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Beyond the readymade: Found objects in contemporary South African art
Abstract and Figures
The use of found objects is evident in a range of contemporary artmaking practices. The use of found objects can, however, no longer be understood as a rupture from tradition as they were in the early decades of the twentieth century when they were first used by Picasso and later by Duchamp, because found objects have become part of a longer genealogy in art making. A new approach is needed in order to understand the significance of the use of found objects in contemporary art. This study explores the significance of the use of found objects in selected contemporary South African artworks in order to move beyond an understanding of the use of found objects as the anti-art gestures like those of the historical and neo-avant-gardes. I propose that a shift in focus, from the idea of the found objects as anti-art, to an exploration of the changing ontological status of the found object as it moves through different social fields is one such new approach. Chapter three explores the meanings that objects accrue in everyday practices, while chapter four focussed on the difference between artworks and more quotidian objects. Pursuing the question of the manner in which the ontological status of the object shifts as it enters into and becomes part of the field of exhibition, chapter five considers the ways in which meanings are constructed for objects in the field of exhibition through the conventions of display. I explore the ways in which artists make use of or invert these conventions as a means of challenging the field of exhibition. Acknowledging that the objects are also active agents within this process, in chapter six I explore the manner in which the materiality of found objects contributes to the meaning of the artworks, and by extension, I consider what new possibilities of meaning a focus on the materiality yields. In the final chapter, I use the concept of the everyday to draw the themes that have emerged throughout this study together. I conclude by situating the contemporary South African art practices within the genealogy of the avant-garde.
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The Paper addresses the tax rules currently applicable in Italy to the artwork trade both fro income tax and VAT purposes. The Italian "Art Bonus" incentive is also analyzed and investigated as to the entities entitled to benefit from it and the conditions to be met to qualify.
Critical essays on the artist Robert Rauschenberg, focusing on the important period of his development in the 1950s and 1960s.
From the moment art historian Leo Steinberg championed his work in opposition to Clement Greenberg's rigid formalism, Robert Rauschenberg has played a pivotal role in the development and understanding of postmodern art. Challenging nearly all the prevailing assumptions about the visual arts of his time, he pioneered the postwar revival of collage, photography, silkscreen, technology, and performance.This book focuses on Rauschenberg's work during the critical period of the 1950s and 1960s. It opens with a newly prefaced version of Leo Steinberg's "Reflections on the State of Criticism," the first published version of his famous 1972 essay, "Other Criteria," which remains the single most important text on Rauschenberg. Rosalind Krauss's "Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image" builds on Steinberg's essay, arguing that Rauschenberg's work represents a decisive shift in contemporary art. Douglas Crimp's "On the Museum's Ruins" examines Rauschenberg's silkscreens in the context of the modern museum. Helen Molesworth's "Before Bed" uses psychoanalytic and economic structures to examine the artist's Black Paintings of the early 1950s. A second essay by Krauss, "Perpetual Inventory," revisits both her and Steinberg's articles of nearly twenty-five years earlier. Finally, Branden Joseph's "A Duplication Containing Duplications" views Rauschenberg's silkscreens in relation to the artist's interests in technology, particularly television.
Recent symbolic and social analyses have drawn much attention to the role of material culture in human society, emphasising the representational and ideological aspects of the material world. These studies have, nonetheless, often overlooked how the very physicality of material culture and our material surroundings make them unique and distinctive from text and discourse. In this book, Boivin explores how the physicality of the material world shapes our thoughts, emotions, cosmological frameworks, social relations and even our bodies. Focusing on the agency of material culture, she draws on the work of a diverse range of thinkers, from Marx and Merleau-Ponty to Darwin, while highlighting a wide selection of studies in archaeology, cultural anthropology, history, cognitive science and evolutionary biology. She asks what is distinctive about material culture compared to other aspects of human culture and presents a comprehensive overview of material agency that has much to offer to both scholars and students.
Moves beyond the symbolic aspects of material culture and takes into account the materiality of material culture
Focuses specifically on how material culture impacts human society, thought and evolution
Interdisciplinary in character and offers both humanities/social sciences perspectives on the role of material culture in society
In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of women from poorer countries have braved treacherous journeys to richer countries to work as poorly paid domestic workers. Scholars and activists denounce compromised forms of citizenship that expose these women to at times shocking exploitation and abuse. In From Servants to Workers, Shireen Ally asks whether the low wages and poor working conditions so characteristic of migrant domestic work can truly be resolved by means of the extension of citizenship rights. Following South Africa's "miraculous" transition to democracy, more than a million poor black women who had endured a despotic organization of paid domestic work under apartheid became the beneficiaries of one of the world's most impressive and extensive efforts to formalize and modernize paid domestic work through state regulation. Instead of undergoing a dramatic transformation, servitude relations stubbornly resisted change. Ally locates an explanation for this in the tension between the forms of power deployed by the state in its efforts to protect workers, on the one hand, and the forms of power workers recover through the intimate nature of their work, on the other. Listening attentively to workers' own narrations of their entry into democratic citizenship-rights, Ally explores the political implications of paid domestic work as an intimate form of labor. From Servants to Workers integrates sociological insights with the often-heartbreaking life histories of female domestic workers in South Africa and provides rich detail of the streets, homes, and churches of Johannesburg where these women work, live, and socialize.