Reading The Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. (books).

READING THE CONTEMPORARY African Art from Theory to the Marketplace

Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor 

Institute of International Visual Arts, London, and the MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999. 432 pp., 51 b/w & 19 color illustrations, notes. $35 softcover.

The editors of Reading the Contemporary, Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe, tell us that by issuing a challenge to the way art in Africa in the twentieth century has been written, they aimed to "provide an alternative art history ... [and] to lay a groundwork for its methodology" (p.14). Readers almost immediately anticipate that this alternative will be like a rollercoaster ride: hardly one page in from the introduction, its first essay, by Oguibe, takes Thomas McEvilley to task for allegedly having concealed in himself the desires of a porn addict in relation to the New York artist Ouattara (McEvilley's African interlocutor in his book Fusions: African Artists at the Venice Biennale [Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994]). Oguibe sees McEvilley as pressing relentlessly for the African artist's subjection. The same McEvilley, we ask, who years earlier devoured William Rubin over the "Primitivism" show, and who challenged Africa Now! to boot? Readers are then even more intrigued to discover that McEvilley himself has an essay in Reading the Contemporary. We know there must be a subtext here, and this, if nothing else, guarantees an initial flood of adrenaline. By the book's end, however, both this flood and the opening promise have been arrested. Oguibe's first essay, though ingenious in places, turns out to be polemical--an attention-grabbing cry of "fire" in the face of smoldering, though firefighters, already departing for other crises, assure us there is no risk of re-ignition.

It will become clear later why I characterize the volume's opener in such terms, but suspicions are already aroused when we realize that the book assembles previously published essays on art, photography, and film by institutionally secure authors including Valentine Mudimbe, Frank Ukadike, John Picton, Anthony Appiah, and Kobena Mercer. That is, for most Africanist historians of the visual with an interest in the subject of the contemporary or modern and the difficult issues and controversies surrounding them, the essays will be quite familiar from earlier appearances in venues like Third Text, Nka, and African Arts.

Divided into four parts, the volume's twenty-two essays plot a path, progressively, from the difficulties of twentieth-century art historiography to national, regional, and, finally, individualized histories and critiques. The volume closes with discussion of the same issues with which it had commenced, but now more concerned with contemporary "metropolitan" art at the millennium's end.

"Theory and Cultural Transaction" consists of essays by, among others, Everlyn Nicodemus, Appiah, and Picton, each exploring a particular doubt. For example, Appiah's, calling in modern African works of art and literature, is a hypercritique of both postmodern practice and discourses such as Lyotard's and Jameson's that claim to have produced an account of these works. This contribution, and all the others in this section, means to question the highly unsatisfactory status of this art in the West (exacerbated in the new globality) by revealing the falsity of its processes and meanings. Examples: the anonymity still attached to its objects, the substitution of artistic individuation by the authority of the collector, the failure to consider local valuations of contemporary artists, and the demand for the strange idea of authenticity, seen by contributors as a fabricated nonissue. Some of the essays offer alternative possibilities while also detailing specific traditions, thus anticipating more direct explorations of art histories in subsequent essays.

The second part of the book, "History" includes essays by Salah Hassan (questioning the traditional/modern dichotomy by exploring the implications of emigration for northern African artists), Manthia Diawara (on Malian photographer Seydou Keita's peculiar modern vision), Ima Ebong (on Senegal and Negritude's fallout), and Chika Okeke (on Nigeria's Zaria school and its outcomes). Stylistically divergent, the essays in this section nevertheless involve the centrality, in the emergence of modern practices, of interrogations of nationality. Two of its forms are uncomfortable intersections where art practices had been co-opted either by then new nationalist politics or by expectations in the foreign lands to which artists migrated. This art struggled to escape exploitative subsumption by such instrumentality, its artists desiring (or strategically tending) to connect crucially to local historicities, real and, as was surely the case in Senegal, displaced. Some writers in the first section of the book had elucidated their analysis by attention to enigmatic artists like Cheri Samba. The artists who take center stage here, however, have matched and challenged Western artists on "their own" ideological turf (Ben Enwonwu and Amir Nour for example).

Narrowing the focus further, the third section, "Location and Practice," centers on single artists or, as in Octavio Zaya's essay, finds unexpected commonalities in their diverse practices. Specifically, though the contributors' African-born subjects come one or two generations after Nour's, they, like him, are established outside continental Africa. Writers here, including Enwezor, relate these younger artists' dissimilar dialogues to the cultural and historical practices of their places of origin, and their subversions of the demands and false expectations of the places where they have since made their homes. This subject could easily grow tedious--it is neither recent nor twentieth-century modern and, if flogged too much, risks becoming overly narcissistic. That problem is avoided, however, by the intensity and originality of the artists' "play" with their paradoxical (un)realities. Ike Ude's radical seizure of Igbo Adamma for a challenging performance of a reconfigured American self is only one of the examples explored.

The final section of the book, "Negotiated Identities," focuses on southern Africa, perhaps responding to Appiah's earlier claim for the historical uniqueness of this region (its modern and troubled history of race). Not only are all the above issues relevant (and the many parallels are surprising), but there was also a reversed vector of migration, with Europeans remaking their histories here in disquieting conditions. How had/have artists, black and white, participated in and dealt with this history? Specifically, how, Colin Richards asks, have they done so in the six or so years around the pivotal 19897 As David Koloane suggests, do White South African artists extend the notion of authenticity to black artists with whom they share the same national and political space, and what does this mean? These issues circulate between Margo Timm's sophisticated reading of the work of the late Namibian artist John Muafangejo (an essay likely to have more longevity than any other in the collection) and Enwezor's interrogation of the apparently unshiftable identities of Whiteness and blackness. The latter seems inspired by both Enwezor's early experience of Johannesburg and, most acutely, of an uneasy encounter with Pippa Skotnes's well-meaning but troubling--and in many ways for Enwezor, failed--exhibition that had attempted to (re)present San histories of encounter.

The last word is had by Laura Mulvey, who discusses Ousmane Sembene's film Xala in terms of its inimitable contributions not to African cinema but to the idea of cinema globally, an aim of the volume as a whole with regard to all forms of contemporary art. Xala, precisely because of its director's sophisticated relation with Malian/Senegalese traditions of narrative (Sembene's is more an intentional contrast that sometimes revives things repressed than it is a mimicry), offers unprecedented ways of seeing Africa's "new ruling class." This essay and Ukadike's earlier reveal the brilliance of African film in all its variety, and the complexity of the historical tradition to which, in one way or another, it is connected. Mulvey persuades that a future film (art) history must account for the incomparable contribution that artists of Africa and its modern diaspora have made to the definition of what it meant to be modern (anywhere) in the twentieth century. Because some of the essays were written as long ago as the early 1990s, the future of which she speaks is certainly already upon us.

Are there problems with Reading the Contemporary? Surely, but I will point only to moments when the quite contradictory positions across the essays see their logics fail dramatically. Consider for example V. Y. Mudimbe's contribution next to one by Oguibe. Mudimbe's wide-ranging essay critiques authenticity and imposed categorization, and posits a more fluid map of contemporary artistry than what Susan Vogel once outlined. Ultimately, however, Mudimbe does seem more enthusiastic (or did ca. 1993, judging by the space given this discussion) about one artistic "current" (was this not Jean Kennedy's invention?) of the three his essay plots. This current, "popular art," is represented by anti-narrativist artists Cheri Samba and Twins Seven-Seven and, Mudimbe argues, their story-telling contrasts such as Tshibumba Kanda and Middle Art.

In one section Mudimbe focuses on a subject recurring throughout Reading the Contemporary: European mentors or benefactors and the workshop artists trained under their (often patronizing) eye. His critique of one such mentor, Romain Delafosse, appears to agree with Oguibe's in his opening essay "Art, Identity, Boundaries." Oguibe's McEvilley might seem to share the attitudes of a Delafosse. However, Mudimbe, like those such as Vogel whom he criticizes, effectively opts for "popular art" as the most interesting(?) of his three "currents." This is the very kind of art that Oguibe's first essay disparaged--unnecessarily for his otherwise crucial argument--as both "barber shop ... signwrit[ing]" and as hardly "qualify[ing] as art beyond the sixth grade" (pp. 24, 25). Oguibe was referring to the Beninoise artist Toukoudagba, and therefore by extension also to a Muafangejo. Such name-calling of course denies these individuals their own easily affirmed agency, political savvy, and artistic complexity. A stance like Oguibe's is also quite contrary to the warnings of four others in the same volume (Margo Timm on Muafangejo, as well as the contributions by John Picton, Sidney Kasfir, and David Koloane). Worse, next to the Delafosse Mudimbe constructs, Oguibe comes to seem (by the way he writes) the more disquieting.

Such incongruities occur regularly in Reading the Contemporary. Whereas Mudimbe implies (p.45) that traditional African artists worked anonymously (that anonymity is not imposed by the whim of the Western collector), Sidney Kasfir will argue the contrary, as will Oguibe and, in fact, as do most Africanist art historians today. What Okeke constructs as "the academic portraiture tradition of Onabolu," Nicodemus strenuously worked against. Whereas Oguibe summons up the figure of the pornographic as desire contaminated by acute power-asymmetries (critiquing McEvilley as a subject who "[cannot] bring his own ambivalence to crisis"), Appiah imagines antihegemony and oppositionality (p. 54). I recall Oguibe's earlier metaphor of the McEvilley-Ouattara encounter as striptease, and wonder why he didn't simply suggest, as he has done on occasion, that Ouattara should have stripped with vulgar haste ("Dogon, Michelangelo, Picasso ... there is no difference"). McEvilley might well have thrown up in disgust, having thus been forced to abjectly confront his ambivalence. Pornography as revolution! Can we not, moreover, read Kasfir as radically "pro-pornography"? By which I mean, isn't her critique of the exclusionary idea "tourist art" at odds with Oguibe's fears? What else is "cheap, crude and mass produced" if not pornography as Kasfir defined it?

Finally, I wonder at a supposedly ascendant "alternative" art historiography that employs the reactionary monikers "Classical," for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African art, and "Caucasian art" (e.g., p. 27), for ... well, what? I also wonder at its occasional plotting of a Hegelian progressive teleology in which linear ancestral traces and center stagings (problematic in themselves) can be deployed, without the difficult mess of fluxing trajectories and competing voices, to terminate in oneself (I kid you not; p. 163). Such an approach, in which problems are simply spat out, counters both Kasfir's admonition that "the canon be brought into alignment with the corpus" and Appiah's caution to run shy of Weberian constructions (p. 57 on). In "[Art] Historians as Ad-Men" (Casabella, Autumn 1986), the Italian critic Vittorio Gregotti admonished postmodern "critics" (Charles Jencks et al.) for repeating the sins of their forbears (Alfred Barr et al. in the 1930s), insisting that theirs was not criticism but mere discourse production. Gregotti remarked that the generators of what in both separated moments was seen as "alternative art history" were hardly separable from their subjects, and that they can now be understood as having been, in their desire to center their artists, merely "critics at the elbow." Quite a few of the essays in Reading the Contemporary suffer from this absence of critical distance.

The most valuable thing, then, about this volume is that it brings together a group of essays on the contemporary, in (and revealing) all their contradictions. I wish Enwezor and Oguibe, rather than smoothing over critical differences (unsuccessfully as it happens), had made a strength of this diversity and of the passage of time witnessed by declaring its overarching subject the intellectual history of conflicts around the contemporary. Staged on an MIT Press venue though, the essays will reach an audience well beyond the Africa-centered one normally engaging its topics--one of the editors' aims surely, but one for which this press's trendy persona is, of course, a mixed blessing.

IKEM STANLEY OKOYE, art historian and architect, teaches at the University of Delaware and occasional practices with Anubis Architecture. He is also Editor of Ijele: Art e Journal, a quarterly juried scholarly journal of modern and contemporary art available free on the Web.