UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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How Poetic Language Enacts Agency: Art, access and agency - art sites of enabling
No full textTranscript of an online creative writing session at the Art, Access and Agency – Art Sites of Enabling Conference.
Co-organised by Dr Adam Levine and Prof Merle Williams (African Centre for the Study of the United States, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)
Being (not) at home: Exiled women artists in postwar New York: Hitting home: representations of the domestic milieu in feminist art
No full textIn postwar art, the question of exile is the question of home. House defines a space as a locative concept. Home represents a place with a symbolic value of belonging and refers to objects, people, and ideas. Home does not designate a fixed state but rather a relational and transformative site in which individual and collective acts of remembering are embedded. In this article, the author explores the aesthetics of exile in the artistic production of exiled women artists in postwar New York, most notably Ruth Vollmer, Louise Nevelson, and Eva Hesse, who have often been excluded from the discourse around 1960s sculptural practice. The author casts the mode of construction and the viewing experience of their artworks through the notions of home and body. This contribution focuses on the intricate interrelations between women, domesticity, and artmaking associated with the aesthetics of exile and displacement, which significantly challenges any stable and absolute conception of home and place. By drawing on the works of feminist scholars and theorists, such as Sarah Ahmed, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Iris Marion Young—in their argument that the idea of home and the practices of homemaking support relational identities—the author sheds light on how women artists in exile investigate notions of home, borders (both physical and psychological), diasporic longing, habitation, and uprootedness in a constant state of exchange
Exploring complex storytelling through wayfinding design: Stories Worth Telling - crafting stories through the art of design
No full textDesigning wayfinding systems in the built environment presents multifaceted challenges. D esigners must navigate not only physical spaces but also the intricate social and symbolic dynamics. In the context of developing a new wayfinding and navigation design brief and project framework for the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Australia (RBGV), another layer of complexity is critical: Australia’s (post)colonial history, and the particular colonial inscriptions that mark the botanical institution. The research team started to address the given project through the Stanford University Design Thinking (DT) 5-Step method while simultaneously questioning the appropriateness of western-centric design methodologies. Integration of the Australian Indigenous Design Charter (AIDC) and the International Indigenous Design Charters (IIDC) alongside the DT method emerged as a promising approach. How these two approaches would interplay together became a key concern. What emerged was the critical need for sharing stories and deep listening as ways toward a shared empathetic pathway between DT and AIDC. The work culminated in the integration of Australian Indigenous Cultural Knowledge into the wayfinding a nd navigation project for the RBGV
Book Review: Jacaranda rain – a South African story
No full textJoan Hettema’s Jacaranda rain – a South African story is a deeply personal account that intertwines the author’s life with the rich tapestry of South African history. In this self-published work, Hettema skilfully navigates through her memories, vividly portraying her experiences growing up in Pretoria alongside the backdrop of significant historical events
The caretaker of wounds : pictures of the deposition of Christ in the work of Marcus Glaser
Get PDFThe South African artist Marcus Glaser (1936-2007) created several prints of the Deposition of Christ, seemingly to understand, through this important iconographical image, his own position in relation to the western art canon. The works reveal the predilections and anxieties of an artist trained in the classical tenets of high modernism in South Africa of the 1950s and 1960s, and shed light on the ways in which some artists of Glaser’s generation responded to the political and arthistorical landscape in which they found themselves. The paper considers Glaser’s images as exemplary prints in a long line of Deposition prints and paintings, beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s (1471-1528) seminal works on the same theme. It also explores the aesthetic anxieties of this individual artist and suggests that they are symptomatic of a particular moment and ethos in South African art of the late-twentieth century
Punctured and stitched: Derrida’s pointure and intertextual polyphony in dandyism meets Athi-Patra Ruga’s Future White Women of Azania
Get PDFThe “pointure” theme, as informed by Jacques Derrida’s (2009 [1978]) appropriation of this term, speaks not only of fusion but also of the interrelationship between two entities that are conjoined, though they may be in conflict with each other. This could be read as a form of intertextuality – Derrida’s text is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s essay, titled "The origin of painting" (2008 [1950, 1957, 1960]), though he works at critiquing and subverting its content. The process of intertextuality is one that informs dandyism, a mode of strategic dress where the wearer is forced to operate with an existing or dominant sartorial syntax. In this way, the dandy’s mode echoes Derrida’s proverbial “rereading” of Heidegger’s text “against the grain”. For this reason, dandyism is characterised as a product of what Sima Godfrey (1982:28) terms ‘intertextual polyphony’, involving a tricky renegotiation between a dominant sartorial syntax and a subversion of it. Athi- Patra Ruga’s artistic practice evokes the dandyist mode; not only does he work with a sartorial vocabulary but pushes it to its logical limit, affecting a subversion thereof. However, is it possible to interweave a discourse between his performance works, dubbed The Future White Woman of Azania (2010-2013), the form of intertexual polyphony inherent to dandyism and the subject matter and mode of Derrida’s text on pointure? Or will the form of definitional crisis attached to each of these ideas, bodies of work or texts prevent a smooth dialogue? Does the act of pointure that Derrida advances inherently bring about a definitional crisis?
Dream weavers: horned animal autobiographies and pointured forms
Get PDFElizabeth Wilson (2004:378) discusses the magical properties of textile media in relation to items of clothing, affect and perception. In this article, I take this enchanted sensibility further in a discussion of the strong confluence of stitched and woven (pointured) forms with horned animal mysticism, discussing the historical and contemporary beliefs surrounding horned animals in both western and African contexts in relation to, and as an influence on, the mysticism relating to pointured mediums.
I invoke Jacques Derrida’s (2009 [1978]:301-315) critical term “pointure”, which stems from the stitched practice of cobbling. Two sub-metaphors employed by Derrida (2009:302-307) in his extrapolation of this term bear weight in this context: his constitution of the word “lace” (derived from the shoe lace), and his perception of a haunting implicit in the relation of the original shoes, to the painted shoes, to the viewer. Following this looped notion of lacing and haunting, I argue that the vacuum made by the stitch is a haunted site invested with themes and experiences of human frailty and desire; filled precipitously by the yarn, a wished for end is sympathetically effected
Designing in-between: Reflectively mapping an artistic research project
Get PDFDesigning in-between is an artistic research project that sprouted from curiosity regarding how the concept of space, characterised by difference, is perceived in an area of Stellenbosch, South Africa,. Participants included six inhabitants of Jamestown, including the primary researcher. Data was collected through tracking each participant with Global Positioning System (GPS) and photographic material, in-depth discussions, the drawing of mental maps, and the construction of written and visual translations of the research process by researcher/s. The project is informed by critical theory and complexity thinking within the field of visual art and artistic research. An over-arching poststructuralist sensibility that values the power of representational practice in constructing and deconstructing knowledge is implied.
In this article the authors aim to critically reflect and elaborate on the research processes engaged in, on the personal insights the research led to, and on the potential implications of the research for scholars working with artistic research in a South African context. Artistic praxis allowed for multi-dimensional experience and multi-perspectival translation of relations between aspects of complex reality. Such openness provided researchers with imaginative possibilities for continuous negotiation of difference. It facilitated experiences of Homi Bhabha’s Third Space, which facilitated transformative learning. Difficulty in translating newfound insights into clear, intelligible arguments was a challenge
Book Reviews
Get PDFBooks reviewed:
Henning Melber, The Long Shadow of German Colonialism: Amnesia, Denialism and Revisionism
Marion Sparg, Guilty and Proud: An MK Soldier’s Memoir of Exile, Prison and Freedom
Ronnie Kasrils and Fidelis Hove, Comrade and Commander: The Life and Times of Joe Modise
Sandra Swart, The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past
Victor Muchineripi Gwande, Manufacturing in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1979: Interest Group Politics, Protectionism, and the State
Neil Roos, Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: Social Histories of Accommodation
David Boucher and Bongani Ngqulunga, eds, Reappraising the Life and Legacy of Jan Smut
