by Jon Lackman | 20 July 2010 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary, Museums
Tolu Ogunlesi’s review of Art Basel alerted me to a recent provocative essay by professor and Aachron Editions publisher Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “The Curator as Culture Broker (A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of Okwui Enwezor in the Discourse of Contemporary African Art),” which he recently presented at a UC-Santa Cruz conference The Task of the Curator: Translation, Intervention and Innovation in Exhibitionary Practice:
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.
After reading Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie’s analysis I was left with the feeling that he is angry about something that went unstated. It is legitimate to debate the merits of continental versus diasporic definitions of Africa, and I agree that Enwezor has often focused on the diaspora. I don’t, however, think it is fair to scapegoat Enwezor’s work as a regime that disempowers both African artists and African American scholars. No one curator or scholar has that much power. Instead I see Enwezor as someone who is to be commended for his work to open up dialogues across cultures. The claim that Enwezor is “legitimizing a notion of Africa that dispenses with the continent itself as a historical theater of contemporary art and visual culture engagements” seems particularly hollow to me, given that one of his major exhibitions was the Johannesburg Biennale of 1997. Similarly, the idea that Enwezor focuses almost entirely on the west is dubious, given that his innovative approach to Documenta 11 was to host conversations about contemporary art across the world—including in New Delhi and Lagos. Full disclosure: I took two courses from Enwezor in graduate school, but I have only heard Ogbechie speak once.