Bibliography: pages 37-38. / The work undertaken for my Masters degree seeks to address some of the prejudice experienced by disabled people. Society's concept of a normal body prescribes unattainable standards for people with disabilities, thereby isolating and marginalising them. Instead of accommodating these physical differences, society encourages disabled people to withdraw from society or to try to conform to able-bodied ideals and to appear 'as normal as possible'. The very physical presence of disabled people challenges these assumptions of normality. Therefore, attempts are made to cosmetically hide the offending part or exclude the person from society (e.g. a hollow shirt sleeve or 'special' school). When individuals fail to conform to the prescribed standards of normality, they face the stigma of being viewed as pitifully inferior and dependent upon their able-bodied counterparts. In this way disabled people do not 'suffer' so much from their condition, as from the oppression of able-bodied biases. Through different eyes, society could be seen as handicapped as a result of its inability to adapt to, or deal with difference. In reality, however, disabilities are experienced by many people and can range from those which are physically visible and easily identified to those less obvious, but often more debilitating such as abrasive, socially aggressive personalities or learning disabilities. It is possible, therefore, to extend the understanding of the term disability to any physical or emotional impairment that limits a person's functioning within a so-called normal society. Although many people and organisations have searched for less pejorative or negative terms to describe an impairment such as 'Very Special', 'people with abilities' or 'physically challenged', these attempts have failed to reverse prejudice. Instead, these descriptions have only re-described the emphasis on 'otherness' and 'difference'. In addition, these replaced descriptions are again associated with the same stigmas that they were intentionally designed to avoid. In the following discussion I have consciously used the word disabled or disability to refer to individuals with various disabilities which I have nevertheless defined as socially constructed. In doing so I am suggesting no pejorative associations. Through this project I wanted to explore notions of disability within various debates associated with disability and society. I have done this in the context of my own experience of disability, and my own attempts to come to terms with disability. In this sense this project represents a personal journey.

Dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master's Degree in Technology: Fine Art, Durban Institute of Technology, 2004. / This research aims to critically investigate the changing colonial and post-colonial attitudes towards the South African landscape, as physical space and its representation, through a post-colonial and Post-Modern critique. Chapter One explores the shifting colonial attitudes toward the landscape from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, to provide an historical overview and context for contemporary practice. Section One defines colonialism for the purposes of this study and provides a brief history of colonialism in South Africa. Section Two provides a concise history of European visual representation from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century in order to contextualize the development of South African landscape painting. Section Three analyzes and evaluates changing colonial attitudes and their representation through a discussion of the work of Francois Le Vaillant (1753-1842), Thomas Baines (1820-1875) and J.H. Pierneef (1886-1957). Chapter Two explores attitudes towards the South African landscape between 1948 and 1994 in order to provide a link between colonial representation and post-colonial contemporary practice. / M

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts (History of Art) by coursework and research report March 2017 / In the 1960s and 1970s, farm worker Nukain Mabuza created a painted hillside rock garden on a farm between Barberton and Kaapmuiden, Mpumalanga, South Africa. He transformed his dwellings, and rearranged and painted the surrounding rocks according to a unified scheme of geometric and animal motifs with a carefully selected colour palette. This altered environment went far further aesthetically, and lasted far longer in time, than the signs and scars that might typically result from a farm worker’s dwelling upon the land. His work arguably bears some of the hallmarks of an inhabited ‘total work of art’. I challenge the dominant ‘outsider art’ explanatory framework adopted by JFC Clarke and re-evaluate the fragmentary archive of Mabuza’s life and work. Working from the likelihood that no single context will offer sufficient grounds for situating Nukain Mabuza’s particular creative practice, I assess the relevance of cultural, historical and religious contexts, which might have shaped Nukain Mabuza’s personal vision and contributed to the form of his expressive environment. Nukain Mabuza’s altered landscape has suffered considerable damage – there is no longer any trace of the two dwellings and the stile, and the paintings on the rocks have all but disappeared. My project seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Nukain Mabuza’s work by extending, analysing, interpreting and situating his inhabited painted environment within the worldview of southern African Bantu-speakers, as a unique personal creative expression, and as an expression of the artist’s modernity. / MT2018

MSc., Faculty of Science, University of Witwatersrand, 2011 / Studies of San rock art in southern Africa have appealed to researchers for specificities of individual rock art sites in order to counter the prevailing practice of conceptualising San rock art as a homogenous entity. This research attempts to analyse social interaction through looking at diverse ethnographies and how such ethnographies can reveal information regarding one rock art site. Individual rock art sites like Xoro Gwai can start to unravel the nuanced, diverse and complex nature of San religious beliefs and rites and how these beliefs were affected or influenced by social contact with other social formations.

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Natal, 1992. / Title from opening menu. Electronic version lacks images. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print with images.

Thesis (M.A. (Fine Art)) - Rhodes University, 2009.

Dissertation (DPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

This research evolved as part of a personal struggle to understand my role as 'art' student. As such the essay is concerned with both the theory and practice of 'art', and the relationship between the two. It is, however, my experience of the lack of an analysis of the concept 'art' as a social and historical phenomenon, and the suppression of the politics of culture in most fine art courses, that has led me to concentrate on theoretical and political issues, rather than the formal aspects of painting. This essay is therefore not concerned with individual 'works of art', but with the general category 'art' as an organisational form. Despite its limitations, the essay goes beyond the personal by exploring some of the social, political, economic and cultural processes that form the broader social context in which the examination of 'art' should take place.

M.Tech. (Fine Art) / In this research I explore performances of white South African masculinities in select works by the South African artists, Anton Kannemeyer and William Kentridge, as well as in my body of practical work. The primary aim of this study is to investigate the nature of performances of white masculinities depicted in the selected visual texts. The term 'performances', in the context of this study, refers to Judith Butler's (1990, 2004) concept of gender as performed identities, as free-floating, unconnected to an 'essence'. Within the context of gender performativity, I apply constructivist identity formation theory to examine masculine identities depicted in the visual texts. This research shows how the performances of white masculinity represented in the artists' selected works function to comment on how white South African men are reconceptualising their masculine performativities in order to adapt to the ideals of post-apartheid South Africa. The study explores a perceived existential crisis in emergent South African white masculinities, analysing how a changing post-apartheid socio-political environment cause white South African men to create new conceptions of identity which break down previously imposed preconceived identities. In this dissertation I explore Kannemeyer's, Kentridge's and my own visual texts relating them to a discourse of social commentary. A key deduction I make from my research is that the selected visual texts operate through Laurel Richardson's factors of lived reality and reflexivity in that the artists' appropriate elements from within their experiences and observations of South Africa to inform their visual narratives. Another key deduction is that the visual texts analysed are structured through heteroglot voices, voices the artist uses to differentiate between the artist as author (his author-voice); the artist as his recognisable alter-ego (his object-voice); and the voice that provides content, context and meaning, to the text (his subjectvoice). There are a number of white, male artists who grew up in apartheid South Africa and who critique performances of white masculinity. I choose Kannemeyer and Kentridge as, apart from their both growing up in apartheid South Africa and using their lived realities and observations of socio-political change to inform their art making, as do I, they also tend to focus on two-dimensional art.

Paul Emmanuel is a South African artist who produces incised drawings, outdoor installations and prints (particularly intaglio etchings and manière noire lithographs). These focus on the representation of male bodies and experience. Having begun his career as a collaborative printmaker, since 2002, his work has become more ambitious as well as critically acclaimed. In 2010, his most recent body of work, Transitions, was exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. I propose that Emmanuel represents the male body as a presence that either is not easily seen or that actively disappears or erases itself. Its subjectivity, and the viewer’s engagement with it, may be characterised as one of intimacy, exposure, loss and vulnerability. Emmanuel’s work may be said to question conventions and ideals of masculinity while, at the same time, refusing any prescriptive interpretation. To develop this proposition, I examine specifically Emmanuel’s incising drawing technique that ‘holds open’ transitions in male lives. In these liminal moments, Emmanuel represents men as ‘seen’ to change state or status, thereby exposing the ongoing process of building masculine identities. Equally elucidatory is Emmanuel’s imprinting of his own body, which, in his use of “traces” that reveal the vacillation between presence and absence, makes contingently ‘visible’ this gendering process, and has particular implications for the expression of subjectivity in a contemporary South African context.