Abstract
The memorialisation of place and representation of land and landscape is
topical in many societies that are dealing with the aftermath of political trauma,
such as Post-Colonial or Post-Soviet countries. In such contexts, artists
engage with land and notions of place through processes of memorialisation
and landscape representation, or very often, the undoing of these traditions
as they were entrenched by regimes that are now redundant. In this article
we investigate two different artistic agendas that engage with such sites in
South Africa, in the work of Paul Emmanuel, and the collective Avant Car
Guard. Though separated by a decade, the artworks discussed here share a
dialogic engagement with existing memorial sites, or indeed, traditions that
memorialise settler belonging, such as the landscape painting tradition or
military equestrian monuments. While Emmanuel’s work may be understood
to employ a dialogic, anti-monumental strategy in response to the statue of
Louis Botha at the Union buildings in Tshwane in South Africa, Avant Car
Guard insert themselves in spaces where they engage parodically with memorial
sites and the tradition of landscape representation. In both cases, white
masculinity is called into question through self-representation, engaging with
notions of Afrikaner hegemony and white anxiety.