Mikhael Subotzky's latest exhibition opens with an image of a naked white man with a tennis racquet, about to serve. It's a scientific illustration of the "massive nerve corpus" of the exhibition title that he found in an encyclopaedia. He's scanned it and erased all the labels, leaving just the body in its vital, active pose.
"By enlarging it and removing the information, you're left with quite a bizarre-looking body," Subotzky observes. "Both bizarre and vulnerable."
It captures a contradiction that, for Subotzky, is at the very heart of the body of work he presents in this exhibition: "I'm very interested in the contradiction between power and vulnerability, and how in fact a lot of the violence that has been done for hundreds and hundreds of years comes from the body feeling vulnerable."
By manipulating this rather banal example in the artistic tradition of a heroic white male body, its vulnerability is revealed. Its oddness - that slightly ridiculous pose - also disrupts our ability to accept this white, male body as normal.
"Racism and racial violence has for so long been based on the 'otherisation' of the black body, but the flipside of that is the disappearance of the race of the white body, and the normalisation of the white body," says Subotzky.
In the official gallery interview published as an introduction to the exhibition, he refers to the many black artists he admires who have been "reconfiguring the canon". His body of work represents a process of deconstructing white masculinity from the inside. It's partly a public gesture, and partly something he believes is necessary to bring about the kinds of cultural changes needed to undo the ongoing violence perpetuated in our concept of white masculinity.
What comes as a shock is just how much pain and violence is involved in this apparently well-meaning gesture. It becomes a kind of excoriation, a spectacle of self-destruction in the process of trying to find a new way of representing white masculinity.
Subotzky isn't shy about subjecting himself to these self-inflicted wounds. For many years now, he has artistically interrogated the conventions of documentary photography, the tradition that gave him his first flush of success.
Subotzky's early work, such as his photographs taken inside Pollsmoor prison, The Four Walls, and, later, Ponte City, his document of life inside the cylindrical 54-storey tower in Hillbrow, brought him fame, but precipitated profound doubts.
The documentary photographer's impulse to reveal "the violence done to the other in society", he worried, remains too external. "I do think that photographic representation can re-perpetuate violence," he says. "I've not really been taking photographs for some years now."
The work that followed was as much an attack on the medium as an interrogation of it. He printed images on glass and smashed it. He ripped off the top layers of photographic prints with sticky tape and reconstituted them on another surface, or combined them with other images.
He took it further, using surgical tape, at first simply because it is acid free. "And then ... I realised I could print on it in strips," he says. He also began thinking about its symbolic power - "it's a white, temporary skin where there's a vulnerability - it mends a wound". He's attacked the surface in some of the multilayered works in this exhibition, too.
"This is my way of scratching my way into the image and trying to understand it," he says.
As much as the medium is subjected to Subotzky's relentless questioning, there is self-interrogation. His subject matter rips into deeply personal references as well as broader public ones. To photography you could add family, education, art and literature, history and, of course, his own body.
There's a parade of white males, from Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf schools he attended (and where his father taught) to Jan van Riebeeck, Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant and Romantic poet John Keats, and many others.
There are literary references, particularly to TS Eliot's Four Quartets, which Subotzky loves, but is uneasy with: Eliot is, after all, "one of the iconic male heroes of the 20th century". Must he destroy everything he loves, too?
Some of the artworks at the very heart of the exhibition have their origins in photographs Subotzky took of the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall student protests that erupted in 2015. The questions they raised about decolonising education chime with his explorations of what it means to deconstruct white masculinity and its implications in the persistent legacy of colonial ideology.
But the destructiveness can be exhausting. The attacking, undoing and unmaking of things sometimes seems in danger of hitting a dead end. More recently, Subotzky started manipulating images in new ways: "I developed this technique where I print on canvas using either found images or my own photos, and then I scrub with a wet sponge."
After an image is manipulated in this way, and printed over again and again, and scrubbed again and again, it becomes a strange hybrid of painting and photography. Sometimes, he simply paints, adding another layer to his composite images.
"In some ways, I see painting as a way of not trying to do damage to things anymore," he says. "I don't want to do that for the rest of my life - just attack things. There's a lot of violence in this work. You start to want to learn how to build up things - to add, not just take away."
Don't expect a resolved thesis from this exhibition. The most complex of the works include creativity as well as destruction. These works are more about exploring ideas than coming to conclusions or putting forward a resolved argument. But in its rawness, violence and anger, the exhibition takes a very important first step and, rather frighteningly, presents an inkling of the feat of imagination it will take to re-invent white masculinity.
• 'Massive Nerve Corpus' is on at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until July 13.
