WORDS FOLLOW ME: More than seven stories

An economic earthquake went through the developing world in the 1980s. The beginning is not easy to mark, but Mexico’s default on its sovereign debt in 1982 is seen as a signal event. In response to that default, the IMF, under pressure from Ronald Reagan, imposed a structural adjustment program (SAP) on Mexico.

This catalysed the domino effect that led to other structural adjustment programs all over the world, including the devastating one we lived through in Nigeria from 1986 onwards.

These geopolitical events explain, in part, the date in the title of Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu’s new book, “Contemporary African Art Since 1980.” The volume represents an essential addition to the canon of art writing on Africa.

In this essay, I want to discuss how Enwezor (one of the oustanding curators currently at work) and Okeke-Agulu (a professor at Princeton) characterised their enterprise — how, in other words, they are working to find a new language for the discourse of African art — in remarks they made at the launching of the book in late October at the New York Public Library.

Enwezor described the economic events of the third world in the 1980s as “the great recession times ten.” He conceptualised African art since the independence movements as organising itself into three broad chronological categories.

The first category of contemporary art activity was in the 50s and 60s, times of post-colonial utopia when everything seemed possible, the shackles of white rulers having been finally shaken off.

The second was in the 70s, a period of pause and ambiguity, an interregnum in which questions were raised about what truly constituted a post-colonial moment.

Then came the 1980s, during which artists responded to the destroyed economic networks that came in the wake of structural adjustment, and sought practices that embedded some of those harsh social realities. This was the period of post-colonial realism.

Things like the rise of political Islam in North Africa in 1979 and Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 were also important shifts.

The challenge in writing about this period, according to Enwezor, was to find a way to uncouple African art (and the theorising of African art) from exhibitions.

Much of the writing in the field of African art history has been in the form of exhibition catalogues, a form that necessarily has its own biases and points of emphasis.

For one, it focuses more on the “masterpiece” or aesthetically pleasing object to the detriment of the political narrative within which an object can make its fullest sense.

Enwezor evoked the “longue dureé” (a term coined by the French historian Braudel), in which precedence is given to long-term historical structures over events.

As different as the various parts of Africa are, there are broad pressures that push its visual cultures in coherent direction (without making them homogenous).

It is also necessary to globally contextualise the content of the continent’s art. This is a richer view than isolating specific instances in a series of masterpieces.

In the past three decades, there has been astonishing diversity, of artistic forms and thematic concerns, in Africa. As Okeke-Agulu put it, there isn’t just one story about African art, nor is there just two.

There aren’t just seven either, he said — echoing the title of a notable exhibition catalogue, “Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa,” in which he participated — there are a multiplicity of stories. A responsible account of the art must take account of that.

One of the areas that has to be looked into is the tension — a productive tension — between the ethnographic museum and the contemporary one. Further extending this point, Okeke-Agulu warned against reducing our understanding of an artist’s practice to an “aha” moment.

For example, the idea that there’s an engagement with kente cloth in the art of El Anatsui is accurate. But does it “explain” Anatsui’s art?

Unfortunately, the unitary moment becomes a kind of art-historical shorthand and in the case of an internationally successful artist like Anatsui, it effectively railroads his works into a fixed and inflexible narrative.

For many American art museums, including the Metropolitan in New York, Anatsui is viewed and exhibited as a “translator” between the traditional and the contemporary, between kente and modern sculpture.

Anatsui ought to be viewed, rather, in the context of other African artists who have also repurposed materials to make their work; this is part of the “tokunbo” or make-do culture that came from tough social conditions.

In this vein are the South Africans Kay Hassan, whose collagist images come from billboards, and William Kentridge whose hand-drawn animations are an intentionally “low-tech” artistic practice.

The talk ended with a consideration of the question of how African artists gain legitimacy. Many of the spaces of legitimation are outside the continent: galleries, collectors, biennales, and museums.

It certainly gives a boost to an African artist to present work in Venice or New York. However, there are increasingly prominent local spaces that can help artists’ work thrive. Some of those, in past years, were FESPACO, the Johannesburg Biennale and the photography expo in Bamako.

Also, there has been some exaggeration as to the dominance of international collectors in the African art market.

For every Anatsui commanding vertiginous fees at London and New York auctions, there is a great artist like Bruce Onobrakpeya, probably Nigeria’s leading printmaker, whose work has been collected by foreign patrons but, to a much greater degree, by African collectors within Africa.

Both kinds of success, and many others that now bring Africa to the attention of the world, were forged from the challenges of the 80s: it would have been difficult, at the time, to believe that anything good would come out of those struggles.