admin“gold”, “savages”, “darkest”, “deepest”, “primitive” and “devastation”.
Africa, its people and culture are not some easily definable species or categories that yield to anthropology’s classifications and Western “labels”.
Our transition from antiquity to the modern becomes a lot more difficult to locate and explicate due to its various influences from within and outside Africa.
Today, there are African links wherever you turn. In the streets of Paris, Los Angeles and Port-au-Prince; they are in classrooms, in museums and in dance clubs; on movie screens and on the airwaves.
Africa has long flowed in New York City’s bloodstream.
Lately, a fresh infusion has arrived with “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994,” an exhibition at New York’s PS1 Contemporary Art Centre in Queens.
From the ferment of African liberation comes a revolution in African art. Post-colonial African art expression is visible extensively and covers many African countries from Algiers to Cape Town.
It is expressed in many media, including art, literature, film, music, theatre and dance. It reflects 50 years of independence and is a socio-cultural manifestation of the time span covered.
It is important to think about African art in terms of new information. It tells a story, one that began in two places at once.
In 1903, the Nigerian artist Aina Onabolu started painting portraits in the city of Lagos, adapting a style from European magazine photographs.
His portraits were a hit with his Nigerian clientele. They looked African, but different, new, chic, modern. Suddenly everybody wanted to look like that.
A few years later, Pablo Picasso was wandering the galleries of the ethnological museum in Paris, the Trocadéro.
He was trying to think and feel his way out of a stifling 19th century European tradition of art. Standing in front of a collection of African masks, he found what he was after. His discovery of the austere simplicity and virility of African and ancient Iberian art influenced his proto-cubist breakthrough entitled “Les Demoiselle d’Avignon” (1907). Here modern European art was born with the help of Africa!
Onabolu invented modern African art with the help of Europe. Which of the two made the more revolutionary move? In most accounts, Picasso gets the nod by default, because Onabolu does not exist for Western art history, nor does the modern African art that followed him. The late 1980s saw the situation change. Prior to then, very few Western scholars knew, or were interested in modern and contemporary art from Africa; particularly art that wasn’t “tribal”, or conversant with
Western trends and styles.
The problem for Western viewers of modern African art which incorporate Western media and styles has less to do with “unknown” than with “familiarity”.
African art cast, however, superficially, in Western pictorial language automatically prompts critical responses which is not apply to traditional African Art.
Whilst the West resists appropriation by other cultures; it has never agreed that cultural exchange goes in both directions. The seminal exhibition titled “Magicians of the Earth” in Paris in 1989 brought together the work of young African artists with some of their Western and Asian counterparts. Despite its shortcomings, the show positioned contemporary African work on the post-modern world stage and opened a new dialogue between Africa and the West.
From Zimbabwe came Thomas Mukarobgwa (1924-99), Joram Mariga, Nicholas Mukomberanwa, Boira Mteki, Sylvester Mubayi, Henry Munyaradzi, Albert Mamvura, Joseph Ndandarika, Paul Gwichiri, John Takawira, Bernard and Lazarus Takawira were all part of the original Workshop School that produced the much-exhibited, world-renowned modernist-inflected Zimbabwe Shona sculpture.
In turn these artists influenced a younger and more vibrant group of artists, who are as mobile and visible on the international art scene as their Euro-American counterparts.
The new contemporary group of artists who emerged in the 1990s in Zimbabwe with their distinctly different styles and genres are led by artists such as Arthur Azevedo, Thakor Patel, Tapfuma Gutsa, Brighton Sango, Eddie Masaya, Tony Monda, Gideon Nyanhongo, Arthur Fata, Cosmas Muchenje, Berry Bickle, Rashid Joggee, Chiko Chazunguza, Gareth Nyandoro, and many other artists who have made inroads onto the international visual art stage.
Many of these artists have remained in Africa, whilst others move between multiple addresses around the world.
Amongst them the pioneering South African painter Ernest Mancoba, born in 1904, had his initial training in missionary schools and later moved to Paris, where he developed his pattern-rich abstract style and became associated with the “Cobra” Group. The Senegalese-born Iba Ndiaye, who also studied in France, became a curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and was asked by the late Léopold Sédar Senghor to assist in developing the National School of Fine Arts in Dakar. He still commutes between the two cities. Gerard Sekoto has spent most of an extremely productive career as a painter and teacher in Johannesburg and in Paris, as has
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré in his hometown, Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Why have so many non-Western artists seeking international careers found it necessary to study, travel and exhibit in the West?
- Dr Tony Monda holds a PhD in Art Theory and Philosophy and a DBA (Doctorate of Business Administration) in Post-Colonial Heritage Studies. He is a writer, art critic, practising artist and Corporate Image Consultant.
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