UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Home is where the art is? Reflections on changing notions of home and contemporary art practices in the wake of the pandemic
Get PDFHow has the pandemic changed ideas of home, and how have artists responded to these changes? This article considers the implications of Covid-19’s impact on notions of home for contemporary art practices, with a focus on the experience of woman-identifying artists, given the gendered politics of home. Many artists have been forced to rethink how they work in response to the pandemic’s effects on freedom of movement, financial security, and exhibition opportunities. In the broader community, ‘working from home’ has resurged with added legitimacy. To the more optimistic social analysts, Covid-19 has offered an opportunity for a major reset of work practices, but evidence suggests that the pandemic has doubled down on the unpaid care burden of women. For some woman-identifying artists, such developments have become the tipping point for exiting the industry; others have rendered their work almost entirely digital; for yet others it has provided the official imprimatur for long-developed sustaining strategies. I analyse how notions of home have been explored in contemporary art, reflect on how Covid-19 has challenged conventional experiences of home, and discuss examples of artistic practice that have adapted to these changes to examine what ‘working from home’ might entail in the wake of Covid-19
Future Frontiers: Ontological Osmosis and Africanfuturist Cyborgs in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon: Decolonising Speculative Fiction
No full textThis article will examine Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) — a tale of shapeshifting aliens arriving off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria — as a quintessential Africanfuturist novel replete with disruptions of traditional science fiction tropes, transcorporeal mutations and endogenous African epistemologies. Our theoretical framework brings together two seemingly disparate thinkers whose work challenges essentialist identity politics: American ecocritical feminist, Donna Haraway, and Cameroonian anthropologist, Francis Nyamnjoh. Haraway’s (1985) myth of the cyborg resonates with Okorafor’s aliens and their dissolution of the boundaries separating human/machine, man/woman, and self/other. Nyamnjoh (2015:6-7) presents a similarly liminal figure in the ‘frontier African’ to whom ‘everyone and everything is malleable, flexible and blendable, from humans and their anatomies , to animals and plants, gods, ghosts and spirits’. Okorafor’s counter-hegemonic representations of gender and selfhood are inextricably interwoven into a decolonising literary project of ‘ ontological osmosis’ that transforms superficially ‘fixed’ markers of difference into permeable thresholds of becoming. These concepts reflect Okorafor ’s Africanfuturist goals, as we show through a detailed analysis of the alien ambassador, Ayodele, and other key characters. This article will also consider Okorafor’s allusions to Mami Wata (a feminine west African water deity or witch) in relation to the protean Ayodele. This analysis will underline Okorafor’s thematic concerns with the question of gender and its relationship with the broader ecological and cultural forces of this society
Practice-based research in architecture at the University of the Free State: Original Research
No full textThe Department of Architecture at the University of the Free State (UFS) established a new practice-based research programme in 2018, facilitating creative research toward master’s and doctoral degrees. The programme is a first for South Africa, and possibly for Africa at large. In this paper, I consider research modalities that are proving to be pertinent to the programme, illustrated by examples of work currently underway at the university and which are new to South Africa. I seek to locate the specificity of creative research within the expanded nature and qualities of architecture conceived as a medium. This medium constitutes a vast nexus of relationships involving persons, environments, and things. I argue that creative research in architecture aims to harness and document the ingenuity of the designer’s medium toward a rejuvenation of design practice. I address three primary questions: What is the medium of architecture?; What is research in the medium of architecture?; and How might one go about designing a creative architectural thesis? I also consider operative concepts such as design as proto-research, the research gap, speculative hermeneutics, tacit knowledge, exegesis, and discovery that leads to the renewal of creativity
Special section editorial: Stories Worth Telling - crafting stories through the art of design
No full textThis special thematic issue of Image & Text focuses on storytelling and how selective aspects manifest in the domain of communication design. It is noteworthy that this particular special issue has arisen as a result of the landmark Stories Worth Telling retrospective exhibition1 curated by the Information Design division of the University of Pretoria’s School of the Arts in June of 2023 at the Javett-UP Student Gallery, showcasing 218 book designs by final year Information Design students. Following the exhibition, this special edition of Image & Text invited scholars, educators, writers, design practitioners, curators, and critics alike to submit articles specifically on the art of storytelling through an image/text interplay that dances upon the editorial stage or other spaces.
In this editorial, we highlight eight original peer-reviewed research contributions that offer unique perspectives on the role of storytelling in design, design education, and illustration as depicted in a multitude of media that run the gamut from poster design to creative writing, picture books, postcards, comics, wayfinding, and place naming. Moreover, we also provide an overview of academic contributions that discuss aspects related directly to the exhibition itself, an exhibition review, and a book review that comments on the importance of writing as a directorial storytelling tool
Designing with words: Writing as design: Stories Worth Telling - crafting stories through the art of design
No full textWriting for design has, over the past few decades, seen steady appreciation. Literature on design writing refers to it as a mostly technical vocation centred on the craft of writing in and of itself. Moreover, the suggestion seems to be that while writing is beneficial to, it is also distinct from the practice of communication design. Elsewhere, writing in the context of communication design is viewed as a specialisation – a skill that is typically reserved for a specialist writer who helps craft a tone to complement a predominantly visual design.
In this article, we argue that writing for design is a far more complex and foundational skill for communication designers. In doing so, we explore the interdependence of narrative and writing, as a systematic design process and so highlight the importance of creative writing as design in an educational context and emphasise how integral writing is to the designer as a storyteller. To demonstrate this, we explore a selection of student work from an editorial project that has, for the past 21 years, been delivered to fourth-year Information Design students at the University of Pretoria (and which formed part of the 2023 Stories Worth Telling retrospective exhibition)
The printed propaganda of the Communist Party of South Africa during World War II
Get PDFThis article examines the printed propaganda of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) from the World War II (1939-1945) period by briefly describing the impact that the War had on the party and its propaganda production. This is followed by an iconographic analysis of the subjects who appear prominently in the images contained in the propaganda. Four iconographic types are described and the reasons for their emergence and visual appearance are proffered. It is argued that the impact of the War on the CPSA and its production of printed propaganda was largely positive, owing to a change in perceptions of the party following the Soviet Union\u27s declaration of war on Germany and the easing of State repression on the party. As a result, CPSA membership numbers increased, the volume and variety of printed propaganda expanded and the audiences for the propaganda grew. The gentleman, intellectual, leader and soldier are identified as iconographic types which appear prominently in the CPSA\u27s printed propaganda during the War. The emergence of these figures is ascribed to the \u27accommodationist path\u27 followed by the CPSA during the War, the development of closer ties between the African National Congress (ANC) and the CPSA, and the alignment of the party\u27s propaganda with values relating to respectability, which resonated with a large part of the audience for the propaganda
‘I participate, therefore I learn’: A process of co-creative graduate supervision in design research in Cape Town
Get PDFChanging pedagogical contexts require a responsive attitude with regard to design research supervision. This article elaborates on experiences and lessons learnt through a co-creative approach to supervision, which draws on an empathic understanding of members in a learning space at a higher education institution in Cape Town. The Design Research Activities Workgroup (DRAW) was initiated in 2009, at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), to support postgraduate students within the design departments and to improve supervision capacity. It embraces a collective learning approach while critically re-interpreting the interaction between supervisors and postgraduate students. A narrative methodology and an interpretivist position were adopted to examine and describe the value and meaning of the DRAW forum to participants. A significant finding that emerged from the study is that the co-creative, group supervision approach to design research breaks down power differentials and enhances both the supervisor and student learning experiences in a specific community of practice
The cinema of Willie Esterhuizen: the quest for sex and hegemonic masculinity
Get PDFIn this article I critically discuss how Willie Esterhuizen’s films explicitly present an affirmative heteronormative hegemonic masculinity despite numerous queer, destabilising possibilities that threaten such dominant masculinity. I read Esterhuizen’s films in terms of their consistent safe-making of homoerotic possibilities. To show how hegemonic heteronormative masculinity features across Esterhuizen’s film oeuvre, his comedies Lipstiek Dipstiek (1994), Poena is Koning (2007), Vaatjie Sien Sy Gat (2008) and Stoute Boudjies (2010) will be investigated in this regard.
In this investigation, I will discuss how Esterhuizen’s films:
• present a narrative foregrounding a quest for sexual intercourse as an integral part of post-apartheid white masculinity;
• utilise notions of anality (as mostly based in farting and verbal references to defecation) in relation to masculinity;
• point to a masculinity of (bodily) control;
• present various moments of homosociality and even homoeroticism in the relationships between male characters that threaten heteronormative masculinity but are, in the end, consistently trumped by hegemonic masculinity
Spectatorship of screen media; land of the zombies?
Get PDFThis article investigates spectatorship of screen media. Early screen media is often thought to necessitate passive spectatorship, with thinkers such as Siegfried Kracauer (1987) and Walter Benjamin (2004) focusing on film. Such theories are later supported by critiques such as those by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2003) on the mass media, and Laura Mulvey’s (2004) text on the gaze in film, along with ideas around the flaws of the Cartesian position as spectatorship formulated in aesthetics. More recently, with the advent of digital media, spectatorship has been re-formulated as more active in terms of meaning making. Following earlier theorists, I argue here that screen spectatorship is not in fact as active as it now appears to be, and that spectators are often performing dialectical zombie-like spectatorship; appearing active when spectatorship is more distracted than before. Overwhelming spectacle catering to the ‘eye lust’ (Gunning 2004:871) and interactive elements convince spectators that they are acting with agency, but as I aim to show, also lead to an exacerbated collapse of contemplative distance, which paradoxically often renders spectatorship uncannily zombie-like. When spectatorship reveals itself as a strangely passive activity, it may be understood as uncanny in the manner that Freud (1955) formulated it.
Christian-Afrikaans women under construction: an analysis of gender ideology in Finesse and Lééf
Get PDFIn this article we explore the nature of a particular kind of femininity, which we term ‘Christian-Afrikaans femininity’. It is our contention that the rise of glossy magazines over the last two decades, and specifically since the fall of apartheid in 1994, aimed particularly at Christian-Afrikaans women in South Africa, is linked to a so-called crisis of cultural identity facing (white) Afrikaans speaking people at this time. The aim of the semiotic and iconographical analysis undertaken here is to explore the nature of contemporary Christian-Afrikaans femininity as it is constructed in two South African, glossy, women’s magazines, namely, Finesse and Lééf. The construction of an ideal Christian-Afrikaans woman is considered here in terms of two closely related issues. On the one hand, we argue that the contemporary version of Christian-Afrikaans femininity is rooted in the social-political context of Afrikaner nationalism. On the other, we show that such myths are also rooted in the ideological construction of the ‘ideal’ woman in a Christian context, where patriarchal notions of gender continue to be perpetuated and maintained. It is, therefore, our aim to explore and expose the ways in which these two magazines naturalise a specifically white and normative construction of Christian-Afrikaans femininity thereby regulating and restricting the gender identities of modern Christian-Afrikaans women.
This research is derived from H Mans’ MA in Visual Studies, completed in 2013 under the supervision of J Lauwrens