Whither African Art? Emerging Scholarship at the end of an age.

In their abundance, diversity, and complexity, the classical arts of Africa remain as rich and inexhaustible a subject for study as Roman art or Shakespeare. Yet scholarship in the traditional arts of Africa seems--if anything--quite exhausted.

Over the past century, African art--chiefly sculpture in wood--has gradually won wide recognition as one of the great artistic achievements of humankind and become the subject of thousands of scholarly studies. Ironically, just as it has finally entered museum collections and curricula worldwide, a majority of Africanist scholars of all generations--not just the youngest ones--have been abandoning the study of traditional sculpture to gravitate towards other subjects, most frequently contemporary art by Africans, the arts of the diaspora, the reception of "primitive" art in the West, and nonsculptural objects such as ceramics and textiles.

The symptoms of exhaustion in recent years seem clear: fewer books presenting significant new research--many of these based on research initiated over a decade ago; fewer, thinner, less-ambitious exhibitions of big ideas that attempt to challenge public perceptions of Africa.

The symposium on Emerging Scholarship in African Art was convened at Columbia University in April of 2005 (1) to examine the field and seek new directions in the study of African art. We were particularly concerned with current research on all the objects from Africa's great art traditions that arrived in the West on the tide of enthusiasm of the twentieth century and are now marooned in Western art museums. We also wanted to consider study of the various current forms of visual culture that have replaced those objects, as well as related research on traditional art forms not found in museums, such as architecture and performance arts. In the discussion that follows, I use "African art" to mean all these classical art forms.

The nine presenters whose revised papers are published here (2) were heartening, for they suggested pathways towards a renewed study of the age-old arts of Africa.

The End of the Era of Collecting

If the study of African art seems in many respects exhausted, that may be because we are at the end of the first cycle in the history of African art in America. The first hundred-year-long cycle was one of intense collecting of information, objects, and images. From the early explorers to recent dissertation researchers, many hundreds of administrators, former Peace Corps volunteers, missionaries, and scholars trooped to Africa and brought back volumes of data, photographs, film, and all manner of objects. The kinds of dense study and collecting that were the core of all that activity have now pretty much run their course and are no more. The century of copious collecting was also the century when African art won admittance to Western institutions. The discussion that follows focuses on African art in American art institutions: art history departments and art museums with encyclopedic art collections. (3)

Beginning around 1950, and lasting through the end of the twentieth century, the process of African art becoming established in academic circles and in the public consciousness was led to an uncommon degree--more than for other fields--by museum exhibiting and publishing. (4) The presence of African objects in the museum setting itself raised basic questions--definitions of art, issues of representation and authenticity--and provided the perfect venue for answers. Not surprisingly, museum-supported publications were often object based, and many of the most enduring examined a single rich area or style: Mangbetu, Yoruba, Chokwe, Baule, Igbo, Luba, Baga, Ashanti--the list goes on.

During this era of collecting, a majority of all extant nineteenth and early twentieth century sculptures poured out of Africa largely into the collections of Europe and America. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the numbers of objects concerned and the relentless thoroughness of collecting after 1960 far exceeded that of the colonial period. There are myriad ramifications of this collecting, but considered narrowly, its double impact has permanently altered the field: In the West, African art has become exceedingly expensive compared to contemporary art, transforming it into "museum art," and in Africa, research has become much less rewarding.

In a logical sequence, museum collections of classical African art are now proliferating in medium-sized independent and university museums. (5) There is no turning back in this process; legal and logistical reasons will oblige these institutions, like the big museums, to remain substantially committed to African art for many decades to come--even if scholarship and public interest wane considerably.

For a fifty-year period beginning mid-century, museum willingness to collect, exhibit, and publish African art was driven by private collectors with a passion for Africa, and they in turn were nourished by a very active art market in America as well as in Europe. That period was characterized by extensive collections numbering several hundreds of objects and an almost obsessive concentration on classical African sculpture of very high quality. While in the earlier years these collections might also include Oceanic and pre-Columbian art--the other two areas of "primitive" art--they soon became specialized in one area or another; only a few of these mid-to-late twentieth century African collections included museum-worthy artworks of other kinds. They were intensely focused on African art.

Private collectors specializing in African art, meanwhile, remain a distinct species--though perhaps a slightly endangered one. They have become fewer in number and their collections are much smaller than those 300-, 400-, or 500-piece collections of the mid-twentieth century. The art market in America has also shrunk to a handful of publicly open galleries dealing in high quality objects and just two important New York auctions a year replacing numerous actions held annually in the 1980s. The end of the era of collecting has probably seen the last of the powerful and passionate collectors, such as Max Stanley, Nelson Rockefeller, Katherine White, or Charles Benenson, among others, whose activist backing of Iowa, the Metropolitan, Seattle, and the Museum for African Art in New York respectively impelled those institutions to create influential installations, scholarly projects, and lasting centers of activity. A colleague whose speciality was Greek art remarked enviously to me in the 1980s that private collecting was essential to the vitality of scholarship and museum activity in any field of art.

Probably a majority of all collectors of classical African art continue to be absorbed by the beautiful "old" sculptures that became the canon early in the twentieth century; they have generally been more concerned with issues of connoisseurship and collecting history than with the conclusions of academics studying the art they collect. (6) The changing focus of scholarship in the field has had little influence on private collectors or the mainstream art market. Collectors and dealers of classical African art have not become involved with contemporary African art. In the field of collecting, as in academic work, it is increasingly clear that, as Sidney Kasfir (2001:10) suggested a few years ago, contemporary African art has become a field of its own, part of "world art," discussed and and curated more prominently by modernists than by Africanists. Major contemporary African works are predominantly purchased by collectors of contemporary art--not by collectors of African art. Similarly; the most important institutional purchasers are no longer museums or departments specializing in African art, but those collecting contemporary art.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, private collections specializing in African art were practically nonexistent. Rather, sophisticated collectors of modern art had offered the first point of entry, daring to add small numbers of "primitive" African objects to collections focussed on the modern. In the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, this by-now-conventional pairing continued--one thinks of Burton and Emily Tremaine, for example, who would show a Kota piece or a Baule monkey with their famous Mondrian. Now, in 2005, most curiously, for the first time since the beginnings of collecting, modern and contemporary art collectors have abruptly lost interest in having a few pieces of African art alongside their contemporary Western ones. Nobody can say exactly why--maybe it just went out of fashion--but the "museumification" of classical African art is certainly part of the reason.

Just what effect has this "museumification" had on collecting and scholarship? The beautiful old objects in collections have aged, and as fewer and fewer analogous objects can be shown to be still in use in Africa, they have become--not unreasonably--associated with the past. Ironically, attempts to demonstrate the present vitality of African cultures by including contemporary art in exhibitions can have the unintended effect of casting traditional objects further into the past. In the mid-twentieth century, prosperous businessmen, university professors, and shabby artists could all have found and bought the same kinds of objects (think of Jacob Epstein's threadbare house packed with what are now million-dollar African sculptures). Artworks such as those are now rare and valuable, necessarily found in small numbers, behind plexiglass or in secure and elegant environments. Art that was once sexy, exciting, and wild has now become familiar, domesticated. What had been "primitive" has become "classical" not only in name but in the way it is experienced-if it once excited passions, it now commands respect, making it seem a little colder, older, more remote, and maybe a little boring.

A Field with an Old Problem: "Studying Something that Appears Alien"

Ours has long been a field with a problem:</p> <pre> "One of the nice things about studying African art," Tom Beidelman observed, "is that we are all so ill at ease doing it." People who study Florentine art, or French Impressionism ... seem to have such enormous certainty about what they are doing and what it all means, whereas among the Africanists, "there is so much angst in

the air with people who are studying something that appears alien

to them. This helps get at more fundamental questions" (Schildkrout

1998:1). </pre> <p>In recent years Beidelman's "angst" has turned into a full-blown phobia--an aversion to dealing with "the fundamental questions" along with the objects themselves.

It is surely symptomatic of terrible malaise that the field is no longer sure what to call itself. What do you call the kind of African art that is at the core of our discipline? (See Bentor and Peffer in this issue). Do you still call it traditional? Classical? Canonical? Historical? You hear them all and you hear a lot of discomfort and evasion around them; those who would cringe at "traditional art" are driven to use the more oblique "art tradition." Even A History of Art in Africa (Visona et al. 2001), the prevailing text book, a work of collaboration and consensus, could apparently reach no conclusion on this. Its title evades the question by defining its art by location--"in Africa"--although it includes a chapter on arts "in" the Americas made by peoples of African descent.

The unease extends beyond the adjective to Africa itself. We don't say "Black Africa" any more--but do we have to say "sub-Saharan"? Or are we now including ancient Egypt and the Islamic Mediterranean in here? Has the phrase "African art," as this journal so confidently named itself in the 1960s, come to have a conventionally understood meaning that overwrites its absolutely literal one as well as its overly vague meanings? (7) Speaking for many, one speaker at the symposium said, "I feel increasingly timid about talking about Africa, since there is obviously no one thing called Africa." I raise the question of this defining terminology here not to enter the debate, but simply to underscore how unmoored the field has become.

There have been repeated cries of alarm and announcements of crisis in the field among recent "First Word" columns in this journal, harbingers, perhaps, of the end of an age. Fred Lamp's much-discussed lament (1999) over the dearth of fieldwork and the practical difficulties of doing research in Africa exposed a fundamental difference between the research experience (and thus the intellectual grasp) of the current generation, who have tended not to do extensive fieldwork, and those of the generations before, whose understanding of African art came from seeing it used and from discussing it with its original makers and owners (see Ogbechie in this issue). Lamp documented the drift away from a focus on classical African art towards work on contemporary and diaspora arts and deplores the diminishing amount of work done "in and on Africa." In the same issue of this journal, Sidney Kasfir echoed his concern, writing, "Will those studying 'classical' genres soon be limited to a small group of codgers too frail to do fieldwork?" (1999:12).

Herbert Cole decried "A Crisis in Connoisseurship?'(2003), pointing to major exhibitions and publications that contain forgeries because scholarship is addressed elsewhere. As if to prove his point, pieces widely considered of dubious authenticity appeared this year in loan shows in three of the leading American art museums active in African art. A field that might base scholarship upon forgeries is a field in trouble.

In her editorial "Nine Contradictions in the New Golden Age of African Art" (Blier 2002; the golden age being one of serious attention to contemporary African art), Suzanne Blier includes a section called "Banishing the Past." She points out that this new acceptance of contemporary art has in some ways further marginalized what she calls "earlier or ongoing historical African art forms" (2002:4), and she raises the interesting possibility that they may be viewed as "too ritually charged, thus inappropriate (sacrilegious) if viewed by the uninitiated of the West or too complex in their signification to be viably examined and exhibited outside their native lands" (ibid., p. 6).

Finally, Al Roberts asks "Is Africa Obsolete?" (2000). Here he calls for research in Indian Ocean areas, encouraging readers to abandon research "in and on Africa"--a tactic that would only exacerbate the problems raised by Lamp, Kasfir, and Blier.

And there is another problem. Perhaps it is time to say out loud what everyone already knows: that scholarship in African art has always been conducted under the shadow of the politics of race in America and the legacy of colonialism in Africa. Distorting first in one direction--denigration--and later in various others, racial politics at home have been an inhibiting factor for American scholars since the late 1960s. On the one hand, not wishing to give ammunition to the enemy, we have knowingly skimmed over things that would cast African cultures in a negative light. Out of respect for the theories of those we were studying, we have also largely refrained from discussing African art in the kind of--often alienating-theoretical discourse common among our colleagues. Our primary obligation, it seemed, was to represent African art makers and users in their own discourse and to make better known the elaboration of their theories. We did this, for the most part, explicitly recognizing the limitations of such acts of translation. There has also been a positive effect: The politics of race have often imposed a kind of rigor and restraint, producing research that takes nothing for granted, making it stronger than it could have been.

On the whole, though, unspoken conditions imposed by the politics of race have inhibited the discipline and produced the paralyzing "angst" Beidelman saw, perhaps today more than ever. The reasons for this recent development are puzzling; one might have expected the opposite. Two universal trends in current scholarship and museum practice--greater reflexivity in all research and the prominence of the politics of identity in all areas of art--have perhaps reverberated more loudly in Africanist circles than in others. We may have been somewhat apologetic to be a predominantly white, middleclass group of scholars studying Africans, most of whom were a lot less educated and less well-off, in terms of material possessions, than we were.

At this point, the field does seem to have become overly anxious about making even basic assertions. Why should it be more difficult to talk about "Africa" than it is to talk about "Europe" or "America"? Surely all these are equally complex and multifaceted; there must be as many Europes and Americas as there are Africas.

The flight from field research on traditional art may be connected to this--to a reluctance to speak for others who have no voice in academic forums. The gathering of information in the field forces the researcher to participate in what often looks like an unequal dialogue--unequal because of perceived power imbalances. It is not surprising that researchers will be more comfortable conducting research on educated, middle-class artists living in cities who unquestionably speak for themselves. Ironically, people living in villages today may not necessarily be as overly impressed with the power or supposed "wealth" of visiting researchers as Western arrogance may suppose. Most of my African friends--rural and urban--would not exchange their lives for mine--but this is a subject for another day.

The Beginning of an Era of Analysis

If the first cycle of voracious collecting and broad acceptance in America is over, then we must be in a new era where scholars can do a new kind of work bolstered by institutional support and nourished by all that has been collected We are arrived at an era of analysis and reflection.

Staggering quantities of raw data from the colonial period have recently become easily available online, as missionary records, image collections, and obscure publications are digitized--to cite two among a great many, the full online collection of G.I. Jones's photographs of Nigerian art taken in the 1930s and the the James J. Ross Archive of African Images 1800-1920, a database of 6,000 published images. Museum collections are increasingly accessible: The American Museum of Natural History has more than 37,000 objects, accompanied by full catalogue information, associated photographs, and sometimes field notes, on a publically accessible site. There are many others.

More darkly, archaeological objects from looted sites are also accumulating in great numbers, whether we like it or not. Aside from issues of ethics, these objects have had scant attention from art historians who, in the absence of archaeological data, may have better methodologies than any other discipline for the search for meaning in the objects themselves. Some fruitful work has already been done on Nok. (8) Perhaps it is now possible to reconsider links between sub-Saharan archaeological objects and the other ancient arts of Egypt and Roman North Africa free from the racist taint that clouded most earlier assays.

The last fifty years or so have left a rich store, larger and less noticed, of data, objects, and especially photos accumulated in the field that are waiting to be reread in light of contemporary questions and theories. Relatively recent collections, only partly published, are now gradually becoming available for reanalysis in archives, such as those of Joseph Cornet, now in New Orleans at Loyola University. The generation of active researchers is on the bring of retirement now, and more will be added every year.

New research, however, has to get down to the hard work of using current thinking to organize such records in new ways to produce new knowledge. So far, this material has been used for much more facile clucking over outdated theories and colonialist attitudes than for substantive contributions to knowledge. The most intriguing aspect for study in old sources is not the obvious--that they are old and reflect the ideas of their time--but that the information can be read between the lines and in the margins of the photos or through the lens to ask questions that were never asked before. I am not advocating a new kind of research--generations of scholars have reinterpreted the work of earlier ones. I am simply pointing to a now huge and largely unexplored body of material assembled since about 1950 that can be compared to early twentieth century data and with current visual culture to construct a history of African art. Despite our assertions that African art is not timeless, the notion that African art has a history and that scholars can at least partially reconstruct it has yet to become firmly established as the foundation for African art research, either within the circle of Africanist scholars or outside it. Several of the papers here do precisely that (see Richards, Bentor, and Forster, this issue).

Most urgently, as Fred Lamp pointed out six years ago, the dramatic changes taking place in the traditional arts on the continent of Africa are conspicuous and compelling. Why the relatively low level of interest in researching the visual cultures that replaced all those objects so rapaciously collected in rural areas? Though I am sure that sure the consensus of Africanist scholars does not believe that the arts in these rural areas are any less authentic, less complexly interesting, or less worthy of study than they once were, the fact is that they are unduly neglected by current students.

If, during the week of the symposium, a radical new interpretation of Michelangelo (presenting evidence that he was the creator of no less an icon than the Laocoon) could be proposed by a young scholar, why shouldn't the next generation have radical new ideas about long-familiar works of African art?

[This article was accepted for publication in November 2005.]

I am grateful to Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology, and the Institute for African Studies, sponsors, and to Jonathan Crary, Chair, for allowing me the opportunity to organize the symposium on Emerging Scholarship; I would like to thank Leslie Ellen Jones for her perceptive editing and forbearance in the face of many difficulties we had putting this issue together. Herbert Cole, Enid Schildkrout, and Jerry Vogel generously and usefully commenting on a first draft of this paper, and saved me from many errors. Anyone wishing to take issue with it should contact me and hold them blameless.

References cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1995. "Why Africa? Why Art?" In Africa: The Art of a Continent, ed Tom Phillips. London: Royal Academy of Arts and Munich: Prestel.

Blier, Suzanne. 2002. "Nine Contradictions in the New Golden Age of African Art." African Arts 35 (3):1, 4, 6.

Boullier, Claire. 1996. Les sculptures en terre cuite de style Nok: approche pluridisciplinaire. Memoire de D.E.A. Universite de Paris I. Paris-Sorbonne.

--. 2001. Recherches methodologiques sur la statuaire en terre cuite africaine: application a un corpus de sculptures archeologiques--en contexte et hors contexte--de la culture Nok (Nigeria). These de Doctorat. Universite de Paris I-Pantheon Sorbonne.

--. 2002-2003. "Bilan chronologique de la culture Nok et nouvelles datations sur des sculptures." Afrique Archaeologie & Arts 2:9-28.

Cole, Herbert M. 2003. "A Crisis in Connoisseurship?" African Arts 36 (1):1, 4-5, 8, 86.

Kasfir, Sidney L. 1999. "Will All Those Still Alive Please Stand Up?" African Arts 32 (1):12.

--. 2001. "Teaching the Contemporary: Disjunctures and Accommodations." Dialogue. African Arts 34 (3):10.

Lamp, Fred. 1999. "Africa Centered." African Arts 32 (1):1, 4, 6, 8-10.

Schildkrout, E., and C. Keim. 1990. African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

--. 1998. The Scramble for Art in Central Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Roberts, Allen. 2000. "Is Africa Obsolete?" African Arts 33 (1):1, 4-9, 93-4.

Visona, Mohica, et al. 2001. A History of Art in Africa. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

(1.) Held at Columbia University in the city of New York, April 22, 2005. Enid Schildkrout and Jonathan Hay were moderators and each made remarks.

(2.) Sarah Margaret Adams's paper titled "People Have Three Eyes: Ephemeral Art and the Archive" is not published here. It appears in RES 48 (Autumn 2005):21-42.

(3.) The trajectory is different in Europe, where sub-Saharan Africa is rarely represented in art museums and art history departments, and the period of discovery and acceptance by the art world still seems to be unfolding. The American-style encyclopedic art museum that includes non-Western art is also rarer there.

(4.) One reason for this is economic: Exhibition visitors provide a guaranteed immediate sale of a certain number of copies. An independently published book might take years to reach the same sales level and thus return on publication costs.

(5.) The Speed Museum in Lexington, Kentucky, is an example: It is halfway through a well-funded, ten-year plan to build a substantial collection of African art. The Yale Art Gallery has received the very large Charles Benenson collection and an endowed curatorship.

(6.) For example, the revelation that virtually all types of figurative Mangbetu sculpture were invented late, mainly for Westerners, created not a ripple in collecting circles. Mangbetu prices did not drop--they didn't even flicker, though this should have caused Mangbetu objects to be expelled from the canon as inauthentic (Schildkrout and Keim 1990). Diaspora arts from Haiti and Cuba, for example, have not begun to find a place in major art museums or big auction houses. Contemporary African art (of a limited sort) was first shown on a large scale in the Pompidou and began to penetrate the art market from there, not via the efforts of Africanist art historians.

(7.) Most aspects of this issue were quite satisfactorily dealt with by Anthony Appiah years ago (1995:21-6); though his essay is widely known, his conclusions have not taken hold among African art scholars. I would argue that, over the past fifty years or more, "African art"--just that, no adjective--has become the conventional phrase for the art that famously inspired Picasso and hangs on the walls of museums around the world.

(8.) Claire Boullier's doctoral thesis (2001) is based on her first-hand examination of about 800 Nok sculptures on the market in Paris in a two-year period. In as-yet unpublished work, she draws conclusions about meaning from iconography (1996, 2001). She found remains of wooden armatures inside twenty-five figures that allowed her to convincingly show how large Nok figures were constructed and fired. Carbon fragments from the armatures produced new C-14 dates indicating an earlier period than previously thought (2002-2003).