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The garden as a metaphor for paradise

  • Authors: Adlard, Michelle Catherine
  • Date: 2001
  • Subjects: Paradise in art , Garden of paradise , Gardens -- Design -- Early works to 1800
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:2391 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002187 , Paradise in art , Garden of paradise , Gardens -- Design -- Early works to 1800
  • Description: In this half thesis the use of the garden as a metaphor for paradise has been explored. The English word “ paradise“ was derived from the Greek word “ paradeisos” which in turn was derived from the Old Avestana “ pairi-daeza,” meaning an enclosure. In Ancient Persia the concept applied to an enclosed garden in the modern sense of the word. For this reason the thesis begins with an examination of the development of the garden in this desert region. A more-or-less continuous chain of development in both the physical and allegorical nature of the garden is traced through history from these Ancient Persian beginnings to the height of Mughal architecture (epitomised by the Taj Mahal), by way of the Muslim expansion through Central Asia and Europe. While the core elements of garden design were set in Ancient Persian times, and recur throughout the period studied, the impact of Islam on the local Persian culture brought about a new development of allegorical meaning associated with the garden. This allegorical development reached its apex, too, in the Taj Mahal in which, it is argued, the metaphorical representation of paradise in the garden tomb was made astonishingly explicit. The research for this mini thesis was gathered from secondary sources, including many published books and academic papers, photographic and diagrammatic evidence of extant ancient gardens, and reproductions of carpet designs.
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  • Date Issued: 2001

The exploration of Black and Brown drag performance communities: an artistic tool for creating safe spaces

  • Authors: Adriaan, Aaron Robert
  • Date: 2025-04-25
  • Subjects: Sexual minority culture South Africa , Performance art South Africa , Drag performance South Africa , Intersectionality (Sociology) , Autoethnography , Theater South Africa
  • Language: English
  • Type: Academic theses , Master's theses , text
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/478383 , vital:78182
  • Description: This research investigates the role of drag performance in South Africa, particularly its contribution to the fostering and maintenance of safe spaces for Black and Brown Queer communities. Inspired by the community building legacy Kewpie. This research project employs auto-ethnographic research practice to generate a better understanding of modes of Queer drag praxis drawing on Linda Tuhiwai Smith's (1999) concept of the "insider/outsider" researcher. The project acknowledges the ethical challenges of researching vulnerable communities. This research is guided by self-reflection and information gathered from fieldwork; informed by an awareness of the theory of ‘intersectionality’ (Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays, Tomlinson 2013) exploring the complexities of race, class, and sexuality within Cape Town’s Queer community. In this way, the study navigates the complexities of race, class, and sexuality within the drag context of Cape Town through the viewpoint of this researcher. The contextual exploration of drag unfolds across two interconnected disciplinary avenues: Firstly, the historical context of drag and its evolution within the performance art canon: to understand the place of contemporary drag in the broader artistic and cultural discourse. Secondly, the study investigates theatrical histories and conventions that have influenced and transformed drag practices. This is done to frame drag performance with forms of theatrical performance. This historical and disciplinary background is used to formulate a distinction that is at the centre of this research: proposing that contemporary drag practice in the City of Cape Town can be understood and to some extent distinguished by the categories of embodied costume and embodied performance. Embodied costume within the scope of this research view the use of drag aesthetics and visual elements in artistic expressions and performances that fall outside of traditional ‘drag show’ culture. Embodied performance refers to drag performances that fall within the context of traditional ‘drag show’ genres, communities, and venues − reminiscent of cabaret performance. This conception highlights the performative aspects of the drag persona, which is an extension of the performer’s identity. While some performers and performances can exemplify either embodied performance or embodied costume, these categories are not mutually exclusive, with incalculable overlaps in keeping with the rich possibilities of drag practice. The purpose of highlighting these distinctions is to create a critical framework for exploring the unique position drag occupies between fine art and theatre, incorporating both fields of practice, and synthesising them into a unique language for the expression of alternate gender narratives. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Fine Art, 2025
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  • Date Issued: 2025-04-25

Art marketing and management

  • Authors: Anderson, Larna
  • Date: 1995
  • Subjects: Art -- Marketing Art portfolios Art -- Finance Art -- Economic aspects Community arts projects
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2392 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002188
  • Description: Formal art education equips students with skills to produce artworks. A formal art education may increase the opportunity for employment, however, art-related employment is very limited. Art graduates would be better equipped to market and manage art establishments or their own careers if art education were to be supplemented with basic business skills. Artists who wish to earn unsupplemented incomes from their art should undertake to acquire business acumen. This includes being presentable to the market place in attitude and appearance. It also includes aptitude in art, marketing and management. Role models and non-models of success and failure in business should also be observed. Art graduates should adopt applicable tried and tested business methods. Good marketing is a mix of business activities which identifies and creates consumer needs and wants. Marketing activities involve research, planning, packaging, pricing, promoting and distributing products and services to the public to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organisational objectives. Art products include artworks, frames, art books and art materials. Art-related services include the undertaking of commissions, consulting, teaching, free parking, convenient shopping hours, acceptance of mail or telephone orders, exhibitions, ease of contact, approval facilities, wrapping, delivery, installations (picture hanging), quotations, discounts, credit facilities, guarantees, trade-ins, adjustments and restorations. Good management is a mix of business activities which enables a venture to meet the challenges of supply and demand. There is a blueprint for management competence. The three dimensions of organisational competence are collaboration, commitment and creativity. Self-marketing and management is an expression of an artist's most creative being. It is that which can ensure and sustain recognition and income. Artists, like other competent organisations and entrepreneurs from the private sector, should operate with efficient manufacturing, marketing, management and finance departments. They are also equally important and therefore demand equal attention. Artistic skill together with business acumen should equip the artist to successfully compete in the market place. There are no short-cuts to becoming an artist but there are short-cuts to becoming a known and financially stable artist. Understanding marketing and management could mean the difference between waiting in poverty and frustration for a "lucky break" (which may only happen after an artists's death) and taking control. Success should be perpetuated through continuous effort.
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  • Date Issued: 1995

Unearthed : personifications of widowhood and acts of memory : volume 1 and 2

Archontic Aporias: the mediums of memory

  • Authors: Arbuckle, Julia Ruth
  • Date: 2023-03-30
  • Subjects: Practice research , Eastern Cape (South Africa) History , Autoethnography , Information storage and retrieval systems Memory , Archives South Africa Eastern Cape , Aporia , Memory in art , Archives in art
  • Language: English
  • Type: Academic theses , Master's theses , text
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/408727 , vital:70520
  • Description: Contextualising my research within the Eastern Cape as a descendant of 1820 settlers, I question the modalities of historical recollection by introducing memory as a viable mode of archival production alongside that of the archive. Through interrogating Eastern Cape archival institutes and employing an autoethnographic approach to my familial archives, I show that archival curation affects the gaps, schisms, and interpretations of archives as much as the ‘unreliability’ of memory. I rely on definitions from Jacques Derrida and literature from Achille Mbembe and Verne Harris, as well as reflexive methodologies, to engage the ways of remembering the past and methods of storytelling. With this undertaking, I expose the aporias within archival processes. This written component is part of broader research that encompasses theoretical study and a practice-based Fine Arts research project culminating in an exhibition that shares themes of memory, archive, trauma, and curatorial and personal heritage management. This research engages in case studies of artworks by Angela Deane and Maureen de Jager to contextualise and position the creative process. , Thesis (MFA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Fine Art, 2023
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  • Date Issued: 2023-03-30

Hippocampus: seahorse; brain-structure; spatial map; concept

  • Authors: Armstrong, Beth Diane
  • Date: 2010
  • Subjects: Hippocampus (Brain) Sea horses -- Symbolic representation Meaning (Philosophy) Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995 Escher, M C (Maurits Cornelis), 1898-1972 Visual perception Space perception Optical art Art -- Themes, motives
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2427 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002224
  • Description: Through an exploration of both sculptural and thought processes undertaken in making my Masters exhibition, ‘Hippocampus’, I unpack some possibilities, instabilities, and limitations inherent in representation and visual perception. This thesis explores the Hippocampus as image (seahorse) and concept (brain-structure involved in cognitive mapping of space). Looking at Gilles Deleuze’s writings on representation, I will expand on the notion of the map as being that which does not define and fix a structure or meaning, but rather is open, extendable and experimental. I explore the becoming, rather than the being, of image and concept. The emphasis here is on process, non-representation, and fluidity of meaning. This is supportive of my personal affirmation of the practice and process of art-making as research. I will refer to the graphic prints of Maurits Cornelis Escher as a means to elucidate a visual contextualization of my practical work, particularly with regard to the play with two- and three-dimensional space perception. Through precisely calculated ‘experiments’ that show up the partiality of our visual perception of space, Escher alludes to things that either cannot actually exist as spatial objects or do exist, but resist representation. Similarly I will explore how my own sculptures, although existing in space resist a fixed representation and suggest ideas of other spaces, non-spaces; an in-between space that does not pin itself down and become fixed to any particular image, idea, objector representation.
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  • Date Issued: 2010

The eyes of the wall : space, narrative and perspective

  • Authors: Baasch, Rachel Mary
  • Date: 2013
  • Subjects: Installations (Art) , Frames (Sociology) , Architecture, Domestic, in art , Narrative art
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2388 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001578
  • Description: The Eyes of the Wall and Other Short Stories is concerned with dialectics of seeing and perceiving as they pertain directly to a corporal understanding of interiority and exteriority, architectural framing and notions of dislocation in relation to place. This practical submission is a site-specific installation that engages in a reciprocal dialogue with its environment. The individual sculptural works which demarcate the parameters of the installation are hybrids of domestic architectural forms, (namely the wall, the window and the door) and internal furnishings such as the curtain and the bed. These hybridised metal and resin constructions frame the interior of a site, a tennis court located within my immediate Grahamstown environment. The placement of familiar objects generally associated with the home and notions of security and privacy, within the open, exposed and permeable enclosure of the tennis court evoke a sense of displacement within the viewer. This supporting document, The Eyes of the Wall: Space, Narrative and Perspective, considers the key conceptual concerns informing my installation. In this mini-thesis I address the relationship between domestic architecture and the body, examining the notion of framing as fundamental to the individual comprehension of space. I position my work in relation to that of Mona Hatoum drawing on the similarities that exist between her practice and my own. In the first chapter of this paper: My House/Your House: Walls, Windows, Doors and Skins I address the relationship between domestic architecture, framing and the body, and ‘contamination’. Within Chapter Two: Narratives of Division I engage with the idea of multiple ‘short stories’—personal and collective narratives—and their connection to issues of division and dislocation. Chapter Three: Seeing Blindness discusses the possibility that perspective, or at least one potential approach to perspective is concerned with that which one cannot see, an acknowledgment of the implicit relationship between seeing and not-seeing. Each of the three core concerns expressed in the title of this mini-thesis, The Eyes of The Wall: Space, Narrative and Perspective intersect within the site of The Eyes of The Wall and Other Short Stories. It is at this intersection that the shadows of stories within stories within stories insert themselves, like phantom limbs into the gaps and tensions framed by the forms of the installation.
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  • Date Issued: 2013

Visual narratives of division in contemporary Palestinian art and social space

  • Authors: Baasch, Rachel Mary
  • Date: 2017
  • Subjects: Art, Palestinian Arab , Art, Palestinian Arab -- Political aspects , Art and society -- Palestine
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/41770 , vital:25132
  • Description: This study analyses artworks by contemporary Palestinian artists that respond to visual narratives of division in social space from a perspective grounded in a South African context. The state of Israel is built on Historic Palestine. Political Zionism has created an ideological narrative of division that positions people of the Jewish faith as the rightful heirs to the land on which Palestinians have lived for centuries. In order to execute their vision of an exclusively Jewish nation state, the founding pioneers of political Zionism colonised and ethnically cleansed Historic Palestine, establishing Israel in 1948. To sustain the exclusive claim to Palestinian land, Israel has divided the space and the people in it at every possible level. The greatest testament to these efforts is the Israeli apartheid wall and checkpoint security system that can be described as a monumental visual narrative of division. With each second that passes, Israel claims more Palestinian land and expands on existing fences, walls and barriers. It is no secret that the Occupied Palestinian Territories are rapidly transforming into open-air prisons. Israel has stolen the Palestinian horizon line and replaced it with a concrete wall that blocks out light, vision and optimism. Within the shadows of these conflicted, traumatised sites of division, Palestinian artists seek openings, cracks and loopholes that signal the possibility for physical and psychological transgression of these seemingly impenetrable structures of division. I have developed a creative methodology that can be understood through the metaphor of ‘looking with the skin’ as a way to identify and analyse visual narratives of division and artistic responses to sites of division in Palestinian social space. Looking with the skin combines aspects of participant observation (specifically the emphasis on engaged fieldwork) from the discipline of Anthropology with the method of visual analysis from the discipline of Art History. In my application of this method through primary fieldwork conducted within the Occupied Palestinian West Bank Territory from 2013 and 2014, I have learnt that Israel’s colonisation, military occupation and system of apartheid directly impacts the ability of Palestinian artists to make and disseminate their work as well as the choice of content within their artwork. The artworks analysed in this thesis by the artists Khaled Jarrar, Y ael Bartana, Larissa Sansour, Hasan Darahgmeh, Fareh Saleh and Emily Jacir can be positioned in relation to artworks by artists based within a South African context, namely Thando Mama, Serge Alain Nitegeka and Doung Anwar Jahangeer. In this thesis I present a combination of my own photographic documentation of sites of division with the West Bank OPT in relation to the specific artworks made by the artists mentioned above. In my analysis of the photographic documentation and the artists’ work I highlight similarities, parallels, threads and intersecting narratives that connect different artists to one another and to the sites of division they are responding to within their artistic practice. This study carves a small conceptual pathway through ideological and physical walls from South Africa to Palestine through the study of contemporary art and visual culture.
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  • Date Issued: 2017

The Hasidic spirit as the foundation of the art of Marc Chagall

  • Authors: Bagraim, Abigail Sarah
  • Date: 1987
  • Subjects: Chagall, Marc, 1887-1985 Criticism and interpretation
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2393 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002189
  • Description: In considering Chagall's art the observer is immediately struck by the constancy of his almost obsessive repetition of certain symbols and themes. In this way Chagall has created his own fantasy world, one with which the observer soon becomes acquainted and grows to love and understand.
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  • Date Issued: 1987

Printmaking at the Dakawa Art and Craft Project : the impact of ANC cultural policy and Swedish practical implementation on two printmakers trained during South Africa's transformation years

  • Authors: Baillie, Giselle Katherine
  • Date: 1999
  • Subjects: Prints -- Technique Dakawa art and craft project Printmakers -- South Africa -- Grahamstown Prints -- Technique -- Study and teaching
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2394 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002190
  • Description: In 1998, the national Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology published a document aimed at the growth of culture industries in South Africa (DACST, "Creative South Africa", July 1998). Focussing on aspects of economic growth which this development could generate for South Africa, it nonetheless points to issues of cultural understanding which need to be addressed. Projects aimed at the development of arts and culture in South Africa have followed troubled paths. While projects aimed at establishing discourse for this development have succeeded on many levels, the imperatives of showcasing, rather than implementing cultural concepts appropriate to South African contexts, have tended to dominate. When the Dakawa Art and Craft Project was established by the ANC, in 1992, in Grahamstown, as the locus for the deve! opment of an arts and culture discourse in the liberated South Africa, all seemed set for success. Yet, less than four years after opening, the Project was closed. While speculatory reasons for closure tended to focus on financial and administrative problems, the basis for this closure had its roots in problems of cultural understanding manifesting themselves at the Project. These reflected a lack of cultural understanding on the part of the ANC and SIDA, the Swedish administrators sent to the Project, and the lack of clear cultural guidelines on the part of the trainees to the Project itself. These reasons for the Project's failure are integral to an understanding of arts add culture development and needs in South Africa today. As other projects, aimed at the same issues of development grow, an understanding of the history of the Project's failure is essential, for it poses questions still in need of answers. Part One examines the historical significance of the Dakawa Art and Craft Project between 1982 and 1994, recording the reasons for its establishment, the path of implementation it followed, and the cultural misunderstandings it posed to development. Part Two examines the cultural context of the trainees to the Project, followed by an account of the printmaking teaching practice, and the effects of cultural concepts on two printmakers trained during the Project's initial establishment, at the time of South Africa's political transformation.
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  • Date Issued: 1999

The artist and the technological society: a survey of attitudes in the wake of scientific and industrial revolution

  • Authors: Baker, Claerwen Glenys
  • Date: 1976
  • Subjects: Art and technology Art, Modern -- 20th century -- History
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2472 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1009499
  • Description: One of the most frequently repeated questions of our time is what is art? Since we have become conditioned to the idea that ''significant art - a much overworked modern term - belongs to the revolutionary avant-garde, artists carry their search for the new at all costs into the field of non art. P.1
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  • Date Issued: 1976

Creative misreadings: allegory in Tracey Rose's Ciao Bella

  • Authors: Bateman, Genevieve
  • Date: 2007
  • Subjects: Rose, Tracey, 1974- Artists -- South Africa Women artists -- South Africa Performance artists -- South Africa Women in art
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2473 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1009506
  • Description: This thesis will aim to investigate the extent to which Tracey Rose's Ciao Bella can be said to allegorically perform a dialectical enfolding of the dichotomous categories of meaning/nonmeaning; image/text; past/present and original/translation. The dual concepts of performance and performativity will be utilized as a means to explore the notion of interpretation as a meaning-making process and as an engagement between artist, artwork and viewer that is necessarily open-ended and in a state of constant change and flux. Rose's performance of Ciao Bella will be read as one that questions the illusion of unmediated representation by parodying and creatively misreading a multiplicity of visual, textual and musical representations so as to foreground the politics of representation. The representational figure of allegory, as one that defines itself in opposition to the Romantic conception of the unified symbol, will be put to work so as to reveal the ways in which Rose's performance works to critically undermine various positivistic attitudes toward self-identity, gender, race, politics, history, authorial intention and interpretation.
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  • Date Issued: 2007

South African art institutions : their formation and strategy with particular reference to the question of legitimacy

  • Authors: Becker, Carl
  • Date: 1993
  • Subjects: Art schools -- South Africa Art -- Study and teaching -- South Africa Art and society -- South Africa
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2456 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007622
  • Description: I have examined the relationship between the art institution and its social base, and the way in which legitimacy is sought and maintained under changing social circumstances. The social pattern of 'avante garde artist' vs. 'philistine public' has tended to be the context within which 20th century art has developed. The consequent disjuncture between the public art institution and its social base was subsequently accepted as the natural condition of Fine Art production. During the 1980's, two significant factors were to influence this 'natural' condition: i) The demise of 'modernism' internationally, ' which broadened the scope of allowable objects for consideration as Fine Art. ii) Political mobilisation in South Africa was accompanied by calls for democratisation and charges of 'elitism' being levelled against many public institutions. These factors have combined to make the S.A. art institutions (public galleries, tertiary teaching institutions and national art competitions) re-assess their legitimacy, particularly in terms of 'accountability' and 'representativeness' . A close examination of these two factors is essential if one is to gain insight into the current condition of the public art institutions. This research is an attempt to understand the history and the current nature of the shifting relationship between the art institutions and the 'public' in South Africa. A further goal is to assess the extent to which concepts that are valid within the realm of the polity can be transposed into the cultural realm: A tendency prevalent within the cultural debate in South Africa during the 1980's. The emphasis of this mini thesis is on the artworld's perception of its social role. I therefore look at the way changing attitudes are reflected in the statements and writing of leading figures within this sector. The method is to critically analyse texts that pertain to my chosen area of research.
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  • Date Issued: 1993

Broken vessels : the im-possibility of the art of remembrance and re-collection in the work of Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski, William Kentridge and Santu Mofokeng

  • Authors: Belluigi, Dina Zoe
  • Date: 2002
  • Subjects: History in art Kiefer, Anselm, 1945- Boltanski, Christian, 1944- Kentridge, William, 1955- Mofokeng, Santu, 1956-
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2395 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002191
  • Description: This thesis is structured around investigating the philosophical and aesthetic problematics, politics, and possibilities of representing the past for the purposes of demythifying the present as well as commemorating the losses of history, as explored in the artworks of Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski, William Kentridge and Santu Mofokeng. The first chapter begins with Theodor Adorno’s philosophical understanding of myth and history: how he is influenced by and then develops Karl Marx’s critique of society, Sigmund Freud’s critique of reason and its subject, and particularly Walter Benjamin’s ideas of history as catastrophe, the role of the historian and his messianic materialism. The second section looks at Theodor Adorno’s dialectic of art and society: immanent criticism in aesthetic practice, mimesis, and the shift in conceptions of allegory from Walter Benjamin’s understanding to that of Jacques Derrida. The last section of the chapter looks at Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist theories against boundary-fixing, within that the ethical relation to the ‘other’ and the theorist/artist as psychic exile. The second chapter deals with the politics of remembrance and representation — beginning with Theodor Adorno’s historic interpretation of the Mosaic law against the making of images and Jean-Francois Lyotard on the im-possibility of representing the unrepresentable. The chapter is divided in two parts between the post-Holocaust European artists Anselm Kiefer and Christian Boltanski, and the post-apartheid South African artists William Kentridge and Santu Mofokeng. It explores, within these artists’ specific contexts, their formal and philosophical approaches to myth and history, and the problematics of image-making, representing the unrepresentable, and commemorating the immemorial. The thesis concludes by considering different conceptions of melancholia as they relate to these artists: the Freudian psychoanalytic approach, Benjamin’s notions of the artist-genius, and Julia Kristeva’s Lacanian reading of the humanist melancholic, concluding with the mythic-historical Kaballist notion of melancholia as the historical burden or responsibility to commemorate loss.
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  • Date Issued: 2002

Featuring simplicity: jargon and access in contemporary South African art

  • Authors: Bereng, Lerato
  • Date: 2014-04-11
  • Subjects: Curatorship , Art museum curators , Art, Modern , Morija Arts & Cultural Festival , Simplicity in art , Jargon (Terminology)
  • Language: English
  • Type: Master's theses , text
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/60479 , vital:27784
  • Description: The focus of this paper is an exploration of curating and its various forms as understood in a South African art context. In order to understand this context I examine definitions of South African publics as well as different curatorial models. I raise questions around art and accessibility as well as the functions of language as a gate keeper within the visual arts. Through a practical exploration of curatorial methods of engagement, I assess the curator's role as disseminator of information. My final project Conversations at Morija that was held in Morija, Lesotho faces the challenge of curating within a space that has a strong creative platform, but lacks a visual art audience. The exhibition was held during the 2013 Morija Art and Culture festival which is dominated by its music component. Despite Morija being the country's creative centre and sole museum, there is little support for its programme both monetary and in terms of attendance. Through a series of conversations several issues pertaining to Morija, Lesotho and the diaspora were addressed. I look at the absence of creative platforms and alternative curatorial methods that engage the public in a participatory manner. Briefly exploring questions of migrant labour and definitions of what constitutes a diaspora. I look at relatable ways to engage the local audience whilst maintaining a creative core in which to spark dialogue around pertinent matters relating to the country. , Thesis (MFA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Fine Art, 2014
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  • Date Issued: 2014-04-11

Narratives and home: remembering an almost forgotten walk

  • Authors: Bezuidenhout, Natasha Belinda
  • Date: 2019
  • Subjects: Home in literature , Home in art , Artists -- South Africa
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/115039 , vital:34072
  • Description: The title of my exhibition Bittersoet alludes to the self-exploratory nature of my practice, as I interrogate the personal memories associated with objects that characterise the relationship between myself and my mother (mamma). This supporting document, Narratives and Home: Remembering an almost forgotten walk, considers the key conceptual concerns informing my practice. In this mini-thesis, I address the question: ‘What is a home?’. Drawing from my own Fine Art Practice, I explore how home can be examined as a product of the imagination, rather than only as a physical place. I consider how ‘home’ is constructed as the primary objective within an ideological framework defined by history, memory and narrative. Engaging beyond the idea of ‘home’ as a fixed structure or place, I examine the idea of ‘home’ as something fluid that is negotiated and defined by the interaction between objects and language. It is concerned with dialectics of memory and narrative as they pertain directly to an experience of both searching for and reimagining home through metaphorical representations. In particular, I explore how home can be seen as equally familiar and unfamiliar, existing in-between, always changing, never fixed, rather in a constant state of flux. The concept of home is addressed in a dialogical process by using Afrikaans as my mother tongue, I narrate informal conversations between myself and my mother. These conversations transform and expand into hybrid words, memories and narratives to form a layered continuous dialogue between my practice and research. This notion relates to exploring oneself and the ‘fictions’ of the past. The self being fundamental to the individual comprehension of both ‘place’ and ‘space’.
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  • Date Issued: 2019

A critical analysis of South African underground comics

  • Authors: Breytenbach, Jesse-Ann
  • Date: 1996
  • Subjects: Underground comic books, strips, etc. -- South Africa -- History and criticism
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2396 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002192
  • Description: In a critical analysis of several independantly produced South African comics of the 1980s and early 1990s, close analysis of the comics leads to an assessment of the artists'intentions and purposes. Discussion of the artists' sources focuses on definitions of different types of comics. What is defined as a comic is usually what has been produced under that definition, and these comics are positioned somewhere between the popular and fine art contexts. As the artists are amateurs, the mechanical structure of comics is exposed through their skill in manipulating, and their initial ignorance of, many comic conventions. By comparison to one another, and to the standard format of commercial comics, some explanation of how a comic works can be reached. The element of closure, bridging the gaps between frames, is unique to comics, and is the most important consideration. Comic artists work with the intangible, creating from static elements an illusion of motion. If the artist deals primarily with what is on the page rather than what is not, the comic remains static. Questions of quality are reliant on the skill with which closure is implemented. The art students who produced these comics are of a generation for whom popular culture is the dominant culture, and they create for an audience of peers. Their cultural milieu is more visual than verbal, and often more media oriented than that of their teachers. They must integrate a fine art training and understanding into the preset rules of a commercial medium. Confronted with the problem of a separation of languages, they evolve a new dialect. Through comparative and critical analyses I will show how this dialect differs from the language of conventional comics, attempting in particular to explain how the mechanics of the cornie medium can limit or expand its communicative potential.
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  • Date Issued: 1996

Intimate masculinities in the work of Paul Emmanuel

  • Authors: Bronner, Irene Enslé
  • Date: 2011
  • Subjects: Emmanuel, Paul, 1969- Masculinity in art Identity (Psychology) in art Gender identity in art Art, South African -- 21st century
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:2397 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002193
  • Description: Paul Emmanuel is a South African artist who produces incised drawings, outdoor installations and prints (particularly intaglio etchings and manière noire lithographs). These focus on the representation of male bodies and experience. Having begun his career as a collaborative printmaker, since 2002, his work has become more ambitious as well as critically acclaimed. In 2010, his most recent body of work, Transitions, was exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. I propose that Emmanuel represents the male body as a presence that either is not easily seen or that actively disappears or erases itself. Its subjectivity, and the viewer’s engagement with it, may be characterised as one of intimacy, exposure, loss and vulnerability. Emmanuel’s work may be said to question conventions and ideals of masculinity while, at the same time, refusing any prescriptive interpretation. To develop this proposition, I examine specifically Emmanuel’s incising drawing technique that ‘holds open’ transitions in male lives. In these liminal moments, Emmanuel represents men as ‘seen’ to change state or status, thereby exposing the ongoing process of building masculine identities. Equally elucidatory is Emmanuel’s imprinting of his own body, which, in his use of “traces” that reveal the vacillation between presence and absence, makes contingently ‘visible’ this gendering process, and has particular implications for the expression of subjectivity in a contemporary South African context.
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  • Date Issued: 2011

The effect of the feminist movement on painting and sculpture in Europe and America after 1945

  • Authors: Brooks, Jennifer
  • Date: 1983
  • Subjects: Painting, American -- 20th century Painting, European -- 20th century Sculpture, European -- 20th century Sculpture, American -- 20th century Feminism and art -- United States Feminism and art -- Europe
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2459 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007675
  • Description: My investigation of women artists and their status in society today as a result of the feminist movement, revealed issues which, I felt, were multifaceted. This necessitated an exploration of many aspects in order to arrive at a fairly satisfactory conclusion as to whether the revolt and the aggression on the part of the feminists had borne any fruit, either generally in everyday life, or artistically. It has proved most stimulating and informative. I think that the need to assess oneself as a woman, working within a male-dominated creative environment is a very necessary process and one which has been most beneficial to me. The subsequent research revealed that a radical, thematic change had occured within the feminist movement at the start of the Eighties; a fact of which, till recently, I was largely unaware. What I discovered was that the militant, feminist approach of the Sixties and Seventies had given way to a more realistic involvement brought on partly by the economic recession and the effects as well of earlier feminist movements, leading to a relaxation on the part of the younger generation. The Violence had faded. Hard times curbed the excesses of the movement and took it along the road to practicality. Dovetailed to this and seeming to run concurrently was the phenomenon of the demise of the Modern Art Movement. These changes described were not only artistic and feminist, but cut right across the board. involving all facets of life. To take one as an example. the political with conservatism reinstating itself in America not merely as an alternative but as a worthwhile direction in itself. Other issues included the sociological, historical, biological, and cultural; all closely interwoven and therefore requiring some generalisations at times. Previous to becoming involved with my topic, I had been reacting to pre-conceived ideas laid on me as a student in the Sixties and Seventies - a militant, aggressive approach acquired as a protective shield, to deal with the masculine environment which denigrated in varying degrees mine and fellow female artists work, sometimes overtly, sometimes subconsciously. This discrimination, is usually denied as ever having existed by the men involved. It shows a lack of awareness of what, we, as female art students, were subjected to. This is one of the main reasons why I undertook this subject; partly out of interest and perhaps partly as some sort of catharsis.
  • Full Text:
  • Date Issued: 1983

The emotive qualities of light as a prime factor in artistic expression

  • Authors: Brooks, R B
  • Date: 1965
  • Subjects: Light in art
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
  • Identifier: vital:2502 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014659
  • Description: What we do possess to-day as 'art' a faked music, filled with exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocted out of the form-wealth of millenia some new "style'' which is no style at all since everyone does as he pleases. A lying plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this, the taste of the "man of the world" can be accepted as the expression and sign of the age. Everything else, everything that sticks to old ideals is for provincial consumption. This is the year 1965 - nearly fifty years since Oswald Spengler published "The decline of the West" The paragraph I have quoted by way of justification for this dissertation is in turn a justiification of the fact that Spengler is as valid today as he was in 1918.
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  • Date Issued: 1965
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