Cattle AuctionPod was fascinated and horrified by the ease in which people could be dominated and subjugated despite their best efforts to resist. From Colonisation to Auschwitz, Beirut to Iraq, Myanmar to Soweto, he saw a continual process of sustained violence and murder underpinning modernity that somehow proceeded unchecked and unjudged. One of the keys to this he felt lay in how Trust and Faith in Authority are conscripted to fill the abattoir. Many of his images play on this tension: here we have docile, possibly even proud cows, being led to slaughter, following faithfully the jaundice eyed farmer across a field of blood. Structural power is never to be trusted.
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Dominee en MevrouwIn 1963 the Pods moved to Port Elizabeth, buying a ramshackle house in that part of town where “Whites only” Walmer and “Mixed” South End merged. Opposite was a NG Kerk (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk,). Representative of the absolute core of Christian Nationalism, the dominee and his wife were regular figures of Pod’s pen, etching knife, and paintbrush: They were all fire and brimstone on the pulpit, sanctimonious in public and yet, grovelling, unctuous and fawning when in the presence of authority. Pod saw religion as a metaphor for politics. He loathed clerical hypocrisy and its role in legitimising a genocidal state. He yearned for the heroism of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to manifest.
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Still life with wolvesDuring the 1960’s, the Group Areas Act was invoked to evict thousands of families across South Africa. The suburb of South End in Port Elizabeth was razed to the ground and its inhabitants scattered to the winds. Here a pass-for-white family look out over police evicting their neighbours.
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The Pope Is Dead, Long LIve the PopeFor Pod, religion was a metaphor for politics. For him the structure - of domination - endures, despite seemingly profound change. The changes taking place in 1990 in South Africa were for him typical of this. Here we see a series of white people in a row of telephone booths sharing the news of change: The alarmed cleric (incumbent state bureaucrat), the suspicious man peering furtively at the future and the cheery lady calling abroad, while her son holds their sharp fanged hounds close…
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SUnday Afternoon, 2002On an autumn Sunday in Sydney, Pod was invited to a shrimp BBQ by an actress, her construction contractor husband - and their two rescue dogs. Given the state of universal misanthropy and suffering in the world, this complex family relationship made an impression on Pod. He always felt there was a message in it somewhere.
As it turned out, the bigger dog, Oscar, had issues. The poor chap was totally neurotic with deep psychological problems set off by pumpkins and washing machines. After numerous therapy sessions, the couple were advised by their pet psychologist that Oscar needed his own “pet”. And so, Rubin Jr joined the family. Not long after, Rubin Jr acquired his own pet, a well chewed soft toy teddy. |
Die Sirkus van die Oranje, blanje BlouThe juggling and politicking by the old regime prior to the first democratic election captivated Pod. It was for him a desperate circus wherein the imperial cohort was finally revealed in their shabby underwear rehearsing frantically for a show that never would.
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Knight at the Wax museum (1 0f 3)Pod loved to paint as play, as a way to think in more complex ways than the head can hold. Puns, irony and satire flowed from his pens and brushes. He was always twisting and turning images, toying with meaning and complexity. Passing the wax museum in Barcelona he was struck a gravity defying, upside down man on a ladder ascending / descending to the booth outside. This dreamlike image stuck in his mind, and he perseverated this image in multiple ways, drawings, etchings, water colours, oils. He couldn’t shake the image for years, and kept returning to it, like a compulsive riddle whose solution always just eluded him. Here the Knight stands casually at the kiosk window, defying gravity, a myriad men descend toward him from above.
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Night at the wax museum (3 of 3)Here there is a woman at the kiosk repeated possibly ad infintum (given the tree sequence). Paradoxes and Borgian possibilities intrigued Pod, if the foreground is the current moment of time, what then of all the points approaching? Is Note the clock in the second booth. is the observer, the self, the only point of convergence? Can you elude the point of gravity and temporality, as the man on the ladder, and like a snake, slither to other moments, other dimensions?
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Staying the Hand of Abraham, 1978A linocut from The Passion of Judas Iscariot. After reading Nikos Kazantzakis, Pod felt compelled to visit Greece. With typical Pod timing, he arrived just as the military junta deposed the monarchy, and found himself sequestered on the island of Patmos. By chance the arch-bishop of Cape Town, Selby-Taylor was there with some fellow clerics and many a hot August night was spent swilling ouzo whilst debating religion and politics. Patmos is of course the island of John of Patmos, author of the biblical chapter Revelations, so it was a fitting place for such conversation. The incessant contradictions and ironies of biblical authority compelled Pod to respond. Here we have the lord staying the hand of Abraham as he is just about to sacrifice his begotten son Isaac. For Pod, Abraham’s act was the ultimate challenge to authority, a political act of immense proportion, that sought to deny Jehova the precedent of sacrificing his son. Hegemony must never be upstaged.
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The ConfessionalThe ease of surveillance by authority: its unquestioned power to intrude, interfere, judge, investigate, condemn and punish. It’s taken for grantedness; and the methods of its conditioning and acceptability, never ceased to amaze Pod. How we bend down before authority, how we kneel before hegemony and bare our souls, reveal our deepest secrets, and volunteer our vulnerabilities shocked him. Our Trust in Authority was something that he saw as probably hard wired, but, nonetheless deserving of questioning.
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1976The 1976 student protests in Soweto were momentous for Marianne. The deepening hegemonic curtailment of education for the majority population angered her immensely. Here she seeks to reveal an alternative world, where education is open and accessible. In this painting we see four African-Americans stepping out of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Educated, self-reliant, free citizens of a progressive world, not banished to be the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” by a racist-religious minority regime.
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Girl Dancer wantedTravelling to the US annually for her son Boris’s autism treatment gave Marianne a purview into the Cold War giant. Despite her European communist roots, she came to admire the cosmopolitan democracy of 1970’s New York, where cops smoked weed in Central Park and kids turned graffiti into high art. For her it was a place where people of all sizes, shapes and colours mingled in egalitarian confidence. This was the time before the Big Apple’s gentrification, before Rudy Guliani and the rise of organised crime as policing.
Here, on 42nd Street, a woman is considering applying for a job as a burlesque dancer, while a bouncer flexes his tough dude pose. This was when burlesque halls still held sway as rent paying citizens, next door to steak house diners and coffee bars. Seinfeld had definitely not moved in yet. After the verkrampte moralising of South Africa, that this was possible, that such tolerance existed, thrilled Marianne. That people could just be, without judgment, censure or condemnation, was for her, wonderful. |