Dollar Falls, transnational dynamics, and mediums of national art.

My response to "[Dis]placement of National Art in a Transnational Artworld" is framed by the provocative mixed-medium installation Dollar Falls commissioned by the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (NGZ), Harare, for its fiftieth anniversary exhibition, January-February 2008. The large-scale, collaborative installation, bearing witness to the nation's fathomless crises, engaged the viewing public "who were amazed by the physicality of the work and then humored by it ... some commented favorably on the courage of the artist and institution." (1) Reactions were "overwhelmingly positive and generated quite a stir" although without coverage in the (state-controlled) media. (2) Dollar Falls helps to focus the units of analysis, especially "transnational" and "medium" in Dialogue's timely, complex, but as yet inadequately stated proposition to theorize the actual dynamics of national and transnational art production in twenty-first century Africas.

Briefly, I agree with the Autumn Dialogue's premise that in recent years the purview of African art has shifted toward contemporary practices in "a transnational artworld." As Sidney Kasfir posits, this is due to intense critical and curatorial attention, which arguably has been artist-led (African Arts' special issue on "Africa '95" [1996, vol. 29, no. 3], Court 1999, Hassan and Oguibe 2001, Njami 2000). The inclusion of top African artists in the Western art world and the extension of the Western canon to accommodate modern African art are extraordinary achievements, these basic changes in combination with the rapid growth of transnational opportunities are generating new conditions for African art--everywhere. That a writer's work is to describe and analyze such events is evident in all responses but one. Nevertheless, I think Dialogue has been too quick in accepting the version of African art promoted by a few uber/super-curators, who also happen to be acculturated into and operate in the highest echelons of the Western art world. My sense is that academe's collective attention has been so dazzled by momentous topicality that we have lost sight of our way.

Reportage of exhibition spectacles and their stars with no or minimal reflection does not substitute for systematic and historical studies. To me, the current imbalance resonates with Chinua Achebe's observation about the West's "invention of a perception problem ... a particular way of looking (or rather not looking) at Africa and Africans [in Africa]" (1998:103-104) that perpetuates a tendency to act for or upon Africa while failing to listen to Africans themselves. Indeed, if the shift to "a transnational world" does not acknowledge the vast majority of Africa's artists and art stories, then such a theory would be invalid and not an apt means to generalize about African art. No less a global grandee than the Ghanaian-Nigerian "transnational" professor El Anatsui posits an ecological case for place: "...art grows out of each particular situation ... artists are better off when working with whatever their environment throws up. I think this has been happening in Africa for a long time..." (2003:24; Okoye 1999).

At first glance, Dollar Falls--a huge, subtlecolored textile mural with tags or gris gris--resembles the serene hangings of the Malian doyen Abdoulaye Konate, whose medium of preference is local, handwoven cotton (Spring 2008:167). In fact, the installation objectifies central-southern Africa's premier natural spectacle: Victoria Falls, a colossal curtain of water whose "smoke" can be seen from a distance of So km (50 miles). Dollar Falls employs the conceit of transforming water into money, and its flowing cascades of water-money symbolize Zimbabwe's mind-boggling hyperinflation. At the time of writing, the Zimbabwe dollar's inflation rate is 231 million% and the means of exchange are now barter and/or the South African rand and US dollar. (3)

The work was devised by John Kotze, an engineer by education who is well known on his own turf as a hyperrealist painter. His concept for "this installation is to visualize the incredible inflation rate.... [T]his is a unique situation prevailing in Zimbabwe ... affecting the lives of every Zimbabwean in and out of the country" (Kotze 2008). The form of his visualization was to represent the cost of one wooden match at Zim$2,000,000, based on a 2006 rate, in a commensurate quantity of valueless 20 and 50 Zimbabwe dollar bills. These bills are illustrated with an engraving of Victoria Falls, which is printed in two different colors. Displayed in the Gallery's largest space, Dollar Falls covered the entire east wall from the floor to the balustrade, leaving a gap between the balustrade and skylight which suggested the sky above the Falls. The bills were pinned on a plain, unbleached, inexpensive cotton support in a pattern borrowed from the engraving, suspended loosely on a frame to allow the bills to flutter, mimicking how water falls. The National Gallery arranged "permissions for the bills" to be used and organized art students to assist in making the installation. (4)

Heeten Bhagat, curator at the NGZ until August 2008, also noted that the work's alternate title, Smoke Which Plunders, was a play on the vernacular name for Victoria Falls: Mosi-oa-tunya, 'smoke that thunders'. "Smoke" is money, greed for money leads to plundering. While plundering is a recurrent theme in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe's political economy, its rendition since 2000, involving the appropriation of land by so-called war veterans and subsequent international sanctions, is resulting in widespread destruction. In the first instance, this coding and the artist's intention indicate a national reading for the content of Dollar Falls. Indeed, the work offers wide accessibility through Kotze's choice of subject matter in that the natural monument of Victoria Falls serves as an emblem (apart from its name) of national unity that is above the ongoing, partisan disputes. This contributes significantly to the creation of an open-ended art work which represents and raises questions about the nation's deteriorating situation and refrains from a politics of blame. The inclusive imagery of Victoria Falls contrasts with the lesser accessibility of "land" and its signifier, stone, which constitute the central trope in the Shona symbolism that inspires and informs Zimbabwean national culture. Furthermore, while Kotze has specified that water stands for money, the metaphor of water is nonetheless polyvocal, standing for fertility or currents of change: this would heighten viewers' apperception of Dollar Falls. Finally, the occasion of the installation as the centerpiece of the NGZ's fiftieth anniversary legitimizes Dollar Falls as "national art" which leaves many of us with even more questions about art and the nation-state. During the global financial crisis in 2008, Kotze's well-chosen metaphor readily extends its relevance.

A further look reveals regional interpretations for the work and artist. Dollar Falls' referent, Victoria Falls, is also shared with Zambia, which on its side has restored the Ndebele name Mosi-oa-Tunya, recalling the northern movements of Zulu people in pre-colonial times. Zimbabwe's political economy operates, as ever, within a regional, southern African framework that is formalized by the Southern African Development Community. This region's populations are mobile, indeed; almost one-third of Zimbabwe's people are displaced in South Africa. These facts bear on the interpretation of Dollar Falls which, in turn, questions the notion of a "free-standing" South African artworld--widely affirmed in Dialogue. For me, the term is problematic but useful in "unpacking" African national and broader, transnational art worlds. While "free-standing" may hold for the high end of South Africa's art world, some South African artist-writers question for whom it stands (Perryer 2004:8-9). I do not know to what extent, for South Africa, the construction of its "national art world" is associated with (i) the hegemony of an elite, professional class with international links, as in Angola, Nigeria, or Sudan, (ii) the hegemony of an ethnic-based albeit professional cultural nationalism, as in Amhara in Ethiopia, Buganda in Uganda, Shona in Zimbabwe, or Wolof in Senegal, (iii) cultural power-sharing at the national level, as in Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, or Zambia, or (iv) something else. Indeed, "free-standing" could apply to the majority of self-sustaining, less- and/or underdeveloped national art worlds, which vary in degree

of inclusiveness and are less engaged with international discourse than Nigeria or South Africa. Reading over these tentative categories alerts me to the losses suffered when committing social science and the related call for better balance and depth in our efforts to revitalize "national art" A big step in this direction is flagging specific debates, such as that between modernists and the avant garde, which are examined in Dialogue by Delinda Collier for Angola and Chike Okeke-Agulu for Nigeria (ses also Okeke-Agulu 2006).

The use of actual, albeit discontinued, Zim dollars for the medium of expression imbued Dollar Falls with immediate, stunning realism and conveyed its subject matter of national hyperinflation. For this theme, daubs of useless bank notes were more effective than an oil-painted picture--and a tribute to Kotze to think thusly. His shift to found materials may have been prompted by the fact that these days money is cheaper than commercial art materials. His ironic contribution to the genre of arte povera may also be a ploy to reach the broader audience of his intentions. With Dollar Falls, it seems reasonable that the appropriation of a medium such as currency, which is intrinsically national, to produce an art work in a national context would support a reading of national content. Zimbabwe's art history is redolent with socially charged associations between medium and national-cultural content. These relative associations--between medium and content in a national context--are beyond discussion here, but along with Dollar Falls leave little space for a teleological concept of medium as offered by Delinda Collier or the glib riposte of Steven Nelson with reference to sui generis practice of William Kentridge. Nearly all scholars agree that drawing, while ubiquitous, is the least stable, most flexible medium: what distinguishes drawing in African cultural settings? Part of the postmodern art discourse is thinking through and thinking anew about existing models of nation/time and medium; Africanists also need to do this (Armstrong 2008:195).

The life story of John Kotze, like that of many southern African artists, is transnational: in his case, he was born in colonial Malawi (1957), educated in Namibia and South Africa (University of Cape Town), and is a long-term resident of Zimbabwe. The realization of Dollar Falls was facilitated by National Gallery curator Hetten Bhagat, an Asian-African designer and filmmaker with British degrees. In March 2008, Bhagat discussed the work during a conference-exhibition, "Expression of Zimbabwe," which had been convened by Africanist scholars at University of Avignon in collaboration with the NGZ and the Galerie Musee des Arts Derniers, Paris. Their objective was to explore "what Zimbabwe has become today not through its undeniable difficulties, but through its art and culture, that is sometimes the only testimony possible for Zimbabwe's misfortunes." (5) The Galerie Musee's French director, Olivier Sultan, told me about the conference, speaking vividly about Dollar Falls. We were both intrigued by the fact that it happened without political interference. (6) I felt affirmed in my longstanding respect for the NGZ, which since its inception a half century ago by the radical expatriate Frank McEwen has fostered transgressive art side-by-side with the forms of classical African art and Western painting on canvas. For me, the NGZ is like the canary singing in the mineshaft, offering hope for survival in desperate conditions (in this, the NGZ has a role similar to that of the Makerere Art School during Uganda's long period of civil strife). The above account suggests varying degrees and kinds of "transnational" identity with different kinds of hybridity, often trans- or inter-African, in which a Western identity in English or French can be one source amongst several.

Dialogues project is opportune: it is time to reconsider and to reconfigure narratives of African national art so as to include local plurality and "transnational" extensions. In my experience, a major aspect of the "transnational" project is the collaborative re-storying of African modernities. For example, at Uganda's Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art, this sort of revision is underway as part of Makerere University's university-wide improvement program; seven art lecturers have already completed doctorates on topics that range from an analysis of phases in the school's history (Kyeyune 2003) to a definitive study of bark cloth (Nakazibwe 2005). Casting the diversity of Africa as a single "tropical geography" obscures the diversity that characterizes contemporary nation-states and their specific kinds of nationalism; these concepts require clarification rather than conflation. Totalizing also obscures the good news that twenty-nine of forty-eight African countries listed in the 2008 Ibrahim Index of African Governance have demonstrated real progress in government and the well-being of the populace in the past few years. (7) How do improving conditions influence African art? An Africanist objective would be to construct a model or paradigm that approxirnates art production in post-Independence nations vis-a-vis relevant, interrelated art worlds: individual, local, transnational, regional, global with time-lines. Some recent, significant events with minimal state involvement--omitting better-known fixtures such as the Dakar Biennale and ZIFF: Zanzibar International Film Festival--offer evidence to consider permutations of the concepts "transnational" and "medium." Such evidence would sharpen our understanding of the dynamics between "medium" and "social group":

* East African Arts Summit and Prints Exhibition (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda), November 2006, Nairobi, organized by the Godown Arts Centre was the third invited conference of twenty-five leading scholars and NGO representatives to discuss policy issues relating to the arts and society, such as capacity-building and media's role, and included a public keynote address by Wole Soyinka.

* The biannual, practice-based, international artist workshops are part of the global Triangle Arts Trust. In 2007-08, they included Kenya (via Kuona Arts Trust), Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa.

* EASTAFAB 07 (3rd East African Art Biennale), November 2-23, 2007, Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania was a committee-sponsored exhibition with works by 100 artists from twentysix countries, with a special connection with Cuban artists.

* Khartoum Expo Sudan Gathering, August 11-15, 2008, was a group exhibition of more than 1000 works by 270 Sudanese artists living in Sudan and abroad, many from the Gulf, in the largest-ever arts event in the Sudan (music, drama, workshops, talks). Organized by the international Sudan Artists' Union and the local General Union of Sudanese Artists with national government co-operation.

* ARESUVA: African Regional Summit & Exhibition of the Visual Arts, September 7-14, 2008, Abuja, Nigeria. Conference theme: Promoting the Visual Arts for Sustainable Economic Growth and Development in Africa. Most participants were leading art history scholars from Nigerian and American universities and sixteen other African countries; organized by the National Gallery of Nigeria. An exhibition of 201 works "in a variety of media" featured pan-African old masters.

In an inclusive but disciplined study of African art, the tales of the uber-curators are but one dimension. My response concludes with hard, self-deprecating advice from the early twentieth century English writer D.H. Lawrence, who introduces his 1923 study of American literature with "Never trust the artist [or curator]. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who has created it" (Lawrence 1990:1)

References cited

Achebe, Chinua. 1998. "Africa's Tarnished Naine: Essay and Poems." In Another Africa ed. R. Lyons, pp. 102-117. London: Lund Humphries.

Anatsui, El. 2003. El Anatsui Gawu. Llandudno, Wales: Oriel Mostyn Gallery.

Armstrong, Carol. 2008." Time and Materials." Art Forum October:191-95.

Court, Elsbeth. 1999. "Africa on Display: Exhibiting Art by Africans." In Contemporary Cultures of Display, ed. E Barker, pp. 147-73. London: Yale University Press.

Hassan, Salah, and Olu Oguibe, eds. 2001. Authentic/ Ex-centric Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art. Ithaca, NY: Forum for African Art.

Kotze, John. 2008. Proposal Dollar Falls. www.johnkotze.com, accessed October 6, 2008.

Kyeyune, George. 2003. Art in Uganda in the 20th Century. PhD thesis. SOAS, London.

Lawrence, D.H. 1990. Studies in Classic American Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Work originally published 1923.

Nakazibwe, Venny. 2005. Bark-cloth of the Baganda People of Southern Uganda: A Record of Continuity and Change, 18th to early 21st Century. PhD thesis. Middlesex University, London.

Njami, Simon. 2000. El Tiempo de Africa. Las Palmas, Canary Islands: Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno.

Okeke Agulu, Chika. 2006. "The Challenge of the Modern." African Arts 39(4):14-15,91.

Perryer, Sophie, ed. 2004. 10 Years 100 Artists. Art in a Democratic South Africa. Capetown: Bell-Roberts.

Okoye, Ikem. 1999. "Tribe and Art History." In Art and its Histories: A Reader., ed. Steve Edwards, pp. 260-63. London: Yale University Press.

Spring, Christopher. 2008. Angaza Afrika African Art Now. London: Laurence King.

Wright, Gillian. 2001. "Juxtapose: An Exhibition of Paintings by John Kotze." Gallery 27:10-17.

Notes

(1) Heeten Bhagat, email, October 3, 2008.

(2) John Kotze, emails, October 6 and 16, 2008. Kotze's practice is reviewed in Wright 2001.

(3) BBC World Service, October 6, 2008.

(4) Heeten Bhagat, email, October 3, 2008.

(5) "Expression of Zimbabwe" website, accessed October 12, 2008.

(6) Olivier Sultan, personal interview, September 3, 2008.

(7) www.moibrahimfoundation.org. This Index, generated by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, uses five key areas to construct the Index of African Governance, stores and ranks by country. Such basic evidence informs our understanding about conditions in continental Africa which is essential in discussions of "transnational" factors.

ELSBETH JOYCE COURT is a lecturer in African art at the University of London's SOAS and Birkbeck College. She made research visits to Zimbabwe in 1986, 1989 (as curator of "Drawing on Culture" at NGZ), and 2002. [e-mail]