‘Why do we find pleasure in alluding? Why do we find pleasure in the alluding of others?’ asks William Irvin in his 2002 article ‘The Aesthetics of Allusion’. Now matter how complicated the answer, there is something deeply gratifying about realising a piece of art alludes to another – like being in on an inside joke, cracking a code, or catching a small hint.
They say allusion serves many purposes: to instruct, to heighten an aesthetic experience and to bind a work of art in some way to what came before it. It activates stored images in our minds and makes us see both the new work and the original in fresh ways. Anton Kannemeyer and Conrad Botes’s Bitterkomix Sketchbooks and Journals are filled with references to the work of other artists. Right off the bat, in the top image on their cover, we see an illustration of Conrad Botes in deep concentration, drawing in his sketchbook while zombie-like figures around him literally strangle one another. In the bottom right corner of the image, a body is draped across a wooden beam, partially covered by a sheet—a deliciously clear allusion to The Raft of the Medusa, Théodore Géricault’s famous oil painting in the Louvre that depicts the gruesome aftermath of the 1816 shipwreck of the French frigate Méduse.
For a different book cover—this time a commissioned work for the novel Werfsonde (2012) by South African novelist Kleinboer, known in English for his autofiction Midnight Missionary (2006)—Kannemeyer draws on Paul Gauguin’s 1892 painting Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao tupapau), thereby linking Kleinboer’s book and its themes to those of Gauguin.
Kannemeyer’s drawing for Werfsonde is included in Bitterkomix Sketchbooks and Drawings, among many others: studies of works by Goya (essential in a body of work as preoccupied with power and violence as theirs), details from Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch, Félix Vallotton and Van Gogh illuminate the pages, along with famous comic characters from Hergé’s Tintin and E. C. Segar’s Popeye, not to mention the work of Jack Kirby (Fantastic Four, X-Men, etc.), and vintage South-African photo comics like Tessa, Die Arend, and Die Wit Tier.
One can spend hours poring over Botes and Kannemeyer’s sketchbooks—more than a thousand of these pages have been reproduced in their new book published this October—discovering, and savouring, these echoes.
