I argue for an ethics that takes into account self-reflexivity, and the artist’s, and the scholar’s, situated relationship to history, in the aftermath of sustained historical racial oppression and authoritarianism. Situated within the parameters of feminist ethics the study foregrounds women artists. A major concern is how artists and scholars enter into dialogues with history, from the perspectives of their own subjectivities, without reinscribing historical and epistemic violence, and the objectification of marginalised subjects. The opacity that characterises the works is a major point of emphasis, and is related to the dissertation’s concern with trauma, racial oppression and historical/epistemic violence. The videos selected for this dissertation suggest ideas of temporal and spatial disorientation, displacement, collapse, and irresolvable repetitive return. The particular temporality of video is engaged through historical and psychoanalytical concepts of trauma. It is concerned primarily with Bennett and Pollock’s privileging, from their particular theoretical perspectives, of the affects and internal logics/worlds of art objects, which prompt critical thought, and theoretical and historical inquiry. This inquiry is underpinned by art historical approaches to the relationship between art and trauma, and, in particular, the work of Jill Bennett (2005) and Griselda Pollock (2013). The study is concerned with the critical significance and temporality of memory in relation to trauma as a historical and psychoanalytical concept applicable to ongoing conditions of historical and political violence and its continuous, apparently irresolvable repetition in political-historical life. Each of the videos engaged enter into a dialogue with historical narratives embedded within the experience and memory of violence and racial oppression in South Africa. I seek to contribute to critiques of the post-apartheid democracy, and the impetus to move forward from the past, to forgive and reconcile its violence, while not actively and critically engaging historical trauma, and its relation to memory. I consider the visual, sonic, temporal, durational, spatial, sensory and affective capacities of these works, and their encounter with historical events/episodes and figures the significance and affective charge of which move across the eras differentiated as apartheid and post-apartheid. It focuses on Jo Ractliffe’s Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting), Berni Searle’s Mute (2008), Penny Siopis’ Obscure White Messenger (2010) and Minnette Vári’s Chimera (the white edition, 2001 and the black edition 2001-2002). This dissertation explores four recent examples of video art by four South African women artists. The animalised human form is a trope spanning many historical periods, and persisting in present-day art and culture as a fecund site for the imagining of the human model through the animal index. Artworks featuring amalgamated animal/human forms are also briefly addressed. This article examines the use of rhetorical similitude as a phenomenon and device or conceit in animal representation, with applied image discussion of artworks from the Urban Animal exhibition (2009) as well as a limited selection of domestic animal representations. Particularly in art and its historical discourse, animals are indexical signifiers, attaching affect or moral allegory to the humans they accompany, merely functioning as allegorical stand-ins for virtue or vice along the ethical spectrum of a particular cultural and historical era. This article seeks to extend on this notion of the symbolic alienation of animals as a cultural phenomenon that is not purely linguistic, but (manifestly) also embedded in visual signs. Derrida, in a counter assault to this humanist position, points out that the domination of animals is (even) encoded in the structure of language. This derisive philosophical treatment has embedded itself in the vast majority of cultural practices and has erased the ancient agency of non-human creatures vis-à-vis human society. Indeed, the Aristotelian and Cartesian theses proposed animals as being little more than automata. Consistently throughout the tradition of Western philosophy, as well as materially speaking, animals have long been the most estranged and disempowered creatures on earth.
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