Negotiating the Taxonomy. Contemporary African Art: Production, Exhibition, Commodification. - Review - book review

Lauri Firstenberg

Sidney Littlefield Kasfir. Contemporary African Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999. 224 pp., 74 color ills., 106 b/w. $14.95 paperback.

[O]ne can say that African artist are not so much fighting for the freedom to be 'African' (whatever that may mean), but to be fully accepted as artists, through this can only be articulated through their Africanness, since that is the site of their categorical exclusion from a global art discourse in the first place. --Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Contemporary African Art (213).

This avowal is telling of the problematics of what one could call the young field of "contemporary African art." Sidney Kasfir's Contemporary African Art, part of Thames and Hudson's World of Art series, was planned originally as a supplement/counterpart to Frank Willett's African Art: An Introduction. However, rather than using Willett's text as a point of departure, Contemporary African Art is a separate survey responding more to a host of other surveys and catalogues engaged with similar issues. This text is also an attempt to grapple with some of the critical questions in the discourse of contemporary African art. Kasfir, who is Associate Professor of African Art History at Emory University, is conscious of the presence, role, and duty of her text, particularly at the end of a decade full of exhibitions and publications, which, in signaling social, political, economic, and cultural contingencies, have tried to define and to redefine this (fixed or flexible?) category, "contemporary African art."

For a general readership Kasfir's text serves well as an introduction to contemporary African art. As a survey of both historical and contemporary material, it addresses the key figures, events, concepts, and artists, but as is the case with all surveys and introductory texts, it excludes some critical artists and exhibitions. What is most impressive, however, is how the author has framed her volume. Kasfir addresses questions previously underdeveloped in the field, as evidenced in the books seven chapters, entitled "New Genres: Inventing African Popular Culture," "Transforming the Workshop," "Patrons and Mediators," "Art and Commodity," "The African Artist: Shifting Identities in the Post Colonial World," "The Idea of a National Culture: Decolonizing African Art," and "Migration and Displacement."

As Kwame Anthony Appiah aptly suggested in his significant article "Is Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" (1991), it is the space of culture and the place of the market in which an artist enters the contemporary art world. In the context of contemporary African art, this proposition points to a highly charged and contested category--a category of Western reception rather than African artistic intention. This problematic method of classification, as well as the impossibility of conclusively defining the diverse artistic production, exhibition, and commodification of mid-to-late twentieth-century continental Africa defines the terrain in which Kasfir has carefully placed her text. Evolved from modern practices which catalogue objects, objects synecdochial for cultures (i.e., an egungun mask as Yoruba culture-at-large), the term "contemporary African art" reflects the design of Eurocentric institutions to serve nationalist agendas, agendas largely derived from the colonial enterprise. In this li ght, Kasfir and her contemporaries must take up the task of formulating new models of translation, resignification and resistance.

How does one reposition the study of a field largely defined by Occidental institutions in the maintenance of colonial hierarchies, a field that has been based on a politics framed by the artificial binaries of traditional/modern as well as non-Western/Western? In pointing to museums and the market's own vested interests in Anglophone and Francophone artists from sub-Saharan Africa, Kasfir stakes out the territory of biases and absences in the scholarship. The author fleshes out some inequities in traditional criticism's larger exclusion of the visual culture from North and East Africa on the continent, as well as itinerant or diasporal artists exhibiting internationally.

Kasfir turns to Appiah as a point of departure and asks, "How 'Postmodern' is contemporary African Arc?" and criticizes Appish for not speaking about modernities as variant in terms of accessibility according to their constituent brands of colonialism (Anglophone/indirect rule, Francophone/assimilation). The critique of Appiah seems to fall a bit short. Kasfir writes, "[Appiah] argues that much of African popular culture is uncritical of the seemingly limitless appetite for imported media and genres, and therefore offers no critique of either colonialism or modernity. In that sense, it is neither postcolonial nor postmodern." This argument needed more elaboration. Still in the territory of Appiah, Kasfir remarks, "the most striking similarity between the postcolonial and the postmodern has been this very condition of hybridity" (14). Unfortunately, such arguments are not rooted in her discussions of the artworks illustrated in her book. For example, the author handles the well-known painter from Kinshasa Che ri Samba's Why Have I Signed a Contract? (1990) in terms of subject matter, social mores, generalizations of urban sign painting, fashion, and commodity culture, and nor in terms of some of the critical debates at hand: self-portraiture and promotion, the market, and the assertion of individual autonomous artistic identity which signals a critical link between the spheres of traditional and contemporary art practice.

Kasfir necessarily traces strategies of Western figures in the field, including Ulli Beier, Jean Kennedy, Andre Magnin, and Jacques Soulillous, mapping out a trajectory of problematic exhibitions, scholarship, and shifts in the discipline. Exhibitions in Europe and the United States during the past decade or so have attempted to define contemporary visual culture of Africa from over the past half-century, yet only recently have debates around contemporary African art in particular accounted for the critical contributions of contemporary African artistic production within modernist and postmodernist discourses. In a 1990 issue of African Arts magazine the editors stated, "What are we going to do about African art?--the issue of contemporary art will not go away." This is the legacy Kasfir must negotiate. She addresses the museological taxonomization of Contemporary African Art by way of noting key international shows that stand as points of departure for the field of contemporary African art and/or artists wh o have been called "the new internationalists."

The 1991 exhibition Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African Art at New York's Center for African Art was consequential in constructing the genre "contemporary African art" in the West. Setting out to counter Magiciens de la terre, curator Susan Vogel framed the visual material in categories glossing the conversion of indigenous practices, the co-option of Western material culture, the adoption of traditional forms, and the assimilation of Western concepts and mediums. These categories included "traditional art," "new functional art," "urban art," "international art," and "extinct art." Kasfir's hook attempts to dismantle such impractical frames, which fail to represent the radiation of sculptural, painterly, and photographic work by practitioners from Africa throughout the continent and in the West.

The Whitechapel Gallery in London's 1995 exhibition Seven Stories about Modem Art in Africa in turn answered Africa Explores, redefining contemporary African art as the products of a group of elite Western-trained artists coming out of the second decade of colonial rule. The exhibition's co-curator Salah Hassan, in his paramount text "The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expressions of the Self and Cross Cultural Aesthetics" has discussed the complexities of the terminology of contemporary African art as it was defined by the Western founder of the Mhari Club in Oshogho, Nigeria, Ulli Beier, in the 1960S. Hassan summarizes that contemporary African art has been thus far established according to the following binaries of traditional/contemporary art: religious/secular, communal/individual, rural/urban, popular/high, convention/invention. Hassan's citicisms of these dichotomies elucidate the root of the conflicted discourse concerning contemporary African art and allow him to consider heterogeneity of style, techniques, and concepts present in the work. Hassan distinguishes the semantics of modern--a critical category entailing style, innovation of language, and marking a break with the past--from contemporary--a temporal term. I see Kasfir's hook as modeled after this brand of discourse. Kasfir re-asserts the question, "Modern or Contemporary?" and examines the parallel acclivity of modernism with that of colonialism. She then, using a framework of geography, artist as individual, artistic process, and patronage, extends this mode of inquiry to questioning whether or not the contemporary is based on innovation or continuity. At the hook's outset, the author queries: "How 'postmodern' is contemporary African art?" and suggests, "Contemporary African art is quintessentially postcolonial in terms of its dates" (9). It would have been prudent to tie these questions back into the work discussed. For example Trigo Piula's Materna (1984) serves as the first illustration in the modern/contemporary section and is read as a parodic meeting of traditional and modern cultural emblems, hut Kasfir does not extend her reading of the painting beyond this historical binary.

In her section titled "Transitional Art" Kasfir addresses "informal sectors" of artistic and cultural production (tourist/popular/urban arts) and focuses on production in South Africa. Here the author again dwells on the issue of labeling practices. But she then poses an interesting question: "What, if anything, constitutes South African art?" Kasfir considers white artists in South Africa such as William Kentridge and Kendell Geers. In delineating struggle/activist art of the 1980s from individualist enterprises of the 1990s onward and discussing international sanctions against South African art, Kasfir does not ignore internal divisions of genres and practices, and she pointedly notes the flurry of international exhibitions taking up the work of artists from South Africa. Kasfir rightfully interrogates notions of local versus international audiences and patronage in this game of naming--considering cultural, economic, political, social concerns of "local, national, and transnational identities" (12) as wel l as extending similar questions to various contexts.

However, there are ways to address these debates and to move beyond them. For instance, Kasfir, harping back to the stale traditional/modern/hybridic debate, gives a great deal of attention to discussing whether or not Skunder Boghossian is an "Ethiopian artist" informed by issues of style, motivation, migration. The author approaches the heated debate of authenticity as well as the complexities and problematics of Western teachers defining the visual style of particular regions, as in Oshogbo, which was marked by expatriate teachers Ulli Beier and Susan Wegner during the 1960s. Such a discussion seems to beg the question, "Is Wegner then a EuroYoruba artist?"

Photography, a marginal presence in contemporary African art discourses, is also minimally represented in Kasfir's text. in a brief discussion of Seydou Keita (who Kasfir calls the "Bresson of Bamako") little is done to examine his work of the 1940s and 1950s as products of a distinctive modem practice. Rather than see Keita's modernity as an elaboration on a particular self-conscious and modern self-awareness, constructed and performed at the brink of decolonization, Kasfir--as well as the scholarship more generally--continues to read the artist's modernity as linked to colonialism.

In her preface, Kasfir states that the focus of her book rests in the period from the 19505 to the 1990S as a means to frame her text. As such, the work represented should reflect a mapping of the processes of decolonization and democratization of Africa from Ghana in 1957 to South Africa in 1994. This trajectory was clear, but complex visual practices oftentimes were subsumed by conceptual discussions or uncritical formal analyses. Kasfir describes Keita's corpus: "But most seductive in these pictures is the play and juxtaposition of light and pattern against skin, most fully realized in the portraits of women with large expanse of textiles in counterpoint to his own cloth backdrop of flowers, leaves or arabesques" and makes a claim for "a new kind of representation" (47). But she never gets at the heart of the project--a resignification of subjectivities, not contingent on colonialism but on independence.

Kasfir's strongest chapter is "The Idea of National Culture: Decolonizing African Art," which deals with the art of the 1960s--the decade of independence. Using Nigeria and Senegal as in-depth case studies for the ways in which artistic movements at the brink of independence defined African modernity, Kasfir aptly discusses rural versus urban, popular versus academic arts, and tensions between indigenous and nationalist cultural practices. Here she confronts the diverse Nigerian movements of the Mbari club, Zaria Manifesto, and Nsukka school, and she explores the Senghorian rhetoric that informed the institutional culture of post-independence Senegal, as well as resistance to it, including the avant-garde and activist Laboratoire Agit-Art of Dakar in the 1970s and 1980s, and Set Setal, an artistic movement of the 1990s.

Kasfir responsibly flags the difficulties in approaching visual culture of the capacious space of continental Africa, defined and divided by over eight hundred languages and comprising over fifty national identities. For those of us compiling disparate and sometimes hard-to-find material for the difficult task of teaching a course in the contemporary arts of Africa, there is a need for new alternatives to mining the archives of Third Text and Nka: Journal of Contemporary Art for theory, African Arts, for traditionalism, and Revue Noire for the pictures to complement a host of catalogues, some shoddy, others critical. Kasfir's new publication will serve as a primary teaching tool, in conjunction with texts such as Okwui Enwezor's and Olu Oguibe's Reading the Contemporary (MIT Press and Iniva, 1999). In facing a difficult task, Kasfir's book accounts well for dispersion in genre, (photography, painting, sculpture, performance, installation), geography (metropolis/rural areas), market, and artistic influence. O ne may view this text as a pointed fusion of an internationalist and an Africanist approach, attending to the complex status and multivalent cultural posturings of artists and artworks among both local and global cultural production and transnational polemics, yet still finding itself in the position to pose the wearied question: "How did one continue to be African and still be a modern artist?" (152).

Contemporary African Art marks a renegotiations of existing taxonomies, revealing the demands and discontinuities of the art market, the museum, and the academy for which the esoteric category "contemporary African art" was generated. Kasfir begins to dismantle the static cultural sphere to which artists from Africa are commonly relegated against the backdrop of institutional narratives and market demands. Her survey argues for the inclusion of white artists, notes the marginalization of artists of African-Asian descent, and opens up geographically hermetic zones. The section entitled "Migration and Displacement" needed to be expounded upon, as these are dense and critical experiences and concepts. Kasfir's discussion of "conditions of exile" (190), centered around notions of politics, economics, and education, included artists such as Yinka Shonibare and Ouattara as culturally nomadic artists whose work speaks to intercultural and extracultural exchange and translation. But again, the author needed to root this discussion more firmly in the work. Kasfir presents in her text the incipience of a new standard for weighing notions of migration, diaspora and complexities of targeting aesthetic citizenship, "[Attempting] to deal with a major issue surrounding the history of contemporary African art since the 1950S such as patronage and other forms of mediation, formal training versus the dynamics of the workshop, the development of new genres, the commodification of art, postcolonial art and national consciousness, and the effects of globalization" (8).

Lauri Firstenberg is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. She is an independent curator and critic based in New York.

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