What Is African Art?: A Short History

By Peter Probst

A history of the evolving field of African art.
 
This book examines the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. It starts with a simple question: What do we mean when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Peter Probst identifies “African art” as a conceptual vessel that manifests wider societal transformations.
 
What Is African Art? covers three key stages in the field’s history. Starting with the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the book first discusses the colonial formation of the field by focusing on the role of museums, collectors, and photography in disseminating visual cultures as relations of power. It then explores the remaking of the field at the dawn of African independence with the shift toward contemporary art and the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it examines the post- and decolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of representation, repair, and restitution.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226793290

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Cover Page for What is African Art?

What Is African Art?

What Is African Art?

A Short History

Peter Probst

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79301-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79315-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79329-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226793290.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Probst, Peter, author.

Title: What is African art? : a short history / Peter Probst.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022006679 | ISBN 9780226793016 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226793153 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226793290 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Art, African—Study and teaching—History. | Art, African—Historiography.

Classification: LCC N7380 .P76 2022 | DDC 709.6—dc23/eng/20220317

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006679

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

Part I

1. Forming a Field:

Colonial Collecting, Racial Omissions, and National Rivalries

2. Celebrating Form:

From Primitive to Primitivism

3. Creating Visibility and Value:

Photography and Its Effects

Part II

4. Discovering the African Artist:

Tradition and Tribality in the Cold War Era

5. Acknowledging the Contemporary:

New Forms, New Actors

6. Extending the Horizon:

Africa in the Americas

Part III

7. Intervening the Canon:

The Postmodern, the Popular, and the Authentic

8. Challenging Representation:

Postcolonial Critique and Curation

9. Undoing the Empire:

Duress, Defiance, and Decolonial Futures

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

What is African art? What do we have in mind, or rather, what do we talk about when we talk about African art? This book is about the shifting answers to this question. The discursive and institutional space I focus on is the field of African art studies or, if you will, the Africanist art world. My aim is to give the reader an understanding of how members of this world have continuously filled the notion of African art with new meanings and why these shifts manifest wider societal transformations.

Since this book is very much about context, let me begin by providing the personal context out of which it emerges. The idea for the book results from a seminar I have been teaching off and on since 2005. Professionally and personally, the year was a turning point for me. At that time, I had not only recently relocated from Germany to the US but had moved from an anthropology to an art history department.

In the 1980s, when I studied in Berlin and at Cambridge University, my understanding of African art was informed by studies about power objects, popular urban painting, spirit possession, and masked performances. As I saw it the field belonged firmly to anthropology. Art history departments in Germany did not offer courses on African art but focused solely on European traditions. At times curators of the nearby Berlin Ethnological Museum offered courses on African, Mesoamerican, or Oceanic art. While we were all aware of the colonial history of the museum’s collections, debates in the department focused more on the then prominent critique of ethnographic authority and practices of ethnographic representation.

Lectures and seminar discussions did not draw sharp distinctions between anthropological and art-historical approaches to African art. Yes, one could discern different ways of seeing, but to me they were complementary. I did not conceive art and society as opposites. The field was small and easily encompassed both disciplines. The common denominator was an interest in traditional art, a term that by then had replaced colonial and market designations like primitive and tribal art. At times there were special exhibitions where one could see modern African art—the category contemporary was hardly used yet. But these were fleeting opportunities. The only permanent place to see modern African art was the Center for African Art and Culture (Iwalewa Haus) at the University of Bayreuth in the south of Germany. In German Africanist circles at that time, the center was famous for allowing visitors to meet and converse with African artists, writers, and musicians in a relaxed, club-like atmosphere. Back then, however, African art was just one of many things I was interested in. It was only much later—in the late 1990s, after having done fieldwork in Malawi and Cameroon and having worked at the Berlin Ethnological Museum and the Free University of Berlin—that I moved to Bayreuth to start a new position at the center. It was only then that I began to conceive of the field of African art as my professional home.

Students studying African art today find themselves in a very different environment. The landscape has changed drastically. First, anthropology is no longer a major voice in the field. Art history has taken over. Nowadays, books on African art are mostly written by scholars trained in art history rather than anthropology. Second, while indigenous or traditional art still has its audience, it has lost its privileged position to modern and contemporary art. The latter has not only won the favor of students, it has also become an investment. Big auction houses such as Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonham’s have their own departments selling modern and contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas, or Global Africa, as the field is now conceived. Art journals regularly inform readers about emerging artists to look out for, and art fairs, like 1:54, provide annual international platforms for finding and buying the work of upcoming artists. In addition, the continent now has its own landscape of art shows, the biennales in Dakar, Bamako, and Cairo being only the most prominent venues (fig. I.1).

I.1 African artists are now a permanent fixture at international biennales: Otobong Nkanga, Veins Aligned, from 2018, with photographs by Zanele Muholi in the back. Installation view, Venice Biennale, August 2019. Photo: the author.

For critics and curators, the critical success of contemporary art has brought its own questions. For instance, should a large metal assemblage by El Anatsui, arguably one of the most well-known and successful contemporary artists from the continent, be exhibited in the gallery of contemporary art or in the African Gallery (fig. I.2)? Should a wall label actually name the nationality of an artist whose work is on display? Why is this information necessary? To answer these questions by simply referencing the effects of globalism misses at least two key developments and debates. One such development is the debate about contemporaneity. In the 1980s anthropology underwent a self-critical analysis by examining how the discipline’s historical usage of concepts like primitive or tribal deployed the category of time as a means of holding its subjects at a temporal and ethical distance.¹ The critique focused especially on modes of anthropological writing and representation. While ethnographic fieldwork means sharing time with subjects and accepting rules of reciprocity, the subsequent scholarly discussion of the fieldwork’s findings reintroduced a distance by labeling the beliefs and practices of the people with whom one lived together as tribal, traditional, or premodern. Anthropology’s acknowledgment of this denial of coevalness (Fabian) was therefore a breakthrough that powerfully aligned with studies exploring Africa as an invention and idea rooted in imperial and colonial discourses of power.² Today these works have become standard references that inform not only public reasoning about racism and inequality but also the visit to an art museum. Artists, critics, and curators often question and challenge the popular practice of framing an artist and/or artwork by using geographical specifications.³ As a result, audiences have learned to be sensitive to the images the signifier Africa conjures. While colonialism has officially come to an end, its images, stereotypes, and structural dynamics have not.

I.2 El Anatsui, Sasa, 2004. Bottle tops and copper wire, 8.4 × 6.4 m. Installation view, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2011. Photo: Susan Mullin Vogel. © El Anatsui.

Though related, the second development is not so much an effect of theory but of media technology and migration. Today we can go online and see and hear artists from different parts of the globe presenting their work. The internet has become a virtual space that we share with other users, allowing us to encounter the other in new ways. The new media environment has affected the public’s view of anthropological and/or ethnological museums as predigital spaces of encounters with cultural otherness. In the past, anthropology museums aimed to provide the objects on display with cultural meaning and context. While the aesthetic quality of objects was acknowledged, objects were not primarily presented as art but as vehicles or gateways into the understanding of other cultures. Nowadays, such representations are seen as flawed and outdated, uneasy remnants and reminders of the colonial past.

The critique is especially virulent in Europe, where colonialism provided the origin of anthropological museums. After all, it was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the height of colonialism, that African artifacts poured into Euro-American museums and were classified as primitive art. To distance themselves from this origin, many anthropology museums have renamed themselves Museums of World Art or World Cultures, but with limited effects, however, since such rebrandings have not resolved questions of restitution and ownership. Nor do relabelings such as World Art and/or World Cultures somehow exempt the art world from reckoning with the past. On the contrary, with tens of thousands of African refugees trying to make their way across the Mediterranean into Europe, the so-called migrant crisis, has brought the colonial past back to consciousness with full force.

Tellingly, the influx of migrant subjects has prompted the reflux of ethnographic objects. On November 27, 2017, during a visit to Burkina Faso, French president Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that African heritage can’t just be in European private collections and museums and pledged to commission a report that would look into the modalities of restitution. A year later, on November 23, 2018, the Senegalese novelist and economist Felwine Sarr and the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy released a detailed report that expounded why, what, and when African cultural property housed in French museums should be restituted.⁴ As they argued,

On a continent where 60% of the population is under the age of 20 years-old, what is first and foremost of great importance is for young people to have access to their own culture, creativity, and spirituality from other eras that certainly have evolved since, but whose knowledge and recognition can no longer merely be reserved for those residing in Western countries or for those who count themselves among the African diaspora living in Europe.⁵

As it happened, the release of the report coincided with two widely noted museum events. The first happened on December 6, 2018, only a week later, when Senegalese president Macky Sall ceremoniously inaugurated the new Musée des civilisations noires in Dakar. In his opening remarks, Sall thanked the Chinese government for its generous financial and technical assistance in building the museum and stressed the duty of African peoples to remain vigilant sentinels of the heritage of the ancients, a reminder that was quickly linked to the debate over the restitution of some ten thousand pieces of Senegalese art from France.⁶ Two days later, on December 8, the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, reopened its doors after a decade of revamping the neoclassical building and overhauling its racist presentation of Belgium’s former colony (fig. I.3).⁷ With more than one hundred thousand artifacts, Tervuren still houses the world’s largest collection of Congolese art. Like Sall in Senegal, Congo’s president Joseph Kabila requested the restitution of large numbers of objects from Tervuren’s collection. This time, however, the demand came with a moratorium. As president Kabila explained, the restitution of objects should wait till the completion of the country’s new national museum, designed and built by South Korea. Meanwhile, the Belgian government has officially agreed to transfer legal ownership to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The process of repair and restitution has started. In November 2021, France returned twenty-six works looted in the late nineteenth century from the Kingdom of Dahomey to the Republic of Benin. Likewise, German government officials and museum directors have officially committed to return a substantial amount of Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. The first returns are expected to take place in 2023/2024 and will likely be housed in the planned Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin City, a new structure designed by the renowned architect David Adjaye.⁸

I.3 Chéri Samba, Réorganisation, 2002. Oil on canvas, 104 cm × 134 cm. Collection RMCA Tervuren. Samba’s painting depicts the struggle for control over the representation of Congolese culture between members of Belgium’s African diaspora museum staff and members of Belgium’s Congolese diaspora and staff members of what was then still the Royal Museum for Central Africa. The Lingala reads, We cannot accept this work being removed. It has made us who we are. The French reads, It’s true that it’s sad but . . . And the Dutch reads, The museum really must be completely reorganized. Meanwhile, Samba’s painting has been turned into a large reproduction that is installed on a wall immediately before the entrance to the introductory gallery of the renovated and rebranded AfricaMuseum. It is thus the first artwork visitors encounter when they enter the museum. © Magnin-A Gallery, Paris.

Objects and Fields

Things have changed. Some sixty years after the end of colonialism, relations between the Global South and the Global North are being redefined, and history is being reconsidered. These shifts also inform the project at hand.

As noted, the decision to embark on a historiography of African art studies has its origins in a history of theories and methods seminar on African art I have been teaching at irregular intervals since 2005. By then, the debate on Provincializing Europe was in full swing, and the contours of a new inclusive Global Art History were taking shape.⁹ In view of these developments, narrating the history of Africanist scholarship seemed like a valuable and straightforward project. After all, no such comprehensive study yet existed. Instead, the few historiographic articles available fragmented the field by genre (classical/traditional versus modern/contemporary art), discipline (art history versus anthropology), and date (pre-1960 and post-1960 with the recognition of African art as an established subfield in [American] art history departments as a turning point).¹⁰ As it happened, my other book projects forcefully pushed the historiographic venture to the side, and only recently was I able to return to it. Resuming the literature research, I realized that over the last decade not much has changed. With the exception of an article by Sidney Kasfir, no article—let alone book—exists that recounts in full the development of the field from the beginning to the present.¹¹

The finding astonishes. Given the by then widely accepted need to open up and decolonize art history, one would have expected to see manifold efforts focusing on the field of historiography, with new African modes of historiographic self-writing emerging simultaneously in the realm of African art.¹² The fact that this did not occur, or only very sporadically, begs the question, Why? What has led to this curious absence of retrospective self-reflection and self-accounting among African art scholars, and what would such a self-accounting look like?

Let me begin to explain my take on the question by looking at the relationship between objects and fields.¹³ Conventionally, objects constitute fields. Reliquaries and stained glass windows from the tenth century, for instance, allowed for, and in a sense formed, the study of medieval art just as Italian paintings and frescos from the fifteenth century allowed for and formed the study of Renaissance art. However, the same applies conversely: fields constitute (i.e., create and define) objects just as much as objects constitute fields. The academic field of African art studies instantiates this principle. When the field emerged in the mid- to late nineteenth century—that is, during the zenith of the Christian-colonial project—objects were experienced, investigated, and interpreted not in the places where they had been made but where missionaries, explorers, ethnographers, traders, soldiers, and a whole slew of other people had sent them, that is, in museums. The objects thus found themselves strangers in a strange land, dropped into a world alien to the world in which they had been made and greeted by people very different from those who had made them. Surely the same distance between the purposes for which objects were made and the way in which they came to be understood and used by another culture is not unique to the colonial context. The appropriation, exchange, and collection of foreign items are not a distinctive feature of Western societies. Among members of the elite in Swahili port cities along the East African coast, for instance, the possession and display of decorative objects from faraway places was a sign of status and sophistication, an aesthetic practice that stretches back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.¹⁴ While the display is reminiscent of Renaissance art chambers, Swahili royalty did not turn this interest in the other into a calculated massive extraction of cultural objects. Indeed, it may be argued that the peculiar dialectic of ruthless violence and subjugation on the one hand and bitter remorse and self-critique on the other that came to inform the history of African art scholarship is a distinctly Western feature that seems to have its roots in the age of imperial expansion.

How does one write historiography under these circumstances? How to explain the dynamics of canon building within a field like African art studies? Michael Baxandall once explained the job of art historians (and historiographers) by stating, We do not explain pictures. We explain remarks about pictures—or rather, we explain pictures only in so far as we have to consider them under some verbal description or specification.¹⁵ Obviously, the application of this method to the history of African art studies is problematic. After all, who is we? The question recalls the proverb the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe once invoked in an interview for the Paris Review: Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.¹⁶ For Achebe, the proverb captured his early conviction to become a historian of the lion. Still, Achebe chose to write in English, the language of the hunters. As he came to realize, the historians of the lions and those of the hunters are inexorably intertwined.¹⁷

Let me come back then to Baxandall’s language-driven approach. For Baxandall, the focus was about the historical interpretation of a painting or a sculpture. How can we explain an artwork, or rather an object designated an artwork? The question is as simple as it is profound. At stake is the inadequacy between image and word, perception and translation, or, if you will, experience and meaning. The relationship between the two is key to my project. Let me explain my premise in simple terms. Experience refers to the perception and responses to an artwork’s subject and formal properties—its color, shape, volume, texture, motion, time, and so forth. The work may evoke emotions such as joy, disgust, or fear. Yet while these affective qualities quite literally have sense, they are devoid of meaning in terms of being able to be communicated and debated with others through language. Thus, to move from experience to meaning, we need to translate experience into words, words that may be the result not just of one but multiple translations. Obviously, this does not absolve us from questioning which experiences we are discussing and whose words we use. And surely, language does not exhaust experience; hence, disputes and conflicts over interpretation are bound to happen. The fact remains, however: as a matter of meaning, art exists only in the realm of language.¹⁸

As these remarks suggest, this book rests on a fundamentally action-oriented argument. What I propose is to understand (art) objects not primarily as aesthetic but as social objects. For the history of African art studies, this requires employing a relational perspective that focuses less on the artwork and its specific artness than on the social relations in which the work is entangled and that it constitutes. The aim of this book is to trace and study these processes within the field of African art studies. The focus is on the Global North as—up to now—still the primary location of the field. The clarification is crucial, for it echoes the book’s intention. Thus, I do not offer an affirmative answer as to what African art was or is. Nor do I explore the local or African meanings and aesthetic qualities of (art) objects. Rather, I am interested in how the works labeled as African art figure in the historical processes and social interactions that constitute the Africanist art world.¹⁹

The Narrative

Where then does this book begin? The question is not merely rhetorical. After all, beginnings have consequences.²⁰ They decree. Beginning in late nineteenth-century Europe, as I do, defines an entry point into the debate that both enables and excludes. What it excludes are alternative beginnings, such as those whose objects came to be the subject of the field. What it authorizes are the academic texts that have come to constitute the field of African art studies. Given the lasting efforts to decolonize the field, the approach requires an explanation. Surely, Africanist scholars have long criticized the absence of African voices and narratives in the Euro-American writing of African history.²¹ And yes, there are numerous successful attempts to recover these voices from vernacular and colonial archives.²² But the purpose of the book is not so much to critique the subject with counterhistories but to show how the need and demand for these counterhistories emerged. In other words the book aims to explain both the formation of the field as well as the emergence of the continuous efforts to remake it and write it anew.

To account for the heterogeneity of parallel events and discourses, I have chosen a tripartite structure that I invite readers to read and see like a three-channel video installation. That is, each of the three parts discusses different developments, often happening simultaneously and often competing with one another, thus making each part a complex set of crisscrossing ideas and arguments.

The first part of this book covers the period from the late nineteenth century up to the time of World War II, when African art emerged as a field of study, a market, and an object of critique. Chapter 1, Forming a Field: Colonial Collecting, Racial Omissions, and National Rivalries, focuses on the newly founded ethnographic museums. At the center of the discussion stands the process of collecting and the ways in which early anthropologists and art historians imbued the collected objects with new meanings and values that spoke to the scientific debates about the evolution and diffusion of culture prominent at the time. Chapter 2, Celebrating Form: From Primitive to Primitivism, shifts the discussion from the world of curators and scholars to that of artists and critics. Ethnographic museums turned into contact zones where artists encountered sculptures and masks from Africa and the Pacific. The popular reception of these works as primitive, savage, or crude both enhanced their attractiveness to certain artists and provided models for experimentation and critique of the received European tradition. Chapter 3, Creating Visibility and Value: Photography and Its Effects, investigates the effects of this artistic valuation of African sculpture on the research into African artifacts and their museal display. As I argue in this chapter, the extensive production and consumption of photographic images had far-reaching consequences with respect to style, value, and fieldwork.

The second part of the book spans the postwar period to the study of Black Atlantic traditions in the 1970s and 1980s. As World War II and colonialism gradually came to an end, the center of research shifted from Europe to the new imperial superpower, the US. Chapter 4, Discovering the African Artist: Tradition and Tribality in the Cold War Era, discusses Africanist research under the conditions of Cold War politics and postcolonial nation building. The rapidly modernizing environment not only altered categories (from primitive and tribe to tradition and artist) but also gave rise to the academic institutionalization of African art history as a recognized subfield in (American) art history departments. As I argue, interest in the traditional artist as the new leitmotif in postwar, postcolonial Africanist research was really driven by the presence of the modern/contemporary artist, attributes that tellingly come up in conjunction with the category of tradition. Chapter 5, Acknowledging the Contemporary: New Forms, New Actors, therefore, investigates how modern African art developed and finally won legitimacy among the Euro-American academic art world. A critical turning point was the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (translated into English at the time as First World Festival of African Negro Arts) 1966 in Dakar, Senegal. Just as the festival provided African contemporary art a prominent forum and platform, it also allowed the field to expand to the Americas. Chapter 6, Extending the Horizon: Africa in the Americas, studies this redirection. As it turned out, the newly developed interest in modern/contemporary African art had no lasting effect. Parallel to and informed by the Black Power movement in the US, research returned to the study of traditional/indigenous art in Africa but now widening it to embrace continuities of black artistic traditions in the Americas.

The third and final part of the book examines the postmodern and postcolonial reconfiguration of the field from the rise of postcolonial theory and revived interest in contemporary art in the late 1980s and early 1990s to current debates on the dynamics of modernism, decoloniality, and the question of heritage. Chapter 7, Intervening the Canon: The Postmodern, the Popular, and the Authentic, discusses the crisis of representation when hitherto largely unquestioned concepts and classifications became the subject of rigorous critique. The chapter focuses mainly on exhibitions and curatorial strategies exemplified by three major shows: Primitivism in 20th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984, Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris in 1989, and Africa Explores at the Center for African Art and the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York in 1991. Chapter 8, Challenging Representation: Postcolonial Critique and Curation, traces the process whereby, from the early 1990s onward, the other began to speak back. Informed by postcolonial theory, a new generation of black artists, critics, and curators began to challenge the burden of representation by using prominent international venues like the Venice Biennale or the Documenta in Kassel as effective platforms. Chapter 9, Undoing the Empire: Duress, Defiance, and Decolonial Futures, discusses the frustrations about the lack of progress in building a more just (art) world. With debates ranging from the interest in modernism and modes of delinking from Western modernity to the toppling of monuments and the building of new museums, the result is an ongoing politicization of the field. Its future depends on the prospects of overcoming the rock