Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents ed. by Kim Miller, Brenda Schmahmann (review)

This edited volume by Kim Miller and Brenda Schmahmann is a welcome and crucial addition to the corpus of scholarly books about visual culture in South Africa. Even though it does not purport to be definitive concerning the appearance, role, and context of public art in South Africa, it offers a rich snapshot of the topic between the years 1999 and 2015. In this regard, it supplements the few extant sources and lays the foundation for further exploration and deliberation. The book consists of an introduction and thirteen chapters centered on four broad thematic areas by a variety of South African and international authors. Rather than attempting to do justice to each discrete chapter, I shall mainly give an overview of the central issues that emerge throughout the book.

The main thrusts of the book are delineated in the Introduction by Miller and Schmah-mann, entitled “Engaging with Public Art in South Africa, 1999–2015.” They provide a useful context for the book and explain the chosen timeline as the start of the presidency of Thabo Mbeki in 1999 up to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in 2015. They also present a working definition and framework of public art as “existing in and for the public realm” (p. xxxii), which is variously refined and expanded upon in subsequent chapters. Miller and Schmahmann explain the rationale for the four thematic sections in the book; what is helpful is that they do not merely proffer a summary of each chapter, but rather present a discursive context and offer their own examples of public art that are characteristic of the given theme. They also expand on the strategies that can be used to recontextualize old monuments and other solutions that have been invoked to create alternative discourses. This touches on one of the central concerns in the book: what to do with (older) public art that has fallen out of favor in terms of ideology or audience. They discuss options such as leaving the old intact, reinventing the old, or creating new public art. At the end of the Introduction, the editors look at prior writings on public art in South Africa and explain how this book differs from previous works like History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa by Annie Coombes (2003) and Sabine Marschall’s Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments, Memorial and Public Statuary in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2010), for example. It is thus clear that this book seeks to fill a significant gap in the discourse on public art and frequently presents original, even ground-breaking research.

The trajectory of the book moves from “traditional” monuments and sculptural modes of commemoration to more experimental interventions in the urban landscape such as billboards and performative visual culture. Broadly speaking, this might be said to designate the shift from sites of veneration to more overt sites of resistance that reflect the changing political landscape in South Africa. The first theme in the book, “Negotiating Difficult Histories,” comprises chapters by Elizabeth Rankin, Brenda Schmahmann, and Gavin Younge. It deals with attempts by contested spaces such as the Voortrekker Monument and monuments to Afrikaner nationalism to negotiate new identities and reinvent themselves to appeal to a broader constituency. The third topic grapples with the contentious history of slavery in the Cape and the manner in which this painful history has been elided or even commodified in picturesque entertainment landscapes aimed at the tourism market.

The second theme, “Defining and Redefining Heroes,” consists of chapters by Liese van der Watt, Naomi Roux, and Gary Baines. It deals with the representation of heroism in recent public art, focusing on King Shaka, Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, and Solomon Mahlangu. In these chapters, the notion of contested representations starts to emerge clearly, as does the role of audience expectations and ephemeral public...