Notes

Conrad Botes adopted a Pop Art style long after the early 1960s American and British stylistic movement had exhausted its aesthetic value criticising dehumanisation brought about by large-scale consumerism. Botes works with the legacy of Pop, focusing on the dehumanisation resulting from the virtual and hyperreal world of the Internet.

The impossibility of any human interaction is captured well in the present two lots. Figures and faces are essentially isolated on a bland picture plane. They appear emblematic in nature: whether of Calvinism or Catholicism in the work, Something Terrible is about to Happen or of the Letter of the Law in the work, The Law. But each with an ironic twist: in the former, it is not Christ dying in the lap of Mary, but the Devil himself. In the latter, the Book of Law is literally carried by Botes himself in a characteristic, bearded self-portrait.

The emblematic nature is reinforced by the graphic, largely linear depiction of figures. These emblems resemble the stock images available in tattoo parlours in any harbour around the world. They are ready for inking on the body. Some of Botes’s self-portraits contain detailed, full-bodied tattoos. Ashraf Jamal calls this a ‘cargo cult’, a culture mooring at every shore and adopted makeshift by indigenous peoples.¹ On South African shores, the cargo culture could be religious dogma or a skewed, biased legal system of the past.

¹ Ashraf Jamal (2017). In The World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art, Milan: Skira, pages 246–247.