“Admirable Facsimiles”: Coffee Tables, Copying Contexts and Helen Tongue’s Rock Art Book c1909

ABSTRACT

What can we learn from studying and comparing the methods by which early researchers approached the practice of rock art reproduction? In this paper, we look at examples of painted reproductions made during the opening decades of the twentieth century. We suggest that a focus on the formal qualities of such copies and the intricacies employed by copyists in their work of translating the rock art from its multidimensional many-hued rock surface onto a flat, one-dimensional paper surface offers potential for reinvigorating rock art displays at the Origins Centre. In addition, this approach offers an opportunity to craft a narrative that affirms the contribution of individual creativity and embraces the nuance and uncertainty that remains at the heart of scholarly research and knowledge-making. We suggest that displays of copies and artworks produced by copyists, showing how these are part of an historical trajectory of art making and research production, allows an enriched engagement with how we understand the art itself, as well as how artistic practice may be recast as scientific method.

KEYWORDS:

• Helen Tongue
• Elizabeth Mannsfeld/Goodall
• Maria Weyersberg
• George Stow
• Origins Centre
• Susan Sontag
• Harrismith District
• Frobenius Institute

Acknowledgements

We thank the South African Rock Art Digital Archive, Iziko Museums of Cape Town, and the Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt am Main, for granting permission to reproduce images of rock art reproductions in their collections. We thank our two anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments and suggestions, which have contributed to the revision and refinement of this paper. In addition, this work is, in part, based on research supported by the National Institute for The Humanities and Social Sciences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lloyd purchased Stow’s reproductions, together with his manuscript later published as The Native Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country (1905) from Stow’s widow in 1882 (see Schoeman 1997; Bank 2006, 376–380).

2 The report emerged from a research project in the early 1980s when Professor David Lewis-Williams led a team of researchers into the field under a study called the Harrismith programme, which aimed to produce comprehensive recordings of entire rock art panels found in the Harrismith area. From these findings, Lewis-Williams compiled an unpublished report, “Rock art recording and interpretation in the Harrismith District” (1985), where he used “new theoretical interests” (1985, 3) in San ethnography as a tool to interrogate and interpret the panels. The project was funded by the Human Sciences Research Council and the University of the Witwatersrand.

3 We are aware that an updating programme has been underway at the Origins Centre during 2020 and is continuing as we revise our contribution in April 2021. Our analysis refers to displays in place prior to the renovations.

4 These photographic displays are being replaced with new material as part of the upgrade.

5 While colour printing via lithograph and silk-screening was available at the time, we have not been able to confirm which of these processes was used for the colour plates in Bushman Paintings (PrePressure n.d.).

6 Thanks to one of our anonymous reviewers for sharing this observation with us.

7 Most of the artworks were produced by Tongue. The title page of Bushman Paintings bears the inscription “Paintings mainly copied by M. Helen Tongue” with notes and descriptions by Dorothea Bleek. The Tongue collection at the South African Museum includes eight original watercolours signed by Dorothea Bleek.

8 Earlier steps in this direction were the exhibitions Made in Translation: Images from and of the Landscape (co-curated by Pippa Skotnes and Petro Keene, Iziko SA Museum, Cape Town, 2010–2011), and Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow and the Landscapes of the San (curated by Pippa Skotnes, Iziko SA Museum, Cape Town, 2008–2009). In Made in Translation, large-scale works by Frobenius and his team were placed on display alongside landscape photography as well as documents and objects from the museum’s allied collections. Unconquerable Spirit featured Stow’s field sketches, artworks, and painted reproductions together with his poetry and other writings and documentary materials.