Sidney Kasfir, 'African Art and Authenticity: a Text with a Shadow'
In: Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 88-113.
There are those who want a text [an art, a painting] without a shadow, without the ‘dominant ideology’; but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text… The text needs its shadow… subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro. Roland Barthes [1]
[...]
But the fact is that Africa is a part of the world and has a long history. There are innumerable befores and afters in this history, and to select the eve of European colonialism as the unbridgeable chasm between traditional, authentic art and an aftermath polluted by foreign contact is arbitrary in the extreme. While it is very true that both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were periods of ‘fast happening’, in George Kubler’s phrase, [13] it would be naïve to assume that no other such periods existed in African art history. What is far more likely is that there were several – some associated with the spread of new technologies (brass-casting, weaving, tailoring, the introduction of the horse), others with the spread of ideas (Islam, a sky-dwelling creator god, the concept of masking). I am suggesting that there is no point in time prior to which we could speak of the ascendancy of ‘traditional culture’ and after which we could speak of its decline. The old biological model of birth, flowering, decay, and death imposes on culture not only an order that is seldom there but also, in this case, the strong temptation to identify the onset of ‘decay’ with the onset of colonialism. This is the historicist flaw in the authenticity test used to construct the canon of African art.
[…]
Among the French dealers and collectors of African art, ‘authentic’ frequently means ‘anonymous’, and anonymity precludes any consideration of the individual creative act. One Parisian collector told Sally Price: ‘It gives me great pleasure not to know the artist’s name. Once you have found out the artist’s name, the object ceases to be primitive art’. [20] In other words, the act of ascribing identity simultaneously erases mystery. And for art to be ‘primitive’ it must possess, or be seen to possess, a certain opacity of both origin and intention. When those conditions prevail, it is possible for the Western collector to reinvent a mask or figure as an object of connoisseurship. But when Price asked one such connoisseur whether he thought the creator of such a work might be aware of these same aesthetic considerations, the answer was an emphatic denial. [21] The ‘primitive’ artist, in this Africa of the mind, is controlled by forces larger than himself and is consequently ignorant of the subjective feelings of aesthetic choice. In such an equation, the Western connoisseur is the essential missing factor that transforms artefact into art. [22] In a seminal essay on issues surrounding the authenticity of Oriental carpets, [23] Brian Spooner argues that an important aspect of the carpets’ appeal to Western collectors is this marked cultural distance between maker and collector, and the corresponding lack of information about the artist that it usually implies. In such situations the collector is able to construct a set of attributes that describes the ‘real thing’. Ironically, it is not knowledge but ignorance of the subject that ensures its authenticity.
[…]
Beginning at the ethnographic gallery of the National Museum in Nairobi, we may view Maasai or Samubru beadwork displayed as part of a standard ‘natural history’ functionalist array with gourds, spears, and the like. Near the front entrance, the museum shop does a brisk business in pastoralist jewellery, especially earrings, as souvenirs. At African Heritage, we may see not only this same work being sold as aesthetic objects but also (on Tuesday mornings) the Maasai women selling it to the buyer and at the same time wearing it themselves. Or the artefacts may be seen on dancers performing at the Nairobi tourist village, Bomas of Kenya. Finally, bookshops all over Nairobi sell Tepilit Ole Saitoti and Carol Beckwith’s Maasai, Mirella Riccardi’s Vanishing Africa, Angela Fisher’s Africa Adorned, Mohamed Amin’s Last of the Maasai, and Nigel Pavitt’s Samburu, in which photographs of the same objects and their wearers are now recast as evocations of a vanishing ‘golden land’. [84] (In fact, we recognise that coffee-table books such as these are the twentieth-century’s ‘cabinets of curiosities’.)Each of these realities –functional artifacts, art object, souvenir, article of dress and body art refracted through the lens of the camera – exists simultaneously in a dialogic relationship to the others, each with its own fragment of the truth. But the ultimate artefacts in this freeze-frame view are the Maasai themselves. In 1987 one enterprising Mombasa curio shop employed a Maasai moran (warrior), resplendent in all his finery, to stroll about the premises and attract potential buyers. Tourism itself is a form of collecting, and taking photographs is the most aggressive form of appropriation. The Kenyan parliament finally felt impelled to pass a law forbidding tourists to take pictures of Maasai, a self-defensive act analogous to those taken by tribal councils much earlier in the American Southwest. But where is the ‘authentic’ Maasai culture in all this?
I began with the questions of who creates meaning for African art and what determines its cultural authenticity. In one sense they are rhetorical, because we already suspect the answer. If ‘tourist art’, the lowest common denominator of what is thought of Westerners to be inauthentic in African art, can be deconstructed in ways that make the definition of authenticity full of self-contradictions, then the same kinds of questions can be asked even more readily about other non-canonical categories such as ‘elite’ or ‘international’ art. Now, in the closing years of the twentieth century, it is perhaps time to bring the canon into better alignment with the corpus, with what African artists actually make, and to leave behind a rather myopic classificatory system based so heavily on an Africa of the mind.
[1] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), p. 32.
[13] George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 84-96.
[20] Sally Price, ‘Our Art, their Art’, Third Text, no. 6 (London: Spring 1989), p. 69.
[21] Ibid., p. 70.
[22] Price quotes the well-know dealer Henri Kamer, who makes this point precisely: ‘The object made in Africa… only becomes an object of art on its arrival in Europe’, (ibid., p. 70).
[23] Brian Spooner, ‘Weavers and Dealers: The Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 199, 222.
[84] Tepilit Ole Saitoti, Maasai, with photographs by Carol Beckwith (London: Elm Tree, 1980); Mirella Ricciardi, Vanishing Africa, (London: William Colllins, 1971); Angela Fisher, op.cit.; Mohamed Amin et al., Last of the Maasai, (London: Bodley Head, 1987); Nigel Pavitt, Samburu, (London: Kyle Cathie, 1991).