Africa: Capolavori da un continente.

Africa Capolavori da un continente

Galleria di Arte Moderna Turin, Italy October 2, 2003-February 15, 2004

"Africa: Capolavori da un continente" (Africa: Masterpieces from a Continent) is one of the most impressive exhibitions of African art ever to appear in Italy. Curated by Ezio Bassani, (1) it displays approximately 400 pieces from important African, European, and American museums and private collections. The installation occupies three floors of Turin's Galleria di Arte Moderna (GAM), whose permanent collection has been removed for the occasion. The wide publicity given to this show, evinced by the great number of articles appearing in the major Italian newspapers and magazines, reflects the clearly stated intention of the curator and the organizers to present the excellence of African arts to the Italian public, which is still largely unaware of these traditions. (2) Indeed, "excellence" and "formal beauty" were the guidelines governing the choice of the objects--exclusively sculptural forms--which represent the genres most widely recognized and appreciated in the Western world. The sheer number of artworks and their overall outstanding quality result in an atmosphere charged with emotion and wonder even for the devotee.

Many of the objects are indeed old friends, and several were exhibited in previous shows curated by Bassani. (3) Their appearance here seems to reinforce the idea that true "masterpieces" of African art are indeed few. The aura of preciousness and rarity is further enhanced by the dramatic lighting, which emphasizes the curator's intent to present the Italian public with an "art exhibition" rather than an "ethnographic display." Nevertheless, some aspects of the complex and multifarious cultures from which the pieces originate can be inferred from a number of initiatives promoted by the City of Turin to complement the show: music dance, literature, cinema, contemporary art, and ethnography are the focus of "Consonanze d'Africa" (African Consonances), a series of smaller exhibits, seminars, and events intended to amplify the effect of the exhibition beyond the museum's walls. Instead, though, these external cultural initiatives seem to present different visions and stories about Africa that somehow contradict the rather limiting formal focus proposed in the GAM presentation.

The exhibition is divided into four independent sections loosely connected to one another by the lines from a poem composed expressly for the exhibition by the Matinke writer Ahmadou Kourouma. The visitors' experience, Kourouma says, should be conceived as an "initiative journey" to the discovery of the objects and the spirit of the "ancestors of negritude" through which he, as a griot, will be the guide. (4) The first part of his poem--divided into five thematic "wakes'--introduces the first section, "The Great Kingdoms," which celebrates the richness and the depth of Africa's history. Upon entering the dark galleries, one is welcomed by some remarkable exemplars of Nok terracottas and Ife heads on loan from the Nigerian National Museum, Lagos, and the Ife Museum. The minimal information on the labels is complemented by short texts by Bernard Fagg (1990) (5) and Leo Frobenius (1936); these texts suggest Westerners' surprise and wonder at finding such beautiful antiquities and evoke the mythical foundations of these ancient civilizations.

The emphasis on the wealth and prestige of the ancient African kingdoms is also seen in the rather expansive section devoted to Benin "bronzes" and ivory sculptures. A color print of the famous Olfert Dapper illustration of the Benin oba's procession and excerpts from Dap per's 1670 text offer the only contextual information about the wonderful pieces on loan from Vienna's Museum fur Volkerkunde and other important museum collections. The sudden shift from Benin material to a series of wooden sculptures from other parts of the continent is intended--as indicated in the catalogue--to extend the idea of antiquity to those works whose age has so far been technically difficult to determine. Figures from the Cross River, Madagascar, and a large selection of works from the Dogon area, some of which are dated to the tenth century A.D., are presented as testimonies to a history that may find greater depth and articulation with improved scientific research. However, since the question of accurate dating is not explicitly mentioned in any of the wall texts, some visitors may exit the exhibit with the false impression that the "People of the Falaise" (as the subsection is titled) are just another ancient powerful African kingdom.

The second section, "The Collections of Sixteenth Century Courts and the Afro-Portuguese Ivories," presents one of the largest selections of the so-called Afro-Portuguese salt cellars, spoons, and horns ever displayed. The ivories are introduced by a group of ancient port maps and manuscripts, which represent some of the earliest Western depictions of the African continent and its in habitants. Bassani has devoted decades of scholarly work to this topic, which is also the subject of one of his contributions to the exhibition catalogue. Unfortunately, this fascinating story of first encounters and representations is barely implied by the minimal wall texts.

The third section of the show, "Twentieth Century Artists and the Discovery of Primitivism," hints at the much celebrated story of French and German avant-garde artists' "fortunate encounter" with African art. Photographic enlargements of studios of famous artists at the beginning of the 1900s provide the background to a selection of objects that are similar to those these artiste might have owned. The pieces, however, are not actually connected to any of them; the only works whose provenance is documented are those that belonged to Apollinaire. In another room, paintings and sculptures by Matisse, Detain, Giacometti, Laurens, Brancusi, and others are juxtaposed with African sculptures and masks solely on the basis of formal affinity, a problematic and disputable premise at best. In certain instances the display even deceptively points to a direct inspiration (as in the case of the transition from a Baga headdress to Picasso's Head of Woman with Wide Eyes, mediated by a pencil drawing of a Baga sculpture by Leger). In many ways, fire subtext of this small section strikingly recalls that of the famous 1984 exhibition" 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art." However, while Bassani's scholarly contribution to that New York exhibition is quoted in the catalogue, no mention is made of the important theoretical debate that fore-grounded the inherent ethnocentric bias of this approach. (6)

The last section, "African Art of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," displays an impressively large (i65 pieces) and heterogeneous selection of sculptures from throughout the continent. Neither dated nor contextualized, these objects are presented to the viewer as the expression of the multiple facets of African formal creativity: Not surprisingly, the texts that frame the experience of these "recent masterpieces" are excerpts from a 1926 essay by Paul Guillaume, an African-art dealer and friend of the avant-garde artists. In many ways this final section can be seen as an extension of the discourse initiated in the previous one. Devoid of any historical or even remotely cultural context, the pieces are shown as powerful forms that need to be experienced emotionally and aesthetically. Thus, works from one culture or closely related regions are dispersed in different parts of the display primarily on the basis of subjective formal criteria, or other subtexts known only to the designers of the show. Whatever the reason for the groupings of objects, it is clear that the discourse of aesthetic appreciation is framed entirely in Western visual terms, with no reference to how African makers and users might conceive of these objects.

While it is important to display African art for its aesthetic qualities, the approach taken in the GAM show seems rather limited. If it is true that too much contextual information may divert attention from the art it is equally evident that no information at all also poses a problem--unless one purchases an audio guide or reads the catalogue beforehand. In one of his entries in the catalogue, Bassani quotes John Pemberton III as stating that "a ritual object, removed from its cultural and religious context, necessarily becomes a work of art whose meaning is determined by the new cultural context in which it is placed." However, while the white and well-lit rooms of the section on "Primitivism" clearly refer to the familiar context of museums and art galleries, the black walls and dramatic lighting hint at a different reading--perhaps that of a mysterious dark continent, a magical atmosphere with deeper cultural meanings that the viewer cannot understand. Informed by self-reflexive concerns and scholarly issues that determine the interest in and value of African objects in the West, "Africa: Capolavori da nn Continente" celebrates a story that has already been told many times. Even though its contribution to the awareness of African art in Italy cannot be underestimated, the exhibition fails to surprise us with the radical difference of African aesthetic conceptions, which not only create astounding forms but infuse so many other aspects of life.

The catalogue Africa: Capolavori da un Continente (368 pp., 272 color illustrations, EUR 68 softcover) is published by ArtificioSkira in Italian only. it contains essays by Ahmadou Kourouma, Stefano Malatesta, Ezio Bassani, Omotoso Eluyemi, Stefan Eisenhofer, Ferdinando Fagnola, Jean-Louis Paudrrd, Paul Guillaume, Maria Grazia Messina, Anne-Marie Bouttiaux. Also available from ArtificioSkira are two small booklets (32 pp., color, EUR 8) containing excerpts from the catalogue and selected images. The first one, Quando Dio abitava a Ife (When God lived in Ife), presents the poem by Ahmadou Kourouma; the second, Gli antenati di Picasso (Picasso's Ancestors), features the 1936 essay by Paul Guillaume.

(1.) Other African art exhibitions in Italy have also been curated by Bassani, who is one of Italy's most prominent and internationally known scholars of African art. In 1984 he was able to bring to Florence the exhibition "Treasures from Ancient Nigeria," organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts; in 1989 he curated "La grande scultura dell'Africa Nera" (Great Sculpture of Black Africa) at Forte Belvedere, again in Florence; in 2000, after the acquisition of his collection by the city of Milan (see note 3), he curated "Arte dell'Africa Nera: Una collezione per il nuovo Centro delle Culture Extraeuropee" (Art from Black Africa: A Collection for the New Center of Extra-European Culture). The 83 pieces featured in that exhibition were also the core of the 2002 exhibition "Africa Nera: Arte e cultura" (Black Africa: Art and Culture) organized by the Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna. In addition to the African sculptures, the Bologna show included objects and manuscripts that testified to the early contacts between Africa and Italian travelers and missionaries, and to the presence of various African objects in the collections of Renaissance courts.

(2.) The show is the outcome of a two-year project sponsored with great enthusiasm by Turin's main public and private cultural institutions. Its organizers and promoters include the City of Turin, the Fondazione Torino Musei, Artificio Skira, and the Compagnia di San Paolo

(3.) Many of the pieces also come from Bassani's own collection, recently sold to the city of Milan and now part of the Civiche raccolte di arte applicata e incisioni of Gastello Sforzesco. They were acquired for a new Center for Extra-European Cultures that will occupy the buildings of the former Ansaldo factory.

(4.) To further enhance the sense of mystery, certain sections of the exhibition feature music specially composed by the Italian composer Nicola Campogrande. While this is undoubtedly an original idea for a display of African art, it is difficult to understand the relationship between the music and the pieces, and the connection seems rather arbitrary and misleading.

(5.) The seemingly recent date of the quote from Fagg's book Nok Terracottas can be misleading, as it refers to the re-issue of his book, which was originally published in 1977.

(6.) An extensive critique of the 1984 show appears in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art by James Clifford (Cambridge: Harvard University press, 1988).