South African Journal of Art History Volume 29 (2014)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/2263/46288

South African Journal of Art History, Volume 29, Issue 1 (2014)
Content
Derntl, Maria Fernanda	The territory shaped : urban plans and urbanization policy in Portuguese America
Folkers, Antoni S	Planning and replanning Ng’ambo, Zanzibar
Hattingh, Heidi Saayman	Mikael Subotzki : The surveyor and the surveyed within the urban environment
Jordaan, June	Ruin cities : sources of nostalgia, consolation, revenge, tectonic landscape and inspiration
Kruger, Runette	City Walls to city streets : utopias of dissent
Lewis, John A.H.	Morality of cities : Renaissance images and texts
Mare, Estelle Alma	Leonardo da Vinci’s ideal city designs contextualised and assessed
Olivier, Bert	Walking in the city as (model for) “dissensus”
Oppermann, Johann	Méliès’ moon is a late 19th-century colonial moon ... “my lunar landscape is just outside Johannesburg”
Peters, Walter	The “wall of flesh” of the Conquered Territory : farmhouses and towns established in defence of the eastern boundary of the Orange Free State, beginning 1866
Steele, John	Outside city limits : introducing Anton van der Merwe of Starways Arts, in Hogsback, Eastern Cape, South Africa
Steyn, Gerald	Is Corbusian Chandigarh an “openly black African inspired” city in India?
Tsoumas, Johannis	Piraeus as a potential Cultural Capital of Europe : the role of its industrial architecture heritage
Verster, Wanda	Observing the city : imagining through faceless figures

South African Journal of Art History, Volume 29, Issue 2 (2014)
Content
Bhana, Poorvi; Stevens, Ingrid	Zen and the art of artmaking: Goldsworthy and Kapoor
Labuschagne, Pieter	The Women’s Monument and memorial complexity in the context of political change: from memorial exclusivity to monument(al) inclusivity
Louw, Mike	“Slow” architecture and its links with Slow Food
Mare, Estelle Alma	A rhetorical interpretation of a geometric diagram of Plato’s “Creation Myth” overlaid on the Parthenon’s main facade
Mare, Estelle Alma	The role of the second architect on a significant building site
Naude, Mauritz	Bellman hangars : structures of scale and functionality
Noble, J.A. (Jonathan)	Architecture, historicism and historiography
Schmidt, Leoni	Van Brandenburg unfurled: architecture in the expanded field of contemporary practice
Steyn, Gerald	West African influence on various projects by Le Corbusier
Strydom, Richardt	The colonial gaze and the artist’s use of authoring strategies in Charles Davidson Bell’s The Landing of Van Riebeeck, 1652
Stevens, Ingrid	The pool of the psyche : water in the work of Ariana van Heerden and Kevin Roberts
Zuiddam, Benno	The devil and his works : the owl in Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516)

South African Journal of Art History, Volume 28, Issue 3 (2014)
Content
De Lange, Rudi W	The representation of women as a competitive self-objectified image : a new design identity of misleading slimming advertising
Du Toit, Flip	Interpreting images from South African family photographic collections of the Anglo-Boer War period 1899 to 1902
Mare, Estelle Alma	“I paint, therefore I am” : self-portraiture in the era of the self-aware and self-reflexive artist
Noble, J.A. (Jonathan)	On the question of architecture and identity, in post-apartheid South Africa
Olivier, Bert	Identity in architecture and art : Versailles, Giverny and Gyeongju
Keogh, Sarah	Visualising the merging of culture from an ‘other’ perspective
Steyn, Gerald	Globalisation, vernacularisasion and the invention of identities

South African Journal of Art History, Volume 29, Issue 4 (2014)
Content
Du Preez, Linda	“Hollow” : reflections on practice, the artefact and the body
Goodrich, Andre; Strydom, Richardt	Landscape art and the territorial ontology : a call for landscape restitution
Goosen, Moya	Reflective Conversations : baudrillard’s orders of the simulacrum
Greyling, Franci	Sin van plek en bioregionalisme : gelaagdheid in ŉ kunstenaarsboekinstallasie van Stanley Grootboom
Marley, Ian; Swanepoel, Rita	Die deelnemingsparadigma as ’n addisionele paradigma in multi-praktisyns en praktykgeleide navorsingsprojekte
Rathbone, Louisemarié; Lotz, Colette	Character and characterisation in the visual arts : nunology’s punning characters
Strydom, Richardt; Goosen, Moya	Expressing liminality through a reflective practice account of Dismotief
Swanepoel, M.C. (Rita)	Hope in despair : an interpretation of Jean Lampen and Rita Swanepoel’s Silent Cries (2013)

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 30

Walking in the city as (model for) “dissensus”
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Olivier, Bert; Mare, Estelle Alma
This paper explores the variegated spatial meanings of “the city” by way of Michel de Certeau’s reflections on “walking in the city” as part of “the practice of everyday life”, which he conceives of as allowing people multiple ways of escaping the straitjacket of the “disciplinary society”. The latter conception, deriving from Foucault’s investigation of disciplinary practices, ostensibly leaves one scant opportunity to escape from the clutches of disciplinary mechanisms such as hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and the examination, which appear to find their counterpart in the apparently carceral spatial design of the city. In contrast to the belief, that one has become inescapably enmeshed in panoptical practices, which tend to reduce humans to “docile bodies”, however, De Certeau traces the multiple tactics employed by pedestrians to subvert their assimilation into the pre-planned geometries of city design. He also alludes to Freud’s claims about repetition of spatially originary experiences, which is here employed to examine the relation between spatial familiarity and foreignness in different cities. These considerations are placed in constellation with Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between striated and smooth spaces, as well as with Hardt and Negri’s distinction between planes of immanence and of control, and Lytotard’s between the modern and the postmodern, thus creating the possibility of conceiving of walking in the city as an act of dissent regarding the society of discipline. This could suggest more robust practices of subverting the ostensibly all-encompassing, pseudo-political realm of what Ranciére calls “the police”, by introducing moments of peripatetic “dissensus” into the striated fabric of the city.
Ruin cities : sources of nostalgia, consolation, revenge, tectonic landscape and inspiration
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Jordaan, June; Mare, Estelle Alma
Ruin cities haunt our imagination and arouse our curiosity for a number of reasons. Those features in them that interest an artist are the characteristic of timelessness that they accrue over the years. Furthermore, they serve as inspiration for creative works. Composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Jean Sibelius, artists like Giambattista Piranesi and Giorgio De Chirico, and architects like Aldo Rossi, Alvar Alto and Giorgio Grassi come to mind. By making reference to the notion of the sublime, this paper will consider selected instances where ruin cities served as touchstones of creativity. In architecture, motifs from ruins are not simply transferred to the new design but also transmuted, where in art and music these processes occur implicitly through a change of medium. While the creative processes in art, music and architecture are analogous, it is not easy to establish common ground among them. In architecture it is less difficult to grasp these processes than other fields because we are dealing with tangible aspects like monumentality, structure, texture and fabric. Indeed, monumentality, structure and texture can equally be used in musical appraisals and architecture. In the works of architecture we explore the inventiveness that comes about as a result of architects using ruin cities as analogues. Needless to say all inventions are inventive derivations, a fact that is of relevance to the practice and pedagogy in creative fields. We hope our study will therefore shed light on the analogical procedures involved in selected creative fields.
Globalisation, vernacularisasion and the invention of identities
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Steyn, Gerald; Mare, Estelle Alma
Architects are adamant that academic qualifications are a prerequisite for design competence. It is therefore ironic that vernacular architecture is having a significant impact on contemporary architectural design world-wide. In remote, rural communities, vernacular architecture is often culturally entrenched, as well as being the only available construction solution due to technological constraints. Because of the distinctive and unique characteristics of such structures, the people and places concerned are usually immediately identifiable. However, globalisation resulted not only in the dissemination of indigenous solutions – often particularly relevant and aesthetically pleasing – but also in their commodification. Such de-contextualised, vernacular ideas are the essence of vernacularisastion; a formal movement subject to individual interpretation and variously motivated by economic exigencies, fashion crazes, or pragmatic concerns. This article analyses the impact of vernacularisasion when stripped of its original ideals and used to create new identities. The aim is to explore its value as a contemporary generator of form. The findings could determine the extent to which vernacular studies should be incorporated in architectural scholarship
Being and becoming in the Late Anthropocene
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Green, David; Mare, Estelle Alma
Colonisation as an ongoing process continues to obfuscate the real identity of a culture “becoming” in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In writing about aspects of my arts practice I touch upon certain Hericlitean, Platonic, and Aristotelian frameworks in this context, along with related ideas of Bataille and Foucault. I also review our unravelling past as a subspecies to colonise (i.e., cannibalise) the “other”, as well as the environment; discussing binaries like the “special” myth that fuels acts of genocide; along with the colonial construct of “being”, in order to project fixed culture as prelude to disenfranchisement, dismemberment, and dispersal.
Interpreting images from South African family photographic collections of the Anglo-Boer War period 1899 to 1902
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Du Toit, Flip; Mare, Estelle Alma
Photography’s truth telling technology enticed early photographers to capture images of war such as the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902. Many of these images include family photographic collections that were taken in and around the concentration camps. These images offer us valuable messages. Photography performs an important role in expressing people’s complex relationships in the identity of cultural groups and a national belonging. This study strives to unravel the potential reasons for the way that society chose to visually represent itself. The question of why a photograph was made involves an understanding of the social, cultural and historical relationships figured in the image, as well as a larger set of relationships outside and beyond the frame. The social aspects of a photograph incorporate the purpose of both the sitters and the photographers as reflected in their decisions to take particular styles of pictures. Posed photographs in particular, provide reliable evidence of how people want to express their identity. Many of the Anglo-Boer War family and portrait photographs are formally posed and could provide evidence of the sitters’ ambition, their dreams and their relationship with processes and people outside the picture frame. A heuristic interpretation of a sample of posed family photographs of the Anglo-Boer War indicate that the sitters sought an identity of respect, and projected a unified family despite their somber adversary. These images reflect a relationship between history and memory and present the past as it was. This research will contribute to our understanding of the value of photography in the lives of South Africans, why time and funds were spent on this activity and why family photographic collections were seen as valuable
City Walls to city streets : utopias of dissent
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Kruger, Runette; Mare, Estelle Alma
Lewis Mumford makes the case that the first (western) utopia was a City, and that the first (western) City was a utopia, and David Harvey similarly iterates that “[t]he figures of ‘the city’ and of ‘Utopia’ have long been intertwined”. The fates of these two constructs are thus seemingly indissolubly linked. Regrettably, this initial construct, the City as utopia / utopia as the City, very shortly mutated into the originary dystopia, inaugurating the conception of the City as a place of suffering and social ills. This inherent dystopian aspect of the early City can be traced to the impulse to control and exclude, a phenomenon not limited to the Cities and utopias of antiquity, but concretely constitutive of the spatial and social geographies of a critical mass of contemporary global cities. This article interprets the works of street artists Banksy, Mustafa Hulusi, Invader and Ben Wilson as exemplary of the production of an alternative utopia which seeks to undermine the dystopian elements of the City. Their work is based on criticality and dissent generated in the city street. This reading is done from a Marxist perspective, based largely on the writings of David Harvey, and interprets the praxis of the artists discussed as the visual embodiment of the explicit or implicit critique of the contemporary deep structure of the dystopian City.
The devil and his works : the owl in Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516)
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Zuiddam, Benno; Mare, Estelle Alma
The territory shaped : urban plans and urbanization policy in Portuguese America
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Derntl, Maria Fernanda; Mare, Estelle Alma
From the mid-18th century on, the number of images of towns and villages of the Portuguese colony in South America increased steadily and showed noticeably similar urban features. These images have been presented in current scholarship as evidence of the planned character in the urban initiatives under Dom José I (1750-1777). This article analyses how plans and drawings functioned in a number of urban settlement dynamics in the Captaincy of São Paulo between 1765 and 1775, while keeping in view a broader urbanization process in that century. The urbanizing policy is treated here as an action developed in a context of conflicts rather than as a project envisioned by metropolitan authorities or detached from the reality of the place.
The role of the second architect on a significant building site
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Mare, Estelle Alma
This article expounds Edmond Bacon’s “principle of the second man”, formulated in his Design of Cities (1967), as a criterion for judging the addition of another building or additional architectural structures a on a significant building site. This principle basically implies that an architect who designs a new building for a site on which a significant building already exists, or a group of buildings that spatially belong together already exist, should not detract from the merit of the work of the first architect, but, also in the case of the restoration or addition to the original, should blend the new structure with the old, not necessarily by imitation or copying. This is a test for an architect’s creative ingenuity and moral responsibility, because a disharmonious architectural addition on an established site can destroy its sense of place. In broad terms, a site that may be considered as architecturally significant can be identified in various ways: it could be an enclosed space, such as most city squares in which a historically important building has pride of place; it could be a historical or culturally significance space in which a sense of place has already been established and reinforced architecturally, or, furthermore, in the case of cities regulated by law with respect to building materials, construction practices or design to ensure uniform aesthetic norms and homogenous cityscapes. On sites with a meaningful urban tradition the designs of second architects may be considered successful if they do not only not distract from the primacy of the existing main building or group of buildings that established and conserves the sense of place of the site, but instead reinforces or enhances its architectural merit and the perceptual unity of the group design.
Zen and the art of artmaking : Goldsworthy and Kapoor
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Bhana, Poorvi; Stevens, Ingrid; Mare, Estelle Alma
This article focuses on the work of two contemporary artists and the ways in which their work can be shown to relate to Zen Buddhist philosophies and aesthetics. It aims to examine the interpretation of Western art by using Eastern thinking and aesthetics as an interpretative strategy, and in particular, aims to examine the application of Zen philosophy and aesthetics to contemporary artists Andy Goldsworthy and Anish Kapoor. The artists have been selected for their varied backgrounds, unique styles, diverse forms of art and varying media, and because in spite of differences their work shows a noteworthy similarity in the manifestation of Zen aesthetic principles, whether intended or unintended.
A rhetorical interpretation of a geometric diagram of Plato’s “Creation Myth” overlaid on the Parthenon’s main facade
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Mare, Estelle Alma; Mare, Estelle Alma
A visual rhetorical interpretation of the design and symbolism of the pedimented main facade of the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis is based on a schematic geometric diagram of Plato’s “Creation Myth”, as described in his Timaeus. Following the aim of Gorgias (fifth century BCE) who claimed that a good speaker casts a spell on listeners, it is likewise postulated that Classical Greek architects strove to cast a visual spell on the viewers of their work by means of geometric composition. As a mind experiment this article proposes to persuade readers that the geometric design of the east facade of the Parthenon can be analysed according to the canons of Classical rhetoric, as explicated by Quintilian, and later expounded visually by Vitruvius and Alberti. The design process (tractatio) of the architects that resulted in the composition of the Parthenon’s east facade is analysed in a framework derived from Classical rhetoric: exordium, followed by diegesis, prothesis, pistis, and the five canons (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and prununtiatio), until the peroratorio.
The “wall of flesh” of the Conquered Territory : farmhouses and towns established in defence of the eastern boundary of the Orange Free State, beginning 1866
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Peters, Walter; Du Preez, J.L.; Mare, Estelle Alma
To defend the sovereignty of the Conquered Territory along the eastern frontier of the Boer Republic of the Orange Free State (OFS) and Basutoland (Lesotho), the government of the former passed the Occupation Act, 1866, which provided for the establishment of three parallel rows of farms and, during the next year, three border towns. In both cases, applicants had to covenant to militia service and building within a stipulated time. As the towns were of strategic importance, unlike the Boer tradition of church-founded towns with parishioners settling around the place of worship, the brief given the surveyors was to lay out the towns to specific allotment criteria without any spatial provision for religious practices. This article aims to show that even under these circumstances the towns came to feature the familiar diagnostic characteristics of Boer-founded towns with the repertoire of inherited townscape traditions. To bed the argument, the morphology of Boer-founded towns as developed in history is briefly investigated with the implication that the amendments made to the border towns of the OFS were culturally driven. Until now, these planned towns and urban entities have received scant attention within the family of Boer-founded towns.
The Women’s Monument and memorial complexity in the context of political change: from memorial exclusivity to monument(al) inclusivity
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Labuschagne, Pieter; Mare, Estelle Alma
The Women’s Monument that was erected in Bloemfontein during 1913 fulfilled a strong urge by prominent Afrikaner leaders, such as President Steyn, to commemorate the sacrifices made by women and children during the Anglo Boer War of 1899–1902. However, the Women’s memorial focus to commemorate women was soon used as a platform to promote nationalistic agendas. Over the decades various additions have been made to the site that transformed the exclusive women’s memorial into an inclusive monument serving a broader agenda. In the post-1994 post-colonial epoch within a broad democratic arrangement the monument is undergoing further changes steering it even further away from its original focus. In addition the new democratic era has ushered in a broad comprehensive all-inclusiveness that has a further impact on the layout of the site and the memorial/ museum. The purpose of this article was to examine the shift from memorial exclusiveness to an allinclusive monument.
West African influence on various projects by Le Corbusier
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Steyn, Gerald; Mare, Estelle Alma
This article contributes to the renewed interest in Le Corbusier by exploring a proposition by the African American architect and scholar, Melvin Mitchell, that West African art and architecture had a decisive influence on a number of Le Corbusier’s projects. The proposition is explored by means of a matrix that cross-references the three levels of human settlement with three sets of architectural form-giving principles. Since Le Corbusier never acknowledged sub-Saharan sources, the results range from debatable to defensible. It is emphasised that the value of studying Le Corbusier does not so much lie in the tangible forms of his buildings, but rather in the thought processes that informed their conceptualisation and design resolution.
Van Brandenburg unfurled: architecture in the expanded field of contemporary practice
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Schmidt, Leoni; Mare, Estelle Alma
This article considers a current project undertaken by Architecture Van Brandenburg in Shenzhen, China. Locating, touching, mimicking, integrating, crafting, unfurling and exhibiting are subheadings used to discuss salient aspects of the project. Models made during the process through which the project developed were shown in the Museo Diocesano at the Architecture Biennale in Venice 2014.
Architecture, historicism and historiography
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Noble, J.A. (Jonathan); Mare, Estelle Alma
This paper considers the legacy of historicism and debates within modern/post-modern historiography – especially in the work of Keith Jenkins, Michael Podro and Hayden White – and discusses how these crucial perspectives have influenced the field of architectural studies and design. A leading question of the paper concerns the use of history in design, as well as the relation of architecture to tradition, modernity and post-modernity.
The colonial gaze and the artist’s use of authoring strategies in Charles Davidson Bell’s The Landing of Van Riebeeck, 1652
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Strydom, Richardt; Mare, Estelle Alma
At the time of their making, colonial paintings were considered objective accounts of actual places and situations. Contemporary redress of colonial depictions contends however that such representations were culturally and materially determined and thus reflects the philosophical and moral bias of their painters. Charles Davidson Bell’s painting The Landing of Van Riebeeck, 1652 (1850) is often reproduced in South African history books without proper context - neither the artist nor the artwork has received much critical attention from art historical scholars. I regard the critical revisiting of Bell as important because it interrogates how Victorian colonial artists, such as Bell, employed authoring strategies and visual codes that served to entrench and naturalise debasing perceptions of their subjects. In this article, I consolidate various authoring strategies, put forward by different theorists, in a triangulated interpretive reading that further takes into account ideological frameworks and social reality in the interpretation of this artwork. My interpretation shows that Bell conformed to entrenched authoring strategies, concepts and features familiar to him, and aesthetic modalities that typified the art of his time. Scrutiny of the artist’s authoring strategies brings to light the role of the colonial gaze in establishing hierarchical relationships between binaries of colonial self and other/ coloniser and colonised.
The representation of women as a competitive self-objectified image : a new design identity of misleading slimming advertising
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) De Lange, Rudi W; Mare, Estelle Alma
Misleading slimming advertisements are a prominent visual feature in South African magazines that target young women. These commercial messages are particularly pervasive in magazines that focus on health, fitness, and beauty. An analysis of slimming advertisements in the Fitness magazine has identified a trend to avoid using overt misleading claim-based messages in favour of competitive self-objectification. This new design identity differs from traditional slimming advertisements in that it features the objectified as the primary graphic element and makes fewer, if any, contestable textual claims. Reading these objectified images through the female gaze as well as from a positivist paradigm predicts two contrasting and opposing outcomes. Objectified imagery may trigger negative body esteem, causing viewers to reject the message and form a negative brand association. Viewers may succumb to the explicit visual call for competitive self-objectification, adopt this as the norm and so accept the marketing message. Objectified imagery without measureable textual claims allows marketers to circumvent the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa’s Code on Slimming and enables them to use these images as misleading visceral graphic elements.
Reflective Conversations : baudrillard’s orders of the simulacrum
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Goosen, Moya; Mare, Estelle Alma
The French poststructuralist Baudrillard’s (1981; 1983; 1976 and 1994) conceptualisation of the simulacrum entails the philosophical-theoretical exploration of the deconstruction and simultaneous realisation of the real. The gradual loss and ultimate realisation of the actual real is systematically arranged by Baudrillard’s three orders of the simulacrum. These orders are historically framed by specific epochs and concurrently represent different phases of the image. This article investigates Baudrillard’s orders of the simulacrum as a possible methodological approach for interpreting contemporary South African art. More specifically, this article focuses on selected art works from the group exhibition Reflective Conversations: Typography, topography, typology (2013). The methodology of this study consists of a theoretical understanding of Baudrillard’s discussion of the simulacrum and the orders thereof. The selected art works are interpretively used as contemporary examples in order to enlighten Baudrillard’s three orders. The value of this research lies in a contemporary reflection of Baudrillard’s three orders of the simulacrum.
Landscape art and the territorial ontology : a call for landscape restitution
(Art Historical Work Group of South Africa, 2014) Goodrich, Andre; Strydom, Richardt; Mare, Estelle Alma
Ingold has used Marx’s distinction between exchange value and use value to distinguish between land and landscape. Land, Ingold suggests, is abstracted, quantitative and interchangeable. Landscape, by contrast, is qualitative and emerges as habitation’s embodiment of the history of inhabitants’ activities, projects and livelihoods. We use this distinction to argue that the 1913 Land Act effectively created a white monopoly on the production of landscape. By closely considering some of the resulting landscapes, we argue that a significant consequence of this monopoly has been the emergence of what we call the territorial ontology. We characterize this ontology as a world in which land and landscape are collapsed into territory – a bounded, possessed collection of qualities value can be extracted from. This is the world of colonial modernity’s racialized relations of production. In the second part of our article, we examine the North-West University’s landscape art collection and using Ingold to illuminate the relationship between landscapes and representations of landscapes, we argue that these representations draw attention to the world and as such form a part of the complex holding the territorial ontology in place. After demonstrating that the territorial ontology has been central to the racialization of the relations of production in South Africa’s colonial modernity, we call for landscape restitution and suggest that universities are the spaces from which to lead this initiative.

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