1 00:00:00,660 --> 00:00:12,390 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, members of the All Souls College, the university community and guests from near and far. 2 00:00:13,220 --> 00:00:23,810 You all, welcome to today's lecture. Last week, we explored the various ways the work of Gatsby, 3 00:00:23,950 --> 00:00:35,739 Siri and a few of our contemporaries engaged with and responded to the sociopolitical political rupture and transformation caused 4 00:00:35,740 --> 00:00:49,090 by the 1952 Gamal Abdel Nasser military coup that became a full blown revolution with consequential impact on life in Egypt, 5 00:00:49,090 --> 00:00:55,510 as well as on international relations during the early years of the Cold War. 6 00:00:56,680 --> 00:01:07,300 Today I turn to South Africa. During the 1950s and sixties, when Hendrix set foot as prime minister, 7 00:01:09,310 --> 00:01:20,440 interior minister transformed South Africa into what a contemporary newspaper described as his native empire 8 00:01:21,250 --> 00:01:31,750 by a messianic promulgation of racist doctrines that earned him the reputation as the architect of apartheid. 9 00:01:32,940 --> 00:01:36,960 Until his assassination in 1966. 10 00:01:38,440 --> 00:01:44,830 My concern today is how the ideology and political infrastructure of apartheid. 11 00:01:46,270 --> 00:01:57,190 As conceived and propagated by foot, registered in the work of South African artists, but especially that of Jamila Fanny, 12 00:01:57,610 --> 00:02:07,270 whose distinctive artistic imagination and compelling work earned him the moniker Goya of the Townships. 13 00:02:09,320 --> 00:02:20,870 By examining the ways in which the work of white and black artists engaged with, accommodated and sidestepped the political, 14 00:02:21,410 --> 00:02:33,170 ethical and moral questions raised by the ardently racist policies that Food and his circle of Afrikaners carried out, 15 00:02:33,170 --> 00:02:40,430 and also interested in how the specific formal language and subject matter do. 16 00:02:40,430 --> 00:02:48,620 Miller developed staged a particular mode of address that I argue distanced 17 00:02:48,620 --> 00:02:56,510 itself from what was then thought of as good black art and trends in white art, 18 00:02:57,350 --> 00:03:01,100 and emphatically rejected the notion of. 19 00:03:02,220 --> 00:03:07,080 The good patriotic art advocated by four foot. 20 00:03:10,740 --> 00:03:22,470 I dedicate my lecture today to two people who helped me on my writing skills as an art critic, curator and art historian. 21 00:03:24,390 --> 00:03:28,570 First is the poet. According to. 22 00:03:30,170 --> 00:03:35,460 Who I met. While studying art at Soka. 23 00:03:37,160 --> 00:03:44,630 She not only lent me her typewriter and gave me my typing lessons for the first time. 24 00:03:45,770 --> 00:03:49,220 When I began writing our criticism for Nigerian newspapers. 25 00:03:50,570 --> 00:03:56,840 She read and commented on my essays before I turned them to the editors. 26 00:03:58,850 --> 00:04:03,500 Her spare and lyrical poetry serves as beckons. 27 00:04:03,950 --> 00:04:09,530 I looked to while shifting from the studio to the scholarship. 28 00:04:11,100 --> 00:04:18,740 Similarly, the art historian. James Meier, formerly of Emory University, 29 00:04:19,670 --> 00:04:30,710 helped me transition fully into art history writing and provided me my first module of analytical rigour and lexical clarity. 30 00:04:32,540 --> 00:04:40,610 I'm still in their debt for helping me on my journey and career as a critic and art historian. 31 00:04:42,470 --> 00:04:45,650 And with that, I turn to today's lecture. 32 00:04:46,250 --> 00:04:59,810 On August 15, 1995, one year in office, Nelson Mandela as president made one of the most controversial trips of his presidency. 33 00:05:01,570 --> 00:05:13,720 He travelled to Aranya, a small settlement of several hundred residents in the arid and remote northern Cape region. 34 00:05:14,840 --> 00:05:19,190 To meet. Mrs. Betsy. 35 00:05:19,190 --> 00:05:32,480 Fair food in her home. Mrs. Fairford was by far the most famous resident of the settlement that to some represented 36 00:05:32,840 --> 00:05:39,530 everything the new South Africa that Mandela fought for in his life to abolish. 37 00:05:41,230 --> 00:05:46,930 Named for the Dutch born English King Richard of Orange. 38 00:05:48,680 --> 00:06:03,500 Aranya was founded by Mrs. Foot son in law, Dr. Carol Boshoff, in 1991, a year after Mandela's release from prison. 39 00:06:05,340 --> 00:06:14,190 And the banning on the banning of the NC, thus paving the way for dismantling of official apartheid. 40 00:06:15,750 --> 00:06:27,330 It was conceived. That is aranya. As a post-apartheid homeland for Afrikaners, also called boas and Afrikaans word for farmer. 41 00:06:28,450 --> 00:06:33,190 Who had no interest in living in a multiracial nation. 42 00:06:34,600 --> 00:06:42,640 Thus, by the time Mandela visited the town, it had attracted significant national attention to its critics. 43 00:06:43,360 --> 00:06:53,320 It was, and I might add, still is a pathetic and controversial redoubt for unrepentant racists and enemies of the new nation. 44 00:06:54,480 --> 00:07:07,950 To its founders. It represented the last hand for a fearful people whose lifeways and heritage were threatened by a black majority led by Mandela, 45 00:07:08,730 --> 00:07:14,550 but also a living monument to the ideas of Mrs. Foot's husband. 46 00:07:15,730 --> 00:07:23,830 The man most associated with a five decade project of nationalising white racism in South Africa. 47 00:07:26,560 --> 00:07:29,590 During the tightly choreographed visit. 48 00:07:31,010 --> 00:07:34,040 Mandela and Mrs. Foods had tea. 49 00:07:35,080 --> 00:07:50,020 With Cake Sisters. It plated syrupy fried confectionary considered so patently Africana that a monument 50 00:07:50,140 --> 00:07:58,480 dedicated to it stands in Aranya as a proud marker of Dutch derived food culture. 51 00:08:01,160 --> 00:08:07,700 And as the visit rounded up, the 94 year old host declared to Mandela. 52 00:08:09,880 --> 00:08:22,660 I identify myself with the wishes of my people for evokes that Dutch for people state which I believe could be developed in this part of the country. 53 00:08:24,190 --> 00:08:29,520 To which he responded. I want a United States of Africa. 54 00:08:30,560 --> 00:08:35,210 Where we can cease to think in terms of colour and what. 55 00:08:37,050 --> 00:08:45,060 In this rather strange exchange in which Mrs. Foods spoke about how people desire for their own state. 56 00:08:45,060 --> 00:08:55,560 And Mandela, countering with his vision of a post-racial nation, lies the awkwardness and fury around this visit. 57 00:08:56,430 --> 00:09:06,300 For here was Mandela breaking bread with the wife of arguably the most hated white political figure among black South Africans. 58 00:09:07,960 --> 00:09:22,600 Even so, it was not necessarily the event or the motivation behind the settlement that riled even some of Mandela's ANC close supporters. 59 00:09:24,170 --> 00:09:31,760 It was the sight of Mandela and boshoff visiting the so-called Monument Hill, 60 00:09:31,760 --> 00:09:39,110 where the president smiling as he inspected the statue of hendrik for food. 61 00:09:39,680 --> 00:09:46,580 The man who from the moment he came into government until his death in 1966, 62 00:09:47,210 --> 00:09:56,510 executed his racist Afrikaner agenda with messianic fervour and deservingly earned a reputation as the architect of apartheid. 63 00:09:58,160 --> 00:10:04,310 At a time when South Africans were hotly debating the fate of monuments of apartheid, 64 00:10:05,210 --> 00:10:15,260 with some suggesting that they be dynamited and others arguing that they be banished to both amusement parks. 65 00:10:16,940 --> 00:10:29,240 What message did mandela send by going to aranya and not demand in the language of south african students two decades later that that food must fall. 66 00:10:32,810 --> 00:10:39,260 In the prickly atmosphere of the visit, it was quite likely that his national audience, black or white, 67 00:10:39,710 --> 00:10:54,560 missed the delicately powerful meaning of Mandela's response to the statue when he turned to Mr. Bush south and said, Well, you made him very small. 68 00:10:57,790 --> 00:11:05,949 What did he mean by pointing to this cultural dimension of apartheid's big man who Mandela 69 00:11:05,950 --> 00:11:15,130 emphasised was the source of a lot of anger and bitterness about the experiences of our people? 70 00:11:16,510 --> 00:11:21,760 I have had in the past. A past like this shaped by food. 71 00:11:22,240 --> 00:11:25,940 What did he mean? In any case, 72 00:11:25,940 --> 00:11:37,879 the heighten controversy around Mandela's visit to Aranya was not only fuelled by the difficult and contentious realities of building 73 00:11:37,880 --> 00:11:49,280 the post-apartheid nation as it was faced by potent collective memories among black South Africans of a man they knew as the face, 74 00:11:49,760 --> 00:12:01,550 heart and power behind the industrial scale traumatisation oppression and disenfranchisement and whose upside edifice? 75 00:12:03,530 --> 00:12:07,120 Outlived him. By several more decades. 76 00:12:10,490 --> 00:12:15,530 In pointing to that 1995 visit and to the existence of Iranian. 77 00:12:16,770 --> 00:12:21,240 Which has since grown into a thriving settlement. 78 00:12:21,990 --> 00:12:30,180 I signal the power of foods presence in the South African imaginary 30 years after his assassination. 79 00:12:31,180 --> 00:12:46,600 In 1966. By the way, the bloodstained carpet of the site of his assassination remained in the House of Congress until the 2000. 80 00:12:48,090 --> 00:12:59,280 I those begin my inquiry today first by examining how he and that is for food the reputation as a deserving member of the club of the African big men. 81 00:13:00,030 --> 00:13:07,890 And second how South African artists including du M.F.A. responded to the apartheid state. 82 00:13:08,250 --> 00:13:14,400 Built by Hendry for food from the early 1950s to the mid 1960s. 83 00:13:17,850 --> 00:13:25,880 In 1937, Hendrik for Food was appointed inaugural editor of the Transvaal, 84 00:13:26,820 --> 00:13:33,690 a newspaper established with the explicit mandate of growing the National Party and 85 00:13:33,690 --> 00:13:40,200 advancing the cause of the resurging Afrikaner nationalism in its original homeland. 86 00:13:40,500 --> 00:13:50,420 The Transvaal. Having established a reputation as a professor of psychology at the University of Stellenbosch 87 00:13:51,230 --> 00:13:59,000 and for his social work among poor white communities that would secure the editorship. 88 00:13:59,540 --> 00:14:06,170 After participating in a high profile protest against Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. 89 00:14:08,050 --> 00:14:18,760 Exploiting anti-British grievance slowly simmering since the Anglo-boer war of the first decades of the 20th century, 90 00:14:19,510 --> 00:14:24,040 led by the Afrikaner, brought a bond secret organisation. 91 00:14:25,280 --> 00:14:31,399 The food built his political capital as a champion of poor rural Afrikaners, 92 00:14:31,400 --> 00:14:39,080 whose condition he argued could not improve without systematic racial segregation. 93 00:14:39,560 --> 00:14:43,460 Executed by a powerful technocratic state. 94 00:14:45,720 --> 00:14:56,760 The elections of 1948, in which only the white populations had a franchise, brought a coalition led by Daniel Mallon's National Party to power. 95 00:14:57,420 --> 00:14:59,940 Given the Dutch descended Afrikaners, 96 00:15:00,240 --> 00:15:10,110 the political platform for the first time to turn the once fringe racial supremacist ideology into a national project. 97 00:15:12,390 --> 00:15:22,460 With the triumph of the Bauhaus in 1948. No small thanks to the newspaper of food founded. 98 00:15:24,160 --> 00:15:27,790 In addition to his wide social welfare campaign, 99 00:15:28,510 --> 00:15:41,080 the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism and state ideology was stamped on a hill overlooking Pretoria, one of the national capitals, 100 00:15:41,650 --> 00:15:54,940 with the inauguration in 1949 of the Voortrekker Monument dedicated to the pioneers who trekked to the Transvaal between 1836 and 1852, 101 00:15:55,180 --> 00:16:01,150 where they founded the Boer Republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State, a symbol. 102 00:16:02,570 --> 00:16:18,480 So late in. With meaning and a structure described by the British art historian Annie Coombs as, quote, some misplaced bakelite radio. 103 00:16:22,010 --> 00:16:25,440 In 1950. Hard right. 104 00:16:25,450 --> 00:16:30,359 Members of the National Party pressed on the Prime Minister to appoint for 105 00:16:30,360 --> 00:16:37,770 foods known for his uncompromising nationalism as Minister of Native Affairs. 106 00:16:39,260 --> 00:16:48,410 In that position. The foods set about transforming the then inchoate ideas of separateness of races, 107 00:16:48,830 --> 00:16:58,220 but the benefits of the boys into an operational system of government based on strictly enforced population management. 108 00:17:00,430 --> 00:17:01,510 In his first year, 109 00:17:02,050 --> 00:17:15,160 he created four racial categories with Population Registration Act reorganised urban and rural space according to races with the Group Areas Act. 110 00:17:16,300 --> 00:17:29,500 And he criminalised interracial sex, which he blamed for the degeneration of white folk with the Immorality Amendment Act. 111 00:17:31,800 --> 00:17:43,230 Three years later, he established an internal passport system for non-white people to regulate their movement and enacted the Ban to Education Act, 112 00:17:43,710 --> 00:17:48,480 designed to limit black education to basic academic instruction. 113 00:17:49,020 --> 00:17:59,910 Those making it impossible for them to qualify for bids for political office or administrative positions in state and private businesses. 114 00:18:01,430 --> 00:18:11,690 This Education Act would have direct negative impact on the status and agency of black artists in food. 115 00:18:11,690 --> 00:18:23,260 South Africa. His Native Affairs Ministry was so effective in formalising apartheid that, as one scholar noted, quote, 116 00:18:23,650 --> 00:18:30,850 it increasingly adopted the character of a state within a state as it developed 117 00:18:30,850 --> 00:18:36,370 universal competencies for the administration of the African population, 118 00:18:36,370 --> 00:18:46,630 unquote. Those, by the time he became prime minister in 1958 for food, was already a dominant force in South African politics. 119 00:18:47,890 --> 00:18:58,870 In the peculiarly racist democracy for food's own personal mission to build an apartheid state with the help of the broader Bund, 120 00:18:59,230 --> 00:19:08,910 made him a de facto big man. An autocratic leader of an African nation captured by a white minority group. 121 00:19:10,370 --> 00:19:22,639 Indeed, with the Shock Veil massacre of March 1960 of children protesting the Ban to Education Act and his 122 00:19:22,640 --> 00:19:31,280 withdrawal of South Africa in 1961 from the Commonwealth to pre-empt international sanctions, 123 00:19:32,030 --> 00:19:39,110 Pfeiffer demonstrated his willingness to deploy extreme violence to achieve his personal political vision. 124 00:19:40,720 --> 00:19:44,980 As this caller Dubai has noted about the early 1960s, 125 00:19:45,700 --> 00:19:56,230 the food enjoyed supreme political power in what he called the era of the fruity and high appetite. 126 00:19:58,140 --> 00:20:02,940 Even as prime minister of a supposedly modern Democratic state. 127 00:20:04,330 --> 00:20:10,990 The food presented himself and was perceived as the sovereign big man. 128 00:20:12,400 --> 00:20:19,570 For instance, in his dealings with the chiefs of the controversial homelands. 129 00:20:21,320 --> 00:20:28,820 What in the used car reservations he created for black that he created for black South Africans. 130 00:20:30,250 --> 00:20:33,360 He often referred to himself as the Great Indian. 131 00:20:34,440 --> 00:20:42,190 That is the great chief. And on Goodwill tours through the homelands, 132 00:20:42,760 --> 00:20:52,930 he often brought gifts of cattle to dispense to the chiefs and enjoyed being regaled by native dances and ceremony. 133 00:20:54,740 --> 00:21:07,520 True to this self-indulgent big man by arrogate in the title, which in the past African sovereigns sometimes bestowed on. 134 00:21:08,770 --> 00:21:17,380 Europeans, like the British adventurer such as David Livingstone and Nathaniel Isaacs, 135 00:21:18,220 --> 00:21:27,100 set foot clearly meant to claim the authority sanctioned by indigenous African traditions in order to dominate, 136 00:21:27,610 --> 00:21:33,190 vanquish and expel the same black nations as societies from his white South Africa. 137 00:21:35,870 --> 00:21:42,380 For presenting himself as the great in do now that is the guardian of the black people. 138 00:21:43,410 --> 00:21:54,060 The historian Christophe Marks tells us that the white opposition leaders took to teasing him by calling him. 139 00:21:55,640 --> 00:22:02,860 The White Shaka. In reference to the imperious 19th century Zulu king. 140 00:22:07,870 --> 00:22:12,700 With what has been described as forceful inflexibility. 141 00:22:12,880 --> 00:22:20,780 Inflexibility. In the remarkably ruthless implementation of his apartheid policy, 142 00:22:20,780 --> 00:22:29,239 for which he earned the nickname the Man of Granite for effort all but achieved his goal of 143 00:22:29,240 --> 00:22:38,060 transforming South Africa into what the newspaper Cape Times called Fairfield's native empire. 144 00:22:41,370 --> 00:22:49,259 In my first lecture, while noting the asynchronous histories of post-colonial modernism, I noted that in South Africa, 145 00:22:49,260 --> 00:23:00,330 the oppressive conditions of apartheid ensured that black artists did not participate in debates and discourses about modernism in Africa. 146 00:23:01,810 --> 00:23:11,889 Let me now state that the absence was a direct consequence of Foote's use of education as an ideological 147 00:23:11,890 --> 00:23:19,300 tool for the Bantu Education Act was designed to severely limit black access to higher education. 148 00:23:20,810 --> 00:23:30,440 And I should add that he must have learned something from the early 20th century education program of the British indirect rule, 149 00:23:31,040 --> 00:23:34,910 which proscribed only the teaching of technical subjects. 150 00:23:35,630 --> 00:23:43,580 Concern that arts and humanities education tended to produce troublesome, educated natives. 151 00:23:45,310 --> 00:23:52,630 In apartheid South Africa Ban the Kitchen Act banned young, talented black artists from the art schools. 152 00:23:53,560 --> 00:23:58,900 And without that, they could not like their counterparts in West Africa. 153 00:23:59,470 --> 00:24:07,150 Take the driver's seat in shaping the discourse around modern and contemporary art in the country. 154 00:24:08,570 --> 00:24:20,060 Thus, the only option open to black artists were informal workshops and art centres run by liberal white artists and teachers. 155 00:24:21,170 --> 00:24:28,940 Moreover, the opportunities to represent South Africa in international exhibitions such as Venice and Sao Paulo 156 00:24:28,940 --> 00:24:37,700 biennials during this period were available only to white artists who themselves were either struggling 157 00:24:37,700 --> 00:24:43,999 to connect with their North Atlantic cousins by developing their own interpretations of European and 158 00:24:44,000 --> 00:24:51,690 American post-war stylistic trends or contending with the contradictions of their white Afrikaner. 159 00:24:55,150 --> 00:25:02,680 This is how the art historian Anita Nettleton describes the food era art industry and I quote. 160 00:25:04,030 --> 00:25:11,650 All official South African publications were in Afrikaans or English, 161 00:25:12,370 --> 00:25:24,460 and those concerned with culture such as London and South African panorama covered almost exclusively the arts of the white community. 162 00:25:26,400 --> 00:25:35,970 The ideology through which power of all kinds that vested in white hands within the apartheid state, denied Africans any history, 163 00:25:36,630 --> 00:25:45,810 denigrated the ability to make art as primitive, and referred to their aesthetic expression as Bantu art, unquote. 164 00:25:47,300 --> 00:25:48,080 In other words, 165 00:25:48,080 --> 00:25:58,340 for Food's Bantu Education Act had the direct effect of banishing black artists from the spaces of critical discourse or intellectual debate. 166 00:25:59,480 --> 00:26:05,030 And not only did the group areas act and the Natives Rate Settlement Act of 167 00:26:05,030 --> 00:26:15,109 1954 remove black populations to the so-called Bantustans that also segregated 168 00:26:15,110 --> 00:26:29,900 black artists into the pedagogic homelands of peripatetic semi-formal arts centres and to a categorical no man's land they called township art. 169 00:26:31,550 --> 00:26:41,150 I'll return to this a bit a bit later. But for the moment, let me paint a broad picture of white elite art and artists in its era, 170 00:26:42,350 --> 00:26:51,200 as it will frame and inform our understanding of the work of the Miller family and his circle of black artists of the same period. 171 00:26:53,630 --> 00:27:06,680 Recent scholarship has pointed to a major tension in the white South African world during the 1950s and sixties, defined largely as a struggle. 172 00:27:06,680 --> 00:27:07,790 On the one hand, 173 00:27:07,790 --> 00:27:19,850 between the figurative impulse and legacies of supposedly conservative artists such as the Afrikaner nationalist painter Judge Pierre Dave, 174 00:27:20,210 --> 00:27:30,200 known for his uninhabited romantic landscapes that conveyed ideas one might call Afrikaner Manifest Destiny. 175 00:27:31,360 --> 00:27:35,920 And the fantastic Primitivist compositions of Alexis Preller. 176 00:27:37,580 --> 00:27:50,000 On the other hand, where the abstract confections of younger artists such as Erich Laubscher and Eduardo Vela, 177 00:27:50,570 --> 00:27:59,930 who are keenly attuned to the styles redolent of European post cubism and American abstract expressionism. 178 00:28:02,210 --> 00:28:10,310 Yet it is impossible to not see the widespread avoidance of political subject matter and social commentary. 179 00:28:10,970 --> 00:28:22,610 That is some expression of our awareness of, not to mention engagement with the radical transformations of the South African Democrat fic, 180 00:28:23,090 --> 00:28:26,540 cultural and political space by fifth foods. 181 00:28:26,660 --> 00:28:39,530 Many official acts that by 1952 led to the massive nationwide defiance campaign against passed laws, or the 1955 rally at Kliptown. 182 00:28:39,620 --> 00:28:40,430 Soweto, 183 00:28:40,670 --> 00:28:51,820 during which the ANC led South African Congress Alliance released the Freedom Charter that laid down the democratic principles of future South Africa, 184 00:28:51,830 --> 00:29:00,860 which led in the wake of mass arrests of the organisers to the treason trials of 1958 to 61. 185 00:29:03,030 --> 00:29:13,920 The banning of the ANC and the imprisonment of several of their several leaders, many of them white men and women. 186 00:29:16,100 --> 00:29:21,230 I should mention that the lead counsel for the defence. 187 00:29:23,400 --> 00:29:34,110 In that infamous trial was the Exeter College alumnus Sidney Kentridge, whose son William, 188 00:29:34,440 --> 00:29:40,950 in the 1980s emerged as a key figure in the anti-apartheid resistance movement. 189 00:29:43,150 --> 00:29:47,200 And that's Mr. Kentridge right there. 190 00:29:48,410 --> 00:29:58,340 The point here is that by driving his racist apartheid laws as minister of Native Affairs and Prime Minister, 191 00:29:59,060 --> 00:30:05,990 Seifert gave political and legal support for government sponsored exhibitions and publications 192 00:30:06,350 --> 00:30:13,610 and patronage for the exclusive benefit of the country's elite white artists who in their work, 193 00:30:13,940 --> 00:30:19,850 apparently ignored the unjust system that funded the privileges. 194 00:30:21,060 --> 00:30:31,560 Put differently, what I might have called the Cultural Group Areas Act had the effect of denying black artists 195 00:30:31,740 --> 00:30:41,700 the possibility of competing for and lay at least equal claims to the contemporary art industry, 196 00:30:42,240 --> 00:30:53,490 as did their post-colonial modernist counterparts elsewhere on the continent, where they actively shaped the art world of the independent nations. 197 00:30:56,650 --> 00:31:06,100 But what is the politics that informed the struggle between figuration and abstraction among white artists in five foot high apartheid era? 198 00:31:08,950 --> 00:31:13,540 This caller, Federico Freshly has offered an insight. 199 00:31:14,730 --> 00:31:18,350 With which I agreed. In a chapter. 200 00:31:20,420 --> 00:31:31,909 On Afrikaner nationalism and changing canons of high art published in the important four volume visual century South African art. 201 00:31:31,910 --> 00:31:32,780 In context, 202 00:31:33,290 --> 00:31:47,180 he notes that despite the triumph of figurative and non-objective abstraction in the West since the Parisian avant garde of the early 20th century, 203 00:31:48,020 --> 00:31:55,250 this mode of image making failed to take hold in South Africa's elite art circles until 204 00:31:55,670 --> 00:32:02,630 the full entrenchment of Afrikaner political nationalism during the 1950s and sixties. 205 00:32:04,310 --> 00:32:16,670 He shows that the shift from illustrated work by artists like Penny needed to create Africana national mythologies 206 00:32:16,670 --> 00:32:28,400 and revisionist histories from the 1930s to figure dependent abstraction of Walter Battis and others in the 1950s. 207 00:32:29,630 --> 00:32:32,900 And finally, the dominance of semantic abstraction. 208 00:32:33,170 --> 00:32:45,399 By the mid 1960s. But he also argues that the political impetus for this shift had everything to do with the fact that the apartheid 209 00:32:45,400 --> 00:32:56,020 government promoted illustrative work first to consolidate Afrikaner nationalism and once firmly in power, 210 00:32:56,500 --> 00:33:03,980 could afford to, quote, shift to a celebration of the nation's objective modernity, unquote. 211 00:33:05,700 --> 00:33:10,490 In other words, it is. Misleading. 212 00:33:12,550 --> 00:33:22,930 To read as some have. They turn to narrative from narrative, not naturalism to non-objective abstraction. 213 00:33:22,930 --> 00:33:33,010 In the mid 1960s, in officially sponsored art and artists are signalling the rise of supposedly 214 00:33:33,130 --> 00:33:38,740 liberal artists critical of the toxic nationalism of the apartheid government. 215 00:33:39,850 --> 00:33:44,440 Rather, the rise of abstraction signified in fact. 216 00:33:45,950 --> 00:33:53,240 The arrival of hi appetite, a moment when the foot government secured supreme political power, 217 00:33:53,930 --> 00:34:05,840 assured of the future of Afrikaner Nationalist Project and thus open to any manner of art so long as they had no implied communist sympathies. 218 00:34:07,560 --> 00:34:13,620 One way to think about this scenario is to juxtapose it to the contemporary politics of the Cold War, 219 00:34:13,620 --> 00:34:23,080 art and culture patronage that saw the CIA acting on behalf of the US and Native Powers funding. 220 00:34:23,100 --> 00:34:28,649 Even radical work by artists and writers in Decolonising Africa. 221 00:34:28,650 --> 00:34:40,110 And even South Africa with a simple objective of keeping them busy to avoid the temptation of siding with communism and the Soviet bloc. 222 00:34:41,320 --> 00:34:44,049 In other words, the food's triumphant. 223 00:34:44,050 --> 00:34:54,610 Apartheid regime and its cultural agencies seem to not mind the rise of abstraction to the extent that it provided white artists 224 00:34:54,610 --> 00:35:05,740 the excuse not to meddle with the politics of what it called terrorists and communists of the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups. 225 00:35:08,280 --> 00:35:14,759 But does the picture I paint here about the white artists response to the food's apathy? 226 00:35:14,760 --> 00:35:23,580 I mean that none of them deploy their work to comment on the regime's violent suppression of the black population, 227 00:35:24,930 --> 00:35:30,240 or that the authorities ignored what it perceived as unabashedly critical art. 228 00:35:31,710 --> 00:35:41,380 Not necessarily. In 19, a 1962 exhibition at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg. 229 00:35:43,820 --> 00:35:50,660 Perhaps inadvertently tested the limits of the regime's accommodative posture when 230 00:35:50,660 --> 00:35:59,120 the show was shut down by the authorities for including two works by Harold Rubin, 231 00:35:59,420 --> 00:36:05,360 who was Jewish, and Ronald Harrison, who was classified as coloured. 232 00:36:08,100 --> 00:36:17,100 Rubin showed a naked, crudely drawn black Jesus screaming with an erection. 233 00:36:18,070 --> 00:36:24,660 As he hangs on the cross. For this offensive work. 234 00:36:25,350 --> 00:36:32,070 Rubin was arrested and charged by the board of Censors under the anti blasphemy law. 235 00:36:33,700 --> 00:36:39,400 Acquitted. A year later, he left the country, settling in Israel. 236 00:36:41,570 --> 00:36:45,920 Harrison's case was a bit more serious. 237 00:36:47,940 --> 00:36:55,680 His painting depicted what was supposed to be the canonical crucifixion scene. 238 00:36:56,930 --> 00:37:10,190 But His Christ was not simply black. He had the face of Purefoods arch enemy, the ANC leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Chief Albert Luthuli. 239 00:37:11,440 --> 00:37:17,260 I was standing beside the Christ His crucify us for food. 240 00:37:18,510 --> 00:37:23,010 And his right hand man, Justice Minister John Foster. 241 00:37:24,510 --> 00:37:31,350 For this painting, Harrison was detained and serially tortured, sustaining life long injuries. 242 00:37:32,520 --> 00:37:41,880 When he received a U.S. scholarship, the authorities in South Africa threatened his family, forcing him to remain in the country. 243 00:37:42,270 --> 00:37:51,570 And like Darius Shafiq, if you remember in this, as Egypt refrained from presenting his work in public for years. 244 00:37:52,750 --> 00:37:59,370 Not only that. The painting itself was smuggled to the to London, 245 00:37:59,940 --> 00:38:09,750 where for a time it was displayed at St Paul's Cathedral and circulated in Britain among anti-apartheid networks. 246 00:38:12,370 --> 00:38:17,859 Two conclusions we may draw from Rubin and Harrison's experience in the hands of the food censors 247 00:38:17,860 --> 00:38:25,600 are one that the anodyne themes and abstract formalism of the era's leading white artists, 248 00:38:26,200 --> 00:38:31,430 including Eban van Dam, Mother and Bessie, silly as bananas, 249 00:38:32,080 --> 00:38:43,720 who are motivated as much by a desire for expression of artistic freedom and bond with their European cousins as it was about finding. 250 00:38:45,200 --> 00:38:49,880 In such work a refuge from the terrors of the regime. 251 00:38:50,690 --> 00:39:00,130 The man of Granite Leader had declared. In his 1962 public and advisory Republican advisory speech. 252 00:39:00,640 --> 00:39:06,670 That the determination to survive as a white nation had become absolute. 253 00:39:08,280 --> 00:39:19,049 The second conclusion is that for all its unapologetic domination of national politics and no internal opposition for food, 254 00:39:19,050 --> 00:39:27,960 South Africa remained paranoid and wary of its real or imagined enemies and demonstrated the willingness, 255 00:39:28,470 --> 00:39:32,880 as in Sharpeville and with the imprisonment of Harrison and Rubin, 256 00:39:33,270 --> 00:39:41,670 the capacity to suppress such art that it perceived as undermining its white supremacist ideology. 257 00:39:45,190 --> 00:39:57,159 Much as the food desired through his upper side laws and acts to separate white and non-white South Africans as much as he was at the vanguard of 258 00:39:57,160 --> 00:40:08,200 Afrikaners who ridiculed those among them that argued the necessity of black labour in the maintenance of a successful white nation and its economy. 259 00:40:09,070 --> 00:40:22,060 The reality of a minority white population compelled reliance on cheap non-white labour and ensured the uncomfortable proximity of races. 260 00:40:24,570 --> 00:40:34,110 Though a few black artists emerged in the pre upper five years, the most promising among them like Ernest Manqoba. 261 00:40:35,130 --> 00:40:36,450 Uh oh. 262 00:40:36,780 --> 00:40:50,460 Well, Jeras, Akoto and S manqoba with no clear path to good education or independently successful career at home, went into lifelong exile in Europe. 263 00:40:51,980 --> 00:40:56,960 But what about the black artists like DeMille of the apartheid generation? 264 00:40:59,730 --> 00:41:04,290 I had noted earlier the immediate impact of the Ban to Education Act, 265 00:41:04,500 --> 00:41:11,190 which made it virtually impossible for black artists to attend formal art schools inside South Africa and 266 00:41:11,190 --> 00:41:20,160 that their only options for any art instruction were government funded or private semi-formal arts centres. 267 00:41:21,600 --> 00:41:30,820 Usually run by white teachers. The most influential of these was Polish Street Art Centre in Johannesburg, 268 00:41:32,110 --> 00:41:40,330 established in 1949 as part of a recreational centre for the city's overworked black labour. 269 00:41:41,290 --> 00:41:48,580 It flourished between 1952 and 1957 on the directorship of. 270 00:41:51,620 --> 00:42:03,470 The modernist printmaker and painter Cecil Courtney's producing arguably the first cohort of modern black artists such as Sidney Khumalo, 271 00:42:04,280 --> 00:42:07,550 Efrain Gartner and Ezra miller High. 272 00:42:09,530 --> 00:42:15,559 At the helm of Polly St Courtney's and his circle of white and ardently modernists, 273 00:42:15,560 --> 00:42:25,820 artist friends and art dealers played a determinative role in shaping the aesthetics and the politics of black art in this period. 274 00:42:27,140 --> 00:42:34,370 Moreover, in 1961, Courtney joined his friends Cecily Sash. 275 00:42:34,370 --> 00:42:43,719 Eduardo Villa. Guiseppe Cattaneo. And Khumalo, too, found the Ammad Loza group, 276 00:42:43,720 --> 00:42:53,820 which advocated for a South African modernism supposedly founded on the art of the country's African ancestors, the Armadillo Z. 277 00:42:55,280 --> 00:43:00,590 Never mind that. Like the much admired Parisian avant garde, 278 00:43:01,010 --> 00:43:06,079 they said their eyes on the formal qualities of West African and Central African 279 00:43:06,080 --> 00:43:12,620 sculpture rather than on the more geopolitically appropriate and goodness, 280 00:43:12,620 --> 00:43:15,110 culture, traditions of Southern Africa. 281 00:43:16,650 --> 00:43:26,670 Apart from this precious enterprise of white artists reclaiming the supposedly African identity at a time when being African, 282 00:43:27,180 --> 00:43:31,440 as Anita Nettleton has argued, was a contested terrain. 283 00:43:32,190 --> 00:43:36,300 Katniss and the influential gallerist, Egan Goode, 284 00:43:36,410 --> 00:43:49,350 that encouraged the black Watts to look to modernists for more abstractions based on both European traditions and African forms. 285 00:43:50,280 --> 00:43:56,940 In other words, just as leading white artists found comfort and refuge in abstraction, 286 00:43:57,600 --> 00:44:04,679 Scottishness and his friends who use their privileged position to implant what 287 00:44:04,680 --> 00:44:11,190 they imagined to be an authentic Bantu modernism stripped of political content. 288 00:44:12,450 --> 00:44:27,720 This inchoate native modernism. A paradoxical mix of abstract and illustrative work was promoted by the white art industry as township art. 289 00:44:28,800 --> 00:44:38,160 As if to bind it to the impoverished, segregated black townships invented by foot and his Afrikaner nationalists. 290 00:44:39,090 --> 00:44:49,650 It is in this murky context of white artists avoidance of political commentary, either out of fear of censors or because. 291 00:44:52,290 --> 00:44:54,960 Of their dependence on state patronage. 292 00:44:56,470 --> 00:45:06,190 That I see the imposition of Bantu Education Act to limit black access to higher education and the knowledge power associated with it, 293 00:45:06,880 --> 00:45:19,450 and the encouragement of non-political work at Palace Street and elsewhere as having the desired impact on the work of black artists of the period. 294 00:45:21,550 --> 00:45:29,920 It is not surprising. I believe that it is in the drawing that is these black artists that they found 295 00:45:29,920 --> 00:45:36,100 the tool and voice with which to respond to apartheid's extreme politics. 296 00:45:37,690 --> 00:45:39,940 And this is what brings me to the Miller family, 297 00:45:40,570 --> 00:45:51,850 who in a few years developed a mode of drawing with incomparable complexity and ambition and thematic density. 298 00:45:53,170 --> 00:45:57,640 Moreover, unlike many of the leading black artists of the sixties, 299 00:45:58,210 --> 00:46:05,690 he was not a product of Polish streets or the Jubilee and more follow art centres that succeeded. 300 00:46:08,210 --> 00:46:14,870 And yet it is in his work. I argue that we see one of the first consistent, 301 00:46:15,080 --> 00:46:24,140 yet powerfully coded response to the politics and psychological subjection of black South Africans under apartheid. 302 00:46:25,600 --> 00:46:39,700 Born in 1942 in Worchester in the Western Cape Dominion, moved to Johannesburg as a teenager and for a while worked in a sculpture foundry. 303 00:46:41,190 --> 00:46:52,320 His first documented encounter with Artmaking was in 1963 when he received odd materials while hospitalised with tobacco losses. 304 00:46:53,900 --> 00:47:02,300 This early work clearly shows a young artist with a rudimentary technical facility with picture making. 305 00:47:03,730 --> 00:47:13,030 But after meeting Sidney Khumalo and is wrongly hired, he developed his cultural language similar to the Polish street modernism. 306 00:47:14,950 --> 00:47:25,239 But he also made friends with Bill Ainslie, a young white artist and activist whose Johannesburg studio was open to artists of all 307 00:47:25,240 --> 00:47:32,860 racial backgrounds and whose work often depicting black subjects with unusual sensitivity. 308 00:47:33,250 --> 00:47:45,610 Must have impressed De Mille. In any case, it is through his drawing that in 1966, the same year the food was assassinated, 309 00:47:46,000 --> 00:47:55,390 that De Mille erupted into the national scene with a travelling exhibition of works that was much discussed in the print media. 310 00:47:56,730 --> 00:48:12,570 Critics in English and Afrikaans media declared him a new star, but invariably identified him by his Sosa ethnicity or as a Bantu artist. 311 00:48:13,290 --> 00:48:19,470 As if to emphasise in the context of apartheid the separateness of his identity. 312 00:48:20,710 --> 00:48:23,230 And despite gaining substantial patronage, 313 00:48:23,230 --> 00:48:33,430 especially among the non Afrikaner networks and his anxiety about the impact of life outside South Africa might have on his work. 314 00:48:34,390 --> 00:48:42,610 He went into exile in 1968 and died in New York in 1992, on the eve of his planned return home. 315 00:48:44,830 --> 00:48:51,400 During that four year period of intense productivity, Miller made interpretative, difficult work, 316 00:48:52,270 --> 00:49:06,040 whether it contains single or multiple figures engaged in mundane activity or involved in esoteric action or depicts important contemporary events. 317 00:49:07,770 --> 00:49:21,060 And I argue that he adopted allegorical coded speech to allow the space of critical reflection on the condition of black life caused by state racism. 318 00:49:22,410 --> 00:49:35,130 Consider, for instance, his massive train accident of 1966 that seems to depict the derailment near the city of Durban in 1965, 319 00:49:35,490 --> 00:49:39,780 or that of an overcrowded train carrying black labourers. 320 00:49:41,030 --> 00:49:44,480 Leading to the death of about 150 people. 321 00:49:45,800 --> 00:49:53,240 And the retaliatory killing of the white signalman by an irate black crowd. 322 00:49:54,080 --> 00:50:04,520 Yet the military does not so much show us dead bodies as present the accident victims in frozen theatrical gestures of terror and anger. 323 00:50:06,740 --> 00:50:14,149 Or is suggesting that even the black dead are still in solidarity with the living in their 324 00:50:14,150 --> 00:50:21,200 expression of outrage over the impoverished and precarious existence under apartheid. 325 00:50:23,650 --> 00:50:30,430 Most of his drawings from this period are rendered in frenetic or pen and ink marks, 326 00:50:31,030 --> 00:50:38,470 his fingers distorted, as if to convey disease conditions and states of existential hardship. 327 00:50:39,610 --> 00:50:49,690 Yet the difficulty of the resultant drawings lies not so much in the fact that they are not pleasant to look at. 328 00:50:50,920 --> 00:50:54,130 As in that thematic opacity. 329 00:50:55,390 --> 00:51:03,580 Consider, for instance, filling a hole that supposedly showed a quotidian moment in black life in the townships. 330 00:51:04,390 --> 00:51:11,770 In it, a couple set in a barren landscape appears to pour stones into a deep, irregular crevice, 331 00:51:12,940 --> 00:51:24,130 but they mend in the broken and damaged earth, lay the foundations for a new township shot or buried in a secret. 332 00:51:26,250 --> 00:51:37,020 Similarly, the classroom, a work of remarkably compositional complexity, features what we must believe to be a classroom scene. 333 00:51:40,370 --> 00:51:48,110 At the top, right. A woman, perhaps a teacher, reads a book to two naked children who pay no attention. 334 00:51:49,510 --> 00:51:54,040 Below them is a chaotic scene of twisted, despondent, 335 00:51:54,040 --> 00:52:09,100 frightened figures and further down upturned clusters of double headed woman clutching an emaciated child and a man forcibly lifting a woman's dress. 336 00:52:10,860 --> 00:52:16,919 Is this Daimler's meditation on the value of the foods vital to education, 337 00:52:16,920 --> 00:52:24,239 the right designed to deprive black people resources for self enlightenment and of flip 338 00:52:24,240 --> 00:52:30,030 ment from the infernal conditions to which white supremacist ideology condemned them. 339 00:52:31,960 --> 00:52:34,720 Here as elsewhere, there is a powerful, 340 00:52:34,720 --> 00:52:44,170 ineluctable thematic opacity that suggests his preference for what I might call oracular expression and reluctance, 341 00:52:44,440 --> 00:52:48,160 or even a lack of desire for direct visual speech. 342 00:52:50,110 --> 00:52:59,350 And this brings me finally to arguably the Miller's greatest work, the mural sized African goanna car of 1966. 343 00:53:00,490 --> 00:53:07,960 No one, as far as I know, has giving a definitive account of the subject of this drawing. 344 00:53:09,270 --> 00:53:16,649 However, many scholars are reading the work through Picasso's Guernica have seen it as a damning 345 00:53:16,650 --> 00:53:22,260 statement on the oppressive conditions under which apathy subjected black people. 346 00:53:24,370 --> 00:53:25,990 But I'm not so sure about this. 347 00:53:27,100 --> 00:53:36,640 And it is not just because it was produced at the time of or more likely soon after the Foods assassination, the news of which, 348 00:53:36,940 --> 00:53:49,210 according to his close friend Omar Badshah, the celebrated with crowds at bashes neighbourhood in Durban till the police dispersed them. 349 00:53:50,690 --> 00:53:57,080 Moreover, in this go, any case, there are no clear suggestions of violence or scenes of subjection. 350 00:53:58,040 --> 00:54:06,499 Rather, we have a layered montage of two naked men wielding clubs, one riding a bull, 351 00:54:06,500 --> 00:54:14,720 the other with three legs pass, falling off a child suckling the teeth of an inattentive cow. 352 00:54:16,060 --> 00:54:24,690 A formally dressed man seated at table, pointing to a saxophonist in the shadows. 353 00:54:26,440 --> 00:54:30,499 A woman in a mini dress. Attending to it. 354 00:54:30,500 --> 00:54:33,290 Diana and a couple. 355 00:54:34,990 --> 00:54:46,810 In tomorrow's end race, not to mention the dogs and goats quietly feeding in the in the foreground and many more scenes they can identify. 356 00:54:48,200 --> 00:54:56,750 Why did the media make this supposedly protest work right after the assassination of the invisible 357 00:54:56,930 --> 00:55:05,480 apartheid architect by a non-white communist anarchist who claimed insanity to escape capital punishment? 358 00:55:06,840 --> 00:55:14,600 Ah, the manic gesticulations of the three legged figure and his bull riding partner and the disturbing 359 00:55:14,930 --> 00:55:23,000 child cow intimacy indicative only of apartheid's disorientation and dehumanisation of black life. 360 00:55:24,140 --> 00:55:31,520 If so, what do we make of the inclusive scenes of rural and urban black culture and society? 361 00:55:33,360 --> 00:55:38,340 Whatever the meaning of this and other of the Millers work from this period. 362 00:55:40,530 --> 00:55:47,070 Here's what I'm certain about. The furthest mark, 363 00:55:47,090 --> 00:55:55,459 making the deformed and animated figures and clues in darkness and the desolate 364 00:55:55,460 --> 00:56:03,080 scenes contradict one of the oft repeated arguments for food made for apartheid. 365 00:56:03,980 --> 00:56:16,490 That is, that it assured and Afrikaner led Republic in which white and black and coloured lived separately yet prosperous and happy. 366 00:56:18,320 --> 00:56:28,250 More than any artist of his time, Miller deployed the figural style and dark allegorical subject matter against fur foods, 367 00:56:28,250 --> 00:56:35,270 greatest desire expressed in one of his last public speeches before his assassination. 368 00:56:36,400 --> 00:56:47,370 And that was for a beautiful, patriotic art that extolled the success and glory of his racist ideology. 369 00:56:48,350 --> 00:56:55,360 An Apartheid republic. Maybe the censors didn't understand to Miller's parables. 370 00:56:56,350 --> 00:56:56,770 Thank you.