Browsing by Subject "Art"

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    The Bizarre Bazaar: investigating gendered performance through interactive performance art
    (2025) Burger, Nicolene; Crewe, Jenni-lee
    The Bizarre Bazaar: Investigating Gendered Performance through Interactive Performance Art This study investigates the persistence and evolution of structural violence as it relates to gender rooted in colonialism/apartheid within contemporary Afrikaner communities, particularly in middle and upper-class enclaves and its impact on the broader South African context. Despite South Africa's legal and political changes post-1994, many of these Afrikaner communities resist change, perpetuating nationalist forms of Afrikaner Femininity through a kind of gendered training and performance. Through critical analysis of community events (like the bazaar) as complex displays of race, class, gender, and politics, and supported by the research of Azille Coetzee, Sarah Nuttall, Christi van der Westhuizen, and Sara Ahmed, the study argues for the capacity of performance art to reveal and disrupt normative Femininity. This work seeks to create an impactful, interactive art intervention conceptualised through a circular methodology of resourcefulness and planning, and influenced by the writings of Anne Bogart, Richard Schechener, and Tim Ingold. The installation-performance piece, The Bizarre Bazaar, is the practical output of this practice-based research endeavour. Mobilising performance techniques such as juxtaposition, swarm theory, heightening the senses of the spect-actors, audience participation, and more, The Bizarre Bazaar musters the ambiguities and tensions inherent in heteronormative gendered performances - showing how bizarre these gendered expectations are and creates a bizarre performance that renders the recognisable strange. Key research questions explore how performance art can, through the investigation of traditional Feminine roles and gendered performances within community events such as bazaars, challenge and potentially transform the normalised modes of White Feminine performativity in South Africa, thus offering new identity possibilities for women.
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    The Charles Davidson Bell Heritage Trust collection : a catalogue and critical study,
    (1992) Lipschitz, Michael Roy; Godby, Michael
    This thesis comprises two parts. Part One is a biography of the life of Charles Davidson Bell (1813-1882), who was the Surveyor General at the Cape from 1848 to 1872. Part Two consists of an illustrated catalogue and critical study of the the pictures by Charles Davidson Bell in the Bell Heritage Trust Collection at U.C.T. The Biography of Charles Davidson Bell has been researched from unpublished sources and from secondary published sources. The chronology of his life is placed in relationship with his versatile accomplishments as an artist and his achievements in other diverse fields. In the Catalogue, the history, formation and restoration of the Bell Heritage Trust collection is reviewed. The criteria used in cataloguing and attribution of pictures is discussed. The cataloguing terminology that has been employed, is defined. The various collections of sketchbooks are introduced and discussed in terms of the ordering and arrangement of the pictures. The pictures are catalogued and placed in their historical context. The inter-relationship between pictures in the Bell Heritage Trust and in other collections is considered.
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    The critical history of the New Group
    (1992) Kukard, Julia; Godby, Michael
    This research had two aims; to clarify the history of the New Group, and to examine the way in which this history has been constructed and distorted. The first section of the dissertation presented a history of the New Group. Chapter One discussed general aspects of the Group's history such as their activities and administration, and Chapter Two focused on the reasons for the New Group's formation and its dissolution. It was indicated in these chapters that the Group formed in order to provide production and retail structures which would enable artists to earn a living from their work, and that once these had been established the Group disintegrated. Chapter Three considered the issue of nationalism and proposed that most art writers during the New Group's existence were primarily concerned with the development of a national South African art. Furthermore, that many of these writers considered modern European art movements after Post-Impressionism and African art, undesirable influences in the development of a South African art. chapter described the way in which these writers' concern for the development of a national art caused the history of the New Group to be linked to the history and institution of Post-Impressionist art movements in South Africa. Later writers, using earlier writings on the Group as source material, were led to believe that the New Group formed in order to promote art influenced by modern European movements such as Expressionism. The Group's existence was explained by these authors as resulting from a desire to institute art influenced by European, modern, Post-Impressionist art styles as an accepted art form. Part of this understanding of the Group included the belief that the New Group was as a whole a group of modern artists who had to battle for recognition and acceptance from the critics. Chapter One indicated this not to be true. Chapter Six found that the use of early writings as source material caused a further distortion in the history of the New Group. The first chapter indicated that African art was an important influence on the work of the New Group artists but, because this was not recognised in the earlier writings on the Group, this influence was not acknowledged in the later writings. The researcher concluded by indicating that a new approach to the history of the New Group was necessary. That is, that the New Group be seen in relation to the construction and extension of accessible production and retail structures in art, rather than in relation to the institution of European modern art in South Africa.