Zombie Babylon

Conrad Botes’ exhibition of paintings and sculptures in ‘Zombie Babylon’, currently showing at Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg, can be explained as exploring this dimension of the spectral - wallowing in lifelessness. First the term Babylon, with its biblical implications, figuratively describes a place oversaturated with delinquencies. Secondly, his coalescence of Babylon with Zombie almost implies a double jeopardy – an enigmatic nightmarish zone with an incorrigible characteristic.

In his delicate and optically illusive Zombie Babylon series of Jesus Christ, we see Christ from panel 1-4, gazing up to the heavens about to emit his classic cries 'Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?' (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?) With both careful painterly prowess and sensitivity, Botes’ Christ seems to ambiguously vacillate from facing the precipice of death and soaring up to the heavens. Similarly on panel 5-8, though Christ turns to the viewer with an air of vulnerability, as if anonymous people out of the frame are secretly pulling the rest of his body out, he leaves a very disturbing hand gesture of ‘the holy trinity’ – thumb, index and middle finger. Though both Christs are classically portrayed in their hyperbolic defenselessness, Botes’ subtle gestures leave us perplexed. At the brink of death at the hands of a nefarious machine, Christ retains an insolence with his holy trinity gesture and piercing eyes. Here, death is undermined as rebellion.

Now allow me a small plea: this theistic positing shouldn’t deceive nor surprise us. After all, religion is almost customary within Botes’ thematic frame. Like Ivor Powell once wrote, we mustn’t worry – he is not saved. Christ’s hand, together with his eyes could, in Slavoj Zizek’s terms, be called 'partial objects', that is to say organs that subtract themselves from the body and start to act as autonomous monsters containing a will of their own beyond the subject’s control.

Botes’ work has often had a preponderance of disturbing (often private) body parts. This pattern of ‘partial objects’ occurs in a repetitive fashion almost everywhere within the show: from the sculpture of the Lawyer’s drooping single intestine, to Jacob’s torn body in his series Jacob’s Ladder, to Goya’s classic print, A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men, to the piercing eyes of many of Botes’ subjects. Though these ‘partial objects’ are part of the body, their subjective presence (and in a sense absence), usurp or newly define it.

The glaring eyes of Michael Jackson and Princess Diana render them palpable, as spectres with an irreverent persistence in our social memory. Their deceptively life-filled eyes, almost animalist, become this sign of zombification and therefore immortalization. Botes’ eyes rather become toxic to how we previously imagined the icons, as precious mortals. Though they still have their ‘normal’ look - as if they’re real windows to the soul - their eyes punctuate our optimism, tormenting us not with their ubiquity, but their excessive haunting resonance. The radiant but destabilizing palette doesn’t empathise, as colour is tucked into little rhomboids that draw us into a nightmarish hallucinogenic vortex. With this palimpsest of colours, almost popish, Botes reminds us of the uncritical consumerist culture that turns humans to Zombies in Babylon. 

Though Conrad Botes’ ‘Zombie Babylon’ is suggestive of many things, it remains equivocal. It is stuck in the unknown and refuses to unleash. Is Botes troubled by consumerism as such or just generally the state of affairs in our capitalist world, for instance? One cannot be sure of Botes’ real concern in this show, as it restlessly wavers from one idea to another - from references to Goya, to Christianity, to Lady Diana and Michael Jackson. Despite the palatable work, thematically ‘Zombie Babylon’ is riddled with inconsistency, confusion and instability.