Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony by Herwitz Daniel;

Author:Herwitz, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI001000, Philosophy/Aesthetics, HIS054000, History/Social History
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

III

By the mid 1980s it was clear to many that the monumental “architecture” of the apartheid state and the national narratives conveyed in these stones were in ruins, the plan of apartheid unraveling. By the plan of apartheid I mean its division of populations on the basis of race and organization of them into distinct nationalities, its forced removal of entire populations from their entanglement in cities, its setting them down in godforsaken Homelands, its restrictions on movement and circulation between the races, its surveillance structures, plans for state and economic growth within this form, racist/unequal apportionment of resources and opportunities. This architecture of modern life was tottering. Economic collapse and increasing violence had accompanied the demise of the apartheid state (as I have detailed at the outset of this chapter). At this moment (1988) of tumbling architectures (buildings and state plans), Penny Siopis painted her Patience on a Monument—a History Painting. It features a black woman who is bronzed in the manner of a piece of monumental sculpture and who sits on top of a monumental load of cultural detritus. The woman’s features are mock versions of Nazi/Deco art: she is cast in the Teutonic build and athletic physique beloved by the Nazi artist and celebrated in Leni Reifenstal’s “masterpiece” in the mode of the fascist aesthetic, Olympiad.

Sue Williamson refers in her book, Resistance Art, to this woman as “anti-heroic, an inversion of liberty leading the people.”4 And so colonial and apartheid history spills out of her work like a genealogy of wastes, a vast junk pile of heritage, “the thickened artifice behind the façade of a faltering regime. The spoils of Empire … mountains of affluence blotting out the horizon,”5 as Jennifer Law puts it. One might add that the reddish gold can only suggest the gold dumps and dust (waste) surrounding the city of Johannesburg, signs of empire, affluence, and detritus. Siopis’s paintings from this time are vast images of the archive, the museum, the history of colonial decay unearthed, monumentalized. One could imagine Soho Eckstein standing in the corner of the painting, impassive and sweating in his heavy middle European three-piece suit, standing on the broken back of the monument he gifted the city, unable to determine how to take his next step without falling on the broken glass where his corporate offices once were.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.