Third Text
Issues
Volume 35, 2021
Issue 5
Number 172, September 2021
Respectability – Armour Against Inferiority: An Enquiry into Self-Representation through Family Photographs and Oral History as a Form of Resistance During Apartheid 517–539
Nadia Kamies
Respectability has been a significant feature of status in the Cape, shaped by racial dynamics that have their foundation in slavery and colonialism and later formalised in apartheid legislation. The issue of representation is central to this article and draws on the work of Stuart Hall, who suggests that the concept of representation plays a more active and creative role in how we think about the world and our place in it. Drawing on oral history and personal family photographs taken during apartheid, I postulate that, through acts of performance such as dressing up and sitting for photographs, people who were classified coloured attempted to take control of the way they were represented. In so doing, they actively resisted their dehumanisation and racial subjugation. In this regard I argue that the photographs defy and resist the memories that we have of apartheid and testify to a will to freedom and humanity.
Beyond the Everyday: Subtle Forms of Resistance in the Work of Usha Seejarim 540–553
Alison Kearney
Contemporary South African artist Usha Seejarim interrogates everyday social practices though using quotidian objects and documentary style videography to create her artworks. Through an analysis of the manner in which Seejarim engages with the everyday, this article explores the ways in which her artworks challenge gendered and racialised identity constructions in contemporary South Africa. I begin by showing how Seejarim draws attention to aspects of everyday activities that often go unnoticed and unquestioned. I then argue that her use of domestic objects to create sculptures challenges hegemonic constructions of feminine identity. This is followed by a discussion of how, through her video works, Seejarim exposes the ways in which daily experience in South Africa continues to be marred by apartheid legacies of segregation. I conclude that Seejarim’s artworks can be understood as agents of social transformation because of how they enable audiences to think differently about the everyday.
Performing Gender in Video Art: Candice Breitz’s ‘Extra’ 554–568
Marie Meyerding
This article examines Candice Breitz’s recorded performances and negotiations of the representation of women and gender dynamics in her video art, looking in particular at her work ‘Extra’ (2011). Showing that Breitz has addressed the representation of women throughout her oeuvre, this article argues that the works ‘Factum’ and ‘Extra’ mark a turning point in Breitz’s practice due to their collaborative nature. In ‘Extra’, Breitz intervenes in scenes of ‘Generations’, the most-watched soap opera in South Africa at the time. Using her body as a tool of metalepsis, Breitz disrupts the seamless fictional narratives, questioning gender-related power structures and modes of identity representation displayed in the show. Findings from studies about gender-stereotyping in ‘Generations’ raise further concerns about the responsibility of the mass media and artists in relation to representation. The article concludes that Breitz succeeds in making her spectators critically examine their own viewing habits by combining performance and video art as two relatively new and highly politically charged artistic media, especially in the context of South Africa.
An Exploration of the Scarcity of Asian Images in Morimura Yasumasa’s Oeuvre, 1991–2010 569–590
Ayelet Zohar
Of the several hundred images Morimura Yasumasa (b. 1951, Osaka) has produced thus far, only three represent Asian men: Mahatma Gandhi, Mao Zedong and the Eddie Adams photograph of ‘the shooting on Saigon street’. While the Vietnamese image is famous for photographic and political implications, the two Asian leaders were famous and influential. Questioning why Morimura has created such a small number of Asian figures, and the possible meaning of this absence in relation to Japanese Orientalism and racism, within the context of Japan's position in the global context and its relations with Asia, and using Iwabuchi's concept of ‘Trans-Asia’ and Stefan Tanaka's writings in ‘Japan's Orient’, I position Morimura's work in this context. I argue that Morimura's numerous representations of Western icons is part of Japan’s dedication to following Western values, as part of the long process, from the Meiji Restoration onwards, in which, through the association with Western values, Japan alienates Asia.
A Critique of the ‘Author Function’ Concept in Art History 591–604
Hammam Aldouri
Since the 1970s, the incorporation of European critical theory into the academic discipline of art history within the Anglophone context has become an established scholarly convention. This article aims to attend to one example of this institutionalised referencing practice: Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘author function’ as explicated in the famous essay, ‘What is an Author?’ From Craig Owen’s attempt to develop a ‘materialist cultural practice’ to Caroline Jones’s recent exploration of the ‘artist-function’ in the reception of Robert Smithson’s work, Foucault’s concept has proved to be a rich source for art historians. That being said, the deployment of ‘author function’ has, as I will show, come at the price of a more careful examination of Foucault’s essay – one that does not permit the seamless reproduction, via a citational practice, of a concept from one study to the next.
Humour and the Commodification of Suffering: Strategies of Cultural Resilience in Contemporary Art 605–623
Chrisoula Lionis
The emphasis on precarity and conflict in contemporary art has meant that artists from sites of crisis are frequently framed as ‘local informants’, expected to perform cultural capital by narrating experiences of marginality and political conflict. This has meant that in contrast to the sphere of popular culture where marginalised groups are expected to engage humour to ‘perform’ their identity (eg POC, female, queer stand-up comedians), performances of ‘sincerity’, ‘authenticity’ and truth remain central to intercultural encounters in contemporary art. Framed by discussion of how humour in contemporary art differs to ‘everyday’ visual forms (memes, graffiti, etc), this article considers how humour is used as a political strategy by artists from diverse sites of crisis: Greece, Palestine and Indigenous Australia. Analysing the work of artists Khaled Hourani, Richard Bell and Kostis Stafylakis, it demonstrates how humour in contemporary art contributes to three forms of cultural resilience: ‘authenticity’, ‘enactment’ and ‘placemaking’.
Haptic Perception and the Non-Western Monochrome 624–642
Simon Morley
In this article I explore Brazilian, Japanese and South Korean monochrome and monochromatic art from the late 1950s to the 1980s, and argue that a non- or trans-visual sensory dimension to painting is brought to the fore, in particular in relation to the haptic modality, which involves paying special attention to the tactile and kinesthetic properties of the body. This sets such monochromes apart from the more familiar ones produced in Europe and the United States. My aim is to widen the interpretation of monochrome painting as a whole beyond the narrow paradigm of the ‘epistemologies of the North’ in order to include the ‘epistemologies of the South’ (Santos).
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group