Table of Contents
Introduction
South African Art in general is art that produced by people who possess the territory occupied by the modern country of South Africa. The following essay will discuss South African Art and the role it played during the Aparthied era in a form of protest and/or resistant art, using one South African Artist and analysing the artworks to visually indicate whether the art is a form of protest art or resistance art.
South African Art
South African art has always taken on the unique flavour of the country, from the 4 000year-old cave paintings of the San Bushmen – the richest collection of rock art in Africa – to the homegrown conceptual art movement that sprang up as apartheid came to an end in the 1990s.
Background History of South African Art
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The first South African Art Gallery was established in 1895 in Cape Town with well over 100 bequeathed works in the Collection being declared the property of the Cape Colonial Government in 1986. These paintings and sculptures largely featured English and European artists including Masters. This highly valued collection can be viewed today as part of the national treasure to be conserved and safeguarded in perpetuity. In the Transvaal, the Johannesburg Art Gallery was formed in the University of Witwatersrand and a new building designed and opened to the public in 1915. By 1926, Long Street in Cape Town was a thriving road of artists including Naude and Gwelo Goodman and South African Art was well established. At this time it is very difficult to ascertain whether the European artists had any contact with indigenous artists. Their craft was almost certainly being admired and collected for curiosity but not pursued for collaboration or amalgamation by fellow artists as another current art form. However, there are a few exceptions where artistic talent was recognized and nurtured even if it was a black artist adopting the Western-style.
The Role of South African Art During the Apartheid Era
There were many people who argued that artists could not deny the realities of living in a repressive society and their art should reflect on the injustices of that society as artists should be obliged to expose state repression. The role of culture (art & literature) under a racially oppressive and authoritarian society whereby the debates ranged from the use of the arts as a weapon of the struggle to the establishment of community art centers as the building blocks of a new people-centered non-racial cultural practice. The debate about art was the transformation of the establishment of spaces but by looking at art as more than a space of political expression.
South African art has deep fault -lines, primarily based on race, but also on ethnicity, gender, and class. It was in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre that some black artists began to wrestle with the role of art in society, this was according to Omar Badsha. The boycotts divided artists, white and black. The discrepancy between black visibility as artists and visibility in the other spheres of related activities is a critical distinction that needs to be addressed. With South Africa’s transition to democracy, new arts and culture policies were developed including the designation of “arts and culture” as an official learning area of schools.
South African Artist
“It is as though our rulers stalk every page and haunt every picture: everything is obsessed by the oppressors and the trauma they have imposed.”- Albie Sachs.
Jane Alexander is a South African female artist and sculptor who is best known for sculpture, The Butcher Boys, which was considered as her response to the state of emergency in South Africa in the late 1980s. Jane was born in Johannesburg in 1959, she is one of the most important contemporary artists in South Africa to have received international recognition. Her figurative sculptures, installations, tableaux and photomontages were formed by her experiences of growing up under apartheid and they could be read as a response to that political and social environment and what followed in relation to broader global conditions.
Analysis of the Artworks
The Butcher Boys sculptures were life-sized and they were oil-painted plaster figures with animal horns and bone details, seated on the bench. The Butcher Boys sculpture it the most visited artwork in the Iziko South African National Gallery Collection in Cape Town, the three figures indicate aspects of violence.it is a reflection of what society was like under apartheid. The figures are considered to have no senses, by looking at the picture it is evident that the ears, heads, and mouths are missing or due to the state of the sculpture and what they entail, it could be described as though the senses are covered with thick roughened skin.
The human figures are rendered with extreme realism, which makes the distortion much more gruesome. The wounds and the distortions of the figures disturb the sanity of the human body and their right to completeness. The suffering of the nation is communicated through and contained by the violated human body.
Protest Art or Resistance Art
Jane Alexander’s work revolved around the Apartheid history as well as the identity, which was under the broader term of “protest art”, but her work was in the form of resistance that was formed with deep political and social understanding even though she didn’t directly contribute to the Resistance Movement ad became aware of the student’s underground movements, organizations and about South Africa’s political situation. It was after The Butcher Boys that Jane became increasingly more restrained and the violence grew more subtle, in more of a metaphorical level.
Conclusion
In order to appreciate the meaning of the artwork of The Butcher Boys, it is important that one understands the history of South Africa, the origin of the artist. Resistance art was the art that was used in a way of showing their opposition to their powerholders. The work of Jane Alexander titled The Butcher Boys, it was considered to be her response to the State of Emergency in South Africa in the late 1980s, and most of her work was based and influenced by the political and social overview of South Africa.
