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Intimate lives, interior places
Get PDFThis is a meditative piece on intimacy, exposure, skin, opacity and relations between human and other-than-humans. It is a reflection in various registers on ways in which intimacy can be understood, drawing on a set of interleaving instances from theory, art and literature. It is an experiment with form which makes use of critical insights from academic inquiry, but which moves closer to ways in which we often think and feel, not always attended to by academic writing. It adopts a mode of writing which offers an imagined dialogue with the reader, as it invites the reader closer to the material being explored. Thus it invokes an intimacy of form intended to renew the search for ways of writing thought
“The same but not quite”: Respectability, creative agencies and selfexpression in black middle-class Soweto homes
Get PDFIn this article, I explore notions of South African black middle-class respectability, focusing on the use of crocheted doilies by two homemakers in Naledi Extension 2, Soweto, Johannesburg – my mother, Geneva Maphangwa and Mam’ Ramuhulu. I explore their use of crocheted doilies as a means of decorating their homes, upholding status, and presenting themselves and their families as respectable. I regard crocheted doilies as metaphoric connectors, linking maternal generations, as well as signifiers of respectability. I also highlight how my mother’s and Mam’ Ramuhulu’s preoccupation with maintaining good status, cleanliness and order is linked to a form of respectability that is embedded with notions of good moral standing
Video, migration, and hetero-temporality: the liminality of time
Get PDFThe threshold (limen) where encounter is about to take place can be considered and fleshed out in many different ways. In a cultural context where the visibility of difference skirts the dangers of xenophobia, racial thinking and ghettoisation, I seek out an aspect of migratory life that is not so obviously visible, yet the visibility of which could help the encounter to occur performatively. This aspect is time: a threshold of (inter-)cultural life. I approach this topic in terms of two forms of visibility: video and migration.
While the moving image and migration were both phenomena of substantial currency and effect during the twentieth-century, in the present moment it appears that the visibility of video and migration is increasingly enhanced, based respectively on the sheer volume and variety of populations on the move, and the pyramiding appeal and accessibility of video. In this article, I probe how video art can contribute to a better understanding of migratory culture through an analysis of selected video works. Conversely, I argue that migratory culture helps to engage with video art on a different, more socially engaged level than might be obvious, particularly, in terms of temporality.
I proceed in this oblique and dialogic manner because video, as an artistic medium can, arguably, provide an experiential understanding of what such a multitemporality means. The phenomenon itself I refer to as multi-temporality; the experience of it, heterochrony. Liminal in art, in culture, and in migratory experience, heterochrony can become the existential experience marked by difference-within that enhances a cultural encounter that performs, rather than declaring “migratory culture” as the standard state of being in the world
At the border post of western art: the provisional “reaggregation” of Moshekwa Langa’s art into the South African canon
Get PDFWhen Moshekwa Langa’s eponymous solo exhibition opened in Johannesburg in 1995, it was hailed as turning point in South African art as it appeared to mark the entry of the first black South African artist working within a neo-conceptualist rubric. Untrained and hailing from a rural locale, years earlier Langa’s art would most likely have been deemed unprogressive or “traditional”. Borrowing from Arnold van Gennep’s (cited by Turner 1969) notion of ‘reaggregation’ – the final phase of a rite of passage, where the subject transcends the liminal phase, in this article I explore the shifts that facilitated Langa’s provisional inclusion, while unpacking the manner in which his identity paradoxically served to ensure his liminal status. Olu Oguibe (2004) suggests that African artists can resist this position through acts of self-definition. Langa avoided this route; he was complicit in constructing his liminal identity. He challenged reaggregation via an ironic re-enaction of reintegration as a universalist subject in a photographic body of work that responded to the skewed reception of his 1995 exhibition.
Meditating on this landmark moment in South African art history, I demonstrate how terms and labels used to “elevate” or culturally position Langa’s art, such as the neo-conceptualist tag, were fundamental to his art being reaggregated by the predominately white artworld, although it was to some degree an uneasy fit. Other theoretical frameworks used to usher his work into the canon of the contemporary, such as a notion of African conceptualism, as proposed by Salah Hassan and Oguibe (2001) are explored. So, too, are the intricacies and flaws involved in “inclusionary” or corrective processes instigated by the same authorities that played a role in determining exclusionary paradigms.
Van Gennep and Victor Turner’s theory of liminality proves useful in mapping the mechanics of aggregation and the position of the liminal subject, but, as I demonstrate in this article, it cannot sufficiently contextualise imposed notions of liminality as ascribed to African artists by Eurocentric writers who privilege inclusion into occidental canons above others
Chesterton’s ontology and the ethics of speculation
Get PDFThis article considers the ontology of the British journalist GK Chesterton with respect to its implications for the interpretation of visual texts, referred to here as the ethics of speculation. This exploration takes place under the assumption that Chesterton’s ontology, as that which relates to understanding the meaning of things, and his ethics, as that which examines the uses and abuses of things, have a dialogical connection. While Chesterton is not formally considered a philosopher, art historian or visual theorist, it is proposed that his ideas as an post-Victorian cultural commentator remain relevant to visual theory today. Unfortunately, Chesterton does not explicate his ontology systematically; this paper suggests that it may be considered in the light of three interlinking considerations: the riddle, the answer and the romance of being. It is in contemplating the interrelationship between these three considerations of being that specific ethical implications concerning visual interpretation become evident. In order to unpack the finer points of this ethics of speculation, reference is made to a single photograph taken during the South African War, A few dead British soldiers in the aftermath of the Battle of Spioenkop, 24 January 1900.
A sex-critical reading of the homosexual sex acts depicted in Inxeba
Get PDFIn this paper, I aim to analyse the homosexual sex acts depicted in the film, Inxeba (Trengove 2017). The analysis is informed by Lisa Downing’s ‘sex-critical’ approach that deems that ‘all forms of sexuality should be equally susceptible to critical thinking about the normative or otherwise ideologies they uphold’ (Downing 2013:95). The findings of the analysis underscore that the film displays a phallocentric scripting of the sex act: the practices and sequence of sexual acts that privilege the erect, penetrating penis. In cognisance of this point, the sex scenes under discussion can be critiqued for perpetuating a narrow phallocentric ideal of sex that runs parallel to hetero-patriarchal norms. To offer an alternative expression of homosexual sex acts, Alphonso Lingis’s writings on sexuality and sexual desire provide a springboard to explore erotic caresses and couplings that encompass the entire male body. To this end, Lingis’s work is presented as a means to queer homosexual sex from hetero-patriarchal and phallocentric scriptings. The paper concludes by using Lingis’s theories to imagine an alternative sex scene in Inxeba that illuminates queer eroticism and pleasure outside of penile penetrative sex
Defining a sphere of influence: Karel Landman’s centenary monument: Challenging Legacies in Post-Colonial and Post-Socialist Notions of Place
No full textLocated on a cleared koppie called “Kolrand” in the Eastern Cape, the Karel Landman Monument (KLM) was designed by Gerhard Moerdijk. Its foundation was laid on 16 December 1938, and the monument itself was unveiled a year later. But rather than being a straightforward outgrowth of the celebrations that surrounded the Centenary of the Great Trek, it is revealed that the KLM was mired in controversy about Karel Landman’s standing as a “Voortrekker” and the monument’s legitimacy. It is argued also that, despite seeming unusual, it deploys visual tropes that can be discerned in other monuments that emanated from the Centenary Trek. Furthermore, it is proposed that its visual language is tied into Afrikaner imaginaries that held sway in the late 1930s. In its inclusion of a globe and its treatment of the trek motif within it, the KLM is underpinned by a conception of South Africa’s place in the world that is at odds with a British imperialist vision of the Cape and Egypt as civilising points at either end of a dark hinterland. It would seem instead to be tied into conceptions of the heartland of Africa as an abode in which the white Afrikaner enjoys a God-given predominance and may perhaps even be linked to conceptions of Monomotapa which were an influence on Moerdijk
Light on loss in new works by Paul Emmanuel: Corporeality / Sensoriality / Materiality: Body-centered interpretations of South African art
No full textVeil 1954 and Carbon Dad 2017, two new works from South African artist Paul Emmanuel’s most recent exhibition Substance of Shadows (2021), are examined as depicting rites of passage of memory and mourning, following the recent loss of both Emmanuel’s parents. They are discussed in dialogue with the five untitled incised drawings from Emmanuel’s 2008 Transitions exhibition, which addressed significant male rites of passage that were also liminal moments in male lives. In rites of passage, the citations, quotations and traces that form a subject’s socially constituted body are undone and rearranged. Transitions (5), however, represents the quotidian liminality of commuting and while it is fruitfully interpreted as a metaphor for death, a deeper exploration of this particular rite of passage is held over, this article argues, until Veil 1954 and Carbon Dad 2017. These two works are therefore examined as a continuation of the works of Transitions. Crucially, however, it is proposed that Emmanuel’s principal memory engagement in these two works is enacted materially, through his medium of obsolete carbon paper, rather than the exposed photographic paper of Transitions. The ways in which Emmanuel works with carbon paper allows a sensitive embodied exploration of aging and frailty to emerge
Haecceity and haptics: A critical explication of bookness in Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking: Corporeality / Sensoriality / Materiality: Body-centered interpretations of South African art
No full textGiven the ongoing need for a more rigorous theoretical underpinning for book arts discourse, this essay conjoins a critical explication of my artist’s book Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking, and the practice of making it, with selected foundational statements on the haptic experience of artists’ books by Gary Frost. These statements provide a framework across and through which I am able to weave the explication. In order to do this, however, a history of the call for a more critical underpinning of the field is first undertaken. Thereafter, selected relevant theoretical tropes that have been influential on my thinking and practice are drawn together, forming a ground upon which the explication can be undertaken, focusing particularly upon haptic theory. This explication of artist’s book practice acknowledges, and is predicated upon, the well-documented lack of a conclusive definition for such objects, and thus I attempt to foreground constituent concepts of bookness as critical and appropriate lenses for characterising and theorising the book arts
South African experiences in a restructured post-apocalyptic geo-political future as depicted in speculative fiction: Decolonising Speculative Fiction
No full textThis article draws on science fiction’s aesthetics of instability and multiple perspectives that disrupt the dominance of a Euro-American narrative voice (Langer 2011), as well as decolonial concepts such as coloniality, decentring and epistemic freedom (Ngũgĩ 1986, 1992; Quijano 2007; Grosfoguel 2011; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018), to analyse the human condition and geopolitical patterns reflected in post-disaster worlds as depicted in Gillian Armstrong’s “Elton” (2011), Abigail Godsell’s (2011) “Taal” and Sarah Lotz’s “Marine Drive, Durban Beachfront” (2014). The notion of multiple perspectives and contexts, and Smith’s (2012) disruptive view that science fiction occurs everywhere, are used as lenses to examine the decolonised literary imagination. Ngũgĩ argues (1986, 1992), that such an imagination moves the literary setting and vision from the Euro-American centre to another centre, in this case to a speculative post-apocalyptic South African future. The article argues that the depicted literary future and unfolding human experiences enable the constitution of decolonised literary imaginings and a cultural geography that restructure the current domination of geo-political and spatial mappings by the Global North. This restructured imagining places South Africa, and by extension Africa, at the centre of a speculative vision of humanity’s sense of itself, knowledge production and agency, which are needed for the future survival of both the environment and other global inhabitants