Africas: El Artista y la Ciudad.

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain May 30-September 11, 2001

This ambitious exhibition, curated by philosopher and critic Pep Subiros for Barcelona's CCCB, took as its premise the idea that urban culture rather than national identity conditions and shapes African artistic production. In undertaking to present the varieties of urban experience on the continent, Subiros grouped major African cities with European centers that have historically exerted colonial control. The eight art-city areas, organized into three sections, were Dakar, Abidjan, and Paris; Lagos, Harare, and London; and Johannesburg and Cape Town. These groupings permitted Subiros to address interconnected themes such as the increasing migration to urban centers within the continent, and the diaspora from those centers to the West. Crucially, it underscored a key aspect of urban experience--mobility--and thereby undercut any fixed notions of "Africanness."

The increasing urbanization of African life is a product of the globalization of late capitalism, and so the urban focus necessarily acknowledged the international scope of contemporary cultural production, no matter what its locus. Unfortunately, the fact that the two South African cities were not grouped with a European counterpart had the misleading effect of isolating it as a special case, just as South Africa is attempting to integrate itself into the rest of the continent. Given the history of Dutch colonization, why weren't the South African cities paired with Amsterdam, especially since one of the artists, Moshekwa Langa, now lives there?

By selecting the city as the vehicle to represent aspects of African culture today, Subiros acknowledged that it is in the metropolis where demographic and social changes can be best charted. The deep historical irony at play here, however, is that African nations achieved independence and began to forge a postcolonial identity just as the nation-state declined in power, both politically and as an ideal. (1) As centers of international capital, cities are oriented less toward their immediate surroundings than to their links abroad. Thus, despite the negative baggage of "tradition" and the current chaotic governance of many African nations, it is the state alone that can counter the influence of the corporate power that sits isolated in glass-enclosed cells within the city's fabric.

Because the exhibition's focus was on the dispersal of "Africas" among continental and Western cities, political issues, even urgent social ones such as racism and AIDS, were not addressed. Instead, Subiros focused on the ways in which the mobility that characterizes city life brings various cultures--"indigenous" and diaspora--into a situation of flux. With the differences between "settler" and "native" minimized, the artists all become citizens of an international art-world, and "Africas" becomes not a geographic locale but a state of mind.

Building on a decade of exhibitions of contemporary African art organized by curators from Western Europe and North America, Subiros highlighted individual artistic sensibilities while providing the city-based context for their works. The latter was presented not through tedious blocks of wall text but through "documentary modules" that included montages of photographs as well as film, press clippings, and music. The framing of the artwork through visual culture rather than text enriched the exhibition visually while permitting an open-ended, viewer-based interpretation. However, the implied premise that the visual supplements would provide the exhibition's historical context was not satisfactorily realized. In its admirable avoidance of a single argument about the nature of contemporary African art, the exhibition also contained certain unfortunate ambiguities and inconsistencies that made its address to contemporary "Africas" hard to read. From the evidence presented, the cities are pretty much the same. Surely their differences are as important as their apparent similarities, however.

Because of the inclusion of photography in each of the "strictly artistic modules," the boundaries between the art spaces and the context modules were often (deliberately) blurred. While some of the documentary photographers, such as Ananias Leki from Abidjan, Akinodbode Akinbiyi from Lagos (Fig. 3), or Santu Mofokeng from Johannesburg, were also included as individual artists, others, such as Luc Gnago from Abidjan, were not. Although this sliding of artist-photographers from one category to another acknowledged the dual role photography plays in our culture as both document and art, those imagemakers who were not permitted the flexibility of moving between categories were inevitably downgraded.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Further, Subiros compiled the still images of three photographers'from Harare--Luis Basto, David Brazier, and Calvin Dondo--into a video that employs the techniques of the mobile camera: fades, close-ups, pans, thus completely altering their compositions. This compilation, which in its lyricism bears an uncomfortable family resemblance to a National Geographic film, is situated not in the documentary but the art section, leaving in dispute the question of the author of the piece-Subiros or the individual photographers. The question of authorship need not have been an issue had not the art section celebrated the individual creative voice, but in this case the different approaches each photographer took to the city of Harare during this tense political time were muted.

Despite these ambiguities, the viewer in the end was granted the authority to mentally include photographers from the documentary modules in the strictly artistic modules. One of the context modules, Joy Gregory's "London," which juxtaposed prosaic views of familiar London landmarks with the racist actions that took place there, proved to be one of the strongest works in the exhibition, as well as one of the most pointedly political.

The alternation of artist and contextual spaces was one means used to organize the material; the other, that of the progression of the artists' spaces themselves, was arranged as a narrative, beginning with a prologue and ending with an epilogue. Inevitably the viewer positioned the first room in the realm of the "past," and the last room in the present/future. Surely the intention was to demonstrate the range of approaches to urban experience rather than to situate them on a temporal continuum; indeed, the circular route through the exhibition emphatically linked the last rooms to the first. Nonetheless, the beginning-to-end, past-to-present progression, although misdirected, was difficult to avoid, for the work in the prologue appeared to be either artifactual or historical, and that in the epilogue more high tech or urbane.

Closer examination problematized but did not dispel this first impression. For instance, in the Prologue, Crumbling Wall, by Nigerian-based artist El Anatsui, consisted of squares of perforated, rusted metal, pieced together into a freestanding wall (Fig. 1). At once monumental and fragile, it brought to mind the jury-rigged shacks constructed from cast-off materials found in every township or slum area. The metal sheets, upon closer inspection, proved to be graters (for cassava), linked to their neighbors by means of metal wire "stitches." References to domestic labor--such as food preparation and the weaving of cloth--in a now-crumbling precapitalist economy came to mind, only to be blocked by the large size of the graters. The rusting metal strips were in fact discarded industrial graters used in food-processing plants. Through such a telling selection, Anatsui presented the abrasive conjunction of an artisanal lifestyle transferred to the subsistence-level street life of the city. As the prickly surfaces indicate, the transference is not a comfortable one.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In Moshekwa Langa's installation from 1997, Temporal Distance (with a criminal intent), the transfer from a rural to an urban, a preindustrial to a postindustrial society seemed to reach its dismal completion. The expatriate's urban cityscape is assembled from large spools of colored thread, empty liquor bottles, and toy cars. Whereas the materials in Anatsui's construction carry with them their place and their history, Langa's manufactured materials could come from anywhere in the industrialized world. Yet the sinuous pathways of the blue and red threads transform the city streets into veins and arteries, the

city's lifeblood. Bottles become both buildings where alcoholic beverages are distilled or distributed and the bodies that consume them. The bright, vital, nearly chaotic system is based on consumption, a consumption that weakens and threatens to poison the system itself. The threads also suggest the paths taken from rural areas to the city, umbilical cords offering (however illusionistically) a lifeline out of poverty. As Langa commented at the press opening, African village life is now found on its city streets. In other words, the rural is not in opposition to the urban; rather, it is now part of the circulatory system that pulses through the seemingly impregnable architectural orders of both corporation and government.

According to the visual evidence presented here, the very stability of these glass-and-steel structures may be their biggest liability, as the foundations are being cut from under them by currents of street life below. In fellow South African Santu Mofokeng's photographs of black religious services, held by groups without the means to own property, worship is not dependent on an edifice but takes place in transit: on trains or in "Appropriated Spaces," as is appropriate to the mobility of city life. Frantz Fanon's distinction between the strongly built, bright, and well-fed settler's city and the crowded, hungry native city still holds, but the native, while still wretched, increasingly occupies, or rather reclaims, a central location while pushing the settler inexorably toward the city's margins.

The legacy of colonial culture still inflects and infects the cities, however, hobbling any hopes of an continent-wide African Renaissance. One of the three postcolonial dilemmas which historian Mahmood Mamdani points out in his essay "Beyond Settler and Native" is that of "the growing tendency to identify a colonially constructed regime of customary law with Africa's authentic tradition" (2) Mamdani argues that the regime of customary law, found predominantly in Nigeria and South Africa, has resulted in a nonracial apartheid founded on a spurious definition of indigeneity. In addition it forms a rationale for distinctions between indigenous and migrant that present an alarming potential for violence.

Nigerian-based artist Dilomprizulike and South African artist Willie Bester address different aspects of this African dilemma. Bester's expressionist assemblages have presented a powerful critique of apartheid and its legacy, in particular its legacy of violence. The over-life-sized metal sculpture Dog of War (2000) began as a more universal statement about the dehumanizing effects of violent crime, but its political valence became more pointed when, as Bester was completing the weapon-laden canine, SABC-TV aired, to a horrified South African public, police tapes of border guards using "illegal aliens" from Mozambique as guinea pigs to train their attack dogs. Bester claims that it is "very important to keep track of the past," lest those in power today "introduce some of the old elements." (3) His dog of war bears witness to the importance of continuing the tradition of resistance art in the "new" South Africa.

Dilo's "fashion statements" are garments fashioned from the excesses of capitalism: the piles of used and surplus clothing found for sale on all city streets in Africa. Gaudy pretensions to elegance, they are postcolonial versions of the Emperor's New Clothes, glad rags that parody the new "African" enjoying the privileges of business success or "customary" authority. In his fashion show/performances, the Politician, the Braggart, and the Braggart's Wife (Fig. 2) all parade their finery, quite oblivious to their personification of the traditional Deadly Sins of Pride and Avarice. Dilo's humorous garments barely disguise his anger at the effects of capitalist entrepreneurs, who, he argues, treat people like the surplus objects they sell, detritus to be cast off when no longer profitable. His art is a salvage operation, and in his Junkyard Museum of Awkward Things in Lagos, he is attempting to return value to those things the European-based African economies discard.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

If "Africas" questioned the distinctions between art and document, past and present, urban and rural, native and migrant, it did so in the context of the uprooting of Africa from its continental base. If Africa is no longer anchored to place, can any viable definitions of Africanness be achieved? Two European-born and -based artists addressed "Africas" via the portrait. Patrice Felix Tchicaya (b. Paris, 1960) creates video "iconosonographs." The installation used both projection and mirrored reflection, so that the head shots of six young black men and women that cycle through in sequence were at once confronted "head on," viewed with peripheral vision, and felt as a presence at one's back. So still were the portrait images that they appeared to be photographs until one registered the movement of their breathing. The controlling gaze of the single viewpoint was subverted by the viewer's position within a triangle of impassive, immobile stares. With viewing positions reversed, it was the viewer who had to account for her own identity, while sensing that it was already known--but would not be articulated--by the silent watchers. The iconosonographs took the pulse of the Western museum-goer while surrounding her with her own limited vision.

Grace, a series of twelve color portraits by Eileen Perrier (b. London, 1974), was equally unsettling (Fig. 4). Formal studio portraits of absurdly grinning men and women of varying age, race, and ethnicity look like a yearbook from an adult education class until one identifies the one element that unites them: their diastema, or the gap between their front teeth. By this supposed flaw (apparently seen positively in African culture), the assembled faces suddenly attained a group identity, while revealing the flawed logic in any such categorization. Displacing the question of her "African" identity or lack of same, Perrier sits among her clan, the tribe of the gap-toothed, and with the insight provided by her wit, we came to see the unbridgeable gap between categories and the individual. If Africas, why not gap-tooths? The artist's vivacious clan, with its varied skin tones of uncertain origin, suggests that "it ain't where you're from, it's where you're at." Her unconventional demographics provide a sample of the polyglot populace that renders London an international rather than an "English" city.

This poetic, often beautiful exhibition posited "African" art as a braiding of memory and current sense impression rather than a result of specific social conditions in the different cities. No matter where they are based, the artists are in transit within a closed art-world system, within which Africa is all in the mind. In the postcolonial urban city, it seems, identity is neither here nor there. Yet as much as Perrier or fellow Londoner Sokari Douglas Camp may claim that they are simply "artists," neither Western nor African, their memories and impressions, however remote or secondhand, establish the fragile thread of a connection to an African identity. Perhaps now, as African nations continue their half-century-long struggle for stability and autonomy, Africa is necessarily more concept than reality.

I thank Elsbeth Court at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London for reading this essay and providing helpful suggestions.

(1.) This straggle was charted in a monumental exhibition organized for the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich: "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994." Like "Africas," it demonstrated the internationalism of modern African art.

(2.) In The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Munich: Prestel, 2000), p. 24.

(3.) In Art in South Africa: The Future Present, eds. Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal (Cape Town: David Philip, 1996), p. 136.

PAMELA ALLARA is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art in the Fine Arts Department at Brandeis University. She recently completed a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship at the Technikon Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.