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REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES: TOWARDS A NEW AFRICAN ART DISCOURSE O k w u i E n w e z o r 0 ne of the problematic aspects of visiting museums, art galleries , and other sites of cultural valuation, in Europe and the United States, is the pervasive absence in these highly policed environments, of art by contemporary African artists Not only are the works of these artists (many ofwhom have been working for the past half century) conspicuously absent from the museum and galleryenvironment, they've also been accorded little attention or significance in academic art historical practices, university curriculums, the print media, or other organs of such reportage Needless to say, various shallow and historically untenable positions are ventured by many in the West, a priori to any contact (at least in a sufficient and meaningful context) with this art The most enduring myth of all such attempts at historicization, is the - . specious assertion by many in Western art establishments, that there is really, no such thing as modern art from Africa For Africa - so the argument goes - the term modern or contemporary, is either an aberration, or oxymoronic, and necessarily disinherited from all assumptions of continuity and dynamism This epistemological bias (which also, is one of visuality) all but eliminates any real chance to begin to de-exoticize contemporary African art products And so, we are conditioned to take as given, the qualifier "Western influenced ", as part and parcel of how contemporary African art may be read, understood, and enjoyed, but never do we import into the space of Western modernism a qualifier like "African influenced " - a qualifier which if used, is potentially distressing to the idea of a wholly autonomous, uninflected Western art historical hierarchy Perhaps the most astounding statement along this line of thinking in recent memory, can be found in the opening lines of Susan Vogel's catalogue introduction to "Africa Explores: 20th century African Art", here Vogel unabashedly delights in telling her audience that "Contact with the West has been the determining experience (italics added) though certainly not the only influencefor African art in 20th century art" 1 The implications of this kind of systemic obscuring of historical facts, surely tittilates a plethora of oppositional desires within many of us, who daily, fail to recognize ourselves in the kind of pictures painted to represent the face of 20th century African art history It is the rupture between such nonsense, the obfuscation and anxiety it evokes, and the reality of present constructs, that begins to gnaw at our most conflicted view of the grand narratives of 20th century art, and its many different currents and moments To dislodge the obvious bigotry wedged into Vogel's statement requires a little more force than has been allowed in contesting various representations of 20th century African cultural practices and histories Bur one sees nothing that is particularly unique in Vogel's statement After all, it has been the fundamental basis for training artists and art historians in the West, for as long as one cares to chart The long history of misinformation which inhabits texts like Vogel's is a disgraceful one Rarely, if at all, in such critiques and discourses do we find African art placed as part of the contiguous critical nexus of revolutionary practices, that has up to date, confounded and thrilled the processes, and highly nuanced modes of transposing into a concrete arena, all the elusive stuff of the psyche and unconcious imagination Except, of course, when it is dressed up in the guise of a primitivist cultural festival,like William Rubin's felicitous attempt at comparative anthropology : "Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern" at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1984 A rather curious title, which more or less betrays the ambiguousness and disingenuousness , of Euro-American accounts of the formulations of 20th century art The question really is, whose "primitivism" are we talking about here? For if indeed "Primitivism in 20th Century Art" denotes only an affinity as suggested by the exhibition and the critical pedagogy which spawned it, then Picasso, Klee, Brancusi, Braque, Modigliani, even Matisse, must be its illegitimate children For nowhere are...

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