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de
arte
88 • 2013 • ISSN 0004-3389
Editorial
Research
Actions speak louder than words in ‘The Alice Sequence’:
A series of exhibitions by Wilma Cruise
Ann-Marie Tully 4
A material paradise: Reworking the Ghent Altarpiece in the
Keiskamma Art Project’s Creation Altarpiece
Brenda Schmahmann 18
The framing of objects in Penny Siopis’ ‘Sympathetic Magic’
Alison Kearney 46
Views and (Re)Views
Some claim the right to look, while others prefer not to
James Sey 62
Collecting the Landscape
Claire Rousell 65
Just above the mantelpiece
Chava Caplan 71
Collecting and Curating
‘A cultural icon and a beacon of light in the inner city’:
The role of the Friends of the Tatham Art Gallery (FOTAG),
Pietermaritzburg, in ensuring the gallery’s success
Federico Freschi 76
Book Reviews
Afropolis
Reviewed by Melinda Silverman 88
Hotel Yeoville
Reviewed by Gavin Younge 92
Picturing change: Curating visual culture at post-apartheid universities
Reviewed by Jeanne van Eeden 95
Faith 47
Reviewed by Annemi Conradie 98
Siyazama: Art, AIDS and education in South Africa
Reviewed by Brenda Schmahmann 101
Obituary
Neels Coetzee: A great and gentle heart (12 January 1940–2 August 2013)
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de arte no 88 2013 © University of South Africa Pr ess
ISSN 0004-3389
pp 2–3
Editorial
Accreditation is the only way for a scholarly
journal to survive in today’s competitive
environment. In order to ensure the academic
standard of de arte, the editorial committee
decided a couple of years ago to invite
internationally renowned scholars to serve on
the Advisory Board. We are happy to announce
that Steven Nelson, Associate Professor of
African and African American Art History at
UCLA, Los Angeles, has become a member of
the panel of advisors.
The present issue contains three research
articles. In her contribution, Ann-Marie
Tully analyses the human/animal dialectic
explored by Wilma Cruise in a recent series
of exhibitions, collectively titled ‘The Alice
Sequence’ (2011–2012). Focusing on key
notions of inter-species communication and
distinction, Tully argues that Cruise’s interest
in Lewis Carroll’s fanciful text stems from the
proliferation of distinctive animal characters
in Carroll’s oeuvre, in particular the credible
‘force’ of the creatures of Wonderland. Carroll’s
fantastical realm, where humans and animals
converse with each other, is fertile ground
for an artistic and theoretical contemplation
of human and animal cognisant difference.
Tully explicates Cruise’s extension of Carroll’s
fictional trope into the Freudian and Lacanian
terrain of the preconscious and pre-linguistic
modality, which she links to the phenomenon
of horse-training methodologies that foreground
bodily modes of communication between
horses and their human trainers. The ‘bodily
register’ of écriture féminine is also connected
to this theoretical grouping as a repurposed
framework for revising notions of human logo-
centric supremacy over animal beings. Selected
artworks from Cruise’s ‘The Alice Sequence’
are analysed in relation to these theoretical
paradigms, with the conclusion that Cruise’s
disarticulated use of text and image enacts
the estrangement of logo-centric reason from
physical inter-species ontology. This artistic
dislodgement of certainty in the prerogative
of language places emphasis on the bodily
presence of Cruise’s sculptural animal figures
– in an artistic echo of pre-linguistic modes of
communication.
Brenda Schmahmann has conducted
extensive research on the Keiskamma Art
Project, an embroidery project in the village
of Hamburg in the Eastern Cape, South
Africa. In her article entitled ‘A material
paradise: Reworking the Ghent Altarpiece in
the Keiskamma Art Project’, she discusses
the Creation Altarpiece, a large-scale work
in needlework, as being modelled on a well-
known art object from the West, namely
the Ghent Altarpiece (1432) by Jan and
(possibly) Hubert van Eyck. Schmahmann
argues that, while the Creation Altarpiece
alludes to the Ghent Altarpiece in terms of
its shape and aspects of its iconographical
content, these areas of similarity actually
emphasise differences between the two works.
Such distinctions, it is suggested, stress that
the frames of reference of the makers of
the Creation Altarpiece are South African.
Meaning is also, however, dependent on the
context in which a work is read – a point
made by exploring the kinds of associations
and connotations the Creation Altarpiece
acquired when viewed in the context of places
of worship.
The third article, by Alison Kearney, deals
with the framing of objects in Penny Siopis’
exhibition ‘Sympathetic Magic’. She believes
that the contemporary practice of using
found objects to make art can no longer be
understood in terms of the anti-art gestures of
the first decades of the 20th century. According
to Kearney, an approach to understanding
this practice is to focus on the changed
ontological status of the objects when they are
embedded in the field of art. With reference
to the use of found objects in Siopis’ (2002)
exhibition ‘Sympathetic Magic’, she explores
the possibilities of meaning that arise from this
shift in focus. Recent anthropological discourse
on the materiality of things provides a starting
point for unpacking the ontological status of the
objects. Danto’s treatise on the transfiguration
of the commonplace and Baxandall’s discussion
of ‘exhibiting intention’ are used to discuss the
objects’ changed significance as art. Kearney
argues that the different treatment of objects in
Siopis’ series of installations demonstrates how
the meaning objects have for us, changes when
we encounter those objects differently.
Thanks to the efforts of Paul Cooper, the
rubric Views and (Re)Views is an interesting
collection of ideas on some of the latest art
events. James Sey wrote a review on ‘The
right to look from the south’, a colloquium
held at the University of Pretoria on 28
and 29 May 2013. Nicholas Mirzoeff, of
New York University, was the guest of this
colloquium hosted by Visual Culture Studies.
The convenor of the colloquium, along with
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de arte no 88 2013
Editorial
Rory du Plessis, was Amanda du Preez, who
aligned the theme of the event specifically to
a recent book by Mirzoeff, titled The right to
look: A counterhistory of visuality (2011).
The second contribution is a review by Claire
Rousell, herself a performance artist, of
the exhibition ‘Collecting the Landscape’,
held from 8 March to 8 April 2013 at the
Artspace Gallery in Johannesburg. ‘Collecting
the Landscape’ was Landi Raubenheimer’s
first solo exhibition in which she explores her
fascination with Johannesburg, her adopted
home, through a modernist lens. Karin Preller’s
exhibition ‘Just above the mantelpiece’, which
took place at the same Artspace Gallery
from 5 June to 3 July 2013, was reviewed
by Chava Caplan. The works are still-life
images taken from photographs and painted
in oil on canvas, a traditional medium in our
world of new technology. Yet Caplan proposes
that it is through the play of painting against
photography, colour against black and white,
staged against unstaged scenes and busy
versus quiet compositions that Preller creates
depth of meaning and stimulates thoughts on
composition, narrative, solitude and obsession.
The section on Collecting and Curating
features a contribution by Federico Freschi on
the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg,
more specifically the role of the Friends of
the Tatham Art Gallery (FOTAG), in ensuring
the gallery’s success. Given the pressures
on public museums and art galleries to grow
their audiences and the scope of their public
engagement in the face of ever-diminishing
resources, Freschi undertook to engage with
FOTAG on its successes and the strategies it
has employed in supporting the Tatham Art
Gallery. To this end, he interviewed the current
Chairperson, Christopher Duigan, and former
Chairperson, Val Maggs, a private art teacher
and founder member of FOTAG. They tell an
interesting story of how to support the activities
of an art gallery and provide a public interface
to parties primarily interested in artworks and
exhibitions.
The Book Reviews editor, Brenda
Schmahmann, again managed to compile
an interesting rubric. The books under
review are, with the exception of Faith47,
all locally produced publications with an
African emphasis. The book entitled Afropolis
addresses questions of the African city, ranging
across the continent from north to south, east
to west. Hotel Yeoville is part of one of Terry
Kurgan’s public participatory projects and offers
a compelling vision of reason and complicity
in the project to be African in our time. In
Picturing change, the subtitle Curating visual
culture at post-apartheid universities identifies
the author’s engagement with visual images
in spaces within academia, such as libraries
or council chambers, that are not structured
specifically and primarily for the viewing of art.
The last book, titled Siyazama: Art, AIDS
and education in South Africa, focuses on
an art project in KwaZulu-Natal run under
the auspices of the Durban University of
Technology (DUT), but which has also involved
input from key partner institutions – amongst
them, the Michigan State Art Museum.
Bernadette van Haute
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ISSN 0004-3389
pp 4–17
of logo-centric reason from physical inter-
species ontology. This artistic dislodgement
of certainty in the prerogative of language to
enforce human superiority over non-human
beings, places emphasis on the bodily
presence of Cruise’s sculptural animal figures,
in an artistic echo of pre-linguistic modes of
communication.
Down the rabbit hole, where we can talk to the
animals
So she [Alice] was considering in her
mind (as well as she could, for the hot
day made her feel very sleepy and stupid),
whether the pleasure of making a daisy-
chain would be worth the trouble of
getting up and picking the daisies, when
suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes
ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in
that; nor did Alice think it so very out of
the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself,
‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’
(when she thought it over afterwards, it
occurred to her that she ought to have
wondered at this, but at the time it all
seemed quite natural). (Carroll 2007:11–
12).
Like the impetuous Alice, and those ‘dear
children’ (Carroll 2007:151) that the
remarkable cleric and mathematical lecturer,
Charles Dodgson (known by his nom de plume,
Lewis Carroll), addressed in his warm and
fanciful greetings to his readership; so too must
the viewer approach the artist and provocateur
Wilma Cruise’s long-term engagement with
the animal subject,2 and now her artistic
investment in the animals of Wonderland:3
playfully, with childish belief, stumbling on
‘truths’ along the way. If it were not for this
impulsive response to the spectre of a talking
rabbit, Alice might have thought twice before
leaping down the rabbit hole that would lead
her to the fantastical world of Wonderland.
The whimsy and naiveté of this artistic offering
provoke a process of engagement in the viewer
that must resist inhibited reason - and this is
decisively the point.
Cruise’s exhibition, entitled ‘The Alice
Diaries’, staged at the Johannesburg Gallery,
Circa on Jellicoe, in July 2012, is the most
recent offering in a series of exhibitions dealing
Research
Actions speak louder than words in ‘The
Alice Sequence’: A series of exhibitions
by Wilma Cruise
Ann-Marie Tully
1
*
*Ann-Marie Tully is a practising ar tist, curator
and writer. She is also a Research Associate
at the Research Centre, Visual Identities in
Art and Design, Facult y of Ar t Design and
Architecture, Universit y of Johannesburg.
Abstract
The artist Wilma Cruise’s exploration of Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) as an
iconic and thematic motif for her recent
series of exhibitions, collectively titled ‘The
Alice Sequence’ (2011–2012), presents a
theoretically rich exploration of the human/
animal dialectic. This article explores key
notions of inter-species communication and
distinction that arise from Cruise’s artistic
exploration, also the practice-led component
of her doctoral study. The author argues that
Cruise’s interest in this fanciful text stems
from the proliferation of distinctive animal
characters in Carroll’s oeuvre; in particular
the credible ‘force’ of the creatures of
Wonderland who, in their fictional veracity,
resist (to some extent) a descent into
becoming solely allegorical conduits. Carroll’s
fantastical realm, where humans and animals
converse with each other, is fertile ground
for an artistic and theoretical contemplation
of human and animal cognisant difference
(a concept at the core of anthropological
distinction). In pursuing this direction the
author explicates Cruise’s extension of
Carroll’s fictional trope into the Freudian and
Lacanian terrain of the preconscious and
pre-linguistic modality (Cruise 2012:17–20),
which she links to the phenomenon of horse-
training methodologies that foreground bodily
modes of communication between horses and
their human trainers (Cruise 2012:18). The
‘bodily register’ of écriture féminine is also
connected to this theoretical grouping as a
repurposed framework for revising notions of
human logo-centric supremacy over animal
beings. Further theoretical formulations
that disregard preconceived conceptions of
human and animal capacity, such as Actor
Network Theory, are discussed in relation to
this premise. Selected artworks from Cruise’s
‘The Alice Sequence’ are analysed in relation
to these theoretical paradigms, with the
conclusion that Cruise’s disarticulated use
of text and image enacts the estrangement
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Actions speak louder than words in ‘The Alice Sequence’: A series of exhibitions by Wilma Cruise
with the topic of ‘Alice and the animals’.4 The
series title for these exhibitions spanning from
2011 to 2012 thus far is ‘The Alice Sequence’.
There is a key theoretical aporia in this title
that deserves further reflection in exploring
the intentions and effects of this body of work.
With the word ‘sequence’, being aligned with
notions of reasonable structured progression,
it occurs to the viewer (if not at once) that
this level-headed term is wholly out of place
in the ‘nonsense’ world of Alice – a world
where reasonable and logical expectations
are regularly upended, where animals talk,
little girls shrink and cats smile. The use of
the word ‘sequence’, which can be further
associated with grammatical syntax, leads
one further down Cruise’s rabbit hole towards
the exhibition’s raison d’être. In employing
this leading term the artist draws the viewer’s
attention to the uncanny conflation of symbolic
language and animal being that is central to
Lewis Carroll’s tale of Alice’s adventures in
Wonderland (1865) and Through the looking
glass (1871). In his idiosyncratic manner
Carroll’s speaking animals exhibit an unusually
keen force of their own, that resists the
customary outcome of the anthropomorphic
representation (in word and image) of animal
beings, namely to figuratively reference human
attributes and circumstances.
Jacques Derrida (in Lippit 1998:1113)
proposes that the word ‘animals’, which has
come to signify all non-human creatures on
earth, is an animetaphor. That is to say, this
pervasive word has less to do with the actual
nature of the many wondrous creatures that
fall under this linguistic taxonomy, and more
to do with anthropocentric mythology and
prejudice, exercised through the vehicle of
the ‘animal’. Derrida’s (2002:402) further
notion of the animal-autobiography also
theorises the rhetorical formulation of human
character and narrative, through the dialectical
relation of the human to the animal. Akira
Mizuta Lippit (1998:1112) further probes
notions of animal signification in the humanist
trajectory, noting Sigmund Freud’s connection
between metaphoric animal signification and
the human unconscious, stating that ‘in each
case the animal becomes intertwined in the
trope, serving as its vehicle and substance’.
In summarising the conception of animality in
the human mode of symbolic language, Lippit
(1998:1113) states that ‘the animetaphor may
also be seen as the unconscious of language.’
Carroll’s oeuvre of animal creatures is
strangely resistant to this ubiquitous collapse
into human signification. When Alice converses
with the sage caterpillar over how to alter her
shrunken physical size (Carroll 2007:54–62),
the reader is not automatically compelled
to look for the metaphoric resonance of this
smoking insect character (as is so often the
case when confronted with animal characters
in literary and visual texts). Rather, like
Alice, the reader is arrested by the frustrating
slowness of this tedious bore of a creature,
his obtuse and taciturn demeanour becomes
the whole focus of one’s thoughts; and
for a time it is not unbelievable to believe
in the cognisance of caterpillars. After a
time, the parallel between the slow-moving
characteristics of the caterpillar-in-the-world
and the anthropomorphic sluggishness of the
caterpillar in Wonderland become apparent.
The reader comprehends the author’s
metonomic rendering of caterpillar-like-
slowness as figuratively supportive of this
Wonderland character’s wise and judicious
traits. Despite this metonomy, the caterpillar
and his fellow creatures in Wonderland resist
dissipating into rhetorical signifiers that may
transport the reader into contemplation beyond
the [non]sense borders of this 19th-century
fantasia. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s adventures in
Wonderland and related fictions suspend the
disbelief of the reader, enforcing the veracity
of communicative animal characters. In this
way Carroll’s oeuvre represents a quite unique
expression of animal agency beyond the usual
surrogate roles assigned to animal characters
in human fictional frameworks; a fantasy, to be
sure, but one that complicates and distorts the
logo-centric premise of human superiority over
non-human creatures. It is exactly this wilful
inversion of the terms of human domination
that is of interest to Cruise. In her recent
doctoral proposal, Cruise (2012:17–20) stakes
her claim in this fraught terrain by asking:
‘How do we begin to challenge the human/self,
animal/other divide and (as a corollary) how do
we do this without language? Bluntly put, how
do we speak to the animals?’
This is a far-reaching question; and one
that reflects significantly on the ontological
conundrum of the differing nature of animal
and human beings. It is important to
pause here and consider the philosophical
trajectory of logo-centric human and animal
conceptualisation; and the inter-disciplinary
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Ann-Marie Tully
directions of animal studies and revision that
Cruise’s art production is notably aligned with.5
The contemporary notion of what constitutes
human and animal being takes its origin from
the humanist canon - a conception aligned
with the idea of philanthropy, signifying a
collegial spirit between humans and excluding
animals from this shared congeniality
(Steward 2002:10). The critical humanist
scholar, Alan Steward (2002:10), connects
the contemporary notion of humanism to
the anthropocentric values of Enlightenment
thinking and Renaissance humanism, which
are rooted in Greek antiquity. He notes that
these ‘humanisms’, set apart by time, are
connected by one strategic sensibility: the
negation of the animal (Steward 2002:10).
This negation is justified through the
Aristotelian elevation of the phenomenon of
symbolic language (possessed by humankind),
over the animals limited capacity to ‘signal
pleasure and pain’ (Lippit 1994:789). This
mode of hierarchical humanism found further
expression in the Enlightenment thinking
of René Descartes, who positioned animals
as automata functioning without sentience,
thought and language, and without the capacity
for reason, which is the chief value of humanist
thought (Lippit 1994:789). Heidegger also
contributed to the celebration of logo-centric
reason at the expense of the animal by
applying his technique of crossing through
words that are simultaneously written and
erased to animal subjects (Lippit 1994:796).
This technique is evidenced in his oeuvre in
relation to words such as ‘being’, pointing
to the mutability of life and death (Lippit
1994:796). In discussions of non-human
creatures, Heidegger crosses out words such as
‘world’, proposing that although the lizard sits
on the rock and therefore inhabits the world,
the lizard’s inability to name the rock renders
him ‘poor of the world’ [weltarm] (Lippit
1998:1113). The notion of animal linguistic
poverty points in antithesis to the fortunate
position of humanity, obtained through the
veneration of reason, so exemplified in the ‘feat’
of symbolic language.
Derrida’s work on the vagaries of the
Cartesian principle is seminal theory in the
development of contemporary animal studies
discourse. In mining the embattled inter-species
frontline of human and animal differentiation,
Derrida (2002:369–418) explores, at some
length, the destructive and telling properties of
the tendency to sublimate the human story in
animal guises – pointing to the ‘animetaphor’
and the ‘animal-autobiography’ as examples
of such colonising gestures.6 This exploration
highlights the imperial subsumption of animal
beings into symbolic forms. The field of Animal
Studies has branched out from critical positions
such as Derrida’s and those of numerous other
theorists (as disparate as Theodore Adorno,
Emmanuel Levinas and Michel de Montaigne)
who contemplated the ontology of animal being
in relation to human being. The post-industrial
modernist tendency towards the deconstruction
of fixed transcendental knowledge has brought
about the destabilisation of conceptions of
hierarchical cultural and human domination.7
This zeitgeist of humanist instability is
caught up in the growing contemporary
acknowledgement of human culpability in
the industrialised phenomenon of natural
exploitation, calling up a revision (in
mainstream and academic circles) of the age-
old question: What makes us human and not
nature? Contemporary animal theorists come
from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Some
forerunning exponents include Steve Baker (art
history), Matthew Calarco (philosophy), Erica
Fudge (literary and cultural studies) and Donna
Haraway (social studies of science, primatology,
feminist theory, cultural studies), amongst
others. Matthew Calarco (2008:2) describes
animal studies as comprising a broad range of
disciplines in the humanities, social sciences,
biological and cognitive studies, pointing out
that despite these multifarious approaches,
there are two recurrent and structural questions
that inform enquiries in the field. One question
concerns the ontology of animal beings and the
other concerns ‘the human-animal distinction’
(Calarco 2008:1–14).
Cruise’s work engages with the question
of human and animal ontology and difference,
in particular the apparent implacability of
interspecies distinction and communication.
She proposes that an answer to the question of
how we may communicate with animal beings
lies in the liminal mode of the preconscious
and pre-linguistic (Cruise 2012:17–20). The
notion of the preconscious, whereby there is
psychological receptivity and responsiveness
stemming from and resulting in actions,
objects and subjects (not words) in the world,
is related to Freud’s (1999:2581) conception
of the foreconscious. In his 1912 essay, ‘A
note on the unconscious in psycho-analysis’,
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Actions speak louder than words in ‘The Alice Sequence’: A series of exhibitions by Wilma Cruise
Freud (1999:2579) expedites the term
‘foreconscious’, which is later altered in a 1925
English translation of the text to ‘preconscious’.
He explains that pre-emptive psychological
(preconscious) activity can be distinguished
from the unconscious in that the unconscious
generally resists passage into the conscious
realm (although this can be realised in physical
manifestations, through some effort); while
the foreconscious is inherently responsive to
physical actions (Freud 1999:2580–2582). In
terms of the association of preconscious modes
of being with pre-linguistic characteristics,
Lacan (2001:182–183) considers the human
accession to linguistic signification as a
repression of preconscious subjectivity, noting
that ‘the ring of meaning flees from our grasp
along the verbal thread’. Lacan (2001:183)
explains this cryptic statement by presenting
the ‘ferret-like ambiguity’ that while one may
grapple (in linguistic/symbolic terms) with
the metaphysics of one’s ‘being in the world’,
one simultaneously represses the ‘truth’ that
one is in the world. This aporia proposes the
separation of the preconscious being from
the exigencies of symbolic existence (Lacan
2001:182–183).
In developing this investment in the pre-
linguistic, Cruise (2012:17–20) further aligns
her thinking with the ideas of the French
literary theorists, Julia Kristeva and Hélène
Cixous. These theorists employ the unutterable
and the unsightly, the personal and the fictional
in a divergent register that challenges the
normative, masculinist models of academic
expression. In expediting these gendered
concerns Cixous foregrounds the relationship
between language and the body, rejecting what
she terms ‘critiques that persist in a logo-
centric Cartesian discourse that posits the mind
as the source of writing’ (Dobson 2004:127).
In its formulation as a feminist mode of critique
and expression, écriture féminine is not to be
understood as proof of the incapacity of women
to possess reason – traditionally the preserve
of men – but rather as an attempt to ‘speak’
in opposition to the ideological limitations on
feminine identity that are embedded within
the grammars of traditional letter and verse
(Pollock 2009:10). As such, écriture féminine
often employs a preconscious ‘bodily register’,
rather than a more ‘reasoned’ (Cartesian)
semantic approach to the relationship between
words and things (Dobson 2004:127). With
this preconscious and physical index in
mind, Cruise (2012:18) argues that although
Cixous’ (in Dobson 2004:127) argument for
a relationship between the body and language
pertains to the human animal, the extension
of this model of alternative expression is
relevant to the reformulation of interspecies
communication and discourse. Extending the
application of the counter-hegemonic notions of
écriture féminine into the project of writing and
representing the animal in a critical-humanist
framework is particularly relevant. As so much
literary and representational scholarship on
the animal’s rhetorical role in anthropocentric
formulations demonstrates, the grammars
of language are saturated with Cartesian
conceptions that foreground the reasoned
capacity of human beings over the supposedly
non-reasoned capacity of animal beings.
Cruise (2012:18), a show-jumping and
dressage trainer and practitioner, notes that
the articulation of the body as a means of
communication is a concept present in the
field of equine studies, in which the practice
of Monty Roberts, the ‘horse whisperer’, is
seminal. Roberts advocates a non-violent
cooperative approach that recognises the
horse’s agency in accepting or refusing
instruction (Patton 2003:85). In effecting this
ideal he rejects the traditional and often cruel
apparatus of domination (whips and ropes),
opting instead for reciprocal body language
and the occasional use of voice (Patton
2003:85). His success in executing this
method is a strong indicator of the plausibility
of preconscious modes of interspecies
communication.8 That said, we should be
wary of creating an impression of equity in
this exchange. Animal studies author, Paul
Patton (2003:85–87), critically explores the
bodily model of horse/human communication
employed by Monty Roberts in relation to
his own experience of training horses. These
instructional encounters are gauged against
the author’s scepticism – a state befitting ‘the
ironist stance of a postmodern intellectual’
(Patton 2003:87) – and result in a fascinating
account of pre-linguistic communication
in action, tempered by the uncomfortable
recognition of species inequity in this exchange:
horse training is an unavoidably coercive
practice (Patton 2003:86).
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Ann-Marie Tully
Prior to the Alice series of artworks, Cruise
was concerned with the bodily exchange of
horses and humans in a manner that mirrors
Patton’s critical and empirical appraisals
of horse/human training methodologies; in
particular the ‘join-up’ techniques of Monty
Roberts, the Pirelli Method, and techniques
of ‘positive horsemanship’, demonstrating a
self-reflexive and interchangeable criticality
in Cruise’s practice as a horse trainer and
artist (Cruise 2012:34). Far from presenting
visions of equine grace and beauty, Cruise’s
sculptural and two-dimensional horses eschew
the romantic trope of horse representation long
enshrined in Western culture. First exhibited
at the ‘Urban Animal’ exhibition at the ABSA
Gallery in 2009 (curated by Sonja Britz and
Ann-Marie Tully), Poor Horace: (Watching The
Hours) (2009) (1) is an artwork entangled in
the fraught terrain of human/horse relations.9
Cruise (2012:34) comments on the ‘static
and lumpen’ proportions of the two resin
horses that make up the sculptural installation,
pointing to the leaden dimensions of the
hooves which, in the case of the standing
figure, appear rooted to the wheeled platform
– a disturbing element that suggests the
figure’s reliance on a prosthesis for mobility.
This bowed figure reminds the viewer of the
‘yoke of human direction’ that is placed on
horses, and is reminiscent of George Orwell’s
(1996:25) over-worked plough horse character,
Boxer, in his allegorical novella, Animal
Farm (1945), whose dictum, ‘I will work
harder’, exemplifies the horse’s complicity in
his enslavement.10 The standing horse also
presents a stark and leading contrast with the
suspended and inverted horse figure. Rendered
immobile in a vulnerable position, the viewer
is reminded of a horse suspended in fetlocks
for veterinary or transportation purposes. This
inversion of the figure also renders the agency
of the represented horse limp and ineffectual
(Cruise 2012:34). In keeping with notions of
preconscious and pre-linguistic communication
and expression, Cruise (2012:34) describes the
movement (denied in both horse figures that
constitute Poor Horace) as a horse’s ‘defining
equine characteristic’.
The disconcerting Poor Horace sculptural
installation featured again at the Everard
Read Gallery in 2011 as part of an exhibition
entitled ‘Horse: Multiple Views of a Singular
Beast’ curated by Ricky Burnett. This artwork
featured as one of a precious few artworks
on the exhibition that addressed the sentient
1 Wilma Cruise, Poor Horace (Watching The Hours).
Installation view at the ‘Urban Animal’ exhibition, ABSA
Gallery (curated by Ann-Marie Tully and Sonja Britz), 2009.
Dimensions variable. Photograph by Richard Markham.
Courtesy of the artist.
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Actions speak louder than words in ‘The Alice Sequence’: A series of exhibitions by Wilma Cruise
horse-being in a manner that did not give way
to the dominant and prosaic appropriation
of the concept ‘horse’ into the service of
human amusement, sentiment and rhetorical
autobiography. A video installation entitled
‘DUST’ (2011), stemming from a collaboration
between Cruise and the filmmaker Clifford
Bestall, was featured on the same exhibition.
Like the substantial sculpture, Poor Horace,
this more ephemeral artwork explores the
movement of the horse as a communicative
gesture in relation to the human viewer. This
video installation features two screens: The
larger screen is a wall-mounted projection of a
statically framed, uninviting Karoo landscape
(Cruise in Burnett 2011:38). The screen
laid askew on the floor to the right of the
viewer is a looped film montage of ‘a horse
collapsing, sinking to its knees, submitting
to gravity, falling down, caving in, crumpling,
legs buckling, meeting the ground’ (Cruise
in Burnett 2011:38). Unlike Poor Horace,
which through the indolence of the sculptural
rendering instils in the viewer a realisation of
the horse’s intrinsic capacity for movement
(and by extension sentience), this filmic artwork
utilises movement (native to film) to emphasise
the horse’s responsive being. Similar to the
viewer’s sense of despair on encountering the
wretched Poor Horace, the vicarious filmic
image of the fallen horse, desaturated and
cropped (dismembered), affects the viewer’s
encounter with hopeless foreboding for an
event recorded, past and implacable. Poised at
the edge of this impenetrable screen, human
agency is ironically marred by the helpless
plight of the fallen horse.
This experiential viewing elicits a narrative
compunction in the viewer. The large screen
transfixes the audience with the vision of an
eerie desert landscape, interrupted with plumes
of dust waxing and waning, complemented by
the mysterious sound of wind and galloping
hooves approaching. This impression is
awkwardly disrupted by the flickering image of
the fallen horse embodied in the screen on the
floor – in actuality only an image of the horse’s
legs kicking, twitching and struggling against
the dusty ground. The viewer’s physically
enacted relation to the two-screen dialogue
provokes numerous chance narratives: A fallen
horse alone and in pain, deserted by the herd;
an injured horse and rider being pursued, man,
woman, villain, hero? Poised at the edge of
the quixotic screen, the viewer experiences a
heightened awareness of his/her mutable and
varied humanity, while simultaneously engaging
in the turgid experience of this animal-
Other. This liminal preconscious encounter is
precipitated by the device of bodily movement:
the visually depicted flailing horse’s legs,
and the sound of thundering hooves, coupled
with the viewer’s own physical presence and
responsiveness.
Returning to the notion of pre-linguistic
communication, it must be said that the idea
of the animal’s capacity to respond in physical
and vocal ways is not a new one. Matthew
Calarco (2008:26–27) asserts that the manner
in which companion animals adjust themselves
to the lives of their human companions is
enduring evidence of variable and wilful non-
human being. The 17th-century philosopher,
Michel de Montaigne (in Derrida 2002:375),
also put forward the capacity of the animal
to respond through bodily communication.
Montaigne (in Derrida 2002:375) considers
the exchange of signs evidenced in his game
with his cat, and muses that ‘when I play with
my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her
more than she is to me?’
Carroll’s (2007:14) animal characters
often confound Alice with their apparently
‘backwards’ use of language and reason.
These tainted dictums are an ideal vehicle
for Cruise’s questioning exploration of the
human conception of linguistic and cerebral
superiority over animal beings. The artist
notes that in ‘Wonderland the animals have
agency. They speak. But Alice does not always
understand what is happening. She is pushed
and pulled hither and thither in a confusion
of understanding’ (Cruise 2012:13). Cruise
goes on to mention the incident in the book
Alice in Wonderland when the caterpillar,
and then the pigeon, ask Alice who she is, to
which Alice has no answer. Cruise (2012:13)
contends that the caterpillar’s question can
be read in a broader ontological sense –
questioning Alice’s status as a human being;
and by association the right of human beings to
consider themselves superior to animal beings.
In this sense the animals that Cruise extracts
from Alice in Wonderland are the harbingers
of questions that assail the dominance of
logo-centric reason and ideological human
supremacy.
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2 Wilma Cruise, ‘The Animals in Alice’, the first exhibition in
‘The Alice Sequence’ (installation view) at iArt Gallery (now
Brundyn and Gonsalves) in Cape Town, 2011. Courtesy of
the artist.
In earlier incarnations of ‘The Alice Sequence’,
such as the first staging of the exhibition at iArt
Gallery in Cape Town, Cruise installed her
artistic realisations of the fantastical animal
figures of Carroll’s oeuvre in spatial dialogue
with dislocated samples of Carroll’s text written
on the gallery walls (2). This pairing of image
and text aligns the artworks with their literary
origin, while enacting the disparity between
iconic image and symbolic text, suggesting the
failure or difficulty of human-specific logos to
reconcile with or participate in animal/human
interactions. A further notion of representational
failure is built into this observation: The
two- and three- dimensional artworks that
populate Cruise’s ‘Alice Sequence’ inevitably
only provoke the response of the human
viewers to which gallery culture belongs. This
institutional aporia ‘haunts’ and situates
Cruise’s artistic project firmly in the realm of
philosophical reflection and frustration, rather
than material realisation, where the project
may, for instance, take the form of a
performance piece engaging human and animal
subjects (which would also be an activity
fraught with species inequity and ethical
challenges).
The awkward juxtaposition of text and
image also offers unexpected literary insight
into the artist’s theoretical framework for
these exhibitions. Cruise literally enacts
the ‘nonsense’ aesthetic of Alice’s world by
confusing and dislocating the audience through
the disarticulation of signifiers. This artistic ploy
removes the viewer from the privileged position
of human authorship, and repositions him/her
in the ‘lesser’ situation of animal experience –
outside of human language and excluded from
the fold of celebrated being.
The intention to contravene communicative
codes with the purpose of opening up sites
of liminal expression and experience, is
reminiscent of the disjointed and paradigmatic
literary devices and effects of the project of
écriture féminine. A strikingly similar impulse
to unsettle the limitations and constructedness
of language is eloquently realised in Carroll’s
(2007:14) frequent use of illogical conundrums
and nonsense phraseology, such as ‘Twas
brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble
in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves,
and the mome raths outgrabe’, pointing to a
shared spirit of revolutionary linguistic enquiry.
Both these literary phenomena, set apart
by time and context, assert that language is
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Actions speak louder than words in ‘The Alice Sequence’: A series of exhibitions by Wilma Cruise
a mutable and contextual tool that should
not be understood to have only one voice or
one intention; nor should one conception of
language and the nature of communication and
agency take precedence over all other forms of
communication and ‘being in the world’.
A further theory worth considering
in relation to notions of anthropocentric
superiority premised on elevated symbolic
consciousness and reason is the hypothesis
of Actor Network Theory (ANT). Bruno
Latour and Michel Callon’s conception of
ANT proposes the replacement of assumed
humanist anthropocentric supremacy with
a heterogeneous approach that avoids the
privileging of the mind over materials (Munro
2009:125). Instead, this argument proposes
that hegemonic structures and interrelations are
best observed in the effects of arrangements/
actors and agents, rather than relying on
the intrinsic properties of the inherent parts
(Munro 2009:125). This revolutionary theory
has far-reaching consequences, extending
from the culpability of criminal bodily actions
premised on conscious mental control, to the
question of animal agency (Munro 2009:126).
In a model where action is more prized than
premeditation, human and animal actions
and interactions can be theorised as equally
responsive (Munro 2009:125–139). A
simplified example of the premise of ANT is
if a dog encounters an obstacle (for instance,
a chair in a narrow pathway) and negotiates
it, we can glean from the sum of its actions
that a reasoned series of decisions has been
affected. If one clings to the traditional notion
that animals do not reason and operate solely
on instinctual responses to cause and effect,
then one might miss the obvious that what we
call ‘instinct’ in relation to animals is thought
in action.
On ‘waking’ from her adventures in Through
the looking glass, Alice angrily shakes the
mischievous Red Queen, who unexpectedly
transforms (through her implied shift between
states of consciousness) into Alice’s kitten.
Having recognised the passage between dream
and reality, Alice speaks candidly to [her]
kitten, saying: ‘You woke me out of oh! Such a
nice dream! And you’ve been along with me,
Kitty – all through the Looking-Glass world.11
Did you know it dear?’(Carroll 2007:324).
Carroll (2007:324) goes on to note Alice’s
annoyance at the ‘inconvenient habit of
kittens’ [who] make no symbolic differentiation
between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the manner of their
‘purring’ response. However, this linguistic
impediment is no obstacle to Alice, who
continues questioning the <suspected> kitten
about its role in her mysterious dream (which
she believes to be real) (Carroll 2007:324).
Alice’s interrogation of the kitten is reminiscent
of Montaigne’s (in Calarco 2008:26–27)
exchange of ‘signs in play’ with [his] cat.
Despite being ‘niggled’ by doubt about the
symbolic capacity of animal beings (a state
that obscures most human encounters with
non-human beings), Alice, like Montaigne,
places her faith in the bodily communication
of the cat (Carroll 2007:325). In a recap of
these perplexing events to her sister, Alice
notes that on confronting the kitten with the
chess figure of the Red Queen and asking this
obtuse creature to ‘[c]onfess that was what
you turned into’, the kitten simply turned [its]
head away (Carroll 2007:325). Alice surmises
from this that the kitten appeared ashamed
and as such must have been the Red Queen
(Carroll 2007:325). Carroll’s (2007:325)
account of Alice’s surety in the communicative
gestures of her kitten is strikingly reminiscent
of ANT and the valuing of the sum of action
over preconceived notions of conscious capacity
(Monro 2009:125–139).
‘Through the looking glass’: Reflections on
pre-conscious inter-species communication
in selected artworks from ‘The Alice
Sequence’
Cruise’s mixed media drawing on paper,
Alice: Self-Portrait I (2011) (3) depicts a
childlike female figure, whose squint eyes peer
intrusively beyond the viewer from beneath
an unruly fringe, while two cat figures float
as if embedded in her chest – an image of
human and animal co-mingling. This atypical
Alice’s lips are firmly closed, suggesting the
absence of linguistic dialogue between the
animal figures and the human figure. Carroll’s
(2007:324) Alice questions the kitten’s
awareness of her discourse with them, but
rambles on anyway in defiance of such pesky
inter-species limitations, while Cruise’s Alice is
confident and introspective. The result of this
combined rendering of inter-species bodies is
the emblematic expression of a pre-conscious
communicative exchange. Unlike Carroll’s
doubting protagonist, Cruise’s Alice displays
no misgivings about her discourse with the
feline subjects. Most important to note in this
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visual scenario is that inter-species dialogue
is heralded as inherently physical and non-
linguistic. This is a distinctly anti-Cartesian
figure that undermines human assuredness in
the value of symbolic language, by stressing
the physical interactivity of human and animal
bodily forms and gestures.
Derrida (2002:372–375) muses on his
awkward and naked confrontation with [his]
cat’s penetrating gaze, thereby asserting the
shared animality of the naked state. He begins
his seminal article ‘The animal that therefore
I am (more to follow)’ (2002) by musing on
an encounter with [his] cat (he stresses the
reality of this creature in the article, to steer
clear of a purely allegorical interpretation
of this experience, which would undermine
the agency of the cat). In discussing his
perplexing discovery of his naked body as
the object of [his] cat’s penetrating gaze,
Derrida (2002:373) notes how thin the
veneer of humanity is, distinguished merely
by clothing, in this instance. His experience
of shame before the cat’s gaze stems from
his nakedness, which is aligned with the
uncloaked character of animal beings (Derrida’s
2002:373). In foregrounding the thin
veneer of human differentiation from animal
beings, Derrida (2002:373–374) gestures
at the reverse of ‘humanist separatism’: an
intrinsically shared animality. Cruise’s Alice is
a similarly transmogrified figure caught up in
the realisation of her combined and contested
animal and human Dasein. This Alice figure’s
clothing is ambiguously rendered, resulting
in a vulnerable appearance, reminiscent of
Derrida’s (2002:373) naked encounter with
his cat. A fragile image of human/animal
mingling emerges from this bare vulnerability,
coupled with the ‘floating’ cat figures that
simultaneously appear embedded in Alice’s
chest.12 This silent and vulnerable mutant Alice
reminds us of the shared platitudes of animal
and human being.
The ceramic sculptural work Caucus – Puppy
(2012) (4) is exemplary of the esprit de corps
of Cruise’s enquiry. The title of this artwork
is gleaned from Chapter three of Alice in
Wonderland, which is entitled ‘The Caucus-
race and a long tale’ (Carroll 2007:34–35).
This chapter chronicles Alice’s encounter with
the illustrious Dodo and a varied group of
animal race participants who compete in the
‘Caucus-race’, a shambolic track event that has
no official beginning and no official end, and
where everyone is a winner (Carroll 2007:34–
35). This fictional race, heralded by an extinct
creature, thus signalling the event’s futility, is
the ‘back story’ to the artwork Caucus – Puppy.
Although not featured as an animal character in
Carroll’s (2007:32–40) ‘Caucus-race’, Cruise’s
puppy is figured as a player in an absurd
contest. In the context of Cruise’s ‘zoo-centric’
enquiry this ridiculous diversion takes on the
questionable connotation of human ontological
severance from the animal world – a notion
exemplified in the practices of commodity
culture. This realised and synthetic human
isolation from nature is a tenuous notion,
undermined by shared physical characteristics
with mammalian creatures, and the universal
dependence of human language and expression
on rhetorical animal vehicles. The extinct
Dodo, invoked by Cruise in her appropriation
of Carroll’s (2007:32–40) ‘Caucus-race’, is
3 Wilma Cruise, Alice: Self-Portrait I (2011). Mixed media
drawing on paper, 200 cm x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
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a portent of doom for the teleology of human
isolationism.
The dark-coloured, small breed of puppy,
frozen in a playful response, front legs lunging
forward, back legs upright and tail erect,
is representative of Cruise’s interest in the
potentials of preconscious and pre-linguistic
interspecies dialogue. Enticed by the puppy’s
playful invitation, the viewer is engaged in a
zooanthropic ‘Caucus-race’ (Carroll 2007:32–
40), invoked by the name of the work – not
as an occidental human Alice – but as a
human-animal Alice prompted to reconsider
the merit of a more serious ‘game’ that stages
and exploits anthropocentric pre-eminence
over the earth and the multitude of creatures
that inhabit it. Notions of preconscious
and pre-linguistic communicative bodily
gestures are enacted in this work, through
the frozen countenance of the puppy and the
viewer’s response to it. But there is a further
enactment of animal/human relations present
in the viewer’s reception of this artwork.
On encountering Caucus – Puppy as part of
Cruise’s installation of the ‘Alice Sequence’
at Circa on Jellicoe in July 2012, the author
of this article was transported to the many
playful encounters she had enjoyed with [her]
canine companions, and like Montaigne (in
Calarco 2008:26–27) she was (and remains)
resolved in the conviction that we can and do
talk to the animals. The apparent failure of
communication that we perceive in animal/
human exchanges is, as ANT would have it,
defined by our preconceived notions of rational
and linguistic superiority over animal beings,
not by empirical encounters, replete with the
force of significant relations between significant
others (Munro 2009:125–139).
Notes
1 This article is a substantially extended and
reworked version of an earlier and shorter essay
produced for the catalogue accompanying Wilma
Cruise’s exhibition ‘The Alice Diaries’, staged
in July 2012 at the Circa on Jellicoe Gallery,
Johannesburg. The catalogue essay is entitled
‘The Alice Sequence’.
2 Wilma Cruise was born in Johannesburg,
South Africa, in 1945. Cruise’s art production
consistently employs the representation
of the body as a site of experience, and a
vehicle for exploring the disjuncture of public
and private, inner and outer being, and the
vagaries of text and image. Cruise is an
accomplished contemporary South African
artist with an impressive resumé of solo and
curated exhibitions, prestigious awards and
4 Wilma Cruise, Caucus – Puppy (2012). Ceramic, 45 cm x
84 cm x 33 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
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Ann-Marie Tully
commissions. Her work is represented in
numerous prominent South African collections.
As both a horse trainer and contemporary artist,
Cruise’s art engages the discourse of animal/
human relations and distinctions through
sustained enquiry. Her practice in a range of
media including (but not limited to) ceramics,
bronze and resin as sculptural media, drawing,
printmaking, film and found objects, references
and invokes the animal as a subject and theme.
Prior to ‘The Alice Sequence’ (2011–2012)
exhibitions, Cruise’s solo exhibitions dealing with
animal-centred themes include ‘Portrait of my
friends and other animals’ (1987); ‘The Dolly
Suite’ (2003–2006); ‘Cocks Asses & … I can’t
Hear’ (2007–2009).
3 Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865)
has served as an inspiration to innumerable
modern and contemporary artists as diverse as
Max Ernst, Salvadore Dali, Adrian Piper, Bill
Woodrow, Kiki Smith, Yayoi Kusama, Pipilotti
Rist, Luc Tuymanns, Mel Bochner and Gary
Hill (to mention a few), who have referenced
and visually extrapolated the surreal world of
Alice as a signifier of transformational potential.
In South Africa, contemporary artists such as
Gordon Froud and Diane Victor, amongst others,
have explored Alice in Wonderland as an
iconographic reference in their artworks.
4 ‘The Alice Sequence’ has seen two previous
exhibition incarnations. In July 2011, the
exhibition was staged for the first time at iArt
Gallery (now Brundyn and Gonsalves) in Cape
Town, entitled ‘The Animals in Alice’. The
second exhibition in ‘The Alice Sequence’,
staged at the University of the North West in
October 2011, was entitled ‘Alice and the
Animals’.
5 Artistic production concerned with the rights
of animal beings, and the complex relationship
between human beings and non-human
beings is a global phenomenon and zeitgeist.
International artists engaging the question of
non-human-animal and human-animal beings
and discourse in their art practice include
Angela Singer, Enrique Gómez de Molina,
Thomas Grüfeld, Iris Schieferstein, Deborah
Sengl, Katharina Moessinger, Chloë Brown,
Daniëlle van Ark, Tessa Farmer, Karen Knorr,
and Frédérique Morrel (all makers of hybrid
sculptural taxidermied forms – what Steve Baker
[2000:54–61] calls ‘botched taxidermies’).
Artists such as Beth Cavener Stichter (a
ceramic sculptor fabricating animal forms);
Patricia Piccinini (a multimedia sculptor who
creates hybrid human/animal manifestations);
France Cadet (an artist who engineers robotic
and bio-oriented multimedia installations);
Susana Soares (who creates insect-oriented
installations); Jan Fabre (whose performance
and mixed media sculptures/installations
reference insect life and metamorphosis);
David Bowen (who ‘cultures’ plant growth
and movement sculptures/installations) and
Eduardo Kac (who ‘conjures’ interactive,
transgenic, telematic, interspecies installations)
can be grouped together as examples of artists
engaged with interspecies sculptural and
installationary media that push and entangle
the boundaries of human and animal, maker
and subject. The artworks of Marcus Coats
(shaman and performance artist ‘tapped into’
the ‘animal underworld’); Julie Andreyev (an
interactive video artist, working collaboratively
with animal participants); Sam Easterson (an
artist employing movement-triggered remotes as
photographic tools to engage the participation
of animals in wildlife photographic documents)
and Jonathan Horowitz (who creates site-
specific billboard installations that decry the
meat market) all employ phenomenological
experience, performance and photographic/filmic
media in projects that debunk, complicate and
interlace the ideological delineations of human
and animal being. Merritt Johnson (whose
drawings, paintings and multimedia artworks
address interspecies experiences of survival,
camouflage, disguise and hybridity); Cornelia
Hesse-Honegger (whose delicate watercolour
paintings of insect beings shift the taxonomic
tradition of this genre) and Sue Coe (an animal
rights activist who employs painting as a means
of activism) are examples of more painterly
approaches to the problem of the human
reduction of the animal.
The performance art of Joseph Beuys, which
engages non-human creatures and natural
phenomena, is a notable influence on
contemporary animal-centred art production.
The work of the fashion designer Alexander
McQueen is also particularly noteworthy as a
visual arts practice that staged and popularised
fashioned-therianthropic-beings in the realm of
popular culture and consumerism.
Although the use of allegorical animal
iconography is an ubiquitous element in
contemporary South African art, artworks that
specifically address animal-centred, animal
studies-related, or posthumanist theoretical
concerns in South African are on the rise. Artists
whose artworks engage this arena (some in a
sustained capacity, others as part of a practice
that also relates to other areas of concern)
include (but are not limited to) Sonja Britz (who
paints portraits of companion animals and
parodies historical and contemporary hunting
scenarios); Wilma Cruise (whose ceramic, resin,
bronze and taxidermied sculptures, drawings
and prints employ animal, human and hybrid
iconography in relation to animal-centred
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Actions speak louder than words in ‘The Alice Sequence’: A series of exhibitions by Wilma Cruise
thematics); Elizabeth Gunther (whose large-
scale charcoal drawings of suspended animal
figures poignantly evoke notions of sentience
and frailty in relation to the represented animals,
and the human-animals the artworks engage
with); Sally Heyns Rumball (an artist engaged in
animal rights discourse, who employs paintings,
sculptures and taxidermied alterations in her
work); Kai Lossgott (a video/installation and
mixed media artist whose artworks mimic and
engage the animal collaborator and celebrate
the entropy of mass consumerism); Rosemarie
Marriott (a ‘cobbler’ of membranous and ‘furry’
recovered animal skins, whose sculptures
and drawings complicate the human/animal
perimeter); Daniel Naudé (who has poignantly
photographed nuanced portraits of Africanis
dogs); Walter Oltmann (whose wire sculptures,
drawings, paintings and prints represent animal
and human subjects in equally paradoxically
tenuous and monumental renderings); Jo
Ractliffe (who employs photography in
the gathering of a poignant archive of her
relationship with her companion animals); Colin
Richards (whose painstaking drawings and
paintings of animal subjects engage in a critical
dialogue with cultural idioms); Ann-Marie Tully
(whose paintings, textile-drawings, ceramic and
found object sculptures reflect on the human-
animal, and the sentience of non-human beings
in paradoxical relation to the anthropocentrism
of linguistic animal idioms); Diane Victor
(whose ‘gothic’ printmaking, drawings and
smoke-renderings engage the animal as a
being, and a medium for the rhetorical critique
of human culture); Graeme Williams (who
has photographed his encounters with his
companion animals) and Gavin Younge (whose
multimedia sculptures and installations engage
media and iconography in relational dialogues
that reference and visualise the philosophical
question of human/animal/natural relations).
Mary Sibande’s recent textile/sculptural
incarnation The Purple Shall Rein (2012) –
depicting a sculptural image of the artist dressed
in a purple quasi-superhero outfit, surrounded
by root-like structures that also entangle the
figure – is arguably entering into the fray of
critical humanist theory. Matthew Krouse (Mail
and Guardian, Friday, 21 June 2013:8–9) notes
that in discussing this work, Sibande references
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical
complex of rhizomic thinking and being – an
alternative model to Western arboreal logic,
that prizes the ability of the rhizome to rupture
and reform with any other point, as a model for
rethinking and engaging Otherness, hybridity and
being (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:7–12).
6 Derrida (in Lippit 1998:1113) proposes the
‘animetaphor’ as the prevailing state of the
linguistic identity of animal beings in human
culture. This compact phrase implies that few
words (and, by extension, thoughts) relating
to animal beings are free of a metaphoric
anthropocentric subtext, which irrevocably
taints the relation of the sign to the animal-
in-the-world (Derrida in Lippit 1998:1113).
Derrida (2002:402) coined the phrase ‘animal
autobiography’, pointing to the drafting of the
human conception of the animal into the service
of human identity formulation.
7 The author resists using the term
‘postmodernism’ in this context, borrowing
rather Caroline Evans’ (2009:304) term ‘post-
industrial modernism’, which asserts Lyotard
and Habermas’ hypothesis that postmodernity
is a continuation of modernity, rather than a
rupture with the past; also borrowing from
Jameson’s connection of postmodernity to ‘late
capitalism’. In the context of a discussion of an
environmental crisis of human origins (driven
largely by capitalist imperatives), suggesting
that animal studies and the humanist crisis
that accompanies it are born of a zeitgeist
which is divorced from the industrial past and
commodity present, would be an obfuscation.
With the exception of this contextual distinction,
‘post-industrial modernism’ is interchangeable
with the ironist and revisionist implications of
‘postmodernism’ (Evans 2009:304).
8 Having lived for many years with ‘packs’ of
domestic dogs the author can attest to having
witnessed and participated in a broad range
of non-verbal bodily communication between
human and canine, and amongst canine
companions. This does not preclude a vast
and evolving canon of vocal communications.
While different dogs vocalise with individual
variability, the author finds herself drawn into
inventing nonsense phrases that ‘grow’ into a
conventionalised meaning that exists strictly in
the inner circle of their inter-species congeniality.
9 Cruise is not alone in her interest in horses.
International contemporary artists who have
engaged the horse as a subject include Belinda
De Bruyckere (whose abject and monumental
sculptures of horses utilise reconstituted
horse bodies); Marion Laval-Jeantet (a French
performance artist who in her bio-physical-
fashioned trans-species performance entitled
May the horse live in me [2011], interacts
with a living horse, wearing stilts fitted with
horse hooves, while being injected with horse
blood); Jannis Kounellis (who brought living
horses into the gallery in his performance/
installation Senza Titolo [1969]) and Maurizio
Cattelan’s The Ballad of Trotsky (1996) and
Novecento (1997), both of which feature a
taxidermied horse hanging limply, suspended
from ropes connected to a ceiling. In the
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Ann-Marie Tully
South African context Diane Victor’s numerous
renderings of tortured and trans-species horses;
and the puppet Warhorse (2007), created for
the National Theatre production of the same
name, by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler of
the Handspring Puppet Company, are seminal
examples. Recently, curator Ricky Burnett
staged an exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery
entitled ‘Horse: Multiple Views of a Singular
Beast’ (2011). This exhibition featured a broad
selection of contemporary South African artists
working with horse iconography and thematics,
and represented a timely exploration into the
presence of horses in contemporary South
African art. That said, the curatorial distinction
between animal-centred artworks and artworks
that engage the horse entirely as a vehicle
for human biography could have been more
pronounced.
10 The plough-horse Boxer serves as a metaphoric
vehicle for Orwell’s (1996:25) Marxist critique
of the oppressive and alienating dimensions
of capitalist enterprises. That said, this
anthropomorphic fictional creature is an
empathetic figure in his own right, and is as
such a good example of how anthropomorphism
– a dangerous and reductive ‘pasting’ of
human characteristics onto animal subjects
– can serve as a ‘necessary evil’ in terms of
socialising human attitudes to non-human
creatures. Through the transference of human
behavioural patterns onto an animal subject,
human beings are narcissistically more capable
of empathising with animal beings. The converse
of this argument is eloquently expresses by
Emmanuel Levinas (in Fudge 2002:1–10) who,
in an account of his experience in a Nazi camp
described a dog called Bobby who recognised
the Jewish prisoners as human, while their
captors perceived them only as animals.
Levinas (in Fudge 2002:1–10) warns against
the desire to anthropomorphise Bobby as more
human than the camp guards, pointing out
that although anthropomorphising the animal
superficially appears to close the human/
animal divide, it masks the animal’s character
and allows in reverse for the animalisation of
humans.
11 The author encases possessive pronouns
indicating ownership of an animal such as ‘his/
her’ in square parentheses as a ‘containing’
device, whereby she ‘captures’ and ‘corrects’
grammar that represents animals as objects
or possessions. This device is also employed
in relation to relative pronouns such as ‘who’,
which are employed in purposeful grammatical
error in relation to an animal being, so as to
assert a ‘deviant’ subjectivity. Also used are
square brackets around neuter pronouns such
as ‘it’, employed in relation to animals, to attach
a less-subjective status to the animal being in
the perception of the speaker. These encased
grammars serve as a punitive or corrective
measure, and are born of a frustration with the
limitations and boundaries of these words (that
are also deeds).
12 The ‘floating’ cats are also ambiguously
‘cloaked’. The pink painterly rendering that
constitutes their backs could be interpreted as
clothing, while the striated marks that fill in
their represented bodies look like ropes/ties. This
admittedly subjective interpretation disturbingly
presents the animal figures in bondage, while
also attributing the human characteristic of
shame and its remedy, clothing, to the non-
human subjects.
References
Baker, S. 2000. The postmodern animal. London:
Reaktion Books.
Burnett, R. 2011. Horse: Multiple views of a
singular beast. Johannesburg: Everard Read
Circa on Jellicoe.
Calarco, M. 2008. Zoographies: The question of the
animal, from Heidegger to Derrida. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Carroll, L. 2007a (1865). Alice’s adventures in
Wonderland. London: Vintage.
Carroll, L. 2007b (1871). Through the looking glass.
London: Vintage. <differentiate between a and b
in text, please author>
Cruise, W. 2012. ‘The Alice Sequence’: An
investigation of animal rights through the
metaphoric lens of Alice in Wonderland. Doctoral
proposal. Stellenbosch: Department of Visual
Arts, Stellenbosch University.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1988. Introduction:
Rhizome. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism
and schizophrenia, <ed?> , 3–25. London:
Continuum.
Derrida, J. 2002. The animal that therefore I am
(more to follow). Trans. D. Wills. Critical Inquiry
28(2):369–418.
Dobson, J. 2004. Helene Cixous (1937- ). In
Contemporary critical theorists: From Lacan
to Said, ed. J. Simons, 118–134. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Evans, C. 2009. Fashion at the edge: Spectacle,
modernity and deathliness. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press.
Freud, S. 1999. A note on the unconscious in
psycho-analysis. In The standard edition of
the complete psychological works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. J. Strachey in collaboration with A.
Freud, 2575–2583. Trans. J. Strachey. London:
Vintage.
Fudge, E. 2002. Introduction: The dangers of
anthropocentrism,. Perceiving animals: humans
and beasts in early modern English culture,
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Actions speak louder than words in ‘The Alice Sequence’: A series of exhibitions by Wilma Cruise
<eds?> 1–10. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Krouse, M. 2013. The purple shall reign at the fest.
Mail and Guardian, Friday, 21 June:8–9.
Lacan, J. 2001. The agency of the letter in the
unconscious or reason since Freud. Écrits: A
selection, 161–197. Trans. A. Sheridan. London:
Routledge.
Lippit, A.M. 1994. Afterthoughts on the animal
world. MLN 109(5) Comparative Literature Issue
(December):786–830.
Lippit, A. M.1998. Magnetic animal: Derrida,
wildlife, animetaphor. MLN 113(5) Comparative
Literature Issue (December):1111–1125.
Munro, R. 2009. Actor Network Theory. In The
Sage handbook of power, ed. S. Clegg and M.
Haugaard, 125–139. London: Sage Publications.
Orwell, G. 1996. Animal Farm. London: Signet
Classics.
Patton, P. 2003. Language, power and the training
of horses. In Zoontologies, ed. C. Wolfe, 83–99.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pollock, G. 2009. Mother trouble: The maternal-
feminine in phallic and feminist theory in relation
to Bracha Ettinger’s elaboration of matrixial
ethics/aesthetics. Studies in the Maternal
1(1):1–29. www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk (accessed
14 March 2012).
Stewart, A. 2002. Humanity at a price: Erasmus,
Budé and the poverty of philology. In At the
borders of the human: Beasts, bodies and
natural philosophy in the early-modern period,
ed. E. Fudge, R. Gilbert and S. Wiseman, 9–25.
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
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ISSN 0004-3389
pp 18–45
A material paradise: Reworking the
Ghent Altarpiece in the Keiskamma Art
Project’s Creation Altarpiece
Brenda Schmahmann*
* Brenda Schmahmann is Professor in the
Faculty of Ar t, Design and Architecture
(FADA) at the University of Johannesburg.
Abstract
The Keiskamma Art Project, an embroidery
project in the village of Hamburg, in the
Eastern Cape of South Africa, has produced
a number of large-scale works in needlework
which are modelled on well-known art objects
from the West. These include the Creation
Altarpiece, now in the collection of the
Unisa Art Gallery, which refers to the Ghent
Altarpiece (1432) by Jan and (possibly)
Hubert van Eyck. Unveiled at the Cathedral of
St. Michael and St. George in Grahamstown
in 2007, the Creation Altarpiece has
subsequently been exhibited in not only art
galleries but also, for example, the Cathedral
of St. George the Martyr in Cape Town.
While the Creation Altarpiece alludes to
the Ghent Altarpiece in terms of its shape
and aspects of its iconographical content,
these areas of similarity actually emphasise
differences between the two works. Such
distinctions, it is suggested, stress that the
frames of reference of the makers of the
Creation Altarpiece are South African rather
than European. Meaning is also, however,
dependent on the context in which a work is
read – a point made by exploring the kinds of
associations and connotations the Creation
Altarpiece acquired when viewed in the
context of places of worship.
Introduction
The Keiskamma Art Project is an initiative
based in the coastal village of Hamburg in the
Eastern Cape. Founded by artist and medical
doctor, Carol Hofmeyr, in 2000, it seeks to
address the lack of employment opportunities
in the town, while also enabling participants to
develop their creative capacities. The project
has received particular recognition for its large-
scale works modelled on well-known art objects
from the West, and one of these – the Creation
Altarpiece – is the focus of this article. A
magnificent work that can be viewed closed (1)
or opened (2), it was completed in June 2007
and acquired by the Unisa Art Gallery in 2010.
Measuring 3.8 metres in height and 5.2 metres
in width when open, the Creation Altarpiece
incorporates embroidery, felting, beadwork
and photography as well as some details in
wirework, and was worked on by about 50 of
the approximately 120 members of the project.
While the first large-scale work by the
Keiskamma Art Project, the Keiskamma
Tapestry (2004), was based on the 11th-
century Bayeux Tapestry,1 a number of
subsequent works by the project are in media
very different to the art objects to which
they respond. Two years prior to making
the Creation Altarpiece, for example, the
project completed the Keiskamma Altarpiece,
which included embroidery, beadwork and
photography, and was modelled on the
early 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece
(1512–1516), featuring paintings by Matthias
Grünewald and incorporating sculptures by
Nikolaus Hagenauer (see Schmahmann 2010;
Brown 2006). The Creation Altarpiece also
refers to an art object from the West made in
a very different medium – in this instance the
Ghent Altarpiece which, completed in 1432 by
Jan van Eyck (and possibly begun by his elder
brother Hubert),2 is one of the earliest extant
works in oil paint (3-4).
In an examination of the significance
of references to the Bayeux Tapestry in the
Keiskamma Tapestry, the author indicated
that, while engaging in an intertextual
reading, she would not wish to imply that
women in the community have knowledge
of postmodernist theory and that she was
therefore cautious in using the term ‘parody’ to
explain the relationship between the two works
(Schmahmann 2011:164). She observed,
however, that there is an aspect of this concept
that is useful in analysis. Linda Hutcheon
(1985:6) suggests that parody is a form of
repetition ‘which marks difference rather than
similarity’. In other words, points of similarity
between two works highlight the distinctions
between them, and it is these distinctions,
more than their points of likeness, which are
ultimately often most meaningful. In this article
the author makes a similar point, arguing
that while the Creation Altarpiece parallels
the Ghent Altarpiece in terms of the themes
and topics of its various panels, these areas
of similarity emphasise crucial differences
between the two works. While the Ghent
Altarpiece offers viewers the possibility of
enjoying a heavenly realm only after death,
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A material paradise: Reworking the Ghent Altarpiece in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Creation Altarpiece
1 Keiskamma Art Project, Creation Altarpiece (closed), (2007). Mixed media, 380 x 260 cm, Collection of the University of South Africa,
Pretoria. Photograph by Paul Mills of the altarpiece in the Thomas Pringle Hall at the 1820 Settler Monument, Grahamstown, at the
National Arts Festival, July 2007.
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2 Keiskamma Art Project, Creation Altarpiece (open), (2007). Mixed media, 380 x 520 cm, Collection of the University of South Africa,
Pretoria. Photograph by Paul Mills of the altarpiece in the Thomas Pringle Hall at the 1820 Settler Monument, Grahamstown, at the
National Arts Festival , July 2007.
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the Creation Altarpiece encourages a
celebration of the material world. More
fundamentally, such differences underline the
fact that the frames of reference of the makers
of the Creation Altarpiece are African rather
than European, and that they are influenced by
current concerns rather than 15th-century ones.
There is, however, a further issue that
arises in regard to the Creation Altarpiece,
which has an important impact on its
interpretation. If seen in an art gallery, the work
may be understood as being simply about the
historical form of the altarpiece. But the work
is in fact a functioning altarpiece and, when
located in a church, it has the potential to
serve as an adjunct to worship. In this sense
it would seem worthwhile to take cognisance
of not only its intertextuality, but also how its
meaning may depend on the context in which it
is viewed.
Major works by the Keiskamma Art Project
are usually first shown at the National Arts
Festival in Grahamstown. But the Creation
Altarpiece, like the Keiskamma Altarpiece
which had been completed two years earlier,
was not exhibited immediately in a gallery-type
space at the festival: Instead, unveiled on 29
June 2007 in the Cathedral of St. George and
St. Michael, it was only moved to the Thomas
Pringle Hall at the 1820 Settler Monument
(one of the venues used for art exhibitions)
the next day. Furthermore, in addition to being
exhibited in art galleries such as the Everard
Read Gallery in Johannesburg, it was shown
in the Cathedral of St. George the Martyr in
Cape Town in September 2008. While the
work would not ultimately be permanently
located in a place of worship, showing it in
Christian churches had certain benefits. As the
author indicates, these contexts encouraged
consideration of the Creation Altarpiece’s
dialogue between Christianity and customary
African beliefs and practices, while also
perhaps prompting thoughts about the form
Christian art might assume in the 21st century.
The central focus in this article is thus
two-pronged: On the one hand, the author
explores the iconography of the Creation
Altarpiece, examining how the choice and
treatment of subject matter reworks that of the
Ghent Altarpiece and interpreting its possible
meanings and associations. On the other, she
shows how those meanings are also inflected
by the context of display, by examining the
connotations and significance the altarpiece
has acquired when shown in Christian
churches. Prior to this, she contextualises this
examination by providing general background
on the Keiskamma Art Project and on
Hamburg, as well as the project’s prior use of
the altarpiece as an art form. The author also
outlines the process followed when making the
Creation Altarpiece.
It should be noted that, other than brief
reviews, the only prior publication on the
Creation Altarpiece is a short pamphlet
produced by the Keiskamma Art Project in time
for its exhibition in Grahamstown (Hofmeyr
et al. 2007). While helpful in introducing the
work, it does not identify the topics of the
various panels and their relation to the Ghent
Altarpiece or consider how the context of
display may affect interpretation. It is hoped
that the engagement here will address this gap
in the literature.
Hamburg and the Keiskamma Art Project
Adjacent to the mouth of the Keiskamma River
and some 60 miles southwest of East London,
Hamburg is one of a number of villages and
towns founded by German legionaries who had
been recruited by Britain to fight in the Crimean
War (1853–1856). The Governor of the Cape
Colony, George Grey, sought to redeploy these
militia as settlers within or just outside of
British Kaffraria (that is, the area between the
Kei and Keiskamma Rivers and the Amatola
Mountains) where, he envisaged, they might
serve as a buffer against isiXhosa-speaking
groups. Most of the 2 362 men who signed up
for the scheme abandoned settler life within a
couple of years,3 however, and by the early 20th
century, the vast majority of people in Hamburg
were in fact isiXhosa speakers.
Following the implementation of the
apartheid government’s Bantu Citizens
Homelands Act of 1970, Hamburg became
part of the Ciskei. As the Ciskei lacked any
significant industries or businesses, many
of its people sought work in cities outside
the homeland, such as East London and
Port Elizabeth, and much of their income
was spent on goods available in those urban
centres which they, in turn, brought home to
their families in Hamburg. The system thus
depended on what Nancy Charlton describes as
an ‘outward flow of manpower and the inward
flow of goods and services’.4
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A material paradise: Reworking the Ghent Altarpiece in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Creation Altarpiece
3 Jan (and Hubert?) van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece (closed), 1432, 350 x 221 cm, St. Bavo, Ghent. © Lukas-Art in Flanders (photograph:
Hugo Maertens).
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Brenda Schmahmann
With the advent of democracy, Hamburg
became part of the Eastern Cape. The post-
apartheid context, although granting people
much-needed rights, did not see much in
the way of development in the area. Simply
shifting their dependence from the earnings of
migrant labourers to small pensions and grants
introduced by the post-apartheid government
or occasional short-term work they were able to
secure,5 members of the community continued
to struggle to find sufficient monies to sustain
themselves and their dependents.
This struggle becomes clear if one asks
members of the Keiskamma Art Project about
their histories. For example, Nomfusi Nkani, a
designer whom the project funded to undertake
a three-year diploma in Fine Art at Walter
Sisulu University in East London when she
revealed an aptitude for drawing, indicates that
she lacked finances to pursue tertiary education
after finishing Grade 12 in 1995. Hence, she
says: ‘I sat at home doing nothing.’ Employed
as a domestic worker for two years, she then
once again ‘did nothing for two years until
Carol Hofmeyr came and started the project in
2000’.6 Caroline Nyongo, who heads the group
producing beadwork, explains how she was
forced to give up employment at a general store
in Hamburg in the late 1990s: ‘My mother-in-
law and my mother were ill so I had to leave
my job and look after them. I then relied on
their pensions.’7 Lack of money could, in fact,
result in illegal actions. In Hamburg, as in some
other coastal villages in South Africa, poverty
and desperation have encouraged people
to become involved in poaching abalone for
syndicates catering for burgeoning markets in
the Far East.8 Noseti Makubalo, lead designer
in the project, is open about the fact that she
and her husband were both unable to secure
work when they returned to Hamburg from
Johannesburg (where he had been employed as
a miner and she had hawked fruit) in the late
1990s and she therefore resorted to poaching
in order to support their family.9
Hofmeyr acquired some experience in
working with embroidery groups just prior
to moving from Johannesburg to the Eastern
Cape. Kim Berman, Director of Artist Proof
Studio in Johannesburg, devised a project
entitled Paper Prayers which comprised a
programme of workshops that set out to
promote AIDS awareness as well as encourage
participants to represent their understanding
of the disease through the making of prints.
Having received a large grant for 1998
from the then Department of Arts, Culture,
Science and Technology (DACST), which was
conditional upon it setting up programmes at
either clinics or existent art groups in all nine
provinces, Paper Prayers decided to extend the
scope of its reach to include some embroidery
projects. These included the Chivirika
Embroidery Project in Mphambo Village and
Kaross Workers in Letsitele – two embroidery
initiatives in Limpopo where Hofmeyr, together
with another art educator, Margaret Epstein,
offered programmes. Hofmeyr and Epstein also
taught embroidery as well as monoprint at
Bushbuckridge, then in Limpopo but reassigned
to Mpumalanga in 2006, where people
involved in the Wits Rural Facility (run by the
University of the Witwatersrand) identified a
group of participants.10
When she settled in Hamburg in 2000
and sought ways of addressing the devastating
poverty she found around her, Hofmeyr did
not initially draw directly on her experience of
working with embroiderers. Rather, noticing
that plastic bags – the kind that supermarkets
and other retailers provide – were not only
readily available to everybody but were also
littering the environment, she thought of a
project which involved participants crocheting
these into hats and bags. While this initiative
was abandoned because the items made were
not marketable, an underlying idea within it –
promoting awareness of the environment and
respect for the natural world – would be at play
in the Creation Altarpiece made some seven
years later.
Embroidery became a focus of the project
in 2001 when Hofmeyr met two friends, Jan
Chalmers and Jacky Jezewsky, who possessed
skills in needlework and were keen to assist
her. With their involvement, the new project
made a selection of embroidered cloths and
cushion covers which they exhibited at the
National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in
2002. Featuring cattle, the works introduced
an iconography which would inform that of the
Creation Altarpiece as well.
The making of large-scale works became a
forum for the Keiskamma Art Project to learn
various needlework techniques. In the course
of producing the Keiskamma Tapestry, for
example, project members were introduced to
the so-called ‘Bayeux stitch’ (a type of tethered
stitch), while skills in appliqué and stumpwork
were gleaned during the making of the
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Keiskamma Altarpiece. Although various other
media have also been introduced (printmaking,
drawing, painting, wirework and ceramics
amongst them), needlework remains a primary
focus of most people in the project.
As the Keiskamma Art Project has
been set up in a context where there are
high levels of poverty, it is understandable
that some members see its benefit residing
exclusively (or almost exclusively) in its
capacity to generate much-needed income
for themselves and their families, and view
opportunities to engage in creative work as
being of peripheral importance. But there are
also members who bring to the process an
interest in contributing to the choice of motifs
and imagery within works – and their active
participation is enabled. The content of each
of the very large works, including the Creation
Altarpiece, stemmed initially from an idea on
the part of Hofmeyr. But the making of works
tends to be process-driven rather than closely
following a comprehensive preliminary plan,
and the objects made are by no means simply
realisations of her personal vision and thoughts.
Rather, at the outset as well as in the course
of devising ways of referring to an artwork
from the West (which is normally one that
was previously unfamiliar to other members
of the project), there is extensive discussion.
Often there are also modifications of plans
and shifts in direction in response to what
has actually been produced. Thus Hofmeyr’s
initial concept – which is invariably a broad
idea rather than a detailed plan of action – is
modified, adapted and developed in such a
way that it also accommodates the viewpoints
and worldviews of others in the group. As she
explains: ‘It is one of the joys of working with
a group that all the other minds come in, and
the connections build up from my initial very
private connections. The more you work in a
group, the more you find that people bring in
things.’11
Project members receive a salary when
working in groups on large-scale works.12
When not contracted to such initiatives, they
are able to earn a living by producing small
works individually, and in these instances
receive payment per item completed. Small
works include, for example, hand-embroidered
cushion covers or bags, items of beadwork,
and pictures in felt or appliqué. Those in
needlework incorporate designs prepared
by members of the project responsible for
design, and any machine-stitching that may be
required (for example, to make a cushion cover
from squares of cloth that have been hand-
embroidered) is undertaken at the project’s
central studio. While some such items are sold
at the shop attached to the studio – a venue
that attracts some tourists – most are marketed
at retailers specialising in arts and crafts in
Johannesburg, Cape Town, and other urban
centres.
Hofmeyr, trained originally as a medical
doctor, redirected her focus towards the making
of art and qualified with a Master’s degree in
Fine Art prior to relocating to the Eastern Cape.
Realising that the lack of medical doctors in
Hamburg presented an enormous difficulty
to the community, she resumed practising
medicine late in 2004. Her work in regard
to HIV/AIDS has been particularly important.
In 2004, she began sourcing antiretroviral
medications privately. When government-
sponsored antiretroviral treatment became
available to Hamburg in 2005, Hofmeyr
founded the Umtha Welanga Treatment
Centre – a facility offering personalised care
to HIV-positive patients – in the centre of the
village.
Previous altarpieces by the Keiskamma
Art Project
These activities informed the content of the
Keiskamma Altarpiece (5), a work which
was an important precedent for the Creation
Altarpiece. Responding to the Isenheim
Altarpiece which was commissioned by the
religious order of St. Anthony to provide solace
to the victims of ergotism, a gangrenous skin
condition which people contracted through
eating infected rye,13 the Keiskamma Altarpiece
spoke of a South African community negotiating
the devastating effects of the HI virus.14
Including an iconography which focuses on the
selflessness of women who assume the role of
carers to children orphaned through HIV/AIDS,
the work speaks of people sustained through
religious faith as well as a spirit of mutuality.
While imagery in the Keiskamma
Altarpiece responds to that in the Isenheim
Altarpiece, it is also linked to norms and
values of makers operating in a South African
context. One important aspect of this reworking
and adaptation concerns its engagement
with Christianity. Almost all members of the
Keiskamma Art Project describe themselves
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A material paradise: Reworking the Ghent Altarpiece in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Creation Altarpiece
4 Jan (and Hubert?) van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece (open), 1432, 350 cm x 461 cm, St. Bavo, Ghent. . © Lukas-Art in Flanders
(photograph: Hugo Maertens).
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5 Keiskamma Art Project, Keiskamma Altarpiece, 2005, mixed media, 298 x 326 cm (centre panel), 250 x 93 cm (each side panel);
75 x 340 cm (predella). Photographs showing the closed altarpiece (top), the first opening (middle) and the second opening (bottom).
Photographs courtesy Keiskamma Art Project.
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6 Detail of the first opening of the Keiskamma Altarpiece, 2005. Photograph by Paul Mills.
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Brenda Schmahmann
as Christian and are affiliated to a variety of
Christian denominations: Some are Anglican,
others Seventh-Day Adventists, and still others
belong to African Christian churches such as
the Zionist Church, for example. But most
couple these Christian beliefs and allegiances
with some level of participation in customary
religious practices,15 normally perceiving these
dual commitments as complementary rather
than in conflict with each other. Members may
thus couple prayers to God, in the Christian
sense, with customs of appeasing and
satisfying ancestral spirits. Noseti Makubalo,
for instance, belongs to the Zionist Church, but
commented as follows on her hopes for the
future sustainability of the project: ‘I pray to
my ancestors and … God that the Keiskamma
Art Project will never close or stop’ (in Shelver
2006:104).
This dual commitment plays out in the
Keiskamma Altarpiece in, for example, the
imagery in the panel in the first opening (6).
On the right side is a representation of Vuyisile
Funda, a local holy man who used to run on
the dunes each morning, making patterns
in the sand which he felt to be inspired by
the presence of God. On the left, along with
a generic church building, are depictions of
people wearing the formal uniforms of churches
with a following in Hamburg. Beneath these
images is another religious event – but this
time customary rather than Christian: People
are represented gathering around a fire for the
sacrificial slaughter of a bull and the roasting of
its meat. The work’s inclusion of imagery which
invokes references to people’s allegiances to
both Christianity and customary belief systems
provided a precedent for this aspect of the
Creation Altarpiece some two years later.
The Isenheim Altarpiece lost its role as an
adjunct to worship when it was disassembled
during the French Revolution and relocated
to the Musée d’Unterlinden – formerly a
Dominican convent – when the complex was
transformed into a museum in 1853. But the
Keiskamma Altarpiece references the role the
Isenheim Altarpiece appears to have played
in the 16th century, when it offered comfort to
those suffering from devastating illness, and
it is thus apt that the South African work has
sometimes been exhibited in places of worship.
First unveiled in the Cathedral of St. Michael
and St. George in Grahamstown in July 2005,
it was once again shown at various churches
during its tour of Canada, the United States
and the United Kingdom which commenced
in mid-2006 and lasted over two years.16 This
provided a precedent for the exhibition of the
later Creation Altarpiece which would also
be shown not only in art galleries, but also in
places of worship.
In the second half of 2005 and early 2006
the project completed two smaller altarpieces.
The earlier of these, the Rose Altarpiece
(2005) (7), responds to Martin Shongauer’s
Virgin of the Rose Bush (1473) and thus,
like the Keiskamma Altarpiece, is based on a
work in Colmar.17 Replacing the Virgin Mary
and Child with a representation of project
member Nokwanda Makubalo and a youngster
whom she had adopted, the Latin wording in
Shongauer’s painting – which translates as
‘Pick me also for your child O Blessed Virgin’ –
has been adapted to allude to the nurturing of
children orphaned through HIV/AIDS by selfless
women who are icons of hope for the salvation
of the community. While generally related to
the Keiskamma Altarpiece, the subject matter
also provides a precedent for imagery on the
upper tier of the closed Creation Altarpiece
(discussed below). Further, the array of birds
and flowers around the adoptive mother and
child can be likened to the rendition of birds
and plants in the Creation Altarpiece – albeit
that in the Rose Altarpiece they tend to be
generic, rather than the outcome of a focus on
particular species.
Figures are represented through appliqué
and photography, as they are in the Keiskamma
Altarpiece and would be in the Creation
Altarpiece. And, as in the Keiskamma
Altarpiece and Creation Altarpiece, beadwork
and wirework feature here – in this instance
being deployed to create parallels to the tracery
on the side panels of the Virgin of the Rose
Bush.18 But producing the altarpiece would
also involve participants gleaning knowledge
of a technique which they appear to have used
here alone: Enabling the modelling of three-
dimensional forms with paper, Cartapesta
Leccese – learned through a workshop
conducted by Luisa Cotardo in July 2005 – is
used for the bower of roses in the central panel.
The Marriage of Nolulama and Luthando
(2006) (8), completed a few months later,
does not respond to any particular prototype
but rather alludes generically to historical
altarpieces – particularly examples from the
13th and 14th centuries – which include gold
leaf and feature a main panel surrounded by
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7 Keiskamma Art Project, Rose Altarpiece, 2006, mixed media, 200 x 230 cm, Collection of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art
Museum, Port Elizabeth. Photograph taken by Paul Mills in July 2007.
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8. Keiskamma Art Project, The Marriage of Nolulama and
Luthando, 2006, mixed media, 331 x 244 cm. Photograph
taken by Paul Mills in July 2007.
smaller panels. It also has an iconography
focused on a community seeking to overcome
the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS. Its central
panel, made through appliqué and embroidery,
depicts a couple who are both HIV-positive
but whose health had improved dramatically
through antiretroviral treatment: Optimistic
that they could live full and long lives, they
had recently married. This image has been
combined with smaller panels which were the
outcome of a painting workshop which the
late Marialda Marais,19 a Johannesburg-based
artist, conducted in Hamburg in 2005. In
preparation for the workshop participants were
asked to each interview a woman who had lost
a child, and to consider the kinds of imagery
and motifs which were significant in terms
of the mother’s memories of the deceased
or her understandings of her loss. While the
paintings speak primarily of the resilience of
grandmothers in the context of
a community suffering the loss
of young adults to AIDS-related
illnesses, the central panel
conveys a message of hope that
Hamburg will, in fact, overcome
the impact of the disease.20
The Rose Altarpiece has
entered the collection of an
art museum and is thus not
examined by viewers within
the context of worship.21 The
Marriage of Nolulama and
Luthando has, however, been
on loan to the Cathedral of
St. Michael and St. George in
Grahamstown since August
2007. Until mid-2012, when
it was moved to a corner
position, it was placed against
the wall on the south side of
the nave. When contemplated
by a congregation within the
framework of religious services,
the work has the potential not
only to invite consideration
of the implications of HIV-
infections on people’s everyday
lives or how people manage a
devastating loss such as the
death of a child, but perhaps
also to inspire confidence that
Christianity, with its long history of negotiating
social challenges (such as the Plague which
devastated populations in Europe when
altarpieces with this type of structure were
popular), offers hope and comfort in the face
of new pressures facing people in the 21st
century. The deployment of the work within the
context of worship is relevant to the Creation
Altarpiece.
Technique and process in the Creation
Altarpiece
Work on the Creation Altarpiece commenced
in November 2006. Motifs and scenes
were drawn by Noseti Makubalo as well as
Nomfusi Nkani and three other young people
– Kwanele Ganto, Cebo Mvubo and Nokupiwe
Gedze – whom the project had also funded
to undertake a three-year diploma in Fine Art
at Walter Sisulu University. Project members
embroidering the designs worked in groups.
Makubalo explained that the size of the groups
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depended on the scale of the individual panels
assigned to them, and that there were ‘four or
six or more people in a group, depending on
how big the panel is that they were working
on’.22
The photographs included in the Creation
Altarpiece were not shot specifically for the
work, but were instead selected from images
taken by Hofmeyr’s husband, Justus, her
son Robert, South African art graduate Tanya
Jordaan (who did work for the project in 2005,
including taking photographs incorporated
into the Keiskamma Altarpiece), a Columbian
photographer Vanessa Ruiz (who had visited
Hamburg) and, in one instance, an unknown
photographer. Three of these images were
included late in the process, in response
to a crisis. The Keiskamma Art Project had
established a collaboration with the Bethesda
Arts Centre in Nieu Bethesda, also in the
Eastern Cape, which includes people with
San ancestry, and had intended enabling this
group to contribute a representation of the
San story of creation to the closed altarpiece,
envisaging featuring it on the upper tier where
the Annunciation is represented in the Ghent
Altarpiece (3). However, a disagreement
between Hofmeyr and the manager of the
Nieu Bethesda project resulted in the latter
withdrawing their participation six weeks before
the work was scheduled to be unveiled at the
National Arts Festival. Robert Hofmeyr assisted
his mother in identifying imagery to replace
the intended contribution of the Bethesda Arts
Centre. Seeming to represent a unified space,
the upper tier (1) in fact comprises a montage
of three photographs of discrete scenes by
Justus Hofmeyr (left panel), Robert Hofmeyr
(centre two panels) and Tanya Jordaan (right
panel). While the conflict between the two
groups was unfortunate, the replacement
imagery ended up contributing purposefully to
the work: Without knowing that the montage
was a late addition, one would assume it had
been devised as part of the altarpiece from the
outset.
As in the Rose Altarpiece, which involved
participants gleaning knowledge of Cartapesta
Leccese, the making of the Creation Altarpiece
entailed project members being exposed to a
new technique – in this instance, felting. Gay
Staurup, an Australian who spent about a year
in Hamburg, provided project members with
training in the process. A versatile technique
which enabled the definition of images and
forms in a range of hues but also with (where
required) three-dimensionality, it lent itself to
being married with appliqué.
Once the embroidery and felting had
been completed, and photographs selected
for the work had been digitised and prepared
professionally, project members with expertise
in beadwork and wirework added details to
the work. The challenging job of producing the
frame and structure of the altarpiece happened
simultaneously.23
Coupled with their gleaning increased
technical expertise and proficiency, project
members acquired greater knowledge of the
natural world. This was observed by Suzanne
Peterson, Acting Dean of the Cathedral of St.
Michael and St. George in Grahamstown:
I remember I had gone to Hamburg while
they were making it. … It was such a
wonderful process because they [i.e.
Hofmeyr and leaders in the project]24
worked with the artisans to get to know
about the things they were creating. So
they took them down to the sea, where
they learned about the types of fish, birds,
crabs and different things.25
This discussion was brought to bear not only on
the Creation Altarpiece, but also on a series of
embroidered panels of birds in Hamburg, which
project members worked on at the same time.
Hofmeyr explains how she realised the impact
of this engagement with the environment:
‘When I came to the studio one day a number
of women were staring out the back window.
And I said what are you doing? They had seen
a hornbill in the tree, and they said “There is
a bird like we’ve done in our picture”. They
hadn’t noticed it26 until they had made art
representing it.’27
The five project members responsible for
the design of the Creation Altarpiece referred
to photographs of the environment. But
also, importantly, reproductions of the Ghent
Altarpiece were consulted and equivalents to
the Flemish work were devised.
Reinterpreting the Ghent Altarpiece
The Ghent Altarpiece was commissioned by
Joos Vijd and Elisabeth Borluut for a chapel in
St. Bavo (then called St. John). While having
a complex iconography that has been the topic
of extensive debate (see, e.g., Dhanens 1973;
Philip 1971; Schmidt 2001), it is perhaps best
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understood in terms of its liturgical function –
one explained eloquently by Barbara Lane. For
Lane (1984:137), the altarpiece was intricately
related to the participation of viewers in the
Mass: It dramatised ‘the relationship between
the earthly ceremony and its ultimate promise’
of salvation by drawing on iconographic norms.
When closed, the Ghent Altarpiece shows
on the upper level the Virgin Mary and Gabriel
in a single deep space across four panels. The
Annunciation, Lane (1984:41–50) reveals, was
intricately connected to the Transubstantiation
– that is, the transformation of the bread and
wine of the Eucharist into the Body and Blood
of Christ. The donors, depicted in the tier
below, are kneeling in witness to this event.
Separated spatially from John the Baptist
and John the Evangelist, the donors are also
depicted as palpable beings, whereas the
saints are represented as carved statues. On
the summit of the altarpiece are sibyls and
prophets (Zaccharias and the Sibyl of Erythrea
on the left, and the Sibyl of Cumea and Micah
on the right) who, in medieval Christian
thought, predicted the coming of a Messiah
(Schmidt 2001:52).
Lane (1984:139–142) observes that,
while the exterior of the altarpiece explains
‘the participation of the donors at Mass’, its
interior ‘portrays the ultimate consequence
of participation in the daily sacrifice’ through
an ‘otherworldly image of breathtaking
radiance’. Showing the figure of Christ as a
priest, it represents below His sacrificial role
via the Adoration of the Lamb. Emphasising
the Eucharist through the blood of the Lamb
which pours into a chalice, the sacrificial
altar is converged upon by various groups of
figures. Angels, holding symbols of the passion,
surround the altar. Prophets from the Old
Testament appear in the left of the foreground,
Apostles and Clergy are on the right, and
Confessors and Saints are shown in the
background. The two panels on the bottom left,
which incorporate a landscape continuous with
the Adoration of the Lamb, represent Knights
of Christ and Just Judges, while those on the
right are of Holy Hermits and Holy Pilgrims.
On the left of the figure of Christ on the upper
level is the enthroned Virgin Mary while on
the right is John the Baptist. Heavenly singers
and musicians appear on either side of the
holy figures, while on the far left and right are
Adam and Eve whose Original Sin is addressed
symbolically in the Adoration of the Lamb
scene. Above Adam and Eve are images of Cain
and Abel – figures, Lane (1984:59) suggests,
who refer to the sacrifice of Christ.
While the Ghent Altarpiece presents
a message of hope to viewers through its
suggestion of the possibility of their enjoying a
heavenly realm after death, the optimism of the
Creation Altarpiece is rooted in a celebration
of the material world and the belief that nature
is itself imbued with a spiritually uplifting
beauty. Hofmeyr explains that, following the
completion and exhibition of the Keiskamma
Altarpiece, she felt the project ‘needed some
kind of celebration because we had achieved
a lot and a lot of people were getting better
from HIV’. The overall intention of the Creation
Altarpiece, as Hofmeyr perceived it, was to
‘encourage people in the village to look at their
environment more closely’ and to promote ‘a
kind of thanksgiving’ for it.28
The closed version of the Creation
Altarpiece substitutes the Sibyls of Cumea and
Erythrea with, respectively, representations
of the prophetess Nongqawuse and another
young prophetess, Nonkosi, who appeared
with her in a well-known photograph used as
a source.29 Nongqawuse is an important figure
within the history of the Eastern Cape and the
resistance of isiXhosa speakers against the
colonial government during the Frontier Wars
of 1779 to 1878. When she was tending her
family’s fields in April 1856, Nongqawuse was
summoned by two ‘strangers’ who indicated
that the amaXhosa people should kill their
cattle and refrain from cultivating crops in
preparation for a recreation of the world. That
prophesy ultimately resulted in about 35 000
isiXhosa-speakers dying of starvation and,
as Jeff Peires (2003a:341) observes, the
final collapse of their ‘national, cultural and
economic integrity’ which had been under
pressure for so many years. Seen in the context
of the altarpiece, however, Nongqawuse’s
disastrous millenarian vision would seem to
be reconfigured into a message of hope for the
restoration of the community in a postcolonial
era – a reworking that can be understood if one
considers the meanings associated with cattle
in isiXhosa-speaking communities of the past,
and how reference would seem to be made to
this in works by the Keiskamma Art Project.
Historically, cattle not only provided
their isiXhosa-speaking owners with milk
and meat, but were sacrificed in key rituals
and were regarded as markers of status and
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economic power (see Peires 2003b:8–9).
Although women in a contemporary context
often keep cattle (see Ainslie 2005), in the
17th, 18th and 19th centuries these animals
were not only looked after by men, but,
deployed as bride price, were also associated
specifically with masculine wealth and agency.
This gendering was transgressed implicitly
through the Keiskamma Art Project deploying
cattle as their key motif. In appropriating an
historical signifier of male economic power
and status, the group was in fact using it to
suggest women’s aspirations and endeavours
to achieve economic upliftment. Indeed, as
argued previously (Schmahmann 2011:177),
it would seem pertinent that the Keiskamma
Art Project deploys an historical signifier of
bride price and reworks it into an articulation
of female agency. A frequent depiction of the
story of Nongqawuse in the early embroideries
was simultaneous with this focus on cattle,
and her vision, too, becomes associated with
economic empowerment – with the restoration
of the land to isiXhosa speakers, on the one
hand, and with the promotion of female
capacity within a new order, on the other. Thus,
rather than blaming her for losses suffered
by the amaXhosa, her prophesy becomes, for
the Keiskamma Art Project, a premonition of
positive social and economic changes in the
21st century – ones which will correct the
wrongs of the past.
The panel corresponding to Micah in
the Ghent Altarpiece includes wording from
Revelation 21:5 (‘behold I make all things
new’). Encapsulating the idea of an apocalypse,
its juxtaposition with the figure of Nongqawuse
suggests that her own prophesy might be
understood within the framework of Christian
concepts about the destruction of an old and
corrupt order, to make way for a new, purified
one. This construction tallies with an argument
by Peires (2003a:159) that, rather than being
a reaction against Christianity and a missionary
influence, as has sometimes been suggested,
the ideas underpinning the cattle-killing
movement were, to a large degree, actually
derived from Christian teachings.
The panel corresponding to Zaccharias in
the Ghent Altarpiece includes words from Luke
1:42 (‘blessed art though among women’)
which invoke references to the Virgin Mary and
the Annunciation. This allusion is reinforced
in the tier below, where the photographic
montage creates the illusion that one is viewing
an interior of a homestead in Hamburg. A
local woman, Nonyamako Gqwaqe, who
was pregnant when the photograph of her
was taken, replaces the Virgin Mary in the
Ghent Altarpiece, while twins, aptly named
Brightness and Sweetness,30 replace the Angel
Gabriel. The radiant light from the central
window infuses the scene with a sense of
spiritual possibility. According to the project,
the representation symbolises ‘hope for the next
generation; hope that it will be a generation
free from Aids’ (Hofmeyr et al. 2007).
The lower tier of the closed altarpiece
includes four panels. Substituting the ornate
carving of the Gothic niches in the Ghent
Altarpiece are recesses embellished with
abalone shells. While additional references to
abalone in the opened view of the altarpiece
point to the potential for desperate local people
to become involved in poaching, as indicated
below, here their iridescence seems rather to
convey a message that there are manifestations
within the natural world which offer humankind
glimpses of otherworldly magnificence.
The Creation Altarpiece was not
commissioned. The initiative of project
members themselves in enabling its realisation
is suggested through the deployment of quasi
self-portraits in the panels which correspond
to those in which Joos Vijd and Elisabeth
Borluut are depicted in the Ghent Altarpiece.
Represented via appliqué, a technique which
does not lend itself to naturalistic portraiture,
the project members are generic in appearance
– perhaps to enable a few figures to stand for
the many people who contributed work to the
altarpiece.
Alongside what would seem to be generic
self-portraits are photographs of two individuals
who have special capacities and powers
which can be harnessed for the benefit of
the community. While a black-and-white
photograph might perhaps invoke the idea of
an historical image, herbalist Aaron Gqwaka
– a respected elder (and the father-in-law of
Nonyamako Gqwaqe in the panel above) who
replaces the tromp l’oeil sculpture of John the
Baptist in the Ghent Altarpiece – is represented
via a shot that Vanessa Ruiz took only a year
or so prior to the Creation Altarpiece being
made. However, the image of diviner Noshumi
Rhubushe, who appears in the position of
John the Evangelist in the Ghent Altarpiece,
had been taken by an unknown photographer
many years earlier.31 Rhubushe suffered horrific
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trauma in her old age: Not only had she lost
two daughters but, Hofmeyr indicates, she
was also the victim of a particularly vicious
sexual assault, from which she never recovered
emotionally.32 Indeed, it was only when
Hofmeyr discovered the photograph of her
taken many years previously that she realised
that Rhubushe had once been a powerful figure
within the community.33 In showing her as she
once was, the Keiskamma Art Project restored
her dignity and indeed transformed her into an
empowered survivor.
The open version of the altarpiece replaces
the images of the enthroned Christ, Virgin and
John the Baptist, with the representation of
a gigantic fig tree from Hamburg. Accorded
palpability and three-dimensionality via the
felting technique, it appears to stretch its roots
down to the panel below. In an interview with
Hofmeyr, she referred to a fig tree in the nearby
village of Bell which had ‘eaten up’ an old
hotel installed by colonists. For her, the image
signified a restoration undertaken by the natural
world as well as the emergence of a new order
from the ruins of an old one.34
This iconography is reinforced through
another substitution: The Lamb of God on the
altar has been replaced by a cow or bull (9).
Hofmeyr felt that the imagery in the panel
could be interpreted as alluding to the fact that
animals were sacrificed in Judaic culture.35
On one level, then, the idea that events in
the Old Testament presage those in the New
Testament – at play in the Ghent Altarpiece
and indeed common in 15th-century European
art – is picked up in the panel. Interpreted via
the motif of cattle, this iconography is, in turn,
adapted to talk about Nongqawuse’s prophesy
and to imply that contemporary sacrificial rites
are part of a purification ritual which, in line
with her prediction, will signify the restoration
of economic power to the local community.
On another level, the sacrificial bull or cow
refers to the fact that customary religious
practices – which include sacrificial rites such
as the one represented here – co-exist with
Christianity in Hamburg. This is reinforced
through the depiction of the different groups
from the community converging on the altar.
Along with schoolchildren (top left corner) as
well as a capoeira group (middle left) which,
as discussed below, is comprised of teenagers
from Hamburg, churchgoers (bottom left
corner, far right and immediate left of altar) are
represented in juxtaposition with a group of
figures in customary dress (immediate right of
altar).
Images celebrating the natural world
feature in the bottom side panels. But while
these parallel panels in the Ghent Altarpiece in
the sense that they, too, represent a landscape
implied to be continuous with that in the
central panel, their focus is primarily on the
local natural environment – in the words of
designer Nokupiwe Gedze, on ‘our river, the
Keiskamma River, and our birds and fish’.36
There is also an engagement with the idea
of sacrifice, but in this instance on a natural
world being sacrificed by humanity. In the
background, Gedze observes, are groups of
people carrying abalone which they are implied
to have poached.37 Their juxtaposition with
a scene focusing on abundant birds and fish
perhaps conveys a message about the need to
be mindful about protecting the environment,
rather than thoughtlessly exploiting it.
As with the herbalist and diviner appearing
on the front of the altarpiece, photographs by
Vanessa Ruiz of two local people appear in
place of Adam and Eve. Shadrack Ndkuholona
and Mildred Paliso are, in fact, transients living
on the fringes of Hamburg society. While able
to survive through fishing and in that sense
at one with their environment, they are also
‘fallen’ individuals who sustain themselves
through alcohol and may operate outside the
law: Paliso holds out the abalone she has
poached, as if seeking to barter them. At the
same time, however, the couple has a certain
dignity which they do not enjoy in day-to-day
life. Indeed, the manner in which they display
their catch may remind one of saints or martyrs
represented with their attributes – a tradition
at play in much Renaissance art, including the
Ghent Altarpiece.38
The Keiskamma Trust, an umbrella body
overseeing initiatives to uplift the community,
has established a project for teaching children
and teenagers music, and the representations
of singers and musicians in the panel adjacent
to the photograph of Shadrack Ndkuholona
– counterparts to the angelic choir in the
Ghent Altarpiece – refer generically to these
youngsters. The trust has also established a
‘memory-box’ project for children and teenagers
in the community who have been orphaned
through HIV/AIDS, which enables participants
to use story-telling and reminiscence to come
to terms with grief and loss. Participants in
this initiative – counterparts to the heavenly
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9 Detail of the Creation Altarpiece showing Nonkosi and Nongqawuse. Photograph by Paul Mills in July 2007.
musicians in the Ghent Altarpiece – are shown
in the panel to the left of Mildred Paliso.
Additionally, the trust has enabled the founding
of a capoeira group, and the photographs
immediately above Ndkuholona and Paliso are
of two of its members displaying their art. The
group is comprised of adolescents, and this is
appropriate for figures who are counterparts to
Cain and Abel. But, perhaps more significant,
is the fact that capoeira – developed in Brazil
by the enslaved – is not only associated with
popular resistance against social injustice and
inequity, but is also syncretic (see Assunção
2002) and in this sense is particularly apt
for an altarpiece which prompts a dialogue
between European and African cultural forms.
Context and meaning
The Creation Altarpiece may encourage one to
think about not only the content of the Ghent
Altarpiece but also how the latter is viewed and
understood in the 21st century. Not nowadays
shown as an ‘altarpiece’, as such, but rather as
an object of contemplation for those interested
in art, the Ghent Altarpiece is housed in an
unadorned chapel at the rear of St. Bavo and
is preserved for posterity in a temperature-
controlled glass container. Payment of the
entrance fee entitles the visitor to a headset
which provides a guide to the work’s history
and iconography. To experience the work as
an altarpiece, the visitor is nevertheless able
to look at its full-size photographic copy in
the Vijd chapel (10). Although the chapel has
changed considerably since the 15th century,
viewing the copy in situ provides one with a
greater sense of how the Ghent Altarpiece’s
articulation of the significance of Mass would
have been experienced by the donors.
St. Bavo is one of many cathedrals which
have absorbed some conventions of the art
museum, while also enabling art objects in
their holdings to be understood in the context
of worship. Likewise, the display of the
Creation Altarpiece in the cathedrals of Cape
Town and Grahamstown attracted some whose
visit was simply to view the work, while also
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10 The Vijd Chapel in St. Bavo. Photograph by Paul Mills in July 2012.
catering for a congregation who experienced
it within the framework of religious services.
When it was unveiled in Grahamstown, Carol
Hofmeyr acknowledged contributors to the
work and thanked sponsors, as is usual with an
art opening, but the occasion also involved the
Acting Dean, Suzanne Peterson, delivering a
blessing she had devised as well as performing
a communion service in front of the altarpiece
(11).39 Similarly, when it was shown in the
cathedral in Cape Town in September 2008
(12), some were introduced to the altarpiece
in between services by representatives of the
Keiskamma Art Project (who also sold small
works by the project in The Link, an area at
the rear of the building (13))40 while others
experienced it in the context of worship:
Although placed just in front of the High Altar
in the choir, which is some distance behind
the crossing where the altar deployed in most
services is located, its large size meant that it
nevertheless enjoyed visibility, and reference
was sometimes made to it.41
As indicated, most people in Hamburg, like
many elsewhere in Africa, perceive Christianity
as an addition to, rather than a replacement
of, their customary religions. Consequently, in
instances when they experience difficulties of
any kind, residents of Hamburg may couple
Christian prayers with endeavours to seek
intervention from diviners or herbalists of
the type represented in the altarpiece. If a
commitment to both Christianity and customary
practices within people’s individual lives is
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A material paradise: Reworking the Ghent Altarpiece in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Creation Altarpiece
11 Suzanne Peterson, Acting Dean of the Cathedral, in front
of the Creation Altarpiece when it was unveiled at the
Cathedral of St. George and St. Michael in Grahamstown
prior to its moving to the Thomas Pringle Hall, July 2007.
Photograph courtesy of the Keiskamma Art Project.
invoked strongly by the iconography of the
Creation Altarpiece, a showing of the work
in church settings may perhaps encourage
a reading of these traditions as completely
compatible. This was important to Hofmeyr,
who commented: ‘In effect what Christianity
and Judaism did was mould out of what people
were doing and believing a faith with roots
in the custom of the people. Just because
Christianity happens to have roots in the
Middle East and in Rome and in other places,
this does not mean that it cannot also acquire
roots out of African traditional religion.’42
But while a showing of the Creation
Altarpiece under the rubric of churches
encourages reflection on adaptations to
Christian belief within different circumstances,
such contexts – even when they are all
Anglican – can affect the meanings which
the work might be understood to articulate in
varied ways. This becomes especially clear if
one compares the showing of the altarpiece
in September 2008, with the display of it a
year earlier.
In September 2007, a few months after
it had been unveiled in Grahamstown, the
Creation Altarpiece was again shown under
the auspices of a place of worship – but this
time in a church hall. The (Anglican) St.
Francis of Assisi in Parkview, Johannesburg,
invited a selection of accomplished flower
arrangers to participate in a ‘flower festival’,
assigning each a verse from Genesis
which s/he was asked to interpret via an
arrangement for display in the church.
Bart Cox, a member of the congregation
and an AIDS educator who had worked
with Hofmeyr in Hamburg, organised for
the Creation Altarpiece to be shown in the
church hall to coincide with the festival,
and for it to be discussed and examined as
part of the official opening of the event.43
But if, in the St. Francis context, the
Creation Altarpiece functioned primarily
as exemplification of how the content of
Genesis could serve as an impetus for
inventive and creative work, when shown
in Cape Town, a year later, viewers would
have been encouraged to find in it reference
to environmental concerns specifically. Geoff
Daniels, coordinator of the South African
Faith Communities Environment Institute, notes
that February 2007 saw the South African
Council of Churches (SACC) National Executive
agreeing that a Season of Creation be included
in the SACC calendar. Thereafter, the Anglican
Province of Southern Africa agreed to develop a
‘Season of Creation liturgy and resource book’
which they intended to ‘raise the profile of the
environmental challenges and crisis facing us
in the context of our faith’.44 While Hofmeyr is
an Anglican and is interested in environmental
theology, the Creation Altarpiece had not in
fact been conceptualised in awareness of these
developments. But when it was displayed in
the cathedral to coincide with the celebration of
a Season of Creation, the Creation Altarpiece
appeared to not simply express an appreciation
for the natural world, but also to articulate a
message about an urgent need to preserve and
protect it.
Meanings ascribed to the altarpiece can
also be affected by occurrences outside the
control of those organising its display. A need
for humankind to be alert to environmental
concerns was, on one level, consciously
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12 The Creation Altarpiece on display in the Cathedral of
St. George the Martyr in Cape Town in September 2008.
Photograph by Tanya Jordaan.
emphasised at the formal celebratory launch
of the Season of Creation on Sunday, 31
August 2008 at 6 pm. The event included,
for example, a filmed recording of a message
from former Archbishop and Nobel Peace
Prize winner, Desmond Tutu, which was
projected on a screen. He observed: ‘As it is
the cornerstone of the Keiskamma Trust to
value and to treat people with compassion and
respect, this includes a reverence and care
for the natural world around them.’45 But the
launch happened to coincide with a violent
storm hitting Cape Town which caused flooding
and damage to buildings, and uprooted trees.
While unfortunate in the sense that it resulted
in a disappointing level of attendance, it was
also interpreted as suggesting
that the protection of the
environment is an issue to
which those of religious faith
ought to direct their focus as
a matter of urgency. Thus The
Good Hope, official newsletter
of the Anglican Diocese of
Cape Town, observed:
Perhaps it was fitting that
on this day Cape Town was
buffeted by storms. For the
Season of Creation is a time
to celebrate God’s wonderful
Creation but also to mourn the
damage that we as humans
are doing the world he has
entrusted to our care. As the
impact of climate change
becomes more severe, we will
see an increase in storms.
(Anon 2008:1)
But if such events
encouraged the altarpiece
to be interpreted within the
framework of environmental
theology, its showing in the
cathedral in Cape Town also
provided the circumstances
for it to enter the realms
of popular culture, while
simultaneously reiterating
references to the Ghent
Altarpiece which inspired it.
During September 2008, the
Creation Altarpiece served
as a backdrop for the music video of a number
called ‘Someone’s at the Door’ by Nigerian-born
gospel singer, Nathaniel Bassey, which Robert
Hofmeyr co-directed (with Angela Nemov) and
which was the primary track of the musician’s
debut album Elohim which he was recording
in Cape Town at the time (14).46 Although
the video does not actually feature the Ghent
Altarpiece, it includes a couple of allusions to
the 15th-century work. The words ‘the Lamb
of God is calling you’ feature in the lyrics
and are sung just prior to a shot of the singer
proceeding through the cathedral doorway (15)
– an arched structure that strongly reminds
one of the niche framing Christ in the Ghent
Altarpiece and which, with its niches on either
side, in fact alludes to the trio of holy figures
on the upper tier of the (opened) Flemish work.
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de arte no 88 2013
A strong visual connection is also established
between this key motif in the song and the
Creation Altarpiece. Reiterating, on the one
hand, the door-like representation of the scene
of the altar and sacrificial bull, the radiant
light which frames Bassey relates to that in
the panels which are a counterpart to the
Annunciation.
Conclusion
The suggestion here is that, through both
its subject matter and form, the Creation
Altarpiece establishes a complex dialogue with
the Ghent Altarpieces, reworking the meanings
of the Flemish work in light of the perspectives
of people living in the Eastern Cape of South
Africa in the 21st century. Rather than focusing
on the possibility of experiencing heaven only
after death, as does the Renaissance work,
the Creation Altarpiece suggests that the
natural world is itself a site of magnificence.
Nongqawuse’s prophesy, while normally
associated with loss, is transformed into a
generic message of hope for restoration. But
the concept of ‘restoration’ involves not only
seeking redress for economic losses suffered
as a result of colonialism and apartheid, as
well as a world free of HIV/AIDS: the Creation
Altarpiece implies that it refers also to a
situation in which the natural environment
is sustained, rather than being thoughtlessly
exploited.
Meaning is also, however, dependent on
the context in which the work is read – a point
alluded to through considering the varied kinds
of associations or significance the Creation
Altarpiece acquired when displayed in places
of worship. Thus, for example, when shown in
the church hall of St. Francis in Johannesburg,
the work was associated with the biblical idea
of creation and served as an exemplar of how
the narrative in Genesis might inspire aesthetic
creativity, whereas it was linked specifically
with the agendas of environmental theology
when shown at the Cathedral of Cape Town.
The work’s inclusion in a gospel music video
is also significant in the sense that it seems to
point to the Creation Altarpiece’s negotiation
between the realms of the sacred and the
commercial. Consecrated and blessed at the
cathedral in Grahamstown before being moved
to an ordinary ‘lay’ venue at the National
Arts Festival in 2007, the work’s negotiation
between two kinds of ambits was also manifest
in the showing of it in the cathedral in Cape
Town where, along with enriching viewers’
understanding of religious ideas and social
issues, the altarpiece served to promote smaller
works by the Keiskamma Art Project that were
made available for immediate purchase.
Showing the work in churches also made
evident the fact that customary African beliefs
and practices are completely compatible with
Christianity, and that there has often been
a melding and an interaction between the
two. Indeed, the display of the altarpiece in
such contexts may reveal how imagery which
interprets biblical accounts in terms of people’s
own experiences and world views can result
in a contemporary Christian art which has
increased relevance.
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to the members of the Keiskamma
Art Project for taking time to answer questions
and providing the author with access to
material. She is also indebted to Tanya
Jordaan for the extensive information she
provided and for supplying photographs, and
the Reverend Canon Roman Smith, former
Dean of the Cathedral in Cape Town, and
Reverend Suzanne Peterson, former Acting
Dean of the Cathedral in Grahamstown, for
their insights about the display of the Creation
Altarpiece. Thank you also to Paul Mills for
taking photographs for this article and to
Robert Hofmeyr for permission to include stills
from Nathaniel Bassey’s video. This work is
based on research supported by the National
Research Foundation (NRF) in South Africa.
Please note, however, that any opinions,
findings, conclusions or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of the
author, therefore the NRF does not accept any
liability in regard thereto.
Notes
1 Purchased by Standard Bank and placed on
permanent display in Parliament in Cape Town
(see Schmahmann 2011:158–192).
2 A quatrain, painted on the foot of the lower
panels of the closed altarpiece, says the
following in Latin: ‘The painter, Hubert van
Eyck, than whom none was greater, began,
and his brother Jan, second in art, completed
the weighty task, at the request of Joos Vijd’
(Dhanens 1973:26–27). But there are questions
around its authenticity and interpretation, and
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13 Works by the Keiskamma Art Project in The Link, the area
at the rear of the Cathedral of St. George the Martyr in Cape
Town, September 2008. Photograph by Tanya Jordaan
some attribute the work to Jan van Eyck alone
(see, e.g., Philip 1971).
3 For a discussion of German immigration to South
Africa, see Schnell (1954), Schwär and Pape
(1958), and Daphne and Brett (1987).
4 See Charlton, N. 1980.
5 See Ainslie, A. 2005.
6 Interview with Nomfusi Nkani in Hamburg, 18
December 2008.
7 Interview with Caroline Nyongo in Ntilini, 19
January 2010.
8 See Hauck, M. and N.A. Swejd. 1999.
9 See Shelver, A. 2006. p. 103.
10 The Mapula embroidery project in the
Winterveld, then part of the North West
Province, was included in the Paper Prayers
initiative. Hofmeyr was familiar with the
Mapula project but did not participate in the
Paper Prayers training in the Winterveld. For
an overview of Chivirika, Kaross Workers and
Mapula, see Schmahmann (2005).
11 Commentary by Carol Hofmeyr during an
interview with her, Noseti Makubalo, Nomfusi
Nkana and Nokupiwe Gedze in Grahamstown,
30 May 2012.
12 While some major works (including the
Creation Altarpiece) were initiated by Hofmeyr,
the Keiskamma Art Project has also received
a few commissions. These include tapestries
made for the central atrium in the Johannesburg
headquarters of construction company Murray &
Roberts in 2009.
13 For discussion of the Isenheim Altarpiece,
see Scheja (1969), Mellinkoff (1988) and
Hayum (1993).
14 For an in-depth exploration of its content,
see Schmahmann (2010).
15 For an overview of the religious beliefs
of isiXhosa-speaking groups, see Asante and
Nwadiora (2007:75–80). A central deity, termed
Qamata, is considered a great king. Mediation
between him and man occurs via the ancestors.
16 Displayed in Toronto’s Cathedral Church of
St. James (July 2006), its next showing was at
St. James Episcopal Cathedral in Chicago (20
August to 20 September 2006). Following its
display at the Fowler Museum (10 January to
11 March 2007), it was exhibited at the First
United Methodist Church of Santa Monica (12
to 23 March 2007), the Grace Cathedral in San
Francisco (May 2007), St. Mark’s Episcopal
Cathedral in Seattle (September 2007), the
(Episcopal) Washington National Cathedral
(16 January to 9 March 2008) and Southwark
Cathedral in London (October 2008). Despite
being the best-known work by the project, the
altarpiece has not, in fact, been purchased.
17 C. Heck (n.d:2) indicates that the Virgin
of the Rose Bush was originally in the
Collegiate College in Colmar. Stolen in 1972,
it was retrieved in 1973 and relocated to the
Dominican Church.
18 The ornate frame of the Virgin of the Rose Bush
dates to the 19th century. The Keiskamma Art
Project’s version, while including allusions to the
side panels, omits references to the tracery on
the summit of the Colmar altarpiece.
19 Sadly, Marais died unexpectedly in 2013.
20 The author’s understanding of the workshop was
gleaned from an interview with Carol Hofmeyr in
Hamburg on 1 June 2006.
21 Exhibited with the Keiskamma Altarpiece at
the University of Johannesburg Art Gallery in
2006, the Rose Altarpiece and The Marriage
of Nolulama and Luthando were also shown
alongside the Creation Altarpiece in the Thomas
Pringle Hall at the National Arts Festival in
2007.
22 Commentary by Noseti Makubalo during an
interview with her, Carol Hofmeyr, Nomfusi
Nkana and Nokupiwe Gedze in Grahamstown,
30 May 2012.
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A material paradise: Reworking the Ghent Altarpiece in the Keiskamma Art Project’s Creation Altarpiece
14 Frame from Nathaniel Bassey’s ‘Someone’s at the Door’ photographed in the Cathedral of St. George the Martyr, Cape Town, and in
front of the Creation Altarpiece. Produced by Odd Digital Media. Directed by Angela Nemov and Robert Hofmeyr.
15 Frame from Nathaniel Bassey’s ‘Someone’s at the Door’, photographed in the Cathedral of St. George the Martyr, Cape Town, and in
front of the Creation Altarpiece. Produced by Odd Digital Media. Directed by Angela Nemov and Robert Hofmeyr.
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23 The frame of the work, made locally in time
for its unveiling, proved unstable. In 2008 it
was replaced by a frame made by professional
carpenters.
24 While various visitors held workshops with
members of the Keiskamma Art Project in
order to help the group to glean historical
understandings which would enable the making
of the Keiskamma Tapestry, investigation of the
natural world for the Creation Altarpiece appears
to have been organised from within the project.
25 Interview with Suzanne Peterson in Cape Town,
8 September 2012.
26 It seems that Hofmeyr meant they had not been
able to identify it as a particular species.
27 Interview with Hofmeyr, Makubalo, Nkani and
Gedze, 30 May 2012.
28 Interview with Hofmeyr, Makubalo, Nkani and
Gedze, 30 May 2012.
29 The photograph, which is in the South African
Library, was taken in King William’s Town
where the pair was held captive in 1878. A
reproduction is included in Mostert (1992).
30 The youngsters are not Nonyamako Gqwaqe’s
own children.
31 Gqwaqe and Rhubushe have died since the
work was completed.
32 Interview with Hofmeyr, Makubalo, Nkani and
Gedze, 30 May 2012.
33 Interview with Hofmeyr, Makubalo, Nkani and
Gedze, 30 May 2012.
34 Interview with Hofmeyr, Makubalo, Nkani and
Gedze, 30 May 2012.
35 Interview with Hofmeyr, Makubalo, Nkani and
Gedze, 30 May 2012.
36 Interview with Hofmeyr, Makubalo, Nkani and
Gedze, 30 May 2012.
37 Interview with Hofmeyr, Makubalo, Nkani and
Gedze, 30 May 2012.
38 The Saints in the background of the Adoration of
the Lamb panel include, for example, Agnes who
displays her lamb and Barbara who displays her
tower.
39 Peterson no longer has a copy of the speech and
recalls only that its focus was on the theme of
creation (Interview with Peterson, 8 September
2012).
40 The involvement of the project was explained to
the author by Tanya Jordaan, who played a key
role in organising its showing in the Cathedral
of St. George the Martyr, Cape Town (Interview
with Jordaan in Cape Town, 7 September
2012).
41 Ascertained by interviewing the former Dean of
the Cathedral, Rowan Smith, in Cape Town, 8
September 2012.
42 Interview with Hofmeyr, Makubalo, Nkani and
Gedze, 30 May 2012.
43 The author learned about the circumstances of
its showing via e-mail communication with Bart
Cox on 1 November 2012.
44 Letter from the Southern African Faith
Communities’ Environment Institute (SAVCEI),
28 April 2008. The resource book developed six
themes as the focus for each of the six weeks
constituting the Season, beginning with ‘God’s
Gift of Creation Biodiversity’ and continuing
with ‘Land’, ‘Water’, ‘Climate Change, ‘Need not
Greed’ and Stewardship’.
45 A transcript of his speech was provided to the
author by Jordaan.
46 See http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=_2xzt7w5uoQ. For information on
Bassey, see http://nathanielbassey.org/
References
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value in the communal areas of the Eastern
Cape Province, South Africa. PhD dissertation,
University College, London.
Anon. 2008. Anglicans take up the challenge of the
environment. The Good Hope LVIII(8):1.
Asante, M.K. and E. Nwadiora. 2007. Spear
masters: An introduction to African religion.
Lanham: United Press of America.
Assunção, M.R. 2002. Capoeira: The history of an
Afro-Brazilian martial art. London: Routledge.
Brown, C. 2006. Hope restored, history reclaimed.
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Charlton, N. 1980. The economics and politics of
dependence. In Ciskei: Economics and politics
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Ltd.
Daphne, R.C. and M.R. Brett. 1987. The fading
tapestry: German settlements in the Eastern
Cape. Neon XXV(52):59–64.
Dhanens, E. 1973. Van Eyck: The Ghent Altarpiece.
London: Allen Lane.
Hauck, M. and N.A. Swejd. 1999. A case study of
abalone poaching in South Africa and its impact
on fisheries management. ICES Journal of
Marine Science LVI:1028–1032.
Hayum, A. 1993. The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s
medicine and the painter’s vision. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Heck, C. n.d. The Virgin in the Rose Bush by Martin
Schongauer. Trans. D. Kirby-Ling. Colmar:
S.A.E.P.
Hofmeyr, C., et al. 2007. The Creation Altarpiece:
Keiskamma Art Project (brochure). Hamburg,
South Africa: The Keiskamma Art Project.
Hutcheon, L. 1985. A theory of parody: The
teachings of twentieth-century art forms. New
York and London: Methuen.
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Lane, B.G. 1984. The Altar and the Altarpiece:
Sacramental themes in early Netherlandish
painting. New York: Harper & Row.
Mellinkoff, R. 1988. The Devil at Isenheim:
Reflections of popular belief in Grünewald’s
Altarpiece. Berkeley: University of California
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Mostert, N. 1992. Frontiers: The epic of South
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people. London: Jonathan Cape.
Peires, J. 2003a. The dead will arise: Nongqawuse
and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856–57.
Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball
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Ravan Press (Pty) Ltd. in South Africa, 1989.)
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of the Xhosa people in the days of their
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de arte no 88 2013 © University of South Africa Pr ess
ISSN 0004-3389
pp 46–61
The framing of objects in Penny Siopis’
‘Sympathetic Magic’
Alison Kearney*
* Alison Kearney is a lecturer in the Ar ts
Division, Wits School of Education, Universit y
of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Abstract
The use of found objects is part of
contemporary art-making practices, and
can no longer be understood in terms of the
anti-art gestures of the first decades of the
20th century. An approach to understanding
this practice, which goes beyond an
interpretation of the artworks as ‘anti-art’, is
needed. One such approach is to focus on
the changed ontology of the objects when
they are embedded in the field of art. With
critical reference to the use of found objects
in Siopis’ (2002) exhibition, ‘Sympathetic
Magic’, this article explores the possibilities
of meaning that arise from a shift in focus
of found objects as ‘anti-art’, to a focus on
the changed ontological status of the objects
when included in the field of art. Recent
anthropological discourse on the materiality of
things provides a vantage point for unpacking
the ontological status of the objects qua
object. Danto’s treatise on the transfiguration
of the commonplace and Baxandall’s
discussion on ‘exhibiting intention’ are used to
interrogate the objects’ changed significance
as art. The author of this article argues that
the different treatment of objects in this
series of installations demonstrates how the
meaning objects have for us, changes when we
encounter those objects differently.
Introduction
With critical reference to the use of found
objects in Penny Siopis’ (2002) exhibition
‘Sympathetic Magic’, this article explores
the possibilities of meaning that arise from a
shift in focus when it comes to found objects
as ‘anti-art’, to a focus on the changed
ontological status of the objects, as they
move from everyday social practices into the
field of art. Siopis’ exhibition is relevant for
a number of reasons. It is an example of a
seminal contemporary South African artist’s
deliberate use of a range of objects in a series
of installations that are self-reflexively engaged
with accepted conventions of exhibiting
artefacts. The different treatment of objects in
this series of installations tangibly demonstrates
how the meaning objects have for us can
change when we encounter those objects in
different ways. Also, this exhibition was a kind
of mini-retrospective of Siopis’ work, and as
such showcased themes and trends in Siopis’
oeuvre (Law 2002a:7; Smith 2002:52).
First, a brief discussion of how the focus of
this article differs from curator Jennifer Law’s
(2002a) discussion of ‘Sympathetic Magic’
in the introduction to the catalogue, and her
catalogue essay ‘The full catastrophe’ (Law
2002b),1 which accompanied the exhibition.
This is followed by a brief discussion of the
historical use of the found object in Modernist
art, highlighting key artworks in the history
of this praxis, in order to contextualise Siopis’
work in an art-historical continuum from which
to identify innovations or similarities. Miller’s
(2005) theory of the humility of things provides
a vantage point for unpacking the ontological
status of the objects qua object, before they
become found objects. Danto’s (1981) treatise
on the transfiguration of the commonplace
is used to discuss the objects’ changed
significance as they move from everyday social
practices into the field of art. The critical
analysis of the series of installations that
follows these discussions focuses on the types
of objects used and how they were presented
to the viewer in ‘Sympathetic Magic’. Reference
is made to Baxandall’s (1991) discussion on
‘exhibiting intention’, and Bal’s (2008) views
on ‘framing’ in the field of exhibition, to show
that the methods of display used in this series
of installations framed the objects in ways that
both revealed and obscured their specificity,
thus affecting the meanings we make of the
objects and the artworks. The argument here is
that this way of looking challenges the humility
of things.
Symbolic exchange
In the introduction to the catalogue, curator
Jennifer Law (2002a) discusses the idea of
an heirloom that is bestowed through a will
in terms of Mauss’ notions of gift giving and
exchange. Sympathetic magic, Law (2002a:7)
argues, is ‘the art of influencing events through
the dual enchanted principles of contact and
imitation’. Objects that have been exchanged
bind the givers and the recipients through a
magical sympathy of sorts. Within this, the
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The framing of objects in Penny Siopis’ ‘Sympathetic Magic’
heirloom is understood as ‘a special kind of gift
– one which aims to extend a life beyond death
through a process of projected possession,
habitation and renaissance’ (Law 2002a:8).
The relationships created through processes of
gift giving and exchange, and the way that the
heirloom both signifies death yet symbolically
prolongs life, are of primary interest to Law.
Writing about Siopis’ ‘Sympathetic Magic’, Law
(2002a:10) states
This exhibition takes Will – the projected
end of a life still in progress – as its point
of departure to reflect upon the historical
biography made corporeal through the
heirloom and thereby chart a system of
inheritance via a material network of social
relations past, present and future.
After the death of the artist, those heirlooms
will stand in for the body of the artist,
thereby symbolically prolonging her life.
Law’s emphasis on the work Will (1997- )
suggests that the way the heirloom connects
the giver and the recipient is the sympathetic
magic alluded to in the title of the exhibition.
Ironically, in the exhibition, the process is
alluded to, yet suspended in the process of the
‘will’ becoming artwork, exhibited in an art
museum, it is suspended in time in the vitrine.
The ‘will’ is constructed as an imagined future
for objects frozen in the moment of exhibition.
So, the Maussian notion of the significance of
the object in exchange is nullified, because the
object is no longer in that kind of exchange.
Law (2002b:16) suggests that it is Siopis’
ongoing interest in exploring personal and
collective trauma – which Law allegorically
links to the transition to democracy in the
‘new South Africa’ – that underlies the works
in this series of installations. She asserts that
‘Siopis is interested in recovering a genealogy of
origins – a seeking out of the first and deepest
wound’ (2002b:26). The objects in these
installations are seen as objects onto which
feelings of trauma, loss, guilt, and even hysteria
and melancholia have been displaced. In
thinking about the series of installations, what
most affected the author as viewer was being
there, with those objects in the space. Siopis’
ability to affect viewers and make their bodily
experience of the work part of the exhibition,
is one of her skills in creating installations. It
is the viewers’ relationship with the objects –
displayed differently in each of the installations
– which was omitted from Law’s discussions,
yet which forms the starting point for this
essay. Law’s discussion further omits questions
of how the mechanisms of display obscured
the specificity of the objects used, and how
that affects the meanings of the objects for us,
the viewers. She, like Siopis, does not question
the artist’s right to appropriate others’ objects,
which is assumed in this series of installations.
Questions about how the meanings of those
objects were affected by the way the objects
were displayed, are addressed here.
From representation to re-presentation
The shift from representations of elements
of everyday life, for example, in Braque’s Le
Portugais (The Emigrant) (1911),2 in which
fragments of words from newspapers and other
still life objects were ‘drawn’ on the picture
plane, to the inclusion of an actual piece of
rope and a piece of oil-cloth with a design of
chair caning printed on it in Picasso’s Still
Life with Chair Caning (1911–1912),3 are
arguably two of the first instances in which
objects from everyday life were included in
Modern art. When artists select objects from
the world to be used in artworks, these objects
move from everyday social practices and are
embedded in the discourse of art, in which a
different set of cultural practices are enacted.
In so far as these objects are inalienable parts
of the artwork, the objects acquire the aura
and status of ‘art’ that similar objects, which
remain part of everyday practice, do not. In the
process such objects become ‘found objects’.
A found object may be a fragment which is
used as is, or it may be altered as it becomes
embedded in the artwork. When a found
object is ‘recognisable’ as an object from the
world, traces of the object’s original context
and significance provoke new possibilities of
meaning in the artwork. Issues of authorship
and the authenticity of artworks are central to
the discourse on found objects in art.
The idea of the ‘found object’ is built
around <the binary of artworks> and what
Danto (1981:VI) refers to as ‘mere things’. In
Still Life with Chair Caning the image is no
longer a window onto the world; it literally
includes a fragment of the world, thus elevating
the mundane to the status of art. At that time,
this challenged conventions of representation
and prevailing romantic notions of the ‘work
of art’ as the expression of technical skill
and absolute beauty (Golding 1959:103).
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Golding (1951:106) argues that it was ‘the
Cubists’ curiosity in exploring unorthodox
technical procedures and the ability to see
aesthetic possibilities in objects and materials
hitherto not thought to have any artistic
value’ that paved the way for later avant-
garde experiments which saw the inclusion of
everyday objects in artworks. Since Picasso and
Braque’s early experiments with collage and
assemblage, artists throughout the 20th century
have incorporated objects from everyday
life into their artworks, in supposedly ‘anti-
art’ gestures meant to critique conventions,
and, later, the very institutions of art. Such
experiments with found objects are evident
in, for example, Duchamp’s ‘readymades’,
Schwitters’ ‘merz art’, Surrealist installations,
and Rauschenberg’s ‘combine paintings’.
While linked in their use of what was
previously considered non-art materials, and
in their unorthodox methods, Duchamp’s
‘readymades’ mark a significant shift from the
way Picasso and Braque used found objects
in their assemblages. Picasso and Braque
included fragments of real items in their
collages, reconstituting those things within
the new environment of the artwork, while
Duchamp designated ‘whole’ objects, such
as a bottle rack and a urinal (which he did
little to change), as artworks. In a letter to
the magazine, The Blind Man, in May 1917,
under the pseudonym, R. Mutt, after his
submission Fountain was refused entry to the
open exhibition of the Society of Independent
Artists in New York, Duchamp (in Harrison et.
al. 2006:252) wrote
Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands
made the fountain or not has no
importance. He CHOSE it. HE took an
ordinary article of life, placed it so that
its useful significance disappeared under
the new title and point of view – created a
new thought for that object.
Later, Duchamp (in Heartney 2008:40)
declared that the selection of ‘readymades’
was ‘based on a reaction of visual indifference
with at the same time an absence of good or
bad taste; in fact a complete anaesthesia’.
Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ challenged the
nature of artistic authorship and notions
of the authenticity of art, because of their
play on long-held assumptions. Benjamin
(2003:251) argues that the aura of an artwork
is inextricable from its ‘authenticity’, which is
contingent upon it being an ‘original’ artwork,
with a unique existence in time and space. The
aura of the artwork is challenged by processes
of mechanical reproduction, and the creation of
artworks through mechanical means because,
according to Benjamin (2003:254), in this
process its singular existence (its originality)
is replaced with many reproductions. Berger
(1972:21) points out that despite an age of
mechanical reproduction the artwork retains its
aura not as a unique object, but as the original
of the reproduction. Duchamp’s ‘readymades’
demonstrate that the aura of authenticity does
not necessarily lie in the trace of the hand of
the maker, but is linked to the concept of the
artist as genius creator. Ironically, as Buskirk
(2005:3) argues, in the case of Duchamp
‘the removal of the artist’s hand rather than
lessening the importance of artistic authorship,
makes the sure connection between work and
artist that much more significant’.
Duchamp would later extend his use
of found objects to creating installations
that activated the total space of the room
for the 1938 Exposition Internationale du
Surréalisme in Paris and the 1942 First
Papers of Surrealism Exhibition in New York,
which he was instrumental in organising and
curating (Kachur 2001:xvi). In these Surrealist
exhibitions viewers were immersed in the
artwork, which heightened the sense of the
uncanny, due to the use of objects in bizarre
combinations and strange juxtapositions,
as is evident in Duchamp’s 1200 Coal
Sack’s <check spelling>(1938),4 made of
approximately 1200 coal sacks filled with
newspapers so as to look as if they were filled
with coal, which were hung from the ceiling of
the exhibition space above a coal brazier on the
floor (2001:29). Kachur (2001: xvi) remarks
that ‘Duchamp’s displays have continued to
have an impact on subsequent installation art,
even up to our day’.
Through his ‘merz art’, Kurt Schwitters
extended the use of collage and assemblage
to creating artworks, architecture, poems and
even stage designs from discarded materials
from everyday life, which he obsessively
collected. These include street car tickets,
bent wheels, twine, tissue paper, tins, and
bits of wood and other discarded debris
(Schmalenbach 1967:94). According to
Schwitters’ manifesto of ‘merz art’, refined
over many years in numerous publications,
including letters and his Merz magazine, the
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The framing of objects in Penny Siopis’ ‘Sympathetic Magic’
two main criteria of ‘merz art’ are a rejection
of objective representation and the use of any
and all materials, which Schwitters obsessively
collected (Schmalenbach 1967:89). Of
the origins of ‘merz art’ Schwitters (in
Schmalenbach 1967:96) wrote:
At first I tried to construct new art forms
out of the remains of former culture. This
gave rise to Merz painting, a new kind of
painting that makes use of every kind of
material, manufactured pigments no less
than junk from junk piles.
Schwitters asserted that his innovation lay
in the fact that he treated all materials as
equal in his collages, made of (formerly)
non-art materials and junk. He viewed this
non-hierarchical approach as a form of
liberation from the limiting concerns of oil paint
(Schmalenbach 1967:96).
In a discussion of the relationship of the
neo-avant-garde of 1960s New York to the
historical avant-garde, Foster (1996:44)
argues that far from mimicking the practices
of the historical avant-garde of the early 20th
century, neo-avant-garde artists in the 1950s
and 1960s in America and Europe built
on the foundational moves of the historical
avant-garde, which allowed for a critique
of art institutions – something which the
historical avant-garde failed to do. Following
Foster (1996), Buskirk (2005:7) argues that
as successive artists referenced the artistic
precedents established by the Modernist artists
before them, they often brought together
multiple sources and distinct approaches.
<check whether meaning is still correct in
this section> This eclecticism resulted in
meta-textual artworks that, while referencing
previous works, nevertheless differed from
them. This is partially evident in the works
of the American artist, Robert Rauschenberg,
who combined discarded found materials
and objects with art materials and personal
memorabilia in apparently non-hierarchical,
random groupings on the surface of his
‘combine paintings’ (Joseph 2003:138).
Within these, each part of the collage seems
to have the same importance, yet demands
to be looked at as a unit and also in relation
to other elements (Krauss 1974/2002:41).
Rauschenberg’s seemingly non-hierarchical
treatment of collaged elements added an
awareness of the experience of looking to his
work. Krauss (1974/2002:41) argues that
what Rauschenberg was insisting upon
was a model for art that was not involved
with what might be called the cognitive
moment (as in the single-image painting)
but instead was tied to the durée – to
the kind of extended temporality that
is involved in experiences like memory,
reflection, narration, proposition.
Krauss (1974/ 2002:51) points out that it
was through Rauschenberg’s particular way
of working with collaged materials that the
artist introduced the idea of the space of the
artwork being similar to spaces of memory.
Krauss (1974/2002:50) argues that in
‘combine paintings’ such as Small Rebus
(1956),5 all the collaged elements (the family
snapshot, the reproduction of Titian’s Rape
of Europa and a child’s drawing) seem to
share an equal presence on the surface of
the painting. She points out that it is only in
memory that equal importance is assigned to
an image we fantasise about or an impression
we recollect. That the space of the artwork
evokes the space of memory is plausible,
Krauss (1974/2002:52) asserts, because
Rauschenberg’s treatment and use of images
transformed the convention of pictorial reality
at the time.
The transfiguration of the commonplace
In ‘The transfiguration of the commonplace’,
Danto (1981) explores the implications of the
inclusion of everyday objects in art for art. His
thesis is driven by the underlying question:
‘What separates artworks from mere things?’
(1981:vi). It was seeing Warhol’s Brillo
Boxes (1964),6 which consists of a stack
of wooden boxes that Warhol made to look
almost indistinguishable from boxes containing
tubs of Brillo, as found in supermarkets, that
prompted Danto to question ‘once an artist
has deemed one thing to be art, how can
this be differentiated from other things that
look like it?’ (1981:vi). Looking to Duchamp
for the antecedents for what he referred to
as ‘the transfiguration of the commonplace’
in art, Danto proceeded to systematically
analyse the possible criteria that might
differentiate artworks from other forms of
material culture. Danto (1981: vi) argues
that Duchamp’s gesture had a ‘profound
philosophical originality’ since it begged the
question of ‘how such objects get to be works
of art, since all that would have been shown
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is that they have an unanticipated aesthetic
dimension’. According to Danto, two essential
characteristics that separate artworks from
‘mere things’ are that an artwork expresses
something about its content (1981:148), and
that through the artwork, the artist enables
us to see his/her way of seeing the world
(1981:207). Thus what the artwork is about
is central to the question of what an artwork is
(1981:52). Danto (1981:208) acknowledges
that these characteristics were part of art
making long before Duchamp and Warhol,
finally arguing:
In the end this transfiguration of a
common object transforms nothing in the
art world. It only brings to consciousness
the structures of art which, to be sure,
required a certain historical development
before the metaphor was possible.
Thus, Brillo Boxes was made possible because
of historical developments in art, like the
invention of the readymade. Once accepted as
art, these so-called ‘anti-art artworks’ expose
the discourses of which they form part.
The first part of this essay focused on
examples of how artists incorporated found
objects in art in the first decades of the
20th century. At first, the inclusion of found
objects was understood as a challenge to
traditional forms of representation, and then,
as successive artists began to experiment
with the inclusion of found objects, became
part of a repertoire of accepted art-making
methods. The use of found objects can no
longer be understood in terms of anti-art
gestures such as those employed in the first
decades of the 20th century, because found
objects have become continuously revisited
and are continuously current elements in art
making – from sculpture, to installation and
performance art. This does not suggest a linear
development between Picasso, Duchamp,
Schwitters and Rauschenberg’s use of found
objects. Rather, following Foster (1996:44)
and Danto (1981:208), the suggestion is that
experiments with collage, assemblage and
installation, on the part of the historical and
neo-avant-garde, opened up new possibilities
for later artists such as Siopis, who are self-
reflexively engaging with the discourse of art.
Contemporary South African artists such as
Penny Siopis, Usha Seejarim, Alan Alborough
and Kay Hassan, to name a few, incorporate
found objects in various ways in their works.
Because the inclusion of found objects is
part of contemporary art-making praxis, an
approach which goes beyond an understanding
of these practices as the anti-art gestures of the
historical and neo-avant-garde, is needed. One
such approach is to focus on what happens
to objects when they are removed from the
field of everyday life and are placed in the
field of art. Danto (1981) has shown that the
inclusion of found objects in artworks may do
nothing to change the status of the artwork
as art, but the status of the object as object
is changed by this transition. The change in
the ontological status of the object qua object,
caused by the transition of the object from the
everyday into the field of art, is largely ignored
by Danto, who focuses on the implications of
including objects in artworks, to enlarge our
understanding of ‘art’. In the next part of this
article, the emphasis falls on the different ways
in which Siopis used objects in ‘Sympathetic
Magic’ (2002). The discussion will focus on
how the manner in which these objects were
incorporated into the field of exhibition affected
their ontological status, as well as the meaning
of the artwork.
Framing ‘Sympathetic Magic’
The entrance to the former Gertrude Posel
Gallery at the University of the Witwatersrand
opened on a large, white, cube-like exhibition
space on the upper floor, normally used for
rotating contemporary art. A spiral staircase
in the centre of the gallery led to a smaller,
more intimate exhibition space downstairs.
The walls of the smaller space were lined
with glass cabinets, especially constructed
to house rotating exhibitions of artefacts
from the Wits Art Gallery’s Standard Bank
Collection of African art. For ‘Sympathetic
Magic’ (2002), Siopis made use of both
floors, purposely utilising the gallery’s
architecture, glass cabinets and permanent
collection. The exhibition comprised a series of
interconnected installations made of a range of
her own artworks, domestic objects, personal
memorabilia and African artefacts on loan from
the Wits Art Gallery and the Standard Bank
Collection. The museum (and, by extension,
the art gallery) constitutes an environment
that is engaged with a particular kind of
ritualised looking (Alpers 1991:25). Part of this
ritualised looking comes from how museum-
goers have been conditioned to behave when
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engaging with displays. Duncan (1991:90)
argues that because of their link to the state’s
demonstration of power and to certain kinds
of control of knowledge and space in the
17th century, in the modern world museums
fulfil the ceremonial function that temples
and civic buildings did in the ancient world.
Therefore, in modern society, museums and art
galleries are secular temples offering a learning
experience that demands a particular kind of
contemplation and a special quality of attention
(1991:91).7 Baxandall (1991:33) points out
that every act of display involves conscious
choices about inclusion, exclusion and value,
on the part of the curators or exhibition
organisers, whose ideas and concerns represent
a particular cultural perspective. Within each
act of display the ideas and values of the
culture from which the object comes, along
with its purpose, and the ideas, purposes and
values of the curators, come into contact with
the culturally determined ideas of the viewer,
who comes to the exhibition expecting to look
at things on display (Baxandall 1991:34).
Thus, the field of exhibition is characterised by
relationships between what is on display, the
audience and the curator. Within this domain
the curators have the power to represent, and
in so doing to validate their theories of culture
(1991:34). Therefore, Baxandall (1991:34)
states that ‘it seems axiomatic that it is not
possible to exhibit objects without putting a
construction upon them’ and so ‘there is no
exhibition without construction and therefore
– in an extended sense – appropriation’.
Baxandall’s discussion focuses specifically on
exhibiting artefacts from ‘other cultures’ in
which the objects may not have been created
for the purposes of exhibition. While not
the same, a parallel can be drawn between
exhibiting artefacts from other cultures and
including everyday objects in art, since neither
object was made to be looked at as art. In
the field of exhibition, curators communicate
their ideas to the audience and influence how
the audience interprets the objects on display
through existing conventions of arrangement
and display, including the use of vitrines,
special lighting and texts (such as labels and
catalogues) which denote ‘elements of naming,
information, and exposition the exhibitor makes
available to the viewer in whatever form’
(Baxandall 1991:37).
Such conventions of display are framing
devices that affect viewers’ interpretations.
This idea is reiterated by Bal (2002:137), who
argues that framing in an exhibition is a form
of intervention on the part of the critic, scholar,
curator or artist, that focuses viewers’ attention
to look at objects and artworks in a particular
way. The frame is a device for containment
and exclusion, and therefore speaks to
power relations around the object, inducing
the viewer to look at the object with greater
attentiveness and in specifically directed ways
(Bal 2002:137). It is through their framing
devices that Western museums communicate
different behaviours in relation to the objects
they contain – including art. Conventionally,
Western art is not displayed in vitrines and is
therefore accessible, but it is also guarded, not
least by learned behaviour and written signs
warning people not to touch. Non-Western
material is often imprisoned, placed in vitrines,
as if in quarantine, and so is interpreted but not
sanctified in the same way as Western art.
The installations in ‘Sympathetic Magic’
were characterised by a conscious play with
aspects of exhibitionism, as evidenced in
Siopis’ use of certain existing conventions of
display, contrasted with a deliberate inversion
of these conventions through unexpected
arrangements of objects, including her
own previous artworks. This self-reflexive
exploration of exhibitionism reveals Siopis’
critical questioning of assumptions around
exhibitionism and spectatorship. On entering
the exhibition, the viewer was confronted
with the artists’ seminal history painting,
Melancholia (1989) (1), suspended vertically
from the ceiling so that viewers could see
the front and back. In this arrangement the
painting, not made for the exhibition but
on loan from the Johannesburg Art Gallery
collection, was treated as an object. In seeing
the back (which is usually hidden), viewers
were able to see what the painting is.
They were then confronted with what, from
the outside, appeared to be a pile of used
domestic furniture and other objects (2). The
pile consisted of broken chairs, sets of drawers,
carpets, souvenirs, and even a moth-eaten
taxidermied crocodile, all precariously perched
on top of each other. These objects were
attached to a dome-like structure that covered
the stairwell. Much of the stuff in the pile was
part of the detritus of life: Broken toys and
old clothes, rescued from the rubbish heap
to be elevated as part of art, but nevertheless
presented in a heap. The structure turned the
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1 Penny Siopis, Melancholia (1989). Oil on canvas, 197.5 cm x 175.5 cm. Johannesburg Art
Gallery collection. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery Editions and the artist.
2 Penny Siopis, ‘Sympathetic Magic’ (2002). Installation views covering the stairwell, University of the Witwatersrand Art
Galleries. Found objects, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery Editions and the artist.
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stairwell into a cave-like environment, through
which viewers had to walk to reach the lower
level of the gallery, and into which Siopis
could insert objects. Like Rauschenberg’s
combined elements, these objects had no
hierarchy, but viewers experienced them
in time, as they moved through the space.
Through first foregrounding the material
reality of the painting as a painted surface,
and then confronting the viewer with an
environment made of many things that could
be understood as a physical manifestation
of the pile of things in Melancholia, in this
exhibition the artist plays with the relationship
between representing things and using real
things as a means of representation. Siopis
reinforces the idea of a connection between her
installations and her paintings by describing
the way she works with objects as not unlike
the way she works with paint. For her, creating
installations is a response to each object in
each new situation. It is important that she
creates the installations herself. In doing so she
considers the placement of each object, just
as she responds to the surface of the painting
in considering the placement of new brush
marks. The artists’ labour is a response to the
materiality of the objects and the paint, as she
works to evoke new meanings (Siopis 2012).
Writing about Siopis’ installations, Atkinson
(2000[2005]:129) suggests that
the surfaces of the paintings seem
to have mutated into the surfaces of
the installation, provoking a similar
experience; we see ourselves seeing
ourselves in the moment of recognition,
of empathy with something we at first
thought to be truly bizarre.
Inside the cave viewers were immersed in
textures, shapes, smells, deep velvet reds
next to army camouflage (3). There was
something profoundly affecting about being
so completely engulfed. The immersion in this
environment challenged the usual distance
between artefact and onlooker which one
finds in exhibitions. In this installation, the
viewer moved from being an onlooker to
being part of the artwork, experiencing the
artwork from the inside. Ironically, because
of the way objects were layered on top of
one another and crammed together, despite
their close proximity the viewer could not
see the objects clearly. Objects obscured
other objects, or only revealed a fragment of
something – a bit of fur; a tatty teddy bear; a
Boy Scout uniform, immaculately ironed and
unexpectedly pristine amidst a collection of
cast-offs. In this installation, familiar objects
were made strange, evoking a Surrealist sense
of the uncanny through the new relationships
between objects in the arrangement. Speaking
of her relationship to things, Siopis notes that
‘in a nutshell, my encounter with objects is an
encounter with that strange familiarity we call
the “uncanny”. Objects are sentient things that
force us to think and reflect on our relations
with the object worlds we inhabit’ (in Mbembe
2005:124).
3 Penny Siopis, ‘Sympathetic Magic’ (2002). Detail of
installation covering the stairwell, University of the
Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Found objects, dimensions
variable. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery Editions and the
artist.
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The concept of the uncanny is attributed to
Freud. In his 1919 essay, ‘The uncanny’ (Das
Unheimliche), Freud (Masschelein 2011:1)8
describes the uncanny as the ‘the feeling of
unease that arises when something familiar
suddenly becomes strange and unfamiliar’.
Although by the end of the 20th century the
concept of the uncanny was not limited to
the definition of the word, Freud’s conception
relates to the meaning of the German word
unheimlich (2011:7) which Freud stressed
was not directly translatable, but approximates
the negative of ‘familiar’ or ‘homely’ (2011:7).
Freud drew attention to how the word concept
is more than the mere negation of what is
familiar, since it conjures up the familiar
(heimlich) in the process of negating it
(2011:8). Thus, the uncanny embodies both
familiarity and strangeness simultaneously.
Rather than seeing this as a contradiction,
Masschelein (2011:8) argues that from a
psychoanalytic point of view,
the prefix ‘un-‘ is not merely a linguistic
negation; it is the ‘token of repression’.
This entails that the uncanny is marked
by the unconscious that does not know
negation or contradiction; even when
something is negated, it still remains
present in the unconscious.
The blurring of the boundaries between
what is strange and familiar in the uncanny
is perceived as unnatural, and therefore
threatening and frightening. In this exhibition,
Siopis extended her sense of experiencing the
objects as uncanny to us, the viewers, who
encountered familiar objects in strange and
dislocated ways. Many objects lay on their
sides, or were partially obscured, heavy things
were suspended above viewers’ heads to
heighten the sense of the uncanny. In Siopis’
installations, the uncanny was evoked to make
the viewer look again at things that usually
go unnoticed, thereby challenging what Miller
(2005:5) refers to as ‘the humility of things’.
According to Miller’s theory on the humility of
objects, objects help us to be ‘us’, i.e. objects
have the capacity to be in front of us, or to be
on the periphery of our vision and still affect
our behaviour. According to Miller (2005:5),
objects are important not because they are
evident and physically constrain or enable,
but often precisely because we do not ‘see’
them. The less we are aware of them,
the more powerfully they can determine
our expectations by setting the scene and
ensuring normative behaviour.
For Miller, the meaning of objects lies not
only in the meanings we attach to them but
stresses that, through their use, a ‘process of
objectification’ happens in the Hegelian sense,
in which the objects make us as much as we
make them. Miller (2005:8) refers to Hegel’s
‘phenomenology of spirit’, which suggests there
can be no fundamental separation of humanity
and materiality, since what we produce is a
reflection of ourselves, and what we produce
also produces us. According to Miller (2005:8),
for Hegel, ‘everything that we are and do arises
out of the reflection upon ourselves given by the
mirror image of the process by which we create
form and are created by this same process’. If
what we produce is a reflection of us, it follows
that we both construct those things and are, to
some extent, constructed by them, since those
things we produce reflect who we are, along
with our ways of doing things, and thereby
show how we reflect upon ourselves. This is
an idea Siopis alludes to in an interview with
Mbembe (2005:124), who suggests that in
Siopis’ installations, objects seem to appear
as ‘souvenirs of the self as well as reflective
of particular social-historical moments’. In
response, Siopis notes that in her work she
does not make a specific distinction between
the personal and the social significance of
things (in Mbembe 2005:124), but rather that
‘encounters with objects produce subjects’
(2005:125). Siopis’ assertion echoes the
Hegelian idea that objects make us, as much
as we make them. Through her conflation of
the personal and the social in her use of objects
in installations, Siopis shows us ourselves.
Excluding the artefacts loaned from the
University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries’
Standard Bank Collection, the objects used
in this installation are part of the artist’s
concatenation of things horded, inherited,
found, received and accumulated through
multiple processes. These objects are the
artist’s medium, variously reconfigured for
installations by Siopis prior to and since this
exhibition (Atkinson 2000[2005]:76–79).
For example, prior to this, the objects were
used in Siopis’ exhibition Reconnaissance
1900–1997 (1997)(4) at the Goodman
Gallery in Johannesburg, and in her installation
Sacrifices (1998)(5), at the University of the
Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Since ‘Sympathetic
Magic’, the objects have been used as part of
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4 (Above) Penny Siopis, Reconnaissance, 1900-1997 (1997).
Detail of installation at the Goodman Gallery. Found objects,
dimensions variable. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery Editions
and the artist.
5 (Right) Penny Siopis, Sacrifices (1998). Detail of one of
four panels of a site-specific installation at the University
of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, artist’s collection. Found
objects, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery
Editions and the artist.
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Siopis’ installation Snare (2004) at Kunsthaus
Baselland. This shows that objects are not
inherently meaningful, but rather have multiple
meanings attached to them as they are made,
used, and move through different social
contexts. Appadurai (1986:1) argues that
objects are not inherently valuable – value is
socially and culturally determined. Value is also
assigned to objects for various reasons related
to their commodity value or economic value,
their rarity, ritual or aesthetic value (Appadurai
1986:10). An object can be valuable in more
than one way, thus Appadurai (1986:10)
suggests that as objects move through different
social contexts they acquire layers of meaning
which he refers to as their ‘social life’. The
notion of ‘the social life of things’ implies that
objects can have multiple meanings that can
be thought of as semiotic, i.e. their meanings
are contextual and rely on the place of the
object in a system of use. While outsiders are
not always privy to the former social lives of
things, traces of their use (marks, scuff-marks)
may offer clues about their former lives. What
is clear is that in their capacity to hold multiple
meanings objects resist simple definition, or
a simple closure of meaning. In each new
presentation, objects are grouped, arranged
and presented in different ways, provoking
new interpretations. As such, the objects
are always in the process of becoming. Each
new arrangement and different presentation
of items can be understood as adding a new
layer of meaning to richly layered objects,
and allowing a surfacing of traces of their
former lives, as things in the world, and as
parts of installations that add meaning to the
artwork. In this particular installation, the
objects were not singled out as the painting-
as-object (Melancholia) and other objects were
in the vitrines downstairs. Individual objects
were important because of their inclusion in
the collection and how it was presented as
a pile when looking from the outside, and as
a cave when looking from the inside. In this
installation, the collected objects were rescued
from the rubbish heap to become part of art,
and in obscuring their specificity they signify
‘the detritus of life’.
In contrast to the sense of immersion
experienced in the pile and cave, glass
separated the viewers from the arrangements
of objects installed in the gallery’s permanent
vitrines. One vitrine held an installation of
mannequins’ body parts, lying in a stack,
evoking a pile of corpses and Surrealist
exhibitions of the 1930s (6). Next to this was
a boarded-up vitrine with light coming through
cracks in the panels. There was enough of
a gap to see between the panels, but not
enough to make out what was inside. This was
reminiscent of the artist’s previous site-specific
installation titled Permanent Collection (7),
an installation of African art and artefacts, in
the downstairs exhibition space of the Wits
Art Gallery, as part of the First Johannesburg
Biennale in 1995 (Law 2002b:14), which
engaged more directly with the gallery’s usual
way of displaying collections. Adjacent to this,
the artist made an installation using artefacts
from the University of the Witwatersrand Art
Galleries’ Standard Bank Collection of African
art (8). The installation featured southern
African milk pails lying on their sides, southern
African beadwork, headrests, West African
masks, a mancala board, drums, baskets and
mat racks. The objects were wrapped with
layers of batting which approximated a form
of geographical sedimentation around the
objects, thus symbolically making them into
obscure archaeological artefacts buried within
the museum. As in the presentation of the
objects in the pile and cave, this seemingly
random collection of artefacts was displayed
without any reference to their original functions,
where they were from, and what they are.
But the artefacts from the University of the
Witwatersrand Art Galleries’ Standard Bank
Collection are ontologically different from those
things in the pile/cave – they are not part of
the detritus of everyday life that made up
Siopis’ pile and cave. Although some items
were domestic objects, they had already been
rescued from their potential end on a pile of
detritus by moves that were politically inflected
when they were selected, taken out of everyday
circulation, included in the Standard Bank
Collection and housed at the University of
the Witwatersrand Art Gallery. These actions
were politically inflected in the context of
historical debates on the status of African art as
artworks.9
In this disregard of the ontological situation
of these objects – first, being removed from
their contexts of use; then being disoriented
in their physical orientation through lying
on their sides and denying their function
– they are multiply displaced. In their non-
specificity, and the ways they were displayed
and wrapped, they were reduced to piles of
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6 Penny Siopis, ‘Sympathetic Magic’ (2002). Installation in vitrine, University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Found objects including mannequins, dimensions variable.
Courtesy of Goodman Gallery Editions and the artist.
7 Penny Siopis, Permanent Collection (1995). Installation in vitrine, University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Found objects, including artefacts from University of the
Witwatersrand Art Galleries’ Standard Bank Collection, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery Editions and the artist.
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8 Penny Siopis, ‘Sympathetic Magic’ (2002). Installation in vitrine, University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Found objects, including artefacts from the University of the
Witwatersrand Art Galleries’ Standard Bank Collection, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery Editions and the artist.
9 Penny Siopis, Will (1997-). Installation details from ‘Sympathetic Magic’ (2002), University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Found objects, dimensions variable, artist’s
collection. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery Editions and the artist.
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The framing of objects in Penny Siopis’ ‘Sympathetic Magic’
things simultaneously signifying and obscuring
‘African culture’. The objects had already been
dislocated from their everyday circulation
before being marked as special, as worthy
of a museum collection. In this installation
Siopis stripped away this uniqueness and
symbolically relegated the items to obscurity.
The arrangement evokes death – much as
the mannequins’ limbs that resemble a pile
of corpses in the adjacent vitrine – as if the
items were buried things, unknown and
unknowable. Despite the objects in the pile
and cave also being symbolically stripped of
their specificity, given the contested history of
the appropriation and display of these kinds of
artefacts, and South Africa’s recent emergence
from apartheid, where black people’s culture
and artefacts were not considered to have any
worth other than as ethnographic specimens,
here the reduction of these objects to signs of
‘African culture’ is insensitive and problematic.
To what extent is Siopis empathetic to the
objects and their meaning, and the contested
nature of the history of the display of objects
such as these, or, is she, as a contemporary
artist working within established discourses
of appropriation and installation, exempt from
such ethical issues?
The heirloom
The final work in this series of installations was
the ongoing work Will (1997- ) (9), consisting
of a collection of objects the artist will bestow
on recipients at the time of her death. Like
so many things of personal value, the objects
making up Will (1997- ) are not economically
valuable – a plastic anatomy mannequin, her
son’s first tooth, an umbilical cord. It was
only in this installation that the objects were
presented in their own, unique spaces – on a
plinth, with a spotlight and a label to address
the specificity and uniqueness of each object.
The labels were not descriptive, but provided
viewers with personal information that would
otherwise have been obscure, including what
the object was, where it was from, and who it
would be bestowed on and why. Viewers were
thus privy not only to the pasts of the objects,
as seen by Siopis, but also to their Siopis-
imagined futures. There is a contrast between
the singling out and ordering of the objects
presented in Will (1997- ), and the seeming
chaos of the objects in the pile and the cave.
Significantly, the isolation of the objects, on
plinths, with labels and lights, within glass
cabinets, marked the objects as different from
those in other parts of the installation, which
formed part of a pile or were obfuscated in
layers of batting.
Not only are the objects forming part of
Will (1997- ) singled out in the manner in
which they are displayed, the title Will turns
them into heirlooms. In the introduction to
the catalogue, curator Jennifer Law (2002a)
discusses the idea of an heirloom bestowed
through a will in terms of Mauss’ notions of gift
giving and exchange. Law (2002a:10) writes
This exhibition takes Will – the projected
end of a life still in progress – as its point
of departure to reflect upon the historical
biography made corporeal through the
heirloom and thereby chart a system of
inheritance via a material network of social
relations past, present and future.
Within this description an heirloom is
understood as ‘a special kind of gift – one
which aims to extend a life beyond death
through a process of projected possession,
habitation and renaissance’ (2002a:8).
In Law’s article, objects are framed to
simultaneously signify ‘history and the body
of the nation’, as well as ‘the body of the
artist’, through synecdoche of the heirloom
(<ref>). After the death of the artist, those
heirlooms will stand in for the body of the
artist, symbolically prolonging her life. Law’s
emphasis on the will suggests that the way the
heirloom connects the giver and the recipient is
the ‘sympathetic magic’ alluded to in the title
of the exhibition. Ironically, in the exhibition
the process is alluded to, but suspended in
the process of the ‘will’ becoming artwork.
So, the Maussian notion of the significance of
the object in exchange is nullified because the
object is no longer in that kind of exchange.
The ‘will’ is constructed as an imagined
future for objects frozen in the moment of
exhibition (Law 2002b:16). The ways in
which the notion of the gift have been used
in this context may also be inflected through
the racial differentiation of objects. Law’s
discussion omits questions about how objects
were displayed in the rest of the exhibition, and
how these mechanisms of display obscured
the specificity of the objects used. She, like
Siopis, does not question the artist’s right to
appropriate others’ objects – something which
is assumed in this series of installations.
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Conclusion
In this exhibition, objects are brought into the
field of art and framed as part of the ‘artworks’.
When objects are included in artworks, the
object, in so far as it is an inalienable part
of the artwork, acquires the aura of ‘art’ as
it is framed in particular ways by the context
of art. In this process the ‘the humility of
things’ is challenged since the objects are
no longer quietly in the background, but are
presented for a particular kind of viewing in
ways that make the familiar seem strange,
and affect interpretations of the artwork. The
ways in which artworks are presented reveal
constructions of meaning.
In this series of installations not all things
were treated in the same manner. Different
objects were framed in particular ways in terms
of how they were presented in the installations
and in the accompanying catalogue. Siopis
makes use of different framing devices to
distinguish and thereby construct different
meanings for the objects. The pile and the cave
of objects (broken old things) are distinguished
from the display of the painting as a single
object, and also from the African artefacts
(lying on their sides and buried under batting)
and other objects displayed in the vitrines.
Through obfuscating the objects’ specificity
their agency is denied – they are ‘dead’ things.
The effect of this obscuring and revealing is
that everything becomes part of the detritus of
life, except those things that have deliberately
been rescued from the rubbish pile. In this
exhibition the only place where the uniqueness
of objects is ‘respected’, is with regard to the
personal, and these objects’ agency as nodes in
a social network of relations, is foregrounded.
Here there is a symbolic change rather than
a symbolic exchange, as the title suggests,
since the objects are no longer in circulation
and have undergone transformation as part
of art through their inclusion in this series of
installations. In Siopis’ work the materiality
of the objects is the material of the work, and
each new presentation of objects is a way of
thinking with things. The exhibition also shows
that in the field of exhibition objects are not
only manipulated, but they are also agents
that affect us, and thereby become part of the
meaning-making process.
Acknowledgement
The author thanks the NRF for awarding her a
Thuthuka Grant which funded this research. The
opinions expressed are those of the author and are
not to be attributed to the NRF.
Notes
1 An extract from Law’s (2002b) catalogue
essay ‘The full catastrophe’ was reworked and
published as an essay titled ‘The gift’ (in Smith
2005).
2 Georges Braque, Le Portugais (The Emigrant)
(1911). Oil on canvas, 117 cm x 81cm,
Kunstmuseum Basel.
3 Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning
(1911–12). Oil and oil cloth on canvas with
rope frame, oval, 27 cm x 35cm. Musée
Picasso, Paris.
4 Marcel Duchamp, 1200 Coal Sacks (1938).
Installation including approximately 1 200
jute coal sacks stuffed with newspapers, and
a coal brazier. Dimensions variable. Collection
Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.
5 Robert Rauschenberg, Small Rebus (1956).
Combine painting, 88.9 cm x 116.84 cm.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The
Panza Collection. (Reproduced in Joseph, B.W.,
ed. 2002:51).
6 Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes (1964). Silkscreen
ink on painted wood, 43.5 cm x 43.5 cm x 35.5
cm. Private collection.
7 In an earlier essay, Duncan and Wallach
(1980:449) argued that the idea of the museum
as a secular temple is reinforced by traditional
museum architecture, that in their emulation of
classical Greek temples, Roman civic buildings
and Renaissance palaces appropriated the
values inscribed in the ceremonial architecture
of the ancient world. This monumental
architecture is meant to impress upon visitors,
who use the buildings or pass through their
doors, society’s most revered beliefs and values
(Duncan et al. 1980:449–450). Even though
many contemporary art museums no longer
emulate classical Greek architecture, the idea of
the museum as secular temple, which houses
revered artefacts, persists in the contemporary
imagination.
8 Masschelein (2011:6) argues that it was
only in the last three decades of the 20th
century, in the wake of discursive shifts
towards post-structuralism and deconstruction
which privileged subjective experience, that
the uncanny was canonised as a concept.
She further argues that it was during this
time that the concept branched out from its
original domain of psychoanalysis into other
fields such as art history, film studies, visual
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The framing of objects in Penny Siopis’ ‘Sympathetic Magic’
art, architecture theory, postcolonial studies,
sociology and anthropology, and developed into a
theoretically layered discourse.
9 For an overview of these debates see Danto
(1988) and Kasfir (1999).
References
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Arnason, H.H. 1972. A history of modern art.
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and Hudson.
Atkinson, B. 2000[2005]. The ocean in a bottle:
Penny Siopis and the slipage of history. In Penny
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Goodman Gallery Editions.
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humanities: A rough guide. Green College
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Baxandall, M. 1991. Exhibiting intention: Some
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Karp and S.D. Levine, <pages>. Washington
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Berger, J. 1972. Ways of seeing. London: The BBC
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Buskirk, M. and M. Nixon, eds. 1996. The Duchamp
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Danto, A. 1981. The transfiguration of the
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———. 1988. Artifact and art. In Art/artifact:
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Duchamp, M. 1917. The Richard Mutt case. In
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<pages>. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Duncan, C. 1991. Art museums and the ritual of
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Heartney, E. 2008. <Art and today>. London and
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Joseph, B.W. 2003. Random order: Robert
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ISSN 0004-3389
pp 62–64
Views and (Re)Views
Some claim the right to look, while others
prefer not to
James Sey*
* James Sey is a Research Associate at the
Research Centre, Facult y of Ar t, Design and
Architecture, Universit y of Johannesburg.
‘The Right to Look from the South’
colloquium, 28–29 May 2013, University
of Pretoria.
In something of a coup for the Visual Culture
Studies discipline within the Department
of Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria
(UP), Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff of New
York University was the guest and leader of a
colloquium hosted by Visual Culture Studies at
UP, inspired by his work.
Mirzoeff is widely recognised for having
shaped the discipline of visual culture
within Western academy through a series
of influential writings. More recently, he has
also been instrumental in the rise and spread
of the ‘Occupy’ movement. This populist,
non-hierarchical organisation of concerned
left-leaning people has now spread to many
parts of the world. It provides a focus for
ordinary citizens to respond to the debt crisis,
global recession and the draconian actions of
supposedly democratic governments in support
of the so-called ‘one per cent’, i.e., the super-
elite of global financial capitalism.
Mirzoeff’s host, and convenor of the
colloquium (along with Rory du Plessis) was
Professor Amanda du Preez. She aligned the
theme of the event specifically to a recent
book by Mirzoeff, entitled The right to look:
A counterhistory of visuality (2011). In the
book, Mirzoeff identifies three ‘complexes of
visuality’ – plantation slavery, imperialism and
the present-day military-industrial complex –
and explains how, within each, power is made
to seem self-evident through techniques of
classification, separation and aestheticisation,
all predicated on modes of looking or being
permitted to look by institutional power. At the
same time, he shows how each complex of
naturalised visuality has been countered by the
enslaved, the colonised and by opponents of
war, all of whom assert autonomy by claiming
the right to look. The colloquium’s title, ‘The
Right to Look from the South’, draws from this
argument the important notion of the particular
inflections given to complexes of visuality in a
politically subaltern region of the world.
Indeed, teasing out this idea was how
Mirzoeff opened the colloquium, setting out
the terms of engagement for the two days
of what proved to herald intense discussion
and reflection. Crucially, Mirzoeff both
broadened and refined the idea of the global
South. The term usually connotes the type of
theoretical reflection on power, knowledge and
subjectivity which emerges from so-called ‘non-
metropolitan’ regions of the world, such as the
former colonies of European nations, and which
re-establishes theoretical investigation from
these regions as valid postcolonial critiques
of current geopolitical discourse. Mirzoeff
made the crucial point that the South, in this
instance, is not simply a geographical reality,
to be opposed to a Northern – or, especially
Western – mode of power and knowledge. In
this sense the idea of the South represents a
mode of theoretical and political critique – a
new way of seeing which consistently engages
critically with a thoroughly globalised and
naturalised complex of visuality.
Another reality, addressed in the opening
engagements of the colloquium, was that
of whiteness – the speakers and audience
participants in the open discussions were all
white. Mirzoeff introduced the issue not as an
insoluble problem, but as a dimension requiring
self-reflection and thought from those present.
This proved to add a crucial and challenging
dimension to the events of the next two
days. While most speakers at the colloquium
explicitly referenced Mirzoeff’s work in their
presentations, deferring to him in the room
(much to the annoyance of the man himself!),
the topics addressed were wide-ranging, and
were generally not bound by the academic
discipline from which they came.
Tatjana Pavlov-West provided an art-
historical analysis of what she termed
(following Diane Wolfrath) the classical
‘heroic rape’ motif in painting. The act
of rape, in these works, according to
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Some claim the right to look, while others prefer not to
Pavlov-West, is always in the cause of some
greater societal good, and often in the mode of
a pact between men and gods, drawing on the
myths and legends of antiquity. Pavlov-West
went on to construct a ‘countervisual’ analysis
of such representations from the point of view
of the victim, linking classical paintings in the
heroic rape idiom with more contemporary
artists and the reality of rape culture in the
current geopolitical landscape.
Myer Taub, from the University of Pretoria,
highlighted recent video performance pieces
of his own, Muscle Jew and the Voortrekker
Monument and Muscle Jew and the Miners,
to write himself into a critical narrative of
monumentalism. Adducing Judith Butler’s
idea of the ‘constitutive act’ in the use of the
body in performing social rituals, Taub, via
a confessional narrative of his own insertion
into various discourses, and his consequent
development of a quasi-autobiographical yet
historically determined character, the ‘Muscle
Jew’, concluded with a screening of the two
performance pieces, of his character interacting
with two Gauteng monuments considered
ideological cornerstones of the apartheid state.
Jenni Lauwrens’ talk was initially planned
to be about recent critical discourse related
to the so-called ‘sensory turn’, in which
the sense of sight, and discourses of the
visual, have been critiqued by ‘theorists who
believe this sense to have been privileged
in Western philosophy, art history and the
concept of aesthetics’, and to play a key role in
processes of ‘Othering’. She wished to explore
alternatives to this position, in order to reveal a
‘countervisual’ sense in which ‘subjects are …
visually engaged with each other in ways that
are neither alienating nor hostile’. In doing so
she incisively analysed a recent art installation
by artist Berco Wilsenach, in Johannesburg,
entitled The Blind Astronomer, in which braille
and star charts are aligned as objects in an
alternative sensorium which paradoxically does
not privilege vision.
Svea Josephy and Andrew Lamprecht’s
talk on photographs of South African prisoners
dovetailed neatly in the afternoon session of
the first day’s proceedings with that of co-
host Rory du Plessis, who examined archival
photographs of black and white inmates
of South African asylums from the 19th
century. Both investigations were marked by
concerns about the politics and the ethics of
photographic representation – in Josephy and
Lamprecht’s case, with the implicit eugenics of
the current vogue in South African photography
for photographing prisoners, and, in particular,
1 Nicholas Mirzoeff
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their jail tattoos. In Du Plessis’ case the critique
focused on a more explicit eugenicism, that
of different views and treatment of black
patients as opposed to white mental patients in
South African asylums during the colonial era.
Discussion around the afternoon session were
met with incredulity from Mirzoeff, in particular
about the blasé nature of the imaging of
hardened criminals in the South African oeuvre,
and their use as advertising gimmicks to deter
drunk driving.
Day two comprised one session of three
papers, followed by a comprehensive wrap-up
discussion. James Sey, from the University of
Johannesburg, kicked off with a paper focusing
on the changing political position of the land,
as both a reality and a visual trope. Beginning
with a view of recent geopolitical data about
urbanisation, and the shift from ‘developed’
to ‘developing’ economies and from rural to
urban space, the talk moved on to consider
how landscape is viewed and contested in
contemporary South African art. Sey concluded
by discussing the recent works of South African
painter, Mary Wafer, of the evocatively de-
peopled landscape of the Marikana site, on
which striking Lonmin miners were shot in cold
blood by the police last year.
Co-convenor Amanda du Preez then
changed the tenor of the event by prefacing her
own talk, also focused on the recent Marikana
tragedy, with a heartfelt confession of her
sense of the ambiguity as regards her own
position as a white Afrikaans academic. More
pointedly, she confessed to feeling as if she
were a ‘placeholder’ for black academics more
suited to critically discussing certain socio-
politic issues which featured prominently in the
colloquium’s discussions, such as discourses of
subalterity and the visual power complex. This
brought the whiteness issue, which had been
simmering below the surface, sharply back into
focus. Du Preez’s talk proceeded to link images
of the Marikana site in the press (some taken
with drone cameras) with Wafer’s aesthetic
view of the site, and to place the mediated
images in a general regime of visuality, in
which the South African government is
complicit.
Rita Swanepoel’s concluding presentation
focused on the possibility of an ethical reading
of history through the medium of art – in
particular, a reading of local artist, Willem
Boshoff’s, Panifice (2001), which featured
parts of the Gospel of Matthew, in English
and in an African language, inscribed on a
series of granite sculptures of loaves of bread.
Swanepoel’s paper speculated on the possibility
of art in this mode becoming part of a historical
discourse of mediation and reconciliation.
The concluding discussion was led by
Mirzoeff, who, rather than focusing on issues
in individual papers, summed up and tabled
key thematics over the two days. The openly
acknowledged intellectual and ethical challenge
presented by the exclusively white gathering
was addressed, but from the positive viewpoint
of a consciousness-raising, and a sense that
dialogue and engagement with black thinkers
and activists in the visual culture field had
become a priority. Mirzoeff aligned the views
on the South African landscape and the work
done by the Occupy movement in Detroit – an
American city which has become a site of
much post-industrial contestation, and which
therefore resonates with socio-political issues in
South Africa. The Occupy movement is literally
taking a grassroots approach in renewing social
and post-capitalist economic relations from the
ground up, in that African-American dominated,
de-industrialised city. In a related context,
Mirzoeff positioned Marikana as a key inflection
point in present discourses of countervisuality
in South Africa. This view has been echoed
by Ronnie Kasrils, who recently contended
that the first post-apartheid government made
explicit policy decisions during the mid-1990s
to align the country with global capitalism
and its associated regimes of surveillance and
control. The tragedy of Marikana thus reflects a
logical end-point to that ideological decision.
2 Amanda du Preez and Nicholas Mirzoeff
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Collecting the Landscape
Claire Rousell*
* Claire Rousell is a per formance ar tist and
lecturer in Contex tual Studies in the Faculty of
Art, Design and Architectur e at the Universit y
of Johannesburg.
‘Collecting the Landscape.’ 8 March–8
April 2013, Art Space Gallery,
Johannesburg.
‘Collecting the Landscape’ was Landi
Raubenheimer’s first solo exhibition. She
used paper pulp, found objects, tapestry and
photography to build a series of works that
reflect on Johannesburg’s streets and skylines.
Originally from Bloemfontein, Raubenheimer
explored her fascination with Johannesburg,
her adopted home, through a modernist lens.
In Federico Freschi’s opening speech he
offered some insight into the importance of
modernity to the development of Johannesburg.
While Paris was completing its renovations
according to the Modernist designs of George-
Eugene Haussmann, the city of Johannesburg
was taking shape on and around a grid of small
mining claims. And as Freschi mentioned, the
thoroughly modern architectural model, the
steel-framed high-rise building, pioneered in
Chicago in 1885, would form the basis for
a number of early Johannesburg Edwardian
constructions. Thus, while a number of cities
in Europe and America were being made over
in the image of Modernism, Johannesburg can
be said to have been born into modernity. This
concern with Modernism is reflected over and
over in Raubenheimer’s exhibition.
Johannesburg’s grid shape remains
fundamental to the layout of the city, and is
reflected in the square-paned buildings of
the modern architecture that would be built
on those sites. This grid is also reflected in
Raubenheimer’s coloured paper pulp mosaics,
although they do not possess the sharp edges
and right angles of modernist architecture.
They are probably closer to the roughly hewn
patches of earth cordoned off and mined
by Johannesburg’s early fortune seekers.
This metaphor could be extended to the grid
structure of Cabinet I and II (2013) (1), each
section a tiny claim filled with a tiny treasure.
The skyline mosaics with their chunky
pixellation simultaneously make reference to
the 19th-century Pointillists and Impressionists;
and to digital image production. Raubenheimer
cleverly draws a link between the two
eras by including photographic works and
basing many of the works in ‘Collecting
the Landscape’ on photographs taken in
Johannesburg (photography being an important
19th-century invention, as well as integral to
much contemporary art) and by repeatedly
referencing Modernist concerns such as
1 Landi Raubenheimer, Cabinet I (2013). Found objects cast into resin, 80 cm x 40 cm. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.
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Cezanne’s flat colour planes, that mark a
movement towards abstraction, and De Stijl’s
focus on a specific colour palette and the grid
structure. Raubenheimer is not interested in
the clean-cut precision of Mondriaan and Van
Doesburg; instead her paper mosaics reflect an
interest in hand-made objects which will later
be discussed with reference to the Arts and
Crafts Movement.
These are themes she has been
exploring since 2011, and throughout her
experimentation abstraction, grids and colour
palettes are repeatedly used to reference the
city. For example, in Toy Museum I and II
(2011), made for an earlier group exhibition
at Art Space, she produced one image which
is a photograph of urban Johannesburg which
is printed through tapestry fabric. In the
second image, the colour palette of the first
image was extracted and painted on top of
the pattern produced by the tapestry fabric.
In Raubenheimer’s view, the colour palette
of Johannesburg is predominantly made up
of blues and oranges. This is a theme she
explored further in Cold Palette and Warm
Palette in 2013, in the build-up to the
exhibition at Art Space.
But how does Raubenheimer distinguish
the Johannesburg skyline from any other city
skyline? In Pink Skyline, Skyline and Blue
Skyline (2012) respectively, cityscapes are
broken down into coloured blocks. She has
even chosen not to emphasise Johannesburg’s
iconic towers: Ponte, Hillbrow and Auckland
Park. In Liquorice (2012), Warm palette
(2012) and Pink Space Invader (2012) there
appears to be a progression towards abstraction
as the works contain the same elements as
the ‘Skyline’, series but rearranged into an
unrecognisable form. Perhaps in a sense this
city becomes every city, any city. It may also
be suggestive of Raubenheimer’s distance,
both social and geographic, from the inner
city, which allows the specificities of the city
to fall away and be replaced by an idealised,
abstracted view of the city.
Referring to the ‘transcendent perspective’
which is evident in Turner ’s Picturesque
Views in England and Wales, Helsinger
(1994:108) explains that ‘even the prospect
provided readers with a secure standpoint,
detailing the physical and social elevation that
made such views possible’. This social and
physical elevation is evident in the ‘Skyline’
series (2012) and in the artist’s photographic
montages (2013). The artist’s geographical
position is difficult to pinpoint, yet she provides
herself and the viewer with a ‘safe’ place from
which to view the city, without asking that we
delve into the day-to-day life of the city.
The skylines and drive-by photographs
suggest a remove, a city which is perhaps
difficult to know intimately, a city which (for
this spectator) must be viewed from a distance
or from within the safety of a vehicle, thus
‘allowing the viewer to experience the city as
a tourist’ (Collecting the Landscape 2013).
This perspective on the city is as comforting as
it is unsettling; implicitly making reference to
middle-class fears of Johannesburg’s inner city.
But then the animal specimens, coins
and seedpods suggest a different relationship
to the city; one of foraging and taking these
grubby little souvenirs back into her home,
handling them, incorporating them into
artworks. As Raubenheimer says: ‘I make the
Johannesburg landscape my own and take
it home with me, a keepsake’ (Collecting the
Landscape 2013). There is a paradox to the
artist’s distanced view of the subject of her
investigation, and her ability to claim ownership
of the objects and impressions she gathers.
Here, Raubenheimer can be likened to one of
Walter Benjamin’s social species, the Collector.
In his address, Freschi compared
Raubenheimer to an unlikely flâneur, another
of Benjamin’s social species. Unlike her male
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fin de siècle counterpart who wandered
the streets and arcades of Paris, she drives
around, viewing the city from a distance,
from high vantage points, from motorway
overpasses. Also, there is the obvious difference
that Raubenheimer is a woman, which may
determine which spaces she can safely enter,
and which ones she chooses to enter. In this
body of work she has not chosen Degas’
brothels or Manet’s bars. What does it mean to
be a female flâneur? And does Johannesburg
with its high rates of physical violence permit
such a thing?
In her discussion of Baudelaire’s notion
of the flâneur, Katherine Golsan (1996:167)
emphasises his phrase ‘multitude, solitude’ as
being key to the attitude of the flâneur. The
19th-century flâneur is seen as a character
who is solitary yet surrounded by ‘multiple
stimuli in the crowd from which emerges the
surprise of unexpected charm, a random,
compelling vision, condensed and crystalized
into the image of a sparkling jewel’ (Golsan
1996:166). It is this jewel that Raubenheimer
finds and pockets, to take home and seal into
her cabinets of impressions of the city. Aside
from this moment of multitude, it appears that
for Raubenheimer, as with the Baudelairean
flâneur, her flanerie is a predominantly solitary
venture.
The flâneur is described as having ‘time for
observing contemporary life’, implying a degree
of middle-class privilege but, in the context
of Johannesburg, this is also what keeps the
artist at a distance from the city (Frascina et
al. 1993:54). It is precisely this social position
that enables her to circumscribe the city and
avoid walking the inner city.
The flâneur is capable, through his
imagination, of experiencing the city in its
entirety, of gaining an overview (Walkowitz
2009:205). And this point of view is assumed
in many of Raubenheimer’s works. The
mosaics are universalised cityscapes that stand
in for Johannesburg as a whole, and are viewed
from a ‘transcendent perspective’ (Helsinger
1994:108).
Frascina et al (1993:30–31) describe
the flâneur as the modern spectator – a
spectator of modernity. Raubenheimer would
indeed seem to be just that, observing facets
of modernity in the structure of the city, and
observing them from within another icon of
modernity, the automobile. ‘Fast travel in a
machine on wheels’ was a key characteristic
of the changing nature of transportation in the
early to mid-19th century (Hughes 1991:12).
Steam trains and motorised transport offered
a view of the landscape that was entirely
unfamiliar, ‘the succession and imposition
of views, the unfolding of landscape in
flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly
past it’ (1991:12). This idea is seconded by
Schivelbusch (in Barnett 2004:38), who avers
that train travel, and perhaps automated travel
in general, showed the landscape through a
particularly modern and industrialised lens.
Unless one is the driver, one is limited to
looking sideways out of the windows, the
foreground blurs and the immediate foreground
is often populated with the industrial furniture
associated with trains or cars which one must
look beyond to see the landscape (2004:38).
A fascination with this way of viewing the land
is evident in Johannesburg skyline montage
(2013) (2), Pastel landscape montage (2013)
and Lamp post montage (2013). Each of these
works is a montage of views which suggests an
accelerated tour of the city, as seen through the
window of a vehicle, thus exemplifying many of
the characteristics identified by Schivelbusch
and Barnett (2004:38). It is evident, then, that
these montages offer a view of the city which
is distanced from everyday life in the city, due
to being enclosed in a vehicle and travelling,
at speed, past the object captured in the
photograph.
2 Landi Raubenheimer, Johannesburg skyline montage (2013). Digital inkjet print on archival paper edition on 5, 112 cm x 15 cm.
Reproduced with the permission of the artist.
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Although, in Buck-Morss’ (1986:102)
description of the decline of the flâneur she
notes that ‘it was the traffic that did him
in’, and he was no longer able to amble at
a leisurely pace, suitable for strolling with
one’s turtle, due to the increasing speed
of life brought on by industrialisation. In
Raubenheimer’s case it is precisely automotive
transport that enables her to view the city. It
extracts her, much like a tone from her colour
palette, from the city’s hubbub. It allows her
to ride around the perimeter of the city, away
from the ‘torrent, where you are tossed, jostled,
thrown back, carried to right and left’ (Buck-
Morss 1986:102). Except, in Raubenheimer’s
case it is a torrent of humanity, rather than
vehicles, that she avoids. Hers is a tranquil,
poetic city devoid of the hustle of people who
reside in one of the most densely populated
urban areas in Africa (Beresford 2007).
Through the process of Haussmannisation,
pushed out of the arcades onto ‘the boulevards,
the flâneur, now jostled by crowds and in full
view of the urban poverty which inhabited
public streets, could maintain a rhapsodic
view of modern existence only with the aid of
illusion’ (Buck-Morss 1986:103). Perhaps it is
illusion through abstraction and universalisation
that allows this contemporary female flâneur to
maintain an aesthetically pleasing and highly
stylised view of the city.
This is not a gritty view of our city – a
common perspective taken by the likes of Faith
3 Landi Raubenheimer, Tapestry 4 (2013). Handmade
tapestry, 20 cm x 20 cm. Reproduced with the permission of
the artist.
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47, who recently exhibited Fragments of a
burnt city (2012) on the same gallery strip
on Jan Smuts Avenue, and photographer Guy
Tillim’s Jo’burg (2004), both of which could
be critiqued for showing only a decaying,
impoverished version of the city. By contrast,
Raubenheimer’s found objects are sealed
away behind immaculate resin. The tapestries
– another neat and precise medium – depict
some of the smog, but only so as to enhance
the breathtaking sunsets which crown polluted
cities all over the world. One of them is filled
with a particularly brilliant light while another
is abstracted to the point of resembling a
cityscape only by association with the rest of
the tapestries and the theme of the exhibition.
Her tapestries, made in quiet suburban homes,
are not imbued with the smells of urine and
rotting litter that rise up from gutters all over
the city.
The tapestries are a focal point for another
modernist concern, the counter-industrial
ideology of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Raubenheimer employs labour-intensive
techniques that counter the idealisation of
industrialisation and automation which are
so frequently associated with Johannesburg
and with modernity. Dazzling sunsets become
intricate woollen tapestries which seem to
contradict the supposedly fast-paced life in
Johannesburg. They also draw the public
urban (and, historically, masculine) space
into the domestic (and, historically, feminine),
realm. The notion of taking impressions of
Johannesburg into the home, echoed in the
‘Cabinets’ series, seems to be an alternative to
making oneself at home in the city. This could
be seen as a way of feminising the overtly
masculine Modernist project by weaving the
interior and exterior together by means of what
is traditionally a female occupation.
Also included in this exhibition are a
series of resin domes which are embedded in
borders made of tapestries found in charity
stores and second-hand shops, resonating
with the collector’s imperative. Sealed in the
resin are found objects, larger than the ones in
the cabinets: bird skeletons, desiccated frogs
4 Landi Raubenheimer, Kelvin Power Plant I (2013). Digital inkjet print on archival paper edition on 5, 27 cm x 20 cm. Reproduced with
the permission of the artist.
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and insects. Another contains old postcards
of Johannesburg. Yet another contains the
paper pulp mosaic tiles seen in the other
works, although here they are magnified in
size and depth by the shape of the resin, to
resemble the cracked and missing tiles of a
Johannesburg suburban swimming pool.
A thread running through the works is of
a view which is obscured, veiled, distorted or
obstructed. Although in the works, Still life
with bird skeleton (2013), Paper landscape
(2013), Pigeon breast and frogs (2013)
and 1986 (2013) magnification through a
clear dome offers the viewer the prospect of
seeing more clearly, upon closer inspection
the Johannesburg specimen remains distorted
and almost guarded by the resin casing. Once
again, our access to the city and its objects is
obstructed by an impenetrable medium.
This theme recurs in Kelvin Power Plant
I and II (2013) (4) and Toy Museum (2013).
Reflections in the side mirror of a car or in a
shard of glass, peek through a hole in the wall.
In each of these photographs the subject matter
is either obstructed or reflected. None of the
images give us a direct view, but rather offer a
view which seems very aware of its mediation.
The sense the viewer gets from this
exhibition of Raubenheimer’s impressions of
the city is of an unresolved relationship with
urban Johannesburg. There is a desire to
know it, to show it for its modernist beauty
and poetic views. What is also evident is a
desire not to subscribe to the Afropessimistic
view which lurks, often unacknowledged, in
many representations of this city. There is also
a desire to own and cherish the grimy little
souvenirs it offers up. But this desire is coupled
with fear – a fear of wandering, strolling and
truly entering the city. The artist’s strategy for
getting to know the city is based on taking
little pieces of it home and nurturing them
there, rather than embracing the unpredictable
urban streets and high-rise blocks of flats.
This contradiction is all too familiar. In
Raubenheimer’s work this author recognise her
own desire to truly know the city intimately,
and her constant fears and failures to do so;
her small, hesitant successes; her fear of
committing to an (at times) unlovable lover.
References
Barnett, G. 2004. Drive-by viewing: Visual
consciousness and forest preservation in the
automobile age. Technology and Culture
45(1):30–54.
Beresford, B. 2007. State-of-the-art children’s
hospital planned for Hillbrow. Mail and
Guardian, 27 September. http://mg.co.za/
article/2007-09-25-state-of-the-art-childrens-
hospital-planned-for-hillbrow (accessed 4 June
2013).
Buck-Morss, S. 1986. The flâneur, the
sandwichman and the whore: The politics of
loitering. New German Critique 39:99–140.
‘Collecting the Landscape.’ 2013. Johannesburg: Art
Space.
Frascina < details >
Golsan, K. 1996. The beholder as flâneur:
Structures of perception in Baudelaire and
Manet. French Forum 21(2):165–186.
Helsinger, E. 1994. Turner and the representation
of England. In Landscape and power, ed. W.J.T.
Mitchell, <pages>. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Hughes, R. 1991. The shock of the new. London:
Thames and Hudson.
Walkowitz, J. 2009. Urban spectatorship. In The
nineteenth-century visual culture reader, ed.
V.R. Schwartz and J.M. Przyblyski, <pages>.
Abingdon: Routledge.
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Just above the mantelpiece
Chava Caplan*
* Chava Caplan is a temporary lecturer in
Art Histor y at the Universit y of South Africa
(Unisa).
‘Just above the mantelpiece.’ 5
June–3 July 2013, Artspace Gallery,
Johannesburg.
In her solo exhibition ‘Just above the
mantelpiece’, Karin Preller has created a
fantastic world of still-life images taken
from photographs of an extensive collection
of trinkets, dolls and curiosities collected,
somewhat obsessively, by a friend. All the
works are painted in oil on canvas, a traditional
and humdrum medium in our world of new
technology and postmodern open-endedness.
However, it is through the play of painting
against photography, colour against black and
white, staged against unstaged scenes and
busy versus quiet compositions that Preller
creates depth of meaning and stimulates
thoughts on composition, narrative, solitude
and obsession.
At first glance this exhibition evokes a
contemporary take on the cultural phenomenon
of the cabinet of curiosities. Plastic dolls are
juxtaposed with African wooden sculptures, tin
boxes display hollowed images of Hindu gods,
and ornate crystal glasses sit beside wooden
<Tintin> figurines. Fiorani (1995:269)
suggests that the cabinet of curiosities was
regarded as a ‘microcosm or theatre of the
world and a memory theatre’. Apart from the
fact that these artworks represent an actual
collection similar to the cabinet of curiosities,
the form of the artworks and the painting
1 Karin Preller, Still Life with Porcelain Cat (2013). <details>
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techniques reflect an idea of a theatre of
memories and dreams. Preller’s use of blurring
and black and white create works that seem
dream-like in their formal composition. This can
be seen in Still life with green doll (2013) and
Still Life with babies head (2013). The solitary
figures, the blurred edges and the almost eerie
use of light are all employed artfully to create
a memory theatre, where images are vague
and surreal, yet physical and recognisable. The
use of black and white adds to the theatre of
memories and dreams, with memories often
being portrayed in black and white in films and
on television, not to mention the throw-back to
old black-and-white photographs.
Preller’s works can be loosely grouped by
their compositions as either busy and over-
flowing, or solitary and intimately lonely. Apart
from the dream-like quality of the solitary
images (discussed above), the images also
create a narrative with what is left outside the
frame. In Still Life with Red Doll (2013) and
Still Life with Porcelain Cat (2013) (1) the
composition of the figures seems to allude to
something just beyond the frame. The strange
position of the figures adds a sense of narrative,
as if something is about to happen, or the
figures are expecting someone. There is also
a sense of dynamism and movement in the
blurring of the edges in Still Life with Green
Doll (2013). Preller’s previous works sought
to freeze movement, which she achieved by
painting stills from family films. In a review of
her earlier work on the Artspace website, Smith
(2009) describes this process as follows: ‘[T]
he works are also crucially about the act of
slowing down the moving image, and providing
the viewer with a chance to ruminate on the
frozen moment.’ In this collection Preller seems
to speed up still moments, adding dynamism
to the still-life genre and allowing the viewer
to create narratives out of compositions
and relationships that would otherwise go
unnoticed.
This act is also clearly seen in Preller’s crowded
compositions. In Still Life with Pinocchio
(2013) (2) the canvas is filled to the point
of abstraction, in places. The figures seem
to be teeming out of the picture space. The
use of black and white echoes an explosion
of memories, but also adds to the sense of
abstraction and movement. Here, plastic
dolls, wooden figures, crystal glasses and,
of course, Pinocchio, huddle together in an
image of juxtaposition and chaos. There is
also a toy skeleton in the background. Skulls
and skeletons traditionally represent memento
mori, reminders of life’s transience, which
Rowell (1997:4) describes as ‘a universal
theme … one of the most ancient in Western
Art’. However, this skeleton is miniature,
plastic and fake, and situated at the back of
the composition where it is unthreatening and
impotent. It becomes simply part of the hustle
and bustle. The artist includes this reminder
of death, but also reminds us not to take it too
seriously. In Still Life with Voodoo Doll (2013),
a genuine voodoo doll is contrasted with kitsch
collectables to create a conversation about the
act of collecting. The voodoo doll, too, could
be seen as a memento mori, however, its
positioning and surroundings render it useless.
Fiorani (1995:269) explains that a
cabinet of curiosities symbolically conveys
its creator’s control over the world. In this
world, control comes through a lack of control.
The objects are overflowing, and meaning is
continually subverted and rearranged through
juxtapositioning and contrasts. Even death
is ignored and subverted through plastic
skeletons and misplaced voodoo dolls. In this
way the collection can be seen as a reflection
of postmodern life, where meaning can never
be arrested, as Conner (1992:291) explains:
‘Postmodernist aesthetics tends to accept
and even to embrace the disorderliness and
complexity of the world.’ The artist’s quirky
touch reflects postmodern pastiche and cliché.
The traditional medium of oil paint is used here
to reflect our postmodern, chaotic world.
Preller’s technique of painting from
photographs sets up an interesting dynamic
between the two media. The advent of
photography at the turn of the 20th century
allowed artists to move away from the
naturalistic imperative in art. It also allowed
for greater dissemination of images. In the
well-known essay, ‘Art in the age of mechanical
reproduction’ (1935), Benjamin (1970:222)
posits his theory on the loss of the ‘aura’
of works of art: ‘Even the most perfect
reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one
element: its presence in time and space, its
unique existence at the place where it happens
to be.’ By painting photographs, Preller has
inverted this process and reinstated the images
with that aura associated with unique works of
art. The mechanical reproduction of images – in
this case, through the medium of photography
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2 Karin Preller, Still Life with Pinocchio (2013). <details>
– was seen to lessen the value and intrigue of
the original. However, in Preller’s exhibition
the artist has created original artworks out
of reproductions, and disrupted the process
associated with the loss of aura. This inversion,
and the artist’s play with reproduction, add a
contemporary interest to what are essentially
paintings of crafts and collectables. Benjamin
(1970:222) celebrates the positive side of
photography, claiming:
[I]n photography, process reproduction
can bring out those aspects of the original
that are unattainable to the naked eye yet
accessible to the lens, which is adjustable
and chooses its angle at will. And
photographic reproduction … can capture
images which escape natural vision.
This is evident in Preller’s use of black-and-
white images, and her technique of mimicking
the visual effects of photographs, such as
blurred edges and focused objects. The irony is
that these techniques, when expressed in paint,
add an element of aesthetic intrigue related
to the aura, thus highlighting the originality of
the works. So, in a strange theoretical twist,
photography, hailed by Benjamin as the end
of the artistic aura, is used in Preller’s work to
add those very elements of unique aesthetic
appeal which are celebrated as ‘aura’.
Preller hints at the act of painting itself
in some the artworks. In Still life with paint
tubes (2013) the central, recurring figure
of the plastic doll seems to emerge from
a pile of paint tubes, and a jar with paint
brushes is clearly visible in the background.
The use of black and white again references
photography, and this work reveals the physical
manifestation of the relationship between
the two, in the collection. The artwork is a
self-reflexive tribute to the artist’s technique.
Such self-reflexivity can also been seen in the
difference between what may be referred to as
staged and unstaged compositions. Some of
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Chava Caplan
the images were clearly captured as they were
displayed in the collector’s home, with all the
chaos and obsession of the collection, and can
therefore be referred to as unstaged. In Still
Life with two Tin tin’s (2013) one can easily
identify a coffee tables, couches and other
furniture in the background – features which
are indicative of the collector’s home. However
in Tin tin and the parallel divider (2013) it is
clear that the composition of the Tin tins was
staged intentionally. The figures seem to be
on an expedition, which is visually reflected
through the inclusion of measuring equipment
which hints at the mapping of a new terrain.
These playful pieces reflect the artist’s hand
in the composition of the collection. They
cement their surrounding, unstaged, chaotic
compositions, and highlight the self-reflexivity
of a contemporary artist.
According to Kearney (1988:1–2) the
proliferation of images in contemporary life
has led to the end of the imagination in the
modernist sense. He claims that all aspects
of our world and our experience have been
colonised by images. In this collection, Preller
has used familiar, pop-culture images and
objects, and represented them in unfamiliar
ways. She has reclaimed control over these
images through her clever use of composition,
in both the busy, isolated, staged and unstaged
images .Through the orderliness and narrative
of the solitary compositions, and the chaos and
abstraction of the busy images, Preller orders a
world of chaos, which parallels the collector’s
intention with the objects themselves.
Paul Crowther (2002:478–480)
reflects on how the move from formalism to
postmodernism has led to anti-essentialism in
art, that has moved the ‘productive energy’ of
the art world into the curatorial sphere. Here
meaning (and, often, a lack thereof) is only
intelligible through curatorial intervention. The
creation of meaning in artworks is no longer
within the control of the artist. Crowther
(2002:480) even questions whether it is
possible for art production to ever again
become artist-centred.
For me, the strength of this collection
lies in the artist reclaiming control. The
collection is a celebration of the essentials in
3 Karin Preller, Still Life with Winky Doll (2013). <details>
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Just above the mantelpiece
art: Paint, composition, colour, effects. The
press release for this exhibition describes the
artist’s technique as follows: ‘In this regard
“Just above the mantelpiece” continues her
distinctive use of photography as a means
to explore the conceptual reach of painting’,
and Preller has done just that. The collection
is made up of artworks that celebrate the act
of painting and are aesthetically pleasing.
Artworks, and paintings in particular, were
originally created for their aesthetic value, to be
displayed in people’s homes, not in galleries or
institutions, and not in keeping with linguistic
and philosophical developments, they did
not reflect a conceptual depth that required
curatorial navigation, but were intended simply
to be seen and enjoyed. Still Life with Winky
Doll (2013) (3) is just such a celebration of
colour, composition, technique, and, above all,
surface. There is no deeper meaning, no need
to consult encyclopaedias – it is aesthetically
pleasing, and would look great on any wall.
‘Throughout history the still life has been
defined as a composition of inanimate objects,
and it is this fundamental limitation that has
allowed, indeed obliged, artists to exhibit a
high degree of imagination and invention in
order to achieve true originality in the genre’
(Rowell 1997:2). Through the traditional use
of oil paint, and the traditional genre of the still
life, Preller has achieved original works which
reclaim the artist’s control of the image. ‘Just
above the mantelpiece’ is an artist’s exhibition.
The artworks are aesthetically appealing,
narratively intriguing, and technically
outstanding. Through the interaction between
painting and photography, colour and black
and white, and clever compositions, the artist
allows the artworks to speak for themselves.
Preller has created a world where the familiar
becomes unfamiliar, and order is created
through chaos (which reflects some fragment
of all our lives). The works are accessible,
endearing in certain instances, and lonely and
haunting in others. They speak of collection
and display, not only within the human psyche,
but also the practice itself. Like the quirky
memento mori, this collection reminds one not
to take life too seriously.
References
Benjamin, W. 1970. Illuminations. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Conner, S. 1992. Modernism and postmodernism.
In A companion to aesthetics, ed. D.E. Cooper,
288–293. Oxford: Blackwell.
Crowther, P. 1992. Against curatorial imperialism.
In A companion to aesthetics, ed. D.E. Cooper,
<pages>. Oxford: Blackwell.
Firoani, F. 1998. The lure of antiquity and the
cult of the machine: The Kunstkammer and
the evolution of nature, art and technology.
Renaissance Quarterly 51(1):268–270.
Kearney, R. 1988. The wake of imagination: Ideas
of creativity in Western culture. London:
Hutchinson.
Rowell, M. 1997. Objects of desire: The modern
still life. MoMA 25(Summer):2–7. http://www.
artthrob.co.za/Reviews/Review_of_Stills_by_
Michael_Smith_at_Artspace.aspx (accessed 17
July 2013).
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ISSN 0004-3389
pp 76–87
Collecting and Curating
‘A cultural icon and a beacon of light in
the inner city’: The role of the Friends
of the Tatham Art Gallery (FOTAG),
Pietermaritzburg, in ensuring the gallery’s
success
Federico Freschi*
* Federico Freschi is Executive Dean of the
Faculty of Ar t, Design & Architecture at the
University of Johannesburg.
Founded in 1903, the Tatham Art Gallery
in Pietermaritzburg is one of South Africa’s
earliest public art museums, predated by the
establishment of similar institutions in Cape
Town, Grahamstown and Durban.1 The early
history of the museum is bound up with the
character and personality of its founding
patron, Mrs Ada Susan Tatham, wife of Frederic
Spence Tatham, a Natal Supreme Court judge
and parliamentarian. Mrs Tatham exercised
her influence and social prominence in order
to form a public collection of artworks for
Pietermaritzburg, on the principle that, like
Cape Town, Grahamstown and Durban before
it, a worthy colonial city should follow the
model of the metropole in providing morally
and spiritually uplifting environments for its
citizens.2 Indeed, as Brendan Bell (1994)
notes, it is primarily ‘the spiritual enlightenment
of the citizens of Pietermaritzburg which
underscored Mrs Tatham’s pursuit of
establishing a collection of artworks for the
city’, supported by her unwavering patriotism
and ‘belief in the notion of colonialism and
Empire’.
To this end, the redoubtable Mrs Tatham
prevailed first upon her extensive social
network to secure £500 of seed funding, and
then upon the municipal council to match this
amount. Thus armed, she travelled to Britain
to secure works for the nascent gallery under
the guidance of William Richmond RA, her
husband’s cousin and a fashionable London
artist, and Edward Poynter, President of the
Royal Academy and Director of the National
Gallery in London (Carman 2006:27). In
addition to a number of works that were to
form the nucleus of the gallery’s holdings,
she returned with a loan collection of works
by contemporary British artists, which local
citizens were encouraged to purchase for the
gallery (2006:27).
The taste and values espoused by Mrs
Tatham and her advisers are evident in some
of the earliest acquisitions that still form part
of the collection: In addition to a 1903 portrait
of the lady herself by Charles van Havermaet
(1), presenting her as formidable Edwardian
mater familias, at once matronly and business-
like (and in both respects not unlike a Van
Havermaet copy of the State Coronation Portrait
of Queen Victoria, also in the collection),3 there
are a number of Victorian paintings in the
mawkishly sentimental, narrative mode which
was fashionable at the time.
The collection soon grew both in quantity
and quality, and was substantially augmented
by a donation, between 1923 and 1926,
from Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Whitwell of
over 400 artworks, objets d’art and carpets.
Amongst others, the Whitwell collection
includes paintings by the French marine
painter, Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), the
German-English realist (and sometime Jack
the Ripper suspect) Walter Sickert (1860–
1942), and a particularly fine work entitled
L’étude d’arbres en fleurs (undated) by the
French-British Impressionist, Alfred Sisley
(1839–1899) (2). In the 1960s, following
what Jillian Carman (2006:28) describes as
the gallery’s descent into ‘complete obscurity’,
the municipality decided to sell off a number
of works from Ada Tatham’s collection.4
This decision was motivated primarily by
the desire to de-accession works considered
unsuitable for a museum, and to grow the
international collection, including works by
South African artists who had connections
to Europe through birth and/or training (Bell
2013). In the 1980s this policy was revisited
in order to accommodate a shift ‘away from the
colonial towards a collection of South African
art in all its forms, including traditional and
contemporary Black art, to reflect cross-cultural
influences and serve the community as a
whole’ (Tatham Art Gallery 2013).
During all this time the gallery had been
housed among the municipal chambers of
the Pietermaritzburg City Hall. In 1990 the
collection was moved across the road to
its current, permanent home in the former
Supreme Court building, built in 1875, which
had been carefully renovated and adapted for
the purpose.
It is an interesting fact of the Tatham Art
Gallery’s existence that, from the outset, it
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A cultural icon and a beacon of light in the inner city’
has relied heavily on the
support and involvement
of the public in ensuring
the growth and integrity
of the collection. As
noted above, the
collection was initially
constituted largely by
public subscription, with
the gallery providing
a space of cultural
reflection and refinement
for the citizens of
Pietermaritzburg. Indeed,
not only were the
public invited actively
to participate in the
acquisition of new works
at the very first exhibition
organised by Mrs
Tatham, the gallery took
the lead in promoting
arts and culture in the
city by hosting weekly
lectures on art and music (Carman 2006:27).
More than a century later this tradition
continues, largely under the auspices of the
Friends of the Tatham Art Gallery (FOTAG).
The mission of this voluntary association
comprised of interested citizens and art lovers
is ‘to support the Tatham Art Gallery in various
ways, mainly through publicity, and fund-
raising events that provide an additional reason
to visit the Gallery’ (Tatham Art Gallery 2013).
Although most of its activities are directed
towards fundraising for the acquisition of new
works, FOTAG has been very successful in
ensuring that the Tatham Art Gallery remains a
vital and dynamic space, and that it leverages
its inner-city location to appeal to a broad
public and offer a wide range of cultural
activities.
Given the pressures on public museums
and art galleries to grow their audiences and
the scope of their public engagement against
the backdrop of seemingly ever-diminishing
resources, I thought it would be interesting to
engage with FOTAG on its successes and the
strategies it has employed in supporting the
Tatham Art Gallery. To this end, I interviewed
the current Chairperson, Christopher Duigan,
and former Chairperson Val Maggs, a private
art teacher and founder member of FOTAG.
1 Charles van Havermaet, Portrait of Mrs F S Tatham (1903).
Oil on canvas, 117 cm x 91.3 cm.
2 Alfred Sisley, L’étude d’arbres en fleurs (undated). Oil on
canvas, 54 cm x 65 cm.
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Federico Freschi
Duigan is a nationally acclaimed concert
pianist, who has the rare distinction of being
a Steinway Artist (3). Since the mid-1990s,
he has operated as a musical producer and
impresario through his Music Revival platform,
which has become synonymous with the
presentation of sophisticated, classical music
concerts featuring Duigan and renowned guest
artists in festivals and concert series, from
Hilton in KwaZulu-Natal to Franschhoek in the
Western Cape (Music Revival 2013). At home,
many of his Music Revival activities centre
on the Tatham Art Gallery. A long-standing
supporter of FOTAG, he became Chairperson at
the start of 2012.
* FF = Federico Freschi; VM = Val Maggs;
CD = Christopher Duigan
FF: Please give a brief background
on FOTAG. What were its
founding aims and intentions?
VM: FOTAG was founded on
November 17, 1977. At the
time it was a popular concept
to form associations of friends
of art galleries.
Following the
example of Dr
Thelma Gutsche,
who started the
Friends of the
Johannesburg
Art Gallery, the
galleries in Cape
Town, Pretoria
and Port Elizabeth
all started similar
associations.
Lorna Ferguson
was Director of
the Tatham at
the time, and she
originated the
idea for a friends
organisation
being formed for
Tatham. At the
time the Tatham
was still located on the second
floor of the City Hall, in a very
small gallery space, with a
small but very fine collection
and without much municipal
support – Lorna really ran the
gallery single-handedly with
one assistant, Julia Meintjes.
Later on she got education
officers and deputy directors,
but from the start FOTAG was a
tremendous asset in supporting
her and the gallery. The gallery
moved into the old Supreme
Court building where it is now
housed on August 10, 1990.
The motivation to move into this
building was largely assisted
by FOTAG, who built public
awareness through organising
guided tours of the proposed
site, inviting the architect,
Gordon Small, to give lectures
on what he intended to do and
so on. Although FOTAG didn’t
do much in terms of fundraising,
it was nonetheless instrumental
in ensuring that the move
happened.
FOTAG was formulated with a
legally ratified constitution, and
soon developed its own identity
3 Christopher Duigan, Chairperson of FOTAG, is a nationally
acclaimed concert pianist and Steinway Artist. Here he is
seen playing the Steinway Model A piano in the Tatham
Art Gallery. The piano was acquired in the 1990s through
FOTAG’s fundraising efforts.
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with its own logo (the result of
a competition, which was won
by a committee member, the
local designer and artist, Clive
Hattan). From the beginning
the aim of the Friends was (and
still is) to assist the Tatham in
purchasing works of art and
promoting its activities, largely
by organising fundraising events,
and cultural and art-related
projects that would promote
and support the gallery, and
give exposure so that it would
bring the public into the gallery.
In addition to these public
relations-oriented aims, FOTAG
also committed to organising
educational workshops. From
the outset, these workshops
were open to all members of
public, regardless of race or
cultural background. The Friends
have been going for 36 years
now, and their aims have been
very successfully fulfilled. Kudos
for this must go to the chairmen
and women, and the large
number of creative committee
people.
CD: I think FOTAG’s role has
changed somewhat over the
years, but without losing sight
of the principle aim to support
the activities of the art gallery
and to provide a public interface
to interested parties that would
be primarily interested in the
artworks and exhibitions. In
the past FOTAG had paid-up
membership, with an annual
subscription for individuals,
families or institutions (including
schools), as well as life
memberships. As a paid-up
member you would have been
sent all invitations to exhibitions,
quarterly outlines, newsletters,
prestige events, etc. Subscription
still exists, but what I have
changed is that FOTAG no longer
charges members to receive
information electronically. It
seems in FOTAG’s interests to
have members, and keeping
them informed electronically
doesn’t cost anything.
Consequently, our paid-up
membership base is smaller,
but we have a big mailing list
of non-official members that
is immediately and frequently
accessible. In the last two years
we have also started an active
Facebook page and group.
VM: FOTAG has had a fairly
high turnover of committee
members and chairs over the
years. However, this has been
something of an advantage –
new people bring in new ideas.
We are fortunate that we have
always had the full support of
the directors and staff of the
Tatham Art Gallery (TAG). I think
one of the reasons why we’re
in a strong and secure position
is because we’ve never been
side-lined by TAG: Whatever we
have organised or suggested has
been approved and supported by
staff. Brendan Bell has been the
director of the gallery for some
time, and works hand-in-hand
with FOTAG; this gives FOTAG
its innate strength and security.
FF: Christopher, you are well known
throughout South Africa as a
concert pianist, and through
your Music Revival as a
classical music entrepreneur.
How did your involvement in
FOTAG come about, and how
do you see FOTAG’s primary
role?
CD: I have been involved in FOTAG
on and off for the past 12
years. My first involvement was
through the purchase of a piano
after the gallery moved into the
new building in the early 90s ….
VM: … One of the Friends’ major
contributions was the purchase
of a Steinway Model A boudoir
grand piano, which has been a
great asset, with many music
recitals being hosted in the
gallery (the minutes show that in
June 1994 a piano recital was
given by one Mr C Duigan …!).
A cultural icon and a beacon of light in the inner city’
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Federico Freschi
There was an initial donation
from FOTAG and the Natal Arts
Trust gave finance, but most of
it was paid for by the FOTAG
initiative of getting people to
‘buy’ piano keys until the full
amount was raised.
CD: … So I began playing concerts
at the Tatham from the mid-90s
after returning from my studies
overseas. Since it acquired
the piano, the gallery has
hosted lunch-hour concerts on
Wednesdays. The South African
Society of Music Teachers also
organised bimonthly concerts,
which I took over when the
person responsible for them
died. My ever-closer involvement
with FOTAG developed from
there, with concerts for
fundraising purposes and various
other events.
In fact, fundraising is FOTAG’s
biggest driver; it controls the
entire publicity campaign in
terms of promoting the gallery
and activities. Indeed, much of
the gallery’s publicity material
comes through FOTAG, as
the museum is very short-
staffed – de facto, FOTAG is
the museum’s primary public
relations arm. We actively
promote the general profile
of the gallery; we bring the
public in with various events;
we fundraise to acquire
artworks for the gallery through
selling exhibitions, concerts,
performances, quiz evenings and
‘private eye’ visits to places of
interest and artists’ studios.
The gallery has always been
funded by the Msunduzi
Municipality – this is its
primary source of funds. FOTAG
membership just used to be a
core focus group interested in
art, and attending exhibitions
and related activities. Its
principle role now, however, has
become fundraising in order to
continue growing the collection.
In fact, this year the gallery
received no budget for artworks,
so the acquisition of new
4 Kudzanai Chiurai, Revelations VIII (2011). Ultra chrome ink
on Innova photo fibre paper, 120 cm x 180 cm.
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artworks will be entirely funded
by FOTAG.
FF: Given the constraints of funding
experienced by all public art
institutions, how do you see the
role of the Friends in assisting
the gallery to meet its mandate?
VM: There is a history to this!
Shortly after we moved into
the new building the gallery’s
acquisitions grant was
cancelled by the municipality.
FOTAG organised a placard
demonstration to protest this,
with a huge number of people
turning out for the event. Artists,
architects, teachers, members
of the public – all stood in the
grounds of the City Hall and
protested. I was chairperson
at the time, and went to see
the mayor who was so taken
aback by the intensity of the
public reaction that she ensured
5 Artist Siyabonga Sikosana putting the finishing touches to his
new work for the Tatham Art Gallery collection. Photograph
by Bryony Clark.
the grant was reinstated the
following year.
CD: Currently, FOTAG aims to be
proactive by creating events that
will attract people, rather than
passively expecting people to
come to the gallery of their own
accord. We have an ongoing
roster of events that happen in
the afternoons, evenings and
on weekends, when the gallery
precinct is easily accessible
and parking freely available. In
addition to the concerts that I’ve
mentioned, we organise a host
of other popular activities: quiz
evenings, cabarets, social dance
evenings, film evenings; we work
with the gallery café by co-
hosting restaurant evenings and
wine tastings. We have Sunday
morning sessions with visiting
artists, and aim at a broad
exposure to different cultures,
both artistic and musical. In my
musical programming I aim to
represent various cultures and
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styles, not just Western classical
music. For me the gallery is a
cultural icon and a beacon of
light in the inner city; this is the
culture and integration we stand
for, the standard of cultural
intellect that we want to see in
the city, and this is what I try
to promote – music that reflects
these values. But the fundraising
events are also great fun, and
their popularity continues to
bring people into the gallery. The
quiz evenings, for example, raise
substantial amounts of money as
well as awareness of the gallery
and its collections. In addition
to general knowledge and music
questions, there is always a
‘gallery scramble’ section where
participants have to answer
questions by rushing around
the gallery and engaging with
artworks to find answers to the
clues provided.
FF: How do you see FOTAG’s role in
terms of the Tatham’s collecting
policy?
CD: We don’t have any impact on the
collecting policy as such. The
proposed works for purchase
come from the gallery’s
acquisitions committee through
the gallery’s director. Works may
be offered to the gallery, or the
director may notice something
that speaks to the collection as
a whole. The gallery also likes
to support the work of local and
regional artists.
The first time that FOTAG
directly instigated a purchase
was shortly after I became chair,
and we acquired two Kudzanai
Chiurai photographs from his
‘Revelations’ series (4) from
the Goodman Gallery. At the
same time, we also enabled
Brendan [Bell] to buy a painting
by Gladys Mgudlandlu, which
not only complimented the
important collection of South
African landscapes, but also
increased the much-needed
representation of a black, female
artist in collection.
FF: What acquisitions has FOTAG
been instrumental in making?
What informed the choices to
acquire these specific works?
VM: The first artworks purchased
by FOTAG were two etchings
by the local artist Bronwen
(Jinny) Heath, and a linocut and
silkscreen by Azaria Mbatha.
In both cases the desire was to
support and promote the work of
KwaZulu-Natal-based artists.
CD: Since I became chairperson we
have acquired, in addition to
the Chiurai photographs and
Mgudlandlu painting, a work
by the local painter, Heather
Gourlay Coyngham (winner of
the Sanlam Portrait competition
2013), several ceramic works
(including the last work
produced by the late Juliet
Armstrong), and most recently a
large work by the young artist,
Siyabonga Sikosana (5). Based
in Pietermaritzburg, Siyabonga
is very involved in outreach
and teaching projects, and the
work we have acquired is of
exceptional quality and detail.
His work in community outreach
and education, as well as his
developing stature as an artist,
made him a natural choice for
the collection.
Ultimately, the choices are
still guided by the gallery’s
acquisitions committee who
have the final say. FOTAG has
to defer to the gallery director,
as none of the current FOTAG
committee members can claim
to be art experts – except Val
Maggs, who has life membership
– we have a broad range of
expertise, but no one is an art
historian or full-time artist. We
are all committed to having the
collection grow in a meaningful
way, and therefore defer to
the expertise of the gallery
management.
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We are working toward having
the gallery host a formal
unveiling or presentation of the
works we helped to acquire, to
the public. Not that these aren’t
shown – there was a recent,
temporary exhibition of new
acquisitions – but to date there
has been no launch as such.
I think it is important for the
committee and its members, as
well as the public, that the work
that we do is made visible.
FF: Does FOTAG have any input
into the curating of exhibitions?
CD: No, we have no input into the
curating either of the permanent
collection or temporary
exhibitions, although we have
suggested the idea of having
our personal choices, or the
choices of local celebrities or
figures in the community, on
exhibition. The only exception is
a fundraising event called ‘The
Fabulous Picture Show’, which
was initiated four or five years
ago by the then chairperson of
FOTAG, Deborah Whelan, with
committee member Michelle
Rall. The idea is to invite local
and regional artists to donate
works in a particular format –
this started out as being A5.
All works submitted – and I
mean all works; nothing is
edited out – are suitably framed
and professionally hung as
an exhibition for a two-week
period in the gallery (6). During
the course of the exhibition
there is a ‘silent auction’ where
visitors can write down their
bids for specific works. On
6 Two visitors admiring paintings on the Tatham Art Gallery’s ‘Fabulous Picture Show’, an annual fundraising event organised by FOTAG
in which local artists are asked to donate small-scale works for sale by silent auction. Photograph by Christopher Duigan.
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Federico Freschi
the final evening the exhibition
closes section by section. If
any bids go over a set amount,
the work in question goes to a
live auction. The exhibition, its
opening function and closing
auction attract a huge amount
of attention and excitement,
and almost all the works are
sold, with the proceeds going
to the FOTAG acquisitions
budget. The exhibition attracts
work from a variety of artists
– from established artists with
a national profile like Andrew
Verster, Terry King and Jinny
Heath, to relatively unknown
local artists – and it is interesting
to see how the standard of work
has changed over the years. It
has also meant the development
of a whole new group of people
purchasing artwork – many
of them buying artworks as
Christmas gifts (strategically, the
exhibition takes place towards
the end of year!). It’s a good deal
– an original artwork, properly
framed, and generally costing
at most R2 500. Recently, the
format has changed to A4, and
artists are also allowed to submit
sculptural works or ceramics.
This annual event is a good way
not only of fundraising, but also
of involving the local community
and a broad range of artists in
the gallery. It brings in a broad
section of the public, and also
encourages an equally broad
range of artists to support the
gallery and its acquisitions drive.
FF: Does FOTAG play a role in
outreach and education?
CD: No, not directly. The gallery has
a busy outreach programme,
and FOTAG’s activities tend to
focus on leveraging the gallery’s
existing support base, which
remains largely white and middle
class (having said that, though,
the demographics of our support
base are changing, both in terms
of membership of the committee,
and in terms of our audiences).
Our ‘outreach’ thus tends to take
the form of activities that are
geared towards the interests of
our members. An example of
this is the popular ‘Private Eye’
initiative, where we facilitate
private viewings of collections
or artists’ studios. Students
often come to these events, and
it is obviously of great benefit
to them to engage first hand
with an established, practising
artist; to see that it is possible
for someone to make art on
a daily basis and to make a
living doing it. For example, we
hosted a lecture/demonstration
by Franschhoek-based master
ceramicist, David Walters,
in which he showed how his
business of working with top
chefs in South Africa means
that making bespoke porcelain
dinnerware is now a major
part of his output, and income.
This kind of information is very
important for young artists to
hear and see in practical terms.
We also host public lectures
and walkabouts by eminent
speakers, and in this way add
value to the wider community.
VM: FOTAG has also been
instrumental in supporting the
career of Siyabonga Sikosana.
We helped him through his
tertiary education by paying
for his registration fees and art
materials. We are proud to see
that he has gone on to make a
name for himself as an excellent
local artist.
FF: What do you consider FOTAG’s
greatest success in terms of
promoting the Tatham gallery
and its collections?
CD: A whole series of projects! I try
to adopt the same approach that
I use with promoting classical
music through Music Revival
– namely, starting from the
position that there is a body of
work that exists, that is capable
of inspiring people. The gallery
is there, the collection exists,
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it is worthy of our dedicated
attention. As with my music-
making, it is about creating
links with the public; creating
an interest, fostering a passion
for and identification with the
art, which ultimately leads to
a personal understanding of its
value. I aim to present music in
an attractive way and to share
my excitement about the music,
and have a similar approach
to the gallery; bringing people
into the gallery for concerts,
social events and walkabouts.
Walkabouts in particular are
very important, being presented
by people whom different
sections of the public identify
with, and introducing works in
ways that they can relate to.
The opportunity to see members
of the public experiencing a
connection with a work of art
through a guided introduction
by someone in the know is
rewarding. Ultimately, all our
efforts are focused on creating a
bridge between the public and
the gallery itself.
Unfortunately, the fact that the
gallery is funded may breed a
certain kind of apathy, without
much effort being spent on
publicising it. The principle
seems to be that just because it
is there, people will go to it. My
work as an independent classical
music entrepreneur has shown
me otherwise, and makes me
hyper vigilant to the need to
create an audience. However,
because of its inner-city location,
it takes extra work to get people
to the gallery! There used to be
massive problems with parking,
for example, but thanks largely
to FOTAG’s efforts there is a new
parking lot with some dedicated
bays for the gallery.
VM: I think the very fact of FOTAG’s
ongoing existence over all these
years is amazing! The ongoing
commitment and support of the
committee and the work that
7 Carl Roberts, Diver (c. 1995). Wood, steel, stone.
3.39 cm x 81 cm x 56 cm (approx.).
A cultural icon and a beacon of light in the inner city’
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we’ve done in keeping the public
interested in the gallery are
amazing! I wonder sometimes
why there has been such
dedication. I believe ultimately
it’s because of what the gallery
stands for: something we all
aspire to – inspiration, integrity,
beauty. This may sound corny,
but it’s an important part of our
lives which we don’t experience
very much. I think this is why so
many people are happy to make
a contribution.
FF: Christopher, having chaired
FOTAG successfully for the past
couple of years, what advice
would you give to other groups
of Friends of public galleries,
particularly as regards audience
development and acquisitions?
CD: I think it’s a matter of using
the gallery and its ambience
to its full potential; to see it
as a platform to create other,
similar themed events that can
integrate all the possibilities of
its aesthetic and educational
value, in order to make it a place
that people will want to come to.
The fact is that art can be very
static, and these days people
tend to want interactive things;
they want to be entertained. The
challenge is to consider what
people want and to be able to
find a compromise that doesn’t
undermine the integrity of the
gallery or the standard of values
that it embraces. In this way
one can offer all sorts of related,
complimentary activities that
use the art and its power to thrill
and delight as a backdrop.
Sometimes we forget how
beautiful the venue is, and that
architecturally it is an excellent
location for all sorts of cultural
and social activities, including
conferences. We also sometimes
forget how beautiful the artworks
are. In engaging intellectually
with them, we forget that sheer
beauty is appealing. I believe
we can use this appeal in ways
that will bring people in and get
them to engage directly with the
art by offering them a broader,
sensory experience. Ultimately,
it really isn’t enough to say: ‘The
gallery is open, come and look at
art.’ I think our interventions are
successful because they enable
the gallery to function as a vital,
public space. Indeed, there are
always people in the gallery; it
seems particularly appealing to
romantic young couples! It is
known across all communities
as an uplifting space; a space
of quiet beauty and cleanliness
amidst the turmoil and squalor
of the city; a place to sit quietly
for a while and gather your
thoughts.
FF: Finally, what is your favourite
work in the gallery and why?
CD: There are two works. The first
is a sculpture entitled The Diver
by Carl Roberts (7), a local artist
who works with wood. It’s a
two or three-metre-tall abstract
shape of a person diving into
water. Apart from finding the
purity and fluidity of the form
very appealing, I also like the
implicit sense of the suspension
of time. To me it is very
evocative of the exact experience
of playing the piano in the
room where it used to stand. It
was a similar experience, the
sense of ‘diving’, of suspended
belief, to the moment before
I start playing a piano and
creating music, where time
takes on another dimension,
where speed and space are
suspended in time, and come
to equal something else. I found
it a comforting presence in the
room; the beautifully polished,
fluid wood meeting the floor and
the sense of suspended belief
that, like the diver, I was going
somewhere else.
The second is Alfred Sisley’s
L’étude d’arbres en fleurs. It
is probably the single most
valuable work the gallery has
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by a high-profile, internationally
recognised master. Like the
music I make, it links the
gallery to a much greater body
of international art, and seems
to affirm our common humanity
across time and space.
NOTES
1 See Carman (2006) for an account of public art
collections and museums in South Africa before
1910
2 See Bell (2009) for a history of the Tatham Art
Gallery collection from 1903 to 1974.
3 See Bell (1994) for an account of the history of
this painting, the original of which hangs in St
James’ Palace. He notes that the painting held
a particular significance for Mrs Tatham, in that
‘the original Winterhalter (1805–1873) portrait
dates from 1846, the year Natal became the
first colony added to the British Empire during
the reign of Queen Victoria’.
4 See Bell (2009) for a full account of the
dispersal in the 1960s of the collection following
a report produced by Eleanor Lorimer, then
director of the King George VI Art Gallery in Port
Elizabeth.
References
Bell, B. 1994. The Tatham Art Gallery Victorian
Collection: The end of colonial art? DASART.
http://www.geocities.ws/dasart/bell.htm
(accessed 30 July 2013).
Bell, B. 2009. Storm in the wheatfield: The
Tatham Art Gallery Collection, 1903 to 1974.
Pietermaritzburg: Tatham Art Gallery.
Bell, B. 2013. Personal communication to F. Freschi
on the history of the Tatham Art Gallery, 28
August.
Carman, J. 2006. Uplifting the colonial Philistine:
Florence Phillips and the making of the
Johannesburg Art Gallery. Johannesburg: Wits
University Press.
Music Revival. 2013. Christopher Duigan: Interview
from classicsa.co.za: Christopher Duigan, pianist
and entrepreneur. Music Revival. http://www.
musicrevival.co.za/ (accessed 30 July 2013).
Tatham Art Gallery. 2013. About the Tatham Art
Gallery. Tatham Art Gallery: Serving Msunduzi
through the visual arts. http://www.tatham.org.
za/about.html (accessed 28 July 2013).
A cultural icon and a beacon of light in the inner city’
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Book Reviews
Afropolis
Reviewed by Melinda Silverman
Kerstin Pinther, Larissa Förster and
Christian Hanussek, eds. Afropolis: Cit y,
media, art. 2012. Johannesburg: Jacana. R
256.00.
Afropolis: City, media, art is a gigantic
portmanteau of a book; halfway between
those finely tooled leather trunks that colonial
administrators packed before leaving for their
postings, and those giant nylon woven bags
– red, blue and white plaid, made in China
– in which African street traders transport
their wares. Part exhibition catalogue, part
theoretical text, part artistic exploration, the
book addresses the questions of the African
city, ranging across the continent from north to
south, east to west.
The purpose of Afropolis: City, media, art is
to provide new perspectives on cities in Africa
– the world’s most rapidly urbanising continent.
The book deliberately avoids ‘the usual negative
clichés of the African continent’ (p. < > ) and
‘the macro political statistics and development
scenarios’ (p. ) which have conventionally
informed Western perceptions of Africa. Rather,
Afropolis presents an array of alternative
narratives in a variety of media – photography,
visual art, photo-comics, cartoons – which
offer up new insights revealing the ‘the social
networks and cultural relations shaping life in
African megacities’ (p. 7).
This explicit focus on artistic media is
because artists can reflect more freely and in
more critical ways than the average scholar,
although, it must be said that scholarly work
and historical narratives are also important
components of Afropolis. The emphasis on art
as a prism through
which to view the city
acknowledges the
important linkages
which have existed
between artistic
production and the
urban condition since
the 1950s. The city
functions both a site
of artistic creativity
and an enduring
motif – particularly
in the fine arts, as
demonstrated by
South African artists
George Pemba, Gerard
Sekoto and Sam
Nhlengethwa.
The blurring of
boundaries between
the scholarly and
the artistic not
only constitutes
the fundamental
methodological
approach of the
book, but is also a
key characteristic
of African cities:
‘African cities are
not closed entities,
but exist within
manifold networks’
(p. ). African cities
are characterised
by ongoing links
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between the urban and the rural, between the
colony and the metropole, and are connected
by multiple migration networks. Mobility is the
norm, with cities being permanent places of
arrival and departure. Using the example of
Hillbrow, in Johannesburg, the authors explain
how the area mutated from a white quarter for
European immigration to ‘a pan-African district
where Zimbabwean, Mozambican and Nigerian
social and economic networks, and those of
many other diasporas, overlap and interlace’
(p. ). According to urban theorist, AbdouMaliq
Simone, ‘African cities are characterised
by incessantly flexible, mobile, provisional
intersections of residents that operate without
clearly delineated notions of how the city is to
be inhabited and used’ (p. ).
The idea for Afropolis: City, media, art
was developed by Kerstin Pinther, who teaches
African art and visual culture at the Freie
Universität Berlin. The book is the outcome of a
German-funded initiative comprising a series of
exhibitions, seminars and workshops in the five
cities that form the focus of the book: Cairo,
Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa and Johannesburg.
The authors acknowledge that the choice of
cities is by no means comprehensive. Their
aim ‘is to draw attention to cities where certain
issues emerge with particular clarity or to
cities where the key discussions on new forms
of urbanity were and are being conducted in
them and about them’ (p. , emphasis in the
original).
The book is clearly structured and easy to
navigate. The first section provides well-written
introductory essays on the colonial project in
Africa; on the need for new lenses to examine
African cities ‘which are entirely different from
their counterpoints in the north’ (p. ); on the
essential characteristics of African cities; and
on the role of German architect and planner,
Ernst May, in the planning of Kampala. The
introductory section also contains reprints of
two seminal essays by urban theorists, Edgar
Pieterse and AbdouMaliq Simone, which
provide invaluable clues to interpreting the
African city. The remaining chapters each deal
with the five chosen cities, with colour-coded
spines to facilitate navigation and differentiate
each chapter – and city – from another.
The introductory essay, written by the
three editors of Afropolis, Pinther, Förster
and Hanussek, looks critically at the colonial
project. They argue that the vision of
African backwardness relative to European
sophistication was less a picture of reality
than ‘a vital plank’ (p. ) to prop up European
countries’ political and economic identities
as modern states. Africa, perceived through
Western eyes, inevitably reflected Western
ideologies. Countries in the west generally
‘defined the continent as solely rural with static
art forms rooted in traditional life’ (p. ). Yet, by
1990 this paradigm had shifted, with African
cities being romanticised and being seen as
possible ‘role models for the development of
future cities’ (p. 14).
What becomes clear from a description of
all these paradigms is the difficulty of using
conventional urban research parameters.
The authors ask (with an obvious sense of
frustration at the impossible task they have set
themselves):
How should one approach a city like
Kinshasa which, despite its vast size, has
almost no scheduled flights and whose
airport now resembles nothing short of a
local train station? How can you locate
the Kibera neighbourhood in Nairobi if it
is not even marked on the official maps?
How should you conceptualise Lagos, a
city with fifteen million inhabitants that
sinks into near-total darkness at night and
where – in the absence of a functioning
electricity network – the hum of generators
is an integral part of the daily soundscape?
(p. 14)
To answer these questions the authors have
consciously adopted the new ‘actor-centred
approaches to urban research on Africa’
(p. ) pioneered by urban thinkers such as
AbdouMaliq Simone, Filip De Boeck, Achille
Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, Dominique
Malaquais, Edgar Pieterse and Jennifer
Robinson. These theorists have successfully
highlighted the ‘creative dynamism enabling
urban residents to create new forms of urban
life – often beyond state control and planning’
(p. ). Simone emphasises the importance
of social networks and flexibility for survival
in Johannesburg. Pieterse, working out of
the Centre for African Cities attached to the
University of Cape Town, argues for urban
policies informed by participative structures,
rather than normative control processes.
He advocates projects that build on small,
reversible steps, rather than large-scale
development programmes.
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Reviewed by Melinda Silverman
Ultimately, the book is intended to shift
perceptions which see ‘the urban poor and
excluded urbanites as the problem’, and rather
‘recognise the energies and ingenuity that they
marshal to retain a foothold in the city despite
all odds’ (p. 8). The book is largely successful
in doing this. Much like Ghanaian Kente cloth,
which is made of individual, patterned strips
sewn together to form a larger, compositional
whole, the publication succeeds both in
breadth – in building up a broad impression of
contemporary African urbanism – and in depth,
with each essay offering an idiosyncratic,
microscopic view of a particular urban
phenomenon, such as fashion, architecture,
transport, trade ….
Most interesting of all are the motifs that
recur across the various chapters. These
recurrences point to the connections between
some of the cities and the pervasive flows of
cultural practices across the continent. There
are the ubiquitous kombi-taxis (or mamatus
as they are known in Nairobi) in almost of all
of the cities covered in the book. There are
also the bars. Those in Douala, documented
by Christian Hanussek and Salifou Lindou,
for example, would be startlingly familiar to
any habitué of a Sowetan shebeen. There are
the same cheap plastic chairs, raw cement
floors, and, most significantly, the same wall
posters advertising Coca Cola, illustrating the
universalising aspect of global brands.
Hannah le Roux and Naomi Roux’s essay
on the Ethiopian quarter in Johannesburg’s
inner city presents a parallel narrative to that
of Manuel Herz, describing ‘Somali refugees in
Eastleigh, Nairobi’. Both essays describe new
diasporas and the extension of trade networks
across the continent. To a South African
audience, Karola Schlegelmilch’s photographic
exploration of architecture in Senegal, Ghana
and Benin is both recognisable (roadside
stalls cobbled together from found materials)
and unfamiliar (with suburban housing being
significantly denser than in most South African
urban environments). Akinbode Akinbiyi’s
photographs of Lagos include an image of a
spaghetti-like tangle of wires, immediately
recognisable to many Joburg residents engaged
in the practice of izinyoka, i.e., illegally
connecting to municipal power sources to
access free electricity (as discussed by Thomas
Kirsch in his essay ‘The technician’s rebellion:
Electricity and the right to the city’).
One of the most fascinating essays explores
the production and dissemination of photo-
comics, and in the process, demonstrates
the remarkably complex flow of ideas and
products across and beyond the continent.
In his essay ‘With Spear in the city: The
adventure of modernity in the photo novels of
the 1960s’, Matthias Krings describes how
these comics came to be distributed in Lagos,
Accra, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kampala.
The photo-novels, illustrating the exploits of
‘Spear, Africa’s top crime buster ’, ironically
originated in Johannesburg in the period of
high apartheid, but followed an elaborate path
through Swaziland where they were filmed, and
London where they were printed, before being
distributed by Drum magazine subsidiaries
in Lagos and Nairobi. As the pan-African
boycott of South Africa took root, all references
to South Africa, such as car number plates
and adverts for South African products, were
carefully airbrushed out of the pictures.
Trade networks are inevitably
complemented by the circulation of cultural
practices. There are, for example, curious
resonances between the portraits taken by
Egyptian studio photographer, Van Leo, and
those taken by Congolese photographer,
Jean de Para: Both focus on the torsos of
muscle-bound men and teenagers dressed up
as cowboys, illustrating the extent to which
Western cultural tropes tended to permeate
African urban culture during the last five
decades of the 20th century.
Although Afropolis has much to offer the
scholar who is interested in Africa, the book
has a number of flaws. One of these is the
irritating absence of captions in many of the
photographic essays. This renders many of
the photographs obscure to readers who have
no understanding of the context in which the
photographs were shot. Explanatory text would
have enhanced the value of these essays.
The book is also conspicuously muted on
the German colonial project, especially given
German sponsorship of the Afropolis initiative.
German colonial authorities proved to be
notoriously harsh taskmasters in the three
regions under their control: German South
West Africa, German East Africa and German
West Africa. Only a single essay in the book
reflects on the linkages between Germany
and Africa. Regina Göckede, in her essay ‘The
architect as a colonial technocrat of dependent
modernisation’, explores the work of German
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architect/planner May – a much-vaunted
progressive at home, who became a reactionary
abroad. This leading reformer, theorist and
practitioner, who designed some of Europe’s
most exemplary social housing projects,
produced a master plan for Kampala, the
economic capital of the British protectorate of
Uganda, that ‘was used as a means to secure
military control, limit activities and separate
different groups of the population’ (p. ).
A glaring absence is any discussion of the
current relationship between China and Africa
which, in effect, constitutes a new re-alignment
of power. Africa now functions as a source of
raw materials to fuel China’s growing industrial
economy, and African cities now provide a
somewhat desperate and undiscerning market
for China’s manufactured goods. Although
evidence of Chinese inroads into Africa is
visible throughout the book, in all five cities in
the form of cheap clothing, plastic-ware and
electronic goods, the Chinese connection is
never explicitly addressed.
Notwithstanding these gaps, the book
makes a valuable contribution to urban studies
in Africa, both for a local audience and for
German readers who are able to access a
German edition of the book, and who have
generally been excluded from the discourse on
Africa, which has, until now, been limited to
English and French speakers.
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Hotel Yeoville
Reviewed by Gavin Younge
Terr y Kurgan et al., Hotel Yeoville. 2013.
Johannesburg: Four thwall Books. R 480.00
(excl. VAT).
This is a difficult book to review, because in
many ways its subject is too participatory
to set in type, no matter how ‘moveable’.
Kurgan’s premise is that Yeoville is not a
suburb of Johannesburg, but rather a temple
of Africa – one that admits all itinerants,
refugees and migratory people. Like her other
public participatory projects (notably Park
Pictures), Hotel Yeoville was expansive in
scope, complex and more like a development
project, as mounted by the European Union
or African Union, than an art project. In her
prefatory essay, ‘A public variation on the
theme of love’, Alex Dodd explains this as a
‘utopian attempt to bind a community through
a kind of inventory of personal and collective
relations’ (p. 10). The project is remarkable on
many levels, and was evidenced (the project
itself spread over three years, 2008–2010) by
multiple and contingent elements: A research
process, a website, and a public-participatory
‘exhibition’ comprising different booths offering
different activities and, of course, this book.
However, there was no ‘hotel’.
Hotels are sites of conflicted emotions.
Their allure is sharpest at the upper echelon.
Their marble foyers exude luxury, the concierge
offers prompt and courteous attention to
one’s cravings, but, for the most part, hotels
are lonely states of mind, sordid, impersonal
and expensive. Kurgan found a wonderful
description by Shuman Basar that sums up the
shifting, and sometimes malevolent, quality
of hotel rooms that are ‘deeply introverted
agglomerations of transient private space,
rewritten over and over again – amnesia,
courtesy of freshly folded bed linen’ (p. 30).
This reference points to the symbolism of her
earlier works, made in the context of Joubert
Park in that her subjects (the people partnered
in her earlier works) had ‘their own set of rules,
exchanges ... they all had their roots elsewhere’
(p. ). Thus Yeoville, the old suburb to the
east of Hillbrow, once the launch pad for an
earlier set of artists, photographers and theatre
makers (Barney Simon, Gideon Mendel, Les
Lawson, Braam Kruger, John Spiropoulos – this
reviewer lived at 21 Regent Street), is now
the landing site for a new
generation of hopefuls from
the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia,
Somalia, Ghana, Ivory Coast,
Liberia, Mozambique and
Zimbabwe. Although not
overly clear why this should
be the case, Zimbabweans
fare least well in the
popularity stakes, but are up
there with the Nigerians in
the ‘vagaries of looking for
love and the difficulties of
finding work’ (p. 33).
Kurgan’s interest in
Yeoville was apparently
kindled by a chance meeting
with a young Cameroonian
woman who had been dissed
in love, and dispossessed
of money and belongings
by members of the South
African Police Services
during a routine raid on non-
nationals. Kurgan states that
she wanted to ‘talk back’ to
this large and cumbersome
story by profiling little,
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intimate stories about individuals. However,
mindful of her own status as an uninvited
‘tourist’, Kurgan approached the African Centre
for Migration and Society at the University of
the Witwatersrand and a new, multidisciplinary
team was formed – John Spiropoulos, George
Lebone, Jean-Pierre Misago and Belinda
Blignaut (who is credited with coming up
with the ‘look and feel’ of the Hotel Yeoville
website).
In their first ‘walk through’ of the project
they noticed the densely layered community
notice board that did service as an OLX or
Gumtree for people who did not possess
laptops or computers. Linked to this lifestyle
malfunction, they found a plethora of internet
cafés – 30 cafés spread over four city blocks.
This gave form to an important component
of the project – the development of an
interactive website aimed at the online café
culture of the suburb. In <Blignaut’s or
Kurgan’s> words, this would ‘enable a largely
invisible pan-African group of Johannesburg
residents to write themselves into the public
domain, and at the same time serve as a
resource that would help new arrivals to
navigate through and around the rules of the
city’ (p. 35).1
To achieve this, the project team drew on
the research experience of Tegan Bristow and
Jason Hobbs, who had produced contextual
research on Internet cafés some years earlier.
Not so much quantitative research on issues
of infrastructure and technological need, but
deep-muscle research that showed up the
fallacy of the so-called digital divide. Instead,
they found that this volatile community at risk
depended on the net to a large extent. The
‘Internet café user base actively embraces,
shares and maximises technology as a survival
strategy’ (p. 37).
Kurgan and her team’s next hurdle was
how to materialise the virtual spaces of Hotel
Yeoville. Their solution, provided by architects
Alex Opper and Amir Livneh, was to build a
series of booths on the first floor of the only
new building in Yeoville – the new glass-and-
steel library building on Raleigh Street. A
brightly illuminated neon sign heralded the
project’s website address and drew people
into the project headquarters. Once there, they
could write about home, their experiences of
Johannesburg, their dreams, fears and hopes of
finding love. They could also generate portrait
photographs or make short movies. In terms of
the publication, of which this piece of writing
is an attempted review, the photographic
portraits form an exalted part. Produced in
the ever-popular Photo Booth, every session
produced four prints in duplicate – one set was
uploaded to the Hotel Yeoville website, and
the other was taken away by the subject(s)
of the photographic session. Participants
posed – either singly or as couples – against a
boyishly pink backdrop. These photographs are
remarkable not only for their candour, but also
for their print quality. The salamander-boxed
limited edition of the book is presented with
four signed photographs.
One might wonder who these people are
and why anyone would be interested to find
out. They are not decked out as refugees or
asylum seekers. They are not identified in the
publication, therefore they occupy a precarious
position, but one that is finally not vicarious.
Kurgan is attentive to this liminality and writes:
Hotel Yeoville engaged contingent
communities of desire – many private
desires that congregated, recognised and
for the most part complied with each other
... Photography was not an end in itself,
but the necessary pretext for something
else to occur: the camera was a trigger, a
facilitator for a most particular interaction,
a protagonist whose presence is one of the
main subjects of the photograph itself. (p.
44)
Everyone in Yeoville comes from somewhere
else. (p. 90)
Clearly self-evidentially true, yet equally
true of greater Johannesburg (a former tented
mining town), Yeoville is almost as old as
Johannesburg itself – it falls four years short. It
was established on a ridge, away from the dust
and squalor of the old, tented mining town that
Johannesburg once was, by an English property
developer. Like other suburbs with bourgeois
aspirations (Doornfontein, Parktown) it was
sidelined by the rapid growth of the city and
became a sober and affordable neighbourhood
of immigrant Jews and gentiles. During the
1980s its bars, restaurants and music venues
enjoyed a short-lived, international cult
reputation. On a recent visit to Johannesburg,
in April 2013, this reviewer passed by his
mother’s old house in Regent Street – the entire
street was full of yellow-fronted spaza shops,
somehow loosely inserted into broken front
walls. This change, and the wrath it inspires
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in some, is, I presume, at the heart of what
prompted Kurgan and her team to embark
on this project. Essentially, urban renewal is
not only about keeping the pavements clean
and tidy: it is about embracing the notion of
urbanisation as a haphazard, organic process
– one that is shaped by need and not by
municipal decree.
In line with Yeoville’s status as a destination
of choice for immigrants (both to South Africa
and to Johannesburg from other parts of
South Africa), Kurgan developed the Journeys
Booth. Based on Google Earth’s interactivity,
participants were able to map their place of
origin, trace their journeys, add photographs
and tell their stories. This is important stuff for
displaced communities.
The booth ceased to exist when the project
vacated its premises in the new Yeoville library
building, but Oliver Barstow’s excellent book
design makes the feel and functionality of this
booth, and the others, tangible for the reader. A
hallmark of the publication is its design, which
is clean, innovative and clear. I particularly
liked the use of coloured text, and (yay!) the
return of underlining.
Three additional booths made up the
ensemble of options available to adherents to
the Hotel Yeoville project: the Love Booth; the
Story Booth and the Video Booth.
Hotel Yeoville, the book, is not only
written by Terry Kurgan. Dispersed between
its pages are essays written by, for instance,
Ms Kihato, a curio salesperson recently
displaced from Bruma. Her essay finds an
unfamiliar correlation between the labour that
a Mozambican willingly offers to an employer
in Joburg, and his lover left near the seashore
in Xai Xai. For Kurgan, the project offered in-
comers ‘an opportunity to re-script’ their lives
(p. 102).
This is a generous book. One cannot really
read it cover to cover, but it is full enough. One
can dip in and gorge on unfamiliar testaments
of differing import – nonetheless, throughout
there is a compelling vision of reason and
complicity in our project to be African in
our time. Towards the end of the ensemble
there is a self-reflexive zen moment – Terry
Kurgan in conversation with Zen Marie.
This is unexpurgated material, with all the
insertions and deletions having been preserved
as palimpsests. Not recommended for skim-
readers.
Note
1 The website also has a comprehensive Directory
of Business and Services, Accommodation, non-
governmental organisations, and so on.
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© University of South Africa Pr ess
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pp 95–97
Picturing change: Curating visual culture at
post-apartheid universities
Reviewed by Jeanne van Eeden
Brenda Schmahmann. Picturing change:
Curating visual culture at post-apar theid
universities. 2013. Johannesburg: Wits
University Press. R 350.00.
With this book, the experienced academic,
Brenda Schmahmann, makes a considered
addition to the growing discourse on South
African art. Although at first sight one might
think that the book deals with university art
collections as such, it soon becomes clear
that her intention is otherwise. Instead,
Schmahmann turns her gaze on ‘visual images
in spaces within academia, such as libraries
or council chambers, that are not structured
specifically and primarily for the viewing of art’
(p. 13). She thus mainly investigates artworks
sited in semi-public and ceremonial spaces that
play(ed) a significant role in buttressing the
traditionally white male institutional culture of
universities. A number of the examples in the
book are taken from artworks commissioned by
universities after the demise of apartheid, that
speak to the fraught issue of transformation.
But many of the most interesting sections in
this book deal with the sometimes tortuous
actions taken by universities to deal with
their inherited images that might no longer
seem politically appropriate. This includes, for
example, the wider domain of visual rhetoric
employed by institutions in their coats of arms,
logos and ceremonial dress.
Schmahmann points out that although not
all artworks in the possession of universities are
necessarily in the public domain, they are also
subject to the ongoing process of re-reading
in order to (re)negotiate their meanings. This
book therefore fills a gap in the literature in
that it does not focus on campus galleries or
collections (e.g., Duffey, Tiley-Nel, De Kamper
and Ernst [2008]; Nettleton, Charlton and
Rankin-Smith [2004]) or on corporate art
collections (e.g., Bester [2007]; Geers [1997];
Hobbs [2006]). Rather, it concentrates on how
universities are responding by means of visual
culture in their hallowed halls to changing
dynamics around gender, race, class, power,
inclusion and identity.
Chapter one turns to
the affect that two formerly
prevalent ideological
positions had on artworks
at two Afrikaans-speaking
institutions, the universities
of Pretoria (UP) and
Stellenbosch, and on
the English-speaking
universities of Cape Town
(UCT) and Rhodes (RU).
The main thrust of this
chapter concerns how these
institutions have been obliged
to deal with the visual
legacies of either Afrikaner
nationalism or British
imperialism. Schmahmann
demonstrates eloquently
that there have been many
ways in which material
which might now be deemed
politically offensive has
been defused by means of
curatorial interventions. So,
for example, the University
of the Free State (UFS)
has attempted to initiate
a ‘“conversation” between
symbols of the old and
new dispensations in South
1 Frikkie Eksteen, Director’s Cut (2008). Eksteen’s paintings
in oil on canvas, exhibited with the portraits of vice
chancellors and rectors at the University of Pretoria
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Africa’ (p. 25) around a statue of President
M.T. Steyn and a monument to the centenary
of the Great Trek. She suggests that the
process of transformation is perhaps best
served by encouraging constructive dialogue
between opposing icons, or at least facilitating
critical encounters with images from the past.
This strategy, as seen in UCT’s engagement
with its keynote sculpture of Cecil Rhodes,
acknowledges that meanings are not static, and
attempts not to alienate traditionalists. Perhaps
less successful have been the ways in which
UP has dealt with its Great Trek iconography.
Schmahmann suggests, possibly correctly,
that UP disposed of some of its problematic
imagery in a bid to protect it and the interests
of conservative donors, rather than to satisfy
the need for transformation. My only issue with
this chapter is that a chronological unpacking,
starting with British imperialism and moving
on to Afrikaner nationalism, might have been
another way to deal with the material.
In the next chapter, Schmahmann looks at
how universities have attempted to deal with
the thorny issue of making coats of arms and
ceremonial dress relevant in a post-apartheid
South Africa. Insignia are one of the most
visible means of establishing identity, and
finding a balance between maintaining the
genealogical pedigrees invested in imagery with
the imperatives of transformation, makes for
interesting reading. Schmahmann shows how
various universities have risen to the challenge
to juggle tradition with innovation; the question
is, of course, whether universities in Africa
should follow Westernised models at all.
Chapter three addresses transformation and
diversity in relation to an examination of some
of the artworks commissioned by universities
under the new political dispensation.
Schmahmann concentrates mainly on four
institutions: UCT, the University of the
Witwatersrand (Wits), RU and UP. She shows
that many of the artworks that have been
commissioned (e.g., Cyril Coetzee’s T’Kama-
Adamastor at Wits) incorporate revisionist ideas
regarding identity and history. She also shows
that, perhaps surprisingly, some traditional
genres such as the portrait bust have been
used to commemorate struggle heroes such
as Walter Sisulu (Walter Sisulu University),
while other mediums such as embroidery have
started to challenge the traditional canon of
university art (e.g., the Centenary Tapestry
by the Kaross Workers at UP). Schmahmann
draws attention to the gender and racial
inequality that still operates in many of these
commissions, but also suggests that artworks
such as the sculptures by the artist Angus
Taylor (UP) have the capacity to make ironic
gender statements. The chapter ends with a
contested artwork from the Afrikaner nationalist
past. Schmahmann discusses Danie de Jager’s
sculpture of four galloping horses, Freedom
Symbol, which originally formed part of the
now-dismantled Strijdom Square in Pretoria
and was relocated to the UP’s Sports Centre
in 2008. The statue has been stripped of all
references to its apartheid connotations, and
Schmahmann uses this as an example of how
decontextualistion seems to have been used
to ‘rehabilitate’ the artwork. Nonetheless, in
terms of her argument that critical engagement
with monuments of the past is imperative,
she comes to the conclusion that this example
encourages ‘amnesia rather than a reworking
of meaning’ (p. 148). As a member of the UP
Art Committee that had to decide on the fate
of the sculpture, I know that the matter was
infinitely complex, but her point is taken and
might perhaps inform interaction with the work
in the future.
In the next chapter, which grapples with the
politics associated with portraits of university
chancellors, vice chancellors and chairs of
council, Schmahmann raises theoretical issues
related to identity, and the aims and limits of
portraiture. She thus unpacks the problems
related to the expectations that portraits should
be naturalistic (but idealised) and capture
the ‘essential identity’ of the sitter. Again, the
issue at hand is the demand for accuracy in
establishing a visual genealogy that invokes
tradition, versus the contemporary recognition
that portraits can but be approximations, as
identity is unfixed and a construction. The
most compelling examples in this chapter
are therefore those that disrupt or dismantle
the expectations of portraiture; it is perhaps
significant that three of the most successful
examples of this are by female artists: Dorothy
Kay (RU), Reshada Crouse (UFS) and Deborah
Poynton (UCT). The example of Frikkie Eksteen
is equally engaging, in that he has used two
of his own portraits of vice chancellors of
UP as a point of departure for a series of
paintings, Director’s Cut, which interrogates
the status and ontology of portraiture as a
reflection of ‘identity’. Even though most of the
works discussed in this chapter are not freely
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accessible to the public in that they invariably
decorate various inner sanctum academic
spaces, Schmahmann again shows that the
earlier entitlement to mastery that these works
convey has also been subject to intense critical
scrutiny.
In the last chapter, Schmahmann delves
into the challenging terrain of censorship of
images on university campuses (which she
herself experienced when she wished to depict
a Tom Wesselmann penis in an academic
article). The demands of academic/artistic
freedom are not always commensurate with
the production of images that can cause harm
or offence. By means of four case studies,
Schmahmann looks at the various ways
that have been used to deal with artworks
considered to be problematic. These methods
were not necessarily successful in that they
generally ended up compromising freedom
of expression, and Schmahmann shows how
visual illiteracy and a basic ignorance of the
remit of visual art has often maintained the
upper hand. This was certainly the case
regarding two etchings by Diane Victor at UP.
In Sheep’s Clothing and Made to Measure,
both from her Disasters of Peace series and
both dealing with child molestation, caused
consternation when they were hung in the
Law Faculty’s Centre for Human Rights.
After consultation and investigation, the two
works were moved to a private office in order
to cause less ‘offence’ in public corridors.
Equally notorious was the reception of Kaolin
Thomson’s Useful Objects ceramic (Wits),
which, once it had been read as a depiction
of a black vagina, became the subject of
vociferous and, for the most part, uninformed
debate. Fortunately, the relevant authorities
at Wits refused to remove the work from
exhibition as it was felt that having just moved
out of a past wherein censorship was enforced,
the new South Africa needed to be exposed to a
variety of images.
Schmahmann ends her book with a case
study of the Rhodes University Tapestry,
executed by the Keiskamma Art Project and
completed in 2011. She regards this as a
good example of a transformative artwork
commissioned by a South African university
that dislodges many of the problems associated
with institutional art policies and practices
discussed earlier in the book. Schmahmann
then skilfully weaves all the threads of the
book together by showing how this artwork
responds to concerns addressed in the
foregoing five chapters. The Tapestry therefore
seems to be a successful attempt to depict the
multiculturalism and inclusivity that universities
have avowed in post-apartheid South Africa.
This book is indeed a useful addition to
the thematic investigation of visual culture in
South Africa. Very wisely, Schmahmann does
not attempt to cover all universities, but rather
uses good exemplars to illustrate her point.
This is the kind of book that one can dip into
without reading it from cover to cover, and the
relegation of the notes to the back of the book
makes for easy reading of the main text. The
technical rounding-off of the book is excellent
and very few typos were observed (e.g.,
Ravteubach on p. 78; double entry of date
under note 165 on p. 258 and Riley-Nel on p.
265). But the index is somewhat confusing as
there are no designations for main entries nor
are sub-entries indented – this makes it difficult
to navigate, especially pages 278 to 280 that
deal with ‘universities’.
Schmahmann manages to touch on a
number of theoretical discourses such as
those related to identity in an uncomplicated
manner, making the book accessible to a wider
audience. Although this is certainly not the
last word on the subject, Schmahmann has
initiated a discourse that is bound to inform
university policies. What she establishes in this
thoughtful book is how universities have risen
to the challenge to reinvent themselves, with
varying degrees of success. Picturing change is
visually gratifying and a pleasure to read.
References
Bester, R., ed. 2007. Figure/ground: Reections on
the South African Reserve Bank Art Collection.
Pretoria: South African Reserve Bank.
Duffey, A., S. Tiley-Nel, G. de Kamper and J. Ernst.
2008. The art and heritage collections of the
University of Pretoria. Pretoria: University of
Pretoria.
Geers, K., ed. 1997. Contemporary South African art:
The Gencor Collection. Johannesburg: Ball.
Hobbs, P., ed. 2006. Messages and meaning: The MTN
Art Collection. Johannesburg: MTN Foundation and
David Krut.
Nettleton, A., J. Charlton and F. Rankin-Smith,
eds. 2003. Voice-overs: Wits writings exploring
African artworks. Johannesburg: University of the
Witwatersrand Art Galleries.
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Faith 47
Reviewed by Annemi Conradie
Wealz 130 (introduction), Faith 47 (other
text). FAITH 47. On the Run Books # 12.
2011. Berlin: From Here to Fame Publishing.
R 140.00.
The figure of a slender, silvery feline, more
cheetah than alley-cat, has taken pause to
glance backward in search of its pursuers,
their tall arrows piercing the ground at its feet.
‘Run run run for if they catch you they will kill
you’, the artist urges the majestic beast, its
grace at odds with the grime, grit, noise and
smells of its bustling, or sometimes deserted,
urban surroundings. Painted in Woodstock,
Cape Town, in 2009, the silver beast has now
paused for approximately four years. Over the
course of these four years the work has not
remained unchanged: The paint that coats the
wall, providing the background and primer to
Faith 47’s work, is flaking and peeling in large
scrolls; marks, stains and scratches left in the
wall by passers-by and others who pause for
a smoke, for lunch, for a chat or a night’s rest
have added to the palimpsest that is street
art. This is its power and its wealth – the
reality that there is no telling for how much
longer Faith 47’s cautious cat will remain in
recognisable form on its concrete canvas.
The site-specificity and the impermanence
of street art are two of the primary reasons
why Faith 47, one of the titles in a series of
abundantly illustrated publications on street
art by Berlin-based On the Run Books, is of
such importance to practitioners, students,
fans and scholars of street art. The book
provides an extensive, compact visual archive
of one of South Africa’s foremost street artists’
work, documented throughout in full-colour
photographs that situate each work within its
particular urban or rural context.
The book is introduced by Faith 47’s
friend and mentor, graffiti artist Wealz 130,
who charts the development of her career and
style, set against an insider’s account of the
development and socio-political context of
graffiti art in late 20th-century South Africa. The
book is concluded by Faith’s son, Keya, who
reflects on a piece of street art he produced
on his 11th birthday. Both the introduction and
conclusion touch on the transient nature of this
art form. Wealz 130 alludes to Cape Town’s
relatively new anti-nuisance by-laws that
threaten the longevity of works of street art,
and his introduction includes a photograph of
the well-known ‘Free Mandela’ slogan that was
recently painted over. Keya, writing about his
completed piece, exclaims: ‘I was happy when
it was done. Knowing that it would not last did
not matter because it’s just for yourself and the
people who see it’ (p. 122).
The aims of documenting, preserving and
archiving impermanent works of art, scattered
on walls, broken-down cars and in alley-
ways across the globe, are thus fulfilled in
this publication. The book’s juxtaposition of
illustrations and snippets of text successfully
draws together several threads integral to the
artist’s work and life: The close relationship
(if not blurring of boundaries) between image
and text, work and context, private and
public, interior and exterior worlds. Her pieces
are framed in terms of her own poetry and
reflections on the work, the spaces and the
people she encounters on her travels, and
her continued grappling with highly fraught
contemporary socio-political environments,
whether in South Africa or further afield.
The book divides the artist’s oeuvre
into six sections: ‘Woodstock’, ‘Cape Town’,
‘Johannesburg’, ‘South Africa’, ‘The World’
and ‘Studio’. Reading the book from the first
to the last page, you are taken on a journey of
pictures and words that starts in Woodstock,
then leads you from Cape Town, the city that
‘raised’ the artist (p. 34), to Johannesburg,
the rural Eastern Cape, Berlin and China,
and, in the end, back to South Africa and
the studio, where the artist produces works
in oil and graphite on wood. Rather than
providing a chronological account of her
artistic development or stylistic categorisation,
the approach of journeying through Faith’s
work, poetry and reflections encapsulates
the importance of site, mobility, incessant
encounters with different places, people, sound
and sights, to the shifts in the artist’s content,
style, media, poetics and socio-political
commentary.
These headings do, however, create high
expectations and one cannot help but be
disappointed by the six-page ‘South Africa’
section which includes a mere ten pieces,
all created within a relatively small radius of
Chintsa and King Williams’ Town in the Eastern
Cape province. Rather than a representative
sample of work created in the broader South
Africa over the past decade, as is provided
in the ‘Cape Town’ section, the work in this
section seems to be more or less documentary
snapshots of a few road trips to the Eastern
Cape and Wild Coast. The paltry selection
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Faith 47
further directly contrasts with Faith’s own
introduction to this very section, where she
lovingly remembers hiking, taking road trips
and exploring South Africa with her mother
and siblings. She proclaims her own love for
the country’s vastness, for taking to the open
road and never tiring from ‘wanting to drive
the expansiveness of the country’ (p. 91).
Reducing Faith 47’s ‘South Africa’ to a handful
of Eastern Cape towns, provides a (hopefully!)
skewed picture of this artist’s experience and
interaction with her homeland, ironically such a
great influence on, and the very canvas of, her
work.
The language editing is a little sloppy at
times. The complex and reciprocal relationship
between text and image in Faith 47’s work is of
immense significance to its layered meanings,
as are the interactions between the text in
her work and those texts existing beyond the
‘frames’ of her pieces. Publishing the artist’s
poetry, memories and penned-down thoughts
on her work and world with illustrations of her
work thus makes for a precious volume, yet this
reader remained quite uncertain whether or not
the typos in the text (for example, p. 24), are
those of the artist. Judging from the precision
of spelling, grammar and punctuation in Faith’s
pieces, greater attention to the text in this
book was needed, especially as it will become
a valuable resource for students and scholars
of this artist’s work. On that note, some of the
captions provide the names of the suburbs and/
or streets where pieces were produced, but the
information is often incomplete, making it quite
difficult for fans and scholars who would like to
track down these artworks.
Looking at street art is an immersive
experience, whether rushing by while travelling
by car or train, or walking past, having the
time to stop and study it amid the noises and
smells of the street, the effect of sunlight,
dusk or streetlights on the work. Studying it
on the pages of a book is, of course, never
the same as encountering it in person, yet the
photographers whose images feature in this
volume must be lauded for their fine work.
They have predominantly captured Faith 47’s
street art in ways that assist the viewer in
reading and translating <interpreting?> each
piece as a continuously changing work, closely
2 Faith 27, run run run for if they catch you they will kill you
(2009). Woodstock, Cape Town.
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entwined with its dynamic environment. The
inclusion of (and even focus on) the unique
locality of the pieces in the illustrations is most
helpful in imagining the scale, relative size and
relationship a piece may have to its immediate
environment.
The illustrations predominantly fill entire
pages, and numerous double-page spreads
manage to pay tribute to pieces several stories
tall, or a few train carriages long. The lives of
the artworks – from their germination in the
artist’s mind to their eventual fading against
grimy walls – are successfully communicated
in this book. Both the illustrated works and
the artist’s penned-down thoughts explore
the poetic and jarring contrasts of beauty and
pain, hope and loss, violence and redemption
– themes that run throughout her work. The
frames of the images embrace the debris, traffic
and passers-by, and traces of earlier writings
and scratchings remain visible in the final
pieces. Advertisements for beer, political parties
and miracle workers not only border large tags
or pieces, but often contribute to the question,
or the statement, of that oft-repeated noun:
faith.
It is the complex relationship between
image and text, and very often text as image,
in Faith 47’s work, that this On the Run
publication has encapsulated, and apart from
documenting and gathering work produced in
the cities and towns of several countries, it has
brought to this collection the further texts of the
artist’s poetry and her reflections on her work,
particularly in relation to the places she calls
home – the ones she frequents, ones she has
visited, and those places and people who have
compelled her to produce.
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pp 101–103
Siyazama: Art, AIDS and education in
South Africa
Reviewed by Brenda Schmahmann
Kate Wells, Marsha Macdowell, C. Kurt
Dewhurst and Marit Dewhurst, eds.
Siyazama: Art, AIDS and education in
South Africa. 2012. Scottsville: Universit y of
KwaZulu-Natal Press. R 225.00.
Siyazama: Art, AIDS and education in South
Africa focuses on an art project in KwaZulu-
Natal, run under the auspices of the Durban
University of Technology (DUT), but which
has also involved input from key partner
institutions – amongst them the Michigan
State Art Museum. Siyazama (isiZulu for ‘we
are trying’) was initiated by Kate Wells in the
late 1990s, in the department of Graphic
Design at the ML Sultan Technikon (MLST) in
Durban (later absorbed into DUT). Wells had
been working with craftspeople in the Msinga
region, and Siyazama was an endeavour to
couple the development of works with enabling
discourse and education about HIV/AIDS. In a
context where women are not only in need of
craft initiatives to enable them to earn a living,
but where cultural norms result in their being
unable to speak about sexuality with their
partners, and where HIV-positive people are
often stigmatised, the project has played an
enormously valuable role in bringing together
economic and health concerns.
The book comprises a series of essays,
most of which are relatively short texts but
with a generous number of accompanying
photographs. In a contribution entitled ‘Opening
essay’, which is the most expansive of the
essays, Kate Wells, Marsha Macdowell and
Marit Dewhurst provide an overview of HIV/
AIDS in Africa, focusing specifically on its
implications for women in isiZulu-speaking
communities in KwaZulu-Natal. It introduces
the types of crafts made by people in the
Siyazama project and includes a map which,
helpfully, provides the reader with an indication
of where Msinga is in KwaZulu-Natal (and, for
readers unfamiliar with South Africa, where
the province of KwaZulu-Natal is). This is
followed by Wells’ essay entitled ‘Reflections on
the Siyazama Project’, in which she provides
an overview of her own background, how she
came to work with craftspeople, as well as the
adaptation of interventions to accommodate
local women’s concerns about the impact
of HIV/AIDS on their communities, with the
assistance of British
Council funding and
through collaboration with
AIDS counsellors from the
Durban City Environmental
Health Department. These
reflections are followed by
a short essay by Kenneth
Fhatuwani Netshiombo,
Executive Dean in the
faculty of Arts and Design
at DUT, which hosts
the Siyazama Project.
Suggesting that community
engagement initiatives are
particularly important for
comprehensive universities,
Netshiombo offers brief
comments on the value of
Siyazama, specifically in
terms of enabling economic
development and spreading
HIV/AIDS awareness.
The next essay, by Ian
Sutherland, discusses
how Siyazama emerged
as a flagship project
from various community
engagement initiatives in
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Reviewed by Brenda Schmahmann
design at MLST. Sutherland explains how, when
MLST was later incorporated into DUT, previous
links were strengthened through associations
with Northumbria University in England
and Makerere University in Uganda. Some
perceptions from Marit Dewhurst about the role
art can play in enabling education and social
change are followed by an essay in which Jacky
Guille discusses an initiative to extend the
<Siyanda> (meaning?)> model to Uganda.
Marsha Macdowell and C. Kurt Dewhurst then
introduce the role <Siyanda> has played in
museums, also situating it within the context
of other exhibitions engaging with HIV/AIDS.
Profiles of individual artists are followed by
outlines of a number of community-engagement
initiatives in South Africa which have addressed
HIV/AIDS. Notes on contributors and a brief
bibliography follow.
The text is very accessibly framed and set
out in such a way that it is clear and legible.
While the book has a sumptuous number of
photographs, it is modestly priced. Providing
very worthwhile information, which will likely
be of value to general readers curious about art
made in KwaZulu-Natal, it will also likely be of
value to undergraduates.
The book’s capacity to serve the needs
of postgraduate or scholarly researchers is
more limited, however. It is not a book that
includes any notes, for example, and it has
only extremely few general references. While
providing a very valuable contextualisation of
Siyazama within the framework of other craft
projects dealing with HIV/AIDS and, to some
extent, exhibitions engaging with HIV/AIDS, it
does not provide a reader with references to
literature on HIV/AIDS, community projects,
methodologies deployed within such projects
or literature on such projects. Also, while
the reader will encounter some moments of
critique and analysis, they are brief. The text
is mostly information-based rather than posing
questions or raising issues. Thus, it does not
comment on challenges which might be posed
by the coupling of economic imperatives with
enabling HIV/AIDS awareness, nor does it really
tackle questions about the degree to which
the initiative met objectives (or failed to do
so). This is certainly not to say that Wells and
colleagues have not engaged in discursive and
thoughtful reflection on what they are doing –
they most certainly have – but rather that they
have elected to limit such engagements within
the book, presumably because they envisaged
it as a ‘coffee table’ text which could introduce
a project to those without specialist knowledge
in art of the area or craft initiatives.
It is also silent on some areas of a factual
nature. For example, it does not indicate how
the crafts are actually organised and marketed
in a practical sense, and what kinds of earnings
members can potentially make from them. I
was uncertain whether the11 profiles are of all
the project members or only some of them, and
the degree to which participation has shifted
since the late 1990s. Also, it does not specify
how often HIV/AIDS workshops have been run,
whether such interventions are continuing,
what kind of strategies are currently followed,
and whether any kind of workshops were
attempted which proved not to be productive.
The background discussion on HIV/AIDS
and the gender politics which underpin it, while
otherwise helpful and a strength within the
publication, would have benefitted from more
specific information about when government-
sponsored antiretroviral treatment reached
the area, and whether this has resulted in a
significant turnaround in the health of people
in the community. Given the duration of the
Siyazama project, the book would also have
benefitted from greater engagement with
government approaches to the disease, and
the challenges these have posed: Certainly, in
the late 1990s, when government-sponsored
antiretroviral treatment was not yet available,
infection was in fact a death sentence, and
interventions thus focused on preventing
infection rather than on living with HIV.
It would have been helpful also if the
editors had engaged with choices made in
regard to the book itself – why it is structured
the way it is, and why certain components
were included. This is not simply to enable the
reader to know where to look in the book for
specific insights, but also offers the reader a
rationale for what was included and what was
left out.
What I missed most of all, however, was
engagement with specific works. While Wells
provides descriptions of shifts that have
happened to soft-sculpture narrative tableaux,
for example, particular examples are not
included, nor are their narratives identified and
interpreted. I wondered whether there was a
reason for this omission. The photographs also
often focus on strings of beads or close-ups
of hands working with beads. While at times
very beautiful, at others they are simply moody
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Siyazama: Art, AIDS and education in South Africa
images which do not illuminate the kind of
works made by those in the initiative, or the
working methods they deploy. I longed for
photographs which showed, clearly, works in
their completed state, coupled with a proper
dating of them, as well as an analysis of their
choice and treatment of subject matter. I longed
for some analysis of the shifts and changes
in artworks through a discussion of particular
examples. And I longed to know, through an
interpretation of specific images, how individual
styles and concerns may manifest in selected
motifs or themes. I had a sense that an interest
in designing the book ended up overriding
concerns with precise visual information, and I
thought this was a pity.
I would recommend that libraries and
individual readers purchase Siyazama: Art,
AIDS and education in South Africa since it is
a text which introduces an art project which,
having made a very important contribution
in South Africa, deserves to be widely known
and recognised. Kate Wells has clearly
played a remarkable role in uplifting the lives
of numerous women, as well as enabling
people to assume agency to negotiate the
impact of HIV on their communities, and she
without question deserves commendation
and recognition for her extensive work in
this regard. But, as a book more directed
at general readers and undergraduates than
at postgraduates or those with a specialist
interest in community projects and the impact
of HIV/AIDS on art, it offers only a broad
contextualisation of Siyazama. The reader who
wants a scholarly or discursive discussion of
issues, as well as engagement with specific
works, will thus be disappointed.
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de arte no 88 2013 © University of South Africa Pr ess
ISSN 0004-3389
pp 104–106
Obituary
Neels Coetzee: A great and gentle heart
(12 January 1940–2 August 2013)
Although Neels Coetzee (Johannes Cornelius
Coetzee) is acknowledged to be one of South
Africa’s finest sculptors, far too little is known
about his person, his education and training,
and, above all, his achievements. The fact
that he produced magnificent drawings,
independent from his sculptures, is just one
of his achievements which has not been
sufficiently acknowledged. Coetzee was a
modest man who lived a reserved life. The
last six years of his life he was bed-ridden and
unable able to produce art.
The artist was born in Bethal, Transvaal. He
spent his first years on a farm where his father
started a small welding workshop. Occasionally
tinkering in this workshop he developed an
early fascination with fire and bellows. After
attending Hoogenhout Hoërskool in Bethal,
Coetzee registered for a BA (Fine Arts) degree
at Natal University in Pietermaritzburg in
1959, but after a year switched to a BA. He
obtained his degree in 1963 with majors in
Fine Arts and Philosophy. His grounding in
the Fine Arts, more particularly sculpture,
was encouraged by lecturers such as John
Hooper and Colin Davidson. Prof Jack Heath
facilitated his admission to the Hornsey College
of Art, London, where he worked from 1963
to 1964. Coetzee was awarded a scholarship
to study at the Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor
Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, Belgium, from
1965 to 1966. This enabled him to travel
widely in Europe – to Germany, Italy, France
and Holland, where he visited museums and
deepened his knowledge.
Coetzee was one of three students
accepted for a one-year course in bronze
casting at London’s Royal College of Art, where
he developed the sophisticated skills and
meticulous craftsmanship which characterised
his work throughout his life. He now moved
away from his earlier figurative work, and
decided to construct rather than cast. Very
few of these early works have been retained.
Coetzee is also known to have destroyed his
own work at times, as well as documents. This
makes the task of reconstructing his oeuvre
difficult.
I met Neels Coetzee when he returned
from his studies at the Royal College of Art
in London in 1967. He exhibited his work at
the Redfern Gallery Summer Exhibition, and
in 1968 took part in a two-man show at the
Adler Fielding Gallery in Johannesburg. He also
taught sculpture part-time at the Johannesburg
College of Art and then at the Pretoria College
for Advanced Technical Education Art School.
When he lived in Pretoria we used to meet
regularly and partied with colleagues of his
such as Robert Hodgins, Maxie Steytler and
Johan van Heerden.
In 1970 Coetzee was awarded the Armcor
Prize and was commissioned to create a
sculpture for the Municipality in Newcastle.
He also exhibited his work at the Transvaal
Academy Exhibition and the R.S.A. Exhibition.
In 1971 the artist was appointed as full-time
lecturer in sculpture in the Department of Fine
Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg. He is known to have been an
inspiring, supportive and generous lecturer and
mentor to many students, amongst whom were
Malcolm Payne, Karel Nel, Diane Victor, Bonita
Alice, Jane Alexander and Marco Cianfanelli.
Coetzee obtained his National Arts Teacher’s
Diploma in 1971 and later his MA (Fine Arts)
at Wits. Students and friends comment on the
fact that Coetzee was also most articulate in
his writing, both in English and Afrikaans. With
the appointments of Peter Schütz and Walter
Oltmann, the sculpture department, under
Neels Coetzee, became firmly established.
The works for which Coetzee first became
known, were fairly formal and geometric. He
created monolithic forms in steel and bronze
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At the passing of Bettie Cilliers-Barnard (1914–2010)
which vaguely evoke upright human figures.
The artist also produced small abstracts in
steel ‘frames’ made of rods and bars, serving
as a kind of ‘space frame’. At the same time
he provided an alternative to the conventional
sculpture base. Coetzee soon realised, however,
that the abstract style was too sterile for him.
He maintained that attention to the formal is
only a means or a tool, to reveal content. The
sources for his sculptures henceforth were
mainly organic and primarily derived from the
human form, animals and insects.
The second phase in Coetzee’s sculptural
development, around 1975/76, marked a
turning point in his career. The artist began
to create more overt representational work.
Amongst these were experiments leading to
the ‘Skull Series’. These works were innovative
in conception as well as technique. Coetzee
made an in-depth study of the ancient Greek
bronze casting and the lost-wax process which
he applied to the ‘Skull Series’. His first skull
bronzes evoke two embattled forms in conflict
and, at times, also refer to the human figure.
The skull shapes appear torn, twisted, crushed
and distorted, conveying a sense of vigour and
life, while symbolising death. Rory Doepel
writes: ‘The violence of the confrontations – the
pain and the anguish evoked through these
twisted and contorted heads – challenges our
zone of comfort, especially in the socio-political
context of the time, for this was a period of
social turmoil.’1 At the same time the theme
of the skull reminds us of the medieval vanitas
still life which symbolises life–death issues
and human experiences, which consistently
occupied Coetzee’s thinking. The theme of the
‘tragedy of man’s destiny’, according to Heather
Marthienssen, is manifest in works which
evoke both the victorious and the vanquished,
that shift between despair and hope, fragility
and strength.2 The artist’s iconography is
complex and multi-layered – it defies any finite
interpretation and is as much personal as it is
societal.
In 1977 Coetzee was awarded the Afrox
Metalart Award, which allowed him to work in
Italy and travel to the United Kingdom, Turkey,
Greece and the United States, where he picked
up on the new trends in sculpture at the time.
Inspired by the Hittite shrines at Avcilar in
the Goreme Valley in Cappadocia, the artist
began research for his ‘Avcilar Series’ in which
he immersed himself again in the residues of
human existence. Coetzee conceived the first
Avcilar sculpture before submitting his winning
entry, Maquette for Worship at Avcilar I, for
a competition sponsored by Webber Wentzel
and First National Bank in February 1989. In
the same year Coetzee was guest artist at the
Johannesburg Art Gallery, where he exhibited
nine sculptures and 15 drawings dating from
1987–1989.
The Avcilar sculptures deal with the
anguish and torment the human being suffers
on his journey through life. As Rory Doepel
remarks: ‘The forms encountered in the Avcilar
series reveal the artist’s process of associative
synthesis: cloud and shroud, gable and crown,
portal and mountain ….’3 He also points out
how this series is a continuation, in many
respects, of the ‘Skull Series’.
The cross is another important
iconographical image which is clearly visible in
The Crucible (1994/95), a work commissioned
by the former Sunday Star as a peace
monument. The sculpture, made of melted-
down AK47 rifles, was dedicated to individuals
who had sacrificed their lives in the apartheid
struggle. Although the work was completed and
later exhibited at the Johannesburg Biennale,
the commission fell through.
Coetzee married Koulla Xinisteris
in December 1985, and our friendship
deepened. Wits appointed me as supervisor
for the theoretical part of his MA (Fine
Arts) dissertation on The skull: Formal and
iconographical derivations. I fondly recall many
stimulating and inspiring meetings with Coetzee
during this time.
Towards the end of 1987, Coetzee went
to Europe again and made a study of works by
Rodin, Picasso, Delacroix and Michelangelo. He
made a series of very dramatic sepia sketches
of religious works, in which the source material
has been examined for the religious content
which increasingly preoccupied Coetzee.
Some of the artists’ drawings are preparatory
sketches for his sculptures, while others are
entirely autonomous. I recall his sketchbooks
from Paris and Florence which also include
some of his eloquent writing. In the Paris
sketchbook, for instance, he has carefully
formulated titles for his ‘Avcilar Series’, e.g.,
Mount Avcila; Dark Mountain; Mount Shroud;
Wolkberg; Mount sunk; Gesinkte Berg; Clouded
Vestibule; Shrouded Vestibule; Worship at
Avcilar. Another group of watercolour sketches
was exhibited together with watercolours by
Alan Crump in 1997 and 1999 at major South
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Obituary
African art museums. Thematically these
sketches were, amongst others, about the
excavations at Thulamela and Machema.4 As
in his sculptures, these watercolours contain
images of gates, doors, portals, doorways and
thresholds, symbolising a point of entry, a
passage, change and transformation.
In 1996 Coetzee was approached by
the Institute of Democracy in South Africa
(IDASA) to design a democracy wall for the
Kutlawanong Democracy Centre in Pretoria,
on the corner of Visagie and Prinsloo streets.
He was assisted in the building of the wall by
employees of IDASA, and the archaeologist
and engineer, Sidney Miller. Pamela Whitby, in
a review in the Mail and Guardian, maintains
that this wall was the ‘culmination of over 30
years of his work as a sculptor in which he
has been preoccupied with residues of human
existence and civilisation’. An application
to declare this wall a heritage monument is
presently being launched. Another traditional
stone wall was commissioned by Eskom in
2004. It was erected outside Megawatt Park in
Woodmead.
Neels Coetzee’s life and work bear
testimony to his belief in transformation and
change. His art is a reflection of the spiritual
journey he chose to travel, and of the mental
pain and anguish he suffered so humbly.
More importantly, both his life and work are
a celebration of the light and peace which,
towards the end, embraced him gently. Coetzee
was a great admirer of the Greek poet, Nikos
Katzantzakis, and often cited the following:
I said to the almond tree: ‘Speak to me of
God.’ And the almond tree blossomed.
God speaks
Whoever seeks me finds me,
Whoever finds me knows me,
Whoever knows me loves me,
Whoever loves me, I love,
Whomsoever I love, [I take to me]
(my translation)5
Karin M. Skawran
NOTES
1 Rory Doepel. 1995. Neels Coetzee. The forms of
torment. In Three sculptors. Three readers, p. 5.
2 H.M. Marthienssen. 1978. Neels Coetzee.
Exhibition catalogue, guest artist Metalart, Afrox,
1978.
3 Rory Doepel. 1995. The forms of torment. In
Three sculptors. Three readers, pp. 1–19.
4 Karin M. Skawran, Alan Crump and Neels
Coetzee: sites revisited. Images in watercolour.
de arte 62, Sept 2000, pp. 72–83.
5 Nikos Katzantzakis, The Fratricides (Oxford
1974), from Sidna Ali the Moslem (9th century).
Preface, np. I totally disagree with the translation
by Anna Gianakas Dallas of the last line of this
poem. which reads: ‘Whomsoever I love, I kill’.
My translation of this line reflects the positive
meaning of these words.
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de arte no 88 2013
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