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Pop goes the easel
Bongani Madondo, The Sunday Times (SA)
May 01, 2005

http://www.suntimes.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=ST6A116839

Read more about Kudzanai Chiurai's exchibition called 'Y Propaganda' at http://www.obertcontemporary.com

Zimbabean artist Kudzi Chiurai is about to explode onto the local scene. Bongani Madondo talks to a young man taking up arms against history

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

The omnipresent eye of President Robert Mugabe keeps watch on every brush stroke and aerosol spray Kudzanai Chiurai puts on his canvasses - or so he thinks. The artist known by his trademark, Kudzi, is a deeply troubled man and a brilliant talent. The 24-year-old who arrived in South Africa five years ago to study fine arts at Pretoria University, says art is his life. Kudzi is a paint-bespattered fugitive, ducking and diving the claws of his country’s president ... Is that it? "No," he says when we meet in his jumbled studio in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. "I don’t necessarily think I’m on Zimbabwe’s most-wanted list, but who knows? I can’t stop feeling troubled by how my work might be interpreted." Kudzi’s larger-than-life, mixed-media works combine political satire, hard-edged hip-hop graffiti, poetry, architectural design and commentary on big cities to produce pop art. His is a political pop deeply embedded in the impressionist tradition - and not in the advertising industry’s variation of pop art.

His large-scale (3.66m x 2.44m) combinations of graffiti, etchings, ink drawing, poetry and watercolours give a sense of a film in progress - the only difference being that the images are frozen on the hardboard on which he chooses to work. In an age where young artists seem to be absorbed by graffiti, self-righteousness, or film and advertising jobs - while older artists are commemorated in one retrospective after another - Kudzi’s arrival and innovative use of street aesthetics to illuminate his conceptual art promises to add zing to the local scene. His brooding, paranoid, funereal and sometimes colourful mixed-media works have thrust him forward as one of the possible heirs to the legacy of US artist Jean Michel Basquiat. As a painter, Kudzi deals with urban African issues with the same subversive and, at times, mad humour as the Zimbabwean novelist Dambudzo Marechera (The House of Hunger). His work charms and chokes. Humour is an integral part of his work and the joke is not on the subjects he tackles with rib-cracking style, but on us, the viewers.

And while Mugabe - his hair flaming orange and spiked to suggest the ageing politician is a devil - seems to pop in and out of Kudzi’s work with ease, the Zimbabwean president is not a subject he discusses easily. "My work narrates a variety of stories, well beyond Mugabe. Uncle Bob is just one of them. I’m keen on themes such as censorship, fear, paranoia, popular culture and inner-city movements ... the individual’s place within the jungle that a big city like Johannesburg is. He [Mugabe] does not define my work, though as a Zimbabwean he is this omnipresent, heroic, self-centred, funny, brutal, visionary, regressive, oppressive figure - the embodiment of what is great and messed with Zimbabwe," says Kudzi. "Whether you are an artist, an accountant, a man of the cloth or a sports player, in or outside Zimbabwe, Mugabe is somebody you cannot not deal with. He lives in our lives. It is quite a stressful undertaking. A yoke many are reluctant to bear. Some carry it inside themselves, hidden, afraid to speak about it in public, but privately deranged. I guess I wear mine on my sleeve. I lay it out for all of us to deal with. It is terribly risky - that I am aware of - but I have to do it."

"Why?" I ask. "I’m an artist and besides, it is what I know, what I understand," says Kudzi. "So you still believethere’s glamour in an artist dying a heroic death?" "Rather the opposite. I think the artist should live longer to record atrocities and beauty. But I am not about to paint flowers, not now anyway. Still, you can neither practise nor dream if fear is a constant factor in your life. In any case, life is about that: everything, every action is political. It can be documented and reviewed according to the viewer’s taste." Though he has created only three works which deal directly with the spectre of Mugabe - The Presidential Wall Paper, The True Believer and The End of Silence - the artist often finds discussing Zimbabwe’s bespectacled kingpin harrowing. "I might sound brave, but I am very disturbed. I am concerned about my family. I am torn apart... you see, my mother still lives in Zimbabwe. I also love the country. I still want to go back. It’s been three years since I last went back. The country is in my bloodstream." The third time I meet Kudzi, our talk is all about the identity he is creating and about living in a country that is, like its President, torn between pro- and anti-Mugabe camps. He is acutely aware of the battle lines - between those who passionately feel that quiet diplomacy is a game for wild birds, and that Mugabe should be pressured to step down; and those who are motivated by a different set of racial and economic considerations.

"I have been called a traitor several times. Once when I was doing an interview on [Gauteng radio station] Kaya Fm, a caller remarked that I am not patriotic about my country. "The underlying message is: ‘You are living large in this country, a liberated African country, getting media attention, yet you are not grateful for the contribution Zimbabwe has made. Sell-out!’ If Zim was not wobbling by, soaking in pain, I would’ve dismissed the caller for being quite funny on a serious talk show. There’s pressure on commentators - artists are commentators - to take sides. There’s pressure, mostly from black South Africans, to overlook the atrocities in Zimbabwe. For them, Mugabe is the ultimate liberator." He shrugs, lights up a fag and sighs. "The untouchable. Sad." "Do you smoke when you are frustrated?" I wonder out loud. "Yes. Like now. This is a stressful discussion." As if propelled by a similar force, we break beat and change the topic, although it will resurface. It seems Kudzi is unable to shelve Uncle Bob for good - until ... unless ...

Besides Uncle Bob, Kudzi is also passionate about the commercial imperatives that define what is and what is not mainstream. He’s also maddened by the bling dictates of corporatised hip-hop that define "the hip-hop generation". But, like his heroes, the late artistic genius Jean Michel Basquiat and the invisible "graff" icon Banksy (both hip-hop artists who succeeded in taking graffiti from the streets to the high-street art galleries), Kudzi is trapped in a hot capsule - a revolutionary who can’t escape the lure of glamour the mainstream art world inevitably holds for the radicals. "Primarily my art is about communicating with the hip-hop generation. It might not be expressing an entirely hip-hop aesthetic, but it sets out to talk to my peers, and they are mostly in hip-hop, be they the music consumers, poets or fashion crowd - the glue that binds us is hip-hop." As with his Zimbabwean demons, hip-hop culture does not sit entirely comfortably within the Kudzi philosophy. There is a sense that he is the sort of adherent who has burst beyond the culture’s stasis and yet, like Erykah Badu sang: "Hip-hop you are the love of my life". The subtext reads: "F**cked up as you are, I will come pray on your tombstone."

"Am I a hip-hop artist? No. But I pencil in hip-hop culture, use it for what I seek to achieve. It’s agitative and also a common language through which youth, across the universe, communicate. It does not define me but is part of my expression, especially the graffiti aspect." Back at his Braamfontein studio, we venture into an area often dismissed as hip-hop intellectual gymnastics. "Hip-hop? Yep! I can relate to it. It samples varying bits and pieces of other musical styles, references different personalities and recreates itself as it goes. Its single identity is made of varying stories. You see, hip-hop is very post-modernist, mah man." I see. But Kudzi is not the first mind gymnast. Since the 1980s to this day, exponents such as Public Enemy, Dondi, Lesego Rampolokeng and Mos Def have sought to elevate hip-hop culture to the status of a political tool against the status quo. "But it can bottle you in. A situation I’m uneasy about. All my life, I’ve wanted to be free." For such a young man who uses the profits from his work to fund his siblings’ tertiary education, the idea of freedom remains just that: an ideal. "At least it is an ideal worth fighting for. What should I do? Curl up and die?" Doesn’t it sound like Nelson Mandela circa the Rivonia Trial?

By the time the interview ends it is too late for Kudzi to go back to Pretoria. On the way to a friend’s place in Melville, where he will crash for the night, it emerges that all his friends are white. "So what?" I think. But race will not be easily tucked away here. Asked if there’s anybody who can give a critical appreciation of his work, he offers as referees two white professors at Tukkies. Again, "So what?" Another person in the car asks him about the gallery that is hosting his exhibition. Kudzi says the gallery is in Melrose Arch and is owned by Mike Obert. Oh, by the way, Obert is a young, white American who has lived in Zimbabwe and who has major issues with Mugabe.

Outside, early winter bares its fangs. Inside the jalopy the mood yo-yos between unease and relief. The driver puts in an Ali Farka Toure CD as a calm-downer. If one were given to careless, racist conclusions it would be easy to shrug Kudzi off as an example of "black talent for a white tool". But sensing he will be crushed by this, I throw in some banter: "Oh, but a man has to live. What’s so bad about being surrounded by a sea of helping hands, black or white?" It doesn’t help. People are people.

Kudzi prefers a cut-to-the-chase approach: "Look," he sighs, "these people just happen to be my friends. I never sat down to create a line of white donors. Nobody pays me to do what I do. I don’t care whether these are the same people seen to be waging a battle against Mugabe. I am doing my bit for my people. Do people realise how stressful that is?" Kudzi’s comment reminds me that in the 1950s writers such as Nat Nakasa in South Africa, and James Baldwin - the toast of the Left Bank in Paris - were criticised for being "the beneficiaries of European benevolence". Can no one do their thing without being judged for the people they socialise with? Or do "those strutting with the cats, waiting to pounce, have no right to call themselves mice?" A sense of paranoia creeps up again. Kudzi pounces on it: "That’s the story of my life.I have to look over my shoulder all the time. Wherever. Travelling on trains or walking the streets. Painting or thinking of my family. I live in permanent fear." I feel for him, but I am also familiar with the plight of thousands of Zimbabweans forced to scrape by, doing the worst jobs imaginable. By comparison, Kudzi looks like an intelligent fun-seeker, performing, as he plods along, one helluva revolutionary trapeze act. Still, Kudzi’s fear is not entirely unfounded. See, just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

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