Little Morals: It’s better off alone, 1990

Little Morals is a set of etchings produced by leading South African sculptor, painter and printmaker Deborah Bell as part of a collaborative portfolio with Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge. The three artists met at the University of the Witwatersrand, where Bell obtained her BAFA (Hons) and MFA degrees. Kentridge, Hodgins and Bell were important participants in the early years of The Caversham Press in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, where they created three collaborative print portfolios Hogarth in Johannesburg (1986), Little Morals (1990–91), and Ubu Tells the Truth (1996–97), as well as numerous individual prints. When making these series, the three would work on their own prints in the same space at the same time, drawing on each other’s responses. ‘When we [came] together to do these projects, we [would] all do our own stuff, so there [was] not the anxiety of getting something major to work,’ Bell recalls, (Atkinson 2002: 59). Bell and Kentridge stuck to black and white in their Little Morals sets, while Hodgins hand-coloured his series.

The Little Morals works reflect something of the interpersonal confusion, turmoil and disruption that defined the years between late apartheid and the transition to a new democracy in South Africa. Laced with ‘rich art historical and theatrical references’ and ‘drawing on the visually dramatic grammar of old silent movies’ (Murinik, 2012: 153), the series has a farcical and melodramatic edge. The images in the portfolio might be read collectively as a self-reflexive joke – a witty visual discourse on the overblown interpersonal sagas of the insulated bourgeoisie.

In a conversation with Tracy Murinik and Julia Charlton in 2009, Hodgins recalled: ‘It was William who gave the title ‘Little Morals’ [after German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, 1951] which we all liked because it has two meanings: little morals, as in, ‘the people have very few morals’; on the other hand, it’s the Victorian thing of moral books, you know: ‘every story has a moral’… The plot is a simple one: a husband suspects his wife of an affair. He discovers them together. He shootsher in a fit of rage and jealousy, and finally presents her lover, who is a boxer, with one of her shoes as cold comfort’. (Murinik, 2012: 153)

Alexandra Dodd