by Jon Lackman | 16 February 2007 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary, Museums, News
Just two of the five scheduled speakers showed for this panel! “Contemporary African Art: Moving Forward, Looking Back; Investigating the Currency of Contemporary African Art” nonetheless proved quite lively. Barbara Pollack in particular provided fireworks. A very rough and selective transcript of her talk:
“I’m not an expert on Chinese art or African art. I am an expert on how weird white people get around such work. They fall apart! They can’t actually go and look at the art and meet the artists, oh no. Or send someone to Africa. Or invite visiting African artists to the museum. Instead they rely on rich people who’ve gone and bought a lot of art and then they present it as a museum show. This is extremely problematic. The Smithsonian doesn’t have people who could curate an African art collection? They have to use Jean Pigozzi’s collection?
“One day I get a phone call from a PR agency – how would you like to write about Jean Pigozzi’s collection? How would you like to come see it in Monte Carlo? OK, but I won’t necessarily write positively about it, I tell them. So they fly 20 journalists from around the world into see this collection, shown at the Grimaldi Forum, which is not a museum by the way … Art from the poorest continent in the world being shown in the richest four square miles in the world. Same as if it were to appear at the Met. Just a more extreme contrast. [Pollack shows slides from the opening gala.] Look at what the wives of the African diplomats are wearing and what the rich women of Monte Carlo are wearing. It’s all strange and tribal to me! If you think about the raw and the cooked, the French have looked for the raw … for the “sub-Saharan artist.” To be a good African artist, you need to be authentic and removed from Western civilization. If we’re looking for “who’s the most African,” we haven’t come very far from 1960.
The contemporary section of the Monte Carlo show has brightly colored walls and music playing, sort of an ersatz African village feeling. There’s any number of artists in this exhibition that are well-known on the international circuit. The artists picked out for the press materials are the ones removed from the gallery system. The whole point of this is that Jean Pigazzi has gone to Africa and rescued artists. It was of a piece that you would go from the show to the gift shop and buy African tchotchkes. Rich people on the beach at the reception afterward. White people actually had tables to sit at. Black artists sat by themselves at the end of the beach, had to wait on a long, cafeteria-style line to get their food. Pigazzi owns all their work. He gives them a stipend and gets everything they own. So they can’t cultivate other relationships with galleries and so on, control their careers. (Sean Kelly started showing Seydou Keita, Jean Pigazzi came into his gallery and started a big stink, they nearly had to call the police.) Each one of the tables for the rich white people was named after an African country. And then there was a fashion show using African fabrics on white models. And … just to show I’m not immune, here’s a picture of me on a yacht.”
Perhaps the most lively Q&A seen yet. Unfortunately it was hard to hear much of it. Chair Odili Donald Odita asks some thoughtful questions that don’t seem to have any ready answers: How viable is the term “contemporary African art”? Should it be applied only to artists living and working in Africa? Is it necessary for promotion? There is also raised the question of neo-colonialism – of African artists having their work exploited and distorted by western curators and dealers with their own motives. At one point, a panelist asserts that “Most of these countries don’t have the infrastructure to support their artists.” Many audience members heartily disagree. “There are hundreds of artists working in Nigeria who don’t give a shit what goes on in New York.”
