In two newspaper reports (The Guardian) last Tuesday, it was revealed that the National Assembly is crafting a legislation regulating the visual arts in Nigeria, and that the National Gallery of Art is actively lobbying for its passage. This legislation is, apparently, one of the pet projects of the current director general of the National Gallery of Art (NGA) under whose tenure the gallery has, so to speak, woken up from a long slumber.
Last year, the African Regional Summit on the Visual Arts (ARESUVA) a project of the NGA, opened in Abuja, indicating the readiness on the part of the gallery to become a major player in the continental contemporary art scene.
While the raison d'être and modalities of the ARESUVA program will need substantial rethinking to ensure its long term viability and relevance within the field of international contemporary art, its inauguration marks an important and positive development in the Nigerian visual arts sector.
To be sure, since FESTAC ‘77, the possibility and extent of interaction between Nigerian artists and their counterparts in other parts of the continent depended on the availability of programs and events-exhibitions, workshops, conferences-organised by state and private institutions in these other African countries. Nigerians expected to be invited, but not, it seemed, willing to play the host, with the result that the country failed to register as an important contemporary art destination.
The result? If you wanted to see the latest and most ambitious work by African artists, you know to visit the Dakar Biennale; if you need to get a sense of trends in photography, the Bamako Photography Biennial is the place to go, and Ouagadougou is the home of film.
That is why the inauguration of the African Regional Summit on the Visual Arts by the National Gallery of Art has the potential of changing the traffic flow, but only if the organisers make a convincing case-through the quality of its programming-why significant artists, critics, curators, collectors, dealers from the continent and beyond should go to Abuja rather than to any of the other more established contemporary art destinations.
I will return to the subject of the African regional summit at some future date, but for the moment, let me stay with the question of a legislation for the visual arts.
There is no doubt that the art industry, like so many aspects of the Nigerian socio-political, economic and cultural practices could be better organised with the help of sound legislations. And the National Gallery of Art, as the flagship governmental art institution, does well to support laws; the enactment of which will supposedly enable the growth of the contemporary Nigerian art industry.
However, some of the issues, according to the Guardian report, that the proposed legislation is supposed to address need to be debated openly and further clarified.
As explained by the director general of the National Art Gallery, the legislation will deal with public monuments, art in public buildings, auction houses, artists' rights, and artist-art gallery relations. In anticipation of the necessary conversations among the sponsors and supporters of this legislation-in-the-making, let me comment on the issue of public art commissions.
The director general is right in blaming lack of transparency for the many embarrassing art in our public spaces, but the question is how this legislation by the National Assembly can meaningfully and usefully address this issue. The problem, as with most things Nigerian, is corruption and nepotism. Rather than select designs or proposals through an open competition, the process of commissioning monuments and sculptures is almost never publicised or transparently vetted.
The legislation must therefore stipulate that any work of art, not just monuments, commissioned by the government, or purchased with public funds must be subjected to a rigorous selection process. Enacting this sort of legislation is not the problem. The fun part is how to use it to eradicate a national culture of nepotism.
In any case, it is unclear which public spaces this legislation is supposed to "sanitise." Is it meant to control the quality of monumental work in public spaces under the jurisdiction of the federal government? Or will it mandate a nationwide quality control regime for art in state and ocal governments; and (even village) public spaces? That is, can Abuja legislate for the other tiers of government, in matters such as public art commissions and art in public buildings?
The Federal Capital Territory has reportedly taken the initiative of setting up a committee for public art that has suggested setting aside 15 to 25 percent public building costs for art. This raises the question of how the impending legislation by the National Assembly will affect the FCT's (and states') guidelines. In any case, my hope is that this committee has also outlined procedures for commissioning public monuments in the FCT.
It seems therefore that a federal legislation on the visual arts, given our political structure, can only have a limited sphere of effectivity. It ought to be specifically directed at the funding, commissioning and acquisition of art by the federal government and its agencies.
If this legislation proves successful, stakeholders could then lobby the state and local governments to use it as a model for their own laws, taking into consideration the political and cultural peculiarities of their domains.