Browsing by Subject "Art History"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    "The advancement of art" : policy and practice at the South African National Gallery, 1940-1962
    (2004) Lilla, Qanita; Mager, Anne
    This thesis is an enquiry into the policies and practices that shaped the South African National Gallery in the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing on newspaper reports, the South African National Gallery's exhibition catalogues, pamphlets and annual reports, records of parliamentary debate and the crucial report of the Stratford Commission of 1948 the study has reconstructed a detailed history of the South African National Gallery. Established in 1871 as a colonial museum catering for a small part of the settler population of British descent, the museum came under pressure to accommodate the Afrikaner community after 1948. This did not mean that the liberal ethos at the museum disappeared, however. The South African National Gallery was strongly influenced by public pressure in this period. Public outrage over controversial art sales in 1947 led to the appointment of a commission of enquiry into the workings of the museum. At the same time, the head of the Board of Trustees, Cecil Sibbett, engaged the public on matters of Modern art. The museum's conservative and controversial Director, Edward Roworth was replaced in 1949 by John Paris who ushered in a new phase of development and management, encouraged the reconceptualization of South African art and reorganized the permanent collection. This initiative took place despite decreased autonomy for the Director and increased government imposition of Afrikaner Nationalist ideology. Nevertheless, the South African National Gallery avoided becoming a political instrument of the Apartheid regime.
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    Chaos and context : speculations about the prominence of participatory art since the mid 1990s
    (2009) Daehnke, Nadja; Godby, Michael
    In his essay The Poetics of the Open Work, Umberto Eco suggests that 'open work' of the 1960s, which stressed audience involvement, contingency and an anti-institutional stance, is an expression of a Quantum paradigm. Here, the irrationality and lack of order of Quantum Theory is seen as paralleled in artistic expression. Since the mid 1990s, participatory art has gained prominence, both in terms of current art production and retrospectives of Dadaist and 1960s 'open work'. Using Eco's essay as a model, this could be seen as a result of the progression of a Quantum Theory worldview to a view that is understood in terms of Chaos Theory. The patterns that mathematical models such as natural numbers, Calculus, Statistical Mathematics and Quantum Theory propose have parallels in social and artistic expression. In an extension of this, Chaos Theory is the latest mathematical model that social and artistic trends express. This is suggested by the mirroring of Chaos patterns in current social phenomena such as the Internet and experience economy. The similarity in approach between social phenomena and participatory art suggests that they answer the same social/audience demands. My primary contention is that the environment in which audiences and artists currently operate is such that demands and expectations raised by Chaos Theory are answered by participatory art, just as they are answered by wider social trends. The primary Chaos patterns that can be observed are interconnection, phase change and feedback. This is not a matter of a linear influence of cause and effect. It is not that Chaos inspires certain characteristics which are then expressed in various social phenomena. Rather, encountering Chaos characteristics in daily life raises expectations that these characteristics will be encountered elsewhere. We are thus not speaking of a causative relation between Chaos theory and social phenomena. Rather, there is a complex pattern of escalation which encourages interaction, feedback and phase change in a dynamic, chiasmic system which itself can best be analysed as another Chaos phenomenon.
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    South African art history: the possibility of decolonising a discourse
    (2017) Becker, Danielle Loraine; Haupt, Adam; Martinez-Ruiz, Barbaro
    In light of recent calls to decolonise curricula at South African universities there has been a renewed interest in what decolonisation might specifically imply for particular academic disciplines. Art history in South Africa has long struggled to move away from its settler colonial origins towards a more Afrocentric focus and its art world has frequently been criticised for being elitist and dominated by white practitioners. To this end, one of the primary questions that this dissertation seeks to answer is to what extent indigenous, African art and African epistemology has been included in South African art history and the institutions that support despite the discourse's traces of colonialism. Through a discussion and analysis of South African art history this dissertation seeks to describe the changes in the discourse since the late twentieth-century in light of the entanglements of the national; the colonial and the decolonial. Such an analysis is provided through a discussion of the biases of art history as a discourse originating in Western Europe; the geographical location of museums and university departments; the character of South African art historical writing; the curatorial strategies used to display African art in South African museums and the specific nature of art history curricula as it is taught at South African universities. The dissertation that follows therefore aims to provide an overarching view of South African art history that takes into account a range of factors impacting its particular framing so that the question of decolonisation can be adequately addressed. The dissertation finds that South African art history has a specific, settler colonial character and that historical African art has been neglected in art historical discourse despite overt attempts to transform the nature of the discipline post-democracy. It is argued that this may be the result of a shift in focus towards contemporary practice in the twenty-first century and away from the historical as a result of a resistance to cultural or racial labels attributed to art due to the legacy of apartheid legislation. As such, I argue that South African art history may find a path towards decolonisation through a renewed focus on historical South African and African art that is perceived on its own terms.