M.Tech. / My research investigates whether the notion of a Goddess is still relevant as a metaphor to contemporary feminist art, both globally and within a South African context. My hypothesis is that the debate between the first and second-generation feminists regarding the relevance of the Goddess to feminism is incomplete. Using critical literary analysis I examine the issues surrounding the debate, exemplified through an analysis of artworks by Ana Mendieta and Tracey Rose. A further aim of my research is to raise critical debate as to whether a multifaceted and contradictory Goddess, such as the Hindu goddess Kālī, is more relevant to the diversity of options suggested by both postmodernism and a multicultural South Africa. Evidence and interpretation of such an ambivalent Goddess is sought in the work of South African artists Claudette Schreuders and Diane Victor. Arguments from texts relevant to the artworks are critically examined, augmented in the case of Schreuders by an interview. The presence of an ambivalent Goddess is developed in my practical work through exploratory research. Assemblages of varying materials have been created to suggest a metaphorical Goddess. Discussion of these artworks reveals that both materials and concepts are inextricably linked and are intended to invite multiple interpretations. By exploring the issue of feminism in a South African context and adding to a general body of knowledge on South African artists, my research contributes to the University of Johannesburg’s niche area Visually Embodying Identity in a Postcolonial Environment.

This research project assesses the development, application and use of paper pulp as a medium for the production of three-dimensional figurative sculptures for application in the Phumani Paper Programme. The research was undertaken to assess the use of this medium with a view to finding ways of stimulating job creation, which would support community development. I chose to focus on the Hear Our Voice (HOV) programme because of its limited success in job creation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). The HOV art programme is presented here as a case study, which includes its impact on the 2002 WSSD and links it to the poverty alleviation projects of Phumani Paper. The presentation of the outcomes of the WSSD demonstrate the viability of the study. The participation of all stakeholders on different levels has been incorporated into this research study. Participatory Action Research (PAR) design and methodology is applied to this research project. The research project is divided into two phases: the first, project implementation phase, and the second, research phase. The first phase discusses the involvement of participants in project implementation and the technical aspects of production. Using phase one documentation as a basis, the second phase focuses on the collection of appropriate research data and then on the analysis of this data. In the broad summary of the HOV programme, the challenges and failures of the project faced by disadvantaged communities are highlighted, along with the creative ways in which these challenges were met and, in some cases, continue to be met, by project participants. This research project considers the potential for sustained and sustainable poverty alleviation in the long term through the group participation and the creative use of waste material in order to produce and market good quality paper products. / Ms. K. Berman Dr. G. Mukuka

Dissertation (DPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

M.Tech. / In this research, I examine whether cultural meanings embedded in original sixteenth to eighteenth century Dutch lace and Shweshwe fabric, as examples of colonial forms, are transformed through selected processes. With reference to Dutch lace from Holland, I analyse how the form changes within colonial and post-colonial contexts, but propose that the cultural meanings of the lace remain similar in both contexts. With reference to Shweshwe fabric, I argue that the form stays the same within both colonial and post-colonial contexts, but that its cultural meaning changes as a result of how patterns printed on it are named and identified in a post-colonial context. In this research, I use the term ‘cultural meaning’ to refer to certain signifiers of culture. I propose that factors such as value, class, aspiration, desire and consumption are embedded in or make cultural meaning. My central argument proposes that crocheted doilies, and plastic tablecloths and placemats might be seen as post-colonial versions of Dutch lace. These post-colonial versions of Dutch lace are adopted and adapted by female homemakers in Naledi Ext. 2 to suit certain decorative tastes, values, aspirations and act as markers of class. This adoption and adaptation of the original colonial form, shifts the cultural meanings imbued within it, but not necessarily the associated consumptive meanings. Whilst the primary focus of the theoretical research is Dutch lace and its proposed post-colonial counterparts, I also examine examples of original Shweshwe fabric and how meanings of motifs found on this fabric have been transformed by the modern Mosotho to reflect notions of value and aspiration, whilst the actual motifs appear to be unchanged. In my practical work, I use Dutch lace, crocheted doilies, and plastic tablecloths and placemats, as well as Shweshwe fabric as visual references in the production of large to small scale paintings. In these, I explore how, through painterly alteration and transformation, shifts can occur in the meanings of patterns derived from these culturally-loaded sources.

The Pretoria Art Museum opened its doors to the public on May 20, 1964. At that time the Johannesburg Art Gallery had already been established in 1910 and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 1895. The realization of the Pretoria Art Museum was an accomplishment of the City’s clerk’s push for the city to have a museum of its own that would enable it to showcase works that the city owned which until then had been confined to its administrative offices and the City Hall. This nucleus collection which had been inaccessible to the general public, consisted of South African Old Masters and 17 Century Dutch art. On 15 April 1964, about a month before the museum opened officially to the public, the Selection Committee of the Board of Trustees of the Art Museum instituted by the City Council of Pretoria met to deliberate on how the collection of the museum was to be built in order to expand this nucleus collection further.The result was a series of eight resolutions that favoured the acquisition of South African Old Masters and The Hague School (19thcentury Netherlandish art). In the minutes of that meeting no mention was made of the acquisition of 20thcentury South African black artists. By 1994 about 2 404 units of artworks by white artists had been acquired in contrast to about 86 units of artworks by black artists. The eight resolutions tabulated by the board, can be taken as an informal policy thatthe museum adopted during the thirty-year period of its existence from 1964 to 1994 to acquire artworks. No formal acquisition policy existed as a part of the museum’s acquisition strategy during that three decade period. Fortunately, as the collection grew, there were deviations in the ‘acquisition strategy’ because works by black artists, though collected at a far lesser frequency than those by white artists, found their place in the collection. This research paper is a homage to the contributions of 20thcentury South African black artists’ contributions to the history of South African art. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSocSci / Unrestricted

In 1979, the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and the Standard Bank Investment Corporation came together to form the Standard Bank Foundation Collection of African Tribal Art, the first public collection of its kind in South Africa, which fundamentally re-shaped public and institutional perceptions of black art in the country. Its collection and display, at first in the Gertrude Posel Gallery and then in the Wits Art Museum, formed a canon of African art that represented the artistic identities of a larger continent as well as those of South Africa’s majority black population. Together these formed an explicit political statement. This dissertation traces the evolution of the Standard Bank Collection, examining key developments at critical moments in South Africa’s political history. Divided into two parts that juxtapose the apartheid and post-apartheid periods, the first section begins with the founding of the Standard Bank Collection and its inaugural exhibition, African Tribal Sculpture held in 1979. In Chapter One, a case study considers how Wits placed black South African objects in dialogue with the canonical sculpture from West and Central Africa. Wits thereby authenticated black South African objects as art, both in South Africa itself and within the field of African art history, an action that undermined the apartheid system. Chapter Two offers a second case study that takes on the racially charged climate of late apartheid, situating Wits’ collecting practices in relationship to the collections and exhibitions of other art museums in the country. Wits curators employed and politicized the labels traditional art and transitional art in their classifications of South African objects at a critical juncture in the nation’s political transformation. Part two looks at the post-apartheid period in a single case study. Chapter Three examines the politics present in exhibitions featuring African art in the new Wits Art Museum that addressed themes relevant to popular urban culture – including style, fashion, and adornment – viewed as central to the presentation of post-apartheid black identities. By examining the types of objects Wits collected and the kinds of exhibitions it mounted, this dissertation illuminates how the art museum’s cultural authority represented and grappled with the changing racial politics of the nation.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, History of Arts, 2013 / This report examines the collecting practices of the private collector of South African art, situated in South Africa, and considers the way in which the act of collecting influences both the contemporary market and the construction of the art historical canon. The report questions the contribution made to the South African art world by collecting practices and considers what is involved in the collecting of fine art. I discuss the collector in relation to Sylvester Ogbechie’s (2010) notion of cultural brokerage; I examine notions of both public and private through the writings of Michael Warner (2002); and I consider what makes into one a collector, with reference to Thomas G. Tanselle’s (1998) text A Rationale of Collecting, while engaging several other sources. The report continues with a comparison between international collectors, with a focus on the ways in which they contribute to what becomes and remains relevant, as well as discussing some local collectors. I conclude with an examination of the way in which auction houses have played a seminal role in the establishment of the canon in South Africa, and the role of the collector in relation to this system. In summary, this paper examines the ways in which the private collector of South African art has a great influence on what is perceived as relevant to the canon, to culture and to art history.

This thesis explores the tensions between nation building and globalisation in relation to state-sponsored visual arts projects, focusing on the Biennale project of the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC). It explores the extent to which this project - aimed initially at internationalising and then globalising South Africa’s art world following the demise of apartheid in 1994 - was compatible with key nation building objectives for state funding of the arts, captured imperfectly in the country’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). It is found that the Biennale project was largely not compatible with the RDP’s objectives for state funding, namely to promote national unity while respecting the country’s cultural diversity, redress imbalances of the past in access to the arts, and promote culture as a component of South Africa’s development, in spite of the GJMC’s statements to the contrary. Rather the Johannesburg Biennale reproduced the dialectic of economic inclusion and exclusion endemic to the political project of globalisation, leading to the creation of economic and artistic ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ akin to the ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ divide that the RDP warned against in its principle on nation-building, and proved to be an inappropriate use of state resources given the divided nature of the South African artworld. Furthermore, the GJMC imported uncritically an exhibition form associated with the discourse of internationalisation in the first Biennale, and then globalisation in the second, from other Biennales, based on contestable theoretical positions on nationalism and globalisation. This they did in an attempt to address a growing financial crisis in the city by using a ‘one size fit all’ set of policy prescriptions falling under the rubric of neo-liberalism, including culture-led methods of enhancing a city’s global status to attract foreign revenue. In particular, the Biennale did not learn the lesson that the shift in focus in other Biennales from internationalisation to globalisation, was also accompanied by growing discontent in these countries about the elitist nature of these events. I also consider whether it is possible to devise an alternative Biennale project that uses international contact to unite the South African artworld, rather than dividing it.

This study focuses on Berni Searle’s art, in which she searches for alternative figurations of identity. For Searle, identity as a category seems insufficient, as it cannot account for individuals of mixed heritage. Searle’s body of work testifies to an attempt to position and locate herself and marginalised subjects within post-apartheid South Africa. History, tradition, culture, race and gender are pivotal to Searle’s visual examination of her body and her identity, as these inscribe the subject at both symbolic and physical levels. Identity was investigated within South African context and the contexts of various postcolonial, postmodern and feminist debates. Searle’s works were investigated revealing nomadic subjectivity, as philosophised about by Gilles Deleuze and theorised about by Rosi Braidotti. Nomadic subjectivity promotes the notion that identity is fluid and located in the interstitial spaces between dichotomies and various debates. The habitation of such liminal spaces in the interstices between binary oppositions and views relates to what Homi Bhabha has defined as the “third space” and the notion of hybridity. Searle constructs her identity by affixing disparate aspects of her self. This is a continuous process whereby the artist inserts and erases her body. Searle’s works are investigated by using the film as a format. In Cinema 1: the movement-image (1986) Deleuze outlined three core cinematic elements, namely the frame, shot and montage, which are employed in an attempt to investigate the various processes at work in Searle’s artistic production. In addition to this, these filmic components were considered for their conceptual implications both in terms of the medium of film and symbolically. The concept of time, as discussed in Cinema 2: the time-image (1989) was utilised to investigate the implications of time for the nomadic subject and the notion of memory. Copyright 2005, University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. Please cite as follows: Adendorff, A 2005, Nomadic figurations of identity on the work of Berni Searle, MA dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-12072005-161121 / > / Dissertation (M (Visual Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Visual Arts / unrestricted

This research investigates the Neo-Baroque aesthetic of excess in contemporary South African art, and explores reasons for the emergence of this style. It investigates artists who use their bodies as a site of resistance, to contest or reconstruct the dominant social values which establish differences between bodies to place them within the marginal position of ‘Other’. This investigation relates to post-colonial concerns. The artists’ exploitation of the Neo-Baroque aesthetic of excess as a comment on social concerns reveals a sense of crisis within South African society, similar to the conditions from which the seventeenth century Baroque style evolved. Neo-Baroque aesthetics of excess manifest in a variety of ways, and are particularly evident when artists transgress social boundaries placed on the body through abject and erotic associations. Excess ultimately arises from complexity, as hybrid art forms are created from the combination of media and content found within the art work. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Visual Arts / unrestricted