V.Y. Mudimbe, 'Reprendre: Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Arts'
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. 30-47.
O weaving reeds, may you never be poverty-stricken May you never be taken for sale in the market May none be ignorant of your maker May no unworthy man ever tread on you. Anonymous women’s song Somalia [1]
Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Arts
The word reprendre - strangely difficult to translate â I intend as an image of the contemporary activity of African art. I mean it first in the sense of taking up an interrupted tradition, not out of a desire for purity, which would testify only to the imaginations of dead ancestors, but in a way that reflects the conditions of today. Second, reprendre, suggests a methodical assessment, the artist’s labour beginning, in effect, with an evaluation of the tools, means, and projects of art within a social context transformed by colonialism and by later currents, influences, and fashions from abroad. Finally, reprendre implies a pause, a meditation, a query on the meaning of the two preceding exercises.
If, however, an African artist does go through these critical phases, consciously or unconsciously, in the creation of art, viewers of the finished work, even some of the most attentive ones, may find themselves looking for traces, for strata and symbols, that might qualify the piece as part of such-and-such a trend in the vague domain of âprimitive art’. Naïve, uninformed, sometimes prejudiced, this kind of looking involves two a priori assumptions, the first concerning the Western notion of art itself and its ambiguous extension to non-Western oeuvres, the second supposing the immobility, the stasis, of non-Western arts. [2] Yet, against these assumptions there is a history, or more exactly there are histories, of African arts. In his Art History in Africa (1984), Jan Vansina convincingly analyses the variety of the continent’s artistic processes, the readjustments and transformations of methods and techniques there, the dynamics of acculturation and diffusion and their impact on creativity. Furthermore, there is no such thing today as âan’ African art. Senegalese trends are different from Nigerian, Tanzanian, or Mozambican, and each is immersed in its own sociohistorical context. Even in traditional masterpieces, [3] the evidence of regional styles and the variety of their histories is clear.
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Regrouping
I still remember the 1983 exhibition of Senegalese tapestries at the Wally Findlay Galleries, New York, and the more recent show âContemporary African Artists’ at the New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem in 1990. What was striking in both exhibitions was the modernist styles of these collections of works. Introducing the Senegalese pieces, James R. Borynack, president of the Wally Findlay Galleries, observed that âthe totality of [works] is immersed in a sort of mythological retrospection which seems to issue from the collective unconscious’. [21] The introduction to the catalogue salutes the tapestries as validating âa true African aesthetic’. [22] The tapestry technique comes from the French Ecole Nationale d’Aubusson, and the execution of the pieces, at least from 1964 to the 1970s, faithfully followed the Aubusson canons. Yet there was a discreet change in the motifs of the works, and it coincided with the introduction, around 1960, of the themes of âNegritude’. The personal influence of Léopolde Sédar Senghor, the president of Senegal, patron of the Manufactures Sénégalaises, and the best-known theorist of Negritude, was visible in the way in which many of the pieces celebrated ancient styles. Colour, line, and movement fused and broke as if driven by a vibrant rhythm. The work was a grand illustration, in fact, of Senghor’s idea of the whole School of Dakar: âan African cultural heritage’, an âaesthetics of feeling’, images impregnated with rhythm.’ [23] A critic might ask whether such pieces, which claim to expose the virtues of an ancient bubbling aesthetic source, qualify as variants of traditional art.
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An Open Space
Il faudra, avant de revêtir le bleu de chaffe du mécanicien, que nous mettions notre âme en lieu sûr (Before Changing Back into the Mechanic’s Overall’s, We Need to Put our Soul in Certainty), Cheikh Hamidou Kane, 1961.
A traveller, Dorcas MacClintock, a curatorial affiliate at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, has a chance meeting with Ugo Mochi, an Italian artist who specialises in the silhouette. An ordinary incident. But then MacClintock discovers Africa, and, eventually, publishes African Images, (1984), with pictures of Mochi. The book’s creators would like it to be a window on African scenery. They introduce it as âa look at animals in Africa’; and the animals are indeed seen fully the way the dictionary defines them, as living, other than human, beings. Both MacClintock and Mochi seem concerned not with the actuality of African animals but with the impact on the eye of these âbeings’ in the landscapes that frame them. MacClintock notes:
Nowhere on earth is beauty of animal form, modelled through time by physical function and environment, so apparent. Hoofed mammals, always watchful for predators reveal tension in the brightness of an eye, the alert stance, the poise of the head or the curve of neck, the stamp of a forefoot, or the whisk of a tail. Predators, too, are tense as they stalk, wait in ambush, or sprint after their prey. At other times, they loll about in the heat of the day. There is beauty of colour as well as of form. Patterns have evolved on some animals â stripes, splotches, and spots â that break up body outlines or provide camouflage. Other animals have conspicuous markings on face, ears, or legs that function for recognition among their own kind, emphasise mood or intent or are flaunted in displays of dominance between rivals. [36]
In the vision of this observer, the beauty of a landscape is rearranged according to the criteria of a ânatural’ art. Yes, MacClintock claims to tell the truth about an order she sees clearly. But what she says nevertheless arises out of a grid of feeling (which is not to say â need I add? - that it is fictitious). In theory, anyone could verify what she has to say. Yet the poetic ensemble she offers is a translation of what she has perceived. Through aesthetic desire, the eye stylises the perceived, then returns to the observer her or his own investment.
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Images of everyday life also appear in the wall paintings of the Ndebele women of Pretoria, where, as Margaret Courtney-Clarke writes, âthe traditional abstract designs have merged with representational forms to create a unique, highly stylised art that combines the elements of the past with the realities of the present’. [42] If acculturation smacks of necessity in artistic activity such as the Ndebele’s, it also sustains the continuity of ancient rituals, techniques and customs. Furthermore, this art not only inserts itself in a tradition, it also espouses the clear light of the Kwandebele region. Thus a conjunction: space, time and human tradition interrelate. MacClintock’s beautifully stylised animals have their counterparts, their stylistic variations, in, say, such narratives as Pilipili’s paintings of fish or crocodiles; the sculptures of elephants, leopards, and birds sold in tourist shops; and even - why not? - in such Malian masterpieces as the Bamana antelope head-dress of the Dogon antelope mask. [43] The Gurunsi compounds illustrate an aesthetic coherence between human and natural milieux; the Ndebele women’s murals demonstrate an evolving tradition. We see, then, that the work of art âis not fashioned far from things and in some intimate laboratory to which [the artist] alone possesses the key. This also means thatâ¦the work is not an arbitrary decree and that it always relates to its world as if the principle of equivalence through which it manifests the world had always been buried in it’. [44] As Michel Leiris has written, one should âconceive of the overall approach to African arts less as primarily âa history of arts and stylesâ and more as the search for, and the according of spatio-temporal form to, the âvisible products of a certain society’s historyâ’. [45]
[1] K.S. Loughran, et al. (eds.), Somalia in Word and Image (Washington DC: Foundation for Cross-Cultural Understanding, 1986), p. 59.
[2] See Sally Price, âOur Art â Their Art’, Third Text, no 6. (London: Spring 1989), p. 65.
[3] See, for example, Susan Vogel and Francine N’Diaye, African Masterpieces from the Musée de L’Homme (New York: The Centre for African Art, 1985).
[21] James R. Borynack, Contemporary Art from the Republic of Senegal (New York: Wally Findlay Galleries, 1983), p. 4.
[22] Ibid. p. 6.
[23] Friedrich Axt and Moussa Babacar Sy El Hadji (eds.) Anthology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal (Frankfurt: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1989), p. 19.
[36] Dorcas MacClintock, 1984, African Images, pictures by Ugo Mochi (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), p. xii.
[42] Margaret Courtney-Clarke, Ndebele: The Art of an African Tribe (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), p. 23.
[43] See Vogel and N’Diaye, op. cit.