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The African Biennale: Envisioning ‘Authentic’ African Contemporaneity

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The African Biennale: Envisioning ‘Authentic’ African Contemporaneity The African Biennale: Envisioning ‘Authentic’ African Contemporaneity by Fiona Mauchan This thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Stellenbosch University Department of Visual Art Faculty of Arts and Social Science Dr. Lize van Robbroeck March 2009 DECLARATION By submitting this thesis electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the owner of the copyright thereof (unless to the extent explicitly otherwise stated) and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification. 03 March 2009 Copyright © 2009 Stellenbosch University All rights reserved ii ABSTRACT This thesis aims to assess the extent to which the African curated exhibition, Dak’Art: Biennale de l’art africain contemporain, succeeds in subverting hegemonic Western representations of African art as necessarily ‘exotic’ and ‘Other.’ My investigation of the Dak’Art biennale in this thesis is informed and preceded by a study of evolutionist assumptions towards African art and the continuing struggle for command over the African voice. I outline the trajectory of African art from primitive artifact to artwork, highlighting the prejudices that have kept Africans from being valued as equals and unique artists in their own right. I then look at exhibiting techniques employed to move beyond perceptions of the tribal, to subvert the exoticising tendency of the West and remedy the marginalised position of the larger African artistic community. iii OPSOMMING Die doel van hierdie tesis is om die mate te assesseer waartoe die Afrikaan- gekonseptualiseerde uitstalling Dak’Art: Biennale de l’art africain contemporain daarin slaag om hegemoniese Westerse voorstellings van Afrika-kuns as noodwendig “eksoties” en “anders” te ondermyn. My ondersoek van die Dak’Art-biënnale is gerig en voorafgegaan deur ’n studie van evolusionistiese aannames rakende Afrika-kuns en die voortgesette stryd om beheersing van die Afrika-stem. In die tesis word die baan van Afrika- kuns vanaf primitiewe artefak tot kunswerk uiteengesit, met klem op die vooroordele wat erkenning van Afrikane as gelykes en unieke kunstenaars in eie reg teëwerk. Hierna word uitstallingstegnieke ondersoek wat gebruik word om verder as persepsies van Afrika-stamme te beweeg ten einde die eksotiserende neiging van die Weste omver te werp en die gemarginaliseerde posisie van die groter Afrika-kunsgemeenskap te herstel. iv CONTENTS PAGE DECLARATION ii ABSTRACT iii OPSOMMING iv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 MAPPING AFRICA: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE 5 WESTERN RECEPTION OF AFRICAN ART 1.1 CABINETS OF CURIOSITY 5 1.2 THE EVOLUTIONARY PARADIGM 6 1.3 ETHNOGRAPHIC OBJECTS 9 1.4 MODERNIST PRIMITIVISM AND THE RE- 13 VALUATION OF AFRICAN ART OBJECTS 1.5 20TH CENTURY WESTERN EXHIBITIONS OF 16 AFRICAN ART 1.5.1 “PRIMITIVISM” IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ART: 17 AFFINITY OF THE TRIBAL AND THE MODERN 1.5.2 MAGICIENS DE LA TERRE 20 1.5.3 AFRICA EXPLORES 23 1.5.4 SEVEN STORIES ABOUT MODERN ART IN AFRICA 26 v CHAPTER2 DIASPORAN REPRESENTATION 30 2.1 WHAT IS THE DIASPORA? 3 2.2 SILENCE, VOICE, AND THE DIASPORAN 32 SOLUTION 2.2.1 AUTHENTIC/EX-CENTRIC: AIMS AND 36 STRATEGIES 2.2.2 AFRICA REMIX: AIMS AND STRATEGIES 38 2.3 PROBLEMS WITH DIASPORAN REPRESENTATION 39 OF AFRICA 2.3.1 WHAT DOES CONTEMPORARY MEAN? 39 2.3.2 HOW “AFRICAN” IS CONCEPTUAL EXPRESSION 41 AND THE DIASPORA? 2.4 THE GLOBAL ART WORLD: THE VENICE 47 BIENNALE AS “WORLD EVENT” CHAPTER 3 DAK’ART: DE L’ART AFRICAIN 51 CONTEMPORAIN: STRATEGIES IN AFRICAN SELF-REPRESENTATION 3.1 NEW AFRICAN INITIATIVES 52 3.2 THE DAK’ART BIENNALE 53 3.2.1 THE STRUCTURE AND SELECTION 56 3.3 PAN-AFRICANISM AS STRATEGY 61 3.3.1 THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL 66 3.4 A NEW FORM OF CULTURAL HEGEMONY 72 vi CONCLUSION 80 BIBLIOGRAPHY 87 vii INTRODUCTION The aim of this thesis is to examine the exhibition of contemporary African art on the African continent, and in particular the African curated Dak’Art: Biennale de l’art africain contemporain. According to Sotiaux (2002: 158): the Dakar Biennale has succeeded in proving to us that another approach to the world is possible. An approach that breaks away from any hegemonic tendency of one culture (and thus one civilization) over the others. I will explore this biennale as a means through which Africa presents its cultural modernity against the weight of centuries of Western1 domination. Thus, the main research question of this thesis is whether African exhibitions, as exemplified by Dak’Art, solve problems of hegemonic Western representation. To date numerous writings have focused on the reception of African art in the West as part of a history of cultural imperialism. These studies trace the migration of African art objects into the West, from the sixteenth through twentieth-century, from the Wunderkammer to the International contemporary art exhibition. Their aim is to demonstrate the establishment of early Western definitions, misconceptions of “classical/traditional” African art and the continued influence of an oppressive colonialist ideology on the reception of contemporary African art. They are, in Elizabeth Harney’s (2007: 120) words, ‘deliberate act[s] of canon reformation.’ As such it is essential that this thesis begins with an examination of this trajectory as an intellectual framework for my continued investigation. 1 I will speak of the West when referring to Europe and North America particularly as colonial powers whose hegemony oppressed and continues to oppress Africa, its citizens and its cultural production after the abolishment of colonialism. 1 Included in this trajectory I will consider the participation of African artists and curators in major Western exhibitions of contemporary art whose aim it is to subvert the exoticising tendency of earlier exhibitions in an attempt to remedy the marginalised position of the larger African community. These artists are by and large diasporan and their enterprise, as I will demonstrate, can be criticised for maintaining a Eurocentric tone. For the most part scholarship on the reception of African art ends here, but efforts to free the exhibition of African art from Western instruction does not. To my knowledge, there exists no comprehensive study on the exhibition of African art that traces the above-mentioned trajectory through to the present day, and certainly no study that investigates the display of contemporary African art on the African continent. The most recent exhibitions of contemporary African art acknowledge the importance of supporting cultural infrastructure and exchange on the African continent, one example being Dak’Art. Thus, this thesis will address whether exhibitions on the African continent, as exemplified by Dak’Art, succeed in overwriting the Western hegemonic paradigm. My approach to the exhibition of African art is informed by a postcolonial critique of Western modernist epistemology. Post-colonial theory rejects colonial beliefs in universal truths, and exposes the normative assumptions of modernist Western discourse. This thesis looks at the effect of such normative beliefs on the reception of African art, relocating interest from the African art object proper to its textual and institutional reception and interpretation by the West. Furthermore, this thesis adopts aspects of diasporan studies and its associated theories of nationalism. Western ideology is a totalising, essentialist mythology (to borrow a term from Barthes, 1973) that does not account for the heterogeneity of the colonised body politic. In Western exhibitions of African art and those by diasporan curators, it is largely denied 2 that postcolonial African art is by and large a national phenomenon. These exhibitions favour an “African essence” that is conceived of as pan-African. Besides literature on the trajectory of African art into the West this thesis relies a great deal on debates carried out on the Internet. As I have already pointed out, comprehensive scholarship on African art bridging the twenty- first-century is very limited. Thus I rely primarily on exhibition catalogues and on debates and reviews on the Internet. In Chapter 1 I ground this thesis by providing a brief outline of the evolutionary paradigm that has arguably informed all subsequent approaches to African art. The transformation of African material culture from ethnographic curiosity to art object will be traced. I will then look at a few landmark exhibitions that demonstrate the entry of African art into the gallery space. The first exhibition I will consider is the (in)famous “Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (1984), whose display of “primitive art” is of particular importance, since it reflected (but also largely aided in determining and fixing) current Western perceptions of “primitive” cultures. This is then followed by an exposition of Magiciens de la Terre (1989), which is a landmark attempt to implement a post-modern exhibition strategy. Firstenberg (2003: 38) describes the combined importance of these two exhibitions as [establishing] a canonical and essentialising discourse around African art for the late twentieth-century, a discourse based on relationships among Western modernist brands of appropriating non-Western cultural objects as emblems of the “primitive”.’ The critiques of these two seminal exhibitions engendered a series of exhibitions in response, the aim of which was to remedy the marginalisation of African arts. The remainder of this first chapter is dedicated to two of these “corrective” exhibitions, namely Africa Explores (1991) and Seven Stories of African Art (1995). 3 Chapter 2 is dedicated to analysing the particular efforts of diasporan intellectuals to re-educate the West on African art, and also traces concurrent polemics (some recycled from previous initiatives) surrounding the exhibition of contemporary African art. The central question posed here is: “who defines the contemporary?” Many of the criticisms against the diasporan enterprise focus on the ways in which these exhibitions might serve the continued marginalisation of Africa.
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