DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Ph.D. Dissertation. Recently completed, in the Department of Art History and
Archaeology, Columbia University c.2001

The Struggle for Art at the End of Apartheid
John M. Peffer

This dissertation examines debates about the definition of "art" and
"community" within the history of the production of art in South Africa,
with particular emphasis on Johannesburg during the 1980s and generally
covering the period 1976-1996.  It posits that in South Africa during
the 1980s a formalist art aesthetic borrowed from America was harnessed
as a sociological phenomenon, as a means to creating community against
the grain of the social separateness of Apartheid. A history of the
educational constraints which beset black artists, and the extent to
which they were restricted by the market and by liberation politics to a
limited set of self-referential styles is sketched.  The extreme
political polarization of the art world in South Africa after the
Culture and Resistance Festival in Gaborone in 1982 is described.  The
relationship of South African art, especially that made by its black
African practitioners, to international polemics about the nature of
abstract art during the Cold War is then explored.  One art workshop
where nonfigurative art was experimented with, the Thupelo Project in
Johannesburg, is singled out as a case study.  The thesis is three-fold:
it establishes the extent to which the making of 'black' modernist
culture in South Africa had as its condition of possibility a
multicultural, nonracial social and aesthetic space-- what I term 'grey
areas'; it describes the critical juncture and foment of political and
aesthetic crises of representation during the end years of Apartheid;
and it demonstrates the inextricability of the history of
internationalist involvement from local revolutionary ideas about a
future South African national identity.

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