In South Africa, the masses don’t do contemporary art. The general public is not invited to exhibition openings. These are for the beau monde. Patrons and intellectuals mingle with artists and their friends. The usual rent-a-crowd, the fashionable and the trendy, are trotted out to swell the numbers and give proceedings a classy edge. Journalists, college lecturers and undergraduates are about as riff-raffy as it gets.

      These are comfortable, reaffirming occasions for a cultured, middle-class urban elite. They see themselves on the ‘same side’ as the art; the stuff speaks to them in a non-threatening way. It may be all sedition and subversion on the walls around them, full-blown assaults on the status quo, but they’re attuned to the various traditions of iconoclasm and the counter-cultural movements; they get the picture, you know? And while it’s true that, for many of them, art may have lost its ability to shock, these were never the sort of people who were going to throw a riot in the first place; they were not going to storm the salon in a rage and trash the building.

      Such a crowd, the intelligentsia and the faux-hemian, would have attended the opening of Brett Murray’s December 2010 show, Hail to the Thief, at the Goodman Gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town. A former anti-Apartheid cultural activist, Murray had studied fine arts at the University of Cape Town where he was awarded his Master’s in 1989 for his dissertation, A Group of Satirical Sculptures Examining Social and Political Paradoxes in the South African Context.

      The title offers a neat summary of the very successful and acclaimed career that followed. In that context, Hail to the Thief wasn’t going to depart from that path. Certainly, there were no major surprises for those who had kept an occasional eye on Murray’s career over the years. Hail to the Thief targeted the ruling elite of the ANC, the corrupt and venal world of Jacob Zuma and his inner circle in particular.

      The works certainly weren’t subtle. There were images of large Soviet-style military insignia with dollar signs in place of the hammer and sickle. Russian and Chinese revolutionary propaganda imagery was similarly subverted. Closer to home, iconic ‘struggle’ artworks from the anti-Apartheid era were crudely undermined, their original messages twisted and debased. A poster, for example, that commemorated the last words of the first Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’, or MK) guerrilla to be executed by the Apartheid state was now silkscreened with the legend: ‘Tell my people that I love them and that they must continue the struggle for Chivas Regal, Mercs and kick-backs – Solomon Mahlangu 6 April 1979.’

      A print marking the anniversary of the 9 August 1956 march by 20 000 women on the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the introduction of pass laws had been turned into a taunt personally directed at Zuma: ‘Now you have touched the women you have struck a rock; you have dislodged a boulder; you will be president.’

      Core demands of the Freedom Charter, adopted by the ANC and its allies in June 1955, were now: ‘There shall not be work and security,’ ‘The wealth of the country shall not be shared by all,’ ‘There shall not be houses and security for all,’ ‘There shall not be peace and friendship,’ and ‘All shall not be equal before the law.’

      Commentators would later say that, as works of satire, the pieces weren’t clever but rather crude. To an extent, it was a point even the artist conceded. Asked by Charl Blignaut, an arts writer with City Press, whether the pieces weren’t ‘all a bit simplistic’, Murray admitted the show was ‘a little poppy, quite didactic and I suppose vitriolic too. But I don’t care. This is not a time for rich metaphors. I want to convey a message.’

      That was in Johannesburg just days before the storm broke. But, back in Cape Town, in December 2010, the critical reaction to Murray’s Hail to the Thief show was extremely positive.

      For Mike van Graan, playwright and executive director of the African Arts Institute, the exhibition echoed the scathing comments by Zwelinzima Vavi, secretary general of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), on the ArcelorMittal Sishen mine deal in which Zuma’s family and friends had received shares worth millions of rand. ‘We’re headed for a predator state where a powerful, corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas are increasingly using the state to get rich,’ Vavi had said of the deal in August 2010. In a predator state, he continued, the chief of state’s family ate first – like the hyena and her daughters.

      ‘Vavi’s anger, frustration and disappointment expressed in [the comment], “We have to intervene now to prevent South Africa from becoming a state where corruption is the norm and no business can be done with government without first paying a corrupt gatekeeper,” reflects the anger and frustration themed through this exhibition,’ Van Graan said. Concluding his review, he wondered whether Murray’s work would ‘drive us to action, whether through shame, guilt or real commitment to a better life for all. It is in how ordinary, particularly poor, people’s lives have been transformed after 1994 – fundamentally and sustainably – that our honouring of struggle heroes and icons will be proved, rather than in how many streets, buildings or parks we name after them.’

      There would be action, all right. But not as Van Graan intended. And it’s noteworthy too that Vavi would side with the hyenas when they rounded on The Spear.

      Lucinda Jolly, writing in the Cape Times, was perhaps more on the mark. She too had praised the work. ‘We laugh at Murray’s cleverness, the way he hits the nail on the head,’ she wrote. ‘But it’s a bit too close to the bone. And underneath the laughter we sense Murray’s anger and the pain of seeing the failure of a society that you had hopes for. Right from the start Murray does not shy away from acknowledging who he is in the scheme of things. He sees himself ‘right on top of the shit pile’. He agrees with Breyten Breytenbach’s criticism of the ANC that the playing fields have not been evened out. Things have been renamed and colours have changed, that’s all. There is a sense of Murray’s anger and impotence, too.’

      Among the pieces Jolly singled out was a bronze sculpture of a thickset, low-browed masturbating ape. This piece, titled One Party State, bore a striking resemblance to the ape of Voortrekker, a work Murray exhibited in his 1991 show, Fat Sculptures. That ape had a shotgun slung on its back and held, in its lap, a cartridge with both hands; in One Party State, the weapon has gone but the shotgun shell has been replaced by the primate’s penis. Twenty years had passed, Jolly was suggesting, but it was the same beast – with the same concerns.

      ‘We get,’ she wrote, ‘its pointed socio-politico thrust and the ramifications of calling someone an aap in this climate.’ More ominously, she warned, ‘We are a thin-skinned, but brutal society. You can’t say this and get away with it, but you can do worse and get away with it. You couldn’t say anything or do