Review of DAK’ART 98 published in NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art
There are no necessary links between the cosmopolitanism of Western art discourse and the practical participation of non-Western art epistemologies. This is not because the worldly aspirations of Western art discourse represents little more than empty rhetoric but because its language was never meant to be aimed beyond the imagination of the Western ego. Much has been written criticizing Modern Art’s Primitivist impulses and the appropriation of African objects and motifs by artists such as Picasso for their own use, but it was a valid and authentic step within the egocentric development of Western art’s conception of itself in the world. In Claude Lévi-Strauss’ “The Structural Study of Myth”(1955), Chthonian beings—emanating as they do from the netherworld beneath the terra (i.e. creatures from the earth)—are monsters that have to be destroyed because of their differences from the Western cosmology. In the story of Oedipus, these creatures are a metonymy for the violence of Western discourse towards all other discourses that refuse to deny humanity’s earthly origins. Over and over again, the development of western art is predicated on non-western art forms as something to be claimed for the West.
Perhaps this has changed somewhat, as anxieties in the West about the virtue of its own thought no longer produces only indifference (or something worse) to the welfare of the other, but also produces the recognition of greater cultural interdependence. Still, a visit to Dakar, Senegal, on the occasion of DAK’ART—one of only two biennials of contemporary art in Africa and the largest and most important—is a reminder of the multiplicity of modernities in the world and not just a singular one. In this case, it is a modernity still struggling to break free from tethered to France in a neo-colonial relationship. Taking in DAK’ART underlined, to my mind at least, the utterly oppressive role that the West continues to play in much of the non-Western world today.
DAK’ART was officially opened by the Senegalese President Abdou Diouf, in a theatre that has seen a lot of wear and tear since the halcyon days of the Premier exposition mondial des arts nègre of 1966 for which it was built. Rather than Duke Ellington, James Baldwin, Aime Cesaire, Josephine Baker, and other luminaries from the world’s African Diaspora, DAK’ART 96’s opening ceremonies included an audience consisting of officials from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, UNESCO, various curators of “African Art,” mostly from America, and the men and women who make up Senegal’s international Ambassadorial corporates. Other than the notable exceptions of the curator from London’s excellent Institute of Contemporary Art and a few others, including the independent American curator Mary Jane Jacob, there were very few of the Western art world personages one would encounter at the opening of events such as Documenta or the Venice Biennale. This would not necessarily be a bad thing, as the world is in dire need of alternative models for not only art but art systems.
But DAK’ART’s political influence is remote, weak, and a highly contained one. What was on view consisted almost entirely of paintings, invariably scaled for the easel. To be fair, this is, in large part, a reflection of the real economy, very poor and politically unstable, in which West African artists must work. Mere canvas and paints are expensive, nevermind the luxury of computers and video equipment for elaborate video art installations. A look at the content of the paintings, however, was another matter. There was very little in the way of political content, at least in the manner in which it is familiar in the West. Ironically, at least to me, the most politically engaging art to be found at DAK’ART were by diasporic artists such as Carrie Mae Weems. Also interesting were artists from South Africa, such as Willie Bester, for whom an entirely different set of circumstances effect their works.
Paintings tended to be historical homages to l’École de Dakar, the post-Second-World-War art movement that was brought up in conversation by many of the artists with whom I spoke. Dialogues about art were generally closeted to this single French art movement which corresponded, not uncoincidentally, with the completion of West Africa’s decolonization process. The École de Dakar, a group of painters who exhibited in the 1966 Festival, is now regarded as Senegal’s most important declaration of artistic autonomy. That this école was never really an école, but a designation by Andre Malraux as he toured the Festival, is just one more irony of several ironies one encounters in Dakar.
Perhaps I am showing my chauvinism in demanding of the art I saw a political concern that could not possibly be there in the way that I would recognize. I was told by an artist from Togo that I would have to fully discard all of my Western conceptions about art in order that I begin the process of understanding his art. Only then would I start to see the political vitality of his paintings, which were, by and large, abstract to my eyes. Another artist mentioned to me that the conflation of art and life is a reality in Africa, not some theoretical carrot as it is often considered in the West. Perhaps they are right.
The reality I experienced at DAK’ART was a biennale that seemed rather purposeless, aside from dredging up the utopian ghosts of 1966. Yet, for all my criticism, which undoubtedly must reveal my prejudices as well, I did come away from Senegal with a deeper understanding of art, something which I seldom experience in the world of Chelsea galleries. I departed Senghor Airport thinking about DAK’ART’s potential as a politically and culturally significant voice in a world in which the presence of contemporary art is becoming more pervasive. The potential is overwhelmingly there but the question of whether it can ever be realized is another matter entirely.