Western Frontiers of African Art by Moyo Okediji (review)

Western Frontiers of African Art is a collection of essays on the subject of African art, and in particular the development of new theories that might enlighten us as to its particularity. The key word in the book is “triangulation,” a term that the author has also explored elsewhere. Simply put, the word refers to the” in-betweeness” of art in the situation of modernity, resulting in the “hybrid logovisual reading” (179) of both “traditional” and modern societies. The innovation in this book resides in the moments when Okediji employs the concept of hybridity to analyze European artworks: an “African” reading of art that has mixed results.

The notion of “triangulation” is part of the author’s theory of “semioptics,” an alternative to “semiotics” as described by Roland Barthes. In a chapter dedicated to unpacking Barthes’ theories of language—particularly the relationship of the spoken word and visual images—Okediji concludes that linguistics does not have the tools to interpret visual images. Although we might point to the many authors who already have agreed with this and elaborated on the problems of linguistics in the years since Barthes, Okediji uses Barthesian linguistics to launch into a chapter titled “Semioptic Equations: The Crossroads of Arrowhead Modernity,” in which he uses Yoruba philosophy to claim art as a production in between word and image, art as “hybrid.” Importantly for Okediji, this is not just true for African art, but for art generally. Unfortunately, I was left wishing that the basis of his discussion of semioptics had been more Yoruba philosophy or even phenomenology and less Barthes, more akin to his provocative chapter “Semioptics of Africana Art History” in Tejumola Olaniyan’s edited volume The African Diaspora and the Disciplines (Indiana University Press, 2010). However, it is clear that in this text Okediji wanted to use Barthesian semiotics to be more precise about the relationships of word and image than has thus far been elaborated in romantic theories of hybridity and “third” spaces.

In chapters like “Homoerotic African Art,” “Transgressive Pictures: Feminism, Pathology, and Poverty,” and “Gendered Triangulation: Anger, Rage, and Dislocation” Okediji applies some of his theories to advance his interpretation of many artworks that have not been seen by the public. I was surprised and pleased that he included sections dedicated to feminism and queer art, two subjects that have been all but silenced in African art historiography. Sections of his analyses of individual artworks convinced me that they indeed require their own theory and must be taken on their own terms. But often it was unclear whether those theories are the author’s or whether they are to be found within the work itself. This book is a complicated assemblage of art history and criticism. It should, I think, be understood mostly as a series of rhapsodies and responses to the art works.

That is to say, Okediji’s analytical acts are at times intellectually exciting, but they can also be vexing. I will just mention two examples among many. In his discussion of Tinuomi Afilaka’s pictographic paintings, which the artist herself refused to comment on, Okediji reads into the dots and lines that make up the three registers of the painting “a rabble of nondescript characters of various assortments, trades, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and ethnicities, all united by their lack of property” (83–84). Of the chevron line at the bottom of the painting, he said that the “pointed, sharp, zigzag side of reality is digging painfully into the softness of their flesh” (84). (To complicate things further, the painting to which he refers, if I followed his reading correctly, appeared to be printed upside down in the book—perhaps an error in editing.) I am not suggesting that the author should not be able to enter into flights of fancy with his writing, but these interpretations are often presented as commonsense readings of the works. None of these statements is presented as a...