Visual Century: 1973 - 1992: Vol 3

Volume 3 of Visual Century: South African Art in Context 1907-1948 is part of a four-volume publication that reappraises South African visual art of the twentieth century from a postapartheid perspective. Edited by Mario Pissarra, the volume looks at the years 1973 to 1992. The forw0rd by Rashied Araeen titled `Art and Human Struggle', sets the theme for this period. Bracketed by porous transitional moments in the early 1970s and 1990s, this volume covers a period characterised by a deepening of the struggle for democracy, a time when historical preoccupations with race were increasingly complemented with growing discourses on class and gender. It was a time when unprecedented internal and external pressure resulted in heightened introspection and action in and through the visual arts. The essays address a multiplicity of ways in which artists responded directly and indirectly to the challenges of this period, mostly as individuals but also through organisations. Resistance and complicity, and the spaces between, found expression in the use of everyday themes, biblical sources, ethnically derived themes, subtle and extreme forms of humour, as well as through representations of conflict. This is a period when challenging art was produced in community arts centres, universities and in public places, a time when the cultural boycott simultaneously united and polarised artists, and exiles mediated the ambivalences of `home'.