by Jon Lackman | 7 December 2010 | Africa, Books, Conferences, Journals
The latest issue of The International Review of African American Art (23:2) is one of the most visually provocative magazine issues I’ve perused in years. It also includes a good mix of writing, including coverage of the most recent Porter Colloquium on African American Art. Summarizing a talk by Jacqueline Francis, Teresia Bush writes:
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.
