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

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by Ikem Stanley Okoye

Are there problems with Reading the Contemporary? Surely, but I will point only to moments when the quite contradictory positions across the essays see their logics fail dramatically. Consider for example V. Y. Mudimbe's contribution next to one by Oguibe. Mudimbe's wide-ranging essay critiques authenticity and imposed categorization, and posits a more fluid map of contemporary artistry than what Susan Vogel once outlined. Ultimately, however, Mudimbe does seem more enthusiastic (or did ca. 1993, judging by the space given this discussion) about one artistic "current" (was this not Jean Kennedy's invention?) of the three his essay plots. This current, "popular art," is represented by anti-narrativist artists Cheri Samba and Twins Seven-Seven and, Mudimbe argues, their story-telling contrasts such as Tshibumba Kanda and Middle Art.

In one section Mudimbe focuses on a subject recurring throughout Reading the Contemporary: European mentors or benefactors and the workshop artists trained under their (often patronizing) eye. His critique of one such mentor, Romain Delafosse, appears to agree with Oguibe's in his opening essay "Art, Identity, Boundaries." Oguibe's McEvilley might seem to share the attitudes of a Delafosse. However, Mudimbe, like those such as Vogel whom he criticizes, effectively opts for "popular art" as the most interesting(?) of his three "currents." This is the very kind of art that Oguibe's first essay disparaged--unnecessarily for his otherwise crucial argument--as both "barber shop ... signwrit[ing]" and as hardly "qualify[ing] as art beyond the sixth grade" (pp. 24, 25). Oguibe was referring to the Beninoise artist Toukoudagba, and therefore by extension also to a Muafangejo. Such name-calling of course denies these individuals their own easily affirmed agency, political savvy, and artistic complexity. A stance like Oguibe's is also quite contrary to the warnings of four others in the same volume (Margo Timm on Muafangejo, as well as the contributions by John Picton, Sidney Kasfir, and David Koloane). Worse, next to the Delafosse Mudimbe constructs, Oguibe comes to seem (by the way he writes) the more disquieting.

Such incongruities occur regularly in Reading the Contemporary. Whereas Mudimbe implies (p.45) that traditional African artists worked anonymously (that anonymity is not imposed by the whim of the Western collector), Sidney Kasfir will argue the contrary, as will Oguibe and, in fact, as do most Africanist art historians today. What Okeke constructs as "the academic portraiture tradition of Onabolu," Nicodemus strenuously worked against. Whereas Oguibe summons up the figure of the pornographic as desire contaminated by acute power-asymmetries (critiquing McEvilley as a subject who "[cannot] bring his own ambivalence to crisis"), Appiah imagines antihegemony and oppositionality (p. 54). I recall Oguibe's earlier metaphor of the McEvilley-Ouattara encounter as striptease, and wonder why he didn't simply suggest, as he has done on occasion, that Ouattara should have stripped with vulgar haste ("Dogon, Michelangelo, Picasso ... there is no difference"). McEvilley might well have thrown up in disgust, having thus been forced to abjectly confront his ambivalence. Pornography as revolution! Can we not, moreover, read Kasfir as radically "pro-pornography"? By which I mean, isn't her critique of the exclusionary idea "tourist art" at odds with Oguibe's fears? What else is "cheap, crude and mass produced" if not pornography as Kasfir defined it?