Concerning “the Eurocentric African Problem” (Meschac Gaba)

Mischa Twitchin

doi:10.1515/culture-2019-0025

Abstract

Abstract Even as it is often eclipsed by reference to the “contemporary,” modernity is widely celebrated in European museums and galleries. When refracted through the commitments of an avowedly Black artistic agenda, how might these institutions reconceive their understanding of modernism in light of African, diasporic, or Afropean perspectives? How might concerns with African agency be enacted in these cultural spaces as they project historical narratives and produce a “public” memory in their own image? What are the implications of the fact that critical resistance to modes of cultural appropriation may, nonetheless, reproduce a discourse that attempts to immunise itself from the association of modernism with colonialism? In the formation of modernist canons, what role might an example of African conceptual art have to play, even when consigned to a museum’s storage space? This paper explores such questions through the paradoxes engaged by Mechac Gaba’s reflections on his 1997-2002 project, “Museum for Contemporary African Art,” now owned by Tate Modern. In particular, it considers the dichotomy between “modern” and “traditional” as this has been constitutive of twentieth-century art history, informing a sense of the African presence within European museums. How might reference to the “contemporary” here relate to the potentials of decolonial cultural politics within such spaces?

Highlights

Even as it is often eclipsed by reference to the “contemporary,” modernity is widely celebrated in European museums and galleries
While exhibitions of ethnographic artefacts and modern art in European museums have been intertwined during the twentieth century, they often seem to remain parallel worlds, even as these very categories have come under renewed scrutiny
How does the difference of institutional context still affect the sense of this art’s presence in European—in Afropean—cultural memory? What continuities and discontinuities of research are entailed by these different histories of collection and exhibition? this has long been a concern of Rasheed Araeen, for example, and much developed in the journal, Third Text, that he founded in 1987, these questions will be addressed here by drawing on reflections by the Benin artist, Meschac Gaba

Summary

Introduction

Even as it is often eclipsed by reference to the “contemporary,” modernity is widely celebrated in European museums and galleries. In Gaba’s own terms, his museum is as much a conceptual work as a material one, where (according to the artist) the project is “a positive way of addressing Eurocentrism, as it’s Europeans who created museums.” [18] This is not to say that Europeans created the projection of power and prestige through collections and their display—but, rather, that institutional claims to universalism remain a problem of the Eurocentric even when museums associate themselves with the contemporary, not least where this association is made in the name of African art.

Results

Conclusion