SA Protest and Resistance Art

SOUTH AFRICAN RESISTANCE /PROTEST ART FROM THE 70’s AND 80’s APARTHEID Legalised racial segregation (Nationalist Party) 1948 – 1994 Activism: One who follows a policy of vigorous action, especially in politics. Casspirs: A type of military vehicle mainly used in riot control. Confrontational: To be or to come face to face, to face bodily as an enemy or in defiance. Dehumanisation: To take away human qualities, to make impersonal. Detainees: people who are detained by the authorities. Exploitative: To take full advantage of, to use workers for one’s own advantage and their disadvantage. Iconography: The visual images and symbols used in a work of art. Incarceration: To imprison. Martyr: One who undergoes death or great suffering to support a belief or cause or principle. Monumental: Massive Paradoxical: A statement etc, that seems to contradict itself or to conflict with common sense but which contains a truth. Patriotism: Loyally supporting one’s country. Subservience: Subordination. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOU15CQL2Mc Alfred Thoba: 1976 Riots Sam Nzima’s famous photograph of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying Hector Pieterson accompanied by Hector’s sister Antoinette. Soweto Riots of 16th June 1976 caused the death of hundreds of children when they defied the authorities. South African Protest Art Posters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLXXiLQP0k Jane Alexander. “THE BUTCHER BOYS” 1985/86 Context is important when viewing The Butcher Boys, especially considering the circumstances in which it was initially released. As Peffer writes, “During 1985 a state of emergency was declared in South Africa in response to renewed outbreaks of violent resistance, and was renewed yearly until 1990. The police were again given wide-ranging powers for the forceful suppression of popular protest, including the detention and interrogation of suspects without trial. Over thirty thousand people were detained between 1986 and 1987. During this period, Jane Alexander produced a sculptural group, The Butcher Boys (1985-86).” (Peffer 2009, p. 75) This climate of fear meant that South Africans could not be outspoken about or stand against conditions within the country. The Boys are mute – Alexander has created them without functioning mouths; it was not possible for South Africans to speak out against the oppressive government at the time, without fear of reprisal. http://nerinedorman.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-butcher-boys.html Sense of drama / death Sense of power – violence, victimization, oppression Use of distortion – not beautiful, but has a sense of the grotesque Animalistic - mutation Strong use of ambiguity Drained of colour They have a potent presence Denied an identity? Materials – plaster, bone, horns, wood, paint Alexander wants the viewer to question and react to and recognize their emotions Silence of space – They are alive – Broken and through placing of watchful, ready to move. damaged figures – sense of alienation, Degradation, anxiety and vulnerablity of the aggressor aloneness, lonliness, Jane Alexander. “THE BUTCHER BOYS” 1985/86 - detail They are personifications of the appallingly spiraling violence, the anarchy, the necklace killings, the detentions, the banning and lootings of South Africa in the 1980s. They represent at one level the artist’s response to these events, the awful assault they represented on values and identity and the profound pessimism of those times. PAUL STOPFORTH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R366LHSNak PAUL STOPFORTH “The Interrogators” 1979 (100 x 180cm) (graphite/floorwax) ● triple portrait of the security policemen who interrogated Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. ● The work has a chilling, steely grey coldness ● The faces are large and stare back at the viewer. They register everything, there is no escaping these three men. ● There is a shadow of the chair in the sunglasses that refers to the struggle that was supposed to have taken place. “What the arts can do in South Africa is to construct images by whatever means possible to expose the nature of tyranny, to support the struggle for freedom, and to give dignity and respect to the lives living and the lives lost.” Paul Stopforth. Paul Stopforth ‘Elegy’ mixed media – graphite and paint, 1980 Based on the horrors of police interrogation: From Mika & Brent: ● injustices of the apartheid system ● Human body as a symbol of the harm of Apartheid ● How were African’s treated during Apartheid... Paul Stopforth Migration Series... PENNY SIOPIS PENNY SIOPIS Patience on a monument, A History Painting, oil paint and collage, 1988 A black female figure, semi–naked, sits on a pile of natural waste and the debris left behind by civilization – including fruit peelings, a stretched canvas, a dead bird, objets d’art, a skull, models of a pregnant womb and a broken heart, a little handbag, ornamental fittings, an open book, and two views of a bust of a black man. These objects have been compacted into appears to be a vast waste-disposal site. She is enthroned like some heroic statue, and peeling lemons in her lap. A collage of photocopied images make up the landscape and the heaped debris. The photocopied images reflect entrenched perceptions: stereotypes of naked savages, the Boers, the British redcoats, scenes of pomp and heroism; The Landing of Van Riebeek, studies of political figures, national symbols and tourist souvenirs. HELEN SEBIDI Helen Sebidi ‘The Child’s Mother Holds the Sharp Side of the Knife’ pastel and collage, 1989.