Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology

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Browsing Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology by Subject "Aesthetics"

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    Political fashioning : aesthetics, art and activism in South Africa 2013-2018
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Bolton, Kylie Monique; Dubbeld, Bernard; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology & Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The thesis offers a reading of four contemporary South African artists as forms of intervention in society. I consider aesthetic practices that include the mediums of sculpture, film and performance art not as a student of the fine arts, but rather as a particular kind of social analysis and mode of political practice, situated specifically two decades into democracy in the country. By using art that I found from the beginning of 2013 to 2018 in museums and galleries in Cape Town, at the Cape Town National Arts Festival and at the Design Indaba Conference, I show how the aesthetic appearance of an artwork affords its readers a cognitive experience that evokes past struggles, contemporary experiences and repressed memories that have been silenced in the narration of South Africa’s history. Further, I argue that by providing a prism from which to evaluate the South African transition, art provides a different representation to the dominant social sciences, which I read alongside my rendering of the artworks. By engaging with various readings of the art and with the sartorial as a form of political rhetoric, following Walter Benjamin, I argue that the aesthetic experience of an artwork can teach us something new about our world which can jolt the public out of moral complacency and political acceptance. In addition, I show how the rapid circulation of images in the digital age has given student protestors and art activists the critical potential to mobilize in the public sphere, to claim and to rewrite history, aligning aesthetics with politics in a progressive way. Through juxtaposing art and social science literature I draw attention to artists as political actors and their aesthetic practice as a form of cultural labour that heralds an opposing, “negative” relationship to structures of power and domination. I finally, consider how the production of South African history results in the absence and silencing of various narratives that these artists illuminate by creating a critical space wherein to juxtapose past remnants with our present fears.