Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts) by browse.metadata.advisor "Van Robbroeck, Lize"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Africa-Lite: cultural appropriation and commodification of historic blackness in post-apartheid fabric and décor design
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Conradie, Annemi; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Over the past few years, cultural appropriation has gained a degree of notoriety as a buzzword, after emerging into the wider public arena from academic, legal and political discourses. Internationally and in South Africa, debates arise predominantly around cases where historically asymmetric power relations are symbolically or materially re-enacted when dominant groups appropriate from economic or political minorities. This study examines the appropriation of colonial images of black individuals and bodies for commodification in twenty-first century South African décor and fabric design. A prominent trend in post-apartheid visual design, the re-purposing and commodification of archival photographs, and its circulation within local and global image economies and design markets demand further research and comprehensive theorising. I investigate the various aesthetic and discursive devices through which images of black bodies from South Africa’s pre-democratic past - including images of suffering, trauma and revolution - are assimilated for consumption and display within retail, leisure and domestic spheres. I use the notion of ‘subject appropriation’ to account for this form of appropriation, and to investigate the affiliation that indigenous groups claim with archival images in cases of objections to cultural appropriation, as well as where such groups deploy archival images for their own self-fashioning. In proposing a critical humanist and black existentialist approach to cultural appropriation, I suggest rethinking colonial representations as sites central to postcolonial ‘communities of practice’ in ongoing struggle for recognition, restitution and liberation.
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    The biopolitics of Gugulective against neoliberal capitalism
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Lemu, Massa; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In critical and museological practices, a focus on diaspora has not only limited the scope of African art but also neglected a whole discursive field and practical corpus that challenges neoliberal globalisation on the continent. While highly critical, most gallery-bound practices from Africa tend to get privatised and absorbed in inaccessible enclaves of the global art world. However, this study demonstrates that the art of Gugulective has potential to escape privatisation. Within the South African context, Gugulective’s socially engaged collaborative aesthetics contests neoliberal privatisation and co-optation through subject-centred immaterial production. In Gugulective’s biopolitical production, artists and non-artists collaborate in transformative aesthetic projects that contest neoliberal capitalism in South Africa. My term “biopolitical collectivism” describes this collective life-forming artistic practice whose products are immaterial rather than material gallery-bound objects. In a context of neoliberal capitalism, which intensifies inequality, pauperisation, and precarisation of life for profit, Gugulective, among other contemporary African art groups, seeks to transform dehumanised subjectivities through collaborative art production, subjective interchange, and sharing. By decentring the object in subject-oriented art, Gugulective’s biopolitical collectivism confronts biocapitalism on the terrain of life itself. This is particularly evident in projects such as Indaba Ludabi, Akuchanywa Apha, Titled/Untitled, and Siphi? in which Gugulective confronts issues of place, space, and race by deploying a cross-disciplinary and interstitial aesthetic practice which situates itself between the art institution and the non-art world, between aesthetics and activism, the township and the city, the shebeen and the gallery, affects and the art object, art, and life.
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    The mark of a silent language : the way the body-mind draws
    (Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2011-03) Gunter, Elizabeth; Van Robbroeck, Lize; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The thesis deals with the notion that individuation in drawing provides visible evidence of experiential cognition as embodied action. It asserts that trait as enaction signifies constructive and inventive processes that involve the body-mind. Trait emerges as nonrepresentationist, non-expressive component of drawing that marks the pre-conceptual as conceptual. Therefore, drawing functions as a complex interface between drafter and world that unifies antimonies such as inside and outside; convention and invention; remoteness and intimacy; body and mind; and subject and object. The thesis outlines drawing as a self-reflexive research process that constructs and invents. An understanding of trait as invention, the thesis proposes, can aid the drawing facilitator at higher education level to develop individual student drafters’ creativity. The thesis therefore argues for a form of drawing facilitation that is responsive to the complex interaction between the self and the world. Responsive mediation develops and celebrates diversity in socio-cultural heritage, personal history, and individual differences.
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    Reconfiguring motherhood: maternal temporality in the work of four South African visual artists
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Steyn, Christine; Van Robbroeck, Lize ; Viljoen, Stella; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this study, I examine the visual reframing of mothering by four South African women artists whose projects conceptualise maternal subjectivity through the bodily and psychological experiences of pregnancy, birth and mothering. The principle thesis of my research is that the selected artists’ engagement with maternal subjectivity can be addressed through an exploration of the maternal body’s ability to disrupt conventional experiences of time. Presenting an alternative discourse of maternal embodiment, the artworks offer ways to consider how rethinking maternity might reformulate our experience and thinking about lived time as that which is dynamic, relational and, at times, conflicting, revealing the intrinsic intra-activity of being.
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    Seeing ghosts : the past in contemporary images of Afrikaner self-representation
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-12) Sonnekus, Theo; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Contemporary Afrikaner ethnic identity is subject to attempts at rehabilitation, which seek to fit Afrikaner whiteness to the post-apartheid milieu. This thesis investigates how popular visual culture, aimed particularly at the white Afrikaner consumer, provides transformative identity-positions by ingeniously re-imagining Afrikanerness. The potential of such images for identity- and memory-work is explored in relation to the various conditions (political, historical, economic or otherwise) that determine their social and psychological significance. The thesis particularly accounts for the manner in which the past is refigured (with varying degrees of criticality and self-reflexivity) in these consumer items and advertisements, and explores their deployment of discursive devices such as irony, hybridisation, nostalgia, and collective memory.
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    Unsettling segregation: the representation of urbanisation in black artists’ work from the 1920s to the 1990s
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Sidogi, Pfunzo; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this study I explore artistic representations of urbanisation produced by black South African artists throughout the twentieth century. Successive colonial and apartheid governments denied black people full rights to the city through, amongst other strategies, the systematic creation of black urbanisms or ‘black cities’. Commonly known as townships, ‘black cities’ were built to house reservoirs of black labour beyond the major cities and industrial hubs. This forced separation resulted in selective and ambiguous integration for the urbanised black populace. The influx of black people into the peri-urban sphere led to an unprecedented proliferation of artists recording the black experience of living and working in segregated urbanisms. Regrettably, much of the discourses on urbanisation produced by white scholars constructed black urbanisation specifically as a ‘problem’,and the diverse artistic annals showcasing urban black life were classified as ‘Township Art’, a category that could not fully capture the multi-dimensional, complex,and layered experiences of the urban black. A Social-Darwinist teleology that rural-based African traditions necessarily had to make way for urban-based western modernity informed the way black artists’ works were interpreted. Contesting these discoures,I use Afropolitanism, and the associated notions of multi-locality and New Africanism, to reframe depictions of twentieth-century urbanisation by black artists in order to redress the sweeping and essentialising binaries that characterised white writing on the phenomenon. Through a thick description of the major forces that shaped urban black life, I use the redeeming qualities of Afropolitanism to arrive at alternate interpretations of the artistic representations of black urbanisation created by black artists, which ultimately unsettle the rural-urban and tradition-modernity dichotomies.
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    A visual and textual re-storying of the diary of Susanna Catharina Smit (1799-1863)
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) De Beer, Marlene; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Dietrich, Keith; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This doctoral project, which involves a thesis and a body of artworks, is a re-storying of the muted voices of three of my female ancestors: my mother, my grandmother and the Voortrekker woman Susanna Smit. I attempt to give voice, via a re-storying of their archives, to some of the more hidden aspects of their narratives. My objective is to draw attention to a ‘maternal debt’ that has been occluded by patriarchy, and to afford voices to the mute women who served as silent corporeal foils for men. I argue that sublimation, for women, occurs within prescriptive patriarchal cultural and social contexts, which invalidates the accusation that women might be consciously colluding in the maintenance of a phallocentric world order. The aim of this project is to reappraise historical interpretations and cultural ideological representations of these Afrikaner female subjects, and to demonstrate how these women’s seeming collusion with an oppressive and prescriptive patriarchy was largely due to internalisation of their own ascribed inferior positions as women in a male-dominated culture. From a phenomenological and embodied perspective, I explore the tension between objectified female subjects, in their attempt to achieve a form of agency and sublimation, and a patriarchal Western Symbolic. Three-dimensional artworks in porcelain and mixed media, and video (which includes poetry) form the principal method of re-storying my ancestors’ lived experiences. Through my artwork I attempt to create an awareness of the need for a feminine Imaginary and Divine.