NEWS
VISUAL CENTURY, A NEW MULTIMEDIA PUBLISHING INITIATIVE FUNDED BY THE DAC, AIMS TO PROMOTE A CRITICAL REAPPRAISAL OF SOUTH AFRICAN ART HISTORY, WRITES GAVIN JANTJES
Since the late 1980s, when Steven Sack's The Neglected Tradition
(1988) made clear the need to research the contribution of black
artists to South African art history, and increasingly since the
1990s, there has been an upsurge in revisionist writing and in the
number of book publications and exhibition catalogues on South
African visual art. Attempts to produce a more inclusive account of
South African art history are concentrated on and around specific
media, the work of individual arts centres or pioneering black
artists.1 Much of this recent writing has, however, been published in
exhibition catalogues, many of which focus on recent art works. This
has inevitably resulted in a younger generation being better
documented than the generations of artists who came before them and
to comparatively few stand-alone studies of art history being
produced.
Further observation of current and recent publications make clear
that, with the possible exception of international exhibitions that
feature South African art, our art tends to be located within an art
historical vacuum and there is little attempt locally to situate it
within an international framework, or a specific African one. There
is also little critical engagement, in many recent and earlier
publications, with arts' broader historical contexts, both locally
and internationally. Taken together the different attempts to revise
history still do not provide an inclusive and general historical
overview.
It is against this background that I conceived of Visual Century,
as a research project that will produce a range of art historical
resources that invites further research. Directed by myself and
managed by the Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), the project has
received initial funding from the Department of Arts and Culture, and
is housed in the Department of Historical Studies at the University
of Cape Town. Subtitled "South African art in context, 1907- 2007",
the project seeks to produce a concise record of a century of South
African contemporary art production.
The first phase of the Visual Century project will create four
publications and a website by 2009. Each book focuses on a particular
historical period. The project has an editorial team, comprising
Jillian Carman, Lize van Robbroeck, Thembinkosi Goniwe and Mario
Pissarra, with Pissarra as editorin- chief. The second phase of the
project will produce a series of documentary films.
Visual Century aims to situate the work of art at the heart of its
research and to explore art's relationship to the broader
environments of local and international histories. It seeks to engage
a broad audience with divergent levels of knowledge of local and
international art and history, as well as degrees of visual literacy.
Consequently it will use accessible language, without compromising
the quality of the content to make the value of its resources count
within varied settings, from the educational to the professional. To
produce an inclusive and historically contextualised account of South
African art history, a wide range of writers will be commissioned,
allowing for diverse interpretations and offering an opportunity to
younger writers and researchers.
In keeping with the notion of contextualisation of art within local and international histories,
the starting point of the research, 1907, marks not only the granting
of independence by the British to the Boer Republics – that set in
motion the establishment of the Union of South Africa - it is also
the year Pablo Picasso painted a signature Modernist work, Les
Demoiselles de Avignon.
To avoid the impression that art is simply a reductive reflection
of broader historical processes, the Visual Century project attempts
to explore the interface between historical events and the art of a
period. One example would be to investigate the impact and legacy of
the Anglo-Boer War on early 'white art', another to ask if the
Cold War finds aesthetic expression in local art. How does the new
constitution change the exhibition and collecting policies of
national institutions? Mapping the influence of European and North
American art on South African art production, art education and the
building of cultural infrastructure over the last century is
relatively easy. A greater challenge is to demonstrate the
relationship between South African art and art from other colonised
national cultures, where there may have been little direct contact.
Seen in hindsight, such research may detect significant
similarities as well as disjunctures. The Visual Century project is
sensitive to concerns about producing a new "master narrative" of
South African art that forecloses further research. Its intentions
are the opposite, to stimulate a critical reappraisal of South
African art by emerging and established historians. Apart from its
invitation to a range of writers, the project will hold seminars
about its work in progress, to create a wider public engagement.
Visual Century cannot be the last word on our history but it can be
tool to get a new generation of historians interested in the nation's
achievements.
Gavin Jantjes is an artist and curator for contemporary
international art at the National Museum in Oslo, Norway
1.The revisionist school is best exemplified in the works of Elza Miles, while Elizabeth Rankin has
been the most visible of the media-centred approach. Sue Williamson's
two books – Resistance Art in South Africa (1989) and Art in South
Africa: The Future Present (1996) – have informally fused the
thematic and chronological, as did numerous the many 'ten years of
democracy' publications from 2004, also John Berndt's From Weapon to Ornament: The CAP Media Project posters (1982 to 1994) (2007).
Gavin Jantjes
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