The text folds: Disappearing race/gender in South African visual art world discourse

This article considers a 2010 government report on the South African visual arts industry. Using a Foucauldian lens, I show how it produces a discourse on ‘gender’ and ‘race’ where these terms function only as quantitative and statistical categories in an administrative and economic art world model. The report presents its findings according to four figures, namely, the ‘white male’, ‘white female’, ‘black male’ and ‘black female’, which I conceptualize as knowledge ‘avatars’ acting as placeholders that obscure the field’s complexity. Despite the use of ‘gender’ and ‘race’ terms identifying various issues in the field, the report’s recommendations to the government virtually ignores the race/gender imbalance so clearly revealed – it is simply folded out of sight or performed away discursively. This phenomenon is explained via Jennifer Tennant Jackson’s concept ‘the efficacity of meta-conceptual performativity’ – how discourses can push things away from the regular knowledge surface (the dispositif) into the ‘fold’.