South African Visual Culture
by Lorraine Khoury
Visual Culture is the visual construction of the social, not just the social construction of vision.
- W.J.T. Mitchell
Today, in an image-saturated society, where does visuality begin and end? Our daily lives are riddled with imagery, and, however hard we may try, we cannot escape this. It comes to us on the flickering television/computer screen, in magazines and in advertising posters and billboards trying to tap into our 'consumer needs'. Nonetheless it is the dissemination, reception and the consumption of the image that provide the most intrigue, as this sheds light on the nuances and idiosyncrasies that make up a culture. In the recently released publication South African Visual Culture (edited by Jeanne van Eeden and Amanda du Preez) some of these issues that define a culture/society - specifically South Africa's - through its visual media, are addressed.
Visual culture is a well established area of academic study in other corners of the globe, initiated by the likes of Nicholas Mirzoeff (professor at New York University). Other scholars like W.J.T. Mitchell heralded visual studies as the convergence of several disciplines like 'cultural studies, media studies, rhetoric and communication, art history', thus suggesting that the analysis of visual imagery had long surpassed being just the preoccupation of the art historian. Mirzoeff notes, in the foreword of South African Visual Culture, that with this book's publication, a comparable reader on visual culture exists on every continent. Thus the publishing of South African Visual Culture is optimally timed.
In its compilation, the editors Jeanne van Eeden and Amanda du Preez have been mindful in their selection of contributions, with many of the essays steering away from the over-debated issues around racial representation and who has the right to represent 'the other' in South Africa. Instead it is by the interrogation of the placement of the 'visual subject', within visual media, that we are made aware of the commoditisation and consumption of certain racial/cultural stereotypes in our society. As illustrated in Donna Smith's essay 'From the Other Side: the representation of lesbian and gay people in popular visual media - a personal view' where she states: 'In this chapter, I look at some of the ways in which lesbian and gay people are now portrayed in the (visual) media, and offer some comment on the extent to which these portrayals affect and reflect society's attitudes'.
Louise Viljoen and Stella Viljoen's contribution 'Constructing Femininity in Huisgenoot', provides an insightful look into the rise and changing face of a South African cultural phenomenon: Huisgenoot magazine. From its inception in 1916 as a periodical advocating Afrikaner nationalism, as exemplified by the use of Afrikaner symbols like the Voortrekker monument on its early covers, to its more recent reincarnation as a fully-fledged women's/homemaker's magazine by providing constructions on notions of what is considered feminine in its pages. A great deal of the deductions here owe a lot to similar investigative essays on Drum magazine as a representation of the black urban and cultural experience in South Africa, as acknowledged in the endnotes.
Carine Zaayman's essay 'Riding a Different Wave: digital media and subcultural expression' profiles the burgeoning phenomena of subversive subcultural uses of public spaces like the Internet. Through a case study on the Cape Town-based CD-Rom youth publication Sub_UrbanMagazine, Zaayman questions the 'subversiveness' of these supposed alternate spaces of expression and whether they actually rather uphold mainstream cultural ideals as a result of contributors' middle-class English-speaking backgrounds. Further, other concepts like culture-jamming in digital media and in subculture are interrogated and what the 'sampling' of familiar brands like the Coca-Cola logo and ribbon font in the Sub_UrbanMagazine implies. Here the creators of Sub_UrbanMagazine play on the audience recognising established brand names and making fresh associations with a brand that is presented in a different cultural context.
South African Visual Culture, in being the first of its kind in South Africa, provides the foundation for establishing visual culture as a legitimate field of study in South Africa and paves the way for further editions to come. Regrettably it falls somewhat short in acknowledging only the producers of visual media but not the recipients (the audience) of visual media enough, as it is only in its reception that something has a cultural impact. The creation, in American institutions, of sub-subjects to 'visual studies' like 'audience studies' has rectified this previous oversight, and no doubt will do the same here. As it is only through the studying of an audience's appetite and consumption of the visual, that the desires of a society are divulged, thus making the distinction between one culture to another.
South African Visual Culture
Edited by Jeanne van Eeden and Amanda du Preez
Published in South Africa (Pretoria) by Van Schaik Uitgewers/Publishers, 2005
269pp, 245 x 170mm
ISBN 0-627-02598-6 (Paperback)
R210
