In June 1985 a State of Emergency was declared in South Africa. At the time I was a lecturer at Bechet College of Education, a so-called "Coloured" teachers' training college. At the end of that year my employment was terminated by the House of Representatives, because I had challenged the response of the authorities to students' resistance to the writing of examinations: a police and army presence on campus did not seem to me appropriate or necessary. The detention and assault of several students served only to radicalise further their political thinking, as well as my own. As a lecturer of art and art history, I felt compelled to question the role of art in a society that seemed bent on destr­oying itself. In this climate, in 1986, I registered my topic for the present study.

My first exposure to "protest art", however, had been the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition. And my first encounter with the producers of "protest art" had been in 1972 as a student at the Natal "Tech" art school, where Clifford Bestall, Paul Stopforth and Gavin Younge were newly-appointed lecturers. Prior to this I had felt a strong sense of disillusionment with the art establishment. As a young, perhaps naive student of art, I suppose I expected more than the pleasant landscapes, still lives, picturesque African studies, and derivative Pop, Op and abstract works which seemed to be the stock expectation of art in the white art circles with which I was familiar. As a primary school child in 1960, I had seen the protest marches from Cato Manor to the Berea in Durban - the aftermath of Sharpeville. In 1964 I had heard of the trials of black political leaders, or "communists", as my school teachers phrased it. The regular police raids on domestic quarters in the backlanes behind where I lived had given me brief and brutal views of the meaning of "passbook offences", and around me in black society was glaring poverty. Until 1971 I had seen little evidence of such conditions and injustices having impinged on the consciousness of South African artists. Some years later, in 1979, Andrew Verster's comments at an art conference in Cape Town that "whites cannot suffer by proxy" (and thus should not be expected to produce political art) served only to make me angry.

As I suggest in the Preface, then, this study has a "corrective" purpose. It sets out to challenge the view that art can and should be "non-political". It is in consequence a tribute to those artists who, in regarding it necessary to oppose Apartheid, have ­struggled to find ways in their art to give forceful expression to their protest. While an evident political engagement in the matter of subject and form is a prerequisite, the term "protest art" will, in the course of the study, be given substance in the analysis of actual examples. At the outset, however, an attempt to define the term should be helpful and allow me to avoid having to place the words "protest art" in "scare" marks.

Over the last thirty years in South Africa, a number of terms have emerged for describing artworks that openly and directly address social injustice, political oppression or socio-political issues in general. "Protest art", "resistance art", "political art", "agit-prop", "propaganda art", "oppositional art", "committed art" and "intervention art", are some of the most commonly used. My choice of the term protest art, to identify the oppositional art that was produced between 1968 and 1976, has been influenced by Herman Giliomee's characterisation of phases in South Africa's political struggle since Sharpeville in 1960. In Parting of the Ways (1982) Giliomee suggests that the struggle has seen three major phases: protest (1960 to 1976), resistance (1976 to 1982), and confrontation (after 1982). He also stresses that in each phase all three forms of opposition were present, but that one tended to predominate over the others. Taking this as a lead, I have tried to establish whether there could be seen to be a correlation between shifts in approach and attitude to actual political struggle and strategies of representation in art committed to that struggle. As I shall show, there do appear to be striking correlations: artists who have been most concerned about political circumstances have also been keenly attuned, or sensitive, to shifts of consciousness and events - often more so than have critics and historians. To the watershed years of 1960 (Sharpeville), 1976 (Soweto) and 1983 (the formation of the United Democratic Front) must be added 1968 and of course 1990, when a phase of major negotiations and reconciliation began. After 1968 the relatively passive or covert protest of the Sixties changed to a more assertive and overt form of response with the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement and an upsurge of radicalism among significant sections of South Africa's youth.

I shall argue that protest art assumes the character of protest politics between 1968 and 1976, in that while it was overt it nevertheless tended to be reactive rather than pro-active. By this I mean that protest art, like protest politics, reacted to situations as they arose or existed, rather than anticipating or initiating events. Consequently, there is often an angry or emotive character to protest art, which may include a satirical bite, or elements of indictment and report­age. Outside the more recognisable art forms that will be the focus of this study, there were ban­ners, posters and T-shirts. But these were largely devoid of visual imagery. In fact as the South African Students Organisation (SASO) discovered in 1972, even T-shirts and posters had to pass the scrutiny of the Publications Control Board if they bore slo­gans or any other political insignia ( Black Review , 1972: 22-24). Applications to print were expected in advance, and permission was invariably denied under Act 26 of 1963. Severe restric­tions on the dissemination of "messages" thus gen­erall­y kept protest art from "taking to the streets". In white areas - as I recall - the "hit-and-run-art" of graffiti disappeared (under a coat of paint or cleaning fluid) almost as soon as it had appeared, and to the best of my knowledge little imagery accom­panied slogans. (For details of my attempts to trace documentation of "street art" see Appendix B.) Gavin Younge (1947-) and Franco Frescura (1946-), part of the politicised generation that came to the fore in 1968, both experienced censorship when their work appeared in distributable forms, Younge's in posters and Frescura's in Wits Student , a campus newspaper. In 1973 Frescura's cartoons bitterly satirising B.J. Vorster reached the prime minister's office and earned the artist over-night detention and suspen­sion from university for a year. In 1976 Younge's posters showing re­settle­ment camps were banned for possession.

Detention and harassment faced several politically active artists and intellectuals. Thami Mnyele (1948-85) and Omar Badsha (1945-), for example, were regularly detained and harassed for their involvement in Black Consciousness initiatives and what were gazetted as illegal trade union activities. Badsha had his passport rights denied to him in 1970, and Mnyele was forced in 1979 to flee the country into exile in Botswana, where he was killed in a South African Defence Force (SADF) raid in 1985. Harold Strachan (1925-), the Durban-based artist was involved in sabotage activites, was imprisoned and then banned, and temporarily went into exile.

However deeply committed these artists and others were to the political struggle, then, their art was prevented from becoming part of a mass conscientisation and mobilisation programme. In addition, constant surveillance and the massive police swoops of 1973 severely curtailed Black Consciousness programmes that had been initiated between 1968 and 1973, and it was only in 1976 that the political struggle again assumed the large-scale proportions evident in the early Fifties. In their defiance of the State, Soweto school pupils helped move protest politics into a phase of extensive resistance and confrontation. In line with this, image-and-slogan-bearing banners, posters, T-shirts, pamphlets, graffiti and other forms of "resis­tance art" began to appear in the closing years of the decade as a prelude to the Eighties when such "popular" forms would contribute in a major way to political activism. (See Younge, 1988, Williamson, 1989, and Potenza, 1991.) Between 1968 and 1976, however, protest art was mainly con­fined to "institutionalised" art forms such as painting, sculpture, drawing (including cartoons), collage, woodcuts, "combines", and "environments". Responses to socio-political issues from artists prior to 1968 were intermittent and scattered, and usually relied on indirect forms of comment through allusion. There were excep­tions. In the Fifties, for example, George Pemba produced work for the ANC, and the PAC rising sun symbol had appeared on the walls of township homes in the Transvaal (Beinardt, 1971).

My choice of 1968 and 1976 as "cut off" dates for the study, therefore, aims to tie developments in art to events of political consequence: this reinforces the tenet of the study that protest art was keenly attuned to shifts of oppositional consciousness and to political circumstances. Matters of periodisation, how­ever, are speculative and dates have symbolic significances around which phenomena move or coalesce according to the perceptions and ideological views of the historian. If this were not the case there would be few re-writings of history. In my view - as I have suggested and shall argue - it was during the period 1968 to 1976 that overtly political protest emerged in South African art in a substantial way. With the advent of Black Con­scious­ness the cultural terrain began to be more sharply politicised than it had been in the past, and the Seventies saw a generation of artists willing to participate, in their art, in directly challenging the injustices of colonialism particularly in its most severe manifestation of Apartheid. In addition to Badsha, Frescura, Mnyele, and Younge some of whose activities I have just mentioned, Jochen Berger (1942-), Clifford Bestall (194­7), Nils Bur­witz (1940-), Norman Catherine (1949-), Cyprian Shila­koe (1946-72), Paul Stopforth (1945-), Harold Strachan, Kanu Sukha (c.1927-1988), Mahomed Timol (1947-) and Andre van Zyl (1951 -) all participated in producing protest work. Rather than offering a survey of all of these art­ists' work, however, I intend examining in depth a few examples as repre­sentative of kinds of protest art that I regard as either compromised in their intention or particularly powerful in their achievement. While there may seem to be a stress on Durban-based activities, it is necessary to note that Durban played a peculiarly significant role in the art and politics of the early Seventies. In the impinging political field key thinkers and activists such as Steve Biko and Richard Turner were based in Durban. In art Badsha, Mnyele, Stopforth and Younge, for example, all practised in the city. Nevertheless, these activities are not treated in any parochial way, and attention is also given to Johannesburg-based artists such as Burwitz, Catherine and Frescura, and to the Cape-based art­ists, Jochen Berger, Timo Smuts and Andre van Zyl. The phenomenon of poetry-book illustration, in which Mnyele was prominent, emanated from Johannesburg and had national significance, while the Art South Africa Today exhibitions - although held in Durban - enjoyed nation-wide status.

Among the artists who strike me as important innovators, for instance, Sukha, Stopforth and Younge offered memorable forms in found-object procedures, while black artist-activists such as Badsha and Mnyele renewed "township" content in shift­ing from images of black suffering to those of black protest and resistance. These particular trends were modified after the cataclysmic event of Soweto 1976, most obviously in that an "aes­thetic" dimension still evident in the work of the earlier 1970s tended to be even further subordinated to aus­tere political immediacies. This was apparent in works such as Stop­forth's "torture and detention" series of 1977. Sig­nificantly, too, Staff­rider maga­zine, which first appeared in March 1978, facili­tated a wide dissemination of graphic works several of which had initially been inspired by Mnyele's book-cover illustrations earlier in the decade. Under its "democratising policy" Staff­rider said that "anyone could be a writer or an artist". In an obverse way, the political crises in the Seventies, which culminated symbolically in Soweto "76", had the effect of discouraging some white artists and commentators from pursuing the practice and discussion of protest art that had characterised the first years of the decade.

Chapters One and Two, which concentrate on work from 1968 to 1976, are the main focus of the study. The Concluding Remarks suggest ways of reassessing a few important subsequent directions in the light of "protest" in the Seventies. In Chapter One I investigate the historical and artistic contexts out of which protest art arose, and I concentrate on the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition. This national exhibition, in comparison with earlier exhibitions of a similar kind, not only included an unprecedented number of overt protest works, but it also represented a range of visual possibilities that were being explored at the time by artists concerned with the political circumstances of this coun­try. Black artists such as Badsha and Sukha were struggling to find modes of representation suitable for communi­cating Black Consciousness ideals. (Some of these artists would go on to join artist and activist Thami Mnyele in creating opportunities for exhibition outside those offered by the white-dominated art establishment.) White artists - for example, Stopforth and Younge - were attempting to adapt "international" trends to give form to a politically "radical" or "left-wing" oppositional consciousness. Central to Chapter One is the work of artists such as Badsha, Burwitz, Payne, Shilakoe, Stop­forth, Sukha and Younge. In Chapter One my discussion will include drawings, etch­ings, seri­graphs, "combines" and paintings, and in Chapter Two I shall continue to examine examples of these forms as well as sculptures and cartoons. (The political cartoon, of course, has long been a form of overt protest, but in South Africa until recently (see Pissarra, 1989, and Schoonraad, 1989) the cartoon was considered to be part of journalism rather than art, and therefore ignored by historians.) My examination of one or two cartoons represents an attempt to broaden and democratise my "definition" of art. My main concern, however, is with art that disrupts the expectations of the art establishment through its very use of recognisable modes of fine art and illustration.

In Chapter Two I examine developments after 1971 and up to about 1976, and consider the roles of socio-politi­cal events and reception in determining the directions taken by artists. As the politi­cal reaction to Apartheid intensified prior to the large-scale uprisings of 1976 (to return to my earlier point), a number of white viewers, critics and historians became increasingly hostile to what was described as "blatantly political" art. In consequence, protest in art became less visible, and the rela­tively open endorsement by the artworld for "politics in art" can be seen, in retrospect, to have been limited to the short period around 1971. Thereafter response to protest works became increas­ingly qualified by cautionary warnings about "propaganda" and "cliche" and, ironical­ly, comment often took refuge in classical notions of "true" art transcending historically contingent situations. In fact, reactions in artistic circles displayed striking polarisations. While Walter Battiss was creating his Fook Island fantasy in 1975, for instance, "activist" artists like Mnyele and Younge were shifting their efforts to grassroots concerns or to black community-based educational projects. Mnyele, a Black Consciousness adherent, helped estab­lish a network of small cultural groups that were independent of the white institutions. And Younge started working towards what was to become the Community Arts Project in Cape Town.

The focus in Chapters One and Two is governed, therefore, by consideration of what I want to suggest should be regarded as a particular phase of South Africa's social and artistic history.

It was in the period - immediately after the rise of Black Consciousness in 1968 and before the Soweto Uprising of 1976 - that several important phenomena coalesced and can be seen to have had a profound influence on the production of art. Between 1968 and 1976, for example, a major intellectual shift occurred from a liberal to a radical oppositional consciousness. The year 1968 saw the demise of the Liberal Party, which chose to disband rather than submit to pressure from the Prohibition of Political Interference Act (passed in 1968) and expel its black members. In the same year a further challenge to a liberal oppositional position occurred when black student leaders decided to secede from the white-dominated and liberal National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to form an exclusively black and politically radical student organisation, the South African Students Organisation (SASO). Such political and racial realignments were spearheaded by the Black Con­scious­ness Movement and, as I shall indicate in the next section, were influenced by radical thinkers in Europe and the United States who emerged from the social and educational crises of "bourgeois society" symbolised by the student barricades in Paris in May 1968. As the past twenty years have shown, these developments have had a decisive affect on the course of South African life, both in artistic and in general historical terms. It is significant that it was in this period that an unprecedented number of artists - white and black - should have chosen openly to protest in their art against prevailing socio-political circumstances. Here, the realities of South African social, economic and, above all, educational divisions require that I employ the terms "white", "black", African, Indian and so on: not as subscription to Apartheid ideology, but as explanatory of material and experiential differences in South African society which at the time had translated into different ideological and representational priorities. In the case of white artists, procedures and thinking began to be influenced by the radical questionings of representational strategies that had currency abroad, and may be seen in retrospect as part of an emerging post-modernism in this country. Unlike their white counterparts, black artists mostly lacked an education in "institutional" forms of visual communication and expression and, with the exception of a few like Kanu Sukha, tended to retain the possibilities of "witness" inherent in forms of expressive realism.

I believe that both "institutionalised" and "street" art forms offer powerful modes of protest, and are equally part of South Africa's difficult history, in which art and politics may be regarded as mutually informing responses to the world. The challenge is not, of course, merely to list works which, for the most part, have not hitherto appeared in South African canons of art history, but to formulate an approach, in theory and practice, for a critical-historical understanding of protest art. Briefly, the dominant educational and institu­tional practices in South Africa have privileged ideal­ist, formalist, and what might be called "bour­geois-liberal" views of art as complex and autonomous artefacts of "strange invention" (expensive materials are part of the expecta­tion). Such a view broadly underlies the studies of Esme Berman and Hans Fransen, which are generally considered to be authorative and with which, in the general tenor of my study, I shall need to take issue. Fransen's Three Centuries of South African art (1982), Berman's Story of South African Painting (1975 edi­tion), and her opus Art and Artists of South Africa (1983) all make references to the early Seventies. When speaking of protest art, however, these texts offer what I regard as somewhat superficial explanations. I shall quote Fransen at some length here because, judging by commentary that has survived, his opinions were shared by several historians and critics. He writes:

A radicalisation of this humanist tendency of the Sixties emerged in the Seventies as "protest art", a particularised commitment expressed in a variety of basically figurative stylistic modes. Comparatively few artists have as yet succeeded in expressing their compassion, indignation or anger in a valid visual form; as we have remarked before, visual artists are not as well equipped for this sort of thing as their writer friends. As a result, the verbalis­ations of these artists often far outstrip their visualisations - a sad reflection of the basic futility of their attempts. For not only do they find difficulty in creating images to match the undoubted depth of their feelings - but they have an even greater difficulty in getting through to their target audience. At best their stirring images find a place on the walls of liberal art­ lovers or government-subsidised art galleries, where they hang alongside some of the more self-pitying images of their black colleagues and the derivative abstracts of certain well-off suburban artists. The comparative tolerance displayed by the author­ities towards this sort of protest art - by blacks or whites - is a sobering indication of the ineffective ness of their work. By banning the works of some more outspoken writers, at least our censors pay them the compliment of taking them seriously. (1982: 359)

Part of my purpose is to counter such dismissive views and to offer a language of criticism with which to investigate protest art in a serious way. In doing so, it is necessary to oppose directly the view summarised by Albert Werth (director of the Pre­toria Art Museum), for example, that art should not have a political purpose:"Ek is oortuig daarvan dat kuns geen politieke doel behoort na te streef nie; dat politiek en kuns geensins vermeng behoort te woord nie" (1980: 12). As a corollary, it is important to look critically throughout the study at another wide-spread assumption, as is to be found justifying Willem Strydom's MAFA thesis on politics and art (1983): that the "universal" is a superior category of evaluation to the "particular". In protest art, particularity is a vital criterion of value, and, consequently, it is necessary to acknowledge that all evaluative criteria are soaked in ideol­ogy. By ideology I mean not an obviously prejudiced set of views that can be easily adopted or disgarded but, as Althusser has suggested, the belief systems which profoundly influence behaviour and perceptions because socialising conventions have been so thoroughly absorbed as to seem " naturally" true (see Elliot, 1987: 36-37). My study thus has the intention of offering a criticism firmly located in the social imperatives of this country. It is not meant to be a coldly theoretical examination of protest art as an abstract phenomenon; rather it is the product of my own painful process of assessing and reassessing assumptions (many of which formed part of my own education) about art in a society experiencing an on-going socio-political crisis.

What I shall argue is that, in contrast to a broadly modern­ist formalism and liberal ideology, a Marxist materialist "break", suitab­ly adjusted to the demands of South Africa, provides a provocative baseline from which to begin an "alternative" field of enquiry. Certainly protest art intends itself to be seen as a material mani­festation of the political-cultural terrain; it wants to deny its autonomy and touch surrounding discourses of society. And in its concern with the re-conscien­tising of people, its human dimen­sion is closer to that of Marx's "unalienated" human labour and to African philos­ophies of "social function" than to the liberal tendency to seek classical, univer­sal ideals which, in their cultural norm of "perfection", are open to charges of elitism and class snobbery. My Marxist approach, therefore, is not meant only to be pro-vocative. It carries my own conviction that art must count in society by binding itself to questions of equal­ity, freedom and justice, not as rare contem­plations, but as praxis: not only for the purpose of interpreting the world, but for the purpose of helping to effect change. Underlying my approach is the need for self-critical aware­ness among aca­demics, so that questions may be raised about whose stan­dards are determining values and norms such as "excellence". This is crucial in an unequal society like our own in South Africa. It is to a fuller explanation and justification of my Marxist approach that I want to turn in the next section of the Introduction.

It was in the Seventies that fresh attention was given to Marxist ideological analysis, and to the type of dialectical cultural theory expounded by Marxists associated with the Frankfurt School, as well as by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. Amongst intellectuals, prior to the Sixties, a crude Stalinist or "vulgar" economic determinism and scientism tended to obscure questions raised, in the Twenties and Thirties, by people like Lukacs, Lifschitz, Benjamin (and his ally, the playwright Bre­cht), Marcuse, Adorno, Fischer and Gramsci: ques­tions about the power of cultural, not simply econ­omic, forma­tions to effect socio-political change. Accord­ing to A.W. Gouldner in his book The Two Marxisms (1980), debate in the early Seventies about the relative roles of economics and human consciousness in producing social change split Marxists into two camps: those who emphasised Marx's mature writings, starting with Capital (1867), with their materialist and scientistic thrust; and those who drew on Marx's more Hegel­ian, or idealist, juvenilia with their strongly humanist inclinations. I intend to take note of the implications of this split in Marxist thinking, and discuss the ways in which humanist Marxism (in thinkers such as Marcuse) was taken up in South African intellectual and artistic debate of the late Sixties and early Seventies. What several Marxist commentators acknowledged was that culture, including art, can change consciousness, and that consciousness in turn can change society. Although the Communist Party and many Marxist manifestoes were banned in South Africa between 1950 and 1990, texts by Marx, Mao Tse-Tung, Mar­cuse, Brecht and by the French Marxist, Sartre, were usually avail­able in univer­sity libraries.

In South Africa, in 1968, student protest - influenced to a degree by events in Paris and the United States - assumed real vigour and persistence. But where so many youthful radicals overseas turned to acts of sabotage and violence, opponents of the State here realised that signifi­cant socio-pol­itical change would only be achieved if militancy were accom­panied by campaigns to change consciousness. In other words, it was recognised that a society conditioned by an oppressive ideology would have to be persuaded at deeply subjective and cultural levels of consciousness to abandon reactionary habits of thought and behaviour. Demeaning economic conditions for black people under Apartheid had produced a consciousness of helplessness and inferiority, and Bantu Education served to reinforce such a mentality of defeat. Grassroots cultural organisations established in the early Seventies, however, attempted to overcome negative perceptions of being. SASO, for example, believed that the older generation of the ANC and PAC leader­ship (which had been gaoled for treason in the Sixties) had failed because they had not cultivated grass­roots consciousness and support (Motlhabi, 1984: 132-3).

A book valued by radical students in the early Seventies was Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1963; English translation, 1967), which articulates ideas about the need to develop a revolutionary consciousness among the oppressed in colonial societies. Fanon writes of the experience of native Algerians in their struggle against French rule, and his explanations of the after-effects of colonisation in a post-colonial society deal with questions of culture as a means of "decolonising the minds" of a colonised people. Steve Biko, the first president of SASO, wrote in much the same vein in the SASO newsletters and in papers delivered at local confer­ences. In a paper entitled "White Racism and Black Conscious­ness" Biko writes:

The philosophy of Black Consciousness... expresses group pride and the determination by blacks to rise and attain the evisaged self. At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realisation by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. (1972: 68)

Their experience of actual events clearly shaped the think­ing of several South African artists as well as activists in the Seventies. But it is also clear from comments by people like Biko, Omar Badsha, Thami Mnyele and Gavin Younge, and publica­tions like the Black Review , that literature from Africa and abroad helped to give substance to local radical thought. Biko, for example, frequently quotes from Aime Cesaire, Fanon and Sekou Toure, and the ideas of Senghor, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Malcolm X and Mao Tse-Tung resonate in Black Consciousness and protest writings of the Seventies. (Support for this view also comes from Ger­hardt, 1979, and Motlhabi, 1984.) In South Africa itself, Richard Turner's Eye of the Needle: towards a participatory democracy (1973) was considered sufficiently influential by the State to have the author summoned to court in 1976 to give evidence as to how far nine Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) trialists had been influenced by his book, or shared his think­ing (Preface, viii, to the memorial edition by Tony Morphet). Like the contextual theology movement of the time, Turner, who was assassinated presumably by agents of the State in 1978, attempted to address questions of South African racism and capitalism in the light of biblical teaching. Although Turner was a Catholic, the socialist overtones of his writings led to his being branded a communist. (Black theologians such as Manus Zulu suffered the same fate.) Turner's condemnation of capitalism echoes that of Marx when he posits that capitalism reduces everything to the status and exchange of commodities, that it functions on the principle of the massive manipulation of consumers and workers, and that in consequence it brings about widescale degeneration of inter-personal relationsips. It is also interesting to note that in April 1974 Turner established the South African Labour Bulletin, which since 1990 has championed the cause of the now-unbanned South African Communist Party. That the Black Consciousness Movement shared many of Turner's views can be judged from the importance given by Black Conscious­ness activists to worker participation in the political struggle: the major strikes of 1972 and 1973 were largely organised under the aegis of the Black Consciousness Movement. Newspaper articles such as those in The Graphic of July 1971 illustrate the way in which communism both captured the imagination of and was regarded with suspicion by black South Africans.

Despite this powerful influence of Marxist thought on culture, a Marxist tradition among writers on art in South Africa has been negligible: Alexander Podlashuc, Joyce Ozynski and Gavin Younge are notable exceptions. It has been artists rather than critics who have most vociferously questioned the role of art in changing the socio-political and economic circumstances of this country. In the early Seventies artists like Omar Badsha were directly involved in trade union initiatives, and Gavin Younge was part of the university-based Wages Commission which had been estab­lished in Durban by sociologist Lawrence Schlemmer and political scientist Turner. Papers from the conference in 1979 on the State of South African Art confirm that even in the late Seventies (after the Soweto Uprising) artists rather than critics or historians continued to take the initiative in giving public expression to their concern about the role of art in oppositional poli­tics. With the strong cultural emphasis in Black Consciousness programmes and with Marcusian (New Left) Marxism tending to downplay economic priorities in artists' thinking, the humanising influence of African Humanism, Negritude, black theology and books such as Turner's also seemed to modify the scientism and even the material­ist thrust of Marxist analysis. (According to Tom Lodge, it was only with the formation of the Azanian Peoples Organisation - AZAPO - in 1978 that economic and class analysis began to appear to any degree in Black Consciousness writings. 1983: 345)

The importance, therefore, of Marxism linked to local frames of reference cannot be underestimated in any study of protest art from the early Seventies, and art historians need to have a clear idea of the implications for art of such socio-political fields of enquiry and practice. Without an understanding of their own ideological commitments, art historians are unlikely to be able to establish and pursue a consistent and convincing methodology of retrieval and sense-making. In this sense E. H. Carr is probably correct when he points out in his book What is History? (1961) that an historian bestows significance only on certain events and phenomena from the past, and suggests sequences and theories of causation for those retrieved fragments according to a vision of what the future ought to hold. In South Africa this is espec­ially true, given the continuing battles amongst various groups for political hegemony. Political choices tend to shape the role allocated by the historian to art in society, affect procedures of selection, prefer­ences for analysis, and the discourses in which explanations are framed. (By discourse I mean a language used to a particular end with distinct vocabularies and metaphors.) Certainly such "determinisms" may not be simple, nor even direct. Nevertheless, I think it possible to trace almost all decisions about art and artworks to a philosophy that directly or indirectly relates art to a social matrix in terms of its meanings, effects and purpose. Even "art for art's sake" assumes art has a purpose (serving art/­artists) and can only be fully understood against the very social conditions it usually expects us to ignore. As Meredith Tax says in Radical Perspectives in the Arts, "Culture is not neutral politically...it is impossible for any product of human labour to be detached from its conditions of production and reception. All culture serves someone's interest" (1972: 15).

What is required of the art historian, therefore, is the articulation of visual languages that can release contextualised significances or political intent whether in expressive realism, photo-realism, modernist figurative abstraction, or post-modernist juxtapositions of image and word play. I intend to favour discussion of works that I have seen at first hand or of which I have a reproduction, while my theoretical and ideological commitments, of course, will have influenced the way in which I present and give meaning to the works. Qualities will not be seen to be unproblematically inherent in the object, but will involve an interchange between the artefact and my perception of it.

In line with my general theoretical approach I have chosen a chronological rather than a thematic ordering of my material. This is, firstly, because protest art and its reception involve immediate and overt responses to specific socio-political or historical circumstances as they happened in (diachronic) time. Secondly, it is to reinforce my view that a developing pattern of response had emerged over the period from about 1968 to 1976. As a Marxist, of course, I would also regard a lack of chronology and context as a formalist reduction of the historicised object. Within the ordering, none­theless, there are emphases, disjunc­tures, even gaps and silences. I do not, and - as deconstructive analysis would remind us - could not offer a seamless narrative of cause and effect. This would be to fall into the "illusion of coherence" that is a disturbing feature of the kind of art history that Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) has dispelled. Instead there is a need to challenge illusions historians might have had about writing unproblematic chrono­logies. Foucault writes of the prominence of the "discontinuities, ruptures, thresholds, limits and transform­ations" of history, as opposed to the "conti­nuities, development, evolution, and influences" (21-3). He also writes of the tendency amongst liberal-humanist histor­ians to seek homogeneity and continuity in their retrievals of history as being pro­foundly bound to a middle-class respect and need for sustain­ing tradi­tions at the expense of possibilities for change.

These comments have pertinence in relation to the documen­ta­tion of South African protest art of the Seventies. In that the work can be seen to represent a rupture around 1968 with tradition-making, it has been marginalised by canonical critics such as Esme Berman (1975 and 1983) and Hans Fransen (1982), and entirely ignored by Evelyn Cohen and Lucy Alexander (1990). Even more recent books which do focus on protest in art - Younge (1988) Williamson (1989) and Potenza et al (1991) - pay little or no attention to the work of the early Seventies, but I shall return to this point in my con­cluding remarks to this study.

To identify abrupt starts, stops and contradictions in the production and consumption of protest art, however, need not lead one into views of history as absurdist plot. In regarding empirical causality with suspicion - as an ideological shaping of bourgeois systems - one can perceive, nonetheless, a cer­tain causal sense or historical "glue" operating to hold phenomena into radically alternative kinds of sense. In this regard George Kubler refers to the models or "shapes" of time that are per­ceived by historians; he mentions linear, cyclic, multi-dimen­sional, and his own "bundle" theories (1962). I tend to think, accordingly, in terms of a "matrix" of linked phenomena that stretches in all directions, but which has a thrust in one of these directions, the future. Here an interest in theoretical physics has given interesting justification to my ideological predispositions. The underlying premise and conclusion of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (19­88), for example, is the intercon­nectedness of everything: the synergy of the universe. Both Marx and Engels, in the language of the Nineteenth century, had made this sort of concept central to their explanations. In Anti-Duhring of 1878 Engels writes that "...dialectics...grasps things and their images, ideas, essentially in their interconnection, in their sequence, their movement, their birth and death...." (Solomon 1972/9: 28). Art and politics are seen to belong to this continuum of time and human experience: affect one, and the other is affected in some way, and these in turn affect everything else.

Consequently, I present the production and consumption of protest art as inextricably enmeshed in the historical matrix. The class, race, gender, generational and cultural circumstances and interests of artists, critics, historians, gallery directors, boards of trustees, and the art-going public were all variables in life lived within the ideological and economic conditions and constraints of Apartheid South Africa in the Seventies. This is not in itself a particularly bold or original observation. The challenge lies, rather, in trying to delineate in the case of protest art the links between the contexts of artistic experience and the contexts of perception. Given the need for a shift of a philosophy of viewing, the hard evidence of actual works must provide a springboard for theoretical speculation. As I have said, a Marxist model makes sense as a frame of thought and conviction because of the neglect of a radical perspective in the arts, in our strikingly unjust and inequitable society.

One of the linchpins of a Marxist model is Marx's base-superstructure analogy for the relationship of economics to culture and art. This concept has caused several difficulties of interpretation and has laid Marxism open to the charge of lacking an aesthetic sense. Yet it is generally agreed today among Western Marxists that art is "relatively autonomous" to the economic base, and is only "in the last instance" (Althus­ser, 1969: 113) determined by economics. This is in fact what Marx and Engels originally believed. As Engels said in a letter to J. Bloch:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure...also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. (Solomon 1972/9: 30)

This question of the "assumptions and conditions" that "drive" history in the "production and reproduction of real life" is obviously important to a study of protest art, indeed to the study of any art, as Marxism is not necessarily devoid of humanising and aesthetic dimensions. Protest art is generally an act of dissension and a provocation to thought and change. It is an attempt at intervening in the way a society perceives its immediate history and conducts its socio-political life. Prior to the mid-Eighties, figures in the South African artworld such as Malcolm Payne and Mick Goldberg (see Powell 1985: 18 and 1979: 126, respectively), often argued cynically that protest art was a futile exercise, a delusion, for they did not believe that art could change society. Based on his readings of Marx and Engels, Maynard Solomon, by con­trast, suggests that:

...super-structural events - ideas, philosophy,art, etc. - prefigure changes in the mode of production. Marxism not only allows for, but demands the heightening of consciousness as a necessary pre­condi­tion for histori­cal progress. (1972/9: 15)

Solomon later quotes Marx as writing in a letter of 1843 to Arnold Ruge:

"Our slogan, therefore, must be: reform of consciousness, not through dogmas, but through analysis of the mystical consciousness that is unclear about itself, whether in religion or politics. It will be evident, then, that the world has long dreamed of something of which it only has to become conscious in order to possess it in reality." (1972/9: 58)

The overthrow of Apartheid has long been a dream of the oppressed and enlightened in this country, but consciousness of the dream has had to be articulated in forms such as protest art. Although Marxists of a realist persuasion describe Gramsci's, or the Frankfurt School's, modifications to classical Marxist theory as idealist, they have not been able to counter Gramsci's theory of hegemony and the role of consciousness in effecting social change. The rise of Fascism and Nazism can, accordingly, only partially be explained in economic terms; similarly the grip of Apartheid went beyond the greed and economic shortsightedness of white South Africans, and involved the myth of racial superior­ity. Protest art was an attempt at heightening consciousness about racial injustice. At the same time, it is linked to modes of production that are in opposition to capitalism. As I indi­cated earlier, several South African thinkers saw protest against Apartheid as inseparable from questions of economics. (Debates since the unbannings of February 1990 and the apparent demise of Apartheid have lent greater force to this perception.)

Within my broadly chronological framework I have chosen to treat artworks rather than artists as loci of attention. The Marxist art historian T. J. Clark, by contrast, argues very persuasively for making the artist the centre of attention. As he says:

The point is this: the encounter with history and its specific determinations is made by the artist himself. The social history of art sets out to discover the general nature of the structures that he encounters willy-nilly; but it also wants to locate the specific conditions of one such meeting. How, in a par­ticular case, content becomes a form, an event becomes an image, boredom becomes its representation, and des­pair becomes spleen: these are the problems. (1973: 13)

Clark goes on to say that "For the artist, inventing, affr­ont­ing, satisfying, defying his public is an integral part of the act of creation" (15). (Clark's "masculine" nouns and pronouns pre-date a feminist conscientisation.)

It is difficult to fault Clark's assertions, particularly as I agree that the artist's self-signature needs to be taken into account in any art-historical archaeology. In focusing on the "artist" neither does Clark ignore the shaping contexts of produc­tion and reception, nor does he underplay the intruding role of the historian in sense-making procedures. He does, however, fail to recognise that his encounter with the art of the past was, in fact, not an encounter with the artist, but with the artist's work and with written accounts of the production, reception and contexts of occurrence. The artwork may be a product of an artist's experience and consciousness, but its historical ident­ity takes substance in the responses of viewers and historians. Clark writes of art history as a process of examining the small links or mediations between the artist, the artist's works and contexts of experience. This is fair enough; nevertheless, I would still start with the art­work, and explain the process of mediation in terms of the assumptions and significances that aggregate around the art­work, and that take their character from the historical matrix.

In choosing to focus on artworks, therefore, I am not lapsing into what Nicos Hadjinicoloau dismissed as bourgeois: an "art history as the history of works of art" (1973/8: 58). Unlike the followers of Focillon, Wollflin and Panofsky (whom Hadjinicoloau cites in this respect), I do not envisage an autonomous "life" of art forms evolving largely independently of economic and socio-political forces and relations. In South Africa art-historical writing, iconography and iconology have tended to be privileged, and the tracing of the genesis of forms and symbols has usually been sanitised so as to exclude questions about politics and economics. Studies on Gregoire Boonzaaier and Pierneef by F.P. Scott (1964) and F.E.G. Nilant (1974) respectively, for example, are particularly guilty of this type of approach. Boon­zaaier was a card-carrying commu­nist in the Thirties and Forties, but this has not been mentioned at all in studies of his life and work. The reason given has been that most of these artists' works do not prompt a political or economic reading. The notion here is of the historian merely "reflecting" the artwork rather than helping produce its significance. One of the virtues of Marxist art histories (for example, those of Antal, Hauser, Fischer, Berger, T.J.Clark and Burgin) is that, in contrast to the narrow­ness of contextual reference offered by iconological studies, these histories always return art to the full range of social experience.

According to this line of enquiry, the artwork as focus of attention is not meant to minimise its informing "social experience". Clark gives an excellent explanation of the difference between social and historical references as "back­ground" and as "context" (1973: 12). Instead of having the reader make the connections between chunks of information on socio-political and economic circum­stances and forms of art (as is the case in recent books such as Younge's Art of the South African Townships - 1988) the art historian, according to Clark, should set out to explain the inextri­cable mediations between the forms artworks assume and the historical matrix of which they are a part. The aim is neither to dissolve artworks completely into their contexts of production and consumption, nor to treat them as mere symptoms of these contexts: that is, one is not practising "historicism", or the over-determination of events and phenomena by history.

Here I shall try to take my cue from Marx himself, and see protest artworks not only as specific concretisations of experience and as the products of worked materials, but also as evi­dence of unalienated labour and thought: of humanity's capac­ity imaginatively to move beyond the limitations and possibil­ities of immediate circumstances. In protest art, such imaginative capacity will be seen as much in the aesthetics, or visual shaping, of the work as in the ideas suggested by its choice of subject matter. As Marx wrote in Capital of 1867:

In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, that is as a being that treats the species as its own essential being.... Admittedly animals also produce­.... An animal [however] forms objects only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man... ­forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.

He continued:

We presuppose labour in the form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of the weaver, and a bee puts to shame an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get the result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at the commencement. (Solomon 1972/9: 22)

Exploring the aesthetic dimension of protest art is not, therefore, inconsistent in any way with a Marxist approach to art. In a paper entitled "The English Middle Class" Marx wrote:

The brilliant contemporary school of novelists in England, whose eloquent and graphic portayals of the world have revealed more political and social truths than all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together....(Solomon: 64)

This is an important consideration for art historians, because what distinguishes us from other historians is our special responsiveness to the imaginative concretisations of experience that constitute art. What distinguishes Marxist art historians from liberal-humanist "aestheticians" is that the former under­stand aesthetics to be inseparable from questions of economics and politics.

By "unalienated" I thus understand Marx to have meant a condition in which people are spiritually and intellectually rewarded by the products of their efforts. In 1844 he wrote of alienated labour in the following terms:

...that labour is exterior to the worker, that is, it does not belong to his essence. Therefore he does not confirm himself in his work, he denies himself, feels miserable instead of happy, deploys no free physical and intellectual energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. (McLellan 1980: 167)

Unalienated labour and thought is, of course, always socially directed. Marx said that:

Man is lost in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in his object. (Solomon: 59)

The implicit criterion for determining the status of an art­work as the product of alienated or unalienated labour and thought, therefore, is its rootedness in a social function. For a Marxist, that function is indissolubly linked to the creation of a better society, one in which all-negative discrimination has been eliminated and class differences no longer exist.

In South Africa, art has often served socio-politically conservative ideologies and minority interests. As in other mass-capitalist societies, it has entertained the wealthy, acted as an investment opportunity, and pandered to privileged "sensibilities". All of this is doubly dubious in the context of a society where educational and financial privilege has been racially guaranteed. As I shall demonstrate, protest artists by comparison have used their faculties of imagination and inventiveness in order to produce art with imagery and forms that contested the values of Apartheid South Africa in the Seventies, and many have continued to resist the acquis­itiveness of the market system. In fact, there were few buyers for protest art prior to the mid-Eighties; a problem of consumer fashion and expediency, even in the world of protest, has now however become a real challenge to protest artists.

A Marxist understanding of art, therefore, could be summed up as follows. It is a view that, firstly, sees artworks as specific instances of imaginatively worked material and as concretisations of consciousness; secondly, it evaluates as "good" those works that are seen by the Marxist to embody in their subject matter and forms a negation of an alienated social order. This "nega­tion" can take the form of criticism (as in protest art), or of an alternative vision (as in Black Conscious­ness imagery presenting black people who have triumphed over their oppression). Works that deal with the anxieties of individuals apparently removed from social correlatives are problematic for the Marxist, as they can be seen to make a fetish of the alienated personality rather than countering it in any critical way. This will be discussed at length later, however, when I examine particular examples of protest art. What I shall try to avoid is what Hadjin­icoloau sees as a limitation of bourgeois art practice where works, the ideology of which is not consonant with that of the historian, are either excluded from any critical consideration, or condemned as failures of aesthetic sensibility. In this respect, Hadjinicoloau makes an interesting equation between ideological and aesthetic concerns. He writes:

"...pleasure or displeasure...are closely linked to the viewer's recognition of himself in the visual ideology of each work" (1973/8: 180), and he quotes George Boas as saying:

...works of art are not the locus of one value, known as "beauty" or something similar, but are rather multivalent, that certain of their values are experienced by some persons, others by others, and there is no a priori method...of determining which of the many values are properly "aesthetic". (180-1)

Marx also recognised as inseparable what is valued in aes­thetic terms and what is valued on every other level of experience. It is a reminder that self-critical awareness is required even when one accepts the necessity of being committed to a particular view of art. It is easy to label "aesthetically bad" those works, which are actually being condemned for their ideological content. Neither the Marxist nor the "bourgeois" critic is free of moral and social preferences.

In the extracts quoted from Marx and Engels, nonetheless, the assumption is that there is an objective world: one about which truth statements can be made and against which hypoth­eses and conclusions can be tested and judged. It is a philosophical assumption that would seem to favour realist depictions of experience, and has led to complex debates, usually described as post-structuralist, about the "truth" of mimetic as opposed to code-laden ways of seeing and under­standing life. Before I discuss the details of this debate, however, it is useful to write in general terms about strat­egies of sense-making. In order for anyone to discuss an artwork, there has to be some rudimen­tary assumption about the nature of the activity involved.

Usually the assumption is that the meanings and significances of our world are discoverable, in inventive reflection, "in" the artwork. It is thought that what is required is an "intense looking" or experiencing of the work, some reading about the allusions and references made by the artist, and general research into the artist's "background". Historians of the iconological school adopt the same principle tied to a more rigorous methodology. Even the extreme modernist/formalist tends to measure the artefact against some life-value in the surround­ing world. This underlying empirical premise about objective reality is not utterly opposed to that of the Marxist "realist". For both iconologists and Marxists, there is the sense that the artwork is a "representation" of reality and that there are discoverable links between a world of "referents" and its various representations in the forms of the artwork. This is vitally important to an understanding of South African protest art because it mostly employs realism in some form or another. In the "combines" of Stopforth and Younge, for example, post-modernist juxtapositions of various representational modes do not assume that forms float free of, or even make, social values in the surrounding society. The parameters of realism continue to operate. In fact, the tactic is to place found "real" objects along­side found photographic images from newspapers. The juxtapositions are not obscurely "clever", and consequently do not rule out a realist reading. In the case of Omar Badsha's drawing Lament for Look­smart (1971), which will be examined in Chapter One, the title refers to a historically particular person, a detainee who died in police custody, and the language is one of expressive realism: the language which I suggested was most widely used by black artists in the early Seventies. Frescura's cartoons, which I shall discuss in Chapter Two, also assume realism - the political caricature, for example, usually focuses on specific people or events, and does not distort features and details beyond our human and societal recognitions.

By "realism", then, I mean a visual language that is concerned with historical particularities, and/or photographic representation, and/or the harsh realities of contemporary South African life. Visual realism works on the principle of a close correspondence of resemblance between the referent and the "representing", or "substituting", image. Realist imagery relies on viewers being able to draw similarities between their sensory experience of the world of referents and their sensory experience of the imagery. In its two-dimensional forms, realist imagery tends to compensate, by various conven­tions of trompe-l'oeil, for missing sensory cues such as those of three-dimensional mass and depth of space. (Silk-screened photographic imagery relies on mechanically-achieved trompe-l'oeil.). Realists of whatever persuasion tend to speak of the world as a reality against which representations of reality can be judged for their qualities of "truth". Post-structuralists, in apparent contrast, might argue that representations, strictly speaking, are representations of representations (in a chain of signification), and cannot be judged against reality because reality itself can only be known indirectly, via symbolic mediation. Thus meaning becomes subject to Derrida's "differance" or elusiveness, and the art work becomes a pal­impsest "text" of possible read­ings, none of which could claim authority. Subject and object are not posited as discrete and, in "theory" anyhow, there can be no closure of meaning or any commitment to "truth­like" statements. This would seem to deny protest art its very intention. In "reality" (as opposed to "theory"), however, Derrida himself has not sacrificed the insight that in order to justify a moral claim in certain "strongly human situations" (he uses the injustice of Apartheid as an example), the critic as well as the artist might intellectually have to halt the process of "differance", and recognise the pressing need to act in the world.

It was on the question of practice (praxis) in the world that Marx built his theories. The lines which were paraphrased earlier are from his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" (Solomon: 52). In dealing with this question Marx also attempted to overcome the perennial conflict in philosophy between idealism and materialism. Marx called his theory naturalism, or humanism, and explained it in the following way:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism - that of Feuerbach included - is that the thing, real­ity, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism - but only abstractly, since, of course idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. (O'Neill 1976: 232)

Marx goes on to say,

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory, but is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, that is the this-sidedness of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely academic question. (232)

Today the most intense criticism of post-structuralism is directed against the "ideal" space it allows for academic theorising divorced from the consequences of practice. In societies like South Africa, however, we need intelligent answers committed to urgent social questions, including questions of sense-making and knowledge. Alex Callinicos quotes Popper as saying, "...genuine philosophical problems are always rooted in urgent problems outside philosophy, and they die if these roots decay" (1983: 156).

Perhaps the phrase "critical theory", therefore, should be replaced by "critical practice". This would be in keeping with Marx's means of overcoming the realist/idealist split, in the sense that thought becomes "sensuous activity" by its capacity for effecting acts in the world. The point has obvious importance for any study of art objects in relation to social commitment. As I suggested earlier, however, studies in this country that have approached this subject have not fore­grounded questions of theoretical and ideological self-critical awareness. This is manifest in matters of vocabularies and discourses, as well as in the way events and specific artworks have been given meaning. As late as 1989, in the anthology of essays African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township, Verstraete ("Township Art: Context, form and meaning") and Sandra Klopper ("Carvers, Kings and Thrones in Nineteenth-Century Zululand"), for example, seem unaware of the need either to articulate the rationale for their decisions concerning selection and value judgment, or to problem­atise their role in the sense-making process. (See my review of this book, Current Writing 2, 1990: 181-183.) Without theoretical and ideological self-consciousness, however, historians may find themselves unwittingly serving interests with which they may or may not have sympathy. Fortunately, this is not the case with the examples I have just quoted, but it is a danger to be guarded against. My own attempts to understand my position, in theory, have perhaps led to my pursuing the present "explanation" with something approaching didactic zeal.

The troubling point to which Marxist analysis must return, nonetheless, is the one I have already raised: the connection between the materiality and the linguistic construction of life and value. Today, discourse analysis is seen to be inseparable from materialist under­standing. Prior to the Sixties, however, Marxists shunned the insights of linguistics because of the tendency of linguistic theory to dehistoricise lan­guage. But the concept of discourse, as evolved by Althusser out of the insights of earlier linguistic/materialists such as Bakhtin, allowed language to develop a historical base. Barthes added theories oflangue and parole in which the avail­able language of an epoch has an effect in determining the character of any individual speech act, and Foucault provided a theory of how critical discourse acts as a "policing agent" in society by guaranteeing that certain vocabularies and ideas are acceptable or unacceptable. Feminist criti­cism, in turn, challenged patri­archy in art and life as a ­mascu­linist-loaded language of choice and assump­tion. Psycho-analytic theory has modified older understandings of the unconscious, so that those prized terms of art history such as "genius", "intuition" and "mystery" are seen as part of bour­geois "language games". Finally, post-colonial criticism has made Marxists in Africa - including myself - aware of the European origins of Marxism, and the dangers of projecting onto Africa values and norms that derive from different social configurations and could continue to efface demands peculiar to the interests of Africa itself. When I turn to the protest art by people such as Thami Mnyele, for instance, it would be inappropriate for me to stress class analysis and ignore images of black identity, the significance of ancient African symbols revaluated in modern revolutionary contexts, and the challenge of "community" activity in relation particularly to western notions of individuality in art. (See Biko 1972, Cabral 1973, Fanon 1965, Mazrui 1986, Mphahlele 1979.)

The point is that a commitment to Marxist material reality need no longer exclude the valuable contributions of linguistically based understandings. Throughout this Introduction I have written of the consumption and reception of protest art. I have also written of "making meaning for artworks" rather than "interpreting" artworks. The phraseology identifies concepts that pose difficulties for the Marxist art historian, because the concepts involve choices between real­ist/materia­list and bour­geois/­idealist notions of art and criticism. Marxists have long stressed the significance of the social "functioning" of culture, including art, where its "consumption" stresses buying and public reception. Bourgeois ideal­ism, by contrast, wants to hold on to the view of the artefact free of such "appropriations", and resists often with passion any attempts to reveal its own subscription to ideological preference or even bias. Yet recep­tion theory, as it emerged in the early Sixties with the Konstanz School, paid unprecedented attention to the viewer/reader in the viewing/reading process. Strongly influenced by Husserl's phenomenology, people like H.R. Jauss and Wolfgang Iser articulated a theory of how the significance of an artwork changes over time: why it is that some artworks are received enthusiastically in their first reception while others are rejected or even vilified, when at a later point in history reception and recognition of value may change. From Husserl's "horizon of perception" there came the phrase "horizon of expectation", which suggested that people respond to new experiences according to the possibilities and limits of the horizons imposed by their particular time and place in history. (Hermeneutical theory would say: by their prejudices, thus meaning the hypotheses people posit and test against experience.) Marxists have seen the value of reception theory, but would challenge receptionists in their tendency to see the viewer or reader as a member of a homogeneous society, and usually of an educated elite. Like most liberal humanists, Jauss and Iser simply do not conceptualise their own horizons beyond Western middle-class expectations, values and literacy. (See Eagleton, 1983: 76-90.) Hermeneutics, or the "science" of interpretation, is challenged on the same grounds, because leading exponents such as Gadamer invariably and unself-consciously posit a uniformly middle-class interpreter. Nevertheless, the idea of an historically-bound interpreter strikes a chord with Marxist theory. Where all of these theories need to be used with care is when we remember the structuralist challenge to the very notion of "interpretation". Like representation, interpretation assumes a reality of refer­ents, in which interpreters "find" meaning rather than on to which they project meaning.

What I am suggesting is what Eagleton points out in his Introduction to Literary Theory (1983: 211): today most Western Marxists are "pluralists" in the sense that, while they hold on to the large Marxist vision of social "happiness", they may draw on non-Marxist theory in areas where Marxism offers no satisfac­tory equivalent. Such a pluralist is Fredric Jameson, who explains his practice in the following way:

...Marxism subsumes other interpretative modes or systems; or, to put it in methodological terms, that the limits of the latter can always be overcome, and their more positive findings retained, by a radical historicising of their mental operations, such that not only the content of the analysis, but the very method itself, along with the analyst, then becomes to be reckoned into the "text" or the phenomenon to be explained. (1981:­ 47)

Although academics and philosophers like Cornel West and Joseph Margolis (see bibliography) have taken issue with Jameson's pluralism or eclecticism, Marx himself - as I have tried to suggest - actually sanctioned the bringing together of materialist and idealist understandings of reality in his theory of naturalism or humanism. In this study I have also filtered my Marxist predis­positions through a pluralist approach. In so doing I hope that an understanding of protest art will emerge that allows for the interest of both its social and aesthetic distinction.

In relation to this, one of the strengths of Marxist critical practice has been its emphasis on the dialectic and on contradiction. Like Hegel and the Greek philosophers before him, Marx recognised that everything contains elements of its opposite or antithesis, and that if contradiction is not articulated or brought to consciousness it can remain ambivalent and block the next step to a more advanced synthesis. By comparison, bourgeois art criticism has tended to find itsraison d'etre in the so-called "richness" of ambivalence. I see the role of artists and critics alike, however, as one that should actively and consciously seek to expose contradictions and offer new kinds of synthesising possibilities. It is such an intention that governs my examination of the production, context and reception of protest art in South Africa for the period 1968 to 1976.