5.3

Meschac Gaba

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART

Kerryn Greenberg

Abstract: Museum of Contemporary African Art is Meschac Gaba’s signature work. Frustrated by the lack of spaces for contemporary African art, Gaba set out to create his own. The resulting immersive twelve-room installation blurs the boundaries between everyday life and art, public and private, and observation and participation.

Keywords: Meschac Gaba; museum; contemporary art; Africa

You don’t need four walls to define your place, to decide who you are. . . . I am not a director of a museum or the Minister for Culture. I am just an artist. I was interested in creating a frame for my work within the museum, at the same time within another museum; although you know yourself, there is no room, you know yourself you are never going to be there. My job at [that] time was to push people to look and take it seriously.

—MESCHAC GABA, 2012

MESCHAC GABA’S MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART is the largest acquisition Tate has ever made. Produced over a five-year period, from 1997 to 2002, the work is both physically immense and conceptually ambitious. While preparing to display the twelve rooms that make up the Museum of Contemporary African Art at Tate Modern in 2013, I realized how few people had seen the entire work and how elusive it was to those who had not. Colleagues across the institution kept saying more or less the same thing: “We understand it is important, but what is it?” After weeks of trying to translate long lists of objects and multiple installation images into something tangible, while attempting to avoid explaining the work in terms of the space it would occupy since each room can expand or contract, the answer I kept returning to is the same one Gaba originally offered in a 2001 interview with Chris Dercon: “The Museum of Contemporary African Art is not a model to imitate . . . it’s only a question.” It is temporary and mutable, a conceptual space more than a physical one, a provocation to the Western art establishment not only to attend to contemporary African art, but to question why the boundaries existed in the first place. The Museum is also Gaba’s answer to the problem he encountered on arriving in Amsterdam: that he could not find a museum in Europe where he could show the type of work he wanted to make.

In the early 1980s, when Gaba stumbled across a bag of decommissioned banknotes cut into small circles on the streets of Cotonou, Benin, he had no idea where it would lead him, but he realized his discovery was important. A few years later he began to experiment with the banknote dots, creating painted collages that he initially framed behind glass and later made into three-dimensional reliefs. It was these works that first attracted international attention in 1992.

By the time Gaba was offered a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 1996, he had been using decommissioned banknotes as a medium for several years, but it was in the Netherlands that his approach radically changed. In the Dercon interview, Gaba describes finding “another reality” when visiting European museums with considerable holdings of traditional objects from Africa: “I needed a space for my work, because this place did not exist. Amsterdam was the first place I began to crave a museum of contemporary African art. Because I say I do something, but the thing is not in the [same] reality as the place I am.”

Before completing his residency at the Rijksakademie in 1997, Gaba presented the first room of his Museum of Contemporary African Art. The Draft Room (see figure 5.3.1) contained an unusual assortment of handmade, found, and altered objects: a piece of fabric on the floor with carefully arranged cylinders of shredded banknotes and plastic bags filled with banknote dots; a four-tiered white metal shelving unit with chicken pieces and circular breads made out of ceramic and glazed gold; a bamboo fishing rod and glass fish tank with a mirrored base, containing a fish skeleton underneath a sand-encrusted lid; a fridge-freezer filled with whole ceramic chickens; an enamel platter with a mound of ceramic chicken feet balanced on a white bucket; three large abstract monochrome paintings; a pile of fruit and vegetables cast in ceramic and glazed red, heaped on the floor in the corner; and Swiss Bank 1997, an old, simple wooden table with golden pebbles arranged on the lower shelf and stacks of coins and banknotes, weighed down with little stones, on the table top.

FIG. 5.3.1. Draft Room from Museum of Contemporary African Art. Installation shot of Meschac Gaba exhibition, Tate Modern, 2013. By permission of the Tate Gallery, UK.

At this first exhibition visitors were invited to support Gaba’s Museum by purchasing a small brooch made from a banknote dot and safety pin. This action served two purposes: first, it symbolized the fund-raising activity one might expect with the establishment of a real museum; and second, perhaps inadvertently, these brooches became a marketing device for the project, with visitors to the exhibition taking a piece of the work out into the world with them. It is significant that these pins were made from West African CFA franc banknote dots, which for Gaba symbolize some of his key concerns: the circulation of ideas and objects, power structures, and value systems. The West and Central African CFA francs were created in 1945 for use in the former French colonies in the wake of World War II when the French economy was in ruin. In 1994 the CFA franc, which had been fixed at the same exchange rate to the French franc since 1948, was devalued. This precipitated a wave of price increases, labor disputes, and demonstrations across the region and is the reason why bags of decommissioned banknote dots could be found on the streets of Cotonou at the time. When asked by Dercon why money features so extensively in this work, Gaba responded, “I wanted to confront society with devaluation. Because money is what people like best. . . . Money is the sinew of war; it’s the chief. You see, I don’t like talking about colonization, but at the same time money can colonize. Maybe that’s why I use money, because I refuse to use the word colonization. Besides, money travels.” One might argue that money, like art, has value in exchange, but little value in use. When devaluation or extensive usage leads to the decommissioning and shredding of a banknote, it has neither use nor exchange value. A banknote dot is the ultimate worthless object, but it is also an ideal medium, laden with meaning.

When Gaba first exhibited the Draft Room he had not yet decided which rooms he would make next, but he was unequivocal that his Museum would consist of twelve sections. The Draft Room prefigures many of the artist’s conceptual concerns and the aesthetic approach he developed in later rooms, with several objects from the initial presentation forming the basis of future sections. Some of the rooms are grounded in familiar concepts: the Library, Museum Restaurant, and Museum Shop, for example, are all recognizable aspects of the contemporary Western art museum. We are even accustomed to seeing architectural models in public institutions that are planning expansion and renovation projects. However, while these divisions are undoubtedly an important part of any major art museum, their activities are seldom seen as core. By placing these aspects at the center of his Museum, Gaba calls into question the nature and function of the museum and our relationship to it. By supplementing these sections with others, such as the Humanist Space, Marriage Room, and Music Room, which are well beyond most museum remits, Gaba creates a space not only for the contemplation of objects, but for sociability, study, and play, in which the boundaries between everyday life and art, the private and public, and observation and participation are blurred.

When Gaba first began working on his Museum, the legacy and backlash of the now-landmark exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in 1989 were still fresh. On a grand scale, Magiciens de la Terre sought to depart from the hegemonic cultural perspectives of Western European and American institutions and their exhibition projects by looking beyond the so-called centers of artistic practice. However, even before the exhibition opened, critics like Benjamin Buchloh and Rasheed Araeen questioned the curators’ treatment of the relationship between “center” and “margin” and noted the exhibition’s potential neocolonialist subtext. Several reviews, including one by Eleanor Heartney, highlighted the absence of politically charged work from Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Australia and argued that this resulted in the exhibition further romanticizing the “Other.” Unfortunately, by ignoring the dynamic practices of urban artists in Africa and the diaspora, the exhibition—rather than opening up international art discourse, as the curators had hoped—reinforced perceptions of the African continent as unchanging, remote, and exotic. It is nevertheless remembered as a seminal exhibition that marked a paradigm shift in curatorial practice.

Chinua Achebe famously argued in 1975 in his “An Image of Africa” speech that the propagation of such stereotypes is due to “the desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.” In a similar vein Gaba talks about addressing “the new day, the new, the now of Africa, an Africa that is not in books,” and he does so while referencing the interconnectedness between Europe and Africa. In the interview with Dercon he notably said, “If I create a Museum of Contemporary African Art, it’s because I say that the people who gave me that kind of education didn’t give us everything. They shut me up inside tradition.” During the colonial era many educators, missionaries, and anthropologists advocated the preservation of tradition-based practices and railed against the “contamination” of the African artist—attitudes that were further entrenched by the collecting and exhibition practices of most Western museums and private collectors until recently. Today projections of artists working in Africa as isolated, untutored, and expressionistic, their art connected with folk or religious activities rather than a distinctive and self-conscious art practice, have been completely discredited and the important contribution of artists in the diaspora acknowledged.

Gaba takes inspiration from daily life and explains that it is there that “you find new things, you find traditional things, you find everything.” In insisting on the here and now and by appropriating everyday objects in his work, irrespective of their origin, Gaba’s project acts as a corrective to the history of past centuries.

In the Art and Religion Room (see figure 5.3.2) a Jewish prayer shawl, a silver horseshoe, simple wooden crosses, a metal padlock, sculptures of Hindu goddesses, a plastic human skull, boxes of incense, traditional wooden African sculptures, reliefs of the Virgin Mary, a dream catcher, and empty perfume bottles, among other things, are arranged side by side on a large, cross-shaped wooden structure. The museum (or Museum within a museum) is one of the few places where this kind of juxtaposition would be possible. It is also a place where looking, questioning, and dialogue are encouraged, and although governed by its own set of behavioral mores, it aims to be a relatively safe space in which visitors can consider their own positions and explore that of others. In the Art and Religion Room, hierarchies are further destabilized by the presence of a tarot card reader in the center of the structure. Referencing the long relationship between art and religion across cultures, this room also mimics contemporary Benin, where Gaba explains most people are poly-religious: “Catholics brought Christianity, but for my ancestors Catholicism and Voodoo are not different. It’s just the new religion. . . . I cannot be a fetishist, but my fetish protects me. You will see sculptures of angels, of Jesus Christ and the Mami Wata, all in the same house.”

FIG. 5.3.2. Art and Religion Room from Museum of Contemporary African Art. Installation shot of Meschac Gaba exhibition, Tate Modern, 2013. By permission of the Tate Gallery, UK.

By removing these items from their original contexts and presenting them as art in his imaginary museum—an action that recalls the historical treatment of objects from Africa by Western museology—Gaba calls into question definitions of art and highlights the subjective nature of selection. We are reminded that a thing is valuable only because value has been ascribed to it and that the positioning of an object in a museum is the ultimate signifier of this.

While Gaba broaches many serious questions in his Museum of Contemporary African Art, his approach is in equal parts sincere and playful. When invited to propose a work for the exhibition For Real, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2000, Gaba suggested the ninth room of his Museum project. On October 6, invited guests and ordinary museum visitors witnessed the marriage of Meschac Gaba to Alexandra van Dongen. Well-wishers brought presents, which—together with the bride’s wedding dress, shoes, and handbag, and their marriage certificate, guest book, and wedding photographs and video—feature in the resultant installation: the Marriage Room (see figure 5.3.3). In this room art and life are indistinguishable, and the relationship between viewer, art object, and artist is reappraised.

FIG. 5.3.3. Marriage Room from Museum of Contemporary African Art. Installation shot of Meschac Gaba exhibition, Tate Modern, 2013. By permission of the Tate Gallery, UK.

The artist’s desire to share his fantasy continues throughout many of the twelve rooms. In the Salon visitors are invited to play the Adji computer game, an adaptation of Awélé, a game commonly played in Benin (and elsewhere in Africa) using stones and pitted boards or holes in the ground. In the Architecture Room the public can build their own imaginary museum using wooden blocks, and in the Game Room gallery goers are able to play with sliding puzzle tables, reconfiguring the flags of Chad, Angola, Algeria, Senegal, Seychelles, and Morocco.

While interactivity is a crucial part of this project, collaboration is equally so. Other artists have contributed objects to the Museum Shop and their time to activating the Museum Restaurant; the role of curators is enshrined in the Library (see figure 5.3.4) with a “curators’ table,” and in the Architecture Room there is a ladder with colorful Plexiglas treads inscribed with the names of the institutions and organizers who have presented the project. In the Humanist Space the branding on the gold bicycles declares that they were produced for the Museum of Contemporary African Art presentation in Kassel for Documenta 11, the exhibition that firmly established Gaba’s career internationally. While the realization of the Humanist Space marked the culmination of Gaba’s Museum, it was also the beginning of his long-term interest in intervening in the public realm. In Kassel visitors were able to use the bicycles to navigate the city, and with this simple gesture Gaba extended the reach of his project out of the museum and into the street.

FIG. 5.3.4. Library from Museum of Contemporary African Art. Installation shot of Meschac Gaba exhibition, Tate Modern, 2013. By permission of the Tate Gallery, UK.

Gaba is conscious that context alters both the meaning and reception of his work. Along with a desire to participate in the Beninese art scene and economy, this is one of the main reasons he has remained committed to both producing and exhibiting in Cotonou, moving back and forth between Benin and the Netherlands. Conceptually and logistically he needs both places—Africa and the West—to realize his projects, which results in a hybridity that is evident across his practice.

The task Gaba set for himself during his residency at the Rijksakademie in 1996–97 was completed in 2002, but his interest in exploring social structures and value systems continues as he repeatedly reveals the site of art making and appreciation to be dispersed, fragmented, and difficult to locate. Time and again he challenges the canon, presenting and framing objects that are important in his life, in the hope that they may have meaning for other people’s lives, too.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Gaba, Meschac. “I Use Money, Because I Refuse to Use the Word Colonisation.” Interview by Chris Dercon. In Museum of Contemporary African Art, edited by Bert Steevensz and Gijs Stork. Vol. 1., Library of the Museum. Amsterdam: Artimo Foundation, 2001.

Greenberg, Kerryn, ed. Meschac Gaba: Museum of Contemporary African Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2013.

Steevensz, Bert, and Gijs Stork, eds. Museum of Contemporary African Art. Vol. 1., Library of the Museum. Amsterdam: Artimo Foundation, 2001.

Wolfs, Rein, Macha Roesink, and Bianca Visser, eds. Meschac Gaba: Museum of Contemporary African Art & More. Cologne: Walther König, 2010.

•  •  •

MESCHAC GABA was born in 1961 in Cotonou, Benin. He began his career as a visual artist in Benin before moving to the Netherlands in 1996 to study at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. It was at the Rijksakademie that Gaba first conceived his major work, Museum of Contemporary African Art, a twelve-room installation, which culminated with his presentation of the Humanist Space at Documenta 11. Museum of Contemporary African Art was acquired by Tate and exhibited at Tate Modern, London, in 2013. The Library of the Museum was donated by Gaba to the city of Cotonou as part of his project Musée de l’Art de la Vie Active (MAVA). Gaba lives in Rotterdam and Cotonou.

•  •  •

KERRYN GREENBERG is Curator (International Art) at Tate Modern. She leads Tate’s Africa Acquisitions Committee and is responsible for formulating Tate’s strategy in the region. She has curated solo exhibitions of Marlene Dumas, Meschac Gaba, Francis Alÿs, Nicholas Hlobo, and Steven Cohen and group exhibitions including Kader Attia, Sammy Baloji, Michael MacGarry, and Adolphus Opara, among others. At Tate Modern she has also organized large-scale retrospectives of Joan Miró, Mark Rothko, John Baldessari and Juan Muñoz and curated displays of Jane Alexander, William Kentridge, Santu Mofokeng, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, and Guy Tillim. She regularly publishes and lectures on contemporary art.