Colour and sculpture : an investigation into the use of two dimensional media in sculpture
- Authors: Wright, Jeanne
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: Sculpture -- Technique Sculpture -- History Color in art
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2436 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004783
- Description: From Introduction: Creative images which are normally called 'art' can be distinguished as either 'plastic' or visual. Both these forms throughout the history of art have relied to a greater or lesser degree on the use of colour. It is my intention to investigate specifically the changing role which colour has played in sculpture - the 'plastic' media of the visual arts and to chart the technical and aesthetic reasons for the use of colour. This investigation will encompass the historical perspective, the material qualities, aesthetic considerations, transitional codes and methods of approach in sociological frameworks and the examination of colour as a metaphysical element in the presentation of three dimensional media.
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- Date Issued: 1988
Coming clean: the treatment of traces
- Authors: Wilmot, Cassandra
- Date: 2013 , 2013-09-13
- Subjects: Salcedo, Doris, 1958- Bereavement in art
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2442 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006121
- Description: Coming Clean is a mixed media installation which aims to address and express ambivalent feelings or notions of loss arising particularly in the absence of a comprehensive narrative or history by focussing on what remains. By researching the role of indexical signs and strategies, particularly as they are deployed by the artist Doris Salcedo, I explore the capacity for these traces to not only effectively mark and memorialise loss, but to also convey the state of loss as experienced by the bereaved without providing a narrative account of the events which preceded them. The domestic ritual of washing is both alluded to and used as a metaphor in etchings, photographic prints and readymade objects to illustrate my concerns, with particular emphasis on the dialectic between what is revealed or concealed. Using representations or traces of this task of laundry to examine this dialectic between concealment and revelation, I comment on the anxiety of dealing with incomplete narrative inheritances by considering how traces of the past which impose themselves on the present may affect both remembrance and the ritual of loss, while also taking into account the complexities behind the disclosure of sensitive information in families.
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- Date Issued: 2013
Détournement : the art of troubling
- Authors: Wilby, Mark Owen
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/345 , vital:19950
- Description: Confidence in the form of, for example, commodified debt or the commodification of future value, is an increasingly large part of today’s globalised economy. This was alarmingly illustrated in 2008 by the repercussions of marketing unstable debt in the form of subprime mortgages in the United States leading to a precipitous global financial meltdown. That was a collapse of confidence writ large. At the same time, confidence is also a cornerstone of everyday social and professional life. The non-ZERO-sum project (exhibition title of practical submission in MFA fulfilment) interacts with the notion of confidence, and more particularly economic confidence. At the same time, the project takes the view that engagement from a fine art perspective would have an inherently inadequate vocabulary if restricted to a representative practice, and so a more interactive approach was sought. Research into the radical activism of the Situationists in the 1950s and 1960s, and particularly their tactic of détournement (the deliberate subversion of social or cultural practices), has informed and influenced the development of an interventionist technique summed up in this thesis as: The Art of Troubling. The Situationists had a dichotomous relationship with art. The group was initially made up mostly of artists and is in other instances referred to as an art movement. They saw art as the fulcrum for social and political change, and had their roots in the Dada, Surrealist, and Lettrist movements. As such, they also carried the genes of the notion of an anti-art, which varied in concept between art as a disruptive and propagandistic practice to the subsuming of art into other forms of social activity. This thesis, Détournement: The Art of Troubling, describes non-ZERO-sum as a bespoke methodology designed specifically for engagement with its particular topic. As such, the concept does not necessarily follow a template for situationist intervention. In 1962, a growing rift between the artists and the political theorists within the Situationist International tore the group in two. In conclusion of the non-ZERO-sum project, this thesis offers the observation that perhaps it was the political faction of the Situationists that had a more compelling idea of an art that functions through its very own subsumption.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Colonial photography in nineteenth century Grahamstown: an analysis of the Dr W.G. Atherstone Bequest
- Authors: Waters, Hywell George
- Date: 2000
- Subjects: Atherstone, W. G. (William Guybon), 1814-1898 Art and photography Photography -- Technique
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2426 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002222
- Description: The research for this degree comprises of a theoretical dissertationand a practicalcomponent of exhibited photographs. The theoretical research investigates the original photographic prints and glass-plate negatives taken betweenthe 1840's and 1890's, by the late Dr. W.G. Atherstone - an enthusiastic, Grahamstown amateur photographer. Dr W. G Atherstone's prints and negatives were examined by the author to deduce and establish his photographic abilities, his numerous techniques, diverse subject matter and the pictorialconstructionof his images. Selected works will be examined in order to interpret and illustrate his diverse interests and approaches towards photography. The selection of these photographs was determined by their pertinence to subject matter, and to the pictorial and historical considerations of the candidate. These issues are finally examined in relation to the candidates's own approach to photography today.
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- Date Issued: 2000
Idolatry and the artist's role with special reference to the work and thought of Andy Warhol
- Authors: Waterkeyn, Linda Catherine
- Date: 1997
- Subjects: Warhol, Andy, 1928-1987 -- Criticism and interpretation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2425 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002221
- Description: This thesis uses Hirsch's dual notion of intention, i. e. conscious, intentional meaning and symptomatic, unconscious meaning, in order to avoid a dead end in the critical assessment of Warhol's work. T.S. Eliot's term "objective correlative" refers to a phenomenon whereby "an inner emotional reality" is evoked by its "external equivalent". (Benet, 1965). Thus, given that no work of art is purely self-referential (as distinct from its being autonomous),Hirsch's notion allows that viewerreconstruction of a painting involves shared values and concerns; that a painting reconstructed by a viewer acquires the status of an icon through which the viewer participates in the artist's sacred cosmos. Sociology of art tends on the whole to extrapolate from actual works to the alleged conditions that gave rise to them. That it cannot predict what specific works will arise from given conditions makes it unscientific. However, its usefulness lies in its ability to reveal what values and concerns are shared by artist and viewer. This is vital for an interpretation of Warhol's work. Warhol's biography leads directly into the meaning of his work. The sickly child of an immigrant steelworker, he grew up in Pittsburgh - an epitome of the technocratic-industrial environment - and was exposed from an early age to a violent and ugly world where the disparity between the super-wealthy and the struggling workers was deeply disturbing. That Warhol himself became a multi-millionaire artistic tycoon is significant, for it means that his works, his icons, were participatory in the very cultural myths and neuroses they appear to display or even despise. That his work has meaning and is open to interpretation there is no doubt. For example, a man-made soup can, as a manifestation and containment of the sacred, is coercive. Here the sacred becomes familiar, affordable and disposable. An electric chair, a man-made instrument of death, gives man supremacy over mortality and the divine prerogative of purging the world of all evil. The essay, however, does not attempt to answer the broader questions raised by Fromm and Roszak about the spiritual emptiness of the twentieth century and the existential crises experienced by those who hunger for meaning and fasten greedily onto anything that seems to proffer a glimpse of something beyond. The essay, nevertheless, strives within this context to elucidate the valid in Warhol's work
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- Date Issued: 1997
'Becoming animal': motifs of hybridity and liminality in fairy tales and selected contemporary artworks
- Authors: Wasserman, Minke
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: Fairy tales -- History and criticism , Liminality in literature , Cultural fusion in literature , Cultural fusion and the arts , Art, Modern -- 21st century -- Themes, motives , Art, Modern -- 21st century -- Exhibitions , Human-animal relationships in art , Human-animal relationships in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2512 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1019759
- Description: ‘Becoming Animal’: Motifs of Hybridity and Liminality in Fairy Tales and Selected Contemporary Artworks serves as a theoretical examination of the concept of the hybrid. My research unpacks the liminal aspect of hybridity, locating the hybrid in the imaginative world of popular fairy tales, folk lore and mythology. In my accompanying MFA exhibition, Becoming(s), I explore these motifs through an installation of mixed-media sculptures which are based on the hybrid creatures that populated the fantasy world of my childhood. The written component of my MFA submission will relate directly to my professional art practise, developing it further and situating it within a relevant context. In my mini-thesis I will consider the liminal in relation to the ‘animal turn’ in contemporary art, with a particular focus on relevant artists working with the motifs of hybridity, such as Nandipha Mntambo, Jane Alexander and Kiki Smith. The ‘animal turn’ is a term used by Kari Weil (2010: 3) to describe a contemporary interest in issues of the nonhuman, and in the ways that the relationship between humans and nonhumans is marked by “difference, otherness and power”. Of key concern to my research will be Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming animal’. Rather than describing a transition from one stable state to another, ‘becoming animal’ suggests a radical dissolution of boundaries – not just between species (such as ‘human’ and ‘animal’) but between any essentialising binaries. As such, ‘becoming animal’ suggests a conception of identity as being fluid and mutable, rather than stable and fixed.
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- Date Issued: 2015
After Baines
- Authors: Walters, John Attwood Vereker
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Baines, Thomas, 1820-1875 Baines, Thomas, 1820-1875 -- Biography Painting, South African -- Exhibitions Painters -- South Africa -- Biography
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2432 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004368
- Description: By researching the life and work of Thomas Baines (1820 - 1875) in relation to a broader discourse of painting and the lived experience of being a 'white' male in a post-apartheid South Africa, I explore the ways in which this figure from the past has provoked the three series of artworks I have produced for my Master of Fine Art exhibition. This study has been divided into two parts, represented by the two chapters contained herein. Chapter One includes a critical retelling of Baines' biography and a discussion of the primary ways in which I have engaged with both the life and the working practice of this artist. I also address my own personal complicity in the constructions of 'the figure of Baines' as I have framed him both visually and textually during my work for this degree. Chapter Two describes some of the practicalities of my working process as a visual artist, including how I understand the theoretical and conceptual concerns which I raise in Chapter One to be visually manifest in my work. In this chapter, I also discuss my work in relation to the work of the contemporary South African artists William Kentridge and Johannes Phokela. The artistic practice of one artist imitating another artist's work is also explored as a central conceptual thread which could be seen to weave my verbal and visual production together.
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- Date Issued: 2011
Form and symbol in ancient Egypt
- Authors: Verwey, Erdmuthe Wilhemina
- Date: 1968
- Subjects: Signs and symbols -- Egypt
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2443 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006133
- Description: From thesis: The Egyptian civilization was regarded by the ancients as the ultimate example of' a morally regulated way of life; their judicious political economy was the admiration of the Elians and both Pythagoras and Plato accepted it as ideal, the former in a small select society and the latter on a larger scale .However a society like this,which is accepted, and acted upon as a completed one, in which everything has been considered, (especially the education of and the habituation to it, to make it second nature), does not take the nature of spirit into consideration, because it is precisely that infinite impulse which acts in contemporary life, and changes its very form. This impulse expressed itself in Egypt in a peculiar way. One would expect that a society, which appears to have been so complete, so fixed in every way, could have no characteristic of its own. Religion, one would expect would have been introduced in the same calm peaceful way, in accordance with the regular order of things. Unlike the Chinese civilisation, where every change is excluded, and the fixedness of character recurs perpetually, this calm order in Egypt was threaded with a spirit full of stirring and urgent impulses. We have here the Oriental Massiveness in combination with the African element. It is a spirit which begins to emerge from the merely natural, without freeing itself from nature. It cannot reach free consciousness of being, it only produces this as a problem: the enigma of its being. One half emerges, the other half is hidden. The buildings of the Egyptians are half below the ground while half rises into the air. The whole country is divided into a Kingdom of life and a Kingdom of death. This, however, is in reality no division, but a unity. The fundamental conception of that which the Egyptians regarded as the essence of being, rested on the fixed character of the natural world - in particular the fixed physical cycle of the Nile and the Sun. These two elements, strictly connected, formed the basis of a very simple and unchanging mode of life. Unchanging, because there is a definite physical cycle which the Nile, in connection with the sun, pursued. The sun rises, reaches its culmination, and then retrogrades. So does the Nile.
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- Date Issued: 1968
The animal as a sacred symbol in prehistoric art
- Authors: Van Heerden, Johannes Lodewicus
- Date: 1974
- Subjects: Art, Prehistoric Animals in art Animals, Mythical, in art
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2449 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007286
- Description: From Thesis: Why the animal as our point of departure in this discussion of prehistoric art, and why as a sacred symbol? Prehistoric art stretched over an immensely long period, from the first evidence of the activities of Neanderthal tribes during the Mousterian period, ± 35,000 B.C., to the end of the Magdalenian, ± 8,000 B.C. We are dealing with a time-span of nearly 30,000 years, during which a strictly Zoomorphic attitude existed. The animal was the dominant feature. It was constantly used in the decoration of cave walls, on engraved stone slabs, and on all kinds of utilitarian objects.
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- Date Issued: 1974
Zundiqondisise!: investigating voice, visibility and agency in the work of Xhosa women crafters who work in community art centres in the Eastern Cape
- Authors: Tutani, Zodwa
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Art centers -- Eastern Cape , Community arts projects -- Eastern Cape , Women artists, Black -- Eastern Cape , Ethnic art -- Eastern Cape , Agent (Philosophy) , Art and society -- Eastern Cape , Voice (Philosophy) , Critical discourse analysis , Postcolonialism and the arts , Feminism and art , Curatorship -- Eastern Cape , Art, Xhosa -- Conservation and restoration , Gompo Community Art Centre , Nomzamo Old Age Centre
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/146546 , vital:38535
- Description: A curatorial practice, Zundiqondisise! Reclaiming Our Voice is a twofold study comprised of curatorial practice and a written thesis, both of which are interdependent, examining the significance of space, agency, voice, and visibility in the works of Xhosa women crafters from the Eastern Cape. The study explores ways of reading and displaying indigenous art, as well as the archiving and inserting of these essential but neglected creative works of black women into the discourse of South African contemporary visual arts. This scholarship takes into account the social, cultural, and labour conditions that give rise to the perceived voicelessness in the ‘craft’ work of Xhosa women who work from community art centres. Through collaborating with two groups of women from two Eastern Cape art centres, namely Gompo Community Art Centre in East London and Nomzamo Old Age Centre in Ilitha Township, the study undertakes to locate, highlight and authorise these women’s voices and agency. This undertaking is carried out through a textual inquiry and curated exhibition, two interdependent components of this study, working with black feminist and postcolonial theories that enable me to formulate a critical discourse and practice towards a reflective scholarship on black women’s ‘craft’ work. It is a scholarship whose various chapters and curatorial interventions are tailored to excavate ancient Xhosa wisdom found in folklore and cultural practices of the everyday. This scholarship also provides new understandings that demonstrate and appreciate the fertile and significant though marginalised indigenous ways of creative expressions and knowledge production.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Hermeneutics and memory in selected works by Willem Boshoff
- Authors: Tryon, Denzil Jordan
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: Boshoff, Willem, 1951- Hermeneutics Memory in art Art, Modern -- 20th century -- South Africa Installations (Art) -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2433 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004453
- Description: From Introduction: Willem Boshoff was born in Vereeniging, South Africa, in 1951. The son of a carpenter, Boshoff developed an early interest in art. Although never taught formally by his father, he nevertheless acquired a knowledge of the craft of carpentry, a skill which he continues to utilize in much of his art-making today. Boshoff studied at the Johannesburg College of Art, and obtained a Master's Diploma in Technology in Fine Art in 1984. He taught at that institution for twelve years, becoming a full-time art practitioner in 1996. He produced some significant works prior to and during the time of his teaching tenure, including his KykAfrikaans visual poetry in 1979-1980, Bangboek between 1977-1986, and the researching and writing of the Dictionary of Perplexing English in 1986 (ending in 1999). In this study I will discuss Willem Boshoff's careful employment of language and materials, througb which he propagates his "study of ignorance" (Williamson and Jamal 1996:148). I will investigate two major works by Boshoff, namely The Writing in the Sand and The Blind Alphabet in Chapters 1 and 2 respectively. Both of these installations are concerned fundamentally with the subversion of power relationships and elitism. As I will show, both works offer an opportunity to investigate their objectives in relation to discourses surrounding language and hermeneutics. My study includes a third chapter, in which I discuss my own work entitled The Bread of the Presence in relation to Boshoff's own methodologies. As will be demonstrated with particular reference to The Blind Alphabet and my own work, a discussion of memory proves to be of some relevance within this dialogue.
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- Date Issued: 2007
African art and myth
- Authors: Till, C M
- Date: 1977
- Subjects: Art, African , Art and mythology , Mythology, African
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2494 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013306
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- Date Issued: 1977
Art and technology: an analysis of this relationship in the field of graphic art since 1960, with specific emphasis on the development of printmaking
- Authors: Thorburn, Dominic
- Date: 1984
- Subjects: Graphic arts -- History -- 20th century Prints -- Technique Art and technology
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2444 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006136
- Description: From Introduction: The reIationship between technology and art today is a logical extension of a collaborative tradition with ancient roots. The artist has always been a principal perpetrator of technological innovation. He, through the natural progression of technical means, has virtually evolved each new art form. There are many examples such as the 'lost wax' casting process, Jan Van Eycks oil paint innovations, Senefelders 'chemical printing' and Niecephore Niepce's first eight hour photographic exposures. Even woodblocks were in their time an innovation. All art uses technology of a kind and artists who prefer to remain aloof from it are in fact merely using technologies absorbed in older traditional media further back in the history of art. It is the flexibility of art to adapt to changing conditions of the world today which has spurred change and brought about a new dynamism in the graphic arts. The present intensity of interest in the print can be directly attributed to the advancement of technology and communication in this century. A whole new field of materials, methods and techniques are now available to the venturesome graphic artist and printmaker. Along with the contemporary technology dedication to expression leads naturally to innovation in aesthetics.
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- Date Issued: 1984
Art and authority : aspects of Russian art since 1917
- Authors: Thompson, Rowan Douglas
- Date: 1991
- Subjects: Authority in art Art, Russian Art, Russian -- 20th century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2450 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007298
- Description: From Introduction: The Artist was denied any role in Plato's Republic because of his ability to impair reason by imitating reality through his works. Aristotle, however, welcomed the artist because of his ability to express ideas about society through artistic form. Ernst Fischer agrees with the latter view, "Art enables man to comprehend reality, and not only helps him to bear it but increases his determination to make it more human and more worthy of mankind. Art is itself a social reality, society needs the artist ... and it has a right to demand of him that he should be conscious of his social function" (Fischer: 1963:46). Fischer adds to Aristotle's view by stating that society has a right to demand a social function from the artist. This issue has been the subject of controversial debate throughout the history of art. In a society based on class, the classes try to recruit art to serve their particular purposes. Art is seen by some as a powerful weapon - a means by which people can be swayed towards certain ideals. At the time of the Counter Reformation Italian artists were given strict instructions by the Jesuits on how to persuade and educate the people with their paintings. Napoleon urged his men of letters, painters and architects to refer to the classical ideals of ancient Greece and Rome to shape the emergent French Republic. The French philosopher, Dennis Diderot, stressed the futility of art unless it expressed great prinCiples or lessons for the spectator. Ideals of justice, courage and patriotism were embodied in the Neo-Classical movement. The didactic paintings of Jacques Louis David portray the above ideals. History records several attempts by those in power to coerce artists into conforming to their idea of society, indicating that authoritative manipulation of the arts is not purely a twentieth century phenomenon. This thesis intends to examine aspects of Russian art since 1917. Because Soviet art was dominated by policies which enabled authorities to determine its content, its history raises ideological issues which are relevant to the study of art. The theories of Suprematism, Constructivism and Socialist Realism will be discussed and conclusions will be drawn as to whether these theories succeeded as art movements which were ostensibly designed for the improvement of mankind. Present attitudes toward the visual arts in Russia will also be examined. However, in order to examine the above it is necessary to place the development of art into historical perspective.
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- Date Issued: 1991
Metaphysical elements of nineteenth century romantic landscape painting
- Authors: Thomas, Christopher Kay Patric
- Date: 1973
- Subjects: Romanticism in art , Landscapes in art , Landscape painting -- 19th century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2495 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013307
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- Date Issued: 1973
Remembering the traumatic past
- Authors: Tarr, Amie
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: Psychic trauma in art , Memory in art -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2431 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004216 , Psychic trauma in art , Memory in art -- South Africa
- Description: In this thesis, I explore my personal family history in relation to the difficulties and challenges raised when representing a trauma in the past. My focus was the Blaaukraantz Bridge railway disaster of 1911, where my great great grandfather, Paul Tarr, was among the 29 victims. The links between my personal family history and the disaster are explored in my art practice. In the mini thesis, I unpack theoretical concerns surrounding memory, loss, and representation of past trauma by examining selected works by Christian Boltanski, Rachel Whiteread and Doris Salcedo. I do not endeavour to provide new insights about early twentieth-century history but instead to engage with different ways of forming narratives about the past. Memory as an alternative form of history writing is the key concept in this thesis in that personal memory and testimony provides an integral perception of the past and important details that would not appear in history texts or other factual forms of writing the past. In this thesis I unpack this issue in relation to my own art practice.
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- Date Issued: 2013
Corporeal identification in selected works by Berni Searle
- Authors: Taggart, Emma
- Date: 2008
- Subjects: Searle, Berni Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981 -- Criticism and interpretation Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961 -- Criticism and interpretation Women artists -- South Africa Body art -- South Africa Self-portraits
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2434 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004576
- Description: Through a detailed analysis of a selection of works produced between 1999 and 2003 by the South African artist Berni Searle, this thesis explores the need to theorise a corporeal viewer in the process of interpreting art works. Such an approach is particularly necessary when dealing with an artist such as Searle because her work, which deals predominantly with the theme of identity, appeals not only to conceptual but also to experiential and corporeal understandings of identity. Searle incorporates the viewer into an experience of her own identity through a physical identification that the viewer feels in relation to her work. For viewers this means that they are made aware of how their own identity in the moment of interpretation is contingent on visual, mental and physical components. In order to develop this argument the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty is drawn on. These two theorists are very useful for an argument of this nature because both interpret identity as a construction involving an enfolding between the mind and, via the act of vision, the body of the subject. Through an inclusion of the corporeal element in interpretation, this thesis also offers a critique of interpretive theories that would reduce analysis to an interaction between eye and mind by analyzing how the viewer's body participates in the act of looking.
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- Date Issued: 2008
The multiple image in art : a personal response
- Authors: Swift, Anthony J M
- Date: 1976
- Subjects: Art, Modern -- 20th century , Art -- Themes, motives , Art appreciation , Art, Modern -- 20th century -- Philosophy
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2497 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013330
- Description: The development of this thesis is akin to that of a painting. It is subject to various influences that have evoked ideas and each idea has stimulated other ideas, thus the continuity could have gone beyond the bounds of this work. It is not so much an amalgamation of similar ideas but a development of diverse ideas which have, once composed, a common factor - the Multiple Image. Image refers to some paintings that have been made or part of them, a photograph, a film, a subject visualized in the mind or a complex reforms which is suggestive. Multiple refers to anything that relatively repeats itself, has facsimilies of itself, triptychs, polyptychs or is a conglomeration of ideas in a work of art. Intro., p. 1.
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- Date Issued: 1976
Image and symbol : some aspects of the creative impulse in the visual arts
- Authors: Stonestreet, Lyn
- Date: 1984
- Subjects: Art Symbolism in art
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2445 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006138
- Description: From Introduction: The making of images has been a human activity since Prehistory, undergoing many and drastic changes over the centuries, but the symbols integral to images have proved enduring and recurrent. This is because the artist draws on that stratum of the psyche which C.G. Jung calls the collective unconscious: a universal archaic memory within the human mind, containing the archetypes of all human experience.In this essay I have dealt with aspects of two of these archetypes; the anima and, to a lesser extent, the mother. I have limited my study to the work of male artists. Long sanctioned by tradition, images of women as seen by men, have provided an acceptable vehicle for men to express their own female principle. As long as a man operates in the world with total apparant masculinity, the anima or female principle is repressed and denied at a conscious level.
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- Date Issued: 1984
A survey of San paintings from the southern Natal Drakensberg
- Authors: Steynberg, Peter John
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: Art, San Rock paintings -- Drakensberg Mountains Cave paintings -- Drakensberg Mountains Art, Prehistoric -- Drakensberg Mountains Art, Prehistoric -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2437 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004918
- Description: From Introduction: The study of San rock art has undergone several different phases in approach to the interpretation of art. Two approaches are currently in use. The first emphasises the art as narrative or literal representations of San life and its proponents may be called the "art for art's sake" school. Adherents to the second approach make detailed use of the San ethnography on the belief system of these people and are highly critical of the literalists because they provide no such context. The second approach has rapidly gained ascendancy and replaced the "art for art's sake" school over the last twenty years. The watershed came with the researches of Vinnicombe (1967) in the southern Drakensberg and Maggs (1967) in the Western Cape who both embarked upon programs of research which had quantification and numerical analysis at their core, so that they could present "...some objective observations on a given sample of rock paintings in a particular area..." in order to compare and contrast paintings from geographically different areas. What Vinnicombe's numerical analyses clearly showed was that the eland was the most frequently depicted antelope and that it must have played a fundamental role "...in both the economy and the rellgious beliefs of the painters...", which opened up the search for what those beliefs might be and how they could be related to the rock art itself. In order to understand what the rock art was all about it was recognised that researchers had to meaningfully contextualise the art within the social and religious framework of the artists themselves. Without the provision of such a relevant context, as many different interpretations of the paintings could be made as there were people with imaginations. Such a piecemeal approach provides a meaningless jumble of subjective fancy which tells us something about the interpreters but nothing about the rock art. It is unfortunate that the advent of this explicitly social and anthropological approach marks the end of the amateur as a serious interpreter of San rock art, for the juxtaposition of the ethnography with the rock art requires a proper training in which the intricacies of symbol and metaphor can be recognised.
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- Date Issued: 1988