Robert-Goldwater-Library

Emerging scholarship in African art

African Arts volume 38, number 4 (winter 2005) A A2583

This posting is an experiment in providing timely access to the contents of journals received in the Goldwater Library. We will continue to send the monthly email "New Arrivals", which includes a list of journal issues received, for the foreseeable future.

image source


In this issue of African Arts guest editor Susan Vogel introduces eight essays characteristic of recent trends in scholarship that cover a broad spectrum of research in African art.

In the issue's introductory "First Word" essay, Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts frames the issue this way:

Here, early in the twenty-first century, we find ourselves asking major questions once again about the field of African art, about the coherence of "Africa" as a term of identification, and about the varied nature of material and intangible forms of expression ... .

First and most important, where is the study of African art headed, and does the journal [African Arts] reflect and contribute to the new directions in which the discipline is moving? Secondly, will the directions the field is taking sustain the journal ... ? Thirdly, given the growth of the discipline, can the journal cover all the bases, or will subfields such as traditional, modern and contemporary, and diasporic studies develop their own constituencies?

CONTENTS

• Whither African art? Emerging scholarship at the end of an age | Susan Vogel

• The Meria landscape in early nineteenth-century Highlands Madagascar | Randall Bird

The ways in which political life and authority are created, maintained, or imagined through landscape are curiously undeveloped in scholarship surrounding the arts of Africa.

• Symptoms and strangeness in Yorùbá anti-aesthetics | David T. Doris

The objects that have been discussed under the privileged banner of Yorùbá art history, the graceful arts of royalty and religion, do not offer us a complete picture of Yorùbá aesthetic practice.

• Layers of awareness: intermediality and practices of visual arts in northern Côte d'Ivoire | Till Förster

Given the central role the electronic media play in contemporary and in particular urban Africa, it should come as no surprise that the so-called traditional arts can no longer occupy the same aesthetic position they did before the advent of photography, TV, video, and more recently the Internet.

• Challenges to rural festivals with the return to democratic rule in southeastern Nigeria | Eli Bentor

While it seems natural to study urban arts in their political and global dimensions, rural arts are still seen mainly as the products of a world that is insulated from national and international political and economic factors.

• Masques dogons in a changing world | Polly Richards

Over the past century, Dogon traditions of masquerade have been recognized by scholars as providing an open system of accumulation and change essential for the masks' survival. Yet paradoxically the very aspects of the masks' evolution that have proved the strength of the tradition and its ability to survive into the twenty-first century have been taken by outsiders as proof of the masks' decline.

• Redefining twentieth-century African art: the view from the Lagoons of Côte d'Ivoire | Monica Blackmun Visonà

• The historical life of objects: African art history and the problem of discursive obsolescence | Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie

This essay evaluates how the field of African art history deals with the problem of cultural and discursive changes deriving from its canonization of specific objects of African art by interrogating the Mbari architecture of the Owerri-Igbo ...

• Notes on African art, history, and diasporas within | John Peffer

What is African time? Or perhaps we should ask instead, 'What time is Africa's?' Is it now? Has it passed? Where, and when, is African art history?

On the Block : Auction Results and Upcoming Sales

----------RESULTS---------

Beaussant Lefèvre, Paris
Antiquités; Arts d'Orient, salle no. 2
March 3, 2006, 1:30 PM
[images & results]

Millon & Associés, Paris
Arts d'Asie; Arts Premiers, salle no. 6
March 15, 2006, 2:15 PM
[online catalogue & results]

Rossini, Paris
Civilisations
March 16, 2006, 1:00 PM
[online catalogue & results]

Catherine Charbonneaux, Paris
Archéologie, Art Primitif, Art d'Asie, salle no. 4
March 19, 2006, 2:00 PM
[images & results] 

Binoche, Paris
Art Précolombien, salle no.4
March 17, 2006, 2:30 PM

Bonhams & Goodman, Sydney
Australian, International & Aboriginal Art
March 29, 2006, 11:00 AM & 6:00 PM
[online catalogue and results for morning session]
[results for evening session]
 

----------UPCOMING SALES----------

Brissoneau, Paris
Archéologie ... Art Pré colombien...Art Africain et Oceanien, salle no.8
April 1, 2006, 1:30 PM
[online catalogue]

Joron-Derem, Paris
Archéologie - Art Précolombien - Art d'Extrême-Orient - Art Africain, salle no. 10
April 3, 2006, 2:00 PM
[online catalogue]

Waddington's, Toronto
Spring Inuit Auction
April 24, 2006, 7:00 PM
April 25, 2006, 10:00 AM
[website]

Northwest Coast Art Auction
April 24, 2006, 7:00 PM
April 25, 2006, 10:00 AM
[website]

Sotheby's, New York
American Indian Art, sale N08210
May 8, 2006, 10:15 AM
May 8, 2006, 2:00 PM
[website]

Skinner, Boston
American Indian and Ethnographic Arts
May 13, 2006, 10:00 AM
[website]

Sotheby's Melbourne
Australian and International Art, sale AU0702
May 16, 2006, 6:30 PM
[website]

Bonhams & Butterfield, San Francisco
Native American, Pre-Columbian and Tribal Art, sale 13668
June 12, 2006, 1:00 PM
[website]

Christie's, Paris
Art Africain et Océanien, sale 5325
Jun 20, 2006, 3:00 PM
[website]

Christie's, New York
American Indian Art, sale 1683
June 29, 2006, 10:00 AM & 2:00 PM
[website]

Pictured : 
(L) Lindsay Bird Petyarre (born 1942), Bush Plum Story (lot no. 924 from Bonhams & Goodman Australian, International & Aboriginal Art sale) / $382 AUD [source] (left)
(R) Bob Dempsey Bob (1948- ), Tahltan/Tlingit, Shark/Human Mask (from Waddington's Northwest Coast Art Auction) [source]

What Century Is This Anyway?

Can you spot the primitive?

Reblogged via Savage Minds:

Last week, Baroness Lady Tonge of Kew brought up the bushmen of the Kalahari in the British House of Lords:

She suggested they were trying to “stay in the stone age”, described their technology as “primitive” and accused them of “holding the government of Botswana to ransom” by resisting eviction from their ancestral lands. How did she know? In 2002 she had spent half a day as part of a parliamentary delegation visiting one of the resettlement camps into which the bushmen have been forced. Her guides were officials in the Botswanan government.

Interestingly, the trip was funded by a company which owns “the rights to mine diamonds in the bushmen’s land in the Kalahari”!

The linked Guardian article by George Monbiot points out some other examples of people being called “stone-aged” when their land looked attractive.

John F Kennedy approved the annexation of West Papua by the Indonesian government with the words: “Those Papuans of yours are some seven hundred thousand and living in the stone age.” Stone-aged and primitive are what you call people when you want their land.

The animal theme comes up quite often too. “How can you have a stone-age creature continue to exist in the age of computers?” asked the man who is now Botswana’s president, Festus Mogae. “If the bushmen want to survive, they must change, otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.” The minister for local government, Margaret Nasha, was more specific. “You know the issue of Basarwa [the bushmen]?” she asked in 2002. “Sometimes I equate it to the elephants. We once had the same problem when we wanted to cull the elephants and people said no.”

See earlier.

Photo source: left | right

Diaspora & Desert @ the Heard Museum

Brian Jungen, 'Void,' 2002 48 Coleman coolers, wooden pallet, light, metal clamps 87" x 96" x 27" , Installation dimensions approx. Installation view Renaissance Society, Chicago Collection Bob Rennie, Rennie Management Corporation Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver

via e-flux: Holy Land: Diaspora and the Desert April 8 – December 31, 2006 Co-curated by Joe Baker and Lara Taubman Heard Museum of Native Cultures and Art 2301 North Central Avenue Phoenix, Arizona, USA 602.252.8848 http://www.heard.org For further information contact: Nicole Haas 602.251.0283 / nhaas@heard.org

Holy Land: Diaspora and the Desert, an upcoming exhibit at the Heard Museum, launches a new chapter of visual ideas in the museum's long history with an exhibit of international import. Eight contemporary artists are convened who share close cultural relationships to desert concepts that engage social, geographical and psychological issues; they are members of communities that have been displaced by the impact of colonialism and post colonialism. Although each artist is of a different background, parallel experiences emerge through different artistic mediums and thinking as it focuses on current issues of nation, identity, diaspora and cultural exchange.

The exhibit will run April 8, 2006, through December 31, 2006, in the Heard's contemporary project space, the Crossroads Gallery.

Participating artists include Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner, Ambreen Butt of Pakistan, Thomas Joshua Cooper, an artist of Cherokee ancestry now living in Scotland, First Nations artist from Canada, Brian Jungen, Odili Donald Odita of Nigeria, Raha Raissnia from Iran, brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre of Mexico and Seminole/Muskogee/Diné artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie from the United States.

About the Heard Museum
Since 1929, the Heard has educated visitors from around the world about the art and cultures of Native people of the Southwest. With almost 40,-00 artifacts in its permanent collection, an education center and award-winning Shop & Bookstore and Café, the Heard remains committed to being a place of learning, discovery and unforgettable experiences.

Museums and the Web 2006 Conference

From March 22nd to 25th Albuquerque, New Mexico, will host the 2006 Museums and the Web conference. The conference "addresses the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture and heritage on-line." According to the conference web site,

Taking an international perspective, senior speakers with extensive experience in Web development review and analyze the issues and impacts of networked cultural and natural heritage. Together, we look ahead to the transformation of communities and organizations.

MW2006 features plenary sessions, parallel sessions, museum project demonstrations, commercial exhibits, mini-workshops, professional fora, a usability lab, a design 'Crit Room,' and the Best of the Web awards. Prior to the conference, there are full-day and half-day pre-conference workshops and a day of pre-conference tours. (See the description of Presentation Formats for more details.)

While the conference is hosting its own blog, blogger Tyler Green points on in his Modern Art Notes blog to a livelier discussion on the Walker Art Center's New Media Initiatives blog.

The conference includes a workshop on museums and blogs, Blogs and Blogging for Museums, featuring (what a surprise!) three speakers from the Walker Art Center. Of perhaps more-than-passing interest is a paper entitled All Weblogs Are Not Created Equal: Analyzing What Works (full text), delivered by Daniel Mosquin. Social museum web applications (aka Web 2.0) will be covered in a mini-workshop entitled Community Sites and Emerging Sociable Technology.

 

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art and Society in the Gulf of Papua New Guinea

An exhibition organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Opening next weekend

April 1 - September 17, 2006
Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH

This exhibition will explore the relationship between social life and artistic expression since the nineteenth century in one of the most important art-producing regions of Papua New Guinea. It includes over sixty magnificent art objects from the Hood's own important Franklin Family Collection and select other collections, including ancestor boards, masks, drums, skull racks, and personal items. It will examine the effects of colonialism on artistic production, the relationship between patterns of collecting and interpretations of art and culture in the Papuan Gulf, and the variation of styles among differing social structures and cultural practices.

A lecture, reception, and symposium will be held in conjunction with the opening of this exhibition at the Hood Museum.

Opening Lecture and Reception
March 31, Friday, 4:30 p.m.
Arthur M. Loew Auditorium
REMARKS
His Excellency Evan J. Paki, Ambassador of Papua New Guinea to the United States of America
COAXING THE SPIRITS TO DANCE
Robert L. Welsch, Visiting Professor of Anthropology and curator of the exhibition. A reception hosted by the Friends of Hopkins Center and Hood Museum of Art will follow in Kim Gallery.

SYMPOSIUM: Art and Society in the Papuan Gulf of New Guinea
April 1, Saturday, 9:00 a.m. - ­2:30 p.m.
Arthur M. Loew Auditorium 
This symposium brings together experts from the United States, Great Britain, and Papua New Guinea to explore the relationship between social life and artistic expression since the nineteenth century in one of the most important art-producing regions of Papua New Guinea.

Welcoming Remarks
Brian Kennedy, Director

Session I
Robert L. Welsch, Visiting Professor of Anthropology, Dartmouth College
Virginia-Lee Webb, Research Curator, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sebastian Haraha, Senior Technical Officer, Department of Anthropology, Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery

Session II
Joshua A. Bell, Assistant Professor, Sainsbury Institute, University of East Anglia
Kaia Rove, Local Level Government Councillor, Baimuru District, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea
Terence Hays, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Rhode Island College

Moderator: Nick Stanley, Director of Research and Chair
of Postgraduate Studies, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, University of Central England

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view from October 24, 2006 through September 2, 2007. 

Interview with Okwui Enwezor

Michael Tsegaye, Untitled, from the series In and Out, 2005 © Michael Tsegaye, Courtesy the artist

via Time Out New York / Issue 546: March 16–22, 2006:

Continental lift
A photography show curated by Okwui Enwezor at ICP sheds new light on Africa
By Barbara Pollack

Best known as the artistic director of Documenta 11 in 2002, Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor first made his mark on the international art scene in 1996, when he organized "In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present" at the Guggenheim Museum. Now, the independent curator is updating that inquiry in "Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photo-graphy" at the International Center of Photography (ICP), a show featuring more than 200 images by 35 artists. TONY met with Enwezor at the ICP, where he was overseeing the installation of an exhibition that promises to challenge stereotypical portrayals of Africa as either an Edenic landscape or a perennially impoverished, war-ravaged zone.

Time Out New York: How would you define African photography?

Okwui Enwezor: I am not saying that there is an African photography, any more than I would say there's a European photography. But there is some commonality among the artists. When you photograph in Africa, you do get different kinds of images because of the environment, because of the unique spatial arrangements and simply because of the nature of life over there. These are compelling images in the show that tell a very different story than the one we're used to seeing.

TONY: So is one of the purposes of this show to give the public a different view of Africa?

OE: No. The idea of the exhibition is really to show the diversity of contemporary practices in photography currently being explored by African artists, both inside and outside the continent.

TONY: But taken as a whole, is the show intended to refute stereotypes about Africa, or at least photographic depictions of it?

OE: "Snap Judgments" is first and foremost a presentation of a framework through which artists are picturing Africa. But yes, you'll find many images that contest the familiar lens that has been trained on Africa over the years. I do think this represents a different kind of photography. It is both anti-photogenic and anti-touristic imagery. I believe these artists have evolved a way of looking at Africa that is completely contrary to Life magazine or National Geographic. The show is not about disaster—what I like to call Afro-pessimism, a perspective of hopelessness. So, in that sense, the photographers that I have selected are resisting the images which have been the stock-in-trade of so much of the media's coverage on Africa.

TONY: You traveled all over Africa to find artists for this show. What were some of the more surprising places that you found art production?

OE: I hadn’t done a show in Africa for a few years—not since "The Short Century," which was shown at P.S. 1 in 2002—so it was an opportunity to get reacquainted with themes on a continent that is constantly evolving and changing. In Senegal, which has a very strong tradition of cinema, it was compelling to find new approaches to photojournalistic work. Ethiopia surprised me because I had never been there before and there’s a very strong group of artists working there, although there's no real photographic tradition. Also, I found the very high number of women who are working and making images throughout Africa very exciting.

TONY: Are the photographers you selected trained or self-taught? Artists or photojournalists?

OE: I think of them simply as people who are working with images. Photography belongs to everyone. With the proliferation of cameras, there is also this incredible visual intelligence—a visual literacy—worldwide. People from all kinds of cultures can "read" images. They know which ones accurately represent them and which ones do not. This is a boon for areas of the world that have been pictured into a corner, like Africa, by a kind of photojournalism. So perhaps you can say that, while there is no African photography, there is beginning to be an African eye. As people will see, there is an aesthetic approach here that is entirely different from the way outsiders have photographed Africa.

"Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography" is on view at ICP through May 28. See Museums.

Snap Judgements, Reviewed

Guy Tillim, Ntokozo and his brother Vusi Tshabalala at Ntokozo’s place, Milton Court, Pritchard Street, Johannesburg, 2004 © Guy Tillim, International Center of Photography

[View Slide Show]

via NYTimes:
Art Review | 'Snap Judgments'
Colorful and Clashing: Looking at Africa
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: March 17, 2006

IF Martians tuned in to our television news broadcasts, they'd have a miserable impression of life on Earth. War, disease, poverty, heartbreak and nothing else. That's exactly how most of the world sees Africa: filtered through images of calamity. "Afro-pessimism" is the diagnostic term that Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian-born art historian and curator, uses for the syndrome. And he has offered bracing antidotes to it in two major photography exhibitions.

The first, "In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present," appeared at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1996. It was fantastic, a revelation. Now, a decade later, the second one has arrived, "Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography" at the International Center of Photography. It, too, is fantastic — stimulating, astringent, brimming with life — and different from its predecessor.

Mr. Enwezor's basic goal is clear. He is not interested in cosmetic spin, in exchanging an upbeat Africa for a downbeat one, smiles for frowns. Rather, he engineers a slow, complex, panoptical turn in perspective, one that takes in many moods and directions.

In the earlier show that view spanned nearly a half century. In the new one it concentrates almost entirely on work from the last five years. And there are other shifts in balance. "In/Sight" was dominated by photographic portraiture, early examples of modern African self-imaging that broke with colonialist models.

No more pictures of villagers standing, mute, in "native attire" with the sun in their eyes as some Belgian or British or French or German cameraman lined them up in his lens. Studio portraits from the 1940's and 50's by Salla Casset of Senegal and Seydou Keïta of Mali were collaborations between artists and sitters, Africans and Africans. Details were discussed. A "look" was negotiated. After all, the sitters were paying. They had every right to like what they saw.

"Snap Judgments," by contrast, includes as many cityscapes as portraits. It is a thoroughly postcolonial show. Most all of the artists were born during or after the years of independence in the 1960's. They play with Africanness, customize it, make it personal, avoid it, ignore it, bring it to the international table and take from that table, while building on the work of their predecessors. [read on...]

 

Honolulu Academy showcases Cook/Forster Pacific collection

Through May 14, 2006, The Honolulu Academy of Arts is presenting a comprehensive exhibition of some 500 Oceanic art objects entitled Life in the Pacific of the 1700s: The Cook/Forster Collection of the Georg August University of Göttingen.

• The Academy's web site features a slide show with 68 images from the exhibition.

• The Academy will publish a full-color catalogue to document the exhibited works, and a compact printed guide to the exhibition.

From the Academy's web site:
This exhibition represents the most comprehensive presentation of eighteenth century cultural objects from the Pacific ever presented in Hawai‘i or the Pacific. These amazing works, made largely before Cook’s contact with the indigenous cultures, are extraordinary for their inherent beauty, craftsmanship, and unique mana (spiritual power). The works are significant as well because they were given as gifts to or traded with Cook from the indigenous peoples of the Pacific ...

The museum at Göttingen became the first-known ethnographic museum in the world in 1770–71. The museum’s first director, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), was the first to use objects from the Pacific Ocean as authentic materials in his lectures. In ensuing years, the Cook/Forster Collection was visited and studied by such famous natural scientists as Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt. In the early 1900s, a group of objects was given from Göttingen to the newly erected Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover. Thanks to the generous cooperation of this museum, the two parts of the collection will be reunited for the first time in many years in Honolulu. The Academy has hired Gerry Barton, a conservator from New Zealand working in Germany, to provide appropriate conservation treatment of the collections.

 

Pearsall Native American collection online

The Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville has mounted an online image database to its Pearsall Collection of Native North American art. The Pearsall database includes a selection of 500 objects, about 20% of the collection, from the United States and Canada, as well as a few Siberian artifacts from the Western Arctic. The database is searchable by accession number, culture area, tribal affiliation and material type. To search the database click here.

Through late 2006 the museum is presenting the complementary exhibition The Pearsall Collection of American Indian Art: 40th Anniversary Selections.

At left: Navajo rug, wool, ca. 1880 to 1900, #P1987

According to the museum's web site,

"Our North American Indian ethnographic collection numbers over 3600 objects, making it the largest such collection in the Southeast ... The ethnographic collection spans all the major geographic areas of North America and includes many important artifact types ...

"A major component in the Florida Museum's North American Indian ethnographic collection came to the University of Florida in 1964 when a donor purchased the Leigh Morgan Pearsall collection for the museum. With representative pieces from most of the major tribal cultures in North America, the Pearsall collection is especially rich in examples of North American Indian art made during the Reservation Period (1890-1920), a time of transition for American Indian cultures. The collection is an important resource for studying the origins of the North American Indian art market."