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MESCHAC GABA THE STREET
MESCHACGABATHE STREET
MESCHACGABA
THE STREET
1 OCTOBER – 21 NOVEMBER 2009MICHAEL STEVENSON
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Meschac Gaba recalls somewhat wryly that when he took his latest artificial hair sculptures
walkabout in his native Benin, mothers pulled their children off the streets. No doubt they
feared this was a masked secret society traversing the shared social spaces with an arcane
agenda that boded no good.
In truth, the mothers’ anxiety was misplaced. There was, as evidenced in Gaba’s video of
the event, nothing inherently threatening about the procession of his assistants, dressed
in jeans and t-shirts, with hair extensions fashioned into the shapes of vehicles atop their
heads and masking their faces. Nor was there any menace in the procession itself as it made
TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONEIVOR POWELL
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its way: past the museum of arts, round the traffic intersections, taking in the grandiose
monuments of the old Marxist-Leninist regime; as it rubbed shoulders with matrons
in stately passage, kids on the loose, men in languid conversation, dudes in their finery
hanging out in cars; along reddish clay pathways under the giant shadow of ancient tropical
trees; taking in the whole of the life of Cotonou. Gaba’s procession had the feel of a private
festivity – eccentric maybe, but not invasive or demanding of attention. What was noticeable
in the general public response was the opposite of a fearful overreaction: for the most part
people glanced up then went back to their business, leaving Gaba to get on with his.
Still, the mothers were not absolutely wrong. Gaba’s Tresses are more than merely
wig-sculptures. They draw – though playfully, humorously and satirically – on masking
traditions that are invested with intense psycho-social power and magic throughout the
commonwealth of West Africa. In some instances such masking traditions can be genuinely
life-threatening – particularly those dedicated to the over-testosteroned gods of iron and
hunting, or celebrating the role of the blacksmith in society. Devotees of such cults routinely
(in the traditional frame) cut secret and dangerous ritual paths through sleeping villages,
and not infrequently mete out random punishments to those they encounter. By and large,
however, the mask is a more benign presence, and masking a socially subscribed and highly
conventionalised mechanism for satire and the ritual ordering of things.
The immediate point is that, via the mask, the head is semantically transformed. A type of
metonymy is effected: what is in the head (in metaphor) comes to be rendered on the head
in the represented forms of the mask.
At the same time as Gaba’s Tresses invoke the quasi-magical semantics of masking
traditions, they are equally rooted in the secular frivolities of fashion. The other reservoir of
reference in Gaba’s wig-heads is the vanity of hair extensions, the styling of artificial braids
to create more or less elaborate and sculptural coiffures. Though, historically, they emerged
in African and particularly West African societies, these deliberately artificialising fashions
have, in recent years, been enthusiastically taken up and given a baroque expressiveness in
the African diaspora of North America and Europe.
Not insignificantly, it was in this diaspora that Gaba first started to explore the use of these
hair extensions as both a material and a subject matter within his work – during a residency
in New York. Within the account he gives of the Tresses, he discovered that a remarkable
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number of West Africans were making a living in the Big Apple (as incidentally they do in
South African cities) by braiding hair. Gaba then set about appropriating the experience
of the high-rise magnificence of the American city through the medium of the artificial
hair extension – both literally and in its cross-culturally restless plays of reference. Empire
State and Chrysler Buildings, both inside and outside the head … these gave rise to a
staggered series of building tress-sculptures, developing (and, in the gesture, appropriating)
symbolically laden architectural icons in London, Paris and in South Africa.
The new cycle of Tresses – while still insisting, via the use of emphatically artificial fluorescent
hair extensions, on the diasporic character of the sculptural articulation – inverts the
relationship between first and third worlds. Here the represented subject matter is that
of vehicular transport – ‘wheels’ in the street vernacular – as a metonymic element within
consciousness. On one level the underlying metonym is captured in the consumerist mantra:
what you drive is what you are. On another, Gaba is wise to a multitude of ambivalences and
ambiguities that are specifically African in character, or at least become positively febrile
in the African context. In South Africa as I write this, an ongoing scandal is playing out in
the media over the multi-million-rand vehicles that senior government officials, in a time of
economic recession, acquire for themselves at taxpayers’ expense. This is part of the reality
that Gaba alludes to. Across the borders, in countries like Angola, you can still see ancient
lorries labouring at speeds in the single digits of kilometres per hour under the weight of
humans and their worldly goods and chattels piled up in pyramids like pineapples. This too
is the reality that Gaba registers, as is the militarised warlord’s tank-head sculpture …
Gaba operates in the space that opens up in the exchanges between the first and third
worlds, between Europe and the US on one side and Africa on the other. It is perhaps a little
glib but nonetheless vividly illustrative to point to the fact that the material from which the
Tresses are made – the artificial hair itself with all its African overtones and resonances
– is made from a kind of plastic, what the technologised West makes from raw materials
plucked out from the developing or underdeveloped parts of the world. And, of course
it was acquired in the US, not in Benin. It is itself a product of identities characterised by
deferral, aspiration and the second remove.
The point is that, like Gaba himself, the Tresses operate in the spaces in between what is
specifically African and what belongs to the second life of Africa in the developed world. And
in the spaces where the developed world has imprinted itself on, and been appropriated by,
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the experience of Africa and of Africans. In his work nothing is either one thing or the other.
His deeper subject matter lies in a zone of virtuality perpetually caught between the two. An
unstable, ever shifting virtuality, a radioactive half-life of the spirit and of culture …
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I am indebted to Michael Stevenson for a traveller’s insight into the society and the lived
realities of Benin. His take on Benin is that, as a society, it operates more or less exclusively
on the business of trading per se. He notes the virtual absence of any intensive exploitation
of natural resources, of any large-scale manufacturing, or, for that matter, of any significant
agricultural production. Tropical, fertile, blessed with a basic sufficiency of food and
subsistence material for survival and shelter, the society has evolved (unusually, if not
uniquely) as a quintessentially mercantile economy, in which the fact of trading becomes its
own justification and, in ways that sit uncomfortably with economic theory, sustains itself in
anomalous defiance of economic fundamentals.
In such an economic climate, what is bought and sold, exchanged or bartered is less
significant than the fact of the transaction. Surplus value – not in the classically Marxist
sense of capitalist exploitation by captains of industry, but nonetheless not unrelated to
this – comes to be the stock in trade, as value abstracted from and not directly predicted
by labour or the production of economic value in the first place. The real currency here is
entirely abstract, surplus value itself; what is being bought and sold is hardly more or less
than buying and selling itself.
In his Colours of Cotonou installation Gaba takes objects like his old painter’s smock, well-
worn jeans, the flag of Benin, then flattens and fixes them into two-dimensional surfaces
textured and patinated by use and encrusted history. These he fits into frames which
themselves have been encrusted with carefully shredded and sorted banknotes – rendered
useless as currency in the shredding (and in the fact that the notes are from discontinued
series). Removed from the business of buying and selling, Gaba’s ‘banknote confetti’ is
turned into texture and impasto, still redolent though with material memories of what the
mulch was made from.
It is this that becomes the frame – both literally and suggestively – into which the objects of
use are fitted. In one way the framing evokes a meditation on art and value in a relatively
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traditional postmodern context. But it goes beyond this in two ways. One rises from the
conscious play that Gaba makes between the two meanings in French of the word ‘cadre’
– one literally meaning ‘frame’, the other referring to the human instrument of a political
movement. The other arises from the fact that Gaba is not concerned to offer critique in and
through his work. The zone of ambivalence is one which he occupies; his work begins inside,
and embraces, the condition – the existential diaspora – of contradiction, and the deferred
realities that define the dance of contradiction are turned into an existential strategy.
A case in point is Vernissage, the participatory performance played out at the opening of
this exhibition. Here a nail bar such as you find in spaza stalls where hair braiding is also
done, bought voetstoets off the street in Cotonou, is reinstalled in the gallery. Colours and
colours of nail varnish, row upon row of vibrant artificial intensity; false nails of every hue
and design; glues and the affixing agents. There is a busy traffic in painting the nails of
opening-night visitors to the exhibition: the vanity made trenchant; high culture colliding
with the cadres of the street. And, of course, with the cadres of the street – the frames of
art, the povera materials ...
Vernissage rests upon another double entendre in French, with the word evoking both
painting nails and a preview or private view of an art collection. It all depends on your frame
of reference. And Gaba here, as in Colours of Cotonou, provides a spare frame. Two for the
price of one. Good value because, at the end of the day, the frame is not different from what
is caught inside it.
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COLOURS OF COTONOU
Colours of Cotonou
2007-2009
Found objects, Beninese banknotes,
wooden frames, glass
Installation dimensions variable
Vernissage
Opposite: installation view
Overleaf and p2: details
Below: opening night performance
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Opposite
Untitled works from Colours of Cotonou
Various dimensions
Below
Meschac Gaba installing Colours of Cotonou
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Colours of Cotonou
Installation view
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This and facing page
Cadres amicales
94 x 88 x 4cm and 99 x 81 x 4cm
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Cadre domestique
100 x 102 x 21cm
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Cadre nationale
98 x 100 x 24cm
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Above
Cadre mecanicien
93 x 84 x 49cm
Right
Cadre friperie
99 x 81 x 41cm
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Above
Cadre peintre
98 x 81 x 41cm
Left
Cadre artiste
88 x 78 x 34cm
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Untitled
70 x 96cm each
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Untitled
42.5 x 38cm and 44 x 36.5cm
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Untitled
32 x 25.5cm and 23 x 18cm
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Untitled
100 x 36cm each
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Opposite
Untitled (detail)
Below
Untitled (detail)
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CAR TRESSES
Car Tresses
2008
Video performance, Cotonou, Benin
Edition of 2
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Car Tresses:
2008
Braided artificial hair and mixed media
Tank
71 x 58 x 29cm
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Deux Chevaux
62 x 54 x 33cm
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Mercedes
56 x 48 x 24cm
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Truck
76 x 48 x 30cm
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Hawk
55 x 61 x 21cm
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Mitsubishi 4X4
70 x 55 x 28cm
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Studebaker
70 x 46 x 21cm
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Fire Engine
78 x 50 x 30cm
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Citroën DS
60 x 59 x 24cm
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Pick-up
64 x 55 x 28cm
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Oil Tanker
64 x 50 x 23cm
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Smart
60 x 40 x 26cm
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School Bus
72 x 60 x 26cm
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Beetle
66 x 63 x 30cm
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Jeep
72 x 50 x 33cm
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Picasso
54 x 51 x 30cm
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Tractor
76 x 40 x 30cm
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Car Tresses
Installation view
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53
Born in Cotonou, Benin, 1961
Lives in Rotterdam, the Netherlands
MESCHAC GABA
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RECENT SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2009 Museum for African Art and More, Museum de Paviljoens, Almere, the Netherlands,
and Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany
Meschac Gaba: Sweetness, UCCA – Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
2008 Trace, Gallery Lumen Travo, Amsterdam
Tresses Milan, Artra Gallery, Milan
Couleurs de Cotonou du mur à la toile, Centre Culturel Français de Cotonou, Benin
Glück – Welches Glück, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden – artistic director
2007 Tresses and Other Recent Projects, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg
Tresses, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town
Sweetness, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy
2006 Tresses, inIVA, London (street) performance
Défilé de perruques, Paris (street) performance
Glue Me Peace, Nobel Peace Center, Oslo
2005 Library of the Museum, BiblioNova, Geleen, the Netherlands
Glue Me Peace, Tate Modern, London
Tresses, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
RECENT GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2009 Esposizione Universale, GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy
Licht aan Zee AA (Afrika, Antila), Kunsthal 52, Den Helder, the Netherlands
2008 Port City: On mobility and exchange, Greenland Street Gallery, Liverpool, UK
Carried Away: Procession in art, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, the Netherlands
Biennale Cuvée, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria
2007 Africa Remix, Johannesburg Art Gallery (international touring exhibition)
Keep the Change, Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York
2006 How to Live Together, São Paolo Biennale, Brazil
Fever Variations, Gwangju Biennale, South Korea
Contact Zones, Sydney Biennale, Australia
De Kleine Biënnale, Fort op de Ruigenhoeksedijk, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Havana Biennale, Cuba
Global Tour: Art, travel and beyond, W139, Amsterdam
Respect! Formes de cohabitation, Musée Dar Si Saïd, Marrakech, Morocco
2005 Identity and Nomadism, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy
Monuments for the USA, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
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Catalogue no 45
October 2009
Cover image Details from Colours of Cotonou,
2007-2009
Michael Stevenson
Buchanan Building
160 Sir Lowry Road
Woodstock 7925
Cape Town, South Africa
Tel +27 (0)21 462 1500
www.michaelstevenson.com
Editor Sophie Perryer
Design Gabrielle Guy
Photography Mario Todeschini
Image repro Ray du Toit
Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town
Exhibition and catalogue realised with the support
of the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam
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MICHAEL STEVENSON
