Jonathan Berndt featured in Art South Africa

The upcoming August 2011 edition of Art South Africa magazine, due out on the shelves at the beginning of March, features an article about Archive and Public Culture doctoral scholar Jonathan Berndt, who died on 11 September last year.

Berndt had begun a doctoral thesis in the APC research initiative and, a week before his death, had captured the imaginations of everyone present at a workshop at the University of Cape Town, when he presented a paper entitled, The Spectral Life of Posters in the Archive, which was part of a bigger project exploring South African Struggle posters.

The Art South Africa article, written by fellow APC doctoral scholar Alexandra Dodd, takes its inspiration from this paper, which revolved around a collection of 76 Soviet posters from the 1940s, known as the TASS (Soviet News Agency) posters. Berndtwas particularly interested in how Russian and other archival networks of political posters had contributed to the cultural and political milieu in which the South African struggle posters had been inked into existence.

'In tandem with the post-war politics of the McCarthy witchhunt, the apartheid regime's violent suppression of Communism as the "rooi gevaar" means that South African Communist literature and design of the 20^th century remains largely consigned to a disavowed archive,' writes Dodd, whosearticle is a companion piece to another feature exploring the use of Soviet iconography by artist Brett Murray in his latest exhibition, Hail to the Thief, which ran at Goodman Gallery, Cape Town from November 2010 to January 2011. 'Whereas Brett Murray's latest body of work uses the pop aesthetics of Soviet iconography to lampoon the excesses of South Africa's ruling elite, Jonathan Berndt's interest in Soviet posters was part of a life shaped by his undying commitment to Marxist ideals.'