There are many reasons to recommend John Peffer’s Art and the End of Apartheid. It makes significant headway toward recording histories and interpreting art of the 1970s and 1980s that were somewhat overlooked post-1994 when South Africa held its first democratic election and art enthusiasts rushed in. (There is some difficulty assigning a date to apartheid’s “end,” but Peffer chooses 1994 for this reason. He “begins” in 1976, when a peaceful march by Soweto students was met with violence. This sparked numerous uprisings nationwide and refueled outright resistance.) The author untangles knotted debates about the call to represent (be an artist) and the call to protest (activate against) the enumerable oppressions of apartheid law and practice. He asks good questions of the debate: Why reduce art to a question of commitment? Why assume that local influences trump foreign ones? And what do we ask of these locales? Why should skin color dictate artistic output? Peffer illustrates ways in which artists of all colors (thus means) embraced international styles and modes of operation despite censorship and segregation levied within, and despite boycotts imposed from without. Further reasons to recommend this book: Peffer’s writing engages and is easy to digest, making the book suitable for students. He situates the time and place of his study within global networks, so the subject of South African modernism, like that of art, responsibility, and activism, rings familiar to people with interests in other locales. Peffer navigates modernism’s difficulties with expertise, making Art and the End of Apartheid a valued resource for specialists in several fields.

The book has nine chapters that stand alone for the topically inclined, but work best in sequence. This approach required Peffer to retrace historical moments in select chapters, and it lessens the impact of some key points (e.g., he attributes heightened interest in war iconography to different sources in different chapters, when on the whole he is pointing to their varied roots). But his plentiful, careful notes catch gaps and reveal years of primary research. Of the nine chapters, eight belong here; the last, “Shadows: A Short History of Photography in South Africa,” detracts from the chronology that comes before. For those unfamiliar with South African political history, “non-racial” refers to a position in which all people figure, regardless of skin color. It is the basis of Peffer’s approach since it enables “grey areas” in an otherwise segregated society. But as a scholar with great interest in Black Consciousness, I am deeply skeptical of its all-consuming narrative. (Briefly, non-racialism was the mode of resistance to apartheid advocated by the African National Congress, which dominates discourse today. There were other modes of resistance before apartheid’s fall, just as there are other ways of conceiving the history Peffer records. For Black Consciousness artists, these areas were not necessarily grey. Black Consciousness runs throughout Peffer’s study, but remains largely sidelined. To his credit, he notes Black Consciousness’s influence on occasion, and gets it right in my assessment.)

The introduction and first chapter develop the concept of “grey areas” as crucial to South African modernism and exercised as resistance to norms and expectations, legislated and otherwise. Grey areas—geographic and aesthetic zones that were “multiracial, peripheral, urban (and) hybrid” (xv)—are traced through most of the book in a series of studies about community, culture, and politics of a specific kind: art made by urban-based black artists with a non-racial political bent. Here Peffer shows how mid-century modernists Gerard Sekoto and Ernest Mancoba confronted many of the same challenges as did their successors, one of whom receives special attention in chapter 7, the splendidly written “Resurfacing: The Art of Durant Sihlali.” In chapter 1 and elsewhere, Peffer underscores the effects of legislation barring access to education, work, and location on artists with international aspirations. According to Peffer, “settler modernist” works by the likes of Constance Stuart Larabee, Alexis Preller, and Cecil Skotnes extol different aspects of life in South Africa than do the “black modernist” works of Sekoto, Mancoba, and Sydney Kumalo. But (more or less, it seems, in this non-racial take) all artists’ “persistent desire for community” (35) enabled “grey areas of cultural hybridity” (39) in both practice and product.

Chapters 2 and 4, “Becoming Animal: The Tortured Body during Apartheid” and “Here Comes Mello Yello: Image, Violence and Play after Soweto,” present two efforts in common pursuit: excising the toll violence takes on those who live with it daily. “Becoming Animal” describes images of human-animal hybrids as having “roots in an indigenous sacred worldview that was applied to the culture of violence spawned by apartheid” (41). Works by Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, and “Dumile” Feni are analyzed as such and called, especially Dumile, “a crucial precursor to the Black Consciousness movement” (50). Hybrid forms that show humans transitioning to animals render their subject—an enemy, the other—sterile. In the hands of Jane Alexander and Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi, they amplify the disjuncture of selves within us. “Here Comes Mello Yello” concerns the creation of miniature (toy) casspirs, those mine-protected, South African-manufactured behemoth personnel carriers put to use in townships in the 1980s. In “a delicate game of competition, identification, and displacement” (99), the life of this icon of violence is traced from its creation and uses to its transference into a toy and then corporate manufacture for the tourist trade, ultimately undercutting its power to displace the violence magnified and controlled in miniature form. In a fantastic moment at the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale, the casspir toy, now swollen from hand-held to life size, a “giant miniature” (124), reemerges as modem for popular critique of state power (and art sponsorship). Peffer again asks good questions of this material: “How can widespread brutality be ‘handled’ through mockery, anxious mimicry, humor, and play? And, specifically, how was the pervasive violence of apartheid coded, resisted, recalled, and even turned into a commodity through its images? . . . What can the study of these other copies (that is, of the productive life of images) tell us about affect and human experience under conditions of social, psychological, and physical duress?” (100)

Chapters 3, 5, and 6 all engage the debate over vision and responsibility that dogged South African artists in the 1980s. “Culture and Resistance: Activist Art and the Rhetoric of Commitment” is a study of the Medu Art Ensemble, a Botswana-based collective active between circa 1979 and 1985. Medu’s impact within South Africa was formative, and Peffer provides one of the best accounts of its history to date (see also Diana Wylie, Art and Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). The “Culture and Resistance Festival” Medu organized in 1982 urged “accountable art” (81) and aligned “African tradition” with resistance culture. The responsibility encoded here—to be part of the community is to use one’s art in common opposition—was accepted by some as a calling. Other artists found the expectation and its execution too limiting. These (mostly) men participated in the Thupelo Art Project, the venue for chapters 5 and 6, “Abstraction and Community: Liberating Art during the States of Emergency” and “These Guys are Heavy: Alternative Forms of Commitment.” In the most thorough accounting of Thupelo and its impact to date, Peffer sheds light on abstraction’s vitality in these years and nicely counters the debate begun in chapter 3. He traces the origins of the Triangle Artists’ Workshop to South Africa, and follows the development of Thupelo in relation to it. He negotiates their differences since these underscore his point: abstraction in a South African context was revolutionary and urged resistance in its own ways. Thupelo offered artists a community for the exchange of ideas and techniques, space and materials for experimentation, and, of fundamental import, the right to self-identify as an artist free to explore the craft in one’s own terms. (This is a key feature of Black Consciousness, but not cited as such by historians who emphasize non-racialism.) Chapter 6 is devoted to Thupelo alumnae and the often quieter expressions of concern, a “soft iconoclasm” that hoped to bring “a new South African into being” with its “imaginative exploration of the ordinary” (179, 175, 174). It is an illuminating read.

The book best ends with chapter 8, which explores the relationship of iconoclasm to censorship (and vice versa) through three case studies from the early 1990s, all displayed in public forums upon state-honored works that express monumental ideas, often on monuments themselves. In each act (by Wayne Barker, the editors of Loslyf magazine, and Tracey Rose), Peffer shows how the principles unmasked the contradictions of their targets and used iconoclasm to attack its suppressive inner drive. Counter-memory is at work here as histories sanctioned by apartheid are “given a swift kick” (240) by modifying the terms in which the object at center is perceived. The object itself remains whole, but its meaning and resonance are fractured by the actions of individuals upon it.