UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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The boundaries of desire and intimacy in post-apartheid South African queer film : Oliver Hermanus’s Skoonheid
Get PDFSouth African cinema is still dominated, both in terms of number and commercial success, by films featuring white Afrikaans-speaking characters. These films are mostly politically voiceless, ignoring the contentious racial and economic dynamics in the country, and they fail to represent queer realities. Skoonheid [Beauty] (2011), the powerful South African film directed by Oliver Hermanus, challenges this trend and offers a portrayal of sexualities and racial hostilities which are often silenced or ignored in mainstream cinema. The film depicts a white Afrikaans-speaking man named François, who becomes obsessed with his friend’s son, Christian. François has secret sex with a group of other white Afrikaans-speaking men on a farm near Bloemfontein. The group has strict rules that “moffies” (queers) and “kleurlinge” (“coloureds” or people of colour) are not welcome to join their sexual gatherings. These regulations and the secrecy that enshrouds same-sex attraction in the film belie François’s longing for intimacy, a longing which develops into an obsession with Christian that ends violently. In this paper, I locate the film within the broader trends of Afrikaans cinema and queer cinema in the country. I then perform a reading of the film to show how it offers an important voice to repressed sexualities, and exposes some of the hostilities which underlie relations in post-apartheid South African society. I focus on how intimacy, both cultural and personal, is impossible for François, and the film reflects how these intimacies are threatened by hostilities and marginalisation within South African society
Subverting the pastoral in Jane Alexander\u27s Pastoral Scene
No full textThis article discusses how the four figures in Jane Alexander’s sculptural installation Pastoral Scene (1995) – the “domestic worker”, the nursing “Black Madonna”, the “white widow” and the lactating wild dog – may be seen to subvert the colonial role that domestic workers perform within the suburban home and landscape. The article delves with more sustained attention than has hitherto been given into some of the visual histories in relation to this tableau, specifically a colonial- and apartheid-era pastoralism that framed landscape conventions and servant portraiture. The article discusses how black African women, when represented as servants in landscapes, function to delineate a space that may be determined by a Europeanised artistic sensibility. Alexander’s tableau subverts these anxieties, and the obfuscation of labour and presence that results, by centering the segregation, migration, urbanisation and disconnection that frequently arises out of South Africa’s socio-political realities. Returning to this work, produced during the formative time of South Africa’s sociopolitical transition in the 1990s, allows for the examination of Alexander’s characteristically riddling allegories but also of her allusive, wide-reaching method of enquiry into a subject – paid domestic labour – that remains woven, frequently in the most challenging and complex ways, into the national psyche and way of life
Editorial
Get PDFThis issue of Image & Text consists of articles that explore diverse examples of visual culture, including fine art, photography, film, and design. Moreover, it is South African visual culture in particular. Two of the articles engage with the influence of apartheid politics on the creative production of Peter Clarke and Billy Monk (Hobbs and Rankin, Jamal), and three others take the post-apartheid landscape as point of departure: A short film by Teboho Mahlatsi (Watson-Seoighe), a community mural painting project (Le Roux and Costandius), and an article on Cape Town as World Design Capital 2014 (Cassim). The other two articles in this issue deal with the notorious Pirelli Calendar from 2011 (Karam) and an exploration of existentialism in selected films by Michael Haneke (Gouws).
Sublimation and reversibility: technologies of vision, the X-ray, and looking at paintings
Get PDFThe first medical X-ray photograph was taken in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen. This was a time when such technological devices to measure and record previously unrecordable and little understood physical processes were proliferating. These technologies focused, with the notable exception of the work of EJ Marey, on visualisation, culminating in the dominance of cinema technologies in twentieth century culture. The use of X-rays in art has been largely limited to revealing layers of paint and other materials underneath the ostensible work, in order to aid the process of the restoration of paintings in gallery collections.
In some cases the X-ray process reveals a different image to the one apparent in an exhibited work, for example the painting Lake Garda (1921) by Maggie Laubser, obscures a self-portrait by the artist. The ability of the technology to reveal thus also raises the spectre of obfuscation – that is, of the aesthetic meaning of the work. The X-ray also thus reveals a temporal dimension to the works which perforce becomes part of their meaning. However, this temporality is not sequential and does not move inevitably forward. Is what we see when we look at the works the primary image, or can the obscured image recaptured by the machine come to replace the ‘finished’ work in terms of time, space and meaning? This technology of vision, in its palimpsestuous character and propensity to manipulate the sequential nature of time, problematises the link between vision and aesthetic meaning itself
Picturing change: Curating visual culture at post-apartheid universities
Get PDFBrenda Schmahmann’s own involvement in changing the visual image of Rhodes University coincided with the writing of this book, in which she takes a look at the way South African universities reconfigured their visual representation in the era of transition from the 1990s to the present.
Second skins: cloth, difference and the art of transformation
Get PDFIn this article, I take the photographic portraits of Maud Sulter and Chan-Hyo Bae as my point of departure to explore (i) the place of cloth in the refashioning of cultural, racial and gendered identities, and (ii) the use of cloth as a vehicle with which to challenge structures of power that render certain peoples, their histories and their cultural expressions invisible.
Staged at the Ben Uri Gallery, London, 2013, the exhibition Looking In juxtaposed the work of Sulter and Bae. The show featured seven photographs from Sulter’s Zabat series (1989), depicting African and African diasporic women artists as the Greek Muses. This was contrasted against nine self-portraits from Bae’s Existing in Costume series (2006-2013), which emerged from his migration to Great Britain from Korea in 2004. There are clear parallels between these artists’ use of cloth. Both embrace masquerade as a subversive strategy; masking becomes an ar
Design as tool for cognitive metabolism. The role of design in the socialisation of knowledge
No full textThe use of digital media for knowledge presentation in education and knowledge management in business, raises two fundamental questions: the relation between design and cognition, and the role of audiovisualistic rhetoric - an, as yet, ill-defined field of consideration in design. This article addresses the question of how design can help to reduce cognitive complexity, produce clarity and contribute to transparency and understanding. It claims that a research policy should not aim exclusively at knowledge production, but should also take into account the process of knowledge distribution and assimilation. Design can assume a decisive role in these two phases of knowledge socialisation . It is able to structure and present knowledge so as to promote and facilitate effective absorption through the judicious application of combined resources from different domains: sound, music, movement, text and images. This application includes aesthetics as a constitutive domain and not simply as an add-on to usability. An example of software development for medical education is used to ground the proposal that design plays a catalytic role in the process of cognitive metabolism
Editorial
No full textA theme that weaves its way through this issue of Image & Text is the question of identity, both historical and contemporary, technical and conceptual. It is explored from a number of viewpoints: professional, personal, societal, architectural and by means of graphic and linguistic expressions
Taipei international public telephone booth design competition 1992
No full textThe Taipei international telephone booth design competition, coordinated by the China External Development Council (CENTRA), attracted 1055 entries from 40 countries. The competition, the first sizeable international one of its kind held in Taipei, forms part of a cultural planning and development programme to upgrade public facilities and increase public awareness of the visual design environment. Designs were thus required to reflect the uniqueness of Chinese culture and to suitably enhance Taipei\u27s visual environment.
Deconstruction: The shifting paradigm in communication
No full textRegardless of the problems created, for bureaux and repro houses, deconstruction sounds like a lot of fun for designers, who seldom want to be left behind where new movements and trends are concerned. Especially now, when they are at last in a position to explore the frontiers of communication. Something they could never do before, because the technology was far too expensive and they were dependent on a few repro houses to achieve desired effects. Which they did, sometimes