Stuart Bird
‘We live in an age of ever-increasing tolerance and even-handedness. Stuart Bird is an intolerant and biased man. He refuses to tolerate violence against women, the unjustified use of force against the powerless and the excesses that those who wield power perpetrate. In his work, which frequently addresses the issue of power he unfailingly positions himself as biased to the ‘underdog’ (even when, as in Lost That One (Self Portrait), that underdog is the artist himself.)
The terms ‘political’ or even ‘topical’ can easily –too easily perhaps – be applied to his works but if one stops there one misses much of the essence of the artist’s work. It would be as if a contemporary of Delacroix used these epithets for his Raft of the Medusa. Of course Bird is referencing the news stories and scandals that confront us every day in the media and he makes clear statements about them (at a time when fewer and fewer South African artists seem to have the need for this) but these are merely the starting point for his art. His meticulous attention to detail and the superb formal qualities of his sculpture should give us a clue that these are no ephemeral ‘jokes’ about current affairs. These works have a permanence and gravitas, which is embedded in the materials he uses: hard woods for his Traditional Weapons; nickel-plated bronze for the popcorn in Pop Pop Pop!. It is as if the ephemeral has been deliberately elevated in these actions; similarly the utilization of cheap found objects and the artist’s act of nomination and recontextualization made more meaningful as can be seen in Black Ram and Made in China.
Stuart Bird is not merely making a timeous political comment, rather his work is deeply concerned with social injustice on a much broader scale, about the way that people with power so frequently abuse it. This is amplified by the way his exceptionally beautiful objects – perhaps through their very beauty – chill us with their hints and potentialities for violence and abuse. If one looks carefully at his work you will see reference to the way the poor, the indigent, women, gay people and others who have been marginalised and controlled through force or rhetoric. Hollow rhetoric is something that Bird seems to have a particular distaste for and several of his works relate to this, and the manner in which such rhetoric turns into action condoned and initiated by the utterer of inflammatory oratory.
Often he makes subtle puns, such as in RSR, a found object of a blow dryer continuously spewing out hot air. These initials may well stand for a well-known biographer of ex-President Thabo Mbeki. At other times the puns are visual such as in White Lies (No Heroes) where the viewer must decode the context in order to unlock the play on words. There is no doubt that there is much humour in his work but it is humour of the driest and blackest sort: forcing us to confront that which we take far too much for granted. In this way perhaps he will succeed in making us all a little less tolerant or the intolerable and a bit more biased towards those whom we see around us suffering abuse.’
By Andrew Lamprecht
