Black President: the Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

Black President The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, New York July 11-September 28, 2003

This Is Lagos Yabis Night, Music and Fela Skoto Gallery New York, New York July 17-September 13, 2003

Taxi drivers in Lagos have their fingers on the pulse of Nigeria. Crawling through Lagos traffic at the height of this past rainy season, I chatted with my driver as I fiddled with the cab's radio dial. I let the needle rest when a song by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti suddenly blasted through the scratchy speakers. After being away from Nigeria for a while, it was one of those moments when everything just jelled--car horns blaring around us, black exhaust spewing from passing buses, traders shouting as they passed by with their wares, Fela's music filling the taxi and pouring out onto the road. Frantic perfection. I asked the driver what it was like to be in Lagos when Fela passed away in 1997. He shouted over the noise, "It was when Fela died that we knew he was a prophet. When he was there in the Shrine, we were just dancing and enjoying. But now, all those things he said at that time, we are seeing them come true. Fela na prophet."

A prophet indeed. Fela Anikulapo Kuti's music looked to the past, present, and future. His searing musical critiques of Nigeria's leadership linked the history of colonialism to present-day problems, and warned Nigerians of the dangers of continuing on that path. The founder of Afrobeat music, Fela, through words and sound, inspired musicians and visual artists in Nigeria and well beyond its borders. Two recent exhibitions in New York, "Black President" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and "This Is Lagos" at the Skoto Gallery, mined the musical and visual legacy of his life and work. "Black President" demonstrated important cross-pollination between music and visual culture, and in doing so made a powerful case for a media-spanning approach to the analysis of visual culture.

"Black President," guest curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, was a remarkable effort to honor Fela in a museum space--usually sanitized, orderly, and quiet, a space antithetical in nature to Fela's own. Schoonmaker wisely transformed the New Museum by filling it with sound. From the moment they opened the front door, and at all times while walking through the beautifully installed exhibition, visitors were bombarded with sound: Fela's music, ambient noise from video installations, and the voices of people talking loudly to be heard. It was a welcome and appropriate break from the standard stifling museum hush.

The exhibition also provided listening stations, one of its strongest points. Visitors could sit at computers, don headphones, and select tracks compiled by Schoonmaker and Pint Orlov that placed Fela's work in a broader context of music that inspired him and was inspired by him. I found it hard to stay seated while listening. Selections were divided into broad eras: 1950s-60s ("Say It Loud--I'm Black and I'm Proud" by James Brown, "Love in Outer Space" by Sun Ra), "70s ("Africa Unite" by Bob Marley, "Jungle Jazz" by Keel and the Gang), '80s, and '90s present. It is impossible to truly appreciate how revolutionary the Afrobeat sound was without hearing the music popular in Nigeria during Fela's early years. I hope Schoonmaker and Orlov will make this acoustic doctoral thesis available on CD.

The roster of artists included in flap exhibition was impressive--Sokari Douglas Camp, Obiora Udechukwu, Kendell Geers, Alfredo Jaar, Olu Oguibe, Ouattara, Yinka Shonibare, Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, and Klaus Burgel, to name a few. Because Fela's music is rooted in protest and social critique, it is easy to argue that any number of works that deal with these themes connect with his legacy. As a result, several pieces included in the exhibition, while strong works, seemed unrelated or too tangential. Ike Ude's Nigeria Vogue (1994) felt out of place, as did Moshekwa Langa's video, Home Movies: Where Do I Begin? Other works were heavy-handed in their approach. Odili Donald Odita's installation Heaven Can Wait (2001), incorporating a red wheelbarrow resting in a puddle of oil (a black plastic cut-out) and loaded with huge bundles of naira, was an obvious condemnatinn of the continuing devaluation of the national currency, the result of corruption related to Nigeria's oil boom. While these were recurring themes in Fela's music, Odita's installation felt like a one-note song, lacking nuance and subtlety.

Sokari Douglas Camp's Open and Close Chop and Quench (2002-3) was another unexpected disappointment. Sokari, (1) along with Satch Hoyt and Yinka Shonibare, focused on the twenty-seven women Fela married in a single ceremony in 1978. Her kinetic metal sculpture depicted one of these wives with "AIDS" scrawled in stark white letters across her forehead, her legs clapping open and closed. In contrast to the artist's other kinetic sculptures, which are carefully crafted and engage the viewer with their ecstatic motion, this piece seemed stiffly mechanical. While it is likely that Sokari was concerned with the stigmatization and possibly the infection of Fela's wives through their association with their husband, who died of AIDS, the piece felt misguided.

In contrast, one of the most moving works in the exhibition was Satch Hoyt's The Shrine (27 Brides of the Black President). It featured a sound capsule upholstered with screaming red fabric, evoking the brightly colored stage costumes of Fela and his wives. Visitors opened the capsule door and released the sounds of a looped soundtrack into the exhibition space--clips from "Shuffering and Shmiling" easing into Mbuti music, then fading into clips of Fela speaking to a concert audience. There was space for one visitor to sit in this shrine, facing a shelf covered with individual sketches of Fela's wives on small, white, vaguely Victorian ovals. Each woman wore a different expressive hairstyle and jewelry, matched with a different facial expression that engaged the viewer. At the center of the cluster of portraits was a sketch of Fela that came across as critical of the musician. In contrast to the vibrant and alert faces of his wives, Fela's eyes were at half-mast, and he was clearly mother-shipping in a characteristic high. Above the portraits were twenty-seven small speakers, alluding to the unique voices of each woman. While other artists in the exhibition addressed Fela's wives and his relationships with women, Hoyt was the only one who successfully presented these women as individuals.

Several previously exhibited works took on new significance in the context of this exhibition. Olu Oguibe's National Graffiti (1989), first shown in Lagos, was exhibited again at the National Museum of African Art in 1997 as part of Simon Ottenberg's "New Traditions from Nigeria." In "Black President," which honored a man who wove local musical history with global trends, Oguibe's paintings, done on Nigerian-made woven mats and referring to mural art in southeastern Nigeria, felt especially appropriate. Victor Ekpuk's Prisoner of Conscience and To Serve Nigeria With All My Strength (1994-2003), both filled with a maze of troubling references to human rights abuses and threatening images of military might, were also first shown in Lagos in 1994, during the Abacha years. In the New Museum version of these works, Ekpuk upped the scale, transforming them from an intimate conversation with the viewer to a loud and damning critique worthy of association with Fela's legacy. In the catalogue (edited by Schoonmaker, p. 162), Ekpuk writes that Fela "became the voice of the common man; he was courageous enough to put his finger in the eye of those who held guns to our heads."

A work by Marcia Kure and collaborative pieces by Kara Walker and Klaus Burgel married the delicate with the disturbing. Kure's History of Africa by Fela (2001-2003) included 59 panels (7 1/2" x 5 1/2" each), one for each year of Fela's life. The work melded themes and motifs Kure has developed over many years, including references to her Plant Series (1997) and her iconic portraits of Nigerian leaders (1999-2000). Her piece references Fela's transformations as he defied and condemned Nigeria's corrupt leaders: ethereal human torsos melt into tangled root legs, an ibis-headed man stands on pigeon feet, and a bull's head rests on a man's torso. The unsettling elegance of Kure's work resonated with the tiny gold pieces by Kara Walker and Klaus Burgel. Walker's sketches of cruel devices invented to keep slave women captive--tall headpieces with curved hooks extended to the sides, towering tiers of bells--were translated by Burgel into tiny, precious gold ornaments. Like Fela's music, Walker and Burgel's Golddigger delivered a stinging critique in a deceptively palatable form.

The Skoto Gallery's complementary exhibition, "This is Lagos: Yabis Night, Music and Fela," included a wide range of documentary images of Fela taken by his personal photographer, Femi Bankole Osunla, and by Howard Cash, a freelance photographer who lived in Lagos for four years in the 1980s. The exhibition also included sculpture by Sol Sax and Osaretin Ighile. The works by Cash and Osunla ranged from photos of Fela in concert (in a dazzling array of stage costumes--a history-of-dress project waiting to happen) to a more intimate image of him leaning protectively over his mother. Most memorable was Osunla's photo of Fela smoking a joint the size of his forearm--when he produced a similar item at a concert in Lagos in 1992, I thought it was some kind of an ivory trumpet until he lit it. The photos by Cash and Osunla at the Skoto Gallery provided a context in which to consider the "Black President" exhibition, but "This Is Lagos" as a whole lacked focus. Though Howard Cash's more general photographs of life in Nigeria in the "80s were framed, most of his (and Osunla's) photos of Fela were simply tacked up on the walls in large, overwhelming groups. While the unplanned display engaged the freewheeling feeling of Fela's music and performances, it failed to recall that this sense of spontaneity existed in tension with Fela's obsession with immaculate performances of his written compositions. (2)

"Black President" was part of a more extensive "Fela Project" organized by Schoonmaker. In addition to the New Museum exhibition and accompanying catalogue featuring contributions by several authors and edited by Schoonmaker, the project includes a volume from Palgrave Macmillan, Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway, (3) and a well-designed, extensive Web site that continues to grow (www.felaproject.net). The New Museum catalogue includes documentary photos of Fela by a number of photographers, including Cash and Osunla, as well as images of Fela's album covers, designed by Ghariokwu Lemi. Oddly, a number of works included in the catalogue's checklist were not actually in the show. Vivien Goldman's essay, a reprint of a 1980 article from New Musical Express, but with an updated introduction, (4) is driven by quotes from Fela's songs and anecdotes about his experiences that truly bring the musician to life. In his essay, "The Power of Song," Olu Oguibe points out (p. 28) that audiences in Nigeria appreciated Fela's music for its social content, while those abroad were often drawn to its strength and complexity of form. Like the taxi driver in Lagos, Oguibe concludes about Fela: "His was the ancient role of the prophet, the anointed seer who spared none and feared no retribution" (p. 31). Barkley Hendricks's Renaissance-style painting of Fela as a religious icon affirms the biblical tone of Oguibe's words but undercuts the simplicity of such associations. Hendricks's haloed image of Fela in a vibrant orange jumpsuit, eyeing his audience as he grabs his crotch, joint clutched between his knuckles, presents the alluring contradictions that inspired the dazzling array of musical and visual responses in "Black President": sinner and saint, inspiration and cautionary tale, lofty intellectual and man of the people, failed politician and musician of singular genius.

The catalogue Black President, edited by Trevor Schoonmaker (192 pp., 40 b/w & 64 color photos; $30 softcover), is available from the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Notes

(1.) The artist prefers to be called by her first name.

(2.) See Michael Veal, Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (Temple University press, Philadelphia, 2000), p. 13; and Olu Oguibe, "The Power of Song," in Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, ed. Trevor Schoonmaker (New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2003), p. 28.

(3.) Also edited by Trevor Schoonmaker (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2003).

(4.) Vivien Goldman, "The Rascal Republic Takes on the World," in Black President, pp. 16-25.