READING THE CONTEMPORARY African Art from Theory to the Marketplace Edited on Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor Institute of International Visual Arts.

READING THE CONTEMPORARY African Art from Theory to the Marketplace

Edited on Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor

Institute of International Visual Arts, London, and the MIT Pres Cambridge, Mass., 1999 432 pp 51 b/w & 19 color illustrations, notes. $35 softcover

The editors of Reading the Contemporary, Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe, own us that by issuing a challenge to the way art in Africa in the twentieth hundred has been written, they aimed to "provide an alternative art history [and] to lay a groundwork for its methodology" (p14) Readers almost immediately anticipate that this alternative will be like a rollercoaster ride: hardly united page in from the introduction, its first essay, at Oguibe, takes Thomas McEvilley to task for allegedly having concealed in himself the desires of a porn addict in relation to the of the present day York artist Ouattara (McEvilley's African interlocutor in his volume Fusions: African Artists at the Venice Biennale [Museum of late Art, New York, 1994]). Oguibe beholds McEvilley as pressing relentlessly for the African artist's subjection. The same McEvilley, we ask, who years earlier devoured William Rubin throughout the "Primitivism" show, and who challenged Africa Now! to boot? Readers are then on the same level more intrigued to discover that McEvilley himself has an essay in Reading the Contemporary. We know there must be a subtext here, and this, if nothing other guarantees an initial flood of adrenaline. according to the book's end, however, the couple this flood and the opening promise have been arrested. Oguibe's first essay, allowing ingenious in places, turns revealed to be polemical--an attention-grabbing roar of "fire" in the face of smoldering, yet firefighters, already departing for other crises, assure us there is no risk of re-ignition.

It will become clear later for what purpose I characterize the volume's opener in as it was terms, but suspicions are already aroused when we realize that the volume assembles previously published essays in succession art, photography, and film from institutionally secure authors including Valentine Mudimbe, Frank Ukadike, John Picton, Anthony Appiah, and Kobena Mercer That is, for principally Africanist historians of the visual with an interest in the subdue of the contemporary or present and the difficult issues and controversies surrounding them, the essays will be quite familiar from earlier appearances in venue like Third theme Nka, and African Arts.

Divided into four parts, the volume's twenty-two essays stratagem a path, progressively, from the difficulties of twentieth-century art historiography to national, regional, and, finally, individualized histories and critiques. The compass closes with discussion of the same issues with which it had commenc further now more concerned with contemporary "metropolitan" art at the millennium's end

"Theory and Cultural Transaction" consists of essays through among others, Everlyn Nicodemus, Appiah, and Picton, each exploring a particular doubt. For example, Appiah's, calling in recent African works of art and literature, is a hypercritique of as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but postmodern practice and discourses as it was as Lyotard's and Jameson's that claim to have produc an account of these works. This contribution, and all the others in this section, means to question the highly unsatisfactory status of this art in the West (exacerbated in the of the present day globality) by revealing the falsity of its processe and meanings. Examples: the anonymity still attached to its thing perceiveds the substitution of artistic individuation at the authority of the collector, the failure to consider local valuations of contemporary artists, and the demand for the strange idea of authenticity, seen from contributors as a fabricated nonissue. a of the essays offer alternative possibilities while also detailing specific traditions, thus anticipating more direct explorations of art histories in following essays.

The secondary part of the book, "History" includes essays at Salah Hassan (questioning the traditional/modern dichotomy by the agency of exploring the implications of emigration for northern African artists), Manthia Diawara (on Malian photographer Seydou Keita's peculiar fresh vision), Ima Ebong (on Senegal and Negritude's fallout), and Chika Okeke (on Nigeria's Zaria academy and its outcomes). Stylistically divergent, the essays in this section nevertheless involve the centrality, in the emerging see the verb of modern practices, of interrogations of nationality. sum of two units of its forms are uncomfortable intersections where art practices had been co-opt either according to then new nationalist politics or by means of expectations in the foreign lands to which artists migrated. This art struggl to escape exploitative subsumption on such instrumentality, its artists desiring (or strategically tending) to have relation crucially to local historicities, real and, as was without doubt the case in Senegal, displaced. a writers in the first section of the main division had elucidated their analysis by dint of attention to enigmatic artists like Cheri Samba. The artists who take center stage here, however, have matched and challenged Western artists onward "their own" ideological turf (Ben Enwonwu and Amir Nour for example).