Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity curated by Kathryn Gunsch

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

David Nthubu Koloane (1938–2019)

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

“The Bag Is My Home”: Recycling “China Bags” in Contemporary African Art

African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

Peter Stepan. Picasso's Collection of African and Oceanic Art: Masters of Metamorphosis. Translated from the German by Paul Aston and Karin Skawran (Introduction), Robert McInnes (Chronology), and John Gabriel (Preface, Catalogue). Munich: Prestel, 2007. 149 pp. Photographs. Illustrations. Index. $85.00. Cloth. - Volume 50 Issue 2

L'influence des chasseurs-cueilleurs en Afrique du Sud est a l'origine de l'expression artistique des concepts et des rites religieux des fermiers africains, resultant d'un echange de culture et d'ideologie entre les 2 groupes

African Art Studies: Are They No Longer Taking the Paths Less Traveled?

Reviewed by: Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa ed. by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, and: Body Politics: Fingerprinting South African Contemporary Dance by Adrienne C. Sichel Megan Lewis Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa. Edited by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019; pp. 372. Body Politics: Fingerprinting South African Contemporary Dance. By Adrienne C. Sichel. Pinegowrie, ZA: Porcupine Press, 2018; pp. 234. Twenty-five years after the historic transition of power in 1994 South Africa is in the throes of decolonization and wrestling with the process of democratization. The 2015 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements jolted the country into conversations around affordable access to education, decolonizing the academy, whose version of history will be taught in universities, and in which of eleven official languages. Two new publications out this year offer vitally important interventions to the scholarship, showcasing the power and potential of performance in the process of democracy and bringing the work of South African artists, especially movers and shakers of color, to international audiences. These are invaluable resources for theatre history educators teaching non-Western performance, as well as inspirations for practitioners worldwide. In Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa, coeditors Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle chronicle how South African artists are “search[ing] for a different language—a corporeal vocabulary of seepage and excess—to articulate the distention of the time” (1). Born out of the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, this groundbreaking collection of fifteen essays documents the diversity and scope of the country’s live art repertoire, which they claim “is born of extremity” and whose “affective tenor of excess and irrationality embodies the unpredictability of crisis” (2). It articulates a decidedly Afro-centric history of experimental performance, situated within a “precolonial and decolonial African genealogy of ritual, ruptures and experimentality, refuting the notion that South African live art is a western import” (3). The book is structured in four parts: the essays in the first section, titled “Live Art in Times of Crisis,” by Nomusa Makhubu, Sarah Nutall, Catherine Boulle, and Jay Pather, respectively, examine live art against the backdrop of the complexities and turbulent times of the young democracy. It addresses the lingering whiteness of the culture at multiple levels of society, the abiding segregation of public spaces, and the sense of unbelonging, placelessness, disruption, and ambivalence that result in these contested times. Nutall theorizes these times as a state of “upsurge,” when acts of defiance brutally confront and disassemble existing norms (43). Through an examination of works by Chuma Sopotela and Buhlebezwe Siwani (These Ghels, 2017), Khanyisile Mbongwa (kuDanger!, 2017), and Dean Hurtton (#fuckwhitepeople, 2017), Makhubu frames live art as “a question of citizenship” through which to understand “belonging and governance” (21). For Makhubu, performance art offers a counter balance to the anatopism of contemporary urban spaces, the feeling of “being un-homed and made to feel out of place” (36). In his essay on the ethics of fostering the kind of live art described by others in this section, Pather calls for a new form of curation-as-mediation, aimed at generating platforms “to give life to new works that are probing and provocative while remaining speculative and unknowable” (103). The second section—“Loss, Language and Embodiment”—focuses on the black female body as a site of contestation, trauma, resistance, and creative potentials. Lieketso Dee Mohoto-wa Thaluki begins with an interview with artist-activist Chuma Sopotela about her 2013–14 performance piece Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda (The chicken has laid its eggs), which Thaluki suggests is an embodied, socially situated articulation of a black feminist language (108). [End Page 180] Next is Gabrielle Goliath’s essay about Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama’s use of performance to “resist the erasure and violation of bodies” (125). Goliath excavates these artists’ use of invocation, absence, and loss toward a kind of public mourning and grievance that resists the ways in “black, brown, queer and vulnerable bodies” are traumatized, rendered either invisible or hyper-visible. The intersections of performance and protest, emergence and transformation are unpacked by Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga in her essay about Mamela Nyamza...

Frames What can be said to, about, and with the categories of self and other in relation to visual art that has not already been said? Given the discursive contexts in which the explorations of and debates about the status of the self and other must be undertaken, where can these go? Because of the vast context of identity politics and politics concerning the construction and representation of selfhood and otherness, found in fields ranging from philosophy to critical theory to literary and cultural studies to psychoanalysis, ethnic, feminist/gender and postcolonial studies, it is clearly no longer possible, desirable or productive to frame debates around representation in terms of self and other as clear-cut, distinguishable categories. Likewise, given the plethora of theoretical positions which has been covered regarding the ethics of representing, speaking for, of, and with the other, this terrain seems well worn to the point of exhaustion. Therefore, with specific reference to South African artistic production over approximately the past decade, in this themed edition the question as to whether there may be 'new' ways of conceptualising selfhood and otherness emerging in visual representation is posed, and if so, what forms might these take? In a panel discussion held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery on 12 April 2008, (1) Sarah Nuttall, taking a lead from Jacques Derrida and Homi K. Bhabha, commented that a point has been reached in South African visual culture where perhaps debates and artistic expressions might rather consider concerns about to whom, of whom and how we are speaking. She proposed that this might be a way of imaging the future in South Africa and globally. It is for this reason that the title 'The address of the other' has been chosen. The use of the word 'address' is intended to connote all of the following: dialogic acts of speaking; an engagement with issues (dealing with, attending to, focusing on, taking up, adopting), referential acts (referring to, gesturing towards, indicating), and the location of speaking (where one is, literally and figuratively, when one speaks- the address of one's address). Although phrased in the singular (the other), it is with the acknowledgement that addresses by and for the other are always multiple, but that in each instance, the address is a singular occurrence. 'The address' encompasses both the self and other speaking; those in-between spaces of interchange and how we speak to and of each other (that is, how the other addresses one, pointing along the continuum of that interchange towards how one addresses the other). The address is also the codified (or possibly even informal or illegal or legislated) site where the other dwells. The thematic title of the edition thus suggests a working through of discussions/ conversations/engagements with the possible explorations and 'calls' or 'addresses' of home/site/space and/or place. Following on Nuttall's observation, the articles in this issue combine in an attempt to skirt the narrowing or rote means for addressing these continuing and necessary problems surrounding the construction of identities as well as the self in relation to the other in South African visual art. The post-1994 South African political dispensation and the consequent ever-changing socio-political environment have called into question (and continue to call into question) power dynamics in the interplay between racial groupings previously legislatively categorised as 'black', 'white' and 'coloured'. While the post-apartheid context is reflective of global concerns regarding identity formation and the politics of representation, (2) the articles and artworks discussed in this edition are emergent from South Africa's particular historicity of apartheid, and yet, simultaneously, reflect the diversity of transforming conceptions of South African identities (individual and collective), which hold such currency in its post-1994 democracy. …

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

This article examines both the development and implications of a sales strategy deployed by Christie’s and Sotheby’s from the mid-2000s to increase their market share and the prices of African and Oceanic art. The strategy was designed to entice affluent modern and contemporary art collectors with eclectic tastes to African and Oceanic art and to develop cross-category collecting between the two art market segments. This was achieved by capitalizing on the historical links between these art forms and by timing the African and Oceanic art auctions and pre-sale viewings to coincide with sales of modern and contemporary art. A survey of sales catalogues produced by the two corporations between 1966 and 2019 documents how specialists have used the engagement of avant-garde artists with non-European art forms as a storytelling device to enhance the value of African and Oceanic artworks. I argue that in the African and Oceanic art departments’ quest for buyers of modern and contemporary art, auction houses are consolidating aesthetic canons established by avant-garde artists and French tastemakers of the early twentieth century with their current marketing of African and Oceanic art.

Doran H. Ross

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor &amp; Other Doubtful Enterprises