Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to Marketplace (review)
A specter is haunting contemporary African a r t — t h e specter of globalization. All the forces of the market and the stud i o — a r t historians, curators, galleries and museums of Europe and the United States and, of course, a r t i s t s—have entered into a holy alliance to domesticate the specter. The work among them "sits precariously in the disjunctive spaces between home and exile," to borrow the words of Okwui Enwezor. It is produced for and in "that exemplary community of the transnational moment made up of ...domains of shared discrepant meanings, adjacent maps and histories, a broad, complex fraternity that hinges on nonabsolutist ways of practicing c i t izenships " (Enwezor, "Travel Notes," p. 12, in the catalogue of the Second Johannesburg Biennale, 1997). The increasing presence of African-identified people in Western centers as producers, consumers or marketers of these artworks was complemented by the global political changes bracketed by the dissolution of Soviet communism and the end of the apartheid system in South Africa. The massive flight of academics to Euro-American institutions would broaden the field of African art history to coincide with the ascendance of theories and aesthetics drawing strength from suppressed or distorted artistic traditions. Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace is an articulation of the processes coalescing in this shift. The leap is far from quantum, the whole point of a catalytic exhibit like Magiciens de la Terre (Paris, 1989) being to signal the eventual arrival of contemporary African-worked objects at the terminus of Eurocentric assent. The editors—OLu Oguibe and Enwezor—recognize the status of that exhibit ("both notorious and seminal"), its self-insertion as a milestone worthy of note, even if the traveler, seeing an imperfect site, would promptly set sail. Most of the contributions in this anthology are thus framed by a keen sense of negotiation and relativism, useful habits in the marketplace of heterogeneity where African art and artists now go for belatedly high prices. Concerns here range from the theories and the histories of contemporary African art to the actual practices of the artists whose work and sometimes lives intersect with the tenuous opposition of high art to mass culture in the age of late capitalism. The inclusion of Valentine Yves Mudimbe and Anthony Appiah in this reader is justified by the rigor of their work in reassessing Africanist scholarships, no more, and the preponderance of trained art historians sets the argument squarely on course. Nevertheless, a close reading, supported by some knowledge of African art would reveal the overall limitations of the tendencies represented here. ( In Chika Okeke's seemingly exhaustive but stilted history of Nigerian art, for instance, Zaria and Nsukka are the sites; Auchi, Yaba and Ife are no more than footnotes.) The works of Appiah and Mudimbe, different but somewhat complementary, are dedicated to a recuperation of the philosophy of culture in A f r i c a— that last word is always a suspect ca tegory—f rom the strictures of European colonial epistemology and the cultural essential ization of the "nativists." Mudimbe's criticisms of the pseudo-modernist "art schools" mounted in the 1950s ' Congo by Pierre RomainDesfosses and in Osogbo, Nigeria, by Ulli Beier and Susanne Wenger, is predicated on the fact that the workshops reinforced the segmentation of African art history according to the colonial order. A condition that, in Appiah's view, is so muddled by the extreme commodification of forms in the wake of high theory as to call into question the wholesale importation of diverse critical stances into the discourse of African art. This argument dislodges the West or the Rest as the custodians of the power to constitute knowledge, and it is well-suited to the intellectual temperament that the editors, sometimes co-curators of international exhibits and (until recently) top editors of NKA, a journal of contemporary African art, would privilege in the "terrain of difficulty" (Oguibe, 18). A strand of this argument is pursued by Everlyn Nicodemus ("Bourdieu Out of Europe") who draws attention to the difficulty (and possibi l ity) of applying Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of autonomous cultural production to practices outside its sphere of origin. Bourdieu's was an analysis of a specific moment in Nineteenth-Century French society, but Nicodemus says that it gives an insight into the management of the system of domination and exclusion that otherizes African cuLtural practices. It is a system little examined, that is, until Bourdieu. It points to the fact that the meaning of the value of art is constituted by an array of producers in the f ield—artist, dealer, critic, gallery, collector and historian. Taking issues with the notion of authenticity—the prison in which African art still languishe s—S idney Kasfir ("African Art and Authentic ity") examines tourist or popular art, contemporary forms which, unable to resist commodification or fit into the sort-and-settle categories of Western art museums, are thus denigrated as inauthentic. Kasfir suggests that these forms are movements upon earlier traditions, transformed no doubt by changes in political and economic organizat ion. Ascribing authenticity to works associated with the colonial past (classified as "old, very expensive or technically complex") and not with those produced in the present is mere idealization, a mourning of the loss of that past. As John Picton ("In Vogue") discovered during a conference on African art in Washington, D.C., in 1989, this was a misconception rife even among Africanist curators, and it is meet that Kasfir acknowledges that the issue of authenticity was once thrashed out on the pages of African Arts. Piction skewers judgements informed by the exoticizing choices of Jean Pigozzi, whose collection would enrich the Magiciens and set an Andre Magnin on the trail of the " true" contemporary artists. But he would admit of the genius of roadside painters (like Sola Olusola near the gate of the University of Ibadan), in much the same way as Kasfir assents to the tradition of the Maconde artists or craftsmen in Tanzania. Is there any irony in the fact that several pages later, Salah Hassan ("The Modernist Experience in African Art") would speak of the "kitsch, crude and naive products of the roadside painters," having in mind such artists as Cheri Samba and Felix Bouabre, the latter once approvingly reviewed by Enwezor? Yet, Hassan's concern is with the contemporary forms unjustly marginalized by Eurocentric distrust of modernism in Africa. The relevant point here is not just the diversity of opinions or practices, but how such diversity is owed to curatorial and academic politics in Europe and America, where scholars and galleries develop analytical paradigms for teaching and research and collection, with very little connection to the history of the works in question. Such are the rules of etiquette in curatorial circuits that Magnin would still lend to Enwezor for a biennale, and the wide condemnation of Susan Vogel's Africa Explores does not diminish her standing much. The waters get more rancorous among the fastest currents. This is the domain of African artists who have made their homes not just outside the continent, but specifically in Western cities. Four such ar t i s t s—Ike Ude, Ouattara, Olu Oguibe and Bili Bidjocka—are the focus of Enwezor's "Between Worlds: Postmodernism and African Artists in the Western Metropolis." He argues that the presence of these artists in cities of the United States and Europe ensures that they are claimed by "no community of i n te re s t "— neither in the West nor in the African countries they came f rom—and are thus able to work within a "liberatory matrix that is oppositional in nature." This