The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

Sometime in 1975, I walked into the office of Arnold Rubin (1937–1988), an associate professor in the department of art at the University of California, Los Angeles, inquiring about graduate study in Africanist art history. Students of African art, he assured me, would be at the forefront of mighty changes in the academic world. He promised that we would blow the dust off the hidebound field of art history. Rather shaken by his passionate rhetoric, I left thinking I might be too conventional for such an avant-garde enterprise. So after a much more pragmatic conversation with Herbert M. ("Skip") Cole about the shrinking number of teaching positions in art history, I headed to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for my graduate work. There I was plunged into a program of instruction and research that was full of its own unexpected adventures and rewards. While I have always been immensely grateful that Skip Cole agreed to be my advisor and guide, I have never forgotten Rubin's vision, his assertion that Africanist art historians would overturn entrenched paradigms and revolutionize the study of art.This issue of African Arts celebrates a generation of scholars—the elders of our discipline—whose contributions shaped the journal when it was launched as african arts/arts d'afrique some fifty years ago. Arnold Rubin was one of these, as he had been appointed editor of "graphic and plastic arts" when the second issue of the fledgling magazine appeared in 1968. As a member of his students' generation, the cohort charged with bringing the study of African art into the twenty-first century, I would like to revisit my initial encounter with this influential scholar and teacher through the lens of African Arts. Has his vision indeed become a reality? Have Africanists reshaped the narrative of art history over the last fifty years and brought novel, interdisciplinary, Africa-centered approaches to a staid Eurocentric discipline?Clearly, I encountered Arnold Rubin during a time when his own views had been shaped by the theoretical and methodological debates swirling around the art department at UCLA, and by his awareness of the new and rather tenuous position of Africanists within the discipline of art history. After all, in the United States the first dissertation on an African topic presented for a PhD in art history (rather than anthropology or Egyptology) had been written less than twenty years earlier, in 1957, by Roy Sieber (1923–2001). While art historians such as Douglas Fraser (1930–1982) may have taught courses on African art as "Primitive Art" during the 1950s, it was not until the 1960s that Africanist scholars such as Sieber and Frank Willett (1925–2006) could draw on their own fieldwork when they offered classes in American art history departments. Rubin presented his thoughts on the development of the field at a conference on "African Art Studies in the 1980s" held at UCLA in 1979 and reviewed for African Arts by Marla Berns:1Although his ideas were disseminated in the classroom as well as through his many creative research projects, it is Rubin's association with African Arts in the first decade of its publication that allows us to examine how his goals for Africanist art history intersected with other impulses during a unique period. Fifty years ago, personal and professional relationships linking Americans and Africans promised to forge new ways of seeing and describing the world, and the excitement of this promise permeated the journal. I should note here that my own memories of that time were recently refreshed by a visit to an African country I had not seen in almost half a century. My brother arranged for me to join childhood friends and family members for a visit to Malawi, where our fathers had worked from 1964–1969, and where our mothers had volunteered in local colleges and hospitals. The church we had attended, constructed by members of the Church of Scotland congregation before 1891 (Briggs 2013:206), was still a vibrant place of worship in Blantyre (Fig. 1), its physical structure intact. I had only vague memories of an even earlier precolonial monument, the Mandala House, which had been the headquarters of the African Lakes Corporation in 1882 (Fig. 2). The interior is now a bright, sunny space managed by La Caverna, an art gallery specializing in paintings by Malawi's most influential modernists, while the upper floor houses the library and meeting rooms of the Malawi Historical Society. This venerable building thus enshrines the art history as well as the history of twentieth and twenty-first century Malawi, both pivoting around the nation's independence in 1964.Flipping through the first few years of african arts/arts d'afrique, the bilingual precursor of African Arts, also brought me back to the heady days of the 1960s. Just as my father and his American colleagues set up a technical college as a "contribution from the people of the United States of America to the people of Malawi" when that nation became independent from Britain,2 the very first issue proclaimed, in boldface print, that "The African Studies Center of the University of California Los Angeles presents a gift [of the magazine] to Africa." Since the journal and the technical school were offered to Africans at the height of the Cold War, when the continent and its resources were seen as vulnerable to influences from the Soviet Union, postcolonial theorists might characterize both as instruments wielded by the US government to ensure the loyalty of African allies.3 It was true that my father had been hired through an American university with funding from the Agency for International Development, while the growth of the African Studies Center at UCLA was nurtured by government grants and fellowships. Faculty and graduate students at UCLA were provided with funds for research on the African continent, allowing the African Studies Center to act as a "think tank" that was continually renewed by contacts with Africa. Former Peace Corps volunteers, sent by the US government to promote democracy and economic progress in Africa, enrolled in graduate programs after returning home, joining the ranks of scholars who studied the arts of the African continent. Yet despite their origins in hegemonic political policies, educational programs and initiatives such as african arts/arts d'afrique fostered a discourse that exposed Americans to African ways of knowing, to epistemologies which would lead researchers such as Arnold Rubin to challenge the assumptions of his own academic traditions.In the second issue, the editors wrote that the purpose of the new journal would be "to record the art of the African past, to provide an outlet for the contemporary African artist, and to stimulate the creative arts in Africa" (Povey 1967:2). Judging from other short entries, the publication was a highly experimental enterprise. According to a later reflection written by John Povey (1929–1992), the specialist in African literature who was one of its original editors, "the entire original concept of African Arts derived from a purely serendipitous seat proximity on an airline which brought Paul [law professor Paul Proehl (1921–1997)] and [Sudanese artist] el Salahi together. They communed and agreed that what was really wanted was a magazine that would display the manifold arts of Africa—hence the plural title—to the world" (1991:6).4Arnold Rubin had joined the editorial board quite soon after his arrival at UCLA. He was almost immediately joined by Skip Cole and by Eugene Grigsby, a professor of African and African American art history at Arizona State University. Other editors worked with them to assemble material celebrating a broad spectrum of African creativity. The first issues featured short essays on architecture, dance, theater, the cinema, music, literary criticism, and oral literature, in addition to an overview of the archaeology of Ife by Frank Willett, a reflective piece by Léopold Sédar Senghor, and reviews of contemporary art. Some of the discussions in these first volumes, such as a long essay by Bohumil Holas, were deeply primitivist, and John Povey himself could give way to paternalist pronouncements: "Somewhere between the inhibiting forms of the tradition and the too facile fashionable fads of contemporary art in the West, rests the legitimate area in which the African artist can create" (1968a:1). Yet in these years Dennis Duerden stated, "I am looking for an African kinetic artist, or one who uses a computer" (1967:30). Too few contributors would join him in expecting African artists of the 1970s and 1980s to engage with developments happening elsewhere in the world of contemporary art, and apparently neither video artists not digital arts would appear in the pages of African Arts prior to the twenty-first century. John Povey himself was startlingly prescient when he humbly acknowledged that "We hope that the possibilities supplied by the presence of this forum will encourage Africans to write their own account of their arts. Such essays will undoubtedly reveal to us areas of perception which are inevitably denied even to the most sympathetic of outside critics" (1968b:1). Unfortunately, the "presence" of the journal would diminish in African libraries and art centers during the following decades (Nettleton 2017, Okwuoso 2017), and as Simbao has clearly demonstrated (2017), scholars based on the African continent would be hindered from publishing their research in the journal by a variety of constraints. It is now clear that the laudable sentiments of Povey needed to have been accompanied by sustained action.Soon after its inception, the editors announced an annual competition, with monetary prizes for winning submissions of art (two- and three-dimensional work) and literature (plays, poetry, short stories, excerpts from novels) that would be published or reproduced in the magazine. Each issue would include reports by African "correspondents" providing "perceptive analyses of the underlying situation that confronts the African artist" (Povey 1968b:1). As a showcase for African literature, african arts/arts d'afrique was bilingual, offering essays in French and English. At the time, this was a sophisticated, European approach that addressed a wide, intercontinental readership, even if the possible incorporation of other languages commonly used in Africa (such as Arabic, Portuguese, or Swahili) was not mentioned. In many ways the magazine resembled creative modernist publication projects such as Minotaure, produced in Paris in the 1930s, or Black Orpheus, published in Ibadan after the 1950s, or Transition, launched in Kampala in the 1960s. What is striking, however, was the offer by the editors of african arts/arts d'afrique to distribute their color illustrations of African contemporary art to schools so that teachers could mount them on bulletin boards (Povey 1968a:38). This was a didactic effort to reach out to the American public, a program to dispel misconceptions about African cultures. In today's global art world, where critics value the transgressive, provocative stance of marginalized artists, few curators would attempt to place reproductions of contemporary African art in K-12 classrooms of the United States.As Doran Ross noted in his review of the first twenty-five years of African Arts (Ross 1992:1), submissions of literary works and coverage of contemporary art faded away after the annual competitions came to an end in 1975. Just as Arnold Rubin brought his experience with performance, ephemeral art, and ritual in African contexts to his exploration of American cultural practices, African Arts covered a broad range of urban and rural artistic creativity in Africa and its Diaspora during the 1980s. It became a leading outlet for fresh, new accounts of artists' practice based on fieldwork conducted in communities throughout Western and Central Africa, and studies of arts from Eastern and Southern Africa were featured as well. Given the variety and sophistication of the new studies appearing in African Arts, its readers may not have noticed how few contributors were still visiting the studios of artists working in African galleries, cultural centers, and institutions of higher education. In a "First Word" written as African Arts approached its twenty-fifth anniversary, Povey complained that at the 1989 Triennial conference of ACASA, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, "contemporary African art … was considered at best marginal, at worst a regrettable intrusion of a tiresome product outside the concerns of serious scholars" (1990:1). Other journals would eventually arise to cover arts identified as "contemporary," such as Revue Noire (in 1991) and Nka (in 1994), and in last decade of the twentieth century African Arts itself would once again turn its attention to artists who had studied in African universities or art institutes. I would argue, though, that by neglecting critical studies of these African artists during the 1980s, Africanists missed the opportunity to interact with art historians in other "non-Western" fields, who were extending their own research methods into the study of modern and contemporary "global" arts (Sullivan 1996, Farago and Pierce 2006, Hay 2008).Furthermore, because African Arts focused on community-based (rather than nationally based) art and architecture during the 1980s, it bypassed a pivotal period in the history of African modernisms. During my visit to Malawi, I was honored to meet Willie Nampeya, now professor emeritus in the art department at Chancellor College in Zomba, who had been a student of my mother, Barbara Blackmun (Fig. 3). After learning of the challenges faced by Prof. Nampeya and his younger colleagues, and realizing that they have worked for many years in relative isolation, I wish that I (and other faculty in American institutions) had been more aware of their need for international recognition and support (see Simbao 2017:6). Whatever the reasons, close contacts between art educators working in Africa and in the United States still tend to be the exception rather than the rule.The switch to a monolingual format in volume 4 (and the adoption of the name African Arts) may have contributed to the diminishing number of articles on modernist cinema, literature, and theater appearing in the journal. One immediate casualty was the coverage of francophone northern Africa. During the first few years, contributors had written about artists based in Tunis and Cairo, providing material that is useful now for researchers reviewing the history of African modernism. The original inclusion of arts from the entire continent had reflected political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when newly independent African states sponsored arts festivals in Dakar, Algiers, and Lagos that were expressions of African solidarity. Of course biennials and other exhibition events today return to this model by soliciting artworks from across the continent, weaving economic and political networks as part of national cultural policies. And of course many art fairs are sponsored by francophone African nations and produce bilingual texts.The early articles on textiles, ceramics, and other artisanal traditions in the Maghreb were also responses to the work of historians and archaeologists, who were then mapping trade routes and the movements of people and ideas across the Sahara. But in the 1960s, art historians had often been introduced to African art by European modernists, who believed that only sub-Saharan Africa could produce art nègre, authentically "primitive" art. Even after abandoning the tenets of Primitivism, many art historians remained in thrall to the masterpieces of West Africa and Central Africa that had inspired early twentieth century French painters. It is not surprising that the pages of African Arts would be dominated by these regions, even though Africanists such as Rubin and Cole had moved far beyond formal analyses of sculpture to broader understandings of the totality of creative production on the continent in its very first issues.Perhaps the shift away from Egypt and the Maghreb was also a result of the critiques of the field of African Studies in the 1970s, when African Americans affirmed their own ancestral links to ancient cultures. Following the lead of Robert Farris Thompson, many Africanists extended their art historical analyses to the Americas, narrating art histories as creative expressions of the Black Atlantic world. As African Studies in several institutions was subsumed under "Black Studies" or appended to departments of African American and Africana Studies, the art historical relationships between West Africans classified as "black" and North Africans seen as "non-black" by outside observers became more difficult to place within an American academic framework. When Sidney Kasfir reviewed Jan Vansina's Art and History in Africa for African Arts, she underscored his inclusion of arts from the northern half of the continent, asserting that this was perhaps "the most alien part of the author's perspective for African art specialists" (Kasfir 1986:12).For the first decade or so, the journal had close relationship with commercial enterprises. In addition to receiving funding from the Kress Foundation to print images in color, african arts/arts d'afrique received advertising revenue from airlines, a mining company, and the Franklin Gallery in Los Angeles. Private collections as well as exhibitions at public institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum were reviewed. This context helps explain why Rubin wrote his influential essay "Accumulative Sculpture: Power and Display" (Rubin 1974) for the Pace Gallery in New York City before publishing it in the contemporary art journal Art Forum (Rubin 1975). It would be several years before a messy divorce would separate private galleries selling "primitive arts" (or "tribal arts") and the academic world. This divorce was finalized as postcolonial theory pushed art historians (and the editors of African Arts) towards new discussions of professional ethics, fieldwork methods, and collection practices.Arnold Rubin may have been instrumental in moving african arts/arts d'afrique in a direction that was quite different from that originally envisioned by Povey and Poehl. His own, detailed study of Kutep mud sculpture in the first volume contained the publication's first endnotes (Rubin 1968). For its second volume, the magazine featured an extended study of Chokwe arts by Marie-Louise Bastin that spanned three issues and whose overview from the of most early Skip essays on appeared that as a new for critical of fieldwork Rubin's and a in on in the of the literature on and Robert Farris wrote his of African Arts was as a forum for research in the arts by art and other submissions were to as they would be at other journals (Ross Povey when from his editorial that despite its African Arts had became an academic publication in with the of a It could thus could more of a to the discipline of art how has this years ago, Doran Ross wrote a "First Word" in which he complained that "the arts of Africa to be in the world, the art the or the classroom … Even the most courses on African arts a at colleges and the Africanist who to have had the in the field of art history as a wrote in the vision of an to position and the of to the rather than the product of artistic to have been Yet by the of African art history more "African art … has collections and What might we in 2017, a decade are many ways to the of Africanist art historians within the American academic world, from positions of Africanists in art history programs or the number of courses we to the number of on African art published by university or the number of articles and reviews we have in the most The number of Africanists who art exhibitions as or curators might also be in addition to the many gallery art independent and whose academic to their in African art. Yet as faculty members at American college or university such might not us what we really wish to our in the art historical they not us much about or even we have had an the field as a I a the art history When Doran Ross and wrote their African artworks to art as of "primitive" Some African again in the on twentieth century European where they were by the of the where they had been of both of the leading for art history Art the by and Art include on African art that are with on or the The that will provide at to African in an in art history. of artworks from the African also in the of American school students need to for an Art History these on the work of Africanists to working in the on African art history, written almost in the by Skip Cole for Art the and and Roy for Art History have been for later in to provide student readers with a historical Povey might have of these which African art was of when the arts of other As several scholars have serious studies of historical developments in African art forms are few and far and the review was launched in part out of the with the of attention to historical context in African Arts and In many has not been on African artistic of the immediate or to such as (see But that may as art historians and other scholars new research and produce more For in Barbara Blackmun had very to draw when a in to for the family on the following (Fig. The was a But when agreed to for at a in (Fig. we could a literature on that the in historical perspective if the history of African art is in and classrooms so that Africa can become in of its inclusion offer students the opportunity to African artistic practices, and that provide them with new ways of looking and is "African its place in the that african arts/arts d'afrique as "graphic and plastic arts" in a collection of identified by artist, and in the today's African artists can be in such as Art which them into the discourse of global modern and contemporary art and on the of are we Arnold Rubin's of as art within a cultural And if we write articles in Art that showcase African studies of art historical are we to Arnold Rubin's vision of Africanist art history as recently wrote that he Rubin would be to that contributors to African Arts still hope to the discipline of art history, even if we are of how this can be

In recent years, the critical study of museums has emerged as a major focus of scholarly inquiry across various disciplines, bringing into greater focus the effect that museum practice has on the formation of meaning and the public perception of objects. Representing Africa in American Art Museums is the first comprehensive book to focus on the history of African art in American art museums. Chronicling more than a century of building and presenting collections of African art in thirteen American art museums, from the late 1800s to the present, the book considers the art museum as a lens for understanding the shifting visions of African art that are manifested in institutional practices of collecting and display in the United States. Thirteen essays present the institutional biographies of African art collections in a selection of American art museums: the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Hampton University Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Barnes Foundation, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Primitive Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indiana University Art Museum, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Menil Collection, and the National Museum of African Art. Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke offer a review of the history of collecting and displaying African art in American museums and identify important issues that are raised by the essays: defining aesthetic criteria for African art and for its display; breaking free from the monolithic rubric of primitive broadening perceptions of what constitutes African art; and formulating a place for context and culture in understanding and presenting African art. Representing Africa in American Art Museums concludes with an afterword that anticipates the direction for the collecting and display of African art in the twenty-first century, including the ethics and legalities of collecting; the deconstruction of a singular and authoritative museum voice in interpreting works of art; the interests and engagement of local African American and African communities that have a stake in how collections are represented; and how, if, and where to include contemporary art from Africa in museum collections.

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

This panel, convened from September 4 to October 10, 2009, is the second of a three-part series on issues in contemporary African art. The first panel, which appeared in issue 22/23 of Nka, focused on large-scale exhibitions, which have been instrumental in bringing the work of African artists to global attention, and the third will examine the politics of contemporary African art and the art museum. What concerns the panel here is the scholarship of contemporary African art: the teaching, research, and publishing in the field. The discussion considers such questions as the place of contemporary African art in art history programs and its relationship with contemporary Western art as a subfield within art history, as well as the challenges involved in training graduate students. The panel also walks on such gritty grounds as the relationship between contemporary and traditional or classical African art history.

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

African Arts — Global Conversations

The Place of Socialism in African Art

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.

The European interest in Africa had a significant impact on Africa’s art and culture, including contemporary African art music and dance, description, materials, subjects, and purpose, all of which was influenced by the European presence in Africa and have an impact on what is now African tribal art. This has opened up numerous new options for contemporary African tribal art by demonstrating to the rest of the world that creativity associated with the past has resurfaced in modernday Africa. African tribal art provides information into their current society. In those days, the Europeans saw Africa as the real deal, full with potential, which they believed was only found in Africa. Because of its differences from European values on art, African culture and art has been branded as ‘tribal,’ ‘primitive,’ or ‘inferior,’ and it continues to remain so. Today, the term ‘tribal’ conjures up images of ‘old fashioned, primitive, and ignorance.’ Westerners have used and continue to use the term ‘primitive’ to characterize African art, although African art continues to play an essential part in the world today, which critics accept. Our goal here is to speculate on how colonization influenced African civilization and, in turn, influenced African tribal art.

The field of contemporary African and African diaspora art and culture is currently riddled by two paradoxes. First, in Africa and its diaspora, we are witnessing a burgeoning of creative energy and an increasing visibility of artists in the international arts arena. Yet, this energy and visibility has not been matched by a parallel regime of art criticism that lives up to the levels of their work. Second, we find a rising interest in exhibiting and collecting works by contemporary African and diaspora artists among Western museums as well as private and public collections. This growing interest, however, has been taking place within an extremely xenophobic environment of anti-immigration legislation, the closing of borders to the West, and a callous disregard for African and non-Western people’s lives. Hence, this essay addresses the need for an innovative framework that is capable of critically unpacking these paradoxes and that offers a critical analysis of contemporary African and African diaspora artistic and cultural production. In doing so, the author asserts the importance of movement, mobility, and transiency in addressing issues of contemporary African artistic and cultural production. This article focuses on the use of the term Afropolitan, which has made its way into African artistic and literary criticism as a crossover from the fashion and popular culture arenas. In thinking about the usefulness of “Afropolitanism,” the author revisits the notion of cosmopolitanism in relationship to the entanglement of Africa and the West and its reconfiguration at the intersection of modernity and postcoloniality.

Constructing African Art Histories for Lagoons of Cote d'Ivoire Review of: Monica Blackmun Visona, Constructing African Art Histories for Lagoons of Cote d'Ivoire, Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010, 216 pp, 41 b/w illustrations (chart, maps, photographs), bibliography, index, $109.95 US hdbk. ISBN 978-1-4094-0440-8.I have already reviewed Monica Blackmun Visona's book: Constructing African Art Histories for Lagoons of Cote d'Ivoire, concentrating on its subject matter.1 However, this book deserves critical mention in this issue of Journal of Art Historiography for its historiographie content.In Chapters 1-3 of her book, Dr. Visona contributes a critical discussion of approaches to study of African Art History since origin of discipline in last century. She begins Chapter 1 with a discussion of relevance of Histories of African Art to other Art Histories: can same rubrics, theories and methodologies that were developed for studies of Western Art since 15th Century be successfully applied to African Art? Indeed, can these analytical techniques be applied to studies of at all times, and worldwide? This question will be argued, and arguable, for some time to come. Even definition of term 'art' needs careful rethinking in today's academic world. Returning to expressive material culture (or, as she labels it, humanity's impulse to manipulate materials to create visually compelling images, Visona concludes that objects and events in different media get different labels in these cultures. However, it seems that for peoples of Ivoirian Lagoons, 'art' is collectively the products of talented individuals. Festivals, she contends, should be discussed as performance art, noting that they are often present occasions for display of visually compelling images (page 4).Visona's Chapter 2 begins with a chronological discussion of various approaches to study of African Art, beginning with identification of style regions in European publications of early 20th Century, and notions of tribal styles, followed by two schools of American scholarship: Roy Sieber's students, trained at African Studies Center of Indiana University, and students of Paul Wingert and Robert Goldwater, both historians who specialized in history of European Art of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The latter group tended in early days to use term primitive, as it had been used since early twentieth century by collectors, anthropologists, colonial officers and dealers. It lumps African Art in with other non-Western arts. This rubric came under severe criticism during 1960s and subsequently, and has now been dropped from most scholarly publications. However, tensions between primitive art approach of modernists and direct studies of African's arts based on fieldwork by scholars since 1960s continues to animate study of African Art to this day. She also notes that recent Francophone equivalent of Primitive Art, Arts Premiers, leads to same tensions (page 8). A description of her personal research, conducted in field between 1981 and 1989, and assumptions that informed it, follows: basically, assumptions were that all and performance served a function within traditional lagoon cultures, that each culture had a discreet style that could be identified, and that changes that came with colonialism caused a disruption and deterioration of traditional arts (page 9). Visona states that these assumptions have all been challenged in recent years. They were based in functionalist and structuralist anthropological theories, both of which came under critical scrutiny with advent of postmodern thought. Postmodernism, deconstruction and postcolonialism have complicated African Art scholarship in remarkable ways, and politics and economics of Africa (and economics of research funding agencies) in recent decades have rendered field studies in Africa much more difficult to realize than they were in 1960s, 70s and 80s. …

Some Preliminary Responses to “Beyond Single Stories”

October 01 2020 A Propos Macron and the Restitution of African Arts: A German Case Study Barbara Thompson Barbara Thompson Barbara Thompson has workled as a consultant with the African ceramics collection of His Royal Highness Franz, Duke of Bavaria since receiving her PhD in African art history from the University of Iowa in 1999. She has taught an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa, served as curator of African, Native American, and Oceanic arts at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and at the Cantor Art Center, Stanford University. She has also organized over forty exhibitions and published internationally on global arts, often focusing on the cross-over between historical and contemporary practices. Since returning to her birthplace in Hawaii in 2014, she works as an independent art historian, curator, and consultant. bthompson@africanartresearch.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Barbara Thompson Barbara Thompson has workled as a consultant with the African ceramics collection of His Royal Highness Franz, Duke of Bavaria since receiving her PhD in African art history from the University of Iowa in 1999. She has taught an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa, served as curator of African, Native American, and Oceanic arts at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and at the Cantor Art Center, Stanford University. She has also organized over forty exhibitions and published internationally on global arts, often focusing on the cross-over between historical and contemporary practices. Since returning to her birthplace in Hawaii in 2014, she works as an independent art historian, curator, and consultant. bthompson@africanartresearch.com Online Issn: 1937-2108 Print Issn: 0001-9933 © 2020 by the Regents of the University of California.2020The Regents of the University of California African Arts (2020) 53 (4): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00545 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Barbara Thompson; A Propos Macron and the Restitution of African Arts: A German Case Study. African Arts 2020; 53 (4): 1–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00545 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsAfrican Arts Search Advanced Search When French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on November 28, 2017, he announced his plans to temporarily or permanently return French state-owned African cultural possessions to their original source nations (Macron 2017). Museums with African art collections were sent into a tailspin as heated debates ignited across the world following the speech. Macron subsequently engaged the Senegalese economist and philosopher Felwine Sarr and art historian Bénédicte Savoy to write a formal report with restitution recommendations. Released in 2018, their report concluded that all cultural possessions in French museums acquired before 1960 without evidence of full consent from their original owners or guardians should be returned to Africa (Sarr and Savoy 2018),1 “essentially advocating the unconditional and comprehensive return of all such possessions”... © 2020 by the Regents of the University of California.2020The Regents of the University of California You do not currently have access to this content.

African art has played a role in the practices of studio-trained African American artists since the Harlem Renaissance. As knowledge about African art has grown and changed, so too have the ways in which artists have appropriated such art and imagined their relationship to the continent. This article explores the meeting of African American art and the knowledge about Africa that is spread through African art history. African American artists such as Houston Conwill, David Hammons, Alison Saar, and Renee Stout have drawn on art historical writings about African art in order to explore new possibilities in their own artistic practices. Not only did such writings allow artists to explore (and re-create) new structures of meaning for their works, but also African art history provided viewers and intellectuals in the arts community with a guide for reading these complex works. I propose that this collusion between African art history and American art can be conceived of as feedback: a resonant discursive loop that connects American art and African art, diasporic art production and its interpretation, and identity production and recognition. By exploring the work of contemporary African American artists and their relationship to African art history, this article examines the ways that resonance and dissonance in diasporic feedback give context to the controversies around the appropriation of African art in the diaspora. Feedback may help to frame the processes of making and interpreting art by diasporic communities and, ultimately, expose the complicated nature of expressing and recognizing racial difference in American identity.