‘Witty, slick and so un-mannered!’ reads the comment from Donald Fair. ‘A most original, satirical view. Highly amusing – if only Africa was!’ scrawls Sharroll First in the heavily inscribed visitors’ book. I have returned to the Goodman Gallery on a quiet Thursday afternoon to Brett Murray’s show, Crocodile Tears, to discern whether the show has the same knockout impact beyond the dizziness of the social spin.

My opening night reaction was unequivocal. I don’t remember laughing so loudly and gutturally in response to a work of art since I first saw Duchamp’s urinal at the Pompidou. Murray’s show is so wildly uncoweringly satirical of the current South African status quo, slashing into former president Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance bluster with his rapier wit, that I felt physically elated by his boldness – liberated by his absence of compunction.

It is not a feeling I am used to. Most of the time, South Africans tend to couch their public commentary in political correctness, saving their vitriol for drunken dinner party catharsis, road rage or to be worked out in the fitful throes of a nightmare. But here it is in the full glare of the spotlight.

A dazzlingly reflective rendition of the word ‘Renaissance’ lazer cut in slick stainless steel cursive, followed by the abbreviations ‘(Pty) Ltd’ in a tidy sans serif font. Can someone really be speaking so directly of the avarice behind the grand vision for a continent? Can it be real? Oh, yes. Yes, it can! Next up is a little golden plaque, neatly inscribed with the following: ‘Every time I hear you sing the machine gun song, I want to find one and shove it up your fat arse.’ My sentiments exactly! And I don’t seem to be alone. This quiet Thursday afternoon is punctuated by the sighting of multiple red stickers, standing out like bold affirmations
of support for Murray’s dissent.
Alongside the Umshini wami rip off is a graphic Modernist rendering of a pipe above the words: ‘Ceci n’est pas un president’ – a riff on Rene Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. A pipe does not a president make. Here, here! The chuckles graduate to belly laughs at the sight of the work below; an elaborately graphic rendering of a small black abyss captioned: ‘The President’s arsehole rendered in the Renaissance style!’ Now he’s really taking it to the limits. Is this too much? Or perhaps just a sharp dose befitting the behaviour that provoked such irreverent ire? For those of us who feel that Thabo Mbeki sold us
down the river with all his noble talk and divisive actions, it’s com
forting to know that our outrage is a shared sentiment; to have the empty pomp of political rhetoric brought down a notch or two.

So, yes, laugh out loud! Laugh in the same crazed way we laugh with the pranksters who dreamed up that insane cocktail of irreverence that is Little Britain, which royally takes the piss out of Blair’s
Cool Britannia. It is good know we can laugh at the direness of things