The Inverted Sign: Rereading Frédéric Bruly Bouabré

THE INVERTED SIGN Okwui Enwezor FREDERIC BRULY BOUABRE'S postcard-sized drawings rendered with colored pencils on cardboard possess a strange and intoxicating charm. Poised between a readily identifiable form of mysticism and the illegible scrawls of a barely school-age child, their brilliantly conflated, massed energy radiates a sense of power and fun-making. Bouabre essentially has the wit and modesty of a poet. As such he cannot, strictly speaking, be called an artist. Still, his ambition, and the work he does, aspires to the lofty heights which the marketplace assigns to those who can wield a brush (in his case: colored pencils and ball point pens), conjoined to a fierce vision, determination, and passion. In this exhibition at Dia Center for the Arts, the work of the 73 year old artist from Cote d'lvoire has been paired with that of the late Alighiero e Boetti: an alumnus of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, to a surprising accord and dialogue. The reason behind this pairing (except for the friendship between the artists) is located in the fact that both artists are obsessed with Journal of Contemporary African Art * Spring/Summer 1995 ,. .~ Dual View: Frederic Bruly Bouabre,The Museum of the African Face (Scarification), 1990- 9 1 (Colored pencil and ball-point pen on card). PHOTO Ike Ude ~ ~ ~ FREDERIC BRULY BOUABRE a form of semioLogicaL archaeoLogy in which Language systems in their discretionary and cryptic forms connive to disrupt and organize the worLd. Boetti's work is about boundaries (reaL and imagined), embLematized by his highLy schematic maps, in which centers of power are subtly shifted and dispLaced. Bouabre is aLso concerned with boundaries, not so much in deLineating them, but in the fact that he wishes to aboLish them aLtogether. This is where any kind of comparative judgements of the two artists' works end. Looked at more closeLy, certain codes of viewing, deepLy embedded in a regressive modernist code of conduct start to reveaL their sordid imprints. These codes, which have been subjects of recent intense contestations, allow for a reading that pointedLy mirrors, at Least in terms of the structuring of this exhibition, William Rubin's exerdse in taxonomic incongruity: the "Primitivism" exhibition of a decade ago, and Centre Pompidou's more recent "Les Magidens de La Terre." In fact, it was at "Les Magidens" that Bouabre entered our criticaL Journal of Contemporary African Art · Spring/Summer 1995mml:1 Detail: Frederic Bruly Bouabre, Connaissance du monde (Knowledge of the world) 1982-94 (Colored pencil and ball-point pen on card, 195 panels). PHOTO Ike Ude consciousness, albeit as a curious occultist, not as an artist. This portrayal of Bouabre makes quite problematic any analysis of his work that does not descend into the murky terrain of a "tribal" or "primitive" invocation of his imagined origins, spiced with enchanting representations of this "unspoiled" eden of an unreflective antiquity. As successful as this pairing might seem to the eye, the morphological reading which it insinuates go back to the unmediated assumptions of the binary structure of such dichotomous juxtapositions: primitive/modern; Alighiero e Boetti representing conceptual and discursive sawiness and Frederic Bruly Bouabre representing naivete and a necromantic exoticism. This of course disavows and subverts the postmodernist predilection for a grand and unitary recuperation of a hybridized otherness into its melange of a post-industrial embrace of "difference." But such attempts at discursivity have tended to elide complete knowledge of this so-called other, as well as being insufferably false, pedantic, and utterly dehistoricized. The cultural sphere and milieu which formed Bouabre— whether as artist or shaman—seems to have fallen into such a dehistoricized terrain. Ultimately, this is what makes him, as subject for review, of most interest to me. For the simple reason that of the two artists, his work is the least exhibited and written about, at least within the context of serious analysis and as the basis for acquiring knowledge about the cultural space under which he practices. Also, something in Bouabre—as an artist and phenomenon—suggests closer scrutiny, particularly in how we respond to work by African artists of a particular "caste," level of training, and visual sophistication. In the...