South African Journal of Art History Volume 34 Number 2 2019 South African Journal of Art History A JOURNAL FOR THE VISUAL ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE

Volume 34 Number 2 2019 tion i Trad Tradition

formation

formation trans trans ition Trad Tradition trans trans

formation formation& &

SAJAHcover34no2.indd 1 2019/12/20 23:50:20

The South African Journal of Art History is a peer reviewed journal publishing articles and review articles on the following subjects: Art and architectural history Art and architectural theory Aesthetics and philosophy of art Visual culture Art and the environment Film and photography History of craft History of design

SAJAH does not publish the following: educational issues; student research; architectural designs; popular culture.

ISSN 0258-3542 Available on Sabinet Website: www.sajah.co.za Archive: UP Space

Indexed by Scopus and Clarivate Analytics i SAJAH South African Journal of Art History Volume 34, Number 2, 2019

Editor Estelle Alma Maré

Editorial Board

Arthur Barker, University of (Regionalism and South African architecture) Monica di Ruvo, Peninsula University of Technology (craft, design pedagogy, interior design, sustainable design) Kobus du Preez, University of the Free State (indigenous architecture, conservation) Adrian Konik, Nelson Mandela University (philosophy, film theory and cultural studies) Estelle Liebenberg-Barkhuizen, University of KwaZulu-Natal (women artists, works on paper) Estelle Alma Maré, Tshwane University of Technology (art and architectural history) Phil Mashabane, Architect (architectural history, theory and conservation) Mauritz Naudé, University of Pretoria (South African architecture) Mbongiseni Nkambule, Tshwane University of Technology (architectural history and theory) Jonathan Noble, University of the Free State (architectural history, theory and criticism) Bert Olivier, University of the Free State (aesthetics and philosophy of art) Johann Opperman, University of (South African art) John Steele, Walter Sisulu University (ceramics, installation art, ephemeral art) Aletta Steenkamp, University of (architecture) Ingrid Stevens, Tshwane University of Technology (art theory, contemporary art, craft) Gerald Steyn, Tshwane University of Technology (African and South African architecture) Ariana van Heerden, University of Pretoria (neuroscience of art making) C.J. van Vuuren, University of South Africa (indigenous architecture, anthropology)

International Advisory Board

Tsion Avital, Emeritus professor, Department of Design and Art, Holon Academic Institute of Technology, Israel Concha Diez-Pastor e Iribas, ESNE (University of Design), Madrid, Spain Maria Fernada Derntl, Faculdade de Arquitetuia e Urbanismo da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil Pascal Dubourg-Glatigny, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France Aleš Erjavec, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia Antoni S. Folkers, researcher, African Architecture Matters, Amsterdam, The Netherlands John Hendrix, Department of Architecture, Lincoln University, UK Mary Johnson, Department of Architecture, De Montford University, Leicester, UK Constantinos V. Proimos, Hellenic Open University and the Technical University of Crete, Greece Raymond Quek, Leeds School of Architecture, UK Tijen Roshko, Department of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Canada Leoni Schmidt, Director of Research, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand Nikolaos-Ion Terzoglou, Department of Architecture, Technical University, Athens, Greece Gert van Tonder, Reki-An Pavilion, Kamigamo Minami Ojicho 5 Banchi, Kitaku, Kyoto City, Japan Alexander Tzonis, Emeritus professor, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

The SAJAH is sponsored by the Art Historical Work Group of South Africa Chairperson: Gerald Steyn Treasurer and Publication Secretary: E.A. Maré Cover design: Johann Opperman Layout: Silverrocket Publications & Design Printed by: Procopyprint

ii South African Journal of Art History Volume 34, number 2, 2019

Contents

Research articles on the subject of “Tradition and transformation”

Yolanda van der Vyver The role of sculptural tradition in (political) power transformations: the self-contradictoriness of psychosocial repetition 1

Gerald Steyn Designing apartments for changing demographics in South Africa 25

Michael Louw Transformation through reclamation and the repositioning of tradition 43

John Steele Ephemeropolis: urban design and performing land art at AfrikaBurn 2019 62

Estelle Alma Maré Representations of the sun before and after the Copernican revolution 84

iii The role of sculptural tradition in (political) power transformations: the self-contradictoriness of psychosocial repetition

Yolanda van der Vyver University of the Free State E-mail: [email protected]

The sculptural tradition of communicating power and ideology in marble and bronze is one that is copied from one civilisation to the next. In the fifth century BCE Greek sculptures idealised the human form in its youthful perfection and more than four hundred years later, Romans modelled sculptures of their political leaders on those of their Greek predecessors. In this way the Romans connected themselves in mythical fashion to the Golden Age of Classical Greece, which marked the height of Athens’s influence and power. The sculptural traditions of the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations were reinvented during the Renaissance and found global expression in nineteenth century monumentalism. But with each significant socio-political transformation, a new power strives to reformulate its predecessor’s memory practices, and when a new society lacks certain traditions, these are often invented or constructed in mythical fashion, based on selections and exclusions from its predecessor’s cultural and political traditions. The prevalence of “Western” statues in post- independence Africa illustrates this form of self-contradictory psychosocial repetition. Despite being alien to traditional African culture, monumental objects that grab back to ancient civilisations and mimic Western cultural and sculptural traditions, strive to express and exercise political power. They are self-contradictory, because they copy and create a mythical, cultural and political tradition on the one hand and simultaneously attempt to erase and replace the memories of their colonial predecessors. The aim of this article is to situate sculptural tradition in its wider historical context and to investigate the social-physical phenomenon of psychosocial repetition within its complex context. Key words: sculptural tradition, psychosocial repetition, political transformation, reformulation of memory practices

Die rol van skulturele tradisie in (politiese) magstransformasies: die self-weersprekendheid van psigososiale repetisie Die skulpturele tradisie om mag en ideologie in marmer en brons te kommunikeer word van een beskawing na die volgende gekopieer. In die vyfde eeu vGJ het Griekse beelde die menslike vorm in sy jeugdige perfeksie geïdealiseer en meer as vierhonderd jaar later het die Romeine beelde van hul politieke leiers op dié van hul Griekse voorgangers gemodelleer. So het die Romeine hulself op mitiese wyse verbind tot die Goue Eeu van Klassieke Griekeland, wat as hoogtepunt van Athene se invloed en mag beskou word. Die skulpturele tradisies van die antieke Griekse en Romeinse beskawings is tydens die Renaissance herontdek en het globale uitdrukking in negentiende eeuse monumentalisme gevind. Maar met elke beduidende sosio-politieke transformasie, strewe ’n nuwe mag om sy voorganger se geheuegebruike te herformuleer, en as ’n nuwe gemeenskap sekere tradisies kort, word dit dikwels opnuut bedink of op mitiese wyse gekonstrueer, gebaseer op die seleksies en uitsluitings van sy voorganger se kulturele en politieke tradisies. Die voorkoms van “Westerse” standbeelde in Afrika na onafhanklikheid illustreer hierdie self-weersprekende psigososiale repetisie. Ten spyte daarvan dat dit vreemd is aan tradisionele Afrika kulture, strewe monumentale voorwerpe, wat teruggryp na antieke beskawings en wat Westerse kulturele en skulpturele tradisies naboots, om politieke mag uit te druk en uit te oefen. Hierdie monumente is self-weersprekend, omdat hulle aan die een kant ’n mitiese, kulturele en politieke tradisie kopieer en skep, en aan die ander kant gelyktydig poog om hul koloniale voorgangers se herinneringe uit te vee en te vervang. Die doel van hierdie artikel is om skulpturele tradisie in sy wyer historiese konteks te plaas en om die sosiale- fisiese fenomeen van psigososiale repetisie binne hierdie komplekse konteks te ondersoek. Sleutelwoorde: skulpturele tradisie, psigososiale repetisie, politieke transformasie, herformulering van geheuegebruike

SAJAH, ISSN 0258-3542, volume 34, number 2, 2019: 1-24 ith every (political) power transformation, the new power adopts certain cultural traditions of the old power. These cultural traditions may be adapted and elaborated Wupon to suit the new power’s cultural requirements. It is also not unusual for the new power to perform a cultural reformulation ritual on the old power’s memory practices in an attempt to control what the transformed community remembers and what it forgets. The result is a cultural layering of the old with the new, which still bears visible evidence of the attempts to scratch off or alter some of the old layers. This article focuses on sculpture and specifically monumental sculpture as such a cultural tradition. It relates the cultural layeredness to the concept of the palimpsest. Sculptural examples are chosen for their relevance to the argument and since this tradition has a past and is an historic art form, the article relies on the historical research method (Leedy 1989: 125-137) and an interpretive-historical research strategy (Groat and Wang 2002: 135-171) in order to situate sculpture in its wider historical context. Both method and strategy are consistent with the nature of the research question. The system of inquiry or the paradigm in which the research is conducted is qualitative because it depends on non-numerical verbal (written) evidence, “mythical” (which includes most of the scholarly work in history) and when considering objectivity: naturalistic (after Groat and Wang 2002: 25-31), where value-free objectivity is neither possible nor necessarily desirable. The investigation starts with the comparison of two Classical sculptures, one Greek and one Roman and continues with an explanation of palimpsest theory that is then applied to Early Christian attempts to erase the pagan Roman sculptural tradition. The aesthetic transformation in sculpture from the Romanesque to the Renaissance is briefly mentioned as an introduction to the global monumental expression of power during the nineteenth century. The discussion then finds similarities between the attempts by European colonial and South African post-colonial powers to express their mythical origins, to dominate “the other” and to erase the memories of their predecessors.

Polykleitos’s Doryphoros compared to the Augustus of Primaporta

Polykleitos’s Doryphoros was a Classical Greek sculpture of the fifth century BCE. The statue portrayed a static spear-bearer in contrapposto stance (a relaxed pose where one leg bears weight) as a youthful and athletic individual in a flawless, idealised and perfect human form (Pischel 1978: 105). The harmonious proportions of the Doryphoros made it renowned as the standard embodiment of the Classical ideal of human beauty. It was therefore simply known as the Canon, which means “rule” or “measure” (Janson 1970: 103-4). The slightly larger than life- sized male nude was solidly built and muscular, a standing warrior originally bearing a spear that balanced on his left shoulder. The original, cast in bronze around 440 BCE, was lost and is only known today from later, mainly Roman copies in marble. The most notable example is the marble copy housed in the Naples National Archaeological Museum (figure 1).

The Roman Republic increasingly gained control of the Greek mainland and Roman occupation of the Greek world was established after the battle of Actium in 31 BCE when Octavian (later Augustus) defeated the combined forces of Roman General Mark Antony and the Greek Ptolemaic Queen of , Cleopatra VII, on the Ionian Sea (Lyon, Rowen and Hamerow 1968: 68). Octavian’s victory enabled him to consolidate power over Rome and its dominions. He adopted the title of princeps (first citizen) andimperator (victorious general) and some years later the Roman senate awarded him the title of Augustus (revered) (Lyon, Rowen and Hamerow 1968: 70). Although he retained the trappings of a restored Republican leader and was the self-

2 proclaimed “restorer of the Republic”, historians generally view this consolidation of power as the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire1.

Portraits of Augustus, thus as the first emperor of the Roman Empire, invoked the power of imagery to communicate his power and ideology and set the example for Roman art to be closely intertwined with politics and propaganda. One of Augustus’s most famous portraits is the Augustus of Prima Porta of 20 BCE (figure 2), named for the town in Italy where it was found in 18632. Augustus is depicted in a freestanding, marble sculpture. He stands in a contrapposto pose, wearing military regalia and his right arm is outstretched, demonstrating that he is addressing his troops. He shows his power as the leader of the army, a military conqueror and a staunch supporter of Roman religion3. The statue also predicts the 200-year period of peace that Augustus initiated, called the Pax Romana (time of relative peace).

Figure 1 Figure 2 Roman period copy of Polykleitos’s, Augustus of Prima Porta (Augusto di Prima Doryphoros, 440 BCE, marble, 2.12m tall, Porta), 20 BCE, marble, 2.08m tall, Braccio Naples National Archaeological Museum Buove (new arm) at the Vatican Museums (retrieved from the public domain (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doryphoros). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doryphoros).

3 The composition of the Prima Porta statue bears a strong resemblance to Polykleitos’s Doryphoros. Both have a similar contrapposto stance and are portrayed as youthful and flawless individuals in a perfect, idealised human form. The Romans often modelled their art on their Greek predecessors. This is significant because Augustus is essentially depicting himself with the perfect body of a Greek athlete: he is youthful and virile, despite the fact that he was middle-aged when the sculpture was commissioned. Furthermore, by modelling the Prima Porta statue on “the Canon”, Augustus connects himself to the Golden Age of the Greek civilization4. These two statues are chosen for their relevance to the argument (figure 3): There was a distinct political power transformation facilitated by violence. An existing sculptural tradition was adopted, adapted and elaborated upon and the idea of repetition, as well as the connection to a mythical past is notable. The two examples are separated by time, which illustrates their temporality and the layering of Roman military clothing over Greek traditional (nude) physical perfection means that the concept of a palimpsest starts to apply.

Figure 3 Doryphoros and Prima Porta table of comparison (table by the author).

Palimpsest theory

The palimpsest is usually associated with literary texts and is inherently tied to writing. Historically a palimpsest is a page from a scroll, manuscript or a parchment roll from which the original text has been scratched off so that, for economic reasons, the page could be reused in another document, since writing material was costly. Papyrus was less durable and less expensive than parchment from animal hide and as a result most palimpsests that survived are on parchment. The word was derived from the Greek palimpsestos and the Latin palimpsestus, which means: “scratched or scraped again”. In Ancient Rome letters were scratched into a wax surface that could be smoothed over and re-used. Parchment, which became popular in Western Europe from the sixth century onwards, was initially washed with oat bran and milk and after some time the original text [scriptio inferior] would reappear. In the late Middle Ages the words were scraped away with a stone and were lost forever4.

The number of palimpsests appears to increase more rapidly in periods of intense intellectual activity (Lowe 1972) and moments of critical change (Baird 2015: 63) than during periods of economic decline. The destruction of Greek religious text was forbidden by decree in 691, which increased the demand for parchment on which secular or pagan texts had been written. It seems that there was also a spiritual motivation, namely to overwrite religious text on pagan (heretical) parchment. This important aspect of palimpsest theory plays a role when considering the next episode in political power transformation and its influence on Western sculptural tradition.

4 Early Christianity adapts Roman basilicas but not pagan sculptural traditions

Attempts to sanctify pagan parchment by overwriting it with religious text can be compared to the efforts by early Christians to build their churches on pagan sites, in order to sanctify the ground5. A new dimension is added to the process of political power transformation, namely the attempt to reformulate the memory of the new power’s predecessor.

The transformation from pagan to Christian could best be seen in architecture, rather than in sculpture. Pagan temples were merely shrines that were built to house the statue of a god or a goddess, but Christian churches had to be big enough to house a congregation of worshippers. When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity in 323, churches were needed everywhere. The first churches in the Roman Empire were imitations of the Roman basilica, which were long halls used as markets or assembly halls and law courts. There was no decorative art, especially not sculpture, because early Christians saw sculptures as pagan objects, since it was associated with heathen sacrifices made before the statues of the gods they worshipped. The table in figure 4 attempts to explain how sculptural tradition in the Roman Empire was affected by religious power transformation from pagan to Early Christian. The new power did not adopt the existing sculptural tradition but repetition can be identified in the development of religious architecture and the palimpsest comes to the fore in the new power’s attempts to erase the mythical past of its predecessor.

The term “palimpsest” has come to be used in other disciplines to denote something that was created for one purpose and later re-used for another. In archaeology it refers to layers of architectural remains, in landscape archaeology it refers to the way different generations alter the landscape and in literature it refers to differing book editions and a multi-layered record produced by layering text over time. It is used in literature and art to describe an object, place or idea that reflects history.4 In 1845 Thomas de Quincey wrote an essay titled The Palimpsest where he stated that “even though the process of layering which creates a palimpsest was born out of a need to erase and destroy previous texts, the re-emergence of those destroyed texts renders a structure that privileges heterogeneity and diversity.” 6

Figure 4 Table explaining religious power transformation from pagan temple to early Christian church (table by the author).

The Romanesque ecclesiastical era saw a sculptural revival and during the Gothic era, sculpture became an integral part of façade decoration on the great cathedrals of Europe, which was the ultimate expression of religious power. The Renaissance is characterised by the reinvention of ancient Greek and Roman sculptural traditions and the masters of sculpture, Donatello and Michelangelo represented Biblical figures, such as Jesus and David, in the classical tradition of the Greek nude. The aesthetic sculptural transformation from the Romanesque to the Renaissance (figure 5) has been extensively documented and for the purpose of this article serves only as an introduction to the global (Western) tradition of nineteenth century monumental expression through sculpture.

5 Figure 5 Table comparing religious aesthetic transformation from Romanesque to Renaissance (table by the author).

European monuments: myth, domination and erasure

Nineteenth century European monuments: time and our mythical origins

During the nineteenth century Europe experienced an explosion of monuments, resulting in a monument mania. Walter Benjamin remarked in his Moscow diary that there was hardly a square in Europe whose “secret structure was not profaned and impaired over the course of the nineteenth century by the introduction of a monument” (Huyssen 2003: 38-9). Monuments do not always incorporate sculpture, but for the purpose of this discussion, the focus will be on those that do.

Huyssen (2003: 42) explained that as Schliemann was unearthing classical monuments of antiquity, nineteenth century Europeans (in mythical fashion) attached their origins and cultural roots to a civilisation that differentiated them from their non-European “others”. The romance of archaeology and their admiration of classical monumental architecture came to guarantee origin and stability as well as depth of time and space in a rapidly changing world. “Monumental architecture of antiquity seemed to guarantee permanence and to provide the bulwark against the speed-up of time, the shifting grounds of urban space and the transitory-ness of modern life” (Huyssen 2003: 42). Add to this the desire to create and monumentalise a deep (mythical) national past that discerns the West from its non-European counterpart and a desire to legitimise or give meaning to the present in order to envision a cultural, political and social future, and the search for national monuments is better understood.

Pallasmaa (2007: 190) stressed that humans need images of historical structures in their minds to strengthen their perception of the depth of time, but their perception of time is inextricably linked to their desire to know their origins (Grobler 2008: 164). In this regard Hollier (1989) pointed out that the search and desire for origins was manifested in the nineteenth century desire for the monumental, which was an inevitable reaction to the way that religious and metaphysical securities of earlier ages were stripped away in modernity by economical, political and industrial revolutions. The desire for the monumental in the nineteenth century created a discourse of origins that was produced by what Georg Lukács later termed “transcendental homelessness” as the conditio moderna and to which he opposed the utopia of an integrated civilisation (Huyssen 2003: 40). Nineteenth century obsessions with origin went hand in hand with its mythical grounding that attempted to fulfil what Huyssen called “the cultural legitimising needs of the post-revolutionary bourgeois nation-state in the grip of accelerating modernisation”. Despite its liberal and progressive beliefs, nineteenth century modernity remained locked in an essential dialectic of enlightenment and myth (Huyssen 2003: 41), which continued into the twentieth century.

6 Early twentieth century European myth and domination

Adorno and Horkheimer explored this concept in their 1944 critique of modernity, Dialectic of Enlightenment, written during their exile from during World War II. They asked why enlightened societies revert back to myth (“myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology”) and claimed that older rituals, religions and philosophies contributed to the process of enlightenment, despite being declared mythical and out-dated by modern forces of secularisation. If a society is so enlightened, why is it then that, just as myth, it is so resistant to change? “Such resistance to change characterises both ancient myths of fate and modern devotion to the facts.” The answer is that enlightened societies are driven by an irrational fear of the unknown, which drives them to domination. They define a triple domination: domination of nature by humans, domination of nature in humans and domination of humans by humans. Progress in an enlightened society comes at a cost to the “other”, whether the “other” is human or non-human. The “other” is marginalised, exploited or destroyed, albeit through sophisticated, indirect methods. They concluded that: “humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologisation, but enlightenment is mythical fear radicalised”7.

Erasing the “other’s” memories as expression of power: the example of Berlin

With each significant socio-political change, new leaders perform a memory reformulation ritual and strive to erase the memories of their predecessors (Elleh 2002: 163). Berlin is such a paradigmatic public memory space (Huyssen 2003: 9). Each regime attempted to make its mark on Berlin’s urban landscape and to undo the legacy of its predecessors and impose its own identity and authority: the Third Reich, the fourth-power occupation, the division between Federal Republic and the Democratic Republic and finally reunification (Sudjic: 2005: 121).

Hitler demolished around 25,000 properties to construct his new city Germania but after the German defeat little remained of his constructions. In 1949 the Russian occupiers demolished the remains of the damaged but mainly intact Chancellery and used the salvaged stone to build Berlin’s huge Soviet War Memorial (Sudjic: 2005: 45-6). The German Democratic Republic (DDR) had other targets and Ulbricht, who worked closely together with Stalin, wanted to model East Germany closely on the Soviet Union. The Berlin City Palace of the Hohenzollern8 was dynamited in September 1950, despite the protests of Ulbricht’s own architects and art historians. A part of the architectural history of the city and the physical legacy of the old dynasty was erased in order to construct a new socialist order. Ulbricht motivated the demolition by claiming that the building was too badly damaged and that it would be too costly for the country to restore it, but he added: “May it no longer remind us of an inglorious past.” Schinkel’s pioneering Prussian state architecture school (Bauakademie) was similarly demolished in 1961 to make way for the DDR’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the west side of Marx-Engels Platz, the Palast der Republik with its orange mirror-glass façades fashionable in the USA at the time was completed in 1976 and stood on the site of the old palace courtyard and Mies’s new National Gallery completed in 1967 required the demolition of the remains of the German House of Tourism9 (Sudjic 2005: 121-4).

In the Federal Republic in West Berlin the discourse surrounded the debate between erasure and preservation of relics of the past regime. Should any trace of the past be erased to guard against the resurgence of the malevolence that it represented or should it be preserved

7 “as reminder of German guilt and a warning of the horrors that Nazism was capable of”? Some argued that Speer’s work should be restored because of its intrinsic aesthetic merit (Sudjic: 2005: 124).

With unification the new Germany was less prepared to wipe out traces of Hitler’s Berlin than it was to eradicate the traces of the DDR. During his remodelling of the Reichstag architect Norman Foster persuaded German Chancellor Kohl to preserve the chalk and paint Cyrillic graffiti left by the victorious Russian soldiers on the bullet-ridden walls behind glass, but the Palast der Republik was demolished after being abandoned due to the presence of asbestos. The DDR’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was demolished in 1996 and proposals to rebuild Schinkel’s Bauakademie culminated in the erection of a temporary structure wrapped in canvas that simulated its façades and indicated the volume and form of the original building. The structure was constructed by students in 2000. Similarly a life-sized canvas mock-up of the Baroque façade of the old Hohenzollern Royal Palace was erected in 1993, which swayed the public in favour of reconstructing the old palace. The new building, to be completed in 2019, will be called the Humboldt Forum and will house a world cultural museum. Angela Merkel called the project the final “closing of a wound”10.

The urban landscape of Berlin is thus a true palimpsest, created through the process of layering, born out of the need to erase and destroy previous layers and, with the re-emergence of those destroyed layers, revealing its heterogeneity and diversity.

South African monuments: myth, domination and erasure

Afrikaner foundation myths

During the twentieth century countless memorials, monuments and museums mushroomed across South Africa11. The most notable is the Voortrekker Monument that commemorates the , which, together with the Second Anglo-Boer War12, are seen by to be the two key events in the foundation of their nation. The Monument is an outstanding representation of the Afrikaner’s foundation myth and contains a historical frieze that depicts the Taking of the Vow that served as the basis of their belief that they were God’s chosen people13 (Grobler 2008: 170). These events form part of the Afrikaner’s “struggle history”. The Great Trek represents the struggle to achieve freedom from the British, and the Anglo-Boer War represents the struggle to secure that freedom14. These struggles claimed the lives of large numbers of Afrikaner men, women and children who were made heroes by those that survived. The National Women’s Memorial in pays homage to around 35,000 women and children who died in British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War and as stated on the pedestal, they did not die in vain but died as a sacrifice to the freedom of those that survived (Grobler 2008: 172).

These events also had a decisive impact on the rigid Afrikaner nationalist identity for the total duration of the twentieth century and as a result the government’s political agenda was expressed in memorials, monuments, museums and historic sites. Markedly in the middle of the twentieth century, South African monuments commemorated the Afrikaner’s grief and loss, perpetuated by the apartheid government for their nationalist agenda (Grobler 2008: 173). The Kruger monumental ensemble, discussed below, is another example of a monument that contained particular political meaning that was manipulated by the regime. It enjoyed considerable prestige as an important symbol in -speaking circles (Tempelhoff 1998: 120). Where the

8 Afrikaner initially lacked tradition, as was the case with song and dance, these were adopted (in mythical fashion) from existing northern European traditions. When considering “traditional” Volksang and Volkspele15 (folk songs and games), one can apply Huyssen’s (2003: 1) notion that traditions are often invented or constructed based on selections and exclusions to give shape to cultural and social life. It is important to note that in doing so, the Afrikaner shied away from English traditions. For instance, Gerard Moerdyk consciously avoided English traditions when designing his churches. He argued for the abandoning of Gothic influence as being un- Afrikaans, reaching for the more sober influences of the Romanesque (Fisher 1998: 132).

The Kruger monumental ensemble on Church Square, Pretoria

After roaming around for over fifty years, the bronze statue of Paul Kruger16, originally cast in Rome in 1899 and intended for Pretoria’s Church Square17, was finally placed in the centre of the Square in 1954 as part of a monumental ensemble containing four Boer soldiers on a sandstone pedestal (figure 6). The statues are life-like, realistic representations of the temporal world, but in terms of scale these representations are bigger than life-size, thus creating a monumental effect.

Industrialist Samuel Marks donated money for a marble statue of the President in 1895 and sculptor decided on a bronze statue. ’s first choice for the location of the statue was and Marks suggested the position west of the central church on Church Square where a pedestal was erected after it was approved by the Executive Council in 1899.

Although the statues only found their way to Church Square during the height of apartheid, the conception and creation of this monument should be seen in the context of the nineteenth century search for the monumental. As explained above, this search went hand in hand with the West’s desire to know its origins and to create a national past that would temporally anchor it and that would strengthen its perception of the depth of time. However, at the time of its conception, Paul Kruger would not have been comfortable with the idea of being the subject of adulation. He was a simple and humble statesman with Gereformeerde, Calvinist values that frowned upon the humanist tradition of human adulation associated with the statue. He recommended Burgers Park, probably because it was a less prominent position for the statue, away from the church on Church Square. The outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War and Pretoria’s fall to British rule on 5 June 1900 prevented the erection of the statue (Engelbrecht 1952: 98) and when it arrived in Delagoa Bay by ship, it was placed in storage (Van Bart 2009). Kruger therefore never saw the statue of himself. He went into exile in September 1900, never to return to the Transvaal again.

The statue was erected in Princes’ Park in 1913 where it stayed until it was moved to the Pretoria Station on the 100th birthday of Paul Kruger on 10 October 1925. In 1939 the City Council authorised the transfer of the statue to Church Square (Engelbrecht 1952: 98), but it was only moved there in 1954 where it remained through the transition into democracy in 1994, up until the present.

9 Figure 6 Anton van Wouw, Monumental Ensemble of Statue of Paul Kruger and Four Boer Krygers, 1896, bronze statues on sandstone plinth, Pretoria, Church Square (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Paul_Kruger,_Church_Square).

The ambiguity of post-(post)apartheid: domination and psychosocial repetition

Apartheid sprouted from colonial racism and power constellations that formed after the Second World War (Snyman in Duvenage 2016: 214). The seminal moment that caused the change to apartheid was when the National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948. Its all-white government immediately began enforcing existing policies of racial segregation under a system of legislation that institutionalised racism and discrimination. Non-whites were notoriously brutalised. With the power shift in 1948 the Afrikaner lost the political innocence that it obtained by being the victim of the Anglo-Boer War (Snyman in Duvenage 2016: 215).

The Afrikaners were driven to what Adorno and Horkheimer called a triple domination: domination of nature by humans, domination of nature in humans and domination of humans by humans. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that the desire of so-called enlightened societies (such as Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa) to dominate during the twentieth century was driven by an irrational fear of the unknown. The Afrikaner’s progress came at a cost to the “other” which was marginalised, exploited and sometimes destroyed. This was done through the sophisticated methods of the apartheid laws.

10 The peaceful elections of 27 April 1994 resulted in an overwhelming victory for the African National Congress (ANC) led by Nelson Mandela. It marked the end of apartheid and the period thereafter became known as post-apartheid. Although apartheid and post-apartheid seem on the surface to be two very distinct political and social systems, they are inextricably intertwined. Hook (2013: 1-6) prefers the term (post)apartheid, which is a terminological decision that signals the ambiguity of the current South African period, one that could be read both as a definitive break from apartheid, but also as a sub-category of the apartheid past. The term post-apartheid is used to simply refer to a less ambiguous context. Hook (2013: 1-6) places social change from apartheid to post-apartheid in its psychic temporal context. He describes the friction of apartheid/ post-apartheid transposition and the overlaying of past- and future-orientated trajectories of history. He addresses the temporal kernel of the question regarding psycho-social change and focuses on ‘psychosocial time’, specifically on instances of repetition, fixation, regression or nostalgia, which are symptomatic of different, often countervailing relations between ‘psychical causality’ and power (Olivier 2015: 124-130).

With the advent of democracy after the end of apartheid in 1994, the government of the “new South Africa” started to push its own political agenda, which in many ways was a repetition of the rhetoric of the Afrikaner of the twentieth century. Post-apartheid is similarly embroiled in dialogues concerning the struggle for freedom (from white domination and apartheid), the search for a new (African-based) foundation myth and the restoration of dignity (to black South Africans) (Grobler 2008: 174). This rhetoric had to be manifested in physical structures and since the end of apartheid various “sites of memory” have been established across South Africa. The history and life of Nelson Mandela, as mythical and iconic figure, is the focus of many of these sites and tourists can visit his birth place in the Eastern Cape, his house in Vilakazi Street, Soweto, his capture site in Howick, KZN, Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, Constitution Hill in central Johannesburg where he was imprisoned in the Old Fort during his trials in 1956 and then again in 1962 and Robben Island near Cape Town, where he served the biggest part of his 27 year prison sentence. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto and Freedom Park in Pretoria are other “new” sites that recall from memory the struggle against apartheid and the trauma that it caused many South Africans. In South Africa memory practices have a clear political function but are affected and partly created by international coverage of memory obsessions (Huyssen 2003: 28). Grobler (2008: 163) mentions the universal trend to politicise cultural memory sites and explains that because these sites are invariably tourist attractions, the government wants to control the way that the heritage and culture of a country and its people is presented to tourists. A government’s interference means the manipulation of the cultural property of a nation. South African memory practices should be seen against the background of the global explosion of memory discourses at the end of the twentieth century, which has added to how we understand history and deal with the temporal dimensions of social and cultural life in ways rarely achieved by professional historiography alone (Huyssen 2003: 5).

Memory discourse: remembering trauma in the 1990s

During the twentieth century the world was preoccupied with memory discourse, commemoration and monumentality. Memory discourse plays an important role in the temporal grounding or anchoring of a society that experiences an ever increasing time-space compression in the wake of the information revolution (Huyssen 2003: 6-7; 28). Together with literature, art and landscape, buildings and monuments constitute the most important externalisation of human memory. These

11 structures are thus mnemonic devices that concretise remembrance by containing and projecting memories. They stimulate and inspire us to reminisce and imagine. “We cannot conceive or remember time as a mere physical dimension; we can only grasp time through its actualisations; the traces, places and events of temporal occurrence.” Architectural structures facilitate human memory (Pallasmaa 2007: 189-90).

Everyday existence is mostly unremarkable and easy to forget, masked by our march towards progress. But a traumatic event is less susceptible to the vagaries of memory (Huyssen 2003: 101), probably because trauma is a psychic phenomenon located on the threshold between remembering and forgetting. In the 1980s post-modern pluralism was characterised by an obsession with happiness, but in the 1990s trauma was given global preference (Huyssen 2003: 8). People relate to place and time through memory (Bender 2002: 107), but by privileging trauma, our understanding of memory is marked exclusively in terms of pain, suffering and loss and our memories are collapsed into trauma, which denies human agency and locks us into compulsive traumatic repetitions (Huyssen 2003: 8). Hook (2013: 1-6) describes the violent pathological repetitions of past social and political formations and focuses on “psychosocial time” when describing repetition, fixation, regression and nostalgia, as symptoms of the relationship between psychical causality and power.18

One of the ways to break out from compulsive traumatic repetitions is to engage in public memory discourses. The transnational discourse of human rights is one way for individuals to deal with historical trauma. Truth commissions and juridical proceedings are more effective than transferring psychoanalysis onto politics and history. Another way is the creation of objects, artworks, memorials, public spaces and commemoration (Huyssen 2003: 9). Certain architectural structures, such as memorials, are conceived and built deliberately to preserve and evoke grief and melancholy, joy and hope (Pallasmaa 2007: 190). Where everyday life is time marked by forgetfulness and the uncelebrated and un-monumental, trauma is worthy of commemoration and preservation in the national consciousness.

The intense global interest in witness and survivor testimonies started with a multi-national holocaust discourse, merged with discourses on AIDS, slavery, family violence and child abuse and radiated out to South Africa after apartheid19. “The privileging of trauma formed a thick discursive network with those other signifiers of the 1990s, all which have to do with repression and a present repetitively haunted by the past” (Huyssen 2003: 8).

But the commemoration of the trauma experienced during apartheid was not enough. What lacked was an expression of an African-based foundation myth, which is a psychosocial repetition of the Afrikaner’s search for its origins during the twentieth century.

African memory reformulation, myth and monument in post-apartheid Pretoria

The front of the city hall of Pretoria, called Pretorius Park, is home to two prominent statues that commemorate the founding of the capital: an equestrian statue of , after whom Pretoria was named, and one of his son Marthinus Wessel (MW) Pretorius, who was the founder of Pretoria in 1855. In 2006 a new layer was added to the existing historical palimpsest of Pretorius Park when a statue of Chief Tshwane (by sculptor Angus Taylor) (figure 8) was erected in line with the existing sculptures defining the front of the city hall (figure 7). Claims were made that Tshwane was the original founder of the town and the name of the greater metropolitan

12 area of Pretoria was changed to the City of Tshwane in 2005. This name change met with huge opposition and was rejected by many of its (white) citizens. Apart from allegations that this was an attempt by the new government to erase the historical past of the Boer-found town, the historical accuracy of the existence of a Chief Tshwane was questioned.

Oral tradition claims that Chief Tshwane lived around 1600 and ordered his family to move away to avoid “genocide by the plundering Voortrekkers”, but the Voortrekkers only arrived in the area in the 1830s and did not even exist around 1600 (Grobler 2008: 175-7). Historians did record that in the 1600s a Ndebele tribe led by a chief called Musi, occupied the area after travelling from Natal, where his son Tshwane (small ape) was born. It was told that after Tshwane’s death, the river that originates in the Fountains area was named after him. However, the exact location of the Ndebele’s settlement cannot be established. Archaeological evidence proves that Pretoria was inhabited during the Stone Age (Labuschagne 2006: 50-1), but only one site in the Fountains Valley area could be identified where definite Iron Age occupation is visible. That site is a cave located in a dolomite outcrop, currently in the Groenkloof Nature Reserve.20 The addition of Chief Tshwane to Pretoria’s history is an attempt at a black founding myth and the creation of an imagined past (Grobler 2008: 175-7).

Figure 7 Statues of Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, Andries Pretorius and Chief Tshwane (from left to right) in front of the (retrieved from the public domain https://showme.co.za/pretoria/tourism/the-statues-of-pretoria/ on 16 August 2019).

13 Figure 8 Angus Taylor, Chief Tshwane, 2006, 6.2m tall (retrieved from the public domain http://www.visittshwane.co.za/gallery/gallery-city-hall/).

Elleh (2002: 163) stated that the most obvious way to reformulate memory with the transformation from one regime to the next is by changing street and city names. This is usually met with resistance because a part of the population feels that name changes would lead to loss of identity (Rapoport 1977: 111). When the symbolic ox wagon trek, fuelled by a wave of , moved through “the path of South Africa” in 1938 (see Mostert 1940), many street names with existing historical names were changed to commemorate the Great Trek21. In post-colonial African states name changes, as an attempt to erase colonial memories, are common 22. In Pretoria many street names were also changed after the end of apartheid to commemorate struggle heroes. Ultimately there is not enough empirical evidence to warrant the name change from Pretoria to Tshwane, since Tshwane referred to an area and not a place. Furthermore, since power is a fundamental aspect of politics, the reasons for changing the name is fundamentally power political and not historical (Labuschagne 2006: 49-56).

The erection of Chief Tshwane’s statue should be seen in the African context of commemoration. Both Elleh (2002: 163) and Grobler (2008: 177) remark on the application of Western memory devices to create African monuments. “The current practice is to imitate western commemorative conventions. A “proper monument” is regarded as a bronze statue on a pedestal, even though this style might be questioned in the post-apartheid context that aims to create an African Renaissance” (Grobler 2008: 177). The statue of Chief Tshwane certainly fits that mould.

14 The new 9m high statue of Nelson Mandela (by sculptors André Prinsloo and Ruhan Janse van Vuuren) (figure 9) at the is not on a pedestal but it also represents a “Western” style memory device. The statue was unveiled on 16 December 2013 in front of the Union Buildings on the spot where Hertzog’s statue once stood. The two wings of the Union Buildings symbolised the coming together of the Afrikaans and the English in 1910 and now Mandela’s spread out arms link the two wings in an embrace of the nation. Mandela is smiling and in movement (in contrast to Paul Kruger’s slightly downward solemn stare to the north). The statue looks to the south with his back turned to the Union Buildings in a welcoming gesture towards the people, from the state.

In other African countries adaptations of Roman-based iconography have marked post- colonial African structures23. Elleh (2002: xviii - xiv) explained that monuments that grab back to ancient civilisations are alien to traditional African culture, but despite being self-contradictory, post independence African states often embrace western-type monumental objects, especially to express and exercise political power. Although this concept applies in a lesser way to the Kruger statue, there are certain similarities. The ZAR was a post-colonial African state that prided itself on its freedom from British Imperial rule. The statue of Paul Kruger was self-contradictory because it did not fit in with the cultural and religious values of the man himself. The erection of the statue on Church Square, fifty years after the death of Paul Kruger, was executed in the spirit of nineteenth century monumentalisation, where the Afrikaner foundation myth was applied to strengthen the nationalist political agenda.

Figure 9 André Prinsloo and Ruhan Janse van Vuuren, Nelson Mandela, 16 December 2013, bronze, 9m tall, Union Buildings Pretoria (retrieved from the public domain https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2014/01/why-there-rabbit-inside-ear-mandela-statue/357269/).

15 Huyssen (2003: 109) reminds us that “the old practice where a figurative sculpture is placed on a pedestal in the middle of a square (as on Church Square) has been replaced by the preferred construction of memory sites in the expanded field that combine sculpture, landscaping, architecture and design and their incorporation into an urban fabric, such as Libeskind’s museum extension in Berlin, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and Memorial Park in Buenos Aires.” Initially post-apartheid South Africa followed the trend to construct such memory sites, as Freedom Park, but it has since regressed to the old practice of placing a bronze sculpture in an urban space, as with the various statues of Mandela (at the Union Buildings, in Bloemfontein and in Sandton) and of Chief Tshwane.

In an increasingly secular Western culture, memory has been marketed successfully, driven by the fear of forgetting, through public and private memorialisation (Huyssen 2003: 15, 18). Huyssen’s (2003: 23) hypothesis is that “the prominence of museums and mnemo- history is an attempt to create a barrier against the erasure and disappearance of memories in a society where the speed of change and the ever-shrinking horizons of time and space cause deep anxiety.” But on the African continent politics have influenced the production of monumental objects since independence (Elleh 2002: xviii) and in post-apartheid South Africa, with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the issues of memory and forgetting are more than just concerns of the past. They have become part of the very political legitimacy of its regime today (Huyssen 2003: 94). “The twin forces of foundation myth and political correctness make it unavoidable for politics to be a determining influence on the way that heritage and cultural attractions convey their message to tourists” Grobler (2008: 163).

To date the statues of the founding fathers of Pretoria stand side by side with the legendary Chief Tshwane in front of the city hall, seeming truly part of the rainbow nation24 transformed in terms of social and cultural activities, and the statue of Paul Kruger remains in the centre of Church Square, but recent calls for non-African symbols of power to step down from their pedestals have become a prominent part of the decolonising debate, which has led to protests on Church Square and damage to the bronze statues.

Removal of statues as part of the decolonising debate

The decolonising debate started in 2015 with a revival of the black consciousness movement amongst University of Cape Town students, which was expressed in the “♯Rhodes Must Fall” campaign to remove the Rhodes statue in front of campus. Protests extended to Oxford, England, which is home to the Rhodes scholarship. English born Cecil John Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape and had strong British imperialist sentiments. Although protesting students are mainly part of the “born free generation” (born after 1994) and were thus never part of the apartheid struggle themselves, they are dissatisfied with the remaining presence of colonial and apartheid symbols, as well as with a dysfunctional government that cannot change their economic situation, which is another remnant of colonial and apartheid legacies. The feeling that a statue can “radiate supernatural omnipresence” caused some protestors to hurl human faeces at the statue in order to shame and thus de-sanctify it (Du Plessis 2017: 271-290).

This movement has spread to Church Square with increasingly loud protests, this time not from students but from members of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), to remove Paul Kruger’s statue because “he killed black people”25. The statue of Paul Kruger has thus not remained exempt from the call for colonial and apartheid symbols to step down from their

16 pedestals on account of the historic injustice associated with their persons (Clarke and Kuipers 2015: 14). Although the complete opposite of a British Imperialist, Kruger was the president of the ZAR, which was established by the white Afrikaans Voortrekkers when they settled north of the Vaal and made Pretoria their capital. The monument has recently been vandalised during shows of public violence, painted lime green and set alight.

However, many members of the Afrikaans population see the proposed removal of statues as offensive to their culture and as an attempt to erase signs of their heritage. They look towards the Constitution and the National Heritage Resources Act no 25 of 1999 to protect their heritage. Although the Constitution of South Africa states that the country belongs to all who live in it and that we are united in our diversity, this diversity runs deep with a rainbow of heritages in the South African public sphere (Du Plessis 2017: 271-290). The National Heritage Resources Act no 25 of 1999 states that no person may destroy, damage, deface or remove from its original position any heritage site without a permit issued by the heritage resources authority responsible for the protection of the site. The City of Tshwane suggests public dialogue in order to change public spaces to represent a new identity.26 Even before these protests gained momentum, Labuschagne (2011: 142-154) warned against the removal of statues by explaining the significance of maintaining the historical nexus between the monument and its site. Placing an African struggle hero in Paul Kruger’s place would completely sever the historical nexus.

In this regard Clarke (in Clarke and Kuipers 2015: 85) included the term “resilience” to the discourse on erasure vs. preservation. He acknowledges that the built environment has to frequently adapt in order to reject past ideologies and to reflect new ones, but he adds that “museumifying” or preserving the built environment in a fixed state for the sake of commemorating an intangible memory of the past, would fail to address its worth in terms of the present society with its new needs and values. Erasing historical structures will not change history and it will not automatically address current problems. He suggests that the built heritage in Pretoria be allowed to play a role in developing the general resilience of the city in order to become inclusive and liveable, in the current socio-political context.

There are those that add another dimension to the discourse surrounding the removal of statues, but their motivation for wanting to do so is based on the notion that the nineteenth century model, wherein nation states monumentalised national and universal pasts so as to legitimise or to give meaning to the cultural, political and social present and to envision the future, no longer works (Huyssen 2003: 2).

Anti-monumentalism

Post-war Europe saw a similar call for the removal of statues and monuments, which Sudjic (2005: xiv) related as an effort to repress future uprising and curb the hankering after the old regime. Huyssen (2003: 38-9) stated that there were other concerns:

From early modernism to current post-modernism, there has been an aesthetic consensus for anti- monumentalism. The monument is aesthetically suspect because it is tied to nineteenth century bad taste, kitsch and mass culture. It is politically suspect because it represents nineteenth century nationalism and twentieth century totalitarianism. It is socially suspect because it is the privileged mode of expression of mass politics. It is ethically suspect because in its preference for bigness it indulges in the larger than human, in the attempt to overwhelm the individual spectator. It is psychoanalytically suspect because it is tied to narcissistic delusions of grandeur and to imaginary

17 wholeness. Michel Foucault claimed that monumental seduction represents the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power and to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

Maré (2006: 95) concurred and added that monuments are primarily erected to celebrate military victories and the prominent stature and prestige of a living or deceased political leader or to serve as political statements rooted in some current ideology. She believes that monuments encourage a false sense of memory of the historical truth that they are supposed to commemorate and no matter how they are designed, most monuments are intended to politically indoctrinate those for whose viewing they are intended. She claims that, as a material object, no monument can heal a nation and the building of monuments cannot escape the struggle for possession and interpretation of memory that is rooted among the conflict and interplay of social, political and cultural interest values in the present. Critique of these notions is that monuments are not always about memory or the interpretation thereof and that a monument can be visualised and designed to attempt to heal a nation.

Monuments have proven to be transformable and transitory. If a monument is also a statue, it is exposed as temporal and the traditional stabilities that had always remained unquestioned in the past, become the focus of resistance. Public memory is subject to change. It cannot be stored forever or secured by monuments (Huyssen 2003: 28). In the current history and memory debate, our notions of the past are disturbed and our imagination of alternative futures is in crisis (Huyssen 2003: 2).

Post-Apartheid as more than a temporal condition

When the decolonising debate spread to Church Square in 2015, the voices of those who want the remaining presence of colonial and apartheid symbols to be removed became increasingly loud. The vandalism on Church Square coincided with other shows of public violence across the country, all roughly twenty years after the end of apartheid. Hook (2013: 1-6) points out the significance of the time when these upheavals occurred.

Twenty years after the end of apartheid South Africa experienced a resurgence of violence27 that appears to be pathological repetitions of the past social and political formation of apartheid and the endemic suffering and violence that it gave rise to. These symptoms of post-apartheid often reflect the social contradiction of an unequal society. Hook (2013: 1-6) explains that psychosocial time plays a role in post-apartheid temporality. The South African experience is characterised by historical dissonance and the juxtaposition of forward- and backward looking temporalities. Post-apartheid temporality simultaneously pulls in two directions: towards the utopic future of what post-apartheid South Africa could be and back towards where structural change has stalled or sometimes regressed.

Hook (2013: 1-6) states that the (post)apartheid condition is haunted by the dull historical echoes of apartheid. His ambiguous term (post)apartheid indicates that apartheid and post- apartheid are more than just temporal conditions: they are social formations, where psychical time and the societal are indivisible. The term thus has a double temporality. Exactly like change in the psychoanalytical process, political transition implies a temporal condition.

History is usually present in psychological and psychoanalytical research but it is often just applied to provide historical contextualisation, which remains divorced from historical 18 comparison. But if the underlying temporalities are considered, temporality becomes the quality of time, in contrast to history, which is an amassed series of past and on-going events. The psychosocial cannot be isolated from the historical (Hook 2013: 4).

Hook (2013: 7) explains that the South African landscape is littered with different temporalities and multiple timelines in its on-going history of transition. Each area in South Africa is a product of various pasts and there is a multiplicity of discourses that are particular to each social-historic site. The post-apartheid condition of the Afrikaner monuments, in other words its future, has not been written yet.

A statue for Jacob Zuma

The ANC after Mandela has come to be characterised by political instability and rapid change in leadership on all state levels. Those in leadership positions today fall from grace tomorrow, either because they form part of the wrong faction in the ANC, or due to corruption or incompetence. The figure of Jacob Zuma is probably the best example thereof. After being fired by then President Mbeki, Zuma was elected as leader of the ANC and went on to become the fourth president of democratic South Africa. However, his links to the notorious Indian Gupta family, allegations of state capture and criminal charges of rape and corruption against him have permanently marred his reputation. It is therefore not surprising that Zuma searched for a visible expression that would guarantee origin and stability as well as depth of time and space in his rapidly changing world.

The Groot Marico Heritage Site, containing the Zuma Capture Site Monument (figure 10), can be seen as a manifestation of his desire to legitimise or give meaning to his present. Zuma, then president, opened the site on 1 October 2017, assisted by his staunch supporter and now disgraced North West Premier Supra Mahumapelo. The monument is in honour of Zuma and other MK recruits, who were arrested by the apartheid police in 1963 while on their way to Botswana to receive military training. His arrest led to his ten-year imprisonment on Robben Island, after he and his fellow accused were convicted for conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government. Zuma believed that the site would have the potential to stimulate economic activity, create jobs, and attract local and international cultural tourism, but it has failed on all accounts. A 6m high bronze statue of Zuma was initially planned, but opposition parties protested against the wasteful expenditure in an area where there was no running water28. The creator of the monument is Afrikaans sculptor Chris van der Vyver, who primarily works in stainless steel. What discerns this monument from the statues of Paul Kruger, Chief Tshwane and Nelson Mandela, also all created by Dutch/Afrikaans sculptors, is the apparent lack of intrinsic aesthetic or artistic merit (see comparison in figure 11). The setting reminds more of a Bushveld camp than of anything associated with Zuma’s Zulu culture and the obvious English spelling and grammar mistakes on the plaques that commemorate his struggle, render the monument a sad reminder of incompetence and failure in the current South African state, rather than relating it to place and time through the memory of pain, suffering, loss and trauma.

Conclusion

The evolution of sculptural tradition in South African from the ZAR to post-apartheid is tied to specific political power transformations and although the transition from apartheid to post-

19 apartheid has been propagated as having been peaceful, the violence that led up to and followed on political power transformation cannot be denied. Sculptural tradition was transformed in each case by adopting, adapting and elaborating upon an existing sculptural tradition. It shows distinct psychosocial repetition, and connects the new power to a mythical past. The concept of the palimpsest applies when considering how old sculptural traditions are layered with new ones, and how each new power attempts to erase the mythical past of its predecessor. And to apply the words of Thomas de Quincey, even though the process of layering which created these palimpsests was born out of a need to erase and destroy previous layers, the re-emergence of those destroyed layers renders a structure that privileges heterogeneity and diversity.

Figure 10 Chris van der Vyver, Jacob Zuma statue, Capture Site Monument, Groot Marico Heritage Site (photograph by the author).

Figure 11 Table illustrating transformation through four South African statues of (power) political figures (table by the author). 20 Notes

1 Retrieved from https://www.wikiwand.com/en/ 11 For a guide to Afrikaner memorials, see Battle_of_Actium on 13 January 2019. Grobler, J. 2012. Monumentale erfenis: ’n gids tot 50 Afrikaner-gedenktekens. Pretoria: 2 The statue was discovered on 20 April 1863 at Kontak-Uitgewers. the Villa Suburbana owned by Augustus’s third wife, Livia Drusilla in Prima Porta near Rome 12 The terms Freedom War or South African War (retrieved from https://www.khanacademy. refer to the same war, but in this article the term org/humanities /ap-art-history/ancient- Anglo-Boer War will be used. The First Anglo- mediterranean-ap/ap-ancient-rome/a/augustus- Boer War (First Freedom War) was fought from of-primaporta on 13 January 2019). 1880 – 1881 and the Second Anglo-Boer War (Second Freedom War) was fought from 1899- 3 Augustus believed in ancestral values such as 1902. monogamy, chastity, virtue and the family unit. He promoted and encouraged traditional Roman 13 Du Toit states in Duvenage (2016: 120) that religion in the state by introducing a number he searched for the source of the idea that of moral, political and religious reforms. His Afrikaners were the Chosen People of God religious revival included the restoration of during his research at Yale in 1981, but that he public monuments and the temples of gods, the found no relevant primary historical sources revival of the priesthoods, the reintroduction in the middle of the nineteenth century for this of past ceremonies and festivals, and the notion, until David Livingston developed it construction of new monuments (retrieved as polemic construction, which ironically was from: https://www.ancient.eu/religion/religion/ taken over by later generations of Afrikaners. on 4 May 2019). Du Toit wrote “No chosen People” and later critically added a comparative perspective 4 Retrieved from https://www.khanacademy. to the twentieth century development of the org/humanities/ap-art-history/ancient- idea of uitverkorendheid (being chosen). mediterranean-ap/ap-ancient-rome/a/augustus- But Abrahamse and Clarke (2014: 31) tell a of-primaporta on 13 January 2019. different story. During the nineteenth century the Dutch believed that they were God’s chosen 5 Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ people who through the grace of God formed Palimpsest. the Netherlands as a state free from Spanish and Roman Catholic rule. The Protestant Dutch 6 Retrieved from https://lucian.uchicago.edu/ Republic was believed to have been a second blogs/mediatheory/keywords/palimpsest/. Israel to the Egypt of Spanish tyranny. The Boers were eager to apply that line of thinking 7 Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/ to themselves. entries/adorno/ on 1 January 2019. 14 Struggle history in South Africa is associated 8 The massive stone palace, begun three hundred with the struggle for freedom, mainly by people years earlier, was across from the Lustgarten of colour, from the apartheid regime that was and had Baroque façades, a corner dome, two perpetuated by a white minority. Although inner courtyards and 1200 rooms (Sudjic 2005: apartheid only became an official policy in 122). 1948, the liberation struggle stretched from the beginning of the twentieth century up until 9 Dierksmeier and Röttcher designed the Haus South Africa’s first democratic election in des Fremdesverkehrs (German House of 1994 (see https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/ Tourism) in 1936 as part of a quadrant of stone- liberation-struggle-south-africa). Grobler uses fronted blocks that were the only section of the same term “struggle history” to describe Speer’s north-south axis for the city Germania the Afrikaner’s struggle for freedom from the that was actually built (Sudjic 2005: 124). British during the nineteenth century. The Great Trek and the Anglo-Boer War were stumbling 10 Retrieved from https://www.germansociety.org/ blocks or hurdles en route to securing that classes/konversationsabend-humboldt-forum- freedom. reconstruction-old-imperial-palace-berlin/ on 4 January 2019. 15 During a visit to Sweden in 1912 S.H. Pellissier witnessed how, after a day’s work, young people would entertain themselves with folk 21 song and dance, dressed in colourful traditional as Roberts Heights. The name was changed attire. This was lacking in Afrikaans society and to Voortrekkerhoogte as part of the wave of upon his return he introduced the Afrikaanse Afrikaner nationalism, to the dismay of the Volksang- en Volkspelebeweging (AVVB), based English residents of Pretoria (Labuschagne on the European model that he saw in Sweden. 2006: 54). It is currently called , which means the hill of Tshwane. Similarly, 16 Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (1825-1904) St. John Street in Bloemfontein became was the State President of the Zuid Afrikaansche Voortrekker Street and then became Nelson Republiek (ZAR). He held office from 1883 to Mandela Drive. 1902 (retrieved from http://melvinresidence. blogspot.co.za/2012/08/proposed-street-name- 22 Rhodesia was changed to Zimbabwe, Salisbury changes-in.html.) Paul Kruger died on 14 July to Harare, South West Africa to Namibia, etc. 1904 in Clarens, Switzerland. His body was returned to the Transvaal and on 16 December 23 An adaptation of the concept of the Roman 1904 his memorial service, which was attended triumphal arch was erected for the celebration by 30,000 people, took place on Church Square, of Ghana’s freedom from the British (Elleh Pretoria, where he had taken the oath as head of 2002: 163). Houphouët-Boigny ordered the state four times (Meiring 1980: 61). construction of the world’s largest Catholic church in Yamoussoukro. His Ivorian ideology 17 The statue of Paul Kruger was originally was driven by the search for the perfect intended for Church Square, but the proposed architectural style, which he believed could geographic location was further to the west, only come out of the Greek and Roman between the Palace of Justice and the second tradition. The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace is Old Raadsaal, west of the church. a replication of a Renaissance inspired Greco- Roman style of architecture and ornamentation 18 See also Olivier’s (2015: 124-130) review (Elleh 2002: 4, 110). of Hook’s (Post)apartheid Conditions: Psychoanalysis and Social Formation. 24 Archbishop Desmond Tutu coined the phrase “the rainbow nation” to describe the dream of 19 The South African Truth and Reconciliation post-apartheid South Africa, where all races Commission (TRC) was set up by the live in harmony and thrive in a climate of Government of National Unity to help deal with reconciliation and multi-culturalism. what happened under apartheid. The conflict during apartheid resulted in violence and 25 Retrieved from https://www.news24. human rights abuses from all sides, from which com/Archives/City-Press/Activist-Paul- no section of society escaped (retrieved from Kruger-statue-will-be-defaced-until-it-is- http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/ on 31 December removed-20150429 on 6 January 2019. 2018). The Apartheid Archive Project collected narrative accounts from a wide range of South 26 Retrieved from http://www.iol.co.za/ Africans about their experiences of racism news/politics/oom-pauls-days-are- during apartheid (Hook 2013: 15). numbered-1846816.

20 Retrieved from http://www.sahra.org.za/ 27 Hook (2013: 2) names xenophobic attacks and sites/default/files/heritagereports/ Other_ the Marikana massacre. Groenkloof_Nat_Res _Van_Vollenhoven_AC_ Aug08_0.pdf). 28 Retrieved from https://ewn.co.za/2017/10/04/ zuma-unveils-monument-at-groot-marico- 21 The South African Army College is situated capture-site on 16 August 2019. on a hill in Pretoria that was previously known

Works cited Abrahamse, J.E. and Clarke, N. J. 2014. in Africa. Pretoria: Visual Books: 25-47. The lure of the ‘Golden Republic’, K.A. Bakker, N.J. Clarke and R.C. Fisher, Baird, L.A. 2015. Eloquent Design: Essays (eds.). Eclectic ZA Wilhelmiens: A on the Rhetorics of Vision. Cambridge: Shared Dutch Built Heritage in South Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 22 Bender, B. 2002. Time and landscape. Hook, D. 2013. (Post)apartheid Conditions: Current Anthropology, 43 (Supplement Psychoanalysis and Social Formation. August/October): 103-112. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Clarke, N.J. and Kuipers, M. (Eds). 2015. Huyssen, A. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Re-centring Tshwane: Urban Heritage Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Strategies for a Resilient Capital. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pretoria: Visual Books. Janson, H.W. 1970. A History of Art. London: Du Plessis, G.A. 2017. “Rhodes must fall” – Thames and Hudson. an alternative approach to statues in the South African public sphere, in M.C. Labuschagne, P. 2006. Pretoria or Tshwane? Green, R.I.J. Hackett, L. Hansen and The politics of name changes, Journal F. Venter (eds.), Religious Pluralism, for Contemporary History, 31(1): Heritage and Social Development in 49–61. Africa. Stellenbosch: Sun Media: 271-90. Labuschagne, P. 2011. Memorial complexity and political change: Paul Kruger’s Duvenage, P.N.J. 2016. Afrikaanse filosofie: statue’s political travels through space perspektiewe en dialoë. Bloemfontein: and time, South African Journal of Art SunMedia. History, 26(3): 142–54.

Elleh, N. 2002. Architecture and Power in Leedy, P.D. 1989. Practical Research: Africa. Westport: Praeger. Planning and Design. New York: Macmillan. Engelbrecht, S.P. (Ed.). 1952. Centenary Album: Pretoria’s First Century in Lowe, E.A. 1972. A key to Bede’s Illustration. Pretoria: Van Schaik. scriptorium. In: Bieler L. (Ed.). Palaeographical Papers 1907-1965, 2. Fisher, R.C. 1998. The Third Vernacular, in Oxford: Clarendon: 441-49. R.C. Fisher, S. Le Roux and E. Maré (eds.), Architecture of the Transvaal. Lyon, B., Rowen, H.H. and Hamerow, T.S. Pretoria: UNISA: 122-147. 1968. A History of the Western World. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company. Groat, L and Wang, D. 2002. Architectural Research Methods. Hoboken, NJ: Maré, E.A. 2006. A critique of the spoliation Wiley. of the ridges of the capital city of South Africa, South African Journal of Art Grobler, J. 2008. The impact of politics on History 21(1): 95-103. heritage and cultural tourism in South Africa. Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Meiring, H. 1980. Pretoria 125. Cape Town: Kultuurgeskiedenis. 22(1): 163 – 85. Human & Rousseau.

Grobler, J. 2012. Monumentale erfenis: ’n Mostert, D. (Ed.). 1940. Gedenkboek: van die gids tot 50 Afrikaner-gedenktekens. ossewaens op die pad van Suid-Afrika: Pretoria: Kontak-Uitgewers. Eeufees: 1838-1939. Kaapstad: ATKV Nasionale Pers. Hollier, D. 1989. Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille. Olivier, B. 2015. Repetition or retrieval and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. transformation? Derek Hook’s (post) 23 apartheid conditions – psychoanalysis Approach to Urban Form and Design. and social formation, Journal of Oxford: Pergamon Press. African and Asian Studies (50) (1): 124-30. Sudjic, D. 2005. The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World. Pallasmaa, J. 2009. Space, place, memory and London: Penguin Books. imagination, in M. Treib (ed.), Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Tempelhoff, J.W.N. 1998. Omvormings van Landscape. New York: Routledge. ‘n Afrikaanse kernsimbool: ’n hede- geskiedenis van Kerkplein 1989-1997, Pischel, G. 1978. A World History of Art. Journal for Contemporary History 23(2 New York: Newsweek Inc. December, 4): 120-47.

Rapoport, A. 1977. Human Aspects of Urban Van Bart, M. 2009. Waar is dié monument? Form: Towards a Man-Environment Die Burger, 3 January: 10.

Yolanda van der Vyver holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of the Free State and a Masters degree in Architecture from the University of Pretoria. She has been a practicing architect since 1996 and is a founding member of Y and K Architects.

24 Designing apartments for changing demographics in South Africa

Gerald Steyn Tshwane University of Technology E-mail: [email protected]

This article focuses on two changing demographic phenomena. The first is caused by the circular migration of members of middle to high income households, who regard their ancestral villages as their real homes, and who want cheap, centrally located accommodation. The second changing demographic is the result of an emerging trend towards providing poor households with subsidised, inclusionary housing near employment opportunities. The purpose of this study is to examine the requirements of these households and translate them into tentative normative design principles. This study relies primarily on observation and interviews for information. A review of the demographic dynamics under study is followed by a discussion of density and urban issues, spatial typologies, and floor area norms. Key words: circular migration, floor area norms, inclusionary housing, spatial typologies

Die ontwerp van woonstelle vir die veranderende demografie van Suid-Afrika Hierdie artikel fokus op twee veranderende demografiese verskynsels. Die eerste word veroorsaak deur die sirkulêre migrasie van lede van middel- tot hoë inkomste-huishoudings, wat hul voorouersdorpe as hul regte huise beskou, en wat goedkoop, sentraal geleë akkommodasie wil hê. Die tweede veranderende demografie is die resultaat van ’n opkomende neiging om aan arm huishoudings gesubsidieerde, inklusiewe behuising naby werksgeleenthede te bied. Die doel van hierdie studie is om die vereistes van hierdie huishoudings te ondersoek en dit in tentatiewe normatiewe ontwerpbeginsels te omskep. Hierdie studie berus hoofsaaklik op waarneming en onderhoude vir inligting. ’n Oorsig van die demografiese dinamika wat bestudeer word, word gevolg deur ’n bespreking van digtheid en stedelike aangeleenthede, ruimtelike tipologieë en vloeroppervlaktes. Sleutelwoorde: sirkulêre migrasie, vloeroppervlakte-norme, insluitende behuising, ruimtelike tipologieë

hanging demographics have been a characteristic of South Africa’s population profile for many hundreds of years. Expansion north from the European settlement at the CCape coincided with the southward migration of Bantu-speaking tribes. Amongst other disruptions, this resulted in the displacement of the Khoisan to the Kalahari. Mzilikazi’s raids, Zulu expansion, the Great Trek, the 1913 Land Act and Apartheid policies of separate development and forced removals, all contributed to demographic shifts. More recently, democracy removed barriers to free movement and substantial numbers of rural people migrated to the cities.

This study explores two demographic shifts: first, the apparently large number of Black people with high-income jobs in the cities, but with strong ties to their ancestral homes in rural villages, to which they return frequently. Since contemporary rural-urban migration has mostly been associated with the quest to escape poverty, this phenomenon has – as far as could be established – not been reported on previously. Second, the impact of the inclusionary housing policy recently proclaimed by the City of Johannesburg, that will unquestionably see a movement of low-income people to affluent medium and high-density mixed-use precincts. Inclusionary housing is intended to allow low income people who would otherwise have been shack dwellers, to live closer to employment opportunities. Since many of the recipients of inclusionary housing are inevitably also part of the regular urban-rural movement – called circular migration – these two demographics are totally interlinked.

SAJAH, ISSN 0258-3542, volume 34, number 2, 2019: 25-42 The White Paper on Housing entitled “A New Housing Policy and Strategy for South Africa” identified circular migration and dual households as one of the “specific sociological factors [that] complicate the ability of housing policy to reach all targets”.1

Evidence for this circular migration emerged long ago: well-known economist Mike Schüssler (2012) claimed that 31,7% of Blacks owned a second property, compared to 10,3% of Whites. Considering the customary close ties with the rural ancestral home, this was not unexpected. Whereas many such households presumably own a makeshift shack in a shantytown, and a rural thatched rondavel, many others can afford to buy houses in town. Still others prefer to rent apartments. In practice, these two groups will then live side-by-side and share amenities.

The emergence of these two demographic phenomena and their associated domestic requirements raises two areas of concern. The first is the lack of flexibility and adaptability in South African apartment designs, and the second is their small floor areas. I will refer to these two demographic types as the luxury car group and the inclusionary housing group respectively.

Method of study

This study of the selected demographic phenomena is geographically delimited to the Hatfield area in Pretoria, Tshwane, although the presence of tenants with very expensive cars is also evident in other medium and high-density neighbourhoods. The methodology is based on in-situ observation and informal interviews, supported with data from the literature.

The analysis of human behaviour by architects through observation in settings under study is a recognised research method. As the indomitable Kevin Lynch (1981: 185) put it: “Empathy and a sharp eye are the best analytical tools.” Figure 1 indicates the core topics and the sequence of the study.

Figure 1 Core topics and sequence of the study (compiled by the author).

Changing demographics

The proportion of building plans approved for the construction of apartments increased from 26% in 2013 to 59% in 2016, according to the Statistician-General (Bloor 2017: 24). Since the 26 population has not doubled during that period, this statistic means that a higher proportion of people are now flat dwellers (figure 2).

Figure 2 Distribution of dwelling types in 2012 (based on figures released by Statistics SA).2

Immediately after the democratic elections, the White Paper on Housing of 1994, under the heading of “Land and Planning Issues” stated optimistically:

The country’s extremely wasteful approach to land will have to change, allowing for higher densities and innovation in its use. A different approach to land use not only promises the possibility of social cohesion but can also have a dramatic and beneficial impact on costs and the efficiency of other resource utilisation such as energy and water.

Disregarding this rational advice, Government then went ahead and built approximately three million small RDP (for Reconstruction and Development Programme) houses on the fringes of cities, thereby greatly contributing to urban spread. Ten years after the original White Paper the (then) South African National Department of Housing released its Breaking New Ground document, subtitled “A Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Sustainable Human Settlements”. Under the heading of “Redefining the Concept of Social (Medium-density) Housing” it is stated:3

Social housing products may accordingly include multi-level flat or apartments options for higher income groups (incorporating beneficiary mixes to support the principle of integration and cross- subsidization); cooperative group housing; transitional housing for destitute households; communal housing with a combination of family and single room accommodation with shared facilities and hostels.

Again, since 2004 there has been very limited government support for any of the housing options mentioned above. The concept of communal housing resonates with the theme of this study. For a long time, the author has been puzzled by the presence of disproportionately expensive cars in student and middle-income apartment block parking areas (figure 3). On closer observation, it was found that their owners are certainly not students. It took more years and some tactful

27 engagement with caretakers and rental administrators to obtain a clear picture: for the owners of those luxury vehicles, “home” is the ancestral village of an extended family, patently not the flat. The flat is simply a temporary sojourn between weekends.

Figure 3 Expensive cars in a student apartment complex (photos by the author).

For these households, the city is a place of employment, to be evacuated over weekends for the trip home. In many cases couples leave their children in the care of family members back home (usually the grandparents); two couples would then share a two-bedroom flat. There are also instances of three couples sharing such a flat, with one couple then occupying the living room.

Meals are seldom prepared in the flat. The occupants frequent the restaurants in the vicinity or buy take-away food. Those expensive cars are not used during the week. These

28 individuals walk to work, or travel by Gautrain and minibus-taxi. It is exactly this arrangement that makes those cars – in their cultural milieu perhaps the ultimate symbols of accomplishment – “affordable”.

This phenomenon is common in neighbouring Botswana, where the villages remain the custodians of Tswana culture (figure 4). Over holidays, cities such as Gaborone and Francistown are deserted. Many shopping centres are even closed during that period.

Figure 4 Circular migration in Botswana (photos by the author).

Communitarianism

The social cohesion of family and community that draws people back to their ancestral villages prevails all over sub-Saharan Africa, a socio-cultural phenomenon that Metz and Gaie (2010: 274) term “Afro-Communitarianism”. From a European perspective, it is perhaps inevitable to conclude that Afro-Communitarianism is not particularly relevant in cities, essentially because urban migrants are separated from the family and friends of their ancestral villages.

However, it seems as if the demands of urbanism and urban living have produced a different kind of communitarianism; a temporary and fluid one necessitated by economic exigencies. The phenomenon of people sharing accommodation and sharing housing costs is found all over the world, and has been the case since antiquity. In South Africa it is evident in the dramatic increase of people living in backyard shacks. The well-known social scientists, Ivan Turok and Jackie Borel-Saladin (2015:387), found that, based on the 2011 population census data, the number of households living in backyards had increased by 55% from 460 000 to 713 000 over the previous decade. Backyard shacks typically increase the footprint of buildings in a township from 13 to 40% or more, although the resulting population density is relatively low at about 200 people per hectare (figure 5).

29 Figure 5 Backyard shacks in Mamelodi, east of Pretoria (survey and drawing by André Christensen for the author).

Another notable example of sharing accommodation occurs all along the East Coast of Africa, ranging from Kenya and Tanzania (including Zanzibar) to the northern shores of Mozambique. There we find the ubiquitous Swahili house, a type that originated in the 19th century and which is the most prevalent coastal housing typology. A wide corridor cut through the centre of the house leads to a courtyard and ablution facilities in the rear. Most Swahili houses have three rooms on each side of the corridor (figure 6). All rooms are about 2.4 metres wide, and if the corridor is in the centre, which is, as mentioned, usually the case, the six rooms are identical. One of the front rooms is usually occupied by the owner and his family, while the other is used for the purposes of a home industry. The other four rooms are let to migrants from the countryside. The courtyard is a communal space for cooking, washing and looking after small children. The built-in bench in front is the place where the men socialise.

Figure 6 A typical Swahili house in Malindi, Kenya (surveyed and drawn by the author).

30 Density and urban issues

The statistics presented in figure 2 would have been encouraging, were it not that many apartment blocks are built on the outskirts of cities, negating the benefits to be derived from high density urbanism. South Africa’s urban sprawl and the resulting spatial and economic marginalisation of poor people are without doubt partly responsible for the nation’s catastrophically large poverty gap. Since apartments provide the highest population density, their construction at economic nodes should be compulsory, while a much more dynamic initiative to contain sprawl is an absolute prerequisite to alleviate poverty (figure 7).

Figure 7 The difference between sprawl and compact urbanism (drawing by the author).

If one observes the day-to-day living patterns associated with higher income circular migration, it is clear why this phenomenon occurs in Hatfield, rather than in outlying areas. Home to the University of Pretoria and serviced by the Hatfield Gautrain Station, the area contains a number of government institutions (for example, the South African Qualifications Authority, known as SAQA), and the Departments of Telecommunications and Postal Service, Communications and Military Veterans. Office blocks, retail complexes and restaurants abound. The area is home to some of the best schools in the country. Apartment blocks have largely replaced individual homes, and many are intended as student accommodation.

If all these factors are considered, it seems as if the mixed-use, mixed-income perimeter block is the most suitable solution (figure 8). This is also the typology recommended by Sir Richard Rogers and Anne Power (2000: 180) after extensive research on the most economically and socially sustainable urban typologies.

Figure 8 Multi-family housing types (drawing by the author). 31 Spatial typologies

Contemporary apartment layouts are the direct consequences of Modernist planning dogma. Modernist architecture as conceived by Le Corbusier and his peers in the 1920s is the direct result of an attempt to provide affordable urban housing on a massive scale after the devastation of World War I. Up to that point, spaces in dwellings, whether cottages or tenements, were mostly undifferentiated (figure 9). As a result, we find that nineteenth century Victorian-era houses, for example, have often served a wide range of purposes: these range from their original residential function, to school, to clinic, and probably many other uses in between.

Figure 9 Nineteenth century house in Worcester, South Africa (drawing by the author).

In 1928 Le Corbusier, Sigfried Gideon, Walter Gropius and others founded the Congrès Internationaux de l’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). This group held annual meetings. In 1929 the theme for the Frankfurt meeting was the minimum dwelling (German: Existenzminimum) while at Brussels in 1930 the topic was that of high and medium density housing. Thereafter, Karel Teige (1932: 58), an architectural critic during that period, claimed that urban working- class families – the proletariat – were only home at night, because the husband, wife and children would be working. Under such circumstances the “dwelling is reduced to lodging”, similar to the luxury car group. Although Le Corbusier’s 1928 proposal for the Wanner apartments in Geneva addressed some of the issues of the minimum dwelling, according to Teige, the spatial organisation, the plan form, is rather tortuous (figure 10). A windowless main bedroom must have been peculiar, even then. 32 Figure 10 Floor plan of a single-storey apartment, Le Corbusier, 1929 (drawing by the author after Teige 1932: 336).

South African apartment plans, like those around the world, have since become more functional, but the trend is to design these around the nuclear family consisting of a married couple and their two young children. This assumption has led to standardised two and three- bedroom layouts (essentially ignoring the presence of single parent households, extended families and childless couples). Figure 11 compares such a standard two-bedroom plan with that of a slightly larger, but infinitely more flexible and adaptable configuration.

Standard Flexible

Figure 11 Standard versus flexible apartment plans (drawings by the author).

33 Floor area standards for apartments

Another issue, intrinsically related to plan layout, is that of room sizes. It is bewildering to see South African social housing schemes offering one, two and three-bedroom flats, with floor areas ranging from 30 to 48 m² being the norm. These are based on minimum standards of accommodation compiled in 1951 (Calderwood 1962: 62). It is even more appalling to see how much smaller South African floor area standards are compared to other parts of the world (figure 12).

Figure 12 Floor area standards in the 1990s (compiled by the author).

The South African minimum standard of 44.7 m² is based on the assumption that two members of a six-person household would sleep in the living room (Calderwood 1962: 38). Commentators may argue that the flats in China and Hong Kong are also very small: 52 m² in Shanghai and 42 m² in Hong Kong (Ho 2015), but there land is so scarce that most apartments are in high-rise blocks comprising 40 or more storeys.

34 Douglas Calderwood (1962: 39) cautioned that minimum floor areas standards should not be interpreted as maximums, but that is exactly what has happened. The Department of Housing’s Breaking New Ground policy does not mention floor areas quantitatively at all. It simply states that there is a need for “the development of [a] dignified size of house that supports morality of family and society”. More than a decade later an internal directive by the Department of Human Settlements specified 40 m² as the minimum size for a freestanding house, smaller even than the 1951 minimum standards.4 The minimum design requirements specified in the City of Johannesburg’s inclusionary housing framework are 7 m² of habitable space per person and a minimum of 15 m² per unit, smaller than a garage!

The City of Johannesburg’s inclusionary housing framework was adopted by its Council earlier in 2019. Accordingly, private developers will have to allocate a minimum of 20% (not 30% as reported in the press) of their total units to inclusionary housing when building 20 or more dwelling units.5 The motivation is to give lower and lower-middle income households – those earning R7000 per month or less – the opportunity to live close to economic nodes. As was to be expected, perhaps, the SA Property Owners Association (Sapoa) declared it was “disturbed” by this “onerous policy” (Mahlaka 2019). Not so Stephen Brookes, chief executive of Balwin Properties, a highly successful developer of affordable apartments, who embraced the policy: “Why should it be the right of only the wealthy to live close to work?”

It must be emphasised that inclusionary housing is an accepted principle in many parts of the world. In some instances, incentives are offered to developers, which could include more units than would otherwise have been allowable, or fewer parking bays. More municipalities can be expected to follow Johannesburg’s example.

Other minimum design requirements for Johannesburg’s inclusionary housing are: • Inclusion of a private bathroom (within the unit, with access only from within that unit) with a minimum of a toilet, shower and basin. • seven square metres of habitable space per person and be a minimum of 15 square metres per unit. • the same outward appearance as market [non-subsidised] units on the same property, or in the same development. • sharing common spaces, such as entrances, lifts, communal spaces, shared amenities, with market units in the same development or property.

The British Parker Morris Standards of 1961 and modified upwards in 1967 possibly offer the most sophisticated and certainly the most comprehensive of floor area standards (figure 13). Following on the publication of the Parker Morris Standards, the British Department of the Environment issued a manual entitled Space in the Home, which graphically sets out the minimum dimensions for every conceivable activity, and every fitting and item of furniture (figure 14).6 From there on others, for example John Noble (1982: 3), were able to map out the spaces to determine a range of “best sizes to suit the purpose and overall quality of accommodation to be provided” (figure 15).

35 Dimensions in m² 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 including storage person person person person person person person

One Storey House 32.5 48.3 60.9 71.5 79.9 88.2 —

Two Storey House 76.1 86.4 96.6 114 (Semi or End)

Two Storey House 78.9 89.1 96.6 114 (Intermediate terraced)

Three Storey House 98.4 102.1 118.4

Flats (minus 3.2 m² 32.3 47.4 59.7 73 82.3 89.7 with balcony access)

Maisonettes 74.7 85 95.1 111.2

Figure 13 Modified 1967 Parker Morris Standards (derived from Parker Morris Committee 1961: 35).

Figure 14 Space requirements for “looking at TV” (UK Department of the Environment 1968: 13).

36 Figure 15 Recommended British space dimensions (Noble 1982).

Since the Parker Morris Standards were not mandatory for the private sector, the dimensions of flats were often below those standards. In fact, in the foreword to a document entitled the London Housing Design Guide, the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, lamented that London contained some of the smallest flats in Western Europe. The document subsequently prescribed compulsory floor area standards that are 10% more generous than the Parker Morris Standards.7

Towards flexibility and affordability in apartment design

Considering the information above, it is clear that multi-family housing, intended to accommodate both luxury car, as well as inclusionary housing demographics, must demonstrate the following characteristics: • Should be centrally located (amenities and transport) • Flexible (different household types) • Low rentals (tenants either do not want to or cannot pay more) • Yield a profit acceptable to developers and owners.

The only difference between the two household types is that the luxury car group does not want to pay normal rentals, whereas the inclusionary housing group cannot. Otherwise, their domestic needs are the same (figure 16). 37 Figure 16 Similar accommodation requirements (compiled by the author).

A decade ago, the SA Department of Human Settlements (2009: 39) advised that “Social housing designs should also aim for as much flexibility as possible within the financial limitations to allow for retrofitting in future.8 Early compromises in terms of spatial layouts, designs or servicing may not allow for this”. Perhaps the solution for achieving flexibility and adaptability is to abandon, not only those fit-for-purpose-only room sizes, but also open plans. By making all habitable rooms equally large, similar to a Swahili and Edwardian house, an apartment would be able to accommodate a wider variety of tenants. In other words, designs should accommodate more household types across the demographic spectrum. At the same time, “larger floor spaces are inherently more adaptable: they offer greater potential for rearrangement” (Carmona, Gallent and Sarkar 2010: 9). Even RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) encourages the regulation of internal space in order to avoid flats that are too small (Park 2017: 52).

The anomaly facing South African developers is that the main user requirement, that the apartments must be centrally located, inevitably increases project costs, because such land is so expensive. However, reducing floor size is not the most rational solution to achieve low cost. Reducing size by 10% does not result in 10% cost savings, because the costs of the really expensive items, the wet cores, remain the same (figure 17).

Figure 18 offers a practical solution. Rather than a conventional two-bedroom pattern, it presents the plan of a four-person flat for sharing. This is an economical configuration since more people share basic bathroom facilities. With very little adaptation, this configuration could serve not only our burgeoning student population, but also both household types constituting the weekend migration market.

38 Figure 17 Cutting space does not correspondingly cut costs (drawing by the author).

Figure 18 From conventional to flexible layouts (derived from Tutt & Adler 1979: 313).

The configuration shown in figure 18 is an elegant solution, but still leaves the issue of floor size unresolved. If it is accepted that rooms which can serve a range of purposes provide the answer, a comfortable range of dimensions needs to be determined through rigorous ergonomic research that takes contemporary furniture and trends, including working-from-home (enabled through internet connectivity), into account (figure 19).

39 Figure 19 Common room sizes for different functions (drawing by the author).

The shared housing strategy is perfectly aligned with the notion of Afro-Communitarianism. Shared housing must not be confused with cohousing, although both are resurgent trends worldwide. The outcome of this study ‒ shared housing ‒ is defined as “two or more people who live in one permanent rental housing unit and share housing costs” (Fernandez and Taylor 2018: 6). Another is “renting their own room or portion of a residence from someone else” (Benton 2014: 9). On the other hand, cohousing, a trend that emerged in its current form in Scandinavia in the 1960s, on the other hand, is defined as a “type of housing for various categories where each household has its own apartment, but with access to communal spaces such as a large kitchen and dining-room and spaces for different hobbies” (Vestbro 2008).

Conclusion

As intimated, none of the phenomena discussed in this study is unique to South Africa; they occur world-wide. What is probably different is that high-income households whose members are not prepared to pay normal rentals, will most likely soon have low-income neighbours. Collectively these potentially sharing households seem to represent a substantial portion of the urban population, and inevitably constitute an important niche market, with specific expectations pertaining to access, accommodation and amenities. The present study is a pilot project to determine the scope and nature of the topic. Further research, perhaps supported by property developers and housing agencies, could have a significant impact on the provision of apartments, in terms of typologies, regulations and marketing and, and by implication on future urban design and mixed-use residential developments.

Notes

1 South African National Department of Housing. Comprehensive Plan for the Development of 1994. The White Paper on Housing: A New Sustainable Human Settlements. Housing Policy and Strategy for South Africa. 4 South African Department of Human 2 Statistics South Africa. 2012. Census 2011: Settlements. 2013. Enhancement to the national Census in Brief. Pretoria: Statistics South norms and standards for the construction Africa: 63. of stand-alone residential dwellings and engineering services and adjustment of the 3 South African National Department of housing subsidy quantum. Unpublished Housing. 2004. “Breaking New Ground”: A internal letter by the Director-General. 40 5 City of Johannesburg Transformation and 7 Office of the Mayor of London. 2010. Design Spatial Planning Directorate. 2018. City of for London. London Development Agency: 48. Johannesburg Inclusionary Housing: Incentives, Regulations and Mechanisms. (Approved by the 8 South African Department of Human City Council on 22 February 2019): 2. Settlements. 2009. Social and Rental Interventions: Social Housing Policy. Part 3 (Of 6 Department of the Environment. 1968. Design the National Housing Code): 39. Bulletin 6 – Space in the Home (DB6). London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Works cited

Benton, Amanda. 2014. Creating a Shared www.hongkongfp.com/2015/07/27/the- Home: Promising Approaches for unlivable-dwellings-in-hong-kong-and- Using Shared Housing to Prevent and the-minimum-living-space/ on 26 April End Homelessness in Massachusetts. 2019. Harvard Kennedy School: Unpublished master’s thesis. Lynch, Kevin. 1981. A Theory of Good City Form. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Bloor, Garreth (ed.). 2017. Rethinking Press. Mobility: Spatial Planning that enables Transportation and Technology in South Mahlaka, Ray. 2019. Furore over New City African Metros. Johannesburg: South Housing Plan, The Citizen, 26 Feb., African Institute of Race Relations retrieved from https://citizen.co.za/ (IRR). business/business-news/2090692/ furore-over-new-city-housing-plan/ Calderwood, Douglas. 1962. Principles of amp/ on 23 April 2019. Mass Housing. Pretoria: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Metz, Thaddeus. and Gaie, Joseph. 2010. The African Ethic of Ubuntu/Botho: Carmona, Matthew, Gallent, Nick and Sarkar, Implications for Research on Morality, Reetuparna. 2010. Space Standards: Journal of Moral Education 39(3): 273- The Benefits. A report prepared by 290. University College London for CABE. Noble, John. 1982. Activities and Spaces: Fernandez, Caroline and Taylor, Jamie. 2018. Dimensional Data for Housing Design. Shared Housing – Alternative Housing London: The Architectural Press. Review. Working document prepared for the Center for Mental Health Park, Julia. 2017. One Hundred Years Services, Homeless Programs Branch. of Housing Space Standards: Retrieved from http://ciesandiego. What Now?, retrieved from http:// org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ housingspacestandards.co.uk/assets/ SAMHSA-Shared-Housing-Alt- space-standards_onscreen.pdf on 23 Housing on 15 May 2019. April 2019.

Ho, Alfred. 2015. The Unlivable Dwellings Parker Morris Committee. 1961. Homes for in Hong Kong and the Minimum Today and Tomorrow. London: Her Living Space, Hong Kong Free Press, Majesty’s Stationery Office. 27 July 2015. Retrieved from https:// 41 Rogers, Richard and Power, Anne. 2000. Turok, Ivan and Borel-Saladin, Jackie. 2016. Cities for a Small Country. London: Backyard Shacks, Informality and Faber. the Urban Housing Crisis in South Africa: Stopgap or Prototype Solution?, Schüssler, Mike. 2012. Economic Outlook Housing Studies 31(4): 384-409. Plus Something on SA Assets and Why that is Important. PowerPoint presented Tutt, Patricia and Adler, David. 1979. New at the South African Agricultural Metric Handbook. London: The Outlook Conference, Pretoria, 3-4 Architectural Press. September. Vestbro, Dick. 2008. History of Cohousing Teige, Karel. 1932. The Minimum Dwelling. – Internationally and in Sweden. Translated by Eric Dluhosh (2002). Retrieved from http://www. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. kollektivhus.nu/pdf/colhisteng08.pdf on 15 May 2019.

Gerald Steyn worked for Frei Otto at the Institute for Lightweight Surface Structures in Stuttgart, Germany, and the National Building Research Institute in Pretoria, South Africa, before entering practice as an architect in 1980, specialising in low cost housing and medium density residential projects. He joined the Department of Architecture at the Tshwane University of Technology in 1999, and transferred to the Department of Building Sciences in 2017. His areas of research specialisation are architectural and urban history, traditional and vernacular African architecture, and contemporary African settlement dynamics. He holds BArch and MArch degrees from the University of the Free State and a PhD from the University of Pretoria.

42 Transformation through reclamation and the repositioning of tradition

Michael Louw University of Cape Town Email: [email protected]

The South African artist and bricoleur, Willie Bester, actively strives to reposition himself and his work in relation to traditional forms of representation. He simultaneously agitates for, and comments on, social transformation while reclaiming found objects and transforming them to re- script their meaning. His work is deeply symbolic, and while his use of reclaimed materials supports this symbolism, reclamation in his work is also based on a pragmatic sensibility that recognises the abundance of discarded or disused materials. Bester’s work, especially his use of collage and assemblage, represents a distancing from, or repositioning of, the artistic traditions of the global North and some of their inherent underpinning cultural values. The use of collage in contemporary African architecture represents a similar distancing from these values, especially in terms of conspicuous consumption. This paper uses Bester’s work, along with the work of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Louise Nevelson, and El Anatsui, as a lens through which to comment on contemporary African architectural projects that make use of reclaimed material to re-script meaning and value. While the architectural works may not all have the symbolic depth of Willie Bester’s work, they are generally also a powerful critique on wastefulness. The contemporary projects typically make use of multiple modes of production and they may include repositioned techniques from the global North and reclaimed materials that have been transformed; the individual material potentials of these techniques and transformations are maximised by combining them and it could be argued that there is a resultant formalisation of a new contemporary Southern tradition of making. Key words: African architecture, Recycling, Tradition, Transformation, Willie Bester.

Transformation durch rückgewinnung und neupositionierung von Tradition Der südafrikanische Künstler und Bricoleur Willie Bester bemüht sich aktiv, sich und sein Werk in Bezug auf traditionelle Darstellungsformen neu zu positionieren. Gleichzeitig agitiert und kommentiert er die soziale Transformation, während er gefundene Objekte zurückerobert und sie transformiert, um ihre Bedeutung neu zu schreiben. Seine Arbeit ist zutiefst symbolisch, und während die Verwendung von wiedergewonnenem Material diese Symbolik unterstützt, basiert die Wiedergewinnung in seiner Arbeit auch auf einer pragmatischen Sensibilität, die die Fülle von weggeworfenen oder nicht mehr verwendeten Materialien anerkennt. Besters Arbeit, insbesondere seine Verwendung von Collage und Assemblage, ist eine Distanzierung oder Neupositionierung der künstlerischen Traditionen des globalen Nordens und einiger ihrer inhärenten kulturellen Werte. Die Verwendung von Collagen in der zeitgenössischen afrikanischen Architektur stellt eine ähnliche Distanzierung von diesen Werten dar, insbesondere in Bezug auf den auffälligen Konsum. In diesem Artikel wird Besters Arbeit zusammen mit der Arbeit von Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Louise Nevelson und El Anatsui als Linse verwendet, um zeitgenössische afrikanische Architekturprojekte zu kommentieren, bei denen wiedergewonnenes Material verwendet wird, um Bedeutung und Wert neu zu schreiben. Die architektonischen Arbeiten haben möglicherweise nicht alle die symbolische Tiefe von Willie Besters Werken, sind aber im Allgemeinen auch eine starke Kritik an Verschwendung. Die zeitgenössischen Projekte nutzen typischerweise mehrere Produktionsmethoden und umfassen möglicherweise neu positionierte Techniken aus dem globalen Norden und zurückgewonnene Materialien, die transformiert wurden. Die einzelnen materiellen Potenziale dieser Techniken und Transformationen werden maximiert, indem sie kombiniert werden, und es könnte argumentiert werden, dass es eine resultierende Formalisierung einer neuen zeitgenössischen südlichen Herstellungstradition gibt. Schlüsselwörter: Afrikanische Architektur, Recycling, Tradition, Transformation, Willie Bester.

SAJAH, ISSN 0258-3542, volume 34, number 2, 2019: 43-61 n art terminology, a found object refers to “a natural or man-made object, or fragment of an object, that is found (or sometimes bought) by an artist and kept because of some intrinsic interest the artist sees in it”1. Pablo Picasso is widely credited as being the first artist to I 2 publicly use a found object in his art . This type of object is also often referred to in French as an objet trouvé and it can be regarded as a work of art in itself or it can be adapted or modified.

The French artist Marcel Duchamp used found manufactured objects in, and as, art pieces which he referred to as “readymades”. His works Bicycle Wheel (1913)3, and Fountain (1917)4 are two of his most well-known pieces and while the term readymade has since become commonly used in the art world, the use of found objects was initially heavily criticised. Their legitimacy was argued for in the journal The Blind Man5 in 1917 after the work Fountain was not exhibited subsequent to it being submitted by Duchamp under the false name of Richard Mutt. The reasons for not exhibiting it, as mentioned in the journal, are that it was either seen as being immoral and vulgar, or that it was regarded as plagiarism – “a plain piece of plumbing”. In support of its relevance as a piece of art, the journal (1917: 5) argues:

Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.

This statement highlights the points that the choosing of the object is a creative act, that by removing its usefulness as an everyday object legitimises its status as a piece of art, and that the addition of a new title changes its meaning. The idea of a creating a different viewpoint is also significant in that the perspective of the viewer has shifted so the object is regarded differently. The work presents a repositioning of perspective, but also of tradition, since the use of found objects and the readymade is now widely accepted as art.

Willie Bester6

Willie Bester started making use of found objects when he was in his early childhood in the 1960s and he dates the initial development of his technique to when he was ten years old (Bester 2019). There is a well-established tradition of making wire cars7 with wire and other reclaimed materials in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in South Africa and particularly in informal settlements. This tradition requires careful observation, craft skill, an understanding of form and materiality, and often a certain level of innovation in order to effect a suitable transformation. Bester engaged in this practice and according to Godby (2007: 11) he was able to trade his works with other children due to their decorative nature and sophisticated modifications that included features such as adjustable headlights. Based on his observations of the buildings in Montagu he also made houses from reclaimed materials that included ice cream sticks, matches and cardboard boxes (Botha 2009: 4). This use of reclaimed material for toys was driven both by necessity due to financial constraints and inversely due to the abundance of disused and discarded materials that were already prevalent during the 1960s. Similar to Duchamp’s work, the items that are chosen for these toys already represent a creative act, while the transformation of use and the change in title or meaning demonstrate artistic or at the very least craft skill.

44 The distancing from, and repositioning of Northern traditions

Willie Bester (2019) remarks that artists often take the initiative to make shifts. While these shifts can be the shifting of people’s viewpoints, they can also be social and political. According to him, his art was initially not regarded as such and it took time for it to be accepted in art circles. This is echoed by Klopper (2007: 2) who notes that he stopped using mixed media techniques to make wirework toys early in his school career because it was implied that they could not be regarded as art. Klopper (2007: 2) writes about Bester’s resistance to the limitations that were imposed on Black and “Coloured”8 people from a young age by the former Apartheid government, while Sanyal (2014: 94) similarly writes about the marginalisation of non-Western artists and he supports the idea that there are two poles in postcolonial identity discourse: On the one hand there is the idea of otherness and unbridgeable difference, which could be established by the centre or it can be claimed by outsiders, while on the other hand there is the notion of inclusivity and multiculturalism. He mentions Sally Price’s “universality principle” in this regard where the notion of universality is used to create an artificial commonality: “The centre professes such inclusivity to subsume colonial subjects in order to further empower itself, whereas the subjects might embrace this incorporation in the name of participation, modernisation, and development.” In Willie Bester’s case, the centre revealed itself as a predominantly Eurocentric community of educators, gallery owners and art patrons who initially did not recognise his work as art (Bester 2019).

Thus Bester early discovered the genre of Still Life in the European tradition and he adopted it not simply as a means of celebrating the material world but also, as countless art schools have done, as a vehicle for developing skills in representation and, even, as a means of defining himself as an artist (Godby 2007: 12).

Godby (2007: 12) notes that still life and landscape paintings “invariably bring with them a cluster of cultural meanings that may not be apparent to practitioner or spectator”. These cultural meanings can be related to people’s relationship to nature, a desire to depict their status, or their prosperity, amongst others. The abundance depicted in many still life and landscape paintings traditionally produced in the global North9 or by White artists in the global South was meant to symbolise the wealth of the owner, and this materialist expression sometimes stands in stark contrast to the social and physical contexts where the work was produced, or where this wealth was generated or extracted10. Bester’s earlier paintings are not as provocative as his later works, but they do show a subtle difference to the depictions by White artists who painted similar subjects (Godby 2007: 12). His painting of a Cape Dutch farmhouse does not show the typical iconic frontal view that implies certain cultural values11, but he shifts the perspective to a view from the back, since he identified more with the experience of the farm workers and servants, thereby diminishing the visual power of the artefact.

His professional work since he moved to Cape Town has often been provocative and when his phone rang after he exhibited two of his works for the first time at Cape Town’s St. George’s Cathedral, his first reaction was one of fear12. His work generated some reaction and reflecting on this he remarks “As my skildery iemand ontstig is dit ’n bewys dat my werk iets beteken”13. Shortly after the St. George’s exhibition, he was labelled as a “resistance artist” although the centre began to shift in terms of its constituency and in its position in relation to his work by acknowledging it as art (Bester 2019).

45 Reclamation, collage and the transformation of meaning

It was only in 1988, when Bester learned about the collage technique at the Community Arts Centre in Cape Town, that he began openly to question what he now describes as the White bias in his art (Klopper 2007: 2).

The development of the collage technique constituted for Bester, as it did for certain European artists at the beginning of the twentieth century, a deliberate challenge to the tradition of oil painting. But whereas the Cubists and others were interested primarily in the means of representation, Bester was concerned to distance his practice from the European tradition and discover a local and contemporary language of art (Godby 2007: 13).

This is similar to the work of the Nigerian-based Ghanaian artist El Anatsui14, in particular his large-scale tapestries which he calls “sheets” that are made from recycled liquor caps. Sanyal (2014: 92) notes that “…they seem also to offer room for references to a variety of postwar Western art, such as large-scale abstraction, the abject, and recycling as a creative strategy” and he mentions Robert Storr’s15 discussion about El Anatsui’s work that, like other similar African artists “…ushered in meaningful transitions in postwar art by straddling conventional mediums and modes of representation” (Sanyal 2014: 100). The blending of conventional mediums and other techniques is a trademark of Willie Bester’s work, in particular his assemblages and collages which Godby (2007: 13) feels could “disrupt the notion of a unitary perspective space that has long been theorised as the pictorial expression of colonial control”.

His reason for choosing a specific item for his work is partly because of its form, which reaffirms the statement in The Blind Man about Duchamp’s work that the choosing of a found object is already a creative act, but it is also based on its potential for having its lifespan extended (Bester 2019). According to Godby (2007: 13), these items are often collected at the place that he was depicting in a particular work, and are then combined with paintings, his own photographs, or newspaper clippings. Bester (2019) notes that he uses oil painting to bind his assemblages together, but also that his use of oil painting combined with reclaimed found objects as part of assemblages is a form of protest and part of being rebellious. Bester moves the found objects around prior to assembly to determine their three-dimensional relationship to one another, which is similar to the artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who also chose materials for “their ability to enter into relationship with each other” (McBride 2007: 251). While McBride notes that Schwitters was not interested in an object’s inherent expressive quality, Bester combines objects’ three-dimensional relationship to one another with a careful regard for their respective expressive and symbolic qualities. In the vein of artists like Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)16, he also sometimes homogenises the colour of his assemblages to allow for the formal unification of the found objects as can be seen in figure 1 (the canopy of which is made of portions of a fence that was originally located on Robben Island).

46 Figure 1 Willie Bester, The Tree, 2019, metal and found objects, artist’s collection (source: photo by author.)

The extension of an item’s lifespan, and a changing of its meaning, can also enable an extension of historic traditions. El Anatsui grew up during the 1960s when many African countries had recently gained their independence and when there was a “profound search for social and personal identity” which was typically found in those countries’ history17. The search for meaning in the past can be related to the word sankofa18 which means to go back and fetch something, and which El Anatsui sees as a way to communicate between the past, present and future. He relates this to adinkra, which is a graphic system from the Ashanti kingdom that has been used to generate textile patterns since the seventeenth century, and also to his own use of discarded materials, which has been described as “a collage of discarded memories”19. James (2008: 37) writes that, for El Anatsui, the found object is “…not related to the Duchampian tradition; instead, Anatsui focuses on the object’s connection to the human hand. Like the invisible remnants of DNA, he says, all objects – used and abandoned – carry the deposits of the object’s user.” This patina of use has been a theme throughout his career, including his wood phase which is much less publicised than his textiles, and he notes that the wooden objects20 that he used “have been put to intense use but are no longer viable” (James 2008: 38). This can, however, be related to the Duchampian notion about removing an object’s usefulness: El Anatsui notes that the liquor caps that he uses will not be used for their original function and that this is made possible by their removal “…from their accustomed, functional context into a new one, and they bring along their histories and identities” (James 2008: 42). This echoes what

47 McBride (2007: 253) writes in relation to Schwitters when she says that the “productive double- coding… lies in the ability of the assembled fragments to point back to the contexts out of which they were extracted as though they were affected by an incurable semantic cross-eyedness.”

While he also values the evidence of use in his found objects, Duchamp’s notion of the changing of title or meaning of an item is an important aspect of Willie Bester’s work. He creates works where the meaning of reclaimed found objects is changed and where they are imbued with symbolic meaning. When speaking about his own traumatic experiences during Apartheid (Bester 2019), his emotions are close to the surface and as Bogatzke, Brockmann, and Ludszuweit (2000: 31) also noted, it is difficult “…to connect the aggressiveness, violence and political rage screaming from many of his images and objects with the mild, courteous and thoughtful person he presents in private.” His art is a form of therapy for him and the emotion that he invests in it, coupled with the symbolism that can be read in it, can be experienced by others. Bester (2019) remembers how a former Apartheid policeman who was looking intently at one of his works became emotional and said that he “gets the feeling” when he looks at the work. Meaning is thereby transferred without the need for verbal explanation.

While Bester uses many symbols in his work, several objects with specific meanings occur on a regular basis (Bester 2019). Guitars made up of found objects represent systems21 and how some people can have control over others; he mentions the well-known Afrikaans phrase “Jy moet dans soos die musiek speel”22. The use of cups is based on the suffering of Jesus Christ where he had to drink from the bitter cup – he struggled to drink it, but it was God’s will. Bester (2019) notes that in a similar way, many people had to swallow bitter cups during Apartheid: “Apartheid se ontwerp was so om bitter bekers te skep”23. He often uses bibles and guns in close proximity to each other, since he notes that violence is often perpetrated under the pretext of religious reasons (and he also recalls how Apartheid forces often prayed before embarking on premeditated violent operations in the townships). The use of children’s shoes was inspired by the American Civil Rights movement which he could identify with, since his own father belonged to a church from Philadelphia, and also by a film about the Holocaust where the only remnants of the deceased were suitcases and bags full of shoes. Shovels are indicative of industry and inequality where only certain people are relegated to perform hard labour. Godby and Klopper (1996: 49) note that Bester often tries to “retrieve original meanings for symbols”, for example when he uses car tyres they are meant to symbolise transport or movement and not the practice of necklacing24.

The symbolism in Bester’s work is often a critique on the control that systems can have on society. Klopper (2007: 19) notes that he uses forms “to focus our attention on the transformation of human beings into dehumanised cogs”. This analogy can easily be applied to the construction industry which is predicated largely on globalised production and trade, which tends marginalise local production, and often exploits local labour, particularly in the global South.

Klopper (2007: 19), when describing Willie Bester’s work Trojan Horse III, remarks that it “underlines the cynical tendency, throughout history, to mark destructive acts as benign”. This statement could well be applied to the current tendency of “greenwashing” energy- intensive new architectural projects by means of rating systems that do not necessarily take their constituent parts’ embodied energy or the removal (and discarding) of previous built fabric into account. According to Bester (2019), “In ‘n see waar mense alles weggooi is dit net logies om te hergebruik25”.

48 Figure 2 Willie Bester, Poverty Driven, 2002, metal and found objects, 166 x 255 x 142cm, artist’s collection (photo and annotation by the author, translation of piece by Bester, 2019).

Figure 3 Willie Bester, The Great Trek, 1996, mixed media and metal, 312 x 406 x 204cm, private collection (retrieved from https://williebester.co.za/Works/sculpture/ on 4 May 2019, annotation by the author, translation of piece by Bester, 2019). 49 Bester (translated by Klopper and Godby in Bogatzke et al 2000: 48) is interested in the contemporary global condition and he notes that his more recent works “explore such themes as the impact of large-scale industrialisation on the lives of ordinary people; the relationship between the two worlds – the rural and the urban, with their contrasting value systems”. The same is true in terms of the relationship between the global North and the global South. Many of his township scenes show the prevalence of global corporations’ advertising boards that form part of the built fabric and in one instance a petroleum company’s logo that he used to critique air pollution had to be removed from his work on a book cover (Bester 2019).

Bester shares his engagement with conspicuous consumption and labour with numerous other artists, including El Anatsui who regards his use of liquor caps as a commentary on consumption and labour (James 2008: 42). The artist Kurt Schwitters was one of the pioneers of the use of reclaimed or recycled found objects and while artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Allan Kaprow were of the opinion that his work was also a commentary on consumerism and wastefulness, McBride (2007: 249) argues that his is “a misreading of sorts, since Schwitters’s use of trash in his collages had never been intended as an anti-capitalist critique…”. He did, however, bring the use of collage and montage into the realm of architecture by means of his famous Merzbau.26

Transforming architectural traditions in Africa

The cultural meanings that are inherent in still life painting or landscape painting as discussed previously are not dissimilar in architectural terms where buildings are depictions of their owners’ wealth; they are often emblems of consumerism, greed and wastefulness. The following statement can be applicable to many contemporary architectural works throughout Africa which are locally produced more for the benefit of audiences in the global North (and their designers’ reputations and social media platforms) than for the long-term benefit of local communities:

[Willie Bester] soon came to realise that art was a privileged White person’s practice that reflected White people’s values and was enjoyed and patronized by White people, for the most part, and by the few members of his own community that shared certain cultural aspirations with their politically enfranchised neighbours. As Bester put it in a recent interview, this was “someone else’s beauty” (Godby 2007: 12).

While this trend may be shifting, the production of buildings in Africa that are largely predicated on traditions, cultural values, and material techniques from the global North remains problematic. When writing about Willie Bester’s work, Van der Wal (2009: 22) notes:

his work is not only a reclamation of the agency that certain communities have been denied in the past, but also a commentary on the discursive and physical scraps that hegemonic institutions often leave behind from which the disempowered have to piece together a new sense of place and identity.

The current abundance of the flotsam and jetsam of capitalist mass-production, especially in the global South, presents both an opportunity and a responsibility. While reclaimable or recyclable materials are also a finite resource, the prevalence of consumerism and a culture of wastefulness means that these types of materials will be readily available (and affordable) for the foreseeable future. Willie Bester’s use of found manufactured materials is primarily a pragmatic one based on their availability and using what is there, but it is also due to environmental concerns27. This is echoed by El Anatsui’s multiple interpretations of sankofa, which he notes “implied even the

50 need to search immediately around” (James 2008: 43). Bester’s view on mass-production is that it makes a big contribution to global warming and that recycling is a collective responsibility (Bester 2019). Fiz (1999: 12) describes Bester’s work Poverty and Racism as an accusation against the global North which “bases its wealth by throwing away waste on the poorest part of the population”. Bester himself (translated by Klopper and Godby in Bogatzke, Brockmann, and Ludszuweit 2000: 32) scathingly describes the title of his work The Arrival as a commentary on the arrival of White settlers in South Africa in 165228 as follows:

Labouring under the erroneous belief that civilisation is predicated on the idea of technological advancement, they assumed that the African peoples they encountered were barbaric savages. Instead of recognising that the notion of civilisation is common to all communities regardless of whether, for example, they wear cotton or leather garments, they therefore sought to conquer the groups they encountered. In the event, they failed to transform their encounter with Africans into an opportunity to build a community founded on a respect for difference and a willingness to pool cultural and other resources. Although driven by greed and wasteful of natural resources, they managed to convince themselves that their exploitative practices served, in effect, to improve the world into which they had sailed.

Similar to Willie Bester’s work, a repositioning of tradition may be required in terms of African architecture, which involves a reconsideration of technological approaches, material use, representation, and meaning amongst others. The notion of sufficiency29 in Africa and the use of locally available resources requires a change in perspective that may involve a certain level of resistance to expectations of conformity, aspirations, representation and its inherent underpinning cultural values. El Anatsui has a similar approach since he believes that “artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up.”30 Bester (2019) was inspired by Black artists in informal settlements and he describes how they used linoleum tiles, the cheapest medium available, and how they carved scenes of cross-border operations by government forces during Apartheid. He was impressed by how well-informed they were at the time and he notes how they taught him to “look, absorb, and to see the meaning behind something”.

In terms of the awareness of wider issues and the prudent use of materials, a number of recent architectural works throughout Africa have begun to engage with these issues. Willie Bester (2019) admires innovation in buildings that make use of recycled content. He visited Freetown Christiania31 in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn just over twenty years ago and he was particularly inspired by the buildings that are made from reclaimed and recycled materials. He also mentions Sibusiso Mbhele’s house in Bergville, South Africa, which is partly made from reclaimed corrugated metal and recycled minibuses. Bester (translated by Klopper and Godby in Bogatzke et al 2000: 46) remarks that “poor people were forced to rely on all sorts of materials to construct their homes. Many of my township scenes celebrate the inventive solutions these people managed to find to the problem of building double storey houses and other complex dwellings – how they live out their dreams with a few pieces of cardboard.” Similar to the resistance to limitations that Klopper (2007: 2) mentions in relation to Bester’s (and many other disadvantaged artists’) educational opportunities, this can also be regarded as a resistance to material limitations through innovation. According to Godby (2007: 14), Willie Bester “involves the phenomenon of recycling for which the [African] continent has been celebrated in recent years”. This is true both of his work, and of the architectural projects that he has been involved with: His ability to integrate three-dimensional found objects with two-dimensional representations in his own work can already be regarded as a spatialization of representation, and this is extended into the making of his own houses.32

51 His primary residence was a collaboration between him and CS Studio Architects and it was completed in Kuilsriver, South Africa, in 1996. The architects refer to it as an “experiment” of art and architecture33 and acknowledge that “the role of the hands become difficult to identify” (Frey 2016: 201). Through its unconventional form and colourful embellishment with art made from found recycled objects, it represents a clear distancing from the monotony of the surrounding context, which is based largely on aspirations linked to suburban imagery from the global North.

Figure 4 House Bester, Kuilsriver, South Africa, 1996, CS Studio Architects with Willie Bester. (photo by the author).

Bester also admires the work of Nina Maritz (Bester 2019), in particular her Visitors’ Interpretive Rock Art Centre at Twyfelfontein34 in Namibia which was completed by Nina Maritz Architects in 200635. Maritz argues that the climate emergency is the issue of our time (Maritz, 2019) and she agrees that architects should be proud scavengers36 although she does note that the time restrictions and regulatory environments can make this difficult in many contexts37. The building at Twyfelfontein is constructed mainly out of materials that were found on site and recycled materials in order to reduce the building’s embodied energy and to make it removable or recyclable itself (Maritz 2007: 71 and Maritz 2016: 12). Gabions were filled with the recycled rubble that was obtained from the demolition of the former kiosk which was demolished on the archaeologist’s advice.38 Screens were made from recycled oil-drum lids, while the roof was made out of quartered two-hundred litre recycled oil drums. The metal was sandblasted to speed up the anodising rusting effect, but it also enables a Nevelsonian homogenisation of the colour palette. The building’s making resonates with Bester’s environmental concerns, and similar to his own work, it is also highly symbolic.

The plan shape of the building is similar to a leaf of a Mopane tree which has the shape of a cloven hoof, and according to Maritz (2007: 69), the building was designed to represent the three stages of trance that a healer or shaman goes through during a ritual.39 This was a driver of the design due to the site’s abundance of San rock art engravings which are most probably related to the “trance dance” ritual. In the first of two “experience chambers” in the building, cut- outs in the ceiling evoke the entoptics or phosphenes that a healer sees during the first stage of

52 trance, while the second chamber has images of phosphenes overlaid with animal prints (which are further enhanced by shadows cast by a timber lathe pergola) which represent the overlaying of familiar images on phosphenes that are usually also experienced during a trance. These are part of a “psychological preparation” of a visitor to the rock art sites.40 The image of the building is described by the architect as something related to “animal skeletons and insect carapaces”, while the bulging roof form represents the physical symptom of the arched back of a dying animal that is experienced during the “little death” stage of a trance. The nosebleed experienced during this stage is represented by the path that runs towards and through the building. The third stage of a trance is when the healer leaves his or her body to become one with the animal visualised during trance.

Figure 5 The floor plan of the Visitors’ Interpretive Rock Art Centre, Twyfelfontein, Namibia, 2006, Nina Maritz Architects (source: Nina Maritz Architects; hatching and annotation by the author, translation of symbolism by Nina Maritz).

Figure 6 The Visitors’ Interpretive Rock Art Centre, Twyfelfontein, Namibia, 2006, Nina Maritz Architects. (source: Nina Maritz Architects; photographer Lydia Schröder; annotation by the author, translation of symbolism by Nina Maritz).

53 While the Guga S’Thebe Theatre41 in Langa, South Africa, was not conceptualised to communicate symbolic meaning, it certainly symbolises a careful approach to material selection which enabled changed meanings for its constituent parts. The building is largely made from stacked shipping containers, which are lined with light clay panels that are in turn cladded with recycled fruit crate planks. The patterning of the façade was inspired by traditional Shoowa textiles from the Congo42 (Baerlecken, Heierman and Reitz 2016: 56). The timber cladding is offset by brick walls on two of its sides, and the façade of this building relates well to Godby and Klopper’s (1996: 45) description of Willie Bester’s works where he uses “a greater range and variety of discarded material to build up surfaces and increase the sense of spatial extension”. The range of materials and techniques on this building provide a greater sense of depth and visual texture and helps to mediate the difference in scale with the surrounding built fabric.

Figure 7 The Guga S’Thebe Theatre, Langa, South Africa, 2016, Faculty of Architecture at RWTH Aachen University, the Peter Behrens School of Architecture at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, the Georgia Institute of Technology and CS Studio Architects from Cape Town (source and annotation by the author).

The use of recycled or reclaimed found objects in informal settlements echoes what Godby and Klopper (1996: 45) describe as Willie Bester’s “physical and symbolic deployment of township waste”. The Silindokuhle Community Hall by Indalo and Collectif saga which was completed in 2015, and the Silindokuhle Preschool by Collectif saga which was completed in 2017 in Joe Slovo West near Port Elizabeth, South Africa, both resonate with this statement.

54 Both the temporary Community Hall and the permanent building for the Preschool made extensive use of recycled content primarily to save costs, and according to the architects the Community Hall of 138m² cost roughly the same as an average 36m² RDP43 house.44 The aim of the projects was also to generate reproducible building methods that employed materials that local residents are familiar with and which are most often used for the construction of informal dwellings, but to transform them to have “high architectural value”. The recycled materials used include pallets, corrugated sheeting, telephone poles, cardboard, industrial racks, glass bottles, windows, car tyres, a shipping container, and a number of other found objects like wheels and skateboards that were adjusted to serve as sliding door mechanisms.

Figure 8 Silindokuhle temporary Community Hall, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 2015, Collectif saga and Indalo. (source: Collectif saga; photographer Joubert Loots; annotation by the author).

Figure 9 Silindokuhle Preschool, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 2017, Collectif saga. (source: Collectif saga; photographer Gorka Biurrun; annotation by the author).

55 A new Southern tradition?

In terms of Willie Bester’s work, and a number of the architectural projects discussed above, there is evidence of a distancing from the global North in terms of representation, but also a distancing in terms of material consumption; both are a form of resistance against specific cultural values. Bester (2019) is of the opinion that the standardised and industrialised system of cookie- cutter government housing delivery perpetuates alienation, and that he prefers the notions of character and sustainability that are representative of many traditional and contemporary African architectures. While there is a clear link between the informality inherent in the construction of dwellings in informal settlements and his own work, his work engages mostly with systemic and structural oppression, injustice, and inequality.

While the African continent might be celebrated for its use of recycled materials by some authors, the intention is not to romanticise poverty nor the prevalence of inappropriate housing conditions or building materials in informal settlements. The many innovators on the continent, who are imagining new ways of using materials at hand and extending their life cycles in the process, and who are creating works whose artistic or architectural merit is globally recognised, should most certainly be celebrated. Their innovation of the everyday is inspiring architects from both the global North45 and the global South to rethink the materiality and formal expression of their works, especially in Africa. While these material innovations are not often used in the global North for a variety of reasons, they are engaging with the socio-economic constraints and prevalence of waste materials in the global South and they can be seen to address social and environmental justice issues. These works are also often a means to address unemployment and to explore replicable building methods that can generate new skills, which means that the transformation of reclaimed materials can also in some ways contribute to socio-economic transformation on a local level.

The contemporary African architectural projects explored here all, probably unintentionally, comply with Duchamp’s three stipulations for a “readymade” in that the choice of material or object should already be considered a creative act, that an object’s previous use should be negated, and that it should have a changed title or meaning that can shift the viewpoint or perspective of the user. Similar to the Southern artists Willie Bester and El Anatsui, these projects also share an increasing concern for the environment and the culture of wastefulness, and their approaches are rooted in the African notion of sufficiency. Like the artists, some of the architectural projects engage with identity and history through symbolism by changing the meaning of found objects, and in other cases by celebrating their patina and history of use to acknowledge the connection to their previous users. Some can be seen to be political statements, but they all exhibit Willie Bester’s resistance to limitations. They resist conspicuous consumption, wastefulness, conventional ways of making, commercial trends, the absence of infrastructure, limitations in terms of skill and education, and conventional aesthetic expectations amongst others. As a form of practice that is becoming more formalised and widespread in the Southern context, they could well be regarded as a form of “resistance architecture”.

56 Notes

1 Tate. 2019. Art term: Found Object. Retrieved peoples speak Afrikaans, these groups were not from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/ defined as “Afrikaners”. They were grouped found-object on 16 April 2019: 1. together under the term “Coloured” to discern them from the white Afrikaner. Bester prefers to 2 As seen in the piece Still Life with Chair use the term “Brown people” or “Bruin mense” Caning (1912), and in a number of later pieces instead of “Coloured people” (Bester 2019). like Bull’s Head (1942). 9 Abraham van Beyeren’s work Banquet Still 3 This piece is a bicycle wheel that is mounted on Life with Nautilus Cup (1650) is a case in a wooden stool. point. According to Business Day (2008: 1), “the larger ‘narrative’ here is the growing 4 A urinal placed on its back and signed by the trade in Europe that placed pressure on land artist under the alias Richard Mutt. and resources and would, ultimately, lead to the colonial expansion of European powers – 5 This was a short-lived journal that was while van Beyeren was painting on Holland, organised by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Jan van Riebeeck was establishing a settlement Roché and Beatrice Wood and it was published at the Cape of Good Hope.” The event of van in May 1917. (The Blind Man. 1917. The Riebeeck’s arrival is depicted in Willie Bester’s Richard Mutt case, in The Blind Man (May, work The Arrival (see endnote 28). (Business 2): 5. Retrieved from https://monoskop.org/ Day, 2008. Is there still life? Exhibition images/6/6f/The_Blind_Man_2_May_1917.pdf curated by Michael Godby and reviewed in The on 16 April 2019). Business Day Weekender (10 March). Retrieved from https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2008- 6 Willie Bester is a South Africa artist. He was 03-10-is-there-still-lifea-business-day-article on born in the small town of Montagu in the 25 March 2019: 1). Western Cape in 1956 to a Xhosa father and a mother who was classified as “Coloured” 10 Business Day (2008: 1) does, however, mention according to the Apartheid government’s racial a counter-tradition in Dutch painting that categories. He initially worked as a dental “affirmed simplicity in reaction against such technician before turning to art on a full-time excess”. (Business Day. 2008. Is there still basis. He was actively involved in the anti- life? Exhibition curated by Michael Godby and Apartheid movement and much of his work reviewed in The Business Day Weekender (10 still focuses on injustice and inequality. He March). Retrieved from https://www.news.uct. has received numerous awards and accolades, ac.za/article/-2008-03-10-is-there-still-lifea- including the Order of the Disa, Members business-day-article on 25 March 2019: 1). Class, from the South African Government, and most recently an Honorary Doctorate 11 Godby (2007: 12) refers to these as “entrenched from the University of Kwazulu-Natal, property and cultural supremacy”. which was awarded to him on 1 April, 2019. A full biography can be accessed on https:// 12 He suspected that the caller might be related to williebester.co.za/biography/. the Apartheid government’s security services, but it was a gallery owner who was interested in 7 Also known as draadkarre (wire cars) in the work (Bester 2019). Afrikaans. 13 This translates to “If my painting upsets 8 During Apartheid, the Population Registration someone then it is proof that my work means Act no.30 of 1950 required that all citizens something”. of South Africa be classified according to four racial groups: White, Bantu (Black 14 El Anatsui was born in 1944 and he completed African), Coloured and Other. The “Coloured” his visual arts degree in Ghana in 1969. contributions of blood and genes included Khoi- Khoi, African, Oriental slaves and European. 15 Storr, R. 2010. The Shifting Shapes of Things Although Muslim descendants of Malay slaves, to Come, in Binder, L. (Ed.), El Anatsui: When descendants of the indigenous Khoi-Khoi and I Last Wrote to You about Africa: 51-62. New the San, as well as biracial people that stem York: Museum of African Art. from sexual unions between white and African

57 16 For example, her well-known work Sky 27 This sentiment is shared by other artists like Cathedral (1958), painted wood, 343.9 x 305.4 Penny Siopis whose work formed part of an x 45.7 cm. exhibition curated by Michael Godby. Business Day (2018: 1) notes that her 1989 work Piling 17 Axel Vervoordt Gallery. 2012. El Anatsui, wreckage upon wreckage “offers a critical Stitch in Time. Exhibition notes, Axel Vervoordt assessment of post-apartheid consumerism and Gallery, Antwerp, 10 May – 30 June 2012. also hints at environmental concerns”. (Business Retrieved from https://www.axel-vervoordt. Day, Is there still life? Exhibition curated by com/gallery/exhibitions/el-anatsui-stitch-in-time Michael Godby and reviewed in The Business on 16 April 2019: 1. Day Weekender (10 March 2008). Retrieved from https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2008- 18 This word is from the Twi language in Ghana 03-10-is-there-still-lifea-business-day-article on and according to El Anatsui’s interpretation it 25 March 2019: 1). means “going back to retrieve” (James 2008: 43). 28 The title of the ship in The Arrival is 1652, the date that Jan van Riebeeck arrived at the 19 Axel Vervoordt Gallery. 2012. El Anatsui, southwestern tip of Africa. While the Dutch Stitch in Time. Exhibition notes, Axel Vervoordt would probably initially have had contact with Gallery, Antwerp, 10 May – 30 June 2012. the Khoi and San only, the work is a generalised Retrieved from https://www.axel-vervoordt. comment on the attitude of settlers over time com/gallery/exhibitions/el-anatsui-stitch-in-time towards the wider precolonial indigenous on 16 April 2019: 1. population.

20 For instance, old mortars. 29 This notion was discussed by Shadreck Chirikure at a lecture that was presented on 27 21 Godby and Klopper (1996: 48) describe the March 2017 at the University of Cape Town guitar as “a multivalent form, standing at where he argued that in pre-colonial Africa once for the idea of social harmony and the there was a balance between consumption and regimentation of life under apartheid”. the available resource base. This translated into a sense of what was deemed sufficient 22 This translates to “You must dance as the music accumulation versus what was deemed to be plays” (Bester, 2019 and Godby and Klopper excessive. 1996: 49). 30 Axel Vervoordt Gallery. 2012. El Anatsui, 23 This translates to “Apartheid’s design was like Stitch in Time. Exhibition notes, Axel Vervoordt that in order to create bitter cups” (Willie Bester Gallery, Antwerp, 10 May – 30 June 2012. 2019). Godby and Klopper (1996: 48) write the Retrieved from https://www.axel-vervoordt. requirement of pass books during Apartheid was com/gallery/exhibitions/el-anatsui-stitch-in-time one of these “bitter cups”. on 16 April 2019: 1.

24 This refers to the gruesome practice of placing 31 This former military area was illegally occupied a car tyre around someone’s neck, dousing in 1971 and it became known as a haven for it with petrol and setting it alight. This was hippies and as a symbol of the counter-culture a form of execution that was often used by movement of the 1960s in Denmark. community members on Black people who were perceived to be collaborators of the Apartheid 32 This applies both to his primary residence in government. Kuilsriver which was a collaboration between CS Studio Architects and Willie Bester and was 25 This translates to “In a sea where people throw completed in 1996, and to his vacation home everything away, it is only logical to re-use” which is a collaboration between him and Linc (Willie Bester 2019). Architecture and Urban Design and is currently under construction in Montagu. 26 This work was built in eight rooms of his house at 5 Waldhausenstrasse in Hannover, 33 CS Studio Architects. 2010. House Bester. Germany. Schwitters started working on it in Retrieved from https://csstudio.co.za/PDF/ 1927, and he went into exile in 1937. The work House_Bester.pdf on 11 May 2019: 1. was destroyed during an allied air raid in 1943. The term Merz was extracted from the word 34 This translates to “Doubtful fountain” in Kommerz or Commerce. Afrikaans, and it is one of the richest rock 58 engraving sites in the world with artwork that become rain, or the stripes on a zebra, or a has been dated to approximately 20 000 years group of ostriches moving mirage-like over the ago. horizon. In the third stage, that of full trance, the shaman leaves his/her body to merge with 35 Another project by Nina Maritz Architects that the visualised animal, enchanting it for hunting makes extensive use of recycled content is the or ‘to make rain’ as a rain-animal such as the Habitat Resource and Development Centre eland. According to belief, the transformed which was completed in Windhoek in 2004. shaman can also move through solid matter and exist in more than one space at once” 36 Afritecture, 2016. Interview with an architect: (Nina Maritz Architects. No date. Twyfelfontein Nina Maritz, in African Design Magazine, Visitors’ Centre. Retrieved from http://www. (February): 78. ninamaritzarchitects.com/twyfelfontein-visitors- centre/ on 9 May 2019). 37 Despite this, the architects adhered to the Burra Charter principles for this project (Nina 40 Nina Maritz Architects. No date. Twyfelfontein Maritz Architects. No date. Twyfelfontein Visitors’ Centre. Retrieved from http://www. Visitors’ Centre. Retrieved from http://www. ninamaritzarchitects.com/twyfelfontein-visitors- ninamaritzarchitects.com/twyfelfontein-visitors- centre/ on 9 May 2019. centre/ on 9 May 2019). 41 This building was designed and implemented 38 This was done in order to allow visitors to by the Faculty of Architecture at RWTH experience the rock art sites without any visual Aachen University, the Peter Behrens School interference from contemporary structures of Architecture at Düsseldorf University of (Maritz 2007: 70). Applied Sciences, the Georgia Institute of Technology and CS Studio Architects from 39 The three stages of trance were researched by Cape Town. It was completed in 2016. J.D. Lewis-Williams who wrote about these stages and entoptic phenomena in Lewis- 42 This is contradicted by other sources that relate Williams, J.D. and Dowson, T.A. 1988. The it to Xhosa beadwork (Architizer. 2017. Guga Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in S’Thebe Children’s Theatre. Retrieved from Upper Paleolithic Art, in Current Anthopology https://architizer.com/projects/guga-sthebe- 29 (2, April): 201-45. A brief explanation can childrens-theatre/ on 10 May 2019: 1). be found in the architects’ project description: “The three stages of trance are a journey into 43 RDP is an acronym for the Reconstruction and the supernatural, where a period of physical Development Programme, which is a socio- endurance (dancing for hours around the fire, economic development policy which was monotonous chanting, smoke inhalation, the use implemented by the South African government of hallucinogenic substances, hunger and thirst) after the fall of Apartheid. prepares the healer or ‘shaman’ for trance. In the first stage, resembling a malarial attack, retinal 44 Saga. 2015. Silindokuhle Community Hall: images called ‘phosphenes’ or ‘entoptics’ appear Press Release. Retrieved from http://www. to the shaman in the shape of scrolls, spirals, collectifsaga.com/inc/downloads/SAGA_ circles and parallel lines that form abstract DOWNLOADS_150901_Presse-Halle- patterns. The shaman starts sweating and Communautaire_LIGHT-FR.pdf on 11 May shivering. The second stage is called the ‘little 2019: 13. (See also Saga. 2017. Silindokuhle death’, as it resembles the physical symptoms Preschool, Joe Slovo West. Retrieved from displayed by a wounded animal just before http://www.collectifsaga.com/inc/downloads/ dying. The shivers continue, nosebleeds occur, SAGA_DOWNLOADS_170626_Presse- the back arches; the shaman feels weightless Silindokuhle_Preschool_LIGHT.pdf on 10 May and levitates. According to belief, the spine acts 2019). as channel for departing energy to be conducted to the heavens, raising the hairs on the neck. 45 The examples of the Guga S’Thebe Theatre, the At this stage, the brain makes associations with Silindokuhle projects, and the works of Rural the phosphenes as representing objects known Studio under Samuel Mockbee are all examples from daily experience. Parallel lines could of this.

59 Works cited

Baerlecken, D., Heiermann, B. and Reitz, 2007 - 13 April 2008. Cape Town: J. 2016. Guga’s Theatre, in AIT 5: Goodman Gallery Cape: 11-16. 54 - 6. Retrieved from https://www. dbxchange.eu/sites/default/files/ Godby, M. and Klopper, S. 1996. The art of AIT%20publication%202016.pdf on 10 Willie Bester, in African Arts 29 (1, May 2019. Winter): 42-9 and 104. Retrieved from https://jstor.org/stable/3337446 on 25 Binder, L.M. 2008. El Anatsui: March 2019. transformations, in African Arts 41 (2, Summer): 24-37. Retrieved from https:// Goniwe, T. 2017. A persistent aesthetic of doi.org/10.1162/afar.2008.41.2.24 on 16 resistance, in The Melrose Gallery, April 2019. Willie Bester: Social Engineering. Exhibition Catalogue: Melrose Arch, Bogatzke, H., Brockmann, R. and 3 November – 3 December 2017. Ludszuweit, C. 2000. Willie Bester. Johannesburg: The Melrose Gallery: In Bogatzke, H., Brockmann, R. and 1-2. Ludszuweit, C. 2000. Ondambo: African Arts Forum. Windhoek: James, L.L. 2008. Convergence: History, Gamsberg Macmillan Publishers: 31- materials, and the human hand – 49. an interview with El Anatsui, in Art Journal 67 (2, Summer): 36- Botha, A. 2009. Dignity and justice – the 53. Retrieved from https://www. mantra of an artist, in A. Botha, (ed.). tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043 Willie Bester. Exhibition Catalogue: 249.2008.10791303 on 16 April 2019. Investec Private Bank and US Wordfest Artist, 5 March – 4 April 2009. Klopper, S. 2007. Trojan Horse III, in E. Stellenbosch: US Wordfest: 4-6. Bedford, (ed.). Willie Bester. Exhibition Catalogue: Montagu 3-16 November Brassaï. 2002. Conversations with Picasso, 2007, Iziko South African National translated by J.M. Todd. Chicago: The Gallery 5 December 2007 - 13 April University of Chicago Press. 2008. Cape Town: Goodman Gallery Cape: 19. Fiz, A. 1999. In the Bester’s dump, in A. Fiz, (ed.). 1999. Willie Bester: Opere Klopper, S. 2007. Becoming an artist in Recenti. Exhibition Catalogue: Studio apartheid Montagu, in E. Bedford, (ed.) D’Arte Raffaelli. Trento, Italy: Studio Willie Bester. Exhibition Catalogue: D’Arte Raffaelli: 11-13. Montagu 3-16 November 2007, Iziko South African National Gallery 5 Frey, P. 2016. CS Studio Architects: Carin December 2007 - 13 April 2008. Cape Smuts, Urs Schmid: Anatomy of a Town: Goodman Gallery Cape: 1-3. Dream. Arles: Actes Sud. Maritz, N. 2016. Namibia: Archaeology of Godby, M. 2007. The road to the Montagu the Future. An exhibition presented by portraits, in E. Bedford, (ed.). Willie the Namibia Institute of Architects 15 Bester. Exhibition Catalogue: Montagu November – 2 December 2016, Casa 3-16 November 2007, Iziko South dell’Architettura. Rome: Architetti African National Gallery 5 December Roma Edizioni.

60 Maritz, N. 2007. Visitors’ interpretive rock Art. Retrieved from https://www. art centre, Twyfelfontein, in Digest of moma.org/documents/moma_ Namibian Architecture, 2007: 68-71. catalogue_1880_300062228.pdf on 16 April 2019. Sanyal, S.K. 2014. Critiquing the critique: El Anatsui and the politics of inclusion, in Van der Wal, E. 2009. Sculpting dissent and World Art 4 (1): 89-108. Retrieved from art as armed protest, in A. Botha, (ed.). https://doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2014. Willie Bester. Exhibition Catalogue: 893902 on 16 April 2019. Investec Private Bank and US Wordfest Artist, 5 March – 4 April 2009. Seitz, W.C. 1961. The Art of Assemblage. Stellenbosch: US Wordfest: 22-25. New York: The Museum of Modern

Michael Louw is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a BArch degree from the University of Pretoria and a BPhil and MPhil degree in Sustainable Development from the University of Stellenbosch. He is currently registered for his PhD studies at the University of Cape Town.

The author wished to express his thanks to Willie Bester for his generosity and friendship.

61 Ephemeropolis: urban design and performing land art at AfrikaBurn 2019

John Steele Walter Sisulu University Email: [email protected]

Elements of some traditions arising out of Burning Man as practiced at AfrikaBurn give substance to vectors for change and transformation at every conceptual, emotional and physical turn, slope, potential watercourse and uprise. This paper unpacks some aspects of those traditions and explores ways in which curation of space, people and creative energies enable imaginative and inventive communal and individual self-expression annually within this land art milieu. The city of Tankwa Town [AfrikaBurn site] is reconstructed from scratch on the bare desert of Stonehenge Farm in the Tankwa Karoo every year, and then dismantled and cleared, in line with ecologically motivated leave-no-trace principles. A look at the evolving urban designs for Tankwa Town, since first iteration in 2007, serves as a foundation for exploring some aspects of Ephemeropolis, the 2019 edition of this fleeting and somewhat anarchic celebration of human creativity. This event is further considered from theoretical points of view assisted by, among others, Inge Konik’s ideas about people and spaces channelling libidinal flows within a framework of activist ecological and environmental awareness; Hakim Bey’s thoughts pertaining to the creation of temporary autonomous zones; Mikhail Bakhtin’s evocation of carnival as a great leveller that is transgressive of all conventional limits; and Karen Halnon’s recognition of contemporary carnivalesque gatherings as facilitating dis-alienation and experiencing of joyous creative fulfilment as a vital source of energy that contributes to activation of meaningfulness in everyday life. Key words: Burning Man, carnivalesque, curating land art, disassemblable city, temporary autonomous zone, town planning

Ephemeropolis: Ucwangciso lolwakhiwo lwedolophu nobugcisa kokusetyenziswa komhlaba eAfrikaBurn nogonyaka we2019 Ingxenye yezithethe eziphuma eBurning Man njengoko ziqatshelwa eAfrikaBurn zinika umongo wokutshintsha isimo kwasekuyilweni, kungabasemoyeni nakwizinto esikwazi ukuzibona ngeliso lenyama. Lomsebenzi utyhila ingxenye yezithethe kananjalo ucwaninga ukusetyenziswa kwendawo, abantu neengcinga eziphilileyo zenza indlela yokucinga nokwenza okukwiqondo eliphezulu nekuthi umntu kunye nesizwe bazibonakalise nyaka ngamnye kobugcisa bomhlaba. Isixeko sedolophu yaseTankwa (kwindawo i-AfrikaBurn) iphinde yakhiwa ukusuka phantsi kwintlango ebharhileyo kwifama iStonehange eTankwa Karoo unyaka ngamnye, ichithwe ukuze isuswe kungabikhonto ngokulandela iimithetho yokulondolozwa kwendalo. Ukuphosa iliso kwizicwangciso ezitshintsa- tshintshayo zedolophu yaseTankwa ukusukela ngonyaka we2007 zisebenza njengesiseko sokujonga ngokuphangaleleyo ingxenye yezinto ze-Ephemeropolis yonyaka u-2019 yokuvuyela ubugcisa babantu. Lomnyhadala uphinde ujongwe ngokubanzi zizimvo zabantu phakathi kwabo abanjengo Inge Konik, Hakim Bey, Mikhail Bakhtin kwakunye no-Karen Halnon eyenza ubomi bubenentsingiselo imihla yonke. Amagama angundoqo: Burning Man, umngcelele ngokubaxekileyo, ubugcisa ngokusetyenziswa komhlaba, idolophu yesigxina, indawo ezimeleyo okwexeshana

rom the outset of my involvement with AfrikaBurn as an art historian since 2015, I have been welcomed as a notebook and camera-carrying active participant, wherein the act of Fresearching becomes a performance thereof. This year, I was one of more than 11,700 co-participants in the performance of Ephemeropolis, the theme for 2019. Framing AfrikaBurn from the inside as a participant immersed in art history in the making has been essential for my abandoning notions of so-called scientific objectivity in favour of friendly intersubjective interactions with people and their creativities. I have been encouraged to take this position by the likes of sociologist Karen Halnon (2006: 33, 35), who, for example, immersed herself in

SAJAH, ISSN 0258-3542, volume 34, number 2, 2019: 62-83 the “hedonistic ecstasy” of heavy metal music, thereby “increasing validity of [her] report” into this form of performance carnival. As an example to me of reasons for effective abandonment of so-called objective distancing, she (Halnon 2006: 35) asserts further that “framing metal [music] culture from the inside was essential to forming a framework unbound by the ordinary moral and structural constraints and judgements of everyday life”, in much the same way as an AfrikaBurn event itself becomes a temporary autonomous zone, more of which later.

Some background

This paper begins by tracing a spatial history of AfrikaBurn, situated annually in the Tankwa Karoo, to lay a foundation for discussion around matters of curatorship of the 2019 event, named Ephemeropolis. In previous papers (Steele 2018: 62-63 and 2015; 2016; 2017), I theorised AfrikaBurn “as a large site-specific interactive [installation that could also be thought of as a] land art event geared towards experientially celebrating community and ephemerality, while also providing a setting for individuals and groups to articulate creative ideas within an organisationally enabling environment”. It was also found that, at AfrikaBurn, an emphasis tends to be placed on creative process and ongoing momentary engagement therewith, whereby some significances of cosplay, performances, theme camps, mutant vehicle art cars, artworks of any description and the fiery burns can be characterised as “arising not from what we have [made/possess], but what we do” (Neimanus et al 2015: 5). This trend is highlighted by the facts that some artworks are ritually burned as a cathartic form of artistic expression, and that everything is removed at the end because AfrikaBurn is guided by an environmentally sensitive leave-no-trace philosophy. It has also been established (Steele 2018: 63, 72) that home-grown idiosyncratic tinkering, ingenuity and manipulation of materials chart expressions of visual art, performances and ideas by an “active collaborator community”1 at AfrikaBurn, and at Burns worldwide. Furthermore, all Burns subscribe to community-oriented consciousness based on “communal effort, participation, civic responsibility, immediacy, decommodification, gifting, leaving no trace, radical inclusion, radical self-reliance and radical self-expression”, as well as in “each one teach one”2 at AfrikaBurn specifically.

Just as the above principles were mainly formulated by the late founder member of Burning Man, Larry Harvey,3 so too have elements of the AfrikaBurn temporary city – Tankwa Town – layout and emphasis on specific focal points been influenced by those of Black Rock City, which is the current Burning Man site in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, United States of America. The earliest drawing (figure 1) of a Black Rock City site plan that I could find, catering for about 250 participants in 1992,4 shows the original shape of the camp as being in the form of a circle, with radial arms aligned to the cardinal directions, and a large open central area for artworks, the very core of which was occupied by The Man artwork, which was ritually torched each year. After several changes, the radial scheme developed by Rod Garrett and his team for the temporary city in 1999 was adopted, and has largely been retained and expanded upon ever since.

63 ↓N-ish

Figure 1 Top: Black Rock City plan for 1992. Designed by Rod Garrett and team. Note circular design, and orientation to 4 cardinal directions (retrieved from the public domain https://journal.burningman.org/2010/04/black-rock-city/building-brc/designing-black-rock-city/).

Bottom: Black Rock City 2016, approximately 67,000 participants. Note the radial scheme. Photo: Jim Urquhart (retrieved from the public domain https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/08/does- burning-man-need-a-new-urban-plan/496550/). 64 Basic urban design principles include cardinal direction orientation wherein Black Rock City faces the rising sun, a central circle for The Man artwork, annular blocks, radial streets at 15˚ increments named according to numbers on a clock face with 12 o’clock being at due east. Rod Garrett5 has explained that this layout provided a conceptually graphic and easy- to-use system of location. Furthermore, at Burning Man large artworks are placed outside the immediate space of the city towards the east, and that “the open side to the circular scheme of the city takes on spiritual and psychological importance … we invite the natural world in … it is humbling to have the vast desert and sky intrude into our self-styled small world”.

AfrikaBurn in 2006 and onwards

Figure 2 This 2006 proposal for site layout for Africa Burns - renamed AfrikaBurn in 2008 - was drawn by founder members Paul Jorgensen and Robert Weinek. Additional information, handwritten by John Steele for illegible sections of this 2006 map, was derived from close-up photographs by Robert Weinek.

Since early conceptual beginnings (figure 2) in 2006 – when a planned site became washed out prior to the first event taking place in 2007 – AfrikaBurn has become a huge interactive artwork (figure 3) in which the current location on Stonehenge Farm in the Tankwa Karoo is a meeting place for collaboration between curators – organisers – artists, performers and participants from all walks of life. Ideally, there is no audience as such.

65 ↑N-ish

Figure 3 AfrikaBurn 2016 (photo: as supplied by Monique Schiess from AfrikaBurn archives).

For immediate purposes of this paper, curation of spaces, artworks and performers is initially considered in terms of urban design and resulting Tankwa Town plans, anchored each year by the Clan centrepiece artwork, and then unpacked further in terms of being a composite visual and performing arts space in due course. Unless stated to the contrary, much of the information that follows arises from telephonic interviews with AfrikaBurn founder members and directors Monique Schiess and Robert Weinek, as well as with theme camp lead Sonica Kirsten, past and present Department of Public Works leads Helena Sheridan and Kristy Derbyshire, and also with artworks and performances lead Isa Marques.6

Schiess, who has been one of the main creative leads for AfrikaBurn as a whole since inception, has recounted how the very first concept discussions for “Africa Burns”, as it was called until 2008, were held at a farm called MalPlaas outside Botrivier in 2006. It was at this meeting that the original 2006 town plan sketched by Paul Jorgensen and Weinek was presented. Some main points to note about the 2006 concept drawing, which was then expanded upon for the first event at Stonehenge Farm in 20077 (figure 4), are – roughly in keeping with Burning Man traditions – the circular centre space for artworks, clock-face delineation of radial streets, and east/west alignment of the 6ish and 12ish axis, with the Civic Centre being initially located on 6ish. Reasons for these urban design features are largely congruent with those mentioned earlier for Black Rock City.

66 ↑N-ish

Figure 4 Tankwa Town maps since inception, graphic and list of map artists from Monique Schiess. Map artists through the years are: 2007 – Mike Orchard; 2008 – Cate Wigley Romano; 2009 – Mandy Darling; 2010 – Lerato Bereng; 2011 – Io Makandal Schiess; 2012 – Io Makandal Schiess; 2013 – Petru Lotter; 2014 – Karyn Reynolds; 2015 – Naama Tsalik; 2016 – Davina Hall; 2017 – Guillaume Vaugrante; 2018 – Claire Du Plessis. 67 On the other hand, contrary to the Burning Man layout, the open section of the 2007 horseshoe is aligned westwards. Schiess relates that there was some discussion about this and that she was a fierce proponent of this westward alignment, which reaches out towards the Cederberg Mountains as a magnificent backdrop for the artworks, and has in the intervening years served to draw participants out into The Binnekring in the evening to collectively enjoy the desert sunsets. Interestingly, the specifically allocated loud and quiet zones noted in the 2006 concept do not appear on the 2007 plan.

Weinek and Schiess started out in 2007 with site demarcation – curation of space – with Weinek on the roof of a small pick-up truck in the centre and Schiess running at the end of a 250-metre-long rope marking out the perimeter with the point of a length of steel reinforcing bar dragged on the ground. Schiess, in conjunction with various team members, has since retained overall responsibility for the Tankwa Town layout. It was also in 2007 that the basics of a Civic Centre with information office, medics, fire fighters and Rangers – non-confrontational volunteer peace officers – was established at the head of 6ish street. The Binnekring inner circlefor artworks, Binnekring road, as well as an outer space known as Buitekring, were also established. The map shows a number of artworks that were allocated specific spaces at the very start. This inaugural event of 2007 was themed “Tribe” and had about 1,000 participants, featured about 15 theme camps with about 16 preregistered artworks.8 In 2007, sites for artworks such as the Clan on the outer edge, then Sand Pendulum and Triple Bypass were allocated on proportionally successive ever-decreasing radii based on the original perimeter diameter.

The Clan artwork is freshly redesigned annually,9 and usually placed approximately at the 12 o’clock position in The Binnekring prior to being burned as a climax event, in much the same way as is done with The Man at Burning Man. The Clan references the AfrikaBurn emblem, which was developed by co-founder Lil Visser in 2006 from an original San rock art painting in the Tarkastad area. The image of one body with several heads and many dancing feet was placed “within an encircling device with added spikes to represent flames associated with a burn … [for us] the image represents … a community as one, united”.10

The 2007 urban plan was largely retained for 2008. Schiess commented that they had found the horseshoe design to be successful for a number of reasons, including that this shape basically enables The Binnekring circular structure, which echoes sitting around a campfire and encourages a sense of egalitarian community. She also pointed out that circular spaces have been closely associated with symbolic meanings, such as those associated with the wheel of time, as well as with sites of ritual, such as Stonehenge in England, throughout history. Schiess emphasised that having The Binnekring space so centrally articulated, within a powerful circular space, foregrounds the importance of artworks for the event, and allows open breathing space from the crowds and between the artworks themselves. She also pointed out that much forethought is given to placement of artworks, and how they will resonate with each other and with the vastness of The Binnekring and the desert, saying that, for example, in both these years and onwards, a powerful 6ish to 12ish axis was achieved by creating a line of sculptures that could best be appreciated from an oblique angle against a backdrop of beautiful natural desert spaces that are ringed by mountains.

Schiess has also pointed out that other curation of urban design elements for 2008 and 2009 that were at least partly sustained into the future include consolidation of the original 2007 basic radial clock face layout with 6ish and 12ish on the east/west axis; block sizes initially averaging about 100m frontage – and 50m deep – on Binnekring road; removal of the Civic Centre from

68 within the circle to around 6ish across Binnekring road; formalisation of an entrance road; and placement of more preregistered artworks beyond the original circular perimeter, spreading out towards the Cederberg Mountains. The Clan was again placed at the head of 12ish, with a total of approximately 1,200 and 1,600 participants, respectively, each year. An aerial photo (figure 5) of AfrikaBurn 2009 gives a sense of the vastness of virtually virgin desert space within which this event takes place. It can also be seen that there is an early tendency towards urban sprawl happening approximately at the top of 6ish – marking the beginnings of a pointy suburb that has become known as Pixie Hat – and between 9ish and 10ish. It can also be seen that the desert terrain is by no means flat like at Burning Man, and that the site is bordered on two sides by ancient floodplain and potential watercourses. These factors were taken into account when aerial views, such as this one from 2009, enabled easy identification of vistas for artworks and suitably raised areas for expanded settlement to be prioritised.

↑N-ish

Figure 5 Tankwa Town 2009 photo with hand drawings by Monique Schiess and team identifying vistas and areas for expansion (photo supplied by Monique Schiess from AfrikaBurn archives).

Interestingly, 2010 and 2011, featuring 2,200 and 4,000 participants, respectively, saw rapid growth on existing grids and layout. This was when Buitekring road was officially established and much discussion, led by Schiess, went into how to curate expanding spatial needs for theme camps, artworks and camping space, while retaining original emphasis on overall aesthetics and open 12ish vistas towards the Cederberg Mountains without compromising space available for artworks in The Binnekring.

69 The 2012 event (figure 6) retains the Civic Centre at 6ish and the Clan at 12ish, and shows a much higher concentration of registered theme camps and artworks in both The Binnekring and out towards the Cederberg Mountains. Also, for the first time, mapped provision is made for suburban extensions, with clearly articulated roads, both along 10ish and in the Pixie Hat suburb. Likewise, it can be seen on the layout map that clear provision is also made for loud zones, theoretically radiating out towards the mountains from the regions of 3ish and 9ish, and across the centre of The Binnekring – not that things are ever really quiet at AfrikaBurn.

Figure 6 Aerial photo of Tankwa Town 2012 (graphic supplied by Monique Schiess from AfrikaBurn archives).

Also, as can be seen in this aerial view on the right-hand side, there is a runway for small aircraft precariously close to residential areas and alongside the entrance road, now known as Welcome road. Participation increased to 5,700 this year, and it turned out that, despite formalisation of many new suburban roadways, one can see uncontrolled urban sprawl occurring on town extremities, especially around 3ish street and the Pixie Hat suburb. Also, if one looks carefully, it can be seen that relatively sparsely populated areas correspond with the designated loud zones at 2ish and 10ish streets, indicating a predilection by many participants for quieter areas for camping.

This random urban sprawl in 2012 became cause for deep concern to organisers because of potential damage to precarious desert flora and fauna, compounded by mighty floods that year, which resulted in many participants who had ignored guidelines about staying within designated camping areas ending up being washed away. These circumstances, among others, resulted in

70 a leadership rethink aimed at formalising suburban growth for 2013 without compromising freedom of movement and space available for creative expression. Consequently, emphasis was placed on raising awareness about the importance of avoiding unnecessary ecological damage in conjunction with improving community consciousness based on principles of collective civic responsibility. These efforts, combined with clearly articulated urban planning, resulted in much more coherent temporary city occupation by 7,000 participants within clearly defined parameters for the urban edge in 2013. Two plazas were added, and 9:30ish Boulevard and Lady Davina Boulevard were added to formalise the south-westerly suburban grid extension by extending an arm along 10ish. It is interesting to see that, in the 2013 urban plan, the basic Burning Man principle of streets placed in concentric circles traversing the radials has been conceptually retained, albeit in a very altered way because of the terrain and watercourses.

Previous urban design lessons learnt in curation of space were consolidated for 9,000 participants in 2014. Collective ecological awareness and sense of civic responsibility can be seen in action, with orderly urban expansion having again taken place this year. Schiess has explained that, furthermore, the Clan site was moved outwards, though roughly still on the 6ish and 12ish axis, and taller works such as Subterrafuge were placed even further out to emphasise opening up the region beyond The Binnekring, as well as to cater for a greater degree of safety between campers and burning artworks. Another important development was to close the old airstrip in favour of a new one a bit further out and slightly realigned in such a way as to avoid overflying Tankwa Town, thereby ensuring greater safety for all.

The Tankwa Town plan was essentially kept intact for the 9,800 participants in 2015. This was the first year that I attended. I easily found a campsite in the newish camping areas along 9ish street and immediately set out to do the rounds and have a look at which artworks were where, and which theme camps were already operational. My arrival was easy and the beginnings of participation and meeting artists and others in this community-minded setting was seamless. At that stage, I hardly realised the extent of local knowledge and real sweat and hard work that had been expended by the Creative teams, the AfrikaBurn Department of Public Works and others in demarcating and setting up the site from scratch … I will return to that matter shortly.

In 2016, Tankwa Town filled up rapidly and ended up catering for approximately 11,800 participants, who mostly occupied the urban layout established during the preceding few years, including new sites opened on Welcome road. The new corner of the 8ish and Binnekring road site established for the Civic Centre in 2015 was consolidated. It can be seen on the map that the Department of Mutant Vehicles stayed on the original 6ish to 12ish axis, and currently remains at that corner on Binnekring road even though the Civic Centre, now known as Off-Centre Camp, has moved. Loud zones, roughly at northerly and southerly endpoints of Tankwa Town at 2ish and end of 10ish, were clearly articulated, the basic principles of which were retained for 2017.

It was, however, identified in 2016 that Tankwa Town needed a spatial revamp because there was a growing sense that the original Binnekring was becoming cramped by so many artworks, mutant vehicles and performances, and that it was also becoming isolated from much of the city that was now extending further down 10ish. A plan (figure 7) was successfully presented by Schiess and team to shave off the end of 10ish and a tip of 9ish, and realign 10ish to embrace the extended Binnekring rather than have new camping areas just growing away from the conceptual centre of the city.

71 Figure 7 Tankwa Town in 2016, with indicators showing suggestion to cut off the tip of the 10ish end of the horse- shoe for implementation in 2017 (photo supplied by Monique Schiess from AfrikaBurn archives).

This shaving of the horseshoe tip facilitated “opening the [Binnekring] circle up to greater visibility and inclusion, effectively expanding the open space that artworks could be placed in, and that mutant vehicles could roam across. Rather than resulting in The Binnekring becoming less defined, these changes thus meant that the old Binnekring circle no longer felt separate from the increasingly used space beyond it”11 for the 13,000 participants this year. One can also see that the Civic Centre, known as Off-Centre Camp since 2015, has taken on a much more pronounced presence, housing the medics and clinic; a sanctuary; Rangers; a section dedicated to dealing with media; another section called Arteria for facilitating artworks and artists; a site for radio broadcasts from Radio Free Tankwa; a volunteer station and a section for kids; a lost- and-found booth; and, finally, the ice station, which sells ice daily and is – given the principle of decommodification that emphasises gifting rather than barter or buying and selling – the only instance of organisationally sanctioned commercial transactions at AfrikaBurn.

In an attempt to try to regulate sound volumes, there is also now a clearly defined loud zone at the end of 10ish Boulevard, and a loudish zone at the end of 2ish. It is also notable that the south westerly street grid extending along 10ish Boulevard and inwards has tended away from the concentric circles of 2013 in favour of reaching out towards new camping areas established since 2015 on Welcome road, serving to successfully integrate these suburbs with each other, despite being separated by a potential watercourse. This particular 2017 site layout proved to be sufficiently effective for it to be largely retained intact for 2018 and 2019, which catered for 11,000 and 11,700 participants, respectively. The major change for 2018 and 2019 (figure 8) was to locate only one loud zone at 2ish and beyond, on the northerly end of the Tankwa Town horseshoe, and to develop the Walk-in Camping suburb extending northerly from the side of the Pixie Hat suburb. 72 Figure 8 Tankwa Town map for 2019, by Sue Guldemond, showing location of artworks and theme camps, as well as the key for these, and the burn schedule (retrieved from the public domain https://www.afrikaburn.com/the-event/archive).

73 Demarcation, allocation and artworks placement

It is extraordinary to think that, in keeping with the principle of being ecologically minded and leaving no trace, the entire Tankwa Town is taken down and the whole site is physically searched, combed and cleared of any debris every year at the end of each event, then demarcated and raised afresh from scratch according to revised urban layouts. In 2019, the demarcation team, under the watchful guidance of Joel Erasmus, arrived at the blank canvas site for Ephemeropolis on Stonehenge Farm towards the end of March. The arduous task of Ephemeropolis demarcation, from scratch with the help of GPS readings, was done by physically nailing a total of 26 kilometres of tough whitish ribbon tape to the desert floor. Enclosed areas indicate living space, open areas indicate roads, plazas and boulevards, and markers indicate ecologically sensitive areas beyond which camping is not permitted. A4-sized welcome notices were nailed to the desert floor of all specific sites allocated to 131 theme camps and organisational members so that they could find and occupy their specified spaces according to the pull-out map available in each WTF Guide handed out at the gate.

Each allocated site was decided upon by Sonica Kirsten and the theme camp team in conjunction with each theme camp lead. Kirsten has related that discussions take into consideration factors such as, for example, preference for relatively quiet or loud environments, gifting of food, drink, shelter or entertainment, as well as for occasional sharing of resources such as generators. Smallish communities within the bigger AfrikaBurn community are created by means of the emphasis on theme camps, which can have any number of members, and then this sense of community is extended more widely when theme camps become interlinked and inter-resourced. It is utterly remarkable that, on the whole, the mere presence of a narrow strip of whitish ribbon tape on the ground in conjunction with an A4-size notice nailed to the desert indicating that a site has been allocated is usually respected by thousands of participants looking for space to pitch camp.

Both Schiess and Weinek have emphasised that curating the land art installation of AfrikaBurn also involves a lot of practicalities apart from such matters as Tankwa Town layout and artworks placement. Such factors include provision of an enabling Civic Centre; a single yet efficient and welcoming entry point; loud and quieter zones; placement of 163 separate and regularily serviced sanitation/toilet facilities for Ephemeropolis;12 medical and fire emergency services with full facilities; volunteer non-confrontational Ranger security services; provision for unregistered artworks and performances; space provision for the 139 preregistered mutant vehicles in 2019 to move about; suitable airstrip facilities and personnel; provision for internal traffic flow and adequate camping, as well as parking facilities; communications between organisers as well as with participants; and also quick and easy access for emergency services anywhere on site at any time. It is within and without these dedicated zones that the participants, who are the creators of this land art event, move, touch, flow, create, roam, dance, perform, eat, sleep and chat while interacting within and without the spaces, places, people and artworks.

The Clan and other registered installations and smaller artworks are carefully positioned within the open horseshoe Binnekring and out towards the Cederberg Mountains by Schiess, Marques and the art placement teams each year. In 2019, a total of 72 registered artworks had allocated spaces in The Binnekring, and many more random artworks also appeared during the duration of the event. This team works in direct and ongoing consultation with the artists and artistic collectives in such a way as to best express originating creative intentions in resonation with surrounding artworks within the whole AfrikaBurn land art environment. Special consideration

74 is given to ways in which to facilitate The Binnekring becoming an interconnective environment that encourages engagement, while also allowing for breathing space between the installations, which also each still stand independently as individual works within the larger collective land art space.

The visual landscapes and soundscapes created by registered artworks in The Binnekring are arranged so that different works become like layered languages, with various textures and perspectives playing off of and for each other, being brought to fruition by movement of people and music throughout. Works that are due to be burned are usually allocated sites on old burn scars to add to energies already inherent to such positions, as well as to be ecologically sensitive. A particularly significant axis is the east/west 6ish to 12ish line, which, when viewed obliquely from 6ish towards an expanded horizon in 2019, included significant large works (figure 9) such as SKOPX, Unhcegila in Flames, Lupis – Lobo’s Lover, Clan and Temple of Stars,13 all of which were ritually torched, apart from Lupis – Lobo’s Lover.

Some theoretical considerations

“In contemporary art, curators play important roles in the production of artistic meaning through exhibition-making” (Acord 2010: 447). Likewise on a more macro scale, it can be said that meaning also arises out of ways in which curation of space – urban design and implementation – results in places with particular characteristics. Paul O’ Neill (2007: 23-24), aptly for AfrikaBurn, lists curatorial roles as including those of “animator, inspirer, brother [sister], community maker and someone who makes people work and things happen, and someone who inspires artists with ideas, programmes and projects”. In 2019, co-curators Schiess, Weinek, Kirsten, Marques, Derbyshire and their teams only experienced full production of artistic meaning upon activation of their layouts, plans and ideas through participation by all-comers – including themselves – at the interactive land art event of Ephemeropolis. Their large-scale co-curation results in a huge land art installation that becomes “a new autonomous artwork” (Rugg and Sedgwick 2007: 7). According to Muller and Edmonds (2006: 147), curated spaces like this become a “living laboratory … a site for collaboration … [wherein] the experience of art is always active and, in a fundamental sense interactive, consisting of the interplay of environment, perception, and the generation of meaning in the minds” of participants as connections take place with performances, soundscapes and objects.

Furthermore, unlike elsewhere in South Africa, with its specifically colonial and legacy of urban design reflecting “social polarisation and inequality [with concomitant] environmental degradations” (Barry et al 2018: 419), curation of space at AfrikaBurn has from the outset proceeded with an emphasis on equality, inclusion and leaving no ecological trace. The Binnekring circle,14 anchored by a proactive Civic Centre, is the focal space for centralised communal creative activity. AfrikaBurn is founded on the principle of radical inclusion, which actively seeks to redress past social and political imbalances. They maintain that “everyone should be able to be a part of AfrikaBurn. As an intentional community, committed to inventing the world anew, we actively pursue mechanisms [allocation of Anathi Tickets, Access Grants, and Spark Grants] to address imbalances and overcome barriers to participation, especially in light of past, current and systemic injustice”.15 These principles and extensive dialogues and consultations by Schiess and Tankwa Town planning teams have therefore ensured that Ephemeropolis and previous layouts are not the result of a “technical-instrumental … product of the autonomous reasoning process of the expert … means to an end” (Harrison: 2006: 319) top-

75 4 1 2 3 5

1 2

3 4

5

Figure 9 Top: Oblique view of 6ish to 12ish axis Major works in this zone include 1: SKOPX; 2: Unhcegila in Flames; 3: Lupis – Lobo’s Lover; 4: Clan; 5: Temple of Stars (photos by John Steele).

76 down approach, which is so often employed in conventional urban design. Rather, at AfrikaBurn, one can partly see application of a “notion of planning that is far more democratically … rooted in metaphors of webs, networks and interactive relationships” (Harrison 2006: 319) despite that a masterplan is drawn each year by a relatively small group of people.

Energies arising from engagement with such webs, networks and interactive relationships at AfrikaBurn can be seen to facilitate constructive human “channelling of libidinal flows”, by which Inge Konik (2018a: 90) refers to expression of instinctive psychic drives, creativity, appetite, intentionality and natural life urges. Konik (2018b: 76) also adopts a useful eco-feminist point of view for examining visual arts phenomena such as Ephemeropolis, securely anchoring a holistic value system to include recognition that “irreparable damage … to the planetary ecology” requires activist redress. She (2018b: 67) is also justly critical of patriarchal attitudes in conjunction with rampant consumer capitalism, which have resulted in a contemporary “amnesiac mainstream culture that prevents revolt and perpetuates social [gross inequalities] and ecological harm”. In this context, it can be seen that AfrikaBurn as a land art event based on principles of decommodification, gifting not bartering, radical inclusion, communal effort and civic responsibility all point towards potential for destabilisation of rampantly selfish ways of social thinking and acting. Such activism is in favour of encouraging libidinal flows towards societal transformation and awareness of self as part of nature rather than as an exploiter of others and our environments.

Konik (2018a: 93, citing theorist Herbert Marcuse 2007: 129) also comments that art, as at Ephemeropolis, “can give expression to possibilities beyond the established order … hinting at the possibility of a world beyond what currently exists, in which the human condition of interrelation and interdependence is acknowledged” and acted upon. Konik’s observations chime with those of Hakim Bey16, who conceptualised “Temporary Autonomous Zones” (Bey 1985) as eschewing social conventions in favour of finding and acting on energies “based on desire as a motivating principle” (Grindon 2004: 157). In this regard, Bey (1994: 2) is cited by Gavin Grindon (2004: 157) as rather wishfully observing that “the only force significant enough to facilitate our act of creation seems to be desire … hence the only viable government is that of love, or attraction”. Enactment of temporary autonomous zone lifestyle and consciousness at AfrikaBurn is a semi-anarchic way of creatively being – ironically enabled by careful urban design, which provides the initial safe haven, in conjunction with promotion of principles such as those of immediacy, decommodification, radical inclusion and radical self-expression – that broadly refers to engaging with actual physical or emotionally accessed spaces and states of mind outside normal social and political jurisdiction, temporarily achieved by living in the moment in disregard of conventional hierarchies and social expectations. Bey (1985: 101) also conceives of the temporary autonomous zone from a sociopolitical activist point of view as being “like an uprising that does not engage directly with the state”, but creates “spaces that step outside capital and embody anarchist social relationships. These spaces are also characterised by the carnivalesque inversion of cultural values and a blurring of the boundaries between art and life” (Grindon 2004: 156).

Here, Bey, as interpreted by Grindon (2004: 156), is explicitly drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984: 275) conceptualisation of carnivalesque – which can be directly applied to both Burning Man and AfrikaBurn events – that dwells within intense moments of “complete withdrawal from the present order”. According to Renate Lachmann (1987: 118), Bakhtin, “in the carnivalesque game of inverting official values, sees the anticipation of another, utopian world in which anti-hierarchism, relativity of values, questioning of authority, openness, joyous

77 anarchy and the ridiculing of all dogmas hold sway; a world in which syncretism and a myriad of differing perspectives are permitted”.

Halnon (2006: 33) also references Bakhtin’s conceptualisations of carnivalesque culture when she succinctly sums up my experience of AfrikaBurn as one of counter-cultural engagement with libidinal flows that constitute “a proto-utopian liminal alternative to the impersonal, conformist, superficial, unequal and numbing realities of [usual everyday] commercialism, and, more abstractly, a resistance to a society of spectacle”. Furthermore, I fully agree with Halnon (2006: 34-35), who finds that carnivalesque events express a “dis-alienating politics of resistance … [and enactment of] human freedom, creativity and egalitarianism”, thus mobilising for AfrikaBurn participants “a critical source of positive meaning for [ordinary] everyday life needs”. Moments of untrammelled creative expression for the pure joy of that act lies at the core of possibilities for dis-alienation that can be experienced by all at AfrikaBurn.

It is interesting that the world’s largest temporary city, catering for the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage festival in Allahabad, India, also has a very specific focus – of bathing in holy waters (figure 10) – as a cause and draw card. According to Rahul Mehrotra18, this four-yearly event rotates between one of four riverside cities, one of which is at Allahabad. In 2013, for example, despite that only 55 days are allocated to this festival, “more than 100 million people from all walks of life came to the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers” at Allahabad. Here, as at AfrikaBurn, communality of purpose is vital for successful interpersonal relationships and social well-being within a specifically prescribed space. Furthermore, careful planning and infrastructural management of space allocation for inhabitants is also required, as are functional roads and essential services, including several hospitals and a police force of more than 12,000. This temporary city is at least partially built by contracted paid workers, 1,700 of whom built the pontoon bridges. Mehrotra describes this “disassemblable city” as “a collage of cotton, bamboo, tin, plywood and plastic … here converging in a constantly changing texture of materials and styles”. The temporary city of Kumbh Mela is erected quickly and then taken down immediately after the festival ends because it is located on a monsoon floodplain. Mehrotra refers to such temporarily occupied spaces as becoming a “kinetic city … an elastic urban condition … that constantly modifies and reinvents itself”19, as does Tankwa Town.

Figure 10 Part of the temporary city Kumbh Mela in 2013, featuring a fraction of the specially constructed 18 pontoon bridges built to facilitate bathing. In this year, the longest temporary bridge spanned 725 meters (retrieved from the public domain, https://worksthatwork.com/4/constructing-the-worlds-biggest- disassemblable-city).

78 Just as with normal towns and cities, disassemblable urban designs for the likes of Black Rock City, Tankwa Town and Kumbh Mela have specific layouts that are geared towards hosting particular events and which, to an extent, determine usage flows and patterns. In all three of these examples, a certain degree of social cohesion emerges out of ways in which each of these urban designs enable participation, as well as encourage inventive use of both core and peripheral spaces. These landscapes offer infinite opportunities for intertwined involvement, depending on each individual’s ever-changing sense of these spaces as “imaginaries”,20 which are worlds that are “known to those who dwell therein” (Ingold 1993: 156).

Such dwelling is by no means determined only by urban design. Henri Lefebvre (1991: 11, cited by Tarantino and Tosoni 2013: 2) is thought to have contributed substantially to the conceptualisation of landscape as composed of mutually inclusive and equally influential “social, mental and physical spaces”. Thus, unlike the determinism expressed in apartheid-era urban design in South Africa, which was “exercised by the [then] powerful in a unidirectional manner over the powerless” (Barnes et al 2006: 336), AfrikaBurn and the disassemblable cities embody varying participation by all in reciprocal relationships. There is no doubt that, “by placing their activities in the environment, people not only shape the settlement, but pre-existing geometry of the settlement [design] also helps shape people’s decisions and behaviour” (Sevstuk 2012: 10).

I am inclined to agree with Sevstuk (2012: 14) that there is nevertheless “no clear causality between form and behaviour”, as well as with Tarantino and Tosoni (2013: 9), who recommend that “we discard any deterministic relationship of causation between sociocultural coordinates, spatial practices and representations in favour of a case-by-case empirical analysis”, to whatever extent empiricism is viable. Thus, sweepingly deterministic viewpoints can be discarded, yet, by recognising that space influences social life and vice versa, it follows that, with AfrikaBurn and other disassemblable cities as examples, it can be deduced that spatial transformation can influence social transformation and that social transformation will indeed also influence ongoing spatial transformation. This bodes well for growing South African towns and cities at large if such lessons are taken to heart.

Finally, it is appropriate to end this section with a quote from Schiess (made tele- phonically on 21st January 2019) that puts theory into action. While wondering out loud about co-curating AfrikaBurn as a meaning infused hyper-connective temporary autonomous zone, she suggested that

one of the things people love about this space is that it is a place where the civic/city infrastructure to creative projects is inverted compared to that of normal towns [art is centrally foregrounded in the proportionally huge communal Binnekring area and beyond, to which the residential areas are peripheral] … what we do is create the space, and people fill it with various intentions and their love and care … we challenge people to do something, to be playful, to open their hearts, to work collaboratively, to define a space … this creates deep meaning for all.

There are thus dynamic synergies between theoretical underpinnings and praxis in Tankwa Town. Out of this emerges a new AfrikaBurn land art event each year, aptly named Ephemeropolis in 2019.

79 Some concluding thoughts

In terms of tradition and transformation, Burning Man, AfrikaBurn and other Burns worldwide have established basic traditions that include centrality of art, performance and music in conjunction with enactment of all the community-minded principles elucidated earlier. These are the creative and caring cornerstones upon which these Burn events successfully, for some, foster dis-alienation, which helps with more meaningfully, creatively and considerately engaging with everyday life. I would argue that one of the strengths of this model lies in the immediacy and intensity of this carnivalesque event, precisely for the reason that it takes place in difficult physical circumstances for such a relatively short space of time each year. Therein lies a weakness too, because a heightened experience of carnivalesque temporary autonomous zone liberation, as well as caring and creative exhilaration, can soon return to one of default normalcy and in my case, anxious ennui, unless some sparks of meaningfulness and community mindedness can be retained and enacted in ongoing daily living.

It is interesting that AfrikaBurn has in many ways asserted local flavour and has by no means slavishly adopted the Burning Man model. AfrikaBurn has, for example, included “each one teach one”17 as an 11th principle central to community mindedness and collective interpersonal empowerment. It is remarkable how mindful application of this 11th principle results in cultural knowledge and practical experience being actively sought, taught and shared, rather than being ignored, imposed or commodified. It is also noteworthy that AfrikaBurn has created its own Clan symbol and tradition of Clan installation artworks rather than adopt the Burning Man focus on The Man effigy.

Furthermore, AfrikaBurn curators have only loosely adopted the Burning Man city radial layout with annular blocks plan, with a central space for art and an emphasis on the desert as a backdrop, into which even more artworks spill. The importance of the east/west 6ish to 12ish axis is emphasised by both Burns, but at AfrikaBurn a very significant deviation is that the open-ended section of The Binnekring horseshoe is oriented towards the west, which draws participants out into the further reaches of The Binnekring each evening at sunset. It is also worth noting that, at AfrikaBurn, suburban growth has been largely determined by terrain – minimising ecological damage and avoiding the flooding – and is far more organic, resulting in a quirky city with growth extending down 10ish and towards Welcome road, as well as outwards into and beyond the Pixie Hat. This makes for lively interaction with different residential areas, which take on individual characteristics. It is also significant that the Civic Centre, which has become known as Off-Centre Camp, has moved from its earlier positioning at the head of 6ish street to being located between 8ish and 9ish streets.

As a whole, it can be said that the entire Tankwa Town is a home-grown composite visual and performing arts space, with an emphasis being placed on registered artworks in and beyond The Binnekring, some of which are ritually torched. Meaning making at this land art event is an adventure. In this process, some traditions established at Burning Man have been idiosyncratically applied and reinterpreted to accommodate local circumstances at AfrikaBurn, thereby in turn creating new traditions that will be transformed in due course.

Finally, it has just been announced that AfrikaBurn is moving, in 2021, from Stonehenge Farm to an entirely new site located approximately 30km south-east, near the Skoorsteenberg mountain, bordering the Tankwa Karoo National Park. It will be very interesting to see how 14 years of space, people and artworks curation will be collectively expressed in a brand new city grid emerging from the dust

80 Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks are extended to Monique Schiess, Robert Weinek, Sonica Kirsten, Helena Sheridan, Kristy Derbyshire and Isa Marques for helpfully answering my long lists of questions, and being available for further discussions. Jonathan Noble is thanked for pointing me towards Mikhail Bakhtin. Laila is thanked for help with language editing. Solomzi Bovana is thanked for help with isiXhosa translation of title, abstract and key words. Anonymous reviewers are thanked for constructive criticism. The financial assistance of Walter Sisulu University is acknowledged. All views expressed and any errors are my own.

Notes 1 Retrieved on 2019/03/23 from the public 9 Images of all the Clan artworks have been domain https://www.ted.com/talks/nora_ archived and are accessible from the public atkinson_why_art_thrives_at_burning_ domain at https://www.afrikaburn.com/about/ man?language=en the-organisation/history/san-clan-history

2 Retrieved on 2019/03/23 from the public 10 Retrieved on 2019/03/27 from the public domain https://www.afrikaburn.com/wp- domain https://www.afrikaburn.com/about/the- content/uploads/2018/03/2018-03-12-SG- organisation/history/san-clan-history English_Final_for-download.pdf 11 Retrieved on 2019/03/31 from the public 3 Retrieved on 2019/03/23 from the public domain https://www.afrikaburn.com/the-event/ domain https://www.farandwide.com/s/burning- event-maps man-history-6325fb09d8644613 12 Kristy Derbyshire, one of the Department of 4 The first Burn happened at Baker Beach near Public Works leads, told me that the event San Francisco, USA, in 1986. The event generates approximately 130,000 litres of relocated to the Nevada desert in 1991. Maps effluent, which is transported from flow bins and information retrieved on 2019/03/24 from with a front-end loader to an off-site effluent the public domain https://journal.burningman. evaporation pond where it is turned into org/2010/04/black-rock-city/building-brc/ humanure. designing-black-rock-city/ 13 SKOPX was conceived and built by Nathan 5 Retrieved on 2019/03/24 from the public Victor Honey and the Sutherland Kuns domain https://journal.burningman.org/2010/04/ Ontwikkelings Projek. Unhecegila in flames black-rock-city/building-brc/designing-black- was conceived and built by the Zebracorns. rock-city/ Lupis – Lobo’s Lover was conceived and built by Michael Kennedy and others associated with 6 Telephonic interviews were conducted with The Spirit Train. The Clan was conceived by Monique Schiess on 12th January 2019 as well Lindsay Cressford and built by Mike Rule and as on 4th February 2019. crew, including Monique Schiess. Temple of Robert Weinek on 6th February 2019. Stars was conceived and built by the Starlight Sonica Kirsten on 7th February 2019. Crew (WTF Guide 2019: 34, 40, 32, 26, 37). Kristy Derbyshire on 15th February 2019. Isa Marques on 14th March 2019. 14 Here the circle also represents wholeness and probably also references the circular snake 7 Note: All event maps can, for the sake of greater ouroboros, archetype of eternal life/death clarity, be accessed from the public domain at cycles. https://www.afrikaburn.com/the-event/event- maps 15 Retrieved on 2019/04/04 from the public domain https://www.afrikaburn.com/latest- 8 These statistics were retrieved on 2019/03/28 news/contextualising-the-radical-inclusion- from the public domain https://www.afrikaburn. principle. This emphasis on radical inclusion com/the-event/past-events is more than just lip service. There are tangible programmes in place, including Anathi Tickets 81 and Access Grants for those of lower income afrikaburn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ groups who wish to participate but cannot AfrikaBurn-Survival-Guide-2019-English.pdf afford the full price. Such specific interventions and mechanisms are geared towards the 18 Retrieved on 2019/08/08 from the achievement of ever-greater participation by a public domain https://worksthatwork. broadening spectrum of peoples more widely com/4/constructing-the-worlds-biggest- representative of society at large, details of disassemblable-city which can be found at the above website address. There are also Spark Grants which are 19 Retrieved on 2019/08/08 from the public available to kick-start projects that positively domain http://rmaarchitects.com/files/Kinetic- benefit lower income communities. There is City_Essay-for-BSR.pdf also a concerted effort at consciousness-raising about inclusivity as an imperative political and 20 The concept of “imaginaries”, according to social goal in the southern African context (and Tarantino and Tosoni (2013: 3) arises through worldwide), details of which can be found at observations by Castoriadis’ (1975) wherein https://www.afrikaburn.com/inclusivity-guide. the cognitive role played by mental images in the orienting practices of urban dwellers 16 Hakim Bey is the pseudonym of Peter Lamborn is explored. The concept of “imaginaries” Wilson (Grindon 2004: 157). is thus intended to refer to the “ensemble of representations through which members of 17 The Survival Guide and the 11 AfrikaBurn a social group imagine their social existence principles on pages three and four can be and that of their surrounding world and retrieved from the public domain https://www. relationships”.

Works cited

Acord, Sophia Krzys. 2010. Beyond the Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: head: the practical work of curating Autonomedia. contemporary art, Qualitative Sociology 33(1): 447-67. Bey, Hakim. 1994. Immediatism: Essays. Edinburgh: AK Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. [1936] 1984. Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Castoriadis, C. 1975. L ‘institution Imaginaire Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana de la Société. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. University Press. Grindon, Gavin. 2004. Carnival against Barnes, Jendall; Waitt, Gordon; Gill, Nicholas capital: a comparison on Bakhtin, and Gibson, Chris. 2006. Community Vaneigem and Bey, Anarchist Studies and nostalgia in urban revitalisation: a 12(2): 147-61. critique of urban village and creative class strategies as remedies for social Halnon, Karen Bettez. 2006. Heavy metal problems, Australian Geographer carnival and dis-alienation: the 37(3): 335-54. politics of grotesque realism, Symbolic Interaction 29(1): 33-48. Barry, Janice; Horst, Megan; Inch, Andy; Legacy, Crystal; Rishi, Susmita; Rivero, Harrison, Philip. 2006. On the edge of reason: Juan; Taufen, Ann; Zanotto, Juliana planning and urban futures in Africa, and Zitcer, Andrew. 2018. Unsettling Urban Studies 43(2): 319-35. planning theory, Planning Theory 17(3): 418-38. Ingold, T. 1993. The temporality of the landscape, World Archaeology 25(2): Bey, Hakim. 1985. TAZ: The Temporary 152-74. Autonomous Zone, Ontological

82 Konik, Inge. 2018a. Exploring discursive O’ Neill, Paul. 2007. The curatorial turn: channelling of libidinal flows: a from practice to discourse, in Issues materialist eco-feminist reading of in Curating Contemporary Art and Nadine Labaki’s Caramel (2007), South Performance, edited by J. Rugg and M. African Journal of Art History 33(1): Sedgwick. Chicago: Intellect: 13-28. 90-8. Rugg, Judith and Sedgwick, Michèle (eds.). Konik, Inge. 2018b. Revisiting The 11th Hour 2007. Issues in Curating Contemporary in critical ecological times, Critical Arts Art and Performance. Chicago: 32(2): 67-82. Intellect.

Lachmann, Renate. 1987. Bakhtin and Sevstuk, Andres. How we shape our cities, carnival: culture as counter-culture. and then they shape us, MAJA: the Occasional Paper no. 14 for the Center Estonian Architectural Review 72(2): for Humanistic Studies, University of 10-15. Minnesota. Steele, John. 2015. Sculpting with fire: Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of celebrating ephemerality at AfrikaBurn Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 2015 in the Tankwa Karoo, South Africa, South African Journal of Art Marcuse, Herbert. 2007. Society as a work History 30(3): 187-200. of art, in Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse 4, edited by Steele, John. 2016. AntheA Delmotte: D. Kellner. London: Routledge: 123-29. performing temporality and returning to chaos at AfrikaBurn 2016, South Mehrotra, Rahul. 2013. Kinetic City: African Journal of Art History 31(2): emerging urbanism in India. Retrieved 131-53. from the public domain on 8th August 2019 from http://rmaarchitects.com/ Steele, John. 2017. Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life files/Kinetic-City_Essay-for-BSR.pdf. at AfrikaBurn 2017 in Tankwa Karoo, South Africa, South African Journal of Mehrotra, Rahul. 2015. Constructing the Art History 32(2): 161-173. World’s Biggest (Disassemblable) City. Retrieved from the public domain on Steele, John. 2018. Of cogs, fire and quanta: 8th August 2019 from https:// Steampunk at AfrikaBurn 2018?, South worksthatwork.com/4/constructing-the- African Journal of Art History 33(3): worlds-biggest-disassemblable-city. 62-73.

Muller, Lizzie and Edmonds, Ernest. 2006. Tarantino, Matteo and Tosoni, Simone. Living Laboratories: Making and 2013. The Social Production of Curating Interactive Art. Retrieved Urban Space: Towards an Integrated from the public domain on 22nd Approach to the Controversial Nature January 2019 from http://rock.siggraph. of Urban Space. Retrieved from the org/artdesign/gallery/S06/paper2.pdf. public domain on 8th August 2019 from https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/271195698_The_Social_ Production_of_Urban_Space.

John Steele first worked as a studio potter in Rhodes village in the southern Drakensberg mountains of the Eastern Cape in the 1970s, then as a pottery manager in Mthatha, prior to taking up his present post as Associate Professor in the Visual Art Department at Walter Sisulu University in East London, South Africa. 83 Representations of the sun before and after the Copernican revolution

Estelle Alma Maré Independent researcher E-mail: [email protected]

Subsequent to brief introductory remarks about the different creative procedures of scientists and artists, the article is structured in three parts. In the first part a selection of mythological representations of the sun as a life-giving object in the sky, which was often venerated as a god, are reviewed from prehistoric times to the end of the sixteenth century. The second part deals with geocentric cosmology that persisted in the West because the Roman Catholic Church accepted Aristotle’s model of the cosmos, albeit modified so as not to conflict with Scripture, until the heliocentric revolution initiated a paradigm change in science and religion. In De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, published in 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus expounded a heliocentric model in which the earth moves around the sun, and which marked a radically new approach to cosmology, though not generally accepted until the late seventeenth century. Modern empirical astrophysics transformed our understanding of the physical structure of the sun and our view of the universe. The third part deals with the question if scientific knowledge of the sun’s central position in our solar system, situated in the Milky Way galaxy, influenced late nineteenth and twentieth century artists who depicted the sun. It appears that the selected modern figurative artists seldom, if ever, felt the need to understand the sun as a phenomenon in scientific terms, since art demands a symbolic representation and personalised expression. Consequently, modern depictions of the sun are as enigmatic as pre-historical mythological representations. Key words: representations of the sun, geocentric and heliocentric models of the cosmos

Voorstellings van die son voor en na die Kopernikaanse revolusie Na bondige inleidende opmerkings oor die verskille tussen die kreatiewe prosedures van wetenskaplikes en kunstenaars is die artikel in drie dele gestruktureer. In die eerste deel word ’n geselekteerde groep mitologiese voorstellings van die son as a lewegewende objek in die lug, wat dikwels as ’n god vereer is, oorsigtelik van prehistoriese tye tot aan die einde van die sestiende eeu behandel. Die tweede deel handel oor geosentriese kosmologie wat in die Weste voortgeduur het tot die heliosentriese model ’n paradigmaverandering in wetenskap en godsdiens teweeg gebring het, omdat die Rooms Katolieke Kerk Aristoteles se model van die kosmos aanvaar het, alhowel met wysigings om stydighede met die Skrif uit te skakel. In De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in 1543 gepubliseer, het Nicolaus Kopernikus ’n heliosentriese model geformuleer waarvolgens die aarde om die son beweeg, wat ’n radikaal nuwe benadering tot kosmologie teweeg gebring het, maar wat nie voor die laat sewentiende eeu algemeen aanvaar is nie. Moderne empiriese astrofisika het ons begrip van die fisiese struktuur van die son en die heelal drasties verander. Die derde deel handel oor die vraag of wetenskaplike kennis van die son se sentrale plek in ons sonnestelsel wat in die Melkweg-sterrestelsel gesitueer is, laat negentiende- en twintigste-eeuse kunstenaars wat die son afgebeeld het, beïnvloed het. Dit blyk dat die gekose moderne figuratiewe kunstenaars selde, indien ooit, genoodsaak gevoel het om die son as ’n fenomeen in wetenskaplike terme te verstaan, aangesien kuns ’n simboliese voorstelling en persoonlike ekspressie vereis. Gevolglik blyk moderne afbeeldings van die son net so enigmaties as pre-historiese mitologiese voorstellings te wees. Sleutelwoorde: voorstellings van die son, geosentriese en heliosentriese modelle van die kosmos

ristotle (348-322 BCE) averred that the way in which we desire to know the truth about things in our physical world leads us not to find out to what use we may put them, but to find out their causes. We want to know why things merit being put into being, and why A 1 we sense them as good simply for being knowable. Basically there are two ways of observing a “thing”, such as the sun, in order to know it: that of science and that of art, which John D. Barrow distinguishes: “The sciences paint an impersonal and objective account of the world,

SAJAH, ISSN 0258-3542, volume 34, number 2, 2019: 84-123 deliberately devoid of ‘meaning’, telling us about its origins and mechanics of life, by revealing nothing of the joys and sorrows of living. By contrast, the creative arts encode the antithesis of the scientific world view: an untrammelled celebration of that human subjectivity that divides us from the beasts; a unique expression of the human mind that sets us apart from the unfeeling whirl of electrons and galaxies that scientists assure us is the way of the world.2

However, there are commentators who have conflicting conceptions of scientific practice, some of whom deny and some of whom confirm scientists’ impersonal approach to their subject, as P.B. Mendawar explains: “In one conception the scientist is a discoverer, an adventurer into the domain of what is not yet known or not yet understood.” And: “In the other conception the scientist is a critical man [sic], a sceptic, hard to satisfy; a questioner of received beliefs. Scientists are men [sic] of facts and not of fancies, and science is antithetical to, perhaps even an antidote to, imaginative activity in all its forms.’’3 An antidote to such speculation is the well-researched conclusion reached by Arthur Koestler: “[T]he equation of science with logic and reason, of art with intuition and emotion, is a blatant popular fallacy. No discovery has even been made by logical deduction; no work of art produced without calculating craftsmanship; the emotive games of the unconscious enter into both.”4 Undeniably, scientists are rational and critical, but generally also capable of being speculative and imaginative. On the other hand, artists are persons of imaginative insight and inventive activity; however, they do not create in a totally intuitive and formal way, since in their representations of observed reality they may also convey cognizance of the essence and meaning of existence and reality in a specific context. Obviously, “existence” and “reality”, with which both art and science deal, are complex terms and difficult to define. In an ontological sense reality refers to all that exists and the reasons for their existence. These reasons, of course, vary throughout history. In modern times our terrestrial reality has been explored by empirical science and products of technology are put to use to the extent that much of the natural world has been altered by cities, cultural landscapes, industrial areas, or simply laid waste. At present even the objects in the sky – including the sun – have come under the scrutiny of science – to find out their causes.5

One has to concede that the differences between the practice of science and the creation of art are manifold, even though, at inception, both scientists and artists are engaged in a speculative realm. The knowledge science generates as “a dynamic, self-correcting process with no absolutes”6 is cumulative and can often be applied in technology. Representational art, on the other hand, reveals a different understanding of reality. According to Tsion Avital, “when we paint something in figurative art, we leave the world of objects and ascend to the world of symbols”.7 This discussion may be concluded by stating that science and art are complementary observations of and responses to the complexity of human experience.8 Actually, no meaningful art is autonomous in the sense that its contents merely relate to expressive form; art actually needs to engage our cognitive and existential interests.9

Unlike scientists, artists cannot be wrong in what they depict or how they represent reality; the contents of their works can nevertheless be judged as trivial or meaningless and the formal and technical execution thereof as unskilled. Since art has no practical function, Oscar Wilde averred that art is quite useless, but “we do admire it intensely”,10 – that is, I may add, some of it.

85 Part one: A selection of mythological representations of the sun from prehistoric times to the end of the sixteenth century

The quest to understand the cosmos11 began millennia ago in ancient Babylon, a key city in ancient Mesopotamia, where, from the eighteenth to the sixth century BCE astronomers watched the night sky and during the last five centuries BCE they “devised elaborate combinations of arithmetical sequences to predict the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies”.12 What the observers gathered from their nightly watches of the movements of the heavens they used for the prediction of cosmic events such as solar eclipses and also for astrological purposes.

The Babylonian sky-watchers influenced their Greek counterparts in Ionia, Asia Minor, from the sixth to the fourth century BCE. While the Babylonians practised magical thinking, the Greeks practised rational thinking. According to Alexander Jones, “the Greeks persistently tried to explain the same phenomena [i.e. the motions of heavenly bodies] by hypothesizing kinematic models compounded out of circular motions”.13 These models certainly resulted from a serious quest for knowledge of the cosmos, and inspired imaginative interpretations of how it is constituted, based on geometric reasoning. A case in point is the assumption that the circle is the most perfect form, since it has no beginning or end and all parts are equidistant from the centre. Therefore the ancient aspiring cosmologists assumed a circular cosmos constituted of planetary bodies and the sun moving in circles to be a perfect creation.14 For Plato (427-347 BCE) and his later Neo-Platonic followers, the circle represents the divine creative intellect in its perfection.15 Consequently, the circular form not only influenced cosmology for millennia, but inevitably got entangled with myth and religion and extended its influence to the visual arts.16

Mythical speculation – which is the opposite of empirical observation of the universe and its influence on life on earth – dominated human history for aeons. According to Michael Herren, myths are often complex, “as they introduce different types of divine beings (e.g., gods, daimones, nature spirits) and describe the interactions between these beings and humans”.17 The creators of myths and the artists who represented their ideas in the visual arts were astute observers of the natural world and, moreover, endowed with an enviable capacity for imaginative speculation about how the world and the heavens function and – most importantly – affect human beings. The sun was often venerated as a god since its illumination and life-giving properties are precious. In dynastic Egypt astral phenomena were granted the status of gods with special insignia in visual representations. Even Plato, an enlightened philosopher, described the sun as a symbol of the Good, an object with divine qualities.18 Later Dante (1265-1321), the great Italian poet, expressed the view that the sun is an image of God: “There is no sensible thing in all the world more worthy to be an image of God than the sun, which with its sensible light illumines first itself, and then all celestial and elementary bodies; so God first illumines Himself with intellectual light, and then the celestial and other intelligences.”19

After the above preamble some questions may be asked concerning the sun as a “thing” and images and symbols created to denote or personify it. First: what mythical conceptions of the sun did prehistoric artists project in their visual representations? Second: how did designers and artists20 in the era before experimental science, from Greek Classical times until the sixteenth century, represent the spectacle of the fire-ball in the sky that “rises” at dawn and “sets” in the evening?

86 Prehistoric representations of the radiating sun

From archaeological remains a researcher may deduce a fragmented understanding of archaic, pre-literary cosmology. Prehistoric symbols and designs representing the sun were based on naked-eye observations of the heavens, most probably elaborated by obscure mythological ideas. Nevertheless an attempt is made to discuss a selection, with the focus on the portrayal of the sun’s rays.

A prehistoric engraving from Scandinavia depicts a red sun disk that emits forklike rays (figure 1). On its right side two figures, a man and a woman, touch the sun and replace its fork- like circular rays in their positions with their arms, while animals and a child standing to the left, look away from the disk. The symbolic message of the figural composition seems to be that humans respond sympathetically or worshipful to the sun’s benevolent presence.

Figure 1 Prehistoric depiction of the sun symbol connected to human figures, Underslös Museum, Gothenburg (retrieved from the public domain www.rockartscandinavia.com/rock-art-motivws-sun-symbols-vv34.php).

The solar representation on an anthropomorphic stele carved from solid rock on the Roceher des Doms, Avignon, France, which was discovered during an archaeological excavation, probably dates from the period between the Copper Age and the Early Bronze Age (figure 2). The stele, in the form of a stylized human face that most probably represented a divinity, is decorated on its lower left side with a solar emblem with deeply incised rays.

87 Figure 2 A solar representation on an anthropomorphic stele, Roceher des Doms, Avignon, France (retrieved from the public domain httpa://en.wikipedia.org/Wiki/Solar_deity).

In prehistoric South Africa there are also examples of rock art representations of entoptic phenomena,21 such as solar images. An engraving found in Province shows two concentric circles with eight pairs of parallel lines radiating from the outer circle, enhancing its implied rotation, seemingly from east to west, which subtly suggests the rising and setting of the sun (figure 3).

Figure 3 Engraving of a sun symbol, Gauteng Province, South Africa (retrieved from the public domain https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/rari/page8.php).

88 In most rock-cut representations worldwide the sun’s rays are prominently emphasised as emanating from a central circular form or disk. If compared with a modern photograph of the sun, prehistoric designers’ astute observational ability should be complimented (figure 4). However, it can be explained why the rays became visual schemata of the sun in prehistoric designs. What early people saw, and we still see, it that when sunlight filters through clouds crepuscular rays occur in the transitory periods between dawn and twilight (figure 5). Such transitional periods probably inspired awe and are often expressed in art, a theme that will be elaborated later.

Figure 4 Photograph of the radiating sun (retrieved from the public domain https://www:sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1727-how-elements-are-formed).

Figure 5 Photograph of the sun’s crepuscular rays (retrieved from the public domain Wikipedia Sunlight).

89 In dynastic Egypt the sun, together with other gods, has always been worshipped as a god. However, during the eighteenth dynasty (1549/1550-1292 BCE) of the New Kingdom, Farao Amenhotep IV, who reigned from 1353-1336 BCE, transformed Amun-Re’s cult at Thebes and declared the sun-disk, , the only god and its worship the state religion. As the representative of the Aten the farao changed his name to (“Living Spirit of Aten”). He not only converted his people’s traditional polytheistic religion to monotheism; he also altered the hieratic art conventions that were maintained for millennia. Figural depictions became more naturalistic, albeit with exaggerated emphasise on curves that displaced the traditional rectilinear style. Even more drastic was the change in the representations of the sun-god directed by Akhenaten. Aten’s rays extend to the presence of human figures with benevolent open hands that proffer their life- giving gifs, as stated in an inscription: “The rays of the Aten are as a protection over thee, their hands possessing health and life.”22

In the bas-relief carving that depicts Akhenaten, his wife Nefretiti, and three daughters, Aten is prominently placed centrally at the top of the panel with a cobra raising its head on its lower edge, announcing that the sun-god is the only god (figure 6). Stylised rays spread from the solar disk towards the reigning figures who are casually seated opposite each other, holding their daughters. Most remarkably the rays sprout open hands, arranged in a half-circle that reach towards and bless the figures, and also energise the space they inhabit.

Figure 6 Aten blesses Akhenaten, Nefretiti and their three daughters, c. 1350 BCE, limestone carving, 32.5 cm high, from Tel-el Amarna, Cairo Museum (retrieved from the public domain https://sites.google.com/site/adairarthistory/ li-ancient-mediterranean/22-akhenaton-nefretiti-and-three-daughters).

Representations of the sun’s diurnal course

What obviously intrigued people of pre-modern cultures is the regularity of the movement of heavenly bodies. Especially the sun’s presumed diurnal movement, based on the common sense observation that it rises in the east in the morning and sets in the west at night, gave rise to abundant myths. How could the sun possibly perform such a feat if it is not a god?

90 In ancient Egypt, before Akhenaten, it was believed that the sun god Ra travelled through the sky in a solar barge, named Atet, and Egyptians would have assumed that the heavenly way resembled the Nile, the Egyptians’ main means of transportation; thus Atet resembles boats on the Nile, complete with oars at the rear. Providing light to the world during the day, Ra disappeared into the underworld during the night. According to figure 7 Ra, Atet’s passenger, Horus, a falcon-headed god, balances the solar disk on his head.

Figure 7 The solar boat Atet (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atet&oldid=883761497).

The idea that inspired the Trundholm sun chariot, probably dating from the Nordic Bronze Age (c. 1400 BCE), is that during its diurnal course the sun disk is drawn across the heavens from East to West in a one-horse chariot without a driver or passenger (figure 8). The sculptural representation explains the movement of the sun disk that causes the alternation of day and night by replicating its presumed means of transport. Brilliantly crafted, the horse stands on a bronze rod, connected to the two large solar disks, joined together by a bronze ring. All the parts are supported by four wheels to enable the lone horse to navigate the sunlit heavenly way and dark underworld circuit.

Figure 8 The Trundholm sun chariot, c. 1400 BCE, bronze, width 54 cm, height 35 cm, depth 29 cm, National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen (retrieved from the public domain http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Solar_deity). 91 In Greek mythology Helios was a Titan deity who is the personification the sun and, according to J.E. Cirlot, “Helios symbolises the sun in its astronomic aspect.”23 In a fourth century BCE relief sculpture the Titan is shown with a radiate halo driving his quadriga, a chariot drawn by four fiery horses, across the sky (figure 9). Not the solar disk, as in the Trundholm sun chariot, but the god himself occupies the quadriga which he steers on its diurnal course, causing the cycle of day and night.

Figure 9 Helios in his quadriga, fourth century BCE, from the Athena Temple, Ilion, now in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin (retrieved from the public domain http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios).

The idea that the sun is transported across the sky is also found in Hindu mythology. The solar deity, Surya, is usually depicted (as in figure 10) sitting under a canopy in his chariot, being driven across the sky by Aruna, his charioteer, who steers seven white horses above the clouds, symbolising the seven days of the week.

Figure 10 Surya driven across the sky in a chariot, data not available (retrieved from the public domain http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Solar_deity). 92 Pagan solar gods

In Sumerian culture (c. 4500-1900 BCE) the sun was venerated as a life-giving deity and in representations its disk acquired wings, supposedly to make it seem alive and able to achieve a circular journey from east to west across the sky during the day and from west to east during his disappearance in the underworld. However, the ancient Sumerian god Utu was said to ride through heaven and the underworld, in a chariot driven by Bunene, sometimes referred to as his son.

Assyrian culture which superseded the Sumerian was more warlike. In Assyrian representations the winged disk acquired the face and waist-high body of a powerful male figure placed inside the winged sun emblem in the form of a ring, as in the example dating from the ninth century BCE (figure 11). Accordingly, “godlike” rulers usurped the sun as a symbol of their omnipotence (as indeed in modern times – see figure 41).

Figure 11 Male figure in a winged sun emblem, ninth century BCE, from the Northwest Palace of Nimrud, now in the British Museum, representing a detail from panel 23, room B (retrieved from the public domain http:// www.wikipedia.org/windex.php?title=Utu).

In Homeric literature (700-675 BCE) Helios and Apollo were initially differentiated, but in later Greek mythology they are sometimes identified with each other, as Walter Burkert observes: “Different names may refer to the same being, or they may be consciously equated, as in the case of Apollo and Helios”.24 Such is the case in the late second century CE Roman floor mosaic Apollo can be recognised by his effulgent halo, reminiscent of the Helios’s radiate halo (figure 12). However, Apollo’s halo is round with mild emanating rays. His glow of sanctity as a god and the way in which his head is encircled by a sun symbol, is enhanced by further enclosing, decorative circles that symbolise his excellence. Thus, according to Cirlot, “Apollo symbolizes [the sun’s] spiritual aspect.”25

93 Figure 12 Apollo with an effulgent halo, from a Roman floor mosaic, late second centuryCE , El Djem, Tunisia (retrieved from the public domain http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(religious_iconogrphy).

In late Roman times cults from the East became established in Rome. One prominent cult was that of Mithras that existed simultaneously with Christianity. Mithras originated as a Persian deity, Mithra; in the West as the deity of a fraternal of Roman soldiers on the frontier and veterans in Rome. Tauroctony is the central iconography of the cult and Mithras is most often represented sacrificing a bull (figure 13 above). He also became identified with the sun and was frequently called Sol invictus, acquiring Helios’s radiate halo (figure 13 below). According to N.M. Swerdlow, “Mithraism, like much else in late antiquity, was permeated by the imagery of Hellenistic astrology”.26 The cult has also been called the great rival of Christianity, which Swerdlow refutes.27

Figure 13 Mithraic relief from Rome, second to third century, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism#Mithras_Sol_Invictus).

94 Christian symbolism, creation and circular forms

In Byzantine and Medieval depictions of the crucifixion of Christ, such as the anonymous Crucifixion, tenth to eleventh century, that originated in Constantinople (figure 14), artists followed Matthew’s gospel (27: 45) which records that at the moment of Christ’s death darkness swept over the land. Therefore, as Jessica Savage avers, “the celestial bodies of the sun and the moon were incorporated into the skies above the crucifixion, not only to signal darkness at daytime but also to imbue the scenes with a rich cosmological significance”.28 The obvious reasoning of the ivory carver of the Constantinople Crucifixion is that if the sun is eclipsed the moon becomes visible. Moreover, one may surmise that the cosmological significance of the dual presence of the symbols of sun and the moon in the crucifixion is that Christ as the ruler of the cosmos is aptly represented by sources of light. Moreover, he is graced with a radiate halo which indicates sun symbolism.

Figure 14 Anonymous, Crucifixion, tenth to eleventh century, ivory and bone, 13.5 x 10 x 0.5 cm, originally from Constantinople, now located in Byzantine, Russian and Ethiopian Icons section of the Walters Museum, USA (retrieved from the public domain http://art.thewalters.org/detail/28247/crucifixion-10).

95 Besides its Christian significance the sun-moon symbolism echoes Roman depictions of “the emperors of late antiquity [...] presented between Sun and Moon”,29 who were venerated as planetary deities. This symbolism persisted in early Italian Renaissance Christian art, despite the prohibition issued by the Council of Constantinople because of the heavenly bodies’ reference to pagan religions.30 An example is an early painting by Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520) in which the theme of the sun and moon’s presence at Christ’s crucifixion is repeated (figure 15).

Figure 15 Raphael, Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saints and Angels, 1502-3, oil on poplar, 283.3 x 167.3 cm, National Gallery, London (retrieved from the public domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mond_Crucifixion).

In Monreale Cathedral, Palermo, Italy, there is a representation of God creating the solar system as described in the Book of Genesis (1180s). What is remarkable about the depiction (figure 16) is that the heavenly bodies, recognisable as the sun and the moon which are in the process of being created, are formally arranged to follow slightly elliptical starry trajectories marked out for them (probably viewed as circles from below), all revolving around the static central earth. God’s halo is in line with and agrees in scale with the nascent heavenly bodies. The support on which God sits is circular. This interpretation of creation approximates the assumption that the circle is the most perfect form and a circular cosmos is a perfect creation: the perfect earth is encircled by other bodies that issued directly from the hand of God.

96 Figure 16 Creation, Monreale Cathedral, Palermo, Italy, 1180s, mosaic (retrieved from the public domain www.thejoyofshards.co.uk/visits/monreale/creation.shtml).

The circular form also found expression in architectural elements such as rose windows in Gothic architecture. According to Painton Cowen: “Hidden meaning resides in the iconography of a [rose] window; there is also meaning in its form – its function as a wheel, a rose, a model of the sun, or of the universe (emphasis in the original).”31 The circle is the significant perfect geometrical form that shaped cosmological models throughout the ages because it was understood to be of divine craftsmanship. It therefore comes as no surprise that the west rose window of Chartres Cathedral, France, resembles a cosmological design compounded of circular movements (see note 16), even though the narrative of its actual depictions informs the viewer of the second coming of Christ (figure 17).

Figure 17 Rose window, Chartres Cathedral, France, west rose window, c. 1216, 13,36 m in diameter (retrieved from the public domain beyondborders-medievalblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/notre- dame-de chartres-cosmological.html).

97 In 1511 Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564) depicted scenes from the Book of Genesis on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The scene in which the powerfully embodied God creates the sun and moon refers to the fourth day of creation. With his right hand God points to the warm, yellow sun and with his left to the cold, blue-grey moon (figure 18). The presence of both the sun and the moon is reminiscent of, though not similar, to the depictions of the crucifixion in which both heavenly light-giving orbs are present.

Figure 18 Michelangelo, creation of the sun, 1511, fresco, 280x570 cm, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Rome (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_the_Sun,_Moon_and_Vegetation).

Unlike Michelangelo the great artist and proto-scientist, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) did not depict the sun directly, but in the middle of mathematical notes he wrote “il sole no si move” (the sun does not move) in “uncommonly large letters”.32 This note was written prior to 1519, when Leonardo was in France, and could only mean that he had heard of the sun-centred cosmos. According to Valerie Shrimplin Michelangelo incorporated sun symbolism, derived from knowledge of the sun-centred cosmos, in the Last Judgement painted between 1536 and 1541 in the Sistine Chapel.33 Clearly, in science and art Europe was approaching the end of a long-sustained geocentric belief.

Part two: The Copernican revolution as a paradigm change in science and religion

In ancient Babylon and Ionia, observers of the heavens formulated conceptual schemes or theories to explain reality.34 Pythagoras (c. 570-c. 495 BCE), an ancient Ionian philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism, was the first to speculate that the sun influences the planets. According to Aristotle (348-322 BCE) the Pythagoreans “believed there was a ‘central fire’, about which revolved, first, an invisible ‘counter-earth’, and then our earth, ‘as one of the stars’, and then in successive paths the moon, the sun, the five planets, and the fixed stars”.35 This belief was obviously erroneous. The exceptional intellectual feat of conceiving a more scientific model of the cosmos in which the immovable sun was at the centre of an immense cosmic sphere of stars, while the earth rotates on its axis and annually orbits the sun in a circular

98 movement, is credited to Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310-230 BCE).36 However, Aristarchus’s only extant work, On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, written in the middle of the third century BCE, “contains no hint of the heliocentric model. In fact, it adheres to the geocentric view. [Probably] Aristarchus decided that presenting a view in contradiction with the general consensus would have been unwise”.37 Indeed! Aristarchus’s decision anticipated sixteenth- century developments in the West.

Aristotle, who made no astronomical observations, rejected the heliocentric model. In his De caelo (On the Heavens) he described a geocentric, two-sphere closed, eternal cosmos, which is a continuation of the Platonic idea that the cosmos is a system structured around the earth.38 Based on philosophical conviction Aristotle postulated that the earth, which continually suffers change, is nevertheless securely at rest at the privileged centre of an everlasting spherical cosmos (figure 19). Beyond the planets and the sun the outermost, limiting surface of the cosmos contains the fixed stars and the sphere of the prime mover that rotate eternally in aperfect circular movement in a westward direction.

Figure 19 Aristotle’s cosmological model (retrieved from the public domain ixora.pro/Aristotle-s-model-of-the-universe/happy-birthday-nicolaus-copernicus).

Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria (c. 100-168 CE) continued Aristotle’s cosmological tradition.39 Alexander Bird credits Thomas S. Kuhn with explaining the Ptolemaic system: “[H]e demonstrated that Aristotelian science was genuine science and that those working within that tradition, in particular those working on Ptolemaic astronomy, were engaged in an entirely reasonable and recognizably scientific project.”40 It is hard to believe that Aristotle’s cosmology was genuine science. However, in his Almagest Ptolemy added refinements to the Aristotelian cosmos, which facilitated the observation of the planets and the sun. Unfortunately, the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic false premise – that the earth is at the centre of the cosmos – had

99 momentous implications in the West. Aristotle’s dichotomy between celestial and terrestrial regions influenced cosmological and religious belief for more than two millennia, supposedly affording humans a central place in a bounded, closed cosmos, as expressed in Medieval and later geocentric models with their circular symbolism.

Belief in the cosmology developed by Aristotle and Ptolemy remained constant during the Middle Ages and Renaissance because the Roman Catholic Church subscribed to a two-sphere, cosmos (figure 20), albeit modified not to be in conflict with Scripture that teaches a beginning and an end of creation.41

Figure 20 A Medieval model of the geocentric cosmos from an Islandic manuscript, 1750 (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model).

However, there was a single voice who thought differently: Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), an intellectual and mathematician who became a cardinal. Based on his mathematical speculations to conceive absolute and mathematical infinity, he “concluded that the universe was infinite in extent, making the idea of a center or of a periphery meaningless. Thus the earth cannot be the center of the universe, and since motion is relative and natural to all bodies, the earth cannot be at rest.”42 For his revolutionary insight Cusa was not persecuted as a heretic, but blamed for prescribing to pantheism.

As Peter Whitfield points out, Cusa was “seen as a herald of Copernicanism. Yet Cusa’s theory was not supported by any astronomical evidence, and remained only a speculation, a logical possibility”.43 Then a century after Cusanus, in 1543, the year of his death, Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) in which he presented a heliocentric universe in which not the sun but the earth moves (figure 21). However, Koestler points out that “[t]here can no doubt that Copernicus was acquainted

100 with Aristarchus’ idea, and that he was following in his footsteps”.44 Moreover, “Kuhn showed that Copernicus was himself more indebted to [the Ptolemaic] tradition than had typically been recognised.”45 Copernicus’s debt to Ptolemy’s calculations of planetary movements in circles is beyond dispute, but what actually has to be recognised is that the heliocentric system’s far- reaching break with the past commemorates a radically new approach to cosmology; hence its designation as the “Copernican revolution”.

Figure 21 Copernicus’s model of the solar system (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican-heliocentrism).

A further astronomic concept of the solar system was elaborated by Johannes Kepler (1571- 1630). As a mystic he postulated God as the astronomer’s sun, Christ as the fixed stars, and the medium between stars and the planets as the Holy Ghost.46 As a scientist Kepler developed the heliocentric model by altering the circular rotations of the planets assumed by Copernicus and his predecessors. To come to the understanding that the planets do not move in circular, but in elliptical lanes around the sun, Kepler made use of the data of planetary movements accumulated by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), with whom he had collaborated. While Brahe was loath to admit that the earth moves (figure 22), Kepler reached a different and accurate conclusion regarding planetary movements (figure 23).

101 Figure 22 Tycho Brahe’s model of planetary movements (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tychonic_system).

Kepler’s proof of the planets’ elliptic movements set scientific exploration of the heliocentric system on a different course. Clearly, the mass of the sun influences the movement of the planets, even though Kepler could not yet formulate the idea of gravity (a feat which Isaac Newton (1642-1727) achieved). This discovery ended Aristotle’s speculation described by Kuhn as science (see note 40), but not with immediate effect. Notwithstanding the evidence that planetary movements are elliptic and therefore “imperfect”, circular symbolism continued its influence in art; it spiralled on in Baroque art and architecture.

Figure 23 Johannes Kepler’s model of the solar system (retrieved from the public domain https://luandsan2.weekly.com/johannes-kepler.html).

102 Belief in Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s closed, circular cosmos did not end in 1543, but was effectively enforced by the Roman Catholic Church for decades thereafter. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake, mainly for his refusal to recant his various disagreements with Church orthodoxy, but also for his belief in the heliocentric, open universe that extends infinitely beyond our solar system. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) became another victim of the Church’s persistent orthodoxy. Copernicus’s book was banned in 1616 and consequently – as during the preceding periods all the way back to ancient Babylon – belief in the geocentric system reigned supreme until late in the seventeenth century.

In Europe heliocentrism, as a radically new paradigm, effected a scientific revolution that overturned and supplanted mythological and religious traditions and gave rise to a new Weltanschauung. In science a “revolution” is more correctly referred to as a paradigm change, described by Kuhn: “A conceptual scheme [such as Aristotle’s eternal, two-sphere universe], believed because it is economical, fruitful, and cosmologically satisfying, finally leads to results that are incompatible with observation; belief must then be surrendered and a new theory adopted; after this the process starts again.”47 The formulation of the physical laws of the mechanistic universe culminated with Newton. Much later, in the first decades of the twentieth century Albert Einstein (1879-1955) postulated theories of space-time, and the quantum physicists discovered the strange behaviour of sub-atomic matter.

The question may arise if or how space-time and quantum theories influenced art. While art and science collaboration is rare in history, in the early 1920s new scientific discoveries nevertheless enticed a group of painters, referred to as cubists, “to look at the concept of the fourth dimension to extend their visual quest for an alternative, conceptual formulation of space”.48 To achieve their ideal cubists composed pictorial space according to averred multiple points of view in which representational objects were subject to geometric fragmentation.

Enter modern empirical science

Physicists explain the formation and activity of the sun in the centre of our solar system as follows:

The sun is a very hot star at the centre of our solar system. It is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, without a definite boundary, but its apparent visible surface from its centre to the edge of the photosphere has a diameter of about 109 times that of the earth. Its mass is about 330 times that of the earth [figure 25]. Seen from the earth it is the brightest object in the sky and certainly the most important source of energy for life on our planet. Sunlight consists of about 50% infrared light, 40% visible light and 10% ultraviolet light, of which the earth’s atmosphere filters out some 70%.

The sun emits light and electromagnetic waves ranging from violet to red. It actually emits more photons in the green portion of the spectrum than any other. However many colours the sun has, the intensity of those colours is so great that it appears white. But because it has strong lines of yellow it causes a slight yellowish tint so that most people see the sun as yellow. When the sun is low in the sky atmospheric scattering renders it yellow, red, orange, or magenta.49

103 Figure 24 The solar system, not to scale (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-System).

Figure 25 A model showing the relative sizes of the sun and the earth (retrieved from the public domain https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth).

The internal temperature of the sun is twenty-seven million degrees Farenheit. To keep its temperature constant the sun consumes 700 million tons of hydrogen each second, at which rate it will collapse in about five billion years. What may have surprised Copernicus is that the sun actually moves: it rotates on its axis about once every twenty-seven days, and, as Dobson explains, it is ‘’part of a solar system that [moves] at around 350 km s-1 in the Milky Way galaxy and [completes] a ‘galactic’ orbit every 200 million years.”50

Even though the sun makes life on earth possible, it is not entirely benevolent since it erupts continually (figure 26). Evidence has been found that a huge eruption occurred 2000 years ago that caused high-energy particles to collide with the earth. If a similar eruption would occur at the present time such high-energy particles, “can knock out electronics in satellites we rely on for communications and services such as GPS”.51

104 Figure 26 Eruptions on the surface of the sun (retrieved from the public domain https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47536271).

Part three: Selected representations of the sun in modern art

The third question (after the first two in part one) is: how did late nineteenth and twentieth century artists (henceforth called “modern”) from various continents – who presumably never studied solar physics or cosmology, but were (like the cubists) generally aware of Einstein’s space-time and relativity theories – represent the sun? The following review of a selection of modern sun-centred compositions will hopefully provide some clues.

Modern sun-centred representations

Artists seldom, if ever, feel the need to understand the causes or physical properties of a phenomenon or “thing”– such as the sun – that they wish to represent in their chosen medium. Contrary to Aristotle’s idea that the search for knowledge focuses on why the things about us are sufficiently good as to merit being put into being (see note 1), modern artists and designers who represented the sun conceived of it as a mental construct and obviously felt no need to indicate its physical constitution or even its real colour accurately. As educated individuals they certainly understood the sun’s central position in our solar system, situated at an outpost of the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of countless millions of other galaxies in the expanding universe. Nevertheless, true to the way in which their pre-literate predecessors have done, they conceived of the sun as a light-giving phenomenon, but with symbolic and expressive effects in landscapes and other contexts.

A late nineteenth century format-filling composition, Plum Blossoms and Sun, by “Oki” Kogaku (died 1876), a Japanese artist of the late Edo period (between 1603 and 1868), shows a red sun behind branches of plum blossom (figure 27). The deceptively simple composition actually denotes more than the beauty of spring in Japan; it evokes a harmonious configuration of Japanese pride of their natural environment and national emblems. Sun-worship is central in Japanese Shinto religion and at Ise the Sun-goddess has a shrine where the nation offers thanksgiving.52 Moreover, the national flag of Japan is a rectangular white banner with the crimson-red sun disc at its center, of which the composition of Plum Blossoms and Sun is reminiscent. This work is not an autonomous representation (see note 9), since the combination of nature worship and national pride blends the foreground plumb blossoms and alighting bird in the foreground with the emblematic sun in the background.

105 Figure 27 “Oki” Kogaku, Plum Blossoms and Sun, before 1876, ink and colour on silken hanging scroll, (retrieved from the public domain https://www.org/collections/object/plum-blossom-and-sun-26899).

Impression Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) by Claude Monet (1840-1926) depicts an early foggy morning view of the port of Le Havre (figure 28). Le Havre was Monet’s hometown, to which he returned in 1872. During his stay in a hotel facing the harbour he depicted his “impression” of a fleeting sunrise in a painting that became famous because it served as inspiration for naming the “Exhibition of the Impressionists”, at which it was exhibited in 1874.

Two small rowboats in the foreground and the orange sun and its reflection in the water are the focal points of the composition; the latter indicating the artist’s interest in the science of light refraction. Actually, the few recognisable elements of the harbour in the background are also meaningful since its functioning denotes the rapid industrial recovery of France after the war with Prussia (1870-71). 106 Figure 28 Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm, Musée Marmottan, Paris (retrieved from the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Impression,_Sunrise).

Vincent van Gogh (1855-90) never painted explicit religious scenes, but imbued natural and figural scenes with symbolic and transcendent meaning. This is evident in Sower at Sunset (1888), a depiction of a labourer sowing a land with a huge yellow setting sun behind his head, glimmering like a halo (figure 29). The meaning of the work is implicit: that the saintly sower cares for the fruitfulness of the earth, echoing the Biblical parable of the successful sower.53 Simultaneously, Van Gogh pioneered an expressive painterly style in which colour fields are not rendered realistically, as in the Sower with a blue field and a green sky, with the intent of transforming the scene into a spiritual vision.

Figure 29 Vincent van Gogh, Sower at Sunset, 1888, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (retrieved from the public domain https://www.wbur.org/news/2010/05/11/van-gogh-mfa). 107 Late nineteenth-century painters such as Van Gogh abandoned Impressionism. Generally, it lost its appeal as a practice with emphasis on naturalism and scientific notions of vision and colour. During the first decades of the twentieth century Expressionism, “as a form of ‘new Humanism’, which sought to communicate man’s [sic] spiritual life”,54 took centre stage in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. There is no uniformity in expressionist techniques, except for the application of non-local, vibrant colour (as practised by Van Gogh) and the distortion of form for emotive emphasis, as in the paintings of the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1864-1944).

The Sun (1916) by Munch was first exhibited, together with works by other expressionists in Cologne at the first exhibition presenting a survey of works by the new generation of painters (figure 30). It depicts a sun-centred landscape with foreground rocks arranged in a half-circle that disclose a distant beach at sunrise. Behind the naturalistic foreground a small circular rising white sun explodes in colourful crepuscular rays, suggesting the speed of light. Reinhod Heller explains: “The imagery is [...] derived from landscape studies and paintings of the massive boulders on the seashore of Kragerø, and presents original allegories of the faculties of history and science as rooted in the folk wisdom of the Norwegian people. [...] [The painting], intended to be seen at a distance, contrasts with the exploration of spatial disjuncture and heavily massed forms in other works of the time.”55 Thus, a blend of reality and the unreality of an intensely radiating sun in a transformed Norwegian landscape established Munch’s expressive style.

Figure 30 Edvard Munch, The Sun, 1916, oil on canvas, 455x780 cm, University of Oslo, Norway (retrieved from the public domain WikiArt.org).

Marianne Werefkin (1860-1938), a Russian-born painter who worked in Germany and Switzerland found her unique manner of expression after the First World War. She appropriated the ideas of Nabis (see note 61) and later expressionistic movements that reacted against Impressionism. In Werefkin’s Sunrise (Sonnenaufgang), painted almost fifty years after Monet’s impression of a sunrise, the ambience is completely different and the composition is also unlike previous sun-centred depictions (figure 31).

108 Brigitte Roßbeck, an interpreter of Werefkin’s art avers with reference to an allegory (La Démence) that the radiating sun (Sonnerad) had a special meaning for the painter as “the sign of the highest cosmic power and the centre of being and intuitive knowledge”.56 In Sunrise the power and beauty of the whirling sun is celebrated; moreover, its light becomes a function of colour applied to the scene and not merely the medium by which elements are identified, as in expressionistic painting. This insight was expressed by Werefin in 1903, when she became an initiator of Expressionism, as Bernd Fäthke states: “Of decided significance within the development of Expressionism is the fact that for Werefkin, the meaning of light as the function of colour – not of objects.”57

The composition expresses the duality of colour during the transitional period between night and dawn. The life-sprouting rising yellow sun and its reflections are contrasted with tonalities of dark blue lingering on the pre-sunrise Lake Maggiore from which a group of night fishermen drag their boat laden with the night’s catch out of the water.58

Figure 31 Marianne Werefkin, Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise), not dated (c. 1920), tempera on cardboard, 47 x 61,5 cm, Fondazione Marianne Werefkin, Ascona, Switzerland (retrieved from the public domain kreiszeitung.de//kultur/des-blauen-reiterin-retrospektive-marianne-werefkin-bremen-3713298.html).

In Red Ship and Sun (1925) Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) depicted a small ship, composed of stylised geometrical forms, sailing in a void under a distorted red sun with a yellow centre (figure 32). The ship as a human construction is contrasted with the awesome solar object, but their togetherness in the composition expresses a mystical sense of voyaging in the vastness of space. One may only guess at Kandinsky’s knowledge of solar boat mythology, of which this depiction is a faint echo.

109 Figure 32 Wassily Kandinsky, Red Ship and Sun, 1925, oil on canvas, venue unknown (retrieved from the public domain https://www.wikiart.org/en/wassily-kandinsky/red-sun-and-ship).

In 1929, when Paul Klee (1879-1940) was teaching at the Bauhaus where he befriended Kandinsky, he painted a fantasy, titled Strong Dream (figure 33), which is reminiscent of Kandinsky’s style in the previous illustration. Under a crescent moon that seems to surround the irregular red disk of the sun, a small man lies sleeping on his back. The unconscious man with saucer-like red eyes lies away from his pillow with knees bent, lost in a fantastic inner world, symbolised by vibrant light emanating from the red sun and the yellow moon during first quarter which miraculously appear enclosed together in a night-black circle.

Strong Dream probably comments on the art of painting, presuming that an artist resembles the man who sleeps with his eyes open and finds inspiration in a vivid, “strong” dream in which he explores an inner reality in which the conflation of the sun and the moon is possible (albeit not in the religious representations dealt with previously; see figures 14 and 15).

110 Figure 33 Paul Klee, Strong Dream, 1929, gouache, venue unknown (retrieved from the public domain https://www.paul-klee.org/strong-dream).

Of German-Danish descent, Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was a versatile expressionist who painted figural studies, still lifes and seascapes. The latter are rendered in vibrant colours to reflect the various moods and movements of water and clouds. In Veiled Sun (1950) the atmosphere is brooding (figure 34). An amorphous dark cloud approaches the small yellow sun surrounded by a warm orange and red glow, which, in a symbolic sense, represents an imminent cosmic confrontation between light and dark that will occur above a green strip of earth and blue water. The sun is not yet “veiled”, but presently it will be obliterated. Whether this scene reflects the artist’s personal emotional experience or his pessimistic brooding on the period in Europe five years after the end of the Second World War is not certain.

Figure 34 Emil Nolde, Veiled Sun (Überschleierte Sonne), 1950, oil on canvas, 55,5 x 88,5 cm, private owner (retrieved from the public domain https://theartstack.com/artist/emil-nolde/veiled-sun-1950). 111 Marc Chagall (1887-198) portrayal of Le soleil de Paris (Paris Sun), 1977, was originally used as a poster for an exhibition of the artist’s works at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (figure 35). It depicts the sprawling cityscape of Paris as gifted with a special, local sun. The centrally placed blazing red sun is surrounded by a faint corona59 and blue rays dissolving in the summer sky. In the foreground the scene is viewed by a seemingly alive gargoyle-like sculpture at a high place; its animal head and fore-paws, placed to the left of the format, are graced with an arrangement of flowers to its right at the bottom of the picture. Below the nebulous city scene is rendered in vibrant blues, with a few landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral are identifiable. Beyond the horizon the sky is inhabited by a small animal, resembling the gargoyle-like figure below, led by a young man who seems to look past the sun at a man and a woman’s disembodied faces on the other side. Chagall conjured up a composition that suggests a narrative, but is surrealist and inscrutable.

Figure 35 Marc Chagall, Le soleil de Paris (Paris Sun), 1977, colour lithograph, 56.5 x 44,5 cm, a total of 150 signed and numbered proofs on Arches wove watermarked paper (retrieved from the public domain masterworksfineart.com/artists/marc-chagall/lithograph/marc-chagall-Paris-sun).

As a South African artist Alexis Preller (1911-75) was acquainted with the blazing African sun, which he represented in Image of the Sun (figure 36). This “sun” is a fiery abstraction brought down from the sky to be viewed directly – a feat only an artist is capable of. The sun’s blazing magnetic field, called a corona (figure 37; see note 49), is part of Preller’s design60 which one may interpret as an expressive correlative of his frame of mind.

112 Figure 36 Alexis Preller, Image of the Sun, 1965, oil on canvas, 98.5 x 93 cm, venue unknown (retrieved from the public domain www.artnet.com/artists/alexis-preller/image-of-the-sun-ChhPk_lPPWif_vhnEs5QoW2).

Figure 37 A photograph of the sun’s corona taken during the total solar eclipse in 2017 (retrieved from the public domain https://www.space/com/41627-solar-eclipse-2017-corona-predictions-accuracy.html).

Preller is renowned for his ability to appropriate and transform images from European and African cultures, for example his depiction of the sun as Helios (figure 38) which echoes Greek myths of the sun-god (see figure 9). The title of the work indicates that Preller’s abstract design represents the fiery being of the sun-god, but voided of a heroic human shape. The circular yellow pattern, reminiscent of a long past ideal of perfection, with its accoutrements against a sky-blue background evokes a sophisticated African design that celebrates the manifestation of sunlight.

113 Figure 38 Alexis Preller, Helios, 1965, oil on canvas, 167 x 182 cm, venue unknown (retrieved from the public domain www.artnet.com/artists/alexis-preller/helios-iHBA22ZMW5KxFBVFPEOGzg2).

In a sun-centred composition Frida Kahlo (1910-54) expresses a very sad mood, not conveyed by her own portrait, but by a “portrait” of the red disk of the sun with a weeping third eye, surrounded by nascent vegetation (figure 39). The physical sun as the generator of life is transformed into a humanised entity who expresses empathy with the painter who had suffered a serious accident in which she was hit by a bus, causing her to become sterile and suffering continuous pain.

Figure 39 Frida Kahlo, Sun and Life (Sol y vida), 1947, oil on canvas, 40 x 49,5 cm, private collection (retrieved from the public domain https://www.wikiart.org/en/frida-kahlo/sun-and-life-1947).

114 Desecrating the sun in political mythology

In modern history the sun was often appropriated for propaganda purposes.

New Planet by Konstantin Yuon (1875-1958) was initially designed for a curtain in the Bolshoi theatre to celebrate the Russian October Revolution, 1917, that gave birth to the Soviet Union, a new country that was politically as spectacular an appearance as a new planet in the sky streaked with vivid beams of light (figure 40). Consequently, Yuon’s propaganda is on a cosmic scale; he metaphorically invokes the universe to produce a new planet to grace the rising red sun in commemoration of the ascent of the Bolsheviks’s proletarian dictatorship.

Figure 40 Konstantin Yuon, New Planet, 1921, tempera on cardboard, 101x71 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (retrieved from the public domain https://www.wikiart.org/en/konstantin-yuon/new-planet-1921).

One “godlike” dictator, Mao Zedong (1893-1976), celebrated his apotheosis by appropriating the sun as a white frame for his red portrait (reminiscent of an Assyrian strongman, see figure 11). “The Communist Party is like the sun”, was the slogan during the Chinese Cultural Revolution which deified the Chairman of the Communist Party as “the Sun that never sets”.61 A propaganda poster (figure 41) shows an enormous white sun that forms a halo around Mao’s space-filling smiling face suspended in a blue sky, “radiating out over his people”.62 Below, a group of euphoric supporters march towards the future in the light of their solar “god” who affords them a good life in an industrialised society whose physical features that symbolise material progress are visible in the distance.

115 Figure 41 Propaganda poster of Mao replacing the sun (retrieved from the public domain www.shan-crosbie.com/blog/2015/4/3/chinese-propaganda-art-throughout-the-chinese-civil-war).

The German title of Wolf Willrich’s Nazi propaganda poster actually gives an account of its contents: “Deutsche Frauen schliesst euch zusammen! Du deutsches Mädel gehörst zu uns!” The poster shows a mother with two daughters, gesturing toward the horizon where a rising sun with far-reaching rays displays the swastika (figure 42). The Nazis were obviously aware that the swastika was an ancient sun symbol which they re-employed to mythologize their aspirations to attain power.

Figure 42 Wolf Willrich, poster for the National Socialist Women’s Movement, 1932 (retrieved from the public domain https://www.loc.gov/item/2004680169/).

116 The way of the artist is to create an imaginative illusion

In Dove with Sun (Colombe au soleil, 1962) by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), the main focus is the dove with a green olive branch in its beak as the harbinger of peace that rises above the chaotic ensemble of broken weapons (figure 43). This representation is likely the artist’s hopeful response to the advent of peace, shone upon by a free, non-symbolic sun (in contrast to the previous three depictions of the sun’s complicity to violent factional politics and war- mongering). But for Picasso a depiction of the yellow disk had a concealed meaning in painterly practice. He averred: “There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, could transform a yellow spot into a sun.”63 In Dove and Sun (Colombe au soleil) (1962) Picasso achieved the feat of transforming a yellow spot into a sun.

Figure 43 Pablo Picasso, Dove with Sun (Colombe au soleil), 1962, colour lithograph, 58.4 x50.8 cm (retrieved from the public domain https://www.masterworksfineart.com/artist/pablo-picasso/litograph/colombe-au-soleil-dove-with-sun).

Not only Picasso could transform a yellow spot into a representation of the sun. So could Van Gogh, Werefkin, Kandinsky and Klee (see figures 29, 31, 32 and 33). Also Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) could do so, in Sunset (1913), an appropriate title with which to end this article (figure 44). Valloton joined the Nabis group in 1892, a group in France who subscribed to Maurice Denis’s insight: “We should remember that a picture – before being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a particular pattern.”64 Clearly, Picasso echoed Denis’s wisdom about painting: a sun-centred picture is essentially a flat surface, with part of it covered with a yellow (or red) spot.

117 Figure 44 Félix Vallotton, Sunset, 1913, oil on canvas, private collection (retrieved from the public domain WikiArt.org).

Conclusion

Creating an imaginative illusion is the way of the artist, not of the scientist. Throughout the ages artists celebrated the light by which humanity lives differently from scientists. The artists referred to mythologized and symbolized the sun; modern scientists transform their wonder and admiration of what was “put into being” by empirical means. Art and science, though seldom influencing each other directly, are the foundations of human culture.

Notes

1 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072a-b. 9 Meaning in art encompasses two aspects: the extrinsic and the intrinsic. Signification 2 Barrow 1995: 1. is extrinsic and referential; significance is intrinsic, possessing a perceptible order. Thus, 3 Medawar 1969: 2.6. a representative or figural work of art cannot be entirely autonomous in the sense of consisting 4 Koestler 1964:264. of only a formal order.

5 NASA has recently launched its Parker Solar 10 The full quotation from The Picture of Dorian Probe, designed not only to take photographs Grey by Oscar Wilde is as follows: “We can of the sun, but to dare to “touch the Sun”. See forgive a man for making a useful thing as Ciaccia 2018: 2. long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires 6 Dobson 2005: 17. it intensely. All art is quite useless.” From the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, quoted 7 Avital 2003: 390. from Caws: 18.

8 See Weisskopf 1984: 311. 118 11 Originally the Greek word cosmos meant 21 An entoptic phenomenon is a visual effect beautiful or ornamental. Gradually it was within an observer’s own eye, causing a visual used to describe the harmony of nature and percept that is unrelated to reality. eventually to refer to the universe, which at the time referred to the solar system. Sagan 22 Inscription on the ceiling of the Third Shrine (1983: 30) explains: “Cosmos is a Greek word of Tut-ankh-Amun. Quoted from Aldred 1969: for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, 128. the opposite of Chaos. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is 23 Cirlot 1995: 143. See also Guirand 1959: 159- put together.” However, the terms “cosmos” and 60. “universe” should not be used interchangeably. Therefore, a distinction is made between 24 Burkert 1985: 129. “cosmos” and “universe”. “Comos” will be used to indicate geocentric, circular models 25 Cirlot 1995: 143. of a finite solar system. In the case of the scientific understanding that our solar system 26 Swerdlow 1991: 51. is heliocentric, not circular, and that it is situated in infinite space, i.e. in the “universe”, 27 Since the Church Fathers passed over the cult of the use of that term is considered to be more Mithras in almost complete silence, Swerdlow appropriate. (1991: 62) avers that ‘’it means that Mithraism was no great popular religion, at least in the 12 Jones 1991: 141. eyes of those who would have been the most concerned if it were. And if it was not a popular 13 Ibid. religion, then it must have been no more than what the monuments and inscription, taken 14 Greek reasoning about cosmology and the literally, show it to be: a rude fraternal cult perfection of the circle may have derived of the soldiers of the frontier, many of them from the ideas of Pythagoras (born 580 adolescents, and perhaps of ancient veterans BCE). According to Kate Hobgood (no date): back in Rome.” “Believing that nothing exists without a center, mathematical philosophers started with a point 28 Savage 2018: 1. and drew a circle around it. This symbol is called the monad and represents the number 29 L’Orange 1982: 36. one.” 30 See Mosheim (c. 1694-1755) for a new 15 For an account of Plato’s cosmological ideas, translation of his book from the original Latin, see Vlastos. 2015.

16 For a discussion of the symbolism of the circle, 31 Cowen 1979: 83. see Cirlot 1995: 46-8. 32 Richter 1970: 152. 17 Herren 2017: 2. 33 Shrimplin 2000. 18 See Notopoulos 1944: 223. In his Republic (532c) Plato identified the 34 See Heller 1998. sun with the highest and most divine form of being – the Good. In the allegory of the cave 35 Quoted from Burkert 1972: 231. Ferguson (Republic (514a-520a) the person who is with (2008: 108) explains: “Pythagoreans made his back to the sun sees only shadows of truth. a leap that set them far ahead of their Thus, for Plato the sun was also a symbol of contemporaries. The Earth could not be the truth. Moreover, at the level of the Idea or centre of the cosmos, not for that matter, could Idos truth is equivalent to the good, as well the Sun. The centre had to be a ‘central fire’, a as to absolute existence, beauty, and therefore fiery ‘hearth of the universe’ around which the indirectly symbolised all these aspects. Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the five planets, and the stars revolve.” 10 Quoted from Notopoulos 1944-223. 36 See Heller 2011: 35. 20 The difference between art and design is explained by Avital 2017. 119 37 For an evaluation of Aristarchus’s heliocentric “main-sequence, yellow dwarf of special type 30 system, see Violatti 2013: 1-5. G2V, mass 1.989 x 10 kg, diameter 1392000 km, luminosity 3.83 x 1026 W and absolute 38 Kuhn (1957: 91) explains Aristotle’s visual magnitude +4.82” (quoted from Cohen cosmology: “According to Aristotle, the 2010: xvii). underside of the sphere of the moon divides the universe into two totally disparate regions, filled 50 Dobson 2005: 300. with different sorts of matter and subject to different laws. The terrestrial region in which 51 Rincon 2019: 1. man lives is the region of variety and change, birth and death, generation and corruption. 52 See Maré 2002. The celestial region is, in contrast, eternal and changeless.” 53 For the parable of the sower, see the Gospel of See also Aristotle 1939 : 23-5. Matthew 13: 1-23.

39 According to Dobson (2005: 181), “Ptolemy’s 54 Vogt 1996: 693. cosmological geocentric system was very complicated”. Moreover, Ptolemy 55 Heller 1996: 293. “distinguished the discipline of mathematical astronomy from theology” (Dobson 2005: 180- 56 Roßbeck (2015: 186) avers that the sun was for 81). Werefkin “das Zeichen der höchsten kosmische Macht, Zentrum des Seins und der intuitive 40 Bird 2018: 15. Erkenntnis”, in which statement there is an echo of Dante’s idealisation of the sun (see note 19). 41 Aristotle believed that the universe was eternal; Christians believed that creation was the 57 Fäthke (2001: 66): “Von entscheidender beginning and that the Last Judgement will be Bedeutung innerhalb der Entwicklung des the end of time. Expressionismus ist, daß Werefkin die Bedeutung des Lichtes al seine Funktion 42 Freely 2012: 205. der Farbe – und nicht als Bedeutung der Gegenstände – bereits 1903 klar war.” 43 Whitfield 1999: 96. 58 For a full description of Sonnenaufgang by 44 Koestler 1959: 208. In part three, “The timid Werefkin, see Fäthke 2001: 191. Canon” (119-224), Koestler gives an extensive account of the life and system of Copernicus. 59 During a total solar eclipse the sun’s corona becomes visible to the naked eye. The corona 45 Bird 2018: 15. (from Latin “crown”) is an aura of plasma that surrounds the sun (and all stars), extending 46 Kepler, Astronomii Opera Omnia (Frankfurt, millions of kilometres into outer space. (See 1858). For a discussion of Kepler’s mystical figure 36.) image of the cosmos, see Burtt (1954: 59). 60 See note 20 regarding art and design. 47 Kuhn 1957: 75-6. For a detailed analysis and reassessment of Kuhn’s paradigm theory, see 61 Quoted from Cohen 2010: 513. Von Dietze. 62 See Crosbie 2015: 4. 48 The aspiration of the cubists are explained in a recent article by Ambrosio 2016: 1-33 63 Quoted from https:news.artnet.com/art-world/ pablo-picasso-birthday-quotes-347585. 49 The Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics, volume 4, defines the sun as a 64 Quoted from Caws 2001: 18.

120 Works cited

Aldred, Cyril. 1968. Akhenaten: Pharaoh of Caws, Mary Ann. 2001. Manifesto: A Egypt. London: Abacus. Century of Isims. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Ambrosio, Chiara. 2016. Cubism and the fourth dimension, Interdisciplinary Ciaccia, Chris. 2018. NASA shows incredible Science Reviews 41(2-3), retrieved from image of the sun exploding, retrieved https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2016. from http://www.foxnews.com/ 1223586: 1-33. science/2018/08/20/nasa-shows- incredible-image-of-the-sun-exploding. Aristotle. 1999. Metaphysics, edited by Joe html on 2018/08/20. Sachs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cirlot, J.E. 1995. A Dictionary of Symbols. Aristotle. 1939. On the Heavens, translated London: Routledge. by W.K.C. Guthrie. Loeb Classical Dictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cohen, Richard. 2010. Chasing the Sun: The Harvard University Press. Epic Story of the Star that Gives us Life. London: Simon & Shuster. Avital, Tsion. 2003. Art Versus Nonart: Art out of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Cowen, Painton. 1979. Rose Windows. University Press. London: Thames and Hudson.

Avital, Tsion. 2017. The Confusion Between Crosbie, Shan. 2015. Chinese propaganda Art and Design: Brain-Tools versus art throughout the Chinese civil war, Body-Tools. Wilmington: Vernon Press. retrieved from www.shan-crosbie.com/ blog/2015/4/3/chinese-propaganda-art- Barrow, John D. 1995. The Artful Universe. throughout-the-chinese-civil-war: 1-11. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dobson, Geoffrey P. 2005. A Chaos of Bird, Alexander. 2018. Thomas Kuhn, in Delight: Science, Religion and Myth Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. and the Shaping of Western Thought. Retrieved from https://plato.Stanford. London: Equinox. edu/entries/Thomas-kuhn/: 1-28. Evans, James. 1998. The History and Practice Burkert, Walter. 1972. Lore and Science in of Ancient Astronomy. New York: Ancient Pythagoreanism, translated Oxford Universiy Press. by Edwin L. Minar, Jr. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Fäthke, Bernd. 2001. Marianne Werefkin. Press. München: Hirmer Verlag.

Burkert, Walter. 1985. Greek Religion: Ferguson, Kitty. 2008. Pythagoras. London: Archaic and Classical, translated Icon Books. by John Raffan. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Freely, John. 2012. Before Galileo The Press. Birth of Modern Science in Medievasl Europe. London: Duckworth Overlook. Burtt, E.A. 1954. Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. Garden Guirand, Felix (ed.) 1959. Helios, in Larousse City, New York: Doubleday and Encyclopedia of Mythology, translated Company. from the French. London: Paul Hamlyn. 121 Heller, Reinhold. 1996. Munch, Edward, in Mendawar, P.B. 1969. Induction and The [Grove] Dictionary of Art, edited Intuition in Scientific Thought.London: by Jane Turner. London: Macmillan: Methuen. 289-95. Mosheim, Johann Lorenz. 2015. An Heller, Michael. 2011. Philosophy in Science: Eccresiastical History, Ancient and An Historical Introduction. Heidelberg, Modern 1, a new translation from the Dordrecht, London and New York: original Latin by James Seaton Reid. Springer. Open Library: Arkose Press.

Herren, Michael. 2017. The Anatomy of Notopoulos, James A. 1944. The symbolism Myth: The Art of Interpretation from of the sun and light in the Republic the Presocratics to the Church Fathers. of Plato, Classical Philology 39(4, Oxford: Oxford University Press. October): 223-40.

Hobgood, Kate. No date. Pythagoras and the Ptolemy, Claudius. 1984. Almagest, translated mystery of numbers, retrieved from and edited by G.J. Toomer. New York jwilson.coe.uga/EMAT6680Fa06/ and Berlin: Springer Verlag. Hobgood/Pythagoras.html on 24/05/2019. Richter, Jean Paul. 1970. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci 2. New York: Dover. Jones, Alexander. 1991. The adaptation of Babylonian methods in Greek numerical Rincon, Paul. 2019. Solar storm: evidence astronomy, Isis 82(September): 441-53. found of huge eruption from sun, retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/ Koestler, Arthur. 1959. The Sleepwalkers A news/sciece-environment-47536271 on History of Man’s Changing Vision of 12/3/2019: 1-3. the Universe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Roßbeck, Brigitte. 2015. Marianne Werefkin: die Russin aus dem Kreis des Blauen Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Act of Creation. Reiters. München: Verlagsgruppe London: Hutchinson. Random House.

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1957. The Copernican Sagan, Carl. 1983. Cosmos: The Story Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in of Cosmic Evolution, Science and the Development of Western Thought. Civilisation. London and Sydney: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Futura. London: Harvard University Press. Savage, Jessica. 2019. The Iconography L’Orange, H.O. 1982. Studies on the of darkness at the Crucifixion, Iconography of Cosmic Kingship in the retrieved from https://ima.princeton. Ancient World. New Rochelle, New edu/2018/04/04/the-iconography-of- York: Caratzas Brothers. crucifixion-darkness/ on 20/04/2019.

Estelle A. Maré. 2002. Ise Jingu: a Shrimplin, Valarie. 2000. Sub-Symbolism and manifestation of the coeval, past, Cosmology in Michelangelo’s “Last present and future, South African Judgement”. Kirksville, Missouri: Journal of Art History (17): 88-96. Truman State University Press.

122 Swerdlow, N.M. 1991. On the cosmical Von Dietze, Erich. 2001. Paradigms mysteries of Mithras, Classical Explained: Rethinking Thomas Kuhn’s Philology 86(1, January): 48-63. Philosophy of Science. London and Westport, Conneticut: Praeger. Violatti, Christian. 2013. Aristarchus of Samos, in Ancient History Weisskopf, Victor. 1984. Science and art: Encyclopedia, quoted from https:www. complementary views of human ancient.eu/Aristarchus-of-Samos: 1-5. existence, in Beauty of the World, Eranos Yearbook 53: 311-23. Vlastos, Gregory. 1975. Plato’s Universe. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Whitfield, Peter. 1999. Landmarks of Western Science: From Prehistory to the Atomic Vogt, Paul. 1996. Expressionism, in The Age. London: The British Library. [Grove] Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner. London: Macmillan: 693-96.

Estelle Alma Maré obtained doctoral degrees in Literature, Architecture, Art History and a master’s degree in Town and Regional Planning. She practiced as an architect from 1975-1980 when she joined the Department of Art History at the University of South Africa and was promoted to full professor in 1998. As an academic she published widely in the field of art and architectural history, aesthetics, literary subjects and cartography.

123 South African Journal of Art History Volume 34 Number 2 2019 South African Journal of Art History A JOURNAL FOR THE VISUAL ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE

Volume 34 Number 2 2019

tion i Trad Tradition

formation

formation trans trans ition Trad Tradition trans trans

formation formation& &

124

SAJAHcover34no2.indd 1 2019/12/20 23:50:20