Abstract:
This article revisits some of the controversies and debates that arose in 2012 over
works by South African artist Brett Murray and his painting The Spear in particular.
It aims to offer a more sober, profound and instructive evaluation of the painting
and the larger body of works it was part of, displayed in the two-part exhibition
titled Hail to the Thief. It undertakes an immanent critique of these works, assessing
their appropriateness with regard to the liberatory aims and horizon of Murray’s art
practice, as well as staking out the level of analysis most fundamental to such an
evaluation. It does so, first, by taking issue with two dominant readings and critiques
of Murray’s works in terms of unintended and unconscious messages that are found
to be counterrevolutionary and racist respectively. Over and against such content
analyses and criticisms, the article closes in on a more properly aesthetic form of
politics embedded in the communicative mode, subject position and scenario of
interaction performed by Murray’s Hail to the Thief works. Although such aspects
were mostly overlooked, the article argues that they are key to determining the
liberatory potential of Murray’s political art. In the end, the latter is criticised for
still adhering to a rather conventional vanguardist model of art’s political role—
postmodern tendencies notwithstanding. The article argues that this is untenable
from a liberational perspective mainly because of the maintenance of an epistemic
hierarchy between critical art and its publics and the ensuing debilitating agential
effects.
