Okwui Enwezor, 'Between Worlds: Postmodernism and African Artists in the Western Metropolis'
In: Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Market Place. Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 244-275.
At the end of the century, studies of postmodernism and critical writing on questions of identity and artistic production thoroughly distance themselves from the spaces occupied by African artists in the Western metropolis. In the rare cases of contact between what so far has been identified as the 'centre' and the subaltern, the zones of enunciation are so fraught with gross misreadings and the most miserable translations of work by these artists, that it seems nothing could possibly mediate the gap that separates the two worlds. This misapprehension and misrecognition is exacerbated by a gaze that perpetually fixes the cultural production of contemporary African artists, if not in the sites of invisibility and non-existence, then on the periphery of encounters between the public and contemporary representation. This gaze reduces their artistic expression to either the aberrant production of a denativised imagination or to an inferior mimetic exercise in futility. In addressing the basis for this exclusion of African artists from the sites of normativity and the critical silence that surrounds their practice, my interest lies mostly, though not entirely, in those gaps - between worlds - where the potent signs that these artists carry from different localities are translated and ultimately transfigured through relocation into new imaginary constructs of identity, which their new places of domicile constantly deny them.
As metropolitan African artists, Iké Udé, Bili Bidjocka, Olu Oguibe and Ouattara occupy such a matrix of elision in relation to the Western postmodernist discourse. Of great interest to me is the variety of approaches, the measure of articulateness that they have employed in delineating boundaries and allegiances, modes of representation and production, which both reincorporate them into, and disunite them from, specific traditions within the realm of contemporary African cultural production. However, this discussion does not approach their work as disinherited from a progressively elusive sense of a triumphant African modernist ethic that ruptures the neo-colonial burden of the unrecuperable other. Nor does it view them as representative or exemplary models of knowledge in contemporary African cultural production, in which their individual aesthetic projects revel. They come together on these pages on that which they represent in the hegemonic imagination: 'African artists', working in the interstices of postcoloniality in the Western metropolitan arena.
As such, I am interested in how their ineluctable presence disturbs, disrupts and problematises the postcolonial border; how their existence in the postmodern arena embodies the discontinuity of normative assumptions about originary 'authenticity' in their work. Labels, as practising cultural anthropologists know, are necessary evils. They either illuminate or they misname. The latter - in cases where the status of the sovereign narrator is accorded as the divine right of a hegemonic imperative - quite often outdistances the former, particularly where such labelling is a morphological binary that separates mere nags from thoroughbreds. Fundamentally restated along the linear parameters of the Western modernist canon (much more firmly entrenched since the 1930s, and through the era of Greenbergian American aesthetic nationalism), the pull of hierarchy quite naturally offers the sovereign narrator unprecedented power either to contextualise or dismiss, to dissolve all edges and turn variety into an atrophied body of sameness, until the subject dissolves and vanishes. [The collapse of entire 'minority' populations into one body known as 'Black British' is but one example of this taxonomic game-playing that reductively homogenises identities while obliterating their disparate and composite social realities.]
If one were to believe the highly efficient Western critical apparatus, as it has existed within the major metropolises of the Western art world, it would seem that no African artist of consequence exists within its sphere of knowledge. To question such views remains, of course, our critical obligation; a clear opportunity for self-fashioning, self-representation, and hermeneutic recovery. On the other hand, in the crude climate of the current multicultural war, such contestation of history through recovery plays differently in the camps of two very self-interested parties. For the neo-conservatives, with their antique, crusade-flavoured, paleo-Christian fanaticism, placing the marginalised in the occulus of critical knowledge is seen not only as a travesty but also as an assault on received notions of 'quality', and more significantly, as heretical. For the self-serving liberal critical establishment, still clinging to outmoded models of Marxist liberal triumphalism, such knowledge, however truncated, represents an epiphany. It will be important to hold on to these two sets of views, because art historical and critical judgements of art and artists in the West constantly play themselves out in the well-regulated and predictable interstices where eurocentric hegemonic power-mongering meets and colonises the contributions of non-Western cultures; those cultures that, in polite euphemism, disappear into the opaque rubric of the 'other'. But more significantly, because the comets of artists whom critical amnesia wishes to narrate out of history refuse to crash in the arctic wasteland of inconsequence. Under the demanding imperialistic gaze of twentieth-century western art history, modernism's self-arrogated centrality and exclusionism become the great totems that bear the imprimaturs of this legacy of erasure, which marginalises as it appropriates. This is an old story, yet it is one that remains relevant if only to remind us of the distasteful task of continuously questioning not only that history, but also the ethnographic paradigms that it appends to the subjects it marginalises.