Unsettling the Canon Some thoughts on the design of Visual Century: South African Art in Context (original) (raw)
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Introducing the pasts and presence of art in South Africa
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In 2015, #RhodesMustFall generated the largest student protests in South Africa since the end of apartheid, subsequently inspiring protests and acts of decolonial iconoclasm across the globe. The performances that emerged in, through and around #RhodesMustFall make it clear how analytically fruitful Alfred Gell’s notion that art is ‘a system of social action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it’ can be, even when attempting to account for South Africa’s very recent history. What light can this approach shed on the region’s far longer history of artistic practices? Can we use any resulting insights to explore art’s role in the very long history of human life in the land now called South Africa? Can we find a common way of talking about ‘art’ that makes sense across South Africa’s long span of human history, whether considering engraved ochre, painted rock shelters or contemporary performance art? This collection of essays has its origins in a conference with the same title, arranged to mark the opening of the British Museum’s major temporary exhibition South Africa: the art of a nation in October 2016. The volume represents an important step in developing a framework for engaging with South Africa’s artistic traditions that begins to transcend nineteenth-century frameworks associated with colonial power.
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Artists from all over the world studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, but the categories of art history and the organisation of museums have rarely allowed them to be studied, taught or exhibited alongside each other. Their separation and dissociation can be attributed to art history’s strong attachment to national narratives. The nation state has operated as the epistemological framework through which artists are grouped and works of art are examined. Even as the ‘global turn’ has sought to combat the Eurocentric assumptions of modernism, it has often perpetuated the discipline’s methodological nationalism, obscuring the cosmopolitan networks to which artists belonged. These national narratives contribute to larger continental frameworks that exacerbate divisions between artists who often sat side by side together in the same classroom. Bringing together unpublished archival material from UCL Special Collections, London, and works of art from the UCL Art Museum, London, and other collections based in the United Kingdom and abroad, this article proposes a new methodological framework that situates the selected artists alongside their contemporaries, challenging the categories and interpretative frames that have been imposed onto their work. It seeks to demonstrate the entanglement of modern art movements globally by examining the works of art and correspondence of such artists as Ben Enwonwu, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Sam Joseph Ntiro, Paula Rego, Patricia Gerrard, Margaret J. Rees Menhat Helmy, Michael Tyzack and Amir Nour.
L'article présente un aperçu général des changements qui sont intervenus dans le domaine des beaux-arts dans la République de l'Afrique du Sud, après l'abolition de l'apartheid en 1994. Plus de détails a été présenté dans l'affabulation concernant l'utilisation par les créateurs modernes des chefs-d'oeuvre de l'art européen ancien (par exemple Rubens et Michel-Ange). Les oeuvres naissants à ce cours montrent des rapports clairs à une nouvelle et compliqué réalité de l'Afrique du Sud au cours des dernières décennies. Cette problème entreprend les artistes du XXIe siècle tels que Johannes Phokela, Wim Botha, Andrew Putter.
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Only very recently – i.e. only a few months ago – occurred a truly historic moment in time: South Africa celebrated the 20th anniversary of the abolition of apartheid. The anniversary of that day, April 27, 1994 is now a public holiday and it is called Freedom Day. President Jacob Zuma presided over the official celebrations organised on Sunday April 27th to commemorate the 20th anniversary of post-apartheid democracy in South Africa, insisting that South Africa today is closer to its dream of a multi-racial nation despite problems of stubborn inequality, poverty and corruption. "Our country has done well," said Zuma at the ceremony which was held exactly two decades after the first democratic all-race elections that decided that Nelson Mandela would become the country's first black president. "We all have a good story to tell. (…)We have moved closer to our cherished dream of a united nonracial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa," he said also at the &q...
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The thesis analyses modes of representation in the South African National Gallery (SANG) between 1930 and 2009. Built in 1930, for the larger part of its history SANG was situated in a white state that disenfranchised the black populace. Whiteness, as citizenship, was normalised and glorified in the state’s museums. Analysis of evidence collected from the archive, decor, art collection, exhibitions, attendance of walking tours and semi-structured interviews with staff demonstrates that SANG’s historic practice does not fit neatly within the dominant theoretical understanding of the art museum, namely a sacred space in which power has been obscured through the ‘art for art’s sake’ model. Instead, the thesis finds at SANG invisible symbolic capital resided alongside the more muscular capital of the colony, which derived its strength from an overt relationship with commerce, politics and race. The thesis further finds that SANG developed a close relationship with its white audience thr...