Browsing by Author "Kaden, Martha J."
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- ItemHerinnering, geskiedenis, identiteit : 'n ondersoek na beeld en teks in mito-poesis(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2002-03) Kaden, Martha J.; Dietrich, Keith; Hattingh, J. P.; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts; Ivan JacobsENGLISH ABSTRACT: This investigation is informed by the assumption that language, as representation and as image, is positioned in a metaphorical relationship to reality. Language, as a structure of representation, is the way in which we represent reality to ourselves and to others and recreate the past, as well as the way in which we invest our lives with meaning, significance and experience. Language includes visual and verbal representation, and this investigation shows how image and text create a variety of multiple meanings through playful and interactive reciprocation. Following from the assumption that language comprises temporal and spatial qualities, it is also the terrain that enables us to know and understand reality, ourselves, and others. This emphasizes the material nature of language, which is also connected with social and cultural practices and, as such, involves reciprocation and interaction between divergences. Language is therefore a mode of action that makes the bridging of divisions possible. Language is proposed as a medium through which the monolithic hegemony of the apartheid past may be confronted within a multicultural South Africa. The aim of representing this past in my work is not to recall it as it was or to discover etemal, inheritable qualities, but rather to bring about re-demption (healing) through re-presentation. Re-demption and re-presentation is a textual practice that involves a re-script of the past. With the understanding that history and culture are regarded as text, re-writing the past does not involve representation as mimesis, but as production. This investigation recognizes the role of the subconscious as the other or the alterity in all language constructs that makes it possible to circumvent the logic of binary oppositions; entertain alternatives simultaneously; erase boundaries; share spaces, and discover the other in the self. This unconscious language of the other, as a strange doubling and interplay between near and far, gives rise to poies/s. The creation of multi-dimensional spaces that draw the poetical and the everyday into an imaginative and directed conceptual interplay as well as provoke dialogue between differences and diversities, engenders a desire for the complexity of the other. The interplay and recurrent movement across divisions and between paradoxes create a new and changed interspace, characterized by difference, plurality, and contradiction. Intertextual spaces allow relationships between differences and exist precisely as a result of dialogicity between diversities. In this way it is possible to establish, by virtue of difference, a mutual, interdependent relationship with the other. Metaphorical language requires an allegorical reading that places divergences in relation to one another, thereby causing a mythic animation of signification that moves from one level to another. Mytho-poeisis, as an allegorical structure, is proposed as a model by means of which symbolic transformation and redemption of the personal and collective psyche may occur. Poetic re-imagining as re-presentation impels change and transformation and points to other possible forms of social and ethical experiences. This impulse, to reconcile the social and the aesthetic, or the cultural with symbolic form, is based on the principle of reconciliation between art and life.