Tony Gum – Flavour of a generation.
By Ashraf Jamal
Since Tretchikoff and Warhol we’ve grown accustomed to ‘High Art Lite’; art which debunks elitism, cruises with design, celebrates kitsch and the popular. In this brave new world of hype, frippery, and a cool embrace of emptiness – embodied in the works of Koons and Murakami – it is the realisation no only that anything is-and-can-be art, but the unwavering insight that canonical systems are dying (if not dead) and that the very prism through which we see the world and make sense of it is shot through with fakery, illusion, spin-doctoring, and the trenchant sense that what – today –is profoundly absent is ‘authenticity’.
Scientists have declared this new historical moment as the ‘Anthropocene Age’; an age that comes after industrialisation and Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, in which it has become impossible to separate the human from the synthetic. The late Steve Jobs was the quintessence of this new world when he announced that he would bring soul back into technology. Epitomising this blurring of the human and the machine, art and design, we now have the Apple Watch, or as Wired Magazine recently announced, the discovery of the ‘plastiglomerate’, a new geological formation comprising melted plastic, fossil, and stone, signalling a time in which all spheres of life and culture – including the artworld – becomes singularly defined by the post-industrial, digital, synthetic.
Enter Tony Gum, a young black woman artist from Guguletu in the Western Cape. Her decision to fuse a specific brand – Coca Cola – with an array of projected identities, ranging from the matriarch in traditional Xhosa costume to the West End Playboy Bunny, marks a newly minted ironic and playful take on the ubiquitous and morbid preoccupation with Identity Politics. In Tony Gum’s case it is the fusion of the African exotic, the ethnic traditional, the Afropolitan urban chic, and the iconic Bunny Girl which allows for a new framework, or prism, through which to see contemporary African art.
All importantly, it is Tony Gum’s wit, her lightness and playful irony which sets the work apart for therein we find no grim exploitation of a historical pain, no entitled supremacist black youth culture, no iconic imprisoning of black beauty, and no gratuitous play with emptiness. Rather, Tony Gum seems to have freed herself from a history of oppression – be it racial, cultural, or sexual – and, seemingly single-handedly, recreated herself as a mercurial aesthetic intelligence. Her work, remarkably sophisticated for someone so young, harks back to the genius of Moshekwa Langa, for Tony Gum, even as she plays fast-and-loose with the most ubiquitous and toxic imperial brand, is nevertheless giving us something fresh. Acknowledged by Art South Africa as a ‘Bright Young Thing’, Tony Gum seems set to make a major contribution to the booming Contemporary African Market. She is the new ‘plastiglomerate’ – the artist best able to splice the mortal with the synthetic, high art and trash, the better to capture the radio-active buzz of this art moment.
TEXT COPYRIGHT CHRISTOPHER MOLLER GALLERY
IMAGES CREDIT BY TONY GUM
By Ashraf Jamal
Since Tretchikoff and Warhol we’ve grown accustomed to ‘High Art Lite’; art which debunks elitism, cruises with design, celebrates kitsch and the popular. In this brave new world of hype, frippery, and a cool embrace of emptiness – embodied in the works of Koons and Murakami – it is the realisation no only that anything is-and-can-be art, but the unwavering insight that canonical systems are dying (if not dead) and that the very prism through which we see the world and make sense of it is shot through with fakery, illusion, spin-doctoring, and the trenchant sense that what – today –is profoundly absent is ‘authenticity’.
Scientists have declared this new historical moment as the ‘Anthropocene Age’; an age that comes after industrialisation and Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, in which it has become impossible to separate the human from the synthetic. The late Steve Jobs was the quintessence of this new world when he announced that he would bring soul back into technology. Epitomising this blurring of the human and the machine, art and design, we now have the Apple Watch, or as Wired Magazine recently announced, the discovery of the ‘plastiglomerate’, a new geological formation comprising melted plastic, fossil, and stone, signalling a time in which all spheres of life and culture – including the artworld – becomes singularly defined by the post-industrial, digital, synthetic.
Enter Tony Gum, a young black woman artist from Guguletu in the Western Cape. Her decision to fuse a specific brand – Coca Cola – with an array of projected identities, ranging from the matriarch in traditional Xhosa costume to the West End Playboy Bunny, marks a newly minted ironic and playful take on the ubiquitous and morbid preoccupation with Identity Politics. In Tony Gum’s case it is the fusion of the African exotic, the ethnic traditional, the Afropolitan urban chic, and the iconic Bunny Girl which allows for a new framework, or prism, through which to see contemporary African art.
All importantly, it is Tony Gum’s wit, her lightness and playful irony which sets the work apart for therein we find no grim exploitation of a historical pain, no entitled supremacist black youth culture, no iconic imprisoning of black beauty, and no gratuitous play with emptiness. Rather, Tony Gum seems to have freed herself from a history of oppression – be it racial, cultural, or sexual – and, seemingly single-handedly, recreated herself as a mercurial aesthetic intelligence. Her work, remarkably sophisticated for someone so young, harks back to the genius of Moshekwa Langa, for Tony Gum, even as she plays fast-and-loose with the most ubiquitous and toxic imperial brand, is nevertheless giving us something fresh. Acknowledged by Art South Africa as a ‘Bright Young Thing’, Tony Gum seems set to make a major contribution to the booming Contemporary African Market. She is the new ‘plastiglomerate’ – the artist best able to splice the mortal with the synthetic, high art and trash, the better to capture the radio-active buzz of this art moment.
TEXT COPYRIGHT CHRISTOPHER MOLLER GALLERY
IMAGES CREDIT BY TONY GUM
