Posts Tagged ‘Veronique Malherbe’
Veronique Untrashed
THE saga of Veronique’s rise to fame and immolation on the alter of popular appeal and rejection by mainstream culture does not stop with our fallout at the Bell Roberts gallery. Though the temper tantrums would last for over a year, she invariably found the wherewith-all to forgive those she perceived as betraying her vision of a narcissistic, Janus-headed pop-culture, driven to self-destruction, paranoia and drug-taking.
I was invited to a follow-up exhibition at Joao Ferrera, in which Veronique had pitched a tent and held the art-world hostage. SPEEDQUEEN & the SAMPLEGODS, and NAKED LUNCH – DISCO KITCHEN screamed the press release.
“Art detective VERONIQUE MALHERBE invites you to the shocking and funking etc etc.” in which a CD launch was combined with an art-exhibition and announcement of the immanent release of an autobiography.
Despite the labour, I found the carefully concocted fantasy slightly disturbing. Gone were the crowds that had literally cued. Instead we were treated to dinner, a very private affair in which the detritus of the last five years was dished up like a used sanitory pad.
A little harsh perhaps, but surely I am entitled to an opinion? At the peak of her career, Veronique did not have a biographer or even a catalogue to show for all the work which had epitomised the white, nineties counterculture. Despite all the media attention, not one art critic had bothered to inquire as to the progress of her “book” and the disappearance of a large body of work under the combined impact of 911 and several years of cultural antagonism.
Veronique and the Plundergods
VERONIQUE, the closest thing South Africa has to a female conceptual pop artist, plundered everything from late 20th century modern primitivism, to rock art feminism, literary theory, post-modernism and deconstruction.
It was this post-punk sensibility that first attracted me to her. Granted, she was one of the most striking creatures of her time with a European ramp modeling career under her belt, which had quickly been dumped for the off-beat allure of University of Cape Town’s Drama Deparment then still struggling to emerge out of the seventies and in a conceptual time-warp as far as the eighties were concerned.
V arrived suddenly at a house party I had thrown for an assortment of heads from UCT philosophy & classics. A truly bacchanalian event with a T. E. Lawrence 7 Pillars of Wisdom and Ecstasy theme which was meant to shock as well as enlighten the European sensibilities of the period. I had purposefully created an art happening in which a pastiche of ambient music, Brian Eno, and Psychic TV was interspersed with poetry recitals, astrological forecasts and food delivered by my younger brothers dressed as cheribum.
Needless to say, there was quite a bit of nudity. Diane George, my Latin tutor had taken the lead by revealing a breast or two. John Cooper (relative/non-relative of Cape Town anti-psychiatrist David Cooper) and Hume himself had taken off their kneck-ties and declaimed on Plato while Leonard Shapiro circulated manifestoes written up by the beatnik Sinclair Beiles.
Enter Veronique accompanied by playwrite Martin Jacklin and Camilla Kraft. She was like a women possessed and I was spellbound. The counterculture salon would continue along with a parade of boyfriends. I remember being invited to a V Christmas party the same year, which must have made it 1988. Not a single woman. Around a large dinner table sat 10 vaginocentric amorattas competing for V attention while we all contemplated the meaning of pumpkin fritters.
Bruce Wessels who would later become Fynn and then Serophin and I, we were all curiously involved in a publishing project along with Jonathan Garnham (Blank), a cultural precurser that had taken its cue from the missives of counterculture hero Tim Leary, the quixotically named Starseed Transmission after a cause which had began at Millbrook.
The exploration of consciousness in CT was inextricably involved in an underground movement that included anarchists, poets, classicists, conceptual artists, queers, draft-dodgers, pirates and mutineers. The late eighties and early nineties was a period of revolt and revolution for the RSA that would not settle down until the dramatic events of the first democratic election. Then Veronique moved to Johannesburg.
