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.

Following the first world exhibition, the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, exhibitions became routine events across the West that merged both education and entertainment to forward political and economic goals. For the most part scholars have taken the frequency, popularity, and propagandistic efforts of exhibitions at face value, viewing them as successful reassertions of the imperial, industrial, and technological superiority of Western nation-states. Though offering valuable insights into the cultural technologies of imperial rule, these works miss the complexities of imperial projects within specific temporal and geographical contexts. This manuscript traces the historical dynamics of India at exhibitions held in London during and after imperial rule: the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, the 1924-25 British Empire Exhibition, and the 1951 Festival of Britain. In historicizing the exhibitionary administration and display of India over time, this study argues for a more complex reading of exhibitions in which displays invoked a mélange of meanings that destabilized as well as projected imperial hierarchies. It also examines the ways in which Indians administered, evaluated, and contested imperial displays. Rather than seamlessly reinforcing imperial dominance, exhibitions, located within specific historical contexts, emerged as contested, multifaceted, and even ambiguous portrayals of empires.

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Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Technology: Fine Art, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2015. / This dissertation sets out to investigate the interpretation of the garden in the work of Marianne North (1840-1926), Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) and my art practice. The garden has historically been a site for man’s interaction with nature and has been the subject of interpretation by Fine Art and Botanic artists throughout history. Marianne North’s (1830-1890) interpretation of the garden is positioned somewhere between Victorian flower painter and Botanic artist. An intrepid traveller, she could be considered as a topographical artist in that she documented the gardens and the flora and fauna of the countries she visited. The focus is on her visit to South Africa in 1883. Claude Monet (1840-1926), in his late Impressionist interpretation of the garden, focused on the seasonal play of light on his Japanese inspired garden at Giverny. Artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) in his interpretation of his garden Little Sparta, acknowledges the transience of the garden and its constant metamorphosis. His three dimensional poetry in the form of inscribed rocks and sculptures reflects his interpretation of the garden as a location of contestation. In an exhibition titled Hortus Conclusis I explore the fragility of the garden through the use of porcelain as a metaphor for the transience of life. / M

In an attempt to understand the multiple lives of an object - specifically a death inquest register from the year 1976 - this dissertation examines five moments in the objects life (referred to as the Ledger) that invest it with ‘capital’. They are; • The Cillié Commission of Inquiry. • Sam Nzima’s photograph of Hector Pieterson. • The destruction of apartheid documents in the early 1990’s. • Kendell Geers’ appropriation of the Ledger. • Museum Africa’s purchase of the Ledger. By applying a biographical methodology to this object, this dissertation examines how the shifts in the multiple lives of the Ledger address the different roles that the archive plays in the construction of memory in South Africa.

Thesis (M.A (History of Art))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Arts, 2016 / This research report explores how the eighteenth century Romantic Child Ideal influenced the representations of children created by artists Terry Kurgan and Mark Hipper, and subsequently what the responses to these works reveal about a relationship to and participation in the ideal within the context of South Africa in the late 1990s. Through a close reading of two seminal exhibitions, the group show Purity and Danger (1997) which featured Terry Kurgan’s photographs of her son, and Vicera (1998) Mark Hipper’s mixed media offering of child nudes, I analysed the manner in which these artists both perpetuate and subvert the Ideal through their specific visualisations of the child. / MT2017

The Johannesburg Art Foundation (JAF), founded in 1982 by Bill Ainslie, maintained a teaching philosophy which opposed any form of discrimination and stressed that art education should be a possibility for everyone. There was no prescribed curriculum and the programme was not dependent on an external educational authority. I argue that particularly in the decade 1982-1992, the South African apartheid government's educational policy towards cultural activities was prescriptive, stifling and potentially paralysing for many artists. Nevertheless, the teaching at the JAF sustained a flexibility and tolerance of ideas combined with an emancipatory ambition that promoted exchange. The philosophy was infused with a social justice and a political activism agenda squarely in opposition to the separatist apartheid education laws. This study contextualizes the impact and efficacy of the teaching approach at the JAF in terms of its intellectual, social and political perspectives during the years 1982-1992. This teaching approach prompted acerbic encounters within the competing systems of formal and informal institutions. It is this controversial anomaly signifying elements of collision in the pursuit of developing modernism that are investigated to some extent. Personal involvement as an artist and teacher, during the period 1982-1992, allowed my contribution and participation in the development of the teaching philosophy. The paucity of available literature on the subject has stimulated a comprehensive preliminary investigation of the way in which the JAF cultivated alternative educational policies. The individual methodologies and personal experiences extracted from interviews with artists, Council Members and members of staff are documented in order to provide a detailed characterisation of the values of the JAF. In addition, original documentation representative of the genealogy of the JAF forms part of the curatorial practice for the exhibition Controversial ways of seeing at the Bag Factory Gallery. The JAF declined from 1992 and finally ceased to exist in 2001.

13 slides in pocket inside back cover. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Hailed in his time as the greatest living artist, Antonio Canova (1757-1822) expressed his genius not only through the masterful conception and carving of his sculptures, but also in the meticulous orchestration of their display. Enshrining his marble figures alongside plaster casts of ancient works, bathing them in candlelight, staining and waxing their surfaces, and even setting them in motion on rotating bases, Canova challenged his audiences to rethink the very nature of sculpture. My dissertation argues, for the first time, that the meanings and impact of Canova's sculpture depended in significant part on the ways in which he and his patrons exhibited them. Canova himself began staging his work in Rome in the 1780s. His patrons, following the artist's lead, subsequently mounted their own dramatic exhibitions of Canova's work. Organized as a series of case studies, the dissertation examines four key exhibitions of Canova's work in four major European centers--Rome, Naples, Venice and Paris--from 1780-1843. These exhibitions had multiple functions. On the one hand, they enabled Canova to showcase his artistic talent and allowed his patrons to advertise their wealth and good taste. More importantly, however, these exhibitions required viewers to transform their interaction with Canova's sculptures into performative moments in which they displayed their own historical, cultural and artistic knowledge. Viewers of Canova's work performed their own position as beholders, and, indeed, my dissertation is as preoccupied with the reception of Canova's sculptures as it is with his and his patrons' display strategies. Not only do viewers' accounts often reveal the particularities of the exhibitions themselves, but the intensity of beholders' responses to Canova's work also signals the way that his sculptures took on a wide-variety of meanings that he and his patrons could not always control. Equally striking is the way diverse visitors continued to find meaning, validity, and subjects for debate in Canova's work despite sixty years of political, historical, and social change. Throughout many transformations, Canova's sculptures remained a focal point for discussions of politics, cultural heritage, archaeology, connoisseurship, artistic production and the development of art history itself. I have focused largely on three Italian centers because Italy was the center of origin for many of aspects of Canova's stagings. In Rome, for instance, Canova was introduced to serious study of the antique and it was there that he began to compare his works of art with ancient masterpieces. The display of Triumphant Perseus next to a cast of the Apollo Belvedere, for instance, generated conversations regarding the nature of imitation and the importance setting and political circumstances had on the understanding of his work. In Naples, on the other hand, the exhibition of Venus and Adonis in a tempietto in the garden of Francesco Maria Berio, Marchese di Salza, launched a city-wide debate regarding modes of artistic production and the best means of communicating those artistic possibilities to an audience. In Venice, in 1817, Leopoldo Cicognara juxtaposed Canova's Polinnia with recently restored Venetian Old Master paintings, including Titian's Assumption of the Virgin, in the Accademia di Belle Arti's new public painting gallery. This exhibition reaffirmed the Veneto's artistic authority at a moment when Venice's political fortunes were at their nadir. Given the primacy French art has held in the study of the nineteenth century, I hope serious reevaluation of this period will contribute to a renewed understanding of the importance Italy had for the history of art at the turn of the century. Yet, I conclude the project by focusing on Paris. It was there, in the French capital, where the exhibition of Canova's Penitent Magdalene in the townhouse of Giambattista Sommariva launched a discussion about expression and the emotional resonance of art. Penitent Magdalene's despair encouraged beholders' self-reflection, and in so doing reinforced notions of individuality and the self, established the sculpture as a particularly "French" and modern work, and perhaps more importantly, forged a direct link between emotional resonance and aesthetic value. Throughout Europe, the staging of sculptures organized by Canova and his patrons generated discussion about the appropriate ways to look at, talk about, and write about sculpture. Reactions to Canova's works inspired wide-spread debates about the nature of artistic production, the writing of art history, the context and significance of exhibitions and personal emotional reactions to works of art. My dissertation reimagines Canova's keystone position in the larger art world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by bringing the contexts of exhibition and response into our understanding of the artist and his work.

This thesis examines the ways in which the process of exhibition development and the politics this involves affects the practice of history in the museum. It does this by establishing the broad parameters of history practice in the museum and places this in relation to academic practice, focusing on the New Zealand context and specifically upon Auckland War Memorial Museum. From this basis the thesis examines the development of City exhibition at Auckland Museum as a large-scale museum history exposition. The development process for this exhibition was created with the aim of changing the traditional Museum approach so as to create a more engaging and scholarly history exhibition than is traditional. At the same time however, there was also an aim of retaining the appearance of the traditional Museum within this programme of change. These aims were to be met by the innovation of the collaboration between an academic historian and the Museum's practitioners in the development process.The research is based upon a detailed investigation of the roles played by the exhibition team members and the decisions, negotiations and compromises that they made through the development process. Beginning with their original intentions and concepts for the exhibition its metamorphosis into the exhibition as it was installed in the Museum gallery is traced. Emphasis is placed on the resonance that the various decisions and changes carried into the finished exhibition. The findings indicate that the Museum's traditions of developing and displaying knowledge exerted a strong conservative effect over the exhibition development in conflict with the programme of change. This conservatism vied with the authorial intentions of the exhibition development team. As a result of this influence the exhibition developed leant towards the conventional. The unexpectedly orthodox outcome resulted from the absence of critical museological practice. The thesis argues that although Auckland Museum had undergone extensive restructuring, including the introduction of new exhibition development processes and a new outlook as an organisation, the conception of history in the Museum had not changed. Ultimately this precluded that the practice of history in the institution would advance through the revised exhibition development process. However, the development of City did help achieve the updating of social history in the Museum and remains a platform upon which a more critical approach to the past can be built.