Everlyn Nicodemus, 'The Centre of Otherness'
In: Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. Edited by Jean Fisher. London: Kala Press in association with the Institute of international Visual Arts, 1994, pp. 91-104.
Looking for strategies to abolish the distance which reduces humans to stereotypes, I staged a project in three continents to explore my ideas transculturally.
I introduced a preparatory dialoguing field work and made the painting/writing on the spot as an artist-in-residence where I was going to exhibit, thus including preparations, production and exhibiting in one participation process. I developed the possibilities of non-coercive subject to subject confrontation. Using gender as a point of reference for a reciprocal self-questioning into what is common human experience, I tried to reach mutual understanding and recognition. Much later, I read that Jürgen Habermas considers inter-subjective communications to be the last resort of much-questioned reason, looking upon art as a potential means to reconcile fragmented moments of reason. My experiments were carried out in Europe, Africa and India.
I now want to position myself in two perspectives which often appear problematic and even conflictual. Firstly, as an African artist who has left Africa but who is also outside the black immigrant communities, the so called diasporas in the West. To simplify, I say 'Africa' meaning Africa south of the Sahara, Africa of the blacks. And secondly, as a modern artist with an outsider's view of modernism in the West. I came to Europe nineteen years ago and have lived in Belgium for five years. I share many of the privileges of European intellectuals when it comes to access to information, and I use it as an African cultural activist, a black mamba in the Zoo of the European Art Saloon.
Wanting my art to be perceived as the expression of an individual artist in our time, on equal terms with the works of modern artists from around the world, here in the West I find myself in a strait-jacket. I am immediately reminded of the fact of being African and thrown back into some notion of 'Africanity'. It is full of preconceived ideas. One of them, which quite carelessly annuls me, is that there couldn't possibly exist such a thing as a modern African art, not to mention a modern art history in Africa.
Of course, I would never dream of equating these kind of regressive white colonial stereotypes about a 'primitive' Africa with the mere romanticism of the African-Americans about their 'roots', or in general with nostalgia vis-à-vis the 'mother continent' that we find all around the black Atlantic diaspora. But I am sorry to say that the ignorance about modern African art seems to be shared equally among blacks and whites outside the continent as well as the phlegm in front of that ignorance.
Like a moon, Africa - so far away - seems to turn round and round without shedding any daylight on diasporan thinking. That is why I find it important here to try to measure the altitude of the sun from an independently chosen African point of view. Because I do not think that a new internationalism can simply mean a prolongation of some contained diasporan perspective. Even if it is true, as Homi Bhabha points out, that its triggering demography is mainly postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora and the poetics of exile.
I would like to add that living in the diaspora myself, I share something which is probably a diasporan experience rather than a living reality in Africa: the notion summed up as the 'black memory'.
I refer myself to the history of black peoples around the world. In my childhood, I did not know much about racism as black was normal and difference was not especially noticed. Processing my European experiences, I have needed the universal black insight, developing a sense of identity through what I recognise as a triple consciousness, to be inside/outside not only in relation to the western world but to the male world as well. I am now inclined, like James Baldwin, to think of blackness as a mark of pain and hardship, which should oblige us to try to humanise modernity's arid landscape.
I do not make black art. When a black consciousness enters my creation, it is not as a programme but as a matter of life experience and of the formation of myself as a subject. I can only represent the world and the time I live in through the way I act out my individuality, what I am, what I have become, whether it be in terms of 'woman' or of 'black'.
This takes me to my relation to modernism. As noted, I came to art as an outsider. The simple social statement in my first paintings soon developed into a composite and open representation of intersubjectivity. My counter-discourse also runs against categorical and definitive labelling. The complexity of what I want to explore has determined my choice of the complexity of forms which I found in modern art.
I took up and apprenticed myself on my own to the craft of painting, getting deeply involved in its challenging practice. Thus, I was led into the role of a modern artist without any premeditation and without ever thinking of entering the successional order of modernism, which I later found to be the dominant idea of the western art world.
It was striking how the construction of modern art's history seemed rationalised into demonstrating the progress of modernity as the ultimate proof of western superiority. This explanation, after the event, seems to have contributed to postmodernism's drawing of close parallels between its own criticism of modernism and the philosophic deconstruction of the modern project intertwining with imperialism. Consequently, modernism has been condemned as an imperial project.
As a simplistic and rather self-centred western idea, this has left me sceptical. I share the outside perspective Edward Said gives us, when he reminds us that artists and intellectuals in the Third World cannot seize upon the ahistorical weightlessness western postmodernism plays around with, but must remain concerned with modernity itself, as the debate is joined by anxious, urgent questions of how to modernise in order to keep up life itself.
I object to a postmodern deconstruction which has even tried to disqualify the term 'modernism'. I claim that modern art shall be seen as universal in the clear sense that modern artists around the world are part of it, from Tagore to Rivera and Frida Kahlo, all those made invisible but not forgotten.
[...]
Western logic has proclaimed the time axis of Euro-American modernism to be universal, the only valid one. All modern art positioned outside it is disregarded. The literary world would indeed be poor if the same exclusion was to be applied.
The ignorance about modern African art has made it easy to disqualify it with these kind of pseudo-arguments. That is why I have been compelled to try to find out myself about its history, a research which for my part has been not a hobby but rather a self-defence. My first findings were how extremely difficult it is to get access to so little information. It is a crucial part of the voyage of knowledge imperative to every conscious modern artist from the Third World to try to overcome that kind of ignorance which deprives us of our background. Exploring and writing about modern African art is in my case a part of how I negotiate the understanding of my position and my struggle as an artist. Comparatively little has been published so far about this history, and that little is extremely difficult to find and to access. All serious dealing with modern African art must, in my opinion, start with a clear understanding of the problem of its virtual invisibility to the world.
When it comes to the western fuss about a universal time axis, one has only to look somewhat closer into history to see the one-eyedness of it. It has been drummed into our heads to the point of deafness how the Cubists in the beginning of this century found formal instruction in the structure of traditional African sculptures. It was one of the first appropriations from African art by western modernism. It was to determine much of its course and to change the concept of plastic spatiality as radically as jazz influenced the sensibility of modern music.
But it is typical of the arrogant saga of western art historiography that nobody bothered to notice that an appropriation in the opposite direction took place in the same years, 1907-07. That is when we have the first example known so far of African artists appropriating from the West a new notion of art and new art practices such as easel painting.
Revolts and revolutions are indispensable to art's dialectical relation to modern time, and that is valid everywhere. It implies demolition and new departure. "One revolts again and again", says Carl Einstein, "against the idea that art should be the repetition of some given rules". But I have found out that the magnificent superiority complex of the West makes it unable to recognise any other revolution in art than its own.
While the Cubist revolution might be considered a formally radical re-formation of an ongoing modernist project, in Africa the adoption of a new art thinking in a modern society, implying new social functions related to the individual and to aesthetic contemplation, was nothing less than a totally new formation, a revolution in a much deeper and wider sense than what took place in Parisian cafés and studios. It opened up new horizons. It had its own dynamics.
The dull Eurocentric thought cannot imagine that the so much despised academic realism can be used as a tool of the avant-garde. It does not see the striking analogy between what took place in Lagos and in Paris, the European building on a traditional art which Africans were abandoning, the African artists making a clean break from their past by taking up a western 'traditionalism' left behind by modernists, the realism of the art academy. Neither can it see that exactly the same step away from native traditions towards something new has been taken in other parts of the world.
And one hasn't reflected in the West about the simple fact that, had the Africans followed the Europeans' footsteps and referred to the same masks and statuettes as Picasso, they would have plunged into a native traditionalism instead of making modern revolution.
What we are facing here is appropriations as breaking points, starting positions and parallel and dispersing dialectic courses within a plurity of irregular, emerging and disappearing archipelagos of artistic discourse, to paraphrase Foucault's vision of a singular history being dissolved. Where, then, is the ruling time axis? When it comes to the appropriations implied, they are on both sides tarred with the same brush.
There is a dilemma I share with all the invisible modern African artists. Among the deeply-rooted western prejudices about Africa is that of a 'primitive origin', an immobility and a lack of force of its own to create history. When that bias is combined with the stereotype of our modern art as derivative and imitative, we mostly find ourselves arguing to the deaf and the blind.
In order to free the thought from the colonial legacy, we must grasp the creation of modern art in Africa as a part of a much wider, genuinely African process of modernisation over hundreds of years. It still goes on in the cultural debates between internationalism and traditionalism. It is loaded with dynamic conflicts, just as it once started in a clash between a new, uprooted and emancipated Africa and an old one, left for so long to itself and its traditions.
[...]
The invisibility of modern African art and art history is not accidental. Facts have been there to investigate if the rich world had not preferred to close its eyes. We all know what kind of power relation is behind this neglect; I do not have to go into it. Since colonial times, the West has been prosecutor and judge, invested with the mightiness of othering and dehumanising and allowing no appeal. It takes time, anger and revolt to come out of it. In the decolonialisation of the mind, which has barely begun, we will continue to be bound to each other, as it can only be carried out in dialogue.
A petrifying mirror has been held in front of modern African artists, their western reception. Still today, we cannot identify ourselves among all the deadlocked stereotypes projected in that mirror. It is true that multiculturalism, which I understand as immigrant and minority experiences urging a postmodern rethinking in the West, has cracked the mirror in many facets. Its advocates pretend to have done away with the totalising view of a western centrality. But to tell the truth, it has had no improving impact upon the reception of modern African art.
In one fragment of the cracked mirror, I see 'Otherness' reversed into ethnic essentialism such as 'Black Art', and in another I notice a defensiveness promoting difference and diversity as a tactic by the white establishment to master minority mutinies. Where, then, is the change of mind which could be trusted, when behind the multicultural smokescreens the arrogance and the closed doors remain? If the Imperial Headquarters manages to reframe multiculturalism into New Visual Internationale, a lot of wreckage will have to be cleared up, not only from remaining colonial thinking but also from postmodern derailments.
[...]
The constitutive incompatibility of criticism and anthropology when it comes to art remained through the century until postmodern relativism undermined it. The debate which was triggered by the MOMA exhibition, ' "Primitivism" in the Twentieth Century Art', in 1984, and initiated by Thomas McEvilley in Artforum seems to have marked the turning point.
McEvilley attacked the formalistic Eurocentrism of the exhibition, which reduced the art of the Others to raw material to be processed in a specific western 'refinement' labelled 'primitivism'. But his business was not to restore the artistic autonomy of their work. On the contrary, it was to have their original ritual functions re-established, the aura of blood and feathers. He protested that the anthropological point of view was excluded from the exhibition, and he called for a contextual reading instructed by comparative studies of religion.
What made the debate into something more than another clash between classical antagonists was probably the fact that Thomas McEvilley himself had one foot in the latest phase of the western primitivism that he attacked. He fuelled his argument by referring to the new 'western primitives', the shamanic dropouts, such as Joseph Beuys. Thus he could take the anthropological argument into the field of artistic discourse and pose as a spokesman for innovation and new attitudes. The Zoo of the Salon swallowed the bait. The postmodern version of an evasive, multicultural, global equality with the motto 'all image makers are equally good shamans' could soon be made concrete in the wording 'equally good magicians' or in French 'Magiciens de la terre'.
Benjamin Buchloh pointed out at the time how the exhibition 'Magiciens de la terre' fell into the trap it claimed to take us out of, that of Eurocentrism and hegemonic arbitrariness. This shortcoming was obvious from an African point of view. While picking kings and aces from western gallery art, the following is more or less the hand that the exhibition selected to play from Africa: one fanciful coffin maker, one mass-producer of graveyard cement statues and dummies, four makers of modernised masks and idols, a former sign painter and a traditional house decorator. Clear message: modern art doesn't exist in Africa, modern art exists only in the West! There was nothing innocent about this falsification embezzling eighty-three years of modern African art history. McEvilley stated in the catalogue the dictatorship of the postmodern curator when using an exhibition as the power to define. You can exhibit whatever you want according to whatever criteria, he wrote. You can forget about quality, priority, historical importance. You must concentrate on Otherness "which honours difference". To him, that was the strategy of the postmodern exhibition.
Jean-Hubert Martin, the curator of the exhibition, confesses that his highest wish was to see it operate as a catalyst for further projects. Unfortunately his prayer was granted by the God of the Fools. Western museums ran to follow his discriminatory example, investing in exotic artefacts money that could have been spent on making modern African art visible in the West. A populist picture painter like Cheri Samba, a product of western marketing, has been launched all over the rich world, apparently without disturbing its distinguished Salon by the urinal male slander about fellow Africans, especially women, that subtitles his placard pictures.
And as a diabolical fulfilment of an infelicitous sermon, confirming this disastrous course of events, we have seen the Pigozzi phenomenon emerge. The Swiss collector, millionaire Jean-Christoph Pigozzi, is said to have wanted to buy the whole African bazaar of 'Magiciens de la terre'. When those objects weren't for sale, he bought instead its assistant curator André Magnin and sent him out into the bush in Africa in search of the same kind of image makers. Once more this Rake's taste for untouched innocence, for a virgin 'purity' which never existed!
[...]
Let us cancel history's old cock-and-bull story! Let us write the new story of all creative visual ideas encircling the Earth carrying on the adventure of modern art! Open new pages of publications, catalogues, monographies, encyclopaedias ...
Prepare the clean walls of your art museums and galleries! The post-moderate boys used to complain that their cleanness amputate the anthropolite context they loved. Fine! Let the surgery now amputate the new feathers, blood and shit which consist of all the irrelevant western minglings and contextualisations! Cut clean until the fact of modern art everywhere reappears, completely defined and honestly presented!
There is nothing unknown to be scared about. It is nothing but your own well-known, well-tried operations, turned towards new aims. It is nothing but a revolution.
To reach beyond the solitary confinement to otherness, difference, diversity ...
We are behind
the bars of time
you cry! - Shake them! Time is a cage
and around the cage
dogs are barking.
Time is a corridor.
Door after door
they all have your name
on the sign.
Gauntlet, career.
Inside papers wait
stamped envelopes
note pads
thick minutes
and a second of insight:
art is there!
out in the freedom of
- whatever!
pissing on your labels.
What's the difference!
Time is a chain
you are the slave trailing it.
- Break the chain! Break the bars!
Listen!
Around the world
art is laughing.