Abject negotiations : the mutability of identification in selected artworks by Berni Searle
- Authors: Rennie, Christy
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Art and identity , Abjection , Searle, Berni , Kristeva, Julia
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6219 , ISBN 978-0-620-45946-4 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/5309
- Description: In this paper I offer a reading of South African artist, Berni Searle's works About to forget (2005) and On either side (2005) in relation to French psychoanalyst and theorist, Julia Kristeva's conception of abjection. In examining Searle's use of the formal elements of tactility in representations of her own corporeality, I draw analogies between Searle's work and two Kristevian theories of heterogeneity, namely abjection and the semiotic (see Pollock 1998:9). I analyse a selection of Searle's work, focusing on her references to tactile, semiotically-driven elements in her open-ended negotiations of self-identification. Particular emphasis is placed on how she uses abjection to evoke an ambiguous sense of self-identification within a South African context. Within this context, Searle suggests the borders of self hood to be fluid in nature. This correlates with Kristeva's model of self hood, or the speaking subject, in which identity is never fixed and is seen as being always in continuous negotiation. In this model, the abject threat of dissolution of self may be contextualised within the state off lux inherent in the understanding of the speaking subject. Therefore, the threat towards one's identity is not so much nullified, but is rather no longer 'other' or separated from the understanding of self. Following Kristeva's (1991:1) thought, one may argue that the foreign 'other' and the selfare intimately conjoined.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Rennie, Christy
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Art and identity , Abjection , Searle, Berni , Kristeva, Julia
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6219 , ISBN 978-0-620-45946-4 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/5309
- Description: In this paper I offer a reading of South African artist, Berni Searle's works About to forget (2005) and On either side (2005) in relation to French psychoanalyst and theorist, Julia Kristeva's conception of abjection. In examining Searle's use of the formal elements of tactility in representations of her own corporeality, I draw analogies between Searle's work and two Kristevian theories of heterogeneity, namely abjection and the semiotic (see Pollock 1998:9). I analyse a selection of Searle's work, focusing on her references to tactile, semiotically-driven elements in her open-ended negotiations of self-identification. Particular emphasis is placed on how she uses abjection to evoke an ambiguous sense of self-identification within a South African context. Within this context, Searle suggests the borders of self hood to be fluid in nature. This correlates with Kristeva's model of self hood, or the speaking subject, in which identity is never fixed and is seen as being always in continuous negotiation. In this model, the abject threat of dissolution of self may be contextualised within the state off lux inherent in the understanding of the speaking subject. Therefore, the threat towards one's identity is not so much nullified, but is rather no longer 'other' or separated from the understanding of self. Following Kristeva's (1991:1) thought, one may argue that the foreign 'other' and the selfare intimately conjoined.
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Critical looking in advertising : Gerry Human's University of Johannesburg Alumni Exhibition : Humanism: The Art of Selling
- Authors: Gray, Brenden
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Humanism : The Art of Selling Exhibition , Gerry Human Alumni Exhibition , University of Johannesburg Alumni Exhibition
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6205 , ISBN 978-0-620-45946-4 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/5288
- Description: In 2008 Gerry Human, the chief creative officer of Ogilvy South Africa, was invited to exhibit pieces from his creative career as an alumnus of the University of Johannesburg (the former TWR) at the FADA Gallery. The ironic title of the exhibition, Humanism: The Art of Selling, suggested that Human was aware of the potential ironies and incongruities involved in exhibiting pieces of advertising within the context of a university art gallery. As a more or less reflexive practitioner, Human provoked in the framing of the exhibition questions about the power of advertising in a post-modern world where the field of legitimate culture, the aesthetic, and the university as institutional categories may have lost their potential to affect major social change. I examine the implications of this statement asking what methodological and theoretical approaches are most effective in examining complex, ironic and multilayered advertising products within a gallery context. In particular, I use the exhibition as a vehicle to ask how advertising may be pedagogically framed, to produce critical, media literate students in the field of visual culture (Willis 1999; Giroux 2005). In doing so, I explore the tensions that exist between understanding the consumption of advertisements and popular culture as passive, hegemonic and constructivist notions of creative consumption, problematising easy readings of advertising products in terms of WJT Mitchell's (2005) notion that images exert power over readers in complex ways, Pierre Bourdieu's (1993) understanding of the cultural field as one where social distinction is produced, and Jean Baudrillard's (1995) ideas around the proliferation of commodities and their value in an economy of signs.A variety ofvisual methodologies (Rose 2006) are critically examined in terms of developing the "interpretative repertoires" of students in relation to the complexity of Human's print advertisements. Human's framing of the exhibition is examined in terms of critical discourse analysis and audience studies. A social semiotic/critical discourse method is proposed as a method for allowing students to unpack the structure of addressability of particular advertisements produced by Human. Here, I draw on Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen's (2006) social semiotic methods, as put forward in Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design -methods such as the "transactional gaze", "narrative and conceptual structure", "social distance and framing" -in order to argue for the predominant use of the declarative as Humans' primary mode of visual and textual address. I link this visual strategy to Bourdieu's (1993) theories of how class distinction is constructed through visuality and begin to unravel the complexities involved in dealing with advertisements in terms of class and the desiring gaze exploring the tensions that may exist between students' lived experiences, the textually mediated world of consumer culture (Fairclough 2006) and the interpretative repertoires students are exposed to in a formal learning environment.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Gray, Brenden
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Humanism : The Art of Selling Exhibition , Gerry Human Alumni Exhibition , University of Johannesburg Alumni Exhibition
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6205 , ISBN 978-0-620-45946-4 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/5288
- Description: In 2008 Gerry Human, the chief creative officer of Ogilvy South Africa, was invited to exhibit pieces from his creative career as an alumnus of the University of Johannesburg (the former TWR) at the FADA Gallery. The ironic title of the exhibition, Humanism: The Art of Selling, suggested that Human was aware of the potential ironies and incongruities involved in exhibiting pieces of advertising within the context of a university art gallery. As a more or less reflexive practitioner, Human provoked in the framing of the exhibition questions about the power of advertising in a post-modern world where the field of legitimate culture, the aesthetic, and the university as institutional categories may have lost their potential to affect major social change. I examine the implications of this statement asking what methodological and theoretical approaches are most effective in examining complex, ironic and multilayered advertising products within a gallery context. In particular, I use the exhibition as a vehicle to ask how advertising may be pedagogically framed, to produce critical, media literate students in the field of visual culture (Willis 1999; Giroux 2005). In doing so, I explore the tensions that exist between understanding the consumption of advertisements and popular culture as passive, hegemonic and constructivist notions of creative consumption, problematising easy readings of advertising products in terms of WJT Mitchell's (2005) notion that images exert power over readers in complex ways, Pierre Bourdieu's (1993) understanding of the cultural field as one where social distinction is produced, and Jean Baudrillard's (1995) ideas around the proliferation of commodities and their value in an economy of signs.A variety ofvisual methodologies (Rose 2006) are critically examined in terms of developing the "interpretative repertoires" of students in relation to the complexity of Human's print advertisements. Human's framing of the exhibition is examined in terms of critical discourse analysis and audience studies. A social semiotic/critical discourse method is proposed as a method for allowing students to unpack the structure of addressability of particular advertisements produced by Human. Here, I draw on Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen's (2006) social semiotic methods, as put forward in Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design -methods such as the "transactional gaze", "narrative and conceptual structure", "social distance and framing" -in order to argue for the predominant use of the declarative as Humans' primary mode of visual and textual address. I link this visual strategy to Bourdieu's (1993) theories of how class distinction is constructed through visuality and begin to unravel the complexities involved in dealing with advertisements in terms of class and the desiring gaze exploring the tensions that may exist between students' lived experiences, the textually mediated world of consumer culture (Fairclough 2006) and the interpretative repertoires students are exposed to in a formal learning environment.
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I am the cup of water without the cup [or William Kentridge, Steven Cohen, Louis Burke and me (or William Kentridge, Steven Cohen, Louis Burke and Him...)]
- Authors: Taub, Myer
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Cultural identity , Transformation
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6207 , ISBN 978-0-620-45946-4 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/5291
- Description: How do I see myself -as I am: As shifting, fluid, resisting and accommodating; an integrated identity by negotiating what is me with others through a series of events that I respond to as they happen, as I make them happen thus informing me of how I see myself as I am. I am the upstart. The title of this paper is derived from bohemian and poet Phillip O'Connor, who in his memoir Memoirs of a Public Baby (1958) wrote: " I was-and am-like a cup of water without the cup and dangerously flowed into other people's being" (first cited in Andrew Barrow 2002:56). It is a witticism that provokes empathy of the self-asserted marginal and hopes to prove that even within the marginalised there are even further marginalised organisms (including how I see myself). How did I come to this? I trace this view with autobiographical events informed by redemptive criticism in an attempt to understand how I see myself as marginal and embrace myself as such. I intertwine this assumption with readings from Hannah Arendt, Della Pollack and Barbra Myerhoff.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Taub, Myer
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Cultural identity , Transformation
- Type: Article
- Identifier: uj:6207 , ISBN 978-0-620-45946-4 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/5291
- Description: How do I see myself -as I am: As shifting, fluid, resisting and accommodating; an integrated identity by negotiating what is me with others through a series of events that I respond to as they happen, as I make them happen thus informing me of how I see myself as I am. I am the upstart. The title of this paper is derived from bohemian and poet Phillip O'Connor, who in his memoir Memoirs of a Public Baby (1958) wrote: " I was-and am-like a cup of water without the cup and dangerously flowed into other people's being" (first cited in Andrew Barrow 2002:56). It is a witticism that provokes empathy of the self-asserted marginal and hopes to prove that even within the marginalised there are even further marginalised organisms (including how I see myself). How did I come to this? I trace this view with autobiographical events informed by redemptive criticism in an attempt to understand how I see myself as marginal and embrace myself as such. I intertwine this assumption with readings from Hannah Arendt, Della Pollack and Barbra Myerhoff.
- Full Text:
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