Negotiations of Difference and Transformative Practices in the Contemporary South African Art World

In 2008 the South African government commissioned a Report on the art industry, and today it stands as one of the only available accounts of its kind. Using a Foucaultian analysis, I established that this Report produces a discourse on gender and race in the South African art world in which race and gender function only as quantitative and statistical categories in relation to an economic model for the art industry. This discourse results in the construction of four figures, which I have termed ‘avatars’, namely the white male, the white female, the black male and the black female. These figures also represent a hierarchy of professional and financial success with the ‘white man’ at the top and the ‘black woman’ at the bottom of this scale. Despite this, no remedy was recommended for the gendered-race imbalance clearly revealed in the Report. Gender was thus folded out of sight.
To counter this, I have used the Constructivist Grounded Theory Method to create an oral archive through which to explore articulations of the lived experience and self-understanding of the situation of artist-women, both ‘black’ and ‘white’, and some men in the South African art world. My large oral archive has been coded to reveal important findings, which I have situated in terms of the struggle for democracy in South Africa. Drawing on both Jacques Rancière and Hannah Arendt’s thinking for theories of political transformation and Arendt’s valuation of storytelling and the political, in particular, my thesis proposes a methodology and key findings that shift from the 'what' created in the Report – avatars conceptualised according to gender and racial categories – to the 'who' – agents who speak back to the struggle for democratization in the South African art world. My research thus seeks to reveal the complex entwining of gender and race in interviewees’ experience. I argue that an analysis that attends to the question of gender is necessary to fully understand the status quo and texture of lived experience of the South African art world, as it remains an invisible and unanalysed dimension as it is lived and understood in terms of artists’ strategies of resistance and transformation.