Third Text Africa, Volume 2.2, ‘Re/framed 2’

POSTED ON: January 29, 2014 IN

In the ‘Heart of Darkness,’ Olu Oguibe
The Artist as a Cultural Salmon: A View from the Frying Pan, Gavin Jantjes
Meeting Carl Einstein, Everlyn Nicodemus
How Africa Misunderstood the West, The Failure of Anti-West Radicalism and Post Modernity, Dennis Ekpo
Africa, Art Criticism and the Big Commentary, Everlyn Nicodemus and Kristian Romare
Colonial/Post colonial intersections: Lieux de Memoire in Algiers, Zeynep Celik
Displaying Authenticity and Progress: Architectural Representation of the Belgian Congo at International Exhibitions in the 1930s, Johan Lagae
Review: Postcolonial Africa, Mario Pissarra

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.

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