Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-85). / During the Spring of 1969, as if adopting the guise of the explorer/adventurer of yesteryear, the American artist Robert Smithson (1938 - 1973) and his artist-wifeNancy Holt (1938 - )2 travelled to the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico (Roberts 2000: 552).Over a century earlier, in 1841, the American 'travel writer' John Lloyd Stephens(1805 -1852)3 had embarked on a similar voyage to the Yucatan peninsula and documented his encounters in his then celebrated book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan(1843). Smithson, aware of Stephens' travels and book, published his own account of his experiences on the Yucatan peninsula in an essay wryly entitled 'Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan41 in the September 1969 edition of the periodical Artforum.

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection is an archive of interviews and stories, drawings, paintings and photographs of and xam and !kun individuals, collected by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd between 1870 and 1881 in Cape Town. My dissertation focuses on the !kun children's material in the archive, created by Lucy Lloyd and the four !kun boys, !nanni, Tamme uma and Da, who lived in her home in Cape Town between 1879 and 1881. Until very recently, their collection of 17 notebooks and more than 570 paintings and drawings had been largely ignored and remained a silent partner to the larger, xam, part of the collection. Indeed, in a major publication it was declared that nothing was known about the boys and stated that "there is no information on their families of origin, the conditions they had previously lived under, or the reasons why they ended up in custody" (Szalay 2002: 21). This study places the children centre stage and explores their stories from a number of perspectives. I set out to assess to what extent the four !kun children laid down an account of their personal and historical experiences, through their texts, paintings and drawings in the Bleek and Lloyd project to record Bushmen languages and literature. In order to do this, I have investigated the historical and socioeconomic conditions in the territory now known as Namibia during the period of their childhoods, as well as the circumstances under which the children were conveyed to Cape Town and eventually joined the Bleek- Lloyd household. I have looked at Lucy Lloyd's personal history and examined the ways in which she shaped the making of the collection in her home. I suggest that a consideration of the loss and trauma experienced by Lloyd may have predisposed her to recognition and engagement of, or at least, accommodation of, the trauma experienced by the !kun boys.

Drawing on personal recollections and collective history, The Last Colour to Fade offers a meditation on the sea as both a physical and psychological landscape. Memories of my childhood spent on Robben Island are interwoven with historical facts, with narratives borrowed from literature and film, and images from art and life. Shifting between first person and third, between my own reflections and those of others, I have found in the lives and works of Adriaan Van Zyl, Derek Jarman, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf and others a shared affinity for water. The sea – changeable, inconstant – reveals itself to be evocative of not only promise and peril, but of sensuality, desire and eroticism. It offers as imperfect parallel the image of the swimming pool and its attendant changing room, evoking a history of the queer body in art and writing. The twelve discrete artworks collected under the title The Last Colour to Fade, are abstracted interpretations of these themes, where colour and materiality are primary. The works share a persistent seriality, with the recurring image of a pool, the motif of tiles, and repetition of form. Most tends towards fragility, towards a suggested impermanence, made from tissue paper, porcelain, or stained tarlatan cloth. The accompanying text is one of fragments and vignettes, which suggest rather than state my thematic concerns, pairing my own voice with those of others in quoted passages and poems. Both my exhibition and writing gesture to the liminal space between what is said and what is left unspoken.

No description available.

In this project, located in the Western Cape, I converge with local artists, Gerard Sekoto and Siona O'Connell, as well as international artists such as Ai Weiwei in China, Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba in Vietnam and Doris Salcedo in Colombia. We all deploy ordinary objects to work against a range of hegemonic paradigms, expressing the plight of marginal communities in varying but connected ways. These "ordinary" objects, through the unique vision of the artist, become more than mere instruments of labour, or even mere metaphors for the workers' plight: they become part of a partisan aesthetic. The manner in which Sekoto, Nguyen Hatsushiba, Weiwei, Salcedo and O'Connell use ordinary objects like the pick, the rickshaw, the sunflower seed, the table/shoe and the ball gown to address globalisation, modernisation, the plight of the worker, the consequences of colonialism and war and how we live in the aftermath of an oppressive regime inspired me to use ordinary objects to create political art and render the lived realities of garment workers in the Western Cape. Scholars like Paulo Freire, Achille Mbembe, Anthony Bogues and Jacques Rancière undergird these kinds of aesthetic projects, with their discourse on oppression, freedom and emancipation.

No description available.

Includes bibliographical references. / Peter Zhang, in writing on the work of Deleuze and Guatarri, identifies what he calls Deleuzian minor rhetoric 1: namely the need to step outside of the major language and occupy the position of minority. This position of minority, which for Deleuze is a position of power, is achieved through the process of becoming, a constant state of mobility. In a sense this is one of the motivations for my project - understanding the language of printmaking I find myself invested in by considering the material qualities of printmaking as well as the process or act of printing through a number of visual forms. In order better to understand my own position within printmaking, I have used this project to explore the figure or persona of the printmaker and in doing so I am journeying towards the Deleuzian position of minority by questioning ways of thinking about print and the printmaker. This project is located within the fine arts practice of printmaking, but positions itself as an investigation of the liminal, in-between processes of printmaking in terms of alchemy and ritual through the figure of the printmaker. The project is everything in-between the initial idea for a print and the final product, a space I have come to refer to as The Printer's Grey. This reflects my own art-making methodology and my particular approach and thinking within printmaking, where my notebooks and proofs hold the same importance as the eventual printed product. These objects all reveal a creative process, which is flexible and shifting rather than one that merely renders an image in printed form. In drawing attention to the in-between processes during the act of making I assert both its instrumental role in the creation of the print as well as the importance of the process as a site of thinking through the visual. Specifically in relation to printmaking, The Printer's Grey speaks to and seeks to draw into the gallery space aspects of the in-studio process of making a print - aspects which often remain hidden when viewing a print.

This study is divided into five sections. The introductory section briefly examines how South African black photography acquired its "history-telling" status and how the agitation against its rigidity came about and was achieved. The following chapter explores the norms and traditions that foreground the material elements and formal principles of Mthethwa's photographs within art criticism. The third chapter considers Mthethwa's betrayal of the viewer's strong attachment to the objective recognition of the depicted in portraiture. The fourth chapter nudges the viewer to consider disembodiment as an alternative discourse of Mthethwa's portraiture practice. The fifth chapter reflects on how the photographic abstractionism of the Wall Paper, 1995-2005 (Fig. 12) inverts the specificity of photography as a medium and promotes an aesthetic inclination rather than the viewer's emotional attachment to it. The last chapter closely explores the reception and criticism of Mthethwa's photography as "photography after the end of documentary realism" and the impact that it has (had) on the reception of his photographic practice and the hypothesis of this study (Enwezor 2010: 100). The overarching motive of this study is to demonstrate the fact that, methodologically, it is the reception of Mthethwa's practice as that which constitutes "photography after the end of documentary realism" that enables the viewer to look at his photographs as visual representations that subscribe to formalism and formal analysis: that dissolve the considerations of content to those of form. It is this viewing experience that, on one hand, encourages the viewer to locate Mthethwa's photographs within art criticism: that enables the viewer to uphold their cultural worth or their status as aesthetic objects that draw the viewer's sensory contemplation or appreciation to their beauty or sublimity. Also, it is this signification that, on the other hand, encourages the viewer to comprehend them as "sites of ambivalence" or as images that cannot be "read mimetically as the appearance of a reality", but as artefacts that are capable of narrating a fiction. (Bhabha 1994: 51).

Bibliography: leaves 75-80. / In this dissertation and series of paintings I wish to focus attention on the interconnection between knowledge and power. This is commented on in relation to socio-medical disciplines. The argument proposes that knowledge is a product of vested interests and should thus not be regarded as transcendent of the context in which it is used. This study examines attempts to naturalize race, class and gender through scrutiny and analyses of the human body. Section One considers specific historical cases which illustrate the use of knowledge as a disciplinary force. Surveillance, classification, objectification and an understanding of science as neutral are identified as central to the construction of difference. These themes are investigated with regard to: Lavater's physiognomy, Charcot's understanding of hysteria, the influence of photography on nineteenth century science, eugenics, degenerationism and racial definitions in South African law from 1948 to 1994. This section draws on scholarship and research published predominantly in the areas of sociology, medical history, anthropology and ethnology. Section One is intended as a parallel text to the series of paintings produced. Section Two offers a personal interpretation of some trends, methods and materials used throughout the series of paintings. The paintings comment on the themes of classification, objectification and discrimination mentioned in Section One. The series also reflects on the mutability of knowledge and the continuing relevance of past doctrines. Primary strategies employed in the paintings are decontextualization and recontextualization of pre-existent texts, an emphasis on aesthetics and attempts to involve the viewer in the acts of looking and interpretation. Section Three consists of reproductions of the twenty paintings made for a Masters of Fine Art degree. Sources and processes used in the paintings are listed.

Includes bibliographical references. / Simon Critchley introduces his book on death, philosophy and literature, Very Little - Almost Nothing, with a preface titled As my father, I have already died, and describes his work as an act of mourning. What follows is an account of his last moments with his father who died after a long struggle with lung cancer. Critchley missed his father's death by twenty minutes: A nurse took me to see him and then left me alone. The room was unlit and sparsely furnished. In pale winter light, he lay with a single sheet covering his corpse: tiny, withered and ravaged by cancer. I spent no more than five minutes alone with him, initially standing petrified, then sitting, and finally summoning up the courage to touch his cheek and nose and caress his forehead. It felt cool. So, this is what death looks like, I thought. This is what my death will look like.