by Jon Lackman | 8 October 2007 | Africa, Contemporary, Museums
An extended review by Elizabeth Harney in the Summer 2007 Art Journal offers an opportunity to help fill in the gap left by CAA’s recent abortive attempt at a discussion of the ethical issues involved in the collecting and exhibition of contemporary African art. We apologize for quoting at this length from Harney’s review, but it seemed necessary:
In the fall of 2005 … the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian readied itself for a major, yet controversial touring collection of contemporary African arts … [titled] African Art Now: Masterpieces of the Jean Pigozzi Collection … As a visual event, African Art Now advanced a particular narrative about contemporary Africa, which was reinforced through a highly polemical, tightly constructed catalogue essay by Thomas McEvilley and a telling interview of the curator, André Magnin … what makes this event unique, I believe, is that its timing, its presence within a major (admittedly conservative) venue, and its intellectual framework suggest a rearguardism that signals a maturation and growth in the field …
McEvilley’s essay ultimately serves to support collecting and exhibition practices deemed fundamentally neoprimitivist in the eyes of many within the field of African arts. The language used by Pigozzi to frame the curatorial choices … seems, as [Holland] Cotter suggests in his [New York Times] review, “silly at best, racist at worst,” as it perpetuates the longstanding artifices of a traditional African arts market with its restrictive parameters of authenticity …
Lest one doubt the prescience of Cotter’s comments or the stakes of McEvilley’s revisions, one need only look as far as a contemptuous review by Brian Sewell, resident art critic and curmudgeon at the Evening Standard in London, of the [2005] Africa Remix exhibition. Sewell described the exhibition as a “wretched assembly of post tribal artefacts, exhausted materials, re-used, and what would easily pass for the apprentice rubbish of the European art school.” He continued, “We are presented here with a bunch of no-hopers whose work is on view because, and only because, they are African. ‘Look, look,’ they say, ‘we can do it too.’ And so they can, but it is not worth the doing, for in following the West they mimic it in witless parody, or ape in modern materials and terms what little they know of a genuine African past, or embark on tasks that can only be completed with the obsessive industry of the deranged.” So we see here, yet again, the link between the insane, the animal kingdom, and the African artist. In this model, modernism only comes to Africa as an import that is a shadow of its former self, and it is blindly and poorly mimicked by those who are cultureless, divorced from their “true” native past. In the same piece, Sewell unabashedly uses the terms “tyranny.” “mutual slavery.” and “cannibalism” to describe a now-lost, precolonial Africa … It is both frightening and sobering to see a critic advance these racist views within a widely read newspaper in the twenty-first century.
It was in an impassioned response to this review that the art historian Sylvester Ogbechie called upon his colleagues to act … In Ogbechie’s view, in the last few years a proliferation of exhibitions have focused on Western-based African artists to the detriment of those living and working on the continent, thus promoting work that is more palatable to the “lazy Western curators who are thereby saved the rigors of traveling to Darkest Africa, where, who knows, they run the risk of being eaten by cannibals in Lagos” …
Those writing about the canon for so-called traditional African arts note that works are generally valued as authentic if they are precolonial (hence “traditional” implies past practices, not innovation and continuance), if they are made within and for a recognizable culture, and if they suggest physical signs of age and local use … What do these revelations about authenticity say about Africa as a constructed field of knowledge within the contemporary art world? … McEvilley quotes Magnin’s stated aims … which are to support “an art that prefers to ignore its possible claim as contemporary, an art often practiced by artists without any formal schooling, many of whom have no ambition beyond satisfying a local community” … [Are] artists to be dismissed because their art has become contaminated by Western influences (presented here as an unmediated whole) that they don’t have the ability to digest properly? Do they uncritically employ fetishistic symbols of Africa because they have become alienated from their own pasts? …
While McEvilley admits that some will find Pigozzi’s approach neoimperialist, he still seems to believe that Pigozzi’s attraction to the uneducated artists is a well-founded pursuit of the “totally innovative and non-derivative.” Furthermore, he argues that “the Magnin-Pigozzi position holds that African artists have lost more than they have gained by allowing Western influences to form their work … if they are educated — meaning in the Western tradition — their work becomes simply more examples, with a tinge of African subject matter, of the type of things Western artists made twenty to fifty years ago.” In one fell swoop African artists with art-school educations or broader cosmopolitan experiences are relegated to the dustbins of modernist history. The stages of modernity are set by a European clock, and Africa is late to the table — its artists destined to create works that are old-fashioned and clearly beyond the pale of contemporary practice …
This line of argument is striking for the extent to which it broadens measurements of authenticity to encompass not simply visual art and its producers but also its critics and interlocutors. Despite his expertise, dele jegede, another critic of Pigozzi and Magnin, is attacked and maligned primarily for speaking from a position within the diaspora. McEvilley discredits him as a “Nigerian scholar … who has taught for many years at the University of Indiana, living in Bloomington, yet still feels that he speaks for Africa.” McEvilley’s mention of jegede’s Nigerian heritage is an essentialist assumption that his African heritage should determine his ability to speak but that it has been compromised by too much time in the West …
In his reflections on this new politics of exhibiting, McEvilley again uses both spatial and racial markers to determine the authentic voice. He is annoyed that Pigozzi and Magnin, as white Europeans, are deemed unfit to determine the canon (or at least saddled with charges of neocolonialism), while a group of largely Nigerian cosmopolites seeks to set the agenda, erroneously promoting Westernized African art …
[T]he fundamental functioning of the field today [is] one in which each exhibition project and text provides canon fodder.
