While formal arts education was inaccessible to many during Apartheid, community-based centres played a significant role in the training of previously disadvantaged artists. By engaging in a socio-political critique of the history of South African art, this thesis argues that even though alternative art spaces are often marginalised, they remain essential to the diversification and democratisation of contemporary South African art today with its re-entry into the international art scene. According to Lize van Robbroeck (2004:52), “some of the fundamental ideals of community arts need to be revised to enrich, democratize and diversify [South Africa's] cultural practice.” The aim of my Thesis is to investigate this statement in relation to the contribution the Community Arts Project (CAP) in Cape Town (1977-2003). CAP and other art centres have played an indispensable role in the establishment of black artists and in producing a locally reflective artistic practice in South Africa, even into the 21st century. Through researching the changes the organisation underwent between the 1980s and 1990s, the ways in which such art centres constantly need to respond to the changing sociopolitical landscape around them become clear. Within South Africa these centres were seen to play a significant part in the liberation struggle and then later in nation building. While these centres were well supported by foreign donors in the late 1980s, such funding was withdrawn in 1991 and the majority of art centres collapsed, illustrating to some degree that the training of artist was not valued outside the context of the struggle against apartheid. By interviewing key people and by reading documentation stored at the Manuscripts and Archives department of UCT I have discovered some of the different benefits and hindrances of working in community art centres both during and after Apartheid. This thesis argues that these centres still play a vital role in contributing to the development of South Africa's local art practice and should not be relegated to the sideline.

This Master of Fine Arts submission, consisting of a thesis titled ‘Political Grey: Areas of Ambiguity and Contradiction’ accompanied by an exhibition titled ‘Positions’, encompasses the concept of leadership while uncovering and expressing its ‘grey areas’ in a contemporary and undefined moment in South Africa. The concept of leadership has been complicated throughout the thesis in terms of how it is conceptualised in a traditional royal African art context as well as how Leader-Figures have been and are portrayed in both Western and African portrait genres. The notion that the new is built upon the old is continued throughout my thesis and is evident in the accompanying body of work. This notion is expressed on a number of levels: by the re-contextualisation of the print medium; the creative processes described as ‘postproduction’ which I use in my work; as well as that which is described as a ‘post-transitional’ moment. The recent political history of the country is considered, with reference made to the anti-apartheid movement and resistance art produced. Printmaking, viewed as an archetypal medium for resistance, is discussed, with reference made to its socio-political role during the 1980s as well as to the extent to which it continues to be used by contemporary artists in a different realm of conflict and change. This is demonstrated by the shift from the medium as a tool for protest to the medium as an instrument of political irony and pointed commentary.

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This dissertation investigates roles of cultural practice in China’s revolution. It begins with cultural experiments in the War of Resistance to Japan (1937-1945) and culminates with the agrarian cooperativization of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. I interrogate how China’s “cultural workers” –– meaning the writers, performers, artists, and filmmakers engaged in the revolutionary project –– participated in mass mobilization. In doing so, I develop elements for a new approach to analyzing cultural works in their relations to political movements. This approach aims to address my study’s driving question: how did the practice of cultural workers advance, challenge, and transform China’s revolutionary process? My formal approach is drawn from an issue at the heart of revolution; namely, that of time. I argue that revolutionaries repeatedly wrestled with remaking time–– whether to and how to break with the past in constructing the future. My study investigates this problematic as it was developed in two temporal fields: campaign time and narrative time. Activists developed campaign time, or standardizing temporal structures, to reform society through sequences of mass mobilization. Distinct from campaign time, cultural workers articulated narrative time through acts of narrative creation in literary prose, theater, art, and cinema. I argue that by analyzing the collisions, collusions, and contradictions between campaign time and narrative time, we can define cultural workers’ interventions in the revolutionary process. The first four chapters focus on the historical emergence of campaign time through mass movements of the Communist base areas during the War of Resistance to Japan. I seek to demonstrate: first, that a coherent series of strategies for mass movements was developed, bearing consistent, repeatable patterns for social reorganization; and second, that cultural workers contributed to, contradicted, and at key moments innovated mass movements through expressions of narrative time. Each of these four chapters proceeds chronologically through major mass movements: the reform of “vagrants” in chapter one; family reforms and women’s labor in chapter two; the hygiene movement in chapter three; and chapter four takes up the anti-spirit medium movement. Chapter five argues that the narrative time of novels stretched the political imagination of campaign time in the scope of the agrarian cooperative movement (approx. 1953-1957). The sixth and final chapter focuses on the case of Liu Qing’s unfinished epic The Builders. I interrogate fraught relations between narrative and campaign times in the novel’s historical trajectory to foreground a problem I call campaign-narrative equivalence. When cultural narratives were conflated with historical movements, such equivalences were produced. The campaign-narrative equivalence is not only a problem for historical interpretation but also for the political imagination. By disentangling these equivalences, which have been grafted upon histories of cultural creation and political transformation, I seek to grasp the distinctive contributions and transformative valence of the cultural worker in China’s revolution –– for then and now.

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Born in 1938 in Poland, I epxperienced wartime Berlin and post-war Stalinism. My first job, at sixteen, was with the East Berlin States Opera and the Bertold Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. The play writes Betrtold Brecht and Buechner had the strongest influence on me. Brecht's play 'Mutter Courage and her children' and Georg Buechner's 'Woyzech' encapsulated the harsh realities of post-war Europe, and confirmed my desire for social justice and reform. Yet, the main influence on my work comes from my own life experience. My life in Australia has become a kind of exile-a deprivation of the origin of my culture and my cradle. After nearly forty years in Australia I feel a little displaced. Yet I left Europe voluntarily to escape from the very culture and history I now miss. I am experiencing a common dilemma of migration. I belong neither here nor there-a kind of dislocation. There exists a twilight zone in the in-between time-a discontinuity of my Berliner development. Artists such as Kaethe Kollwitz, John Heartfield, George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckman influenced my teenage years. Later, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. I work with found objects, such as toys crafted by human hand. I am giving them a new meaning, a new being. They are meditations on the conflict of war, where women and children are the primary victims of political fragmentation. My sculptures evoke memories of a childhood stolen. They take on a menacing character reminding the viewer of the effects war has on humanity. But Art is the reflector and searcher; it is our way to enlightenment. Joseph Beuys introduced the concept of an expanded notion of art ("der erweiterte Kunstbegriff???) to surpass the boundaries of modernism with in art, science, spirituality, humanism and economics. He drew attention to the potential of human creativity. Art, against all odds, is poetry to life.

South African photographer Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko and South African painter Tracy Payne explore different ways of communicating African realities. The visual imagery of these two artists focuses a lot on movement, challenging the rigidity of boundaries set by Western social constructs. In their work, Veleko and Payne critique the limitations of terms such as “authenticity.” It is extremely difficult to portray shifting notions of contemporary African identity in light of the stain of colonial philosophies which have, in times past, exoticised and appropriated the African body and ascribed conventions of “authenticity” to African representations. Undermining the burden of Western boundaries1, Veleko and Payne redefine what it means to operate in Africa today. Veleko seeks additional cultural realities to complicate her identity as a woman living in Africa while Payne uses concepts of movement to question the validity of structures which advocate an either/ or binary such as “East” and “West” and “masculinity” and “femininity”. By subtly merging aspects of these binaries in their representations, Veleko and Payne bring transnational possibilities to light by undermining the restrictions inscribed in the social and political history of (South) Africa with regard to collective and individual identities. Constructs of gender have contributed to a heightened sense of “African” “masculinity,” forming a stereotype of the African body which is difficult to break free from. Considering the notion of transnationalism and the issue of moving beyond boundaries, borrowing aspects of different cultures in attempt to better define a sense of self, Veleko and Payne engage in the sampling of different lifestyles and perspectives to better define their individualities. This thesis seeks to provide an analysis of the visual language used by Veleko and Payne to promote fluid “African” identities.

Orientador: Marcelo Siqueira Ridenti / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-13T14:51:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Czajka_Rodrigo_D.pdf: 28867714 bytes, checksum: 679abe450c88d07ab4e58df2eaf474c6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Resumo: A produção artística e cultural realizada no Brasil entre as décadas de 1950 e 1960 é permeada de intensas discussões, tensões e conflitos que envolvem a disputa de distintos projetos intelectuais. Assim, a formação de um campo intelectual, a diversificação dos circuitos culturais e núcleos intelectuais e a emergência de uma intelectualidade de esquerda foram elementos presentes nesse contexto sócio-cultural. Estes foram fatores essenciais na consolidação de uma resistência cultural de esquerda que se defrontava tanto com o centralismo burocrático do Partido Comunista Brasileiro quanto com o regime militar após 1964. Entre dilemas ideológicos e políticos uma intelectualidade de esquerda floresceu não de forma homogênea e unitária, mas entremeada de impasses, disputas e embates que permitiram, em certa medida, a formação de núcleos culturais caracterizados, sobretudo, pela fragmentação. Com intuito de aferir tal modelo de análise dispusemos de um conjunto de Inquéritos Policiais-Militares (IPMs) que além de constituírem um material inédito de pesquisa, trazem elementos importantes para a discussão e detalhamento das questões culturais caras à intelectualidade de esquerda daquele momento. Constata-se, por exemplo, que a resistência cultural, mais que símbolo de uma unidade contra a repressão seja dos partidos ou do Estado, foi um fenômeno a partir do qual determinados núcleos intelectuais viram-se representados; uma hegemonia cultural de esquerda construída não pela coesão dos projetos de resistência, mas pelas dissensões e por aquilo que representava a resistência e a subversão comunista / Abstract: The artistic and cultural production made in Brazil at the 1950s and 1960s is permeated intensive discussions, tensions and conflicts involving the dispute of different intellectual projects. The formation of an intellectual sphere and the emergence of a left intellectuals group were elements presents in this context. These were key factors in consolidating a culture resistance of left that was built in the middle at the bureaucratic centralism of the Brazilian Communist Party and the military dictatorship after 1964. Between ideological and political dilemmas the left intellectuals appeared not homogeneous, but permeate of impasses, disputes and conflicts that favored the formation of cultural groups characterized by ragmentation. To check this analysis we searched a large number of military process (called IPMs) that as being a new material research, provide important elements for discussion and details of the cultural questions of the intellectuals at that time. For example, that cultural resistance, more than a symbol of unity against oppression of the the Party or the State, was a phenomenon from which certain intelectuals groups have been represented; a cultural hegemony of the left not made the cohesion of the projects of resistance, but by dissension and by what it represented the resistence and communist subversion / Doutorado / Doutor em Sociologia