ETD Collection

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/104


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Subject: search.filters.subject.Art, South African

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    Approaching trauma: South African painting through Kant, Greenberg and Lacan
    (2017) Webster, Jessica
    The aim of this thesis is to consider a concept of trauma which may offer support for the contemporary interest in and practice of painting. Jacques Lacan’s (1959-1960) structural and abstract articulations of trauma as das Ding is the central framework for the trajectory and form of the research and writing in this thesis. Lacan’s seminar on das Ding develops the notion that philosophical and social functions of art are aimed at structuring the traumatic and tragic sphere of experience. Das Ding is a hypothetical construct that resonates with Kant’s epistemological, moral and aesthetic philosophy. Primarily, I see the historical framework of das Ding as foregrounding a certain ‘ethics’ in my approach to painting and its interpretation. Kant’s own emphasis on the communicability art may offer is key to this thesis. His focus is not on interpretation as an act eliciting direct meaning from representations in art, but frames the potential for humane interaction: for how a consideration of the perception of beauty and the form of the cognitions that arise in private and public spheres may lay the groundwork for thinking about communicability in general. Through the lens of das Ding, I suggest that an emphasis on aspects of non objective, non-communicable elements of making and experiencing painting is a viable way of contemplating both its pleasures and, often, its more painful effects. I contend that the displacement of meaning enabled by conceptualising the structural implications of trauma, in theory and in the practice of painting, may sustain a quiet yet significant social position in the wider sphere of intellectual activity and pursuits.
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    Situating Nukain Mabuza's rock garden: a study of a landscape dwelling through multiple explanatory frameworks
    (2017) Cuthbertson, Hazel Claire
    In the 1960s and 1970s, farm worker Nukain Mabuza created a painted hillside rock garden on a farm between Barberton and Kaapmuiden, Mpumalanga, South Africa. He transformed his dwellings, and rearranged and painted the surrounding rocks according to a unified scheme of geometric and animal motifs with a carefully selected colour palette. This altered environment went far further aesthetically, and lasted far longer in time, than the signs and scars that might typically result from a farm worker’s dwelling upon the land. His work arguably bears some of the hallmarks of an inhabited ‘total work of art’. I challenge the dominant ‘outsider art’ explanatory framework adopted by JFC Clarke and re-evaluate the fragmentary archive of Mabuza’s life and work. Working from the likelihood that no single context will offer sufficient grounds for situating Nukain Mabuza’s particular creative practice, I assess the relevance of cultural, historical and religious contexts, which might have shaped Nukain Mabuza’s personal vision and contributed to the form of his expressive environment. Nukain Mabuza’s altered landscape has suffered considerable damage – there is no longer any trace of the two dwellings and the stile, and the paintings on the rocks have all but disappeared. My project seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Nukain Mabuza’s work by extending, analysing, interpreting and situating his inhabited painted environment within the worldview of southern African Bantu-speakers, as a unique personal creative expression, and as an expression of the artist’s modernity.
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    A site-specific approach to interpreting rock art and interaction in the southern region of the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa : the case of Xoro Gwai rock shelter
    (2012-01-16) Pinto, Lourenco Casamiro
    Studies of San rock art in southern Africa have appealed to researchers for specificities of individual rock art sites in order to counter the prevailing practice of conceptualising San rock art as a homogenous entity. This research attempts to analyse social interaction through looking at diverse ethnographies and how such ethnographies can reveal information regarding one rock art site. Individual rock art sites like Xoro Gwai can start to unravel the nuanced, diverse and complex nature of San religious beliefs and rites and how these beliefs were affected or influenced by social contact with other social formations.