Matter, metaphor and meaning : the precariousness of the reality value of the representational status of Zwelethu Mthethwa's photography

This study is divided into five sections. The introductory section briefly examines how South African black photography acquired its "history-telling" status and how the agitation against its rigidity came about and was achieved. The following chapter explores the norms and traditions that foreground the material elements and formal principles of Mthethwa's photographs within art criticism. The third chapter considers Mthethwa's betrayal of the viewer's strong attachment to the objective recognition of the depicted in portraiture. The fourth chapter nudges the viewer to consider disembodiment as an alternative discourse of Mthethwa's portraiture practice. The fifth chapter reflects on how the photographic abstractionism of the Wall Paper, 1995-2005 (Fig. 12) inverts the specificity of photography as a medium and promotes an aesthetic inclination rather than the viewer's emotional attachment to it. The last chapter closely explores the reception and criticism of Mthethwa's photography as "photography after the end of documentary realism" and the impact that it has (had) on the reception of his photographic practice and the hypothesis of this study (Enwezor 2010: 100). The overarching motive of this study is to demonstrate the fact that, methodologically, it is the reception of Mthethwa's practice as that which constitutes "photography after the end of documentary realism" that enables the viewer to look at his photographs as visual representations that subscribe to formalism and formal analysis: that dissolve the considerations of content to those of form. It is this viewing experience that, on one hand, encourages the viewer to locate Mthethwa's photographs within art criticism: that enables the viewer to uphold their cultural worth or their status as aesthetic objects that draw the viewer's sensory contemplation or appreciation to their beauty or sublimity. Also, it is this signification that, on the other hand, encourages the viewer to comprehend them as "sites of ambivalence" or as images that cannot be "read mimetically as the appearance of a reality", but as artefacts that are capable of narrating a fiction. (Bhabha 1994: 51).

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Michaelis School of Fine Art

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Mputing, Abel

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Salley, Rael

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20096

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/20096