African Art Studies: Are They No Longer Taking the Paths Less Traveled?

Abstract

| 7 African Art Studies: Are They No Longer Taking the Paths Less Traveled? by Simon Ottenberg I very much agree with Sidney Kasfir’s thoughts. I will write around them here. There appears to be a major lessening of interest in African art and artists in Africa, with moves to studies of organized Diaspora artistic movements and of single artists living outside of Africa. Is this the illusion of a broadening of interest in African arts, or is it a sideways move from a focus on the African continent to African artists and diaspora movements in the West and elsewhere outside of Africa? This query relates to concerns about students and faculty studying African artists outside of Africa without ever going to that continent. I am aware of the shortage of funding for travel and the availability of African artists in the West to be researched. These artists usually speak a Western tongue, attractive to students who may wish to avoid learning sometimes difficult African languages, although, as a result, they may miss some elegant aesthetic discourses of African artists in native languages. Another deterrent for work in Africa, of course, is the political and military unrest there. Students may feel they can learn enough about artists’ culture and home background from the artists themselves and through publications. But I do not think you can create first-rate work if you lack personal contact with the country, community, and artistic milieu that artists experienced in Africa. When African art studies began in the United States, it was largely carried out by scholars with little or no experience in Africa, as was the case of Douglas Fraser and Paul Wingert. Are we turning to that situation again, but now we study African artists in the West without trips to Africa? Have we come full circle? Every graduate student or young faculty member who studies contemporary African art or an artist living outside of Africa should spend considerable time in Africa working on their artist’s background. It would be extremely helpful for students and faculty to be well grounded in historical analysis. Today, some studies of contemporary artists and their art are open to Sidney Kasfir’s past criticism of anthropologists for failing to note the realities of their artists’ historical background, the influences from elsewhere on them and those that they spread to others, in both instances sometimes inter-ethnically. To write the biography of an artist without setting a broad historical background is minimal scholarship, although some students and art reviewers feel the past is insignificant in contrast to the objects created. I found it exciting to see contemporary art groups in Africa diversify and multiply, and sometimes decline. There is serious neglect of contemporary artists and art in Africa in favor of the study of African artists in the West. Do not assume that the “best” African artists, whatever that means, live in the West and that those who do not necessarily create inferior work. Most often those who leave Africa do so through fortuitous circumstances, access to funds, training, or sponsorship by a gallery or entrepreneur. Scholars of contemporary artists living in the West are becoming embedded in rapidly changing fashions in Western art, and perhaps also in world art. Which African artists are “in” today and which “out,” and who will be “in” tomorrow? Read Holland Cotter in the New York Times. Western fashion is now embedded in our scholarship. This requires careful examination of African art scholarship in the West. As an anthropologist, I would opt for detailed comparisons of African artists’ roles in the colonial and postcolonial periods and the Diaspora, seeking underlying similarities and differences in behavior and experience and explanations for them. Under the rubric colonial I include both modern artists and indigenous artists and their mixtures. Out of comparison new theories might arise. African art scholarship suffers from a lack of comparative analysis. I would also compare artistic movements in all three periods, including modern and traditional artistic movements within both the colonial and postcolonial periods. I suggest that we may be able apply the term movements to some indigenous African artistic activities, thus linking them to the present conceptually, something Kasfir wishes to do. There are still many possibilities for exciting work on indigenous art of the colonial period. I recently published in African Arts a paper on a small collection obtained by an Englishman between 1890–1909 in southeastern Nigeria, objects residing at the Vancouver Museum, British Columbia. After fifteen years of modern African art studies, it was quiet work—no interviews, lots of publications and archival work to read, and email queries, while examining objects removed from contemporary art controversies. Hundreds of such studies are still possible, historical and aesthetic in nature. They often require comparison with pieces in other collections or elsewhere. I hope that kind of work does not die out, is still respected in the future, and that those who prefer it can find work, if not in teaching, in research museums. The job of analyzing African art in museums and elsewhere has hardly begun.