The early 1970s was a time of intense political upheaval in South Africa. It was marked by an upsurge in black trade union organization, and at the University of Natal in Durban, philosopher Rick Turner, who would be assassinated by security police in 1978, helped initiate a Wages Commission to gather data and disseminate information on working conditions at the University. Artist Gavin Younge, teaching printmaking at the university, was involved in the commission and helped organize students and factory workers in strikes in 1972 and 1973. These activities were deeply threatening to the apartheid government, which relied on a compliant and inexpensive black labor force to keep the economy going. Younge received “warnings” from the security police to stop his involvement: His car was attacked, his tires slashed, bricks were thrown at his house at night.
In May 1975 Younge left Durban, accepting a lectureship at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. One of the first series made after the move was his Resistance Register (1975–76), photographic screen prints of himself and fellow artists holding up a signboard promising others to “Resist.” Says Younge, “It was a response to the political oppression of the time and an attempt to ‘stand up and be counted,’ couched in conceptual terms. Adherents promised to ‘misbehave’ in some unspecified way at some undisclosed time. The series represented a movement away from ‘protest art’ because it did not rely on overt images of defiance, and instead emphasized the notion of human agency.”
Participants included one of the top students at Michaelis at the time, renowned painter Marlene Dumas, Bruce Campbell Smith, now one of the largest collectors of black South African art, and artist Paul Stopforth.
In related activities, Younge was one of the organizers of the State of Art in South Africa conference at the University of Cape Town in 1979, an important moment in coalescing the idea of artists’ social responsibility. He also presented a paper at the conference Art Towards Social Development and Change in South Africa in 1982 in Gaborone, Botswana, and exhibited on the accompanying exhibition. There Younge showed his work Botha’s Baby (1981), cut and welded from tough, bulletproof steel with a cutout space for a gun on the feeding tray. The piece was a response to a call from the National Party’s head of state, P. W. Botha, to whites to have more babies to offset the burgeoning black population.
Although Younge said at the time that he did not believe in art as a means to change society, his work seems to belie his statement. These works were made in the years when many white artists were still uncertain as to how to address the harsh inequities of the apartheid system and thus pointed a way forward.
Resistance Register: Rosemary Hochschild 1976
Photographic screen print on cotton paper
84 x 118 cm
Photographer: Gavin Younge
© Gavin Younge
Resistance Register: Paul Stopforth 1975
Photographic screen print on cotton paper
84 x 118 cm
Photographer: Gavin Younge
© Gavin Younge
Resistance Register: Gavin Younge 1975
Photographic screen print on cotton paper
84 x 118 cm
Photographer: Gavin Younge
© Gavin Younge