Museums and contemporary African art. (dialogue).

Some Questions for Curators

The following exchange attempts to document the rapidly changing scenario of museum practices in exhibiting contemporary African art. I asked museum curators in Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, Berlin, Vienna, and Frankfurt to respond to a set of questions, which follow my background remarks below. I hope it will stimulate further discussion. Responses should be directed to [e-mail] and should aim for brevity.

At the 1989 Triennial Symposium on African Art, the first one in which contemporary art was debated as a serious topic by curators, discussions stalled on the vexed question, Should contemporary African art (or equally, Native American, Australian Aboriginal art, etc.) be subsumed into the regional collections of a museum and displayed there, or does it belong in the department of contemporary art? No one was sure what to do about this, because leaving contemporary art out of the African display spaces seems to promote a false impression to the museum public that African art ended with the colonial conquest and that African cultures are therefore backward-looking and anti-modern; yet excluding the work of African artists from the museum's contemporary art displays suggests that they are not "good" enough (au courant, original) by Western museum standards to be included there. Since 1989 both strategies have been tried, often successfully, though both fears have also turned out to be well founded.

The venerable Ethnologisches Museum (ex-Museum fur Volkerkunde) in Berlin first opted to include contemporary Native American art as a regular installation, and since this past August (2002) has made a quite serious commitment to contemporary Angolan (and other African) art as well. In a wall text, the Native American curator explains that contemporary Native American art is shown here because the mainstream contemporary venues have no interest in it, so it's here or nowhere, as far as Berlin is concerned. Frankfurt's equally renowned Museum der Weltkulturen (also ex-Museum fur Volkerkunde) has opened a contemporary space, Galerie 37, on its grounds. This is the hard-won project of retiring curator Johanna Agthe, who, with Elsbeth Court, recently organized "Dreaming in Pictures," a career retrospective of the work of Ugandan Jak Katarikawe, a "visionary" painter whose work stands in contrast to the types of art more often seen in transnational venues (see my review article in this issue, p. 74). Separate may not be equal, but it preserves the possibility of exhibiting hard-to-classify art to a public interested in formerly colonized parts of the world.

In the United States the evolving strategy, at least in art museums, seems to be to opt for inclusion rather than separation from mainstream contemporary art. For example, the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago acquired and installed major works by Yinka Shonibare and William Kentridge, which were on view during the College Art Association meetings of 2001. The National Museum for African Art (NMAfA) in Washington, because of its already specialized nature, is able to have its cake and eat it too, by creating the new position of contemporary art curator, currently held by Elizabeth Harney, and setting up separate exhibition spaces devoted to African contemporary work. While this works nicely for the museum public, it may be less than wholeheartedly embraced by some artists of African origin who prefer to think of themselves as transnationals or "just artists" and don't want their ethnicity to be a defining part of their artistic personas. (Incidentally, one problem which immediately drops away by following the mainstreaming path is the issue of just who is an African artist, since it becomes irrelevant. Both Kentridge and Shonibare have, for different reasons, been subjects of that kind of scrutiny in the past.)

Blockbuster shows have greatly influenced the mainstreaming tendency. One only has to think of a decade ago, when Susan Vogel's "Africa Explores" was split between the then-Center for African Art and the New Museum for Contemporary Art, which may have been the thin end of the wedge in this debate, at least for the United States. Four years later, Clementine Deliss's "Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa" was held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and this past season, Okwui Enwezor's "The Short Century," which was only partly about "art," was shown at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art before going on to P.S. 1, MOMA's more experimental partner in Queens. From these examples, it looks as if "contemporary African" is being exhibited as part of an increasingly globalized contemporary art-system outside of NMAfA and the European ethnology museums, both of which define their parameters somewhat differently. The question will be, What are the gains and losses involved in this trend? I solicited replies to these specific queries:

1. Have there been any recent shifts in your museum's exhibition or collecting policy toward the work of contemporary African artists? Or do the questions raised back in 1989 still seem too intractable?

2. Has the identity issue (e.g., artists of African origin who live and practice in Western countries, or artists of European descent who live and practice in African countries) been raised as a classificatory problem of collection or display at your institution? An example: At a recent NEH-sponsored art workshop in Atlanta, some of the African American artists planning a joint exhibition project on African American and South African art were unsure about including white South African artists, because the underlying logic of the exhibition plan stressed the parallels in experience between segregation and apartheid. One of the things it revealed was the difference between American and South African cultural politics: the American multicultural mosaic which is infinitely subdivisible versus the ANC-driven ideology of One South Africa.

3. The transnational artist who lives and works far from his or her country of origin represents a tiny minority among all practicing African artists, probably less than 1%, but now is receiving a great deal of overdue attention in international exhibitions such as biennials, triennials, and the 2002 quintennial Documenta 11. Do you see this trend as having redefined, for Western-based curators, critics, and the public, the parameters of what contemporary African art encompasses, by focusing on artists with international connections and proclivities?

4. What will happen to African artists who work in more "traditional" modern media (aside from not being invited to biennials)? A clear-cut example of a disjuncture between global and local practice is the dominance of video and other types of installation art in major Western-sponsored venues and the near disappearance of painting and traditional (especially carved) sculptural forms there. Not only are such technologies as video difficult to afford for artists practicing in most African countries, but they are received with considerable skepticism by local audiences. Painting, although an imported colonial form, has been domesticated as thoroughly as the novel, and is now quite justifiably considered "African" by those same audiences. One result is two separate universes of contemporary practice which are not easily bridged.

5. In Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, 2000) the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said of globalization and culture that as cosmopolitanism increases, so in fact does parochialism (p. 246). In other words, global flows, because they are highly selective, create as much misunderstanding as they do the confluence of ideas, so the best we can hope for is a kind of "working misunderstanding" about cultures far from our own. Would you like to comment about this relative to African artists and the various "platforms" (to use Okwui Enwezor's Documenta term) available to them?

6. Taking the long view of a century or more, do you see the current situation as having anything in common with the period in which African art was first propelled onto a world stage? Who if anyone is being colonized, and by what or whom?

Sidney Littlefield Kasfir

Dialogue Editor

SIDNEY LITTLEFIELD KASFIR divides her time between Atlanta, where she teaches and curates African art at Emory University, and northern Kenya, where since 1992 she has studied and participated in Samburu pastoralist arts and encounters with modernity. She is also Dialogue editor and a consulting editor of African Arts.