Global Art • 1959 • II
Robert Lebel's monograph on Duchamp is published in French and English.

Local Context • 1960 • I
Sharpeville massacre – mass protests erupt following the murders.

Local Context • 1960 • II
The government responds to mass protests in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre by declaring a State of Emergency and by passing the Unlawful Organisations Act, which effectively outlaws the PAC and the ANC.

Local Context • 1960 • III
Attempted assassination of Verwoerd at the jubilee celebrations of the Union of South Africa.

Local Art • 1960
The African Art Centre is founded in Durban to promote the work of rural and urban artists in KwaZulu-Natal.

Global Art • 1960 • I
The New Realist group is formed at the house of Yves Klein. An article on the New Realists in the New York Tribune in 1961 refers to several of the group as Neo-Dadaists; the link is downplayed by the group.

Global Art • 1960 • II
Jean Tinguely's Hommage à New York, a giant steel construction, performs its own destruction for a select audience in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Global Art • 1960 • III
George Heard Hamilton publishes Marcel Duchamp from the Green Box, an English translation of twenty-five of the boxes' notes. He makes little attempt at ordering Duchamp's haphazard notes. A year earlier, British artist Richard Hamilton had managed to produce an annotated diagram of The Large Glass that emphasised the relevance of specific notes to areas on the actual work. The diagram was sent to Duchamp, who urged Hamilton to contact his friend Heard Hamilton to discuss the possibility of deciphering and translating the entire contents of the box. Hamilton takes up the challenge and the collaboration results in The Green Book, a full translation of The Green Box, published in 1960. "We are crazy about the book...your labour of love has given birth to a monster of veracity and a crystalline trans-substantation [sic] of the French Green Box...The Bride must be blossoming ever more" – Duchamp to Richard Hamilton.

Global Art • 1960 • IV
A Kurt Schwitters retrospective is mounted at the Venice Biennale.

Global Context • 1960 • I
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan presents his 'Winds of Change' speech before parliament in Cape Town.

Global Context • 1960 • II
William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso co-author Minutes To Go, the first published cut-up novel from the beat generation group.

Local Context • 1961 • I
South Africa gains complete independence from Britain and formally becomes a republic with Verwoerd as Prime Minister and CR Swart as president.

Local Context • 1961 • II
The ANC and the PAC both form armed wings, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, MK) and POQO respectively.

Global Art • 1961 • I
The Art of Assemblage is mounted at the Museum of Modern Art. A highly influential exhibition, it features the work of Christo Coetzee, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Daniel Spoerri.

Global Art • 1961 • II
The Fluxus Internationale Festspiele, the official launch of the Fluxus movement, is organised by American artist George Maciunas in Germany.

Global Art • 1961 • III
Pierre Restany organises the exhibition À 40° au-dessus de Dada (40° above Dada). His introduction to the catalogue establishes a kinship between the New Realists and the non-art of Dada and Duchamp.

Global Art • 1961 • IV
In July, the First Festival of New Realism is held in Venice.

Global Context • 1961 • I
In Germany, the construction of the Berlin Wall divides the city into Communist East Berlin and Democratic West Berlin. The wall stands for nearly thirty years.

Global Context • 1961 • II
Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man to orbit the Earth.

Local Context • 1962
The Sabotage Act is passed.

Global Art • 1962 • I
Fluxus artists organise the Festival of Misfits at Gallery One in London.

Global Art • 1962 • II
Yves Klein dies in June; the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York hosts a self-titled exhibition of the New Realists in October.

Global Art • 1962 • III
The First International Congress of African Culture, organised by Frank McEwan to discuss the aesthetics of contemporary African art, is held in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). Tristan Tzara attends the conference and, following the exhibition, visits Mozambique with architect Pancho Guedes.

Global Art • 1962 • IV
Andy Warhol paints Campbell's Soup Cans, the canonical work of the Pop Art movement.

Global Context • 1962
Sinclair Beiles collaborates with the Greek artist Takis on his The Impossible: Man Within Space, a magnetic sculpture that suspends Beiles in mid-air while he reads out Takis' Magnetic Manifesto, performed at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris.

Local Context • 1963 • I
Formation of group and magazine Sestiger. The Sestigers, or writers of the 1960s (recalling the Dertigers of the 1930s), adapt conventional literary genres in an attempt to do for prose what the Dertigers did for poetry. André P Brink, Etienne Leroux, Ingrid Jonker and others tackle difficult subjects largely uncharted within official Afrikaaner culture, such as sex, atheism, sexism and racism.

Local Context • 1963 • II
MK leadership are arrested at their Liliesleaf Farm headquarters. At the subsequent Rivonia Trial, the prosecution argues for the death sentence. Eight of the trialists (Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Denis Goldberg, Ahmed Kathrada, Elias Motsoaledi and Andrew Mlangeni) are sentenced to life imprisonment.

Local Context • 1963 • III
The 1963 Publication and Entertainment Act is passed.

Local Context • 1963 • IV
The '90 Days' Act is passed, enabling police officers to arrest any person suspected of 'sabotage' without a warrant of arrest and to detain them for 90 days, without legal advice or visitors, before trial.

Local Art • 1963 • I
Kevin Atkinson co-founds the Cape Town Art Centre and becomes its Art Director.

Local Art • 1963 • II
Egon Guenther, Cecil Skotnes, Cecily Sash, Giuseppe Cattaneo, Sydney Kumalo, and Eduardo Villa form the Amadlozi Group ('spirit of the ancestors'). They are interested in applying modernist styles to African subjects.

Local Art • 1963 • III
First national, non-racial art competition exhibition, Art South Africa Today, opens at the Durban Art Gallery.

Global Art • 1963 • I
In Munich, the Second Festival of New Realism takes place, in the course of which Christo (Javacheff) joins the group.

Global Art • 1963 • II
Genpei Akasegawa (of the Neo-Dada Organisers) and others form the Fluxus-oriented Hi-Red Center Group in Japan.

Global Art • 1963 • III
According to a declaration by Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, art celebrates its birthday on the 16th of January 1963 – before this day, Filliou states, there was no art, but on this day, it was 1 000 000 years old, and it all started when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.

Global Context • 1963
The Organisation for African Unity is formed after a meeting of state heads from around Africa in Ethiopia.

Local Context • 1964
A time bomb is planted in the Johannesburg Station by Frederick John Harris.

Global Art • 1964
The Grand Jury Prize at the 34th Venice Biennale is awarded to Robert Rauschenberg.

Global Context • 1964 • I
In the US, African Americans are guaranteed the right to vote.

Global Context • 1964 • II
The Africa Centre is inaugurated in London. Conceived in 1958 by a small group of British patrons, the centre promotes and supports the push for independence by various African states.

Local Context • 1965 • I
Ingrid Jonker commits suicide by drowning in Cape Town.

Local Context • 1965 • II
The Criminal Procedure Amendment Act doubles the period of detention without trial to 180 days.

Local Art • 1965 • I
Kevin Atkinson studies etching at Atelier 17 in Paris with Stanley Hayter; has discussions with Marcel Duchamp at Hayter's studio.

Local Art • 1965 • II
The first issue of de arte is published at Unisa (University of South Africa).

Local Art • 1965 • III
George Boys exhibits at the São Paulo Biennale.

Global Context • 1965 • I
Race riots erupt in Los Angeles.

Global Context • 1965 • II
America deploys combat troops into Vietnam.

Global Context • 1965 • III
Britain enacts the Race Relations Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in public places. The scope of the prohibitions is expanded in amendments made in 1968 and 1976.

Local Context • 1966 • I
On September 6, Verwoerd is assassinated by a uniformed parliamentary messenger named Dimitri Tsafendas. The blood-stained carpet where Verwoerd lay after the murder remains in Parliament until its removal in 2004.

Local Context • 1966 • II
Prime Minister Vorster's government lists the names of 46 South Africans in exile, preventing leading writers from publishing or distributing their work in the country.

Local Art • 1966
George Boys leaves the Johannesburg School of Art, where he was vice-principle, to form Visual Arts Research, an independent teaching studio based on Continental philosophy.

Global Art • 1966 • I
A major retrospective of Duchamp's work is shown at the Tate in London.

Global Art • 1966 • II
Pro-Situationist students at the University of Strasbourg appropriate funds to print 10 000 copies of Tunisian Situationist Mustapha Khayati's On the Poverty of Student Life.

Local Context • 1967 • I
The Terrorism Act and the Internal Security Act extend the period of detention without trial.

Local Context • 1967 • II
Military conscription becomes compulsory for all young white men.

Local Art • 1967 • I
Ernest Cole, living in exile in the US, publishes his book House of Bondage. The book is banned in South Africa.

Local Art • 1967 • II
Walter Battiss visits Daniel Spoerri in Switzerland. Mounts multimedia Yes-No installation in Pretoria. Works are wrapped in cellophane and viewers are given torches to navigate the space and unwrap works if they choose.

Local Art • 1967 • III
Kevin Atkinson presents 'an environment of Mirrors, Light, Sound, Movement and Projections', with Helmut Starcke and Richard Wake at Design 67, Cape Town.

Global Art • 1967
The term arte povera (poor art) is coined by critic Germano Celant to describe the work of thirteen Italian artists.

Local Context • 1968 • I
Formulation of black consciousness and the South African Students Organisation (SASO) by Barney Pityana and Steve Biko.

Local Context • 1968 • II
The South African Defense Force deploys armaments and infantry into Angola to assist the Portuguese in crushing the liberation movement of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola).

Local Art • 1968 • I
The international events of May '68 drive Kendell Geers to claim the year and month as his 'birthday' and indelibly inform his future persona as an 'aesthetic terrorist'.

Local Art • 1968 • II
Kevin Atkinson exhibits a Colour and Movement Structure in Greenmarket Square as part of the Structures exhibition, Cape Town Arts Festival; a large-scale, sound-activated electronic box is selected for special Exhibit No. 9, South African National Gallery.

Global Art • 1968 • I
The Museum of Modern Arts hosts the exhibition Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, organised by William S Rubin. Marcel Duchamp dies.

Global Art • 1968 • II
Andy Warhol is shot by Valerie Solanas.

Global Art • 1968 • III
Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers exhibits his work Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Publicité in his home. In this and other works, many of which incorporate found objects, he calls into question the institutions that surround the production and consumption of art.

Global Art • 1968 • IV
The Art & Language group is formed.

Global Art • 1968 • V
South Africa participates in the Venice Biennale for the last time until 1993.

Global Context • 1968
May is a watershed moment for art and politics. French students demonstrate against President Charles de Gaulle in Paris, touching off nationwide demonstrations and worker strikes. Student riots erupt in various nations around the world. Strongly associated with The Situationist International, led by Guy Debord, the events forge a powerful link between art and political agitation and prompt widespread institutional, political and social reform.

Local Art • 1969 • I
Kevin Atkinson is selected to exhibit at the São Paulo Biennale.

Local Art • 1969 • II
George Boys presents his first 'happening' in Johannesburg, based around ideas on 'art and the man in the street'.

Local Art • 1969 • III
Battiss works on screenprints with Josef Kroll in Germany and Chris Betambeau in London. He produces a print with Betambeau called Tinguely and his Machine, which is reproduced in the September 1971 issue of Studio International as one of Battiss' many advertising interventions in the publication.

Global Art • 1969
New York art dealer Seth Siegelaub mounts the group exhibition January 1–31: – Objects, 0 Paintings, 0 Sculptures, which is dedicated to conceptual art.

Local Context • 1970 • I
The magazine Izwi is launched.

Local Context • 1970 • II
South Africa is expelled from the International Olympic Committee.

Local Art • 1970 • I
Jean Tinguely visits Pretoria as an ardent fan of Grand Prix racing. Tinguely uses facilities at the Pretoria Tech (now Tshwane University of Technology). 4th-year art student Malcolm Payne misses his art history exam to film the sculptor at work.

Local Art • 1970 • II
Responding tacitly to political third forces in South Africa, Battiss establishes the International Society for Invisible People by painting his studio door. 'International' is later replaced with 'Cosmic', to avoid an association with 'nationhood'.

Local Art • 1970 • III
George Boys presents an 'environment' at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Global Art • 1970 • I
In Milan, the New Realists put on a series of events to celebrate their tenth anniversary, with an exhibition, The New Realists 1960/1970, a series of action-spectacles in the city and a funeral banquet for which Spoerri has made for each member of the group an edible representation of their work.

Global Art • 1970 • II
Gilbert & George enact their first living sculpture performance at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in Britain.

Local Art • 1971 • I
Wolf Weinek publishes his Protest No. 1 in response to the Multiple exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Local Art • 1971 • II
George Boys collaborates with June Schneider on a multimedia experiment at the Johannesburg planetarium.

Local Art • 1971 • III
Battiss begins placing artworks in the advertisements section of British art journal Studio International. At least seven works are placed between 1971 and 1973. These document mobile sculptures such as String Thing from Africa and Mobile Monument to You; his travels; ongoing communication with Spoerri; and Fook mythology. He introduces Miss South Africa of the Future a.k.a. Dumb Dolly, a mannequin/rag doll created in direct response to draconian censorship laws in South Africa.

Local Art • 1972 • I
Kevin Atkinson is a founding member of Space Gallery, Cape Town, and appointed as lecturer in Design at Michaelis, UCT. He exhibits at Edinburgh Festival with Richard Demarco Gallery. He later visits Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and meets Joseph Beuys, who he describes as "more of a showman than a shaman." He has influential discussions with artist and theorist Jack Burnham, developer of 'systems art'.

Local Art • 1972 • II
George Boys completes work on a stainless steel installation for the foyer of Esselyn Towers, Johannesburg.

Global Art • 1972
Prolific and influential pop group Cabaret Voltaire form in Sheffield, named after the Zürich venue. Their earliest performances were Dada-influenced performance art, but they later develop a hybrid style of pop, dance, techno, dub house and experimental electronic music.

Local Context • 1973
The extreme right-wing Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement or AWB) is formed in a garage in Heidelberg with Eugène Terre'Blanche, a former police officer, as its elected leader.

Local Art • 1973 • I
Kevin Atkinson presents his solo exhibition, I am a verb, at the Space Gallery. Completes 180 m long Triangle piece on slopes of Signal Hill with help of students. The piece is burnt.

Local Art • 1973 • II
George Boys exhibits a series of found objects at the Lidchi Gallery, Johannesburg.

Local Art • 1973 • III
Wilko Milcinovic presents an exhibition of assemblage objects at Gallery Y, Johannesburg. Critic Natalie Knight likens his approach to that of Daniel Spoerri and situates his practice within the legacy of Dada.

Global Context • 1973
America reaches a ceasefire with Vietnam.

Local Art • 1974
Kevin Atkinson embraces teaching as an art form. He continues to travel, exhibit and lecture widely in South Africa and internationally.

Global Art • 1974
Kraftwerk, the West German avant-garde music group, released Autobahn.

Local Context • 1975 • I
The Inkatha Freedom Party is formed in Natal, led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

Local Context • 1975 • II
The South African Defence Force begins a fifteen-year-long series of cross-border raids into Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe in an attempt to stifle the underground operations of MK and other subversive anti-apartheid groups.

Local Art • 1975 • I
Battiss launches Fook in Cape Town at the Goodman-Wolman Gallery.

Local Art • 1975 • II
Kevin Atkinson is appointed senior lecturer at Michaelis.

Local Art • 1975 • III
Christo Coetzee commences his 'protest' phase, which remains a formal concern until 1978.

Local Art • 1975 • IV
After slashing up an entire exhibition of his own paintings with a razor blade (prompted by an unfavourable review of the exhibition and seeing a film on the other artist known as Christo), Coetzee repairs the works with string, thread and buckled leather strips, adding text elements that include references to Dada, Italian Futurism, Art Informel and the Gutai. When these 'restored'/remade works are exhibited in 1975–1976, he presents lectures on intuition, physicality, and process in art practice, referencing Art Informel (Tapié), Action Painting (Harold Rosenberg) and Body Art (Marcel Duchamp and Piero Manzoni).

Global Context • 1975
The MPLA in Angola and Samora Machel's FRELIMO Party (Mozambique Liberation Front) in Mozambique come into power as Portugal grants independence to all its colonies.

Local Context • 1976 • I
Over 25 years after its international popularisation, television broadcasting is finally introduced in South Africa.

Local Context • 1976 • II
Soweto Uprising – black students protesting Bantu Education are shot at by police; nationwide protests and riots erupt.

Local Context • 1976 • III
Gibson Kente's How Long Must We Suffer...? is filmed during the uprising and is the first black-made film in South Africa.

Local Art • 1976 • I
First Johannesburg Fook exhibition, at the Goodman Gallery.

Local Art • 1976 • II
Christo Coetzee presents a Concept/Invisible exhibition of cut works on scraps of paper, forwarded by post to Pretoria. He facilitates the donation of 11 works by Gutai artists to the collection of the Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg).

Global Art • 1976
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson premiere their avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach.

Local Context • 1977 • I
On October 19, the government declares 19 Black Conciousness organisations illegal and bans two newspapers and numerous publications. Numerous activists are detained as a result of their affiliation.

Local Context • 1977 • II
The Riotous Assemblies Act bans all outdoor public meetings.

Local Context • 1977 • III
On August 21, 1977, Steve Biko is arrested under the Terrorism Act of 1967. He dies on September 12 in police custody.

Local Context • 1977 • IV
Helen Zille, political correspondent for the Rand Daily Mail, obtains concrete proof of a police cover-up. She and editor Allister Sparks were represented at the subsequent quasi-juridical Press Council by leading defence lawyer Sydney Kentridge (father of William Kentridge), but the two were nonetheless found guilty of "tendentious reporting." Zille and Sparks resign after the paper's owners, Anglo American, demand that equal rights rhetoric should be toned down.

Local Art • 1977 • I
Boshoff writes his first dictionary (Dictionary of Colour) and begins work on Bangboek (1977–1981).

Local Art • 1977 • II
The Community Art Project (CAP) is established in Cape Town.

Local Art • 1977 • III
Pat Senior assumes the directorship of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. During her tenure, works by Donald Judd, Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sol LeWitt, Andy Warhol, Gilbert and George, Lucas Samaras and Michael Goldberg, among others, are purchased for the gallery's permanent collection.

Local Art • 1977 • IV
Gimberg Nerf is born in Johannesburg.

Local Context • 1978 • I
Vorster resigns from the presidency in 1979 as a result of his direct complicity in the Muldergate scandal, involving the misappropriation of huge sums of government money and abuses of the parliamentary system. PW Botha replaces him.

Local Context • 1978 • II
Former head of the army, Magnus Malan, becomes the Minister of Defence.

Local Context • 1978 • III
Compulsory conscription for all white men adds 37 000 soldiers to the army. An additional two years of compulsory service spread over twelve years creates a Citizen Force of 130 000.

Local Context • 1978 • IV
Operation Koevoet is formed as a highly specialised wing of the South African Police Service. Consisting of around 900 Ovambo tribesmen and 300 white police officers, who are financially rewarded through a bounty system, the Koevoet platoons use guerilla-styled military tactics to suppress armed SWAPO insurgents in South West Africa (now Namibia).

Local Art • 1978 • I
In Pretoria, Christo Coetzee presents a 'protest exhibition' of hermetic works, covered with black paint and plastic.

Local Art • 1978 • II
Claude van Lingen and Malcolm Payne are featured artists in the JAG's guest artist programme.

Local Art • 1978 • III
JAG hosts Art of the Space Age, featuring works by Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, Josef Albers and others from the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, as well as a comprehensive Walter Battiss exhibition including Fook objects, and an exhibition by Eduardo Paolozzi.

Local Art • 1978 • IV
The first edition of Staffrider is published by Ravan Press and subsequently banned.

Local Context • 1979
Magnus Malan establishes the sinister State Security Council to deal with resistance groups.