lacquer on fibre glass and metal

Artwork date: 1972
Signature details: signed
Literature: cf. Catherine, N. and Friedman, H. (2000). Norman Catherine. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, another exampe from this series illustrated on p.27.

(1)

140 x 44 x 29 cm excluding base

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Notes:

Norman Catherine and his art are often described in almost shamanic epithets. He is the serial self-re-inventor, slipping stealthily between altered states of consciousness, through manipulation of irrational spaces, time warps and extremes of scale. And even in the diaper years of his career, he was already producing works whose components would serve as recurring refrains throughout his oeuvre.Snare, for example, provides an early indication of the artist’s ability to straddle the dichotomy of politics and pathology, both in terms of race and gender. Executed in 1973 as part of a body of work for his second exhibition at the Goodman Gallery, Snare suggests that Catherine’s art was becoming less a weapon of struggle than struggle the weapon of art. A sculptural installation constructed from customised fibreglass and shop window mannequins, it is adorned with sharp, animalistic protrusions and rendered in his signature garish hues alongside another Catherinism – a pair of taptickles (a combo of taps and testicles) mounted on a metal rod.In this work, Catherine is clearly ‘tapping’ into the influences of surrealist art, such as Hans Bellmer’s eroticised dolls that explore sexuality, evoke abusive relationships, articulate fetishistic fantasies and objectify the female body as a captive of the male sexual gaze. But Snare evokes fear, not erotic desire. The title suggests entrapment, specifically of an animal, and an essentially misogynistic attitude towards women, as temptresses, seductresses, savages and predators. Catherine therefore creates a hybrid, fractured creature, parodying and subverting the Surrealist idea that the ultimate surreality is the fusion of the self with another and Shakespeare's reference to sex as "the beast with two backs."It shocks the viewer into making new connections from the binaries of black and white, human and bestial, crudity and sophistication, primitive and futuristic. And it is through Snare’s inversion and subversion of the conventional order that Catherine sets the stage for the pantheon of demons, jugglers and jokers that, in later years, would ultimately dominate his head, heart and art.

Hazel Friedman