Browsing by Author "Brown, Storm Jade"

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    Art, outrage, dialogue: a McLuhan reading of three visual communicative practices in Cape Town public space
    (2015) Brown, Storm Jade; Irwin, Ronald
    This mini-dissertation places a specific focus on the City of Cape Town and considers the space between aesthetics, commercial interest and social relevance in public visual communication practices. Instead of making a general statement or providing a value judgement, this research examines the nature of the debate surrounding public artistic practices by referring to three main artists; namely Michael Elion, The Tokolos Stencil Collective and Freddy Sam. The basis of the discussion is centred around the recent controversy surrounding Michael Elion's Sea Point public art sculpture, Perceiving Freedom (2014) and the respective questions it raised about what public space means, who has the right to represent themselves, and what that looks like. By drawing a comparison with Perceiving Freedom (2014) to the visual communicative practices of Freddy Sam and The Tokolos Stencil Collective, this research examines the progression of the debate. This encompasses the ways in which each artist and their work serve to illuminate the different visual modes of engagement in Cape Town's public spaces. Due to the contemporary nature of the subject matter, this debate is engaged with on three different levels. The first level examines the context of this debate and each artist, whereas the second level considers the points where their respective visual communicative practices intersect and engage in dialogue with each other as well as the general public. The last level considers an alternative way of reading the content, context and form of visual communicative practices so that their resulting effect can be better understood. This is done with the use of Marshall McLuhan's (1964) total effect media theory. Although several other prominent South African artists are mentioned in the scope of this research, it is important to note that the focus still pertains to the aforementioned themes of aesthetics, commercial interest and social relevance in public visual representative practices. Therefore Michael Elion, The Tokolos Stencil Collective and Freddy Sam remain the specific focus of discussion, as their respective works are used to illustrate these three themes. The first level of engagement offers a theoretical background to the reader by briefly familiarising them with international street art and graffiti practices. This brief yet concise background allows for a better understanding of the history and politics surrounding unsanctioned public visual practices and how they differ to formal sanctioned and funded ones.
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    Entanglements of media and space: an exploratory case study of two public arts projects in Johannesburg and Cape Town
    (2024) Brown, Storm Jade; Irwin, Ronald
    This research presents a spatially and media sensitive analysis of the layers of discourse created by two South African public art case studies between 2017 and 2019. Public art is selected as the research object as it “necessarily explores the very meaning of public space” (Wacławek, 2011:65) and it “can become the central focus for a range of competing discourses related to that domain” (Clements, 2008:19). Furthermore, the concept of public space has changed since the “internet and related technologies have created a new public space for politically oriented conversation…” (Papacharisi, 2002:9). When public art is photographed and re-presented in an online space, its surrounding audience and public sphere also extends. This results in a collapse of physical spaces into online ones, and has transformed contemporary understandings of what it means to be public and what it means to be visible. The emplaced yet fragmented nature of public art could not be more relevant for a South African context where public spaces are increasingly contested in a post-apartheid context. Therefore two specific public art case studies were chosen for this research. These projects first appeared in physical locations before moving into online and mediated spaces. The first project, #ArtMyJozi by The Trinity Sessions, features community public art projects created in and around the Rea Vaya Bus Rapid Transit Terminals on Louis Botha Avenue in Johannesburg. #ArtMyJozi was commissioned by the City of Johannesburg and the Johannesburg Development Agency. It used a placemaking approach to guide the artwork creation process and community engagement. The second case study looks at three iterations of BAZ-ART's International Public Art Festival (IPAF) from its inaugural year in 2017. The IPAF started off as a South African iteration of a global public art festival, and was a commercially sponsored three-day long event where various murals were created in and around Salt River and the surrounding Central Business District of Cape Town. Although both projects are loosely branded as ‘public art', each project underwent a very different project delivery and community inclusion process. Furthermore, there was no shared meaning about the term public space. These differences in approach and process resulted in vastly different public responses and discourse themes for each case study. This discourse emerged in both online news media and Social Network Sites, as well as within the physical spaces that the works occupied. Therefore, in order to study both sites of discourse for each public art case study, this research uses an exploratory case study approach. The approach triangulates various data collection sources including field visits, social media posts, press releases, government policies and interviews. After this, a Critical Discourse Analysis and a Content Analysis are used to discern key interrelated discourse themes. This layered and triangulated approach is informed by Couldry and McCarthy's (2004) conceptual framework of MediaSpace. MediaSpace presents a spatially sensitive approach to examining media objects and the discourse that they create over five distinct levels. Importantly, it highlights how each level is interconnected with all other levels. It also considers the cumulative scale of effects between media and space. This study is a necessary one, as it explores how discourse is created in public art projects in South Africa, and by extension, how discourse around public spaces is amplified, maintained or negated in various spaces including online ones. There has not yet been a localised and digitally inclusive study of this phenomenon in South Africa.