Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art: Number 40, 2017

Citation preview

JOURNAL OF

CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART Okwui Enwezor, Salah M. Hassan, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, editors

Nka contributes to the intellectual dialogue on world art by publishing critical work in the developing field of contemporary African and African Diaspora art. The journal features scholarly articles, reviews of exhibitions, book and film reviews, and roundtables.

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dukeupress.edu/nka 888.651.0122 @DukePress DukeUniversityPress

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FROM THE EDITOR

Chika Okeke-Agulu

JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART

FOUNDED 1994

FOUNDING PUBLISHER Okwui Enwezor EDITORS Okwui Enwezor Salah M. Hassan Chika Okeke-Agulu

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ASSOCIATE EDITORS Sarah Adams • Carl Hazelwood • Nancy Hynes Derek Conrad Murray • Sunanda Sanyal CONSULTING EDITORS Rory Bester • Isolde Brielmaier • Coco Fusco Kendell Geers • Michael Godby • Elizabeth Harney Thomas Mulcaire • O. Donald Odita • Gilane Tawadros Frank Ugiomoh MANAGING EDITOR Clare Ulrich

KIND OF MILES

THE MANY MOODS OF STUART HALL Grant Farred

CONTENTS N U M BER 4 0 , 2 0 1 7

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GRAPHIC DESIGN Mo Viele ADVISORY BOARD Norbert Aas • Florence Alexis • Rashid Diab Manthia Diawara • Elsabet Giorgis • Freida High dele jegede • Kellie Jones • Sandra Klopper David Koloane • Bongi Dhlomo Mautloa Gerardo Mosquera • Helen Evans Ramsaran Ibrahim El Salahi • Janet Stanley • Obiora Udechukwu Gavin Younge • Octavio Zaya

STUART MCPHAIL HALL

IN MEMORIAM (1932–2014) Grant Farred

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ARS AND TECHNE

JACK WHITTEN RETROSPECTIVE Chanda Laine Carey

RAPTUROUS BODIES

A CONVERSATION WITH CAMILLE NORMENT Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo

Cover: Walter Oltmann, Razor Brush Disguise, 2014. Aluminum wire, 38.6 x 33.5 x 23.6 in. Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo: Anthea Pokroy

Nka wishes to acknowledge support for the publication of the journal through generous grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, The Hague, Netherlands, and David Hammons. Andy Warhol Foundation

Nka is published by Duke University Press on behalf of Nka Publications.

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JOURNAL OF UNCOLLECTABLE JOURNEYS

EDSON CHAGAS’S FOUND NOT TAKEN Ana Balona de Oliveira

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FASHIONING MODERNITY

DRESSING THE BODY IN ETHIOPIAN PORTRAITURE Julia Kim Werts

THE STORIES THAT NEED TO BE TOLD

REVIEWS

56TH VENICE BIENNALE Selene Wendt

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SHARJAH BIENNIAL 12 THE PAST THE PRESENT THE POSSIBLE Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi

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NEGOTIATING CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ARCHITECTURES

AT LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Kristen Windmuller-Luna

DISGUISE

MASKS AND GLOBAL AFRICAN ART

EN MAS’

CARNIVAL AND PERFORMANCE ART OF THE CARIBBEAN

YORUBA ART AND LANGUAGE

SEEKING THE AFRICAN IN AFRICAN ART

From the Editor MATTERS ARISING In Memory of Uche Okeke (1933–2016)

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recently lost several giants in the field, among them Stuart Hall, who is memorialized in two commissioned essays by Grant Farred in this issue, but we feel compelled to dedicate this issue’s editorial to another African giant and visionary modernist, Uche Okeke, who passed away on January 5, 2016, in Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria. In the Igbo tradition, the death of someone who had attained old age and who was accomplished in life and work is a moment of celebration—celebration of a successful, concluded journey on the earthly realm and an opportunity to reaffirm the ties that bind the imagined community, despite the loss of a member. Indeed, Okeke’s funeral on March 4, 2016, was one such celebratory event, attended by visitors from his hometown and from other parts of Nigeria and beyond—the whole affair supported by stakeholders in Nigerian art and culture. The national and state chapters of the Society of Nigerian Artists showed up in full force, as did high-powered representatives from the Federal Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Because Okeke later in life had become somewhat of a legend, rarely seen, and had gained a reputation as one of the most influential modern African artists of the twentieth century, his funeral was, in the Igbo and African world, as it should be. But how to ensure his lasting legacy? Okeke, whom I met for the first time in 1992 when I organized his retrospective exhibition, was one among an extraordinary generation of Nigerian and African artists who joined their compatriots in working toward and bearing witness to the remarkable period of decolonization of the continent that effectively began with the end of the Second World War. It was this generation that more or less established the grounds, through individual and collective work, for what Frantz Fanon described in 1958 as postcolonial “national culture,” and the 4 • Nka

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institutions and platforms that became laboratories of new, modernist, and eventually contemporary African art. Also in 1958, Okeke—then a first-year art student at the Nigerian College of Art, Science, and Technology, Zaria—established his Cultural Centre in a room provided by his mother in their family compound in Kafanchan, Plateau State. This center began as a small collection of artifacts and craft objects he acquired during his travels in different parts of Nigeria as well as works of art by his friends. In 1963 the center moved to Enugu, the capital of Eastern Nigeria, and then to Nimo as the Asele Institute at the onset Nigeria’s political crisis that eventually led to the Biafran War (1967–70). Though practically moribund today, the Asele Institute remains one of the most important repositories of primary documents, artifacts, and midtwentieth-century Nigerian art within the country. Besides setting up the Asele Institute, Okeke’s work as the head of the art program at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, at various times between 1971 and 1985, was equally remarkable. As an accomplished poet, painter, scholar, and folklorist, he firmly believed that indigenous art and design had a lot to contribute to the development of progressive work in the field of modern and contemporary Nigerian/African art. He thus inaugurated a new curriculum that would, within a decade, transform the program into one of the most influential and best-known art schools in postcolonial Africa. There is perhaps a connection between Okeke’s institution building—at Nsukka and Nimo—and the decline of his output as an artist after 1965, but that’s a matter for future research. What is indisputable is that the work from just his first decade of practice—from his folk-fantastic drawings based on Igbo tales (1958) to his groundbreaking Oja Suite and Munich Suite drawings inspired by his research into Igbo Uli wall painting and body drawing (1962–63) to his powerful canvases of 1965—guaranteed his place as a foremost postcolonial modernist in the class of his contemporaries such as Ibrahim El Salahi, Demas Nwoko, Farid Belkahia, Gazbia Sirry, Skunder Boghossian, Papa Ibra Tall, Kamala Ishaq, Malangatana Ngwenya, Elimo Njau, and others. Okeke’s two lifelong colleagues, Demas Nwoko and Bruce Onobrakpeya, who with him founded the now legendary Art Society while in art school at

Zaria, also established important art institutions: in the late 1960s, Nwoko designed and built his multipurpose New Culture Studios at Ibadan to include a drama theater as well as artists’ studios and residency apartments. In the late 1990s, Onobrakpeya established the Bruce Onobrakpeya Foundation in his hometown of Agbarha-Otor in the Niger Delta, with its signal program being the annual Harmattan Workshops for professional and amateur artists from across Nigeria. Uche Okeke’s death, however, compels us to ponder the fate of ambitious, visionary projects like the Asele Institute, which was set up by individual artists from a generation that so much believed in their ability to catalyze advanced national culture in the era of political independence. It is my fervent hope that, in collaboration with the artists and their estates, relevant government agencies and nongovernmental bodies will draw up immediate and long-term plans to support, sustain, and expand the work of these institutional projects. This is the only way to fulfill Okeke’s vision and that of others like him, who belong to the age of Nigerian and African independence. Chika Okeke-Agulu

From the Editor

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STUART MCPHAIL HALL In Memoriam (1932–2014) Grant Farred

Courtesy the artist and Stuart Hall Foundation. Photo: Dharmachari Mahasiddhi

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t is difficult to take the measure of a life, to understand how an individual’s passing affects those with whom he or she came into contact. It is especially difficult to measure a life such as Stuart Hall’s because of the many ways in which his work influenced several generations of intellectuals—anticolonials, postcolonials, postwar leftists impatient with the orthodoxies of the Old Left, newly emerging cultural studies scholars, and, by no means least, immigrants recently arrived in the European metropolises from far-flung outposts in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Born in colonial Kingston, Jamaica, Hall graduated from elite Jamaica College, whose alumni included the future Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley. After winning a Rhodes Scholarship, Hall left Jamaica in 1951 to read for a degree in English at Merton College, Oxford University. Although Hall’s work would have a significant impact on the ways in which universities were radically reorganized from the 1960s on, he took the decision to abandon his doctoral work in 1956 in order to immerse himself in the construction of the New Left. A response to the three political crises of 1956—the Soviet invasion of Hungary; Nikita Krushchev’s public denunciation of Stalin’s atrocities; and the Suez Crisis, originating in GamelAbdel Nasser’s decision to nationalize the canal, to which the British, French, and Israeli governments responded with the threat of military intervention—the New Left sought to reconceive politics in its entirety. Alongside figures such as Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, Hall was instrumental in creating a mode of thinking about politics that was distinctly different from what would become known in its decline as the Old Left, particularly those leftists who remained in the thrall of various European communist parties. Out of this period of political ferment Hall established himself as a leading intellectual. He was the inaugural editor of the extant journal the New Left Review, and together with Williams, Thompson, and Richard Hoggart, Hall became one of the enduring voices of the cultural studies project. In 1969 Hall succeeded Hoggart, the first director of the Centre

for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the English Midlands, a position he would hold for the next decade. Out of this intellectual formation emerged generations of scholars who would, each in their own way across continents, leave a mark on cultural studies: Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Pratibha Parma, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, and Michael Denning, to name only a few. After he left CCCS in 1979 Hall went on to teach in another pathbreaking project, the Open University, an institution established to make tertiary education available to those sectors of the British population historically excluded because of class, race, or gender. Hall would remain at the Open University until his retirement from the institution in 1997. It was during his tenure at the Open University that Hall developed his critiques of the British left, especially the Labour Party, and using the work of Antonio Gramsci, he was among the first political theorists to recognize and understand the political danger incarnated by the “authoritarian populism” of Margaret Thatcher and, no less so, Ronald Reagan. With the increasing dissemination of Hall’s work the influence of cultural studies and the politics it advocated and advanced gained favor in universities, political organizations, and a range of civic institutions. However, Hall’s most important contribution to the work of politics—and cultural studies, the study of race and racism, media studies, the study of sexuality—was his commitment to thinking— rethinking—the very presumptions of his own positions. That he maintained such a commitment over a lifetime is perhaps the distinguishing mark of his work. Little wonder, then, that several generations, in the wake of his passing, find themselves taking his measure, each in their own way, each with the sense that his oeuvre bequeathed a different salience to them. In taking the measure of Stuart Hall, all those who learned from him, who sought to work in his spirit, are compelled to take their own measure. Grant Farred is a professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University.

Farred

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KIND OF MILES The Many Moods of STUART HALL

Grant Farred

Courtesy the artist and Stuart Hall Foundation. Photo: Dharmachari Mahasiddhi

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line from John Akomfrah’s documentary The Stuart Hall Project has stayed with me, in no small measure because it has always struck me as discordant, this analogy that Stuart Hall makes between his life and that of Miles Davis. At first glance there appears to be little that Hall and Davis share, at least in terms of temperament. Miles Davis is unquestionably possessed of an artist’s sensibility, given to exuberance—a musical genius presenting his talents to the world, sans apology. Hall, on the other, is a study in charm and modesty, qualities that did little to disguise his fierce, if sometimes impish, intelligence, an intellectual whose acumen spanned a range of fields. And he was, of course, unyielding in his political commitment. The difference in what I am naming, perhaps improperly, “temperament” is arguably where the divergence in regard to their approach to their work both begins and ends. This discomfiture of mine can be shown to be at once superficial—it is but a single layer deep, if that—and, more important, revealing, because it compels me to address this line, to mine it, to understand why it troubles me, to consider what it means for an artist such as Miles Davis to put his “finger on the soul” of a thinker such as Stuart Hall. As one of jazz’s great innovators and relentless experimenters; as one of its most restless and careful students; as perhaps its greatest risk taker in terms of his willingness not only to break, but also sometimes ruthlessly to destroy conventions, it could be said that Miles Davis was a musician always in search of the next difficulty. A difficulty that he sought out with that inimitable cool, in the way that only Miles Davis could. Cool, we can say without hesitation, was born with Miles. Whatever Miles did, whatever the direction in which he took jazz, he did so in an inimitably Miles fashion. Just consider the many iterations of jazz, the many interpretations, the many innovations that issued from Miles. The many moods of Miles Davis. Just consider . . . In the bebop years there was ’Round About Midnight (1957), his first recording with saxophonist John Coltrane, Paul Chambers on bass. There were those signal jazz recordings, Sketches of Spain (1960) and Milestones (1958), but none of these albums matched the magnificence of Kind of Blue (1959), with Bill Evans on piano. Kind of Blue is

for many jazz aficionados the greatest jazz LP ever. Kind of Blue also gave birth to what is sometimes known as “modal jazz,” a form of jazz in which the harmonic framework is formed by musical modes rather than chord progressions. In the 1950s, instead of giving preference to chord progressions, musicians began to write their music using modal scales. These jazz greats included Davis, the pianists Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Some of the key pieces of modal music include Davis’s Milestones, in particular “Flamenco Sketches”; Shorter’s “Footprints”; and John Coltrane’s Impressions, as well as Kind of Blue.1 Ever prepared to think his music again, Miles was key to the post-bebop era, and his influence provided opportunities for a new generation of jazz artists, including Hancock, no slouch at cool and experimentation himself; bassist Ron Carter; and Shorter. Out of this iteration of Miles emerged albums such as E.S.P. (1965) and Miles Smiles (1967). All this, needless to say, was preparation for the next phase in the 1960s, his “electric period.” At the very moment Miles was transitioning from one mode to another, an LP featuring his fellow innovators Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane was released. Recorded between April and July of 1957, Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane is marked by a combination of haunting beauty and a clarity that seems to emerge from an unfathomable depth. This LP celebrates an empathy of disposition between Monk’s piano and Coltrane’s tenor sax. In truth, the album represents a certain anachronism, because by the time the LP was released in 1961, Coltrane was a band leader in his own right. The LP itself, however, featured appearances by Coleman Hawkins (tenor) and Art Blakey (drums). The percussive work on “Ruby, My Dear,” by turns subtle and even more subtle, is a thing to behold in itself. No matter the achievements of his contemporaries, notable and beautiful as they are, Miles was charting his own path, setting himself the task of ever greater innovation. His recordings of the 1950s and ’60s was followed by even more experimentation in the 1970s. During this period, Miles was working in genres that ranged from fusion to funk, from African rhythms to electric music technology. Whatever fascinations had compelled Art Farred

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Stuart McPhail Hall. Photo: Donald Maclellan. Opposite page, Miles Davis with Trumpet. Photo: Aaron Rapoport

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Farred

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Blakey and the Jazz Messengers to record “A Night in Tunisia” in 1957, Miles sought his own inspirations.2 He was, as always, intent on his leaving his mark in his own way. As always, as always, pushing himself and music itself. In no way can Miles Davis’s influence be restricted to jazz any more than Prince’s can be labeled “pop” or Bob Dylan’s be filed under blues or folk rock. And yet like Prince, Dylan, Elvis, Michael Jackson, or Bruce Springsteen, no matter what he was trying to do, no matter how hard he pushed at the boundaries he perceived, Miles always sounded distinctly like Miles. There could be no mistaking him, even if the experiment did not quite work. For Miles Davis it was always about the next conceptual challenge, the one he alone seemed able to identify and confront.3 This talent enabled him to see his work as a musician anew, to imagine new ways to make—or break, and then remake—jazz. In the process of making jazz new again, in perfecting, honing, seeking a new iteration of his voice, what is equally audible are the ways in which the sound of a Coltrane, an Evans, or a Hancock is grafted onto Miles’s distinct tone, thereby enriching, complicating his ability to sound like no one but himself while giving the likes of a Gil Evans, who worked with him on Sketches of Spain, or a Shorter their proper due. Singularity and the collaborative are not the only features that mark Miles’s work, but they can never be overlooked. The distinctness of Miles Davis’s voice resides in part in his ability to draw in others—“sidemen” like Coltrane or Shorter, who had their own particular sound—and in the very strength of that voice. Miles easily overwhelmed lesser musicians, either those who were unsure of their own sound or those who simply lacked the technical facility or ingenuity to stay with him. As was the case with Oscar Peterson (a pianist with an incredibly beautiful touch, to which albums such as Oscar Peterson and the Trumpet Kings—Jousts and Nigerian Marketplace bear ample testament), Miles had little time for those whom he perceived to be doing something other than just jazz with jazz music, or, as he believed to be true of Peterson, had no real “feel” for jazz or the blues. As Miles so famously put it, “Oscar makes me sick because he copies everybody. He even had to learn how to play the blues. Everybody knows that if you 12 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

flat a third, you’re going to get that blues sound. He learned that and runs it into the ground worse than Billy Taylor. You don’t have to do that.”4 To take liberty with Miles’s critique, doesn’t everyone, not just Oscar Peterson, have to “learn how to play the blues”? Even Miles? What about Elvis’s rendering of the blues? Or Dylan’s? Or James Brown’s? At issue for Miles, one suspects, is an essentialist supposition. It is not just that true jazz artists know how to play the blues; it is more like they’re simply “born with” the blues. Peterson is thus disqualified not by nationality—the pianist is Canadian by birth—but by racial sensibility. The issue for Miles is authenticity: that is, the ability to play jazz or the blues derives from a relationship to race and blackness that is beyond question. Miles did, however, grudgingly give Peterson some credit for his work with the bassist Ray Brown, a kudo that must then, at whatever remove, acknowledge the quite splendid Trumpet Kings, which features trumpeters Harry Edison, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Clark Terry, and Jon Faddis. Trumpet Kings is worth way more than a listen, in no small measure because of the ways in which Peterson, with Ray Brown on bass, is able to draw out, establish a rapport with, and extend the range of the various trumpeters, distinctly in every case. At the core of the album is the kind of collaboration, risk taking, and testing of the boundaries of the play, of the interplay between Peterson and his colleagues, which is, of course, a hallmark of Miles Davis’s career. Stuart and Miles The commitment to the collaborative political project is similarly at the core of Stuart Hall’s life as an intellectual. Hall sought in his politics and in his theorizing (the two are not distinct) to find and conceive, sometimes from the ground up, sometimes by aligning himself with other thinkers (Marx, Gramsci, among others), the work of politics, the work of crafting a sustainable left project. In this regard Hall possessed at least one (more, no doubt, but for this point one will suffice) great gift: he not only knew his own intellectual voice—that is, his timbre, tenor, tone, his very distinct vocabulary as a political thinker, as that figure for whom politics, justice, culture, economic prospect, ideological

imagination was the overriding concern—but he also knew how to meld the voices of his collaborators into his own. In this regard Hall’s work with Paddy Whannel (The Popular Arts) and Martin Jacques (some of the essays in The Hard Road to Renewal are coauthored) stands out without achieving the collective spirit of Policing the Crisis.5 As invested in the collaborative project as Hall was, that commitment, it must said emphatically, could not in any way diminish the utter recognizability—the pure force—of his voice. One knew when one was listening to Stuart Hall. Reading or listening to Stuart Hall taught one what Stuart Hall sounded like. It is not that Hall repeated himself. It is, rather, that his voice possessed a singularity. Critiquing Thatcher’s policies, taking the measure of cultural studies, reflecting on the state of race politics in Britain, it was always possible to identify his intervention; one always knew that it was Stuart Hall who was speaking. In listening to Hall, however, one is made privy to his own engagement with thinkers. Such a list of influences, if that is the correct term, would include Antonio Gramsci (Prison Notebooks was an important text for Hall), Karl Marx (and the Marxists who, like Hall, sought to fit Marx for the demands of their conjunctures), and Michel Foucault.6 Hall’s voice is in this way a pedagogical political weapon and the instrument of intellectual instruction because of the ways in which he registered how his thought was shaped in and through conversation with others. In turn, the generosity and resonance of Hall’s voice reminds us of how his work shaped the political outlook and intellectual trajectories of several generations of thinkers who came after him. It is because of his ability to forge new intellectual and political formations in such a singular way that his voice retains its distinctness. Little wonder that one hears, without mistake, Stuart Hall: his voice as a thinker, his voice thinking. More than anything this is what Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project accomplishes: it is the vehicle that allows Stuart Hall to speak to us. But it would be remiss not to mention how Akomfrah’s documentary lends Hall’s voice a new timbre, unexpected resonances; it also reminds us of how his most serious interventions were so deliberate, so considered, so full of risk, and yet always at their very edge they

do not disguise, they cannot suppress, his smile. Stuart Hall, the Stuart Hall John Akomfrah has given us the opportunity to see again, seemed eminently capable of enjoying politics. Let us pause for a moment to appreciate this. Upon reflection, there might be few things cooler than that. Stuart Hall seemed to know all along that not only did Miles Davis “put his finger on [Hall’s] soul,” theirs were souls bonded in the politics of cool. Coffee, 1993: The European Café, Tottenham Court Road In July 1993, I arranged to meet Stuart Hall at the European Café in the Tottenham Court Road Tube station in London. It was a conversation that would last almost three hours. In the course of that conversation Hall revealed many aspects of his work. He sketched for me more clearly the trajectory that had led him from Jamaica to Britain. He gave an assessment, now with the benefit of some historical hindsight, of the future of the cultural studies project. And he reflected on the politics of the conjuncture (the policies of Tony Blair’s Labour Party, how Bill Clinton’s presidency might unfold, his concern about a post-apartheid South Africa). By far the most surprising revelation was the fact that he had, during his time as a student at Oxford University, played in a jazz band. If memory serves (and it may only be that my listening to “A Night in Tunisia” during the writing of this essay has provoked this “instrumental affinity”) Hall identified himself as a jazz pianist. To add to this revelation, he told me that one of his bandmates was a Jamaican bus driver in Oxford. This musicianby-night, Hall remarked ruefully some forty years after the fact, was entirely unknown to Hall, the Oxford student, other than when they played together. His clear recollection of the bus driver’s musicianship and his own remove, by class, by dint of education (Hall, the Rhodes scholar from elite Jamaica College in Kingston), evinced a recognition of his double alienation. Hall could never belong fully to Britain, as he acknowledged many times in the course of his life, in no small part because of his race and ethnicity, no matter that he was groomed in the best colonial traditions in both the West Indies and the metropolis. Neither did he have, at least in those early days in Oxford, a geopolitical Farred

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constituency where he could find the company of like-minded colonials—black intellectuals of all stripes with whom he could engage, into whose lives he could immerse himself, where it might be possible to find his political and cultural footing as a colonial abroad. It would take decades for Hall to find, indeed to help construct and consolidate, such a community for himself, for those already there regardless of their class position or their level of educational accomplishment, or for those who were either newly arrived or yet to set foot on Britain’s postcolonial shores. It is for this reason that, in thinking again about the significance Hall assigns Miles Davis, the memory of that unknown, unnamed Jamaican bus driver returns. Hall, the jazz man, and his black jazz colleague return, are returned to us, to me, in and because of Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project. To phrase the matter somewhat baldly and, as such, badly: If Miles Davis did indeed touch Stuart Hall’s soul, then it must in part have had something to do with Hall’s struggle to find a place for himself in the metropolis, with the phantasm of that bus driver/jazz musician and the ways in which all of these conceptual, political, and existential difficulties cohered in the figure of Miles Davis. A Medley for Stuart Miles Davis, we could say of the relation Hall claims to him and the role he assigns him, not only “touched” Hall’s soul, but the music and its many moods, its vagaries, its experimentations provided a lodestar, a touchstone, and a balm for that selfsame Jamaican soul. If such a speculation might be permitted, Miles Davis provided, at the very least, jazz as a musical genre, as a mode of being deeply inflected by race, as a means of delivering solace, succor, and sustenance for two black souls. Now, in retrospect, one wonders if Hall’s band, I think he said it was a quartet, played much Miles? If so, what was Hall’s favorite? If not, what did they play? Blakey? Coltrane? Monk? (Surely not Oscar Peterson, one mischievously suggests.) To what jazz were Hall and his bandmates listening; to whom was Hall listening by himself in his Oxford room? Did the place Hall assigns Miles Davis only come into focus later on in his conversation with Akomfrah, or was it, as one suspects, a love that lasted a lifetime? 14 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

There is no symmetry, perfect or imperfect, between Miles Davis’s music and Stuart Hall’s work, nor should there be. What does emerge through John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project is a glimpse—partial, contingent, almost incidental yet not—into the soulfulness of Stuart Hall’s thinking. Hall’s acknowledgment of Miles Davis is also a recognition of how one mode of being, being black, calls to and makes life possible, under sometimes trying conditions, to another: how one black creative force hails, draws upon, depends upon, is in vital need of another. There is nothing didactic about this relationship, but The Stuart Hall Project allows us to understand how the various cultures of black life sustain each other under difficult circumstances—often without recognition, often in the most unexpected ways. Stuart Hall is careful to say “Miles Davis put his finger on my soul.” It is an affective, political gesture of the most delicate, almost intimate, order. To touch the spirit, to get at the core of a philosophical concept, to name the allure of a troublesome yet deeply influential thinker, to be touched by this spirit is to know firsthand, to experience the gift, if only for a moment. Something, something of value, something that can make possible and then sustain a life is being offered. As in an opening gambit, Akomfrah draws us into Stuart Hall’s life through Miles Davis’s discography, establishing a conversation between two phenomenal spirits in the history of black life, two resplendent, magisterial souls. We are invited to access Hall, not only through his work, his writings, public appearances, and colleagues and comrades, which sometimes are indistinguishable from the other, but through the portal of a radical jazz figure. As such, Stuart Hall makes himself unfamiliar, if only for the shortest moment, and in so doing he compels us to think of him on other terms, on deeply intimate, heartfelt, soulful terms. Is it now possible, one wonders, to “hear”—that is, to read, think, apprehend, struggle with—Stuart Hall’s work in other, more soulful registers? In a language that can bear the imprint of those many moods, those many modes of being, of making music, of remaining aggressively (true to) himself, in which, through which, Miles Davis registered his impact upon the world?

Such an audible experience of Hall’s work may or may not be possible. At the very least we can now say, with all the authority of the soul, that we have at last (much as we never expected to have such a need) a soundtrack for the work of Stuart Hall. A soundtrack, moreover, that he claimed as his from (almost) the very beginning of his intellectual life. Maybe, just maybe, in turn, it may now be possible to hear, to listen to, to approach, the oeuvre of Miles Davis in a different light. It might now be possible to recognize that the cadences, the riffs, the pain, the utter joy, that manic tonality, that inexhaustible capacity for experimentation in, say, Kind of Blue or Sketches of Spain, or take your pick from that vast treasure trove that is Miles’s music, are audible in an entirely different, entirely unexpected medium. In light of such a recognition, one wishes that Miles might be around, might return just long enough to pay tribute to the soul of Stuart Hall. Since that is not possible, we will have to make, as John Akomfrah has done, a medley of Miles for Stuart. A Medley for Stuart—that has a ring to it. Of this we can be sure: a Miles medley is a medley like no other. It is filled with the deepest longing, the most enduring troubles, the most intensely experimental propensities that are so clearly etched in Miles Davis’s music. Similarly, Stuart Hall’s work has shown itself to be ceaselessly inventive, always in search of the conceptual answers to the political demands of the day, deft and subtle in its ability to address the difficulties of dislocation, deracination, and out-of-placeness that is the everyday lived reality of the diaspora, and marked by a profound commitment to unearthing the most resilient mode of being when confronted with the needs of our conjuncture. In this way, it is possible to say that the Hall oeuvre is a felicitous testament to the challenges presented by Miles Davis’s discography. What John Akomfrah documented was a soulful fraternity, a fraternity only in its incipiency. Through Miles Davis’s music one black soul, one creative black force, one black subject determined to make a life in a place that was never, could never fully be his, found another. Simultaneously, The Stuart Hall Project may be heard as the call for black life to listen to itself, to listen to itself in as many registers as possible.

“Miles Davis touched my soul.” In that iteration —or is it a confession, the recollection of a lifelong intimacy?—it is possible to hear Stuart Hall himself as we have never heard him before, to make acquaintance with a voice we thought we knew so well in a new, albeit posthumous, way. In the act of listening to that voice, that multitongued voice, what makes itself available is the possibility of glimpsing a heretofore unseen creative intimacy between two of the most gifted and soulful thinkers of the black condition. Grant Farred is a professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. Notes

This article is dedicated to my friend, Hugh Millar “Gus” Ferguson, for introducing me more than thirty years ago to jazz writing. I remain grateful to this day for the Nat Hentoff book. Thanks, once more, Gus. gf 1 Other musicians who contributed to modal jazz include McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, and Joe Henderson. There is also the John Coltrane quartet of 1960–64. Coltrane, in fact, may have explored the possibilities for modal jazz more extensively and intently than any other musician. 2 Blakey’s drum work on “A Night in Tunisia” can stand as the standard for drumming/percussion on a jazz album. Blakey’s ability to do so many things was remarked upon by Count Basie’s trumpeter, Joe Newman, in the liner notes of “A Night in Tunisia” (my emphasis): “If you’ve heard him play when he’s working, there are times when he does keep several rhythms going at one time— one with his sock cymbal, one with his foot pedal and each hand is doing something else.” 3 In his autobiography Born to Run (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), Bruce Springsteen talks about his need, almost unfailingly emerging out of a deeply autobiographical place, to address a different element of himself, to mark a different stage of his life with every LP. In this way Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1975) enabled him to address a particular element of his past—the experience of growing up in Freehold, New Jersey—while Tunnel of Love (1988) gives voice to a yearning for love, marriage, and family. Springsteen rejects, flatly and out of hand, the idea of a “concept” LP, and yet it often seems like this is precisely what he is attempting to do. Miles seems to almost aggressively want to chart his path, to map his trajectory with a new mode of jazz, by conducting a new kind of experiment, by, not to put too fine a point on it, testing his own capacity for making jazz, again, anew. 4 As quoted in https://ethaniverson.com/rhythm-and-blues /oscar-peterson-and-miles-davis/. Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and 5 Law and Order (1978; repr. London: Macmillan, 1993). 6 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971; repr. New York: International Publishers, 1989).

Farred

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ARS AND TECHNE

JACK WHITTEN Retrospective Chanda Laine Carey We the people are the tribe. We no longer accept provincial, nationalistic tribalism. Painting has become global; we live in a complex, and interconnected world. Our space is multidimensional, and our aspirations go beyond the personal autobiographical concerns of race, sex, politics and religion. —Jack Whitten, Artist’s Statement

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Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3885907 © 2017 by Nka Publications

J

ack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting was a retrospective of highly focused depth and breadth at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) from September 20, 2014 to January 4, 2015, curated by Kathryn Kanjo.1 Among the works selected for the exhibition, an emphasis on technology, process, and memorialization reflect Whitten’s strength as an innovator and chronicler of American memory and black culture. His exploration of geometry and scale approach the transmedial, dignifying the late works with a heft and substance that satisfy the mind and eye. Whitten’s painting practice is rooted in midcentury abstract expressionism—New York painting of august longevity. The retrospective skillfully argues a lasting commitment to consistent formal concerns and radical experimentation throughout the decades. Whitten’s exploration of abstraction ranges widely, with a focus on innovative processes that expand the early influence of gestural abstraction into a series of approaches to experimentation, yielding a diverse, yet coherent oeuvre. The materiality of Whitten’s painting asserts itself through his interest in tools and radical techniques, manipulating texture and color in a variety of carefully refined processes. These reflect the artist’s wide-ranging but focused concerns, including cosmology, transculturation, travel, and memorialization of personally and culturally important icons from arts, politics, and African American culture.

Jack Whitten, Flying High: Betty Carter, 1998. Acrylic on canvas, 106.5 x 84.3 in. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY. Photo: John Berens

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Apps for Obama, 2011. Acrylic on hollow core door, 84 x 91 in. Collection of Danny First, Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY

The works that opened the show reflect Whitten’s most recent innovation in process, tessellation, a brilliant turn on the classic modes of modernist painting composed of pigment, medium, and the support of the painting. The cut and composed pieces of tessellated acrylic create an effect much like mosaic but also evoke the pixelated format of digital images. Whitten’s turn on tessellation combines allusions to ancient and contemporary image-making techniques within a single medium. The artist 18 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

relies solely on the paint in a process he describes as “construct-deconstruct-reconstruct,” which defines his practice since the turn of the millennium. The work of tessellation engages sculptural and spatially oriented techniques upon the ground of the painting, asserting the power of painting to encompass all the plastic arts without an appeal to other mediums or naturalistic representation. Each fragment of tessellation is a painting in itself, selected for color and texture, which has traces of gestures cut into

geometric forms, most often in squares the artist has deconstructed from large panels of paint. In the foyer of the museum designed by Venturi, Scott, and Brown late works of large scale appear through a forest of pillars. The massive scale of the works and the sheer weight of the thick layers of paint are notable in multipaneled works such as Flying High: Betty Carter (1998) and Apps for Obama (2011). Amorphous masses of acrylic set in a maze of blue tessellations cross three hollow-core doors to distinguish Apps for Obama, which deftly integrates social and technological change with an appeal to the ubiquitous forms of the digital and the transformed political sphere. The artist’s small self-portrait was hung across the gallery, materializing a statement included in the opening text of the exhibition: “Any evidence of substance is the form. I am not an illustrator of ideas. I am the idea.” Emerging from a subtly textured, monolithic black background impressed with a small-scale grid, Self Portrait I (2014) is dominated by an oval form, evoking the image of a head from thickly textured acrylic swaths of metallic blue, turquoise, silver, and black, flecked with details in fluorescent orange and green. Of the artist’s late works his use of tessellated paint finds most organic form in the self-portrait. Loose, sculpturally expressive swirls of paint define the edges of the skull-like form. Emerging from darkness like some kind of new earth, stellar mass, or galactic body, the painting expresses the artist’s understanding of time in colors of deep space and terrestrial oceans vivified with Day-Glo satellites. I have not been interested in the Modernist concept of progression, the avant-garde notion of advancing time. My position has been closer to that of a cosmologist. In other words, we learn by going back in time. The life that we construct is a life that has been out there—we now know—for billions of years.2

Homecoming: For Miles (1992) also reflects Whitten’s view of cosmological time in black, gray, and white. The tessellated squares are set out in a strict grid. Whitten laid out the small squares in a composition reminiscent of galactic clouds. Globelike lines and circles of white spatter on black orient the viewer to the homecoming

that symbolizes the life of the jazz great. The great gig in the sky plays out against cosmic circles, latitudes, and longitudes crisscrossing a Cartesian grid—a home for Miles much larger than the Earth. Cosmological concerns also loom large in Black Monolith IV for Jacob Lawrence (2001), a subtly shaped work. Its slightly tapering top distorts the viewer’s sense of scale, which creates an impression of even greater height than its already monumental proportions that dwarf the body. The massive work and the Black Monolith series of paintings call to mind an inversion of the encounters with a monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.3 Whitten’s monolith for the painter Jacob Lawrence is a chromatic reversal of the film’s monolithic black menhir. Instead, a pale, granitelike amorphous form bordered in fluorescent orange stands beneath intimations of a black sky. Black tessellations in differing textures, touched with layers of transparent green or blue, suggest an atmosphere open to deep space. The black monolith, which is the background, seems solid enough to be the support itself. Memorials to friends and poets in the Black Arts Movement stand out as landmark achievements in the artist’s decades of development. Black Monolith V Full Circle: For LeRoi Jones A.K.A. Amiri Baraka (2014) suggests a sphere constructed of tessellated paint on matte-black ground. The full circle is composed of myriad textures of acrylic medium, some thickly white, then painted black on the surface. Others are clear or transparent, striated or glittering, strings and things of paint, merging from a black, gray, and white perimeter onto a center of shiny blacks and growths of green. Beneath a section of white, appearing like an arctic pole near the top of the circle, masses of acrylic medium rest like crumpled plastic bags, the detritus of an urbanized world; irregular seas of transparent medium form cloudlike masses. Different weights, textures, and thicknesses of cast and cut paint pulse on the surface, punctuated by small touches of warm and hot paint in yellows, orange, and magenta. Vibrant heat radiates from Nine Cosmic CDs: For the Firespitter (Jayne Cortez) (2013). Whitten’s painting results in a transformed sense of pigments he juxtaposes in many works, as firespitting becomes the appearance of intensely glowing, yet matte, vermilion-orange and muted black that undulate Carey

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Black Monolith V Full Circle: For LeRoi Jones A.K.A. Amiri Baraka, 2014. Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 63 in. Collection of Sheldon Inwentash and Lynn Factor, Toronto. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann

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with ultrasonic vibration in a pulled paint paean to cosmic fire that ripples with nearly hidden touches of green. Nine circles slightly larger than compact discs keep the cosmic rhythm, each in a different color, with rough and slightly irregular edges of white that rise from the waves of fiery paint, giving body and texture to the abstract index of compact discs, the object of digital recording. Three distinct bodies of work completed in the 1960s illuminate Whitten’s internal struggle as a black man in the civil rights movement and his emergence as an artist. In 1959 Whitten departed from his birthplace, Bessemer, Alabama, in the American South, leading to enrollment at Cooper Union in New York in 1960 and contact with the civil-rights-oriented African American artist’s group, Spiral. In MCASD’s Grant Parker Gallery, related works from the 1960s showed Whitten’s transition from Romare Bearden–influenced collage techniques into more austere experiments in color and process. These early works developed into a psychedelic explosion of expressionist gestures in the later years of the decade. Uniting the room was a theme of heads and faces emerging from tumultuous fields of color, as well as haunted grounds of black and white. The room foregrounded a chronology of civil and psychic unrest that defined the decade. The Blacks (1963) references a Jean Genet play of the same title and highlights the artist’s concern with issues of race and identity. Painted white masks cover collaged black faces, emulating Genet’s play and visually attesting to some of Frantz Fanon’s earliest influence on global visual arts. A simple palette of black and white highlights African ethnic identity clearly. The central figure has a broadly drawn nose and large bow of rose-colored lips. This largest face in the work is set in fields of black surrounded by white masks and a white void, creating contrasting fields of negative space that force the picture plane into multiple registers of representation. The black fields allude to an afro and suit, with two small masks below the mouth that give the impression of a tie, a look that finds a new presence in Harlem’s street fashion today. Psychic Eclipse (1964) is the largest of a suite of process-driven, small, black-and-white canvases of the same year, works that define the period after Whitten’s graduation from Cooper Union.

Profoundly concerned with the ghostly appearance of white and gray forms suspended in a layered black ground, Whitten developed a wet-on-wet process using two layers of canvas, the artist’s gestures pressing the white paint from between them. These small paintings represent a recurring interest: a restricted palette of black and white that Whitten engages over decades, with varying interest in accents and fields of pastel or pure color. Whitten’s gallerist deemed these early works unsalable at the time and did not exhibit them. Titles, including Head IV, Lynching, The Gray Void, and Christ, make explicit the issues and experiences central to a body of work that remains both formally and socially challenging in the contemporary moment. Created in the year following the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and brutal attacks on churches and civil rights marchers in Alabama, Whitten’s personal eclipse of the psyche is reflective of a dark moment of violence in the history of the nonviolent civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Whitten left the movement because he found it “too difficult to turn the other cheek.”4 This internal struggle manifested as a creative struggle, during which other artists and music sustained him.5 In 2007 the artist told Robert Storr about the crisis of the period:

The Blacks, 1963. Acrylic, collage with rice paper and newsprint on canvas, 32 x 31 in. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann

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Martin Luther King’s Garden, 1968. Oil on canvas, 51 5/8 x 41 1/2 in. Collection of Jeff and Leslie Fischer. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY. Photo: Mark Steele

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It wasn’t an intellectual situation, but rather, it was an emotional necessity. As a matter of fact, they’re my autobiographical paintings. I mean, I was going through a serious crisis in my life. But then everybody was. The whole race issue forced me to pick myself apart subconsciously until I met people like Leroi Jones, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence who had found other solutions for their creative lives.6

The memorial work Martin Luther King’s Garden (1968) resonates with the cultural and creative crises that define the era, imbued with a psychedelic urgency that pulses with vital dynamism born of disturbance. The plethora of gestures that create the works range from the representational to the calligraphic, expressing the urgent and explosive culture of the time. The tumult of the late 1960s is marked in strong, dark, and vibrant colors across three canvases that reflect Whitten’s long-standing interest in Willem de Kooning. Whitten sought to free himself of that burden of influence in the early 1970s.7 Faces emerge from Whitten’s gardens—King’s portrait. Other faces, bursts, and collapses of space and light on the canvas allow all sorts of material and emotional suggestions to surface and recede from the eye. Materialized emotion reached a flashpoint in New York Battleground (1967), a work informed by social unrest and the war in Vietnam.8 Large planes of color in cool blue and gray, as well as hot tints of red, yellow, and orange, ripple across the canvas. Punctuated by gestures that lie restlessly between the calligraphic and the pyrotechnic, a wash of red paint that drips like blood from the center completes the painting. Mesmerizing works of the mid-1970s occupied the largest gallery of the museum, reiterating continued and increasing interest in Whitten’s works of this period, the subject of a 1974 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a 2013 exhibition at Brandeis University’s Rose Museum of Art. Psychedelia and the drug culture opened Whitten to new experiences visible in Satori (1969), a painting inspired by a significant enlightenment experience. Satori reflects Whitten’s interest in the mind-expanding philosophy of Zen Buddhism and its concept of sudden enlightenment. The monumental square painting was the centerpiece of the largest gallery, as well as the largest painting in the exhibition, stylistically standing apart from the rest of

the works in the retrospective, churning with energy, presenting enlightenment experience as dynamic, yet stable. The painter presents a monument to both gestural and geometric abstraction on a grand scale. The spark of sudden enlightenment arises from the mists of a chaotic sea of churning forms on an altarlike geometric mass composed of perfectly rendered, hard-edged perspectival lines, resulting in a solid form of indeterminate scale. The composition focuses on a yellow flame of illumination, surrounded by haloes of red and pink. Streams of yellow paint trail off a huge central brushstroke with a quality of linear regularity and gestural freedom at the same time. A sense of landscape surrounds the altar, set in the midst of expressive gestures reminiscent of waves, hills, mountains, and stony outcroppings from which the light of spiritual freedom through spontaneous understanding emanates. Loose brushwork and flecks of white spatter create a feeling of stormy seas or breaking waves from which the flame signifying the peace of enlightenment emerges. Like the traditional symbolic image of enlightenment, Whitten’s giant spark rises like the lotus of purified higher consciousness that grows from the mud of worldly suffering and desires. Feeling the anxiety of abstract expressionist influence and throwing it off, Whitten took inspiration from De Kooning’s house paintbrushes and reprographic technology, which allowed him to reduce expressionist painting to a single gesture. Whitten’s continued focus on process blossomed in the context of an artist’s residency at Xerox Corporation, where xerographic processing allowed him to develop a new approach to gestural painting.9 Test works called “slabs” represent the artist’s emerging technique. The intriguing surfaces of the 1970s paintings give a sense of an absent touch in the mechanized gesture of the artist. Whitten expanded the scale of the brush to a pick and then to the invention of a painting tool the artist has called a “processor” or “developer.” Untitled (1970) is an astoundingly complex composition, developed from early test efforts composed of complementary colors, which was produced by striating paint with a carpenter’s saw. The subtle movement of the artist’s hand introduces a tight wave to the lines that appear perfectly straight from a distance. This choice resulted in an opportunity for more distinctive formal innovations Carey

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throughout the decade. Other types of experimentation with application of paint and unconventional approaches to supports were central to the practices of several African American abstract painters, including Ted Clark’s push-broom works, Al Loving’s deconstruction of the canvas, and Sam Gilliam’s removal of the canvas from the stretcher bars. In retrospect Whitten’s innovative works executed with a processor and single gesture result in winning an end game of reductive expressionist painting of increasing historical importance and arresting formal beauty. Various details appear in the single-gesture works, including ruptures, eruptions, incised lines, and geometry impressed from behind the canvas. These processed works stand with and apart from the ethos of abstract expressionism, signaling a new turn in expressionist painting of lasting significance. The paint, poured from a five-gallon bucket or larger, determined the form and composition of the work in concert with the interventions of the painter, whose understanding of different viscosities and drying times result in multilayered streaks and expressive openings. On close inspection these layered breaks in the surface are reminiscent of geological strata, rendering a physical depth to the surface created by the irregular response of paint to the artist’s movement of his processor. Similar works executed with a squeegee emerged again a decade later in the oeuvre of Gerhard Richter. The refinement of Whitten’s process shines at its most painterly in Pink Psyche Queen (1973). Its challenging palette of pink is punctuated by uncountable colors, with ruptures of red, black, green, and yellow above a processor-impressed triangle and swirls of yellows, gray, white, blues, and umbers. Prime Mover (1974) has a granulated, gravelly texture spread across sections of the canvas. The effect, produced by the resistance of small pieces of dried paint pulling other layers and separating masses of paint, exposed the strengths and weaknesses of layers of paint above and beneath. An atmosphere-like electronic static envelops the field of the work in small bits of processed paint, pulling through a wetter layer to create a sense of an interrupted televisionary moment, as well as seeming to replicate cut stone slabs and a prime mover’s creation of earthen worlds. Numerous titles of works from 1974 reflect Whitten’s interest in Chinese culture and receptivity 24 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

to cross-cultural influences. Recent interviews reflect his continued interest in Asian culture, likening his current painting process to making a stir-fry, Chinese-style.10 Lines and geometric shapes placed beneath the canvas interrupt the patterns in the paint pulled by the processor. The process moves distinctly, from right to left, going against the grain of writing in English while simultaneously evoking the bleeding ink of flawed xerographic image reproduction. Three paintings address the body with their proportions, as well as Chinese culture: Chinese Doorway, Lapsang, and Chinese Sincerity. Each is composed of slick surfaces and palettes that loosely evoke the sense of cuisine in pale greens, rich ochers, browns, and blacks of soy and oyster sauces, mustard, and tea leaves. The intermittent irregularity of the paintings’ surfaces of poured and pulled paint are seemingly composed of a few colors mixed under the hand of the artist to blend new hues. On closer examination a profusion of colors reveals burgundy and lavender, surprising the eye with unexpected harmonies and subtle evocation of emotive and expressive depths, all beholden to the artist’s systematic interventions from behind and in front of the support of the canvas. In the late 1970s, Whitten began summering in Crete, a move that inspired a challenging series of optically complex works named for letters of the Greek alphabet. He scaled up his saw to rake-based processes, increasing the complexity of his canvases. These works prove difficult for some viewers. Striated lines of black and white with graphite produce subtle, light-absorbing textures and optical effects. In the wall text for the exhibition, Whitten is quoted as describing the effect as “geometric spectral,” an optical state where the painter has created a simultaneous sense of rich texture and smoothness that has intense effects on perception. A camera cannot capture such effects. Sgraffito enhances the surfaces of this series, where lines frequently move across planes bisected by semicircles. Norman Lewis Triptych I (1985) shows relationship to the emergent space of the pixelated images in the personal computer and gaming age, as well as Whitten’s new approach to painting. Kanjo’s curation exhibits great strength here, using a single work to bridge the artist’s formal, memorial, and technical concerns in a single work, bridging the

Satori, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 105 x 109 in. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann

processes and concerns of past decades and bringing them into conversation with the present via one painting. Small-scale squares, no larger than onefourth of an inch, form a field of black, the depth of gridded paint a ground for touches of white upon the raised surface, punctuated with a composition of primary red and yellow modulated with soft blue and light pink. The memorial to the fellow master of the aesthetic idiom of abstraction stands apart from other contemporaneous works in its horizontality, as well as its historical harmony with its creative and technological moment. The question or practice of making and grieving as a historicist painter comes to the fore in Whitten’s

memorial works, begun in the 1960s after the death of his brother. Spiral: For Romare Bearden (1988) draws on cast acrylic exemplars of everyday textures of urban life at the time of Bearden’s passing, including bubble wrap, chair caning, tire tracks, footprints, and traction-gridded metal plates. The composition rests in a field of black and white, touched by myriad gestures in several accent colors such as rust, brown, red, pale and cobalt blues, and a single striking stroke of royal purple. A sense of the city’s profusion of debris meets the eye: a glimpse of a rag, a chair, the ends of opened packages in the middle of a road crossed by foot and machine. The styles and techniques seen in Spiral: For Romare Bearden Carey

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Chinese Sincerity, 1974. Acrylic on canvas, 67½ x 40 in. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann

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returned in Whitten’s memorial painting 9-11-01 (2006). The tessellation and signs of urban detritus connect the assemblage-oriented works of the 1980s to later memorial works, most notably the memorial created to commemorate the losses of September 11, 2001, when he observed the planes hitting the towers. This significant work was included in the 2013 Venice Biennale. In the twenty-first century the E-Stamp and Black Monolith series reflect the artist’s current formal concerns with technology and memorialization, centered on the memorials to the greats of jazz, literature, and politics, a theme that was a focus of the exhibition’s curation. This large and richly varied body of work reflects an abstract artist at the height of his expressive powers. All of Whitten’s memorials reflect his personal remembrance of the departed. The pixel patterns of electronic postage inspired the E-Stamp series. Its subjects include cabaret singer Bobby Short (Black Butterfly/Harlem Butterfly) and curator Marcia Tucker, who was important to Whitten’s first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney. E-Stamp IV (Five Spirals: for Al Loving) (2007) breaks with the strong influence of the founding grid pattern to incorporate a rich range of bright hues of blues, yellow, white, and oranges across the static square, generating a powerful counterpoint in rhythm and movement, as well as utilizing Loving’s bright palette. Elegiac and stately, yet arresting and vibrant, massive memorials to Ralph Ellison, Barbara Jordan, and Thelonious Monk stand out as a particularly powerful grouping in the exhibition, where tessellation in black assumes a central focus. The cosmic rhythm of Whitten’s artistic time signature merges with an embedded razorblade, eggshells, molasses, copper, salt, coal, ash, chocolate, and highly visible blackness in Black Monolith II: Homage to Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man (1994). The work suggests human form made visible as geological form surrounded by watery light and is a crescendo of improvisational freedom. The small pieces of Whitten’s hair embedded in the paint are distinctive inclusions in this work and others, most notably his self-portrait, lending the works representational signs and refusing pure abstraction. Shaped panels are a recurring choice in Whitten’s late works, inflecting them with different forms of expressive monumentality. A pentagram-shaped

support lends an imposing magnificence to Black Monolith III (For Barbara Jordan) (1998). Whitten paints Jordan’s importance as the first black female congressional representative in the United States through a rendering of her memory in a color scale of cosmic magnitude and human-scaled space, which hints at her vast importance to culture and politics far beyond her famous first in the US Congress. Whitten’s memorial Brilliant Corners (For Thelonious “Sphere” Monk) (1998) deploys flexion and curves that alter the geometry of the conventional square canvas into convex sides. The corners dance with white tessellations and brightly accented colors radiating from an organic black, then gray, center, giving a sense of a sonic cosmology of limitless creative expansion rendered through the art of painting as space and light. Memorial paintings stand out as the artist’s lasting contribution and strengthen an argument for Whitten’s emphasis on technology in form and process that defines his position as an abstract painter. These are decades-long markers of considerable importance that establish him as an exceptional elder statesman of American art of the twentieth century and into the next. Chanda Laine Carey is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York University Center for the Humanities. Notes

1 The exhibition traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, May 15–August 2, 2015, and to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, September 3, 2015–January 26, 2016. 2 Jack Whitten, museum wall text, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. 3 Whitten completed the most recent work in this ongoing series in 2016. 4 Robert Storr, “In Conversation: Jack Whitten with Robert Storr,” Brooklyn Rail, September 4, 2007, www.brooklynrail.org /2007/09/art/whitten#bio. Kenneth Goldsmith, “Jack Whitten,” BOMB 48 (Summer 5 1994), bombmagazine.org/article/1772/jack-whitten. 6 Storr, “In Conversation: Jack Whitten with Robert Storr.” 7 Ibid. 8 Saul Ostrow, “Process, Image and Elegy,” Art in America 96, no. 4 (April 2008): 148–53, 183. 9 Michelle Kuo, “Jack Whitten,” Artforum International (December 2013). 10 Scott Indrisek, “Jack Whitten,” Modern Painters 25, no. 8 (September 2013): 21–23.

Carey

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RAPTUROUS BODIES A CONVERSATION WITH

CAMILLE NORMENT Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo Sound, like experience, is fleeting, but it leaves traces in the mind and in the body. As such it is historical, and a viable tool for anticipating and understanding what is to come. — Camille Norment

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Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo: Before we discuss your project Rapture for the Nordic Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, it would be good to talk more generally about the ideas and themes in your work, with reference to previous projects. We could start by talking about sound and music, which underlie much of your practice as an artist. Within which context, historical or counterhistorical, do you situate this interest? Camille Norment: Heidegger suggested an understanding of the world through sound and hearing because of sound’s temporal and nonessentializing qualities. If we take this thought further and pause to listen to history as an onset of temporalities, we could also hear the emergence of human history as a wave of recognizable and dynamic characteristics, ranging from intimate sexualities to social conflicts, some of which repeat and converge with echoing force. It’s less a specific kind of music or history of music that I’m interested in than how sound and

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3885918 “Rapturous Bodies” was first published in Verksted #19 (2015). All rights reserved.

Camille Norment, from a performance with the Camille Norment Trio on the opening day of Rapture in the Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennale, May 6, 2015. Courtesy OCA. Photo: Marta Buso

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music are situated in culture and society. There is no sound that falls outside of culture or social experience, so I find it a revealing entry into sociological experience. Often I’m attracted to instances that seem to denote or are associated with spaces of cultural or social dissonance. And I refer to “dissonance” not as a construction of opposites, but rather as an active state—a new element created from the space that’s in between, centralizing all sound into a synonymous noise of acoustic experience and social signification. Central to many of these investigations is the hold that music has over the body, which has caused many sounds and musical experiences to undergo censorship—especially in relation to the female body. KGA: That “hold” that you talk about has of course been a key question in scientific and sociocultural debates over the centuries. Succumbing to feelings within one’s body has at times been revered while at other times feared and considered to lead to a loss of rationality. Your work’s focus on the perceptual isn’t a matter of losing one’s mind but of coming to one’s senses. I believe the issue here is one of emplacement, and your practice suggests the sensuous interrelation between body-mind-environment. In this way, you challenge modernity’s hierarchical ranking of the senses. Modernity privileges the eye, the gaze, as the leading sense, organizer, and interpreter of

Close-up of Camille Norment playing the glass armonica. Nordic Pavilion, 2015. Courtesy OCA. Photo: Marta Buso

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the world. Bringing the notion of emplacement to bear on your work pushes the spectator to consider his or her sensuous relationship to the materiality of the world in which we live.1 CN: My interest was never to replace a hierarchical focus on the visual with a hierarchical focus on the sonic, for example, but rather to engage in the complex relations of a broader sensory experience. Of course, this initially meant raising a general discourse around the sonic, but this discourse was also justified and made more specific by my interest in the unique role that sound has in relation to human psychology. I started to address this question early on in my practice. In Dead Room (2000), for example, the exterior of the space is covered with soundinsulation material, while the interior is padded with bright white vinyl. Eight subwoofers embedded symmetrically in the four walls pulse with the rhythm of an inaudible bass frequency that causes the speaker membranes to visibly move in and out without producing audible sound through the ear. What is instead perceived inside the space is a disturbance in the body, heightened by the visual and tactile sensation of the white upholstered walls, ceiling, floor, and bright fluorescent light, in the manner of a clinical padded cell. Similarly, in Notes from the Undermind (2001) the visitor is invited to enter a padded cell in an unused part of the museum, a hollow shell. Inside this aseptic environment are a number of stainlesssteel poles, each producing a different pitch as they vibrate at their own particular frequency. The tones of this subtle harmonic choir change as the poles are touched by visitors, which stops them from resonating. As visitors speak, an acoustic distortion is produced that resonates with the poles, creating an audible effect that is both eerie and atmospheric. With the simple absence of light, the perception of the sound comes into question; it becomes like the soundtrack for an alternate set of social narratives, moving the pleasant, ambient soundscape into the realm of heterotopic spaces of nightclubs and the unconscious. What is interesting is that in both cases the audience experience is split between experiencing the work as a desirous comfort zone and as psychologically unsettling.

Installation view of Rapture. Nordic Pavilion. Courtesy OCA. Photo: Matteo De Fina

AC: This is interesting if we think of the relation between music and the structure of society. Modernity has imposed structural standardization in music to obtain standard reactions, to create mechanical responses from the body of the listener, producing an alienation from instruments and sounding. When analyzing the diffusion of sound and its commercial broadcasting, cultural thinker Jody Berland reassigned the birth of popular music and its fundamental characteristics to the industrial period, when the rules and genres were standardized to create harmonic compositions that “beat out a standard scheme.”2 The details, as much as the form, are standardized in order to render the experience familiar. In several of your works you’ve attempted to create an experience that addresses not only the ear, but also the body of the viewer,

resulting in a sense of the uncanny, where what was familiar becomes unfamiliar. CN: Yes, and the two works I mentioned attempt to take advantage of recognized and codified objects such as pulsing subwoofers, subway or stripper poles, padded rooms, etc., and sound experiences such as ambient music, which when recontextualized collapse recognizable signs into alternate significations, becoming something just out of reach and putting the original recognition into question. It’s appropriate that you mention “beating out the standard scheme,” because Dead Room, named after the term for an anechoic chamber, was inspired in part by the deadness of the sound produced by the “standard scheme” of pop music. The eight subwoofers pulse to the inaudible frequency for three minutes García-Antón and Cataldo

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and thirty-three seconds at a time—the length of the average pop song. It’s also, of course, a conceptual reference to John Cage’s iconic 4'33" of “silence.” KGA: Dead Room recalls alternative subversive spaces that were later anesthetized, losing their original potency. I’m thinking, for instance, of electronica in the late 1990s in Detroit, which saw the growth of an entire generation of dance music fans following the lead of techno’s founders—Richie Hawtin, Derek Plaslaiko, Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson—and continuing to refine the sound and style of Detroit. CN: I was studying at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s when I was introduced to the emerging electronica scene in Detroit through DJ friends obsessed with white-label, 12-inches, and through periodic visits I made to clubs or vacant buildings somewhere within the puzzle of Detroit. Then, I was more of a bookworm than a rave kid, but I carried that experience with me and pursued it when I moved to New York in 1992. What was wonderful about rave culture was that it was so welcoming across the social divides that had so defined music in the US. It was a musical phenomenon that claimed a de facto space beyond the still rigid cultural modes. The rituals of the clothing, objects, drugs, and even finding a location for the gathering were sometimes spoken about with reference to the ideas around the historical rituals of early humans. Losing oneself to the rhythm was the point—dancing into trance. For me, this relates to the notion of “the gaze” as losing oneself in an image; trance functions as a sonic gaze, the loss of oneself in the sound. Rave culture became a type of religion until it, too, became institutionalized. That said, this type of social experience related to music is not unusual, especially in youth culture. There’s discussion among communities of cultural anthropologists and neuropsychologists in which the height of the potency of the musical experience is said to be parallel to the sexual potency of bodies in their prime and further suggests a strong affective, adaptive, or evolutionary relationship between music and sexuality. If this initial connection existed, it has certainly been transfigured and augmented in contemporary practice, but a 32 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

relationship between music and sexuality remains strong nonetheless. Music is also considered to have had an adaptive role in community building and the forging of social structures. We understand music as a defining characteristic of what it means to be human, and in this we have an interesting insight that feeds into an even greater set of social interactions. Science used to see language as that which makes us human, but the human brain is structured to process acoustic systems that move far beyond the production and analysis of speech. In affirmation of Darwinian theories on the role of music and language (which were largely contested at the time), the scientific community now generally accepts music as having preceded language and having a strong affective role in human evolution. In this line of thinking music is directly associated with survival and folds into social structures that aim toward the same end. The paradox is how culture intersects and redetermines this role through extremes of manipulation or censorship. KGA: The late Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology at New York University, reflected upon how culture may “tune neurons” and is, therefore, an important complement to physiology and neurological thinking: “Our nervous systems need culture as much as they need chemicals. Without language and culture we are like headless monsters. . . . The biological and the cultural are woven in us together from the very start. . . . This is why a pure view of physiology is not sufficient.”3 How might this type of thinking inform your work? CN: I think that neuroscience today presents a fascinating study of tools and context. My interest in neuroscience is certainly related to the new possibilities in reading brainwave patterns and responses, but it’s also motivated by assertions that there is conclusive understanding. Analysis of what’s occurring in the brain must meet the context of that individual body, and it also has to meet the history of that body as an individual as well as a member of social groupings. The analysis itself must take care to place itself within its own sociocultural predispositions. What I find very interesting is the relationship that some of the new scientific findings have to ancient understandings across the globe, many of

Triplight, 2008. Microphone cage, stand, light, electronics, dimensions variable. Courtesy Camille Norment Studio

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which had previously been sequestered as myth or superstition. To further complicate the field, there are even more beliefs arising from supposedly lost practices that claim a space of activation through neuroscience. In any given Internet search on the topic it can often be difficult to differentiate between the claims derivative of scientific method and those put forth by New Age belief systems. It’s most interesting when they intersect. I see a certain parallelism here between this amorphic duality and the period of the Enlightenment, when scientific thought was emerging and similar conflations between science and myth occurred. What remains key to understanding that particular historical context, and the contemporary, is culture. Science must claim objectivity to pursue its goals, but science itself is not, and cannot be, completely objective. Science will always fall within culture and be guided by the sociocultural values in which it is situated. AC: Cultural theorist Judith Butler suggests that “the way in which debates within sexual politics are framed are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time.”4 When bodies made a display of themselves, although gendered, they lost their natural function of reproduction. Is this sexual potency of the mastered body, such as that of the dancer, what you’re referring to in Degas’ Dancers (1995)? Does Degas (a male and a painter) represent the masculine gaze, which genders and objectifies the represented model? CN: When I was a girl I had one of those music boxes that released the twirl of a ballerina when opened. I was fascinated by the folding of the body when lowering the lid and would peer into the enclosing darkness to see what was happening to the body, to the hyperproportional legs once suspended in the air. I wondered what she looked like shut away in the box until put on display again. I was very young and couldn’t make much more of it then. When conceiving Degas’ Dancers, I was drawn to the innocence associated with the figure of the ballerina that stood in contrast to the inherently sexual nature of dance that I came to understand, having been a dancer myself, and to the often 34 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

unnatural contortions that the body would have to endure as a classical ballerina on display. I later renamed the work Music Box, specifically to allow for interpretation to go beyond simply that of the male gaze. Projections of desire onto a body belong to various gendered spheres of perception, though they may function differently. As a consequence of this thought, I made the work suggest the presence of several female bodies by way of the positioning of the stiletto pointe shoes, so the bodies would exist as projections cast by any viewer. What may have initially appeared as a chaos of altered ballet slippers was, in fact, a choreography of paired shoes, carefully positioned to suggest extreme body positions that stratified both the classical and strip-club dancer. Situated in a black box—the heterotopic interior of a closed music box or night club—the bodiless pole evoked the dance pole of a striptease, further collapsing these perceived high and low spheres of dance into a sexualized singular entity. KGA: The material body was heavily questioned and dematerialized with the upsurge of new technology and the digital revolution of the 1990s. Did this encourage you to enter the realm of sound? CN: The rapid increase in the accessibility of digital production tools in the 1990s allowed many creators to enter the realm of sound. Often the new intimacy that was afforded caused the thinking to be motivated by the tools. It follows that a surge of detachment occurred, in which sounds were spoken of in objective terms such as the sine wave, which was assigned the role of the elemental unit. It became fetishized as a “pure” sound, given that it has no overtones, but it was also treated as if it were “purely” disassociated from culture. In the art world, the sine wave became one of the most popular sonic referents. The dissociative digital sine wave was one of my attractions to the analogue glass armonica, which produces a similar sound but is definitively culturally codified. I feel that it was largely through digital technology that sound art in the 1990s and 2000s appropriated the formal language of high modernism, which is fine as one definable trajectory of investigation, but it became overbearing and largely exclusive of the notion that sound perception and music are

situated within the context of culture and are indicative of social values. Of course, they’re not mutually exclusive, but the striving for the “new sound” concept, or the revealing of the hidden sonic secrets of the inaudible spectrum, often failed to consider why we should think it was interesting in the first place—its subjective relationship to the world from which it was produced. AC: How much did your work in Palo Alto in the late 1990s influence this thinking? CN: In Palo Alto I worked at Interval Research, a think tank initiated by Paul Allen, comprised of scientists, designers, musicians, mathematicians, and artists set on inventing the future. My interests and tasks then were context-driven—that is, considering and shaping the dynamics of specific technology within specific social contexts. Prior to Interval I was engaged in the roles, social alignments, psychological relationships, et cetera, that emerging media were creating. I’d say that I brought this thinking —technology as a contextual tool and not as an end—with me when I went to Palo Alto. The decade after that was very interesting, as I saw technology we’d worked with early on find its place in the world. AC: You moved to Norway in the early 2000s, when the country was thriving with new forms of popular contemporary music and breakthroughs by Norwegian jazz musicians, followed by electronica and pop artists taking over from Black Metal artists. The Insomnia Festival had just started in Tromsø, one of the northernmost cities in Norway. How did this passage influence your work? CN: In Norway Black Metal started in the 1980s but took off in the early 1990s. I was familiar with the music during this time, but as it was culturally translated into the US the listening experience became sequestered to social groups that I typically wouldn’t have a relation to. It was often funny when I entered a record shop and asked for a recommendation. By the 2000s I’d been listening to a lot of electronica coming from Norway, and of course there was jazz from earlier on. Norway’s thriving music scene in the 2000s from experimental to pop was absolutely part of the gift of moving to Norway. Music culture

was strongly supported and very accessible. I settled in Oslo, and in the beginning I had to translate what seemed to be familiar social signs but in fact signified something other than what I would have expected. Once, for example, I was shown a photograph of a wooden structure deep in the forest that had a large Confederate flag hanging on the wall. I was enthusiastically invited to join the music performances that took place there. It was a gesture of pure welcome, but being an African American I couldn’t help but imagine being invited to a similar situation in the US, which would have likely meant something very different. The Confederate flag as a sign was just too strong for me to accept as innocently decorative, in spite of understanding this situation as an example of cultural difference. My days were filled with many uncanny juxtapositions and curious uncertainties. But in the music I found no confusion, no cross-wires, only a freedom of experimentation and creation. Undoubtedly, being in Norway afforded me access that I never felt I completely had in the US, and I held onto it. When I formed the Camille Norment Trio together with Håvard Skaset and Vegar Vårdal I encountered strong associations related to one of the instruments in the trio, the Hardanger fiddle, as a national symbol. While my interest in the Hardanger was for its overtones and its interesting historical relationship to stimulation-based fear (it was banned by the church in Norway), I know that nationalist positionings of the instrument are present, and I hope that the work serves to deconstruct them to some extent. My musical experience in Norway has certainly been one of transgression. KGA: This brings us to two important aspects of your practice. It relates to how on the one hand you subvert the technology of sound production, giving objects such as speakers and microphones physical embodiments, and on the other hand you unfold the sociocultural significance of instruments. AC: That’s right, so let’s consider the objectification of musical tools such as microphones in Triplight (2008) or speakers in Swing Low (2008–9) and how they return in your work as artifacts and objectified elements, creating a friction with their supposed function while heightening their form. Triplight García-Antón and Cataldo

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takes the 1955 Shure microphone as a cultural icon. Swing Low is an audio sculpture consisting of a sound-focusing system that “swings” back and forth across the room like a pendulum, broadcasting the sound coming from a variety of people individually whistling the first two notes of the slave spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Sound becomes visual and vice versa. The function of these tools is somehow misused to enhance vibratory motion or sensory perception. They stand for sound, even in the absence of actual sound. CN: In both of these works the absence of an actual body, and the presence of a projected body actualized through other material elements, were used as a strategy for engagement with the viewer through which to project codified sound. Both these works contemplate the visibility and invisibility of the subject. Triplight presents, through the shadow of the microphone illuminated from within, the flickering ribcage of a body no longer present, or perhaps simply unseen, like a collective cultural memory that has somehow become encased within it, if not suppressed by the power that this iconic microphone has today. Flickering like a stutter, the shadow references music and speech, the struggling utterance of existence, and as such Triplight unites the specific historic discussion around suppression within the Golden Age of the 1950s with the continued suppression one finds on both a local and global scale today. Also with a phantomlike presence the disembodied voices within Swing Low “swing” through the room like a lynch rope. Here, the articulated utterance is important—the whistle. Whistling has long been used to signal presence and beckoning, desire and also alarm, with as few as two notes. The song Swing Low is accredited to an anonymous US slave but has today become one of the most widely recorded songs and even the theme song for England’s Rugby World Cup. Born from a tragic history, the song momentarily takes hold of listeners as subjects in the ongoing historical and global narrative of oppression of cultures and individuals. KGA: In the Camille Norment Trio you work with three very specific instruments: the electric guitar, the glass armonica, and the Hardanger fiddle. 36 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

They all have contested sonic histories. Why is this important to you? CN: The way in which I’ve approached the instrumentation of the trio has coincided with my investigations into hysteria and its relationship to vibration, as perceived during the Enlightenment period and today through neuroscience. Each of the instruments was thought to invoke a socially transgressive experience in the body, especially the female body, and in those cases the fear was inevitably sexual in nature. Franz Mesmer, from whom the term mesmerize is derived, used the glass armonica as a sonic medicinal tool in his suggestive healing sessions of women, who were put into a trance state through the music until it brought them to convulsions that were likened to orgasms. The glass armonica moved swiftly from being considered the voice of angels, producing hypnotic and ecstatic responses, to a threat to health, sanity, and even life itself, buoyed by waves of superstition and hasty scientific conclusions. From the clarity and poignancy of the vibrations produced by a single tone to the volatile waves produced by mass-hysteric fear we have an interesting framework for addressing macroscopic phenomena through a set of microscopic intersections. Similarly, fear around the Hardanger was associated with its visceral overtones and the ability of a skilled player to induce trance or even seduce women. This is similar to the US in the 1950s and ’60s and its fear of the guitar. Western societies hoping to paint a picture of social perfection struggled with the emergence of the new teenager and the frenzy brought on by the rock star wailing on his guitar. An important correlation for me here is Jimi Hendrix’s use of electric guitar feedback to create the sound of a body in pain, associated with his brief experience in the military. According to cultural theorist Greg Tate, Hendrix “primarily used [guitar feedback] to portray bodies in extreme, explosive pain—sometimes paradoxically, to express quiet suffering.”5 But this representational use of feedback was extended as a tool of social commentary and a tool of social transgression. Both rapture and rupture are present, and both musician and fan are enveloped in the ecstasy of the wailing tones and the disruption caused by the social anxieties from which it was derived.

The body continues through these theories to resonate as a cage, or the instrument of social anxiety and repression, where sound falls at the center of cause, referent, and cure. It continues in the current sonic and ultrasonic weapons being developed by contemporary war strategies that involve the military use of sonic walls against the enemy, or sonic torture, and sound as a social binder or therapy in peacekeeping operations, but also in the creation of riots. In this setting sonic power is used in extreme forms to manipulate and subdue; ecstatic trance is reduced to mind-broken delirium, social bonds turned into isolation or mass hypnosis, and the body itself ruptured by sonic waves. AC: In the performance Angels and Demons (2013) you cast yourself back in time to the period when the glass armonica originated. You appeared as a paradoxical character, playing on the cultural dissonance created by you as a historical subject, subverting the ruling system pertaining to such an

instrument. What are the key elements that connect you as an artist to the armonica? CN: More typically I examine the experience of bodies through objects or situated contexts, a distancing I find useful toward facilitating a space open enough for further questioning. When I started playing the glass armonica I felt compelled to move beyond just playing it with the trio toward tracing the historic situation. Having been invented in 1761, and having had an initial life of only a few decades (it disappeared for nearly two hundred years), the glass armonica became synonymous with the Enlightenment, a period of “new light” that was only to fall upon Western white men. This activated my position as an African American female playing an instrument whose brief history occurred during a time in which I would likely have been a slave, or servant at best, in a Western locale. Sun Ra turned to electronic music in order to remove himself from his historical and contemporaneous position and

Electric guitar, glass armonica, and Hardanger fiddle. Courtesy OCA. Photo: Marta Buso

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aim toward outerspace and the future for affirmation and transgression. In Angels and Demons I performed with the accompaniment of a recording of Sun Ra’s “Angels and Demons” that I had slowed down to 10 percent or so of its speed, playing the main melody on the glass armonica at roughly the same speed. In addition to my being clad in eighteenth-century dress, the music created an uncanny, hypnotic environment while sounding recognizably like contemporary electronic music, which set up an intriguing and highly charged intersection of many historical and contemporary experiences related to the sound and history of the glass armonica and my body as a black female. Through my use of the glass armonica, like Sun Ra, I’m acknowledging and activating a transgression, a forward movement from the past into an empowered now and a desirous anticipation of the future. Saying this, however, I’m reminded of Nam June Paik, who said, “You can never measure now.”6 Even today I feel this measurement is fleeting when placed in a global context. I would say that the transgressive empowerment I feel may be more of an exception than a rule, and most certainly what’s considered transgressive in one context has no meaning in another. Angels and Demons was also very much inspired by the glass armonica’s relation to psychology, specifically to hypnosis. The work’s enacting of a double consciousness, played out through time and social context, led me to take a closer look at hysteria. My investigations into hysteria were initially closely linked to its relationship to vibration, as perceived during the Enlightenment period, and today’s return to vibration through neuroscience and sound studies coincided further with how I’d been approaching the glass armonica contextually. Hysteria was long deemed a female disease and hence was named after the womb. Women were thought to have finely strung nerves that made them more susceptible to vibrational stimuli such as music, leading Mesmer to play the glass armonica as part of a cure for hysteria. During this time many respected physiologists thought the nerves were hollow so that the animal spirits could flow freely through them. Advancements in physiopsychology and feminist awareness later defined the diagnosis as a historical misreading—an erroneous meeting of science and 38 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

social predisposition. However, war revealed similar symptoms in men. Since men lacked the sexual organs associated with the term hysteria, the term shell shock was applied. Hysteria had up until then been viewed as both the product of female oppression and a physical and mental rebellion against this repression. Shell shock was deemed an epidemic of male hysteria, a disguised protest of the male body. It’s interesting, though, that vibration is at the center of both of these diagnoses, both as cause and cure. Clitoral vibration was frequently used as a cure for hysteria in women, which spurred the fabrication of the first mechanical vibrator. So for women

Camille Norment performing Apparition—Angels and Demons. Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway, May 6, 2013. Courtesy Camille Norment Studio. Photo: Jon Benjamin

it was about the fine vibrational tease or even airborne sympathetic vibrations, while for men it was about the devastating vibrational force of the bomb. Vibration is an important point of connection between a range of sciences, including neurology, musicology, and even spiritualism, and unites string theory with the eighteenth-century obsession with the glass armonica and Aeolian harp, an instrument played by—vibrated by—the wind. “Vibration” suggests sympathetic vibration, the movement of molecular bodies or even ideas across media and locales. This moved me to consider the idea of hysterical architecture, a psychosomatic

relationship between architecture and volatile social states of social interaction through history. The hysteric was said to have experienced a loss of self, and yet this is also the desired state of the meditative trance. Neuroscience is exploring new (or confirming old) relationships between music, the body, and the mind, the results of which are stratified on a wider scale between MP3 brain entrainment and sophisticated sonic warfare. All these historical intersections constitute an important aspect of Rapture. Rapture’s hysterical architecture exists within this space, between the devastation of sonic shock and what neuroscientist García-Antón and Cataldo

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Jaak Panksepp calls the musically induced “skin orgasm.”7

drawn to examine the current state more closely and to assess the possibility and effects of change.

KGA: So this brings us to your project for the Nordic Pavilion. It’s a site-specific sculptural and sonic intervention that unfolds into a series of performances. The project draws from the various elements of inquiry that we’ve been discussing and that have informed your practice over the years. Can you describe it for us?

AC: Could you tell us a little bit more about the title Rapture?

CN: As an interplay of several historical and contemporary references that have a sympathetic resonance with one another, Rapture invites many readings, but I hesitate to set them as definitive myself. One of my starting points for the project was the Nordic Pavilion itself. It’s one of the most beautiful pavilions in the Giardini, and its deceptively simple architecture belies a sophisticated assembly of heterogeneous elements—circulation, trees, topography, weather, context, and natural light. I came to treat the pavilion as a body, considering the windows that interconnect inside and outside spaces as a membrane, a skin. It functions also as a monumental structure and has become strongly codified within a discourse of Nordic identity. In Rapture I wanted to convey a space traversed by a strong dynamic force such as the wind or intense sound, which has left the pavilion in a state of excitation between catastrophe and shock and an ongoing, unfinished moment. When you enter it emits a situation of tension, an in-betweenness, with the architectonic space being in a fragile state of disruption and an active state of transformation or becoming. The shock vibrations are suspended as audible and visible, and a lament, or a chant, emanates from the architecture. Glass constitutes two sides of the pavilion structure, and the social metaphors associated with glass have a long and poignant history. The etymology of the word for window is the old Norse word vindauge—eye (auge) of the wind (vind)—stemming from the days before glass windows came into use and the window was simply a hole in the wall where the wind came through. The practice of understanding the status quo and predicting change has long been called “reading the wind.” Reading the pavilion windows as “eyes of the wind,” one may be 40 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

CN: I’ve reflected a lot upon states of rapture and rupture as both a duality and as a continuum. Amid the eighteenth-century discourse on vibration, philosopher David Hartley described pain as only pleasure in excess, while Edmund Burke took this notion further to suggest that vigorous or excessive vibration was the cure for a melancholy state caused by lack of stimulus. What’s described here historically, and I feel is present in a contemporary analysis, is a state of dissonance between an ideal and a disruption of that ideal, a state in which this active space depicts a contradiction, then a becoming. Rapture explores the visceral relationship between the human body and sound through the visual, the sonic, and the architectural body. In our times the excitation of the body is a site of contestation between affirmation/empowerment and manipulation/repression. The term rapture captures this oscillation, as the project explores a sensory experience that is both cognitive and somatic. If the body can be defined and potentiated by sound, then with Rapture the pavilion becomes and reflects a body in trauma and a body in rapture.8 Also, Rapture’s use of the tritone, a coupling of two notes with three whole notes in between, floats in the ear, unresolved. Rapture presents an unsettled situation: it hovers, asking the perceiver to contemplate, predict, to shape the future. In presenting a more perceptual rupture within the pavilion, I suggest, through the title, the search for rapture, transgression, and loss of the self toward an altered state of being. AC: Can you expand on this relationship between rupture and rapture? CN: I came across a quote by Arne Nordheim: “Music lives in the span between poetry and catastrophe.”9 Through all the filtering we undergo in social interaction, it’s easy to recognize the inherently volatile nature of human interaction, the causes of fear and attempts at control, and the

Notes from the Undermind, 2001. Architectural sound installation. Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Courtesy Camille Norment Studio

everyday as a space between rapture and trauma. The hold that music has over the body is situated quite firmly within this flux. Through Rapture I sought to build upon this and offer an experience that, like music, might complicate and accentuate the dissonant space constituted by rapture and trauma, itself within the span between poetry and catastrophe, which is perhaps the way culture can witness and represent the times in which we live. KGA: Can you give us more details about how the project was conceived to produce an unsettling immersive experience for the visitor? You worked on new glass armonica compositions for the Biennale. Can you tell us what they are and how they inform the project? CN: I was very motivated by the notion of excitation for the reasons I’ve mentioned, but also because

it’s been a concept that’s become highly fetishized in the realm of sound art. It was important for me to consider and to relay the notion of excitation within a context that might open up a discussion beyond that of the “essential sounds” of objects and architectural structures. In Rapture I excite glass, using resonant frequencies and the glass armonica transmitted through audio exciters. These are devices that transmit sound through direct contact with a medium—vibrating the physical molecules as opposed to airborne transmission, which vibrates the air like typical speakers. I do this in order to situate that specific glass and the pavilion itself within the discourses related to that instrument’s history as well as the contemporary discourses we’ve discussed. The compositions are built primarily around the excitation frequencies and the two notes of the C-major triton—a musical interval that was also previously banned by the church in the West García-Antón and Cataldo

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Dead Room, 2000. Architectural sound installation, 360 x 360 x 240 cm. Courtesy Camille Norment Studio

because of its suspended or unresolved tonality and the existence of six semitones in between the notes. Emanating from suspended boom microphones, aimed toward the glass and the visitors, are the individual voices of a female choir singing the tritone as prolonged tones, articulated by the inhalation of their breath and their sometimes faltering voices as they struggle to sustain the note. The relationship between the chorus and the excited glass is simultaneously bidirectional cause and effect, and one of empathy. It’s also simply a beautiful and haunting melding of historical tracing and the contemporary state of the world in a global perspective. The membrane of the pavilion has been visually excited into a stilled state of anticipation. What can be viewed from one perspective as the result of a sweeping destructive force is also likened to Panek’s “skin orgasm.”10 What was important here was not to offer a rigidly conclusive thesis but rather to situate historical and contemporary intersections that themselves, like the suspended state of the window and sound, are unresolved. AC: You said earlier that there’s a certain fetishism among musicians for the perfect wave that the glass armonica produces and, consequently, an idea of purity. Has this played a part in Rapture? CN: The relationship between the glass armonica and the sine wave has played a central role in my 42 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

investigation. The sine wave has been (and still is) worshipped as an untouched tone, untainted by overtone. It’s almost a tone without a body. If one relates overtones to sociocultural resonance, it’s clear why the sine wave may be perceived as a space of retrieve. The glass armonica produces a near sine wave, but its cultural connotations are undeniably present, given the poignancy of its history. Not only does my playing it activate an empowerment, but it also gives me a platform from which to explore the formal qualities of the tone within an examination of a contemporary context. I’m not attempting to essentialize the history of the instrument but rather to trace its historic context in the present. Relevant to Heidegger’s thoughts on the temporal, it’s important to underline that any essential thought or formulation is something that’s up for revision and change and can’t hold a claim of truth to the material, linguistic, or natural world. This approach makes the work of facilitating, opening, and listening/interpreting important. The actual listening experience of the glass armonica activates a perceptual response that hovers between beauty and noise, rapture and trauma, and reveals how closely they may reside within the same spectrum of experience. AC: Rapture’s site-specific installation unfolds through a series of performances during the opening and at specific moments during the duration of the Biennale. Who’s involved in these performances, and what are they about? CN: The performances are extracted from specific elements within the elemental and conceptual framework of the installation. I perform with my trio—consisting of myself playing the glass armonica, Vegar Vårdal playing the Hardanger fiddle, and Håvard Skaset playing the electric guitar. Sofia Jernberg, an amazingly versatile vocalist, takes the voices in the choir beyond the tritone into a physical body whose utterance borders on the prelingual, as it grapples with both rapture and rupture. And David Toop joins me in an abstracted and augmented “performative lecture” around hysteria. KGA: When drawing the pavilion, the Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn obviously thought about questions like “What is the Nordic?”11 In its representation

of Nordic identity there’s certainly an aspect of a national stereotype, with its stress on landscape and nature, but the pavilion offers opportunities to go beyond that. The sensation of entering the space is quite different from that of other pavilions. Fehn referred to it as a “shadowless space,” and its smooth and harmonious light stands in stark contrast to the strong and constantly changing light of Venice, so there is a strong manipulation taking place on an immaterial level. How do you feel you’ve challenged and manipulated the parameters of a given cultural identity and its representation? CN: Undoubtedly, post–22 July 2011, the perception of the innocence of Norway has been ruptured, suffering an alteration from which it cannot turn back. On this day, thirty-three-year-old Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik killed a total of seventyseven people in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, many of them children. It was a harsh and frightful awakening. What I experienced in my home in central Oslo on 22 July, three blocks away from the bombing, relates to shell shock, since the sonic impact of the blast was etched into my body, as was the new relationship that my local environment had to make with the world. That state of rupture, of molecular vibration, exists for me as a lost moment in conscious time, save for its visceral memory and the global pressure brought on by unresolved situations. The Nordic Pavilion and its “shadowless” state can be read within this context. Rapture metaphorically casts shadows within the pavilion and converses with a global environment from which Norway cannot be isolated; its identity as a nation has been changed. Perhaps these shadows were always there but haven’t been perceived before, because shadows are typically soundless.

Notes

1 See Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008).    2 Jody Berland, “Radio Space and Industrial Time: The Case of Music Formats,”  in Simon Frith, ed., Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2003).  3 Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 4 Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,” British Journal of Sociology 59, no. 1 (2008): 1–23. 5 Greg Tate,  Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003). 6 Nam June Paik uses this expression during a panel discussion  with Merce Cunningham, John Cage,  Richard Kostelanetz, and Dore Ashton. The panel, titled “Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art,” was held at Pleiades Gallery in Durham, North Carolina, in 1978. 7 Jaak Panksepp, “The Emotional Sources of ‘Chills’ Induced by Music,” Music Perception 13, no. 2 (1995): 171–207.  8 For the eighteenth-century discourse on vibration and pleasure see David Hartley, Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations (Leake and Frederick, 1749). For the discourse on excessive vibration see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756).  9 Arne Nordheim referred and came back to such an expression in several public occasions. Panksepp, “The Emotional Sources of ‘Chills’ Induced by 10 Music.” 11 Sverre Fehn refers to the peculiarity of the Nordic light on several occasions and wrote, in particular, about the Nordic Pavilion in Venice: “To build a museum for the visual arts is the story of the struggle with the light.” See Sverre Fehn, “Nordisk paviljong ved Biennalen i Venezia,” Byggekunst, no. 6 (1962): 144–45. 

Katya García-Antón is a curator and director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Antonio Cataldo is a writer and senior program coordinator at OCA.

García-Antón and Cataldo

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JOURNAL OF UNCOLLECTABLE JOURNEYS EDSON CHAGAS’S

FOUND NOT TAKEN

Ana Balona de Oliveira

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Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3885929 © 2017 by Nka Publications

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s an artist who has been devoting his attention to urban spaces, abandoned objects, and faceless bodies—mostly through photography, although recently also in video—Edson Chagas (Luanda, 1977) does not necessarily share the material and the formal preoccupations of a sculptor, least of all, perhaps, a sculptor like Carl Andre (Quincy, Massachusetts, 1935). Andre envisaged his practice as “materialistic,” he abhorred any interpretation going beyond the works’ material literalness, and he considered his sculptures to be appropriately received by the viewer only when physically experienced, to the point of stating: “I hate photography; I hate photographs; I hate to take photographs; I hate to be photographed; I hate my works to be photographed.”1 Yet Chagas immediately, and coherently, advances the name Carl Andre when it comes to discussing the importance of space, matter, objects, and bodily movements (with objects) in space in his photographic practice. Despite photography’s material nonliteralness and the never thoroughly abstract quality of his own work (though almost abstract at times), Chagas identifies with Andre’s abstract and

Edson Chagas, Untitled (Newport, Wales, UK), 2013, from Found Not Taken series. Chromogenic color print, 120 x 80 cm. Courtesy the artist; Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg; and A Palazzo, Brescia, Italy. © Edson Chagas

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Desacelera o Mambo: Celebrating Life by Slowing Down Perception, 2015. Pigmented inkjet print on cotton rag paper, 40 x 60 cm. Courtesy the artist; Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg; and A Palazzo, Brescia, Italy. © Edson Chagas

spatial nonidealism, often quoting him: “I’m not an idealist as an artist. . . . I try to discover my visions in the conditions of the world. It’s the conditions which are important.”2 Indeed, regardless of the degree of abstraction attained, the specific spaces, matter, objects, and bodily movements (with objects) in space from and with which Chagas composes his photographic images are always concretely inscribed in, and concretely address, the conditions of the world. Looked at from the vantage point of the lived experience of a historical contemporary moment and geopolitical and cultural landscapes other than those of 1960s and 1970s New York, such conditions could not but be very different from Andre’s. Affinities on ideas about pacing down the accelerated rhythms of highly urbanized capitalist societies are also discernible through attention to the bodily, almost performative, and far from solely visual perception of spaces with ethicopolitical implications. Implicitly evoked in Chagas’s most recent work, Celebrating Life by Slowing Down Perception 46 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

(2015), I argue, is the idea of “experiencing art” as “ecstatic change of state” or “fierce calm,” phrases Andre used, interspersed with references to Tao and Zen, to describe his affective response to the physical experience of visiting several kinds of gardens in Japan in the 1970s.3 I have elsewhere described Chagas’s work as an aesthetics, ethics, and politics of deceleration.4 This decelerated inhabitation of urban space calls for nonconsumerist relationships with things—old, broken, with missing parts, and yet presented to us as the still functional, magnificent protagonists of a nocturnal narrative soon to unfold, it seems, on a quiet sea-and-sand stage. It arises from Chagas’s own lived experience of seaside leisure spaces, where he encounters, and enhances photographically, a possibility of rest from the urban chaos of Luanda in post–Cold War, post-Marxist, and post–civil war Angola. As is well known but worth recalling at this juncture, Andre’s materialism was a Marxist stance of resistance against what, by the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, was only the beginning

Untitled (London, UK), 2014, from Found Not Taken series. Chromogenic color print, 80 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist; Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg; and A Palazzo, Brescia, Italy. © Edson Chagas

of a major global trend of increasing commoditization and control of life and death under neoliberal capitalism.5 Though Chagas’s critique departs from a different generational, geographical, and medium position than Andre’s 1997 diagnosis that “stillness, silence, and peace are treasures our mass culture is endlessly trying to steal from us and destroy,” this idea might be said to be at the heart of Chagas’s critique through photography.6 In Found Not Taken (2008–), Chagas’s performative actions of walking, finding, and relocating abandoned banal objects in order to photograph them against the backdrop of urban facades in London; Newport, Wales; and Luanda, cities he has inhabited, intend to reflect critically on increasingly global patterns of mediatized and waste-producing mass consumption.7 Concomitant to this is the commoditization of objects, subjectivities, and spaces, as well as notions of so-called progress and national reconciliation in Angola since 2002, in the form of large infrastructure and grand urban regeneration

projects.8 Purportedly embodying an optimistic vision of futurity, these projects ultimately result in the erasure of public communal space and the dislocation of city dwellers who cannot afford to pay the price of gentrification, not to mention the majority of periphery and slum dwellers.9 Chagas proposes alternative, slowed-down relationships to urban space through a sort of relational “retrieval” and rearrangement in space of objects that mass consumption has discarded.10 As the title of the series indicates, the objects are found but not taken, acquired, or consumed—except as image—and are, instead, repositioned and reactivated by an artistic recycling of sorts. Value, other than exchange value, is reascribed precisely to those objects that consumption has qualified as valueless. They become the photographer’s fellow travelers for a while, always to be returned to (a renewed spatial relation to) the city. Found Not Taken has a personal, biographical quality, which, if not obvious, is nonetheless relevant. Balona de Oliveira

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Untitled (Luanda, Angola), 2009, from Found Not Taken series. Chromogenic color print, 80 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist; Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg; and A Palazzo, Brescia, Italy. © Edson Chagas

It is marked by an experience of displacement and estrangement, first in London and Newport, and afterward in Luanda, where the long experience of diaspora and the changes found in the postwar, fast-growing urban landscape prevented any easy and immediate sense of homecoming. Diaspora and isolation, the urban experience of commuting amid the anonymous crowds in London and Newport, and the continued search through walking for a lost familiarity upon the return to Angola are at the core of Chagas’s cartographic and archival impulses.11 In his serial, performative-photographic cataloguing of encounters with thrown-away, lonely objects, the photographer, in the process of making the work, returns these objects to some sort of relation with and within the urban space. Chagas gathers transient catalogues and lived encyclopedias by walking across several sorts of borders. When Found Not Taken was exhibited in the context of Luanda, Encyclopedic City—the exhibition curated by Beyond Entropy, which won the 48 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

Golden Lion for the Angolan Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013—Chagas’s performativephotographic encyclopedia of Luanda “occupied” Venice’s Palazzo Enciclopedico, the overarching theme of that year’s biennial and the title of the main exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni.12 More specifically, Chagas’s encyclopedic Luanda was shown at the Palazzo Cini amid its collection of Renaissance masterpieces.13 This northward movement contained an ethicopolitical statement of remembrance of and resistance to the ways in which Eurocentric art-historical and curatorial narratives, including that of the biennial itself, have either omitted or distortedly appropriated so-called peripheral histories of African artistic practice throughout the twentieth century, not to mention other more violent histories of erasure and domination. Chagas’s work, framed by Beyond Entropy’s curatorial approach, connected Luanda to the main exhibition’s titled theme of The Encyclopedic Palace, only to question its Enlightenment-indebted

starting point in all-encompassing epistemological, archival-museological, and architectural dreams and imaginations.14 The Enlightenment master narrative of modernity hides a dark genocidal history of collecting (by plunder) and classifying knowledge on colonized territories and populations in order to dominate these and exploit their resources. Luanda, Encyclopedic City countered a notion of the encyclopedic not sufficiently deconstructed by the main exhibition.15 This was done not by doing away with the collecting impulse, but by suggesting alternative ways of making and exhibiting a collection: by finding without taking (except as image); and by conceiving of an encyclopedic collection and exhibition as uncontainable by the architectural and the archive-museum-palace, and permeating, while permeated by, the urban and the city.16 In fact, Chagas and Beyond Entropy made Luanda circulate farther: visitors were invited to take away the photographs,

printed as posters and stacked in sculptural sets of varying heights on wooden pallets on the floor, in order to make their own version of the catalogue and disseminate the exhibition within and beyond the urban space of Venice. The way the images circulated contained a suggestion of dislocation and movement different from those of capital and commodities, and reminiscent of the process of their making.17 The ongoing series was also exhibited in the context of the collective exhibition Journal at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in 2014.18 As opposed to other instances of the series’ exhibiting history and journey, where there is no affective connection, in Journal (another name for encyclopedia, archive, cartography, catalogue, or collection) it made sense to photograph again the city where Found Not Taken had first begun in 2008 and to engage with the particular circulations necessitated by the location and architecture of the

Found Not Taken, 2008–ongoing. Installation view, Luanda, Encyclopedic City, Angola Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, 2013. Courtesy the artist; Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg; and A Palazzo, Brescia, Italy. © Edson Chagas. Photo: Paolo Utimpergher

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Untitled (Luanda, Angola), 2012, from Oikonomos series. Chromogenic color print, 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy the artist; Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg; and A Palazzo, Brescia, Italy. © Edson Chagas

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Jean P. Mbayo, 2014, from Tipo Passe series. Chromogenic color print, 100 x 80 cm. Courtesy the artist; Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg; and A Palazzo, Brescia, Italy. © Edson Chagas

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ICA and neighboring works by the other exhibiting artists. If, at the Palazzo Cini, the cohabitation with Renaissance masterpieces that could not be moved was initially felt as restriction and ultimately entailed the increased mobility of the images as take-away posters stacked on the floor, at the ICA there was an immediate wish to install the fly-poster prints in a nonwhite cube manner, in in-transit areas full of those visual noises the white cube endeavors to erase. Connection with the surroundings, or visual dialogue instead of isolation, was exactly what was sought. The fly-poster prints, transient urban objects themselves, were installed in intimate and attentive relation with the patterns of the surrounding spaces, which were also spaces of passage, that is, the “streets” and “corners” of the gallery space. In other words, the images were curated in the space of the gallery similarly to the way Chagas “curates” the discarded objects in the space of the city for the two-dimensional space of photography. Those familiar with Found Not Taken, notably the Venice project photographed entirely in Luanda, will recognize the method used in London, both in 2014 and 2008, and in Newport. But despite the serial reenactment in these disparate locations, Found Not Taken never does away with a concomitant sense of local inscription. The series always departs from Chagas’s own movements in the specific urban space of those (to date) three diasporic and affective geographies and from his everyday encounters with the specificity of their objects.19 He repositions them against patterned walls in almost geometric, if also playful and poetic minimal compositions that never become too descriptive. He allows the viewer to see up-close, in detail, but it is that very closeup perspective that also conceals, turning the city into a personal and peripatetic set of surfaces and screens. The gaze, apparently documentary, evinces opacity and texture. The viewer can only suspect the unfolding of potential micronarratives: the moment when the abandoned object is found; the decision to place it that way, against that particular wall; the moment when it is not taken or taken only as image—not only by the photographer, but also by the viewer when the image is printed as a take-away poster. Yet despite the process’s uniformity and the images’ nondescriptive quality, one seems to be able to discern when Chagas is taking us to London, 52 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

Newport, or Luanda through the very material textures of the walls and the types of objects portrayed, without being given any immediate recognition except through titles in labels. In this and other series such as Oikonomos (2011–12) and Tipo Passe (2012–14), both exploring the genre of portraiture, Chagas examines circulation, dislocation, and transformation: the multiple ways in which bodies and identities, objects and commodities, images and imaginations dwell in the urban spaces of the global North, the global South, and in between. The discarded objects become critical signifiers of the fever of consumerism—notably, though not exclusively, in postwar, fast-growing Luanda, where he currently lives. By rearranging them into new configurations, Chagas is also pointing toward the possibility of reinventing alternative relations with(in) the city. Chagas examines processes of gentrification, commoditization, and consumerism through visual strategies of resistance in the form of critical and creative imaginations of alternative ways of dwelling, not only in Luanda, but also in London and Newport. In so doing he invites us to consider the complexities of a contemporary moment in which notions of so-called Europeanness and Africanness cannot but be problematized, be it in terms of cultural, ethnic, gender, and sexual identity evident in the above-mentioned series Tipo Passe or in the ways in which the space of the city is produced, inhabited, and reinvented. In line with theories on diaspora and migration and the economic, technological, and cultural dimensions of globalization in the fast-growing urban spaces of the former colonial world amid the emergence of new areas of influence from which China stands out, Chagas’s work does not allow us to lose sight of the complex ways in which North and South divides take place within, and not simply between, both North and South.20 Commoditization and consumerism are also examined in the series Oikonomos, as both title and images suggest. We are introduced to several white-shirted torsos (in reality, the photographer’s own body) performing invisibly as in Found Not Taken, though now for the camera. These cover their heads and faces with plastic and cloth shopping bags from several provenances, both Western and Eastern, which advertise, among other things,

worlds of commercial and touristic hope and enjoyable lives of consumption. Chagas thus reflects on the defacing, homogenizing consequences of a global neoliberal capitalism that turns subjects into consumers, real or desiring, and, most perilously, bodily subjectivities into commodities. By wearing an inconspicuous white shirt in each of the photographs that make up the series, Chagas retains a focus on heads and faces as markers of individuality typical of portraiture conventions. Yet such conventions are undermined precisely by the sort of faceless heads, the “masks of everyday consumption,” to use the artist’s words, which these white-shirted bodies carry.21 They become anodyne markers of the global flows of capital—of which Angola has become an integral part—whose disparate Western and Eastern origins are conveyed by the supposedly optimistic messages and images they advertise and show. Like Found Not Taken, Oikonomos is the outcome of repetitive, performative gestures with found, discardable objects, here placed in the space of the photographer-performer’s own body. The aim is to examine the contradictions inherent to an age in which agency seems to have been reduced globally to its opposite—that is, stultifying, wasteproducing mass consumption or its desire. This investigation is done most prominently in Found Not Taken as a critical examination of dwelling in the global city, though never too descriptively. Here is an unaffordable city of glossy skyscraper waterfronts, in certain instances mass-designed thousands of kilometers away, built where unprofitable but lived architectural heritage used to stand, and hiding an ocean of peripheral and precarious slums—enclosed upper-class condos built against poor, often racialized ghettos.22 Yet despite the urgency of facing the inequalities of our globalized present, Chagas’s work is also motivated and inspired by the energies of ordinary citizens and commuters who, against all odds, creatively resist the capitalist colonization of urban space by retaining a sense of community and reclaiming the reactivation of public space. It is not progress and modernization that are to be done away with insofar as they can actually improve people’s lives, but their unequal, securitized, and nonenvironmental versions. Despite his acknowledged affinities with Andre, the distance between Chagas’s artistic discourse and

his sculptural, minimalist inspiration could not be more clearly manifest. While this affiliation with Andre might have faded away in the course of this text without ever disappearing completely, another seems to emerge: one that is perhaps more “mine” than Chagas’s. He admits to having become better acquainted with the painterly, photographic, filmic, and installation work of the Angolan artist António Ole (Luanda, 1951) upon his return to Luanda at the end of 2008. Although Ole’s work did not influence Found Not Taken, whose inception is actually deeply marked by London, it is nevertheless evoked in the series’ immersion, through walking, in the urban space and architectural facades of the city. From the moment Found Not Taken found—without taking, except as images—the textures and colors of the walls and objects of Luanda, it could not but recall Ole’s portraits of Luanda through the photography of its musseques’ facades since the 1970s, which three decades later culminated in Ole’s renowned architectural and sculptural installations Township Walls.23 Despite the generational distance, Chagas concedes that the Luanda-based works of both artists could only evoke the lived experience of that shared context.24 The Luanda-based images of Found Not Taken make up only one of the several geographic coordinates of Chagas’s affective cartography between south and north, Africa and Europe, diasporic displacements and the embrace of an active, unhomely process of unbelonging as the inevitable but also positive outcome of the diasporic experience: one which reveals clearly and ethicopolitically the mythic, unreal nature of supposedly stable identities and circumscribed origins.25 Chagas also suggests this in Tipo Passe, where he presents us with his own version of a possible collection of large-scale, passport-like photos of African global citizens— Afropolitan, in line with Mbembe.26 The faces of these potential travelers are “identified” by several types of traditional African masks and the hybrid, mixed-origin names given in the titles, with all sorts of forms, colors, patterns, and provenances in the African continent sometimes disrupting national borders.27 Nevertheless, however positive the diasporic experience might become, and despite the very commoditization of the globalized art world itself, Chagas’s work is also a constant and consistent Balona de Oliveira

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reminder that, as Homi Bhabha noted more than twenty years ago, one must not lose sight of the fact that “the globe shrinks for those who own it,” whereas “for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.”28 Ana Balona de Oliveira is a FCT postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon and at the Institute for Art History of the New University of Lisbon, an invited assistant lecturer at the Department of Art History of the New University of Lisbon, and an independent curator. Notes

1 Carl Andre is an American sculptor and one of the most prominent figures of American minimalism. By materialistic Andre meant “made out of its own materials without pretension to other materials”: Carl Andre, quoted in David Bourdon, “The Razed Sites of Carl Andre,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 107; Carl Andre, “Essay on Photography for Hollis Frampton” (1965), “On Photography and Consecutive Matters” (1962), with Hollis Frampton, “Against Photography” (1972), “Art and Reproduction” (1976), in Cuts: Texts 1959–2004, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 175–80. 2 Edson Chagas, interview by author, Lisbon, April 27–28, 2015. Quoted from Carl Andre, “Un entretien entre Carl Andre et Elisabeth Lebovici et Thierry Cabanne,” Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris, July–November 1976, reprinted in “It Is Being Which Makes Symbol Possible . . . ” (1976), in Carl Andre, Cuts: Texts 1959–2004, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 126. Andre is also quoted in Edson Chagas, artist portfolio (PDF emailed to the author), 63. 3 Carl Andre, “On the Gardens of Japan” (1970), “A Fierce Calm” (1972), and “Experiencing Art Is an Ecstatic Change of State” (1989), in Cuts: Texts, 116. Chagas also commented on his admiration for Tao and Zen (Chagas, interview by author, Lisbon, April 27–28, 2015). The full title of Chagas’s series is Desacelera o Mambo: Celebrating Life by Slowing Down Perception (2015), in which he included a video piece for the first time. See “Edson Chagas,” in Ângela Ferreira, Ayrson Heráclito, Edson Chagas: Novo Banco Photo 2015 (exhibition catalogue), ed. Nuno Ferreira de Carvalho (Lisbon: Museu Coleção Berardo, 2015), 89–132. The Portuguese/Kimbundu phrase of the title means “slow down things,” whereas the English phrase was inspired by the work of Chagas’s friend, the musician João Ana (Chagas, interview by author, Lisbon, April 27–28, 2015). 4 Ana Balona de Oliveira, “In Slow Motion: A Fotografia de Edson Chagas / In Slow Motion: The Photography of Edson Chagas,” in Novo Banco Photo 2015, 93, my translation. 5 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11–40. 54 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

6 Andre, “Stillness, Silence, Peace” (1997), in Andre, Cuts: Texts, 292. 7 On walking and emotional, social, and psychogeographic space see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (1969; repr. Boston: Beacon, 1994); Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1999); Henri Lefebvre, Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, ed. Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman (New York: Continuum, 2003); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 8 Jon Schubert, “2002, Year Zero: History as Anti-Politics in the ‘New Angola,’” Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 4 (2015): 835–53; Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War (London: C. Hurst, 2015). 9 Some of the regeneration projects in Luanda’s waterfront have involved the demolition of slums and the forced removal of their inhabitants to the peripheries. 10 Against the pervasive idea of failure of the African city see AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2004; Simone, City Life from Jacarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (New York: Routledge, 2010). 11 On the notion of archival impulse see Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 12 Gioni’s exhibition title and biennial theme were inspired by the Italian American artist Marino Auriti’s 1955 Palazzo Enciclopedico, an architectural model for an imaginary museum supposed to collect “all worldly knowledge”: Massimiliano Gioni, “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace),” in Il Palazzo Enciclopedico / The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th International Art Exhibition: La Biennale di Venezia (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013), 18. See also “Marino Auriti” and “Angola. Luanda, Encyclopedic City,” in Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, 36–37, 204. 13 Luanda, Encyclopedic City allowed this collection to be visited, as the Palazzo Cini is usually not open to the public. 14 Gioni wrote that “Auriti’s plan was never carried out, of course, but the dream of a universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout the history of art and humanity” (Gioni, “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico,” 18). He acknowledged The Encyclopedic Palace as a fragile construction and a delirious mental architecture, and the biennial model itself as utopian, inspired as it is by the “impossible desire to concentrate the infinite worlds of contemporary art in a single place: a task that now seems as dizzyingly absurd as Auriti’s dream” (Ibid., 21). One was left with the overall impression, however, that the darker side of the so-called universal dreams of modernity, including that of the biennial, remained unexamined in Gioni’s curatorial statement and project. 15 Gioni wrote, for example, that “the exhibition sketches a progression from natural forms, to studies of the human body, to the artifice of the digital age, loosely following the typical layout of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities,” without ever stopping to examine the complex and weighted history of this conceptual framework and curatorial device (Ibid.). 16 Beyond Entropy wrote, “No building can contain a universal multiplicity of spaces, possibilities, and objects. When a building tends towards the encyclopedic, it becomes a city” (“Angola, Luanda, Encyclopedic City,” in Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, 204).

17 Unlike Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1990s minimalist stacked posters to be taken away by visitors, Found Not Taken is not always presented as a set of take-away posters, which means it does not depend conceptually on the take-away feature, as Gonzalez-Torres’s stacks do. This curatorial strategy was first used in Venice, where it arose from the restrictions found at the Palazzo Cini, occupied by Renaissance artworks that could not be moved (Balona de Oliveira, Chagas, “Entrevista/Interview,” in Novo Banco Photo 2015, 106; Chagas, interview by author, Lisbon, April 27–28, 2015). The Venice version of Found Not Taken has subsequently been exhibited in the collective show Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2015 and will be exhibited at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town in 2017. 18 Journal took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts between June 25 and September 14, 2014. Alongside the onsite exhibition was an equally important online space, where commissions and a journal of the project were on view. 19 Regarding the making of Found Not Taken in London, Chagas states: “It is funny how one sees the difference between spaces from the discarded objects found in them. In Chelsea, contrary to what happens in the East End, you rarely see discarded objects on the street” (Balona de Oliveira, Chagas, “Entrevista / Interview,” in Novo Banco Photo 2015, 103 [my translation]; Chagas, interview by author, Lisbon, April 27–28, 2015). As to Luanda he has elsewhere stated: “While growing up in Luanda, everything was reutilised and it was special to me to see how the consumerism habits were changing. I could find sofas and washing machines,” to which he added, “The experience of doing it in Luanda, London and Newport is totally different” (Edson Chagas, “C& Interview with Edson Chagas,” Contemporary And, www.stevenson.info /sites/default/files/2013_suzana_sousa_contemporary_and_2013 .pdf, accessed August 7, 2015). 20 Chagas states: “London and Luanda are not similar cities, but in both there is a movement which is the consequence of the rise in house prices and of the gentrification of certain areas of the city. In Luanda, the waterfront has become very expensive” (Balona de Oliveira, Chagas, “Entrevista/Interview,” in Novo Banco Photo 2015, 103 [my translation]; Chagas, interview by author, Lisbon, April 27–28, 2015). On diaspora and migration see, for example, Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222–37; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (Cambridge, MA: Iniva and MIT Press, 2008). On provincializing Europe and thinking from the South see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Achille Mbembe, Critique de la Raison Nègre (Paris: La Découverte, 2013). Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa (Boulder: Paradigm, 2012); Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Boaventura Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses, org., Epistemologias do Sul (Coimbra: Almedina, 2010). On the economic, technological, and cultural dimensions of globalization see Arjun Appadurai , Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013). On the former colonial world and the notion of postcolony see Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On the influence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) on the African continent see Pádrag Carmody, The Rise of the BRICS in Africa: The Geopolitics of South-South Relations (New York: Zed, 2013). 21 Chagas’s artist statement on Oikonomos, word document emailed to the author. 22 See Schubert, “2002, Year Zero”; Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land. 23 On the work of António Ole, see António Ole, Marcas de um Percurso (1970 / 2004) / Milestones on a Journey (1970 / 2004) (exhibition catalogue), co-ord. Rosário Sousa Machado (Lisboa: Culturgest, 2004); Ole, António Ole, intro. José António Fernandes Dias (Luanda: Banco Espírito Santo de Angola, 2007); Ole, Na Pele da Cidade/In the Skin of the City (exhibition catalogue), co-ord. João Pignatelli (Luanda: Instituto Camões–Centro Cultural Português, 2009); Ole, António Ole: Hidden Pages, ed. Ulf Vierke and Johannes Hossfeld (Wuppertal, Germany: Peter Hammer Verlag, 2009); Ole António Ole, documentary, directed by Rui Simões (Portugal: Real Ficção, 2013); Ole, António Ole: Luanda, Los Angeles, Lisboa (exhibition catalogue) (Lisboa: Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, 2016). 24 Chagas, interview by author, Lisbon, April 27–28, 2015. 25 On unhomeliness see Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 26 On Afropolitanism see Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (Paris: Découverte, 2010). 27 On Tipo Passe see “Edson Chagas,” in Novo Banco Photo 2015, 89–132. 28 Homi K. Bhabha, “Double Visions,” Artforum (January 1992): 88. See also Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 110; Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

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FASHIONING MODERNITY DRESSING THE BODY IN

ETHIOPIAN PORTRAITURE Julia Kim Werts

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Coronation image of Emperor Haile Selassie, pictured with Empress Menen Asfaw. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

rom anthropological inquiries into dressing the body to historical narratives of fashion and psychoanalytic theories of the relationship between the ego and the image of the self, adorning the physical body has been the subject of a wide range of academic discourse. Existing research on fashioning the body or the image of the body, however, is limited to either fashion history in the West or anthropological investigations into the body-adorning practices of non-Western cultures. Consequently, the question of photographing the fashionable body, and the Western notion of fashion in photography, are rarely applied to non-Western cultures, and fashion is often considered by many fashion historians to be a specifically Western, specifically modern phenomenon that has firm roots in the Industrial Revolution.1 However, at its most

Crown Princess Medferiashwork, c. 1943. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies. Photo: Haïgaz Boyadjian

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basic, fashion is like any other system of communication. It functions as a visual expression of social and cultural as well as personal desires, whether through photographs or in person.2 In regard to Africa, photography and fashion have rarely been considered together, though it has long been established that the “fashion system” relies heavily on the visual image, particularly the photograph, for its distribution and perpetuation. The most relevant work has been through Seydou Keïta’s and Malick Sidibé’s images from Bamako, Mali, during the 1960s. Although the success of their photographs has been fundamental to expanding beyond the constraints of understanding photography in Africa as a colonial enterprise, the actual move toward deconstructing the image has been a rather limited one. Firmly situated within the euphoria of independence from colonialism in West Africa, Keïta’s and Sidibé’s images tend to be discussed in terms of the social and political conditions of the times, though a large part of their appeal lies in the fact that they depict a uniquely Malian fashion sensibility, both in photographic style and in the clothing worn. Therefore, the question of how fashion functions through photographs in Africa more generally remains unasked and unanswered. In this article, I draw from Western and nonWestern modes of fashioning the self in relation to the image of the body in order to specifically address the unique role of photographic portraiture in Ethiopia during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie (1930–1974). Portraits of the emperor and his family, printed daily in newspapers and magazines, were highly influential aspects of nationalism during the mid-1900s; however, these images affected not only the ways in which urban Ethiopians identified as such, but also how the rest of the world envisioned the legitimacy of Imperial Ethiopia.3 Early Photography and Portraiture in Ethiopia Compared to the western coast of Africa, photographic technologies came to Ethiopia relatively late. Only months after the release of the daguerreotype to the French public in November 1839, French daguerreotypists had brought their new technology to North Africa, the Middle East, and South America. By 1840 the photographic process had reached the shores of South Africa, as Europeans 58 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

Emperor Menelik II. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

stopped at the Cape of Good Hope en route to India and Australia.4 In Ethiopia, the first photographer to visit was probably a British Protestant missionary, Henry Aaron Stern, in 1859, early in the reign of Emperor Téwodros II.5 There was limited photographic exploration of Ethiopia until 1879, when Emperor Menelik II invited a group of three Swiss craftsmen to help with the modernization of his country. Throughout the late nineteenth century, various Europeans visited Ethiopia, and following Menelik II’s victory over the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, the number of visitors as well as photographers increased significantly in Addis Ababa as Europeans dispatched numerous missions to the formidable emperor and his court.6 Most of the photographs from the late 1800s and the early 1900s are quite similar in style and subject matter to other photographs of Africa during that time. Taken mostly by Europeans, they consist of images of the landscape, living quarters, and men

and women engaging in everyday activities. Formal portrait photographs were limited to people of higher social and political status such as provincial governors and military leaders. Typically dressed in official or royal traditional clothing, these early portraits were aesthetically simple images of seated individuals looking toward the camera, against a plain backdrop. The circulation of these portraits was also quite limited. Though the first newspaper, a four-page, handwritten weekly, was introduced in 1895 photographs did not appear regularly in print until the 1930s. Before mass media, photographs did receive some circulation as postcard images and printed booklets. However, these means of circulation were likely limited to European distribution and consumption. Because of the dynamics of the relationship formed between Emperor Menelik and European powers, Ethiopians played a significantly larger role in the development of photography in their country. During Menelik II’s reign (1889–1913), people from various regions were encouraged to immigrate to Ethiopia, as the emperor was interested in bringing craftsmen and technology from beyond his country to aid his goals of modernizing Ethiopia. One of the most influential groups of immigrants in Ethiopia was the Armenians, many of whom established photographic studios in Addis Ababa.7 Christian Armenians from a predominantly Muslim region were well suited to train and work as photographers, because, according to Islamic beliefs, the recreation of human likeness is prohibited.8 (In Egypt, for example, Armenian immigrants ran many of the first non-European studios.) Additionally, in Ethiopia, Christian Armenians were able to integrate easily due to the demand for their trade as well as their shared religious beliefs as Christians. As contact with Europe and neighboring countries increased, the aesthetic quality of formal portraiture in Ethiopia began to develop a distinct style. Influenced by European as well as Orientalist concepts of portrait making, Ethiopian portraits from the 1930s and 1940s often employed the use of background settings containing romantic landscapes, flowers, pedestals, classical columns, and Oriental rugs. As opposed to many other instances throughout Africa, where European and/

or Orientalist concepts of design and aesthetics were both brought and applied by outsiders, Ethiopians themselves wielded a great deal of power in terms of negotiating their own relationship with foreign influences, not only in the field of visual culture. Although the Ethiopian landscape made it a geographically difficult country to penetrate during the Scramble for Africa, the persistent and sometimes unorthodox actions of Ethiopian leaders helped establish the aggressive role of the monarchy in preventing a forcible incursion by European forces. During Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign, the import of Western technologies was fiercely regulated; however, the practice of maintaining an active exchange had been well established by his predecessors. The characterization of photography in Africa as a tool of colonialism and empire building has been a common theme in academic inquiries into African photography. Developing Susan Sontag’s metaphor of the camera as a weapon that one “aims” and “shoots” in order to “capture” an image, many

Tafari Makonnen/Haile Selassie, c. 1930. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

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Foreign envoys during Emperor Menelik’s time. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

scholars have investigated the imbalance of power between the photographer and the photographed.9 In Ethiopia, the power to create images of, and essentially “fashion,” Ethiopians was largely removed from European hands, allowing a space in which the rapport between the photographer and the photographed was not a reconstruction of the inequities of colonialism. It would be neglectful to say that Ethiopia was not affected by the colonial enterprise; although brief, the Italian occupation of Ethiopia brought with it lasting effects of both colonialism and fascism. However, because colonialism was never institutionalized in Ethiopia, the role of modernization rested largely in the hands of Ethiopians, albeit a small number of Ethiopians with very particular motivations. Clothing and Fashion in Ethiopia In much the same way that photography in Africa is closely associated with colonialism, a vast majority of the existing inquiries into dressing 60 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

the African body are directly related to European contact and the civilizing mission. In Jean and John Comaroff ’s Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialects of Modernity on a South African Frontier, clothing the “naked” African body is discussed in terms of equating the dressed body to a civilized body, a body that through being properly covered was somehow closer to God.10 In many instances throughout Africa missionaries photographed their “successful” conversion of “savage heathens” to civilized and “well-dressed” Christians.11 Additionally, colonial governments often produced pamphlets of the modernizing and civilizing processes, comparing and contrasting images of the primitive African with the educated, civilized African, the unclothed savage with the neatly dressed colonial subject.12 However, the Comaroffs argue that the importance of dressing the body was not merely part of the civilizing mission and a sign of the conversion to Christianity; it also signaled a means of commodifying the body. By the time Europeans began to

Emperor Haile Selassie outside his home in England during his period of exile. He is speaking with Hakim Workenah. His daughter Princess Tsehai is to his right, and Crown Prince Asfa Wosen stands to the left of Hakim Workenah. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

settle in Africa, how the body itself was dressed had long been established in Europe as a commodified fashion system in which consumption was a major index of social standing. In numerous encounters with the “improperly” clothed natives, neither the consumptive aspect nor the visible markers of social status were apparent to the European eye. Aside from the more obvious differences in, and the “problem” of, nakedness, the Comaroffs describe this perceived lack of classificatory dressing as a “disturbing” absence of social order for Europeans.13 In Ethiopia, however, there was a visible classificatory system of dressing the body. Not only did the nobility dress differently from the rest of the population, but distinct differences in dress also existed among those in power, signifying their titles and roles within the feudal system. The title of the wearer was distinguishable through the various colors and fabrics of his or her ceremonial robes. Additionally, members of the clergy dressed in distinct clothing, another visual signifier of a social

system that was somewhat more familiar to the European mode of dressing. Ethiopia’s relationship with Westerners was, therefore, quite unique in terms of clothing the body. For the most part, Ethiopians continued to dress in traditional fashions well into the twentieth century. Though Western clothing quickly became a part of the wardrobe of the royal family and other high-ranking officials, the fluidity with which they shifted from Western and Ethiopian clothing was noticeable. Emperor Haile Selassie was regularly photographed wearing both traditional and nontraditional fashions, and he combined elements from both in his dress. He was often photographed in dark Western slacks, leather loafers, and the traditional white cotton cloth wrapped around his torso. Before the Italian invasion in 1936, the emperor was most often photographed in either full traditional regalia or a more casual hybrid of Western and Ethiopian styles. As Haile Selassie continued to travel on official state business to various European Werts

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Empress Menen, c. 1960. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies. Photo: Torkom (Tony) Boyadjian

countries, his wardrobe gradually reflected the influence of foreign styles. The traditional cloak, which was worn draped around the shoulders and closed at the neck, was redesigned to include a collar that resembled those on tailored shirts. However, following his five-year term of exile in England during the Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941, the emperor returned with a much more Western style of dress.14 Increasingly, portraits of the emperor and his family reflected a Western fashion sense. Official portraits that were released for the press show Emperor Haile Selassie and Empress Menen in Western clothing—the emperor most often in suits or full military regalia and the empress in Western-style ball gowns. Though this was a significant change, these new fashions still reflected an Ethiopian style. The headdress worn as part of the full military regalia reflects those worn by military leaders as part of the traditional uniform, and the empress’s silk ensemble is accessorized with a shawl draped over her arms, a necessary element of traditional women’s dress in Ethiopia. 62 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

However, more so than the emperor and his wife, their children were reflective of the changing fashion sensibility in urban Ethiopian culture during the 1950s and 1960s, a time of dynamic cultural and social change. In particular, the Crown Prince Asfa Wosen and his wife, Princess Medferiashwork, depicted not only a change in dress, but also a sense of modern fashionability through the embodiment of their clothing. Their comfort both in the clothing they wore and as subjects of a photograph are apparent in comparison with portraits of the emperor and the empress. Rather than standing rigid and posing in front of a plain backdrop, these images of the crown prince and princess are highly stylized and contain both obvious and discreet indications of a dialogue with modernity. In the portrait Asfa Wosen wears a fashionable, three-piece suit, complete with a handkerchief in his breast pocket, and he focuses his gaze slightly away from the camera. The soft focus lends an air of romanticism to the photograph, conveying a softer, more human side of the heir to the throne. In the image of Princess Medferiashwork, the elegance of her dress and the soft lighting that falls on her face and torso emphasize a certain sophistication in the act of reading. A comparable image of the emperor’s daughter Princess Tenagnework conveys a similar sense of stylishness, not only in the clothing and accessories she wears, but also in the specifics of the background and the props used in the photograph. Fashioning the Body through Portraits Contemporary academic discourse on fashion and fashion theory in the West has relied on psychoanalytic theory and the politics of embodiment. Because clothing is worn on the flesh, it serves as a boundary between the self and the other, as well as an indication or sign of what lies beyond the flesh. The relationship between the clothing worn and its wearer relies on both the tactile nature of the fabric on the skin and the perception of being looked at. The question of “vision” gives emphasis to the fact that concepts of seeing must be viewed as historically specific, linked to specific discourses and forms of social power and, consequently, a particular way of organizing the relations between the observer and the observed.15 The invention of photography is a crucial moment in the development of a modern

Emperor Haile Selassie, 1958. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies. Photo: Torkom (Tony) Boyadjian

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Princess Tenagnework, c. 1940s. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

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structure of vision. In legitimizing specific forms of subject-object relations, technologies of vision such as photography organize specific relations among knowledge, power, and the body.16 In this way, examining the role of photographic images in relation to how they are seen is central to understanding identity formation, be it a collective identity or a personal one. Photographs of Emperor Haile Selassie proliferated in mass media throughout his nearly fifty-year reign. In the 1930s images of the emperor and his family were the most common photographs published, thus the most readily available to the public. The emperor’s photograph appeared in nearly every issue of every publication, both Amharic and English, and until the 1940s the same handful of portraits was printed on a regular basis. In later years (1960s and 1970s) press photographs of the emperor engaging in official state business became more common than formal portraits in newspapers. Portraits were usually reserved for special-issue publications such as those celebrating birthdays and anniversaries. Whether it was magazines or newspapers and later television, images of the royal family dominated visual media in Ethiopia throughout the mid-twentieth century. How, then, did these images function as markers of a newly emerging urban identity? More specifically, how did the ways in which the subjects of the photographs dressed negotiate the Ethiopian relationship with modernity? In many instances, photographs of the emperor himself served as propaganda both in and out of Ethiopia. Many fashion historians believe that King Louis XIV was the first monarch in the Western world to realize that appearances could be used to change the people, but visual representations of power existed long before then. For example, Ancient Egyptian pharaohs wore false goatees as a symbol of authority, even when the ruler was a woman. Purple togas with gold embroidery were worn exclusively by emperors for state occasions during the Roman Empire. In the years prior to the US acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands, Hawaii’s royal family circulated portrait photographs of themselves dressed in decadent European styles. These photographs intended to convey to Western powers a sense of political authority and autonomy.17 In Ethiopia, Lij Iyasu,

Crown Prince Asfa Wosen. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

the true heir to Emperor Menelik II’s throne, lost favor with the Ethiopian people when photographs of him in Muslim attire confirmed that the supposedly Christian ruler had converted or was overly sympathetic to Islam.18 The clothing worn, the materials used, their modes of production, and the ways in which these objects and their wearers were represented figure prominently in the development of both cultural and national identities. In the case of Haile Selassie, his self-image functioned in much the same way as portraits of the royal family in Hawaii. The emperor’s portraits elicited a sense of legitimacy and authority through the careful presentation of his physical body. However, unlike the rulers in the Hawaii photographs, Haile Selassie regularly shifted back and forth between Western and non-Western styles, visually presenting himself and his country as one that both embraced modernity and celebrated tradition. When on official state business, he often dressed in Western suits or military uniforms, but at palatial celebrations he either combined traditional and modern dress or wore traditional robes. Werts

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His clothing as well as that of his children was directly representative of the shifting ideals of the governing body and their role within that government from the 1930s to the 1970s. Though the legitimacy of his title was placed in a broadly Christian context, that legitimacy was specifically situated within Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. His full title—Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings of Ethiopia, and Elect of God—had little relevance to foreign relations and international trade with Western nations. In Europe and America, the elaborate silk and velvet robes and Orthodox Christian motifs did little to indicate a legitimate, modern government. The separation of church and state had to be signified in some way, if only representatively. In this way, the shift from full traditional regalia to less elaborately decorated ceremonial robes depicts the visual separation of religion from the authority of the monarchy. The persona that the emperor portrayed to the public was one in which the emperor himself was highly invested. The visual representation of his authority, as well as that of his relationship with the modernizing process, was a carefully and precisely executed illustration of his role and Ethiopia’s role in the international arena. Through these images of the royal family, the Ethiopian public witnessed a visual transformation of the physical body that coincided with the rapid modernization occurring in urban centers. The metropolis transformed not only in the sense of paved roads, schools, and hospitals, but also in terms of how the body itself was situated within the shifting cityscape. Photographic Legacies The “image” of the powerful and ever-adapting Ethiopian empire was likewise shattered through the visual image in 1973, when British reporter Jonathan Dimbleby produced a film depicting the famine in Wollo Province that claimed an estimated two hundred thousand lives. The images from his film The Unknown Famine stood in stark juxtaposition with the photographs of the emperor and his family in large, lavish palaces, holding sumptuous feasts for visiting dignitaries, driving expensive cars, and traveling the world. Portraits of the royal family that for decades had served as an indication 66 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

Emperor Haile Selassie in his study. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

of the power and ability of the monarchy, as well as the country itself, to adapt and survive in a rapidly modernizing, increasingly global world no longer carried that authority. However, more than thirty years after the fall of the monarchy, these portraits are reemerging as signs of power. Portraits of the royal family are highly visible throughout the urban landscape— on cars and taxis, on clothing and accessories, in storefront windows, and on the cover of books and magazines. In a country where the conception of national identity has been challenged repeatedly, a significant amount of cultural and historical dignity still lingers in the legendary past. The emperor, who so carefully crafted and fashioned an image of himself that was recognized throughout the world, maintains a certain sense of authority through the photographic image. Julia Kim Werts is an art historian of contemporary African art who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Notes

This article, which is part of a larger project on Ethiopian photography, is largely based on archival research conducted at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I would like to thank the institute and the staff at the library and archives for their help with this project. 1 Both Gilles Lipovetsky and Elizabeth Wilson discuss the development of the “fashion system” as a Western enterprise in that the specific social and economic conditions of the West were necessary elements for its creation as well as its perpetuation. See Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 2 Roland Barthes, in The Fashion System, claims that vision is flawed and unreliable; therefore, we are unable to fully comprehend vision as a tool of communication. However, Barthes specifically refers to written fashion in the form of text about fashion in magazines. For more, see Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). 3 Though this paper will focus primarily on formal portraits, I also consider informal portraits taken in public settings as well as press photographs of the emperor, his family, and other high government officials, who typically consisted of the extended royal family. 4 Vera Viditz-Ward, “Studio Photography in Freetown,” in Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography (Paris: Revue Noire, 1998), 34. 5 Richard Pankhurst, “The Genesis of Photography in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa,” British Journal of Photography 123, no. 44 (1976): 952. 6 Ibid., 955. 7 Following the Armenian Genocide during the 1910s, Armenian refugees fled from their home to various countries. Armenians who came to Ethiopia arrived as Emperors Menelik II and Haile Selassie were working to modernize the country and build the new capital city, Addis Ababa, which was established by Emperor Menelik II in 1886. Many were skilled workers and helped

shape the urban landscape through fields such as architecture, local crafts, and photography. 8 Nicolas Monti, Africa Then: Photographs, 1840–1918 (New York: Knopf, 1987), 7. 9 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta, 1978), 8. For more on African photography and colonialism see Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, eds., Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and Elizabeth Edwards, Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 10 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 11 Margaret Jean Hay, “Changes in Clothing and Struggles over Identity in Colonial Western Kenya” in Fashioning Africa: Power and Politics of Dress, ed. Jean Marie Allman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 70. 12 See David Binkley, Foreword, in Christraud Geary, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960 (London: Philip Wilson, 2002), 7–9. 13 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 227–29. 14 Interestingly, during his time in England, Haile Selassie was most often photographed in a more traditional style, typically Western slacks and shoes with a white cotton wrap and cloak on his torso. 15 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 6–8. 16 Suren Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 2. 17 Lydia Kualapai, “The Queen Writes Back: Lili’uokalani’s Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 17, no. 2 (2005): 49. 18 Although this assumption cannot be proven, photographs of Lij Iyasu in Muslim attire do exist. It is unclear how, or whether, these images were circulated among the public.

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THE STORIES THAT NEED TO BE TOLD 56TH VENICE BIENNALE Selene Wendt

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n an essay for Platform Videobrasil, “The Individual Stories and Shared Histories of a Global Narrative,” I discuss the predominance of narrative forms in contemporary film and video. This particular topic provides an interesting frame of reference in relation to the 56th International Art Exhibition All the World’s Futures (2015), curated by Okwui Enwezor and organized by La Biennale di Venezia. In this exhibition narratives unfold within an expanded framework that also includes performances, interventions, concerts, and live readings. Enwezor’s investigation of the state of things is defined by a multidisciplinary approach that defies strict distinctions between what is or should be considered art. He extends the notion of artistic practice beyond the strictly visual in an exhibition that reveals a multiplicity of interrelated narratives. The interconnectivity of seemingly disconnected situations and stories throughout All the World’s Futures contributes to an exhibition that is simultaneously fragmented, overlapped, and intertwined. The result is a complex structure of stories that exists between past and present, combines shared histories with personal stories, and ranges from the highly visual to the completely invisible. Throughout the exhibition past and present are in constant ebb and flow, as contemporaneity is influenced by history, memory, loss, absence, and displacement.

Glenn Ligon, A Small Band, 2015. Neon and paint, 74 3/4 x 797 1/2 in. Courtesy the artist; Luhring Augustine, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. © Glenn Ligon. Oscar Murillo, signaling devices in now bastard territory, 2015. Twenty flag paintings of oil, oil stick, thread, and dirt on canvas. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York / London

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A labyrinthine path between two gardens—from the Giardini to Il Giardino delle Vergine—is illuminated with works that tell the stories that need to be told. These stories relate to distinctions of power and class hierarchy, social injustice, mass migration, absence, and loss. In the spirit of Edward Said, topics of displacement and exile abound in works that are woven together from the ragged, yet beautiful threads of daily life as influenced by the long-term effect of history and its implications on what plays out in the present. These narratives are punctuated by an abundance of words, text, and literary references that are written, spoken, sung, recited, projected, sculpted, drawn, whispered, murmured, or simply inferred. With the Arena as the central axis of the exhibition, conceived as a gathering place for

continuous live readings, songs, recitals, and film projections, Enwezor clearly defines his curatorial agenda. Among many highlights in the Arena programming is Joana Hadjithomas’s and Khalil Joreige’s live reading of their artist book Latent Images: Diary of a Photographer (2009–15). The work involves a two-hour performance featuring actors who read a 1,312-page book aloud by first cutting open and slowly turning each page as they describe a series of invisible photographs. Latent Images includes thirty-eight photographic plates, selected among hundreds of reels of film originally exposed but until now never developed by a fictitious Lebanese photographer, Abdallah Farah, between 1997 and 2006. The actual photographs are invisible, replaced

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 177 Days of Performances of Latent Images, 2015. Performances and timeline of 354 books, 177 metal shelves. Courtesy the artists

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Charles Gaines, Sound Text #2: Steal Away, 2015. Graphite on printed paper, single channel video, monitor. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Charles Gaines

by detailed descriptions of the photographs from the photographer’s meticulously detailed notebook. His photographs are thereby read to us rather than shown to us, and we are left to imagine the photographs as we focus our attention on the spoken word. The images that we conjure up in our imagination tell an interesting story about the photographer, as well as political and social stories about postwar Beirut. According to the story in the exhibit, Farah was prevented from developing his films due to lack of basic photographic supplies. Nevertheless, his notebook becomes an equally viable platform for creative expression to the extent that even when the situation in Beirut improved, he still enjoyed taking photographs that he would leave undeveloped. What makes the Arena resonate on so many levels is the extent to which the performances are consistently linked to works in the exhibition, creating a space that is more than an additional platform for artistic expression. For instance, a large-scale wall installation composed of books functions as a physical record of Hadjithomas’s and Joreige’s live reading. One by one the unread books, with their pristine, untouched pages, are replaced with the books that have been methodically cut open and read during the performance. As a work in progress

the tattered edges of the books will eventually take over the entire installation, ultimately resulting in a trace of a trace. These traces are embedded into a wall of books that cannot be read, whose content can only be imagined by the viewer in the same way we are left to imagine the photographs in the live reading. As such, the scars of the past are simultaneously hidden and visualized in the same spirit as the performance itself. Charles Gaines plays an equally central role in the Arena with his original master composition Sound Text (2015), which was derived from his recent body of work Notes on Social Justice (2013), a series of large-scale drawings of musical scores from songs, some borrowed from as early as the American Civil War (1860–65) and others dating from the mid-twentieth century. The musical score is an original composition by Gaines, with arrangements for piano and string quartet by Sean Griffin. In the main pavilion Gaines’s Sound Text fills an entire room with a symphonic narrative. Gaines has a gift for transforming music, literary references, and drawings of musical notes into multimedia installations that are as aesthetic as they are melodious. Reading between and sometimes through Gaines’s enlarged drawings of sheet music, I found Wendt

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myself completely transported to another time and place. Music set the tone for an unexpected encounter with historical figures, including Frederick Douglass, Confucius, and Susan B. Anthony. Stendhal was there too, if only in my mind. Paradoxically, it felt as though I was listening to a book and reading a symphony while also feeling the art. As is typical of Gaines’s approach, text, music, and image are melded together into an intricate narrative that weaves in and out of history, literature, music, and visual art. He combines early twentieth-century music manuscripts with political texts, large-scale drawings of sheet music, and audible music. Alphabetic and musical languages are cleverly combined in a constant play between text, image, and music that culminates in a multisensory work that can be seen, read, and heard. Words, texts, and narratives contribute to the overall visual language of the exhibition, and the underlying messages are quite clear. Glenn Ligon’s A Small Band (2015), dramatically positioned over the entranceway to the main pavilion, hints at what lies inside—“blues, blood, bruise.” The lowercase letters are practically begging to leap down from the roof. Coupled with Oscar Murillo’s signaling devices in now bastard territory (2015), visitors enter between a series of flags blackened with oil, oil stick, thread, and dirt on canvas that hangs with funereal weight below Ligon’s unlit neon words. Ligon’s message continues inside the exhibition with Come Out. Both works relate to the testimony of Daniel Hamm, one of six black youths commonly known as the Harlem Six, who were arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem riots of 1964. The case was integral to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and brought attention to police brutality against black citizens. “Come out to show them,” painted repeatedly to near abstraction, is cited from minimalist composer Steve Reich’s famous 1966 recording of Daniel Hamm, as he describes having to make his beaten and bruised body bleed in order to receive medical attention: “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” In a slip of the tongue, Hamm actually says “blues” instead of “bruise.” Thinking back on the entranceway, the words blues, blood, and bruise suddenly scream out in capital letters, reminding us, in the spirit of James Baldwin, that we are still in occupied territory.1 72 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

There is no mistaking the historical and political implications of these works, and it’s no surprise that Adrian Piper won a golden lion for her Everything series, inspired by a well-known quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power. He is free.”2 Within the specific context of All the World’s Futures the message comes across as utterly apocalyptic. “Everything will be taken away” is written repeatedly in perfect cursive script on school chalkboards, evoking the kind of classroom punishment that is symptomatic of the misuse of power by authority figures. The ongoing Everything series conveys important lessons that relate specifically to blacks and women and is as disturbingly relevant today as it was when she first began the series in 2003. A few too many journalists lashed out with hollow complaints about the overly somber tone of All the World’s Futures, and I was left to wonder what kind of stories they had expected or hoped to be told at a time of such intense political and social upheaval worldwide. While the exhibition offers no comfort zone for those who are afraid of looking into the critical mirror of social and political injustice, there is no dearth of beauty in the stories that unfold. In Barthélémy Toguo’s installation Urban Requiem (2015) sculptural forms in the shape of human busts are stamped with phrases that form the basis for a series of prints on paper displayed on the wall. Toguo conveys the harsh and immediately familiar realities of our time through artistic craftsmanship and delicate forms that are intended to inspire people to dream. In an interview for Biennale television Toguo describes the diverse sources of inspiration for the work.3 With a sparkle in his eyes he discusses the importance of Albert Camus, who stated that art isn’t a solitary delight; it is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. In accordance with Camus, Toguo believes that the artist has a role in society to communicate what is going on in the world, and Urban Requiem expresses the collective cry of those who are suffering. The phrases reveal problems relating to massacre, genocide, war, mass migration, militantly controlled national borders,

Samson Kambalu, The Last Judgment, 2015. Four hundred soccer balls covered with pages from the Bible. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry Gallery

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police brutality, and other injustices that are happening from Ferguson, Missouri, to the West Bank, and many other places in between. Samson Kambalu offers a refreshingly playful approach with three separate works featured in the exhibition. The most whimsical work contains four hundred balls in various sizes, plastered with pages from the Bible, that are scattered around the premises, inviting the public to engage with these “holy balls” as they wish. The Last Judgment (2015), apparently inspired by Michelangelo’s masterpiece, could easily be interpreted as a clever questioning of the place of Christianity in the contemporary world. As tempting as it was, one didn’t have to kick, play with, or throw one of the balls in the canal to understand the various implications of the work. Equal parts intervention and installation, the work functions as an unexpected catalyst for creativity and play. A significant part of the work involves Kambalu’s photographic documentation of different visitors engaging with the balls, which he then posts on Facebook, giving the work a lasting impact that makes subsequent visits to Facebook much more interesting. Kambalu’s vision of the future is decidedly optimistic, with playfulness and an appreciation for cosmopolitanism as essential guiding factors that will hopefully lead us toward a better tomorrow. Bringing us quickly back to reality through his video installation Ashes (2014–15), Steve McQueen recounts the story of a young man’s premature death. The footage was filmed in Grenada over a decade ago when McQueen met the protagonist of the film, Ashes. Filmed at the height of carefree youth, Ashes is captured smiling and playing on a motorboat that speeds through the turquoise sea. In a powerful foreshadowing of the tragedy that will follow, Ashes falls out of the boat at one point, leaving us in suspense until he pops up again with an ear-to-ear smile. Drowning would not be the cause of this young man’s death, but his fate is no less tragic. In this beautifully directed film the continuous and almost hypnotic sound of waves is offset by film footage of Ashes’s grave being prepared and voiceovers that describe the circumstances of his death. The documentary style reminds us that this is not a fictional story. This is the tragedy of a young man 74 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

Steve McQueen, Ashes, 2002–2015. Video. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

who died too soon, apparently because of drugs that he found on the beach and stole in an attempt to get rich quickly. Ultimately, this is the universal story of death as it relates to the struggle for a better existence. The actual shooting is left to our imagination, with voice-overs that help us visualize the events that led to his death: “He tried to run, and then they shot him in the back, and when he fell one of them guys went over to him and shot him up around his belly and his legs and thing. And that was about it.” An equally foreboding visual narrative is conveyed in John Akomfrah’s three-screen film installation Vertigo Sea: Oblique Tales of the Aquatic Sublime (2015). Typical of Akomfrah’s approach to film, he combines historical documentation with BBC Natural History Unit footage, offset by a few enigmatic scenes that bring to mind the kind of existential angst typical of Henrik Ibsen. Literary references to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse add additional layers of meaning to a mesmerizing visual essay about whaling, polar bear hunting, and environmental issues. However, Vertigo Sea is more than a

spectacular visual narrative about humanity’s conflicted relationship with the ecosystem and the fate of endangered animals in the Arctic Circle; it is a story of epic proportions that is as poetic as it is cautionary. The acted sequences are filmed in a manner that emphasizes a sense of human loss and longing, further accentuated by visual references to the passage of time. The narrative relates as much to human emotions as to the damage that humans cause. Documentary footage from the high seas and images of whaling and polar bear hunting in the Arctic are set against overwhelmingly beautiful scenes from nature, resulting in a powerful tale about humanity and its relationship to the sea, conveyed in a timeless visual narrative that balances perfectly between fact, fiction, history, and contemporaneity. Stories conveyed through the universal language of music also resonate throughout All the World’s Futures. Among numerous participating artists with a keen understanding of the power of music is Kay Hassan. Throughout his work Hassan takes common, everyday objects and reconstructs these objects in a particular way that inspires us to focus on their significance as traces. A clock bears an obvious reference to time and history, eyeglasses speak about personal experience and looking, while vinyl records and radios are personal possessions that link people together from different places and backgrounds through shared musical experiences. Each object thereby conveys a story that relates directly to memory, history, and recollection. With Empire Medley (2015) two pianos are placed dramatically in the center of the space; a white piano stands upright, while a black piano is positioned awkwardly on its side. Hassan wanted to place the white piano on top of the black piano as a visual metaphor for the suppression of black voices, but in the end he couldn’t because it would have damaged the piano. The walls are decorated with colorful collage portraits that also refer to voiceless masses. Similar to billboard images that are plastered layer upon layer, these paper constructions are wrinkled all over and frayed around the edges, just barely hinting at the images and stories embedded beneath the surface. Hassan fills the emptiness of the space with these portraits of everyday people, individuals whom he sees on the streets of Johannesburg and other cities.4 The masked individuals on these billboards allude

to racial tension. He thereby appropriates the visual language of billboards into a narrative that speaks directly about race relations in South Africa. I can just about see the traces of an OMO billboard that has been reconstructed into something meaningful. The process of transforming the ripped and layered remnants of billboard images into collages is similar to how Hassan salvages objects from the universal lost and found before implementing them into a rich visual vocabulary that speaks of nostalgia and memory. Empire Medley immediately brought to mind My Father’s Music Room (2008), in which Hassan integrated old vinyl records into an installation work, creating a homelike setting in a museum environment by decorating the space with an old carpet, a couch, and a table. On one wall he stacked the records, while the other walls featured collages and sepia paintings of Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday. As part of the installation, a selection of their music filled the room, thereby adding to the viewer’s experience of the work.5 The power of music to touch us, inspire us, and perhaps even make us feel transported to another place is highly relevant throughout Hassan’s work. In looking at the collages and works on paper featured in Empire Medley, and as we listen to the arrangements for piano by John White, we can allow ourselves to be transported by our imagination to another place and a different era. As we listen to the rhythm, we are encouraged to consider the disharmony and contradictions caused by the arrogance of empire. Before even entering Carsten Holler’s and Mana Mansson’s video installation Fara Fara (2014), the infectious rhythm of Congolese music pulses from inside the space with the intensity of a Jamaican sound system. The two-screen video installation conveys the story of a sound clash between two rival musicians from Kinshasa—Werrason and Koffi Olomidé. As anyone with the slightest interest in African music knows, Kinshasa’s contemporary music scene is as vibrant as what is going on in musical capitals such as Kingston or Havana. The well-known rivalry between these superstars is conveyed in a captivating documentary style that reveals the intricacies of their personalities and individual musical styles while also conveying the complexity of Congolese music in general. Wendt

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The widely popular tradition in which two rival musicians perform against each other in front of massive crowds of people is deeply rooted in the Congolese music scene. In traditional Lingala this is known as fara fara, meaning “face-to-face.” Similar to a Jamaican sound clash where musicians compete to win, in this case reggae and dancehall are replaced by the characteristic sounds of soukous, which typically features an intense interplay between many guitars, coupled with a beat and melody that owes as much to Cuban rumba as it does to indigenous village music. As the film reveals, the competition is not necessarily limited to musical talent. The musicians make use of all methods and means to sway the audience in their favor, including theatrics, dancing, gyrating, and strutting, with flamboyant dress as an equally decisive factor. The sights and sounds of Kinshasa really come alive in this colorful, almost

electrifying film that provides valuable insight into the context, history, and political impact of music in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Language and its dissolution into something nonsensical is conveyed in Sonia Boyce’s video Exquisite Cacophony (2015), featuring an intense dialogue between the performers Elaine Mitchener and Astronautalis, filmed during a performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A live performance of Exquisite Cacophony is also featured in the Arena programming. As I tried to decipher the words being sung, shouted, whispered, and drawled I felt myself simultaneously pulled in and pushed away. Extending language beyond clear meaning, Sonia Boyce melds social, racial, and sexual innuendo into a highly stimulating conversation. Without missing a beat, the performers push language beyond its own limits as they play with and

Various artists, Invisible Borders: A Trans-African Worldspace. Photographs and multimedia. © Invisible Borders Trans-African Project. Photo: Emeka Okereke

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tease our perceptions. In a perfectly improvised call and response we witness a man and a woman who banter back and forth, here, there, and everywhere. Every conceivable stereotype is addressed, challenged, and questioned in a dialogue that is as sexually charged as it is calculated and distant. Are they fighting or flirting? Are they strangers or lovers? As they bask in the glow of each other’s limelight it’s hard to imagine two people more in sync with one another, but that’s just for a fleeting moment before the mood shifts completely as they steal the stage from each other. Is this real or fictional? Are they enemies or friends? Is that southern accent for real? Yes, no, maybe so. Words and language are magically transformed into song in a linguistic performance that is fueled by rap, lullaby, laughter, and orgasmic outcry. Just when you think you understand the gist of the dialogue, irony is suddenly

offset by seriousness that will leave you laughing at the most inappropriate moment. As we observe and listen to the live performance, we become part of a dialogue that is directed at us; clear distinctions between performance and improvisation, fact and fiction, meaning and meaninglessness are blurred beyond distinction. Those who make it to the far end of the Giardino delle Vergine are rewarded with Emeka Ogboh’s The Song of the Germans (2015). For this piece Ogboh recorded the German national anthem in ten different African languages: Igbo, Yoruba, Bamoun, More, Twi, Ewondo, Sango, Douala, Kikongo, and Lingala. The song is played continuously, with a slightly different arrangement each time. Each segment begins with one singer, who is then joined by a chorus of other singers at different stages in the song, culminating in a full choir at the end of each segment. Ten

Various artists, Invisible Borders: A Trans-African Worldspace. Photographs and multimedia. © Invisible Borders Trans-African Project. Photo: Emeka Okereke

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Oscar Murillo, Frequencies, 2013. Mixed media on canvas. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York / London. Photo: Nicholas Nazari

speakers are set within the raw, empty space at the same height as the ten singers who stood in a circle as they recorded the song in a studio. It doesn’t take long before the harmony and melodiousness is overpowered by the unsettling implications of the work. Beyond the unexpected and rather pleasurable experience of hearing the German national anthem sung in other languages, the work continues to resonate in my mind when I think of these individuals who pledge allegiance to a country that may or may not even accept them. The work is a compelling metaphor that relates not only to these ten singers, but also to immigrants and refugees all over the world. The potential of art to change lives and the implementation of art as a tool for social activism provide a beautiful subtext for the entire exhibition. Theaster Gates’s Gone Are the Days of Shelter and Martyr (2014) is a beautiful example. This multimedia installation addresses the recurring dissolution of and demolition of church parishes in African American and Hispanic neighborhoods across the United States. It would be difficult to imagine All the World’s Futures without Theaster Gates’s 78 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

participation. He stands alone in his implementation of the language of sculpture as a tool for social change and powerful artistic expression. The entranceway to the installation is nearly blocked off by a massive wall of slate roof tiles placed next to a dramatically lit church bell. On the other side of the wall a video installation is coupled with a statue of a saint and the remains of church organ pipes. The church that inspired the work was built in 1911 and is now little more than a pile of rubble. The video features the Black Monks of Mississippi, who are filmed raising and dropping church pews at regular intervals with the precision and grace of dancers. Their movements are synched with cello music that plays in the background and segues into blues-gospel chant, resulting in a work that is rhythmic, dramatic, and poetic. Not only are remnants from St. Laurence Catholic Church in Chicago’s South Side included in the installation; they are given new life and significance as sculptural objects in their own right. Gates’s use of repurposed materials, in this case roof tiles that are transformed into a commanding sculptural form, is also connected to his ongoing work with Rebuild Foundation, an

urban renewal project that could ultimately transform one of the poorest areas of Chicago into a vision comparable to Versailles. Social activism is also at the core of Invisible Borders: The Trans-African Project, an artist collaborative founded by Emeka Okereke in 2009 that comprises African photographers, writers, and filmmakers who use photography as a tool for facilitating cultural awareness and understanding.6 Their Trans-African road trip project unites artists from different African countries as they travel across national borders while creating works inspired by their experiences. As such, the project not only explores questions of movement and migration in Africa, it actively transcends national borders. Driven by ideals of cross-cultural creativity, they are guiding the way along the many roads that will hopefully lead to a better future. Embracing the full potential of art as a tool for societal change, they are also pushing the boundaries of collective art practice in general. Their project indicates that if there is hope for the future, it will be found in the absolute dissolution of national borders. Oscar Murillo’s Frequencies (2013) is another ongoing collaborative project fueled by issues of social engagement. Murillo has visited schools throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, inspiring students, primarily between the ages of ten and sixteen, to participate in the project. He invites students to express themselves on canvases that are attached to their school desks, created in various shapes that correspond to the particular shape of school desks from different countries. Results include a fairly substantial amount of illegible scratches and graffiti-like outpourings, but they also include works that bring Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat to mind. The project captures the unlimited potential of cross-cultural creativity and collaboration and is a perfectly natural extension of Murillo’s artistic practice. Murillo’s works typically challenge preconceived notions about art, which is precisely what makes his work so engaging, whether he is working individually or collaboratively. His large-scale paintings are typically composed of rough-hewn, stitched canvases that are often punctuated with fragments of text. An element of chance plays beautifully into his compositions, with grime and dust as essential

visual elements. However, what may appear to be left to chance is in fact quite calculated. Similar to how Edvard Munch exposed his paintings to the elements for added effect, Murillo is widely known for paintings that are accentuated with dirt. In fact, the seemingly unfinished, experimental quality of his work has become his trademark. In distinct contrast to the blackened canvases of signaling devices in now bastard territory, which seem to predict doomsday, the bright colorful outpourings of Frequencies signal hope for the future. Among the most interesting national pavilions are those that responded directly to Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial theme, and Poetics of Dissent in the Chilean Pavilion is a perfect example. The selection of Lotty Rosenfeld as one of two participating artists in the pavilion is particularly relevant. It is important to keep in mind that Enwezor’s idea to use the Arena as a focal point for the Biennale was inspired by the 1974 Biennale and its collective revolt against ongoing political and social oppression and unrest in Chile during the aftermath of the violent coup d’état, in which General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende. Enwezor elaborates on the significance of the 1974 Biennale events in an extract from his essay Addendum: The dedication of the program of events to Chile and against fascism remains one of the most explicit attempts, in recent memory, by which an exhibition of the stature of the Art Biennale not only responds to, but also courageously steps forward to share the historical stage with the political and social contexts of its time. It goes without saying that, in view of the current turmoil around the world, the Biennale’s Eventi del 1974 has been a curatorial inspiration. In response to this remarkable episode and the rich documentation it generated, the 56th International Art Exhibition: All the World’s Futures, will introduce the Arena, an active space dedicated to continuous live programming across disciplines and located within the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. 7

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and censorship, Lotty Rosenfeld played a pioneering role of artist as activist. Nelly Richard pinpoints the essence of Rosenfeld’s artistic practice in an analysis that also corresponds to the curatorial theme of All the World’s Futures: The way this work moves back and forth between different historical events and geopolitical conflicts brings the memory of Chile’s past to bear on the unfolding present of global events, reminding us that the unconcluded meanings of the traumatic memories continue to speak—if in a deferred way—to the expectant consciousness that remains agitated and unsettled.8

The relationship between history and contemporaneity creates a fascinating subtext that links past, present, and future throughout the exhibition. For instance, Walker Evans’s renowned photographs of the Great Depression from his and James Agee’s 1936 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men provides a strong historical counterpoint for contemporary works that address poverty and labor conditions, in particular. Similarly, Bruce Nauman’s 1983 work Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain echoes the dark undertone of many of the text-inspired works. In a curatorial exclamation mark, Nauman’s work is set against Adel Abdessemed’s Nymphéas (2015), composed of daggers shaped into floral arrangements. Overall, meaningful connections between various works contribute to an intricate tapestry of art that is carefully stitched together from the threads of history. After three full days of sensory overload, by the time I finally made it to the Nordic Pavilion just in time for Camille Norment’s live performance my expectations were quite high. Similar to how performances in the Arena enhance the experience of works displayed in the main exhibition, Norment’s live performance is essential to a full appreciation of the depth and range of Rapture (2015). Throughout her work Norment translates sound into site-specific experiences, and in this case she transformed the bright, open-ended space of the Nordic Pavilion into an all-encompassing work that speaks about the poetics of space. Within a space where traditional boundaries between outside and inside are barely 80 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

discernible, the shattered windows placed along the edge of the pavilion define a clear division between inside and outside while also providing an intriguing sculptural element. Reflecting the paradoxical nature of the sound component, the windows are physical barriers that we can see through but not transgress. This beautiful yet unsettling visual element emphasizes the underlying tone of vulnerability and fracture in both the soundscape and the live performance. Norment’s installation conveys the simultaneity of rapture and rupture, more specifically related to a state of ecstasy or the experience of losing oneself, and the unsettling state of rupture that subsequently takes place. We enter into a space where our experience of sound is heightened and challenged by the architectural and sculptural elements. A chorus of twelve female voices, accompanied by a glass armonica, contribute to a soundscape that is both eerie and atmospheric, that repeatedly yet almost imperceptibly shifts from comforting to disquieting and back again. As Norment plays the glass armonica during the performance, accompanied by carefully composed music and barely audible utterings, the sense of emptiness and absence already suggested in the visual and sonic elements is replaced by a more immediate sense of urgency. I felt simultaneously captivated and captured by music, words, and song that ranged in intensity from a whisper to a cry, and every variation in between. Describing the process involved in creating Rapture, Norment has compared it to reading the wind to determine the state of things right now. I can’t imagine a more poetic metaphor within the wider framework of an exhibition highlighted by stories, poems, narratives, sound, music, and images that come together to convey a sense of all the world’s futures. Selene Wendt is an independent curator, writer, and founder of The Global Art Project. Notes

1 James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966. 2 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, trans. Harry T. Willetts (1968; repr. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), chapter 17.

3 Barthélémy Toguo for Biennale TV, La Biennale di Venezia Channel, May 6, 2015, Venice, Italy. 4 The Everyday People series was first shown in Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 2014. 5 Selene Wendt, “The Cracked Mirror of Beauty,” in Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art (exhibition catalogue) (Oslo, Norway: The Stenersen Museum, 2009), 72. 6 In addition to Emeka Okereke, other artists who participated in Invisible Borders projects include Lucy Azubuike, Emmanuel Iduma, Lilian Novo Isioro, Ala Kheir, Teresa Menka, Jide Odukoya, Amaize Ojeikere, Charles Okereke, Ray Daniels Okeugo, Uche

Okpa-Iroha, Teresa Menka, Vanessa Peterson, Tom Saater, and Jumoke Sanwo. 7 Okwui Enwezor, “Addendum, Notes on the Program and Projects of the 56th International Art Exhibition: All the World’s Futures: The Arena,” www.labiennale.org/en/art/archive/56th -exhibition/enwezor-addendum. Nelly Richard, “Poetics of Dissent: Paz Errázuriz and Lotty 8 Rosenfeld,” in Poetics of Dissent: Paz Errázuriz and Lotty Rosenfeld (exhibition catalogue for Chilean Pavilion) (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2016), 59.

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SHARJAH BIENNIAL 12 THE PAST THE PRESENT THE POSSIBLE Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi

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t was instructive to see the 12th Sharjah Biennial (SB 12) a week after attending the preview of the ambitious 56th Venice Biennale on May 6, 2015. The Venice Biennale’s principal exhibition, All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor, enjoyed its fair share of praise and criticism due to its sheer audacity. It included the highest number of artists (about 137) in the biennale’s history; assembled a breadth and depth of works and practices never seen before; and attempted to frame a new roadmap for the art world’s future, in which the character and content of an artwork is, certainly, more important than the geography of the artist. Such great ambitions come fraught with challenges. The most striking was the juxtaposition of works, which in some instances appeared bombastic or uneven but ultimately reflective of the tenuous messiness and uneasiness that characterize the contemporary world, in line with Enwezor’s interest in truly addressing “the state of things.” In contrast, SB 12, held March 5 to June 5, 2015, took a mellowed approach in presenting similar arguments as the Venice Biennale but packed no less of a visual and intellectual punch.

Adrián Villar Rojas, Planetarium, 2015. Site-specific installation, Kalba Ice Factory, Sharjah Biennial 12, 2015. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy kurimanzutto, Mexico City; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and the artist. © 2015 baumann fotografie Frankfurt a.M. Photo: Jörg Baumann

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Adrián Villar Rojas, Planetarium, 2015. Site-specific installation, Kalba Ice Factory, Sharjah Biennial 12, 2015. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy kurimanzutto, Mexico City; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and the artist. © 2015 baumann fotografie Frankfurt a.M. Photo: Jörg Baumann

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The Sharjah Biennial was established in 1993 as part of the second wave of art biennials of the global South that emerged in the early 1990s as a consequence of neoliberal globalization that led to the deregulation of the art world.1 It has since become the most significant international art event in the Middle East and North Africa region. Following a change of direction in 2003 and new leadership under artistic director Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the Sharjah Art Foundation was consequently created in 2009 to oversee the biennial and its ancillary platforms and activities. They include the March Meeting (an annual public forum for discourse and dialogue on arts, culture, history, and society), research and publications, production grants and commissions, artists’ residencies, and an elaborate schedule of exhibitions that happens outside of the biennial’s own March to June season every alternating year. All of this has solidified the preeminent position of the Sharjah Biennial in the region and on the international art calendar. SB 12 had an expansive yet carefully delineated trajectory. Curated by Eungie Joo and her associate

Ryan Inouye, and adopting the elegiac title The Past, the Present, the Possible as its theme, the exhibition considered the critical role of the past in shaping our present conditions and the possibility of a future that, perhaps, might push the linear “progressive” narrative of modernity in other directions. It explored the meaning of community and the idea of place as the spark for creativity and artists’ imagination, focusing on Sharjah. Artists were commissioned to make new works that were inspired directly or indirectly by the lived experience in Sharjah. My initial reaction after visiting some of the exhibitions on May 10 was the intellectual stimulation in a very concrete sense that SB 12 offered. This is a scarce commodity in an art world system with too many rote biennials that are often heavy on verbiage and thin on substance. This is not to say that SB 12 was totally exempt from the usual arcane biennial-speak. I did hear some of that during the March Meeting conversations. But, generally, there was something palpable and authentic that I encountered in most of the displays, something that was equally visible in the accompanying March

Saloua Raouda Choucair, various works, including Interforms (1960–62), Module (1980–83), Duals (1985–87), Rapture of Revelation (1985–87), and Sparkles (1991–93). Installation view, Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah Biennial 12, 2015. Courtesy Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation. Photo: Sharjah Art Foundation

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Hassan Sharif, left, Coir and Cloth, 2007. Coir and cotton-blend fabric, 130 x 200 x 200 cm. Right, Copper 4, 2014. Copper wire and copper tube, 310 x 430 x 54 cm. Installation view, Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah Biennial 12, 2015. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Genevieve Hanson with Nina Farr

Meeting, which was held May 11–15 instead of the usual March. The preceding March Meeting of 2014 was configured as a kind of laboratory by curator Joo to try out ideas and articulate the framework of SB 12 in partnership with invited artists and other resource persons. The 2015 March Meeting conversations at the Sharjah Institute for Theatrical Arts, led this time by participating artists Eric Baudelaire, Kristine Khouri, Rasha Salti, Ayreen Anastas, and Rene Gabri, addressed serious issues of historical and contemporary significance that took the Middle East as a logical point of departure. There were real attempts to examine overlapping histories in the Middle East and draw the rest of the world and other histories into that orbit. Questions were raised regarding the convenience and relevance, or its lack thereof, of the nation-state as a governing unit. 86 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

Conversations considered collective actions in the political and art-related spheres, past and present, in addressing political flashpoints in the Middle East. These were very tangible issues to contemplate while visiting the several exhibits. Trudging the pavements of Sharjah under the sweltering heat, one marveled at the creative engineering that created a hypermodern city that still retains visible elements of old civilization in the middle of the desert. SB 12 had fifty-five participating artists, a careful mix of different generations at various stages of their career, and a fair balance of male and female from twenty-five countries. Works ranged from conventional paintings and sculptures to installations, mixed media, new media, videos, and photographs and addressed a mixed bag of themes, from formal aesthetic inquiry to the more pressing issues that face the world today. They were displayed at several

locations in the city and beyond, including the Sharjah Art Museum, the Sharjah Art Foundation’s spaces, Islamic architecture–type courtyards, vernacular buildings, and the converted ice factory at the city of Kalba on the Gulf of Oman, some two hours away from Sharjah. Considered together or individually, the works on display helped to visually articulate the biennial’s theme of the past, present, and possible. I was struck by the work of the indefatigable Lebanese modernist Saloua Raouda Choucair. Her incredibly comprehensive practice dates back to the early period of Arab modernism in the 1940s and perhaps captures a modernist past Joo was intent on bringing into the conversation. Selections of her early painting experiments with color and abstract lines (1947–51) and studies of structural and organic forms in wood, flat steel, aluminum, and stone occupied two galleries at the Sharjah Art Museum. Hassan Sharif was also an excellent example of Joo’s attempt to map the arc of twentieth-century modernism from a Middle Eastern and North African perspective. A pioneer of conceptual and experimental art in the United Arab Emirates, Hassan is well-known for his accumulative installations and

exploration of ordinary objects from the everyday. A selection from his 1980s body of work, including Drum (1985) and Wooden Column (1985); several study sketches of the two works; and philosophical writings was displayed in four second-floor galleries at the Sharjah Art Museum. A more recent work, Copper 4 (2014), a dense cascade of thick and slim wrought coppers, squeezed, twisted, and bent into coils in the middles and both ends of the copper rods, occupied the niche facing the stairs as the viewer approached the second floor. It was clear that a lot of consideration went into the choice of venues for the various works to create specific visual experiences. In museum settings, the displays had a quiet elegance, were uncluttered, and reflected a clever economy of space. Other displays, in biennial-type settings or courtyards and informal spaces around the souks, had more intrusive or robust physical presence. As Joo stated during our conversation, it was important to show several works by each exhibiting artist in order to better acquaint viewers with the work or practice of the different artists. This strategy was clearly effective in the display of works by Choucair and Sharif. In other instances it did not work very well. Lynette

Adrián Villar Rojas, Planetarium, 2015. Site-specific installation, Kalba Ice Factory, Sharjah Biennial 12, 2015. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy kurimanzutto, Mexico City; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and the artist. © 2015 baumann fotografie Frankfurt a.M. Photo: Jörg Baumann

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Yiadom-Boakye’s signature portrait figures at Bait Al Serkal and Bait Hussain Makrani looked very forgettable, because there were far too many, and they looked repetitive. Conversely, Bryon Kim’s Sunday Paintings (2001–ongoing), a series of small panel portraits of the sky painted in the course of the artist’s travels across several geographical locations, though appearing repetitive, compensated with its poignant formalism and diaristic narrative. Some of the truly memorable works of SB 12 included Adrián Villar Rojas’s imposing site-specific installation at the abandoned ice factory in Kalba. Titled Planetarium (2015), this major work covered the entire interior of the factory and spilled outside. It was composed of beautifully striated and stratified concrete pillars and thick slabs of varied lengths and shapes encrusted with vegetation, bones, seashells, rocks, and detritus, and cement troughs on the floor. Heaps of soil mixed with dung, symmetrically arranged as cultivation ridges at the entrance

to this old factory, complete the installation. Rojas’s work offers an apocalyptic of concrete merging with vegetation and waste (organic and synthetic), with the unseen human factor as the obvious catalyst. It captures ongoing concerns centered on the Anthropocene and anxieties about an uncertain future. Another standout was Im Heung-Soon’s Reincarnation (2015), a two-channel video that focused on the social experiences of a community of Korean women who married Iranian men and have lived in Iran for more than forty years. The video considers two historical events, the Vietnam War (1955–75) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), which have largely shaped the women’s existence. It captures the quotidian lives of people who continue to live under precarious conditions. Basel Abbas’s and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s The Incidental Insurgents (Parts 1–3) (2012–15) was another compelling work, comprising objects and video installations displayed at Bait Al Serkal,

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, The Incidental Insurgents (Parts 1–3), 2012–15. Mixed media. Installation view, Sharjah Biennial 12, 2015. Partial commission by Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy Carroll/Fletcher, London, and the artists. Photo: Sharjah Art Foundation

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opposite the Sharjah Art Foundation’s office. I previously encountered an iteration of the work at the 31st São Paulo Biennial in November 2014. Its intense power is difficult to put into words. The configuration at Sharjah held similar power. Yet I must say that I had a problem with seeing the same work, albeit configured differently, back-to-back in two different biennials. It says something about the incestuous nature of the biennial circuit: its circulation of the same artists or works. Although contemporary art biennials tend to mirror each other in terms of intent, ideas, or in showing the same artists or works, modes of address are not always the same. For a lot of them, and increasingly for most biennials, it is no longer enough to construct narratives of contemporary art without addressing histories of exhibitions, exhibition making, art history, and, more important, conventional political histories. Such was the strength of SB 12 and its ancillary platform, March Meeting 2015. While conversing with locals I learned that a major criticism of SB 12 was its museological effect, which created a distance with the public. In contrast, most observers found SB 11 to be loud and colorful, more in the public domain, with works that engaged the local public instinctively. I felt that Joo’s museum background came through in an organic way in the way she balanced restraint, particularly in the museum display, and boldness without being loud. The works and artists were also well researched. I was mostly concerned with the spotty representation of African artists. But above all, SB 12 had a sensitivity and simplicity that I found refreshing and productive. Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi is an art historian and curator of African art at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Notes

1 There is growing scholarship on the first wave of non-Western art biennials that emerged in the early postcolonial period, such as the traveling Arab Art Biennial in the Middle East and North Africa region in the 1970s. See Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global,” Third Text 27, no. 4 (2013): 442–455, doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.81 0892.

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Negotiating

CONTEMPORARY

AFRICAN

ARCHITECTURES at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Kristen Windmuller-Luna

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frican architecture is having a moment in European museums. African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence (Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia, 2015) and Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design (2015) were both on view in 2015 at the Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein, Germany), while Munich’s Haus der Kunst hosted the mid-career retrospective of Tanzanian-born British architect David Adjaye from January 29–May 31, 2015. Just one year earlier at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, African architecture took the exhibition world with Forms of Freedom: African Independence and Nordic Models at the Nordic Pavilion and with the Young Architects in Africa competition and exhibition. Africa—Big Change / Big Chance debuted the same year at the Triennale di Milano. Joining the crowd in 2015 was AFRICA: Architecture, Culture, and Identity (AFRIKA: Arkitektur, kultur og identitet), a

Andre Christensen and Mieke Droomer, Louisiana Spine, 2015. Installation view of AFRICA: Architecture, Culture, and Identity exhibition, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Hummelbæk, Denmark, 2015. Courtesy Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Kim Hansen 

sprawling, ambitious, and contradictory exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in coastal Hummelbæk, Denmark, June 25–October 25, 2015. Sharing many artists and works with Vitra’s exhibitions, AFRICA: Architecture, Culture, and Identity unfolds across three floors, spilling into the museum’s sculpture park. Nearly eighty architects, writers, and artists, either born in or working on the continent, contributed to the exhibition and catalogue.1 The exhibition opens by using geography to chart the multiple concepts of Africa. Demographers’ data-laden maps bump against cartographies popularized on social media, including Anthony England’s Ebola/No Ebola and Kai Kruse’s The True Size of Africa. A political map of the continent hangs

on the opposite wall, with red lines joining square Instagramlike photographs to each country. Fortynine countries are labeled in Danish and English, except for Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, whose borders are defined yet unlabeled. The omission of these five African countries was not a mistake but the result of a curatorial decision to define “Africa” as the area south of the Sahara Desert.2 The continent’s upper portion was included in the 2014 exhibition Arab Contemporary: Architecture, Culture, and Identity, itself preceded in 2012 by New Nordic: Architecture and Identity, the opening exhibition of the Architecture, Culture, and Identity trilogy. This artificial separation prompts immediate comparison to 2010’s Afropolis: City, Windmuller-Luna

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Wangechi Mutu, Sleeping Serpent, 2014. Mixed media. Installation view, AFRICA, 2015. Courtesy the artist; Victoria Miro, London; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Kim Hansen

Media, Art (Afropolis: Stadt, Medien, Kunst), exhibited at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne and the Iwalewa House in Bayreuth. Afropolis’s artcentered investigation of African cities, informal architecture, and urban futures was truly African in scope. Rather than detaching the Maghreb from the rest of Africa, it looked at Cairo alongside Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Kinshasa. Equally, recent academic writing about African architecture addresses the entire continent, most notably David Adjaye’s 2011 African Metropolitan Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture, whose individual volumes group African capitals according to terrain (such as “Forest,” “The Sahel,” and “The Maghreb”), or Nnamdi Elleh’s 1997 African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation, which engages pan-continental architectural history from the Neolithic period to the present via the theory of triple heritage (the 92 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

intertwinement of indigenous, Western, and Islamic dimensions).3 While Louisiana’s AFRICA claims to examine “Africa right now,” it falls immediately short by perpetuating the racialized bifurcation of the continent into the northern “Arab” and the sub-Saharan “black.” To extend Jan Vansina’s argument about the artificial division that characterized the art history of Africa some thirty years ago, we cannot amputate half of Africa and then call a portion of what remains “African architecture.”4 Nevertheless, AFRICA’s seven themes provide points of entrée into the vast topic of contemporary sub-Saharan African architecture: “Belonging,” “Coexistence,” “Growing Cities,” “Making Space,” “Rebuilding,” “New Communities,” and “Building Futures.” The catalogue also follows this structure, with many of its texts replicated in the galleries. Several sections extend into the sculpture park,

Installation view of “Growing Cities” gallery, AFRICA, 2015. Courtesy Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ulrik Jantzen

where the array of 1:1 architectural models includes two large site-specific works. Symbolically framing the exhibition, South African architects Andre Christensen’s and Mieke Droomer’s Louisiana Spine replicates their Dordabis Community Spine, an undulating structure of wooden poles built in Namibia to serve as both boundary marker and gathering space. Across the garden the Louisiana Hamlet pavilion is a multipurpose structure, created by the Spanish architects SelgasCano and designers Helloeverything from workaday scaffolding components. Conceived as mobile architecture, it will become a school in Kibera, Kenya, when the exhibition closes.5 While the multipurpose nature of these structures is clear, it is less obvious that every work in the exhibition serves a dual curatorial purpose. Grounded in the journalistic zeitgeist of “Africa rising,” the display is intended to both raise awareness of African

architecture and counter negative media portrayals of the continent by explicitly focusing on “more encouraging and inspiring narratives.”6 Narratives and artwork contributed by twentyfive artists, writers, designers, and architects fill the narrow, winding corridor of the “Belonging” gallery. While polyphony is intentionally employed to question who may define belonging, the works feel untethered and lack a unifying voice to cohere them, as both curator-written labels and artists’ statements appear undifferentiated. The two could have been better appreciated if clearly distinguished from one another. Audio and film pieces particularly suffer in the cramped space, with Emeka Ogboh’s duallanguage storytelling installation ENGLiiGBO battling for aural territory and crowding out the mental quiet required to silently read Somali artist Diriye Osman’s To Be Young, Gay, and African, a chronicle of struggle and celebration. Windmuller-Luna

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Kéré Architecture, Village Elders in Burkina Faso, 2012. Courtesy Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Tian Ren

Deep charcoal-gray walls envelop the following section, “Coexistence,” which contemplates the seeming paradox of how individuals and buildings exist together in space. A didactic called the “Coexistence Perspective” supplements each label, stating each work’s intent and potential self-contradictions or historical juxtapositions. In the case of Patrick Wilcoq’s photographic series Old Colonial Villas of Mbandaka, where crisp, saturated images illustrate the colorful, if sometimes shabby, facades and interiors of repurposed structures, the thematic label underscores how an oppressive colonial regime built the structures now adapted by the Congolese middle class and government. Wangechi Mutu’s collage painting All You Sea, Came from Me, a pink and red-spattered Medusalike sea goddess with a womb of tangled snakes, watches over the mixed-media installation Sleeping Serpent, a full-bellied ceramic snake with a female head, whose state of repose 94 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

belies her potential for infinite consumption. Here Mutu’s work exemplifies the apparent contradictions inherent in those who maintain belief in magicoreligious powers in a consumeristic world. The form of this consumeristic world, increasingly centered in megacities, is the subject of the following gallery. “Growing Cities” forms the exhibition’s core, its space divided into cells by South African architect Heinrich Wolff ’s multipointed, scalloped star installation. Here, the urban formulas of Lagos, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Dakar, and Maputo are computed with maps, art, film, photographs, and architectural plans. Data on ethnic, religious, linguistic, workforce, and other statistics for each country and city are posted high on each outer wall. Microlevel mapping is particularly effective here, as demonstrated by planning studies conducted in informal sectors that combined local knowledge with formal cartography. In a program conceived by the

Kéré Architecture, Louisiana Canopy, 2015. Installation view, AFRICA, 2015. Courtesy Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ulrik Jantzen

Digital Matatus project, bus passengers and planners equipped with mobile mapping applications jointly created ordered diagrams of the otherwise unwritten routes of Nairobi’s semiformal minibuses (matatus). Also in Nairobi, Map Kibera Trust plotted the sprawling Kibera informal area by combining conventional cartography with mobile-based mapping implemented by young Kiberans. Thus, both visible amenities such as shops and water pumps, and intangible neighborhood concerns such as areas deemed unsafe by schoolgirls, were equally included. Mapping efforts like Digital Matatus and Map Kibera Trust provide data for assessing community needs and developing future urban plans by using community members to chart the often overlooked structures present in areas typically denigrated as slums. Widening the definition of contemporary architecture, the “Growing Cities” theme gives equal representation to both architect- and user-built

structures. Intimate case studies abound, from the reinterpretations of colonial-era civil structures in Maputo to the analysis of lower-class-initiated architectural interventions—as in Mikhael Subotzky’s and Patrick Waterhouse’s multiyear documentation of Johannesburg’s Ponte City apartment building, where tenants became de facto squatters after a never-realized renovation plan. Hung in a tight floor-to-ceiling block, the serialized images of red doors, television sets, and windows mesmerize. While every window portrait is superficially the same (a resident in near-silhouette against the glass), close looking rewards viewers with the revelation of the shifting skyline or the subtle differences in light caused by covering a window with sheer lace curtains, stuttering venetian blinds, or sagging floral bedsheets. This theme’s appreciation of spatial difference is regretfully abandoned in the next section of the exhibition. Windmuller-Luna

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“Making Spaces”—a consideration of the rural “traditional” architectures of Africa—should be the theoretical underpinning of the exhibition, providing a point of reference for new structures based on the vernacular. Instead, it distills the African village into the circular hut and enclosure, a fictional, universalized typology that neither reflects the diversity of rural architecture and lifestyle nor acknowledges the existence of precolonial urbanity. One wall aggregates aerial photographs of rural enclaves, while the opposite discourses at length on the role of the tree in African architecture as both loci of activity and formal inspiration. Viewed from high above, the African village is made specimen, its human occupants extracted from the picture by virtue of scale. A free-standing wall panel has video screens that rotate enlargements of each example; its back is covered with street views of public squares, houses, and burial sites grouped according to themes like “Encounters” and “Intimacy.” Each

label’s text is generally limited to recording the photograph’s location, with an occasional notation of the event depicted; dates of photography or construction are not included, lending the structures a sense of timelessness. Based on the presentation of these forms, sweeping hypotheses about the nature of “traditional” architecture continue outside at the Louisiana Hamlet. The accompanying wall text paints a picture of an African architectural history that is homogenized to the point of absurdity: traditional rural settlements were circular because of a link between the moon and female fertility, rendering “the hut . . . as a creator and protector.” Furthermore, according to its history, rural precolonial houses were only made of reed, clay, and wooden stakes, and before colonialism . . . urban centers were nonexistent, with only “colonial penetration” inspiring Africans “to convert material constructions into social position and prestige.”7

Bodys Isek Kingelez, Projet pour le Kinshasa du Troisième Millénaire, 1997. Wood, cardboard, paper, metal, mixed media, 332 x 100 cm. Installation view, AFRICA, 2015. Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. Courtesy Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ulrik Jantzen

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In his catalogue essay on the origins of African modernity, Nnamdi Elleh asserts that “African architecture consists of more than huts with grass roofs. It reaches back to the monuments of ancient times, to cities of the Middle Ages, and includes construction activities of contemporary times.”8 By foregrounding the circular hut and cattle fence as the traditional archetype, “Making Spaces” overlooks not only the peripatetic and ephemeral, such as tents, but also the permanent, such as the stone houses of Zimbabwe or the square compounds of northern Ethiopia. Equally omitted is the influence of weather, climate, and landforms on architectural forms that gave rise to such diverse structures as the rectangular adobe and courtyard buildings of the Sudan and the impluviumstyle houses of the West African forests. Precolonial African cities such as the capitals of the Kuba or Benin kingdoms are ignored, thus making the concept of African urbanity falsely rooted in European colonial intervention. Rather than rely upon facile

generalizations, explanations of the basic construction elements, origins, and evolutions of these “traditional” structures would have provided a firmer basis for subsequent viewing of “traditionally” inspired architectural projects—perhaps as a group of case studies, similar to those of the three typologies of user-built structures in Maputo, seen earlier in “Growing Cities.” Fortunately, back in the galleries, the Louisiana Canopy by Kéré Architecture of Burkina Faso provides an antidote to this lack of information by carefully examining its vernacular inspiration. Installed alongside the pavilion, architect Diébédo Francis Kéré’s catalogue essay explores the model for his Danish installation: an open structure composed of wooden poles supporting a flat, thatched roof in his home village of Gando. Whether serving as a children’s play space or housing a gathering of elders, the structure’s interior was always visible to the community at large. For the exhibit, Kéré created

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a canopy from debarked willow logs fastened into uneven circular bundles supported by slender poles, themselves jutting forth from tiered rows of stickbundle platform seats. Gradually shifting artificial light fills the space, evoking the play of light and shadow so elemental to the original structure. The Louisiana Canopy embodies the ideal of the locallyrooted contemporary structure and creates a space that visitors engage with in multiple ways: some watch videos about Gando on monitors, others stop to check their smartphones, and still others climb and run across the seats to play. Down one floor, “Rebuilding” uses socially oriented architecture in Rwanda to create a narrative of the country that goes beyond its horrific genocide. The gallery includes a two-walled replica of the openwork brick construction the Kigali firm of Active Social Architecture employs in educational structures. The fragment is installed in front of site photographs and an architectural rendering of a typical interior, occupied by a teacher dancing alongside her seated students. The same hue as the gallery floor, the red bricks blend into their surroundings and block the wall-size photographs from immediate view. Ample seating, both integrated into the structure’s low-sashed windows and in the form of brightly colored children’s chairs, encourage lingering, while a blackboard replicates the feel of an early childhood education center. Down a final level, “New Communities” considers multifunctional spaces whose planning and eventual use are determined in part by their future occupants. Socially rooted structures—churches, women’s centers, libraries—are displayed in a multitiered room of unfinished wood, imbuing the space with the smell of newness. Stressing the need for structures that can accommodate both known and unforeseen requirements, models, plans, and photographs highlight the modular, including stalls that can be packed away nightly to make space for events (Watershed market and university, Cape Town). The capacity for multiple modes—whether for learning, shopping, or living—is key, as is end-user participation in the building process, whether they are installing sandbag walls in their future houses (10-by-10 Sandbag House, Cape Town) or shaping openbottom clay pots to reinterpret as skylights in a community library (Gando, Burkina Faso). 98 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017

“Building Futures” closes the exhibition. Centered around Bodys Isek Kingelez’s 1997 cardboard and foil model city, Projet pour le Kinshasa du troisième millénaire, the section uses Afrofuturism to consider imagined futures from the independence era through the present day. The ethnography-inspired hairstyle photographs of J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere (including the iconic 1975 Onile Gogoro Or Akaba, the exhibition’s primary image) share space with white plastic scale models of African parliaments and photographs, gathered under the headline “Architectures of Independence.” Built primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, their forms simultaneously soar toward the future and reach into the past. Visible in a large photograph to the left of Kingelez’s model, a building at the south of 1961 Independence Square in Accra typifies this mode; its streamlined, tripled white catenary arches and horizontal balconies evoke an Asante stool of leadership, a symbolic reminder of the period’s deeply political deployment and definition of tradition. While the impulse is to compare the structure to Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, the so-called “American gateway to the West” was completed four years after Ghana’s. While the epic exuberance of architectural forms linked with early nationhood are foregrounded in “Building Futures,” the theme also considers the contemporary dynamic between political freedom and foreign influence. The all-too-brief subsection “Chinese Cities in Africa” is fortunately expanded upon in Daan Roggeveen’s and Michiel Hulshof ’s excellent catalogue essay “The Chinese Impact on Urbanisation in Africa,” which scrutinizes the impact of China’s African investment through a study of the Lekki Free Zone. A special economic zone outside of Lagos, Lekki is primed to become a kind of “non-Lagos,” whose infrastructure, assets, and tariff-free productions will be off-limits to most Nigerians. Visitors to Hummelbæk and New York City, where the authors curated a similarly named summer 2015 exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, will find the two gridded presentations of briefly captioned photographs almost identical. Scenes include the white siding-clad sheds of the Eastern Industry Zone under a cloud-studded blue sky south of Addis Ababa; tandem Chinese and English business phrases on a chalkboard in Lagos; the flat orange-painted concrete walls of the Great

Wall Apartments of Nairobi; and the grand, multiseated auditorium of the Chinese-gifted, -funded, -planned, and -built African Union headquarters. While the smooth, 3-D renderings and shiny facades of architectural models and completed structures seen earlier in the exhibition hold great visual appeal and promise, their role in everyday architecture is limited. As Edgar Pieterse defines in the catalogue, green, elite-oriented “glamour projects” gain an outsize amount of media attention despite their undersized impact and place within the built environment.9 The opposite of “glamour projects,” the fast-moving, primarily foreign-funded architecture in “Chinese Cities in Africa” truly reflects what is “right now.” Changing both major urban centers and smaller towns, it is these generic roads, houses, religious buildings, and commercial centers—all in dripping concrete framed by bamboo scaffolding— that are actually redefining cities, snarling traffic, and creating miles-long barriers between neighbors with the construction of a street-level light rail, as in Addis Ababa, where skyscrapers grow alongside the tracks like weeds. The relationship of most of these structures to vernacular constructions is tenuous or nonexistent. Omnipresent, dense, and chaotic in major cities, these identical new buildings are now poured into existence on a daily basis in smaller towns. Though small, this section begs the viewer to question just exactly what is the trajectory of contemporary African architecture. With its kaleidoscope of images, Louisiana’s AFRICA provides many answers to the hows and whys of contemporary African architecture, ultimately succeeding in its intention to supplant mediabased stereotypes of the continent with alternative narratives. Juxtaposing architecture’s two dominant global modes—that of the architect-designed structure and that of the user-built structure—AFRICA makes clear that the final outcome of the unfolding story of contemporary African urbanity is yet unknown. The inclusion of the 1:1 scale architectural excerpts makes the exhibition unusually physically present, a pleasant departure from conventional architecture exhibitions that too often rely upon photographs, renderings, and models. The breadth of interdisciplinary and architectonic examples emphasizes that while forms may not be universal, a certain degree of continuity can be found across the

continent because of the desire for versatile communal spaces, the adaptation of architectural vernaculars, and user-driven construction. Despite this, AFRICA is an endeavor at odds with itself. Rather than interacting, its many voices— from the curatorial, to the authorial, to the artistic—often overpower or contradict one another. Notwithstanding curator Mathias Ussing Seeburg’s declaration that the exhibition would neither try to “pinpoint the specifically African” nor rely upon generalizations, too often the wall texts and labels rely on the tired tropes of the tribal and traditional to create fantastical pan-African architectural typologies, undermining genuine explorations of the local.10 Outside of the problems concerning generalization, both the exhibition and catalogue contain errors or omissions. These include the more pedestrian introduction of spelling errors in the English catalogue, as well as more troubling factual problems such as the misrepresentation of the date and title of the 2014 Dak’art Biennale or the failure to attribute the sources of the statistical data presented in each urban case study. Through both its successes and shortcomings, AFRICA urges questions beyond the how and why to be asked about the nature of African architecture: How is tradition defined? Can architecture remain emblematic of place? Where does the idea of a nation, let alone a continent, fit in? By prompting dialogue, AFRICA underscores how architectural modernity is a negotiation, an act of simultaneity for which no single answer can ever be found. Kristen Windmuller-Luna was a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015–16 and is currently the collections research specialist in African arts at the Princeton University Art Museum. Notes

1 AFRICA: Architecture, Culture, and Identity (exhibition catalogue) (Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015). From the museum’s website and press release: “By pinpointing 2 a number of judiciously selected examples from a cultural here and now, the exhibition sheds light on the diversity and complexity of the part of Africa south of the Sahara Desert.” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, AFRICA: Architecture, Culture, and Identity, 2015. 3 David Adjaye, African Metropolitan Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011); Nnamdi Elleh, African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997). 4 Jan Vansina, Art History in Africa: An Introduction to Method (New York: Longman, 1984), 1.

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5 Following the writing of this review and the close of the exhibition, the pavilion was shipped to Kenya and successfully reconstructed as a school in Kibera in 2016. Fred Bernstein, “SelgasCano, Helloeverything and Abdul Fatah Adam Team Up to Build School in Nairobi,” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2016, www.wsj.com /articles/selgascano-helloeverything-and-abdul-fatah-adam -team-up-to-build-school-in-nairobi-1472655872. Mathias Ussing Seeberg, “Introduction: The Door Opens 6 from the Outside,” in AFRICA: Architecture, Culture, and Identity (exhibition catalogue), 13–17.

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7 Wall text for Louisiana Hamlet, AFRICA, 2015. Adapted from Morton Nielsen, “The Settlement,” in AFRICA: Architecture, Culture, and Identity (exhibition catalogue), 255. 8 Elleh, African Architecture, 19. 9 Edgar Pieterse, “Reaching for Adaptive Urbanism,” in AFRICA: Architecture, Culture, and Identity (exhibition catalogue), 129–33. 10 Seeberg, “Introduction,” in AFRICA: Architecture, Culture and Identity (exhibition catalogue), 13.

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REVIEWS

DISGUISE: MASKS AND GLOBAL AFRICAN ART BROOKLYN MUSEUM, NEW YORK APRIL 29–SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

Disguise: Masks and Global African Art was an intriguing attempt to re-present concepts as well as traditional and contemporary objects and images related to the metaphysical, if not physical, space of Africa in the white box (hegemonic Western) museum. The exhibition originated at the Seattle Art Museum during summer 2015, then traveled to the Fowler Museum UCLA before arriving at the Brooklyn Museum. A highly appropriate venue, the Brooklyn Museum is known for its early committed collecting of African art and, more recently, its support via programming of a growing local network of African American and transplanted African artists.1 The exhibition rides a rising tide of African diaspora art in the West that increasingly has looked both ways within the scope of a growing contemporary scene since the 1990s. Along with emerging high-profile exhibition venues beyond Western centers, the wave has been facilitated by the infiltration of African American, black British, Afro-Caribbean, and Africa-based artists, photographers, and filmmakers into colonial bastions like the Guggenheim Museum and the Venice Biennale.2 In New York City a small-scale recent precedent was Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), which shared some innovations and some ambiguities in organization with Disguise.3 Thus, Western art habitués are generally a long way from the European modernist take on African art climactic in the Primitivism show at the Museum of Modern Art (1984), an ironic catalyst for the ever-more nuanced cross-cultural and cross-chronological exchanges seen in Disguise. In the Brooklyn Museum show, 102 • Nka

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Walter Oltmann, Razor Brush Disguise, 2014. Aluminum wire, 38.6 x 33.5 x 23.6 in. Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo: Anthea Pokroy

comparisons between the traditional, of which contextual examples were included, and the modern were far more light-handed and evocative, with the focus instead on relationships and divergences between the recent internationally flung art, funneled down from a vast field of potentially relevant work that broached, in some way, African masking. Pamela McClusky, acclaimed scholar and educator on African masquerades and long-term curator at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), in collaboration with Erika Dalya Massaquoi, a Seattle-based scholar of African arts and designer, selected ten artists, several of whom were commissioned to create works for the show and the SAM collection, around which to base the show,

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3886098 © 2017 by Nka Publications

filling it out with a few works by approximately a dozen peers. The contemporary artists are all of African descent, some born and working in Africa, others not on both counts or some combination. Their collective production was linked beyond the theme as “global African art,” which collapses certain distinctions of the diaspora. This curatorial approach resulted in some theoretical confusion and physical imbalance yet also referenced the potentially expansive field while allowing for some indepth considerations. I have included a few examples by less than half of the twenty-five artists included in the show in an attempt to convey the range of sensibilities and high-pitched visual energy throughout, which was aided

with a soundtrack by Nigerian audio artist Emeka Ogboh, Egwutronica (2015), that mashed up traditional Igbo and electronic music informed by cadences and dynamics of traditional masquerade accompaniments. An introductory display of printed matter that implicated, back-handedly, Western progress regarding the appreciation and understanding of African arts seemed unessential to the main exhibition. Nevertheless, the selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century West African zoomorphic and character masks, also in this section, paired with wall and label texts that outlined basic functions of masking—ancestral identity, nature, community, life passages, and importantly, exclusive performance by males, in most cases—was necessary. Also overlaid at the start was a schematic breakdown of becoming, further dissected into six liminal spheres carried through the exhibition: controlled, again, another, political, an artifact, and new. While fluidity between them was emphasized in exhibition texts and in McCluskey’s “Introduction” and an interview with Massaquoi in the exhibition catalogue, the distinctions were mainly vague.4 Nonetheless, certain structural confusion (in literal and philosophical senses) also signaled flexibility, creativity, and risk-taking vis-à-vis terminology, inclusions, and juxtapositions. More effective was the insertion of traditional African works among the centralized contemporary works in the ensuing galleries. For example, a Yoruba pieced-textile egungun mask (Nigeria), or masquerade costume, as it is more typically described and distinguished from a face-covering in the West, and a Gola carved helmet mask and raffia ensemble (Liberia) were placed near a signature Nick Cave (American), Soundsuit (2008), and a costume sculpture used in performance, The Fatalist (2013), by Alejandro Guzman (Puerto Rican). Cave’s decades-long oeuvre, which includes performance-geared costume works as well as mannequin sculptures implying motion and sound such as the one here that sprouted a faux-botanical armature, has evoked African masking from the start—although, at least initially, not directly by the artist; whereas Guzman’s multihorned, towering construction of natural, industrial, and found African-made elements was inspired specifically by the legacy of

African masquerade. Also in proximity was an extensive display of dangerously sharp-edged wire and razor-crafted masks and costumes by Walter Oltmann (South African), along with drawings of them inhabited. While virtually all African masks created for ritual use have been and remain designed to facilitate the transition of the masker (or dancer) into spirits and/or personified moral characters, the egungun is known for attention to complete body coverage in this aim. Two photographic series explored egungun maskers from quasi-anthropological perspectives, each by photographers known primarily as documentarians. The crisply detailed color portraits of Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou (Beninese) depict maskers in exquisitely ornamented, ritual-ready regalia (Untitled Egungun series, 2015). Jean-Claude Moschetti (French) offered more atmospheric visions from his Magic on Earth series (2013) in triptych format, with maskers flanked by landscapes. If Moschetti’s title rings up the controversial Paris exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (1989) in terms of neo-primitivist undertones, neither his nor Agbodjélou’s images did in the context of this exhibition. Such concerns were further complicated by

the inclusion of two millennial egungun costumes collected by the Seattle Art Museum that imitated aspects of modern commercial dress—in other words, their status as art objects was unclear but provocative. Zino Saro-Wiwa (born Nigeria; British) provided unusually intimate glimpses, particularly as a woman photographer, of a relatively recently established masking society evolved from an Ogboni tradition in Men of the Ogele: The Whirlwind Series (2014–15; printed 2016). Her triptych video The Invisible Man: The Weight of Absence (2015) challenged the traditional male gendering of masquerade with female masking and body morphing in a personal performance of mourning. Wura-Natasha Ogunji (American), also a feminist video and performance artist, was represented here by video documentation and costumes from her performance, An Ancestor Takes a Photograph (2014), in which industrial-clad, ghostly maskers flipped the gaze on pedestrians in the streets of Lagos. A nonnarrative formalist approach was seen in the loop videos of Sondra Perry (American) that captured the artist in a white room dancing frenetically so that only her dreadlocks were perceptible (Double

Installation view of Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, Brooklyn Museum, 2016. Clockwise from left: Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2008); Alejandro Guzman, The Fatalist (2013); Edson Chagas, Oikonomos (photo series, 2011 / 2015); unknown Gola artist, helmet mask with raffia costume, early to midtwentieth century. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Jonathan Dorado

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REVIEWS

Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I and II, 2013. A tour de force, collectively, were three dazzling installations (2014–15) in a darkened gallery by Saya Woolfalk (American), produced under the rubric of ChimaTEK, a fantasy, futuristic, female imaging-type company. Inspired by traditional Mende helmet masks (exceptional for their use by female societies), intricately carved hairdos, and serene expressions, Woolfalk combined ethereal, stylized mannequin exemplars with revolving, tantric video loops in altarlike tableaus. Also in this futurist vein were several works by Jacolby Satterwhite (American), perhaps most typical, Forest Nymph (2011), a trippy video parody (seemingly) of Nijinksy’s erotic ballet Afternoon of a Faun (1912). Interspecies origin myths and masking were also conjoined by Nandipha Mntambo (b. Swazi; South African) in the striking photographic self-portrait with bovine ears and horns, Europa (2015). The image, also translated into a bronze bust on view, recalled the animal-headed humanoids of Jane Alexander, with whom she studied. Rounded out by a self-portrait-as-toreador photographic series, cowhide “paintings,” and Picassoesque minotaur drawings, Mntambo’s work teased out human/ animal bonds prescient in various traditional masquerades and evidenced broadly by survivalist instincts, evolu-

tionary science, and diverse historical art imagery. A series of digital ink drawings by Brendan Fernandes (b. Kenya; Canadian), Anomalia (2007, printed 2015), also imagined cross-breeds of animals and masks, carried through in his installation Neo-Primitivism II (2007–14), composed of white, molded plastic masks placed on replicated deer-hunting decoys. More obvious but also original were his African maskshaped, blinking neon signs from the series From Hiz Hands (2010), subtitled with the museum accession numbers of his models. A higher-tech version of those was one way of looking at Jakob Dwight’s (American) mask-morphing, digital abstractions on monitors from The Autonomous Prism series (2010–14), while Dadaist collages of African masks placed on figure paintings by Western “masters” by William Villalongo (American), from an extended umbrella History series (2012–14), picked up on Fernandes’s turn to lingering issues regarding the visual semiotics of European primitivism. Edson Chagas (Angolan), who recently received wide exposure in New York in Ocean of Images: New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (2015), came across as urbane and slightly smug with Oikonomos (2011; printed 2015), a photo series of a whitecollar (literally) “manager” (loosely

Detail of Saya Woolfalk, ChimaTEK: Virtual Chimeric Space, 2015. Mixed-media installation. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Jonathan Dorado

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translated) with various cheap shopping and travel bags placed over his head. Woman #3 (2013) by Paul Anthony Smith (Jamaican), a photographic portrait of a beaded Kuba-masked sitter, was embellished with passages pricked (with a sharp ceramic tool) on the image surface that appeared simultaneously twinkling and furry. Through this “picotage” (the artist’s term) technique Smith truly achieved the transformative ideal of masking, especially as it eludes detection in reproduction. Willie Cole (American) was represented by a triptych of mixed-media prints, Man, Spirit, Mask (1999), which included a photographic self-portrait and his renowned domestic iron imagery that can morph into scarification, ships, and masks. Although Cole was featured in the Metropolitan Museum’s mask show with assemblages of found objects mimicking specific African masks, he was not included in the original Disguise exhibition (Seattle) or catalogue. There’s nothing unusual about slight deviations with touring shows, according to many factors, including collection holdings, as in the case with Man, Spirit, Mask (owned by the Brooklyn Museum), and there is no question of Cole’s relevance. In Seattle, Ebony G. Patterson (Jamaican), absent from the Brooklyn Museum, was included with a series of fabric-based works with digital memorial portraits modified by bandittype bandanas beneath their eyes (Of 72 Project, 2012), as documented in the exhibition catalogue. (At the Fowler, neither was included.) The variation among shows reflects the malleable scope of the theme—African masking and, if not always as, disguise, and vice versa. In this sense, Toyin Odutola’s (American) obsessively ink-colored, black-on-black figures dappled with patterned light seemed to wear their own decorated skin. The relatively slender catalogue gives a good snapshot of the exhibition’s blend of vibrancy, erudition, and hodgepodge. Opening pages provide rich images of some of the art, unidentified, between several translucent color pages with quotes by some of the artists, identified, so that associations are kept loose. Substantial statements by each of the ten main artists—Ogboh, Oltmann, Saro-Wiwa, Ogunji, Woolfalk, Satterwhite, Mntambo, Fernandes, Dwight, and Sam Vernon (American)—

Gallery view of works by Brendan Fernandes. In foreground is Neo-Primitivism II, 2007–14, sculptural installation. On wall is From Hiz Hands, neon series, 2010. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Jonathan Dorado

were illuminating. Vernon’s black-andwhite, shadowy, texture-patterned wallpaper installation was rather subdued in the exhibition, and although infused with content through its title How Ghosts Sleep: Ancestors, Spirits (2015), his musings on the mask as technology, relevant for a number of the artists, inspired another look. Dwight discusses affinities with ritual in his methodical, hi-tech process. Mntambo cites an abandoned colonialera bullfighting arena in Mozambique as a wellspring. Oltmann points out the conquistador silhouettes beneath his spikey armor. Ogunji connects her infatuation with cell-phone video and life in the fledging electronic capital of Nigeria. Such shared details and casual tone by all are engaging. McClusky provides two short, substantive essays. In “Disguise: How the Masquerade Takes Shape,” she pulls together diverse anecdotes and references to communicate a tension between the continuity and mutability of African masquerade and pries out elements such as surprise and extrasensory vision to target insights on a few of the contemporary works. A performance by Guzman in his costume sculpture is centralized in “Meet Me Where the Masks Are Alive

and the Spirits Roam Free,” where she also touches on historical violence to the many masks separated from their bodies in the name of Western art and imperialism, relative to the mismatched configurations in Villalongo’s collages.5 Massaquoi’s contribution to the project, as per an interview, stemmed from her integrated conception of art and mass media and its a priori embrace by many contemporary artists coming out of Africa, where time-worn Western artistic divisions and criteria were never entrenched. She notes a documentary framework as a common starting point for several of them, as well as the purposeful thematic and narrative blurring in the exhibition. The catalogue itself has a transitional feel that will surely be as interesting in retrospect as it is in capturing a moment in the evolving demographics of African aesthetics through time and around the world. Jody B. Cutler is an art historian affiliated with St. John’s University in New York City.

Notes

1 For example, see Daniel Sheffler, “Brooklyn Inspires African Artists,” New York Times, October 14, 2014, www.nytimes .com/2014/10/15/arts/international /brooklyn-inspires-african-artists.html?_r=0. From Disguise, Brendan Fernandes, born in Nairobi, and Toyin Odutola, born in Nigeria, are those I know of currently based primarily in Brooklyn. 2 See the exhibition catalogues Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora, ed. Laurie Ann Farrell (New York: Museum for African Art, 2003); Christine Y. Kim, et al., Flow (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2008); Tanya Barson, Peter Gorschlüter, et al., Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic (London; Tate, 2010); Thomas McEvilley, West African Artists at the Venice Biennale (New York: Museum for African Art, 1993); Okwui Enwezor, All the World’s Futures: 56th International Art Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia (Venice: Marsilio, 2015). 3 See Wendy Grossman, “Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” African Arts 45.1 (Spring 2012): 78–80. 4 Pamela McClusky, “Introduction,” and Erika Dalya Massaquoi, “Disguise in Contemporary Context: Interview with Erika Dalya Massaquoi,” in Massaquoi and McClusky, Disguise: Masks and Global African Art (exhibition catalogue) (Seattle Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2015). 5 Massaquoi and McClusky, Disguise.

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REVIEWS

EN MAS’: CARNIVAL AND PERFOMANCE ART OF THE CARIBBEAN CLAIRE TANCONS AND KRISTA THOMPSON, EDS. NEW YORK: INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL; NEW ORLEANS: CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER, 2015

En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, coedited by Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson, is the third part in a multiyear project investigating the intersections between Carnival, contemporary art, and curatorial practice. The volume follows a series of artist commissions, in which nine African American and Caribbean artists were asked to create new performance works that engaged with the 2014–15 Carnival and masquerade season at

points throughout its transnational circuit. John Beadle, Charles Campbell, Christophe Chassol, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Marlon Griffith, Hew Locke, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, and Cauleen Smith staged performances, composed video and sound works, and “played mas’” (i.e., performed in Carnival) in cities across the black Atlantic. These works and their documentations then formed the basis of an exhibition, curated by Tancons with Thompson, which debuted at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, before traveling to locations in the Caribbean. This eponymous volume is at once an exhibition catalogue, a chronicle of the commissioned works, a reevaluation of Carnival’s significance, and a critical reflection on the process of curating performance in the mode of African diasporic masquerade practices. The book itself, like the larger project, is in three parts. The first part comprises longer essays by Tancons, Thompson, Shannon Jackson, and Kobena Mercer. For the second segment Tancons has compiled an extensive and densely illustrated timeline that traces significant episodes in the history of Carnival, emphasizing the inroads this

popular festival has made into the fields of dance, theater, literature, and, in particular, its increasing presence in the art world since the 1980s. In the final section of the book each of the nine artists’ descriptions of their projects precede brief responses—some critical, some anecdotal—by D. Eric Bookhardt, Petrina Dacres, Paul Goodwin, Erica Moiah James, Nicholas Laughlin, Thomas J. Lax, Alanna Lockward, Annie Paul, and Yolande-Salomé Toumson. Not content to simply explore affinities between the aesthetics of Carnival and contemporary performance practices, the scholarly contributions by Tancons, Thompson, Jackson, and Mercer make a series of significant propositions. Together they argue, from varied vantage points, that Carnival historically exposes a “counterculture of modernity” (following Paul Gilroy’s theorization of the black Atlantic); that the essentially hybrid art presents an alternative genealogy for contemporary performance and, in fact, presaged now common forms of participatory and socially engaged art; and that popular masquerade practices showcase an exhibitionary mode divergent from the museum complex, offering an

Installation view of En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean exhibition, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, 2015. In foreground is Lorraine O’Grady, Looking for a Headdress, 2014. Exhibition design: Gia Wolff. Photo: Sarrah Danziger

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Courtesy Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and Independent Curators International

opportunity to reimagine the curation of performance and public ceremony inside and outside the museum.1 While most people will have some degree of familiarity with Carnival, it nevertheless may seem a remote topic for the majority who do not live in its centers, places like Brazil, New Orleans, Martinique, and Trinidad and Tobago. Yet the authors deftly argue how relevant its premises are to contemporary experience, both inside the sphere of art and out. From protest movements and Black Lives Matter to socially engaged art practices and institutional critique, the themes of Carnival overlap with our preoccupations with collectivity, democracy, and freedom in an era of militant global capitalism.2 Reminding us that public space in many geographic regions—and particularly those of the black Atlantic—has been “precisely formulated in opposition to a black collective presence,” Thompson, for her part, argues that Carnival, and the projects conceived for En Mas’, upend racialized constructions of space. Expanding on the politics of space and movement in the Caribbean carnivalesque, Jackson remarks on the power of masquerade practices among African diasporic populations, whose migration has been forced in one measure and mobility restricted in another, to supplant “an analytic fixation on the products of culture with an analytic that values the movement of culture.” This movement lies at the heart of

En Mas’, from the transnational movement of diaspora to the smaller-scale parades through the streets of black Atlantic cities. It is the movement of masquerade art—and its exteriority in relation to the modern museum—that forms the basis of Tancons’s theorization of Carnival as countermodel to the exhibitionary complex in her own highly original contribution to the volume. Tancons, who initiated the En Mas’ project, compellingly weaves the alternative Carnival etymology carrus navalis (“chariot of the sea”) together with slave ships and the Middle Passage, Foucault’s “ship of fools,” and the flow of the processional for a Carnival theory that emphasizes not flesh and indulgence, but movement, with its concomitant terms of dynamism, hybridity, immateriality, alienation, and diasporic migration. Odd, then, that the curators of En Mas’ chose to stage the results of the artist commissions in the still, finite halls of a museum. Indeed, it may be that the projects conceived for En Mas’ come to life more fully in the format of the book, with texts that walk us engagingly through Charles Campbell’s and Cauleen Smith’s “psychogeographic dérive[s],” Ebony G. Patterson’s blinged-out funeral parade, and Marlon Griffith’s somber counter-Carnival than they did in the exhibition space. Carnival’s inveterate incompatibility with the museum goes further than format; Mercer elaborates how Carnival exemplifies Georges Bataille’s “economy of pure expenditure,” renouncing possession and posterity while the museum, of course, is premised on collecting. Consequently, Bataille’s “petite mort,” as an event that dismantles the carefully maintained borders of the self, helps us to understand what Mercer describes as the “elective identity loss” that may constitute the “mutual composition”  of the Carnival parade. Engaged in a collective form in which authorship is dispersed, the paradegoer performs not as an individual, but as part of a multitude.3 More than an attempt to restitute the place and influence of Carnival in contemporary cultural cartographies, then, En Mas’ asks how might we redefine the museum with Carnival in mind. What would a museum look like that values the movements of culture over its products, emphasizes collectivity over the individual

subject, and relies on an economy of, some might say, waste rather than cultural ownership? Singularly ambitious in considering the role of Carnival in contemporary global culture, En Mas’ is also a preamble for future thought in art and exhibition making. Kirsten Gill is a curator and art historian based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Notes

1 See Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” in The Black: Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 2 Not only has Carnival always been, as the introduction notes, “at the nexus of performance and protest,” but many recent protest movements have also adopted distinctly carnivalesque methods. Coauthor Claire Tancons has made this argument elsewhere, most notably in her essay “Occupy Wall Street: Carnival against Capital? Carnivalesque as Protest Sensibility,” e-flux 30 (2011), www.e-flux.com/journal /occupy-wall-street-carnival-against-capital -carnivalesque-as-protest-sensibility/. 3 In his discussion of Bataille’s theories of the “economy of pure expenditure” and “petite mort,” Mercer references Georges Bataille, Essential Writings, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Sage, 1998). 

Gill

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REVIEWS

YORUBA ART AND LANGUAGE: SEEKING THE AFRICAN IN AFRICAN ART ROWLAND ABIODUN CAMBRIDGE: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014

Yoruba Art and Language seeking the african in african art

Rowland Abiodun

Courtesy Cambridge University Press

What is art? Why ought we to bring the “African” into African art discourse, description, scope, and evaluation? If we take seriously the analogy with the point-and-shoot camera with which Rowland Abíódún begins this book, we can deduce that he wishes to argue that our understanding of the subject matter of African art is impacted by what tools, theories, and concepts we deploy in the task and how sophisticated they are.1 To the extent that our instrument is the equivalent of a point-and-shoot camera, calibrated to flatten the object and failing to register its many hues in as close as possible to their original realization, we are unlikely to end up with an adequate, much less correct, characterization of the object of our investigation. The alien-derived tools with which Yorùbá art has been interpreted, de108 • Nka

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scribed even, have meant, for instance, that “African art was not even considered art with a capital ‘A’ until relatively recent times mainly because art was ‘for art’s sake.’”2 Abíódún is not advocating the incommensurability of different traditions of art, but he wants to argue that total indifference to the ways of making, valuing, and understanding art in the context of the larger cultures within which such art is produced in Africa is likely to lead to the kinds of minimally inadequate, maximally incorrect appraisals of African art that is widespread in the discourse over time. “This study is offered as a contribution to, and revision of, the conceptual tools that we need in order to meet the challenges of studying Africa’s still largely misunderstood artistic traditions.”3 The aim, then, is to insert into the discourse of African art tools that are fashioned from within the cultures that gave birth to the artistic traditions themselves. This does not mean that foreign tools may not be applied. Nor does it mean that foreign scholars have no place in the interpretation of African art. Even African scholars, who do not evince the requisite familiarization with or sophistication in the language in which the original discourse is articulated, are wont to exhibit similar stumbles as those of their foreign counterparts. The problem is not with the personnel of the interpreters; it is with the conceptual tools they bring to their task. The reason for such outcomes is not far to seek. No doubt much art emanates from the genius of single and singular individuals. But even in those situations it requires much more than the genius of the individual artist. Our characterization of art and our evaluation of same must give a nod to the enabling community within which the art piece is named and evaluated. Art may be autonomous, but it is not freefloating. Yorùbá art, in particular, is made up of products that are indigenous to a particular area, marked by specific discourses in their original home. Additionally, some of the objects go back to antiquity and the discourses that attach to them, the context of their emergence, and the functions that they were made to perform. The criteria of appreciation and criticism by which they have been assessed and judged

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 40 • May 2017 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3886120 © 2017 by Nka Publications

are, without exception, imbricated in a particular linguistic and cultural tradition and its associated practices. Any assessment of these objects in all their complexity that does not have the requisite grounding and fluency in the factors just listed is likely to be inadequate, if not false, but definitely problematic. A note of caution is warranted here. There are other attempts at incorporating Yorùbá elements into the discourse of Yorùbá art. Too often, though, they are marked by what I would call equivalencism, under which we think all that is required is to look for equivalent Yorùbá terms for concepts derived from other traditions respecting the object of analysis. The danger with this manner of proceeding is that it takes the point-and-shoot camera as unproblematic and begins to force its object into the constricting conceptual framework it has not bothered to interrogate. There is no deep analysis of Yorùbá phenomena as such. On this view, one would take the conceptual framework of art in say, Italy, mistake it for the universal concept of art, and then look for the equivalent in Yorùbá. Abíódún’s book steers clear of equivalencism by forcing us to confront Yorùbá life and its intellectual processes as an independent, integrated whole, marked by the requisite complexity that usually attaches to civilizations that are advanced enough to not only make art, but to have criteria of definition and evaluation that often are identified with aesthetics and similar theoretical forms. When Abíódún deigned to look inward and tease out a theory of art from Yorùbá, what he found is the core of this book. According to him, the key to making sense of and judging Yorùbá art is to conceive of it as oríkì.4 Ordinarily, oríkì is associated with delineating the boundaries, the very essence of a thing, a person, a practice, and/or a process as well as of the many concatenations of people, things, practices, and processes. Oríkì is standardly verbal, covering a variety of Yorùbá literary and performative genres that include affective speech, recitation, incantations, chants, vocalized curses, targeted discourse, a bride’s lament, a hunter’s dirge, dramatized satire, figures of speech, and more.5 I don’t think that anyone familiar with Yorùbá dis-

Ogo Esu (Esu dance staff), Osogbo, nineteenth century. Wood, beads, cowries, cloth, leather, and iron. Height: 18 1/4 in. Courtesy William Watson, New Orleans, and Museum for African Art, New York. Photo: Richard Todd

course would deny that whatever else the phenomena just stated may be, they all, without exception, lend themselves to characterization as art—verbal art, that is. What Abíódún has done in this book, and the most startlingly original contribution of the tome, is to claim that oríkì is not solely or strictly verbal; oríkì, he argues, is visual, too. In Yorùbá, oríkì is art and visual representations; the plastic arts are oríkì, visual oríkì. If oríkì is as central to Yorùbá life as is generally accepted, and the thesis that art is visual and verbal oríkì, it follows that no deep appreciation of Yorùbá art can be accomplished without more than a superficial familiarity with Yorùbá culture and its many embodi-

ments. This is what makes Abíódún’s case in this book so compelling. If sculpture is visual oríkì, how then do we differentiate one type from another or one movement from another and one style from another? For this Abíódún introduces another concept: àsà (style). Style, fashion, mode, school, tradition, and their cognates all translate the idea of àsà; it is the middle term between oríkì and its diverse realizations in various artistic embodiments. Thanks to this idea we open up new areas of discussion in Yorùbá art respecting the relation between oríkì and àsà. We find, for instance, that oríkì is differently realized in àsà such that time makes a difference to how visual oríkì is produced, understood,

represented, embodied, manifested, and interpreted. In this construal àsà is not coterminous with its usual identification with custom and tradition in translations. Àsà, here, is a principle of individuation among several contending ways of making art and assessing it. Àsà is time-bound, and although a work of art may be timeless in its appeal, it cannot but be marked by the time in which it was originally made. Time, in this context, refers to the specific temporal duration, but also to what is in vogue; the particular mode of making art that informs and frames a work is an additional temporal dimension. An àsà may be of short duration, but duration it must have; it cannot be fleeting. If oríkì involves the invocation of an essence beyond the material through which it is presented, shaped by the àsà, then we have a metric with which to identify and evaluate how well the oríkì is realized and how true the specific instance is to an àsà that has been around for long enough and has become itself a movement or a tradition. Even then, within a single àsà there would be many sub-àsà, and it is their sectoral oríkì that would supply us with the appropriate principle of association and grouping. For example, jùjú, reggae, and jazz are all àsà of performance oríkì that we call music, and each of them, in turn, has different sub-àsà, sometimes denominated by a single innovator in the sphere. Here I would like to suggest that we have a more versatile tool for Yorùbá art and its criticism than Robert Farris Thompson’s “aesthetics of the cool,” one which complements the latter but manages to supersede it. A good part of the discussion in Abíódún’s book is devoted to the contention that visual oríkì are hardly ever separable from their context or their function in those contexts. He insists that we must acknowledge that any art comes with a lot of historical baggage and, therefore, some literacy is requisite if we are, as the saying goes, to get it. In chapters 1 through 7 Abíódún proceeds to show how Yorùbá art as visual oríkì can be applied to many genres in Yorùbá art. Although he limits himself to plastic arts, this has fecund implications for, say, music or dance. He takes on, for good measure, some of the existing interpretations and aesthetic appreciations in Táíwò

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REVIEWS Fragment of a face, Ilé-Ifè, Nigeria, twelfth to fifteenth century CE, terra-cotta. Height: 15.2 cm. Courtesy National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria, and Museum for African Art, New York. Photo: Jerry L. Thompson

the scholarship. Even if one does not agree with his interpretations, one comes away with a new, bold, and very plausible account of Yorùbá art from the vantage point offered by Abíódún’s theory. In the chapter on “Ilé-Ifè: The Place Where the Day Dawns,” Abíódún takes on existing interpretations of some of the more noteworthy art objects that have been found by archaeologists in the area of Ilé-Ifè. He is particularly concerned to controvert the dominant tendency to “link Ifè-naturalism with Ifè kings and rulers.”6 He argues that not only should this temptation be resisted, but such a link cannot be supported by the preponderance of evidence from Yorùbá language, culture, and visual oríkì traditions. The fundamental claim is very simple and direct: Yorùbá oba (kings) are òrìsà (deities), gifted with transcendence that is standardly reserved for deities. Yorùbá obaship iconography does not lend support to oba being represented as ordinary mortals in some of the icons that are now interpreted as artistic de-

pictions of some of them. No one suggests that Yorùbá oba are not imaged or represented in visual oríkì. After all, we have depictions of other òrìsà that are even superior to oba in the hierarchy of deities. The critical difference is that, given the near-òrisà status of the oba, there simply are imagings and depictions that would be forbidden or, at least, not entertained for an oba. For instance, depictions of an oba in any state of undress would be highly unlikely. Were such to occur, it would leave us with the responsibility of explaining the deviation. Needless to say, this is without prejudice to new àsà emerging or an oba having fallen from grace in the estimation of his subjects and the artist seizing the opportunity to treat the said oba with levity, or the artist engaging in some iconoclasm. What each one of these possibilities involves cannot be sundered completely, or even in any significant fashion, from their idiomatic frameworks if we are to begin adequately to understand or analyze them. Of course, what is being said here does not even begin to pres-

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ent the sophistication and complexity of Abíódún’s argument in this respect. I am sure it will reward serious engagement by scholars, as will other areas of the work that I have not brought into focus here. Chapter 8, “Yorùbá Aesthetics: Ìwà, Ìwà Is What We Are Searching for, Ìwà,” is the one that raises the most questions for me. The core claim of this chapter is that there is a near necessary relationship between “‘ìwà’ (generally glossed as ‘character’)” and “‘ewà’ (generally glossed as ‘beauty’) in Yoruba thought” such that the first “is fundamental to the definition” of the second.7 Although I cannot even begin to make the case here, I think that the glossing of ewà as “the expression and appreciation of ìwà” is problematic and, I would argue, implausible. This is another reason to have more than a passing familiarity with the language of the original, especially when engaging a culture where many of the artifacts and discourses are domiciled in orature. Abíódún insists that in “Yorùbá culture and metaphysics, ‘ewà’ refers not so much to the superficial appreciation of a thing’s physical appearance as to the deep appreciation of its essential nature. In short, ‘ewà’ (as a feature of an individual) is being true to one’s essential nature.”8 I object to this characterization. There may be implications here that Abíódún may not want to embrace. For instance, if “ewà is being true to one’s essential nature,” except that nature is good by definition and only good nature is allowed, it should be obvious how many unsavory things and persons will, on that account, have ewà. Think murderers and unspeakably ugly things. Ewà must be something other than, and additional to, ìwà. Hence, we talk of “good character,” which means that ìwà (character) is not necessarily good and, by the same token, the being of something (ìwà) may be good in terms of realizing its essential nature, but whether that being has ewà (beauty) is a separate question. Ewà is a much more complex term than is realized in Abíódún’s discussion. To begin with, ewà is not often the term we use to describe the “essential nature” of a thing or person. The word for that, I contend, is èdá (essence/ nature). When ewà is deployed it is in the sense that Abíódún denies in this

chapter: a judgment of appearance. Ewà is always considered fleeting, degradable—an independent category that is sometimes adapted to particular contexts. It is a versatile concept that is applicable to things, processes, institutions, persons, practices, and so on. I look forward to future debates with Abíódún on this score, and I am sure other scholars will weigh in. In sum, Yorùbá Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art is a book written with wit, argued with verve, supremely confident in its thesis, and exhaustively documented. Most important, this is a breathtakingly original book that is destined to alter our understanding of Yorùbá art and aesthetics forever. Of course, its sweep and the boldness of its thesis invite engagement and, I dare say, contestations from scholars of philosophy, art, aesthetics, language, and religion. A superlative book does not discourage criticism; it provokes it. I hope other readers oblige the author with theirs. Olúfémi Táíwò teaches at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Notes

Editor’s note: We have chosen to omit certain diacritical marks due to typesetting complications. The author did not agree to this omission. 1 Rowland Abíódún, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 3–4. 2 Ibid., 4. 3 Ibid., 5. 4 Ibid., 11. 5 Ibid., 12–13. 6 Ibid., 212. 7 Ibid., 245. 8 Ibid.

Art as Caribbean Feminist Practice A special section of Small Axe 52 This special section focuses on the work of women whose artistic practices are grounded in a feminist ethos and engage multiple nuanced meanings of the Caribbean and its diaspora across linguistic, geographic, material, and formal boundaries.

Start reading: smallaxe.dukejournals.org

Táíwò

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Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art is published two times a year, in May and November, by Duke University Press, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701, on behalf of Nka Publications. Submissions/correspondence Please send submissions and inquiries to The Editors Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art Toboggan Lodge, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Phone: 607-255-0696 Fax: 607-254-4271 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.dukeupress.edu/nka Unsolicited material must be accompanied by proper return postage. World Wide Web Visit Duke University Press Journals at www.dukeupress.edu/journals. Subscriptions Direct all orders to Duke University Press, Journals Customer Relations, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701. The 2017 volume of Nka corresponds to issues 40–41. Annual subscription rates: print-pluselectronic institutions, $200; print-only institutions, $190; e-only institutions, $160; individuals, $50; students, $35. For information on subscriptions to the eDuke Journals Scholarly Collections through HighWire Press, contact [email protected]. Print subscriptions: add $8 postage and applicable HST (including 5% GST) for Canada; add $10 postage outside the U.S. and Canada. Back volumes (institutions): $190. Single issues: institutions, $95; individuals, $27. For more information, contact Duke University Press Journals at 888-651-0122 (toll-free in the US and Canada) or 919-688-5134; [email protected].

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EDSON CHAGAS | ETHIOPIAN PORTRAITURE STUART HALL | CAMILLE NORMENT | WALTER OLTMANN SHARJAH BIENNIAL 12 | 56TH VENICE BIENNALE | JACK WHITTEN