It is a relatively recent phenomenon to see memorials as indictors of remembering the dead along South African roadsides. These memorials are expressions of places where death occurred. These expressions are arranged with visual and material elements, substantiated with some symbolic, often religious, meaning. This research wants to make the connection between Material Religion and Visual Culture Studies by investigating the way in which roadside memorials are compositionally arranged. Ten examples of roadside memorials were selected and discussed in order to come to some understanding of the connection between religious convictions and visual expressions thereof. / Dissertation (MA (Visual Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Visual Arts / MA (Visual Studies) / Unrestricted

This dissertation is a study in representation. More specifically, it is a study in the representation of art and of art history as melancholy representation. The latter is produced or opens up, because objects of art â pictures, images, or Bilder (read âlikenessesâ) â have a tendency to withdraw or turn away from view. Objects of art, which may be thought of as âthinking objectsâ or âliving imagesâ, that is, as quasisubjects, negate complete ownership. Like living things, objects of art are infinitely incomplete; they arise out of an ongoing process of becoming and disappearance. As such, our relationship with them may be said to be one of âmutual desireâ, want and lack. Moreover, as Michael Ann Holly (2002) has argued, the study of art history is bedevilled by lost, obscure, or obsolete objects; cloudy, shadowy, ghostly, even corpse-like objects that deny total acquisition or last words. It is in this sense that one can say art history â perhaps like any history â is a melancholic science. It is also from this melancholy perspective that this dissertation reflects, in various ways, on the imaging of history as catatastrophe or as catastrophic loss â as this is figured in the work of Walter Benjamin, Anselm Kiefer, and William Kentridge. How then do we write about art and the history of art, when the objects of our study are both too close and too far away, mutually absent and present â fleeting, yet seemingly permanent? How can one âimageâ the catastrophic debilitation of melancholic disavowal or death of self, without succumbing to its debilitating attractions? Following on from Max Penskyâs (2001) tracing of the historical image of melancholia as dialectical, the aim of this dissertation is to delineate a discursive space for perception and reflection; a critical space within which to think of the melancholic im-possibility of representation qua possession, as essentially negatively dialectical: futile and heroic, pointless and necessary. Finally, this dissertation asks: how can one write about the imaging of history as castastrophe, as this is figured from within different historical frameworks: that of an early twentieth century German-Jewish philosopher, a late twentieth/early twenty-first century German artist, and a late twentieth/early twenty-first South African-Jewish artist? How can one hope to relate their essentially melancholy work without becoming culpable of ahistoricity or even pastiche? No easy answers have been forthcoming during the writing of this dissertation. However, it is my delicate contention that reading and picturing their work in and as a melancholy constellation whose parameters shift depending on oneâs point of view, as opposed to submitting their similarities and differences to rigorous systematic analysis, has revealed surprising and enlightening elective affinities. In the final analysis, visual and philosophical analogy has the last say. And this seems fitting, especially where one encounters a writer and two artists whose thinking in images tirelessly challenge our thinking âlogicallyâ in words alone.

The disciplinary anxiety that has emerged between art history and visual culture studies increasingly dominates academic research and institutional practice both in global and South African contexts. The research posed here explores the contested relationship between the discipline of art history and the newly-emerging field of visual culture studies. For, despite the fact that art history has already transformed itself due to ideological pressures, this transformation is evidently no longer sufficient to ward off the visual cultural onslaught. Since the disciplinary boundaries between art history and visual culture studies intersect - or, more aptly, collide - this research examines whether these two fields are complementary or antagonistic endeavours. The proliferation of multitudes of ambiguous visual images, perpetuated by the rise of new media technologies, has complicated image production and consumption. As a result, a critique of all image-making technologies - including art - has gained momentum in light of the increasing entanglement of images with human existence. In particular, this research argues that art history can no longer maintain its allegiance to hierarchical distinctions between images, nor can it rely on traditional art historical methodologies only in its analysis and interpretation of images. This research proposes that art history visual culture studies can critically analyse the ideological functions of images in our postmodern era more appropriately than traditional art history is able to do. / Dissertation (MA (Visual Arts))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Visual Arts / unrestricted

This essay aims to investigate the visual and symbolic language of banners and standards belonging to two Swedish temperance organizations, the Independent Order of Good Templars, and the Swedish Blue-Ribbon Movement. The examined material is 98 banners and standards from Folkrörelsearkivet för Uppsala län. Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson's semiotic starting point in the article "Semiotics and Art History" (1991), mainly based on Charles Sanders Peirce's semiosis, has been used as the method of analysis. Support has also been taken from Roland Barthes' semiotic concepts of denotation and connotation. Visual culture studies, with support from Nicolas Mirzoeff's Introduction to Visual Culture (1999) has been used as a theoretical and structural starting point of the essay. The analysis has shown a rich use of symbolic signs within the material, and that – and how – the use of said symbolic signs is both similar and different between the organizations. The analysis has further demonstrated the possibility to interpret meaning which were communicated through the banners and the standards visual and symbolic language. In the essay's discussion, these meanings have been divided into different themes which can be said to reflect the ideals, ideas, and activities of the organizations. The visual communication is understood based on the activities and religious history of the organizations, and on the political, social, historical, and cultural context of the collective symbols.