The Virtual Museum of Contemporary African Art opened 14 December with the Virtual Project Bad for your Health/Wrong Colour by Mustafa Maluka. We asked prof. Mieke Bal for her comment, which resulted in the following Guided Tour through the Project. The illustrations render the works discussed in a non-interactive form; for a link to the real thing, please click here.

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Who is this rather handsome guy, whose earnest portrait looks at you from against the aura-like background of a broken British flag? A portrait, in the history of western painting, stands for the individual, the genre for individualism. Success, too: only the successful can have their portrait painted. Or are worth the painter's while.

This face, however, could have been computer-generated out of the world's gene pool. He could be Latino, Asian-British, African. He could be from that smaller-scale global gene pool, Cape town townships. Beyond individualism, he is also from the utopian world beyond race.

Why paint this man? Why paint, period. Painting in the here and now, place of computer-animation and the virtual museum: is it perverse nostalgia for an art form long gone? Clearly not; not if the obsoleteness of painting goes hand in hand with the obsoleteness of its most political genre: portraiture. For this artist from Cape Town it is the rightful and insolent re-occupation of the realm of High Art from which he and his peers had long been wrongfully kept at bay.

Painting the former elite art as re-occupation; portraiture the eternalization of the individual elite - royalty, presidents, businessmen - as the act of substituting Everyman for the political and economical elite; animation and presentation in a virtual environment as the globe-wide occupation of the museum.

This secular, global Saint is not only the result of painting as mixing colors on a magical palette. In another act of re-occupation, Maluka has brought computer animation inside its Other, august portrait painting. The eyes of Mister Universe are animated. Eyes and brows flash left and right, paranoid. The burden of tokenism takes its toll. More is needed to make this handsome feel good.

But it can be done. If you interact with him his face becomes friendly. You touch his mouth and he kisses you. This is no royalty but a true Everyman. The recipe is utterly simple and doable. Interact, and you are rewarded. Who can resist touching painting, committing the forbidden act, transgressing the ultimate taboo of art: Do Not Touch? Maluka pokes fun at the art world in the same gesture that mocks individualism's collusion with exclusion. Erasing "race," he puts humor, friendliness, and biting critique in its place.

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Modernist abstract painting is not spared parody and commentary. An abstract flat image, the dollar sign at the bottom its only figuration. Move around the flat surface and famous brand names lure you into fantasies of wealth, leisure, speed, beauty. It's all yours, but only fleetingly so. For fantasies don't last.

You can get lucky and win the lottery. Click on the dollar sign, and under a shower of applause dollar bills whirl down. From heaven, or from American airforce planes, dropping not peanut butter and jam but fluttering pieces of paper. But, as the work's title says...

Is the painting worth all this money? Perhaps, as another fantasy of success. But in the jungle, what would you do with it? But then, how do you stay alive on peanut butter? These days the painting seems to imitate Life, as in the old days. The cheerful clapping that accompanies this most universal of deceptions foregrounds an emptiness that hurts.

This painting is funny but no fun. Money as the most useless yet the most fetishized of commodities: in a world where people crave for spiritual fulfillment so much that they literally kill for it, this painting in its stillness and visual emptiness can induce despair. And the animation makes it only worse. A few seconds of applause, useless pieces of paper, and then silence. Stillness. The unbearable lightness of being. What is it that has been so utterly destroyed? By whom or what?

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(... like slaves on a ship talking about who has the nicest chain -). Talib Kweli's rap song resonates through the title of this painting. A Chuck Close-type portrait of a corporate type, even more generalized than the paranoid role model of the first painting, and just as dispersed, torn to pieces or dots as the wealth of the second. Modernist painting and classical portraiture go asunder hand in hand, overruled by an animation on the rhythm of rap. Rap, not as contemporary musical fashion but as continuous with slave culture.

In systemic opposition to the second work, this painting will not stand still. Maluka's own music pounds the rhythm of this changing face. Every once in a while, the corporate man in tie and suit becomes a woman, but the distinction hardly matters. Pink pins hang down from the top, threatening to lock the figures up. They come close to hurting the impeccable face, bringing some expression in its dead features. Not even Successmen are safe from potential danger.

The background pattern comes and goes like gold floating through the painting's surface. Fleeting gold, fleeting value. Some of the songs of hiphop talk about killing each other, perhaps over the nicest chain on the ship. But the guys making the money, the record company owners, the executives who produce nothing, continue to make their money. Their faces remain unaffected.

Bragging about nice chains, sitting on fleeting gold flecks. Somewhere, in this picture, slavery has remained. The humor, meanwhile, remains both light and bitter. Its target remains unspecified. Global capitalism, white supremacy, what's the difference? And the boys rap on, making poetry out of the dirt of history. And the artist creates on, deploying the most august of art forms in conjunction with the most popular of music; in the mood of mockery that cannot shed seriousness. A mixed marriage of sorts.

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Re-occupation again; of portraiture, again. This time, the genre is the self-portrait. Self-portraits of artists tend to boast the sitter's occupation: painter in front of easel, or with brush in hand. This is me, rich and famous, worth your time to look at me. Or not rich but famous. Not here, not in this series, though.

Painting and its time-consuming slowliness is gone. Photography has taken its place. The art of the instant, of the snapshot. No animation here. The animation is inside the art form. A series of self-portraits that flaunts its street-wise form. No patient calculation, no artistic balance. Mustafa in front of washing machines. Mustafa against South-African mountains. Mustafa in a posh apartment. Mustafa in the subway. Just caught, in a fleeting moment: Mustafa on the move.

Mustafa against wall paper. Mustafa against other art. He - where is he? He is neither here nor there, but everywhere. He places himself in the front of the image, very close to the picture plane, dominating the background as fundamentally silly. Not Everyman, but Everywhere. He is in spaces from imagined to real, from perennial nature to the New World, from two-dimensional background to linear perspective receding into infinite depth.

Where is he? He presses forward. It is he, not the background that matters. He is the King of the Place. After centuries of subordination, he occupies all those places of exclusion and domination. He takes back what is rightfully his. He is here, to stay. Better get acquainted, better get friendly. Cheerful, mournful, caught in random moments, he is not going to budge.

Who is he? He looks into the lens. He looks into your face. In each image, his face is different. His hairdo changes. It's only the choice of the morning's toilette. His cloths change. Of course they do. The color of his face changes, according to light and exposure. Skin color is like cloths is like hairdo. Does it matter? Only if you decide so. You choose.

But precisely, this is the moment of truth: who is he? And who are you? No clicking control here. The images move by, just a little faster than you would like them to. Like street life. If you wish to get acquainted with who he is, you just have to find another way to stop him.

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This title of a 1998 show of Maluka's acknowledges the horror of rape, and offers a cure, a the-rapy. Rape the ignorance that destroys the self-image and value of the youngsters in the townships, and everywhere else. The metaphor of violence hurts. It hurts me because of its sexual nature. Rape as the age-old metaphor, the allegory of men fighting against men: Lucretia.

Mustafa Maluka goes about the world, and the world of art, wrecking havoc on complacency, resignation, acceptance of fate. With bubbling artistic and political energy, he beats the crap out of ignorance. The metaphor is threatening. It also offers a way out. He uses his own face to attack crude racial stereotyping. That is why in the series Who am I? his face is so insolently and unesthetically close to the picture place, to your space.

Maluka doesn't ask for his rights. He takes them, occupies them. Don't we all, though? The violence triggers that awareness, and so the violence disappears, turning into the magician-artist's "natural" presence and his therapeutic powers. No place, no icon of relations between people, no value is sacred for him. That is his the-rapy. He demands, no, he takes, by force if need be, knowledge, power, and respect. So far, the worst violence has been called for.

By deploying the metaphor of rape, his combat against racism and economic domination is male-identified. But somehow it doesn't frighten me. His humor winks: you choose, to be a target or an ally. And his play with the global gene pool offers the therapy for all those violent young men who have not learned another language. "Race" only exists if you want it to. That, then, also holds for gender. Stop ignorance, stop rape.


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