Kabiito Richard's paintings: a local reinvention in a global perspective.

The complexity of the history of modern art in Africa is no big news. Not only was institutional art training introduced in the African colonies under individual circumstances, but its destiny at each of those sites has been decisively shaped by the local events of the postcolonial decades. The consequence is multiple histories of individual and collective intellectual efforts to assert what Chika Okeke has identified as "the unmistakable mark of the artists' twentieth-centuryness" (Okeke 2001:30).

Facing such diversity, then, any study of an intellectual milieu in Africa has to pay close attention to a variety of issues peculiar to that scene. The case of an emerging artist, for example, is instructive in this context. Such an artist inevitably faces the challenging task of recognizing and adapting to several influential mediating factors--various social and cultural discourses, the institution's model(s) of instruction, and the inclinations of individual mentors--in order to build a personal idiom of visual expression at the conclusion of formal training. An attempt to historicize the legacy of an institution by examining how some of these agencies shape the individual's creative quest can be particularly effective in bringing to light a local history of representation as well as the global aspirations of those localized efforts. Focusing on a selection from an untitled series of paintings done between 1995 and 1997 by the Ugandan painter Kabiito Richard (b. 1969), this paper examines such a case.

A graduate of Margaret Trowell School of Fine and Industrial Arts at Kampala's Makerere University, Kabiito now teaches there. Here I examine the formal and iconographical properties of Kabiito's images, in which he incorporates fragments of indigenous objects, to discover how artifacts from known cultural contexts are transformed into pictorial signs. My thesis is twofold. I maintain that, on the one hand, the paintings resist classification as ethnically authentic images, instead testifying to a contemporary artist's vision using local references to move beyond the confines of that locale into a global space of artistic discourse; yet, on the other hand, I argue that the experiments aiming at that broader arena also demonstrate a local reinvention of the pictorial strategies of modernism. In addition to analyzing the individual works, I trace their institutional lineage through a discussion of the relevant aspects of the Art School's training and, finally, place the project in the larger context of a global politics of culture.

Man in Kanzu and My Heritage

As Kampala is located in the heart of the kingdom of Buganda, once the most powerful of the four monarchies of southern Uganda, the majority of the artists at the School, including Kabiito, are Baganda. "I felt I owed something to my culture," says Kabiito about his use of traditional Kiganda objects and materials in his work. "They [local artifacts] inspired me to represent them in visual forms. I wanted to show what else the artifacts could offer." (1)

With no apparent thematic unity, some of the paintings of the series show only images of artifacts, while others offer collages made with actual objects. Man in Kanzu (Fig. 1) and My Heritage (Fig. 2) belong to the first group. In the first picture, Kabiito alters the image of a "male" Kiganda drum (omugalabi) to represent a man clad in the full-length white robe (kanzu) and cap that Arab traders brought to Buganda in the nineteenth century, accompanied by the full-sleeve jacket that came later with the Europeans. One of the most common male attires in the region, especially in rural Buganda and its neighboring areas, this combination of acculturated garments is accepted today as traditional dress. Kabiito does not so much see the drum as a reference to music as he visualizes the familiar gender identity of the instrument by suggesting an analogy between the elongated shape of the object and that of a male body in the flowing robe. The figure, however, neither claims any credible presence in space, nor does it appear to be a caricature of either the drum or a human; instead, the complete absence of any suggestion of volume in the transformed object, the asymmetry of its shoulders, a curious combination of translucency on the left half and opacity on the right, and the organic flat shapes in the background confirm the primacy of the picture surface. The pensive character thus demonstrates a contemporary Ganda artist's passion for painting no less than his awareness of the history of his culture's openness to foreign influence.

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Unlike the solitary object in Man in Kanzu, an abstract image of an entire environment--the royal tomb located at Kasubi near Kampala--is the subject of My Heritage. A quick look at this edifice, therefore, will help clarify the picture. The kabaka (king) is the supreme symbol of Buganda's identity, and the royal tomb contains the graves of the last four of the kabakas. (2) A surviving testimony to the scale and grandeur of Buganda's royal architecture and the most revered shrine in the kingdom, the tomb (Fig. 3) displays on multiple levels what in Luganda is called kutimba. A void, or a bare, unadorned space or body is philosophically unacceptable in Ganda thinking--a concept that Alois Lugira describes as the gaganda's "horror of vacuum" (Lugira 1965:39). Conversely, an effort to produce a sense of enigma by placing or hanging coverings, obstacles, or partitions is identified as kutimba, an expression capable of describing a range of activities, from decorously draping one's own body, to ambiguously speaking with proverbs, to embellishing spaces with objects or images. Kutimba is thus an aesthetic term as well, not often intended as such in contemporary contexts but evident in both the tomb's architecture and the arrangement of the relics it houses. The building's sloping roof, for instance, makes the walls almost invisible from a distance; even the partially exposed front wall is methodically interrupted by two rows of roof supports. Further, a number of thick rings, made of palm fronds and dyed in a combination of red and black, cover the entire slope of the high ceiling of the commodious but dimly lit shrine hall (Fig. 4). Finally, an array of shields, medals, photographs of the deceased monarchs, and a variety of spears crowd the four graves located against a backdrop of bark-cloth curtain, with the roof supports around the graves also wrapped in the same material (Fig. 5). Simply put, strategies of juxtaposition and concealment stemming from the idea of kutimba are key to the tranquil mood of the monument.

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Filled with reed patterns and textures emulating the thatched ceiling and punctuated with images of the ritual spears, My Heritage offers a stylized image of this tomb interior. The rings on the ceiling become elegant coils in this scene, while the predominance of terracotta tones alludes to bark-cloth. The dominating coil shapes mingling with the vertical lines of the reed and the spears provide some illusion of three-dimensionality in certain areas, only to reaffirm the two-dimensional character of the picture surface in others. Moreover, a framed face appears on the upper right as a reminder of the royal photographs enshrined in the tomb. Kabiito, however, not only stylizes the face to avoid verisimilitude, instead emphasizing the pictorial role of this painted reference to a royal portrait, but also reaffirms its visuality by shaping another face--albeit a more abstract one--out of the coils. The connection between the two "faces" is all the more noticeable because, unlike the upright spears obstructing the actual royal portraits on the shrines, the image of the spear that strategically overlaps the framed portrait in the painting is upside down, its blade reaching the left eye of the abstract face below like an index. Representation thus gains its clearly defined territory. If the placement of the real spears before the photographs in the tomb demonstrates kutimba, I believe what we encounter in the painting is not so much an example of kutimba as a painted representation of its demonstration. In other words, translating a familiar aesthetic concept in the idiom of painting, Kabiito reinterprets the idea of tradition on artistic terms. A reference (the painted face) to another reference (the royal photo) to the supreme authority in Ganda society, overlapped by a symbol of military power (the spear), the picture-within-a-picture becomes a mediating sign in an artist's dialogue with his inherited notion of heritage.

Much of the immensely diverse array of art in the Western world in the last few decades has engaged in deconstructing the question of the artist's agency in an artwork. Taking the Duchampian approach to representation as a point of departure, it has often pushed the limits of the artist's presence to the point of threatening to efface it altogether. There is no question that this is not Kabiito's position. On the contrary, when Olu Ogiube remarks in his eloquent exegesis of El Anatsui's quest for self-definition that "... the found object for Anatsui was not complete in and of itself, but required the transfiguring intervention of human agency in order to be translated into sculptural form" (Oguibe 1998:48), we can see that Kabiito's interest in exploring formal possibilities is likely to find a comfortable ally in the modernist ethos of this view. In order to understand the origin of his inclinations and choices, it is important at this point to momentarily shift focus to some of the key events in his institution's past.

An Influential Teacher

Kabiito shares his interest in Buganda's material culture with a number of his contemporaries and former instructors, especially his teacher Pilkington Ssengendo (b. 1942), who, according to Kabiito, was the first mentor to draw his attention to it. Ssengendo's own interest in the subject stems from living through two decades--from the late 1960s through the late 1980s--of social turmoil, marked by violent persecutions of the Baganda under the regimes of Apolo Milton Obote (independent Uganda's first prime minister), and that of Idi Amin Dada, both northerners. Following open hostilities (the origin of which is an older north-south animosity rooted in Uganda's colonial history) with Kabaka Mutesa II, Obote plundered Buganda's royal palace Lubiri) in 1966, dissolved the monarchy, and forced Mutesa to flee to exile, where the monarch died three years later. Initially friendly with the Baganda because of their opposition to Obote, Idi Amin's regime of the 1970s eventually proved equally antagonistic to Buganda's interests (Kasozi 1994). And when Obote displaced Amin in 1979 and returned to power in the following year, he decimated thousands in various parts of Buganda until his own deposition in 1985. It was not until 1993 that the new government reinstated the kingship through the coronation of Mutesa's son Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II.

The violence and suffering of this period frequently recurred as pictorial themes at the Art School, though the artists developed individual strategies of camouflaging political statements in mythic or religious narratives to avoid reprisals. "It was individuals expressing themselves ... and the topic at that time was brutality," Pilkington Ssengendo reminisces. "The subjects were morbid, took us a long time to change." (3) That change began in the early 1990s, when shifting focus to their local roots rather than brooding over memories of trauma seemed a more constructive approach to many of the artists. For Ssengendo, who belongs to a highly influential family close to royalty, the young kabaka's coronation in 1993 was a symbolic event in this new process of healing and renewal. "I was extremely happy to witness the coronation of the king," he admits, and explains that it was this event that motivated him to take a fresh look at his culture.

One of the items that drew Ssengendo's attention while exploring pictorial possibilities of Kiganda artifacts was bark-cloth (Fig. 6). Meticulously prepared from the bark of a species of fig tree called mutuba, bark-cloth has fibers intersecting at right angles, much like the warp and weft of woven fabric, and while it can be white or brown, a rich terracotta color acquired through processing is the sign of high quality. Not only men and women in Buganda and the neighboring kingdoms wore bark-cloth in precolonial times, but its finest variety was also integral to such occasions as coronation and royal burial. Having lost much of its functional role, however, today it is primarily a popular symbol of the cultural pride of the Baganda and their neighbors. Regardless of a legendary claim that a Muganda hunter named Wamala from the Ngonge (otter) clan discovered the efficacy of this material during one of his hunting trips (Lugira 1965:56), the fact that this material has assumed a crucial role as a marker of tradition in several groups across the south is sufficient proof of its crosscultural connotations, and hence of the dynamism of cultural exchange in the region. Any notion of its essential context or identity thus already fractured, its physical or simulated presence in a contemporary artwork further precludes such a possibility and establishes it at least as a crosscultural symbol in the region.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

In Coronation Site (1993), Ssengendo presents his own vision of the historic event (Fig. 7). While simplified, elongated human forms punctuate the space like elegant apparitions, the distinctly garbed kabaka decisively occupies the center of the scene with his entourage. The static vertical forms balance the horizontal patterns of subdued hues of red and brown and their complements of green and yellow; but as we become accustomed to this axial interaction and the complex openwork of positive and negative spaces of what seems to be an architectural background, we discover that the dominating red and brown bands in the scene are actually suggestions of strips of bark-cloth--the artist himself points out that "the colors [in the picture] signify the tone and texture of bark-cloth." (4) Drawn as much to the historical significance of bark-cloth in Ganda society as its potential as an artistic device, Ssengendo employs the material in a dual role: The form and tone of bark-cloth in the painting still recall its status as a cultural symbol, especially in light of the subject of coronation; but at the same time, the transformed image of this indigenous material also ceases to be itself and adapts to its new role as a unifying agent in a pictorial composition.

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Each painting is a unique experience for Ssengendo; and indeed, Conversation of 1997 (Fig. 8) is quite different from Coronation Site. Rather than seeking a visual pattern that resembles bark-cloth, Ssengendo in this smaller painting uses the actual material as an alternative to canvas; reinforced by fabric and prepared with local gums and saps, bark-cloth here participates with its physicality. The image shows a mundane scene of villagers absorbed in daily gossip, painted with dull values of red and brown. Drastically cropped in the foreground is a figure with an unusually elongated neck, succeeded by another schematic, though more "believable" figure at a distance. Two more characters farther in the background echo the one closest to us. While the positions of the two main figures suggest a slight illusion of receding space, several horizontal bands dividing the surface ultimately render that space as a completely shallow one. What is more, the texture of bark-cloth clearly visible across the entire surface heightens this ambiguity, and I contend that the artifice produced by the presence of this material is the key to the significance of this picture. On the one hand, the two larger figures can be read as villagers draped in bark-cloth, as the actual bark-cloth's texture makes the painted images of the dress on these two characters momentarily appear as "real" bark-cloth garb. In the predominantly flat background, on the other hand, that same texture becomes less a physical attribute of bark-cloth and more a visual property of a painted surface; and the two suggestive figures, which appear to be paintings-within-a-painting, like the framed face in Kabiito's picture, reinforce this pictorial obligation of bark-cloth's physical character. Twice in Ssengendo's work, then, bark-cloth dedicates itself to the service of art--once emulated in paint, and then physically participating with paint in simultaneously producing an illusion and dispelling it.

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The pictorial artifice of Ssengendo's images, however, cannot overshadow their distinctly narrative gesture--a sense of telling a story. Not only do their titles betray the subjects, but the subjects themselves carry enough specificity to conjure stories. And evaluated along this line, the two of Kabiito's paintings we have seen are also unable to distance themselves from a discernable narrative scheme. Despite their transformation into visual motifs, the images are still evocative of identifiable referents: a man in a recognizable dress and a renowned monument; and needless to say, the transparent titles provide obvious clues to this end. This task of making narrative more ambiguous, more indeterminate, is something that the second group of paintings accomplishes; but it is crucial to first have a brief look at the ways the Art School has interpreted the role of narrative in representation through the decades in order to understand the images from a historical perspective.

Pictorial Narrative in the Art School's History

An English artist and art teacher trained at the Slade School, Margaret Trowell (1904-1985) founded Makerere's Art School in 1937. Like many Europeans of her generation in contact with Africa, Trowell believed that Africans had an essentially unique way of thinking and that the continent was rapidly losing its pristine way of life on contact with Europe, a view that led her to volunteer for the fledgling Kampala Museum (now Uganda National Museum) during much of the 1940s (Trowell 1957:106, 115), working first as an honorary curator and then as a member of the trustees. Her rigorous work at the Museum was hardly an isolated event, as what she learned about Uganda's material cultures from her curatorial efforts had significant impact on her teaching. She occasionally invited traditional experts to demonstrate basket-making, pottery, and weaving and insisted that her students be aware of the aesthetic value of local artifacts.

Trowell's enthusiasm for indigenous artifacts had its limitations, however. Trowell wanted her students to know about local material cultures insofar as that knowledge made them aware of the value of their traditions and provided means of livelihood through teaching in elementary schools or producing objects for the market. (5) But when it came to art-making, she maintained very different standards: She neither encouraged appropriation of local motifs or artifacts to make pictures or sculptures, nor mentioned any such possibility in her elaborate discussions of art teaching in Africa (see Trowell 1937, 1951-52). The reason for this was her strong aversion to modernism. Trowell disliked what she saw as the "synthetic formalism" of much of modern Western art; since use of traditional elements in the making of pictures would inevitably invite formal experiments--"soulless superficiality" as she called it--she kept her art instruction completely segregated from her teaching of craft (Trowell 1957:123-4). In short, she maintained a strict separation in practice, if not in theory, between "art" and "craft."

On the other hand, Trowell did not see emulation of nature in the European academic tradition as an alternative suitable for her African students. Convinced that colonial Africa had much in common with medieval Europe, she instead regarded the art of the Middle Ages as the source of inspiration (Trowell 1937:9, 127). While it remains unclear which era of the several centuries in European history known as the Middle Ages she actually meant to emulate, her expectations of her students were unequivocal: A deeply religious person, Trowell believed that narrative was indispensable for meaningful art. In fact, as she would later reminisce in her autobiography, she envisioned a generation of East African artists excelling in representations of "Africanized" Christian and genre themes of East African rural life (Trowell 1937:126). Paintings by her students, such as Tanzanian Sam Ntiro, were thus predominantly flat and decorative though invariably dependent on descriptive subjects. Further, the rarity of figurative pictorial traditions in East Africa led Trowell to consider her students "fresh and unsophisticated." She became obsessed with the notion of creative originality and even stopped making her own art to guard her students from her influence (Trowell 1947:1-7; 1957:124). One of her common methods of invoking pictorial composition in class, borrowed from her mentor Marion Richardson's practice of teaching art to English children, was to provide a vivid verbal description of a biblical or genre scene (Trowell 1937:52-3; see also Richardson n.d.). In short, beginning with Trowell, the Art School became a discursive space for conflicting notions of tradition and modernity for years to come.

This approach to teaching changed radically when Trowell retired and returned to England in 1958 and a new group of instructors took charge of the School. The Scottish artist Cecil Todd arriving from South Africa, the Tanzanian-born English artist Jonathan Kingdon, Zanzibari Ali Darwish, the Sudanese printmaker Tag Ahmed, and several others offered a model of instruction very different from Trowell's. They encouraged students to explore visual mediums and learn the complexities of formal and conceptual possibilities, experimenting with abstraction, if necessary. Observation and personal interpretation of nature replaced Trowell's strategy of visualizing scenes from verbal descriptions, and obligation to art became more important as a driving force in creative pursuits than one's religious belief. Moreover, recognizing the significance of their own mediation in the training, the instructors often worked alongside their students.

In the atmosphere of postindependence optimism, the School wanted to encourage self-expression without searching for an authentic African identity. "A politician who decides to define what the East African Personality is ... uses some breathtakingly banal stereotype," Jonathan Kingdon comments on the issue after more than three decades, "But an artist is another matter altogether. Cumulatively, works of artists give one a sense of the interest and diversity of the people in that area." (6) And because the Art School in this decade represented students from various countries, the question of diversity became all the more important. Students such as Pilkington Ssengendo were advised to look beyond East Africa to draw from cross-cultural sources, including modern Western art, but were also reminded that one's ultimate goal in combining influences was to develop means of self-expression based on individual needs and inclinations. The mission was, as the painting department declared in the School's handbook of the mid-1960s, "to develop the intrinsic talents of the students." (7)

While the training was clearly modernist in much of its aspirations, it had its limits to experiments with abstraction. Far from being a homogenous style, modernism in the visual arts of the Western world has been identified with a range of trends. One view, professed most passionately by Clement Greenberg between the 1940s and the 1960s to publicize such New York-based movements as Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, and Post-Painterly Abstraction, underscored the urgency of overcoming painting's dependence on narrative in order for it to "reduce" itself to its own "essences," to produce what Arthur Danto has called "materialist abstraction" (Danto 1993:67; see also Greenberg 1963). Greenberg's teleological approach to art history regarded visual narrative as an obligation to the literary medium, therefore arguing that its rejection was historically preordained (see Greenberg 1989, 1940).

This version of modernism never had a following at Makerere, at least partly because none of the teachers themselves worked along this line. No matter how much idiosyncrasies of self-expression were encouraged and no matter how liberally the form, subject, and purpose of pictorial narrative changed in contrast with that of Trowell's era, the link between the signifier and referent in an artwork not only still followed convention, but remained predominantly figurative. Ssengendo's paintings from even recent years illustrate this well. Trowell had categorically rejected the changing circumstances of contemporary Africa as something unworthy of representation, in favor of rural and biblical subjects (Trowell 1957:124), a view Cecil Todd summarily dismissed as "naive" and "primitive" (Todd 1962:2). But Todd's reverse emphasis on Africa's urban life and social events as subjects suggests that he too believed there were stories to tell in this decade of transition. The School in this period thus did not have as decisive a break with its past as is commonly believed. Attention to indigenous traditions was another vital issue. Unlike Trowell, teachers now encouraged use of local artifacts as pictorial devices, but the fact that this attention was fundamentally a part of Margaret Trowell's legacy cannot be ignored.

There were only occasional exceptions to the kinds of figurative narrative art produced at the School, such as Muhammed Kamulegeya's Untitled (Fig. 9), which renders the tie between the signifier and its tangible referent largely tenuous, if not totally obliterated. (8) A Muslim Muganda student shortly behind Ssengendo, Kamulegeya (b. 1944) was unable to reconcile his religious faith with the demands of figurative representation; committed to the value of diversity, Kingdon helped him resolve that conflict through a nonfigurative solution. (9) In this work, possibly produced in the early 1970s, Kamulegeya offers four separate square panels constituting one large painting. The surface is completely covered with images of an array of Kiganda artifacts without any clear reference to a narrative, let alone any suggestion of receding space. The objects, mostly musical instruments and weaponry, are transformed into near-abstract signs, retaining only tentative ties with their referents. Spearheads and arrows echoing the larger triangular patterns derived from Kiganda baskets guide us through opposing jagged and organic forms, while contrasts of bright shades separate the numerous geometric configurations. Individually a formal dead end, the panels begin to interact only when all four are placed to form one large square, like pieces of a puzzle. This resort to abstraction to construct a personal image of one's material culture is an approach that Trowell would surely have rejected as "synthetic formalism," but one that nonetheless profits from her legacy of respecting traditional artifacts. As we shall see shortly, Kabiito Richard's paintings of the second group claim kinship with this type of experiment.

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From Objects to Signs The European instructors left Makerere in the eve of Idi Amin's regime, and as I mentioned earlier, the unstable political climate of the 1970s and much of the 1980s made figurative narrative, as opposed to nonfigurative abstraction, increasingly central to making covert social statements. Today, however, possibilities of nonfigurative representation have a much stronger appeal to Kabiito's generation, which has a greater global awareness of art--particularly of the various movements and genres of the twentieth century--than did the students of the 1960s and is often more eager to avoid direct references in favor of ambiguity and circumlocution. In Stronghold (Fig. 10) Birds in Camouflage (Fig. 11), and Co-existence (Fig. 12), Kabiito therefore takes a position between Ssengendo and Kamulegeya. While influenced by Ssengendo's interest in Ganda tradition, he carefully distances himself from his teacher by pushing the limits of figurative narrative, and in this respect he is closer to Kamulegeya. However, he also rejects Kamulegeya's strict geometricity by leaving traces of organic figural presence as well as hints of uncertain narratives through evocative titles.

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Kabiito incorporates fragments of bark-cloth, mats, and baskets in different capacities to explore their visual compatibilities with painted surface. He insists more than his teacher that we recognize the physical presence of elements that are alien to canvas, yet takes extra care to make that presence ambiguous. In Stronghold, for example, while the folded corner of the actual mat on the upper left unequivocally betrays the tangibility of the material, it finds its complement in the lower left corner, where a triangular piece of mat pasted on a dark blue ground offers an illusion of a fold. I see the difference between the two corners, corroborated by the analogous distinction between the actual shadow along the edge of the smaller fold and the painted shadow along that of the larger one, as signaling the transformation of material fragments of a culture into components of a pictorial image. Kabiito reiterates this message by alluding as much to the texture of mat in the rows of jagged patterns on the upper right, as by making the diagonally placed mat share its natural color with the overlapping paint. "I wanted to see how the canvas behaves with the bark-cloth," Kabiito explains, "... how the patterns of a mat could be married to the texture of bark-cloth." (10) Let us recognize this manner of speaking as clearly modernist in its use of visual metaphors like "behave" and "married," indicating the artist's interest in formal experiments more than storytelling. Partly overlapping the mat, framed by real and painted cane rings, and marked by a tiny drawing of a cow (the only figurative element), bark-cloth here appears in the form of a disc. But this conspicuity of bare bark-cloth only makes us more aware of the emulation of its value in paint on the upper left, and the gradual transition from the image of mat to a piece of actual bark-cloth in the lower right corner, disguised in paint and identifiable only by its texture. Thus interwoven, mat, bark-cloth, and canvas are indeed "married" in a studio through a painterly ritual; and while this pictorial bondage helps the mat to take the first step toward emancipating itself from its ties with its Kiganda past, it enables bark-cloth, already a cross-cultural item, to move one step farther from such specificity.

Basket coils and cane rings in the next two paintings replace mat and bark-cloth as the most visible elements. Almost faceless yet evocative of an organic entity, a large coil dominates the surface of Birds in Camouflage in an elegant gesture, mimicked by a painted form behind it. As its numerous disintegrating tentacles merge into the picture surface like rhythmic lines marking boundaries of painted spaces, the unfurling object becomes less evocative of a basket and more a reference to Kabiito's ambition of using tangible objects to move beyond tangibility into the domain of visual fiction. My observation here is indulged by the artist's own remark that we just encountered: his ambitious use of the visual metaphors. Where else but in a visual fiction can inanimate materials be imagined as taking on human attributes?

This transformation of the coil into an image of a coil takes a decisive turn in Co-existence. The most complex of the three canvases in composition and texture, this painting shows grotesque human forms emerging in fields of rich impasto. A combination of three large circles of cane rings dominating the center takes the shape of an amorphous creature that wears a headdress made of pieces of basket and stares with one large eye, which is also a painted version of the base of a basket. What is more, a real magic marker in the lower right corner serves as the phallus of this entity. Though the pen initially attracted Kabiito as a familiar example of the influence of an imported commodity culture, he claimed to have used it playfully as a symbol of sexual union. (11) In light of its dual role, then, the pen--an instrument for making marks now referring to appropriation as well as transformation/creation--can perhaps be understood also as symbolic of Kabiito's enterprise of art-making, his goal of pushing the boundaries of functional objects to alter them into pictorial signs.

"After I began, I kept on changing, and changing", says Kabiito, "Until I came to that stage of ... nonfigurative form." (12) While none of these images is in fact completely nonfigurative, figural presence in them draws much less attention than in Ssengendo's. But toward the very end of the series, Kabiito once more relies on the authority of a figure, though without submitting completely to a decisive narrative. In Self-Portrait (Fig. 13), he paints directly on goatskin--used in certain Kiganda dances and as a ritual carpet (kiwu) inside the royal tomb during ceremonies--to recall momentarily his teacher's work. Faintly evocative of Ssengendo's Conversations in its emphasis on a character looking out from the foreground, the presence of another schematized figure in the background, and in its use of an indigenous material as its base, the image claims its narrative identity most immediately in its title. Kabiito, however, paints along the natural disposition of the soft hair of goatskin not only to visually integrate the curious "hairy" image to the surface more than the elongated man in Ssengendo's picture, but also to make the floating marks of paint in the background reminiscent of the nonfigurative forms in the upper right corner of his own Co-existence. Furthermore, bark-cloth reappears here as another reference to the interaction between actual objects and their painted illusions, only here the framed disc, present in its entirety in Stronghold, has disintegrated into a semicircular fragment on the figure's left and a quadrant on his right shoulder, with the remaining quarter missing. Thus, it seems to me that having explored the pictorial possibilities of tangible artifacts and their images on canvas, Kabiito in the end acknowledges his debt to Ssengendo as well as to the legacies of Trowell and her immediate successors, but also demands recognition of his own artistic inquiry. And leaving its traces in the painted patterns and fragments of bark-cloth scattered in this picture, the black image stares at us as a personal fiction visualized on the surface of a collective signifier. Whereas the title claims an authentic selfhood, perhaps a specific story about an individual's local roots, his (or rather, "its") spectral presence appears to possess the liberating indeterminacy of a dynamic sign.

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Thus far I have argued that Kabiito's pictures free themselves from any static notion of ethnic identity, any fixity of meaning, to emerge as multivalent images that assert his claim as a contemporary artist in the diverse intellectual milieu of the global arena and that important local factors play a vital role in shaping their origin and destination. However, since such an ambition of an African artist, especially with easel painting as its tool and focus on formal experiments, is bound to be prey to a complex power discourse dominating the same global arena that the artist aspires to reach, a brief discussion of the nature of that politics of culture will place the significance of Kabiito's endeavor in a historical perspective broader than what we have been considering so far.

Local Reinvention in a Global Politics of Culture

The 1970s were a decade of battle cries, echoes of which still reverberate in Euro-American cultural circles. Slogans like "Death of the Author," "Death of Art," and "Birth of the Reader" signaled a radical shift in the paradigm of art history and criticism, from Greenbergian elitism to an ostensibly relativist approach to art as a locus of social discourses. Easel painting was "villainized," to borrow Arthur Danto's term (Danto 1993:68), particularly because Greenberg had hailed it as the quintessential visual medium capable of registering the primal mark of the Author's genius. Well into this era of revisionism, Brian Wallis noted art's newfound status as a testing ground for a variety of theories: "[T]he issue is less how art criticism can best serve art, than how art can be a fruitful realm for critical and theoretical activity" (Wallis 1984:xvi). Academically trained artists from the former colonies, however, fell through the cracks during this clash of the Titans (West 1989; Enwezor 1999). How could one kill an Author from a formerly colonized society that had never had an opportunity to flaunt such a figure to begin with? This is the question that has since lingered in the margins. (13) Wallis's comment leaves one wondering how a contemporary African artist's work, more often than not dismissed by most modernist as well as many postmodernist culture brokers as a mere derivative of Western trends, could serve a corresponding critical practice that is itself only in the making.

Obviously, then, on the infrequent occasions when, through this postmodernist euphoria, such art has been considered for critique, its privileged "newborn" readers have not only tragically trivialized it as a banal mirror of social realities (Ilona 1993-94:87), but have silently swept under the carpet any instance that has refused to comply with such a homologous reading of art vis-a-vis society. My dense commentary on Kabiito Richard's pictures is my reaction to this attitude that still rules the reception of contemporary African art in the West. Far from transparent devices of storytelling, the images lend themselves to rigorous analyses of material, technique, pictorial strategy, subject, and other such sources that inform their formal and conceptual construction. In other words, I deliberately underscore what I consider to be the crucial factor: the artist's agency.

This approach, of course, will most likely invite accusation of an anachronistic alliance with the formalist dictums of a dead modernism, thus reaffirming rather than undoing the well-known myth of the schooled African artist's lack of originality. But when Arthur Danto, in his defense of the reemerging "posthistorical abstraction" in New York around 1990, interprets the "Death of Art" slogan (read: end of the modernist prescriptions for art) as a political declaration of the 1970s, like "Death of the Ruling Class" (Danto 1993:64), one is tempted to ask why this death should have the same meaning for postcolonial African artists, since the politics was hardly theirs; moreover, why any cautionary measure against an uncritical adoption of postmodernist strategies in postcolonial contexts should necessarily imply resurrection of an obsolete version of modernism. As a matter of fact, modernism's numerous intersecting as much as diverging enterprises through a century from Manet to Rothko make any proposition for its wholesale resurrection simply absurd; rather, it offers possibilities of reinvention of some of its pictorial strategies that may very well be meaningful in certain postcolonial milieus. "The clear truth is that abstraction is possible," argues Danto. "The question is only what made it so vehemently actual all at once and at that moment. And the answer, it seems to me, would have to be local rather than global" (Danto 1993:67; my emphasis). The specific circumstances of the art practice at a site, then, are sufficient to validate reinvention of not only abstraction, but any other elements of modernist representation that may prove to be relevant for that place.

A mere derivation is basically a parasitic act. Its manner of borrowing and execution elevates the originary status of the lending model, a folly that confirms its own inferiority. Let me cite an observation made in a non-African context to illustrate the difference between this form of borrowing and reinvention. During the heyday of postmodernism in the 1980s, Thomas McEvilley wrote an essay on contemporary Indian art. In its patronizing tone (an interesting evidence of a self-assured postmodernist's latent biases) and its comic search for a few dominant patterns of art practice in the complex art world of a vast nation whose provincial cultural differences alone can bewilder any Westerner, the essay is an annoying example of a feeble attempt to understand a postcolonial art scene. At least as an attempt, it nonetheless does make some instructive comments, one of which is on the question of cross-cultural borrowing. "[I]t should be said," writes McEvilley,

   that in asking who made something
   that looked a certain way
   first, we are asking a question that
   in a global world, where all elements
   are laid out on the table, is
   surely dead. We can see the African
   model that moved Picasso,
   and we can see the Matisse that
   moved someone else. The useful
   question now is not who first
   thought of the look, but what each
   culture or artist do with the look,
   how it was used, contexualized,
   filled with meaning--how it functioned
   (McEvilley 1986:108).

Two points become clear from this passage. First, reinvention crucially depends on one's ability to recontextualize the borrowed elements and inscribe them with new meaning; and second, because of an equally prominent history of borrowing on the part of the lending culture, any claim to the authenticity of its own model is pointless--one more banal display of its power to dictate self-expression in a global climate.

At any rate, despite Kabiito's formal inclinations, his pictorial approach significantly deviates from the strategies behind most modernist art. His experiments of "marrying" disparate materials on the picture surface to see how they "behave" may remind us of the making of modernist collage, such as those under Synthetic Cubism, in their objective if not in form; but that is where they part company. Kabiito neither chooses the elements he brings to canvas--physically or in illusory forms--through chance encounters, nor does he regard them simply for their formal resilience. Instead, he carefully selects items for specific ritual functions or cultural memories as well as their potential to participate in his pictorial drama. This is the story of neither modernist nor postmodernist collage. This conscious strategy of employing specific functional or mnemonic devices from one's own material culture to fracture their contexts with the help of one's acquired knowledge (and here the institution's legacy becomes an indispensable factor) of the formal language of modern art to produce images that assert a global claim is what I consider a local reinvention of modernism. In other words, modernism, recontexualized and inscribed with new meaning in Makerere's context, performs a mediating role in the artist's renegotiations with his idea of tradition. On the one hand, the local origins of the artifacts, pictorially distanced yet a part of the history of the pictures' making, secure the images from succumbing to the spurious notion of a universal aesthetic that modernism so passionately professed; on the other hand, their global ambition decisively resists any claim to authenticity of local tradition. This to me is a creative solution to a postcolonial artist's search for his position in a postmodern art world, if not a postmodernist strategy par excellence.

The interest of so much of postmodern art in critiquing the artist's own subjectivity by blurring the divide between highbrow and mass culture, or between art and life, hinges on a profound distrust of the Cartesian myth of the ego-centered "I" and its concomitant notion of progress, concepts central to the history of modernism. However, whether such modes of self-analysis will be relevant for artists whose society has been a victim of those ideas of Enlightenment via colonization will depend on those individuals' interpretations of the specific conditions of their milieu. While the Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare (Hynes 2001), or South African Berni Searle (Coombes 2001), for example, have indeed engaged in the deconstruction of selfhood in powerful ways through mixed media installations, Kabiito obviously chooses a different avenue, one of direct engagement with his canvas in his studio. And as long as a case can be made by showing how such a project is interwoven with various local and global issues, I am not ready to subscribe to the evolutionary view that Kabiito's passion for painting and collage as means of self-definition, in contrast with the obviously postmodern gestures of Shonibare or Searle, is a retrogressive step in art making. Sidney Kasfir's analogy between easel painting and the literary genre of novel as a "localized" mode of expression in African contexts (Kasfir 2002:87) suggests that the medium will continue to be a viable option to many African artists in the twenty-first century. Given the contemporary art scene in Africa, it will therefore demand the same critical attention as other forms of visual expression.

[This article was accepted for publication in September 2003.]

(1.) Interview, Kampala, October 23, 1997.

(2.) The four kabakas buried at Kasubi are: Mutesa I (d. 1884), Mwanga II (d. 1904), Dawdi Chwa (d. 1939), and Mutesa II (d. 1969).

(3.) Interview, Kampala, August 19, 1997.

(4.) Interview, Kampala, August 26, 1997.

(5.) With aid from the Calico Printers' Association of Manchester, Trowell even began a textile design class in the 1950s, where students learned to design and print fabrics by appropriating visual motifs from local baskets, mats, and earthenware. These prints, marketed as "Makerere Prints," became popular for a brier period.

(6.) Interview, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, March 12, 1999.

(7.) Margaret Trowell School of Fine Arts Handbook, 13.

(8.) I use Untitled as a tentative title for this painting in the absence of a more reliable one.

(9.) Jonathan Kingdon, interview, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, March 12, 1999.

(10.) Interview, Kampala, October 23, 1997.

(11.) Ibid.

(12.) Ibid.

(13.) The same question has been raised about the parallel scenario of women artists in the West (see Pollack 1990:126-7, Bal and Bryson 1991:184, and Chave 2000:149-63).

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