PROTEST ART IN SOUTH AFRICA 1968 - 1976:

A STUDY OF ITS PRODUCTION, CONTEXT AND RECEPTION

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of fine art and History of Art , University of Natal, 1992.

ABSTRACT

PRO­TEST ART IN SOUTH AFRICA 1968 - 1976: A study of its production, context and reception

In this study I examine protest art of the early Seventies in South Africa, an aspect of art that has hitherto been either marginalised or neglected. I argue that the protest works which most forcefully broke from the modernist assumptions of the 1960s were most attuned to the shift of oppositional political consciousness that occurred, in about 1968, with the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement and New-Left thinking in South Africa. Amongst the works discussed are early post-modernist "combines", drawings in an expressive realist idiom, paintings, serigraphs, cartoons and sculptures. Forms of protest such as graffiti, posters, banners and T-shirts are also considered.

The examination is conducted from a contemporary Marxist perspec­tive that has been modified by aspects of Africanist post-colonial thinking and placed in dialectical relationship to non-Marxist theories such as post-structuralism and reception aesthetics. The implications and consequences of the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of the study are discussed at length in the Introduction.

In Chapter One I focus on the Art South Africa Today exhibition of 1971. I do so because I believe that it was with this exhibition that overt political protest first appeared substantially in the art of this country. I tie this to the period between about 1968 and 1971 as a brief "free" space for the expression and reception of protest before the State realised the significance of Black Consciousness and clamped down on extra-parliamentary opposition.

In Chapter Two I trace the changes that occurred in protest art and its reception after 1971 as the political climate in South Africa became increasingly tense and confrontational. In the Concluding Remarks I indicate ways in which understandings of the period 1968 to 1976 may contribute to a reassessment of subsequent exhibitions, debates and publications on "protest" in South African art.