Fine Art: Hazel Friedman
If the success of an art exhibition were predicated solely on theoretical justification, then Persons and Pictures: The Modernist Eye in Africa (Newtown Galleries) would be a winner. The fact that, in visual terms, it translates into a slightly uneven display of works executed in the vocabulary of a bygone genre does not nullify its semantic coherence or its historical significance.
Sponsored by the British Council, it offers a cogent argument against the fashionable notion of modernism as the symptom of a colonial mindset imposed on an “innocent” Africa.
Curator Ricky Burnett’s show serves as a riposte to this “modernism-as-the-strictly-bad-guy” point of view. Focusing on work made in eight different countries over approximately 30 years — mainly paintings as opposed to the more “customary” sculpture — he draws on three examples of European influence, representing the dfferent faces of Western art patronage: art teacher Jonathan Kingdom from Makerere University in Uganda; Frank McEwan, one-time director of the then Rhodesian National Art Gallery; and collector Robert Loder, who helped initiate Africa ’95, which is currently taking place in London.
Central to this exhibition is the argument that modernism was not the exclusive domain of the white Westerner, impregnating cultures that were unready to meet its challenges. Art from a series of workshops held in Uganda, the then-Rhodesia, Ghana and South Africa shows that modernism could be a strategy of liberation from the stereotyped images that conformed to the expectations of a white market.
It was a means by which African artists could free themselves from traditional functionalist constraints as well as from the myth of the inherent “Africanness” of the representational image and the essential “un- Africanness” of modernist abstraction. This point is illustrated by the inclusion of a mini-retrospective of paintings by South African David Koloane and Ghanaian Atta Kwami from Ghana. It is particularly through the former’s oeuvre that one can gauge this process of creative liberation.
Koloane’ earlier output is clearly influenced by the dictates of art centres that encouraged the depiction of a sentimentalised (saleable) African stereotype. His work of the late 1980s is a rebellion against this “black art for white market” ethic.
In the 1980s, Koloane deliberately eschewed representational devices, focusing instead on brushmark, colour, texture and tone. His post-1990 output suggests a successful process of integration on both formal and conceptual levels. In these works, the image has made a re-appearance, its form filtering through smoggy urban sunsets (or sunrises). But its presence is fluid — it seems to be emerging from the shadows of its own history, suggesting a redefinition of black art based, not on a critique of the past, nor on a desire to perpetuate the myth of unsullied Africanness, but rather on a desire to articulate lived, felt experience and to absorb a multitude of nutrients.
Yet there is something disconcerting about this show, stemming only partly from the unnevenness of the works on display. Apart from Koloane’s work, and the delightful Rousseau-like fantasy-scapes of Uganda’s Peter Binaka and Peter Mulindwa, there is nothing particularly titillating about the paintings on view. Clearly, they have been selected, not as the best examples of their genre, but primarily in order to make a point about the genre itself. But while their “worth” (in modernist terms) is questionable, their “value” (in ideological terms) is not.
These paintings are as authentic as the most traditional of African artefacts. Yet it remains difficult to criticise them simply as art-works in a particular genre, outside their ethnographic context. This probably says more about our prejudices than it does about the exhibition itself.