Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
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of the Witwatersrand, 1953. Courtesy of Wits University Press.)
Plate 10: D. M. Calderwood, Proposed New Residential Centre, 1953. Garden City principles underpinned the master plan for KwaThema. Green belts, sports fields, private gardens and civic space were intended to create a natural environment and healthy neighbourhood. (From D. M. Calderwood, ‘Native Housing in South Africa’, PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1953. Courtesy of Wits University Press.)
Plate 11: D. M. Calderwood, Analysis of 50’ x 70’ plots, 1953. The modern garden was a technical problem to be solved. Through iterative experimentation, Calderwood argued, useful and efficient residential plots could be planned for black urbanites. (From D. M. Calderwood, ‘Native Housing in South Africa’, PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1953. Courtesy of Wits University Press.)
Plate 12: Joane Pim, site of the garden of the Western Deep Levels hospital for mine workers in 1964.
Plate 13: The hospital garden three years later. In an homage to Humphry Repton’s Red Books, Beauty is Necessary presents a before-and-after view of a garden for the mine workers’ hospital. Pim deployed eighteenth-century landscape gardening principles to make a garden in the veld. (Images from Joane Pim, Beauty is Necessary [Cape Town: Purnell & Sons, 1971].)
Plate 14: Top, Roelof Uytenbogaardt, Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK) Welkom Wes. A monolith planted in the veld, Uytenbogaardt’s church (1966) is at one with – indeed, of – its rough, authentic environment, a fundamentally different view of modernity from that of Pim and other Garden City ideologues. (Original in possession of University of Cape Town Libraries. Courtesy UCT, Special Collections.)
Plate 15: Bottom, Jane Alexander, Security/ Segurança, 2006. A wheatgrass lawn and the sculpture Bird (2006) are ‘protected’ by razor-wire double diamond-mesh fences; a perimeter of 1 000 sickles, 1 000 machetes and 1 000 used South African workers’ gloves; and Brazilian guards, Fabio Silva, André Luiz Marianno, Flávio de Jesus Bastos, Joeferson Goss Oliveira and Alessandro Messias da Rocha. (© 2018 Jane Alexander/DALRO. Photograph: Juan Guerra.)
Plate 16: Top, Lungiswa Gqunta, Lawn 1, 2016. Gqunta’s installation is a disconcerting lawn landscape made from a 242 × 122 mm wooden board studded with upturned broken bottles unevenly filled with surprisingly green petrol. (Image courtesy of Lungiswa Gqunta and Whatiftheworld Gallery.)
Plate 17: Bottom, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Do not go far they say, 2015. An old-school brown suitcase filled with soil and growing lawn is watched over by porcelain German shepherds. Wa Lehulere’s installation challenges the notion that the lawn is permanent and immobile. (© Kemang Wa Lehulere. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg.)
Plate 18: Edwin Lutyens, Site plan of proposed layout and extent of Joubert Park. Redrawn by author. Lutyens, architect of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (1915), proposed doubling Joubert Park by spanning the railway tracks and including Union Ground (now the location of Park Central Taxi Rank). The changes would have placed the gallery in the centre of a generous twenty-acre park.
Plate 19: Left bottom, Terry Kurgan, Park Pictures: Aerial map showing the fixed positions of forty photographers working out of Joubert Park in 2004. As part of her Park Pictures project (2005), Kurgan documented the professional photographers who made a living taking portraits in the park outside the Johannesburg Art Gallery. (Image courtesy of Terry Kurgan.)
Plate 20: This page, top, Terry Kurgan, Park Pictures: Photographer Godfrey Ndlovu’s unclaimed portrait, 2005.
Plate 21: Bottom right, Terry Kurgan, Park Pictures: Photographer Varrie Hluzani’s unclaimed portrait, 2005. The lawn appears in a great number of the unclaimed portraits Kurgan collected from the Joubert Park photographers. As a backdrop, the lawn provides an ambiguous location of urbanity and respectability. (Images courtesy of Terry Kurgan.)
Plate 22: David Goldblatt, Sleeping man, Joubert Park, Johannesburg. 1975. Shot during a brief liberal phase after 1974 in which black people were permitted into Joubert Park, Goldblatt’s closely observed image of a man sleeping on the lawn ties into long-held racial anxieties about proper comportment, leisure and idleness. (Photograph by David Goldblatt. © David Goldblatt, courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.)
Plate 23: Sabelo Mlangeni, A space of waiting, 2012. Mlangeni’s painterly photograph of Joubert Park captures a gentle, even pretty aspect of Johannesburg’s inner city. How, we might ask, can the pictorial language of the picturesque be seen as appropriate for representing the post-apartheid landscape? (Image courtesy of Sabelo Mlangeni.)
Plate 24: Top, Pieter Hugo, Aerial View Dainfern Gated Community, 2013.
Plate 25: Bottom, Pieter Hugo, Aerial View Diepsloot, 2013. Hugo’s diptych of post-apartheid Johannesburg illustrates the stark contrast between the lush gated compound of Dainfern and the nearby settlement of Diepsloot. While the disparity in these aerial views is indisputable, what ecological subtleties are lost in this kind of visual polemic? (© Pieter Hugo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg/Yossi Milo, New York/Priska Pasquer, Cologne.)
Acknowledgements
I want to acknowledge the financial support of my family; the postdoctoral fellowship that I held for 2016–18 through the Wits City Institute,