Inner-city safaris and wild public art.

Inner cities; Safaris; Public art; Scrap metals; Vladislavic, Ivan, 1957-

As Ivan Vladislavić observes in his 2006 novelPortrait with keys,Johannesburg's public art has an abundance of animal iconography on which he relies to create an evocative and sensitive metaphor between the poaching of actual animals and the trend in Johannesburg to steal parts of public sculptures for scrap metal. Using this as a starting point, this article explores three examples of contemporary public art in Johannesburg and investigates to what extent they exist beyond inherited tropes of animal iconography, as inherited from South Africa's colonial architects and city planners. The ways of looking that are invoked, primarily by Clive van den Berg's toy-like, concreteEland(2007), have been constructed in both primary and secondary texts as nostalgic calls for an imagined pre-urban South Africa. The claim is made here that the sense of nostalgia and sentimentality is only a superficial reading of these public artworks, and that upon a closer reading they transform existing tropes to perform a ritual of loss and recovery, thus enacting the liminality of post-trauma South Africa and a sense of cathartic memento mori. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]