The Art of Life in South Africa is an astonishing book, powerfully constructed, intricately researched, and gorgeously written. From the focused study of individual lives and practices that flourished in and around the Ndaleni art school, Magaziner extends the possibilities of a more democratic form of art history.
David Doris, author of Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, ... Read moreand the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria (2012 Herskovits Award winner) In this beautifully written book, Dan Magaziner opens a small story to reveal expansive, deep questions. The Art of Life in South Africa offers an unexpected and transcendent intellectual history of African self-making and art practice.
Julie Livingston, author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic The Art of Life in South Africa is beautifully rendered, well researched, and tells an important, scarcely told story. Combining in exciting ways intellectual, cultural, and social historical approaches, Magaziner offers a meditation on what happens if we examine a past that is shaped by broader historical forces (in this case apartheid) but that cannot be reduced to them.
Clifton Crais, author of The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics The Art of Life in South Africa contributes to a global conversation about `art' and `craft'at the same time as it challenges neat distinctions between center and periphery, metropole and margins. Art education provides rich terrain through which the entangled relations of modernity, subjectivity, and materiality can be explored. This book is as important for students of global modernism as it is for scholars of South African art, history and politics.
Tamar Garb, author of Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography The Art of Life is an impressive work that is sure to become a basic text in the field of African cultural history. Ndaleni will no longer be forgotten. The Art of Life in South Africa is a richly suggestive and moving contribution to South African intellectual history. Weaving in a highly imaginative way the two concepts of life and art, Magaziner opens unique pathways for research in the historical sociology of the object-worlds South Africans invented, created and inhabited during the long twentieth-century. Written with extraordinary clarity and precision, this book will appeal to anyone curious about new trends in the historiography of culture.
Achille Mbembe, author of Critique of Black Reason Ultimately, Magaziner reflects that approaching the history of complex and compromised communities like Ndaleni through the overarching nationalist frame of the South African liberation struggle does not allow enough space for difficult, nuanced, and fragile realities to surface....Magaziner's carefully wrought study provides insights into the impetuses and negotiations, features and weaknesses, of a highly constrained, imbalanced, and charged setting....The extended nature of the study does require a little stamina, but its achievement in being theoretically rich and sensitively argued more than sustains the reader. Its liberal incorporation of photographs (over a hundred), mostly of former students' artwork, not only vivifies the study, but is a valuable act of archival recuperation. Daniel Magaziner tells a profoundly human story of the institutional and social constraints under which African artists operated and the different ways in which they sought to find a way to produce beauty in the midst of oppression.
Frederick Cooper, author of Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State Show Less