ABSTRACT
This chapter considers performance and citizenship in South Africa. It addresses the problem of how to see contemporary art, blackness, and freedom together. Seeing love, fellowship, and exchange while looking at artworks requires ways of "being with and for" at once. By the twentieth century, the history of performance art became one of a permissive, open-ended medium with endless variables, executed by artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms and determined to take their art directly to the public. Africana contemporary art responds to the processes that have maintained the multiple injunctions against "black" folks shaping their own presents or futures. Visual production in the context of South Africa confronts both geographic location and global sensibilities. Whereas female fickleness and erotic love have guided interpretations of the scene, Jennifer Milam notes the notion of swinging is a game of visual distortion, one through which Fragonard manipulated and transformed emblematic conventions.
