Reading in Detail: Katy Deepwell on the Work of Ndidi Dike

R E A D I N G I N D E T A I L K A T Y D E E P W E L L ON T H E W O R K OF N D I D I D I K E T he "Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa" exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery last year was the largest exhibition of contemporary African Art (post-1945) in the recent africa95 festival in the U.K. which ambitiously brought together seven curators to organize seven independent stories of contemporary art in Africa. The work of Ndidi Dike was included in the Nigerian section of the show which set before its audiences a new view of contemporary art from Africa. However, its presentation in London was much overshadowed by the enthusiastic critical coverage of the "blockbuster" exhibition, Africa: Art of a Continent, at the Royal Academy. The latter historical show, in spite of the scholarship embedded within the catalogue and the inclusion of Egypt within a geographical exploration of African art in the last 2000 years (prior to 1940), succeeded in significantly reinforcing the dominant image of Africa as an anthropological subject and its possession of an authentic past as contingent upon European collectors and ethnographers. By contrast, the crowded exhibition space of Seven Stories, underlined the difficult curatorial task of selecting representative works and artists to present any form of narrative covering 50 years of art production in each of the selected countries or of producing a visually coherent exhibition across the necessarily different trajectories of aesthetic, cultural, and political concerns. The arguments advanced in the Seven Stories catalogue, by the Nigerian section curator, Chika Okeke, highlighted the muchdebated tension between the modern and traditional in contemporary Nigerian art as well as the politics of "Natural Synthesis" developed by the Zaria Arts Society. Salah Hassan's recent article, "The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expressions of the Self and Cross-cultural Aesthetics," usefully suggests ways of developing a further critical framework for discussion of Dike's work. Hassan argues for a intertextual, dialogic approach to reveal social relations of intellectual production at temporal, spatial and historical levels.1 From a Western feminist perspective, it is also possible to read Dike's work through comparisons with theories on women and modernism (contrasting her formal strategies across painting/relief/sculpture with figures like Louise Nevelson). In this respect, a strategy for reading her works in contrast to both the process-oriented formalist readings of Arnold Glimcher and Laurie Wilson's iconographic study of the modernist American artist Louise Nevelson provide a useful means in considering the particularity and specificity of Dike's project.2 Separated by nearly half a century in age and working in two different countries, America and Nigeria, the differences between these two artists superficially could not be greater. What initially unites Nevelson and Dike are a number of formal strategies in their work. For both artists, their primary medium is wood, carved and assembled in panel forms — Dike's panelled reliefs and Nevelson's famous "Walls". They both produce single works as part of larger series, both use found objects in their work, though Dike's work is less dependent on this than Nevelson's. Both artists' sculptures/reliefs rely on an accumulation of detail, "multi-layered" textures, and a strong tactile sense (These two features take on a very specific meaning in relation to the idea of "reading in detail" [Naomi Schor] below and a case could equally be made that their work involves concepts of the feminine as identified by H. Cixous and L. Irigaray ).3 In order to compare the two in this way a high degree of formalistic abstraction is needed: a position which overlooks the detail, when it is in the accumulation of details that the differences between their projects lie and the contrast becomes most apparent between a Western modernist, born in Russia who lived and worked in America and a modern African artist, born in England who lives and works in Nigeria. Both artists deliberately restrict their palettes to a minimum range of colors: Nevelson to black, gold, and white, Dike to the traditional Uli...