Over the past eight years, I have focused my research on exploring the ways that contemporary African artists challenge historic and neo-avant-garde discourses of art through my art making, theoretical scholarship on African art, and by developing ways of engaging with art in the art museum.
My interest in the ways that artists engage with discourses of art led me to explore how artists challenge the ontologies of art in my PhD titled “Beyond the Readymade: Found Objects in Contemporary South African Art” (obtained in 2016). While conducting my PhD research, I became interested in how the legacies of avant-garde practices have become part of accepted, artistic practices in global contemporary art making practices. I questioned the ways in which contemporary South African artists use found objects could be understood, other than as anti-art, since found objects have been part of art making practices longer than acrylic paint. Focusing on three contemporary SA artists who use the found objects differently, I explored issues to do with the meaning of objects in the world and their changed ontology as they move into the artwork, and what that means for the artwork and the object in the world.
My book chapter titled ‘Trace and fracture: Legacies of the ‘readymade’ in contemporary South African art’ (2019) summarises the key points of my PhD research findings. Drawing on discussions of the implications of the found object on the nature of art making by theorists such as Danto (1981) and Foster (1996), I begin by exploring the ways in which the historical and neo-avant-gardes challenged notions of the artists’ labour through their use of found objects. This is followed by an exploration of the manner in which contemporary South African artists Alan Alborough, Penny Siopis and Usha Seejarim engage with notions of the artists’ labour through their choice of objects and the manner in which they work with those objects. I investigate the ways in which these artists’ praxis can be understood as a continuation or challenge of the avant-garde’s exploration of artist’s labour. I then consider the implications of their use of found objects for contemporary ideas of the artist’s labour in order to move beyond an understanding of the use of found objects such as they were when first used by the historical and neo-avant-gardes. In exploring the historical use of found objects, and situating contemporary uses of found objects within the discourse of the avant-garde, this study addresses the need Foster (1996) identifies for new genealogies of the avant-garde that complicate its past and suggest alternative futures.
After completing my PhD, I broadened my exploration of Alan Alborough’s work, to the ways in which his use of found objects as materials challenge previously held ideas about the relationship between materiality and conceptualism. In the article, ‘Dismantling Dichotomies: Alan Alborough’s Material Conceptualism’ (2016) I investigate the relationship between the material and the conceptual in Alborough’s works. I argue that Alborough’s preoccupation with materiality challenges the construction of conceptual art as a dematerialised art. I recommend social anthropological theories of materiality which, when applied to Alborough’s works, are useful in revealing the ways in which this artist challenges the dichotomy of materiality and concept commonly associated with conceptual art.
I further extended my PhD research by curating an exhibition at Wits Art Museum (WAM) titled ‘Beyond the Readymade’ (2018). Through the exhibition I turned the questions that I asked in my PhD to works in the WAM collection that were not part of my PhD research. At the time I wrote a modest catalogue and an education resource for the exhibition.
Thinking about my position as artist-scholar-curator-educator, in my book chapter titled “Confronting the museum: artists’ interventions as critique” (2021), I critically reflect on the successes and failures of my ongoing, interactive, art project called the ‘The Portable Hawkers Museum’ (2003-) which interrogates museums as fraught spaces where histories of conquest, matters of cultural value, control and display are performed in the post-colonial era. In the chapter, I suggest that for art museums to have a future in Africa, they must invite and engage in critical dialogue with artists. With reference to specific examples from my own artist practice, I argue that by mediating between the museum, their collections and their constituents, artists challenge inherited museum practices, and call into question the hegemony of the institutions of art. In the process, dialogues between the various agents are established through which museums might start to reimagine themselves. Acknowledging that a dialogue necessarily involves discussion from all participants, I consider some audience responses to the 'The Portable Hawkers Museum'. I conclude that recognition of the inadequacies of the term museum is needed in order for museums in Africa to address the problems of their colonial legacies and their alienation from their constituents. Therefore, I propose that artists, museum curators and heritage managers work with the concept of the museum 'under erasure' when thinking of museums futures in Africa. I conclude the chapter with my realisation that, like the historical and neo-avant-gardes, this project ultimately failed to achieve the institutional critique that I aimed for, because my ‘Portable Hawkers Museum’ is nevertheless a museum, and therefore brings with it the associations of other museums. Drawing on Derrida (1976) I end with a proposal for a new ‘museum under erasure’ to achieve the decolonization of museums in Africa. Translated from the French "sous rature" by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1976), to write "under erasure" is a philosophic writing device proposed by Heidegger and expanded upon by Derrida. To write under erasure is to recognize that the language used to communicate is no longer adequate to communicate meaning, but that there is not yet a more suitable terminology, or a single word that could capture the true meaning of a concept. For Derrida (1976) crossing out the word is better than creating a new word, because the act of crossing out signifies that the word and its meanings continue to be problematic, avoiding substituting one terminology for another, which hides the problems of the word and its meanings, producing the illusion that the issues are resolved. (In 2021, following the publication, I began a new art project that takes up this challenge).
My interest in how to theorise, interpret and write about African art extends to my work in the field of art education. Through developing education materials that enable particular engagements with art, I explore ways of looking at art, experiential learning, and the role of the art museum in art education. To date I have written seven educational resources for WAM. I co-authored a book chapter titled “Putting Theory into Practice” (2015) with then WAM education curator Leigh Blankenberg. The chapter outlines the pedagogies used to design the activities in the education resources, and then, with reference to specific examples, critically evaluates the efficacy of the education resources for learning about social justice through art.
In the paper “Art History is Dead, Long Live Art History” I question what call for the decolonisation of university curricula imply for disciplines like art history which emerged at the time of colonial expansion and the categorising of knowledge that came with the enlightenment? I begin by briefly exploring the origins of the discipline, in order to create a platform from which to consider contemporary art history writing. I then consider the ways in which the decolonisation of the discipline could be understood as the end of art history. A reflection of some of the affordances and limitations of the rhetoric in which calls for decolonisation are framed, leads me to consider methods of writing art history that could be construed as acts of decolonisation. I conclude by suggesting that one way to decolonise the discipline is to foreground the author’s subjective voice when writing arts histories. Since this paper was published, I have continued investigating processes of interpretation and ways of writing arts' histories. In particular, I question what is an appropriate way to approach interpretation and write about African art that is relevant to our current socio-political context? I explore a range of theoretical frameworks including philosophies of art, anthropology, sociology and phenomenology in trying to answer this question.
The article 'Beyond the everyday: Subtle forms of resistance in the work of Usha Seejarim' (2021), which was developed from my PhD research, explores the ways in which South African artist Usha Seejarim questions interpretations of the everyday and challenges identity constructions in contemporary South Africa. I begin with a discussion of how Seejarim draws attention to aspects of everyday and persistently gendered activities that often go unnoticed and unquestioned. I then consider how Seejarim’s use of domestic objects to create provocative sculptures challenges stereotypical constructions of feminine identity in her body of work ‘Venus at Home’ (2012). This is followed by an exploration of the ways in which Seejarim extends her engagement with the subject to representing the experience of the everyday through her use of video. I argue that through her choice of subject coupled with her manipulation of filmic media, the artist is able to simulate aspects of everyday experience such as repetition and boredom. I conclude that Seejarim’s artworks can be understood as potential agents of social transformation because of how they resist gendered and racialised constructions of identity in contemporary South Africa and enable audiences to think differently about what constitutes the everyday.
Continuing my exploration of ways of understanding contemporary artists’ use of found objects, my latest, article, ‘Infinite Mirror: Critical Reflections on Wayne Barker’s Strategies of Appropriation’, published in January 2022, explores the politics of cultural appropriation in contemporary South African art. Through focusing on selected works by Wayne Barker, who is well known for mixing referents taken from high art and popular culture in his art practice that spaces more than 30 years, this paper explores the complexities of appropriation as a contemporary strategy for art making. It begins by distinguishing between different types of appropriation. Then the genealogy of strategies of appropriation within western modernist art is outlined in order to locate Barker’s art making practice within the trajectory of the historical and neo avant-gardes. The subsequent analyses of selected artworks critically consider the extent to which Barker’s appropriation challenges or reinforces the cultural associations and symbolic meaning of that which he appropriates.