by Jon Lackman | 16 November 2010 | Africa, Books
Monica Blackmun Visonà, co-author of the celebrated survey A History of Art in Africa, has published a new book, Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Côte d’Ivoire, “an investigation of the methods employed by art historians who study creative production in Africa,” an attempt “to situate local and regional artistic practices in the context of the global art market”:
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.
