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African art - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York
Art Journal, Spring, 1997 by Christa Clarke
Ever since objects from Africa first attracted the attention of modernist artists at the beginning of this century, museums and galleries devoted to avant-garde expression have played a pivotal role in legitimizing African material culture as an art form for Western audiences. As early as 1914, Alfred Stieglitz championed the aesthetic merits of African sculpture at his Gallery 291 in New York through installations that highlighted form over ethnographic content. The appreciation of African artifacts as art gained more widespread acceptance in 1935 when the Museum of Modern Art mounted African Negro Art, curated by James Johnson Sweeney. This exhibition introduced objects from sub-Saharan Africa to a larger museum-going public and, in the process, established a canon of "classic" African art. While an entire field devoted to the examination of these works on their own terms quickly developed following the 1935 show, modernism has continued to mediate public perception of and interest in African art through exhibitions such as the MoMA's controversial Primitivism in 20th-Century Art of 1984. It seems fitting, then, that toward the close of the century, a modernist institution has again approached the subject, this time attempting "the first major survey of the artistic traditions of the entire continent."(1)
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Africa: The Art of the Continent opened in New York in June 1996 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, presenting over 500 works of art from museums and private collections throughout the world. Originating at the Royal Academy in London, the exhibition, which made its debut there in October 1995, was conceived and curated by Tom Phillips, a British painter, collector of African art, and Royal Academician. Phillips's objective in organizing the exhibition was to present African art as an aesthetic equal to that of the West. The resulting show was astonishingly broad in scope, stressing not only the chronological depth of African artistic expression but also a geographical range encompassing the entire continent. At the Guggenheim - the show's sole American venue - the exhibition practically filled the building with a host of stunning works, some familiar and others exhibited for the first time. While the installation itself encouraged an aesthetic appreciation of the objects, didactic labels and contextual photographs provided a cultural framework for African art. Unfortunately, these two strategies of display - the aesthetic and the contextual - were never integrated into the conceptual structure of the show overall and ultimately the conflict between them undermined the larger aims of this ambitious exhibition.
The story behind the conception and execution of Africa: The Art of a Continent is at least as complex as the exhibition itself, revealing the delicate ethical, political, and social issues involved in the display of African art. Phillips's initial selection of objects for the London show raised concerns about issues of African cultural patrimony, resulting in the last-minute deletion of many works scheduled to be in the exhibition. The loan of antiquities from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, for example, was barred by Islamic fundamentalists who won a court order prohibiting religious treasures from leaving the country. The Royal Academy had also planned to exhibit a sizable number of undocumented terra-cotta antiquities from the Inland Niger Delta region of Mali, an area particularly vulnerable to illegal excavations. Under pressure from the British Museum, which threatened to withdraw all its loans, the Academy was forced to exclude the Malian terra-cottas from the show. Still, many of the exhibition's critics were dismayed to find these contested pieces published in the catalogue along with other works of questionable source, including objects from the Nok and Cross River regions in Nigeria.
When it opened to the public in London, Africa: The Art of a Continent drew additional criticism for the strategies of display employed by Phillips in the installation. The over 800 objects, illuminated by spotlights in dimly lit rooms, were presented in a minimalist fashion that emphasized the aesthetic. Although works were grouped by culture and geographic region, the identifying labels provided little information and were difficult to associate with the individual objects. Phillips defended his "decontextualization" of the objects in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, arguing that "the very test of what we call art is its capacity to survive independently of a context it can never revisit" (p. 20). Many, however, found this approach problematic. Africanist art historian Roy Sieber, emeritus professor at Indiana University who later served as an advisor for the Guggenheim venue, was among those who criticized the London installation. "To put an object on a pedestal, light it and walk away is not helpful," Sieber noted. "There should be more information to teach us about the people and remind us that any choice we make about African art is based on Western values. In this sense, Tom [Phillips] is undoing 50 years of art studies by claiming, like Roger Fry, 'Don't give me facts, just let me look at the object.'"(2)
