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Monumental graveyard forge of empires3/15/2024 ![]() ![]() Issues of racial segregation thus became inseparable from the fraught discourse around land ownership and belonging, and also underpin the historical landscape tradition in South African art. This ideology, instituted by a white patriarchal Nationalist Government, disenfranchised the majority of the population for the benefit of the colonisers. In South Africa this is complicated by a history of colonialism, exacerbated by the imposition of apartheid as a government policy from 1948-1994 (Britannica a). Land is an emotive topic globally - it encompasses ingrained understandings of ownership, food security, safety, belonging, comfort, love and notions of home. Keywords: Public art, South African art, Dialogic, anti-monumental, Paul Emmanuel, Avant Car Guard. ![]() In both cases, white masculinity is called into question through self-representation, engaging with notions of Afrikaner hegemony and white anxiety. While Emmanuel's work may be understood to employ a dialogic, anti-monumental strategy in response to the statue of Louis Botha at the Union buildings in Tshwane in South Africa, Avant Car Guard insert themselves in spaces where they engage parodically with memorial sites and the tradition of landscape representation. Though separated by a decade, the artworks discussed here share a dialogic engagement with existing memorial sites, or indeed, traditions that memorialise settler belonging, such as the landscape painting tradition or military equestrian monuments. ![]() In this article we investigate two different artistic agendas that engage with such sites in South Africa, in the work of Paul Emmanuel, and the collective Avant Car Guard. In such contexts, artists engage with land and notions of place through processes of memorialisation and landscape representation, or very often, the undoing of these traditions as they were entrenched by regimes that are now redundant. ![]() The memorialisation of place and representation of land and landscape is topical in many societies that are dealing with the aftermath of political trauma, such as Post-Colonial or Post-Soviet countries. IIUniversity of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa. IUniversity of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa. Memorials, landscape and white masculinity: dialogic interventions in South African art ![]()
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