Negotiating the Taxonomy. Contemporary African Art: Production, Exhibition, Commodification. - Review - book review

Sidney Littlefield Kasfir. Contemporary African Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999. 224 pp., 74 color ills., 106 b/w. $14.95 paperback.

[O]ne can say that African artist are not so much fighting for the freedom to be 'African' (whatever that may mean), but to be fully accepted as artists, through this can only be articulated through their Africanness, since that is the site of their categorical exclusion from a global art discourse in the first place. --Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Contemporary African Art (213).

This avowal is telling of the problematics of what one could call the young field of "contemporary African art." Sidney Kasfir's Contemporary African Art, part of Thames and Hudson's World of Art series, was planned originally as a supplement/counterpart to Frank Willett's African Art: An Introduction. However, rather than using Willett's text as a point of departure, Contemporary African Art is a separate survey responding more to a host of other surveys and catalogues engaged with similar issues. This text is also an attempt to grapple with some of the critical questions in the discourse of contemporary African art. Kasfir, who is Associate Professor of African Art History at Emory University, is conscious of the presence, role, and duty of her text, particularly at the end of a decade full of exhibitions and publications, which, in signaling social, political, economic, and cultural contingencies, have tried to define and to redefine this (fixed or flexible?) category, "contemporary African art."

For a general readership Kasfir's text serves well as an introduction to contemporary African art. As a survey of both historical and contemporary material, it addresses the key figures, events, concepts, and artists, but as is the case with all surveys and introductory texts, it excludes some critical artists and exhibitions. What is most impressive, however, is how the author has framed her volume. Kasfir addresses questions previously underdeveloped in the field, as evidenced in the books seven chapters, entitled "New Genres: Inventing African Popular Culture," "Transforming the Workshop," "Patrons and Mediators," "Art and Commodity," "The African Artist: Shifting Identities in the Post Colonial World," "The Idea of a National Culture: Decolonizing African Art," and "Migration and Displacement."

As Kwame Anthony Appiah aptly suggested in his significant article "Is Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" (1991), it is the space of culture and the place of the market in which an artist enters the contemporary art world. In the context of contemporary African art, this proposition points to a highly charged and contested category--a category of Western reception rather than African artistic intention. This problematic method of classification, as well as the impossibility of conclusively defining the diverse artistic production, exhibition, and commodification of mid-to-late twentieth-century continental Africa defines the terrain in which Kasfir has carefully placed her text. Evolved from modern practices which catalogue objects, objects synecdochial for cultures (i.e., an egungun mask as Yoruba culture-at-large), the term "contemporary African art" reflects the design of Eurocentric institutions to serve nationalist agendas, agendas largely derived from the colonial enterprise. In this li ght, Kasfir and her contemporaries must take up the task of formulating new models of translation, resignification and resistance.

How does one reposition the study of a field largely defined by Occidental institutions in the maintenance of colonial hierarchies, a field that has been based on a politics framed by the artificial binaries of traditional/modern as well as non-Western/Western? In pointing to museums and the market's own vested interests in Anglophone and Francophone artists from sub-Saharan Africa, Kasfir stakes out the territory of biases and absences in the scholarship. The author fleshes out some inequities in traditional criticism's larger exclusion of the visual culture from North and East Africa on the continent, as well as itinerant or diasporal artists exhibiting internationally.

Kasfir turns to Appiah as a point of departure and asks, "How 'Postmodern' is contemporary African Arc?" and criticizes Appish for not speaking about modernities as variant in terms of accessibility according to their constituent brands of colonialism (Anglophone/indirect rule, Francophone/assimilation). The critique of Appiah seems to fall a bit short. Kasfir writes, "[Appiah] argues that much of African popular culture is uncritical of the seemingly limitless appetite for imported media and genres, and therefore offers no critique of either colonialism or modernity. In that sense, it is neither postcolonial nor postmodern." This argument needed more elaboration. Still in the territory of Appiah, Kasfir remarks, "the most striking similarity between the postcolonial and the postmodern has been this very condition of hybridity" (14). Unfortunately, such arguments are not rooted in her discussions of the artworks illustrated in her book. For example, the author handles the well-known painter from Kinshasa Che ri Samba's Why Have I Signed a Contract? (1990) in terms of subject matter, social mores, generalizations of urban sign painting, fashion, and commodity culture, and nor in terms of some of the critical debates at hand: self-portraiture and promotion, the market, and the assertion of individual autonomous artistic identity which signals a critical link between the spheres of traditional and contemporary art practice.