The oeuvre of the Kalahari Studio (Cape Town), Drostdy Ware (a division of Grahamstown Pottery, Grahamstown) and Crescent Potteries (Krugersdorp) is investigated within the historical context of the 1950s, a watershed period that witnessed crucial developments in South African cultural and political history. This dissertation elucidates the historical development, key personnel, the ceramics, as well as relevant technical information related to the Kalahari Studio, Drostdy Ware and Crescent Potteries. This dissertation analyses the broader socio-political and ideological paradigms that framed South African art-making, as well as the international design trends that influenced the local studio ceramics sector. The establishment and demise of the South African studio ceramics industry and requests for tariff protection were considered within this context. Significant primary research was conducted into the present status of South African studio ceramics from the 1950s in the collections of our heritage institutions. Wares of all three of the studios reveal a predilection for figurative imagery, especially images of indigenous African women and iconography derived from reproductions of Southern San parietal art. Imagery of African women is considered within the framework of the native study genre in South African painting, sculpture and photography from 1800-1950 and Africana ceramics from 1910-1950. Images of San parietal art are investigated within their historical context of a growing public and academic interest in the Bushmen and a surge in publications containing reproductions of San parietal art. Some images of African women and San parietal art conform to pejorative and theoretically problematic modernist cannons of the'other', while some are subversive and undermine the dominant pictorial and ideological artistic conventions. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2000.

This dissertation explores the importance of narrative in Ardmore ceramic ware and determines how and to what effect ceramic narrative is used by Ardmore Ceramic Studio. It gives a historical overview of narrative in ceramic wares of English potteries from the eighteenth century to date, as a means of contextualising and locating the influences of Ardmore narrative ceramics. This paper examines selected narrative works, by artists such as Andrew Sokhela and Wonderboy Nxumalo, with reference to Noverino N. Canonici’s writings regarding Zulu oral literature. One of the intentions of this paper is to illustrate how the fundamental elements of Zulu storytelling play an influential role in Ardmore ceramic narratives. Narrative as a means of communication, education and entertainment is assessed with reference to Ardmore examples. This dissertation investigates the potential to use ceramic narratives as anthropological research tools. The focus of this paper is to investigate the use of ceramic narrative in disseminating information and creating social awareness. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.

This study explored the dynamics of local-level trade in plant-based mats and baskets in Khanyayo village, Eastern Cape. These dynamics include social aspects of harvesting, resource tenure and trade. It also includes institutional issues such as legislation that enhances or restricts the degree to which local people could benefit from the trade or direct use. The study also explored the contribution of the trading in mats and baskets to the livelihoods of the Khanyayo people.

Through a detailed analysis of a selection of works produced between 1999 and 2003 by the South African artist Berni Searle, this thesis explores the need to theorise a corporeal viewer in the process of interpreting art works. Such an approach is particularly necessary when dealing with an artist such as Searle because her work, which deals predominantly with the theme of identity, appeals not only to conceptual but also to experiential and corporeal understandings of identity. Searle incorporates the viewer into an experience of her own identity through a physical identification that the viewer feels in relation to her work. For viewers this means that they are made aware of how their own identity in the moment of interpretation is contingent on visual, mental and physical components. In order to develop this argument the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty is drawn on. These two theorists are very useful for an argument of this nature because both interpret identity as a construction involving an enfolding between the mind and, via the act of vision, the body of the subject. Through an inclusion of the corporeal element in interpretation, this thesis also offers a critique of interpretive theories that would reduce analysis to an interaction between eye and mind by analyzing how the viewer's body participates in the act of looking.

This dissertation examines the history of the Durban Art Gallery from its founding in 1892 until 2004, a decade after the First Democratic Election. While the emphasis is on significant changes that were introduced in the post-1994 period, the earlier section of the study locates these initiatives within a broad historical framework. The collecting policies of the museum as well as its exhibitions and programmes are considered in the light of the institution 's changing social and political context as well as shifting imperatives within a local, regional and national art world. The Durban Art Gallery was established in order to promote a European, and particularly British, culture, and the acquisition and appreciation of art was considered an important element in the formation of a stable society. By providing a broad overview of the early years of the gallery, I identify reasons for the choice of acquisitions and explore the impact and reception of a selection of exhibitions. I investigate changes during the 1960s and 1970s through an examination of the Art South Africa Today exhibitions: in addition to opening up institutional spaces to a racially mixed community, these exhibitions marked the beginning of an imperative to show protest art. I argue that, during the political climate of the 1980s, there was a tension in the cultural arena between, on the one hand, a motivation to retain a Western ideal of 'high art' and, on the other, a drive to accommodate the new forms of people's art and to challenge the values and ideological standpoints that had been instrumental in shaping collecting and exhibiting policies in the South African art arena. I explore this tension through a discussion of the Cape Town Triennial exhibitions, organised jointly by all the official museums, which ran alongside more inclusive and independently curated exhibitions, such as Tributaries, which were shown mainly outside the country. The post-1994 period marked an opening up of spaces, both literally and conceptually. This openness was manifest in the revised strategies that were introduced to show the Durban Art Gallery 's permanent collection as well as in two key public projects that were started - Red Eye @rt and the AIDS 2000 ribbon. Through an examination of these strategies and initiatives, I argue that the central role of the Durban Art Gallery has shifted from being a repository to providing an interactive public space.

The tribal life and the oral traditions of black South Africans have been marginalized. The consequence of the western civilization and the apartheid regime forced people to do away from their traditional heritage and culture; they adopted the western way of life. They buried their oral tradition and only a little has survived. To save the dying culture of the art of the oral tradition we need to go out and record and document the surviving oral tradition as soon as possible. Since the art of the oral tradition is an art form conducted by an artist, it may be possible to tell the ibali likaNongqawuse by means of visual imagery. Visual images can be read and be understood easily by the public because visual forms, sings, images can make up a language for both the literate as well as the illiterate.

This thesis explores various dilemmas in making theatre performances in the context of social disruption, trauma and death. Diverse discourses are drawn in to consider issues of body, subjectivity and spectatorship, refracted through the writer’s experiences of and discontent with making theatre. Written in a fractal-like structure, rather than a linear progression, this thesis unsettles discourses of truth, thus simultaneously intervening in debates about the epistemologies of the body and of theatre in context of the academy. Chapter 1: Methodological Anxieties Psychoanalytic theory provides a way in for investigating the dynamics of theatrical performance and its corporeal presence, by focusing on desire and its implication in the notions of loss and anxiety. The theories of the unconscious and the gaze have epistemological implications, shifting definitions of “presence” and “truth” in theatre performance and writing about theatre. This chapter tries to outline the rationale for, as well as to enact, an alternative methodology for writing, as an ethical response to loss that does not insist on consensus and truth. Chapter 2: (Refusing to) Look at Trauma This chapter examines the politics that strives to make suffering visible. Discursive binaries of public/private, dead/living, and invisible/visible underlie the politics of AIDS and sexuality. These discourses impact on the reception of Bill T. Jones's choreography, despite his use of modernist artistic processes in search of a bodily presence that aims to collapse the binary of representation (text) and its subject (being). The theory of the gaze shows this politics to be a phallocentric discourse; and narrative analysis traces the metanarrative that results in the commodification of oppositional identities, so that spectators participate in the politics as consumers. An ethical artistic response thus needs to shift its focus to the subjectivity of the spectator. Chapter 3: The Screen and the Viewer’s Blindness By appealing to a transcendent reality, and by constituting spectators as a participative community, ritual theatre claims to enact change. The “truth” of ritual rests not on rational knowledge, but on the performer’s competence to produce a shamanic presence, which director Brett Bailey embraces in his early work. Ritual presence operates by identification and belonging to a father/god as the source of meaning; but it represses the loss of this originary wholeness. Spectators of ritual theatre are drawn into an enactment of communion/community, the centre of which is, however, loss/emptiness. The claim of enacting change becomes problematic for its absence of truth. Bailey attempts to perform a hybrid, postcolonial aesthetics; but the problem rests in the larger context of performing the notion of “South Africa”, a communal identity hardened around the metanarrative of suffering, abjecting those that do not belong to the land of the father/god – foreigners that unsettle the meaning of South African identity. Conclusion: Bodies of Discontent The South African stage is circumscribed by political and economic discourses; the problematization of national identity is also a problematization of image-identification in the theatre. In search for a way to unsettle these interrogative discourses, two moments of performing foreignness are examined, one fictional, one theatrical. These moments enact a parallel to the feminine hysteric, who disturbs the phallocentric truth of the psychoanalyst through body performance. These moments of disturbing spectatorship are reflected in the works of performance artist Marina Abramovic. Her explorations into passive-aggression, shamanism and finally theatricality and the morality of spectatorship allow for an overview of the issues raised in this thesis regarding body, viewing, and subjecthood. Sensitivity to the body and its discontent on the part of the viewer becomes crucial to ethical performance.

This thesis centres on the debates informing the progress of three public art galleries in South Africa between 1990 and 1994. This was a period of great change in the country, spanning from the unbanning of left-wing political parties and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, to the first democratic elections which resulted in his inauguration as President of South Africa. The study focuses specifically on the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the South African National Gallery, and the Durban Art Gallery, delineating the events and exhibitions held, the programmes initiated, and the artists represented by these galleries during this post-apartheid/pre-democracy phase of the country’s history. The debates relevant to these galleries linked to those prevalent in the arts, museology, and politics at the time. Many contemporary South African artists called attention to apartheid oppression and human rights abuses during the 1980s. After 1990, with these pressures alleviating, there was a stage of uncertainty as to the role, responsibility, and focus of visual art in a post-‘struggle’ context, however there was also an unprecedented upswing in interest and investment in it. On a practical level, the administration of the arts was being re-evaluated and contested by both independent and politically-aligned arts groups. Public art museums and sponsored art competitions and exhibitions made increasing efforts to be ‘representative’ of South Africans of all races, cultures, creeds, sexes and genders. The many conferences, committees, and conventions created during this transitional era focused on the creation of policies that would assist in nation-building; historical and cultural redress and regeneration; and the education and representation of previously disadvantaged groups. This coincided with a revolution in museological discourses internationally, from the theorization of a museum as a place of commemoration and conservation, to a forum for discussion and revision between both academic and non-academic communities. With the sharing of the process of constructing history and knowledge, came the challenging dynamics involved in the representation of identity and history. In all of these groups - the arts, museology, and South African politics - the predominant issue seemed to be a negotiation between the bid to open up control to more parties, and the reluctance of some parties to relinquish control. While the emphasis is on significant changes that were implemented in the transitional period, the study locates the changes at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the South African National Gallery and the Durban Art Gallery within their historical, geographical, and socio-political context. Various artists working in these locations during this era are also discussed, as the changes in their status, and the progressions in their subject matter, materials, and concerns are interesting to examine more nuanced definitions of the ‘political’, probing the politics of identity, sexuality, gender, race, geography, and belief systems. Some artists also focused specifically on post-apartheid preoccupations with territory, trauma, conflict, memory and freedom. This kind of artwork was assiduously acquired during the early ‘90s by public art galleries, whose exhibitions and collecting focus and policies were undergoing considerable revision and redress. This thesis examines these changes in light of their socio-political contexts, as well as in light of shifting national and international imperatives and conceptions of museums and museum practice.

M. Tech. (Department of Visual Arts and Design: Fine Art, Faculty of Human Sciences), Vaal University of Technology. / My practice-based research aimed to produce commemorative portraits of black women in key positions who are associated with the Vaal Region. The study was undertaken in order to contribute to the empowering, positive and growing body of creative research on the visual representation of black women in the visual art field. My concern lies in the dearth of artistic representation of black women, particularly from the Vaal Region and with the hegemonic Westernised portrayal of black women in a Visual Arts discipline dominated by prejudiced attitudes towards issues of race and gender. This was accomplished in two steps. Firstly, through the examination of black feminist theories which underpin my theoretical framework, and further challenge and draw attention to the omissions, invisibility, non-recognition and negative portrayal of black women. In addition selected techniques in artworks of Zanele Muholi, Karina Turok, Sue Williamson and Bongi Bengu have been appropriated to create my body of work. Secondly, I utilise commemorative portraiture to produce iconic portraits of advocate Faith Pansy Tlakula, Professor Ntombekayise Irene Moutlana, Professor Kholeka Constance Moloi, Avitha Sooful, Lerato Moloi, Terry Pheto, Lira, Palesa Mokubung and the late mama Adelaide Tambo which were exhibited in the bodutu gallery accompanied by a catalogue and a comment book. Both of these methods are qualitatively explored as creative strategies to portray and award agency positively to black women through Third World readings of gendered perspectives.

This dissertation investigates the correlation between semiotic theory and the way that gendered subjectivity is represented in contemporary South African art. The phenomenon of signification is central to the semiotic theories of the Bulgarian semiotician and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Semiotics can be described as the science of the sign that considers the way in which artists express their personal experience in art making. In this investigation I refer mainly to women's artworks, although the concept of gendered subjectivity in the work of male artists is also discussed. This particular research investigates the symbolic relations of culture in gender terms, that explores the apparent contradictions of subjectivity inherent in capitalist patriarchal society. / Art History, Visual Arts & Music / M.A. (Visual Arts)