Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa By Delinda Collier

Abstract

The first known work of electronic music was created in remarkable circumstances, but until about a decade and a half ago, it was virtually unknown to most scholars of media studies—for whom the French musician Pierre Schaffer's experimentations with musique concrète had comfortably occupied that role. In fact, it was in the presence of a Coptic zaar ceremony—an all-female spirit possession ritual—performed privately in Cairo in 1944, that the audio signals generated by women's chanting were captured and translated into electronic data to be registered, via magnetic resistance, on a steel wire. The recording apparatus belonged to Egyptian artist Halim El-Dabh, who returned to his studio, manipulated the recording's reverb, intensified and removed certain aural traces, and “added various other interruptions in the flow of magnetic charges on the strip of wire,” electronically creating a piece of music entitled Ta'abir Al-Zaar (p. 63).The historical implications of this narrative, which centers a North African artist as a pioneering figure in the emergence of new media art, cannot be understated; yet, Delinda Collier's sensitive analysis of Ta'abir Al-Zaar, in the second chapter of her groundbreaking new book Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa, takes us further than either the field of media studies or traditional African art history would seem methodologically equipped to go on their own. While the book's broadest aim is to both chronicle and theorize African artists' innovations in film, sound, and digital technologies throughout the twentieth century, it is also a meticulous work of criticism that weaves connections across several disciplinary divides, forging new interpretations of media art through a specifically African esoteric lens. In the case of Ta'abir, for instance, she considers the parallels between the technological process of wire recording and the zaar as an example of trance: “Both posit that sound can be removed from one place and become present within another,” Collier writes. “Both have specific techniques to achieve that movement and to make known the importance of the movement, the transmission” (p. 63). Interweaving El-Dabh's story with that of European concrete music, conceptual art, the history of broadcast radio and Egyptian surrealism, Collier concludes that Ta'abir is “as much about the sensuous experience of sound as it is addressing the membrane between the seen and the unseen […]” (p. 87).Media Primitivism is a nuanced and singular intellectual project that stands to make an impact across the fields of African art, media studies, and art history. The chapters are dense with bibliographic sophistication—perhaps to an extent that may be daunting for undergraduate readers—as Collier interweaves advanced discourses and primary material from each of these disciplines to venture new historical and analytical possibilities in tandem. In the book's illuminating introduction and six main chapters, for instance, she holds several interrelated theses about the concept of “medium” in tight suspension, drawing from the term's “convergent definitions” in order to make a case for the as-yet-unexamined “symmetry” (and conflict) to be found across “Afro-Atlantic and Western theories of art and technology” (p. 1). This reading hinges on the notion of the “fetish,” a type of object (analogous to “black box” technology) whose power is concealed from view. In her analysis of Ta'abir Al-Zaar, for instance, the fetish concept enables Collier to pinpoint the almost magical capacity of wire recording technology, just like the zaar ceremony, itself, to abstract and isolate sound while occluding its true source—and to imagine the endeavor as a kind of “aural masquerade” (p. 61).Medium can be understood in relation to the literal materials or substrates of artistic production, but also to those who communicate between the earthly and spiritual worlds. Relatedly, the author sees mediation as a form of allegoricity, “the conscious move ‘from this to that’” (p. 4). It is, precisely, art history's own allegories surrounding concepts such as “Africa,” modernism, and modernity—whereby African art has too often been “fetishized” and rendered ahistorical or technologically belated—that Media Primitivism resolutely and carefully subverts. (This point is key to understanding Collier's subversive utilization and reorientation of several terms—”fetish” and “primitivism” among them—that have been out of circulation in recent Africanist scholarship, yet which allow her to confront and override unsavory disciplinary histories). Throughout the book, African philosophical systems and (art) histories are positioned, instead, as central to the emergence and ontology of media art. As Collier concludes, the “hypermediality of electricity-based art is an African way of doing art” (p. 5).The book's first chapter, entitled “Film as Light, Film as Indigenous,” reflects on the use of “natural media” in the oeuvre of Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé, asserting at the start that elements such as sound, light, and air/wind are presented by Cissé as “either media themselves or as preconditioning perception” (p. 31). Focusing on the film Yeelen (1987), whose narrative loosely follows the epic of Sundiata Keita, Collier engages in both historiographic and technical-materialist analysis. She first, carefully, dismantles the Eurocentrism inherent to canonical film history, wherein African film is assumed to be not just peripheral to, but indeed derivative of, French avant-garde cinema, and unpacks a range of dangerous misconceptions surrounding media literacy in Africa. Among these are Marshall McLuhan's claim (following John Wilson) that “Africans as a whole do not have the perceptual apparatus to look at pictures,” being more “naturally” inclined towards interactivity than passive viewing (p. 36).Collier also pushes back against the frequent invocation of the griot archetype in relation to African cinema; she doesn't reject this framework outright but suggests that it can lead scholars to analyze works according to narrative content, exclusively. Yeelen's plot draws from Bambara mythology and recounts the dramatic conflict between the young Nianankoro and his diabolical father, Soma, who both wield the ritual powers of komo. For Collier, Cissé smartly links the materiality of film itself with the concept of nyama—an intangible spiritual energy or power—by positioning light as doubly integral to the process of mediation: it is “that which we look at or hear and that which we see or hear through.” (31) For instance, the recurring motif of lightninglike flashes, which are a stand in for komo magic, mirrors the literal significance of light in producing the photographic exposures necessary for traditional film.Chapter 2, “Electronic Sound as Trance and Resonance,” chronicles El-Dabh's experimentation with electronic music, and has already been discussed herein. Again, Collier reiterates a medium-sensitive methodology, wherein a substrate (in this case, the wire recorder) is adjoined to spiritual belief or practice (the practice of zaar) (p. 84). In both of these chapters, she emphasizes the work's “obviation of mediation”—in other words, its concreteness: light is to nyama and to film, as sound is to the zaar and to electronic music. In one of the book's most beautiful passages, Collier describes sound as a sensuously experienced, abstract, and pure medium, in all facets of the term:“We do not have any visual evidence of or knowledge about a thin strand of wire wrapped tightly into a spool as it unfurls and registers magnetic charges translated from ambient sound. No one can see the magnetic charges on the wire spool, bouncing off the walls of a radio studio and registering those new charges onto its flat, petroleum-based surface of tape” (p. 87).In chapter 3, “The Song as Private Property,” we stay focused on audio recording technologies, but move geographically southward. Here, Collier examines issues of cultural ownership, appropriation, and authenticity that are raised in the (now dormant) multimedia work Song of Solomon (2006), by the duo of South African artists Julian Jonker and Ralph Borland. The 8-channel sound installation—described by the artists as an “aleatoric sound collage” (p. 93)—takes form as a circle of speakers, emulating a chorus, from which emanates an overlay of around seventy versions of the song “Mbube.” Originally recorded for radio in 1939 by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, the tune has been popularized by its many appropriations, with Pete Seeger's “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” being the most famous.Complex issues surrounding authorship and authenticity arise from two different sides of this example. The contemporary work, created using Max/MSP software, has not been shown since 2010, when it was deemed in violation of copyright law and subsequently dismantled into “a set of obsolescing hard drives” (p. 95). This claim is ironic given the troubled history of the song “Mbube” itself: Solomon Linda was compensated just ten shillings for his copyright, and never saw the royalties from the song's global circulation. Further, as Collier explains, “Mbube” is performed in the isicathamiya style, which evolved in the context of a newly electrified, late nineteenth century urban South Africa, and in response to encounters with African American jubilee performance. Because this genre's “origins” are often mistakenly assumed to be rural and collective, the music industry has been able to delegitimize legal claims to “authorship” by individual musicians. Collier sensitively unpacks the “mimetic loop” that binds Zulu choral arrangements to antebellum minstrelsy, straight through more contemporary, capitalist exploitations of Black artists and producers (p. 103).Chapter 4 takes on the allegorical fictions surrounding Blackness within modernist discourse at large, which are mapped onto a discussion of electrification (and darkness) as both an artistic medium and a symbol of infrastructural inequity. Entitled “Artificial Blackness, or Extraction as Abstraction,” the chapter opens with a vivid description of South African artist James Webb's The Black Passage—an installation that takes the form of a 66-ft-long, unlit corridor. The viewer is immersed in a “thunderous,” grinding soundscape recorded within a mining elevator at South Deep, one of the most exploitative and dangerous sites of mineral extraction on the continent (p. 121). Collier connects this work to art historical discourses as varied as Kazimir Malevich's “zero sum” abstraction, “presentness” via John Cage and Minimalism, and the “spacelessness” of installation art amidst contemporary art's “globalization” in the 1990s (p. 131). Yet, as she continuously proves throughout the book, the alleged non-space of conceptual, media, or installation art is a myth. As she will explain in Chapter 5, digital technologies (including those used frequently by artists across the biennial circuits) “require massive amounts of previous earth,” extracted from the depths of the African landscape (p. 155).With this realization, we must unpack an immense historical burden. The South African mining industry, Collier points out, “has been the most circumstantial for technological development, has the worst labor conditions and the best financial returns in the country, and was entangled with the most infamous social engineering project: apartheid” (p. 124). In another work by James Webb discussed herein, entitled The World Will Listen, the artist cut the power of his exhibiting gallery for the duration of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Collier, who witnessed this performance, writes that like other attendees she “assumed that the cut was due to a common power failure in the city”—an admission that evidences the tragic irony of the unequal distribution of public utilities in the very places from which such power is minerally sourced (p. 136).Chapter 5, “The Earth and the Substratum are Not Enough,” continues to reflect on the extraction economy, considering coltan (columbite-tantalite—a metallic ore that is mined in Central Africa and has become crucial to today's digital devices) and the age of digital/mineral capitalism. Amidst today's green revolution, she considers the battery as environmentalism's “talismanic object” (p. 155), and notes its appearance as medium and motif in work by Central African artists. Examples include Jean Katambayi Mukendi's assemblage Ecoson (2010), which serves as an illustrative protoype of electrical circuitry, and is meant to “teach people how to properly hack into the electric grid of Lumumbashi” (p. 157), as well as Sammy Baloji's video installation The Tower (2015), which addresses “the dichotomies of life and death in global economies” including Kinshasa (p. 170).In the final chapter, “The Seed and the Field,” Collier elegantly transitions to an ecocritical consideration of art, technology, feminism, and the agricultural landscape. A primary work considered here is Wanuri Kahiu's film, Pumzi (2009), which speaks to the “fetishizing of the seed” amidst the genetic manipulation and commodification of nature (p. 184). The film's protagonist is Asha, the curator of a virtual natural history museum in a dystopian future marked by environmental decline. Asha receives a rare and precious seed, but perishes in her attempt to plant it in a barren landscape. Collier imagines the seed as the “emblematic object of origins—of nature—as a last frontier” (p. 186), explaining that recently, corporate scientists have invented a means of genetically modifying seeds so as to remove their ability to reproduce. This prevents farmers from becoming economically self-sufficient, as they stay reliant on purchasing continuous supply. The chapter engages Black eco-feminist frameworks, and also considers works by artists such as Penny Siopis, El Anatsui, Wangechi Mutu, and John Akomfrah, who in different ways consider issues of environmental crisis through a materialist lens.Media Primitivism, which is Collier's second major publication, is a highly sophisticated work of critical analysis bolstered by scholarly rigor demonstrated across historical, geographic, and disciplinary borders. The book will be most rewarding to readers who are already well versed in the bibliographies of African art and/or media studies, as many of its most compelling analytical propositions hinge on nuanced interventions into these fields' canonical discourses. Rather than applying familiar research methods to fill a gap in the art historical narrative, or borrowing interpretive tools from other disciplines, its most exciting contribution is that it breathes new life into the theoretical possibilities proposed by African art itself.There are key takeaways, here, for specialists in several fields. Scholars of contemporary art, for instance, should take note of Collier's debunking of the myth of placelessness that is often attendant to discussions of new media, despite its supposedly utopian, globalizing potential. Further, Collier's approach to “place” as an Africanist is, on its own, commendably wide ranging. Not only does the author treat works of film, music, and fine art on equal terms, but she attends to art histories on both sides of the Sahara, while also straddling a chronological divide that typically separates modern (or colonial-era) art from its contemporary (or postcolonial, postwar) counterpart. In forging a discourse on electrification and the African landscape in twentieth century art, Media Primitivism makes a case, though perhaps not overtly, for a field encompassing Africa amidst/after industrialization. This designation would not only be broad enough to contain Collier's many subjects, from the late nineteenth century to the present, but importantly, it would supplant the primitivist assumption that Africa is irrelevant within narratives of the world's industrial age—an era that is, after all, integral to the canonical origin story of modernism itself.