Facing Toward the Future: How New Categories May Emerge

Gagliardi and Biro accurately recognize language as an important site of change in the presentation and discussion of African arts with a historical bent. Toward the end of the essay, they make the point that, "Once we recognize that our determinations of style reflect our evaluations of form, then we must also revise our language to signal to our audiences that the style of a particular object may or may not reflect anything about who made it, for whom, or why" (2019: 4).

This is an important point to emphasize, i.e., that the work of signaling, or even addressing more strongly than merely signaling, to audiences that the naming conventions used by art markets and museum displays carry with them histories of epistemic violence. The work of questioning and undoing these categories and the violence out of which they emerge is far from over. The work of scholarly criticism has indeed got us to a point where "educated" audiences are aware that categories like Baule or Shona or Zulu reference constellations of meaning that are much broader than the simplistic colonial "tribal" descriptors. Each object so described was collected from a particular place, at a particular time, often under circumstances that involved domination and violence in colonial encounters. What's more, the work had been made at a particular time, in a particular place, by a particular person or people. It had been used either in the flow of daily life, in ceremonial circumstances, or as art or ornament. This is how, as scholars and audiences schooled in critique, we approach these works, as the authors acknowledge. The work of conveying this to audiences—perhaps the majority of museum-goers—must continue even at the risk of appearing didactic to those who know better.

When we turn to language and contemporary artistic creations that reference past eras of African art, such as Theaster Gates's installation that illustrates Gagliardi and Biro's essay, the authors also correctly argue that the work of "recognizing complex histories" cannot be passed from museums or universities onto living artists (2019: 4). This is the responsibility of scholarship. In South Africa, for example, critique of colonial categories of neat "tribes" has been consciously undertaken by some artists, but the penetrating task of developing methods for giving detailed histories back to artistic works that were collected in colonial situations and are held in collections of museums in South Africa as well as in Europe and North America, is being done by scholars collaborating across disciplines (e.g., Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016). Attempts to get beyond static inherited categories requires opening up again and again the thickness of how works were talked about in the contexts in which they originated in Kenya or Mali or Zimbabwe in languages other than English or French. It was often when works were collected by outsiders that they moved from being described in quotidian terms that normalized them in the life-worlds of their creators and users to being bluntly labeled by "tribe." It may not be possible fully to undermine the use of designations like Baule because of how well established they are in international circuits as Gagliardi and Biro recognize.

It may be then that our analyses need to be future-facing in such a way that we teach prospective collectors and traders who pass through university classrooms to depart from the colonial mentalities and discourses that remain alive today. Furthermore, where contemporary collectors still do not, they need to be challenged to describe the objects they collect differently to how their predecessors did: they must contextualize the works with details such as names of artists, places of creation and collection, and circumstances under which the works are collected. Such collection practices will then make possible the further attempts of scholarship to fill out our knowledge of the quotidian contexts of the works. In time, then, new categorizations will emerge that are not as epistemically violent and offensive as the "tribal" categorizations away from which we are attempting to move. Much work still remains to be done along the vectors Gagliardi and Biro signal...