Strauss & co - 17 February 2018, Cape Town

138 contemporary art auction Strauss & co The sentence,“In God We Trust’ is spelled out in bright green neon lights, spread over three large-scale canvases. These canvases are copies of well-known scenes in JH Pierneef’s iconic Johannesburg Station Panels: respectively, Karibib, S.W.A., Premier Mine , and Apies Rivier, Pretoria . In addition, the canvases seem to be defaced by splashes of brightly coloured oil paint. Given Pierneef’s status as South African landscape artist par excellence, it is inevitable that he would become the target of art “iconoclasts’ , such as Wayne Barker. Perception was that Pierneef was a mouthpiece of Afrikaner Nationalism, and it is therefore not surprising that anti-Pierneef sentiment started when resistance to the apartheid regime was at its fiercest, namely in the 1980s. Breaking or destroying his images and thereby negating his legacy, became the objective of many South African artists, including Barker, from that time onwards. 49 Wayne Barker SOUTH AFRICAN b1963 In God We Trust, triptych 2015 mixed media on canvas 139 by 120cm each R350 000 – 500 000 EXHIBITED 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, New York, 15 to 17 May 2015. Iconoclasm is the breaking or destroying of images, especially of images and pictures set up as great objects of veneration, as in the case of Pierneef’s landscapes. What has happened that has made images the focus of so much passion? To the point that destroying them, erasing them, defacing them, has been taken as the ultimate touchstone to prove the validity of one’s faith, of one’s science, of one’s critical acumen, of one’s artistic creativity? To the point where being an iconoclast seems the highest virtue, the highest piety, in intellectual circles? In an interview, Barker said “I destroyed Apies River in a performance in a black working-class bar for an SABC television show on the artist Braam Kruger, who was living in town. The bar was called Avanganye ,“Let’s be friends’ . I destroyed the work while being filmed and interviewed, saying,“This is the violence, this is the workers.’