Browsing by Author "Green, Louise"

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    Hidden treasures in Ivory Towers : the potential of university art collections in South Africa, with a case study of UCT
    (2007) Franzidis, Eva; Green, Louise; Tietze, Anna
    This dissertation takes as its central theme the context of a university as a setting for artworks. While globally many university art collections enjoy prominent status in their communities, and are well endowed and visited, their South African counterparts are sorely underused and valued. Thus, the aim of the study is twofold; in the first instance, an argument is made for the positive and productive role South African university art collections can play within their society - and primary research reveals the rich and varied collections held throughout the country. The second focus is on one particular case study: the University of Cape Town (UCT) art collection, and the acquisition body that oversees it, the Works of Art Committee (WOAC). Through a detailed analysis of this committee's thirty-year archive, and informed by the experience of an extensive internship with the WOAC, the study provides an overview of their operation, assessing their successes and failures. What is revealed is that there are numerous problems inherent within the way in which this committee is run, and the management of the art collection in general. Aside from compositional issues within the committee itself, the fact that there is no educational integration between the collection and the university community, is highly problematic. As such, numerous suggestions are offered, with the hope that the collection can become a more meaningful presence to those on campus, and beyond. For, with a far healthier acquisition budget than the South African National Gallery, and access to a large and diverse audience, it seems as though a highly exciting opportunity is being overlooked.
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    The nature industry : reflections on culture at the end of nature
    (2004) Green, Louise; Higgins, John
    At the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century the concept of nature assumes a new visibility. I argue that this visibility, which takes the form of an anxiety about 'the end of nature', can be linked to a sense of crisis surrounding the possibility of life in late capitalist society. An understanding of the 'end of nature', I suggest, can best be achieved by returning to the work of Theodor Adorno. In particular, the figure of the constellation seems to offer a effective mode of analysis for addressing the complexities contained in this cultural phenomenon. The cultural texts I have chosen to juxtapose are drawn from a series of seemingly unconnected areas of cultural life: a parkway, a utopian novel, an exhibition of chimpanzee paintings, a dystopian novel, a series of popular films and a number of philosophical essays and cultural commentaries. I say seemingly unconnected because my thesis attempts to show how the general sense of 'the end of nature' emerges in different ways in these different discursive forms and representational arenas. What emerges from this constellation of elements is an image of nature as that which holds and conceals the irreducible contradictions of living in consumer society. The image makes visible how things like landscapes, animals and human bodies, become marginalized and/or reduced to commodities sometimes even in the very act of trying to conserve them. What also becomes evident in the phenomenon of the end of nature is an inflation in the value of the concept of 'nature'. If in some ways, the new value acquired by nature seems simply to repeat an earlier movement, in which reified nature becomes the desired alternative to the degraded landscape of industrial production, this interpretation does not sufficiently account for the extent and intensity of recent interest in nature. This inflation in the value of nature is not only a tum away from history. It also involves recognizing something about the agency of what is not human. Nature returns as a sign of loss and of value not only because of real environmental concerns, but also because, in a lived condition of increasing abstraction, it contains the promise of something outside.
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    The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art
    (1994) Green, Louise; Higgins, John; Driver, Dorothy
    In this paper I discuss the relation between Olive Schreiner's social context and the form of her fictional writing. It is not intended as an interpretation of her work but rather represents a preliminary sketch of the social and political discourses which structured her environment. I suggest that for Olive Schreiner writing is not a means of representing a given reality. Instead writing itself is a constitutive act through which she attempts to articulate a subject which expresses the conflicts and contradictions of its social and political location. In the first section of the paper, I discuss Olive Schreiner's position as a woman in relation to the literary canon. I argue that the social discourses of femininity in the late nineteenth century attempted to exclude women from the realm of cultural and intellectual production. Looking at the work of Herbert Spencer, the influential social philosopher who used scientific principles as the basis for his ideas about social order, I analyse the way in which Olive Schreiner rewrites his theory in order to make a space for women as cultural producers. In the second section I look at the dominant forms of the novel available to Olive Schreiner. The dominant mode of representation for metropolitan writers was the realist novel and women writers such as George Eliot found it an extremely effective way of articulating their experiences. The other significant form of writing for Olive Schreiner was the colonial adventure story, the most popular way, in the nineteenth century, of representing the colonial space. I suggest that Olive Schreiner's rejection of both these forms and her choice of the allegorical mode, can be understood in terms of the specificity of her position as a colonial woman writer. In the third section, I focus more closely on one of Olive Schreiner's texts, The Story of an African Farm in an attempt to illustrate how allegory allows Olive Schreiner to reorder the unstable colonial space. Both realism and the adventure novel, I argue, assume a coherent and unified self. The colonial context, I suggest problematises this sense of self as individualist agent and in the figure of Lyndall I see the limits of the reflective self as a means of interacting with the colonial situation. Bibliography: pages 68-69.