ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a description of an exhibition in which antiquarian objects are seen to provide justifying shapes and forms to history. The writer extends this idea with a wide-ranging group of examples taken from art history, before selecting the particular example of Soweto museums to explore ways in which concrete presence and form are given to a story or history of a people. The chapter shifts to contemporary artists, culminating in Johannes Phokela, and concludes with non-pejorative use of the term ‘rhetoric’ to describe ways in which form and style inevitably inform representations of history.
