Doctoral Degrees (Media, Visual Arts and Drama)

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Culture, politics and identity in the visual art of Indian South African graduates from the University of Durban-Westville in KwaZulu-Natal, 1962-1999.
(2012) Moodley, Nalini.; Leeb-du Toit, Juliette Cecile.
The purpose of this research is to document the visual art production of Indian South Africans who graduated from the University of Durban-Westville (UDW) with a degree in Fine Art, and provide an explanation of how and why their art works are so poorly documented within a post-Apartheid art historical narrative. When South African Apartheid society was designed to promote Black intellectual underdevelopment, this Indian university provided a space for young Indian intellectuals from all fields to engage with the struggle politic of the country to envision a strategy for a liberated and democratic future. While the visual art in this country has provided powerful social commentary throughout the Apartheid years, the voice of the Indian artist has remained silent. Some students managed to complete their degrees and find a little recognition as artists; the majority, however, relegated their art-making to a pastime. Little is known about this body of graduates; hence this research attempts a systematic study about how Indian Fine Art graduates fell into silence upon the completion of their degrees. The rationale of this study is to determine in what ways the constructs of culture, politics and identity, as key environmental factors at UDW, impacted on the virtual absence of Indian artists from South Africa’s art history. To this end, the social history of education of Indian South Africans since their arrival in this country has been provided. The influential and historical location of the University College for Indians (UNICOL) and later UDW as a cultural and political construct is explored against the art production of its Fine Art Department. Thus, the geopolitical space of this university as a site of struggle is contextualised. Against this background, the varied life stories of the forty-three graduates presented in this study are contextualised within the framework of separate and segregated education. These stories illuminate the unfolding dynamics that shaped the directions they subsequently took. The significance of this study lies in its contribution of knowledge to the existing literature on Indian history in South Africa as well as on the art production of this community as students of the Fine Art Department at UDW and subsequently as a small body of practising, but not always exhibiting, artists. Through this study I suggest that some of these graduates became internal exiles, which positioned them on the margins of the art-producing community in this country. This position of marginality impacted on their representation within the South African art historical archive. The study makes a number of recommendations to bring these and other South African Indian artists into the picture again.
Lost in transformation : a critical study of two South African museums.
(2008) Rodéhn, Cecilia Margareta Olofsdotter.; Leeb-du Toit, Juliette Cecile.
In this dissertation Transformation, as understood in South Africa, is investigated in the ‘Natal Museum’ and the ‘Msunduzi Museum Incorporating the Voortrekker Complex’ in terms of socio-political structures, the museum as a place, its collections and displays. I have emphasised the ethnographical perspective and analysed it by using key concepts such as new museology, time, space and place. My research focuses on the perception and mediation by museum staff-members of Transformation which is compared and positioned against South African and international museological theoretical discourses. I further explore the political backdrop to Transformation of South African museums and discuss related problems and aspects such as reconciliation, nation-building and the African Renaissance. Socio-political structures, acts, reports and policy documents are analysed over a long temporal sequence, but focus on the period 1980-2007. The long temporal sequence is a tool to capture the development connected to the museums in space and time and aims to compare and present previous developments in order to investigate how Transformation positioned itself as against the past. I hold that Transformation should be treated as an ongoing process connected to other transformation processes across time. I also propose that Transformation started earlier than previously suggested and that it is not a question of one Transformation but of many transformation processes. The urban landscape and the concept of place and name are explored. My research examines the urban landscape from the establishment of Pietermaritzburg to study how the museums were positioned in the landscape and how this has contributed to associated meanings. The museums are treated as demarcated places in the urban landscape which are named and infused with meaning and ownership. The museums are constituted and acted out within specific socio-political structures. The dissertation suggests that the objectives of Transformation reveal themselves through negotiation and alteration of place and name. My research explores the history of the museum collections – how objects were acquired, classified and used to materialise the museums´ institutionalisation of time and what this brought about for heritage production. I investigate what did and did not change when the museums transformed and I deconstruct the new and old objectives and socio-political ideas of collections. I analyse displays as socio-political spaces, the agent’s appropriation, and the discrepancies within dominant socio-political structures. When Transformation materialises in displays it becomes visible for the public to see. The negotiated displays show how the museum tries to visualise Transformation to the public. The discussion analyses the discussed concepts of Transformation, the structures, place, name, display and collection, and relates these to the concept of time, and to how agents create time and make it visual. I also discuss how museological writing and political speeches shape and negotiate Transformation through their articulation and how they sometimes constrain and form discrepancies to actual reality.
Michael Zondi : creating modernity.
(2010) Nieser, Kirsten.; Leeb-du Toit, Juliette Cecile.
This dissertation considers the creativity of Michael Zondi as one of South Africa’s so-called pioneer artists and the manner in which he used his art to contribute and create modernity. His creative skills initially locate him outside the classical designations of any one artistic discipline. From cabinet-making and building construction, which included an engagement as an architect and interior designer, ultimately Zondi became the proficient originator of a comparatively very large body of work in three-dimensional figurative wood sculpture. This study is largely confined to the latter body of work. The wood sculptor is located within the ambit of the black intelligentsia who, with their western mission education, was seeking to define and shape African modernity for themselves beyond descriptions mired in Eurocentric expression. Zondi’s early work emerged from crafting skills in woodwork, with thematic narratives that reflect regional sourcing among the amaZulu. Conceptually these represent a continuity of the creative practice of the generation before his own, particularly that of the black literary elite, who inspired him. He drew on the humanist values of the African communalism in which he was nurtured. As an ikholwa, he further drew on his Christian faith for guidance, using biblical inspiration for a few of his figurative works of art. Apart from participation in various group exhibitions from the early 1960s, unusual exhibition opportunities included two solo exhibitions, in 1965 and 1974, and an exhibition of his work in a group show in Paris, in 1977, which he attended personally. In the South African environment of black disempowerment and marginalization he secured his position outside party-political activism by using his art as his voice, especially among white patrons. As he found predominantly private patronage for his expressive human portraits, his philosophical exchange with enlightened friends, especially the medical practitioner Dr. Wolfgang Bodenstein, became the backdrop for his creative experience. Sensitive mentorship and informal tuition by white patrons provided Zondi with some knowledge of European modernist art. Drawing on it as an inspirational resource, the artist made discerning selections from this aesthetic in order to develop his own personal style. At the same time he ensured that his art remained accessible for a broad audience that included the rural people of his home environment, who were the source of his inspiration. Zondi’s thematic move beyond the confines of his Zuluness was the decisive factor which enabled the artist to engage in a very personal reconciliatory quest with white South Africans across the racial divide. In an endeavour which spanned the four decades of his active career as a sculptor, his self-representation through art was simultaneously an immersion in the human condition which became the expression of a shared humanity. By becoming the facilitator of reciprocity between people, it stood in defiance of the long-canonized fetish of race and segregation. By proffering his art as a means of communication, it thereby became an original and formative tool in shaping African modernity.
A social and cultural theoretical appraisal and contextualisation of the visual and symbolic language of beadwork and dress from southern KwaZulu-Natal, held in the Campbell Collections, UKZN.
Winters, Yvonne Elizabeth.; Leeb-du Toit, Juliette Cecile.
This Doctoral dissertation, A social and cultural theoretical appraisal and contextualisation of the visual and symbolic language of beadwork and dress from southern KwaZulu-Natal, held in the Campbell Collections ,University of KwaZulu-Natal seeks to act as a review and contextualisation of existing holdings of beadwork and dress to be found in the Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Most of the material referenced in this thesis was collected by the author in the post of Senior Museologist for these museum collections, but remain true to the eclectic, Africana and Oral History orientated collecting-policies of the founder, the late Dr Killie Campbell who’s ideas were no doubt equally informed by the Modernist, Colonialist notions of her times. Her collections were also heavily influenced by her friend and protégé, the artist Barbara Tyrrell, who recorded indigenous African dress according to the categories of gender age-grade/status and profession, noting within each category the correct posture, gesture and name of sitter/poser in some 1200 in-situ field-sketches of indigenous peoples of southern Africa. However, museum collecting is neither static nor neutral and as Campbell’s museum and library holdings had been bequeathed to the University of Natal (later KwaZulu-Natal), further collecting-policies were to be influenced by prevailing theories and schools of thought within the university disciplines most affecting the Collections at that time, namely Social Anthropology and History. The first of these schools excluded ‘material culture’ as being an art form (and at the time designated as a ‘craft’), as it concentrated instead on social and kinship organization( as did the British and French Schools versions of this school adopted by the English speaking University of Natal). ‘Material culture’ was the domain of Cultural Anthropology of the American and German Schools, which had been adopted by the Afrikaans speaking universities in South Africa. This fact side-lined the museum holdings of the Campbell Collections as a relevant source of study material for the University’s students as it not only delegated the material cultural artefacts to the status of ‘popular’ and ‘tourist-art’, but they were also an echo of the ruling apartheid Nationalist Government’s attempts to subvert the topic of indigenous culture to its own ends of divide and rule. Only the library division of the Campbell Collections assumed a more academic profile as it fell under the auspices of the discipline of History. The introduction of Orality-Literacy under the Faculty of European Languages and the introduction of a component of African art into the History of Art course at UKZN during the 1980s could be said to have redeemed material culture by contributing a new perspective upon it. The acquisition and sale of ‘authentic’ items of African art via western ‘Tribal-Arts’ sales-houses tends to de-emphasise the cultural function of these items for aesthetic considerations, a disingenuous mode of forcing up investment values. Only the academic writings of such art-historians as Anitra Nettleton, Sandra Klopper, Juliette Leeb-du-Toit, Thenjiwe Magwaza and Frank Jolles among others can counter this trend. This because they so often reference the Orality-Literacy theory of Walter Ong and the Symbolic Interactionist, Interpretivist and hermeneutical orientations in anthropological thought pioneered by people such as Clifford Geertz, famous for his introduction of the term ‘thick description’. These above mentioned schools of thought are the ones privileged in this thesis. From Geertz’s viewpoint I argue that instead of presupposing, as is the usual 1980-90s stance on beadwork that any suggestion of meaning, communication or message stems merely from the wish of African sellers of these crafts to appeal to European tourists/buyers with romantic notions of the ‘mythic African other’, rather these items may well still contain messages and communications that can only be understood by reference to the culture that produced them. Traditionalist women beadworkers, following ‘ukuhlonipha kolwimi’ (respect of language) encode messages into the non-verbal art of beadworking. In this they express themselves via regional colour and motif conventions that reference the formerly oral isiZulu language of the praise-poets, with its metaphor, alliteration and innuendo. In these items design and meaning unite to reflect the beadworkers/wearers’ concerns and act to not only circumscribe their identities according to gender/status/age-group that accompany important rites-of-passage like engagement, marriage, birth(ing) and death (and mourning),but also allow for the woman to express her expectations and disappointments, thus giving her a ‘voice’ albeit a non-verbal one. The regional location concentrated upon in this study is that of both the Embo-Mkhize and their Zulu neighbours’ resident in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands and the Bhaca and related Nhlangwini peoples of southern KwaZulu-Natal and East-Griqualand. The period covered is the 1950s to the 1990s, a time which largely parallels that when the administration of the Collections both passed to the University and continued to be administered by it. The majority of the items of beadwork and dress analysed in this study had actually been worn by their makers. They were obtained on field-collecting trips by museum staff during the 1980s–1990s, initially mainly by the author. Later on items were obtained increasingly more from African isiZulu speaking field collectors. Where possible in this thesis the original language of the maker-wearers, along with their explanations as to the meaning attributed to these items, has been retained and English translations provided accordingly, thereby allowing for a much clearer understanding of the connection between the rich idiomatic phraseology, often regional in its variations, and the symbolic choice of colour, motif and pattern and their intended communication. Not all beadwork and dress necessarily carries messages, but nearly all allow for ornamentation in its role of respecting and honouring (ukuhlonipha) both the ritual participants and wearers themselves as well as their viewers/witnesses (both those living and those deceased as in the case of the all-important amadlozi or ancestral-spirits). Concerns of African Feminism, modernisation and change are addressed throughout the study which has been divided into six chapters: Chapter 1 is an Introduction which gives a background to the topic, issues involved, literature and methodology. Chapter 2 is an intensive discussion of pertinent views and schools of thought (both Modernist and Postmodernist) that pertain especially to art and aesthetics, orality-literacy, anthropology (especially Interpretivism and Symbolic Interactionism) and museology, all of which are apposite to the selection of the beadwork and dress holdings under consideration. In Chapter 3 there is a discussion of the phenomenon of Nguni age-grades for both male and female and the ritual dimensions of courting which relate to the cultural significance of beadwork and dress in their function as external markers of such status and self-image. I also discuss manifestations of modernisation in relation thereto. Chapter 4 is an intensive overview of female engagement and marriage beadwork and dress and how these relate to concepts of the role of women in Nguni culture and integral to the many and various rituals of engagement and marriage that indicate these culturally important rites-of-passage. Examples of the ever-present modernisation and adaptation are also discussed. Chapter 5 examines the museum held documented beadwork communications of the women makers (in isiZulu, if available, with English translations) in the light of the cultural overview of the previous chapter. These communications involve the makers’ concepts of self, expectations, disappointments, conformity and attitudes to polygamy and awareness of modernisation and culture change. Chapter 6 is the Conclusion which summarises the thesis as a whole and suggests possible areas needing further research, particularly in field recordings of life-histories and the collecting of supporting documentation where available. The Bibliographic References follow and the thesis is supported by images placed in Appendices and marked by Chapter numbers and then Figure numbers, referenced accordingly within the chapters’ text.

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Media, Visual Arts and Drama) by Author "Leeb-du Toit, Juliette Cecile."