Reading The Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. . - books - book review

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by Ikem Stanley Okoye

READING THE CONTEMPORARY African Art from Theory to the Marketplace

Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor

Institute of International Visual Arts, London, and the MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999. 432 pp., 51 b/w & 19 color illustrations, notes. $35 softcover.

The editors of Reading the Contemporary, Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe, tell us that by issuing a challenge to the way art in Africa in the twentieth century has been written, they aimed to "provide an alternative art history ... [and] to lay a groundwork for its methodology" (p.14). Readers almost immediately anticipate that this alternative will be like a rollercoaster ride: hardly one page in from the introduction, its first essay, by Oguibe, takes Thomas McEvilley to task for allegedly having concealed in himself the desires of a porn addict in relation to the New York artist Ouattara (McEvilley's African interlocutor in his book Fusions: African Artists at the Venice Biennale [Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994]). Oguibe sees McEvilley as pressing relentlessly for the African artist's subjection. The same McEvilley, we ask, who years earlier devoured William Rubin over the "Primitivism" show, and who challenged Africa Now! to boot? Readers are then even more intrigued to discover that McEvilley himself has an essay in Reading the Contemporary. We know there must be a subtext here, and this, if nothing else, guarantees an initial flood of adrenaline. By the book's end, however, both this flood and the opening promise have been arrested. Oguibe's first essay, though ingenious in places, turns out to be polemical--an attention-grabbing cry of "fire" in the face of smoldering, though firefighters, already departing for other crises, assure us there is no risk of re-ignition.

It will become clear later why I characterize the volume's opener in such terms, but suspicions are already aroused when we realize that the book assembles previously published essays on art, photography, and film by institutionally secure authors including Valentine Mudimbe, Frank Ukadike, John Picton, Anthony Appiah, and Kobena Mercer. That is, for most Africanist historians of the visual with an interest in the subject of the contemporary or modern and the difficult issues and controversies surrounding them, the essays will be quite familiar from earlier appearances in venues like Third Text, Nka, and African Arts.

Divided into four parts, the volume's twenty-two essays plot a path, progressively, from the difficulties of twentieth-century art historiography to national, regional, and, finally, individualized histories and critiques. The volume closes with discussion of the same issues with which it had commenced, but now more concerned with contemporary "metropolitan" art at the millennium's end.

"Theory and Cultural Transaction" consists of essays by, among others, Everlyn Nicodemus, Appiah, and Picton, each exploring a particular doubt. For example, Appiah's, calling in modern African works of art and literature, is a hypercritique of both postmodern practice and discourses such as Lyotard's and Jameson's that claim to have produced an account of these works. This contribution, and all the others in this section, means to question the highly unsatisfactory status of this art in the West (exacerbated in the new globality) by revealing the falsity of its processes and meanings. Examples: the anonymity still attached to its objects, the substitution of artistic individuation by the authority of the collector, the failure to consider local valuations of contemporary artists, and the demand for the strange idea of authenticity, seen by contributors as a fabricated nonissue. Some of the essays offer alternative possibilities while also detailing specific traditions, thus anticipating more direct explorations of art histories in subsequent essays.

The second part of the book, "History" includes essays by Salah Hassan (questioning the traditional/modern dichotomy by exploring the implications of emigration for northern African artists), Manthia Diawara (on Malian photographer Seydou Keita's peculiar modern vision), Ima Ebong (on Senegal and Negritude's fallout), and Chika Okeke (on Nigeria's Zaria school and its outcomes). Stylistically divergent, the essays in this section nevertheless involve the centrality, in the emergence of modern practices, of interrogations of nationality. Two of its forms are uncomfortable intersections where art practices had been co-opted either by then new nationalist politics or by expectations in the foreign lands to which artists migrated. This art struggled to escape exploitative subsumption by such instrumentality, its artists desiring (or strategically tending) to connect crucially to local historicities, real and, as was surely the case in Senegal, displaced. Some writers in the first section of the book had elucidated their analysis by attention to enigmatic artists like Cheri Samba. The artists who take center stage here, however, have matched and challenged Western artists on "their own" ideological turf (Ben Enwonwu and Amir Nour for example).