African Visual Arts Research Articles

Monni Adam’s ‘African visual art from an art historical perspective’: A book review

The purpose of this study was to conduct a comprehensive and critical review of the book ‘African Visual Art from an Art Historical Perspective’ authored by Monni Adams published in 1989. The book is focused on the study of artworks from Sub-Saharan indigenous societies based on the perspectives of Art Historians in the United States. The book has been an indispensable teaching and research resource for practitioners, teachers, researchers, and students of art history as well as all those who are interested in acquiring in-depth knowledge in the history of the visual arts of the African continent, especially sub-Sahara Africa. However, 35 years since it was written, there has not been any academic rigorous review of the book although it is still used as a theoretical bedrock in the African art history discipline. Hence, this critical and comprehensive review of the book scholarly discusses the context of the book within its scope of African visual art history while intelligently appraising and critiquing its contents and/or arguments while shedding light on its strengths and weaknesses.

New Masks, New Meanings: Covid Perspectives on African Art History: Part 1: Behind The Mask: African Art History in a Pandemic Era

New Masks, New Meanings: Covid Perspectives on African Art History: Part 1: Behind The Mask: African Art History in a Pandemic Era

The Making of Contemporary Art in Tanzania

The Making of Contemporary Art in Tanzania

Crossing Worlds: South–North Collaborations as Creative Encounters with Arts, Humanities and Sciences

ABSTRACT The humanities and the arts are increasingly in crisis, yet have never been more needed. To illustrate challenges and possibilities in this crisis, we give examples of collaboration between north and south; and amongst scientists, artists, humanities and legal scholars. As a Canadian law professor and a South African visual arts scholar who co-founded a Johannesburg community art centre, we describe our collaborative work and its lessons. Overall, our work strengthened our convictions that while the humanities are in crisis, they are also in a state of becoming, hope and possibility. We describe two examples: HIV/AIDS prevention work in the early 2000s when artists and humanities resources helped stem the tide of infections in the midst of scientific misinformation about how the disease was spread. Our second example is a seminar abroad for Canadian law students in South Africa. As the responsible faculty members, we integrated arts and humanities pedagogies into the students’ experiences. Students found many encounters unsettling, and arts methods both ameliorated and, in some cases, accented, their discomfort. Discomfort, when normalised and engaged, gave way to curiosity and growth. This work proved useful in addressing broader questions of the role of arts and humanities in future democracies.

Race and the anxieties of cultural obscurity: Meditations on blackness in South African performance and video art

The focus on politically circumscribed identities in South African visual arts during the first decade of the post- Apartheid era (1994–2004) illuminated key tensions in the process of transformation. The arts practice, in general, seemed to respond directly to social imbalances that were established through Apartheid and roused significant discussions around issues of power with regard to racial and gender identity constructions. Arguably, the ‘second wave’ after the first decade propagates a Post-Race sentiment. This article seeks to discuss issues around terms such as Post-Race and Post-Black. I use performance and video art (or new media) as indicative of a change in general perceptions about race, art and transformation in South African cultural practices. Although the term ‘Post-Black’ has not been used to define a specific South African movement or aesthetic, here I juxtapose it with the term ‘Post-Race’ to map out similarities in thought about Blackness in general.

Other Views: Art History in (South) Africa and the Global South

AbstractThe International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA) has recently been addressing concerns about the unequal distribution of resources around the globe and challenges from post-colonial societies to the older methods and concepts of Western art history. At the CIHA congress in Melbourne in January 2008, one of the key issues for discussion was the extent to which we need to re-think the discipline of the history of art “in order to establish cross-cultural dimensions as fundamental to its scope, method and vision”. The national association of South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) proposed continuing these discussions in the colloquium ‘Other Views: Art History in (South) Africa and the Global South’, held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in January, 2011.A principal focus of the discussions took the ‘other view’, that is the view from the Global South. What if the centres of intellectual and financial power are reversed? What if the ‘developing world’ becomes the ‘first world’? If South becomes North? In short, we tried to imagine a public intellectual space where such polar reversals can happen, and where new histories of art can emerge which are not necessarily centred on Western-based systems, nor dependent on the West for validation.This paper explores some of questions central to this debate, and provides a tentative framework for its central aim, viz. to complicate the history of art and the relationship between histories in the Global South and the ‘North’ or ‘West’.

Reflections on the South African Visual Arts Historians and the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (or What happens when art history collides with the global South and Vasari's Lives of the artists)

When reflecting on the recent symposium at the University of the Witwatersrand, organised by the South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) under the aegis of the Comite International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA), I could not help but think that such organisations - both committed to the perpetuation of very different types of art-historical discourse - made for an unanticipated pairing.

Space, ritual, absence: Liminality in South African visual art—a review of the UJ colloquium (9–11 March 2011, FADA, University of Johannesburg)

Space, ritual, absence: Liminality in South African visual art—a review of the UJ colloquium (9–11 March 2011, FADA, University of Johannesburg)

The address of the other: the body and the senses in contemporary South African visual art

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. …

Making art in the wrong place: violence and intimacy in Speak English To Me

Discourse around socially engaged art practice needs to consider the roles symbolic and representational violence play in collaborative community-based settings. In this article, I examine a dialogical art project, Speak English To Me, which I conducted on the streets of Yeoville, Johannesburg, in 2007 and 2008, in terms of the ‘intersubjective vulnerabilities’ (Kester 2004) and forms of symbolic power (Bourdieu 2005) that emerged in my engagements with the residents of the area. Aspects of the project are closely described in terms of the relationships that developed between myself (as the artist) and the participants, in our collaborative development of aesthetic representations. Using two key texts as a departure point, namely Joseph Gaylard's The retreat of creativity: reflections on the role of the South African visual arts in social development (2005) and Colin Richards’ Bobbit's feast: violence and representation in South African art (1999), I reflect more broadly on the conceptual tensions that exist in local criticism around representational and situational aesthetic practices within a post-colonial context. I assert that socially engaged art practices necessitate a revisiting of the concept of otherness in terms of addressability, audience and modality, and that symbolic wounding in representation is intimately tied up with the context of reception. Through my analysis of Speak English To Me, I conclude that socially engaged art discourses cannot avoid issues of representational violence, and would benefit from understanding them as intrinsic and valuable to aesthetic practices conducted in everyday community settings.

Book Reviews

Kanga:The Cloth that Speaks by Sharifa M. Zawawi. New York: Azaniya Hills Press, 2005. 128 pp.Simon A. Clarke studied printed textiles at Middlesex University and Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, University of Central England. As a Senior Lecturer at University College Falmouth, Clarke's current area of research is digitally printed textiles and Eastern African visual arts.

African Studies Review: African Visual Arts from a Social Perspective

African Studies Review: African Visual Arts from a Social Perspective

African Visual Arts from a Social Perspective

The study of African art began in the first decade of this century. In looking back over more than 70 years of research, it is possible to discern a distinctive set of social science concerns, priorities, and modes of analysis. This social perspective depends not so much on disciplinary affiliation as on the kinds of stands taken on the nature of art and on the relative importance of culture as an explanatory principle in understanding its meaning. This paper is concerned with articulating the main models that have been utilized in social research on African art and with tracing their impact on the development of art studies. This historical account will also point out some of the most serious limitations of these models and will suggest studies which may lead to promising new directions. The focus of this review, then, will be on tracing the development of conceptual models with a social perspective. Studies with a social perspective include those which deal with the relationships among art, society and culture. These relationships can be conceived in a number of different ways, including, as Baxandall (1985: 89) succinctly suggests, “causality or significance or analogy or participation.” Such relationships are always a two-way street: not only do social practices and beliefs illuminate and affect art, but art also illuminates and affects social practice. Two essays will clarify the specific nature of the social perspective. Both classics in the field, both dealing with aesthetics, they are: “Yoruba Artistic Criticism” by Robert Farris Thompson (1973b) and “Principles of Opposition and Vitality in Fang Aesthetics” by James W. Fernandez (1966).

African Visual Arts from an Art Historical Perspective

This overview assesses the study of sub-Saharan art by art historians in the United States, as a complement to the earlier examination by Paula Ben-Amos (1987) of African art studies from an anthropological perspective. Academic status for African art history, focused on sub-Saharan Africa, began in the 1950s, when a small group of scholars assigned style categories and broad social functions to works of West and Central African sculpture. With the expansion and development of the field, linked to the use of anthropological methods, the emphasis in research has shifted towards adopting multiple perspectives of analysis and seeking African categories in relation to varied artistic production. Nevertheless, study of sub-Saharan art has achieved only a marginal status in the disciplines of art history and anthropology. This essay examines the problems of these relationships, the types of changing scholarly activities that have characterized the field of sub-Saharan art, and considers options for the future.