Image & Text : a Journal for Design

The South African artist Marcus Glaser (1936-2007) created several prints of the Deposition of Christ, seemingly to understand, through this important iconographical image, his own position in relation to the western art canon. The works reveal the predilections and anxieties of an artist trained in the classical tenets of high modernism in South Africa of the 1950s and 1960s, and shed light on the ways in which some artists of Glaser’s generation responded to the political and arthistorical landscape in which they found themselves. The paper considers Glaser’s images as exemplary prints in a long line of Deposition prints and paintings, beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s (1471-1528) seminal works on the same theme. It also explores the aesthetic anxieties of this individual artist and suggests that they are symptomatic of a particular moment and ethos in South African art of the late-twentieth century.

This article discusses how the four figures in Jane Alexander’s sculptural installation Pastoral Scene (1995) – the “domestic worker”, the nursing “Black Madonna”, the “white widow” and the lactating wild dog – may be seen to subvert the colonial role that domestic workers perform within the suburban home and landscape. The article delves with more sustained attention than has hitherto been given into some of the visual histories in relation to this tableau, specifically a colonial- and apartheid-era pastoralism that framed landscape conventions and servant portraiture. The article discusses how black African women, when represented as servants in landscapes, function to delineate a space that may be determined by a Europeanised artistic sensibility. Alexander’s tableau subverts these anxieties, and the obfuscation of labour and presence that results, by centering the segregation, migration, urbanisation and disconnection that frequently arises out of South Africa’s socio-political realities. Returning to this work, produced during the formative time of South Africa’s sociopolitical transition in the 1990s, allows for the examination of Alexander’s characteristically riddling allegories but also of her allusive, wide-reaching method of enquiry into a subject – paid domestic labour – that remains woven, frequently in the most challenging and complex ways, into the national psyche and way of life.

Within the context of the New Digital Age, is there still space to explore the phenomenon of the soul? The soul is often omitted in the philosophical discourse of technology and its impact on being human, owing to the (mis)conceptualisation of the soul as an outdated, western notion that is no longer applicable or significant in contemporary society and global culture. Throughout this article, I counter this argument by showing that an exploration of the soul in a technologicallydriven society remains significant, since it reveals pivotal aspects of being human in contemporary society that could not have been highlighted otherwise. I maintain that the soul deserves consideration within the New Digital Age, since it allows us to think about being human in relation to technology in a unique manner, uncovering promising ideas as well as critical forewarnings. I also show that the soul is a culturally universal notion that enables a global discussion. By exploring visual culture examples (namely her, artworks by Aleksandra Mir and Wit) that represent various perspectives on the soul within a technological society, I contend that visual culture opens up a space for discussion on the soul in the New Digital Age.