African Art and Agency in the Workshop

By Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Förster

“Compelling case studies demonstrate how African workshops have long mediated collective expression and individual imagination.” —Allen F. Roberts, University of California, Los Angeles

The role of the workshop in the creation of African art is the subject of this revelatory book. In the group setting of the workshop, innovation and imitation collide, artists share ideas and techniques, and creative expression flourishes. African Art and Agency in the Workshop examines the variety of workshops, from those which are politically driven or tourist oriented, to those based on historical patronage or allied to current artistic trends. Fifteen lively essays explore the impact of the workshop on the production of artists such as Zimbabwean stone sculptors, master potters from Cameroon, wood carvers from Nigeria, and others from across the continent.

Contributions by Nicolas Argenti, Jessica Gershultz, Norma Wolff, Christine Scherer, Silvia Forni, Elizabeth Morton, Alexander Bortolot, Brenda Schmahmann, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Karen E. Milbourne and Namubiru Rose Kirumira

“A closer examination of the workshop provides important insights into art histories and cultural politics. We may think we know what we mean when we use the term ‘workshop,’ but in fact the organization of groups of artists takes on vastly different forms and encourages the production of diverse styles of art within larger social structures and power dynamics.” —Victoria Rovine, University of Florida

“Taken as a whole, the case studies provide a wide window into the very diverse structural and functional characteristics of workshops. They also clearly describe how African workshops have served both contemporary political and cultural needs and have responded to patronage, whether it be traditional or stimulated by tourism.” —African Studies Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780253007582

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Rethinking the Workshop:

Work and Agency in African Art

Till Förster and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir

Why Workshops?

Workshops—preliminarily understood to be any group of artisans, large or small, who not only share a workspace but, in most cases, also draw on it as a stable framework of communication and learning governed by the acknowledged expertise of one or more senior members of the group—are one of the most basic institutions of production of African art and material culture. Yet empirical studies of workshops are usually part of larger ethnographies or art histories, and so they are frequently and frustratingly incomplete. This has been a deterrent to the development of a more general and theoretical understanding of the role workshops play in the process of creativity—and particularly of how the creative practice of one artist in the group relates to that of another or to the workshop as a whole. The persistence of old and the emergence of new styles and genres remains poorly understood if it is not related to the workshop within which artists learn and work.

Even a brief look at existing studies of workshops reveals how different they can be in African societies. Workshops range from the early historic potter workshop of the ancient cultures in the Nile valley to the postcolonial fine art workshop run by international artists. The differences in their internal organization and their external impacts on the arts are equally large. Accordingly, the state of research is uneven and disparate. Early colonial period accounts of artisanal practice are heavily weighted toward metallurgy—especially the production of iron—and copper-alloy casting, whereas most of what we know of carving workshops comes from late colonial or postcolonial sources. The Yoruba carving workshop and apprenticeship are well documented (e.g., Bascom 1969a, 1969b; Carroll 1967; Fagg 1969; Kasfir this volume; Pemberton 1987; Perani and Wolff 1999; Picton 1991a, 1991b; Willett 1971; Willett and Picton 1967; Wolff 1982), as are apprenticeships of the Dan and Gola (d’Azevedo 1970, 1973; Himmelheber 1960, 1963; Fischer 1962) and Senufo (Förster 1988, 1992; Himmelheber 1960; Richter 1980) workshop organizations, as well as Cameroon Grassfields (Argenti 2002; Koloss 2000, 2008), Pende (Sousberghe 1959; Strother 1998, 2008), and Maconde (Dias and Dias 1970; Kasfir 1980; Kingdon 2002). To piece together a fuller picture it is necessary to look at certain processes, such as apprenticeship, across several kinds of practice within a community or a corporate group. One has to keep in mind that apprenticeship itself can follow rules and regulations or it can be informal, and it can take place within a workshop setting as well as outside of it.

But there are pros and cons to this approach: on the one hand, carving is a type of work like any other kind of artisanship. One begins knowing little or nothing, is apprenticed to someone (often a relative or friend of the family) who knows a lot, and gradually gains expertise—usually after several years. This is as true of wood, stone, or ivory carving as it is of radio or motorcycle repair. On the other hand, the production of certain objects destined to be receptacles for spirits often carries a whole set of prescriptions, prohibitions, and ancillary practices that set this kind of work apart. It may, for example, require that the apprentice exhibits a certain set of traits that makes him receptive to such work, as d’Azevedo found among the Gola in Liberia in the 1950s and 1960s, when children earmarked for carving apprenticeships were expected to be either dreamers or people of special mind who exhibited certain food preferences and behaviors at an early age (d’Azevedo 1973:294).

In addition to workshops run on the classic master-apprentice model—and which are probably as old as their European counterparts—there are also sponsored workshops that date from the late colonial era onward and usually are set up by a cultural outsider acting as broker, by a mission, or—more recently—by a development agency. Unlike the former type, these build on an uneven distribution of knowledge, in particular of the international art world or handicraft market. These workshops have run the gamut from Ulli and Georgina Beier’s Osogbo painting and printmaking workshops in the early 1960s, to the Shona women’s appliqué and painting workshops of the late 1980s and 1990s in Weya, Zimbabwe, to the !Kung San, Ku, and Khwe Bushman workshops of the 1990s in Botswana and South Africa; some of these are discussed in separate case studies herein. These vary greatly in almost every respect except one: all the participants are equally inexperienced at the beginning, so there is no sliding scale of mastery that comes through years of apprenticeship.¹ This introduces an element of competition; some participants will display the skill and talent needed to become innovators, and others will drop out or become their disciples or protégés. Short-term workshops that last a few days or weeks compensate for the absence of an experienced master artist within the group by introducing a trained outsider to provide technical instruction; this practice is usually accompanied by denials that the outsider influenced the style adopted by the participating artists.² This article of faith sprang from an anticolonial philosophy tempered with the belief that beneath the conscious level in every human dwells a creativity that only needs encouragement to manifest itself. In 2012 this seems naïve and overly romantic, like the belief that all Africans possess innate rhythm, but in the 1950s and 1960s this was firmly believed by such sophisticated cultural brokers as Ulli Beier in Nigeria, Frank McEwen in Rhodesia, and Pierre Lods in Congo-Brazzaville (not to mention Léopold Senghor himself). This belief was rooted not only in the anticolonial movement but in the antiacademic movement in French art, expressed by such figures as Gustave Moreau, Matisse’s teacher.

A third model is a classic one, found also in Europe and Asia—the royal workshop or guild with a king as patron. Well-known examples from Dahomey (King Gézo), Cameroon (King Njoya), and Nigeria (the Oba of Benin and various Yoruba kings) are augmented by Karen Milbourne’s study of the Barotse King Lewanika—like Njoya, a cultural broker in his own right—who organized the early-twentieth-century Lozi carving workshop at Victoria Falls. In this model the broker is not a cultural outsider but part of the traditional elite, and creates a different structure and set of loyalties within the workshop.

These different types of workshops often coexisted at a time and sometimes interacted with each other. So-called traditional workshops may provide the bulk of sculptures for the tourist market and, at the same time, accommodate one or two outstanding artists who produce only on commission—but who also make a living as intermediaries between the (often younger carvers) under their patronage and outside clients, such as curio dealers who order semi-finished masks and statues in quantity.

These examples reveal the need to think more deeply on what workshops are and how they may best be conceptualized. We, thus, would like to introduce some of the major issues we are trying to come to terms with in our attempt to analyze the transformation of the African workshop. But first, we offer one caveat: many, many African sculptors did not and do not carry out their practice in a workshop setting. Some had a close personal relationship to only one master, who taught them individually and regardless of the presence of workshops and other artists in their immediate environment. The Dan of Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire had more personalized relationships that also fostered the appreciation of individual mastery. Other African artists learned informally on their own—sometimes just by watching other carvers at work, and at other times by trying to copy pieces they happened to see somewhere else. The Tiv, Ebira, and Idoma of central Nigeria fall into this category. At other times, as Robin Horton (1963, 1965) wrote about the Kalabari, young boys learned on their own by having to construct so-called junior Ekine society masks. But these casual solitary learners are not our subject, although we will occasionally mention them to highlight comparisons to workshop learning models.

The distinction between societies that had workshops and those that did not is not one of a linear, historical transition from traditional to modern. Workshops exist in many contemporary African societies, whereas some so-called traditional societies reproduce their arts more or less without institutions that frame the learning of skills, and—by extension—the reproduction of style and genre. Obviously, there is a wide variety of possible workshop constellations that crosscuts the divide between tradition and modernity. We can place different kinds of workshops within the same analytical field of African art studies without suggesting that all workshops look alike. There is no need to dichotomize workshops across the continent as traditional or modern, nor along the more current lines of local or global. We argue for a differentiated analysis of the workshop as a particular institution that shapes the reproduction of art in many African societies. We will elaborate a fuller, more general understanding of the workshop on the basis of the case studies presented in this volume, but must first offer a few words about what workshops can be.

We have a double understanding of the workshop. On the one hand, we take the workshop to be an institution that provides economic resources. What these resources are is an open question that only empirical research can answer. On the other hand, the workshop is an institution that shapes the imagination of its participants. As a cultural institution, it provides a setting where artists learn to see art, and learn about style and genre and how to reproduce them. At the same time, the workshop is also a social space that is constituted by its participants. Any analysis of workshops must take this twofold character into account.

The two perspectives always merge, but it is helpful to keep them analytically separate: The economic side leads to different modes of reproduction than the sociocultural side. If, say, tools are provided by a workshop, their accessibility becomes central to those who want to make art. No artist can realize a work in his or her imagination if denied access to the necessary tools. One may assume that the materiality that goes with workshop settings frames and shapes the reproduction of art. The connection between the material side and the production of art as material objects appears to be obvious. Less obvious, but no less important, are cultural considerations. It is clear that the accessibility of tools and other resources alone does not suffice to produce an artwork, and certainly not one that will be recognized as such by the work’s intended public. The imaginative power of the artists as individual and social actors is a precondition as well. First, an artist has to be able to imagine something invisible—that is, a work of art that does not yet exist. Second, he or she has to be able to imagine how others will see and, at times, evaluate it.

It is this power of imagination that distinguishes artists’ workshops from others—such as motorcycle or radio repair shops. Technical creativity also requires powers of imagination—if imagination of a different kind. In Africa, this is sometimes formulated as a Jua Kali aesthetic (Kasfir 1992, 2007) and the artisan as someone close to Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur. But simply repairing an already existing mechanical object certainly needs fewer imaginative capabilities than forming an art object from raw beginnings. It is certainly a sliding scale, but in the end, it may help us to distinguish workshops in the arts from those in other fields. Such powers of imagination do not fall from heaven. They are based on experience, and more often than not, this experience is mediated by the social and cultural world in which an artist lives. A workshop as an institution provides a framework for such experiences. A workshop is—at least to some degree—a sphere that shapes individual experience, which then leads to an informed mode of seeing and appreciation of artworks by its participants.

That said, it is not sufficient to describe how members of a workshop share certain tools or how apprentices learn within a workshop setting from other members. It is much more interesting to look at how the two spheres—the material and the cultural—interact. The provision of resources may frame the work of the artists—but their work, in turn, shapes the materiality of the workshop. Any conceptualization of the workshop in African art must take the articulation of the two strands of inquiry into account.

One may object that separating the two perspectives, economic and sociocultural, is but an argument based on the historically grown distinction of the major disciplines that once were the roots of African art studies, namely art history and anthropology. But the main argument is and remains what we take as a fact—that material objects as goods in the economic sense and and as cultural products are in essence different; thus, they need different modes of inquiry, analysis, and theoretical explanation.

At the same time we are also aware that every material object is born twice: from the hand and mind of the artist, and simultaneously as an object of discourse (Tilley 1990:333)—that is, as a subject of societal and cultural consciousness. This latter incarnation comprises what is written and said about the object by its makers, sellers, users, collectors, and the cultural brokers who are responsible for moving it among these parties. Although this discourse takes place primarily in the cultural sphere, it clearly figures in economics as well. The important point about discourse is that it is partly responsible for how the object is constituted, in the sense of being known and recognized. The question, then, becomes this: How does it relate to the conceptualization and the everyday experience of the workshop?

We would argue that this is not merely an issue of an object’s creation inside the workshop versus a corresponding discourse that develops outside it. The simple inside/outside distinction is complicated by the fact that feedback often comes from cultural brokers, or occasionally the collectors themselves, wherever a marketing interface is lacking. What sells versus what does not sell provides the most primitive kind of feedback. But there are more refined types of feedback: for example, the potential buyer in a painting workshop may decide that he does not like the way he is portrayed and suggest changes to the artist; or someone might commission a mask and request that certain colors or features be added. These interventions keep any workshop from being a strictly bounded entity.

The Workshop as an Economic Institution

The workshop as a social and economic institution has been an issue in a variety of disciplines. It has obtained a high degree of attention in economic history as well as in the social sciences, in particular in anthropological material culture studies. Studies of workshops in art history have often concentrated on premodern art. Well-known examples are the mid- and late Gothic workshops of the Parler family in southern Germany and Prague (Pinkus 2008; Schock-Werner 1978). Their wooden sculptures manifested a distinct workshop style that influenced much of central Europe at the time. Another example is the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder. His paintings of Martin Luther introduced a new genre of portraiture in the fine arts. It became a model for works in the century that followed and influenced the reformer’s image in the popular imagination over generations (Heydenreich 2007; Koerner 2004; Stiftung preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg 2009). Sometimes labeled medieval or early modern art factories, the workshops certainly enhanced the production of paintings because of the material resources that they provided the artists (Stamm 2009). In these studies, the possible tension between individual artists and their agency and the workshop as a social and economic institution is also addressed. Workshops’ styles were not always as compulsory as they were sometimes described by later scholars and artists.³ Determining factors obviously included specific resources and the type of interaction that was fostered by the provision of these resources.

We will first address this material side of the workshop before turning to the modes of interaction among its members and the imagination of style and genre that such interaction fosters. In general, the workshop played and still plays a key role in the social organization of the economy. As a room, a building, or—more precisely and more generally—a social space, workshops can provide both a space for cooperation and the tools and materials necessary for the production of goods and commodities. Until the emergence of larger factories—or, roughly, until the beginning of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century—the workshop was the most important, if not the only, social space of artisanal production, and it remained so in many parts of the world. However, it is not an institution that belongs to a bygone era. It is not a medieval institution that faded away—although workshops were much more dominant in the organization of artisanal work until the advent of modernity.⁴ Despite its relevance to our own history and its presence in our society and many others, the workshop has been neglected as an analytical category. We believe that a deeper understanding of how workshops actually foster the material production of art will also reveal much about the individual agency of their members.

Before analyzing the workshop more deeply in economic terms, let us briefly review the relevant history of the concept of the workshop. Two essential features distinguish the workshop from other modes of production:

a) A workshop provides the means of production, mainly materials, instruments, tools, and utensils. What has been described for premodern Europe is by and large also valid for most contemporary workshops in the Western world, precolonial African societies and for the informal economy of many African societies today. Not every artist participating in a workshop possesses tools and utensils. More often than not, ownership is uneven. Elders may be proprietors, as may adult artists—but apprentices, for instance, may not possess even one of the tools they use. In some cases, the community of the (elder or adult) artists as a corporate group owns all the tools; in other cases, individual property by elders may be dominant. If, in this economic understanding, the workshop mainly serves to provide materials and tools, the crucial question is who has access to these tools and materials and how this access is regulated.

b) It is obvious that, even in this narrow, materialist understanding, workshops lead to a distinct type of cooperation and interaction, more or less directly linked to the sharing of the means of production and to the modes of interaction that this brings about. Of course, such modes of interaction affect individual participants’ engagement in the workshop. Sociologists thus distinguish work in a workshop (Werkstattarbeit [Weber 1980:64]) from other types of work, such as factory work. As a type of work, Werkstattarbeit concerns how participants as social actors collectively cope with problems and how they exchange ideas about their work. This perspective becomes clear when one focuses on apprenticeship. Apprentices learn how to solve problems by participating in workshops. Obviously, there are links between the two points—but interaction is also a social practice that cannot be reduced to its material side. Very little research has been done on these links.

The relation between these two aspects of the workshop has certainly changed over time and according to particular historical situations, but the workshop has remained a part of art history over the centuries. As a distinct type of work and cooperation, its advantages were appreciated by many informal, as well as formal, institutions. Die Brücke as a group of artists came close, in the early years of its existence, to being a workshop that provided materials and a shared social space. It fostered material cooperation as well as the exchange of ideas. Another example comes from the Bauhaus, which emerged a few years later. When Walter Gropius was appointed director in 1919, he called for a reform in teaching that, he said, should be based on the fundamentals of artistic work—that is, crafts and the mastering of materials. The arts were, he said, best learned, understood, and taught when artists were working as a team—not in splendid isolation. He believed devoutly that the teaching of handcrafts and the arts had to be embedded in society. Thus, the teaching of the arts at the Bauhaus was—since the 1919 founding of the school—based on workshop courses led by two masters, one of them an artist and the other a master craftsman.⁵ The aim of the workshops was to combine—or, more precisely, to unite—artistic excellence and practical experience by bringing them together in workshops. As early as his 1919 manifesto, Gropius claimed, Schools must return to workshops (Gropius 1919). Gropius’s emphasis on workshops, however, was not an end in itself. He aimed at a strategy that would allow him to spread and implement his ideas of design and architecture.

This short description immediately raises questions about the authority of the teacher or master artists and the autonomy of the ordinary members. Let us first return to the economic side of workshops. If a workshop is defined as an institution that provides certain resources to its members, the artists as social actors must cope with these facts as conditions that frame their engagement with the workshop. The provision of resources thus can be conceptualized as a structural context in which actors and their human agency engage. However, the ways in which the artists cooperate in this setting are only partly caused by the setting. If the workshop is understood in this sense, it is often conceived as more or less utilitarian; but there is more to it than that.

The classical definition of workshops stems from the fact that the means of production are the basis of any work and, by extension, the basis of the social interactions in which its members will engage. In societies in which materials for a specific kind of artisanal work—such as metals or imported paints—are scare resources, the workshop is a useful if not essential institution by which to enlarge the economic performance of its participants and of the society in general. It is more likely, however, that this provision of materials goes hand in hand with the provision of other resources. In the classical case studies, in Africa as elsewhere, these other resources are mainly tools and facilities that are needed for work—to borrow Marxist terminology, the means of production. A well-known example is the artisanal glass bead production of Nupe that Siegfried Nadel described in the 1930s. What was provided was not only glass as the central raw material, but also charcoal and—perhaps, still more important—the central smelting oven. In his analysis, Nadel speaks of guilds to which an artisan must belong. The reference to early modern modes of production is obvious. The parallels between European and African guilds also are obvious. However, there are also significant differences: a European guild was a more comprehensive institution than a workshop. It was tied to one city, and it had relationships to other, similar guilds in other cities. The organizational frame was based on a more or less complex urban society, in which the guild was one institution among others that complemented it. Although Nadel (1946) argues that Nupe craftsmanship is also embedded in an urban society, it remains doubtful whether the term guild is an appropriate description. What Nadel describes is much closer to other African institutions: membership in the so-called Nupe guilds is mainly, if not exclusively, based on kinship. In addition, access to central means of production is linked to kin seniority, which is also part of many other African institutions.

Although the kinship element also was often part of European guilds, the differences remain significant. Even so, Nadel’s study is still an outstanding ethnography of such relationships in an African society. It shows that an analysis of the workshop as an economic institution must address the question of power relations with regard to the actual distribution of materials, tools, and other facilities in African societies. In other words, it must address the modes of production. The older material culture studies provide some data, but their main focus is on the technical side itself, not so much on its social organization. There are only a few studies that analyze artisanal modes of production in Africa. Pollet and Winter’s (1971) study on the Soninké and their blacksmiths is one. They distinguish the work of artisans from that of farmers on the basis of how it is socially embedded. They see artisanal work as being structured by client-patron relationships, whereas farmers’ work is mainly communal and based on kin groups. But patronage in this case is not related to a market and the selling of objects; it is about the control of knowledge and tools, which are the deficient resources among the Soninké. The case of the Soninké shows that it would be far too easy to reduce the notion of resources exclusively to the material means of production. Patronage and access to knowledge or to a particular market are equally important. An appropriate economic definition of workshops needs to broaden the understanding of what resources are relevant to the actors. It is an open question that cannot be answered by theoretical reflection. The focus on the material means of production would be too narrow. A workshop that provides a particular patronage, such as well-paid production for a royal court, will differ significantly from another workshop in which material is the main resource provided. The former are is likely to regulate membership, whereas the latter will probably focus on who gets access to the materials.

The major research question would be this: How does the sharing of particular resources relate to the organization of the workshop as an economic institution? Are there typical modes of interaction within this organization? The questions sound very anthropological or sociological, but they have direct relevance to art studies, since the reproduction of style and iconography depends on how artists as social actors work and how they interact with each other.

The workshop as a concept is also well established in art history. To some extent, it had initially been borrowed from its original economic context. The abovementioned studies of early modern workshops also address their economic aspects and relate them to style, iconography, and genre. But there is a significant difference in the methodological approach of art history that leads to this other focus. Unlike anthropologists and sociologists, art historians tend to conceptualize the workshop from another perspective of the object as a result of work in which participants engage. The objects that have been produced by artists come first, and if one is not able to trace individual artists, the workshop as an entity is constructed on the basis of the outward appearance of objects. Anthropologists, however, focus first on the actors and their practice—and sometimes forget about the objects that they create. Art historians address the same connections as social scientists do, but they do it the other way round. The old anthropological position, which is to treat the workshop as a corporate actor (not unlike the former ethnic group), is still very much present in art museums—where artworks are often given such labels as unknown workshop of the Pot People or the Basket Folk, to paraphrase Arthur Danto (1988). The workshop thus appears to be an institution that is exclusively tied to premodern periods, when individual agency was not yet an issue.

The workshop also plays a role in the more recent and modern history of art—although workshops are often labeled by other terms; there were and still are galleries and art centers that organize workshops on a more or less regular basis. This is particularly so in places where the majority of artists are informally trained and may have no knowledge of techniques such as printmaking, which are usually acquired in art school. Some cultural centers, such as the German Goethe Institut or the Centre culturel français, also make use of workshops as cultural and at times political instruments. In some parts of Africa, missionary art and handicraft schools are the major organizers of workshops, and some directly market the objects in their own shops worldwide (see Morton, Forni, this volume).

Such institutions have a direct relevance to contemporary African art, although many critics would deny the status of art to many, if not most, objects that come out of such workshops. However, there are artists that are now recognized in the international art world that went through such workshops at certain points in their careers. The bad reputation that workshops have in recent art history is probably due to the modern focus on individual originality and the assumption that workshops will always lead to styles, iconographies, and genres that all members more or less involuntarily have to share. The workshop thus is treated as a place where all three—style, iconography, and genre—are (re)produced and where there is not much space for individual agency. But such an understanding would precisely reproduce the materialist assumptions about the superiority of the means of production—which is, as we have seen, a misinterpretation of the economic basis of workshops. The role of individual agency becomes much clearer if one takes the social and cultural side of workshops into account.

The original materialist assumption was that the provision of particular resources frames the work of the artists and by extension, its outcome. If one resource—for example, the provision of access to a particular market—dominates, it should then lead to a fairly even production of works, the repertoire that this market demands. Examples that seem to confirm such a materialist position can be found all over Africa and in many other parts of the world. The description of Tengenenge in Zimbabwe, for instance, can be read as an example of demand-driven tourist production. Its workshop character would then be twofold: the artists are provided stone for their sculptures, and, more important, they are offered access to the tourist market by framing their production in one place. This is a utilitarian perspective that privileges the economic, income-generating side of workshops. It has been the focus of most development agencies and NGOs since independence. But, as Christine Scherer shows in chapter 7, the ongoing interaction of the artists within this setting also leads to innovation and new types of objects that are only later exposed to potential clients. From the point of view of development agencies, which often fund craft workshops precisely for this income-generating outcome, a workshop would be considered very successful if it earned considerable income for its members, but such a quantitative approach goes against the presupposition of art scholars that innovation is always more desirable than mere replication, which would be aesthetically less interesting.

We strongly argue against a flat and shortsighted materialist perspective while simultaneously maintaining that the material side is one important element of what a workshop is and means to its members. Our argument is mainly based on the empirical observation that workshops providing the very same resources do not necessarily lead to the reproduction of the same style, and at times not even to the continuity of one (see Förster this volume).

In order to make use of the resources provided by the workshop, its members must sustain interactions over time. It is, however, an open question how they do so. It is also debatable whether these interactions must always be tied to one place, as the conventional understanding of workshops almost always implies. We will return to this question, but for now, it is sufficient to state that the provision of resources does not determine the actions—that is, the art practices—of the members of the workshop. As any observer of workshops knows, the artists and their orientations influence the context in which they act, even if they cannot control it. This relationship is seldom addressed in African art studies and calls for an adequate theoretical grounding; the examples of workshops in this volume thus invite us to rethink the concept of the workshop across different contexts.

The Workshop as a Social Space of Learning and Interaction

A workshop is also a social setting. It is a social space in which individuals cooperate. When one focuses on this social side, a workshop can be seen from quite a different point of view than the abovementioned utilitarian perspective suggests: it is a sphere in which interpretive processes unfold. Every artist who is or becomes a member of a workshop will interpret—and even has to interpret—the actions of others in this context. He or she has to look at what others do: how they resolve practical problems or questions of style and genre, how they respond to patronage, and so on. It is this act of interpretation of others’ actions that is at the root of the educative as well as inventive character of many workshops. A workshop is not a place where individuals accidentally meet and either exchange ideas or not. It is a social institution that fosters particular modes of reciprocal interpretation and, in general, social interaction. These modes are seldom as obvious as they would be in a class, where a privileged and more powerful person teaches others right and wrong. The interactions taking place in a workshop are often much more subtle. Artists in workshops learn much more through others, not from them.

The wide variety and subtle modes of interaction in a workshop call for a thorough and theoretically informed analysis. That artists in a workshop learn more through others than from them is confirmed by innumerable observations: most of the time, the younger artists who, according to the conventional understanding of education, would be in apprentice positions, concentrate on their own pieces without receiving any advice from their elders or masters. Elder artists usually intervene only when they see overt mistakes or gross violations of what they expect to be an outcome of that work. However, this does not mean that learning is reduced to such moments of direct instruction.

There are several possible strands of thinking with regard to human agency in a social setting. We will first describe a two-dimensional approach and then try to differentiate it. From the perspective of scholars such as ourselves, the practices within the workshop as social space can first be analyzed with regard to two distinguishable but related dimensions: one is the pragmatic side of the artists’ work, the other is its experimental or—if one prefers—its creative side. Any analysis of work in workshops must keep in mind that the distinction is purely conceptual and analytical, not a feature of lived reality. The artists as actors do not need to bother about the dimensions of what they do; they just engage in practice. Analytical differentiation helps to understand human action, but it is not necessarily a conscious intention. Artists and also the persons that run workshops may have different opinions about what they do. If these opinions guide the actors’ practice, however, they must be taken into account by the scholars. In the end, a synthetic view of work would have to overcome the limits of both perspectives and bring them together.

Let us first examine the workshop in a pragmatic and phenomenological perspective. A workshop, then, is a space which—at a given time—serves as a social setting to its members. Although it is more or less stable in its basic structure—for instance, with regard to the provision of resources—it is also a constantly changing social setting. Younger members may learn and then take the role of experienced artists or teachers as older members reduce their presence and retire. Some members might request more support with regard to specific resources—such as access to a tourist or urban market—whereas others may contribute to the provision of resources, perhaps in terms of tools and materials or of direct instruction. Changing membership as well as the changing roles and statuses of its members makes the workshop a temporal-relational context of action. It is in this context that art practices emerge. They are based on intersubjectivity—that is, on the congruence of perspectives of the cooperating artists. Intersubjectivity must be created by the actors that engage in such cooperation. It grows out of a process of interaction—a process that is often described as work by the actors.

It would be virtually impossible to cooperate without there being any overlap of the actors’ perspectives on their work. Even a superficial study of artists in workshops shows that they always share a more or less explicit understanding of what they do and how they intend to do it. This points to the fact that, despite all hierarchies, exchanges in a workshop always flow both ways between teachers and apprentices. However, the degree to which a particular actor will have a chance to influence this exchange is an open question. The case of the Bauhaus workshops illustrates that the will to overcome any hierarchy may be closer to a modernist ideology than to actual reality. It is much more likely that a teacher or an internationally renowned artist who has been invited to give a course at a local, African art institution will be privileged in this exchange (Scherer 2009; see also Okeke-Agulu this volume).

Intersubjectivity means that the members can hold simultaneously to their own viewpoints as well as to those of other members of the workshop. They do so by coping with emerging situations in the workshop, if not always to the same degree and not always in a conscious attitude. But whenever intersubjectivity becomes an issue, a particular human capacity is needed—that of imagination. One has to be able to imagine first what others see and aim at, and then the possible outcomes of one’s own projects and plans. Work and cooperation thus influence the imagination of the members of a workshop.

In this context, it is certainly helpful to discuss imagination before we address the possible link between it and the work that is carried out in a workshop setting. We understand imagination, in its original Latin sense, to be the human capacity to bring something to mind—or in the context of art, to envisage something that does not yet exist, is out of reach, or is invisible. Whatever the object of is, its essential quality is its absence in time or space. Thus, imagination is about the presence of an idea or, more appropriately in our context, of an image in the mind of an individual or social actor. Imagination lends presence to the absent, and the work of imagination can be understood to be the realization of images in the mind—such as an object that takes a particular shape or style and that differs from other objects that existed before. Imagination thus dissociates from the materiality of ordinary, everyday life. Imagination in this sense requires distancing oneself from the schemes and styles that existed before. It is by imagining the nonexistent that artists can overcome the constraints of past practices.

Imagination may lead to the realization of the imagined. That said, it is clear that imagination is necessary to bring something—an object, an artwork, a performative act—into existence. Imagination is a precondition for creativity, even if the outcome does not entirely fit the image that the artist had in mind when he or she created the artwork. Neither does imagination mean that the artists always have a clear image in mind of how the artwork that they intend to create will have to look. It may also—and, perhaps, more likely—mean that they intend to transform existing schemes with regard to one or another element of them.

There are countless examples for such intentions. Even in the most traditional of contexts, artists have often aimed at the transformation of a particular feature of the masks or statues that they create, for instance through the introduction of colorful paints on Guro masks showing a woman with a snake. The degree of clarity of the imagined is certainly related to personality of the artist, but is equally related to the situation in which he or she works. If a workshop is conceptualized as a social space, the imagination of the artists is bound to the ways they, as forward-looking actors, choose and transform a particular practice out of the fluid and shifting fields of possibilities that emerge within the workshop. Even if the workshop is the only source of materials, tools, and possibly other resources, and even if it limits the agency of the artists with regard to technique or patronage, it still does not determine the work of the artists. There always remains a degree of indeterminacy that is linked to how individual actors actually engage in the workshop and in the interactions that it fosters as a social institution. Attention is focused by these ongoing interactions, not only by the materials and resources offered. This side of workshops is illustrated by all studies presented in this book.

What happens in a workshop is that members, and in particular younger members, project themselves into the experienced work of others. They learn through others, not from others, as mentioned above. In some workshops, they are invited to do so on the basis of past experiences. In other workshops, the emphasis is much more on how to distance one’s own art work from preexisting schemes. Whatever the focus is, styles and genres as schemes of work that orient the art practice of the participating artists are almost always unevenly distributed when a workshop is created—and again when new members engage in it. The classical uneven distribution is perhaps best illustrated by the late colonial workshops in which a teacher, usually white and male, worked with younger artists and introduced them to new materials and techniques. But the postcolonial workshop setting, such as that in the School of Dakar, can be analyzed in a similar manner: in these cases, the more experienced artists do not explicitly take the role of teachers, but the younger artists learn through them. The younger artist engages in interactions with the established artists and learns to make considered decisions about style and genre—that is to say, about an artwork that he or she, in the beginning, imagines and intends to bring into existence.

Imagination links experience and reason as it guides action and orients it toward the future. An art practice devoid of imagination would reduce the artist’s work to mere means-ends rationality. The dissociating character of an open mode of imagination is an essential element of all art practices. However, imagination may lose its dissociating character long before the object is actually created. The feeling of difference between the (imagined) object and the imagination may fade under certain circumstances, in particular when the setting is highly emotional. Work in a workshop setting can be conceptualized as an oscillation between open and closed modes of imagination, and between individual and social modes of focusing on an imagined object.

This oscillation between open and closed modes of imagination has its background in the ongoing social interaction in the workshop. A workshop is continuously evaluated and reconstructed by its members. In other words, a workshop is not just a natural space that is filled with members and interactions, it is a social space that is created and continuously reproduced by the actors. A workshop constantly transforms its shape as members change their positions and engage in different interactions. But this does not mean that it is an unstructured social space. The central empirical issue is to examine the situations fostered by the ongoing interactions and cooperation: Are there straightforward and well-defined situations with fixed frames of references to past experiences? Or are there more ambiguous, unsettled situations and unresolved problems? Both are possible. A workshop can stimulate individual problem solving as well as social engagement in these problems that then leads to joint projects seeking to overcome them. The individualization of artistic expression may be based on interaction as well as on the uniformity of style that is more often ascribed to workshops. And it would be far too easy to interpret such differences in the familiar tradition versus modernity dichotomy. Frank McEwen’s workshops and the emergence of the so-called Shona stone sculptures are striking examples of a fairly high uniformity of style. It is also interesting to note that this example points to an internal contradiction in many workshops of this kind: artists who are invited to engage in a deliberately forward-looking agency and who feel creative can often be highly conservative with regard to styles and solutions once they are adopted. We believe it is precisely the unproblematic situation in which new modes of artistic expression are expected from them that leads to this paradox. McEwen urged the artists in his workshops to never copy. But at the same time, almost all examples of stone sculpture that they saw were made by the other members of the workshop. The situation they worked in was characterized by two factors: first, McEwen would recognize a particular style by a particular artist as innovative and promising. This style thus enjoyed the appreciation of the master, which made it a solution for the formal problems other artists in the workshop were facing. Second, the success of this style was not limited to the immediate sphere of the workshop and the local art world in Zimbabwe. Owing to McEwen’s patronage, it had an outreach far beyond the Zimbabwean audience. It guaranteed to some extent both income and recognition in the international art world. It is not too farfetched to describe this process as the emergence of a workshop style—one that was then incorrectly labeled Shona stone sculpture. Once established as a genre, it was reproduced by many artists who sought to make a living—even if they developed other, personal styles besides the one that sold better.⁶

The possibilities a workshop offers to its members vary over time, as do the conditions of their engagement. Numerous empirical studies have shown that the conditions of work shape the individual, but there is also strong evidence that individuals shape the conditions in which they work. Artists as members do so by acting and interacting within the workshop. Creativity is embedded in the actions the artists engage in or maybe refuse to engage in. It is the continuous reorganization of work that is at the root of their agency and creativity. If, then, the creation of an artwork is taken as an event and as an outcome of work performed in a workshop, this action can be conceptualized as an event that emerges within the workshop as well as out of the workshop. The artists’ experience of what happens in a workshop is based on a series of such events. They constitute the history of the workshop as a historical institution of creative work. But there may also be moments in the history of workshops when the members engage in a reflexive attitude toward the institution and come to see it as being of continuous existence. They may then situate themselves and their art practice in this context. The workshop is then often seen as a place that links the future to the past and to experiences that proved to be successful.

The constant interaction of the members is the basis of what we call the iterational dimension of workshops. We prefer this term to the older terms tradition