Wendy A. Grossman’s thoroughly researched and lucidly written exhibition catalog Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens effectively reveals the process “by which African objects, formerly considered ethnographic specimens, came to be perceived as Modern art in the West” (XII). Photography and Man Ray are both at the center of this process, and given the wide range of interest which converges in the catalog, it will be of great interest to a variety of readers. At the core of the catalog is the argument that the photographs by Man Ray and other photographers of African art objects from the early twentieth century are anything but neutral. Grossman demonstrates that these photographs, in fact, not only serve to elevate the objects photographed from the status of ethnographic artifact to art object, but also to incorporate elements of those objects into the aesthetic and conceptual discourses of Modernism.

One of the most impressive aspects of the catalog is the way in which it is positioned to appeal to a spectrum of readers. For scholars of Man Ray or Modernist Primitivism it is required reading, offering exciting new research into little-explored aspects of these fields. For students of these topics or those with casual interest, Grossman provides concise contextual histories near the beginnings of most chapters which serve to ground the reader in the topic at hand. Several sidebars serve to illuminate aspects of the project not directly explored in the text proper, such as Charles Sheeler’s photographic album of the John Quinn collection, and Man Ray’s cover image for Henry Crowder’s book Henri Music which featured a photomontage of African objects. A “Concordance of African Objects” follows main text, providing substantial context on the African objects themselves and adding yet another dimension to the catalog.

The catalog is organized thematically and largely chronologically, with the first two chapters discussing the relationships between American modernism and African art, and the context for Man Ray’s interest in “primitivism” in his early career. In the following chapters, specific episodes of Man Ray’s work involving African art are discussed in detail. Underlying much of Grossman’s analysis is the contention that the production of meaning in Man Ray’s photographs is based more on their context than any other factor. Given that Man Ray’s work was visible in such a variety of contexts, and to a variety of audiences, this important point is often absent in analyses of his photographs, as Grossman points out.

In her final chapter, Grossman discusses several of Man Ray’s fashion photographs that contain African objects. Here she makes a compelling case for Man Ray’s work as a vital link between the Modernist Primitivism of the avant-garde and trends in fashion and illustration that make use of African art. Others have noted that this final chapter is perhaps less resolved than the others, and may seem a surprising choice with which to end the catalog[1]. I however tend to agree with some that Grossman’s last chapter effectively opens up the topic to further investigation either by Grossman or another scholar.[2]

Susan Rosenfield writes:

dele jegede, alongside [Sylvia] Forni, and Rachel Nelson provided their panels with optimistic insight regarding progressive alternatives for contemporary African art. Both presenters still warned of this imminent threat of globalization on the African art market, observing that Western aesthetic values cause contemporary art to migrate in a way that jegede described as “eerily reminiscent” of colonialist-era movement. Nonetheless, jegede explored the burgeoning revaluation of the local, arguing that African auction houses and collectors encourage the marketing of indigenous tastes.

Samuel M. Anderson writes:

Several conference sessions were constructed around revisiting broader theoretical concepts of visual culture through African lenses. One such panel looked at Tonye Erekosima and Joanne Eicher’s “cultural authentication” model through a wide variety of visual arts practices … [Another] engaged Bruno Latour’s “iconoclash.” Like cultural authentication, iconoclash attempts to describe the transference of imagery between cultures, but iconoclash is much less systematic, depicting a state of uncertain contradictions rather than a process of incorporation. The panel was divided between two perspectives emphasizing either closure or potential …

This edition of the Triennial was notable for the attendance of many more African scholars than in previous years [whose] presentations demonstrated that approaches to art history education within Africa are as diverse as the continent itself.

In her contribution to the debate, Elizabeth Harney questions

Whether a “field” of contemporary African art history exists. What, indeed, is the rush to name this field? Above and beyond the professional questions of who we build our careers … [there’s] wariness about closing down the capacious and extremely diverse set of conversations … [That said] canonization is inevitable [and] perhaps it has already come to pass.

Okwui Enwezor hints at an intriguing development to come:

[W]hat I believe in passionately, as far as contemporary African art goes, is institution and capacity building … Without these the field will not grow. Stay tuned for the launch of a new institute dedicated to this very idea … [C]oming from Nigeria, I will not subscribe willy-nilly to messy, chaotic, unruly, and other qualifiers as attractive ways to theorize this difficult problem. We have seen what all of those qualifiers connote when applied to Africa.

And then later elaborates:

[A]t the invitation of a foundation here in the United States we are developing a model of a mobile summer art academy, in collaboration with African institutions … We are working on a five-year pilot program and have designated five African countries among which the project will rotate. Concurrently, we are developing an online academy … Our attention is to bridge the gap, not to create false dichotomies of “African-based” curators … and non-African-based scholars … In our project, we see knowledge transfer as part of a new politics of countering NGOism, as a specific critique of the development models that have deracinated institutional capacities and created a culture of dependency and sympathy in Africa. But this venture in itself is not a solution, only a strategy to create a robust global African public sphere of knowledge production.

Sidney Kasfir chimes in near the end of the exchange:

Initial impression: what a lot of verbiage! Quite a few of us in the roundtable seem to equate intellectual integrity with using as many words as possible … [My PhD advisor] advised me to avoid too much clarity and conciseness … I’d also like to say a bit about the terminologies that we use to talk about African art. I steer clear of the traditional-contemporary frmework because it creates a nice distinction that does not exist in reality. The older genres, like masquerades, continue to thrive and are in a real sense also contemporary … The last of these conceptual frameworks is postcoloniality, which for me is steadily losing its explanatory power. Whether construed as “after” or “against” the colonial … [the concept] began to flatten out in the 1990s and now is simply taken as an all-purpose descriptor … [T]he keywords are uncertainty, ambivalence, and contingency [but] they are very, very capacious and could also be used to describe the experience of being a colonized subject … [T]he postcolonial has pretty much been edged out by globalism-related discourse on diaspora and migration.

Critical race art history, as [Francis] defines it, requires comparative study of racial identities and their constructions. She says the primary goal of this approach is not to “diversify” the canons of American art, modernism, or any movement or style. “Instead, critical race art history is a discursive analysis of the ways visual representation produces knowledge of and about race – as a framework of social and cultural assignation and belonging.”

Sharron Patton writes on the keynote address by Okwui Enwezor and his recent book Contemporary African Art Since 1980, co-written by Chike Okeke-Agulu:

[The book] ignites an intellectually intense discussion … Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu eschew continuous histories, conventional geopolitical terrains and compendia of artistic movements, traditions and styles. Rather [they] scrutinize Western methodologies, critical theory and philosophy about Africans and their art. Artists represented in this book are transnational, multicultural, cosmopolitan and pan-African in their perceptions of themselves and their art and global in the reception of it by collectors, curators, galleries and museums … By examining the works of artists of various African backgrounds and sensibilities – e.g., those who reside in Africa, those who migrate or have migrated permanently or semi-permanently to locales outside Africa, those who deploy a “strategy of combative ambivalence” and whose works display an aesthetic that casts doubt on “what qualities embody authentic contemporary African art” – we recognize new artistic models, aesthetic incongruities, different artistic principles and affiliations … In his talk at the Porter Colloquium, Enwezor admitted that … he likes “work that wages a productive resistance” to the visual culture industry and its “politics of form” … [responses] to what Enwezor calls Afro-pessimism – the West’s dim regard of Africa: “We’re presented a place that is always in the midst of disintegration and chaos, almost at the edge of disappearing.”

In the October Art in America, Steven C. Dubin credits Contemporary African Art Since 1980 as “provocative, timely, and insightful,” “transcending past biases,” but also finds it sorely wanting:

Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu open with nearly 40 cowritten pages of densely theoretical argument, unpunctuated by images, and organized thematically … Almost 300 pages of plates follow, with works arranged by date from 1980 to 2009 yet captioned with only the most basic identifying data … [Their] strategem of strictly segregating their ideas from any images of works under discussion creates a confounding disconnect … [T]hey generally remain at a far remove from specific works of art … The result is a book that is intellectually challenging but annoyingly remote, as though the authors, entranced by their own grand theorizations, could not be bothered with particular facts and clear formal analyses.

This book was originally intended to be a unified account of the spectacular visual arts of the Lagoon Peoples, or lagunaires … Yet as I have discussed my research with art historians in other fields, they seemed to be wondering how (or even why) I had investigated the arts of these relatively little known cultures. Art historians seemed to be particularly curious about my studies of performances, and by the participatory nature of my fieldwork. Gradually I realized that they were puzzled, even skeptical, about my application of art historical practices in African contexts …

Visonà surveys several different disciplinary approaches to this art — including those of art history, African studies, geography, linguistics, history, archaeology, anthropology, and visual studies — and discusses her own research. A final chapter examines the fates of Lagoon art abroad, as well as the impacts of other cultures upon the Lagoon:

Despite their interest in the provenance of African objects, Africanists of my generation believed that studies on the reception of African art in the early colonial era could be entrusted to the armies of art historians who specialize in European modernism … This assumption was proven to be false, however, by the Museum of Modern Art’s [1984] exhibition, Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art … [Subsequent debates] centered upon the exhibition led to serious analyses of modernist attitudes towards African art, and their continuing influence in contemporary discourse, by a number of anthropologists … Art historians, however, are only beginning to reconstruct the ‘social life of African things’ … [and to] challenge notions that present African works as inert recipients of European actions.

She concludes with a discussion of a contemporary Lagoon artist, Emile Guebehi:

[W]hen art dealers in New York began to exhibit statuary by Guebehi and [his associate Nicholas] Damas, critics were unaware of the artists’ well-established reputations in Lagoon communities [and] constructed an entirely new narrative around his artistic production … [A]rt historian Barbara Thompson borrowed one of [Guebehi's] figures for a major [2007] exhibition, Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body … Guebehi’s statue, despite its entrenched history with ‘local culture’ in the Lagoon region, was placed in the ‘contemporary global’ section [of the exhibition] … Segregating the ‘global’ artists so clearly from ‘traditional’ artists allowed her to protect their reputations (and safeguard their elite status) … [Thompson] read Guebehi’s figure as if it ‘deconstructed’ notions of gender roles … Sadly, this assessment would be considered ludicrous by the men of Lagoon … who commission sculptural groups from the artist … [This led me to] evaluate my own responsibilities as a cultural broker … [H]is chances of acquiring fame and fortune have already been seriously compromised by my insistence that Guebehi is part of an African (rather than an American) community; as soon as I contacted Jack Shainman with questions about his descriptions of Guebehi’s work, the artist’s webpage was removed from the gallery’s website.

• Kaelen Wilson Goldie on Routes d’Arabie at the Louvre (The National)
• On Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art from Ancient Nigeria, previously in Santander, Madrid and London, now in Houston, and later in Indianapolis, Richmond and New York: Douglas Britt (Houston Chronicle); The Economist; Itziar Reyero (ABC.es); Richard Dorment (The Telegraph); Jonathan Jones and slide show (The Guardian); Mark Hudson (Financial Times); Rachel Campbell-Johnston (The Times); Waldemar Januszczak (Sunday Times); London press roundup
• On Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel at the V&A: Souren Melikian (New York Times); Jonathan Jones (Guardian); Martin Gayford (Telegraph)
• PD Smith on Mark Hudson, Titian: The Last Days (The Guardian); Keith Miller (The Times), Serena Davies (The Telegraph)
• James Hall on Salvator Rosa at Dulwich Picture Gallery (The Guardian)
• Jed Perl on Susan Lake, Willem de Kooning: The Artist’s Materials (The New Republic)
• Martin Herbert on Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (The Telegraph); cf. Gayford on Freud’s Bacon (Bloomberg)
• The Economist on Damien Hirst
• On Umberto Eco on beauty: Arthur Krystal (Harper’s/Powell’s); Mike Phillips (The Guardian); cf. Nicola Copping on Roger Scruton, Geoffrey Jones, and Carol Dyhouse (Financial Times)

But how would you say your work has contributed to the the global discourse in art and in changing the general feeling about African art before you came into the scene?

I think it’s up to evaluators of what I have done to address this question … I know that I came of age as a curator [in New York] at a time of radical transitions on the global sphere … [T]he transitions were of movement, migration, the intersection of many different subjectivities; national imagination, social temporalities and so on … At this particular point, it was almost unimaginable to see the work of an African artist … So, what really set my work apart was that within this small village of New York, there were not that many young curators like myself who were thinking Africa in this particular way. It does not mean there were no African things happening …

How do you see the relationship between African artists based abroad and at home, and how do you work with them?

We do not travel as a band; there are differences in our projects. As it should be, we do not all head one direct[ion] like a delegation … I work with all artists. I understand and I am somewhat sympathetic to current debates that we have; and these debates are not new. We had it in 2002. We are repeating it now; and I see it as part of an anxiety. I am somewhat sympathetic too … [O]ne way to confront this anxiety is to create a situation in which we are not only answering to the hosts somewhere but that we also become host … I have not visited Nigeria for long. But I keep abreast of what people are doing. I would then say that there is a crisis of content production in contemporary Nigerian art … In a place like Lagos, artists here should put their heads together and, through the arts, make Lagos a place that people want to come to. Everybody wants to run to Dakar (Senegal) for example, every two years, because it is a meeting place.

Enwezor says that he plans to “come back for a comprehensive visit of Nigeria, in terms of the arts. That visit would not stop at Lagos or Nsukka. I can certainly tell you that my next visit to Nigeria will be in less than a year.”

Enwezor’s curatorial focus is … African artists who live and work in the West … [He] produces ahistorical interpretations of contemporary African art in general … advancing a very self-referential narrative of contemporary practice using limited number of artists recycled in closed-loop exhibitions. Enwezor’s curatorial intervention is also built on a notion of globalization that assumes the free flow of cultural producers: however, this notion is patently false … Consider [the] ongoing transformation of African studies in the American academy: almost all academic positions focused on African art history are now being offered to scholars of the African Diaspora, and the field faces an increasing reluctance by researchers to conduct “Africa-focused” research in Africa. Consider also that museum collections devoted to contemporary African art are primarily filled with artworks from African artists based in the West … Enwezor came to curating from a rather undefined background with negligible training in African art history but with an active engagement with New York art of the 1990s … Enwezor’s various publications show large gaps in his understanding of art history and African art history in particular. Furthermore, Enwezor’s elevation (and in fact, the elevation of African curators in general within the American discourse of contemporary art) served to displace African American artists and art activists who were, at the beginning of the 1990s, starting to demand greater representation at the table. Shifting attention to African curators allowed the mainstream art establishment to completely cut out these bothersome African Americans. The fact that Enwezor has largely not collaborated with these African American curators and critics speaks volumes about his own complicity in this process of marginalization … Africa is also being renewed in response to the challenges of modernization and globalization. We must try to understand its unique responses to these processes rather than try to impose the aesthetic preferences of contemporary Western art on it. Enwezor has clearly failed on this front and his curatorial practice should now be subject to a formal criticism that is so far lacking.

Along the way, Ogbechie also has some choice words for contemporary curators generally:

In the run up of the economic bubble, hedge fund managers in particular became star figures of pop culture by leveraging financial brokerage to stratospheric levels and manipulating financial information to create newer and more esoteric financial instruments that yielded greater levels of profit. The move away from the “basic labor” of banking and money management into this rarefied field of financial information brokerage provides a parallel to the rise and role of the curator in contemporary practice … [W]hereas artists in the era of modernism claimed an avant-garde status and the authority to define the horizon of meanings of their work, contemporary curators have by and large usurped this role … [T]he contemporary curator is a culture broker in pretty much the same way a hedge-fund manager brokers financial instruments … It suggests that curators benefit from their work in a manner completely out of proportion to the value of their input.

His essay appears to be attracting notice.

As far as I know, Enwezor has not (yet) responded.

For a review of Ogbechie’s talk and the conference generally, read this account by PhD student Johanna Gosse.

In gesturing toward a theoretical framework with which to comprehend the breadth and depth of the work of this generation of African diaspora artists, several art critics have referred to them as “Afropolitans,” which could serve to embody a sense of cosmpolitanism in regard to their existential experience … The term, as I understand it, speaks to a new, morphing identity, fluid enough to encompass a new breed of diasporic, culturally or ethnically mixed Africans who came of age or grew up outside Africa but continues to move in and out of the continent. It speaks of cosmopolitanism and a sense of belonging to the metropolis. At the very least, it foregrounds the Western metropolis as a key site for the expression of African concerns. At the same time, Afropolitan has taken on a life of its own and become part of the language of fashion and advertisement … Yet I wonder whether, by using the term Afropolitan, we restrict ourselves to the middle class and the offspring of well-to-do Africans. Also, how can we distinguish them from their counterparts in older black communities … who were in the Western metropolis before the rise of the Afropolitans? As historian Earl Lewis reminds us, the entire Atlantic world, including the United States, is constituted by “overlapping diasporas” … Exploring the works of contemporary artists continues to afford us a fresh look at the renewed importance and changing practice of exodus. Indeed, their works, as they tie to their constant mobility in and out of Africa, hold out the possibility of circular, rather than only unidirectional movement.”

She was critically aware but cautious in her writing. The canoe prows of the Cameroon coastal communities exercised her intellectual horizons, over and over again. In an African Arts essay she examined the transregional importance of the canoe for commerce and communication, drawing on the history and aesthetics of the prows as a metaphor for movement and contact … Rosalinde was cryptic and very succinct [in conversation] … ‘Earnest, as impure as the driven snow’ … ‘He’s a nice fellow, with limiting reservations.’