Strauss & co - 4 June 2018, Johannesburg

Consensus is growing among scholars about the definition of Contemporary Art. Art historians, for example now date the ad- vent of Contemporary Art unanimously to the year 1989. 1 It is the year in which profound changes occurred in the world. The Fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, hailed the end of the Cold War, the fall of Communism and the rise of neoliberalism and late-capitalism, as well as the opening of European boarders. The massacre resulting from a clampdown on student protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, signalled gross infringements of basic human rights. The dawn of the Internet, or the World Wide Web, resulted in connectivity on a global scale. The un- veiling of the research project on the Human Gnome, deter- mining the sequence of nucleotide pairs making up human DNA, knowledge useful in understanding deseases and devel- oping medicine, was also announced in that year. And lastly, a major exhibition, Magicians of the Earth was mounted at Centre Pompidou, Paris, focusing on non-Western art from around the world and coining the phrase, Contemporary African Art. These events impacted on art practice and production in a fundamental way, in terms of new media available to artists, (for example, net-art, digital art, virtual art, etc.), and in terms of subject matter. Contemporary artists reinvent the conventional, modernist portrait in a radical way, focusing on a multifaceted identity of the sitter. Says Grovier: ‘From now on, the essence of identity would be as unfixed physically as it has always been philosophically.’ 2 The contemporary portrait weaves together issues of politics, history, sexuality and religion and the manner in which portraits are contingent on these. Artists nowadays depict contemporary struggles, uprisings and unrest, as well as rendering their take on the migration Contemporary South African Art Lot 237 William Kentridge Red Sleeper ( detail)