Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2001) ISSN: 1525-447X (Missed) Connections and Context: American Exhibits/Audiences and Modern African Art: A Critical Review of Encounters with the Contemporary

Courtney E. Cole

Encounters with the Contemporary is a yearlong exhibition of contemporary African art drawn from the National Museum of African Art’s permanent collection, curated by the museum’s new modern and contemporary curator, Elizabeth Harney. The exhibit is divided into three sections, installed for four months each; I will be writing on the first third of the exhibit, which ran from January through April 2001. The works included in each four-month phase are further divided into the areas of: A Journey Toward Freedom, Building Blocks to an African Modernism,¹ Printmaking, and Globalism and Diaspora.

I will confine my comments primarily to the South African art included in the show, its obfuscated relation to the other African art exhibited, and the intended dialogue between both of these, and the viewer, that was lost along the way. My critique stems largely from the assumption that most of the viewers of this exhibit were Americans who have little to no knowledge of Africa and its socio-politics, both past and present. It is my assertion that the absence of information necessary for an uninformed audience to understand the works and the connections between them rendered the problematic. The result of its fundamental lack of explanatory information for viewers was that the audience received mistaken and truncated views of South Africa, contemporary Africa and the artistic productions of, and connections between, both.

Though this exhibition purports to be composed of “modern African arts,” South Africans clearly dominate the exhibit, making up 12 of the total 32 artists included in the yearlong exhibition. South Africa remains the mostly widely renowned African country in the United States, even if this reputation stems largely from the infamy of apartheid. In the last few years, however, South Africa has largely reclaimed its tarnished position within the international community with the peaceful transfer of power between the apartheid government to multi-racial democracy and the election of international hero, Nelson Mandela, as president in 1994. It also has the distinction of being one of the most economically promising and politically stable African nations, and currently enjoys a fair amount of foreign investment and interest. With over a third of the artists from South Africa, this exhibit seems to reinforce South Africa’s reputation, in the eyes of the American public, as the foremost and dominant African nation at the turn of the twentieth century.

And while there are artists from Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, and other countries included in this exhibit, there are no artists from the majority of Africa’s countries—including Uganda, Djibouti, Zaire, Benin, Mozambique, Somalia, Namibia, Tunisia, or Burkina Faso and many, many others. An ordinary American museum-goer, with little knowledge of the number of countries that compose the African continent, may not even notice this absence. Nonetheless, this absence could lead the viewer to one of two rather unsavory conclusions: either art is simply not produced in the countries excluded, or work from produced in these countries is of inferior quality and therefore excluded. Either alternative not only serves to reinforce stereotypes about South Africa as the most (or only) important African country, but actually even misinforms patrons as to the status and quality of the art in less well- known countries.

It was telling that the first paragraph welcomed patrons to the exhibit by telling them it was “a reminder of where we have been and a preview of things to come.” This statement reinforced the idea that African art is something static, objectively and unproblematically reflected in both the museum’s permanent collection and in the curatorial choices of this exhibit. This exhibition of art from only a few African countries (especially the primacy of South African art), this statement seems to inhere, is representative of “natural” facts about where African art—or the best of African art—has been, is being, and will be produced.

It is certainly not necessary that every African country be represented in such an exhibit; however, I do assert that the inclusion of work from such a small number of countries can serve to misinform people and reinforce false stereotypes they already have about African countries. Perhaps this exhibit is simply representative of the countries that make up the museum’s permanent collection.² Nonetheless, whatever the reason for one country being overwhelmingly represented in an exhibit which claims to have a generally “African” focus, this incongruity should be explained to the viewer. The problem is not that so many South African artists were included, per se, but that the reason for this inclusion should be clear to museum-goers. They should be informed as to the rationale for the inclusion of so much South African work in the exhibit, as well as the lack of art from so many other African countries.

For example, the viewer could be informed that the display of South African art is deemed especially urgent presently as this country, and its artists, comes to terms with the political system responsible for its horrific past. Otherwise (as I pointed out earlier) the exhibit seems to imply that, by whatever criteria the curator used, South Africa is unequivocally ascendant over all other African countries in its aesthetic productions. Clearly more insight into the process of how and why selections are chosen was necessary for the museum-goer to fully grasp the meaning of the exhibit as a whole. Without this transparency, the viewer was often left to make the most crude misjudgments and characterizations about the nature and state of African art because s/he was missing this crucial information.

One of the sub-topics of the exhibit, A Journey Toward Freedom, with its attendant commentary on the museum wall, did begin the transparency I’m calling for. It could be read as the beginning of a comment on why an overwhelming number of the works included are from South Africa—namely that the post-apartheid era of freedom has produced a bevy of works confronting the country’s recent socio-political changes. The opening paragraph reads:

With the dismantling of apartheid in 1994 and the first multiparty elections, South African society entered a profound period of reflection and reconciliation. Many visual artists, who for the first time in many years were able to express themselves freely, explored their nation’s changes through their works.

However, while this helps the viewer understand the exhibit’s emphasis on South African artists, this statement is both a gross mischaracterization and irresponsible reduction of historical facts. Many artists, both black and white, worked fervently during apartheid to use their art as a tool for protesting policies of apartheid. Also, many white artists did not protest apartheid; on the contrary, they were complicit with the regime and profited from the overwhelming resources and privileges it allocated to whites. This statement seems to ignore, or at least obfuscate, the creative production, which thrived amidst the censorship and repression of the apartheid regime, while occluding the fact that many white South African artists colluded with the apartheid regime. This leads the uninformed viewer to the conclusion that only in the post-apartheid era has there been a burgeoning of artistic works that grapple with apartheid, which is simply untrue. Generally, the impact of apartheid on arts production was not explored or explained in any meaningful manner within the exhibit.

Furthermore, the “race” question, which was such a weighty aspect of the political system, was completely ignored within the exhibit. The exhibition purported to represent the works of South African artists who now have the political freedom and historical distance to explore apartheid and its effects. However, there was no mention of how race mediates, influences, and otherwise affects artists’ positioning toward and explorations of apartheid in their art. Neither was the existence and work of the Workshop School, the current label for works by black South African artists, explored in the exhibit. In this way, the curator effectively effaced the complexity of South Africa’s sociopolitical realities by completely neglecting to address how race—which persists as a decisive identity characteristic even in South Africa’s new political dispensation—affects the work on apartheid by the artists included in the exhibit.

The last paragraph in the description of A Journey Toward Freedom closed by stating:

By placing the works of South African artists within a larger African context, we hope the exceptional circumstances faced by South African artists and the concerns they share with artists in other parts of the continent and the diaspora will become clear.

This intention was obscured by the melange of topics within which many apartheid-related works were displayed. Apparently, the saturation of this exhibit by South African artists was intended to exemplify South Africa’s interaction both with the continent and the larger world. Works by South African artists were interspersed with works by artists from other countries within all of the other sub-topics. The descriptions of these works, however, tied the themes of the works exclusively to internal socio-political realities of South Africa and the apartheid regime. The short descriptions accompanying works from other countries related them topically only to the individual artist and her/his country of origin. There was no clear understanding of what sort of dialogue was going on between these artists. Because of this, the “shared concerns” which were purported to be a thrust of the curatorial focus were not at all clear to the typical viewer.

In commenting on the contemporary focus of this exhibit, the museum noted that it is “intensifying its dedication to collecting and displaying arts from contemporary Africa. Through this commitment the museum hopes to. embark on a cultural and artistic exchange that will generate a better understanding of our shared humanity.” Again, this notion of exchange, both between different African artists, and also with museum-goers, might be a good intention; nonetheless, such a lofty goal, especially when examined in light of a largely ignorant audience, has a tendency to be problematic. There can be no exchange unless museum-goers have some understanding of the socio-political milieu in which these works were created, and the small descriptions accompanying the art were certainly not sufficient to bridge the epistemic gap in most American visitors’ understanding. Indeed, even as one who has a fair amount of knowledge about Africa, and has spent time in post-apartheid South Africa more specifically, I am not sure that the intended dialogue between myself and the works went on; furthermore, any attempt to convey a dialogue between the works of South African and other African artists was completely lost on me.

I want to close this review by stating that my critique of this exhibit is based not so much on the works included, but rather the lack of information and, in some cases, the mis-information that obscured and hindered the exhibit’s stated focus and intentions. I believe that the intended audience of this exhibit, being largely uninformed about African art and its socio- political context, was thus practically left with a skewed and inaccurate view of South Africa and its contemporary social and aesthetic realities. Furthermore, since the exhibit did not provide the pertinent information the audience needed to understand the exhibit’s intention, the stated purpose of the exhibit—to create dialogue between African artists and people from other cultures—was obfuscated by the contextual understanding that most viewers lack.

Copyright 2001 Africa Resource Center

Citation Format

Cole, Courtney E. (2001). (Missed) Connections and Context: American Exhibits/Audiences and Modern African Art: A Critical Review of Encounters with the Contemporary . Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: 2, 1.

	I stop here to make a point that falls outside the scope of the paper, but which nonetheless requires both comment and interrogation. This title, Building Blocks to an African Modernism, title seems to infer that it is only in the post-colonial, contemporary era that any sort of modernism surfaces within African art. This implication is patently false and also misguided, insofar as it locates the advent of African modernism in terms of whiteness and in relation to Africa’s colonial period. The following quote, which introduces Building Blocks to an African Modernism, flagrantly displays this attitude: “The evolution of modern African art has been intricately linked to the forms of education, patronage, market and criticism available to support its development.” Education, patronage, economic markets, and academic criticism are, for the most part, European artifices which have, at various stages of colonialism, been imported, superimposed, and both covertly and overtly forced upon African people. And while it is perhaps true that these four constructs have influenced the development of contemporary African art, to suggest (as this quote most certainly does) that they have provided the building blocks to its modernism is completely absurd: “The possibility that there are different traditions of modernity and different understandings of what counts as modernity in art is tightly regulated. Through the hegemonic manipulation of disciplinary assumptions, terminologies, values, and ideas, modernity unfolds along an inexorable path as one unitary process.What is missed by scholars [and, in this case, curators] upholding this Eurocentric frame of interpretation is that Africa’s idea of contemporary art need not overlap with that of Europe’s, and that the history of its own process of modernism need not preserve the creative and intellectual dominance of Europe. (Nkiru Nzegwu, “The Concept of Modernity in Contemporary African Art,” in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Self-Fashioning, ed. Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali Mazrui [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999], 395.

	However, even this fact would not be so “simple,” after all. The overwhelming majority of the works included in the exhibit were obtained through museum purchase. If the exhibit simply represents the depth of the Museum’s collection, then there is clearly something disparate in the demographics and determinations utilized in the purchasing of works. Where do purchasers travel and how do they obtain information about African artists? Is it any coincidence that most of the art in this exhibit comes from a nation which has retained many social and political ties to the West and has one of Africa’s most robust, Westernized economies? These questions are not raised and are left unanswered.