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作者

来源

CITIES,Vol.77,P.33-38

语言

英文

关键字

South Africa; Public art; Third space; Urban commons; Performativity

作者单位

[Gurneys, Kim] Univ Johannesburg, Visual Ident Art & Design VIAD Res Ctr, Johannesburg, South Africa. [Gurneys, Kim] Univ Cape Town, African Ctr Cities, Cape Town, South Africa. [Gurneys, Kim] POB 23126, ZA-7735 Western Cape, South Africa. Gurneys, K (reprint author), Univ Johannesburg, Visual Ident Art & Design VIAD Res Ctr, Johannesburg, South Africa.; Gurneys, K (reprint author), Univ Cape Town, African Ctr Cities, Cape Town, South Africa.; Gurneys, K (reprint author), POB 23126, ZA-7735 Western Cape, South Africa. E-Mail: kimjgurney@gmail.com

摘要

Art in public space in South Africa is increasingly a more visible locus of sociopolitical resistance and recalibration of the public sphere. This article focuses upon an emblematic example: the sculpture of a former colonialist, removed from its public university site in Cape Town following sustained protests. Since April 2015, the empty plinth of Cecil John Rhodes has become a site of re-imagination from graffiti interventions to performance and installation art. While the plinth continually morphs in symbolism and significance, its ousted artwork waits at an undisclosed location for its fate to be decided. This interregnum represents a liminal condition that theorists call 'third space', extended in this research towards a fourth dimension of performativity. The physical disappearance of the artwork has triggered a second life, its apogee a national protest movement with global resonance. Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall are student-led calls for university decolonisation and free education arguably best understood as provocation around systemic issues in society. As this deeper work ensues amid fractious contestations, the artwork's re-animation of the public sphere is clear. Its leftover plinth is political, making visible other kinds of structural voids. It is also poetic: a zombie monument demonstrating through its reinventions public space as common space contested, negotiated and performed in the daily creation of city futures.