Tarzan I Painting

Tarzan at the Johannesburg art fair A few years ago I befriended a Serbian animator, illustrator and academic Mileta Positc, who had come to work as a lecturer at Wits University. I remember in that early stage of our relationship being curious about why he and his wife Sanja had decided to come and live in Johannesburg. It turned out that besides the work opportunity presented to Mileta by Wits University, a governing reason for coming to Africa, was for Mileta to fulfil his childhood fantasy of visiting the great amorphous sprawl of jungle in which the legendary Tarzan had lived. Of course, Mileta was not entirely naive to the fact that in reality Africa was nothing like the Weissmuller movies, but somehow traces of these romanticised visions lurked in the back of his mind. Such Romantic and glamorised visions of Africa are symptomatic of a colonial discourse perpetuated in the west since the first boats returned to Europe from exotic shores hundreds of years ago. The representation of Africa, as a Garden of Eden, in which Man could live harmoniously with nature, commanding his world through acts of heroism, bolstered the order of colonial hierarchy, in which white men stood at the very top of the apex, commanding all of nature bellow. Admittedly I have been fascinated by the evocative narratives presented in movies like Tarzan, despite that for many years I have been aware of the problematic nature of the subtext. The romance for me has been tainted somewhat, destroyed and darkened by reality, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I see myself as a boy listening to my father’s stories of how he grew up as the son of a British parks board officer, on the banks of the Zambezi River. My father certainly lived the colonial dream as a boy, spending a lot of his time in the rain forests, or fishing for tiger fish, or climbing baobab trees, while some of life’s more tedious realities where taken care of by a plethora of servants cooking and cleaning back at the family home. His life at this point was ideal, a prince in a kingdom of elephant, hippo and pythons. Black people, who surrounded him every day, where forced to be servile to the order of white privileged colonisers, who in those days believed that the world was more at peace when each and every participant assumed their place in the ‘natural’ hierarchy of life. The British colonial project which my father caught the tail end of in Zambia, was ultimately flawed and destined to be subverted as people became more aware of the insidious nature of its discourse. In time people from all corners of the social spectrum have looked beyond the heroic narratives and the romantic propaganda and unveiled colonialisms dark underbelly. Today, those subtexts have been decoded, reframed, deconstructed, dissolved. My paintings which appeared on the 2013 Joburg art fair look at the collapse of the colonial romance through the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies. The process of painting is somewhat of an exercise in contesting and deconstructing narratives. The initial image which I paint onto a fresh white canvas, is usually lifted directly from the movie, and painted as a pristine black and white image, representing almost photo realistically the original frame. From then on that image is ‘contested’, subjected to layers of process, which at times render the image meaningless, but always changes it from its original reading. In this way the Tarzan series, mimic the way in which colonial narratives have been deconstructed from the perspective of social and political discourses.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:1400 W x 900 H x 50 D in

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