In/Sight

M. C. ST E P H E N S L et m e say from the outset that the selection of work in "In/Sight" is outstanding. "In/Sight" is also a monumental, curatorial achievement if for no other reason than having introduced so many great artists at once to the decadent world of the Western Establishment. With few exceptions, these photographic works which represent — in the political sense — African Subjectivity in opposition to Western Misconceptions About Africa are thought provoking — in the political sense — and aesthetically challenging. Dare I say beautiful? When I arrive at this place, having survived the four-story, death spiral through "Africa: Art of A Continent," I am elated. I see first the prison walls of C a m p Boiro (1994), brutalized and stained with legends 1 can't translate but apprehend, presented like a triple door, a triple threat, a triu m p h . Here, the triptych signals to me, is the best and the worst of postmodernism, postcolonialism. There are no prisoners here; there are only voyeurs. This is the record of my experience of "In/Sight." African Subjectivity in opposition to Western Misconceptions of Africa is a very different proposition than African Subjectivity. To this end the curatorial agenda is stout as is the exhibition catalogue of prints and essays by Mssrs. Enwezor, Zaya, Oguibe, introduced by Ms. Clare Bell. The texts in toto is integral to the exhibition's critical framework, as it brings forward some arresting observations on the historicity of "Afficanity"— in the political sense — and, with startling clairvoyance, the moral frailty of the image-world per se and "the difficulty of interpreting what has been encoded as visual truth"!p.211 as it arises in me, the so-called western consumer, the adressee of this letter. When the demiurges collide, the resulting contingency is a deliberate extrusion of the exhibition as an event in itself: African Subjectivity reveals nothing but the impotence of m y gaze, my claim to ownership, and, ultimately, my compassion for the project. The message is clearly political, faintly fascist, "I have seen you, but you cannot see me." Here, at the center of a classic inversion, "In/Sight" flirts with hubris. God knows, the "Black Male" show at the Whitney Museum should Zarina Bhimji, We are Cut from the Same Cloth, 1995, cibachrome display transparency and light box, courtesy: Public Art Development Trust. ModySory Diallo, Camp Boiro (detail), 1994, cibachrome prints, courtesy of the artist. Drum (South Africa), October 1958, courtesy of Bailey's African History Archives, Johannesburg. have been so fascinating. The "meta-territory of the exhibition site" [p. 22] identified in the text refutes all claims to the images save that of Africa. Inclusion is not the agenda. Some not so interesting stereotypes of western stereotyping —the excerpt of Conrad (Again), the Berlin Conference, the curious interpretation of Avedon's William Casby, Born a Slave— represent the flesh of the other regarding authenticity, anthropology, ethnography, essentialism, etc. The appropriated stage is assembled in the familiar, stultifying Western fashion of fait accompli. Instructive historiographies about, for, and by people of the continent are sketchy. For what the texts seek to project "is a whole transactional flow that refutes both Sengorhian negritude's salvage paradigms and a complacent Western historicity of morbidly inscribed ethnographic yearnings, lusts, prejudices, appropriations, and corrosive violence." [p. 29] The medium, of course, mitigates the message. The photographers proffer a range of approaches to subject. Territory and process: The most contemporary prints exploit the mutability of reflection in and on image making through abstraction. What we see is how their art frankly demands action, fulfilling Barthes concept of "pure contingency" in photography. Portraiture: We see how this existential form which, in the same breath, Barthes pronounced "banality" is realized by artistic pertinence •— not the artists' biographies which accompany every selection in the exhibition but the personal goals of the sitter and operator. Attempts to animate portraiture for the western consumer flow from the catalogue text over, of all things, "specifc sociocultural situations and ideological conditions."[p. 31] While this is as awkward if not disingenious synedoche for "European style" or "'details' which constitute the very raw material of...