Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In South Africa, in the early 1970s, two architectural projects — the new campus of the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) and the Afrikaans Language Monument — came to signify, for many, unsettling aspects of Afrikaner cultural identity. The architect Johan Carel van Wijk, who had worked in the USA, was closely involved in both undertakings and drew the artist Ernst de Jong into the task of transforming the plastic qualities of both architectural spaces into the visual rhetoric of two-dimensional corporate identity design. De Jong, who had obtained a degree in painting and information design at the University of Oklahoma in 1957, transferred his American experience to his native country and was, almost single-handedly, responsible for elevating “commercial art” to the more rarefied profession of graphic design in South Africa. Immediately upon his return from the USA, he established Ernst de Jong Studios (EDJS) that rapidly took on legendary status as de Jong and his staff forged the identity of a newly independent, bright and putatively modern nation. The output of EDJS was vast and this venture allowed de Jong the freedom to practice as a fine artist. EDJS closed its doors in 1994, the year in which South Africa finally set aside the ideologies of the apartheid era. This paper selects the case studies of RAU and the language monument in order to reflect upon the contexts in which creative practitioners align themselves with ideologies with which they do not necessarily identify and yet come to exemplify.