"Contemporary African art" in Western spacesPower of the Written Word Underscores
Perhaps the time has come to have a serious discussion about the representation of "contemporary African art" in Western exhibition spaces, which focuses only on African artists who live and work in the West. In my review of the Africa 95 exhibitions almost ten years ago, I suggested that curators should be held responsible for their curatorial choices, and that the constant "rediscovery" of "African art" in various periods should stop. Recent exhibitions suggest otherwise. by Sylvester Ogbechie professor March 8, 2005
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Reviewed by Brian Sewell at Evening Standard (18 February 2005)
Imagine an exhibition in the Hayward Gallery devoted to contemporary European art of the whole continent, from Lapland to Malta and Portugal to Moldova. With so many cultural inheritances represented within so many nations, the exercise would be a monumental folly, the sheer quantity rendering the encyclopaedic approach impossible and all other approaches so intellectually distorting as to make them unacceptable.
No sane man would embark on such a project, yet for Africa, three times the size of Europe, with far greater racial, religious and cultural divisions and diversities and an older cultural history - it was, when all is said and done, in Africa that man first stood on his hind legs - just such an exhibition has been contrived and is now to be seen on the South Bank.
Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, is part of Africa 05, a distinctly political poly-art beano that, quite by chance, of course, coincides with the interest in that continent currently expressed by our political masters, no doubt to their advantage in the imminent election.
With Mandela rivalling the Pope as the world's greatest living saint (and held in far higher esteem by the powers that be in London), I hardly dare be skeptical, but my first impression of the exhibition remained after a second and third perambulation - that not much of it qualifies as art in any contemporary European sense, and that what little does is so European in its sad inadequacy that it hardly qualifies as African.
This wretched assembly of post tribal artefacts, exhausted materials re-used, and what would easily pass for the apprentice rubbish of the European art school, has about it the air of a state-run trade fair.
One is expected to be polite because the place of origin is poor and for this we blame ourselves to some extent, to make allowances because its artists are even poorer in resources and materials than the Italian artists of (self-imposed) Arte Povera, and, in the spirit of generosity, do business of some kind; the critic must abandon criticism and concede to the paid genius of publicity who described this exhibition as "eye-popping" and the curators who insist that here we witness "breathtaking diversity" and "the wealth of creativity that abounds in Africa today".
Creativity, however, ain't necessarily art. If this is Africa's bid to dominate the world of international biennales, to be given special issues of Modern Painters, Apollo and the Burlington Magazine, to be mocked by David Lee's Jackdaw for the Art Bollocks that it generates or, more worthily, to be recognized as a driving force in the onward march of art history, then it has failed.
The painting is stale, corny, one-trick-pony stuff, and very little here in the Western idioms of video and photography reaches the cutting-edge of which the Arts Council constantly prates but never manages to define.
This, of course, makes the point that someone made the choice of what and who should be included and what and who should not, but he or she or they may well have had pretty poor qualifications to make these judgments, perhaps had an axe to grind, and not one of them could have had the necessarily intimate grasp of what is happening in the visual arts throughout the whole of Africa.
Where, I wondered, after looking at woebegone inferior sculpture in veins in which she is mightily successful, is the work of Sokari Douglas Camp, the Nigerian artist whose Masquerade sculptures at t he Museum of Mankind enthralled and exalted all who saw them there in the context of ancestral West African art? With her absence I suspect that a narrow and exclusive French post-colonial view underlies the selection - indeed, the Francophone curator writes of other exhibitions as evidence of a split between English-speaking, French-speaking and Arabic-speaking visions.
He writes, too, of scandal and chaos, peevishly, as though Africa and African artists are not responsible for themselves, and appears to lay the blame on what he calls the "Judeo (sic) Christian religion". I have long thought that Christian missionaries in Africa, no matter what their denomination, all well-intentioned in their trousered way, were responsible for a great evil in Africa when they denied the African the comforts of animism, tyranny, mutual slavery and even cannibalism that were the established props of then comparatively small African societies.
In the 19th-century tussle for spheres of influence, Christianity in all its proscriptive forms went hand-in-hand with snatching political and commercial advantage, but I doubt if it had much effect on African art, for such a thing in any Western sense did not exist. There was no tradition of easel painting, mural decoration, or the possession of works of art for aesthetic pleasure; there were instead a myriad examples of ancestral craft and fetish repeated generation after generation, and for these we in the West had greater respect than the societies that gave rise to them - which is the reason for their presence in Western museums and private collections (not as art but ethnography) and their immediate reappearance on the international art market whenever ethnic collections have, since the Sixties upheavals in the Belgian Congo, been returned to their places of origin (witness the dispersal and recovery of African objects at the museum in Tervuren).
There is a thesis subject in the change in perception during the 20th century as the masks and figures that influenced Picasso and his ilk ceased to be ethnographical objects and became what the market now describes as ethnic art. The contemporary art in this exhibition is so feeble precisely because it is so little rooted in any native tradition; it adopts Western forms, techniques and devices because it has no models of its own and Western models are so readily available; and it is exhibited in the West because it would be politically incorrect not to play with it the silly Western game of recognising as art everything that is made by man, no matter where. As in the West, success and exposure are not controlled by quality; there, as here, it is the patchy business of being noticed by a curator able to exercise patronage.
In this case the exhibition is bedeviled by having to be pan-African and it is not surprising to see its panjandrums make the same mistakes as those who mounted the Royal Academy's Africa: Art of a Continent in 1996, bundling the Arabic traditions of Mediterranean countries with those of Sub-Saharan Africa, east with west and north with south, though they were separated (and still are) by such distance and hazardous terrain as separate continents.
The RA's exhibition was, nevertheless, genuinely African in that it was largely pre-colonial and pre-Christian (Ethiopia was omitted); the Hayward's is not and in its postcolonialism illustrates a vain scramble by African artists to be seen as part of a Western world, for that way lies esteem and the wealth that accompanies it. They do it very poorly.
Some of the exhibits may be interpreted as political protest, the world vomiting on America, a random collection of posters, papers, incoherent and illiterate propaganda and bits and pieces not unlike those of the current resident protester in Parliament Square, and Yinka Shonibare's absurd Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour (did this shallow-minded, insignificant and repetitive clown really merit a place on the Turner Prize short list?), but as with the art, so with the protest - neither has clear point or purpose.
What is Hassan Musa, a Sudanese living in France, trying to say with the Great American Nude in which he turns Osama bin Laden into a bare-bottomed odalisque by Boucher waiting to be sodomised. As a newspaper cartoon in The Independent it might work, but as art on a large scale it is both trite and transitory, its fleeting point hardly worth the making.
The only exhibits to make a significant point are three large prints by the Durban photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa; these are of laborers in the field, each single figure an image of pathetic resignation exquisitely staged to communicate his numbing drudgery, a slave without shackles, but a slave in all but name. Plus ca change ... Surely this is where the African artist has a duty, not in self-advantage on the fringes of the Western art market?
This is a thoroughly depressing exhibition. We are presented with, largely, a bunch of no-hopers whose work is on view because, and only because, they are African. "Look, look," they say, "we can do it too." And so they can, but it is not worth the doing, for in following the West they mimic it in witless parody, or ape in modern materials and terms what little they know of a genuine African past, or embark on tasks that can only be completed with the obsessive industry of the deranged. Had we in the West not swamped the continent with our colonial ambitions, our Christianity, our medicine, our commercial and industrial greed, had we left Africa to be still the Dark Continent and work out its own purposes, I have no doubt that an Emil Torday of today could have bought new ethnic objects as beautiful as those he acquired for the British Museum a century ago. We should come away from this exhibition blaming not the Africans for the deficiencies of what we've seen, but ourselves, paraphrasing Kipling's melancholy question: "What have we done, what have we done?"
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Author: Jean-Baptiste Bacquart