The pasts and presence of art in South Africa: Technologies, ontologies and agents
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The pasts and presence of art in South Africa: Technologies, ontologies and agents
Edited by Chris Wingfield, John Giblin & Rachel King
In 2015, #RhodesMustFall generated the largest student protests in South Africa since the end of apartheid, subsequently inspiring protests and acts of decolonial iconoclasm across the globe. The performances that emerged in, through and around #RhodesMustFall make it clear how analytically fruitful Alfred Gell’s notion that art is ‘a system of social action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it’ can be, even when attempting to account for South Africa’s very recent history.
What light can this approach shed on the region’s far longer history of artistic practices? Can we use any resulting insights to explore art’s role in the very long history of human life in the land now called South Africa? Can we find a common way of talking about ‘art’ that makes sense across South Africa’s long span of human history, whether considering engraved ochre, painted rock shelters or contemporary performance art?
This collection of essays has its origins in a conference with the same title, arranged to mark the opening of the British Museum’s major temporary exhibition South Africa: the art of a nation in October 2016. The volume represents an important step in developing a framework for engaging with South Africa’s artistic traditions that begins to transcend nineteenth-century frameworks associated with colonial power.
- Complete volume - The pasts and presence of art in South Africa: Technologies, ontologies and agents
- Chapter 1 - Introducing the pasts and presence of art in South Africa
- Chapter 2 - Reframing the Wonderwerk slabs and the origins of art in Africa
- Chapter 3 - Poisoned, potent, painted: arrows as indexes of personhood
- Chapter 4 - Relocated: potting and translocality in terminal Iron Age towns and beyond
- Chapter 5 - Appropriating colonial dress in the rock art of the Makgabeng plateau, South Africa
- Chapter 6 - To paint, to see, to copy: rock art as a site of enchantment
- Chapter 7 - Art, rationality and nature: human origins beyond the unity of knowledge
- Chapter 8 - Birds, beasts and relatives: animal subjectivities and frontier encounters
- Chapter 9 - Art, animals and animism: on the trail of the precolonial
- Chapter 10 - A discourse on colour: assessing aesthetic patterns in the ‘swift people’ panel at Ezeljagdspoort, Western Cape, South Africa
- Chapter 11 - Unsettling narratives: on three stone objects answering back
- Chapter 12 - Art and the everyday: gold, ceramics and meaning in thirteenth-century Mapungubwe
- Chapter 13 - Presences in the archive: Amagugu (treasures) from the Zulu kingdom at the British Museum
- Chapter 14 - Considering the consequences of light and shadow in some nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century South African images
- Chapter 15 - The day Rhodes fell: a reflection on the state of the nation and art in South Africa