Action through Aesthetics: Philanthropic Art Initiatives in South Africa during the Apartheid
South African artists played an expansive philanthropic role throughout the stages of the apartheid movement. Their artwork ranged from reflective to pro-active and reconciliatory. Although many scholars argue that South African artists were agents of social change, scholars have not drawn a connection between South African art history and philanthropy. Philanthropy is a platform from which artists can serve as catalysts within society. This thesis argues that South African artists acted philanthropically through their work to challenge the destructive social mores enforced by apartheid. INDEX WORDS: South Africa, Apartheid, Philanthropy, Agency, Social mores, Relief, Improvement, Reform, Art ACTION THROUGH AESTHETICS: PHILANTHROPIC ART INITIATIVES IN SOUTH AFRICA DURING THE APARTHEID
Annie E. Coombes. Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa: History after Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 384 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95. Paper.
LITERATURE AND ARTS Annie E. Coombes. Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa: History after Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 384 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95. Paper. Dominion has been a timeless theme of art, and monumental public art the most dramatic articulation of politicized nationalism. Monuments to war heroes, victors in conquest, totalitarian despots, or distinguished statesmen all typically pay visual homage to the idea of power, specifically male sovereignty. In South Africa there have always been two orders, the seen and the unseen, the ravaged and the reconstructed, mortality and immortality, death and rebirth, violence and beauty. These are "warring ideals," such that in public culture the victor and the vanquished seem irreconcilable, always contradictory. The museum world and the domain of visual and performance culture were, for decades, among the few sites where visions of resistance and social transformation could be presented in a society hemmed in by censorship. In Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa: History after Apartheid, Annie Coombes attempts to fence off a space in which recessed lighting figuratively illuminates the museological, the chronological, the diabolical. In writing about the complex political affiliations of the South African art world, however, she resurrects a somewhat dated ethnographic enterprise that reflects the intellectual cadence of a neocolonial art world. The sheer weight of the white authoritarian colonial mind over-powers text and subtext, and it is difficult to accept the author's analyses of models of historical knowledge when her vision has been shaped by European systems of thought. How does contemporary South Africa relinquish the "post-apartheid" nomenclature as a driving theme of public debate, art production, and art critique? Part of the dilemma in writing about South Africa's art world is that it is, compared to that of many other societies, a relatively small world. Apartheid put South Africa on the map. Thus Coombes's relentless focus on memory culture and the politicization of art demonstrates the challenges of trying to fashion any narrative of national identity outside of the realm of the political. The tensions concerning the museumification of Robben Island and District Six (chapters 2 and 3), for example, directly engage the question of exclusion-the exclusion of constituencies victimized by apartheid. Part of the problem in the South African art world has been the absence of alternative nonwhite institutions. In other societies with histories of genocide and enslavement (read: the U.S.) in which those alternative art worlds thrive, however precariously, the articulation of power, politics, and art gradually develops its human capital; professional communities of color compete, if not always equally, to define their own realities. A community-based arts movement, built and sustained by committed cross-racial alliances in the 1960s-1990s, has provided an anti-museum site of counterhegemony which this book would have done well to document. Globally, museums have served as public temples, a counterpoint to religious sites. Coombes explores the new codes of behavior stipulated by the "new" South Africa in chapter 6 by recounting the effects of contemporary events such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and how memorial and historical contemplation affects the new art emerging from a nation in the throes of reinvention. …
Research on Fracture Recognition in Well Logging Images: Adversarial Learning with Attention
Semantic recognition of fractures in well logging images is vital for engineers to implement oil and gas exploration. An essential approach to accomplishing the object is to adopt deep learning based on convolutional neural networks. However, due to the lack of annotated labels in well logging images, it is scarcely available to directly train the semantic segmentation network. In this paper, we explore a domain shift model attempting to achieve domain adaptation from one annotated dataset to our target well logging images. This model's core is to utilize adversarial learning, including generator and discriminator, which can prompt the model to generate fracture segmentation similar to the source domain in the target domain. For enhancing the domain adaptive model further, an attention module is introduced, which can suppress redundant noise in semantic segmentation results. We demonstrate that our proposed model performs well by extensive tests and ablation experiments in the ultrasonic well logging images.