‘There is nothing to hold onto here’: complicity and vulnerability in Gavin Krastin’s On Seeing Red and Other Fantasies (2015)
- Authors: Smit, Sonja
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/156352 , vital:39981 , DOI: 10.1080/10137548.2018.1553626
- Description: In this article, I analyse some of the ways in which Gavin Krastin’s On Seeing Red and Other Fantasies (2015) engages with outrage and protest in a self-reflexive way. The idea of art as means to question and institute change in society, is contentious and my discussion here focuses on how forms of resistance, are easily subsumed within a capitalist context.
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- Date Issued: 2018
Challenging desire : performing whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa
- Authors: Smit, Sonja
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: Performance art -- South Africa , Bailey, Brett, 1967- , Cohen, Steven, 1962- , Antwoord (Musical group) , MacGarry, Michael , Eurocentrism -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2164 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1016358
- Description: The central argument of this thesis asserts that in the process of challenging dominant subject positions, such as whiteness, performance creates the possibilities for new or alternative arrangements of desire. It examines how the creative process of desire is forestalled (reified) by habitual representations of whiteness as a privileged position, and proposes that performance can be a valid form of resistance to static conceptions of race and subjectivity. The discussion takes into account how the privilege of whiteness finds representation through forms of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism in the post apartheid context. The analysis focuses on the work of white South African artists whose work offers a critique from within the privileged “centre” of whiteness. The research is situated within the inter-disciplinary field of performance studies entailing a reading and application of critical texts to the analysis. Alongside this qualitative methodology surfaces a subjective dialogue with the information presented on whiteness. Part Two includes an analysis of Steven Cohen’s The Cradle of Humankind (2011), Brett Bailey’s Exhibit A (2011) and Michael MacGarry’s LHR-JNB (2010). Each section examines the way in which the respective works engage in a questioning of whiteness through performance. Part Three investigates South African rap-rave duo, Die Antwoord and how their appropriation of Zef interrogates desires for an essential authenticity. Part Four focuses on my own performance practice and the proposed value of engaging with a form of practice-led research. This is particularly relevant in relation to critical race studies that require a level of self-reflexivity from the researcher. It presents an analysis of the work entitled Villain (2012) as a disturbance of theatrical desire through a process of ‘becoming’. This notion of meaning and identity as ‘becoming’ is argued as a strategy to challenge prevailing modes of perception which can possibly restore the production of desire to the viewer. The thesis concludes with the notion that performance can offer a mode of immanent ethics which is significant in creating both vulnerable and critical forms of whiteness.
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- Date Issued: 2014
Revolt as a strategy of de-reification in contemporary performance practice
- Authors: Smit, Sonja
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: Mantero, Vera Bouwer, Jaco, 1973- Performance art -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2147 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002379
- Description: This thesis investigates the concepts of revolt and de-reification and how these can be perceived and implemented within the context of performance. The argument focuses on the ability of revolt to question and unsettle processes of reification which in turn manifest a strategy of de-reification. I investigate the potential in contemporary performance practice to challenge prevailing modes of perception and restore the production of desire to the spectator through strategies of de-reification. This research is approached through a qualitative process which entails a reading and application of critical texts to the analysis. This reading/application is engaged in a dialogue with the interpretative and experiential aspects of the two works selected for analysis. Chapter One functions as an introduction to the concept of reification and the necessity of a process geared towards de-reification through revolt. I argue that revolt is already embedded in avant-garde artistic practices through an experimental and questioning approach to artistic practice and the production of meaning. Chapter Two is an analysis of Vera Mantero’s solo work, one mysterious Thing said e.e cummings* (1996). This is structured around two identifiable elements, one being the resistance to signification (designification), which is argued as a strategy of revolt within the piece. The second is the notion of abjection, which works doubly to aid the resistance to signification as well as working as a strategy of revolt by its implication in the work. Chapter Three analyses Jaco Bouwer’s Untitled (2008), specifically dealing with the notion of absence as a strategy of revolt and de-reification. The discussion is focused on the potential complication of desire through absence as enacting a larger project of revolt. As in Chapter Two, this is similarly related to the fragmentation of signs through designification which emphasises the strategy of absence. This thesis concludes with the idea that meaning-making in performance can be considered a process. Instead, the lack or failure of meaning within these selected performance practices enables a return to the individual (performer and spectator) as the agent of desire.
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- Date Issued: 2010