On Three Counts I Am an Outsider: The Work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode

OnThreeCounts IAman Outsider The Work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode Octavio Zaya M istaken and deceptive attributions, appropriations and outright forgeries are conditions ofthe art market as much as they are symptoms of the functionally authoritative position that Art History occupies in its utterances. In all such cases from - Elmir de Ory's copies of Matisse and Picasso, to the arguments and dissent surrounding the paternity of many paintings that were once ascribed to Rembrandt and Goya - the preeminence and referential order of the original author-artist remain intact, even in instances in which the original images are subjected to manipulations which strip them of the authoritative claim to meaning, as in Sherrie Levine's rephotographing of Walker Evans' images of the rural poor. However, in dealing with African art (not to mention those instances in which it is appropriated and misrepresented), western "experts;' as well as dealers, seem resolutely committed to the erasure of the source. They are inclined to recompose the social interactions and traces that the art-object at hand has accumulated in the West; to conveniently profer a story which is reticent, if not mute, about Africa. Thus, while Africans are purposefully ignored by the silence which prevails in African art on the subject of the history and the authorship of their art-objects prior to their ultimate passage to the West, the list of the western owners of these African pieces, their line of descent in the West and their pedigree, literally amount to their value. The longer this pedigree, and the more important the owners, the more prestigious and valuable the object: of two African sculptures which might trace their history to the same origin and artist, the one which was once owned by, say, Matisse or Rockefeller, will accrue the higher market and historical value in the West. Writing on the appropriation and transference of author-ity that western critics exercise on African artists, Olu Oguibe explains that "the defacement ofthe native consigns her to the category ofthe unknown. Displaced to the befuddled corners of obscurity and rudimentary episteme, the native is made available for discovery, and this discovery transforms the discoverer into an authority, this supposed privileged knowledge often translating into the right to represent."1 This practice continues, of course, in contemporary discourses, "where novel strategies are employed to anonymize African art by either disconnecting the work from the artist, thus deleting the author-ity of the latter, or constructing the artist away from the normativities of contemporary practice."2 (my emphasis) Moreover, as Okwui Enwezor has recently asserted, in referring to the adversarial experiences of contemporary African artists in the West, "the postmodern , western metropolis, with its centrifugal pull, has always, in the minds of many marginal communities, represented a site oftheft, a port of dispossession. It is there where the margin comes face to face with the real threat of erasure and defacement..."3 mBJournal of Contemporary African Art· Spring 1996 This reiteration of erasures, mis-attributions and blatant seizures, elucidates the structure at play in the disputed parameters in which the work of the late Nigerian photographer Rotimi FaniKayode is framed. It also explains the paucity of commentary related to the extent of his collaboration with the late British photographer Alex Hirst. Despite the herculean task of Mark Sealy and Autograph, who currently oversee Fani-Kayode's work, much of the controversy regarding attributions and ownership that surround his work still remains. Making this even more difficult is the fact that Kayode left no will when he passed away, hence, the delicate handling of these issues as they continue to come to light. 1 The first time I saw Fani-Kayode's photographs, in the 1991 spring issue of the British magazine TEN 8 which focused on the body as a site of identity politics, contestation, and displacement, the name ofAlex Hirst wasn't mentioned once. Even in the biographical notes, there was no reference to any kind of collaboration or working project between Fani-Kayode and Hirst. If anything, Fani-Kayode's photographs were characterized by Kobena Mercer as "distinctive" for their "subtle and subversive miscegenation of the visual codes through which [they] articulate[s] Black gay male...