Contesting Art: Art, Politics and Identity in the Modern World (Ethnicity and Identity) 1859731341, 9781859731345

Citation preview

Cont:esting Art:

General Editors:

Shirley Ardener, Founding Director, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, University of Oxford Tamara Dragadze, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London Jonathan Webber, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology,

University of Oxford

Books previously published in the Series

~on.testing .A.rt: Art, Politics and Identity in the Modern World

EDITED BY

Jeremy MacClancy

First published in 1997 by Berg Publishers Published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 7605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Jeremy MacC!ancy 1997 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the L ibrary of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Front cover photograph: Welcome figure carved by Joe David of the Nuuchah­nulth whaling people of Vancouver Island, raised in 1984 in front of the Provincial Parliament Buildings in Victoria, British Columbia, during an anti­ logging rally. The figure is now installed at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia. Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants. ISBN 13: 978-1-8597-3134-5 (hbk)

Cont:ent:s Preface

Jeremy MacClancy

Notes on Contributors Anthropology, Art and Contest

1

Jeremy MacClancy

2

Identity and Style in Ghanaian Artistic Discourse

Maruska Svasek

3

Tribal and Palatine Arts of the Cameroon Grassfields: Elements for a 'Traditional' Regional Identity

Jan Fowler

Contested Ethnie in Two Kwakwaka'wakw Museums

4

Barbara Saunders

5

Art, Argument and Anger on the Northwest Coast

6

Losing One's Marbles: Cultural Property and Indigenous Thought

Charlotte Townsend-Gault

A. David Napier

7

Negotiating 'Basque Art'

Jeremy MacClancy

8

Catalogues, Collectors, Curators: The Tribal Art Market and Anthropology

Murray Satov

Index

vii ix 1 27

63 85 131

165 183

215 243

V

Preface This book brings together a number of new ethnographic studies on art, politics and identity. The main reason for producing it is that while a number of anthropological articles on the politicization of indigenous art have appeared in recent years, there has not, to my surprise, yet been a concentrated discussion on the issues involved. The aim ofthis book is to provide a series of different ethnographic cases, exemplifying different aspects ofthese issues, in order to demonstrate the varied, complex nature of this debate, and to further discussion on it. The origins of this book lie in a seminar series entitled 'Art and Contested Identities' which I convened in 1994 at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, as part of the 'Identity and Ethnicity' seminar series which Shirley Ardener, Jonathan Webber and Tamara Dragadze have been running at the Institute for several years. I am grateful to them for allowing me the opportunity to convene these seminars within their general series. The seminars were consistently well attended and I thank our audiences for their productive, sometimes provocative questions. As editor, I have been forced to be selective but I am grateful to those speakers at the series whose papers it has not been possible to include. I am also grateful to those anthropologists who did not give papers yet generously agreed to provide chapters for the book. Pauline von Hellermann compiled the index. At Berg I thank Kathryn Earle and Sara Everett who did their patient best to ensure I kept to my deadlines. For permission to reproduce photographs, we are grateful to Christie's, the Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, and the Pitt-Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. If readers do find any errors, inaccuracies or significant omissions they should not blame any of the above, rather Jeremy MacClancy Oxford Brookes University

vii

Not:es on Cont:ribut:ors Ian Fowler is a lecturer in social anthropology at Oxford Brookes University and member ofQueen Elizabeth House, International Development Centre, University of Oxford. His research interests include the material culture of the Cameroon Grassfields, the regionalization of identity in the Cameroon and the ethnography ofvirtual communities. He is Series Editor of Cameroon Studies. Jeremy MacClancy is a senior lecturer in anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. He has done major fieldwork in Melanesia and northern Spain, as well as in Nigeria, northern Italy and the London auction rooms. His main areas of research interest lie in the anthropologies of food, art and Europe. He is the author of To Kill a Bird with Two Stones: A history of Vanuatu (1980) and Consuming Culture (1993). He has also edited Sport, Identity and Ethnicity ( 1996) and Popularizing Anthropology ( 1996, coedited with C. McDonaugh). He is at present completing a manuscript on the decline ofCarlism since the end of the Spanish Civil War. David Napier is Dana Faculty Fellow and Professor of Anthropology of Art at Middlebury College in Vermont. He holds graduate degrees in anthropology (Oxford) and philosophy (Leuven, Belgium), and was for a number ofyears a practising artist. He has taught or been a fellow at several institutions, including Oxford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and New York University. He is the author of two books and a number of articles on symbolic anthropology. Murray Satov has a first degree in art history from Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. After working and travelling for several years, he returned to academia, gaining an M.Phil. in Anthropology and Museum Ethnography from the University of Oxford. He now lives in Montreal, where he runs and owns a retail business specializing in industrial safety products. Barbara Saunders is a research fellow at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She studied history of art and anthropology at the universities of Nottingham, Leiden, Utrecht (from which she gained her doctorate in 1992), Fredericton, New Brunswick, and British Columbia, Vancouver. In 1993 she was a research fellow at the Sainsbury Research ix

X

Notes on Contributors

Unit, University of East Anglia. She publishes mainly on colour and the Kwakwaka'wakw ofthe Northwest Pacific coast. Maruska Svasek studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts 'Minerva' in Groningen, and cultural anthropology at the University ofAmsterdam, from which, in 1996, she gained her doctorate for an ethnography of the Czech art world. She is presently engaged in the study of political, economic and cultural processes in the Czech-German border area, and of the discourse ofEuropean integration. She has published articles on artistic and political developments in Ghana and the Czech Republic, and on the history and development of the anthropology of art. She is the editor of Focaal. Journal ofAnthropology. Charlotte Townsend-Gault is an assistant professor in art history at the University of British Columbia. She has published extensively on contemporary First Nations art in North America. She is at present writing a critical study ofNorthwest Coast art (an extension ofher doctoral thesis from University College London), entitled Re-thinking Kwakiutl food vessels.

-

A n.-thropology, Art: and Contest:

Jere,ny

11,,facClancy

C>

n 28 August 1963 a group ofYirrkala Aborigines from northeast Arnhem Land presented a petition to theAustralian Parliament. In it they called for the government to reconsider their decision to allow a mining company to exploit their homelands. By those times their formal plea was not in itself unusual. What was unusual was that the_J)etition was framed as a bark painting, showing the clan designs of all the areas endangered by the company's plans. Against a background of cross-hatching and triangular blocks ofcolour, a series ofbirds, lizards, fish, turtles, snakes and other animals surrounded the typewritten words of the paper. The traditional style of the frame complemented the modem text of the petition, thickening its context, adding further dimensions to its significance. The frame highlighted the fact that this was no conventional Western entreaty, that their argument was based on extra-European grounds. It demonstrated, in a visually striking manner, that the Yirrkala's claim to the land arose out of their spiritual relationship with it. They chose to present their plea in this manner because, in the words ofone ofthem, 'It showed, in ways in which raising a multi-coloured piece of calico could never do, the ancient rights and responsibilities we have towards our country. It showed we were not people who could be "painted out" of the picture or left at the edge of history' (Yunupingu 1993: 65). In order not to be misrepresented by others at this critical juncture, the Yirrkala represented themselves. In order not to be painted out, they had to paint themselves in, according to their own designs. Though the novel form of the petition gained it the attention of news journalists and captured public imagination, it still failed in its immediate objective. The mining leases were not revoked. But it was more successful in the longer term, as it led to the establishment of a Parliamentary Enquiry which played an important part in the process of achieving land rights for the Yirrkala and their neighbours. The petition itself, which became for 1

2

Contesting Art

its creators a symbol of their struggle for land rights, was prominently positioned in the new Parliament House in Canberra (Morphy 199 l: 18). Through the skilful deployment of art, the Yirrkala had won recognition of their culturally distinctive claims to their homelands. This particular event exemplifies an increasingly common, increasingly significant occurrence - the use of art objects for contestatory purposes in the multicultural milieux we all now participate in. Maoris petition British museums for the return of the tattooed skulls of their ancestors. Native American artists make their claims through pictures. Colonized Melanesians challenge Western conceptions of them by recreating their artifacts and revitalizing the rites in which they were customarily used. The political and economic reasons for this increasing prominence of art are not hard to discern. Many peoples, bent on self-determination and unhappy with the way they are represented by others, wish to represent themselves to others and art is one of the most powerful media by which to do so. Also, many peoples, aware of the inflated prices paid for 'important tribal pieces' on the Western art market, have come to revalue both the objects removed from their homelands and the objects they produce, while the rise of tourism has vastly expanded the market for their artifacts. Further, if the degree of structural difference between societies is being steadily eroded by the seemingly uncheckable advance of global capitalism, then art becomes, partially by default, a key means of proclaiming continuing cultural difference. None of these factors is primary, rather it is their interplay which has led to the recent emergence of art as a major contemporary site of cross-cultural contest. The topic of art as contest in intercultural settings has been touched upon by some anthropologists (e.g. Thomas 1991) but, strangely, has not yet received the sustained attention it merits. A key aim of this book is to correct this omission. To that end, the contributors provide detailed and comparative analyses, based on extensive fieldwork, of a variety ofcrosscultural contexts where peoples fight with art, where they negotiate and dispute the meanings it can bear. The contributors investigate how people use art objects, for example, to resist colonialism, to subvert racism, to demolish demeaning stereotypes, to better their own position or that of their own group, to defend a challenged notion of their people's identity, to reinvent that identity. Like a recent analyst ofthe roles art can be made to play, they think that 'art is not ancillary to or reflects the social scene but a major and integral part of the transaction which engenders political behaviour' (Edelman 1995: 2). The contributors examine, in short, how art is intertwined with empowerment, and artifact with advocacy. All of the studies collected in this book have their clear limits. None

Anthropology, Art and Contest

3

of the contributors is trying to reduce the power ofthe pictures or objects discussed to the parameters ofanthropological analysis. While the various contributors are able to tease out subtly the diverse contexts within which pictures are sited and interpreted, they do not pretend that the results of their intellectual approaches exhaust the range ofpotential meanings these objects may bear or the spectrum of responses they might evoke. But they do claim, contra those who assume the transcendence of their aesthetics, that all aesthetics are socially grounded and, as such, are appropriate subjects for social analysis. Until relatively recently few anthropologists gave time to the study of art. Those who did were predominantly concerned with the uses of objects in traditional, supposedly unchanging societies. The few functionalists among them tended to focus on how local uses of the objects helped to sustain the present structure ofa society, cataloguing carefully the various social functions indigenous items were meant to fulfill (e.g. Anderson 1979: 25--51; Glaze 1981). The structuralists who studied art regarded objects as forms ofcommunication which attempt to resolve symbolically the existential contradictions oflocal life. Perceiving indigenous items as bearers of complex cultural messages, they acted as decipherers trying to break the local code (e.g. Levi-Strauss 1979; Rosman and Rubel 1990). However, despite the best intentions of their practitioners and the revelatory results of their analyses, both functionalist and structuralist approaches often served to highlight the interpretative power of the anthropologist at the expense of native exegesis or any acknowledgement ofhistorical agency. Also, they tended to exaggerate local consensus about the meanings and roles ofthe objects and to over-emphasize the boundedness ofparticular cultures, as though they were wholes unto themselves. The contributors to this book, striving to avoid their predecessors' pitfalls, do not regard societies as isolated, homeostatic systems coasting in a timeless 'ethnographic present'. Instead, they provide fully historicized examples of societies undergoing change, of permeable cultures in contact with one another, all ofthem members, to a greater or lesser degree, ofthe same world system. These days, it would be difficult to sustain any other sort of view. !Kung San now have their paintings sold in London and Paris. Muslim middle-men of the Ivory Coast peruse the latest copy ofAfrican Arts to see how the market is moving. The land-diving islanders of Pentecost, Vanuatu, seek royalties from bungee jumping entrepreneurs around the world for breaching their 'cultural copyright'. This is not simply to shift from a naive view of cultures as separate unto themselves to an equally simplistic view of cultures as coherent but dynamic groupings ofpeople which bump into contact with one another,

4

Contesting Art

like intersecting circles in a Venn diagram. It is rather to see culture as a continuing construction, which both organizes and emerges from people's behaviour. The boundaries which divide off the people of one culture from those ofanother are not necessarily those rules, habits or dispositions which differentiate them structurally but those which its members choose to distinguish themselves from others. The culture of a people thus becomes open to a variety of definitions as different members interpret it in their own way for their ends, and the boundaries they choose need not coincide. Today, this process becomes ever more evident as the plurality ofglobal communications continues to expand and as peoples increasingly enter the capitalist world-system. In this contemporary context, the potentially central role of art can be suddenly and starkly realized, with peoples reifying or creating their sense of culture through the use of particular objects. Here, art objectifies power. Anthropologists of art frequently worry about how to define 'art', if they are to use it as a comparative concept. They often point out that no similar term exists in the particular societies they are studying. The problem here is how to compare something across cultures without the particular definition chosen predetermining the answers arrived at. The difficulty arises because Western ideas of art and aesthetics are themselves such historically particular products of European culture (Eagleton 1990; Staniszewski 1995). One possibility (Morphy 1993) is to employ the term in a broad sense in the hope that the resulting trawl of other cultures may net such a varied range of objects that the original definition will be reflexively revised. That hope may be praiseworthy but remains difficult to translate into action while non-white artists continue to be relatively powerless players within the Western-dominated world art market (Lippard 1990: 2-l 7; Fisher 1995). It is significant, however, that, to my knowledge, no anthropologist who has participated in this debate has acknowledged that the term 'art' or synonyms for it used in other cultures may well become themselves a cause for internal contest between interested parties. In these contexts, the question 'But is it art?' is not as a hoary chestnut to be ignored but a politically-motivated interrogatory to be studied. As MacClancy demonstrates in his chapter about the continuing debate between Basque nationalists, journalists and artists over the nature and aims of 'el arte vasco' ('Basque art'), 'art' and its synonyms are not unproblematic terms but can themselves become sites of dispute as different parties struggle to impose their own definition. A subsidiary aim of this collection is to contribute towards ending the idea that the anthropology of art is exclusively concerned with the study ofnon-Western societies and their art. This particular focus, a consequence

Anthropology, Art: and Contest:

5

of the history of the discipline, has for long smacked of the arbitrary and in the contemporary world appears not merely quaintly idiosyncratic but blinkered to present realities and verging on the neo-colonialist. At a time when established notions of culture appear to be dissolving before our eyes and the concept of creolization threatens to become the intellectual norm, it seems gravely out of place for anthropologists of art to continue to concentrate on the traditional production of images among 'the X' at the expense of investigating, say, the discourses sustaining the Western art market. The examples employed in this book are all of pictorial or sculptural art. This is purely for reasons of space and focus. Most, if not all, of the points made here about the use ofpictures or objects could apply equally well to the production of films, poetry or music (Washabaugh 1996), the performance of beauty pageants (Cohen, Wilk and Stoeltje 1996), the crafting ofchocolates (Terrio 1996) or the sale offashionable garb (Kondo 1992). But I had to be selective. I was editing only one book, not a series of volumes. However, when the staging of Miss World in India leads to terrorist threats and the deployment of20,000 police (Bedi 1996) or when, in South Africa, the wearing of highly decorative anti-apartheid T-shirts is made a punishable offence (Williamson 1989), the general politicization of aesthetics in cross-cultural contexts cannot be put in doubt. While the problems discussed in this book are worldwide in scope, the range of particular ethnographic areas examined by the contributors is more restricted. There is an (unintended) focus on the art ofthe American Northwest Pacific coast and of coastal West Africa. This is no comment whatsoever on the anthropological value of the art produced elsewhere, simply a consequence of who could attend the seminar series and who could provide potential chapters. It is to my regret that there are no sections, for instance, on the art of Melanesia, East Africa, or Southeast Asia. The contributors discuss a mesh of interrelated points. For the sake of expository convenience, I group them into several themes: anti-colonialism, anti-racism; painting propaganda, picturing power; individuals, groups, categories; art as property; concepts and objects; the marketing of art. Anti-colonialism, Anti-racism

What aesthetic strategies are available to those whose culture is bludgeoned by expatriate dominators? What artistic tactics can be employed by those uprooted and then exploited in their new homeland?

6

Contesting Art

How may they contest the model ofthemselves created by the colonizers? How, in other words, may they use art to fight the conditions of life and terms of thought set by the foreigners? One way was to reject colonialism totally, and to persist in the production ofindigenous forms which missionaries condemned as 'idols to devils'. The danger of adopting this tactic was its regressive and rigid character, threatening to ossify locals' sense of their own culture. As Svasek points out (this volume), some colonial art schoolteachers, wishing to 'save primitive culture', reinforced this tactic by obliging their students to make only traditional objects. But if peoples were to survive the continued resi~ence of whites in their lands, the varied and steadily evolving nature of colonialism required them to adopt a more supple, creative strategy than outright rejection. In a climate of change, it was better to face the foe and watch his moves than to tum one's back, and not know where or how he might strike next. Some indigenes accommodated to the change, without simply emulating the model of themselves set by the colonizers, by exploiting Western imagery for local ends, transforming it in the process. This must be seen as an essentially creative response to the challenge set by the foreigners' arrival. For instance, self-flattering Europeans have all too often interpreted local sculptures of whites as representations of themselves. This is frequently not the case, as the carved figures may well represent local gods or malevolent spirits. By clothing them in Western garb and giving them Western physiognomies, their artists tried to express in a modem mode the power of these local beings and, by expressing it, tried to control it (Cole 1990: 136--59). Others appropriated Western images to boost positive forces, rather than to constrain negative ones. In the nineteenth century the armed Asafo companies of the Ghanaian Fante synthesized traditional and European iconography and motifs to produce a visual military style (which continues today) meant to express 'the invincibility of the spirit, if not the war machine, of the Asafo' (Preston 1975: 68). Throughout much of the twentieth century, many Melanesians have formed or joined renovatory movements which have adopted visual or symbolic expressions ofWestern might: flags, badges, uniforms, instruments, architectural forms, etc. The key aim of these revitalization cults was not a simple-minded mimesis but a sophisticated taking on of whites' visual style in an effort to regain some of the power of which, they felt, the interlopers had robbed them. As a leader of the John Frum movement said to me during my fieldwork in Melanesia, they drilled like Western soldiers and prayed like Western believers because they waited for John, on whose return 'We will be

Annual gathering of the John Frum army at their headquarters, lpekel, Tanna, Vanuatu (15 February 1979. Photograph: Nabanga)

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Contesting Art

masters of ourselves again, as we were before the whites came and told us we were nothing.' One plastic possibility was to subvert the colonial status quo by creating images of the foreigner for satiric ends. Caricature and mimicry are the major modes here, for the white man was not seen as superior for long: The natives began to know him better, and ceased devising tales which would explain his superiority. They soon found out that the white man was only another species ofthe human race. When they became familiar with him, they treated him to their mockery exactly as they did any member of their own tribe, especially when they recognized his weakness. {Lips 1937: 14) In colonial West Africa Hauka, performers of spirit-possession rituals, mimicked and mocked the ways of the white man in order to 'master' him (Stoller 1995). Among the Dogon, dancers entertain their audience by donning 'white man' masks and lampooning his alien ways (MayburyLewis 1992: 166--7). In Malawi, the Mana'anja aped, in their masked comedies, the key figures of Catholicism, especially Joseph and Mary, whose immaculate conception was the source of much ribald conjecture (Kramer I 993: 170). In southeastern Nigeria, the Owerri Igbo of southeastern Nigeria made mbari, house-like structures, as sacrifices to the gods in the face of impending disaster. Within them, alongside representations of deities, they included figures explicitly designed to provoke laughter, such as couples copulating in less common positions and caricatures of colonial officials with long thin noses and two-faced heads (Cole 1982). One artistic way of breaking the new economic relations established by Europeans was for indigenes to make special effigies of merchants who swindled them. For instance, the Hermit Islanders of the Bismarck Archipelago off the Papua New Guinean coast carved figures displaying the ailments they wished to see afflict their exploiters: elephantiasis of the testicles and other causes of great pain. Lips (1937: 190--l) considers these objects, meant to operate via sympathetic magic, to have been 'central images in magic rites, by which the spirits were entreated to punish the evil trader'. Other indigenes chose to challenge the colonial status quo more openly. Instead of trying to subvert the imposed model by the relatively private use ofsatire, they aimed to transcend it by acquiring competence at skills which some colonials claimed they did not possess. By proving their abilities in this manner, they directly exposed the constructed nature of the model and so undermined the ideological foundations ofthe colonialist project. In the process, the supposedly innate superiority ofthe colonizers

Anthropology. Art and Contest

9

was revealed as but an aspect of hegemonic rhetoric. In this intercultural arena, art can become a particularly powerful weapon in the fight for recognition of racial equality. For if colonizers upheld (as they did) artistic vision as one of the highest marks of civilization, then members of the colonized who could demonstrate their painterly prowess dramatically displayed the artifice underpinning their oppressors' supremacist theories. In colonial Africa for instance, British officials held that blacks were incapable of creating great art. All they could pretend to aspire to was craftsmanship. In the first half of this century a series of local artists set out to contest this racist caricature. Perhaps the best-known of them is the self-taught Nigerian Aina Onabolu (Nicodemus 1995a; Okeke 1995). By successfully becoming a master ofportraiture, he strove to demonstrate that realistic painting was not exclusively European but a universal artistic medium, the rightful heritage of all cultures. By the 1950s, with independence looming, many local artists came to think it no longer so important to dispute colonialist superiority. Instead they sought to displace it by fabricating new national cultures and a new modernism. Some indigenes attempted to subvert the racist order by taking a different tack: by taking on Western interpretations ofblacks but revaluing its terms in the process, turning denigrated attributes into laudable virtues. Perhaps the most famous example of this strategy was the 'Negritude' movement led by Leopold Senghor, who in 1960 became the first president of Senegal. Exploiting his reputation as a poet and philosopher and his position as a national leader, he promoted the potential contribution of African culture to world civilization and provided comprehensive state assistance for local artists. To Senghor, artists had an integral role to play in the development of the new nation. 'Art Negre,' he stated in a famous speech, 'saves us from despair, uplifts us in our task of economic and social development, in our stubborn will to live ... Senegalese artists of today, help us live for today better and more fully.' He devoted twentyfive per cent ofthe state budget to culture, set up Ecole des arts du Senegal, a national school of fine arts, drama, music and architecture, and had the state buy the best products of its graduates. Senghor, manipulating the rhetoric of European modernism and primitivism for his own Africanist ends, praised '/'ame negre' as being emotive, spiritual, expressive and rhythmic. He called for an art that would assimilate Western experiments in art with these supposedly inherent African values. The predominant pictorial style which arose out of these efforts, known as the 'Ecole de Dakar', was characterized by semiabstract, modernist expressions of traditional African exotica. As critics have pointed out, the trouble with

10

Cont:est:ing Art

this well-intentioned but idealizing approach is that it can be seen as Africans internalizing European visions ofthem, aiding the perpetuation, rather than the dismissal, ofprimitivist and universalizing conceptions of blacks. Since the demise of the Ecole, leading Senegalese artists have worked independently ofthe state. They try to create new pictorial forms, where art can be confrontational, transgressive and historically grounded (Ebong 1991; Harney 1996). These varied responses to colonialism are not merely reactions by indigenes to check external pressures. They are at the same time internal attempts by members of peoples to recreate themselves in the transformative contexts of the colonialist project. To the American black cultural commentator bell hooks, they are attempts to recognize the existence of, and to substantiate non-Western subjectivities. She-sees them as a way for oppressed peoples to construct a space for themselves, and so proclaims the need to 'set our imaginations free'. Acknowledging that 'we have been and are colonized both in our minds and in our imaginations', she calls for the promotion and celebration of creative expression (hooks 1995: 4). On these grounds, art is not a decorative border to the anticolonialist and antiracist struggles, but an integral, essential part of them. People, to be free, have to fight against both the objective conditions and the terms of subjectivity imposed on them. To do that, they need, among other things, to create and to share art. Painting Propaganda, Picturing Power

Hitler knew well the power of paint. A failed painter himself, he knew that, iftightly controlled, the production ofart could enhance the authority of his regime; ifuncensored, it could contribute to its undermining. Thus culture had to be regulated ruthlessly and the avant-garde obliterated. At the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition, staged in 1937 in Munich, his minions displayed what was unacceptable: contorted forms, violent colours, and disturbing subject-matter. After the calamitous period ofthe Weimar Republic, people needed to be 'healed', by the promotion and production ofuplifting, realist portrayals of exemplary German types: the warrior, the factory worker, the mother. 'Pathological' expressionism with its primitivist focus was taboo (Hinz 1995; Whitford 1995). Little wonder then that a local anthropologist of art, Julius Lips, was constantly harassed by Nazi officials searching for his 'Nigger pictures' -photographs oftribal representations of Europeans (Lips 1937: xxviii). In the twentieth century the totalitarian approach to culture has been an all too common strategy. Both Franco and Mussolini had artists fulfill

Anthropology, Art and Contest

11

their dictatorial wishes. After the Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky championed the ideological control of art and wished to help establish 'the dictatorship oftaste'. Stalin wanted to transform artists into 'engineers of the human soul' (though he ended up only turning them into socialist realists). It is disturbing, then, that a group of St Petersburg artists has recently revived the Stalinist aesthetic. Lauding a classically derived realism, they condemn the epoch ofmodernism as a latter day 'Dark Age' infected with 'primitive, African, shamanistic' values (O'Mahony 1996). Various nationalist groups have attempted to adopt comparable hegemonic strategies. To Basque nationalists (MacClancy), art was contemptible if not inspired by patriotism. Indeed pictures not inspired by patriotism could not be good art. They wanted, and were prepared to sponsor the production of, minutely detailed realist paintings of folkloric scenes portraying an impossibly ever-harmonic view of Basque rural life. Artists ofthe period chafed against these restrictions and nationalists only came to regard their works as acceptable when they gained national prestige and thus could be turned to propagandistic end. During the years ofFrancoist suppression these roles reversed somewhat as many Basque politicians remained quiet while artists became political protagonists, promoting 'Basque art' as a key instrument in the fabrication of an autochthonous culture. The democratic associations which artists established were to be the harbingers of a new form of independent self-government. Beyond Europe, various revolutionary movements have upheld similar principles ofpromoting art for propagandistic purposes, often leading to the same tension between politicos and artists. Until its legalization in 1990, the African National Congress followed the orthodox Leninist line of 'art as a weapon of struggle'. Adopting the Russian proletcult model ofrevolutionary art, its leaders promoted the idea ofa 'People's Culture', a flowering of proletarian art dedicated to the destruction of apartheid. But this view came to be internally contested as some ofthe ANC's most prominent intellectuals argued for the autonomy ofculture. Unlike Lenin's epigones, they did not want proletcult to become an instrument of oppression. Anyway, as they claimed, art could not be a real instrument ofstruggle because it thrived on ambiguity, contradiction and the revelation of hidden tensions. This sense of artistic freedom did not mean lack of commitment to the struggle, rather the absence ofcontrol by ANC leaders (Elliott 1990; Sachs 1990). Most Fourth Nations artists who paint or sculpt in the modernist manner would tend to agree. While many of them wish at one and the same time to exploit the dimensions offered by the medium they choose and to make political statements, those statements need not be propagandistically clear.

Aurelio Arteta, Portico (c. 1910. Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao)

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Anthropology, Art and Contest

13

Indeed some of the most efficacious art produced by politicized contemporary artists is effective precisely because its meanings cannot be fixed. Many ofthis sort ofcanvases exhibit an empowering playfulness. In paintings by some native Americans, the complex and satirical figure of Coyote as Trickster has come to symbolize the relation of their culture with that of the dominant one, used by his portraitists to pass ironic comment on the portrayal of native Americans by non-natives (Fisher 1991). Jimmie Durham (1993), a Cherokee artist who exhibits internationally, comments sardonically on Western categorizations of others by presenting himself as a Caliban who knows the language of the colonizer better than he does himself. But for all its wit and humour, this playfulness is deeply serious. For as the Cheyenne artist Edgar Heap of Birds (1991: 339) says, expressive forms of communication 'must serve as our present-day combative tactics'. Thus while the Koorie art ofurban Aboriginals may be described as 'angry, humourous, ironical, whimsical' (Ryan 1993: 60--2), it is still meant to proclaim 'Tyerabarrbowaryadu', 'I shall never become a white man'. Individuals, Groups, Categories

Even today the vast majority of objects in a museum of anthropology are exhibited anonymously. All too often the accompanying label reads on the lines of 'Malangan, New Ireland, donated by Revd. J. Macdonald 1931' or 'Inuit two-face mask, Lower Yukon, collected by the Alaska Commercial Co., date unknown'. It is as though an object's Western provenance is as important as its ethnographic source, with the name of the ethnic group substituting for that of its maker. In these contexts the ethnic group is the signature, defining its origin, guaranteeing its authenticity. Justifiers ofthis practice might argue that many non-Western societies do not elevate individual creativity to the same obsessive extent as Europeans, though this is to ignore the degrees of innovativeness and individuality which non-European peoples do recognize in the production of art objects. Indigenous constraints on individual expression may be real nonetheless, and in times of flux and development they may well be internally contested. Among traditional communities of the American Southwest, where egalitarianism is one of the highest social values, innovative artists successful at selling their works to Europeans were ostracized and accused of practising witchcraft. Some were banned from their home villages and their life threatened (Wade 1985). In the 1950s Oscar Howe, a native American from the Plains, was strongly criticized

14

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by local conservatives for painting Cubist-influenced works. A decade later a student of his who dared to include in his pictures images of icecream cones, beer bottles and other artifacts of White culture had his exhibitions picketed by traditionalists demonstrating against his 'grotesque and shameful' depictions ofnative Americans (Highwater 1985). In India today, where religious dispute has so politicized social identities, traditional forms tend to be regarded, not as products ripe for commercial exploitation, but as resources to be treasured and respected. Thus local artists who wish to probe the way the past may be used for present purposes have to tread particularly carefully (Roberts 1994). Individual artists do not only have to face potential criticism from members of their own culture, they have as well to contest their ethnic categorization by Western art marketeers. Svasek shows (this volume) that within a decade of independence, Ghanaian artists, disenchanted with the failed political programmes of national or pan-African unity, began to state that they did not wish to be viewed as 'African artists' but as individuals, as artists who happened to be African. To them the relevant distinction was no longer African and non-African, but those part of the international art scene and those not, and they knew on which side of the boundary they wanted to lie. By shifting allegiance to a cult of individuality, they acknowledge the change in contestatory arena. Their forefathers used paint to challenge the colonial status quo. They use it to criticize the limitations of Ghanaian politics and the unequal global distribution ofeconomic power. As they are aware, Western exhibitors of art are often more interested in displaying unusual forms ofmodem African art, such as fantasy coffins, than works on canvas directly comparable with those produced by their counterparts in the West. The difficulty for indigenous artists who paint in a modem Western mode is that the majority of Euro-American buyers of art only appear to be interested in non-Western works to the extent that they are recognizably 'different'. At such times it seems as though the colonial stereotype of blacks has been replaced by a new, but equally distancing, equally restricting brand of exoticism. The problem is most acutely exposed by Western art critics' use of terms such as 'transitional' and 'hybridity'. Usefully vague, 'transitional art' covers all work other than that which is unambiguously traditional or modernist. Thus it may include wirecraft, shop signs, tin windmills, and lorry decoration (Vogel 1991). Some indigenous critics charge that Western curators' concern with this broad range of objects feeds the prejudices of their publics, so denigrating the efforts of non-Western painters. Further, while 'transitional art' implies a sense of development, it also

Anthropology, Art and Contest

15

implies that its producers have yet to reach the same level as those who use the term. The Tanzanian painter Everlyn Nicodemus is pungent on this point: The warped Western dealing with contemporary African art culminated in the 1980s with some big exhibitions and collections, blazoning abroad signpaintings and folklore artefacts as genuine cultural expression, while suppressing the existence of modern, professionally trained artists. It came close to an ideological warfare against modern African art as such ... We have seen that all this twaddle about ... 'transitional' art is nothing but a refusal to acknowledge the paradigm shift which is at the heart of modern African art; it is a clinging to the same kind of prejudices against which Onabolu launched his war 90 years ago. (Nicodemus 1995b: 35. See also Richards 1990; Oguibe 1993)

The idea of 'hybridity', popularized in anthropology by Clifford (1988: 1-17), is subject to similar strictures. Clifford wishes to celebrate cultural contaminations, in a world where surrealism is not out of place and it is notions of pure products which are crazy. Within the parameters of his postmodernity, hybrids are not odd by-products but the global order of the day. This idea of hybridity, however, threatens to mask particularity for the sake of an oversimplifying generality. Deploying it in a universalizing fashion, as Clifford does, runs the risk ofcelebrating a global notion of difference at the expense ofrecognizing local differences. Thus, though postmodernists proclaim a new anti-essentialism they end up in fact doing the opposite, by practising a time-honoured form ofessentialist labelling. In the Western art world for instance, interest in the idea of 'hybridity' allows critics and curators to display 'their own capacity for acknowledging cultural difference, while refraining from engaging with the stories and works that emerge from elsewhere' (Thomas 1996: 9). Also, 'hybridity' carries with it connotations of stasis. And what some non-Western artists wish to underline is not a static mixture but a perpetual flux between cultures, where none is dominant and the tensions between them remain unresolved (Samson 1995). Unlike a generalized hybridity, this sense of flux is grounded in the contingencies of space and time, providing these artists with a kind of rootedness in their contemporary predicament of multicultural particularity. Some non-Western artists are well aware of the dangers of 'hybridity', which they regard as but the latest attempt by Westerners to exercise hegemony. As one Senegalese painter put it: 'I am not between two worlds; I am not a hybrid - I am Moustaphe Dime and I represent only me. I will not let anyone (in the West) imprison me in a little ghetto' (in Harney 1996: 50).

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Contesting Art

It is comments such as this which show that the need for non-Westerners to enlighten whites remains as pressing as ever. A rise in the number of indigenous critics writing about art might redress the imbalance somewhat. But even iftheir number were to rise, their effect would be limited. Because of the structure of the Western art market (Root 1996), they would have great difficulty gaining any visibility or regard, and they would still have to employ the terms of Western art discourse. Non-Western artists, by entering the capitalist world-system, in however marginal a manner, inevitably surrender a degree of autonomy, and may well end up as minor actors in a play scripted and directed by others. As Frank McEwen, stimulator of the Zimbabwean 'Shona' school of sculpture, put it, Promotion counts as much as the art, and if the promotion is right the art will be right, and if the promotion is wrong it will go wrong, and that's the whole answer. The future is in the hands of the promoters. (quoted in Smith 1995)

Art as Property

Art objects are things, and as such may be possessed. Until relatively recently the question as to whom these possessions belonged was regarded by curators ofWestern museums as unproblematic. Quite simply, applying European legal notions of possession, they considered objects in their collections as belonging to their museums. But with the rise of independent nation-states in former colonial territories, a new class of indigenous politicians, imitating the example of their erstwhile masters, wished to substantiate their nationalist ideologies by the consolidation of their national heritage. Their calls for the return of objects removed from their countries were later joined by those from ethnic leaders bent on the restitution of what they judged past wrongs. One consequence of these campaigns has been to make Western curators acutely aware of the inescapably political nature ofthe collections under their care and oftheir own position, willy-nilly, as political actors within these conflicts. As they are well aware, there are few outcomes which satisfy all parties. In intercultural, international debates ofthis nature, the foremost considerations in any particular dispute are: how is the past constituted; who, if anyone, may be said to own the past (Warren 1989: 1); exactly what sorts of concepts of ownership are in play; the degree to which Western notions of proprietorship are appropriate or applicable; how well such ideas mesh with their indigenous analogues. Saunders, Napier and TownsendGault (this volume) discuss various aspects of these considerations in a

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trio of dovetailing chapters on the peoples ofthe Northwest Pacific coast, whose ways oflife were made famous anthropologically by the studies of Franz Boas and his local co-worker George Hunt. Regularly, the repatriation of objects to their land of origin helps to revitalize indigenes' sense of their own identity. However, it may also serve to re-kindle intra-tribal differences. Saunders shows that when Kwakwaka'wakw campaigned for the restitution of potlach regalia sequestered over fifty years before, the issue of their present ownership led to local division, with one group appealing to European ideas of genealogically-based inheritance and another wielding 'traditional' notions ofproprietorship. The matter was only resolved by the distribution ofthe collection between two specially constructed museums run by locals. These museums have, in tum, became ways to underscore the differences between the two groups, as their controllers have deployed their objects in opposed ways. One set of controllers, emphasizing the common ownership oftheir regalia, reify their culture and do so in a manner which Westerners will understand. The other set, who stress individual ownership, do not exploit their collection to suggest that the Kwakwaka'wakw are a homogeneous group. They choose to leave the process of defining ethnic identity open-ended and ambivalent. Anthropologists frequently discuss objects which they think such intimate aspects of parts of people's lives that they represent them as inalienable. However, as Napier (this volume) highlights, many anthropologists fail to observe the extent to which inalienability is often not a timeless cultural quality but internally contested by different members or factions of the same group. One example he discusses is that of Louis Shotridge, a Tlingit and punctilious ethnographer in the pay ofa university museum. When his hardup fellow tribesmen turned down the very large sum of money he offered for their greatest remaining treasures, which were being left outside and weathering badly, he attempted to steal them. The central question here is in what terms should his actions be evaluated? On the one hand, since Tlingit often use art objects as political weapons, some locals interpreted his efforts to acquire pieces still in use as a move for power, which they ensured he lost. On the other hand, he viewed himself as helping his culture, by helping to protect their most prized objects. There is no easy resolution and the alternatives are not necessarily exclusive. What, however, this problem does underline is the quandary which arises when one member of a group tries to commodify what some other members claim cannot be alienated. In these sorts of circumstances is a liminal character like Shotridge to be regarded as a thief, an aspirant politico, or an over-zealous anthropologist of his own group? One thing

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Cont:est:ing Art:

that is clear is that debate on these issues is not clarified by commentators perceiving inalienability as a commandment written in stone. People's ideas about the connections between persons and things are neither static nor politically innocent. People may wish to possess the objects they produce. They may also wish to retain exclusive possession of some of the meanings they bear. Townsend-Gault (this volume) shows that in contemporary British Columbia, locals deliberately do not disseminate certain bodies of knowledge, especially those concerned with spiritual matters. Instead they restrict the possible translations of the objects they reveal in order to protect knowledge integral to the self-representation of their culture. At the same time indigenous politicians and artists oppose the way nonindigenes present their culture in a sanitized, ossified manner of benefit only to the provincial tourist industry. Rather than have their heritage 'whitewashed' in this manner, they strive for the right to represent themselves in the appropriate arena and in the appropriate manner, whether those be a 'welcome figure' in the University ofBritish Columbia, a nativecarved Queen's baton at the Commonwealth Games, or a chocolate frog moulded by a Haida artist and sold in Vancouver stores. By these twin processes of exclusion and ofcreative response to the evolving provincial context, indigenes attempt to preserve some sense ofownership over their culture and the way it is portrayed. They do not want others to gain possession of what they regard as theirs. Concepts and Objects

The history ofWestern understandings ofothers' art is a history ofWestern, not of others', conceptions: 'idols', 'ju-ju figures', 'fetishes', etc. Use of these terms is now considered tabu, except in academic discussions of their Western construction (e.g. Shelton 1995). Only the word 'tattoo' (Gell 1993) seems to escape all such censure. Yet even though anthropologists have learnt to be much more circumspect in the terms they employ to classify the artefacts they study, it appears many conventional art historians are not so cautious. For instance, art historians of Cameroonian culture, as Fowler demonstrates, select pre-constructed notions (ones anthropologists would consider out ofdate) which they use to categorize objects in terms oftribes and regions, and which lead them to over-emphasizing greatly the role of palace and courtly arts. (For the latest example ofthis regalizing tendency see Phillips 1995). To Fowler (this volume), arguing from his Cameroonian case, a thoroughgoing anthropology is potentially subversive of ideology, while

Anthropology, Art and Contest

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art history appears to accept uncritically local representations of ideal states of power and being. This might seem at first a cloistered controversy, one between scholars of neighbouring disciplines, of little relevance to the extra-mural world. Best to let academics fight out their own turf wars on the lawns of their college quads. But the reason why Fowler has chosen to present this particular example is that modem Cameroonian elites are well aware of the esteem in which their objects are held by Europeans. This knowledge enables them to exploit certain material symbols of power in their modernist project of constructing an identity located in a sense of traditionality. Thus they create local public and private museums, organize cultural festivals, campaign vociferously for the repatriation of appropriated chiefly funerary sculpture, and then fight vigorously when the object is returned but remains in the capital. In the example he gives, the celebrations on the 'homecoming' ofone particular object, the Afo-aKom, were so great because it represented a rare indisputable triumph of the local over the global. The power of a chiefdom (the Korn), its chief and its mystical agencies (objectified in the figure itself) had defeated the mighty American market. The fact that American dealers had appraised the object in extremely high monetary terms only added to the victory, and the degree of its significance. By maximizing the complex value of objects in this way, local elites manage to fabricate a very strong sense of identity which they can use to buffer the domineering proclivities of the state. By appropriating appropriations and by exploiting multiple categorizations, they thicken the contexts of the object and increase its power as well as that of themselves and of their group in the process. All the sadder then, that the Afo-a-Kom gained a new significance a year later when it somehow found its way back to the New York art market (Greenfield 1989: 274). The 1'-1:arket:ing of Art:

Many Westerners are only aware of non-Western art thanks, ultimately, to the international market in it. For it is above all the existence of this trade which has led to the survival ofso many of these imported objects, and their continued production. Missionaries, colonial administrators, and members of expeditions may have brought items back primarily as souvenirs but most have survived because they had commercial value, being bought by dealers, artists, collectors and museums. The prestige with which famous artists and grand museums have indirectly endowed

Transport of recently bought funerary figure from Southwest Bay, Malakula Island, Vanuatu (Photograph: J. MacClancy)

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Anthropology. Art and Contest

21

these objects has only helped to swell the trade. Indeed nowadays the role of the market has become so important it is difficult to look at many well-known pieces without thinking ofwhat they are worth. Some classes of antique objects have become so valuable that bands of locals, often sponsored by dealers, systematically pillage sites for objects worth smuggling. For instance, in the Inner Delta region ofNiger, famed for its 'Djenne' statuettes, looters have plundered up to ninety per cent of the listed sites in the area (Sidibe 1995: 28). Today, almost all the 'Djenne' statuettes circulating on the market are stolen goods. The market is a constantly evolving one. As prices for the more expensive items rise beyond the financial level of most, buyers with cultural aspirations but without the means to fund them search for new kinds of objects to fulfill their desires. Artefacts once ignored are reexamined, and often re-valued. New sub-categories of marketable items are created. In the 1980s 'traditional textiles' became an established part ofthe market (MacClancy 1988). Then, African dealers re-presented sling shots and house-ladders as 'artworks' for sale (Steiner 1994). Recently, 'ethnic collectibles' and 'recycled art' (Cerny and Seriff 1996) have been recognized as distinct, emerging sectors of the trade, with some players in these new sub-markets already differentiating between 'low' and 'high quality' items. The Western art market is a most unusual one. According to Marquis ( 1991 ), if conventional criteria of commercial law were to be applied, many of its participants would be arraigned for 'insider dealing'. Perhaps it is for this sort of reason that, as Satov demonstrates in his chapter, all players at the Western end of the tribal art trade - appraisers, collectors, and curators - deny any ability to influence the market. Curators of anthropology museums are keen to distance themselves from the London auction houses because they consider so many aspects of the market ethically dubious. They wish to bolster an identity ofthemselves as upright professionals untainted by the immoralities of this trade. Many of them contest commercially-oriented approaches to material culture which favour the aesthetic over the ethnographic. Yet, Satov argues, it is in fact very difficult for them to maintain this position with any consistency since many of them admit to the importance of aesthetics when buying objects and since the postcards in their gift-shops emphasize the artistry of artefacts in their collections. However marginal they may think their roles to be, they cannot easily disavow their effect on the market nor deny that they are among the beneficiaries of Western interest in the non-Western world. Anthropologists are not separate from their home societies. They, and their discourses, are component parts of them.

22

Cont:est:ing Art:

The contestatory roles that art may play are many and diverse. Only a suggestion of that range can be provided within the compass of this book. However, what its chapters do demonstrate conclusively is that meaning should not be taken to be unitary unless it can be convincingly shown otherwise, and that a depoliticized notion of art threatens to perpetuate ideologies instead of critically analysing them. The substance of the chapters also suggests that it is time to transcend simple binary divisions such as the global and the local, traditional artists and assimilated ones, market commodities and objects 'made for native use'. Rather we need to examine the historically particular and interactive nature ofencounters between 'peoples', whether in colonial or neo-colonial times, whether in the African protectorates ofthe British, the indigenous and cosmopolitan areas of the northwest Pacific coast, or the museums and art galleries of the contemporary West. Instead of burdening ourselves with outdated, static notions of 'culture' and 'society', we need to follow the various ways people create and contest representations ofthemselves through art and its markets. The study of art has remained on the margins of anthropology for too long. But as the potential political role of art becomes ever more manifest, the opportunity exists for its study to enter the centre-stage ofthe discipline. This book is a contribution to that end.

References Anderson, Richard L. (1979), Art in Primitive Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Bedi, Rahul ( 1996), '20,000 to police Miss World contest', the Daily Telegraph, London, 23 November, p. 15 Cerny, Charlene, and Seriff, Suzanne (eds) (1996), Recycling, Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap. New York: Henry N. Abrams Inc Clifford, James (1988), The Predicament ofCulture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press Cohen, Colleen Ballerino, Wilk, Richard, and Stoeltje, Beverly (eds) (1996), Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. London: Routledge Cole, Herbert M. (1982), Mabari: Art and life among the Owerri lgbo. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

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- - (1990), Icons: Ideals and Power in the Art of Africa. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Durham, Jimmie (1993), A Certain lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics. London: Kala Press Eagleton, Terry ( 1990), The Ideology ofthe Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ebong, Ima ( 1991 ), 'Negritude: Between Flag and Mask: Senegalese Cultural Ideology and the "Ecole de Dakar"', in Susan Vogel (ed.), Africa Explores. New York: Center for African Art, pp. 198-209 Edelman, Murray (1995), From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations shape Political Conceptions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Elliott, David ( 1990), 'babel in south africa', in David Elliott (ed.), Art from South Africa. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, pp. 6--9 Fisher, Jean (1991 ), 'Unsettled Accounts oflndians and Others', in Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth ofPrimitivism: Perspectives on art. London: Routledge, pp. 292-314 - - ( 1995), 'Some Thoughts on "Contaminations"', Third Text, no. 32, Autumn, pp. 3---c7 Gell, Alfred (1993), Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford: Clarendon Press Glaze, A. (1981), Art and Death in a Senufo village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Greenfield, Jeanette (1989), The Return of Cultural Treasures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Harney, Elizabeth ( 1996), '"Les Chers Enfants" sans Papa', O:iford Art Journal, vol. 19, I, pp. 42-52 Heap of Birds, Edgar (1991), 'Born from sharp rocks', in Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on art. London: Routledge, pp. 338-44 Highwater, Jamake (1985), 'Controversy in Native American Art', in Edwin L. Wade (ed.), The Arts of the North American Indian: Native Traditions in Evolution. New York: Hudson Hills Press/Philbrook Arts Centre, Tulsa, pp. 222-42 Hinz, Berthold ( 1995), "'Degenerate" and "Authentic": Aspects of Art and Power in the Third Reich', in Dawn Ades (ed.), Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-45. London: Hayward Gallery, pp. 330--3 hooks, bell (Gloria Watkins) ( 1995), Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press Kondo, Dorinne ( 1992), 'The Aesthetics and Politics of Japanese Identity in the Fashion Industry', in Joseph J. Tobin (ed.), Re-made in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 176--203 Kramer, Fritz (1993), The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa. London: Verso

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Levi-Strauss, Claude (1979), La Voie des Masques. Paris: Pion Lippard, Lucy R. ( 1990), Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America. New York: Pantheon Lips, Julius (1937), The Savage Hits Back, or The White Man through Native Eyes. London: Lovat Dickson MacClancy, Jeremy ( 1988), 'A Natural Curiosity: The British Market in Primitive Art', Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 15, Spring, pp. 163-76 Marquis, Alice Goldfarb (1991), The Art biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics. Chicago: Contemporary Books Maybury-Lewis, David (1992), Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World. London: Viking Morphy, Howard (1991), Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System ofKnowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press - - (1993), 'The Anthropology of Art', in T. Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopaedia ofAnthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 648-85 Nicodemus, Everlyn (1995a), 'Bourdieu out of Europe?', Third Text, no. 30, Spring, pp. 3-12 --(1995b), 'Inside Outside', in C. Deliss (ed.), Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, pp. 29-36 Oguibe, Olu (1993), Review of 'Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art', African Arts, January, pp. 16-22 Okeke, Uche (1995), Modern African art: its role as a catalyst of African developement in the 20th century. Paper presented at the 'Mediums ofChange: the arts in Africa' conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1 October O'Mahony, John (1996), 'Beauty up there in red lights', the Guardian, 17 February, p. 27 Phillips, Tom (ed.), ( 1995), Africa: The Art ofa Continent. Munich: Prestel Preston, George Nelson (1975), 'Perseus and Medusa in Africa: Military art in Fanteland 1834-1972',AfricanArts, vol. VIII, no. 3, Spring, pp. 36-41, 68--71 Richards, Colin (1990), 'desperately seeking "africa'", in Artfrom South Africa. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, pp. 35---44 Roberts, John (1994), 'Indian Art, Identity and the Avant-Garde: The Sculpture of Vivan Sundaram', Third Text, no. 27, Summer, pp. 31---6 Root, Deborah (1996), Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, & the Commodification ofCulture. Boulder: Westview Rosman, Abraham and Rubel, Paula G. ( 1990), 'Structural Patterning in Kwakiutl Art and Ritual', Man, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 620--39 Ryan, Judith ( 1993), 'Australian Aboriginal Art: Otherness ofaffinity?', in Stephen Cone Weeks (ed.), Aratjara: Art ofthe First Australians. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, pp. 49---63 Sachs, Albie ( 1990), 'preparing ourselves for freedom', in Artfrom South Africa. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, pp. 10--15

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Samson, Colin ( 1995), 'Mestizaje: Spiritual Soundbites and the Art of Ruben Trejo', Third Text, no. 32, Autumn, pp. 75-84 Shelton, Anthony (ed.), ( 1995), Fetishism: Visualizing Power and Desire. London: South Bank Centre Sidibe, Samuel (1995), 'Fighting pillage: national efforts and international cooperation', in Harrie Leyten (ed.) Jllicit Traffic in Cultural Property: Museums against Pillage. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute Smith, Peter (1995), Frank McEwen 1907-1994. Cyclostyled pamphlet Stoller, Paul (1995), Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. London: Routledge Staniszewski, Mary Anne (1995), Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art. New York: Penguin Steiner, Christopher (1994), African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Terrio, Susan J. ( 1996), 'Crafting Grand Cru Chocolates in Contemporary France', American Anthropologist, vol. 98, no. 2, pp. 67-79 Thomas, Nicholas (1991), Entangled Objects. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press - - ( 1996), 'Cold Fusion', American Anthropologist, vol. 98, no. 1, pp. 9---25 Vogel, Susan (ed.) ( 199 I) Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. New York: Center for African Art Wade, Edwin L. (1985), 'Straddling the Cultural Fence: The Conflict for Ethnic Artists within Pueblo Societies', in Edwin L. Wade (ed.), The Arts ofthe North American Indian: Native Traditions in Evolution. New York: Hudson Hills Press/Philbrook Arts Centre, Tulsa, pp. 243---54 Warren, Karen J. ( 1989), 'A philosophical perspective on the ethics and resolution of cultural property issues', in Phyllis M. Messenger (ed.), The Ethics of Collecting Cultural Property: Whose Culture? Whose Property? Alberqueque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 1-26 Washabaugh, William ( 1996), Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture. Oxford: Berg Weeks, Stephen Jones (ed.) (1993), Aratjara: Art of the First Australians. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag Whitford, Frank ( 1995), 'An Overview', in Lutz Becker and Martin Caiger-Smith (eds), Art and Power: Images ofthe 1930s. London: Hayward Gallery Williamson, Sue ( 1989), Resistance Art in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip Yunupingu, Galarrwuy (1993), 'The Black/White conflict', in Stephen Cone Weeks (ed.), Aratjara. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, pp. 64-6

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I dentity and Style in. G-han.aian. Artistic Discourse

ltdaruska Svasek

W

hether people perceive and classify specific objects as art depends not only on their knowledge and under standing of art history, but also on their expectations ofthe artistic output of their producers. In 1978 Nelson Grabum asked a group of American anthropology students to give their opinions about a series of objects made by Eskimos and Cree Indians. The students used Western cultural categories, such as the opposition between art and craft, and projected their romantic views of 'primitive people', to classify the objects (Grabum 1978). 1 Grabum 's study clearly shows that objects, as dynamic signifiers, can be incorporated into discourses which demarcate, define and reinforce specific social identities. In their interpretation of the objects displayed as museum pieces, the students used images of primitives-being-closeto-nature, primitives-having-lost-their-authenticity, and students-beingobjective-observers. Daniel Miller argues that 'objects may not merely be used to refer to a given social group, but may themselves be constitutive of a certain social relation', calling this phenomenon 'the cultural nature ofthe subject-object relationship' (Miller 1987: 121-2). Grabum's findings and Miller's argument suggest that art objects cannot simply be regarded as reflections of fixed identities. In Karin Barber's words, '[art forms] are in themselves important means through which consciousness is articulated and communicated' (Barber 1986: 8). It is important to note that not only art producers can claim certain identities and constitute social relations through their products, but that members of the public (ranging from interested outsiders to specialized art historians or collectors) can use the same objects to their own ends. Art works can be perceived and interpreted in many different ways. 27

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Cont:est:ing Art:

Numerous authors have pointed out that the interpretation and presentation of African, Asian, South-American and minority group art in the West has created and reinforced an image of second-rate, exotic peoples (Graburn 1978; Stocking 1985; Clifford 1988; Price 1989; Karp and Lavine 1990; Coutts-Smith 1991; hooks 1992; Jordon and Weedon I 995). They have shown that terms which relate art to images of identity (such as 'primitive' and 'non-Western') have been used as oppressive symbolic tools in colonial, neo-colonial and racist discourses and practices. As far as I know, fewer studies have analysed how African, Asian, South American and minority group artists have used the concepts style and identity themselves (Mount 1973; Spanjaard 1988, 1993; Svasek 1990a; Morphy I 995; Cooks I 997). In my view, this is a field of research which will rapidly grow in the next decades, revealing how political, economic, and artistic processes are linked in specific cases. In this article, I focus on the ways in which Ghanaian artists have defined and given form to their artistic identity in the context of colonialism, decolonization, and post-colonialism. I argue that they have done this partly in a reaction to the expectations of colonial employees, pan-African ideologists, Ghanaian nationalists, various consumer groups, and organizers of international art exhibitions. I also show how they have used strategically existing stereotypes of Ghanaian identity and style in an attempt to cope with the harsh conditions on both local and global art markets. The material on which this article is based was collected in Ghana between August 1989 and March 1990. At the time, the focus of my research was directed at artists formally trained at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, as well as at 'wayside artists' 2 informally trained to produce paintings, statues and signboards for local and tourist markets. Fieldwork was mainly conducted in Accra and Kumasi. Whenever I was in Accra, I stayed at the house of Amon Kotei, one of Ghana's most prominent older artists, who designed Ghana's coat of arms. Kotei, a very active painter of seventy-two with a good sense of humour, shared with me many memories concerning the development of the Ghanaian art world. He introduced me to numerous artists and collectors in Accra. In Kumasi, I stayed for a period of three months at the University of Science and Technology and daily visited the School of Fine Arts. I conducted interviews and had informal talks with art students and members of the teaching staff. Most of the time spent on the university grounds, I devoted to two classes of painting and sculpture students who were preparing themselves for their final exams. Outside the Academy, I also visited the shops and studios of the wayside artists,

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and asked them questions about their training, careers, and aesthetic preferences. In this article, I mainly concentrate on what Susan Vogel calls 'international African art' (Vogel 199 I: 176). By this, she means the art objects produced by academically trained or self-made intellectual Africans, distributed through galleries of contemporary African art and African cultural centres, and consumed by local elites, expatriates and a (growing) number of Western collectors. Genuine Art:ist:s, Nat:ural Ident:it:ies, and Non-commercial St:yles

In the history of Ghanaian art production (here limited to the history of 'international Ghanaian art') various individuals and social groups have utilized the notion of style in order to present their art as an expression of their 'natural' identity. The interpretation of artistic style as 'natural' is based on the assumption that in art, genuine and counterfeit developments can be distinguished and that stylistic features ofpast and present art works can be related in either proper or improper ways. By choosing certain formal elements and representing them as the ones that objectively form diachronic chains, the illusion is created of natural continuity and consistency (style) as though there were a stylistic machine which works autonomously and independently of human intervention. Boundaries are drawn between 'natural authentic' styles and 'artificial counterfeit' nonstyles. To discover and describe to which category a certain object belongs is the work of specialists who possess the 'right' knowledge necessary to 'read' and decipher it (Preziosi 1989). 3 Most producers, consumers and critics of Ghanaian international art have defined genuine art as a conscious, subconscious, or half conscious expression of the artist's self, undisturbed by financial considerations. In their discourse, notions of artistic style are directly related to the assumption that genuine art is non-commercial, and that non-commercial styles are expressions of 'natural identities'. Identity is understood as an indication of timeless ontological qualities of either individuals or social groups. In the first instance, the artist's identity is perceived as a particular combination of personal inborn characteristics, in which case the artistic style represents the artist as an individual being (the image of the independent creator). In the second instance, the artist is classified as a member of a particular social group, in which case the artistic style symbolizes a shared group identity (the image of the primitive, African, Ghanaian, or universal artist).

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In their determination ofspecific identities, artists and their public select certain elements of past and present artistic and non-artistic behaviour and label them as characteristic. Deviant behaviour is called artificial or commercial, and if one acts in a deviant manner one may be accused of loss of identity, and loss of artistic integrity. Artistic style is represented as evidence of identity, and identity as evidence of artistic style. Thus, both terms serve as normative tools, used to structure and control both artistic and non-artistic behaviour of individuals and members of specific social groups. In my opinion, the representation ofidentity and style as timeless natural categories is an act of ideological decontextualization and a denial of the way in which these categories are used as instruments to struggle for political power and economic gain. 4 The relationship between artistic styles, identity formation and power issues can only be analysed if the art works are placed in the political and economic contexts in which they are produced, distributed and consumed. I agree with Bogumil Jewsiewicki who states that 'we must transfer the focus of our analysis from the unique work of art to the relationship between the artist and society, particularly noting the sociopolitical dynamics ofpower' (Jewsiewicki 1991 : 135. See also Bourdieu 1968, 1979; Szombati-Fabian and Fabian 1976; Fabian 1978, 1996). The following paragraphs will show how (verbal and visual) discourses of style and identity have reinforced politically relevant processes of social differentiation and integration in Ghana. The Image of Primitive :M:an: Fetish Objects and Primitive Art

When, in 1887, the British colonial government of the Gold Coast drew up the 'Education Code' in which they laid down rules for the educational system in the colony, they introduced a new subject: 'Hand and Eye training'. This involved the technical and naturalistic drawing of simple objects. Art lessons based on indigenous art forms were not to be given, because the inhabitants of the Gold Coast were thought to be non-rational primitives lacking the qualities to produce art. In 1930, G.A. Stevens, who taught at the art department of Achimota College, criticized the Education Code, saying: 'The Code was drawn up as if there were no indigenous arts in the country at all, whereas these were in a much more flourishing condition than they are today' (Stevens 1930: 150). Indigenous products made of wood, metal or textiles were labelled as 'fetish objects' or 'functional crafts'. Images ofAfrican culture were constructed as mirror images of European culture, the former being primitive, non-

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rational and inferior, and the latter developed, rational and superior. 5 By the end of the 1920s, the formerly-named fetish objects were reinterpreted as 'primitive art', due to changing art conceptions in Europe. Because artists such as Picasso became inspired by the forms ofparticular African masks they bought and saw in Paris, and created a new primitivist style, the objects of their inspiration were incorporated into the domain of 'art'. Although Africans were now thought to be able to create art, the adjective 'primitive' still classified them as inferior to the whites. 6 Ifthese artists were primitive, how could they make anything other than primitive art, since art was thought to be an expression of the artist's self? The objects they found were stylistically contrasted to European realism, and indigenous works of art which could be categorized as 'realist' were either ignored or explained as being the result of foreign influences. 7 The image that colonial art teachers had oftheir students' culture limited the artistic freedom of the students of Achimota College, which, established in 1920, was the first secondary school with a specialized art department in the Gold Coast Colony. The art department later developed into an Academy of Arts and in 1951 was moved to Kumasi. 8 At the time when Achimota School was established, the African inhabitants of the Gold Coast were identified as still having a special human quality that had been lost to modem Europeans. They were expected to keep on working in the style of their ancestors, perceived as an unchanging tradition. That was all the more important, because Africans were thought to be fast losing this quality. The colonial British presented themselves as heroes saving the true identity ofthe primitives. Stevens wrote in 1930 in a mood of paternalistic concern: The present is a formative period, and an African style, which is completely in harmony with their racial genius and which is in the true line of descent from their primitive past, has hardly had time to emerge. (Stevens 1930: 157)

The students of the art department of Achimota College were more or less forced to create art in the style of their ancestors. In 1931, a so-called 'traditional' sculptor was appointed as teacher (Pippet 1935: 20). From 1937 to 1945, Osei Bonsu, the master carver of the Asantehene, chief of the Ashantis, was appointed as well (Mount 1973: 15). The students were taught to make Akuaba fertility figures, stools and state swords, the latter originally made ofmetal, but done by the students in wood. Akuaba statues were traditionally used by women who could not bear children in order to become fertile. In the interpretation of the Europeans, the non-realistic features of the statues and their functionality in 'unscientific' and 'pagan' practices made them expressions of a primitive mind. The British,

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paradoxically, attempted on the one hand to 'civilize the primitives' by introducing them to a British type of school system and converting them to Christianity, while, on the other hand, they intended to 'save primitive culture' by forcing them to produce primitive art. The students of Achimota College were often city boys who were confronted with contemporary city life. Being more interested in making models ofaeroplanes, they had problems in understanding why they should only produce images related to their cultural past (Svasek 1989). Amon Kotei recalled how, when he was a student at Achimota College in 1938, he made realistic portraits in clay. One day when he had finished one of them, he showed it to Meyerowitz, the head of the department, who screamed: 'Horrible, horrible, this is not African art, this is European art!' The words of Stevens and the reaction of Meyerowitz can serve as a demonstration of how identity construction and the enforcement of style were related in practice. Because of the colonization by the British and the influence of the missionaries, the chiefs had lost power and many people had turned to Christianity. Therefore, the demand for objects that functioned as symbols of indigenous political and religious power had lessened (De Graft-Johnson 1964: 106). Nevertheless, the colonial art teachers wanted the students to produce them. Although many students were not really interested, most of them obeyed because they were in a position of having no power. The illusion ofnatural primitive style, as an expression of an inferior mind unspoiled by negative effects of development, could be maintained by the colonial teachers. It served as a powerful ideological construction which reinforced the image ofbackward Africa, only to be modernized by the help of the superior whites. The Language of the Rulers: Claiming a Symbolic Code

After the end ofthe Second World War, some artists, such as Amon Kotei, Kofi Antubam and Saka Acquaye started to fight the myth of static primitive tradition (Svasek 1990b). They claimed 'European' realism (broadly defined and incorporating diverse styles, such as naturalism, impressionism and expressionism) as an artistic style of their own, thus symbolically denying boundaries between themselves and their colonizers. In 1989, Amon Kotei showed me a photograph of himself in his early years, standing in front of one of his realistic portraits in clay. He used the picture to prove to me his ability to work in a naturalistic style, and thus to challenge the idea that whites are superior to blacks. He also gave me a paper he had written in 1977, which stated:

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The prejudice was that the Ghanaian is not fit, capable, or that it is not African art to do anything that is realistic. Let us change this prejudice, and prove that the colour of our skin has nothing to do with acquisition of knowledge which is power, and the exercise of intelligence which is the only possession God gave to human beings to use. (Kotei 1977)

It was an act of emancipation through artistic style, a refusal to submit to the neat hierarchic cultural scheme of the paternalistic white colonizers. But although artists such as Kotei broke the myth of white stylistic superiority, they insisted on the distinction between black and white cultural identities. The colonial distinction between modem Europe and traditional Africa was maintained, but redefined. Tradition was reinterpreted as a distinct cultural and historical process. African cultural tradition no longer meant 'primitive', but was reinterpreted as being something of which to be proud. Kofi Antubam used the notion of evolutionary development in his perception of African art. In 1954, he described three stages ofuniversal artistic development (archaic abstraction, classical naturalism, nationalistic romanticism), and argued that the intellectual artists in the Gold Coast had reached the third stage, characterized by the particular people's full realization ofthemselves as a nation and the growth of their national pride. It is the time of dynamic movement and realism in art. Artists seek in all earnestness and expand their means and method ofexpression by knowledge acquired from other lands. (Antubam 1954: 3, cited by Mount 1973: 225)

The emancipation of African artists was linked to the rise of nationalist and pan-African movements in the late 1940s and 1950s. Serving as soldiers in the British army during the Second World War, and getting to know them at close quarters, Africans had come to realize that the idea of white superiority was a myth. They were also influenced by war propaganda of the Allied Forces in which democracy, individual human rights and the right ofself-determination were propagated. After the war, more and more Africans questioned why they had fought for ideals which were not applied in their own situation. They no longer accepted white domination, and demanded independence (Davidson 1978: 202; Buah 1980: 149). In this context, the conscious tum of artists against the wishes of their white teachers was politically highly significant. They no longer wanted to 'stay primitive under force', and chose to work in styles the Europeans defined as civilized. They did not intend to adopt a Europeanlike artistic identity, but wanted to use these styles to strengthen the notion

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of their own African identity, a construction that had revolutionary value for the creation of national and black consciousness. The art works thus functioned as instruments in the struggle for independence, which was embodied in the person ofKwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah, who had already played an important part in the nationalist and pan-Africanist movement in the United States (where he had lived for a period often years), and the United Kingdom (where he had studied and taught at several universities for two years) returned to the Gold Coast in November 1947. He accepted the post of General Secretary in the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the first political party, established in 1947, by black inhabitants of the Gold Coast. He became one of the spokesmen of the nationalist struggle for self-determination, and his politicized version of the Biblical text, 'Seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things will be added to you,' became a slogan in the struggle for independence (Buah 1980: 150-3). However, Nkrumah's ideas were too extreme for the more conservative UGCC members of the UGCC, and in 1949 he established his own party, the Convention's People's Party (CPP). The CCP, using the Accra Evening News and the Cape Coast Daily Mail as public media, actively propagated national and pan-African consciousness. When the Gold Coast finally became independent and was renamed Ghana, Nkrumah was appointed as its first president (ibid.: 156). The Africans who had consciously turned to figuration painted images of a distinct life-style, which they thought to be typical of Africans in general, and Ghanaians in particular. In their representations of African life, all aspects of contemporary society which they regarded as being modem and European were excluded and rejected as signs of the cultural domination of the British. They made images of durbars, chiefs, villages, musicians and dancers, fishermen, women carrying pots, and other 'typical African' scenes. Figurative art works showing African tradition are produced to this day. They depict aspects ofcontemporary life that evoke memories ofthe past. Any sign that can be interpreted as 'modem' is deliberately left out. For example, in 1988 Amon Kotei made an oil painting with the title 'Market Women'. He depicted the women in what he called traditional African dresses, including colourful cloths and scarves. The market women in the painting sell fish, something Ghanaian women have done for time immemorial. However, Kotei gives an idealistic view of present-day Ghanaian culture as being solely rooted in past traditions. Although scenes as depicted in 'Market Women' can be found in contemporary Ghana, Kotei's experience of present-day culture is more varied. His daughters,

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who often model for him, do not (always) wear scarves, and the youngest girl sometimes puts on trousers. One works as a hairdresser and another as a seamstress, so Kotei is confronted with the latest hair and clothing fashions. His choice to depict 'tradition' is a conscious one. The same applies to Ebeneezer Donkor, who graduated at the School of Fine Arts in 1990. In 1989 he made a watercolour painting with the title 'Village'. The work was based on sketches he made in his home village. When I accompanied him there, I did see quiet rural scenes like the one depicted. However, I also saw the bus that took me there, as well as cars, radios, beer bottles, and other signs of modernity. Just like Kotei, Donkor deliberately left out aspects of contemporary life which he perceived as non-traditional. Dynamic Abstraction: a Pan-African :M:edium of Expression

In the late l 940s, some artists started to resist the cultural and political domination of the British not by claiming their styles of expression, but by strongly rejecting them as something alien. 9 Instead, they reinterpreted the abstract style oftheir ancestors as 'dynamic' and 'African', and argued that abstraction was an expression of genuine African identity which had to be further developed in the present. Ironically enough, a number of Gold Coast artists discovered the value of old African art during their stay in Europe. The sculptor Oku Ampofo for example, who lived in Edinburgh from 1932 to 1940 in order to study medicine, was confronted with pieces ofAfrican sculpture when he visited British museums. He described them as having an emotional effect which Western education had not given him: 'I found in these ancient masterpieces the emotional appeal and satisfaction which Western education had failed to cultivate in me. It was as though an African had to go all the way to Europe to discover himself' (quoted in Mount 1973: l 73). Back in the Gold Coast, he decided to develop further the art made by his African ancestors, thus struggling against the cultural dominance of Europe. When I visited him in I 990, Ampofo told me how certain 'innate' qualities of African artists were spoiled by the influence of European artistic styles: 'The amazing thing was that even ... those who were colourful and those who were symbolic in their painting and sculpture, when they got a scholarship from the British government ... and went abroad, by the time they came back they were all spoiled.' Ampofo fought against people who rejected the art of the past as having no more significance to present day Africa:

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Ebeneezer Donkor, Village ( 1989)

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And what about the future? Many there are who think that any attempt to revive African traditional art or even learn from it will be like flogging a dead horse. I hold the opposite view...the rest of the century may well see a definite renaissance. The aesthetic appeal of African art cannot be limited to any particular epoch. (Ampofo 1968: 25)

Contrary to artists such as Kotei, who disassociated realistic style and European identity, Ampofo and others emphatically defined realism as a European style ofexpression, foreign to African culture. Just like realists who depicted traditional life, they were influenced by Nkrumah's 'African personality philosophy', which was based on the image of pan-African identity. In Ampofo's words: 'Nkrumah was behind me. My work meant a step in the direction of a further development of a typical African identity.' The stylistic features ofthe non-realistic art works were diverse, but mostly described as abstract and angular. As media of expression, various materials and techniques were chosen, such as ebony and other kinds ofwood, plaster of Paris, and oil and acrylic paints. 'Past' concepts of beauty and wisdom, such as long, ringed necks and big round heads (which were also part of the Akuaba fertility figures) were used. The abstract 'neo-traditional' genre is still produced by a great number of contemporary artists. In 1965, Ampofo made the ebony statue 'Primordial Instinct'. The importance of fertility and the love of a mother for a child is often mentioned by Africans as a characteristic ofAfrican culture. Through the choice of material (ebony has been used a great deal in various parts of Africa), the selection of the theme, and his personal semi-abstract style, the sculptor aimed to create an image of a dynamic pan-African artistic style, expressing pan-African values. The painter Kobina Buckner intended to transpose the qualities of African sculpture to the two-dimensional surface of the canvas in a style he called the 'Sculptural Idiom'. In one ofhis acrylic paintings ofwomen, which was made in the 1970s, he drew on the stylistic features of the Akuaba figure. The women in the picture eat food out of bowls and wear traditional clothes. It is clear that Buckner did not regard the fact that many 'traditional' wax prints are made in Holland as relevant. Summarizing, one can say that the construction of African identity through the production of both realistic and abstract styles had an antiwhite political connotation, especially in the late 1940s and the 1950s. It served as an ideological tool in the struggle for emancipation and the fight for independence.

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The Experience of t:he Cit:y: t:he Depiction of' lVIodern Life

After independence, which was attained in 1957, most artists were inspired by the philosophy of African personality, propagated by their first president, Nkrumah. They tried to give form to their cultural past, either in an abstract, realistic or semi-realistic style. Although the intended message was to show Ghana as a dynamic culture rooted in the past, the majority ofbuyers, who were non-African foreigners, persisted in interpreting the works as signs of an exotic and petrified tradition, contrasting with the dynamism of Western modern life. Even though artists tried to maintain that they propagated political ideals, their political message was 'lost' on its way to the consumers. The rising demand was thus not a political, but a commercial success. In 1981, the art student Wisdom Kudowar argued that commercial success was in fact an important reason for artists to create images ofthe past. 'The artists', he wrote, 'wanted to reflect [their] cultural heritage', because 'first of all, foreigners' demand for paintings and other artifacts with African imagery was very high' (Kudowar 1981: 19). 10 The relationship between the artists and the largest sector oftheir public showed itself · not to be educational and political, but mainly economic. The demand of the consumers, and not their willingness to become political conscious guaranteed the production of the images. Bennetta Jules-Rosette pointed out that the relationship between art producers and consumers is often indirect. People who sell the work have an important mediating function. As 'middlemen,' they offer an interpretation of the work to the customer, partly based on the ideas of the artist, but also grounded on the expectations of the buyer. The buyers' expectations as perceived by the middlemen will influence the interpretation the middlemen will offer. If buyers like certain works better than others, the middlemen (who are commercial entrepreneurs) will communicate this to the artists. The artists create images that are received and purchased by their audiences. Through this process, the artists present their perceptions of themselves and their works. These products are transmitted to the consumers via middlemen whose intervention interprets and "sells" the work of art. In tum, middlemen transmit the consumer response back to the artist. (Jules-Rosette 1984: 16, 17)11

This explains how consumers' demand can indirectly influence (but not necessarily fully determine) the production of artists, while the latter are

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able to uphold the illusion of being 'non-commercial'. The demands of the tourist market, in itself a manifestation of the economic and political power of the West, thus partly determines the way in which Ghanaian artists represent themselves through art. 12 According to the painter Ato Delaquis, who was teaching at the Kumasi School of Fine Arts at the time ofmy fieldwork, the financial dependence of the artists on foreign buyers is not the only reason why artists keep on creating images of the past. According to him, both the artists and the Ghanaian public cling to a romanticized vision ofthe past out ofconfusion: 'The present-day African is confronted with an awkward and embarrassing problem in trying to know his place in the twentieth century world ...it is a psychological question ofan emptiness in our lives' (Delaquis 1976: l 7). Both Delaquis and Ablade Glover (a prominent painter who was director at the School ofFine Arts in Kumasi at the time ofmy fieldwork) studied painting at the School of Fine Arts in the late l 960s. They consciously broke the myth of the romantic African past by starting to paint scenes out of present day city life in the beginning of the l 970s (Svasek 1991 c). On the one hand, they noted that the 'past scenes' were often interpreted as signs of backwardness. On the other hand, they reacted against the idea that Modernity would make Africa less African. The scenes they painted had previously been excluded by artists who depicted African culture. Delaquis and Glover constructed a stereotype of modern Ghana opposed to African traditional culture. For images, they chose big city markets, beer bars, street scenes, and car parks. All these were represented as signs of modern Ghanaian identity, understood as the result of a historical interweaving ofAfrican and European cultures. In 1968 Delaquis made a drawing called 'Bamboo Disco' which shows women wearing trousers and mini-skirts, and men in fancy soul trousers, dancing to Highlife music. Western-made instruments such as the saxophone are being played, and the singer uses a microphone. The acrylic painting 'Trotro Transport Station', painted by Delaquis in l 989, shows another modem scene. Compared to the picture by Donkor it gives a totally different image of Ghanaian life. Delaquis' crowded Trotro station makes one think of people travelling and goods being transported, whereas Donkor's village scene gives an impression of a quiet life and a peaceful atmosphere. Delaquis aimed to break the stereotyped image ofbackward village culture and replace it for one of modem, 'global' city life. How contemporary Ghanaian city life is depicted is partly dependent on the art public's idealized image of modem Ghana. In 1969 Delaquis made drawings of hemp smokers, but these drawings were not accepted

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by the Ghanaian public. Nobody wanted the pictures because they showed a negative side ofcontemporary Ghana. Consequently, Delaquis no longer exhibited this type of drawings. The student Osei Isaac Agyekumhene, who frequently painted the big Kejetia market in Kumasi, told me in 1989 that in his close-up representations of the Kejetia market he consciously avoided painting the muddiness ofthe market grounds. People would not enjoy a painting like that. Drugs and dirt are clearly aspects of contemporary life which do not fit into the art public's idealized image of modem Ghana. According to them, true modem Ghanaians do not (publicly) smoke grass or sit in the mud, but dance to Highlife and do business. Formal Art Education and the Ideal of Artistic Freedom

Delaquis' and Agyekumhene's decisions not to include references to drugs or dirt in their paintings demonstrates the tension between the ideal of artistic freedom and the reality of the art market. Formally trained artists, even though they like to believe that their work is free from commercial constraints, do adapt at times to consumer demands. At the Kumasi School of Fine Arts, the influence of commercial forces on art was a taboo topic. Art students were stimulated to develop their own styles, independently of market forces. Occasionally however, certain art teachers felt themselves forced to warn their students about the harsh reality of the art market. At the time of my fieldwork, the art student Adam Agyeman was doing his final year exams. After I had made pictures of several of his works, all painted in an abstract geometric style, I asked him why in one of his new works he had depicted a soccer player. He explained to me that he had followed the advice of his teacher Ato Delaquis, who had told him that if he continued to paint in a totally abstract vein, he would risk not selling any ofhis works and not being able to live from his production ofpictures. When I confronted Delaquis with this problem, he admitted that even though he tried to stimulate the students to produce original, innovative non-commercial works, the reality of the art market could not be denied. Unfortunately, he said, most Ghanaian and foreign buyers were not interested in purely abstract art, because they did not perceive it as 'typically Ghanaian'. From a Ghanaian artist they expected a different artistic style. The ideal of artistic freedom was reinforced whenever I asked academically trained artists about the similarities and differences between themselves and the informally trained wayside artists. They argued that

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the latter were (skilled) craftsmen producing commercial goods. In contrast they defined themselves as free individual creators of non-commercial but genuine art. According to some the difference in quality between themselves and the informally trained artists was so great that they were offended by the fact that I showed interest in the products of the latter. Kotei for example once reacted with irritation when I left his house to visit once again 'one of those commercial copy-artists who just repeat themselves'. He argued that I was just wasting my time, because all wayside artists worked in a similar way, producing the same statues and paintings over and over again. Formal education at the Kumasi School ofFine Arts (the only art school in Ghana where students receive an academic title) differs in many respects from the informal training given in the workshops of the wayside artists. The latter are headed by master carvers, painters and designers, who teach the profession to a varying number of assistants. 13 Under the guidance of the master artist, they produce works commissioned by customers or middlemen, who sell the works in local shops or export them to other countries all over the world (see also Jules-Rosette 1984; Steiner 1994). The assistants are boys from poorer families, and get some pocket money during the time of their training. Sometimes they also sleep in the workshop. After having completed their training, which generally takes about three years, they work as fully trained artists and receive a salary. Some leave and start their own workshop. To the informally trained artists, commercialism is not a taboo, but rather a positive sign of success. In their discourse, commercialism and creativity are no exclusive categories. In contrast, the students who study at the Kumasi School of Fine Arts come from families which are financially better offthan most Ghanaians. However, this does not mean that they have never to cope with financial problems. At the time of my fieldwork, many art students complained that they did not have enough money to buy high quality materials. During my stay, which took place at the end of the academic year, the meeting halls where students could socialize and buy food and drinks were mostly empty. They had spent their grants, and lack of money forced them to cook in their rooms or even miss out meals. The students who would soon graduate admitted that they faced their post-university existence with a mixture of hope and fear. They did not know whether they would be able to survive as independent artists. This fear was not ungrounded. The number of Ghanaians, expatriates and tourists who buy art works made by formally trained artists is rather small. A related problem is the limited number of places to exhibit and sell the works. At the time of my research, there were only three private

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galleries in the whole ofGhana (all in Accra). Foreign cultural institutes, such as the Goethe Institute and the British Council, as well as some international hotels in Accra occasionally organized exhibitions. Throughout the country there were only a few National Art Centres, where art was promoted and artists could sell their works. Most visitors to these centres were foreign tourists, and the competition with low-cost souvenir art was big. In my opinion, this was also the reason why the formally trained artists were so negative about the creative capacities of their informally trained colleagues. In some contexts, they tried to sell to the same customer group, and were clear competitors. On the whole, the working conditions for the art school graduates were not easy. Today, seven years after I completed the fieldwork, the situation is not very different. Artists as Free Creators, Artists as Political Actors, Artists as Entrepreneurs

The characterization by formally trained artists of their own work as 'untouched by market influence', was strongly based on two ideal images. In the first image, which can be called 'religious', artists use creative talents which are mysteriously generated by supernatural inspiration. This idea is reflected in the words of Ablade Glover, who defined creativity as a 'divine need' shared by all human beings. Creativity is a need that is inside you, that you are born with. Ifwe nurture it, it grows ... Creative people can really see things. And as you begin to see things in your mind's eye, you begin to produce them ... The Bible says that man was created because God did so. If every man was created in His image, then you must have His qualities. I think that creative quality is what everybody has, not only the artist. Everybody has creative quality, which is imbued to us by whoever made us, whom we call God. It is that quality that we call creativity, because He has creativity. He imparted it to us. Now I have already said that creativity need not be in painting alone. It can be in cooking, it can be in music, it can be in writing. It can be anything. The fact that there is a creative impulse which truly is there which most people have, except some who sit all day and are bored, and don't know what to do with themselves, whereas someone else uses his creative powers. I think that creativity must be divine.

In the notion of art as divine creative force, the relation between an art producer and his public is imagined as a relationship between an inspired visionary and someone 'whose eyes are opened'. In Glover's words:

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AG: I think of [artistic] inspiration as something that stirs up the creative impulses. So having stirred it up it begins to work. Usually it happens by seeing something, like the roofs of the town. It excites your imagination. It immediately makes you think 'when I am home I am going to paint them'. MS: And do you think that through your painting you can give the viewer the same feeling? AG: Exactly. Out of your painting you hope to excite the same imagination you have. Pass it on. An artist, according to Glover, is someone who uses his creativity to produce unique works of art. Reproducing works for the sake of better sales puts an object immediately outside the domain of art. In his words, 'an art object is unique. If you reproduce it, it means you copy. Only the original work, which can be produced, but not reproduced, I define as a work of art.' Another ideal on which formally trained artists have based their definition of art, is the conviction that artists are political actors who must consciously choose to propagate a specific message. Ampofo reflected on the artistic ideas dominant in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early l 960s. He argued: 'Art had a function in the political struggle, because our artistic achievements showed that we were ready for political independence'. In this political view on art, artistic and political spheres merge, and art becomes a political weapon. The relationship between the artist and his public is educational, or one of 'making politically conscious'. In both the religious as well as the political view on art, acknowledging the possible influence of the market on the images artists produce is taboo. The fact that artists produce commodities, and that as such, are embedded in the market economy, is not seen as relevant to the way in which they define themselves. Unlike the informally trained artists, who measure their success by their ability to please their customers, and increase their sales, formally trained artists strongly disapprove of commercialism. This is reflected and sustained by the fact that whenever Ghanaian intellectual artists talk about their own art in public, they try to avoid the topic of market dependence, or argue that even if other artists may conform to customer demands, they do not. This does not mean that academic artists are not confronted with the reality of the art market. The preferences and expectations of art buyers are an essential part of the material conditions under which Ghanaian artists work. Ironically, by making talk of their economic dependency taboo, artists meet the expectations oftheir buyers, with whom they share the myth of non-commercial artistic authenticity.

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Another point of irony is that at the tourist market, the informally trained artists also present their works as 'genuine art' in a reaction to the expectations of their customers (Svasek 1990a, 1991a). The Art:ist: as Individual: Globalizat:ion and t:he Concept: of Individual St:yle

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the concept of African identity started to lose its political importance. Various coups in Ghana and wars between African countries destroyed the illusion ofnational and pan-African unity. The notion of a shared cultural past expressed in contemporary national and pan-African artistic styles lost its significance for many (but not all) ofthe artists. Students at the School ofFine Arts in Kumasi felt themselves restricted by their teachers, who wanted them to be inspired by their identity as African or Ghanaian. Some artists rejected the notion ofartistic style as an expression of African identity. To them, this idea was only a political construction, previously useful in the struggle for independence, but nowadays no longer having an important function. It was regarded by some as oppressive, because it did not leave any space for an artist's individual identity or his personal opinion about national and international developments. 14 To their displeasure, art had become an instrument of national politics: The idea of an existing original national Art should be rejected outright, since Art in its present state is universal. No Nation can now lay a claim to a national style in Art. Public mind has been polluted by the idea of 'Pan Africanism' (African personality), hence the call for the Ghanaian artist to express himself in a national style. (Quao 1970: 53)

Delaquis argued that in the 1960s, the more extreme advocators of black identity restricted freedom ofexpression by propagating strict ideas about the style in which black artists should work. He accounted how once, when he was a student at the School of Fine Arts in Kumasi in the late 1960s, he had drawn a spheric picture of a Ghanaian female model in light greys. Mitchell, his African American teacher, had shouted that he should have used a black pencil to show that the model's skin colour was black instead of grey. By using a grey pencil, he had denied both his own and the model's black identity! A number of artists who belonged to the younger generation in the 1970s refused to identify themselves primarily as Africans or blacks. Instead they emphasized that they were individuals who belonged to an international community of directly or indirectly communicating artists.

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They rejected the existence of a consciously-created African style. African identity and style were no longer seen as natural categories but deconstructed as cultural constructs. Glover told me in 1989 that he often tried to convince his students that art made by Africans does not need to 'look African': It is sad. I keep telling my students and everybody I meet that it is sad to make a conscious effort to do something called an African painting ... I think it is wrong to make something African, because there is nothing like African. The African is me, so if what comes out of me cannot be taken as African, then what is African?

The painter and art teacher Atta Kwami argued: 'I am African, but then I am not proud of being African. It is no big deal; I am just a human being, in the sense that Africans are not special'. The emphasis on individuality by some Ghanaian artists is reflected and enforced in their artistic products. Their style is no longer meant to be an accessible expression of group identity, but a highly personal way of giving form to ideas. They do not divide the world into African and non-African parts, but into international social networks forming professional fields: people who are part ofthe international high art scene, and people who are not. Values thought to be essential in this scene are emphasized, such as individualism, innovation, and originality. The artist is seen as a characteristic individual, who expresses his views in a personal, unique style. The painter Eric Kwabla Wemega-Kwawu, a self-made artist who is determined to enter the international art world, is one of the most extreme artists in his pronouncements. In his brochure, published when he exhibited in the American Club in Accra, he states: 'When I paint, I work solely for myself, developing my technique primarily to give free reign ofexpression to my inspiration. I am not accountable to anyone, nor is it necessary to acknowledge any basis for rationality' (Wemega-Kwawu 1989: 10). When I visited him in 1989, he told me endless stories about famous European artists such as Picasso, Gaugain, van Gogh and others. He sketched such vivid pictures ofthese artists, their lonely struggles and their final success, that it seemed as ifhe was talking about his closest friends. In every story he emphasized that, after a period of hunger, humiliation, and insecurity all these artists had 'made it' as innovative artists, and become accepred. The endless and detailed 'success after all' stories obviously helped him to keep on believing in developing a distinct, individual style, even though the biggest buying groups of Ghanaian art are more interested in easily recognizable depictions of the Ghanaian world.

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The ideology of individuality is clearly articulated and communicated by works of artists such as Wemega-Kwawu and Kwami. Through their works, most of which are not obviously 'made in Africa', they show themselves opposed to notions of'African-ness' in art and tum their backs on the biggest group of art buyers, who are only interested in easilyunderstood images of Africa (Svasek 1991b). 15 This does not mean that they regard themselves as isolated beings, unformed by society. WemegaKwawu for instance, does not deny that he was born in Ghana, is influenced by his surroundings, and inspired by geometrical designs, Akan icons, canoe decorations, wall paintings and other designs. In the untitled oil painting by him reproduced here, Wemega-Kwawu does not intend to symbolize African cultural identity through the depiction ofa typical African decoration, but aims to concentrate on what he calls 'its universal quality as graphic design'. Wemega-Kwawu perceives himself as an international artist, who enjoys non-Ghanaian designs as much as Ghanaian ones. 'Masks' is the title of the oil painting made by Kwami in 1989, who was teaching at the School of Fine Arts in 1989. Without the title, one cannot easily make the connection between the image and the objects of its inspiration. The combination of the abstract composition and the title gives an impression ofa painter who speaks in a personal visual language, only lightly inspired by the actual forms of masks. He seems to be more interested in experimenting with form and colour than with the sending of a clear message. The absence of a clear content forces the onlooker to use his or her own imagination and to concentrate on the formal qualities of the work. The fact that some artists define themselves emphatically as individuals who belong to an international artistic network, must be understood as a critique of national politics as well as of the unequal global distribution of economic power. Both limit the artists in their communicative and economic possibilities. Nationalist politicians are suspicious of critical art and because of lack of money and influence, Ghanaian international artists have a rather peripheral position in the High Art world. By creating a utopian image of a single world-wide artistic community, they claim the right to be part ofa global network ofrespected and well-paid art, not dominated by national politics or Western economic power. It is interesting that similar images of equality are constructed by Western promoters ofAfrican contemporary art. Susan Vogel, for instance, seems to be quite optimistic about the position of African artists when she notes that 'insofar as one can generalize about so large a group, International artists in Africa do not feel themselves to be marginalized or on the periphery' (Vogel 1991: I 94). In my opinion, this is a naive

Ghanaian Artistic Discourse

Eric Kwabla Wemega-Kwawu, Untitled ( 1989)

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Atta Kwami, Masks (1989) assumption. During my research, I found that Ghanaian artists who aim to be part of the network of internationally accepted art have many problems in finding access to it. Compared to their Western colleagues, they do feel themselves marginalized. Shif"t:ing Identities~ Changing Styles

So far, I have given examples of situations in which artists clearly defined their artistic identities and styles, either in line with or against the expectations of their public and other artists. In the examples given, the artists represented themselves as 'natural', identifiable wholes (such as traditional, modem, and individual), and deconstructed other essentialist images (such as primitive, black, and African). All these labels suggested that Ghanaian artists perceive themselves as having a rather fixed social identity, expressed in a specific manner. Yet, during my fieldwork, I also spoke with artists who interpreted their artistic behaviour from a nonessentialist view on identity and style. This alternative view is based on ideas of inconsistency and change, and is in line with Katherine Ewing's

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remark that 'people can be observed to project multiple, inconsistent selfrepresentations that are context dependent and may shift rapidly' (Ewing 1990: 251). The sculptor Kweku Andrews, teacher at the School of Fine Arts in Kumasi, showed himself to be someone who selects consciously which identity to emphasize in which communicative context. He was born in Ghana in 1939, but lived from 1975 to 1981 in the United States. During his stay there, he studied art, taught art appreciation (in the framework of a course in Black American Studies), lived as artist in residence in the Midlands, and exhibited and sold his sculptures. When he came back to Ghana he became teacher of the sculpture department at the School of Fine Arts in Kumasi. When I interviewed him, he told me that in the United States, in reaction to the expectations ofAfrican Americans, he consciously presented himself as an 'African artist'. In Ghana on the other hand, when teaching his Ghanaian students, he emphasizes that they should not limit themselves by ideas about 'Africa': MS: There is so much talk about African identity. Was it important when you were in America? KA: It was, because there was pressure from the black Americans. They wanted you to be an African. And I was [laughs]. .. MS: And about this African identity... can you tell me more about it? KA: Sure, in fact when I went to the United States, at first, I was more influenced by white American arts. Our professor was Debbie Butterfield, and she told me, 'I don't know which programme I should draw for you. What is your idea? Your works are quite different from what we are doing here.' I said, 'Don't worry, I can pick up ideas here and there.' [But] she wanted to draw a special programme for me, and I became very comfortable with it. Together with other African artists, we formed a black committee, and had a group exhibition in Chicago. When we opened the exhibition, my wood carvings which were inspired by the work ofthe Ghanian sculptor Vincent Kofi, 16 were bought instantly. That inspired me, because the person who bought them was a black American, and he understood what I was trying to say. So I said: 'Ok, I think my people are trying to understand me, so why don't you go on doing your own African thing.' When I heard these black Americans converse among themselves, I understood that they wanted to know much about their African background. I could portray that in my work, and I could speak about it. MS: So they pushed you in a way? KA: That's right, they actually pushed me.

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MS: KA: MS: KA: MS: KA:

MS: KA:

MS: KA:

Not to go more into a European style. It was more or less political [laughs]. You helped them in their struggle? That's right... I was pushed by the black community in America. They wanted to see something African. And is it still important, this search for African roots? Very very important. Even the government now is asking us to be an African, to portray Africans. But on the other hand I talk to my students and say: 'You have to feel free to portray anything you want. It should not be bound.' They should not be imprisoned. That's right. I show them my works. I listen to people, I have to be inspired by something. Sometimes I sit down and I feel that I have portray something about Britain. Then I have to do it. Human beings are human beings in the first place, and not Africans or Europeans? That's right. We are all members of the world, so we can speak to anybody. If you see one ofmy favourite carvings in my house, it depicts an African boy taking care of the cows. He is African, but the whole idea is about taking care of animals, which is something that takes place all throughout the world. So I told my students, if you are inspired by something, go for it. But never think only about Africa, or your Ghanaian background.

Andrews was not the only artist I met, who consciously chose to emphasize alternately different, seemingly conflicting identities. Andrews did this by interpreting his work and his task as an artist differently in different contexts. Other artists accomplished this effect by working in two or more different styles, each stressing another aspect of their multiple identity. The manipulation with various identities and styles might seem to be a sign of a free, relativist attitude towards life. However, Ghanaian artists themselves regard their flexibility more often than not as the result of restricting market forces. Producing works in different styles was a strategy to enhance their sales, reacting to the expectations of different groups of consumers. One marketable style (representing exotic African tradition) easily fitted to the taste offoreign customers. Besides that, they produced works which were harder to place, and therefore, harder to sell. The formally trained artists almost always argued that they preferred their less marketable work, but that they were forced by their financial situation to produce exotic pictures as well.

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Conclusion

The changing definition and meaning of style and identity in Ghanaian artistic discourse is part of a wider process in which artists, critics and art consumers articulate consciousness and claim political rights. The British colonialists justified their control over the Gold Coast by ascribing to the inhabitants an inferior primitive identity expressed by objects made in an undeveloped style. Emancipated Gold Coasters deconstructed this image, and redefined it as a powerful and oppressive cultural construct. They claimed black cultural and political independence on the basis of panAfrican identity. National governments did the same after independence. African identity was imagined and expressed in different ways. To some Ghanaian artists, it was based on traditions rooted in the past which could be depicted in figurative styles. Others defined it as a dynamic process which should be developed further, and found inspiration in the abstract and semi-abstract art of their predecessors. Another group of artists, concentrating on what they saw as the modern aspects of African identity, depicted them in a figurative manner. Some artists rejected the notion of African and national identity as purely ideological concepts, having political but not much artistic value. They argued that art works based on 'African-ness' are a commercial success mainly because they are still interpreted as images ofbackwardness and exoticism, and see themselves as international, individual artists. On this basis, they have claimed freedom of expression and equal access to the Western-controlled international High Art market. Their imagined unification of international artists in one shared global artistic community functions as a demand for change and a mystification of reality at the same time. Many artists use more than one artistic style, mostly for commercial reasons. Because of the taboo on talk of commercialism, only a few artists admit this. Some artists argue that the use of more styles is related to the fact that their identity is not fixed, and that they emphasize different aspects of their identity depending on the social context. Although the interest in African contemporary art by Western art dealers and exhibition-makers is growing, the reality is that the works are still mostly exhibited in centres for African culture and ethnographic museums, such as the Vol.kenkundig Museum in Rotterdam, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Iwalewa Haus in Bayreuth, and the Centre for African Art in New York. In the last decade however, the exhibition of contemporary African art in Western art museums has slowly become more common (Faber 1992: 65). In 1989, the Centre Pompidou in Paris

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organized the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre which included contemporary art from all over the world (Martin 1989). In 1991-2, the Groninger Museum mounted the exhibition Africa Now. In 1993, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam showed the works oftwenty-seven SouthAfrican artists in the exhibition Zuiderkruis. Many other examples could be given. It would however be naive to suppose that the growing interest by Western art museums in African contemporary art implies a more equal distribution of power in the global art world. After all, the staff members of the art museums decide to organize exhibitions of African art. They are the ones who control the exhibition financially, and appoint exhibition curators. The curators then create exhibition concepts and select the objects, partly on the basis of their own intellectual and aesthetic preferences, and partly influenced by the expectations of the museum public. 17 In the case of the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition, none of the above mentioned Ghanaian artists was chosen to participate, even though most of them were considered 'important' by the Ghanaian art historian Kojo Fosu (Fosu 1986). What was shown instead, was something which seemed spectacular in Western eyes: coffins shaped in, for example, the form of a Mercedes Benz by the wayside artist Kane Kwei. In fact, most Ghanaian producers and consumers of Ghanaian international art I spoke with, regarded Kwei's coffins as functional craft, and opposed that to real art. This points at how, within Ghanaian society, the elite differentiates itself as a distinct social group from 'the people' through knowledge about art made by academically trained intellectual artists. Whereas 'normal people' only have access to artists who work in public on commission, members of the urban elite are invited to private exhibitions of international Ghanaian artists, and have the money and space to buy and display the art works. 18 Kwei's coffins were also selected for the exhibition Africa Explores, organized in 1991 by the Centre for African Art in New York. In this exhibition, the objects were classified as 'new functional art' and thus distinguished from 'international art' (Vogel 1991: 97-100). In this exhibition, the curators tried to respect the meaning the coffins have in Ghana. However, by isolating them within the walls of an American museum, the coffins were automatically aestheticized and made into 'objects of others'. The choice for Kwei's coffin by the curators of Magiciens de la Terre shows that history of art is still mainly written by Western and Westernoriented art historians and critics. 19 The curators Martin (in Paris) and

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Vogel (in New York) had the power to decide which objects were to be recontextualized as products of 'world magicians' and 'African explorers'. 20 Idealistic notions of 'increasing equality for all artists' must clearly be replaced by a more complex perspective which reveals the power struggles inherent to art production in the context of a global artworld.

Not:es

1. The objects ofthe Cree Indians, which were actually objects the Indians used in their own household, were placed by most of the students in a category of non-authentic craft. The animal statues of the Eskimos, produced as souvenirs for tourists, were classified as genuine works of art. 2. The name 'wayside artist' comes from the fact that these artists have their workshop/shop by the side of the road at strategic places where many potential customers walk or drive past. Tourist artists, those who work for the souvenir market, are often also called 'wayside artists'. 3. By creating an image of an objective but hidden domain of artistic regularities that can only be discovered by themselves, art historians create and justify the existence of their own professional field. Donald Preziosi notes how, in the movie Lustfor L(fe, a cinematical biography of Vincent van Gogh, 'the art historian or critic is the implied practitioner or operator of a revelatory machinery, working at the recuperative task of reconstituting for a lay audience an originary fullness ofmeaning and reference, a semiotically articulatable presence ofreal being'. Thus, the movie 'performs important ideological work for art history and criticism' (Preziosi 1989: 22). 4. In his lecture The Style ofthe Method, at the 'International Conference on Style in Philosophy and the Arts' held at the University of Amsterdam in April I 990, Berel Lang called the denial of authorship of both scientific and artistic styles an 'ideological decontextualization and a wilful repression of history'. 5. McEvilley also identifies a relationship between the collecting of African objects, the 'freezing' of Western and non-Western identities and the construction of an ideology of Western superiority: 'In the colonial period, objects made in non-Western cultures were brought back to the West not just as booty but as evidence. They were

56

6.

7.

8.

9.

I0.

Cont:est:ing Art:

understood, at however mute a level, as proof of the superiority of the colonialists- that was the point of calling the colonialized cultures "primitive"' (McEvilley 1991: 266). James Clifford has remarked, 'The fact that rather abruptly, in the space of a few decades, a large class of non-Western artifacts came to be redefined as art is a taxonomic shift that requires critical historical discussion, not celebration . . . the scope and underlying logic of the "discovery" of tribal art reproduces hegemonic Western assumptions rooted in the colonial and neocolonial epoch' (Clifford 1988: 196--7). Mitchell, who taught art history at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi in the 1970s, writes: 'Another mystifying fabrication propagated again by our European inhabitants, is the so-called African Negro Art. The most unethical thing about this unscientific study is the complete alienation ofcertain parts ofAfrican from African Art. Concentration is consistently focused on fetish, ritualistic sculpture to the exclusion of almost all other art forms' (Mitchell I 988: 39). The art department was established at the College in 1936 by the British sculptor and designer H.V. Meyerowitz. As director of the art department, he designed a three-year course, and employed an educational staff consisting ofEuropeans and Africans. When Meyerowitz died in I 946, the Scottish painter J.M. Mackendrick succeeded him. In 1951 the department moved to Kumasi and became part of the University ofScience and Technology. Mackendrick stayed head until four years after Ghana's independence in 1957. He was replaced in 1961 by the Ghanaian painter S.V. Asihene, who had already worked at the department as a painting teacher. The department was renamed into the School of Fine Arts, and the course was extended to four years. The school contained sections ofpainting, sculpture, ceramics, commercial and graphic design, research, extramural studies, textiles, jewellery, and art education (Mount 1973: 124-9). Today the name 'College of Art' is used. This not only happened in the Gold Coast but in many other African and non-African colonized areas. The Lebanese painter Wasma' Khalid Chorbachi wrote: 'There is nothing wrong with Western styles. But they simply were not my language. That was not me! I had to have my own language' (Chorbachi 1989: 146). Also in Indonesia, some artists consciously turned away from realism and found inspiration in their indigenous art forms (Spanjaard 1988: 114). According to Kudowar, besides the first economic reason, there was

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

57

also a political reason, namely that 'the concept of Africanisation expounded by Kwame Nkrumah was taken up seriously by both painters and writers' (Kudowar 1981: 19). As a third cause, he mentions the influence of Western artists such as Picasso, who were fascinated by old African art, on Ghanaian intellectual artists. In Kudowar's words, there was a 'consciousness or discovery of the beauty in African art by Africans themselves as a result of Western interests' (ibid.). The connection between the artist's output and the expectations of buyers in Ghana has been a central theme in my own writings about Ghanaian art (Svasek 1989, 1990a, 1991a). Because at present the demand for past cultural scenes is still high, Ghanaian art producers keep on creating these images. My analysis of the works made for the final examination in 1989 by painting and sculpture students of the School of Fine Arts in Kumasi, at the University of Science and Technology, shows that 50% (54 of l 08 art works made by 12 painting students and 18 sculpture students) are depictions of past cultural scenes (Svasek 1990a: 95). In all Ghanaian cities and towns there are numerous possibilities to learn informally how to paint, carve, and design. In most commercial centres there are workshops, where art works are produced and often also sold. In the workshops I visited, the number of assistants varied from one to five. In Senegal, the same thing happened. The Ecole de Dakar was established to produce artists, who created images which were intended to communicate Sengor's message ofNegritude. First ofall, it functioned in a process of emancipation from the white cultural domination. But at the same time, '[its] fictional ethnographic repertoire ... coupled with the state's appropriation of the works these artists made, aligned the school with an official, largely ahistorical national space in which the artists were generally unable to reflect on or adjust to social and political change' (Ebong 1991: 204). Partly for commercial reasons and partly because they 'enjoy doing it', most 'individual' artists also make paintings that clearly depict images of African or Ghanaian life. Working in different styles is quite common in Ghana. Mostly this can be explained as a marketing strategy: a bigger section of the public can be reached if one works in more than one genre. Vincent Kofi was highly inspired by Nkrumah's political ideas. During a stay in the United States at the Columbia University in 1959--60, he made the statue Awakening Africa, a bronze figure, sitting up, with

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17.

18.

19.

20.

Contesting Art

the eyes looking determined into the future. The face of the figure is inspired by the features ofthe head ofthe Akuaba figure (Mount 1973: 129--31). The art historian and curator David Elliot notes, 'Audiences have their rights too and their greatest right is, of course, not to visit the museum. The larger the cultural difference, the wider the gap to be mediated and the more critical the cultural balancing act becomes. If the tastes and expectations of the public are not taken into account, both museum and the art it shows rapidly lose their credibility' (Elliot 1992: 34). It is paradoxical that Ghanaian art historians promote works created by formally trained artists and show less interest in the works of the informally trained wayside artists, whereas in the West, exhibitionmakers prefer works of the latter. Because of their influence in the global art world, Western exhibition-makers seem to 'undermine' the position of indigenous art historians. Howard Morphy writes, 'Often, the role of the local (art) market in its global context is to act as a filter, selecting out from the many those few artists who will operate on a global scale. However, as long as the global focus is in the West the flow from the local to the global will be limited by the spaces allocated within that market' (Morphy 1995: 217). It is not surprising that the organizers of Les Magiciens de la Terre have been accused by several critics ofa neo-colonial attitude (Konijn 1992: 29). Despite this criticism, the exhibition remained 'the first ... to bring together contemporary art from all over the world. For the first time ever, art from non-Western countries was set in an historical framework' (ibid.).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Ghanaian artists and art historians mentioned in this article for cooperation in the research, and Val Daniel, Peter Pels and Jeremy MacClancy for their reactions to an earlier draft of this article.

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References Ampofo, Oku (1968), 'Sankofa', Cultural Heritage, Accra, pp. 24-5 Barber, Karin (1986), The Popular Arts in Africa. Birmingham: University of Birmingham, Centre for West African Studies Bourdieu, Pierre (1968), 'Outline of a Theory of Art Perception', International Social Science Journal, no. 20, pp. 589-612 - - (1979), 'Symbolic Power', Critique ofAnthropology, vol. 4, nos. 13/14, pp. 77-'i!,5 Buah, F.K. ( 1980), A History of Ghana. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Chorbachi, Wasma' Khalid (1989), •Arab Art Twenty Years Later', Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 143---53 Clifford, James ( 1988), The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, literature and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Cooks, Bridget R. ( 1997), 'Complicated Shadows: Challenging Histories of Cultural Representation in Contemporary Art', Focaal. Journal of Anthropology no. 29. Special issue 'Visual Art, Myth, and Power' (eds) Svasek, Maruska and van Beek, Gosewyn, pp. 25---36 Coutts-Smith, Kenneth (1991), 'Some General Observations on the Problem of Cultural Colonialism', in Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 14-31 Davidson, Basil ( 1978), Africa in Modern History: The Search/or a New Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Delaquis, Ato (1976), 'Dilemma of the Contemporary Artist (2)', Ch'indaba, vol. I, no. I, pp. 27-30 Ebong, Ima (1991 ), 'Negritude: Between Mask and Flag: Senegalese Cultural Ideology and the "Ecole de Dakar"', in Susan Vogel (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th CentUTJ' African Art. New York: the Centre for African Art, pp. 198209 Elliot, David (1992), 'Framing the "Frontiers": Definitions of Modern and Modernist Art', in Harry Leyten and Bibi Darnen (eds), Anthropology and the Modes ~fRe-presentation. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, pp. 31---{i Ewing, Katherine P. ( 1990), 'The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self and the Experience oflnconsistency', Ethos, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 251-79 Faber, Paul (1992), 'Towards a Global Art Museum', in Harry Leyten and Bibi Darnen (eds), Anthropology and the Modes ofRe-presentation. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, pp. 61-70 Fabian, Johannes ( 1978), 'Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and Conjectures', Africa, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 315---34 - - ( 1996), Remembering the Present. Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Fosu, Kojo ( 1986), Twentieth Century Art ofAfrica. Zaria: Gaskiya Corporation Limited

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Glover, Ablade E. (1979), 'Problems of the Contemporary Ghanaian Artist', in From the Artists Congress. Accra: Ghana Association of Artists and Arts Council of Ghana. Graburn, Nelson H.H. ( 1978), "'I like things to look more different than that stuff did": an Experiment in Cross-cultural Art Appreciation', in Michael Greenhalgh and Vincent Megaw (eds), Art in Society: Studies in Style, Culture and Aesthetics. London: Duckworth, pp. 51-70 De Graft-Johnson, Charles (1964), 'The Evolution of Elites in Ghana', in P.C. Lloyd (ed.), The New Elites of Tropical Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 104-15 hooks, bell (Gloria Watkins) (1992), Black Looks: Race and Representation. London: Turnaround Jewsiewicki, Bogumil ( 1991 ), 'Painting in Zaire: From the Invention of the West to the Representation of Social Self', in Susan Vogel (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. New York: the Centre for African Art, pp. 130--51 Jordon, Glenn and Weedon, Chris ( 1995), Cultural Politics: Class, Race, Gender and the Postmodern World. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Stephen (eds) (1990), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museums Display. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press Jules-Rosette, Bennetta ( 1984), The Messages ofTourist Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective. Plenum Press: New York Konijn, Fieke (1992), 'A Universal Language of Art: Two Exhibitions of nonWestern Art in Dutch Museums of Modern Art', in Harry Leyten and Bibi Darnen (eds), Art, Anthropology and the Modes of Re-presentation. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, pp. 23-30 Kotei, Amon (1977), 'The Artistic World', Unpublished paper. Accra Kudowar, Wisdom Edinam ( 1981 ), Some Trends in Contemporary Painting. Unpublished thesis. College of Art, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi Martin, Jean Hubert (1989), 'Preface', in Magiciens de la Terre. Paris: Centre Pompidou, pp. 8--11 Miller, Daniel ( 1987), Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Mitchell, Leroy E. ( 1988), Africa Come Back. Terna: Ghana Publishing Cooperation McEvilley, Thomas ( 1991 ), 'The Selfhood ofthe Other: Reflections ofa Westerner on the Occasion ofan Exhibition ofContemporary Art from Africa', in Susan Vogel (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. New York: the Centre for African Art, pp. 266-75 Morphy, Howard ( 1995), 'Aboriginal Art in a Global Context', in Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism ofthe Local. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 211-39 Mount, Marshall Ward ( 1973 ), African Art: the Years since 1920. Newton Abbot: David & Charles

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Pippet, Gabriel ( 1935), 'Teaching Wood-carving at Achimota', in M.E. Sadler (ed.), Arts ~[West Africa. London: International Institute ofAfrican Languages and Cultures, pp. 20--2 Preziosi, Donald ( 1989), Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven and London: Yale University Price, Sally (l 989), Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press Quao, Nii Oobo (l 970), Some Ghanaian Contemporary Artists. Unpublished thesis. University of Science and Technology, Kumasi Scott, James ( 1990), Domination and the Arts ofResistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press Spanjaard, Helena (1988), 'Free Art: Academic Painters in Indonesia', in Paul Faber (ed.), Artfrom another World. Rotterdam: Museum voor volkenkunde, pp. 103-32 - - (1993), 'Modern Indonesian Painting: The Relation with the West', in Indonesian Modern Art: Indonesian Painting Since 1945. Amsterdam: Gate Foundation, pp. 19--38 Steiner, Christopher (l 994), African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Stevens, G.A. ( 1930), 'The Future of African Art with Special Reference to Problems Arising in the Gold Coast Colony', Africa, vol. 3, pp. 150-60 Stocking, George W. (ed.) ( 1985), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. History of Anthropology, vol. 3. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press Svasek, Maruska ( 1989), 'Copying Urge or Own Identity?', Ghana Newsletter, vol. 7, no. 26--9, Nijmegen, pp. 24--7 - - ( 1990a), Creativiteit, Commercie en ldeologie. Moderne Kunst in Ghana, 190~1990. Unpublished MA thesis. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam - - (1990b), 'Back to Africans Roots', Ghana Newsletter, vol. 8. no. 6, Nijmegen, pp. 27-31 - - (1991a), 'Souvenirs: Art or Kitch?', Ghana Newsletter, vol. 9, no. 1, Nijmegen, pp. 15--18 - - (1991b), "'Rikki" Doesn't Give in to the Public: The Badly Understood Pictures ofWemega-Kwawu', Ghana Newsletter, vol. 9, no. 2, Nijmegen, pp. 22-7 --(199lc), 'It is Not My Fault We Use Toyota's and Bedfords: Ato Delaquis Paints Everyday-life', Ghana Newsletter, vol. 9, no. l, Nijmegen, pp. 10--16 Szombati-Fabian, Ilona and Fabian, Johannes (1976), 'Art, History and Society: Popular Painting in Shaba, Zaire', Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, vol. 3, no. I, pp. 1-21 Vogel, Susan (l 991 ), 'International Art: The Official Story', Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. New York: Centre for African Art, pp. 176--97 Wemega-Kwawu, Eric Kwabla (1989), Wemega-Kwawu: Paintings. Takoradi: Wemega-Kwawu

Tribal and Palatine Arts o:fthe Cameroon G-rassfields: Elements for a 'Traditional' R.egional Identity Ian .FoJ-Vl~r

Int:roduct:ion

The 'Republic of Ambazonia' does not yet exist save as a precipitate in the imagination of a strongly politicized regional identity. This region comprises the anglophone sections of Cameroon and the wider Grassfields including the francophone Bamileke but excluding their Barnum congeners. It is currently the centre of vocal anglophone opposition to the francophone dominated regime. The wider Cameroon Grassfields area has long been noted for its fine material culture and elaborate hierarchical political formations. In this chapter I shall examine critically the elements of this regional identity which derive from the representation of its material culture and political hierarchies in academic discourses. I shall focus on art historical and museological studies ofthe Grassfields. Such studies, in their generally uncritical use of anthropological and historical sources, characterize the region with an over-emphasis on palace or courtly arts set in the frame of tribal units determined by common claims to dynastic origins. I will argue that while this may certainly be viewed as a misrepresentation of any underlying reality it is nonetheless extremely significant as a representation of an ideal, perhaps the ideal, of Grass fields politics and culture - as seen from the perspective of palace and chief from the early colonial period

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till. the present day. As such an idealized arena of expectation and performance it serves very well to open up a semantic space in which the aspirations of a modem elite may be expressed, through the consumption of material culture (Homer 1990), for a prestigious identity that is at once both local and global, both modem and traditional. I will examine the link between the rediscovery of a regional identity in the context of contested incorporation into the modem state and the recapture ofpre-constructed - almost offthe shelf- material and ideational elements ofidentity from western epistemological domains. Such elements come pre-wrapped in the cloak of tradition. And, hence, it is here that solutions to the problem of becoming modem yet remaining the same are sought through localizing a modem identity in tradition. I will argue that while academic representations of the material culture of the Grassfields have overdrawn the themes oftribe and palace this does provide a parallel space, a simultaneity, for the working out of identity by modem elites and for the reinvention of the chieftaincy. Colonial History and Current Conflict

Cameroon shares the general African historical experience ofincorporation into world capitalist systems, a relatively brief period of colonial rule and then, since the I 960s, a post-colonial state that, in theory at least, strives for modernity. It departs from this historical norm in its experience of a military struggle between two European powers for colonial hegemony, the defeat and expulsion of one regime, partition and separate development, and subsequent reunification at independence in the 1960s. The singularity of these circumstances has important implications for the modernist project to develop a national culture and create a nation. The imposition of effective German rule over that region of Cameroon which was to become known as the Grassfields came relatively late and took the form of a military administration that ran between 1902 and 1915. The German colonial regime was brought to an abrupt end in 1915 with the invasion of British and French forces and the eventual creation ofan international boundary that cross-cut the wider Grassfields region. This latter area had been designated as the Kameruner Grasland under German occupation; the term Grassfields was introduced by the British. This has been taken up by the local population who accordingly refer to themselves as 'Graffi'. From 1915 there ensued a period of nearly half a century of separate and very different experiences ofcolonial rule as Cameroon under partition was administered separately by British and French colonial regimes. A

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more short-lived post-colonial federal structure was brought to an end with the declaration of a unitary state in 1972 (Fowler and Zeitlyn 1995). These experiences of initial incorporation, militarily imposed partition, separate development and reincorporation into a post-colonial modem state are particularly significant for the Grassfields, cross-cut as it was by the imposed international boundary which set apart anglophone and francophone sectors of the former Kamerun. Out of this set of difficult historical circumstances has currently arisen an intriguing tension between a putative regional identity on the one hand and a national anglofrancophone division on the other. This latter divide, perceived as exclusion and hence felt more strongly by the anglophones, has, twenty years on from reunification, serious implications. In the present-day context of insistent demands for multiparty democracy and the concomitant questioning of the very bases of incorporation into the modem state anti-'french' sentiments have surfaced in a virulent and potentially destructive mode. Political mobilization has occurred at the level ofthe wider pre-partition Grassfields region, the case in point here being the Bamileke of the southern and francophone part ofthe Grassfields. The Bamileke have long been characterized by entrepreneurial expertize (Wamier 1985), production and wealth, and high political aspirations. The latter were severely

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thwarted in the contest for power over the construction ofthe post-colonial francophone state. This led to great political and social disorder in the 1950s and 60s. Chiefs were murdered, palaces burnt and treasures destroyed or sold to meet short term needs. These upheavals did not extend to any great extent into the anglophone Grassfields which at the time had a quite different political agenda (Fowler and Zeitlyn 1995). It is in the context of the current political crisis in Cameroon that the Bamileke have stressed their ties with former brethren from across the colonial linguistic divide. This recent regionalization of identity is dramatically manifested by the emergence of an Anglo-Bamileke movement, in part represented by the SDF, the Social Democratic Front, currently the main opposition party in post-colonial Cameroon. Grassfields Society and :M:aterial Culture

The kinds of political formations which the Germans came across in the Grassfields at the end ofthe nineteenth century were individual chiefdoms ranging in size from 200 to 60,000, often bounded in physical space by large-scale earthworks and fixed in dynastic time by very long chief-lists. There were chiefs (termed Fons), palaces, elaborate retainerdom, and male associations with political functions. These communities varied considerably in the degree ofcentralization ofpolitical powers, this degree tending to correlate inversely with population densities. The largest chiefdom, Barnum, had the lowest densities whereas groups such as the Meta or Moghamo on the western margins ofthe Bamenda Grassfields, described as acephalous, had the highest densities ofall. While patrilineal succession and virilocal marriage, large compound units with sons, brothers and their wives were predominant in the wider Grassfields, a large section of the Bamenda Grassfields practised matrilineal succession. Thus the Grassfields emerges as a region which can not easily be characterized as culturally, politically or socially homogeneous. When it comes to economic activity the diversity is even more striking. Whence then a distinctively Grassfields character given all this diversity? It is clear from early German written material and photographic records that the Germans were very much taken with the material culture of the region they called the Grasland. Geary ( 1988) presents some astonishing accounts of German collecting activity at the beginning of this century when it was very much a question of sending home booty in the form of masks, etc. in order to win a medal from the Kaiser. It is in these material realms, of domestic architecture, carved portals, masks,

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decorated cloth, ironware and beadwork that a distinctively Grasslands character of things, people and places emerges. The materials, objects, skills and ideas were the substance of an intense system of exchanges which served to negotiate status between individual descent group heads and between communities. Hence, in some senses no one is innately Grassfields so much as one becomes more or less Grassfields in character in relation to one's position in the regional structure ofexchanges and the opportunities this presents. What is particularly distinctive about this region is precisely this pattern ofeconomic specialization upon which participation in exchange networks was based. I must acknowledge my debt here to Warnier (1985) for the broader picture. He represents the pattern of economic specialization as a series of concentric rings. Working in from the periphery we have a surrounding belt of palm oil production, then an inner ring of cereal and agricultural production associated with entrepreneurial trading houses, and then a central zone characterized by production of high value low unit volume commodities, such as fine ceramic ware and wood carvings, woven caps and decorated raffia-work, and a very great deal of ironware. Physical factors, topographic, edaphic, and climatic, do not account for this regional specialization. We may, as Warnier does, adduce Ricardian notions of comparative cost advantage - we may point out the apparent ordering of production according to relative transportation costs - but there is no reason to expect that the conditions which brought this pattern of economic specialization into being should necessarily survive its continued existence. A very important element in this has to do with the means by which male seniors exercised control over access to women, prestige, ancestral favour and other mystical sources of power. In the chiefdoms of the northern Ndop plain, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was the case that not a single item of the necessary materials which a junior male required to attain social adulthood, such as fees for membership of recreational and political associations and marriage payments, were produced locally. These key items, comprising principally palm oil, salt, cowries, and camwood, were only obtainable through regional trade networks. These networks were only open to and closely guarded by senior males. In order for juniors to get anywhere it was necessary for them to contribute material and physical assistance to seniors in the specialized production of local commodities. The advantages to senior males in this scenario are very clear and it is important to note that this goes hand in hand with an extraordinary degree of economic control exercised by the secret male political associations linked to the palace and the chief (Warnier 1985).

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The chiefdom of Babungo exhibits all the elements of this picture. Political and economic powers were concentrated in the palace-linked male association, Tifwan. Access to the means ofproduction and regional trade was controlled by senior males. The economy was characterized by the specialized production of a single high value commodity, iron. In the early part of this century Babungo produced no significant volumes of palm oil although this substance was the key 'lubricant' of all social transactions including payment of bridewealth, for filiation rights, for sacrifices to the ancestors and spirits of the chiefdom, for payment for entry to and increase in rank in male associations. The chiefdom of Babungo produced both utilitarian and expressive ironware, similarly that ofBabessi produced domestic utilitarian ceramic ware as well as expressive fine ceramics for chiefs and notables, while that of Bamessing did the same for raffia-work, and immediately to the north those of Babanki and Oku were major centres for carving, and in the case ofthe latter for medicines, charms as well as some ironware. It is from these chiefdoms that the bulk ofGrassfields material culture derives or, at least, that bit of material culture, male-centred, which the Germans took to be characteristically Grassfields. Harter ( 1986) has argued, basing himself I believe on a misreading of Wamier ( 1985), that the specialization in the production of high value objects at the centre of the Grassfields is indicative of economic hardship and exigency; in the sense that since they had nothing else they were obliged to make fine art for sale in order to make ends meet. However, the chiefdoms of the northern Ndop plain were no less densely settled than individual settlements anywhere in the Grassfields apart from Fumban. They were fiercely independent both from each other and from their large and powerful neighbours, the Barnum. In their production of high value low unit volume items of material culture which incorporated powerful immaterial forces of transformation, as mentioned above, they were, given the nature oflocal cosmological ideas, extremely powerful. Chiefs engaged with other chiefs in more or less continuous exchanges which had dimensions of competition and alliance. A retainer of Fon Sangge ofBabungo recounted to me his experiences of carrying the Fon 's bag in the early years of this century. The bearers were not supposed to know what was carried in the bag, which had been sealed by the Fon, but it was always clear whether it was hoes, cloth or something else. He claimed he most frequently carried hunks of leopard meat. Bear in mind that leopards and chiefs are closely associated and that it is believed that a chief has the power to transform into a leopard, amongst other beasts, and to go and ravage the chiefdom of his enemies. It was every able-

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bodied man's duty to kill a leopard ifhe came upon one, as it was believed to be a transformed foreign chief on the rampage. Accordingly when Sangge sent out leopard meat to his allies he sent them the corpses of his transformed enemies. This is the nature of competition here, it has little to do with population size or military strength. It is in this arena of competitive exchange that we should seek to understood the intense and specialized production of highly charged objects of material culture: the masks, the funerary sculpture, the fine ceramics and beadwork, etc. which make up that corpus ofso-called royal or palatine Grassfields art. In this light Fagg 's (1981) observation that the vitality of sculpture here might be related to the abundance of palm wine and palm oil proves to be not altogether fanciful. The bulk of goods against which the high value products of the central Grassfields were exchanged was made up of palm oil produced on the periphery. In the case of Babungo production of ironware, the labours of all concerned were much alleviated by the voluminous flow of palm wine from the specialist wine tappers of the chiefdom. Palatine Arts and The Regalization of" Chief"taincy

The art of the Grassfields of Cameroon has been widely and repeatedly praised in the art-historical literature for its diversity, elaboration and creative vitality. An extraordinary variety of materials including wood, bronze, copper, iron, stone, clay, bone and ivory were exploited to produce an equally diverse range of objects including funerary statuary, door posts, decorated pots and pipes and stools characterized by a range of motifs incorporating figurative and abstract design. Some scholars such as Lem ( 1951) have attributed this to the influence of migration and cultural mix, others such as Harter ( 1986) have pointed to economic forces. Generally, however, art historians and collectors, such as Northern ( 1973) and Harter ( 1986) too, have characterized Grassfields sculpture and other material culture as royal art; hence volume titles such as Royal Art ofthe Cameroon (1973), Les Rois Sculptueurs (1993), etc. I would contend that notions of royal or courtly art, palace treasure houses, etc. reflect as much an on-going process ofregalization of chieftaincy as it does a categorical mismatch. In other words, at the same time that we are busy reporting local conditions in terms ofWestern categories the actors in these conditions are attempting to emulate the values ofthese very categories. There is a great deal of ethnographic literature that presents a timeless pre-colonial scenario ofFons as kings whether sacred,

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semi-sacred or simply sacral ruling over rigidly hierarchized societies divided into royals, commoners and slaves. There is an evolutionist program here too in that the highly centralized chiefdoms ofthe centre of the Grassfields are held to have developed out ofso-called acephalous type political formations which persist on its geographical margins. Harter, in his monumental work on Cameroon art (1986), presents the palace as an aesthetic environment that is unique to the Fon himself and that is in no way shared by even the highest of his notables. He accounts for this uniqueness in terms of the roles of the Fon as guardian of the social and cultural order, guarantor ofthe fecundity ofthe soil and women of the chiefdom, intercessor with royal ancestors, link between royal and commoner associations and diverse clans, holder of all secrets, etc. Now I am sure much of this is the case for many Grassfield chiefdoms. I am absolutely certain, however, that this is a perfectly true picture, albeit a composite one, ofFonship as represented by Fons to the outsider. Typically Harter (as have many of us who have spent time in the Grassfields) approached these communities, their culture and their art through the chief and palace. The consequences ofthis are twofold. Firstly, the chief, by virtue ofhis quasi-monopoly in dealings with foreign agents, is further set apart from everyone else (Gausset 1995); secondly, the view that the outsider gets is most definitely skewed by this imposed angle of vision. Peeping out from under the palatine blanket reveals a quite different and heterogenous world. In Babungo, for instance, it was Ba the head of the commoner regulatory association Tifwan, who dealt with dynastic ancestral rites. The Fon himself did not enter the grounds of the Tifwan association as ruler but only as a junior member of its most senior titleset. Tifwan itself was located in the so-called palace but was not of the palace as no so-called royal might enter it apart from the Fon (Fowler 1993). Much ofwhat would go to make up what Harter calls 'the aesthetic environment', the masks, dance and sacra, actually comes from Tifwan, the commoner association. Few of these things were unique to Tifwan, let alone the Fon. Accordingly, when Harter puts forward the idea that in the past not even the highest notable might have any of the things, of ivory, or bronze, or decorated with certain motifs or cowries, that were reserved to the Fon, he in fact represents a backwards projection of an ideal ofFonship as held by Fons, i.e. of what it should be. I have a little physical evidence, in the form ofpotsherds collected from long abandoned slag heaps in Babungo, which indicates that the use of certain motifs on decorated ceramic work was not restricted in this way in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One reason why notions of a court-based art should have been seized

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upon so eagerly by visiting Europeans has to do with the fact that many chiefs set up carving workshops in the precincts oftheir so-called palaces. Hence the title of the posthumously published commentary on Harter's collection Les Rois Sculptures. This is a very good example ofthe way in which Western emphasis on the individual and individual skills and expertize in the production of high art only serves to obscure any understanding of a quite differently ordered universe, a universe where notions of individual agency and power although seeming to overlap Western notions ofindividuality and creation actually derive from a very different set of conditions. Hence, if Fons are frequently associated with fine wood-carving it has more to do with the great powers associated with age and seniority than with individual skills and artistic expertize. In my own fieldwork community ofBabungo the chief invited a reputed carver from another chiefdom to come and work in the palace. The chief then sent his sons to help and learn the craft. Presently the chief sits and supervises carving, directing this and that and giving the final finishing touches to the carvings themselves. I see important parallels here between the chief in this capacity and that of an older blacksmith who, no longer able or willing to do any heavy labour, sits and supervises the production of all the objects which are manufactured in the smithy. He then finishes them offwith small decorative touches, burning marks onto a knife handle or knocking indentations into a cutlass blade. This represents authorship and, finished in these ways, they are regarded as his products in much the same way that the act of scarification finishes or completes the person. Accordingly, when art historians seek to authenticate the relationship between producer and object and jump to the dichotomy between 'real' carver kings and those who 'don't hesitate to usurp the paternity of renowned works which were in fact made by artists placed under their protection', they very seriously miss the point. In a similar vein to Harter, Homer ( 1990) writes that at the tum of the century the creation of new art forms in the Grassfields was limited by political and economic circumstances which also promoted the rapid development of sumptuary laws. I consider that the imposition of these sumptuary laws, called Mbumi in Nso, may have had more to do with a crystallization of particular social identities/formations linked to the chieftaincy than with some set of political and economic circumstances for which there is little evidence. In this process the Fons were being set apart or setting themselves apart as a group with common attributes exclusive to them. What may previously have been more fluid and characterized by performance and negotiation became fixed and represented in terms of rigid hierarchies centred on ascribed status.

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Certainly my own researches in Babungo on material exchanges between chiefs in the first decades of this century indicate that these exchanges had as much to do with setting them apart as a group, a collectivity, a set of royals, as with determining their relative ranking. It seems plausible that this process intensifies in the proto-colonial and colonial periods. Being royal, in the sense of being different in kind, then emerges as a new concept of being. Hence, while this image is not false it is, historically and ethnographically, an error to project it backwards in time and to over-generalize it for the Grassfields. We need to be constantly wary of tendencies to level things out and of the consequent loss of heterogeneity in the face of efforts to generalize and typify Grassfields culture and society. A common pitfall is to mistake the ideal for the general and then project this on to the past which then in tum is used to account for the present. "'Tribe' and Regional Identity

As in much of West and Central Africa identity in the Grassfields is an outcome of extemality. In the 1840s and 1850s European chroniclers on the Atlantic coast such as Hutchinson, Clarke, and Baikie recorded that traders and slaves from this area were known as Mbudikum, or Mburikum, and had a reputation for energy and diligence and honesty in their dealings. It thus appears that, in their nineteenth-century diaspora, Grassfielders were perceived by others to be some kind of a collectivity. When the Germans arrived in the Grassfields in the late nineteenth century it was perceived as a region which could be distinguished from its neighbours on the basis ofdistinctive material culture, architecture and political forms. This is not to say that the region was culturally homogeneous but only that it was perceptibly different from both its southern forest neighbours and from northern groups ofthe Adamawa. Even this minimalist statement is problematic since the Germans, ofcourse, had their own preconceptions about the nature ofcoastal groups, forest peoples, and those beyond, which significantly influenced where they went, what they 'saw' and what actions they undertook. Identity in the Grassfields was, prior to the imposition of colonial rule, very firmly located in place, in language and in notions to do with dynastic time and ancestral beneficence. The exigencies ofcolonial administration required the effective parcelling up of areas of administration, to bond like with like. It is at this point that 'tribal' groupings begin to emerge in association with claims to dynastic origins and the process, in parallel, of the regalization of chieftaincy in the region.

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I have a deep suspicion that the kinds of questions put by agents ofthe colonial regime really had not been asked or considered before. They indirectly brought into existence novel ideas about identity, time and place that both referred back to a fictive past and held up a mirror reflecting the present moment and circumstances in which the questions were put. In other words bounded units ofpersons (groups, princes or whatever) came bravely from elsewhere to be masters of where they are today, in just the same way as had the newly arrived Europeans (explorers and administrators) asking these very questions. Hence, it is not at all surprising that common claims to dynastic origins cross-cut willy-nilly internal Grassfield linguistic groupings and bear no significant relationship with languages present in those areas from which origins are claimed. Yet claims to diverse origins in the composition of the general population of individual chiefdoms do have very real expression in terms of multilingualism, trade, exchange and marriage relations with chiefdoms of origin. It appears that actual relations in the composition oflocal groupings are taken as models and projected outwards in an areal fashion onto regional groupings and contiguous co-regions of claimed origin. In other words what is real at the local level ofthe chiefdom is used as a template for claimed common dynastic origins to create broader groupings. Art: History and t:he so-called "Bamenda-Tikar'

Whether real or imagined, such claims to common dynastic origin have been picked up quite uncritically by art-historians such as Northern (1973) and raised up to the level of tribal groupings into which local forms and styles of material culture can be bound up for archival and expositional purposes. ·In some ways this is an advance over the earlier efforts of collectors and documenters oflocal material culture who often erroneously conflated point of acquisition with provenance. A good example of this is the chiefdom ofBali-Nyonga which was the initial base for the introduction of the German colonial project into the region. It had no indigenous longstanding practice of wood-carving at all but there were a great deal of carvings. In fact there were probably a great many valuable objects around because this chiefdom was a major nodal point in the political economy ofthe region. The avarice ofthe first Germans for high quality art and crafts is well-attested in the literature. They bought it up and shipped it back to Europe as examples of Bali art which it most certainly was not. But, as in many such cases, the erroneous

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bases of such notions are largely irrelevant since they are no less real for being objectively wrong. And, indeed, the Bali chiefrose to the occasion and invited a Bamileke group, the Bati, renowned for carving skills to come and settle and work in Bali and there was briefly a florescence of carving. Interestingly, this seems to coincide with a decline in the fortunes of Bali in the region. Eventually the Bati left to settle elsewhere and at a later point carving workshops were set up in Bali by mission efforts. The material upon which Bali's earlier false reputation as a centre of artistic excellence was based came largely from the central zone of the Grassfields, from Korn, both Big and Small Babankis, Oku and the Ndop plain. By the time Northern came on the scene in the 1970s these real centres ofproduction had long since (Ankermann 1910) been recognized as such. What Northern did was to tribalize these groups as the so-called Bamenda-Tikar. Now, she has been to the area and it is true that some local cognoscenti (Musa 1988) who have read the literature may well articulate such claims. But any such claim can really only be based on the most superficial and uncritical reading of the existing literature. In fact the Bamenda part of this nomenclature derives from a very small chiefdom, called Mandankwe, where the Germans built a fort and set up an administrative station around 1902. And from that time the region administered from here became known as Bamenda. The Tikar element of this curious tribal nomenclature reflects what I have outlined above regarding common dynastic claims to origins. In other words inclusion in this group does not follow linguistic lines, nor do the languages of the Grassfield chiefdoms claiming Tikar origins bear any meaningful relationship to that of the actual Tikar, a relatively small group living to the east of the Mbam. It is worth pointing out that the art of the Tikar is scarce and little known in relation to the arts ofthe Grassfield chiefdoms. It may be that we can read these origin claims in two ways. Firstly, these claims only appear in the administrative record in the 1920s, in the historical context of a new (British) colonial regime seeking to establish some form ofeffective administration. Hence, this may constitute a specific form ofrepresentation to that nascent colonial administration by individual communities as associational groups of relatively equal value. However, there is a wider context, that of the partition of the former colony of Kamerun. And, just as in post-Yalta Europe, the political debate did not cease with partition. The Tikar lie to the east in the francophone section and, hence, claims to Tikar origins may reflect a desire to reject incorporation into Nigeria. There may, ofcourse, be a material base upon which such claims have been elaborated. Barnum, the largest of Grassfield chiefdoms and one of

Tribal and Palatine Arts: Cameroon Grassfields

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those which claims dynastic links with the Tikar, does indeed border the Tikar area with which it presently maintains some ritual ties. Geary ( 1988) recounts Barnum traditions that up until the reign ofan early Barnum chief the material symbols of the chieftaincy, especially the double-gongs and other iron sacra, came from the east, from the Tikar rather than from the Ndop Plain at the centre of the Grassfields which became the source of these items in more recent times. So in one sense art, in the form of powerful objects of material culture, may well come almost to 'transmit' or confer identity independent ofthe movement ofpeoples. However, the ritual ties between the Tikar and the Barnum may only be relatively recent and may represent an element in the positioning of Barnum within the emerging political economy ofthe nascent colonial state. This orientation towards eastern and northern elements of the francophone colonial state certainly persists today in the stark disengagement of the Barnum from the Anglophone-Bamileke alliance and similar political expressions of disenchantment from the francophone centre at Yaounde, the national capital. Ident:ify and Incorporat:ion in t:he Post:colonial St:at:e

The study of non-Western art is, of course, a component of Western cultural discourse. However, its consumption is not restricted to Westerners interested in art history or museological studies. Our endeavours, or more precisely others' samplings and interpretations of them, may be a significant resource for the remaking of society. The local may recapture some of 'itself' back from the global and reincorporate this captured element in the redefinition of identity. In other words, modem elites may reappropriate certain notions and categorizations of African art and material culture from our own domains of Western cultural discourse for their own purposes. In one dramatic instance it was an actual object which was recaptured. The Afo-a-Kom, a chiefly ancestral figure from the chiefdom of Korn in the western anglophone section of Cameroon, has, so far, gone through a threefold process of creation. Firstly, it was locally created as an object of expressive funerary sculpture used in chiefly ceremony and rites. A second process of creation occurred when it was appropriated ( some say stolen) and later reappeared as a work of African art in a major Madison Avenue art gallery in 1973. Its third creation was as an object of globallocal contention when a media furore arose over it leading to its return to Korn in 1974. In Korn eyes the return of the statue to its point of origin

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Contesting Art

The Afo-a-Kom in front of the Ngumba (regulatory association) building within the royal palace at Laikom (c. 1958. Photograph and copyright: Gilbert Schneider) represented an inversion of the local over the global. It was the local in the form of the power ofKom, its chief, the Fon, and its mystical agen