Nine contradictions in the new golden age of African art - First Word

African Arts, Autumn, 2002 by Suzanne Preston Blier

African art today is in the midst of a brilliant renaissance, heralded in exhibitions such as "The Short Century," which recently closed at PS. 1 in New York. That show, curated by Okwui Enwezor, adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago (and artistic director of Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, 2002), addresses art and politics in Africa from 1945 to 1994 (see review, p. 76). It has received extraordinary attention in the media and has brought contemporary African art to the notice of the non-Africanist museum and gallery goer while at the same time sparking lively discussion among Africanist art scholars. In short, the exhibition has generated more than the usual buzz. The proliferation of numerous other shows on contemporary African art have added to the excitement. "Africa, whatever it is," notes Holland Cotter in his provocative review of "The Short Century," "is everywhere. It's far more than just a continent. It's a global diaspora, an international culture and a metaphor with fantastical associations ..." (New York Times, Feb. 17, 2002).

Like many aspects of globalization, this great new artistic era in many respects encompasses striking contradictions, complications, and paradoxes. Nine stand out. In one way or another they address the question, "How is Africa defined in this Golden Age of contemporary African art?" The nine issues raised here point to the fact that overly simplified and stereotyped views of Africa still prevail.

1. Identity. While born in Africa, most of the artists celebrated as part of the new artistic wave have spent their adult lives in Europe or the United States. Although their "ethnic" and "racial" profiles vary, many state quite explicitly that they want to be known not as African or, say, Nigerian artists but as artists. Period. (A similar issue was largely resolved long ago with respect to the category of women artists.) Some assert that by insisting on an African label, scholars, curators, art dealers, and art collectors reify a sense of second-tier importance, of segregation. Paradoxically, the popularity of many artists has been predicated on the ways that a certain "Africanness" is being read into their work; a subtext of the exotic and the different continues to shadow the Western response. Whatever label is chosen for these artists has an effect not only in academia but also in the marketplace.

2. Locality. Because these works address largely modern or postmodern artistic and intellectual concerns, they often have little saliency in the local areas where the creators' families still reside. Some pieces, in their hypersexuality, politicization, or choice of materials, are even seen to be anathema to key local values and social concerns. This does not mean that the burden of a particular type of representation should be shouldered by artists wherever they live, but rather that here too there are sometimes striking disconnects that have an impact on markets, exhibition venues, and responses in Africa itself.

3. Artistic Models. Western art critics often ostracize African works that incorporate visual abstraction, assemblage, jarring juxtapositions, salvage materials, and recycling, saying they are derivative of Euro-American modernist movements. Yet these approaches are firmly rooted in Africa's art historical past; they were appropriated and reframed from the African aesthetic wellspring by artists in the West. Those artists in Africa who stick too closely to the earlier sources of this tradition (for example, shrine makers, woodcarvers, and dress designers) have been largely ignored in the new contemporary arena, though as living artists they are necessarily also "contemporary." African studio-trained artists in turn sometimes bridle that "unschooled" rural sign makers or history painters reaching across to modernist genres get prime exhibition spaces and lengthy texts, edging the "professionals" to the periphery.

4. The Market. Although promoted by some Western entrepreneurs as exotic "outsider artists" whose visionary or spiritual sources come exclusively from within (like magic), most of the contemporary artists on view arrived at these new forms through modern art schools, local experiences with commercial advertising, or other important interactions with the West. In addition, many of these artists' oeuvres are held and tightly controlled by their Euro-American promoters and dealers--in Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Venue, price, mode of representation, and frequently content are herein brokered. To some degree there is a colonial legacy in this situation, with French- and English-speaking entrepreneurs espousing competing artistic agendas. While in some ways they are no different from patrons of art in other areas historically, today, when art passes far more as commodity, the disequilibrium between the artist's power and that of the dealer or patron carries concerns. As with music, present and future royalties are a vital question. To see this solely as an issue of the colonial legacy however, is simplistic, for a highly talented group of African curators and critics in the West also currently exercise sizable control of aesthetic agendas and the discourses which shape the material they advocate.