White Nights
Published on the occasion of Brett Murray’s Hide at Everard Read, Johannesburg, February 2021.
In Brett Murray’s Hide, the artist invites a novel hesitancy into his work. Familiar with the uncertain charge of giving offence, Murray now considers the censorship offence inspires. There is little of the polemic tone that previously characterised his work, few brash jokes and damning declarations. Instead, the artist questions his convictions, appears distrustful of his own moral certitude. With the lasting UMMM… of the text work Doubt (2018), Murray approaches his subject with something like apprehension.
“The punitive gesture of censoring finds its origin in the reaction of being offended,” JM Coetzee writes in his essay Taking Offence (1996). “The strength of being-offended, as a state of mind, lies in not doubting itself; its weakness lies in not being able to afford to doubt itself.” Doubt is then the antidote to the certainty that justifies outrage. Though founded on such certitude, the offence is seldom specific, more I-know-it-when-I-see-it, yet no less intolerable for its indeterminacy. Being-offended is a profoundly unpleasant state of mind – it demands an action that it might be made exterior, might guard the psyche against the object of outrage. Censorship alone offers itself as defence. In taking offence – Coetzee again – “we feel any or all of a miscellany of states of unpleasure, including but not limited to disgust, shame, hurt and anxiety; also a measure of resentment against the one on whom this unpleasure is blamed.” That this measure of resentment can have menacing consequences is well known to the artist. In the story of Murray’s The Spear (2012), giving offence sent him not only to the nation’s courts but to the court of public opinion, which was less given to rigour and reason, less concerned with the ideals of free speech. Indeed, the echo chamber of the internet proved no uncertain foe – the accusations levelled against him as numerous as they were nebulous.
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