Editorial

Any day now one expects the proclamation that ‘contemporary African art’ is dead. After all, its been rumoured for some time, but it seems that no-one will listen until someone with an ego bigger than a continent says so.
Odds are that the proclamation will say the following: “Contemporary African art is now successfully assimilated into international art. Retaining the label, and its attendant discourse, will unnecessarily restrict the work of artists, who just want to be artists.”

There will be some sympathy for the proclamation. After all, how many more ‘deconstructions’ of ‘authenticity’ can one bear? And is it not true that the discourse has been in a state of paralysis for some time, bound into a reactive cycle that, once the hypocrisies of universalism have been exposed, has typically led nowhere beyond the cul-de-sac of iconoclasm for iconoclasm’s sake?

And yet such a proclamation will be a tragedy. It will be a tragedy because in the countless curatorial projects that set out to problemmatise the notions of ‘Africa’ and ‘African art’ very little attention has been paid by the doyens of this discourse to artists working across the African continent, to addressing the prevailing and desired conditions for their practice. A lot of work still needs to be done to develop a discourse that makes sense of work produced in ‘developing’ contexts, such as those that prevail in most parts of Africa. Even more work needs to be done on the ‘pioneers’, of whom barely a monograph exists.

Instead the very idea of associating ‘African art’ with a continent has been trashed, in favour of artists with historical links to the continent but living elsewhere, for whom ‘contemporary African art’ was a necessary stepping stone to visibility in the west, and for whom that stepping stone now threatens to become a millstone. For such artists the proclamation is surely overdue.

Similarly, I suspect, for many South African artists being shackled to a continent that relatively few have demonstrated any interest in, must surely be a quiet torture - I mean, first the cultural boycott isolated us, now I must carry a pass that labels me ‘African’ when all I want to do is join the unfettered ‘international’ community of artists...

The articles featured in this issue of Third Text Africa continue the question of framing and reframing that made up an earlier issue. They date back to the emergence of this discourse, when the naming of ‘contemporary African art’ was in its infancy, and before there was a place for the admittedly cynical tone of this editorial. They highlight the earnestness that went into a valid critique of how Africa was portrayed through the prisms of ignorance and prejudice, and they represented a significant step in unmasking and shaming that misrepresentation.

By revisiting this material it is hoped that this edition will pose a valid challenge to us today: in what way did the critiques developed in the earlier writings on contemporary African art progress beyond those exemplified in these examples? Or did the discourse manage the illusion of breaking new ground, whilst being in effect frozen in a moment, on the threshold of developing new discursive frames that can elucidate both the particularity and universality of art produced across Africa, not only in the advent of globalisation, but also in the critical decades preceding and following political independence.

Has the work been done, or has it barely begun?

Mario Pissarra
Editor, Third Text Africa

Publication & Copyright Information

Olu Oguibe's "In the 'Heart of Darkness'" was published in Third Text no. 23, 1993, pp. 3-8.

Gavin Jantjes' "The Artist as a Cultural Salmon: A View from the Frying Pan" was published in Third Text no. 23, 1993, pp. 103-106.

Everlyn Nicodemus' "Meeting Carl Einstein" was published in Third Text no. 23, 1993, pp. 31-38.

Denis Ekpo's "How Africa Misunderstood the West, The Failure of Anti-West Radicalism and Postmodernity" was published in Third Text no. 35, 1996, pp. 3-13.

Everlyn Nicodemus and Kristian Romare's "Africa, Art Criticism and the Big Commentary" was published in Third Text no 41, 1997-98, pp. 53-65.

Zeynep Celik's "Colonial/postcolonial intersections: Lieux de Memoire in Algiers" was published in Third Text no. 49, 1999-2000, pp. 63-72.

Johan Lagae's "Displaying Authenticity and Progress: Architectural Representation of the Belgian Congo at International Exhibitions in the 1930s" was published in Third Text no. 50, 2000, pp. 21-32.

Mario Pissarra's "Postcolonial Africa" was published in Third Text no. 57, 2001-02, pp. 106-108.

All previously published texts appear in Third Text Africa with permission of Third Text and Routledge. Copyright resides with Third Text/ Authors. No article may be reproduced without the written permission of the Editor, Third Text.

Editorial

Dis/locating Africa/s, or how championing a cause lost a continent

Few could argue that it has been critically important to unsettle dominant notions of Africa. When Africa was widely reduced to a stereotype of backwardness, to an unchanging land without history and differentiation, it was imperative to challenge and counter this image by presenting imaginative and inspiring alternatives. In the main this was done by casting off the boundaries of continent and by turning the binary between the West and Africa inside out.

This intellectual exercise had some genuinely visionary moments. But like any new movement it generated an orthodoxy that now makes sifting the valuable moments from the swamp of tedious re-runs a tiresome affair. It has also been marked by a tendency to privilege iconoclasm to the point that it sometimes appears to be an end in itself. And it generated its own ironies: The dislocation of a fixed Africa and its replacement by a plurality of Africas has translated into a new regime where Africa’s hearts now beat most loudly in big cities off the continent. Pluralism, it seems, begins abroad. Convenient too, that the art capitals of the world can now engage Africans by dealing with those on its doorstep, or in their backyard, leaving the continent in some remote hemisphere, too distant to resonate for this beast called ‘contemporary African art’.

Through locating Africa as primarily in Europe and the USA, the idea that the international somehow excludes most Africans has been perpetuated. For Africans labouring under colonial complexes it appears to make good sense to look to the fiscally-rich world for developmental models. With tourist-friendly biennales proliferating across the globe, one may well ask why not Africa too? So what if most African countries have no properly resourced museums, and have populations who are largely disinterested in the visual arts? Can these problems be addressed through the biennale model, or through other kinds of programmes? Does the biennale model introduce its own benefits that makes such problems irrelevant? Will the money spent freighting works and pampering over-indulged curators be better spent elsewhere, or will it only be raised in the name of a biennale? Who are these biennales really meant to serve, and who actually benefits from them? Should the biennale model be adopted, adapted or rejected? And where is the space for such debate to take place, when to ask critical questions is to immediately paint one as a spoiler?

This edition of Third Text Africa consists primarily of reviews and reflections on African biennale’s. They capture both the promise that these exhibitions can work for art and artists in Africa, and the critique that they are all too often simply exotic platforms where marginalised curators and artists get a precious moment to pitch to the movers in the art-world, hopefully enabling careers where it really matters, which you will have to struggle to locate anywhere on this giant continent, which remains, for the foreseeable future, Africa.

This edition also includes a few accounts of artists’ workshops. Unlike the biennale, artists’ workshops are generally low-key affairs that attract little public attention, and almost no exposure in art journals. For their champions workshops are sites of experimental practice that facilitate qualitative exchanges between artists. For detractors there is often little to show for them. Interestingly both these institutional forms – the big spectacle and the hidden laboratory, inadvertently reinforce the idea that artists do, whilst the talking gets done by everyone else. While this model suits many artists, surely one needs to involve artists in designing projects that can relocate artistic practice as integral to human development.

And that goes for non-Africans too.

Mario Pissarra
Editor, Third Text Africa

Publication & Copyright Information

Clementine Deliss' "The Dakar Biennale 92: Where Internationalism Falls Apart" was published in Third Text no. 23, 1993, pp. 136-141.

Bernd Scherer's "Johannesburg Biennale: Interview with Lorna Ferguson" was published in Third Text no. 31, 1995, pp. 83-88.

Candice Breitz's "The First Johannesburg Biennale: Work in Progress" was published in Third Text no. 31, 1995, pp. 89-94.

Bryan Biggs' "Dak’Art 96" was published in Third Text no. 36, 1996, pp.83-86.

Jen Budney's "Who’s It For? The Second Johannesburg Biennale" was published in Third Text no. 42, 1998, pp. 88-94.

Katya Garcia-Anton's "Dak’Art 98" was published in Third Text no. 44, 1998, pp. 87-92.

Bisi Silva's "Dak’Art 2000: The Millennium Biennale?" was published in Third Text no. 53, 2000, pp. 103-106.

Yinka Shonibare's "Jean-Michel Basquiat, please do not turn in your grave, it’s only TENQ" was published in Third Text no's. 28/29, 1994, pp. 199-200.

Clementine Deliss' "Reply to Yinka Shonibare" was published in Third Text no's. 28/29, 1994, pp. 201-202.

Els van der Plas' "The Ujamaa IV Workshop in Mozambique" was published in Third Text no. 38, 1997, pp. 81-86.

All previously published texts appear in Third Text Africa with permission of Third Text and Routledge. Copyright resides with Third Text/ Authors. No article may be reproduced without the written permission of the Editor, Third Text.