Art criticism and Africa

Art Criticism and Africa

Edited by

Katy Deepwell

African Art and Society SeriesSeries Editor: Sajid Rizvi

Art criticism and AfricaEdited by Katy Deepwell

Concept and design: Sajid Rizvi

ISBN 1-872-843-13-1

© 1997. Updated 2014. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form (graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems) without permission of the publishers

Published by Saffron Books, an imprint of Eastern Art PublishingP O Box 13666London SW14 8WFUnited Kingdom

Telephone +44-[0]-181-392 1122Facsimile +44-[0]-181-392 1122E-Mail saffron@eapgroup.comWeb www.eapgroup.com.

Printed in the United Kingdom

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Art CritiCism And AfriCA • �

Acknowledgments • 6Heather Waddell • Jock Whittet 1913-1996: A tribute • 7 Katy Deepwell • Introduction • 9Olabisi Silva • africa95: Cultural colonialism or cultural celebration • 15John Picton • Yesterday’s cold mashed potatoes • 21Everlyn Nicodemus • The art critic as advocate • 27Colour plates • 33Ola Oloidi • Art criticism in Nigeria, 1920-1996: the development of profes-

sionalism in the media and the academy • 41Murray McCartney • The art critic as advocate: A Zimbabwean perspec-

tive • 51Barbara Murray • Art criticism for whom? The experience of Gallery magazine

in Zimbabwe • 55Tony Mhonda • Art critic as advocate • 63David Koloane • Art criticism for whom? • 69Colin Richards • Peripheral vision: Speculations on Art Criticism in South

Africa • 73Chika Okeke • Beyond either/or: Towards an art criticism of accom-

modation • 89Fatma Ismail Afifi • The Kom Ghorab project in Cairo • 95Olu Oguibe • Thoughts towards a New Century • 97George Shire • Art criticism of Africa outside of Africa: A reply to Olu Ogu-

ibe • 107Tribute to Stephen Williams • 111Contemporary art in Africa• A general bibliography • 113Appendix • Notes on AICA • 119Index • 121

Contents

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Acknowledgments

This volume could not have been published in its present format without the financial support of the Arts Council of England. Further financial assistance came from the London magazine, Arts and The

Islamic World, via the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). One of AIW's former contributors, the late George Whittet, was responsible for many a timely piece about contemporary artists from North Africa. Mark Gisbourne, James Hy-man and Bisi Silva, of AICA, were supportive throughout. Encouragement for going ahead with the series on African Art and Society, in conjunction with occasional monographs in Eastern Art Report, came from several distinguished colleagues, including John Picton, of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Uni-versity of London, who is editing the next volume in the series, Visual Arts in Post-apartheid South Africa.

I am grateful to Katy Deepwell for her editing of the texts and to my wife, Shirley Rizvi, executive editor of Eastern Art Report, for her help throughout the vari-ous stages of production. Colin Richards, John Picton and Robert Loder lent many of the illustrations related to South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and other states. Several other illustrations were provided by Elisabeth Laloushek at the October Gallery, Clare Stracey of Art First and Nancy Hynes. To all of them, I am sincerely thankful.

Further acknowledgments are due to the Museum of Mankind, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Oxford and the Royal Academy of Arts for the use of illustrations for some of the shows featured in africa95 and earlier. Finally, a note of thanks to all friends and colleagues, too numerous to mention here, who have expressed their support for and interest in the series.

Sajid RizviSeries Editor, African Art and Society

Art CritiCism And AfriCA • �

A tribute

Jock Whittet 1913-1996

George Sorley (Jock) Whittet was a modest, considerate man; a family man and a good friend to many in the ar t world, commissioning articles by younger and lesser-known art critics and, more

recently, passing on useful contacts. A Scot by birth, he shared his fellow coun-trymen’s love of the open air and countryside and lived with his family latterly at Shoreham-by-Sea, on the southern coast of England, where he enjoyed swimming and the fresh sea air.

Jock’s modesty was such that many younger critics were unaware that af-ter war service in North Africa and Italy 1942-45 he had been editor of Studio and then Studio International from 1946 to 1966. He was also the author of several books, including Scotland Explored (1969), Lovers in Art (1972), Mystic Dreamscapes (1988) and many art catalogues.

In the 1970s and 1980s he wrote for Le Monde, the Daily Mail, Arts and the Islamic World, Arts Review, Arts and Antiques and contributed to BBC televi-sion and radio programmes.

It is, however, his assistance to contemporary artists from the Arab and Islamic world, Australian and British artists that he will be most remembered for internationally. In fact he was probably appreciated more abroad than in Britain, as is often the case with modest writers and critics.

Heather Waddell, AICA Executive Committee

� • Art CritiCism And AfriCA

Anonymous, Tomb painting from Ghana. Portrait ofKwasi Adedivi 1880-1992, a well known local diviner, from a tomb beside the road near Denu Junction, Ghana.

John Picton 1994

Art CritiCism And AfriCA • �

1 The International Association of Art Critics (AICA) is a

UNESCO non-governmental organisation, officially founded in 1951, by art critics who are

anxious to improve international cooperation in the fields of

artistic creativity, circulation and endeavour. See appendix.

2The conference received the financial support of UNESCO, Visual Arts Department of the

Arts Council of England, the British Council in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Egypt and The

Courtauld Institute.This volume was made possible

by the financial support of the Visual Arts Department of the Arts Council of England, AICA

and a generous donation in memory of Jock Whittet.

In November 1996, AICA1 organised a conference on Art Criticism and Africa with a particular focus on Nigeria, Zimbabwe and South Africa.2 The essays collected here are developed from papers given at the

conference by contributors who came from these countries as well as Egypt, North America and Europe.

The conference had a twofold purpose. The first aim was to develop an initiative within AICA, a UNESCO non-governmental organisation, to facilitate the establishment of autonomous national sections of AICA in those African countries where English is recognised as an official language. The latter initiative has led to AICA sections in Nigeria and Zimbabwe being established in 1997 with discussions about a section continuing in South Africa. The second aim was to develop an ongoing dialogue with many of the visual arts participants who had come to the UK to take part in the africa95 festival.

Africa95 was a significant festival in the UK and contributed to the developing awareness about contemporary African art in Britain where, with the exception of some excellent small-scale exhibitions, the majority of exhibitions of African Art had been concerned with traditional African arts. The Art from South Africa exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in 1990 and Africa Explores shown at the Tate in Liverpool in 1993-4 were two exceptions in recent years. The AICA subcommittee3 attempted to build on contacts established during af-rica95 and to bring together again some key individuals who had a stake in the curation and art criticism of contemporary art in Nigeria, Zimbabwe and South

Katy Deepwell is president of AICA British Section, an artist, critic and lecturer in art theory and history. Her PhD was Women Artists working in Britain between the

Two World Wars (Birkbeck College, 1991) from which she curated Ten Decades: The Careers of Ten Women Artists born 1897-1906 (Norwich, 1992). She recently edited New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies (Manchester University Press,

1995) and is working on a second anthology on Women Artists and Modernism. She is founder and editor of the first international feminist online visual arts journal,

n.paradoxa:http://web.ukonline.co.uk/n.paradoxa/index.htm

KAty deepwell

Introduction

3The AICA African Art Criti-cism subcommittee included

James Hyman, Jane Norrie, Sajid Rizvi, Bisi Silva and Katy

Deepwell (chair).

10 • Art CritiCism And AfriCA

Africa. The aim was to continue the dialogue with British art critics, as many people felt that the context in which contemporary art from Africa was received remained overshadowed by the debates about ‘primitivism’ in Modernism; by anthropological perceptions of traditional African art and by misconceptions about the ‘ethnic Other’ in Europe. The dimension that africa95 brought to understanding the situation of contemporary African art is the subject of Bisi Silva’s review of the exhibitions organised then and the reason for reproducing her discussion here.

How, when the context for receiving contemporary African art seems over-determined by misunderstandings, by lack of knowledge, by dogmatic ways of seeing, is it possible to take a fresh look? When one attempts to look again at the present situation of art criticism in Africa and the relationship between art criticism and perceptions of contemporary African art, it is not a question of wiping the slate clean or of starting from ground zero. As much as everyone in this volume would advocate the need for greater historical understanding of the production of contemporary African art, whose perspective and which legacy is employed remain the pertinent questions. John Picton’s opening remarks address the dilemma of where to start from a European academic position: namely, how does one bridge the gulf between the position Africa and research on Africa occupies in the West and the reality of contemporary art production? How does one cast aside received ideas as the only mechanism for discussion and find a means of addressing the complexities of the situation in Africa as central rather than peripheral to understanding contemporary art from Africa?

We initially asked all the participants to address their understanding of the criticism of contemporary art from Africa in the present moment. Four loose thematic groupings were used to extend the discussion: namely, the art criti-cism about Africa which takes place outside Africa; the role of the art critic as advocate; art criticism for whom? and institutional issues in the administration of culture. From these initial topics, the different positions and ideas of each contributor developed.

As many of the contributors reaffirm, art criticism has its own history. It does not arrive as a fully formed set of terms and ideas to be used indiscriminately on every art object. Nor does it arrive only in the form of the 2,000-word essay published as standard in European and American contemporary art journals and catalogues. Discussion and debate play an equally important role in the generation of a critical culture and, with the widespread development of film, television, radio, the use of video and the Internet, the forms of critical exchange are not confined to the written word alone. Informal and formal structures for discussion play an important part in the exchange of ideas between artists and critics and in building broader audiences for art. Once we reject the idea of a singular or universal language, form or set of tools to describe or address our experience of art objects, this does not mean that ‘anything goes.’ Criticism does not then collapse into relativism or comparative anthropology as if by the predetermined logic offered by some post-modernists. Acknowledging the shifts in standards, the variety of sites and places where art criticism occurs, the development of key debates about the function of art and its interpreta-tion provide the means necessary to open up a space for a re-examination of contemporary art from Africa.

Art criticism is not the inferior counterpart to art history, in so far as it is seen as only the space of ‘reportage’ or cheap journalism, interested only in scandals about dealers, prices for art or gossip about artists. Much of the debate which follows concerns the conflicts between ‘academic’ and ‘journalistic’ approaches

Art CritiCism And AfriCA • 11

to art criticism but the aim of these discussions is to assess how ideas about contemporary African art can be carried forward, not to return to a demarcation of territory or an intellectually élitist approach.

Art criticism mediates the important relationship between art and its audi-ences. In this respect, art criticism plays a role in a changing and evolving process. Terms, ideas and issues within art criticism change as dramatically over the course of time as the art itself. Thus, art and art criticism are insepa-rably bound together in a mutual exchange. While it is possible to analyse the variety of shared value and belief systems which operate within the numerous constituencies and communities which form the ‘art world,’ it is also possible to detect a dominant consensus which determines and privileges certain types of debate over others. This consensus, when identified as an entity, represents a ‘way of looking’ in the sense of a world-view in so far as it offers a means to grasp and evaluate the variety of social and political projects of artists. In this respect, the words chosen by a critic do not simply reflect experience or things as they are, they stake a position in relation to the dominant consensus.

The identification of key critical terms to mediate the experience of the viewer when confronted by the art object is part of the process of building or shifting the consensus view. The use of particular terms draws a line around an artist’s project and equally positions them as conservative, avant-garde or revolutionary. Particular phrases offer affiliations to other artists and point to ideas and con-ceptions which in turn fuel other work in both criticism and art practice. The language we use to speak about art is not neutral, it carries with it a variety of located and implicit meanings. Certain critical terms possess currency at one time and not at another. In translation critical terms travel from one language to another and in the process the definition of art and the stakes for both art and culture changes. Such slow transformations bear careful consideration within an historical and political framework in order to assess the values which people in very different constituencies hold. Once one starts to pay attention to how language operates, to how ideas are framed and concepts presented, the different positions within art criticism start to come into view.

Within this book, a range of very different histories, political positions and experiences are present. How each contributor approaches a subject, how each constructs an argument for and about the present varies dramatically. Two very different approaches, for example, are represented by Everlyn Nicodemus’ and Ola Oloidi’s contributions. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory as a model through which to reassess the field of art production, Everlyn Nicodemus highlights the fact that European art criticism is not a stable entity but a tradition which is reinvented and changing since the 18th century.

Taking these ideas about the basis for historical understanding and the infra-structure in which art operates one stage further, Everlyn Nicodemus goes on to address how there is a paradox for the development of art criticism in Africa with, on the one hand, the obliteration of a local art history and developed forms of art criticism while, on the other, a resulting dependency on western models of art history. Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘field’ becomes a means to emphasise the role art criticism can play in building an infrastructure and an audience for art while remaining cognisant of the stakes in a local and global politics.

Ola Oloidi’s essay traces a history of the conflict in Nigeria between the different conceptions of art criticism which have emerged amongst groups of journalists and academics from the 1930s to the present. His account stresses the outlines of an indigenous tradition of art criticism in Nigeria, mediated by the development of the university and the newspaper industry. Issues of profes-

africa95

The africa95 logo.

12 • Art CritiCism And AfriCA

sionalism, education and training as well as economic and political pressures pre- and post-Independence play a part in determining these developments. He ends by stressing the relevance of critical terms in Yoruba for discussion of the values of art and the skill of artists, pointing to their transformative dimen-sion in understanding art.

Murray McCartney traces another history with regard to Zimbabwe post-Independence reviewing the stark legacy of colonialism and assessing the emergence of factors for change after a period of civil war, disenfranchisement and lack of educational opportunity for the majority of the population. He stresses how access to general education has improved although little place has been given to art education, but points to how the general culture of literacy and lo-cal publishing ventures may offer sources for hope and indications of change. Barbara Murray’s paper describes the history of a relatively new venture in Zimbabwe, the magazine, Gallery. She outlines how, slowly and without much capital, an attempt was made to raise the stakes for art criticism, encourage a greater awareness of contemporary work in Zimbabwe and build an expanded audience for art through the magazine’s distribution through schools. Barbara Murray raises two important questions: who is the audience for art criticism and who do art critics write for? This idea is then developed in Tony Mhon-da’s paper and a cross-section of the responses to that paper from the floor of the conference which throw further light on the context of art production in Zimbabwe. Tony Mhonda’s remarks underline the impact of the commercial market for art abroad which, coupled with the legacy of the colonial education system, have created a closed and moribund regime for the discussion of art in Zimbabwe. Tony Mhonda questions the reality of building a greater or more diverse audience for art or art criticism in Zimbabwe when the market for art is so commercial and geared almost exclusively to European collectors.

David Koloane takes up several of the points made by Mhonda and Murray in their assessment of Zimbabwe while addressing the very specific legacy of apartheid in South Africa. The difference in the situation of each country be-comes apparent. David Koloane’s essay concentrates on the double standard in criticism when a white or a black artist is discussed, highlighting the way the former is inserted into ‘art history’ whereas the other is expected to represent ‘black culture’; ‘ethnicity’ or ‘blackness’. However this recognisable scenario is counterbalanced by his positive suggestions for change and the need to de-velop greater critical dialogue between artists and critics (who remain largely university trained). His paper goes on to suggest collaborations between artists and critics through writing workshops to develop criticism, artist-in-residency schemes in universities and art schools; the need for writing assignments to form a standard part of the training of artists as well as informal talks at art galleries to engage the public.

Attention to the critical context in which art is received while trying to build new frameworks for writing art criticism is the theme explored in both Colin Richards’ and Chika Okeke’s papers. Colin Richards assesses the role of art criticism in the changing situation of South Africa with attention to post-colonial theory. Focusing attention on a few key examples of the critical reception of a work of art and an art project, Colin Richards highlights the tense political and social stakes in these debates and the attempts to build new communities in the ‘new’ and ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa. Colin Richards draws attention to the complexity of the local situation while demonstrating how these conflicts are staged with regard to different constituencies and interest groups. While problematising the ‘location of criticism,’ he is keen to stress the value of aca-

Gallery

Gallery No 7 cover.

Art CritiCism And AfriCA • 13

demic forms of criticism as part of the process of building a culture, offering tools which may enable dialogue and exchange in the face of worrying signs of anti-intellectualism or of sterile paralysis which is the result of confrontational and antagonistic positions found between groups or types of artists.

Chika Okeke offers a modern reassessment of a productive synthesis between European theory and traditional Igbo philosophy embodied in and developed through Olu Oguibe’s theory about the masquerade. In this respect, his work remains conscious of the legacy of Zaria Art School’s ideas of ‘Natural Synthesis’ but seeks to develop terms, issues and ideas relevant to the situa-tion of contemporary African art. The idea that the masquerade necessitates viewing and understanding of the work from many positions becomes a metaphor for art discourse to find value in

many different opinions. Fatma Ismail’s essay presents another possibility for art critical devel-

opment in her discussion of a collaboration between a critic and two artists in the creation of an art project together in Cairo. Art criticism becomes central to the artistic process. It is not seen here as simply the means of advertising the art once made but as part of the development of ideas, negotiations and understanding which fuel a contemporary site-specific project in a local com-munity. AICA’s section in Egypt has in the last few years tried to play a strong role in developing new cultural initiatives and introducing new opportunities to debate the situation of contemporary art.

The histories presented in this volume are not just simply academic exercises or invented traditions, they draw on lived experience of the production of art and attempts to disseminate ideas. Enforced migration or voluntary exile from Africa given recent political and social conditions are part of the lives of many Africans now living in Europe and America.

A panel within the conference addressed the question of contemporary African art criticism from the perspective of individuals who no longer live in Africa. Here, on the one hand, in George Shire’s essay, personal memory and history become the grounds for critical reflection upon systems of value in reading and interpreting the world informed by social and political knowledge brought by different languages (English and Shona) and cultures and locations (between Zimbabwe, Britain and America). While, on the other, for Olu Oguibe, brought up in Nigeria, knowledge of the repression and military dictatorship there, become a reason to argue ever more forcefully for Republican/democratic values in life and art.

The contributors’ conception of history, the intellectual resources they use, the experiences which they draw upon are part and parcel of what enables their thoughts, their words. In tracing this, perhaps the reader will gain a great deal of insight into the conflicts, the problematics, the debates which have guided and shaped their world-view and their work as well as their view of art criticism in parts of Africa today.

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Penny Siopis, Hush-hush: Collaborator, 1995, mixed

media installation from the first Africus Johannesburg Biennale exhibition, Objects of Defiance/

Spaces of Contemplation (South Africa) curated by Emma

Bedford.