It is not uncommon nowadays for politicians to sneak into our bedrooms late at night and whisper their outrage. The Twitter utterances of Malema, Trump and Zille are, however, one of many genres of political bedtime story now available to adults interested in social engagement over intimacy and sleep. Cape Town sculptor Claudette Schreuders, who is currently showing her work in New York, including a painted wood bust of President Cyril Ramaphosa, is not exempt from this state of affairs.
At night, in bed with her partner, artist Anton Kannemeyer, she is prone to scroll through her smartphone. The cul-de-sacs it leads her into will often colour their nocturnal conversations.
"Oh shit, we've moved onto politics again," she summarises when I meet her at her Pinelands studio.
Of course, politics has long intruded on family life. Schreuders recalls her youth in Joburg. "I remember my father sitting on the edge of the chair watching the news. It was the most boring thing, but if you made a sound he would tell you to shut up. Maybe it's a middle-age thing. I'm like that now. Every day I check the news on my phone, and there is nothing satisfying about it."
Viewed from a certain angle, from the vantage of her stoic portrait of Ramaphosa, Schreuders's exhibition In the Bedroom (at Jack Shainman Gallery until June 22) offers a meditation on the intrusion of politics on the domestic.
"The show was initially just going to be about the bedroom, a reprieve from politics, and then I realised that he [Ramaphosa] is in the bedroom," says Schreuders.
Apart from the Ramaphosa bust, all the painted wood sculptures on her show focus on the intimate moods and rituals of the bedroom. It is a place of candour, anxiety, banality and sex. The most eye-catching piece on view is a study of a partially clothed couple going at it doggy style displayed near a small, wall-mounted work depicting a uniformed schoolboy in Christ-like pose.
The show also includes a teeny sculpture of a dead budgie, as well as various full-length studies of adolescent women, each an unreliable proxy for the artist. One girl-woman sleeps, another introspectively combs her hair, a third politely stands with her arms behind her back, and a fourth closes her eyes as her naked body is engulfed in flames. Each is a family secret encoded in wood.
The artist can't precisely recall when Ramaphosa first wandered into her field of vision. Pressed for a date, she responds: "I guess it was when he bought that expensive buffalo." She is reiterating a popular fiction that continues to haunt the president.
In early 2012, when Ramaphosa was still juggling business and politics, he unsuccessfully bid R19.5m for a buffalo cow and her heifer calf at a game auction in North West. His political enemies weaponised this display of available wealth a few months later when 34 miners were killed at Lonmin's Marikana mine, in which Ramaphosa owned a stake.
Schreuders's instinctive recall of Ramaphosa as rancher has little to do with Julius Malema's constant carping about it, but owes instead to family stuff. The artist's father now farms near Bela-Bela in Limpopo, very near Ramaphosa's wildlife game ranch.
The jacaranda wood for her presidential bust also hails from Limpopo. Schreuders bought the wood in 2004, at about the time she was busy with a commission of four larger-than-life bronzes of SA's Nobel Peace Prize laureates that was unveiled at the V&A Waterfront in 2005. She says the process of rendering Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk was very different to sculpting Ramaphosa.
Commissions have cautious clients and lawyers. Living politicians are busy and have pernickety handlers. They are also not immune to vanity. She recalls De Klerk expressing dismay at her cartoonish style when he saw a model at her studio.
The Ramaphosa bust, which was made using only Google as reference, is more representative of the artist's work, which is a marriage of diaristic pieces and reverent descriptions of public figures, notably artists.
One of her earliest sculptures depicted Congolese painter Chéri Samba. Her last New York show, in 2016, included sculptures of Mandela, writer Bessie Head, painters Marlene Dumas, Alice Neel and Balthus, as well as a childhood depiction of her lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch in the early '90s, artist Brett Murray.
Schreuders has only made 115 sculptures since graduating with a master's degree from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1998. Drawing is integral to her method as a sculptor. To better understand Ramaphosa she drew aspects of his physiognomy: his ears, the shape of his chin, the slope of his forehead. But it was a photo of him wearing headphones that clinched it for her.
"He wasn't doing anything with his face and had withdrawn into himself. Politicians never do that. They are always aware of people looking at them. I like to see someone who is not aware of being seen, because then you can really see them."
Restraint might strengthen a work of art but it rarely makes for poor propaganda, which every public sculpture is.
Take artist Lungelo Gumede's recent bronzes of SA's four presidents, installed along Durban's M4 highway. The tableaux presents Mandela fist pumping the air and a portly Ramaphosa beaming like mob enforcer. Schreuders purposefully avoids emotion in her work.
"What I want is to present Ramaphosa as neutrally as possible. I want there to be a lot of space for whoever encounters the work to project what they feel on him. I don't want what I project on him to be the only thing that you get out of him."
Of course, lurking behind this restraint is feeling, lots of it. Schreuders likes SA's optimist in chief. "It takes a bit of love actually to make a sculpture." The artist guiltily giggles at the admission.
• 'In the Bedroom' is on at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York until June 22.
