A tenacious debate among followers of African visual culture is whether the art produced by art school-trained artists has a higher status in the contemporary art world than work produced by artists trained in traditional crafts, often learned directly from older generations and apt to be repetitive. Or not. Most experts dismiss this debate as spurious, believing each work must stand on its own merits, no matter what the artist’s training or skin color, but some collectors, like the Italian-born Jean Pigozzi, founder of the Contemporary African Art Collection based in Geneva, Switzerland, have very specific criteria for the artists they collect.
Pigozzi sends his curator André Magnin to Africa to search for new work, which, according to an article by Ingrid Sischy in Vanity Fair (December 2005), must be made only by artists who are “black, breathing, and still living in Africa.”
White artist Joachim Schönfeldt has very visibly fueled the discourse of “art” versus “craft.” In his native South Africa, Schönfeldt was considered an art world provocateur in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At this time Schönfeldt insisted on blurring the boundaries between art and craft, intentionally sullying art’s preciousness in the process, and arguably elevating the perceived status of the modes of production called craft.
With his sculpture installation Roar (1995–2006), Schönfeldt has apotheosized the art/craft debate and drawn attention to Africa’s perceived status as a “curiosity cabinet” in the eyes of Western collectors like Pigozzi. The sprawling work is a set of sculptures of three-headed animals. The central component, a powerful-looking lioness carved from blue gum wood, an Australian indigenous wood, cuts an imposing figure. The attendant birds and cows, smaller in stature and made variously from wood and glass fiber resin, complete a retinue of mute specimens, refugees from a mythologized African history.
In the 2007 article “Roar Against the Silence,” published in the magazine Art South Africa, South African art historian Rory Bester details how the work went on sale at the Art on Paper Gallery in Johannesburg for more than R1.5 million ($185,000). This was an unheard-of high price—set deliberately high by the artist himself—in the local market. As Bester states in the article, “The pricing is itself a self-conscious intervention into a South African art market that [Schönfeldt] believes is, for the most, part marshaled below R50,000 ($6,150).”
In Roar Schönfeldt has made an artwork of immense beauty and power, yet one that deliberately uses many of the visual and conceptual cues of craft, like idealized wildlife forms, lustrous varnished surfaces, and an apparently African folkloric content.
By pricing it in this manner, Schönfeldt seems to critique the stratification of prices for commodities and to interrogate the ethics of a system that rewards some effort so highly yet relegates other effort to the level of craft.
Untitled (Roar) (detail) 1995–2006
Wood, lacquer and paint
106 x 188 x 91 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
Collection: Hangart-7 Sammlung
Photographer: Wayne Oosthuizen
© Joachim Schönfeldt
Artist in his studio at the Bag Factory
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Kate Fountain
Untitled (Roar) (detail) 1995–2006
Wood, lacquer and paint
106 x 188 x 91 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
Collection: Hangart-7 Sammlung
Photographer: Wayne Oosthuizen
© Joachim Schönfeldt