Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa ed. by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle (review)

Acts of Transgression, edited by Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, is a landmark collection of essays exploring contemporary live art in South Africa more than two and a half decades after the outset of a volatile postapartheid era (1994). The essays are wide-ranging, innovative, and employ different methodologies and diverse perspectives to provide comparative analyses of an array of performances that blur interdisciplinary boundaries. Yet they all provoke insights into social injustice and the complexity of identity to reject existing sociopolitical structures that oppress and marginalize. The 68 illustrations richly evoke the mise-en-scène of performances that have mostly appeared for limited viewings.

The performance of protest in its myriad guises forms the basis of live art at the Institute for Creative Arts based at the University of Cape Town. First held in 2012, the ICA Live Art Festivals showcase recognized and lesser-known artists, all of whom employ disruption to foreground deteriorating sociopolitical conditions in South Africa. Some of these performances are featured in the anthology; other artists are also included. At the same time that live art performances were gaining attention, political protests of the Fallist Movements of 2015 were taking place on university campuses. Students challenged authorities to decolonize education, remove symbols of apartheid, and make tertiary education accessible. They used sit-ins, marches to Parliament, and often violent means to resist oppressive social structures. These movements are clearly cross-referenced in the detailed and helpful index.

The editors provide a fulsome introduction to emphasize that in South Africa "live art is born of extremity" (2). They argue that the performances, inspired by both traditional African forms and Euro-American performance art, offer "shifting notions of crisis" and concomitantly reveal "artistic agency within a time of political urgency" (11).

The four parts of the book spotlight key themes. The first, "Live Art in a Time of Crisis," begins with a compelling chapter by Nomusa Makhubu, who focuses upon artistic citizenship, anatopism (being totally out of place, unhomed), and the trauma of the post-1994 city of Cape Town. Juxtaposing the wealth of the city with the poverty of overcrowded townships, Makhubu maintains that while black residents frequent the city, they occupy outsider status. She examines Those Ghels (2017), by Buhlebezwe Siwani and Chuma Sopotela, which is staged in outdoor city areas where black women watch US television sitting in cages evocative of the tiny spaces of township dwellings. They speak isiXhosa, a foreign tongue for many urban whites, and act provocatively, thus stressing their positions as interlopers.

Makhubu argues that the white queer artist Dean Hutton provokes vicious responses when they wear an outfit emblazoned with the words "F**k white people," "in bold type (in the style of American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger)" (35). Their interventions emphasize their anatopism, their state of being unhomed, and have created violent arguments about white supremacy, privilege, and nonconforming whites.

Catherine Boulle scrutinizes the internationally known white performance artist Steven Cohen, who joined contestants at a dog show by inserting himself into the line-up as a performing mongrel in Dog (1998), where he was bare-bottomed with his genitals exposed, only clad in a tutu, and exceptionally high heels. His impeded movement represented his difficulty negotiating the political terrain. Cohen's extensive oeuvre is disruptive and unsettling; for Boulle his "decentring of the white male subject [is] a provocation at the heart of his practice" (66). A disturbing performance titled Maid in South Africa (2005) highlights Nomsa Dhlamini, an 87-year-old Swazi woman, who has been Cohen's domestic worker since childhood and whom he regards as his collaborator. She sheds traditional garb for a maid's uniform, which she removes to perform her domestic worker chores while bare-breasted but wearing very high heels. This performance is disturbing for white viewers, especially those who were complicit in...