About

ABOUT CHRIS:

BIOGRAPHY:

Edited biography for Christiaan Diedericks

By Hayden Proud

 The densely layered images and objects in Christiaan Diedericks’ work bear testimony to the course that he has charted for himself as a professional artist since 1994. His works collectively facilitate a greater appreciation of a creative endeavour, which are contemporary with the halcyon years of the 'new' South Africa. Some of the earliest works in his oevre date from the watershed year of the first democratic elections in 1994 followed by the country's adoption of a new constitution in 1996. The protection and freedoms afforded gay , bisexual and transgendered people through the prohibition of any discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation established a new legal and social 'landscape' against which Diedericks' works have not only been created, but by which they must also be evaluated and interpreted. His work confirms him not only as a speculative artist-philosopher on the diverse and complex psychosexuality of masculinity, but latterly, especially in his most recent Cold Sweat series of 2009, as a commentator on global political and social issues.

The sheer diversity of the visual sources, references and styles evident in Diedericks' work define him as an avowed post-modernist. He openly defines himself in as a sort of 'cat burglar' who 'loves to “steal” from popular and contemporary culture', while at the same time 'employing my own photography as a tool more and more'.(1) It is not only popular and contemporary culture that come under his purview, but also the deeper recesses of art history, and specifically, it seems, the work of iconic artists who also happened to have been homosexual, such as Leonardo da Vinci , Michelangelo and the sculptors of Antiquity. To this can be added more recent figures such as Tom of Finland who in turn had drawn on the work of the American Paul Cadmus and other figures of the early twentieth-century American avantgarde who openly expressed their sexual orientation in their work.

However, to only seek the purely visual cues in Diedericks' work is to overlook the literary and philosophical elements which underpin his thinking. Among the literary sources that have inspired him is that of the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman. Whitman's open homosexuality and his belief in individual freedoms has made him a cultural role-model for many gay writers and artists, especially in the post-Stonewall (post-1969) era. It has been suggested that the very nature and texture of Whitman's poetry, which was itself derived from the diverse vernacular rhythms of New York slang and the rhetoric of American journalese, inspired certain gay visual artists to play with its visual equivalent, to similarly overlay, mix and fuse imagery drawn from social history, the mass media and personal, autobiographical sources. The autobigraphical runs like a leitmotif through much contemporary and 'queer' art produced in this vein.

Diedericks’ body of work sits well within this relatively new 'tradition', even as he brings his peculiarly South African experience to bear upon it. Part of the serious intention of the new and openly-gay artist is to reject his 'outsider status'; to proclaim his shared humanity with the rest of human-kind and to embrace it, as Whitman himself stated in the following words:

            I celebrate myself,

            And what I assume, you shall assume,

            For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.(2).

Diedericks, like the gay American artist and AIDS-activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) and even the so-called 'Pop' artist Robert Rauschenberg before him, produces work that is highly self-conscious and deliberate in its hyperbolic, if not anarchic, eclecticism. Textual elements overlay images appropriated from photography and the mass media, art history, the cinema and sources of an autobiographical nature. Elements articulated in terms of pure line are juxtaposed with, or suspended over others that are either painterly or photographic in nature. The effect of layering this diverse imagery is one of compressing historical time within a single image. Despite the apparently idiosyncratic and incidental nature of Diedericks' approach to image-making, his firm hand, fine craftsmanship and his calculated content deliver to great effect. His meticulous mastery of a variety of graphic techniques, both traditional and experimental, support the complex images that flow in unison from the twin sources of his artistic imagination on one hand and his indignation at the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the world on the other.

Diedericks is an artist who is continually involved in evolving his own distinctive language around his South African gay identity. The internal dialectic in his work is between a deep sense of longing for love, completion and acceptance and a deep critique of the needless internal pain and suffering that a denial of these inflicts on the other.

Ultimately, any gay artist who chooses to identify himself openly with queer issues and the politics of gay identity has to deal with the politics and issues of the body; of the matters of sexual expression and the nature of love. As Gregory Woods has summed up so articulately:

Eros pitches his house in the human body. It is here that all declarations of love, poetic or otherwise, have their origin; and it is hither that, even after their dizziest flights of spirituality, they must return. The verbal flourish of erotic candour – the song or the sonnet, graffito or billet doux – is an echo of the body's signs, an articulation of the flesh.(3)

To this one could equally add, in the case of the work of Christiaan Diedericks, the marks of the artist's hand as he inscribes and articulates with brush, burin, chisel or pencil. These too echo the body's signs; these too are ultimately an articulation of the flesh.

Cape Town, November, 2009 

1. email correspondence with Chris Diedericks, 27 October, 2009.
2. From Whitman's ‘Song of Myself’ in his extended poem Leaves of Grass.
3. Gregory Woods. 1987. Articulate Flesh: Male homoeroticism and Modern poetry. Yale University Press: New York and London, p. 1.