William Kentridge’s Monument (1990) as counter-monument and the embodiment of negative aesthetics

This article analyses the film Monument (1990), created by South African artist William Kentridge. It frames the analysis around James E Young’s original ideas of the counter-monument and negative aesthetics. The former is defined as an anti-monument or a memorial that is open-ended, provocative, and subversive. The latter, Young’s negative aesthetics, is defined as anti-redemptive art or counterart, that is, a critical aesthetic. This is art that provokes, shocks, and repels, while critically challenging the audience to remember. Arguing for the film and its antihero Harry as both counter-monuments and the embodiment of negative aesthetics, I make a significant contribution to the already established work on William Kentridge by providing a unique reading of his film as a counter-monument. This article also works as a concept document for interrogating James E Young’s counter-monument outside of the context that gave rise to its initial conceptualisation, that is, post-World War II Germany and the Holocaust. In doing so, I also make a contribution to the scholarly debate surrounding counter-monuments; countermemory; and negative aesthetics, by contending that not only Holocaust (non)representations are counter-monumental, but other (counter)artistic responses to historical traumas or catastrophes, such as apartheid, can also be countermonuments, in this case, film

Postcards of “Cape girls”: Telling an Edwardian story of Cape Town: Stories Worth Telling - crafting stories through the art of design

Picture postcards originated in the nineteenth century as an efficient, cheap, and democratic form of mass communication that encompassed many functions, including entertainment. As bimodal texts, comprising a visual image, a nchoring textual c aption, a nd (sometimes) th e w ritten m essage by the sender, postcards assumed the power to communicate complex ideas and ideologies in a compact format. Under the influence of cultural studies in the 1960s, which stated that culture itself is the site of struggle for social meanings expressed in class, race, and gender relations, postcard studies (deltiology) has become an important interdisciplinary field since the 1980s. The postcard exposed millions of people to visual culture and predated the functions of mobile phones, the Internet, and social media platforms such as Instagram. In this article, I focus on a series of artist-drawn, lithographic postcards by Dennis Santry (1879-1960) in Cape Town in 1904. They depict six so-called “Cape Girls” engaged in leisure activities against the backdrop of iconic Capetonian sites. My interpretation of the postcards suggests that a selective story privileges the tastes of a white, middle-class, English-speaking, imperial audience

Special section editorial: Hitting home: representations of the domestic milieu in feminist art

The politics of the home was often a focus in second-wave feminist art in the West. Influenced by Betty Friedan’s The feminist mystique (1963), which challenged the notion that women were content to be wives, mothers, and homemakers, artists often represented the domestic milieu as a space of oppression. Friedan’s ideas would, however, be challenged by bell hooks, who indicated that such perceptions assumed a woman who was middle-class and white. As hooks observed in Feminist theory: from margin to center (1984:2), Friedan ‘did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure class housewife’. It should also be noted that Friedan’s views were shaped by a US-specific context and that the politics of home, domesticity, marriage, or parenthood may be perceived very differently in geographies outside the United States or the West, more generally, including South Africa

Arcades revisited as urban interiors in a transformed city context

Pretoria is the administrative capital of South Africa and is located within the City of Tshwane in the Gauteng Province. The city’s Central Business District (CBD) is characterised by a network of arcades and walkways that cut through the long and deep city blocks. In this article, we discuss arcades as urban interiors and the potential of these spaces to become points of social interaction within a transformed city context. We reflect on the original purpose of the arcade and based on criteria derived from a literature review, we critically assess the current use of three arcades and describe challenges experienced in the functioning of these spaces. The design of the building edges that link the interiors to the adjacent arcade space are revisited as a design element that has the potential to reactivate the arcades as urban interiors. Guidelines for improving the city dwellers and daily commuters’ experience and use of these spaces as urban interiors are formulated and discussed. These guidelines, although formulated within a South African context, are relative to any urban interior within a city that has lost its sense of place and that needs to be reactivated through the treatment of its surrounding buildings’ edges

Surface and underneath: A linguistic landscape analysis of the Bosman neighbourhood in Pretoria

This article explores how the study of the linguistic landscape (LL), which is to say the texts visible in public space, allows for a rich and complex understanding of place. More specifically, the article studies the Bosman neighbourhood in Pretoria through a geosemiotic lens. Geosemiotics situates signs in the material world, approaching them as actualisations of a multimodal social semiotic and as a site of encounter of the cycles of habitus, interaction, place semiotics and visual analysis. Walking is adopted as a research methodology, a means of reading the city and also a praxeology with which to constitute place. Aspects of LL that are considered here are reading path, change over time, materials used, represented participants and local and global production. Themes discussed are the habitus of receivers and producers expressed in the LL and mediated practices such as literacy. Language domination, the differentiation in LL according to power and temporality, informal and transgressive texts and the narratives and lives of producers and receivers are also introduced. Bosman emerges as a site of entanglement where origins, aspiration, intimacy and vulnerability merge in unexpected ways

‘Untold stories’: The relationship of word and image in the work of Shaun Tan: Original Research

Primarily known as a children’s book author and illustrator, Shaun Tan has repeatedly resisted this label and rather positioned himself between the fields of literature and fine art, emphasising that his training and primary interest are in the latter. This essay approaches Tan’s work via his idea of ‘untold stories’, articulated in the eponymous section of his book The bird king and other sketches (2011) and in the 2018 solo exhibition at Beinart Gallery in Melbourne, Untold tales. Untold essentially means unpremeditated in Tan’s vocabulary and relates to his evocation of Paul Klee’s idea of ‘taking a line for a walk’. Using his idea of untold stories as my central point, the essay foregrounds the untold critical story of Tan as a fine artist, focusing in particular on works that have received minimal to no critical attention: his 2015 series of paintings Go, said the bird, his 2003 public mural The hundred year picnic, and his ongoing 9x5 inch series of observational works in the tradition of the Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionism. The latter is a particularly strong and formative influence on Tan’s career as a painter, allowing for a discussion of his work in the broader context of postcolonial art history and settler colonialism

Recognising situatedness and resolving conflict: Analysing US and South African education law cases

Hierdie artikel voer aan dat hofbeslissings, veral die wat op die hoogste vlak gemaak word, nie die produk is van neutral regsbeginsels nie, maar heel dikwels van ideologie. Deur te verwys na sake soos Morse v Frederick and Parents Involved in Community Schools v Seattle School District No 1 in die Verenigde State, sowel as Mpumalanga Department of Education v Ermelo in Suid-Afrika, toon hierdie artikel duidelik op hierdie verskynsel wat merkwaardiglik nie algemeen aanvaar word nie. In antwoord daarop, stel die outeurs ’n leerstuk van omstandigheidsbewustheid oftewel “situational appreciation”, ’n leerstuk wat bewustheid van ’n besluitnemer se omstandighede in ag neem. Die omstandihede, of konteks, voorsien ’n verskaf ’n konsekwente maatstaf om die beslissende faktore in daardie Hoogste Hof- en Grondwetlike Hof uitsprake te identifiseer, verduidelik, en te bespreek. Daarby bespreek die artikel die invloed van kollegialiteit tussen regters in die hoogste howe, en beveel aan dat die Hoogste Hof in die Verenigde State en die Grondwetlike Hof in Suid-Afrika kollegialiteit beklemtoon om te verhoed dat skerp ideologiese verskille uitsprake beïnvloed, en te verseker dat uitsprake op grond van beginsels deur samewerking verwoord word. Hopenlik sal hierdie ontleding ’n noodsaaklike beskrywende en bepalende konteks verleen aan die uitsprake wat ons lewens voortdurend raak

‘Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert’: Reconsidering ironic kinship in Neill Blomkamp’s science fiction film Chappie: Original Research

Neill Blomkamp’s 2015 science fiction film Chappie engages with the familiar narrative trope of robot sentience. Blomkamp confronts viewers with a naïve and vulnerable childlike robot protagonist that is more human and likeable than any of the stilted and stereotypical real human characters in the film. It is the mechanical creature with which the viewer readily identifies and sympathises. Blomkamp facilitates, not only between his characters, but also with the audience, a kinship of the sort that Donna Haraway in Staying with trouble c alls a ffinity g roups o r a ssemblages o f ‘ oddkin’. T he i mmediately sympathetic response of the viewing audience to the mechanical robot is a key strategy in the way that Blomkamp applies irony in this film, which Haraway also identifies as central to her idea of the cyborg as an alternative and potentially liberatory myth. In this article, I engage in a close reading of the film, focusing on the broad network of speculative and science fiction narrative traditions within which this film operates. I consider possible reasons why the film was misread and met with criticism when it was first released. I also specifically investigate the strategies and techniques Blomkamp uses in his depiction of the robot character and how his use of its childlikeness and vulnerability and its engagement with violence and sacrifice are central to the film’s ironic engagement with the central argument about the dangers of dehumanisation and the need to recuperate humaneness

A nation under our feet: Black Panther, Afrofuturism and the potential of thinking through political structures

In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series written by American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. The point of departure is Coates’s idea of ‘the Mecca’, a term he uses in his earlier nonfiction. It refers to a space in which black culture is created in the shadow of collective traumas and memories. We argue that in a nation under our feet the fictional African country of Wakanda functions as a metaphorical Mecca. This version of Wakanda is contextualised in terms of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and theories on the influence of ideology in comic books. The central focus of the article is how this representation of Wakanda questions the idea of a unified black people and how Wakanda, like the real world Meccas described by Coates, display internal ideological and political struggles among its people. We argue that the various characters in a nation under our feet represent different and conflicting ideological positions. These positions are metaphors for real world political views and in playing out the consequences of these ideologies, Coates explores African and global political structures without didactically providing conclusive answers to complex issues