Katarikawe dreaming: notes on a retrospective. .

Bilder aus Traumen/Dreaming in Pictures: Jak Katarikawe was written for an exhibition of the same name that opened at Galerie 37, Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (September 14, 2001-March 31, 2002). The show is scheduled to travel to the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi and the Makerere University Art Gallery in Kampala, Uganda. For dates, see the exhibition Web site: http://www.katarikawe02-03exhibition.info/.

The catalogue, by Johanna Agthe and Elsbeth Joyce Court, is in both German and English (Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurt am Main, 2001; 152 pp, 11 b/w & 152 color illustrations, map; 21,50 euros softcover).

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For those who track the fortunes of contemporary African art and artists, three notable exhibitions took place in Germany in 2001-2002 which invite both questions and comparisons. The two group shows, "The Short Century" in Munich and Berlin (later Chicago and New York) and the mammoth Documenta 11 in Kassel, both directed by uber-curator Okwui Enwezor, garnered major international publicity and critical attention. For Documenta, a bellwether art-world event held every five years in Kassel with attendant transatlantic pilgrimages, this is the norm. "The Short Century" did not really hit its stride in critical and media attention until it opened in New York. Overlapping them with much less hoopla was the forty-year career retrospective of Ugandan painter Jak Katarikawe, organized by Johanna Agthe and Elsbeth Court at Galerie 37, the contemporary art space on the premises of the venerable Museum der Weltkulturen (formerly the Museum fur Volkerkunde) at Frankfurt am Main. Although I was asked to review only the Katarikawe catalogue, it helps in developing my argument to use the other exhibitions as a foil, especially as they all took place around the same time in one national locality.

This review essay therefore consists of three parts. First, the issue of audience is critical to understanding the multiple strands of creative work or cultural production which are encompassed by the terms "contemporary" and "African" in current exhibitionary practice. I will approach this through a brief comparison of Katarikawe's show to the group exhibitions in order to examine their "reach," that is, what audiences they are intended for, and the degree to which those intentions actually succeed. In an increasingly globalizing kunstwelt, this becomes in part an issue of localities, but only in part. In a longer essay it would be useful to compare the curatorial philosophies as well, since they are very different, but here I will mention them only in the most general way. The second part will describe "Dreaming in Pictures" as a joint intellectual project, and its catalogue as a particular approach to talking about art. Finally, in the third section I will raise one or two issues about Katarikawe's art which are mentioned but not developed in the catalogue.

Reach: The Who and Where of Looking

Unlike the two large group exhibitions, which were expressly conceptualized to elicit critical attention from the mainstream art world and its ancillary media in Europe and the Americas, "Dreaming in Pictures" was meant to engage not only with an audience in Germany but also with those in two African cities, Nairobi (where Katarikawe has worked for the last two decades) and Kampala (where his early career developed). The Kampala run will return Katarikawe's work to the city where he held his first major exhibition thirty-five years ago, a show of wax-crayon pictures by a young taxi driver and chauffeur which happily could have fit into an Oshogbo workshop (and whose work logically found its way to Iwalewa-Haus in Bayreuth in 1990).

The issue of an exhibition's reach is not only conceptual: moving "The Short Century" to Chicago from Berlin was a little like moving the Queen Mary out of dry dock, and its sheer size kept it out of the National Museum of African Art in Washington. In New York the only space large enough was P.S. 1, MOMA's cavernous partner in Queens. (1) Documenta, which began as Germany's postwar absolution for the Nazi treatment of modern art, has strong European ideological roots but under Enwezor's direction extended its coverage to include fifteen individual African artists and two collectives. And though Documenta is much too sprawling to go anywhere, (2) he managed to deprovincialize it by creating preliminary "platforms" (let the metaphor stand as political) in locales far from Kassel, the exhibition itself being the fifth and final platform. One, a conference on the problem of global cities, with a stellar list of speakers, was held in Lagos. It might not be the city of your dreams for everything on your to-do list, but (or maybe therefore) as a site for this particular conference, it was a brilliant choice.

Unlike the video-rich diet offered by the big shows, the Katarikawe, retrospective comprised fewer than 100 works, all in pictorial format, so that with some Ford Foundation assistance it has been able to plan what no Western postcolonial blockbuster exhibition has been able to contemplate so far--to go to Africa after its Frankfurt run. Logistically this is not very complex compared to bigger exhibitions, but conceptually it will be moving into a very different space which may require some strategic curatorial rethinking. (3) Nothing exposes the oversimplification of the globalizing process faster than an examination of the problems of African venues for European-planned exhibitions. (4) The challenges are not only those of logistics or expense or security, though these considerations insinuate themselves from the very beginning. It is the issue of audience reception that concerns me here. What happens when we project the Katarikawe exhibition onto a Kampala or Nairobi public?

Much of Katarikawe's work is explicitly or by inference erotic. In Frankfurt, or Europe generally, sexuality and its representation are a ubiquitous part of public culture, so the depiction of eroticism hardly deserves special attention. Galerie 37 is a series of small rooms, one of which was given over to the theme of the erotic, since "Dreaming" is not installed chronologically but thematically. Further, for European audiences who perceive the work as "non-Western," "neoprimitive" (the "good" primitive, primitif), or "visionary," the sex is discreetly clothed in a scholarly rhetoric of otherness. But possible problems could surface in Nairobi and Kampala, where cultural officials invited to comment for the press and TV might suffer a certain discomfort from the images of a woman copulating with a lion, or the painting of the voluptuous seated nude with legs spread revealingly as she dreams of a husband. (5)

It is also the case that Katarikawe's pictures are illustrations of his dreams or imaginings, and the catalogue is full of verbatim narrative situations--sexual longing being one--which constantly recur in his work. It is not the local art establishment but the untutored public, the people we art professionals are always trying to convince to walk in the door, which poses the biggest challenge. In Nairobi, Jak's contractual gallery, Watatu (which is not the show's venue), occupies an elite space on the second floor of a closely guarded downtown high-,rise; his work has had lengthy exposure at Watatu, but mainly to resident expatriates and local intellectuals (see the catalogue, ills. pp. 34-35). It is also the case that his dealer, the late Ruth Shaffner, framed his work in the same rhetoric one would expect in Europe.

As for white-collar Nairobi--the bank clerks and schoolteachers who might also see the exhibition in the National Museum's more accessible space--how will they react to an artist who ignores the usual social codes? Colonial and missionary mores have a long shelf life when it comes to the public representation of sexuality (remember the recent collective indignation over the nude statue of Shango in Lagos?), and within the past five years, women (aside from those of the night) who venture out in miniskirts have been stripped naked in both Nairobi and Kampala busparks by self-appointed guardians of the public morals. While there was a strong public outcry over these events, especially from women, there were also the ambivalent letters in the press saying that while vigilantism was bad, the women also "deserved it" for being so shameless.

It is perhaps ironic that while local African audiences would surely not see Katarikawe's themes as the work of a "cultural other," it is the very familiarity of his biography--Kigezi herdboy, a family with no money for school fees, Kampala taxi driver-as one more urban migration story which makes his erotic fantasies unacceptable for public delectation. They cross a privacy threshold which for wananchi (ordinary people) is held inviolable.

But the issue of audience involves more than just locality: there is no "global audience," or even one pristinely divided with Africans here and Europeans there--just numerous local ones of differing degrees of complexity. In many African cities, expatriates form a large part of the patronage sector of the local intelligentsia. Nairobi, for example, is home to more than two hundred NGOs and is the African headquarters of the United Nations. These organizations, along with Ford and Rockefeller offices, expand and further cosmopolitanize the usual embassy patronage and the institutional presence of the former colonizers--the French Cultural Centre, Goethe Institute, and British Council--who are still active in supporting local arts programming. To these one could add the occasional safari tourist. (Nairobi is also the starting and ending point for most camera and hunting safaris, but however well-heeled, tourists are not usually art patrons, and stalk the craft markets instead.)

There are two things these resident foreigners, different though they are from one another, have in common as an audience of potential patrons. One is an expectation that African art ought to look different from that produced in Berlin, Paris, and London. They are therefore very attentive to an artist such as Jak Katarikawe who (somewhat quaintly these days) actually paints pictures and seems to exist somewhere beyond the reach of the critical apparatus of the cutting edge. Were he living in the American South instead of East Africa, there would be accounts of him as an "outsider artist."

The second common attribute, the other side of the same coin, is that these expatriates tend not to collect the work of artists working in a "transnational mode," that is, one that they don't perceive as local and African. This comes with their territory (for example, it reflects the NGO philosophy of finding local solutions to development problems) and has changed very little over the past generation. It is tied up with notions of what is grassroots African, what is derivative, and what is merely bad art clothed in a current idiom.

Unlike Nairobi's, Kampala's intellectual and artistic life is dominated by Makerere University, and since Uganda has undergone severe dislocations through years of civil war and economic upheaval, the local exhibition system is no longer built on the patronage of a large expatriate community like Nairobi's. Nonetheless the presence of a major art school with its teaching staff and students has always given it a self-sustaining character despite the ups and downs of politics, and a kind of noncommercial art-centeredness which Nairobi lacks.

If one then turns to indigenous intellectuals such as those at Makerere or the Kenyan universities, their reactions parallel those of the resident foreigners. Through an odd twist of history they have come to embrace painting and other works of rectilinear format as a fully indigenized genre within the context of postcolonialism. Picture-making has been part of the formal education system for the better part of a century now. So while decidedly more skeptical about the virtues of "the primitive" which occupy their European counterparts, local intellectuals do see painting (or novels or plays) as one of several possible vehicles for the legitimate expression of an African cultural identity. And more worldly than the wananchi, they might be gently amused, but not put off, by Katarikawe's sexual imaginings.

One could conclude that at least among educated classes, "Dreaming in Pictures" will have a very broad reach, even if for different reasons, among its African and European constituencies. If "The Short Century" had been a smaller, simpler undertaking and could have been shown in a few of the postcolonies with which it concerns itself, (6) it might well have been given a more mixed reception than in its Euro-American venues. Just as the "cultural other" is a Western construct which is by definition without resonance at the supposed site of otherness, so also are the late-colonial films and video-prone installation art formats that are a high point of "The Short Century" lacking in resonance for most local African audiences.

Unless one has grown up with a steady diet of television and movies, to the point where they become the dominant medium of visuality, it is difficult for an art audience to accept on faith the replacement of old-fashioned pictorial space with an essentially cinematic time-space instead. And regarding content, to the uninitiated these media would be vaguely perplexing and occasionally even insulting--the contemporary videos because they don't seem to be about anything in particular, and anticolonial films such as Jean Rouch's Les maitres fous because they seem to primitivize Africans.

What all this points toward is the still-emergent, unstable nature of what various publics perceive as contemporary, and African, art. Cultural matrices and their operating rules are often incommensurate across localities. Artists who have committed themselves to careers outside (or, less often, inside) Africa in pursuit of a borderless version of the contemporary have had to leave large segments of their local African audiences behind. This is neither bad nor good in itself, but it clarifies just how globalism operates: it is not just a smorgasbord of choices for artists to select from but also a tangled set of consequences, not all of which can be predicted.

"Dreaming in Pictures": The Project (7)

Johanna Agthe's East African anthology Wegzeichen [Signs]: Kunst aus Ostafrika 1974-89 (1990), the compendium of work she collected and interviews she conducted for the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Frankfurt over a fifteen-year period, provided the baseline for further work with Jak Katarikawe. She was joined by Elsbeth Court, a London-based lecturer, independent curator, and former resident of Nairobi who has known the artist's work over the past twenty years of his career. Together they prepared the broad outlines of his biography, using the earlier interviews by Agthe, supplemented by those of Hagen Neumuller in Bayreuth in 1990 at the time of the Iwalewa-Haus exhibition, and by those of Court in 2000. This first catalogue section, called "About Sixty--Attempt at a Biography," rummages through the artist's past using old family photos, news clippings, and gallery handouts. Taken as a whole, the biography is an admirable piece of sleuthing, divided into short periods defined by key events.

There are occasional seemingly inexplicable developments: Katarikawe's sponsor David Cook, then a Makerere English professor, spends three months teaching him to print his signature in block capitals, but the artist never learns to read and write. Yet a few years later he is a self-announced "professor" at Makerere, hired in 1975 as a demonstrator in the Music Department. How could that happen in a society such as Buganda, obsessed with paper qualifications? The answer is straightforwardly political: Idi Amin came to power in 1971, and the mass killings began less than two years later. Makerere's teaching staff was decimated as virtually all of its expatriates as well as many Ugandans fled the country. The university, the former home of several world-class scholars, struggled to stay open during those dark years (even after the "disappearance" of the Vice Chancellor himself) by hiring its own newly graduated B.A.s, and formal hiring requirements in the lower ranks were suspended. Ironically, a time of terror briefly became a time of opportunity for people like Katarikawe.

I was disappointed that only three paragraphs were devoted to the artist's past twenty years in Nairobi. I would like to have seen the same attention to anecdotal detail in this section as was given to his early years in Uganda. For example, Ruth Schaffner told me in 1994 that Katarikawe was the only artist in Kenya who was able to live well solely on the sale of his pictures. ("Well" meant a $1,000-a-month studio apartment in a pied a terre near the University.) One can't help wondering how he has interacted with other Watatu artists; though they are very disparate, they form an interesting network and include several activists such as Sane Wadu and Shine Tani, who have started their own workshops outside Nairobi. Despite (or perhaps because of) his stronger financial standing, Jak appears to have remained a solitary figure, at least among artists, a Ugandan in a Kikuyu-dominated city.

"Each One I Paint Is a Dream," the second and largest catalogue section (by Agthe), attempts to frame Katarikawe's pictures within the narratives he has attached to them in interviews. There is a problem, both with the language and his rambling speaking style, in turning the sometimes tangled narratives into a linear "story," but these are nonetheless rich and compelling. It is not stated explicitly, but it appears that the descriptions by the artist were recorded in English, not transcribed from Kiswahili, since his idiosyncratic idiom is corrected parenthetically in places. (8) That the English is so robust, full of speculation and asides, is surprising considering that Ruth Shaffner discouraged extensive discourse between him and his public on the grounds that "Jak doesn't speak much English."

The pictures and their narratives are grouped thematically. This approach draws out Katarikawe's major interests over the whole trajectory of his painting career, but it leaves the catalogue with no chronology of his development as an artist. For example, the portraits include not only a sophisticated and recognizable portrait of Elizabeth Bagaya, Princess of Toro, dated 1974, but also Bibi Arusi, a rendering of a bride painted in a heavily outlined art brut style, which was done only four years earlier. (9) It is hard to explain how this huge transition in Katarikawe's ability to depict naturalism occurred within that brief time frame. On the other hand, Bagaya is not an imagined work but was apparently copied from a newspaper photograph, which may have opened up a new image source for him, more precise and finite than the imagination.

At some point in the planning for the show, the authors decided not to try to create a chronology of Katarikawe's paintings, apparently because such a large number are undated and the artist is vague about when they were made (p. 12). Johanna Agthe instead proposes a rough chronology of his use of media, from drawings to watercolors to wax crayon to oils. But one could go further, in that Katarikawe's style for representing figures develops toward greater naturalism as he gains control of the oil painting technique. He also moves progressively toward the "white" canvas. In the Watatu years (1980s and '90s), human subjects are often replaced by humanoid Ugandan cattle expressing thoughts about themselves relative to people, as in Wife Pregnant, Cow also Pregnant. The palette is very light (the cattle themselves are white), and the brushwork thin and delicate compared to the heavy impasto and dark colors of the early paintings. Both styles are powerful, but they are very different--one would almost think they were by different artists. My personal favorites are the landscapes from the late '80s and '90s, especially the evocative and dreamlike Kigezi Valley of 1992, with its luminous, hazy sky and barely defined features.

The final section, by Elsbeth Court, "My Brush Speaks Better Than My Tongue," is a kind of wrap-up of Katarikawe's place in East African art history. This is a close to impossible task because (a) the writing on the art history of the region is so thin, and (b) as we've already seen, with his undated oeuvre and the generally spotty information on the Uganda years, an evaluation of Katarikawe himself is far from easy. One example is his supposed mentorship by Sam Ntiro, who was not in Kampala during most of the period (mid-'60s to mid-'70s) he is said to have helped the artist.

There is also Katarikawe's relationship to Makerere University, which I think the artist somewhat overstates perhaps in order to create what he perceives as a better pedigree for his work. While Michael Adams, who was very much a nonconformist, may have taken him under his wing for a while, the cultural politics of the University at the time I was living there were still quite elitist. The stingingly cruel incident reported on page 44 ("I Wish I Know to Write"), in which a Makerere lecturer, knowing Katarikawe is illiterate, tries to humiliate him by asking him to write on the blackboard in front of foreign visitors, rings very true.

Elsbeth Court makes some ingenious comparisons between the painting styles of Katarikawe and Giotto, but when it comes to actual influences, it is much harder to relate his work to that of other East African artists. Sam Ntiro came the closest, though Katarikawe has by now far surpassed Ntiro's work in both range and imagination. There was actually another informally taught artist with Makerere connections: Richard Ndabagoye (see S. Kasfir, Contemporary African Art, 1999, p. 150, ill. 119). He was employed as a sweeper there, and Adams and Jonathan Kingdon mentored him in printmaking techniques. Yet I can say with certitude that his work did not resemble theirs even minimally. (10) I think that the teaching dynamic plays out rather differently in these cases. In "normal" art-school pedagogy, students tend to imitate their most admired teachers until they can develop a style of their own. But informal training is just that: it is not an apprenticeship and lacks those intimate ties.

Prolegomena

I will end with some questions of my own to add to those raised by the authors.

(1) Nearly all of Katarikawe's career has taken place in urban environments, Kampala and Nairobi. Yet his imagery has never reflected the African city life he lives but is decidedly rural (or simply imaginary). Why? Or, put differently, how much of this can be attributed to gallery or art market pressures and how much to artistic vision?

(2) Kampala and Nairobi are very different art worlds (I have heard Kenyans refer to Uganda as "the other side of the moon"). In Kampala, as in Nsukka or Ife in Nigeria, the university's art school exerts a powerful presence. An artist like Katarikawe is therefore very much the exception to the rule, and he is regarded as a "scarce resource" requiring protection and nurturing. Nairobi, on the other hand, has always been a much tougher, dog-eat-dog environment, with self-taught or informally taught artists the norm and art school-trained artists in the minority. Doesn't an "outsider" artist (doubly so because also a Ugandan) function very differently in the two places?

(3) Is Katarikawe, using the current sense of the term, a transnational artist? Does twenty years of working outside his own country in an African, yet distinctly different, milieu make him one automatically? Or does one have to be an educated intellectual to adopt a transnational philosophy; that is, is it a closely articulated and self-conscious way of thinking rather than just living? In what ways is he different from certain Ethiopian artists (e.g., Wosene Kosrof) who live in the United States and continue to paint a field of images drawn from the Amharic scriptorium? Is that the same, philosophically, as painting cows that think?

(4) Finally, what is it about German culture that has made their museums and citizens, more than those in the United States or other European countries, so interested in documenting and collecting African culture ? This is not just the matter of contemporary art, of Johanna Agthe's efforts in Frankfurt, of Ulli Beier and Oshogbo and Iwalewa-Haus, or even of "The Short Century" (since Okwui Enwezor is, after all, not German, even if the sponsors were). It goes back much farther, to Nachtigal, Barth, Schweinfurth, Frobenius, and many others. Perhaps our German colleagues can answer this one, but it seems an important piece of European intellectual history for Africanists to grasp.

(1.) For details about the venues for "The Short Century," I have drawn upon comments by Chika Okeke, one of its co-curators, and the discussion he led at a graduate student seminar in the Department of Art History at Emory University in April 2002.

(2.) It took my colleague and Artforum critic James Meyer three days to view the entire show meticulously. The process included a significant amount of time watching videos.

(3.) I am writing this review in August 2002, but it is likely to be published after it has shown in Nairobi and during its Kampala run.

(4.) Once again one must make an exception of South Africa with its white-dominated and Western-style institutional base.

(5.) Johanna Agthe has since informed me that the second painting will be pulled from the show before it travels.

(6.) The show's premise is that the nationalist and independence movements in Africa were the main vehicle for the emergence of modernism in the arts (a powerful idea but one which might not always stand up to close scrutiny).

(7.) African Arts prefers to review exhibitions and catalogues separately. But perhaps because I've also seen the show in Frankfurt, talked with Johanna Agthe about it while there, and have curated a Katarikawe show myself at the beginning of his and my career, I have found it especially difficult to compartmentalize the catalogue as an isolated piece of scholarship. I see "Dreaming in Pictures" as a project instead, which was realized jointly through the exhibition and the catalogue.

(8.) "We have restricted our editing work to correcting errors and omitting repetitions" (p. 10).

(9.) There are actually three dates given for Bibi Arusi: ca. 1965, ca. 1966 (both p. 105), and in the caption, ca. 1970 (p. 106).

(10.) Ndabagoye's very promising career as a printmaker came to an abrupt end when he became involved in a crime of passion and was imprisoned.