Painting postcolonial displacement: reconceptualising South African modernism
Herbst, Günther (2022) Painting postcolonial displacement: reconceptualising South African modernism. PhD thesis, University of the Arts London/University for the Creative Arts.
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This research project aims to theorise, critique, and respond through an art practice to a largely unknown but unique aspect of architectural Modernism. Modernism's history may be well understood in the West, but this practice-based PhD finds and details the unusual appropriation and deployment of Modernism in South Africa. My enquiry therefore proposes a critical investigation into politics that both geographically and socially brings to the fore issues of nationhood, origin, and displacement. This project sets out to articulate an historic archive of the development of Modernism that is framed through a colonialist dialectic, visualising a darker side of the modernist project.
My response to the visual manifestations of modernist traditions and legacies in South Africa’s architecture is traced through historic race-based urban spatial structures and inbuilt inequalities that are still prevalent today. Contextualised through colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial references, a visual language emerges which is situated within post-conceptual painting and sculptural production methods. My methodologies draw from overlooked historical references and specific architectural archival repositories in South Africa. My process starts with preparatory drawings and collages including architectural model-making focusing on domestic architecture. These models are photographed and subsequently turned into large-scale paintings that due to their hybrid nature appropriate a language of fiction/science fiction. This enables me to open up this particular historical content and allow for ambiguity and multiple interpretations.
What my research found was how architectural Modernism was used by White nationalists during 1950s apartheid South Africa to develop and represent a heroic and modern society that simultaneously was determined to distinguish itself from the legacy of British imperialism. The result was a particularly cruel programme that relied on scientific and technological solutions to segregate the Black and White population spatially and socially. The egalitarian futuristic dreams of the International Style were thus manipulated and mutated into modernist structures that were specifically designed to keep the population segregated from each other. Modernism in South Africa has its roots firmly linked to the International Style or Modern Movement in architecture and planning that shows an inextricable linking of colonialism and Modernism. The visual side of this research project works to draw attention to marginal modernist aesthetics in order to reconceptualise and reinterpret hierarchical colonial frameworks that developed out of the centre of European Modernism.
This is a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of the Arts London.
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