Engaging Modernities: Transformations of the Commonplace.

Engaging Modernities

Transformations of the Commonplace

Anitra Nettleton, Julia Charlton and Fiona Rankin-Smith

University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, Johannesberg,

2003. Full color, 96 pages, softcover.

R120.00, students R80.00

The Mlungu in Africa

Art from the Colonial Period, 1840-1940

Michael Stevenson and Michael Graham-Stewart

Michael Stevenson Contemporary, Cape Town,

2003. Full color, 111 pages, softcover. R170.00.

Two recent South African publications are welcome and valuable additions to the growing corpus of literature dealing with sub-Saharan transculturated or "hybrid" art. Both publications accompanied exhibitions: The publication of The Mlungu in Africa coincided with the May 2003 debut exhibition of the new Michael Stevenson Contemporary in Cape Town, which showcased a selection of objects featured in the book, while Engaging Modernities was published in tandem with a 2003 exhibition of the same name at the Durban Art Gallery.

The two books cover related but different terrains. The Mlungu in Africa deals with sculptures and relief carvings of colonial figures from approximately 1840 to 1940, while Engaging Modernities covers the production of a wide array of hybrid forms from the colonial era to the present day. Neither of these publications targets an exclusively academic readership. The Mlungu, with its large, glossy, full-color photographs and detailed information on individual objects, clearly aims at attracting collectors. On the other hand, Engaging Modernities, which deals with African cultural modernity in an intelligent yet accessible manner, is ideal for students and a culturally literate public.

The Mlungu in Africa features wood and ivory carvings of the colonial era. The selected objects constitute a shrewd and experienced dealers' collection--a collection that testifies to an eye for finely executed and ethnographically rich pieces that cohere aesthetically and thematically. The terrain is very clearly articulated: Stevenson and Graham-Stewart take pains to stress that these pieces were created before the introduction of jet travel in the 1950s and that it therefore predates the proliferation of formulaic colon figures--brightly painted wooden sculptures of colonial officials and functionaries--created for the mass tourist market. It incorporates a rich diversity of wall plaques, free-standing figures, walking sticks, and miniature ivories that fascinate and amuse the viewer with their bare observation of the brutal pomp and self-importance of colonial functionaries and their imperial leaders.

These are quality pieces, shining with the irresistible patina of age, most of them produced with the characteristic attention to fine detail and finish that predates the era of mass production in Africa. Although the authors take pains to convince the reader that these pieces, "contaminated" as they are by European presence, tend to be overlooked in favor of "authentic" precolonial sculptures in most international collections and exhibitions, it is immediately clear that these objects share, in dealers' terms, the combination of age and scarcity that makes the market in "traditional" African art such a lucrative one. Now that the sources of precolonial African art have dried up, pieces such as these, which document the earliest production of an African modernity, are becoming more and more valuable, with additional impetus provided by an academic environment fascinated by cross-cultural encounters and alternative modernities. The presentation of these sculptures as rare and desirable objets d'art confirms that collections such as these stretch the limits and extend the boundaries of the elite market for "authentic" African art, rather than posing a serious challenge to it.

After a general introduction of thirteen pages, the bulk of the book comprises beautiful color photographs of individual pieces (sometimes cropped to show detail and patina), accompanied by information that confirms that this publication is primarily targeted at collectors. Where attribution is possible, details are provided about the master carver and information is supplied about similar pieces in reputable collections. Lot numbers of comparable objects auctioned by Christie's enable the prospective buyer to evaluate the rarity and potential value of the sculpture concerned. Stylistic characteristics are contextualized by comparing the carving to similar pieces. Information is relayed, where available, on where and how the objects were collected. Anecdotal details, including observations from colonial diaries or tales of encounters with the artists concerned, enrich the text.

The painstakingly researched information on individual items is put in perspective by the introduction, which deals, in very broad terms, with academic debates and problematics in the field. In this background discussion, Stevenson and Graham-Stewart consider the shortcomings of existing taxonomies to describe these early colonial representations of Europeans and modernized Africans. The introduction also deals in broad (but not overly reductive) terms with collection practices in the colonial era; the creation of new markets for art; issues of attribution and anonymity and the role of the individual artist in colonial culture. The tendency on the part of museums, collectors, and academics to regard the hybrid object as sign of contamination, acculturation, and loss of authenticity is roundly criticized. A cursory survey is also provided of recent exhibitions on the representation of the colonial figure in Africa and of current academic approaches to the topic. A comprehensive bibliography points the reader to virtually all that has been published on nineteenth and early twentieth century "hybrid" African art between 1927 and 2002.

One criticism I can level against this book is that it hesitates to address the extent to which transgression is articulated by these artists. African colonial representations remind us that colonial power is not possessed solely by the colonizer. The representations in Mlungu tolerate no simple binary opposition between colonizer and colonized, between power and powerlessness. The authors mention the "awe and fear" that manifest in these pieces, but the repertoire of conflicting positions enunciated by these objects also disarticulate the power of the colonizer. The carvings abound with swords, rifles, crowns, scepters, sashes, brocade, medals, and epaulettes. The colonizer (and the functionary) is not rendered as subject but as perverse palimpsest (to borrow a term from Homi Bhabha) bearing inscriptions of generic ceremonial and symbolic power. The text does not adequately address or account for numerous representational ambiguities. The degree to which mimicry, as counter-colonial strategy, simultaneously enables power and produces a loss of agency; the colonizing subject as object of both desire and derision: Consideration of these issues could have contributed a more nuanced and subtle reading of the genre. But perhaps such academic theorizing would have been out of place in what is, to all intents and purposes, a professional, information-rich, glossy, and well-edited item for the collector's bookshelf.

Engaging Modernities deals with the material transformation of objects in modern Africa. All art featured in this book is from the Standard Bank collection, which is housed at the University of the Witwatersrand. This collection, which was started in 1978, initially incorporated mainly "traditional" art but has since grown to include a wide array of transcultural objects from a variety of sub-Saharan countries. One hopes that this book, which introduces the reader to debates, controversies, and perspectives on African modernities, will open the door to many more in-depth and thickly descriptive explorations of this wonderful collection. The book is a valuable addition to African cultural studies and is particularly suitable for tertiary teaching, not only because it deals with complex issues in a readable and accessible tone, but also because it suggests creative and dynamic ways of overcoming the reductive local / global and tradition/modernity dichotomies in Africa. The text is accessible without injuring the complexity of the issues at hand. It avoids being overly academic (the text contains hardly any footnotes or references to other sources), and sustains a conversational tone that never masks the seriousness of the inquiry.

This is a visually seductive book. The slightly off-beat layout includes stunning full-color reproductions of a vast array of objects, as well as compelling close-ups of details and textures. Battered Barbie dolls share intricately embellished beadwork with kings' crowns. Colonial walking sticks, embroidered flour-sack washcloths, and Plexiglas snuff boxes compete for attention with didactic paintings and beautifully embellished items of clothing. The wild transgression of boundaries between art and life, function and aesthetic, craft and art, commodity and sacred artefact delights the postmodern eye. The modernities that are reproduced here are fractured, heterogeneous, and polyphonic.

The text is divided into subheadings that articulate the various forms, functions, and social modalities of these objects. These subheadings include (inter alia): "Military and missionary modernity," "Imaging the self as modern," "Modernity incorporated," "Traditional forms in modern materials," and "Modernity and contemporary concerns." While the boundaries between these subdivisions are permeable and tenuous and many of these objects could happily appear under two or more of them, the divisions nonetheless assist a structured and systematic untangling of the numerous social, economic, and aesthetic factors that underpin articles of such a hermeneutically complex nature.

The authors resist popular terminologies (such as "recycled art") to deal with this art. The implication that the creator of hybrid culture is a bricoleur, serendipitously adapting and transforming random materials that happen to be at hand, is rejected in favor of a modernity that is articulated as a deliberate and conscious strategy: "The makers of the works included in this exhibition have used elements from the worlds of mass-production and Western technology to negotiate their own spaces as modern and not just contemporary" (p. 14). These articles are interpreted as statements of belonging to the modern world: the modern, not as alien, Western other, but as integral part of countless millions' life experience.

The book proposes no simple, one-way flow of exchange between producers and consumers or between rural outpost and urban center. The text makes it quite evident that these transfigured and transformed objects serve a number of heterogeneous functions and that no simple theory can account for such prolific and rich diversity. It is made abundantly clear that the modern is not something that is uniformly produced only by specialists in the developed world, but that it is a complex construct that may also be produced to act as interface between local experience and global reality.

I do, however, have a problem with the glib use of the term "Western." While care is taken to avoid the reproduction of Africa as trope, the concept of the West is never critically engaged and technologies, synthetic materials, and various modern forms are too glibly designated as essentially "Western" products. A footnote to explain the very inclusive use of the term might have alleviated this problem. As it is, the somewhat uniform and monolithic representation of "the West" mars the attempt to produce a nuanced and subtle reading of cultural hybridity as the inevitable product of a complexly interwoven global milieu. The Western/modem conflation strikes one as too simple and too overstretched, particularly in a text that takes into account Muslim and other influences on contemporary African culture. It is simply no longer satisfying to describe contemporary global modernity as Western. Terms such as "Western modern consumer society" or "Western capitalism" are unnecessary and ultimately inaccurate and, most problematically, imply a reading of the modern as implicitly a Western preserve-which runs contrary to the very marrow of the text.

A second criticism concerns enunciation: It is not always clear who created the object and for whom it was intended. This information is provided only in a few, select cases. While it must be taken into account that objects often arrive in collections by circuitous and undocumented routes, many of the objects featured in this book resist interpretation because such vital information is missing. Steiner (1994:2) talks of the "social life" of commodities, whose values, meanings, and spirit change as they move through time and out of the context for which they were intended. While all the objects entrance the viewer with their rich creative ingenuity, a lack of information regarding original context and subsequent "journeys" can be frustrating to the reader.

Engaging Modernities (and the collection it represents) is valuable, on the one hand, because it radically counters the dismissal of the hybrid as sign of displacement, degeneration, and the decay of the authentically African. It also utterly militates against a reflexive rejection of the commodity form, or of any reinstatement of the hoary humanist opposition between "authentic" and "commercial." In its exploration of the culturally novel ways in which hybrid artefacts are manipulated, commodification is perceived as opportunity for empowerment rather than as sign of loss and acculturation.

On the other hand, the text avoids the postmodern pitfall of mindlessly celebrating the hybrid art object as simple emblem of cultural plurality and creative agency. In the conclusion of Reinventing Africa, Annie Coombes welcomes the recent curatorial interest in the "hybrid" "because it is productive of interruptions to the West's complacent assurance of the universality of its own cultural values" (1994:218), but she cautions that too many of these exhibitions uncritically celebrate transculturated art as sign of a mutually productive culture contact--as an exchange on equal terms between the Western centers and those groups on the so-called periphery. Coombes accuses these exhibitions of failing to address the relations of power and transgression that are articulated in the objects on display and ascribes the celebratory nature of these shows to a "utopian desire to envision a truly 'cosmopolitan' society, representative of a 'postcolonial' context" (ibid.). Engaging Modernities recognizes the creative agency of the African artist without disavowing the complex conditions of desire, disempowerment, poverty, and limited access to cultural capital that often give rise to material ingenuity in postcolonial Africa.

Engaging Modernities also undermines the tendency to polarize tradition and modernity as absolute binary opposites, where one necessarily replaces the other. In The Consumption of an African Modernity, Michael Rowlands asks, "If an African modernity is not simply a procrustean emulation of Western styles sitting uneasily on an otherwise authentic traditional culture, then what kinds of identity are being renegotiated, what ideal lifestyles are sought after, and how contrary are they to the reality of the present?" (1996:189). This text provides some answers to these questions, and sketches an African modernity that gives rise to a particularly complex kind of personal identity space.

Coombes, Annie. 1994. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rowlands, M. 1996. "The Consumption of an African Modernity." In African Material Culture, edited by M. J. Arnoldi, C. Geary, and K. Hardin, 188-213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Steiner, C. 1994. African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.