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that depended on a particular concept of ‘ethnicity’. That whole notion of ethnicity here, because it’s been part of the political project and ideology of apartheid, makes it so much more difficult to unpack the idea of white ethnicities and how these have been constructed, without reproducing the worst aspects of that ideology. PS: Strictly speaking, white ethnicity does not exist. There is Afrikaner ethnicity, for example, in which race (as in white) is of fundamental importance. But the whole issue is very complex. That is why I have been held back in many ways. I suppose I couldn’t find the forms for dealing with ‘whiteness’ without falling into that trap. AC: Is there a kind of a crisis in terms of areas of representation for people working as visual artists here? Is there a way in which a whole body, a whole iconography, a whole way of framing one’s work is now no longer viable? For example, the issue of gender can be raised in a way that wasn’t something that many artists felt they could prioritize previously if they were committed to the struggle against apartheid. All those ‘grey’ areas were politically and strategically not useful things to focus on at that time. So, it seems that now, there’s both a crisis and a new freedom for artists. The way some critics are now responding to your own work is perhaps symptomatic of this shift—and it signals a potentially new problem. Are you concerned with the way artists are, in some quarters, now being encouraged to see aesthetics and politics as necessarily autonomous realms, partly as a respite after the more explicitly ‘political’ work during apartheid? Is there a danger that work like yours, which engages with the subjective and the private might easily be read as comfortably a-political in this context? PS: In a way. And it makes my practice very problematic because if I do want to explore the political dimension of sexuality and the realm of privacy it does not mean that I am giving up the political at all. Just because one’s not literally painting images of the liberation struggle does not mean that you are not political, or that you don’t have a political positioning personally apart from the context of the work. AC: Are you anxious that your work is now going to be recuperated into a much less politicized set of discourses around which sexuality is seen as a way of escaping an engagement with some of the more difficult issues post-apartheid? PS: This is always a risk. It always was. In fact strongly ‘political work’ was appropriated itself in the past. I think that we’re going to see a lot of such displacement in the public realm. What’s already happening in the work around sexuality that’s been done, especially with the younger generation
DOI link for that depended on a particular concept of ‘ethnicity’. That whole notion of ethnicity here, because it’s been part of the political project and ideology of apartheid, makes it so much more difficult to unpack the idea of white ethnicities and how these have been constructed, without reproducing the worst aspects of that ideology. PS: Strictly speaking, white ethnicity does not exist. There is Afrikaner ethnicity, for example, in which race (as in white) is of fundamental importance. But the whole issue is very complex. That is why I have been held back in many ways. I suppose I couldn’t find the forms for dealing with ‘whiteness’ without falling into that trap. AC: Is there a kind of a crisis in terms of areas of representation for people working as visual artists here? Is there a way in which a whole body, a whole iconography, a whole way of framing one’s work is now no longer viable? For example, the issue of gender can be raised in a way that wasn’t something that many artists felt they could prioritize previously if they were committed to the struggle against apartheid. All those ‘grey’ areas were politically and strategically not useful things to focus on at that time. So, it seems that now, there’s both a crisis and a new freedom for artists. The way some critics are now responding to your own work is perhaps symptomatic of this shift—and it signals a potentially new problem. Are you concerned with the way artists are, in some quarters, now being encouraged to see aesthetics and politics as necessarily autonomous realms, partly as a respite after the more explicitly ‘political’ work during apartheid? Is there a danger that work like yours, which engages with the subjective and the private might easily be read as comfortably a-political in this context? PS: In a way. And it makes my practice very problematic because if I do want to explore the political dimension of sexuality and the realm of privacy it does not mean that I am giving up the political at all. Just because one’s not literally painting images of the liberation struggle does not mean that you are not political, or that you don’t have a political positioning personally apart from the context of the work. AC: Are you anxious that your work is now going to be recuperated into a much less politicized set of discourses around which sexuality is seen as a way of escaping an engagement with some of the more difficult issues post-apartheid? PS: This is always a risk. It always was. In fact strongly ‘political work’ was appropriated itself in the past. I think that we’re going to see a lot of such displacement in the public realm. What’s already happening in the work around sexuality that’s been done, especially with the younger generation
that depended on a particular concept of ‘ethnicity’. That whole notion of ethnicity here, because it’s been part of the political project and ideology of apartheid, makes it so much more difficult to unpack the idea of white ethnicities and how these have been constructed, without reproducing the worst aspects of that ideology. PS: Strictly speaking, white ethnicity does not exist. There is Afrikaner ethnicity, for example, in which race (as in white) is of fundamental importance. But the whole issue is very complex. That is why I have been held back in many ways. I suppose I couldn’t find the forms for dealing with ‘whiteness’ without falling into that trap. AC: Is there a kind of a crisis in terms of areas of representation for people working as visual artists here? Is there a way in which a whole body, a whole iconography, a whole way of framing one’s work is now no longer viable? For example, the issue of gender can be raised in a way that wasn’t something that many artists felt they could prioritize previously if they were committed to the struggle against apartheid. All those ‘grey’ areas were politically and strategically not useful things to focus on at that time. So, it seems that now, there’s both a crisis and a new freedom for artists. The way some critics are now responding to your own work is perhaps symptomatic of this shift—and it signals a potentially new problem. Are you concerned with the way artists are, in some quarters, now being encouraged to see aesthetics and politics as necessarily autonomous realms, partly as a respite after the more explicitly ‘political’ work during apartheid? Is there a danger that work like yours, which engages with the subjective and the private might easily be read as comfortably a-political in this context? PS: In a way. And it makes my practice very problematic because if I do want to explore the political dimension of sexuality and the realm of privacy it does not mean that I am giving up the political at all. Just because one’s not literally painting images of the liberation struggle does not mean that you are not political, or that you don’t have a political positioning personally apart from the context of the work. AC: Are you anxious that your work is now going to be recuperated into a much less politicized set of discourses around which sexuality is seen as a way of escaping an engagement with some of the more difficult issues post-apartheid? PS: This is always a risk. It always was. In fact strongly ‘political work’ was appropriated itself in the past. I think that we’re going to see a lot of such displacement in the public realm. What’s already happening in the work around sexuality that’s been done, especially with the younger generation
ABSTRACT
that depended on a particular concept of ‘ethnicity’. That whole notion of ethnicity here, because it’s been part of the political project and ideology of apartheid, makes it so much more difficult to unpack the idea of white ethnicities and how these have been constructed, without reproducing the worst aspects of that ideology.
