African art - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

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)

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)

Despite the controversial nature of the exhibition, the Guggenheim decided to host the show, their third exhibition to focus on art outside the context of Europe and America. (The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., had initially expressed an interest in taking the show but later declined.) Jay Levenson, deputy director for program administration at the Guggenheim and coordinator of the exhibition in New York, explained the relevance of the subject to the museum's mission to exhibit contemporary art: "African art played so critical a role in the development of the Modernist aesthetic that it has always been appreciated by the audience for 20th-century art."(3) The venue has special historical resonance given the founding of the museum by Peggy Guggenheim, herself an early collector of African art. Levenson also stressed the local appeal of the exhibition to a New York audience and, in particular, its interest to such African-American intellectuals as Cornel West, a Guggenheim board member and a contributor to both the London and New York exhibition publications.

In taking the show, however, the Guggenheim made significant modifications to the original exhibition as presented at the Royal Academy. While the London exhibition was largely a product of Phillips's artistic vision, the Guggenheim solicited the active participation of an advisory committee of Africanist art historians to adapt the exhibition to its New York venue. Chaired by Michael Kan of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the committee included Ekpo Eyo of the University of Maryland; Frank Herreman of the Museum for African Art, New York; Dominique Malaquais, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University; Peter Mark of Wesleyan University; and Edna Russ-man, a specialist in the art of ancient Egypt - in addition to Roy Sieber. This committee scaled down the size of the exhibition, selecting less than half of the 800 works exhibited at the Royal Academy and adding nearly 150 new works from American public and private collections. While maintaining the geographical orientation of the original show, members of the advisory committee opted for thematic arrangements within the existing divisions instead of grouping objects by culture. And although the Royal Academy catalogue remains the official record for the exhibition, the Guggenheim published a 200-page handbook, Africa: The Art of a Continent, 100 Works of Power and Beauty, that highlights a selection of works from each section, many of which were unique to the New York venue. This publication also contains new essays by committee members Ekpo Eyo and Peter Mark, and by Suzanne Blier, professor of African art history at Harvard University. An introduction by Cornel West and commentaries by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., originally published in the London catalogue, were also included. Noticeably missing from the Guggenheim handbook were the contributions of curator Tom Phillips, who wrote the introduction to and edited the London catalogue.

Although the shift in curatorial direction at the Guggenheim was apparently intended to minimize Phillips's aestheticizing philosophy, the installation itself maintained an emphasis on the visual impact of African artistic expression. The exhibition design, by Adeboyega Adefope and W. Rod Faulds, used the curvilinear and angled architecture of the dramatic Frank Lloyd Wright building to both harmonize and contrast with the three-dimensional aspects of the objects. This was clearly a show about sculpture, a curatorial preference manifest by merely gazing across at the figural works facing out from the spiraling ramp [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. At the same time, the Guggenheim evidently recognized the difficulties of presenting African art on a purely formal level in this more culturally sensitive era. Directly addressing the political and aesthetic ramifications of displaying African objects in a Western museum context from the start, a wall text introducing the exhibition read: "As with all exhibitions, this exploration of the arts of the African continent is a construction. It reflects the ideas and attitudes - aesthetic, historical, and cultural - of the curators who select-ed and organized the works of arts and the scholars who composed the explanatory labels and captions." This self-conscious approach to museum display, absent from the initial exhibition, was coupled with a greater emphasis on the context and content of the objects themselves throughout the installation. Thematic groupings demonstrated a variety of approaches to African art, including sociocultural (discussion of the use of masks in initiation rituals), iconographic (exploration of the mother-and-child figures in various cultures), and stylistic (abstraction in South African headrests). Visual complements to the works were provided by large color and black-and-white photographs showing African art in its indigenous contexts. The museum also produced an educational acoustic program that offered detailed information for fifty-six works in the exhibition as well as a selection of music from the various regions.

Unfortunately, the Guggenheim failed to integrate this contextual information in a lucid and structured manner, resulting in an awkward dichotomy between form and content throughout the installation. To understand the thematic arrangements, the visitor was asked to make connections between disparate (and likely unfamiliar) objects by reading individual labels that attempted to establish a continuous narrative throughout the show. Certainly some of the thematic groupings may have been apparent to the casual visitor, such as the section focusing on various roles of female figures. Most, however, were less obvious, like the assemblage of works exploring the more esoteric idea of an object's ability to create and define an architectural space. Given the scale of this show, one wonders if any thematic organization could have been sustained no matter how clearly articulated. Still, the audience would have profited from explicit introductions to the thematic sections, perhaps through didactic wall texts, as the labels themselves presented exciting and even challenging approaches to African art. The visual material also provided little insight into indigenous frameworks for African art, due largely to its marginal placement throughout the installation. Contextual photographs were relegated to the hallways between sections and in the corridors leading to the restrooms, when their purpose would have been better served had they been integrated with the objects. The schism between the two approaches to display was perhaps most evident in the acoustic program, which offered a choice of either object or context for the selected works in the exhibition.

While the Guggenheim's installation strategies differed from those of the London venue, a guiding principle of the exhibition remained the chronological depth of African artistic expression. This theme was introduced in a "prologue" immediately following the entrance that featured a series of ancient hand axes from southern and eastern Africa. The oldest artifact in this section - and in the entire exhibition - was the "Olduwan core" (Royal Academy cat. 2.1), a smoothed and rounded piece of quartzite found in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and dating to 1.6-1.7 million B.C. While given an aesthetic spin in the accompanying label ("The workmanship of some examples . . . so exceeds functional requirements as to suggest an aesthetic sensibility"), the relevance of these artifacts to an exhibition devoted to artistic expression is questionable. The focus on history initiated in the prologue was underscored throughout the exhibition with the placement of antiquities first in each of seven geographic sections. Although careful attention was obviously paid to the dating and placement of these historical works, dates were rarely provided for the remaining objects in the show, many of which were clearly no older than a century. The selective nature of this chronological approach intimated that African art is an art of the past, a common misperception that was further reinforced by the absence of contemporary African artistic expression in the exhibition. The omission of contemporary African art was all the more surprising given Suzanne Blier's catalogue essay, "Enduring Myths of African Art," in which she observed, "Scant attention is paid to recent and contemporary African art, because this art does not conform to primal typologies or expectations and because, in many circles, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it is believed that artistic production in Africa has long since come to a standstill" (p. 27). At a press conference preceding the opening of the show, the issue was addressed by Jay Levenson who stated that the Guggenheim was planning a major exhibition devoted to contemporary African art in the near future.

Along with an emphasis on Africa's history, an additional objective of the exhibition was an attempt to move beyond the idea of African art as defined by race. Subverting a long-standing division between northern and sub-Saharan Africa, the exhibition embraced the arts of the entire continent. The geographical orientation of the installation began with "Ancient Egypt and Nubia" and proceeded to "Eastern Africa," "South Africa," "Central Africa," "Sahel and Savanna," "Northern Africa," and "West Africa and the Guinea Coast" as the show circled to the top of the building. The inclusion of the arts of northern Africa in a major survey of African art was easily the most significant contribution of this exhibition. In his catalogue essay, "Putting Northern Africa Back into Africa," Ekpo Eyo eloquently expressed the difficulties in overcoming this long-standing ideological obstacle:

The idea that northwestern Africa and Egypt are not part of Africa has gained such wide acceptance that when the Royal Academy of Arts in London contemplated mounting the exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent, it had first to justify the inclusion of the arts of northwestern Africa and Egypt in an exhibition dedicated to the continent as a whole. That it decided to do so was for me a triumph for truth and common sense. This is an unprecedented exhibition and, hopefully, one that will foster the necessary changes in the way that people look at the continent, its history and its arts (p. 9).

The geographic and evolutionary justification for considering the continent as a whole provided by Eyo in the catalogue was complemented by Peter Mark's essay, "Historical Contacts and Cultural Interaction," which summarized the extensive history of cultural and artistic exchanges among Africa, the Muslim world, and southern Europe.

The sections devoted to the arts of northern Africa were illustrative of such themes, emphasizing artistic interaction both within and beyond the continent. In the section on ancient Egypt and Nubia, for example, there was a concerted effort to give equal weight to Nubia, a culture historically overshadowed by its neighbor Egypt. Alluding to active cultural interchange between the two regions, a 7th-century B.C. statue of the Nubian king Senkamenisken ([ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]; Guggenheim cat. 12), unique to the New York exhibition, showed the ruler in Egyptian pose and costume but with a traditional Kushite headdress, reflecting his ancestral ties to the Kushite kings who had also ruled Egypt. Throughout the section, the curatorial selections eschewed the monumental grandeur of Egyptian art in favor of smaller and less familiar works. A rare example of early Egyptian three-dimensional art was a door socket in the form of a bound prisoner dating to 3100 B.C. (Guggenheim cat. 3; Royal Academy cat. 1.24). Many of the objects included in the exhibition were intended for personal use, such as the New Kingdom wooden headrest in the shape of a hare (Royal Academy cat. 1.53), whose form is strikingly similar to those used in a number of sub-Saharan African cultures.

A diversity of cultural and artistic traditions was especially visible in the northern Africa section, which contained not only early Carthaginian works created under Phoenician and then Roman rule, but also an array of Muslim objects from later periods. Reflecting the region's complex history, a Moroccan gravestone (Royal Academy cat. 7.19) inscribed in Arabic to a 13th-century Marinid sultan reuses a Roman stela from the 3rd to 4th century. Of note as well is a richly illuminated Mamluk Qur'an from 1305 (Guggenheim cat. 98; Royal Academy cat. 7.55), by the celebrated calligrapher Ibn al-Wahid, an exceptionally beautiful work and the earliest dated example of its type. The section also included a number of objects by nomadic artists who once dominated trade routes across the Sahara, illustrating again the ties between northern and sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition to the inclusion of northern African artistic expression, the exhibition's organizers should also be commended for their attempt to give greater recognition to the arts of eastern and southern Africa. Historically, these regions have been underrepresented in Western museum collections, which typically reflect early preferences for figural works from western and central Africa. With the gradual breaking down of Western distinctions between art and artifact, items of personal adornment and utilitarian objects - more commonly seen in eastern and southern Africa - have entered the realm of artistic appreciation. In the eastern Africa section, the exhibition included an elaborately beaded Iraqw skirt from Tanzania (Guggenheim cat. 20; Royal Academy cat. 2.41) as well as a selection of basketry and headrests from the region. The primary emphasis in this section, however, remained the human form: the exhibition design, for example, dramatically positioned a series of Konso and Bongo grave figures, accentuating their attenuated features [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. Of these figural works, the pair of funerary figures by a Vezo artist from Madagascar (Guggenheim cats. 24 and 25; Royal Academy cats. 2.31a and b) was particularly striking for its haunting sculptural presence reinforced by extensive weathering and dramatic abrasions of sand.

Many pieces from South Africa were exhibited here for the first time, since Western institutions were previously unwilling to accept loans from South Africa under apartheid. A highlight of this section was the famed Lydenburg Head ([ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]; Guggenheim cat. 31; Royal Academy cat. 3.10a-b), never before seen in the United States. Among the earliest known sculptural forms in southern Africa, the terra-cotta heads date from A.D. 500 to 700. Some of the more recent works exhibited reflect the decades of political upheaval and dislocation in the region. Beadwork created by Ndebele female artists, for instance, encodes messages of social protest in abstract, geo-metric designs. In the exhibition, the delicate appearance of a beaded train, or nyoka (Royal Academy cat. 3.35c), belied its power as a means of communicating Ndebele cultural identity in the face of oppression. Other forms of personal adornment demonstrated the inventive resourcefulness of artists with limited access to traditional media. A pair of Zulu earrings (Guggenheim cat. 43D; Royal Academy cat. 3.36d) translates abstract designs usually created in ivory or horn into the more recent media of vinyl used in flooring. Dating to the 1950s, these earplugs are also the most contemporary objects included in the entire show.

While the exhibition was expansive in its inclusion of the arts of the entire continent, the areas central to the established canon of "African art" - central Africa, the Sahel and Savanna, and western Africa - clearly dominated the show. Their prominence was underscored by the organization of the installation itself, which featured those sections (in addition to eastern Africa) in clear view on the ramp, while north Africa, Egypt and Nubia, and southern Africa were relegated to adjoining galleries in the Monitor and Tower buildings. Beginning with the central Africa section, figural works whose forms are more familiar to Western audiences were highlighted. For instance, the exhibition included a large number of minkisi, or power figures, embellished with nails, feathers, or other ritual additions, which are found in various cultures throughout coastal and southern Zaire. Some effort was made, however, to represent a range of objects in a variety of media. In addition to textiles by Kuba and Kongo artists from Zaire, this section featured an unusual Solongo stela (Royal Academy cat. 4.15) that, at over two feet in height, is one of the largest bas-relief carvings found outside the Nilotic cultures.

The section devoted to Sahel and Savanna, with just over forty works displayed, was the smallest of the geographically oriented divisions and, in content, the weakest. The section opened promisingly with unusual antiquities, such as a 7th-century megalith from Mall and 10th-to-16th-century terra-cottas from the Sao culture complex in northern Nigeria and Chad. Overall, however, the regional representation was heavily weighted toward the Dogon of Mall, a people whose art and culture have fascinated Westerners ever since Marcel Griaule's initial anthropological study during the 1930s. While Dogon sculpture filled two divisions within this section, objects from Burkina Faso were largely overlooked, a serious omission in a survey exhibition. Also missing (for good reason) were the controversial Inland Niger Delta antiquities. Their absence was candidly addressed in the wall text leading to this section, which noted: "A host of brilliant terra-cottas and metal sculptures known from this area have for the most part been illicitly excavated and are consequently not included in this exhibition."

Circling to the top of the building, "West Africa and the Guinea Coast" was undoubtedly the crowning glory of the exhibition. Antiquities from present-day Nigeria were prominently represented and included an ample display of the well-known metalwork from the kingdom of Benin as well as a number of Esie soapstone figures (12th-15th centuries), less familiar to museum audiences. Masterpieces from the collections of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria highlighted this section. Among these was the so-called Dinya Head (Guggenheim cat. 57; Royal Academy cat. 6.47), a magnificent life-size terra-cotta head that originally was part of a larger figure. Unearthed accidentally by a tin miner in 1954, the head belongs to a corpus of fragmentary terra-cottas, dated 500 B.C. to A.D. 200, from a civilization known as the Nok culture located in present-day Nigeria. The rich artistic traditions of Ire, a Yoruba civilization established around 1100, were also well represented. Of particular note is the famed Tada figure, a spectacular representation of a seated male dating from the 13th to 14th century (Guggenheim cat. 60; Royal Academy cat. 5.64). Made of pure copper using the lost-wax method of casting, this large, naturalistic figure is sensitively rendered with careful attention paid to details of dress.

While rich in uncontested masterpieces of African art, "West Africa and the Guinea Coast" was particularly marked by scant visual reference to the indigenous framework for these objects, an absence that affected the entire exhibition. The section featured a variety of masks, an artistic tradition found in numerous cultures throughout sub-Saharan Africa, which demonstrated an astonishing range of stylistic, iconographic, and functional diversity. Unfortunately, none of the masks were displayed in their entirety, which would typically include a full-body covering as well as other embellishments to the sculpted headpiece. A few color photographs placed in the hallways provided the only glimpses of the incredible aesthetic experience of African masquerades. In another part of the installation, architectural works from various West African cultures were grouped together to explore the public functions of African sculpture. Again, though the object labels attempted to contextualize the works, the massive pillars and door frames lost considerable visual impact without a sense of their original setting.

Despite such problems in display, visitors to the exhibition were offered a chance to view a vast range of works, many magnificent, that together demonstrated the aesthetic power of African artistic expression. The opportunity to come face to face with some of the greatest masterpieces from the entire continent was the show's supreme achievement. Yet at the same time, Africa: The Art of a Continent was a superficial exhibition - perhaps necessarily so given the enormity of its undertaking - providing little understanding of the traditions and beliefs of Africa's richly diverse artistic heritage. While there were admirable attempts to introduce contextual background for the objects in the New York venue, these contributions were introduced in opposition to, instead of integrated with, the exhibition's primary focus on aesthetics. Ultimately, the exhibition relied upon the audiences' perceptions - and preconceptions - of African art to guide them through this continental survey. As noted by Kwame Appiah in his catalogue essay "Why Africa? Why Art?" "What unites these objects as African, in short, is not a shared nature, not the shared character of the cultures from which they came, but our own ideas of Africa" (p. 7). Sounding remarkably similar to early modernist approaches to non-Western art, Appiah's assertion is all the more alarming given the long-standing history of misinterpretation of African art, both unconscious and deliberate.

Admirable in intent, Africa: The Art of a Continent was, in the end, unsuccessful in execution, having had a supreme opportunity to not only educate newcomers to African art but also stimulate critical debate within the field. New York audiences regularly have access to survey installations of African art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, both of which feature recently renovated galleries. Additionally, a number of provocatively focused exhibitions over the past decade or so have introduced museum visitors to alternative and/or indigenous ways of looking at and thinking about African art and culture. (Such installations do not necessarily preclude a consideration of aesthetics; for example, the recent exhibition Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History, curated by Mary Nooter Roberts for the Museum for African Art, is a model example of the integration of form and content in the display of African art.) While the Guggenheim has clearly paved the way for a broader consideration of African artistic expression in its inclusion of the arts of the entire continent, the aesthetic imperative guiding Africa: The Art of a Continent is not fundamentally different from that of the 1935 Museum of Modern Art show. More than sixty yearn after that exhibition introduced African art into Western art historical discourse, the nature of this discourse has, unfortunately, not been advanced by this current exhibition. In spite of the Guggenheim's efforts to rectify the flawed and problematic exhibition it inherited from London, the show's genuine contributions are buffed amid its retrogressive premise. As we approach the 21st century, we no longer need to repeat history on a larger scale but rather to direct our energies at effecting radically new approaches to the display of non-Western arts.

Notes

1. Press release from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, May 15, 1996.

2. Quoted in Steven Vincent, "Out of Africa," Art and Auction, May 1996, 127.

3. Personal communication, July 30, 1996.

CHRISTA CLARKE, a 1996-97 Kress Foundation Fellow, is completing her dissertation, "Defining Taste: Albert Barnes and the Promotion of African Art in the United States," at the University of Maryland.

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