning constructs of masculinity, and inserting Quwe (who resembles a black Springbok player, Gcobani Bobo) both as impostor and a new standard. In addition, says Lemaoana, “Part of the work dealt with the idea that we [black men] all look the same. That is why the individual is repeated.” The untitled work won for the artist the 2005 ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto award.

Recently Lemaoana has turned his attention to media images of African National Congress President Jacob Zuma. In a work entitled “The Hierarchy of Mockery: A Man Amongst Men” (2007) Lemaoana populates the image with unlikely figures, males dressed in generic pink, with their faces (and identities) obscured by stocking masks. In the center of this pyramidal arrangement is an appropriated newspaper image of Zuma dancing.

In 2007 Zuma was quoted in the press as saying that “When I was growing up, an ungqingili (homosexual) would not have stood in front of me. I would knock him out.” It was a statement for which, under pressure from gay and lesbian groups, he later apologized. Considered in the context of traditional, iconic photographs of African power like those of Nelson Mandela and dictator Idi Amin, Lemaoana’s portrait of a dancing Zuma surrounded by men in pink reads as truly postmodern. South African photography carries some hefty macho baggage; dramatic close-ups of violent confrontations between police and protesters have inscribed a very particular sort of heroic masculinity into the traditions of documentary photography. Lemaoana’s approach eschews this ethos of action: His images are closer to a hybrid of posed fashion photography and digital image retouching, where visual information is created away from the street, in the studio and on the computer.

Blurring gender divides, critiquing power, and unsettling “classic” photography’s aesthetics, Lemaoana’s work is a study in nontraditional image making, pushing against the notion of the photograph as document.

“The One” 2006
Digital print on 100% cotton rag paper
59.5 x 42 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and and the
Art Extra Gallery, Johannesburg
© Lawrence Lemaoana

Untitled (Team) 2004
Digital print, fabric frame
42 x 59.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the
Art Extra Gallery, Johannesburg
© Lawrence Lemaoana

“Hierachy of Mockery: A Man Amongst Men” 2007
Digital print on 100% cotton rag paper
44.5 x 42 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the
Art Extra Gallery, Johannesburg
© Lawrence Lemaoana