Anton Kannemeyer

Anton Kannemeyer is something of a missionary. Anton Kannemeyer is tall, balding and wears spectacles in the tradition of all good missionaries, he even sometimes has a beard, albeit it a snappy, carefully contoured one. The zeal of preaching a new doctrine, complete with its own style, codes and insider jokes comes through in all of his work. Kannemeyer's religion is the comic. Kannemeyers' language is satire.

Anton Kannemeyer was Born in 1967 he grew up in the cartoon like parody of Transvaal working class suburbia and was educated at Linden High School. He graduated cum laude for both his honours and masters degrees in Fine Arts from the University of Stellenbosch. He went on to lecture at the University of Pretoria, the Witwatersrand Technicon and then as a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch. Early in 2006 he resigned to work as a full time artist. Kannemeyer has participated in numerous group exhibitions (sixty in total) most of them international; and has had a number of solo shows, notably at The Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Art on Paper Gallery in Johannesburg and at the Michael Stevenson gallery in Cape Town. He has also curated several comic exhibitions in South Africa and Europe.

Joe Dog is Kannemeyer's pseudonym and when pronounced in Afrikaans means You Dog. Aided and abetted by Conrad Botes (Konradski), he has displayed a Duchamp-like ability to manipulate the media by generating controversy, in a full frontal assault on the Afrikaner cultural mainstream. For Kannemeyer it has been a concerted campaign of revenge against the hated authority figures of his boyhood - his father, 'Barries' who caned him, and all the headmasters, priests, policemen and rugger buggers who in one way or another attempted to indoctrinate, punish and belittle him. His intensely personal response to the humiliations of his boyhood has since radiated out into a broader psychosexual, socio-historical critique of Afrikaner culture and South African society in general. (Extract taken from Andy Mason, The Big Bad Bitterkomix handbook, published by Jacana, 2006)

In these prints Kannemeyer has focussed on images from his Alphabet of Democracy series. The first were done in 2005 " J is for Jack Russell" and "D is for dancing ministers". The initial reference is to childhood primers and illustrated alphabets, Letterland gets political!...The text on the prints reflects his obsession with hand typography and the style of the prints recalls his earlier silk-screens with the backgrounds of flat colour. The appealing primer like text is deceptive, on closer inspection the one image is of a blood spattered blanket covering a murdered farmer with his, still living, Jack Russell curled up asleep on top of him. A documentary image from Zimbabwe given a dagger like twist by Kannemeyer.

There has been some discussion in the workshop as to who the ministers are in the "D is for dancing ministers" print. Mosiuoa Lekota, Penuell Maduna?? Certainly they are too fat to be Mbeki but then maybe they are caricatures of the designer-suited-over-weight men who still feel the urge to toyi-toyi. This is one set of alphabets that are not going to make it to the Foundation Phase classrooms of the Department of Education.

In 2008 he added the following lithographs to the Alphabet of Democracy. G is for goodhealth, B is for black, W is for white, N is for nightmare and F is for footwashing.These prints refer to local, South African events and definitions from dictionaries used in schools; but their meaning extends way beyond South African borders and picks up on prejudices and social issues across the globe. "N is for nightmare" and the "B is for black" and "W is for white" would resonate as quickly in the USA and Europe as they do here on the southern tip of Africa.

In " Birth, The first and direst of all disasters" and "Say, if you speak English we must be getting near civilization", Kannemeyer combines historical references to seeemingly mundane photographic records with just a slight manipulation of the imagery and addition of bitingly funny text.

New Editions

ArtPrintSA Artists

Anton Kannemeyer exhibition at The Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC

Anton Kannemeyer reviewed in The New York Times

Lithographs 2008

Lithographs, 2005