OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Langerman, Fritha"

Browsing by Author "Langerman, Fritha"

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The cannibals' banquet
(2012) Grobler, Isabelle Christine; Langerman, Fritha; Alexander, Jane
In this project I have attempted to determine and analyse my own "mechanisms of filtering, selecting and assembling" (Hoptman 2007: 128). The cannibals' banquet consists of a practical body of work and an artist's book. The function of the artist's book is to contextualise my creative practice within a theoretical and historical context. My area of interest is assemblage and its relation to consumption. A primary attribute of consumption is that it is premised upon the creation of a constant desire for new things. The corollary of this process is a mass of obsolete or 'dead' objects, which are discarded to make room for these recent acquisitions, ending up in scrap yards, second hand shops and flea markets. My interest is in what I perceive as an integral relationship between the origins and development of assemblage and that of a consumer society, since both function within object relations. With object relations I mean the interaction between people and objects as although objects themselves are lifeless, the relationship between an object and a person is animated through the assignment of meaning to an object by a person. In this sense the object stands in relation to the person who projects certain attributes onto it as the carrier of such meanings. The same object could conceivably hold completely different meanings assigned to it by different individuals at the same time.
Open Access
Claiming process : a strategy of production in approaching notions of self, biography and community in painting
(2002) Nichol, Catherine; Langerman, Fritha
My project is an exploration of process within the painting medium, themed round my experiences of 'self' and community, as located in my past and present circumstances. Throughout my work, my intention has been to explore my social, personal and political 'beliefs' in order to create a body of paintings that both reflects and challenges my 'belief' structures. In my work there are contradictory desires for change and stability, and an ongoing struggle between location and dislocation.
Open Access
Claiming, breaking and creating : a visual response to the experience of constructed social and spatial constraints
(2003) Qangule, Thembeka; Delport, Peggy; Langerman, Fritha
My personal experiences of patriarchal abusive behaviour have shaped and affected me. Two things in my formative schooling years marked the beginning of deep emotional disturbances in my life. Firstly, the vulnerability of being a female schoolgirl, constantly trapped in fear by threats of potentially abusive boys both within and without school premises. The 'old boys', as we would refer to them, instilled in me a negative attitude towards men that has affected me in later life. Secondly, my Sub A teacher who welcomed me with a 'klap' on my first day at school. This was followed by a long year of misery. I found myself going through a journey of broken emotions that resulted in years of aggressive behaviour, creating havoc in my family. This disturbing turbulence led me to seek internal liberation in order to analyse and deal with my emotional state. My health became affected by constant headaches and other stress related conditions. In addition to these formative experiences is my experience as a fine art student at the University of Fort Hare. Like many other black people in South Africa, I entered the field of fine art at a tertiary level with no prior art training. My early work was informed by social concerns and focused thematically on the upbringing of children in a safe and conducive environment. This idea emanated from what I observed and perceived as the submissiveness and subordination of women in my neighbourhood, either as mothers or as girlfriends. The failure for women to stand up to their authoritative, abusive husbands has detrimental effects on children. One of the reasons being that children ' ... attempt to protect a mother who is being attacked by a male companion or a husband, or they are emotionally damaged by witnessing violence and abuse' (hooks 2000: 72). Once I had obtained my undergraduate degree I enrolled at the University of Cape Town for an HDE (Higher Diploma in Education in pursuit of my career). That was a distressing experience. I constantly felt alienated from the tutorial group as I was the only black person in the art tutorial class. This was my first involvement with 'white establishment'. Language and culture, among other things, created a gap and a barrier between my classmates and myself and I discovered that this was the case with other black students also from Fort Hare. Unlike at Fort Hare, I could not easily approach lecturers at UCT to discuss problematic areas concerning my studies. At the time there was only one male black lecturer, who only came in for a section in the Psychology of Education course. Entering UCT felt for me like an act of trespass. I made up my mind that I would not allow myself to feel as if I was at UCT under protest. It is this approach that is the impetus for this dissertation.
Open Access
The dissection: An examination of the printmaking tradition as a means to reconsider the relationship between the human body and its representation
(1995) Langerman, Fritha; Payne, Malcolm; Skotnes, Pippa
My work is informed by the identification of the body as a site of anxiety. Computer technologies have led to increased disembodiment, while AIDS has reinforced awareness of the body as physically vulnerable. The basic premise governing my dissertation is that the body of the individual has become a collection of parts - fragmented by its representation. More specifically, I have referred to medical illustration and its role in the objectification and abstraction of the body. In revisualising the image of the body I have chosen to work within a formally fragmented framework. My title, The Dissection, refers to an intrusion into the body, that has as its aim the extraction of knowledge: it is about revealing the unseen. It also relates directly to my working method, which isolates, cuts and sews images. My source materials are medical engravings derived from eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century medical atlases. As these references form part of the history and technology of printing, my project has been to recontextualise these images within the tradition of printmaking. This has resulted in technical innovations becoming a significant part of the work's content. The first part of this paper deals with the assertion that medical illustration constructs the body as an .object. I refer to Barthes in assessing the notion of authorship, and discuss alternative theories of the subjective construction of the body. Having established the body as object, I consider the influence of illustration on the perception of the body. I then examine the influence of illustration on theories of biological determinism, and identify the implications of these theoretical concerns for the body as art object. The second part of the paper situates my work within the context of printmaking. I draw parallels between the printed body and collage, and mention my use of format and the multiple in an interpretation of the body. The final section makes specific reference to my body of work.
Open Access
Erasing the object : sculptural manoeuvres into the sublime
(2008) Khoury, Milia Lorraine; Langerman, Fritha
During the Spring of 1969, as if adopting the guise of the explorer/adventurer of yesteryear, the American artist Robert Smithson (1938 - 1973) and his artist-wifeNancy Holt (1938 - )2 travelled to the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico (Roberts 2000: 552).Over a century earlier, in 1841, the American 'travel writer' John Lloyd Stephens(1805 -1852)3 had embarked on a similar voyage to the Yucatan peninsula and documented his encounters in his then celebrated book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan(1843). Smithson, aware of Stephens' travels and book, published his own account of his experiences on the Yucatan peninsula in an essay wryly entitled 'Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan41 in the September 1969 edition of the periodical Artforum.
Open Access
Fallen things: delineating veil-wound-womb through sculptural practice
(2025) Chambers, Kerry Lee Maria; Langerman, Fritha; Van Der Schijff, Johann
Fallen things is an exhibition of sculptural objects and accompanying text that investigates how the overlapping motifs of veil-wound-womb can articulate fragility and the erotic in sculptural practice. This research draws from Christian iconographic traditions of the contact relic and vera icon, Surrealist object theory, and the generative potential of the matrixial effect to examine how these conceptual and practical motifs manifest in contemporary artistic practices. Using a wide range of source images in the written component and working with casting, carving and assemblage; I explore how gravity, temporal moments of contact, and subtle material juxtapositions cultivate a tactile dialogue between materiality and form. Nestled in the grey area between abstraction and figuration, and drawing on Barbara Baert's analysis of material tensions between cloth and skin, wound and womb, material and psychological; this body of work delineates a sculptural practice that is associative and intuitive, evoking surfaces that hover between exterior and interior.
Open Access
Gutter Pop
(2024) Vossgätter, Elize; Langerman, Fritha
This research project revolves around wax, an inherently mercurial and unstable medium, porous to contaminants, sensitive to temperature, and preservative by nature. In a series of artworks and a minor dissertation, I engage with wax as both material and metaphor; an analogy with which to explore the relationship between human and natural environments and the themes of temporality and disintegration within the context of the present climate crisis. Bees, the producers of natural wax, are attracted to my work and constitute an integral part of the project. Gradually removing wax from the studio to their hive, they have become co-producers. The resulting collaborative works gesture to a post-natural state where the unknown biodegradable effects of human production and waste — continuously synthesised materials and contagions that co-evolve with organic processes — create a hybrid ecosystem. In articulating my practice and its thematic resonances, I am guided by posthumanist theorists Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz. My engagement with wax explores a mediated materiality shaped by haptic, synthetic, and digital interventions. These interventions extend reflections on the tentative co-existence of the human and non-human world, and question the capacity for protection and preservation. My work envisions precarious futuristic environments by creating tensions between process, form, material, and colour, and collapsing previously held boundaries of pictorial space and interdisciplinarity. In a presentation of my methodologies, I discuss how my chance collaboration with bees has further informed my understanding of posthumanist thinking and expanded the field of my painting practice.
Open Access
How To Fold A Grid
(2023) Lehr-Sacks, Maia; Langerman, Fritha; van der Schijff, Johann
How to Fold a Grid explores the body, object, and thing in relation to the grid. It explores the use of the grid as an orientation and disorientation device. It discusses the elements of the grid: point; line; square; cube by referring to queer theory, Object Oriented Ontology, the physics of time and cartesian geometry The artist (the body) navigates these themes through paper folding, sculpting, making marks, as well as collecting and arranging found objects. There is a particular focus on a repetitive and modular process of making. The works interrogate a distortion and manipulation of the grid. This engagement acts as a mechanism of allowing the artist to orient themselves through practice while also querying the binaries imposed by the object subject divide in relation to the structural hierarchies imposed on queer bodies by the social matrix that defines the “norm”.
Open Access
Post- Print: a moment of compression
(2022) Ranger, Adrian; Langerman, Fritha
‘Post-Print' is a practice-led project that seeks to situate the emergence of the printmaking tradition - and the notion of the print as ‘reproduction' - as a pivotal Event which once shaped a past era's perception of reality, just as the ‘digital-multiple' template today functions as a contemporary reproduction of our Being. For this project, I will draw on Slavoj Žižek's philosophical reading of the notion of ‘Event' as a framework for my central thesis: I want to expand on how the moment of compression for a technology for looking (i.e., the introduction of the printing press and the digital device) may be considered a veritable Event. In the process, I will inevitably rely on Walter Benjamin's observations in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' as an inspiration for my discussion of the print as reproduction and the image as Event. Finally, I happily acknowledge the influence of Guy Debord's ‘The Society of the Spectacle' (1967), to which I will bring a particular focus on the notion of ‘the mediation of being through the image' in relation to my video installation, entitled ‘Image-Machine'. The progression of creative discourse - the transition from the ‘print' to the ‘post' as the means of infinite reproduction - is the core of my project, as this shift of mediums contextualises my own retrospective mediations of the avalanche of images that characterise the present Event. Rather than mere diversions, I consider historical thinking and anachronism to be practical methodologies in my work. These retroactive interventions are themselves closely informed for me by the philosophical strategies of fragmentation, reframing and détournement variously proposed by Benjamin, Žižek and Debord. Thus, I will discuss here how these philosophical ideas have shaped the critical processes and curatorial choices within my final exhibition, ‘Post – Print', whilst also referencing and cross-examining my video installation, ‘Image Machine', and an installation of press-like object works, titled ‘Fragmented Studio'.
Open Access
The Printer's Grey : alchemy, ritual and performance in fine art printmaking
(2013) Van der Merwe, Darren; Inggs , Stephen; Langerman, Fritha
Peter Zhang, in writing on the work of Deleuze and Guatarri, identifies what he calls Deleuzian minor rhetoric 1: namely the need to step outside of the major language and occupy the position of minority. This position of minority, which for Deleuze is a position of power, is achieved through the process of becoming, a constant state of mobility. In a sense this is one of the motivations for my project - understanding the language of printmaking I find myself invested in by considering the material qualities of printmaking as well as the process or act of printing through a number of visual forms. In order better to understand my own position within printmaking, I have used this project to explore the figure or persona of the printmaker and in doing so I am journeying towards the Deleuzian position of minority by questioning ways of thinking about print and the printmaker. This project is located within the fine arts practice of printmaking, but positions itself as an investigation of the liminal, in-between processes of printmaking in terms of alchemy and ritual through the figure of the printmaker. The project is everything in-between the initial idea for a print and the final product, a space I have come to refer to as The Printer's Grey. This reflects my own art-making methodology and my particular approach and thinking within printmaking, where my notebooks and proofs hold the same importance as the eventual printed product. These objects all reveal a creative process, which is flexible and shifting rather than one that merely renders an image in printed form. In drawing attention to the in-between processes during the act of making I assert both its instrumental role in the creation of the print as well as the importance of the process as a site of thinking through the visual. Specifically in relation to printmaking, The Printer's Grey speaks to and seeks to draw into the gallery space aspects of the in-studio process of making a print - aspects which often remain hidden when viewing a print.
Open Access
The virus and the vaccine: curatorship and the disciplinary outsider
(2022) Liebenberg, Nina; Langerman, Fritha; Skotnes, Philippa
In the various departments of a university, researchers, lecturers and students exercise limitations on the objects or subjects they study through the disciplinary categorisations and processes they apply. These methods, taught in the curricula of their undergraduate programmes, promote a particular way of looking and of understanding that privileges certain characteristics over others. As students become assimilated into their respective academic communities, they become naturalised to the resulting biases, habits, norms and conventions and, subsequently, are unaware of lurking blind spots. This process limits the kinds of knowledge these disciplinary ‘insiders' are exposed to, and I argue that it can lead to the occlusion of ethical considerations, hinder discovery and perpetuate negative aspects of the hegemonic Western foundations of many of these disciplines. To support these claims, I focus on an object housed in the University of Cape Town (UCT) library, a Tabloid medicine chest. This chest has been rendered invisible in the library because it exhibits characteristics that fall outside of those privileged by the library's categorisation systems and its search engines. By conducting an object-study that delivers a wide range of findings – most quite separate from the chest's original intended use – the object becomes a prompt and a provocation to examine where else in the institution knowledge has been rendered invisible by insiders and their methods. I survey objects and collections resident in the departments of the university and discuss two collections in detail: the M.R. Drennan anatomical collection, actively used in science curricula, and the Kirby collection of indigenous instruments, almost invisible in its host department. These case studies illustrate how limits imposed by their respective insiders curtail the explanatory power of objects, limiting an understanding of the social and political pressures brought to bear on a discipline and that shape its practice. The case studies, particularly of the Drennan collection, also illustrate that outsider perspectives can help expose disciplinary limitations. The next part of this enquiry considers the outsider perspective as championed by a particular form of curatorship and artmaking introduced by lecturers at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT in the 1990s. The exhibition making format and curatorial strategies introduced by these individuals are shown to be effective in revealing limitations placed on objects, in surfacing blind spots within the university and its affiliated museums and in opening up collections and their disciplines to outside perspectives. The effects of such exhibitions are traced as they reverberate in the university and culminate in the introduction of an interdisciplinary initiative focused on examining the university's knowledge archives, the instatement of an honours programme in curatorship and various departmental installations. Lastly, to elucidate what is at stake when an object is limited by the constraints of its host department and to showcase the potential of artmaking and curatorship in combating these limitations, the invisible chest in the library is subjected to a range of my own artmaking and curatorial strategies. This process is conceptualised as a shift from object-as-virus to object-as-vaccine. The methods I employ celebrate a much wider resonance of the object and extend the results revealed by the object-study at the start of this thesis.
Open Access
The visitor centre: artistic reconfigurations of multispecies relationships in an urban environment
(2021) Grobler, Nicola; Langerman, Fritha; Anderson, Pippin
Extinctions and biodiversity loss in the age of the Anthropocene are closely related to speciesist attitudes and a lack of care for nonhuman species. This thesis is an examination of relational art practice and conversation as tools to encourage empathy and care for nonhuman species in urban environments, here specifically performed in the City of Tshwane/Pretoria. The thesis focus is predominately on non-reciprocal multispecies relationships between humans and wild and semi-wild species that occur in urban ecosystems. Cartesian dualism has conditioned humans to objectify and “other” nonhuman species, and in identifying this problem, this study examines representations of nonhuman species in natural history museums, where the categorical separation of human and nonhuman species is maintained through a static, hierarchical taxonomic narrative. This is demonstrated in a case study of the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Tshwane. Whilst much scientific research has shifted towards a recognition of emerging and entangled organisms in multispecies assemblages, this study argues that the didactic method of natural history museums and other forms of public biological science deny a nuanced and horizontal relationship with nonhuman species. Through creative practice, the argument is made that an alternative mode of experience and understanding can allow for more caring and empathetic relationships with nonhuman species. The Visitor Centre was devised as a mobile hub with which to engage the public through the close consideration of constructed art objects that sparked conversations about urban nonhuman species. Assemblage and relational aesthetics were employed as creative methods that, through the phenomenological and dialogical workings of The Visitor Centre, were used to unsettle the limitations of species-specific categories by human design. By means of anthropomorphism and storytelling, the artwork brought forth considerations of nonhuman species as subjects, facilitating the emotional and empathetic responses that followed. In this research, both the impact of the conversations of the participants and the artist-researcher's multiple roles as creator, witness, listener, interlocutor and audience are made evident and are acknowledged as key strategies in the formation of this alternative space of relationship making.
Open Access
Variations on a theme by John Herschel
(2014) Groenewald, Madeline; Langerman, Fritha; Saptouw, Fabian
Herschel resided in Cape Town until 1838. He set up a telescope in the orchard of their estate, Feldhausen, in Wynberg, and worked towards completing a systematic survey of the southern hemisphere for stars, nebulae and other celestial objects (Warner, 1996:55 & Buttmann, 1974:104). Herschel’s observations in the Cape were not only focused on astronomy. His scientific contributions included work in the fields of geology, meteorology and botany and this scope of diversity extended beyond the disciplines of science since he also pursued his interests in poetry, music and visual art (Buttmann, 1974:112 & Schaaf, 1989:10). Herschel played the flute and was also an avid draughtsman, evident in the extensive collection of sketches that he made of Cape botanicals and landscapes (Schaaf, 1989:10). In addition to these sketches, his diary entries from his stay in Cape Town, published in “Herschel at the Cape: diaries and correspondence of Sir John Herschel, 1834 to 1838” provide another affirmation of his variety of skills, since poetic descriptions and multi-sensory observations can be found amongst scientific and analytical inquiries. For example, in his diary entry March 1836 he commented on a nightjar’s song and included a music staff with an accurate notation of the bird’s melody. In a letter to William Henry Harvey in 1837 Herschel wrote about the scents of Cape flowers, applying perceptive metaphors for each flower species, such as cinnamon, pepper and ginger (Warner, 2011:34-35). He often created links between his observations from these different fields, such as applying his study of botany to that of photography by using Cape flower juices for photographic colour filters (Schaaf, 1992:98). The title of my MFA project references John Herschel as well as the Theme and Variation form in music in which a single musical theme, often written by a different composer, is followed by a series of developments of this theme through the employment of a range of compositional techniques (Lindsay, n.d.). The body of work that I created is structured according to this musical form. I used Herschel’s representations from and of the Cape as the basic theme which I then developed through a series of variations, employing media and methods across disciplines, time periods and sense modalities. By way of this process of mediation, the resulting art works become parallel records of my own specific experience of Cape Town.

Browsing by Author "Langerman, Fritha"

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