Abstracts

Kurt Campbell (Bio)

South African (Rock) Art after Apartheid and the ethical ingenuity of the Barrydale puppet parade, or the primary achievement of techne in Africa

The Barrydale Puppet Festival in Cape Town South Africa created by the Ukwanda Puppet Makers is of particular importance as an object lesson in how artwork may display ethical ingenuity after the time of the Apartheid regime. Using this particular festival and the artistic productions it calls into being, the paper will establish how visual cues taken directly from well-known rock paintings and San mythology become iterations of original prehistoric art allowing the concept of the 'mnemotechnical envoy' to emerge, that is to say objects/artworks that have taken on new forms as they responds to different memory needs and yet preserve conceptual fidelity: the demands of changing environments influence how we seek effective identity from the past in the present. This concept serves the remarkable stories contained in the paintings that start at the rock face in the Palaeolithic period and, within a special frame of seeing, may be observed in hitherto unthought yet exciting designations- read the giant puppets of the Barrydale Puppet Festival. This offers up new theories about how images/artworks are ‘activated’, how they are ‘potent’ as points of hosting others. Crucially: They invite others into the world of the San, an act of intense hospitality in a manner that both bends and re-establishes time. The debates around these ways of seeing form an indispensable part of the larger story of the subject, the subjects and the subjugated in South Africa after apartheid.