Expanding the canon: telephone wire and tin cans.

Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone Wire Baskets David Arment and Marisa Fick-Jordaan with contributions by Karel Nel and Paul Mikula Santa Fe: S/C Editions, 2005. 211 pages, 270 color illustrations. Glossary, list of resources. $50.00, cloth.

Africa on the Move: Toys from West Africa Stefan Eisenhofer, Karin Guggeis, Jacques Froidevaux Stuttgart, Germany: Arnoldsche, 2004. 216 pp., 195 color, 28 b/w illustrations. $75.00, cloth.

The reception of African art in Euro-American art markets can be traced historically through the incremental expansions of its canon, from West and Central African figurative sculpture to furniture, textiles, South and East African beadwork, ceramic vessels, and so on. With the exception of the most prominent of these expansions--into the realm of modern and contemporary art--most of these shifts in the canon of African art have not challenged the rubric of "tradition" by which non-Western art has long been evaluated. Instead, they have expanded the category "art" to incorporate utilitarian objects, nonfigurative objects, and body adornments--all forms whose indigenous roots and ties to local cultural practices conform to long-standing conceptions of the "traditional." The two publications at hand are a part of this trend, proposing new genres for admission to the rarified realm of "traditional" art, yet they present a twist on this approach to the canon, for both focus on art forms that are distinctly contemporary. While the effort to promote new artists, styles, and genres is certainly not unusual in the international art market, these books' explicit efforts to lay out the case for the "art-worthiness" of their subjects offer fascinating insights into the expectations and the tensions that drive ever-shifting markets for African art.

Africa on the Move: Toys from West Africa and Wired: Contemporary Zulu Telephone-Wire Baskets present, respectively, toys from Burkina Faso made of recycled aluminum cans (or, significantly, toy-like sculptures made for the art market), and South African baskets, bowls, and plates made of telephone wire. Wired, the more substantive of the two publications, places its subject in historical perspective and offers insights into the lives of artists, while Africa on the Move is focused entirely on the present and only lightly contextualizes the production of recycled-material toys. The two have in common a focus on objects that emerge out of a lack of resources, innovations that draw from longstanding practices as well as changing markets and media.

Both Wired and Africa on the Move feature genres that might be said to be not yet fully admitted into the African fine art market. The goal of these publications, expressed with different degrees of explicitness, is to convince readers that their subjects are legitimate as art rather than as artifacts or souvenirs. While the addition of new genres to the canon may be attributed in part to a recognition of the aesthetic power and cultural centrality of these forms, other motivations are certainly at play as well, including the demands of the collecting community. As Christopher Steiner demonstrated in African Art in Transit (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), his analysis of the Abidjan market in "traditional" African art, savvy merchants have successfully predicted, or facilitated, the expansion of the realm of marketable genres to include wooden pestles, sling shots, and other objects that had previously been located solely in the "artifact" category. Such investigations of the mechanisms by which objects become art do not impugn the worthiness of these forms--in investigating the ways in which these publications take part in this process, my intention is not to question the artistic merits of the objects themselves.

The telephone wire baskets and toys made of recycled aluminum containers that are featured in these publications, though they are completely different in style, medium, and place of origin, have significant characteristics in common. Both art forms are distinctly modern, developed at the interface between African and Western cultures in the twentieth century. Both exemplify their makers' ability to transform salvaged raw materials--even trash--into aesthetic statements. In both instances, the use of recycled commodities opens a window onto histories of economic inequities and the struggle to earn a living outside the formal sector.

Before addressing the contents and implications of these publications, a brief discussion of their presentation is in order, for both books make strong visual statements. These are "coffee table" books--stylishly designed hardbacks with lush illustrations. Africa on the Move is the hipper of the two, designed in a minimalist, sans-serif style with ample white space and a neon yellow cover. Wired is large (10"x10") and boldly designed to complement the vivid geometries of the wire baskets that are its subject. Both are richly illustrated, each with well over 100 color images of toys and wire baskets.

Readers encounter several "voices" in the texts--artists, collectors, art historians, and culture brokers. Together, their perspectives elucidate the networks of products and expectations out of which markets are created. These networks are usually obscured by the seemingly self-evident status of some objects as art, others as craft or artifact; only rarely are conceptual ingredients used in the process of making objects into art evident. In addition to presenting two forms of contemporary African visual culture, then, these books contain a subtext which can be read as a study in the multiple criteria by which objects are admitted to the realm of "African art."

Wired presents the history of South African telephone wire baskets, called imbenge (pl. izimbenge) in Zulu, a word that also refers to the basketry beer pot lids that were the inspiration for the telephone wire forms. The contributors describe in substantial detail the baskets' recent success as commodities in international art markets. Co-authors David Arment, an American collector, and Marisa Fick-Jordaan, a South African gallerist, have assembled an overview of the history of South African wirework and the recent explosion of interest in telephone wire baskets made in and around Durban, a major city in the heartland of the Zulu region. In the first sentence of the book's preface, Arment succinctly describes the book's dual goals: "At its heart, this book tells a story, which is long overdue, about the traditions and resourcefulness of a group of Zulu weavers and the individuals who helped turn a craft into a fine art." Thus, Wired presents two related narratives. One describes the innovations of Zulu weavers, for whom the baskets represent a continuation of past practices and an adaptation to new challenges and opportunities. The second narrative is that of the collectors and cultural brokers or merchants who steered these objects onto the global art market by elucidating the history, cultural context, and artistic merits of imbenge for external audiences, in addition to directly influencing imbenge production.

A forward by artist, collector, and art historian Karel Nel, titled "Re-Wired: Transformations of the Wire-working Traditions in the Southern African Region," provides a rich historical and cultural context for the contemporary movement. He describes the long history of copper and brass wire in southern Africa. Wire, originally drawn by hand and later acquired through trade, was wrapped around the hilts of weapons and staffs, stitched onto snuff containers made of gourds and ivory, and worn on the body as beads, bracelets, and anklets. These metals were more than decorative, for they often symbolized the political and spiritual power of those who wore them. Nel's discussion is well illustrated with objects from public and private collections.

Nel's historical overview is followed by a recitation of the history of telephone wire baskets in a different form: a "Song of Praise" modeled on Nguni praise songs. This long, free-flowing text is by Paul Mikula, founding trustee of the Bartel Arts Trust (a South African arts foundation that has provided support for a group of basket makers). The chapter is a bit difficult to read; the sentences break in unpredictable rhythms that presumably reflect spoken rather than written cadences. The piece is, as its title indicates, an extended celebration of this art form rather than an analysis. It mythologizes the creativity of artists. Of Marisa Fick-Jordaan's influence Mikula writes, "She wanted the baskets bigger still, and flatter, and wilder. She pushed the artists and found the buyers. She gave them all courage and helped them unearth their talents--and soon they took flight and magic happened and a new art form was born"(p. 23). Mikula describes in very general terms the cultural context in which salvaged telephone wire (called "scoobie wire") was adapted to imbenge-making, setting this innovation in the early twentieth century gold-mining region around Johannesburg where men from rural areas lived most of the year. He describes how men lived in single-sex hostels where "the allocation of jobs by gender could not exist ... Soon the most wonderfully decorated patchwork clothes and decorated baskets were being produced"(p. 21). Whether they developed through magic or the creativity born of adversity, Mikula salutes the genius of wire baskets and their makers.

Marisa Fick-Jordaan, co-author of Wired, played a key role in fostering the careers of imbenge-makers and marketing their work as the first manager of the BAT Shop in Durban, a project initiated by the Bartel Arts Trust. Fick-Jordaan offers her own version of the imbenge story in a chapter titled "Transitions." She describes, from the perspective of a merchant, how a township outside Durban called Siyanda became a center for the production of wire baskets that were sold and exhibited in international art fairs and exhibitions. The chapter focuses on the recent history of imbenge, centering on the post-1994 period, when the baskets' popularity was part of the international celebration of South Africa's emergence from decades of apartheid. According to Fick-Jordaan, the distinction between the imbenge as a contemporary art form and the beer pot lids they emerged from lies in part in the emphasis on individual artistic identity (one of the hallmarks by which "art" is generally distinguished from "craft"): "We placed an emphasis on the development of individuality ... well outside the boundaries of traditional Zulu patterning'(p. 26).

The distinction between categories, "craft" or "curio" versus "art," is, as any Africanist art historian knows, ambiguous and problematic, yet it is absolutely crucial to this presentation. In her narration of the development of an organized support system for Zulu wire artists, Fick-Jordaan pinpoints the specific moment at which "Telephone-wire basketry had made the leap from curio to art craft"(p. 29): the 1998 award of a major national art prize (the FNB Vita Craft Now Award) to Ntombifuthi Magwasa, a wire-basket maker. The chapter concludes with a statement that further broadens the marketing potential of imbenge, even as it complicates the genre's classification: "In ten years, coiled telephone-wire basket weaving has become a traditional craft in an urban area where none existed before"(p. 35). Thus, izimbenge are an innovation, a product of the urban, international atmosphere of the contemporary city, yet their foundation in the past lends them the appeal of tradition. Fick-Jordaan negotiates the fine line between contemporary/art and traditional/craft in order to find space for izimbenge within the art market.

The balance of the book, 170 of its 211 pages, comprises three richly illustrated sections: profiles of fourteen imbenge-makers, a discussion of the adaptability of baskets to home decor, and an extensive survey of imbenge styles and iconography. The profiles of artists were likely intended to elucidate the creative inspiration behind the baskets and to underscore the importance of individual artistic identities. Yet the profiles' most important function may be the window they open onto the lives of black South Africans, pre- and post-apartheid. The details that emerge from the brief profiles--displacement from home regions, unemployment, lack of access to formal education, and HIV/AIDS (which took the life of one of the featured weavers)--are part of the fabric of these lives, along with the perseverance and resourcefulness that led these artists to imbenge as an economic solution as well as a form of creative expression.

The short chapter titled "Collection" celebrates the consumption of izimbenge, describing the plates' diverse audiences and lightheartedly cautioning that "... collecting the wire plates can become addictive" (p. 105). The photographs, which would be at home in Architectural Digest or House Beautiful, feature izimbenge as wall decorations, as charger plates for elegant table settings, and as colorful accents on coffee tables. Their integration into the new settings of collectors' homes in Dallas, Durban, and an adobe house in Santa Fe emphasizes the global appeal of these forms, which are "... entirely at home in a contemporary environment. That said, the baskets are not out of place elsewhere" (p. 106). This chapter might be viewed as a "how-to" for potential collectors, placing imbenge within their aesthetic comfort zone.

Finally, the "Plates" section of the book offers a visual guide to izimbenge, categorizing the seemingly infinite variety of design motifs and basket shapes. Each design category is illustrated with numerous examples. The classifications include abstract patterns such as zigzags and swirls, as well as representational imagery that is classified thematically, including HIV/AIDS motifs and logos for South African sports teams. The section includes styles associated with "tradition" such as early twentieth century wire-wrapped staffs, as well as distinctly contemporary departures from the past, like the minimalist "designer" baskets of the Zenzulu project, developed and designed by Fick-Jordaan. With this corpus of imbenge styles, the authors create a canon for this art form, demonstrating that it has a stylistic logic that will enable future collectors and students of the form to situate and classify other baskets.

Africa on the Move is the more explicitly market-driven of the two publications, and it is also the less substantive. The book opens directly into more than 160 pages of color photographs of recycled aluminum toys, with the title page appearing on page 173 (a rather confusing format). Each photograph is a brightly lit portrait of an individual car, truck, airplane, bicycle, or rocket ship. These images are placed in the middle of a stark white page, eliminating all sense of space, scale, or context--one could scarcely do more to suggest the stereotypical white cube of the high art setting.

The book's two essays, which are translated into English, French, and German, are short and enthusiastic in their support of the toys as authentic works of art. The first essay, "Global Players--Children's Toys from Post-Colonial Africa," is by Stefan Eisenhofer and Karin Guggeis. Unfortunately, the authors are not identified (though Africanists may know that Eisenhofer is a curator at the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Munich). Their essay opens with the question that seems to run as a subtext throughout this publication: "Yeah--but is it art?" (p. 174). The authors are clearly aware of and sensitive to the implications of classifying objects as art or as craft/artifact. They describe the ways in which these toys may play multiple roles in the market: They may appeal to the Western desire for "'simple,' 'genuine,' 'handmade'" objects, or they may be emblematic of the loss of Africa's "purity" as "... objects made from the profane, impure, defiled detritus of civilization ..."(p. 175).

Eisenhofer and Guggeis take a poetic approach to describing the sophistication and cultural importance of these toys, using language that seems to be aimed at situating the toys within the august realm of art, such as "masterpieces of creativity," "far beyond the standard of mere crafts," and "works sparkling with originality" (pp. 176-8). They also note, perhaps ironically, that these are not in fact the works of children, but of adults who have recognized the market potential of recycled toys. The authors also locate these forms within the larger discourse of contemporary art, noting their similarities to the work of African artists whose work circulates in "high art" markets, including Romould Hazoume, Massimo Wanssi, and Simonet Biokou. (One might also add the prominent sculptor El Anatsui.) For these artists, "refuse becomes a metaphor for Africa as the disenchanted, dispossessed, disregarded continent ..." (p. 175). Still, recognizing the minefield presented by the art/artifact discourse, they remain officially neutral: "Yet ultimately it does not matter whether they are called art or not--these little creations made of rubbish or refuse are exhilaratingly sophisticated by any standards"(p. 174). Rather than categorization, this essay's aim is to elucidate the possibilities for a new reading of recycled toys.

The second, much shorter essay is by Jacques Froidevaux, who is not identified but is apparently the collector of the toys presented here. He, too, concerns himself with the art-worthiness of the objects: "One sort of question keeps on being asked: 'Is this authentic art brut or is it just vulgar mass production aimed at tourists?'"(p. 206). The addition of the word "brut" to this discussion opens an entirely new can of worms, placing the toys within the discourse of a specific twentieth century Western artistic category (most closely associated with the art of the insane). Froidevaux draws no firm conclusions in his essay, yet this presentation of his toy collection certainly has all the stylistic hallmarks of an art book.

In between the two essays, a sixteen-page black-and-white photograph spread titled "The Toymakers and their Sources of Inspiration" presents scenes from the cityscape of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, source of most of the toys featured in the book (a handful of the toys are from Ghana and Togo). Here, we see urban streets plied by the bicycles, mopeds, and overloaded trucks that serve as models for the toy makers. The photographs also include portraits of several recycled-toy makers, many photographed at work and others simply posing for the camera. One of the artists, Robert Compaore, is the subject of a very brief interview with Froidevaux, transcribed onto a single page (p. 212). Compaore describes how he made toys for himself as a young boy, until a German visitor admired his work and purchased several toys. From then on, toy-making became a means of earning money rather than an amusement.

In reading these works, one wishes for further interviews, with both recycled toy makers in Burkina Faso and with imbenge makers in South Africa, perhaps giving the creators themselves an opportunity to define the works. While one might wish for further insights into the lives of these artists, both of these publications provide valuable documentation of art forms that are prominent in their places of origin and, increasingly, on global markets. The issues at stake here are much more than academic, for the classification of objects has a direct impact on the prices they command, as well as their value in a more ineffable sense. These are both markets on the margins, where people have turned to salvaged materials not because they seek to make a conceptual statement but because they cannot afford "traditional" art materials. Here, at the intersection of categories and hierarchies, we can discern both the contingency and the power of the art market.