3 Trigo Piula, Materna, 1984
Contemporary African art did not just appear from nowhere towards the end of the colonial period, but people often see it that way – as a response to bombardment by alien cultural forms or as an outcome of colonialism, pure and simple. In reality, contemporary art in Africa has developed through a process of bricolage, building upon the already existing structures and scenarios in which the older, precolonial and colonial genres of African art were made. It is in this structural sense, and in the habits and attitudes of artists towards making art, rather than in any adherence to a particular style, medium, technique or thematic range, that it is recognizably ‘African’.
This book, the second edition of Contemporary African Art, describes the successive transformations that have occurred in African artistic practice, beginning with the transition from late colonialism to nominally independent political statehood. For most anglophone and francophone African colonies this occurred in the early 1960s, while for the Portuguese-speaking colonies it took place in the 1970s, for Zimbabwe, 1980, and for South Africa, as late as 1994. From this initial period of change, the book moves to look at a second transformation in artistic practice, which began in the late 1980s: the ongoing expansion of the art world in response to the economic forces of globalization.
Before turning to these changes, it is important to address the even larger, earlier rupture in artistic practice that occurred in both Europe and Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though for vastly different reasons. In France, this shift occurred in response to a small group of ‘modern’ artists and their supporters, while in Africa it was a result of large-scale colonization by European imperial powers following the Berlin Conference of 1884–5.
At around the same time, the impact of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) in the West had given rise to the phenomenon of the natural history museum. This was intended to document cultural and natural evolution, and also engendered a popular ideology that saw the new African colonies as opportunities for specimen collecting, both of flora and fauna and of material culture. African sculpture, in its early role as ‘specimen’, began to arrive in England, France, Portugal, Belgium and Germany, where its radical difference from contemporary academic models made it attractive to a Western avant-garde that rejected academic formulas of representation. Late nineteenth-century African art thereby serves as a bridge between two very different twentieth-century art histories, played out on very different stages with very different actors and audiences. Collectors and patrons, who until the mid-twentieth century were mainly the colonizers themselves and other Westerners, formed the other important bridge between these two art histories.
Modernism in Western art refers to a broadly specific historical interlude between the mid-nineteenth and late-twentieth centuries, which, to use critic Clement Greenberg’s famous phrase, linked the newly emergent avant-garde to the bourgeoisie by ‘an umbilical cord of gold’: rising capitalism. In Africa, ‘the modern’ came hand in hand with colonialism, and is closely identified with the imposition of social and economic transformation that was justified by social-evolutionary theories of ‘improving the native’ while extracting their labour and natural resources to feed industrialization in Europe. Sociologist Anthony Giddens defines modernity as a new kind of civilization, which has swept away all previous social orders. In Marxian cultural theory, modernity is the ‘action-horizon’ of a system of global capitalism, and ideologies of modernization are the tools of Western dominance through forms such as colonialism.
In the postcolonial 1980s, this dominance took the form of strict Structural Adjustment Programs, imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank as a condition for massive loans to ill-managed and debt-ridden African economies. Program policies included deregulation, mass privatization and the devaluation of artificially inflated currency, causing a plummet in buying power for ordinary citizens and elites alike and concomitant impoverishment in every sphere of life. Under these mandatory neoliberal reforms, as state-run industries were forced to retrench and privatization spread, those who had enjoyed forms of government and institutional patronage – including many artists – saw that sponsorship vanish.
Prominent examples include, in Senegal, the disappearance of material support for artists and artistic training after the end of Léopold Senghor’s presidency in 1980. Equally destructive was the effect on traditional ceremonial life and by extension its art forms – for example in central Nigeria, where the once frequent family-sponsored, dry-season ‘second burials’ (commemorative funerals) had to become occasional, community-funded events, because no single household could provide the necessary food, drink and payments for masquerade performances. At the same time, privatization made a small number of the rich even richer, and set the stage for some to begin collecting art as an investment. To most people, whether urban artists or rural farmers, modernity was a mixed bag of goods: education, medical care, consumer goods, but also the collapse of old systems that had worked.
3 Trigo Piula, Materna, 1984
4 Gedewon, Cherchebbi, 1977. This ink drawing was intended as a talisman to protect the client by swallowing up demons when it is invoked. It is named after the prayer inscribed in five of its twenty-seven panels.
Current critical discourse on Western art purports that a movement away from the practices of late modernism to new forms of contemporary art took place sometime in the late 1980s. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism are often used as markers of a meaningful political and cultural shift in both ideology and practice. Economically, this is supported by the post-Communism expansion of global capital and, with it, the emergence of new art markets. But as a new period in art, the ‘contemporary’ (and not just the literal meaning of contemporary as ‘current’), this has not been as clear-cut and all-encompassing as it is made to sound in either Africa or the West (or, more currently, the Global South and North). There are still a substantial number of older artists who think of their work as ‘modern’, both in and out of Africa. In the institutionalized art world, places such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York treat contemporary art as simply the cutting edge of the ‘modern’.
Similarly, while Western cultural theory asserts that globalization has created a world in which vast territories, including both Europe and its postcolonies, are interconnected through the circulation of goods, money and ideas, there are still places in rural Africa where an artist can spend a productive lifetime without connecting with a global art market. In African cities such as Nairobi or Abidjan, where links to global patronage through traders, galleries and cooperatives are clearly visible, individual artists still make choices about the audiences to whom their work will be directed. In this balancing act, local, national and transnational identities are determined not only through the varieties of patronage artists are able to attract, but also by their points of reference on the compass of the postcolonial world. The output of an African artist working in London or California is filtered through a very different everyday reality from that of a counterpart in Lagos or, at an even greater distance, in an upcountry village in the same nation-state. And as practising African artists, each should lay equal claim to our attention.
But art books and catalogues are generally written and read in New York and Los Angeles, Paris and London, rather than upcountry African towns, and increasingly the focus of critical attention has come to rest on those artists, transnational yet also African, who inhabit this larger and distant art world. For these diasporic Africans, versed in the current debates of cultural theory but also far from home, curator Okwui Enwezor (himself a Nigerian intellectual who resided in the West) spoke of the tension between here and there, the ‘seeing eye’ and the ‘remembering mind’. This double vision is not a part of the artistic experience for artists who have not migrated, and for whom the most pressing issue is often the ongoing lack of support in their own home countries.
The majority of African artists have been affected deeply by the colonial and postcolonial condition, most obviously by weak institutional support and economic dependence on international institutions and expatriate patronage. But to refer to contemporary art exclusively as ‘postcolonial’ is to deny it any deeper history and connection to what came before the colonial incursion – formal colonialism in most African countries only represents about sixty years of an art history extending back at least two thousand years in some places. The colonial era was a period of turbulence and major change – but arguably it was no more important than other major historical changes such as the spread of metallurgy, the Islamic conquest or the slave trade. The network of social relations in which art-making is historically implanted – the workshop, the apprenticeship system, the deference to experience and authority – is in many ways still similar to that which existed before colonialism, though with the interesting addition of a colonial model of academic art education for elites, and their subsequent critique of this system.
There has also been the question of postmodernity: how much might this label apply to African art? The scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah asked in 1991 whether the 'post-' in postcolonial meant the same as the 'post-' in postmodernism? The answer seemed to be both yes and no. If colonialism brought modernization, then why wouldn’t the postcolonial and the postmodern be parallel periods of reflection and critique?
Above all, postmodernism presumes a conscious awareness of modernism, its accomplishments and its limitations. This consequently reduces the discussion to that small sector of the artist community, largely diasporic, who are in a position to offer a critique of modernism. That is to say, those who may have strived for and achieved it, but found it wanting; those who have examined it, found it irrelevant to their purposes and have chosen to bypass it in favour of an alternative vision of the world; and finally those who, to quote the curator Richard Hylton, critique it by ‘wittily question[ing] the linearity of history and identity’. Hylton was speaking of Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962), a London-born Yoruba artist, but the same description could apply to Trigo Piula (b. 1950s), who lives and works in Congo-Brazzaville.[206] In his painting Materna (1984), a visual double entendre on Kongo images of maternal power and the ‘magic of consumerism’, imported evaporated milk tins and the face of a European milkmaid become the icons of modern Kongo motherhood.[3]
Given the very different modernities experienced by African artists, their formulations of the postmodern are bound to be sporadic and highly individual. Finally, ‘postmodernism’ as a set of strategic practices was identified with the art of the 1980s in the West. It is therefore already ‘historical’ rather than contemporary in a literal sense. We can still speak of ‘the postmodern condition’ as part of the zeitgeist, but not as a current art movement.
The most striking similarity between the postcolonial and the postmodern has been the condition of hybridity – Samburu warriors with spears, mobile phones and Christmas ornaments in their hair, or, in the reverse, lawyers or government bureaucrats having themselves filmed taking part in traditional performances in their ancestral villages. As Appiah points out, both terms also share the central premise of the commodification of artwork and the dominance of an international art market. On the other hand, he 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.
5 John Goba, Odeh-E-Lay (No. 1), 1992
The ‘postmodern question’ has been absorbed, digested and dissolved into the debates about contemporaneity that have prevailed since 2000, while postcoloniality has settled into a comfortable late-middle age. As firsthand memories of colonialism recede into the past, ‘post-’ is now sharing space with ‘trans-’, as in transnational and transcultural, and will eventually be retired as a critical term of choice in the visual arts – though it seems assured of a permanent place in subaltern literary studies, where it began.
6 Pende blacksmith Ngoma Kanduka Mbuya at work on a mask, Djindji, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photo by Z.S. Strother, 6 July 1987
7 Colonial-era news photograph of Pende sculptor Kaseya-Ntambwe (left) with a European visitor, M.R. Verly (right), looking at the work of an apprentice. Ngonji, Congo, pre-1958
All other things being equal, the new will arise where the old does not already exist; that is, where it does not have to compete with a tradition already in place. Since a portion of the artistic production in the well-known sculpture-producing regions of West and Central Africa continues to emulate or revise older forms, many of the new genres of contemporary African art have sprung up elsewhere.[6, 7] And although, with a few exceptions, the older types of African art originated in a social order which was kinship-centred and based in traditional patterns of authority, the new ones are more likely to occur in urban contexts and be lodged in an emerging class structure in which art no longer is based in ritual but in consumer culture.
The places where new art is produced in the greatest variety and quantity therefore fall into two categories: cities through Africa, and several regions of the continent that were not major sites of precolonial image-making. Countries such as Zimbabwe, Senegal, South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, which are seldom represented in museum collections of traditional sculpture, are major locales for the production of new forms.[5] By the same logic, a substantial proportion of artists in Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and the Congo continue to be involved in the production of masks and figures, some of which are still intended for local use but a greater number for a global market. New art has also developed in these countries, but here its formation must take place within a milieu of existing practices, sometimes producing hybrid images and reflexive content that uses or comments upon precolonial forms. These range from John Goba’s (b. 1944) exuberant Ode-lay masks, which combine paint-store pigments and porcupine quills – originally used in the 1970s by the Ode-lay society, in masquerades in urban Freetown, Sierra Leone, but now eagerly collected by art museums – to the sophisticated reworking of adinkra (hand-stamped Akan funeral cloth) and kente (strip-woven Akan royal cloth) designs in the early wood relief pieces of Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui (b. 1944).[8]
8 El Anatsui, Patches of History III, 1993
What is meant by ‘contemporary art’ in and out of Africa? Is it a set of qualities or a slice of time? The moving edge of the late modern or its fragmented and globalized replacement? Conversely, is modern art really ‘over’ in Africa and has it been replaced by the contemporary? In the twenty years since the this book was first published, a lively and exhaustive discussion of these questions has taken place among art historians, cultural critics, curators and, most recently, anthropologists of art. Arranged on a continuum of opinion, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) with its presentation of the contemporary as the newest revision of modernism exemplifies one extreme, and the exhibitions and writings of critic and curator Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) the opposite, representing the contemporary as a deterritorialized, hybridized, essentially postcolonial dialectic space of ideas and practices, even in places that were never colonized to begin with.
There are two important footnotes to these representations. First, the landscape of art looks different depending on where you stand in it, and the MoMA perspective espoused here comes from the high-profile curator Kirk Varnedoe (1946–2003) in 2000 and director Glenn Lowry (b. 1952) in 2007, based on a collection that is classically modern Euro-American. Enwezor’s view, on the other hand, was that of an outspoken independent curator whose major exhibitions were most frequently grounded in the anticolonial and postcolonial experience in Africa. The second point to note is that African contemporary art has a distinctly different prehistory from its Euro-American counterpart, and one that positioned it at the art-world periphery until it was caught up in the currents of transnational cultural flows in the past few decades. Despite these flows, the market remains difficult to access for the hopeful transnational artist. Even today, ninety-five per cent of contemporary art market activity in the USA occurs in New York, so its proximity becomes essential to artists hoping to break into that market.
9 Pilkington Ssengendo Nsibambi with The Kabaka, 2011. In Ssengendo’s words, ‘The king collected everything, including riches from abroad which were kept locked up.’
The question of the contemporary’s relation to modernism is therefore still hotly debated, and this is as true in Africa as it is in New York. Terry Smith, in his influential book What is Contemporary Art? (2009), commented on this issue by calling one of several manifestations of the contemporary ‘remodernism’, thereby acknowledging the continuing presence of one in the other. Though he was thinking of European artists such as Gerhard Richter, the same observation can be made about many older-generation artists currently or recently practising in Africa.
The oldest practising African artists, whose careers began in the independence decade of the sixties, were ‘modern’ in that time frame and often continue to think of themselves that way – however much their work has evolved. In this sense, ‘modernity’ is not simply a before/after break with the past. It is only loosely embedded in time, except at its inception. In the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, ‘modernity’ implied a pairing of Western-derived media such as easel painting and printmaking with African ‘content’. One such movement is Senghor’s École de Dakar, which was based partly in the principles of Négritude philosophy but also in Parisian modernism and the ancient North African tapestry tradition. Another such is the Zaria Art Society in Nigeria, with its manifesto of ‘natural synthesis’ between Western techniques and indigenous visual languages: first uli mural and body painting, and later nsibidi murals and adinkra and kente textiles. Or Bruce Onobrakpeya (b. 1932), a Zaria alumnus who uses experimental printing techniques to represent subjects of Urhobo myth. In East Africa, the late Ugandan artist Pilkington Ssengendo Nsibambi (b. 1942), who came out of Makerere Art School in the independence decade of the 1960s, continued to paint the great themes of Kiganda myth in a modernist, abstract style well into his seventies.[9] He asks, ‘Why should Ugandan artists not be interested in their own culture first and foremost? If they don’t care about international art, so what?’
The following eight chapters, including a new chapter on photography, work through the issues that artists and art-making faced during and after late colonialism: the introduction of print and electronic media and with them consumerism on a wide scale; the changing conditions of patronage under and after colonialism; the relation of art to emergent nationalisms; the transformations in rural and urban workshops; the introduction of academic art training and the emergence of a class of artist-intellectuals from universities and schools of fine arts; and diasporization. To these has been added a ninth and final chapter that addresses the global expansion of the contemporary art market, with its biennials, art fairs, auctions, independent curators, transnational artists and a new class of collectors, including the impact these changes continue to have on contemporary African art.