Art Pig by Alex Dodd

As much as I might enjoy a glass of good bubbly, some Saturday Night Fever action on the dance floor or a picnic in the park with a small clutch of fellow hedonists, when it comes to art and literature I’m a sucker for full blown tragedy, unmitigated honesty, slow feverish engagements with doom and gloom…

I’d rather spend five hours reading Philip Roth on death and dying than tune into Oprah’s daily self-congratulatory love fest celebrating the joys of public confession, success and guilt-free donuts. The splendour of dark art lies in its uncompromising hyperbolic extremity. When you read the final chapters of JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, in which the doomed protagonist spends his free time voluntarily euthanasing dogs, your own dire soap opera starts to feel comfortingly mild by comparison.

In his book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Eric G Wilson, a professor of English literature, extols the creative power of gloom, arguing that in our relentless contemporary pop-cultural pursuit of happiness, we demonstrate a ‘craven disregard for the value of sadness’, which is the muse behind much art, poetry and music.

For those who have embraced the fact that creativity stems from discontent, this promises to be a bumper week on the art circuit, with Diane Victor exhibiting solo as this year’s festival artist at Aardklop in Potchefstroom and Judith Mason’s retrospective, A Prospect of Icons, opening at the Standard Bank Gallery. Victor and Mason are two my favourite South African artists and they have more than few things in common.

Firstly, there is courage. Both are artists who refuse outright to prettify or tone down their views of themselves or the frequently brutal world in which they find themselves. It’s a ‘dog eats dog’, ‘survival of the fittest’ kind of place, and both Mason and Victor have repeatedly explored the fine line between humans and and the fierce animal selves lurking just beneath the mannered surfaces of our civilized personae. Mason’s canvases growl and yelp with animal life – dog, fish, hyena, snake, bird, ram… Similarly, Victor’s work teems with dogs, sharks, bears and horses, all interacting with humans in a manner that recalls the relationship between the castaway Indian boy and the tiger in Yann Martel’s Booker Prize winning novel The Life of Pi.
Radically uncompromising, the work of these two artists is often difficult to stomach. And yet an inexplicable, almost alchemical, kind of relief comes from with sitting with their images, breathing through the painful truths they offer up. It’s in this strange aftermath that the humour often becomes apparent…

Victor and Mason are both draughtsman of the highest order, with that rare ability to use a pencil as if it were a wand. Neither is afraid of hours of painstaking labour to produce a work of awe-
inspiring subtlety and detail. In the presence of works by both of
these artists, you become aware
again of the idea of art as a kind of
calling – not so much a matter of being chosen from on high, but of hours of relentless, self-sacrificial dedication to a chosen path of action.

The title of the Mason exhibition, A Prospect of Icons, is a reference to her use of religious imagery, a central concern in her work. Her paintings consist of recurrent and ambiguous symbols and anatomical allusions, such as the wing, the eye, the heart, the female breast, the plait of hair, wire mesh and under-vest. She harnesses these through a trajectory of religious iconography and mythological figures, such as Arachne and the Minotaur. Skulls, raw flesh, ghoulish phantasms and intimations of great bloodiness haunt her canvases, which would be in good company alongside the work of Francis Bacon or Edvard Munch.

In many of Victor’s works, ‘the religious structures that are upheld in Gothic imagery are seen as part of the problem’, writes Karen von Veh. ‘Not only do we find corrupt clergy and evil personified in religious devotees, but the very core of biblical teaching is subjected to scrutiny and found wanting.’
Although both have, in their own ways, ruthlessly tackled the dogma and hypocrisy of Christianity, absorbing their work is a strange affirmation of faith in the rigours of expression. You can’t stand in a gallery of works by either of these two artists without being gobsmacked by a sense of their absolute dogged commitment to the disciplines of their chosen media.