Esther Mahlangu and the Curatorial

"Sibbett, Cecil James, (died 23 Nov. 1967), JP; Hon. Colonel, The Cape Town Rifles; Chairman and founder, South African National Savings Organisation; Past Provincial Grand Master IC, Southern Cape Province; Hon. President, 1820 Memorial Settlers’ Association; Trustee: South African Library; South African National Gallery; South African Museum; Vice-President, The Cape Horticultural Soc.; Director of Companies" published on by Oxford University Press.

THERE ARE TWO museums in South Africa competing for representation and commentary on `who are the Bushmen?'. The South African Museum and the South African National Gallery, situated across from each other in Cape Town's Company Gardens, combine efforts to concretise a debate regarding how the indigenous categories, `Bushman' and `Khoisan' (1), can be publicly represented. The two museums draw together different and changing historical relationships to these categories as well as the practice of museum display and exhibition. On the one hand, the SA Museum (a natural history museum), with its turn-of-the-century-built dioramas of Bushmen frozen in primordial time, reminds us of the colonial era ethnologist whose vocation it was to preserve the promise of a more authentic relationship between man and nature. While, on the other hand, the National Gallery, an art museum, offers a critique of the exibitionary enterprise which made museum representations and practices, such as those found in the SA Museum, a naturalised source and display of information. Patricia Davison, the Assistant Director of the SA Museum, says, It is hoped that the present exhibition [at the National Gallery] will set up a dialogue, as it were, with the diorama [at the SA Museum]. Together, these exhibits have inspired heated dialogue and debate around a multitude of issues facing contemporary South Africans, and testify to the important role of public culture in actively shaping both ethnic and national boundaries. This paper will focus primarily on one exhibit, namely the Miscast exhibit that opened in Cape Town's National Gallery on April 12, 1996. By documenting the negotiation process now unfolding in the spaces between and within the National Gallery and the SA Museum, this paper will look at how public culture and the museum (i.e., the National Gallery) contribute to the crafting of national and ethnic boundaries. More specifically, we examine the limitations and ambiguities of cultural critique deployed in the interrogation of museum and representational practices. The primary obstacle to the Miscast curator's vision of a break with the past is the fact that in South Africa the colonial past rests too heavily on its present. As a result of this continuity, many of the visitors to this exhibit at the National Gallery (2) found themselves unable to extricate and distance themselves from the discomfort emanating from their identification with the representations of Bushmen subjects drawn on for this exhibit. South Africa's rapidly changing political climate has drawn the Museum into efforts to dismantle the icons, lexicons, and artifacts of apartheid through the installation of exhibits and displays which interrogate the past with a strategically critical eye. The exhibit analyzed here is one that has drawn historically silenced and marginalised groups into the legitimated and powerful domain of the state Museum, enabling them to participate in their own public cultural representations. The exhibitionary politics brought into being by the debates between these two Museums and their constituent publics invites the language of racial-ethnic difference, the nation's need to heal, reclaim, and revise its past, as well as the impulse to propel contemporary social boundaries into interaction with a newly forged democratic public sphere. Circulating between the two museums are a whole host of publics bringing diverse local readings to bear on a debate which has been unfolding among academics for many years (3). The natural history museum (SA Museum), as a continuous, legitimated, and even celebrated space of representation, has been central to the codification of scientific visual and textual meaning. The National Gallery, by the same token has contributed to the codification of the nation through artistic representation. The opening and democratising of the public sphere of these museums provide a lens through which we can observe individuals coming together as active brokers of the boundaries of the public and dominant cultural frameworks. …

The thesis analyses modes of representation in the South African National Gallery (SANG) between 1930 and 2009. Built in 1930, for the larger part of its history SANG was situated in a white state that disenfranchised the black populace. Whiteness, as citizenship, was normalised and glorified in the state’s museums. Analysis of evidence collected from the archive, decor, art collection, exhibitions, attendance of walking tours and semi-structured interviews with staff demonstrates that SANG’s historic practice does not fit neatly within the dominant theoretical understanding of the art museum, namely a sacred space in which power has been obscured through the ‘art for art’s sake’ model. Instead, the thesis finds at SANG invisible symbolic capital resided alongside the more muscular capital of the colony, which derived its strength from an overt relationship with commerce, politics and race. The thesis further finds that SANG developed a close relationship with its white audience through its construction as a ‘homely space’. As a consequence, I argue SANG developed museological conventions that better fit the analogy of the political house than the temple. Taking new museum ethics into consideration, the thesis examines how SANG’s distinctive heritage impacted on its ability to be inclusive. My fieldwork on recent representational practice at SANG reveals strategies congruent with the post-museum, including performative political exhibitions, diversification of the collection and active dialogue with the communities it seeks to serve. At the same time embedded modes of white cultural representation were identified that restricted its capacity to ‘move-on’. The thesis contributes to the field of museum studies by drawing attention to the significance of the individual histories of art institutions in determining their ability to make change. The thesis also contributes to the field of visual sociology by presenting images and ‘map-making’ as an integral feature of the research design.

PLAN B, a Gathering of Strangers (or) This Is Not Working by Goldendean

Public art galleries in South Africa, in particular the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, owe their establishment to the energetic debates on the role of art and public art galleries that were prevalent in Europe during the 19th century. These debates focused on the ability of art to educate and civilise, and such ideas travelled along imperial networks to the Cape and Australia, where they were negotiated in local contexts. At the Cape, a series of public art exhibitions was initiated with the intent of establishing a permanent art collection and gallery, the ultimate aim being to provide a space in which to cultivate taste and civility in the general public. But the visual culture that emerged from these exhibitions was focused predominantly on local or British landscape and genre. Similarly, in the collection established for Cape Town's permanent gallery, later the national gallery, there was very little grand narrative art or art of the past characteristic of other national galleries. A culture of informality prevailed instead. It is argued that the commitment to nature painting in the Cape and elsewhere in South Africa stemmed from an indifference or antipathy to the metropolitan culture on which major international art galleries were based, compromising the professionalism and status of these local art institutions. A comparative analysis of some of the galleries of Australia, the Cape's colonial rival, reveals that they received far greater support and demonstrated far greater professionalism than their South African counterparts.

In South Africa, art activism plays an important role in the fight against HIV/AIDS. During the past number of years the South African National Gallery (SANG) has staged several events where works of art were commissioned to respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The article discusses how the activist strategies of the SANG draw on two distinct traditions when combatting the AIDS epidemic by means of art. These two traditions are found in the SANG's legacy in the resistance art movement during the fight against apartheid, and in the resources of its networking strategies with the AIDS activist movement in general, and more specifically the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The article explores the different roots of ‘artworks against AIDS’ and highlights its findings with short overviews of the SANG's exhibitions held between 2001 and 2007. The article also discusses how both the SANG and the TAC benefitted from the ‘social movement spill-over effect’ (Epstein 1996), which enabled them to use their previous activist structures and resources in order to embark on the struggle against HIV/AIDS. Although the art activist strategies are successful in getting the art world's attention to respond to the effects of HIV/AIDS, the article suggests that in light of the ever-changing landscape that characterises the epidemic, art activists are challenged to continually reinvent their strategies of engagement. Advances in treatment options play a significant role in shaping new meanings and forms of social mobilisation that influence the signifying practices driving activist strategies. The need for an ‘ethics of representational practices’ that is sensitive to changes in the landscape, offers art activists a renewed basis from which to act when engaging with the complexities of mediating the realities of people's lived experiences in the time of HIV/AIDS.

Focuses on the reasons why the South African National Gallery (SANG), in common with all institutions with a commitment to public service, now has to reassess and expand its services in order to redress past inequities. The new Government formed in South Africa after the watershed elections of 1994 is encouraging change and radical restructuring in every sphere of social, cultural and economic activity. SANG has initiated changes to address majority needs in a culture of learning which formerly did not include arts education for black people. Describes the challenges in the managing of collections the new ventures pose for librarians.

<b>Is There Still Life?: Continuity and Change in South African Still Life Painting</b> by Michael Godby. Cape Town, Iziko: South African National Gallery, date. 64 pages, 84 color illustrations, Further reading. R120, soft cover.

This article critically examines the politics of representing “the native” in relation to issues of cultural property, accountability, artistic licence and access. The discussion is focused on a recent exhibition which opened at the South African National Gallery (SANG) in Cape Town on April 13, 1996, entitled “Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture”. The exhibition, which aimed to explore critically the categorisation and (mis)representation of Bushman peoples, has initiated much discussion and controversy in South Africa between and within indigenous groups, academic circles, the media and the public sphere. The authors examine the motivations, reception and implications of such an exhibition at this critical point in the development of South Africa's new democracy.

The end of apartheid in South Africa initiated a period of intense analysis of historical and contemporary questions of identity. In the Cape, people who had been classified as “coloured” or “other coloured”began to reclaim their precolonial identities. This process has been made difficult by wide-scale language death during the twentieth century and the accompanying death of cultural traditions. In the case of the first people of South Africa, the bushmen, this process was further complicated by their depiction in museum exhibits and displays as “living fossils,”alienated from history and culture. This article examines these stereotypes and the historical circumstances that gave rise to them. As a counterpoint it looks at an extraordinary archive of nineteenth-century folklore that was created through a unique collaboration between settler and native. Finally it examines an exhibit mounted in 1996 at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in which bushman identity was held up to scrutiny and the prevailing stereotypes confronted.

Classical Impressions, Modernist Aspirations: Shaping a Field of Contention at the South African National Gallery (1895–1947)

This article traces the South African National Gallery’s (SANG) journey through social transformation in South Africa. As South Africa transformed from pre-colonization, colonization and apartheid, to a post-apartheid state, this state art museum itself transformed, sometimes parallel to these changes, sometimes earlier. The museum was established as a colonial structure, but went through a process of transformation. As a national museum, it represented the state by default. Through several processes and curatorial championship such as Heritage Day, inheriting artwork from the Ethnographic Museum, and various socially-engaged projects, inclusion of black South African curators, the museum managed to transform itself into a more democratic institution. This is significant when studying museology, social transformations, postcoloniality, ideas of a white-wall white cube art museum, “primitive” art, and other fields as it touches upon and affects each of them and shows how these concepts can be better understood by studying their relation to one another, especially in the context of South Africa.

This paper examines the relationship between museums and representations of national identity in South Africa. From their early development in Western Europe in the nineteenth century there has been a close relationship between museums and other exhibitionary spaces and the production of national identities. In South Africa, museum displays have historically supported colonial and apartheid ideologies, but with the transition to a post-apartheid society museums have reassessed their divisive roles and repositioned themselves within South Africa’s contemporary nation-building project, organized around building unity from diversity. The development of this new relationship between museums and democratic nation-building is examined here through discussing the attempts of South Africa’s museums to become more inclusive in their exhibitions, and analysing debates in the museological community concerning the challenges facing museums in a post apartheid society. These issues then inform an analysis of an exhibition at the South African National Gallery titled Contemporary South African art 1985-1995. The exhibition attempted to use art to document the political transition and contribute to building national unity. However, by discussing the political operation of classification in museums I argue that the exhibition ultimately fails to represent this period inclusively, and I question, more generally, the possibility of art museums engaging in a properly inclusive nation-building project.

This paper focuses on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an ongoing process of collective memory and public culture. Rather than concentrating on the actual TRC hearings themselves, it focuses on artistic and cultural mediations of this process. It explores the ways in which the South African artist Sue Williamson has engaged with the contradictions, ambiguities and silences of the TRC process. Williamson's work on the TRC, which was exhibited in the South African National Gallery in 2004 as part of the Decade of Democracy Exhibition, reflects upon the ‘grey zones’ and limits of the TRC's nation building efforts. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section locates the TRC, as a state ritual of nation building, within the broader anthropological literature on ritual. The second section situates Sue Williamson's work within academic debates on the TRC. The final section focuses on Williamson's work in the context of the role of museums and art galleries as spaces of nation building.

Other| May 01 2007 FRESH: ARTIST’S RESIDENCY PROGRAM: South African National Gallery Ruth Kerkham Ruth Kerkham Ruth Kerkham is a Doctoral Candidate in African Art History at Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nka (2007) 2007 (21): 122–123. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-21-1-122 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ruth Kerkham; FRESH: ARTIST’S RESIDENCY PROGRAM: South African National Gallery. Nka 1 May 2007; 2007 (21): 122–123. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-21-1-122 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNka Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2007 Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.