This study of "protest art" in South Africa for the period 1968 to 1976 presented me with several difficulties of research in relation to decisions regarding intention and tone. In examining a sketchily documented and - as I argue - little understood period of South African art history, I was faced with the fact of having almost no documentation readily at hand, indeed even available. The whereabouts of several key works are unknown, exhibition catalogues are usually incomplete, and academic criticism is virtually non-existent.
Enquiries were conducted among colleagues in art history, notices calling for information about works were placed in local and national newspapers, and questionnaires and letters were sent to artists. (Details are given in Appendix B.) Responses were few, however, and any useful information I gathered is acknowledged in the course of the text. For the most part, I have had to try to reconstruct the period under examination from miscellaneous sources, where the dimensions and provenance of works are rarely recorded. (In one case, I have had to rely on personal memory in conjunction with the exhibition catalogue.)
This has entailed my having to place alongside the traditional "art historical" expectations of the professionally reproduced illustration (from art gallery archives), copies of works from catalogues, book covers and newspapers. In the case of the important "Lament for Looksmart" - the whereabouts of the original remain unknown even to the artist - the only record available is a photographic print in a newspaper reÂcording the work against the audience on the occasion of its exhibition. (What might be called a record of "incompleteness" is provided in Appendix B. This is offered as a comment on the state of our art history where "oppositional" expression is involved and, more positively, as a spur to further recovery of the period under discussion.)
The alternative to avoiding description and discussion of works that are not currently available in galleries or recorded in any proper sense, however, is to avoid the difficulty and, in my view, the challenge of "rewriting" many aspects of art history in South Africa. It is in this spirit that the present study aims to regard perceived limitations of the record as part of the raison d'etre of its approach. The approach is not dictated by empirical and positivist views that see works as autonomously there in their completeness to be described, or revered. Rather, it assumes that works exist not in any simple "objective" sense, but in subjective relation to particular social and art-critical assumptions and conventions. While the evidence of the artefact cannot be denied - I have engaged in extensive "close analysis" -the main purpose of the study is not so much to value "shades of texture" as to "re-position" works in a paradigm that questions existing preferences. (I use the term "preferences" here in deliberate reaction to a still widespread view in art circles that history is something "objective", something that exists independently of the historian's own interpretations and assumptions.)
Other decisions follow from my main intention. Instead of attempting to describe a comprehensive record of protest (allowing for the view that paradigms shift, one could, of course, "make" or "unmake" protest in any art), I use a "case study" of examples as a means of understanding and evaluating "protest art". While reference to academic criticism would have been useful, the fact is that hardly any exists for the period, and the exhibitions that I discuss must stand as a silent comment on the neglect of "protest art" in "established" art circles. At least, the newspaper reviews I have turned to (some written by knowledgeable art critics) serve the important task of recording the moment while giving us some sense of how works were being received by exhibition-goers of the day. The "public" reaction is a crucial consideration in any understanding of the impact of "reception" on the making of meaning. Unfortunately the art galleries relevant to this study did not keep visitors' books and records of purÂchase for the period under examination. This has made newspaper reports and reviews my key source of immediate and contemporaneous, public opinion.
There can be no finality about a study the purpose of which is to argue that compilers of South African art have tended to neglect, or even reject, many protest works not - as might be claimed - on aesthetic grounds but according to deeply absorbed (almost "naturalised") ideological predispositions. This large "argument" directs the study in selection and tenor, and a Conclusion would be inappropriate if it meant merely summarising what has already been said in several chapters. Instead, I have appended some "Concluding Remarks" as a brief indication of the possibilities of ongoing investigation along the lines suggested by the study.
The ideology of this study, therefore, is not meant to be concealed, and this has consequences for modes of address and academic convention. The conventions favoured by the so-called objective historian are marked by phrases such as "one could write" or "it is" rather than "I write" or "I believe it is", "on the one hand...on the other hand" rather than "I am committed to the view that". As recent theories of sense-making have persuasively argued, however, such a "rhetoric of fairÂness" characterises dominant "bourgeois-humanist" criticism whose neglect of, and even disdain for, the political in art can hardly be considered seriously as objective viewing. My own critical stance, in contrast, foregrounds the "subjective" not as a stylistic quirk but as a necessary means - as loaded as any other - of trying to shift critical evaluation of art from a broadly modernist preference for the "unfamilÂiar" or the "strange", the "non-political", the "universal" to a specific concern about art in relation to political (and, I hope, human) necessity in South Africa. This bears on my decision to avoid the footnote or endnote as a "gesture" to fair play: as a way of balancing negative judgment with other critics' positive evaluations. Such a procedure would contradict the ideological purpose of the study, and one needs only to note that corresponding overtures to protest art are not deemed necessary in texts that assume the "traditional" view of the marginal status of politics in art. Where I have thought it necessary I have, therefore, built an opposing argument into the body of the text. (In matters of pure bibÂliographical referencing the Harvard system rather than an "endnote" system has been adopted.)
In defence of my approach I would point to the sructuralist and neo-Marxist revolution of thought since around 1968 where thinkers and critics (such as Barthes, Derrida, AltÂhusser and, in Africa, Fanon and Cabral) have in different ways brought a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (to quote Foucault, 1964) to bear on the so-called unitary narratives and forms of western metropolitan culture and academic practice. The common identification has been the complicity of "culture" with the interests of specific institutions, groupings and power relations. I shall content myself here, however, by quoting in support of my style and tone a figure closer to the recognised language and achievement of modernist formalism, Baudelaire, who in 1846 said that criticism should not be objective but partial, passionÂate and political.
Such a comment strikes a chord in South Africa today, and allows me to end this Preface on a note that indirectly endorses my project in arguing for a return of art-historical criticism to society.
One of the major difficulties in satisfying institutional expectations in this study has been financial. I approached art galleries for slides of certain works only to be informed that these particular works in the possession of the gallery had not been recorded on film. As a result, I have had to agree to the hiring of proÂfessional photographers by the galleries for one-slide shootings at exorbitant costs per session. What emerged was that galleries had not seen the need to record many of the local "protest" works in their holdings. The more immediate point, however, is that the exercise of having individual works photographed for the first time has considerably added to the cost of my research. In consequence, I have had to borrow a camera and in several instances (and when permitted by galleries) take my own less than professional photographs.
As I see it, such a practice does not actually conflict with the "democratising" intention of my study, nor with my theory of repositioning works in contexts of understanding. Costs of research need to be borne in mind, however, particularly if we are serious about extending the possibility of art-historical research beyond a few relatively privileged students to a larger student body in a changing South Africa. This last ideal is implicit, at least, in the area of interest of the present study.