Prof. Dr. Tobias Wendl; Dr. Melanie Klein

Within the visual and discursive area of negotiation of the establishment of modern art in South Africa, Subproject 1 analyses historical dynamics of translation of concepts of authenticity and originality and looks at the contact zones of art criticism and art schools that helped shape this new South African modernism. It also discusses the latter’s manifestations and continuities in contemporary art from South Africa and Uganda. The project starts by making a historical regional comparison of teaching views in Uganda and South Africa. This will clarify to what extent the alliances and networks of art educators across different regions nevertheless involved different systems adapted to the local circumstances with corresponding freedoms of scope.

The project then examines how, within the area of negotiation of contemporary art and with the broader actor networks of a globalized art scene, concepts of the authentic and the original change, reconfigure and find their way into new contexts of attribution. It looks in particular at the directions of movement of actors in the sphere of art education. It also investigates the debates surrounding new agencies that are claiming autonomous areas of scope and which will need to be taken into account as a corrective for a writing of art history that, while wishing to acknowledge divergent modernisms, nevertheless establishes these latter in the form of overly homogeneous classification mechanisms that in places revert to a binary language (Mitter 2012, Conrad and Randeria 2002). The tension between artistic self-positioning and market-strategic production, and thus between subject and object authenticity, shall also be defined in more concrete terms with reference to these movements. Authenticity seems in this sense not least to be a provisional crucial factor in the determination of cultural images, which in countries such as South Africa and Uganda constantly constitute themselves anew in a complex weave of labelling processes by others and self-positioning, and relocate themselves “between universalism and particularism, between transgression and demarcation” (Mersmann 2004: 98).