Boetie is verlore: the reproduction of militarized white masculinities through the lens of Boetie gaan border toe! (1984)
- Authors: Coetzee, Joseph
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/4245 , vital:20638
- Description: My father fought for the South African Defence Force (SADF) from 1983 to 1985. At that time the apartheid regime was involved in extensive military operations in what is now Namibia and Angola. This conflict was aimed at quelling the liberation movements in those countries and, as Gary Baines has noted, supported the United States of America’s Cold War interests (Baines 2007:1). When I was fourteen I found a piece written by my father in which he remembers the first person that he had killed in the aforementioned conflict. This was a child soldier who he compared to me as I was a similar age at the time of his writing. The idea of my father as a killer haunted me. He has carried the trauma of his experiences on the border with him; he has told me how the dead visit him in dreams. On the one hand, these memories, not my own, have been constructed through my interpretation of the events in my father’s stories. On the other hand, homologies may be drawn between his actual experiences and a fantasy representation of the conflict I have encountered, the film Boetie gaan border toe! or Brother goes to the border! (1984). This apartheid propaganda film presents an idealised representation of the conflict from the point of view of the apartheid state. The protagonist of the film, Boetie, is an example of the aspirational and dominant image of militarised masculinity the apartheid state wished young white men to emulate. The racist sexist, patriarchal and materialistic reality created within the film is one I am familiar with. The toys I grew up playing with, television shows, films, advertising and popular culture I consumed, alongside the boys’ school I attended and the University I currently attend are all rooted in and continue to reproduce this reality. I have encountered many similar archetypes to the Boetie character. With this in mind I wish through my art practice to create a work which draws upon my father’s writing and imagery from Boetie gaan border toe! (1984). I have placed these alongside windows into my contemporary context in order to emphasise the continual reproduction of these ideas. In reference to the Boetie film I have decided to create my own film entitled Boetie is verlore or Brother is lost. This is a magic realist documentary film that I have constructed through various interviews and fantasy dream sequences in order to paint a picture of the continual incubation and reproduction of realities similar to that of Boetie. Boetie is a rich white man who is characterised through his material possessions and his compulsive heterosexuality. White women are interchangeable to him whilst blackness in the film is made completely invisible. In South Africa such representations are strongly linked to the question of land and naturalising the white male coloniser’s dominance and privilege.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Détournement : the art of troubling
- Authors: Wilby, Mark Owen
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/345 , vital:19950
- Description: Confidence in the form of, for example, commodified debt or the commodification of future value, is an increasingly large part of today’s globalised economy. This was alarmingly illustrated in 2008 by the repercussions of marketing unstable debt in the form of subprime mortgages in the United States leading to a precipitous global financial meltdown. That was a collapse of confidence writ large. At the same time, confidence is also a cornerstone of everyday social and professional life. The non-ZERO-sum project (exhibition title of practical submission in MFA fulfilment) interacts with the notion of confidence, and more particularly economic confidence. At the same time, the project takes the view that engagement from a fine art perspective would have an inherently inadequate vocabulary if restricted to a representative practice, and so a more interactive approach was sought. Research into the radical activism of the Situationists in the 1950s and 1960s, and particularly their tactic of détournement (the deliberate subversion of social or cultural practices), has informed and influenced the development of an interventionist technique summed up in this thesis as: The Art of Troubling. The Situationists had a dichotomous relationship with art. The group was initially made up mostly of artists and is in other instances referred to as an art movement. They saw art as the fulcrum for social and political change, and had their roots in the Dada, Surrealist, and Lettrist movements. As such, they also carried the genes of the notion of an anti-art, which varied in concept between art as a disruptive and propagandistic practice to the subsuming of art into other forms of social activity. This thesis, Détournement: The Art of Troubling, describes non-ZERO-sum as a bespoke methodology designed specifically for engagement with its particular topic. As such, the concept does not necessarily follow a template for situationist intervention. In 1962, a growing rift between the artists and the political theorists within the Situationist International tore the group in two. In conclusion of the non-ZERO-sum project, this thesis offers the observation that perhaps it was the political faction of the Situationists that had a more compelling idea of an art that functions through its very own subsumption.
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- Date Issued: 2016