Gendered Visions: The Art Of Contemporary Africana Women Artists (review)

REVIEW GENDERED VISIONS The Art of Cont empor ar y Africana Wome n Artists E d i t e d B y GENDERED VISIONS: THE ART OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICANA WO M EN ARTISTS Salah M. Hassan [ed.] Africa World Press, New Jersey, 1997. Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists, a volume of essays edited by Salah M. Hassan, with contributions by Florence Alexis, Diane Butler, Dorothy Desir- Davis, Salah Hassan, Bob Meyers, Olu Oguibe, and Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, is one of the most recent documents devoted to issues in contemporary African art. It is also the accompanying catalogue of an exhibition of the same title, held at the Herbert F.Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 1997. The essays in the volume are linked by each author's forthright attempt to negotiate the complexities of a project centered on identity politics, namely the place and practice of contemporary women artists from Africa and its Diaspora. The term Africana is transferred from Diaspora studies and the academe , to the gallery space as an al ternative term for dealing with the problematics of identity across geographical and other differences. However, it is debatable whether the adoption of the term is a successful remedy for the indeterminacy of "Diaspora" in dealing with the work of the artists discussed in the book. The six artists whose works i n spire the collection, Elisabeth T. Atnafu, Xenobia Bailey, Renee Cox, Angele Etoundi Essamba, Houria Niati, and Etiye Dimma, disparatein origin, chosen medium, and sources of influence, are collapsed within the genre of "Afri- Diaspora women artists," and linked through a likened positionality, namely the "common...destinies of Diaspora, migration, and dislocation." In his own essay, for example, Hassan contextualizes the mixed- media work of Tariqua Atnafu within the domain of contemporary production in Ethiopia, as well as in relation to Western post- modernist practices. Although Hassan and his co- curator Dorothy Desir- Davis define "Africana" as flexible rather than fixed, the concept nevertheless rehearses familiar tensions between the individual and the universal , the specific and the collective , which drive such postmodernist practices and identities. The authors' allegiances to the larger project of characterizing the work of each artist around the framework of Africana, and accounting for the multiple histories and Diaspora represented by the artists and their works, only succeed in creating an other collectivizing, museological paradigm. In the book, Hassan contributes an engaging piece on Houria Niati's performances and i n stallations . According to him, her work speaks to the historicalimage of Algerian woman. Through them she places herself against a backdrop of Orientalist images, memories , and fantasies, and thus restages and critiques Western desire for Orientalist spectacle. In Meyers's essay, he deals with Renee Cox's concerns with the intersection of race and gender, in her strategic adoption of the conventions of nineteenth century ethnographic photography for a visual play with the archiving of racially and sexually marked bodies. Without discussing Cox's images directly , Meyers reviews historical constructions of difference vis- avis the photographic medium. In the process, however, he glosses overthe role of photography in signifying practices and mythic constructions of subjectivity. In same general manner, Diane Butler discusses photo- artist Angele Etoundi Essamba, as an artist who images the body; black and female, erotic yet "redemptive." Without reading Essamba's images critically, formally , or contextually, however, Butler merely produces an ahistorical and largely biographical overview. In the end, the aforementioned essays are linked more by a discourse of stereotypy than by a new paradigm of Africana aesthetics. Moreover, one does not come away with the conviction that the peculiarities of origin and location which may characterize these artists practices, or the old dichotomy of West versus non- West, may be easily displaced by the unifying frame of "Africana." Whereas Desir- Davis has little difficulty in describing Xenobia Bailey's crochetworkas the product of an "African based and gender based aesthetic", Olu Oguibe's paramount essay, "Beyond Visual Pleasures," interrogates the notion of "gendered visions" as it investigates the non- aesthetic motivations of women artists from Africa. Oguibe briefly traces the discourse of contemporary African art, and addresses the practice of women artists...