Achebe and Danticat at Princeton

Edwidge Danticat
(Photo Source: Miami Bookfair International)

The Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, author of Krik? Krak!, and Forming of the Bones, among others, will be the Toni Morison Lecturer at Princeton University on March 25. Her lecture, "Creating Dangerously: The immigration Artist at Work"--the title of which partially comes from Albert Camus' influential 1957 essay on art and political engagement--ought to be an important excursion into the place of contemporary art in society, but more pertinently the experience of immigration and dislocation as an enabling force for creativity, and, I hope, the political implications of immigration in the age of fraught globalization.


Achebe and Simon Ottenberg
at the opening of Obiora Udechukwu's opening at the Skoto Gallery, NY
July 2006 (photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu)

A day after Danticat's lecture, an even more momentous occasion will be the public conversation between Kwame Anthony Appiah and Chinua Achebe whose Things Fall Apart in its 50th year has been the subject of major international attention; a focus that acknowledges the novel's critical presence in the world of literature, and the discourse of European colonization in Africa. It will be wonderful to see the two public intellectuals and philosophers broach some of the ideas that have made their work, in different ways, landmark moments in the world of modern thought. I will, hopefully, return to this blog after the conversation, which I await with great expectation!

Contemporary African and Black Art in Harvard and Williams College

Harvard Professors Suzanne Blier and Benjamin Buchloh at the New Geographies in Contemporary African Art Symposium, Feb 29-March1, 2008 (Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu)

This past weekend witnessed two very significant symposia in the State of Massachusetts: New Geographies in Contemporary African Art organized by Suzanne Blier at Harvard University, and Artistic Crossings of the Black Atlantic: The Migratory Aesthetic in Contemporary Art jointly convened by the Williams College Museum of Art and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. For some like me, it was most frustrating sitting in what turned out to be, as expected, one of the most impressive symposia till date on the subject of contemporary African art, yet thinking about the missed chance to participate in the events in Williamstown. Just imagine a symposium featuring Isaac Julien, Fred Wilson, Magdalena Campos-Pons, Willie Cole and Hank Willis Thomas providing, through discussion of their work, an opportunity to examine and extend Paul Gilroy's notion of Black Atlantic to visual practices. From all indications the Black Atlantic symposium was a smash hit, which made me sulky when my friends Lisa Corrin (director of WCMA) and Peter Erickson (professor at Williams) who spearheaded the program told me how much I missed.

But of course, the Harvard symposium was very memorable. To begin with, among the participants are many scholars and artists I really admire, including Betsy Harney (Univ. of Toronto), Steven Nelson (UCLA), Dominique Malaquais (Centre National de la Recherche, Paris), Paul Stopforth, Ute Meta Bauer (MIT), Magdalena Campos-Pons (yes, the same Magdalena also in the Black Atlantic program at Williamstown!), Abiola Irele (Harvard), Gary van Wyk (Axis Gallery, NY), and Allan de Souza (San Francisco Art Institute). And yes, Okwui Enwezor deservedly gave the keynote. The two people I missed the most from the symposium though were Salah Hassan and Sidney Kasfir who have played leading roles in entrenching contemporary African art scholarship in the American academy.

One of the more hilarious passages in the proceedings was when Allan de Souza had to read a paper on his work prepared by Moi Tsien (Berlin) who could not attend. Allan severally alerted the audience to what he saw as misreadings of his work. And because he was reading directly from Tsien's paper, he referred to himself in the third person! It was pure drama, that had serious implications in the sense that Allan's disclaimers brought to the fore the question of the place of intentionality (the so-called intentional fallacy), and the ever present dangers of scholarly mediation of knowledge of and about artists.

But something else happened. After Okwui's keynote, an audience member commented that he was speaking to the converted, with the exception of Benjamin Buchloh (the esteemed Harvard art historian associated with the journal October) who actually introduced the keynote speaker. When he had the chance, Professor Buchloh rose to correct the commentator, because he too is, as he put it, a convert! That, I think, was a important statement that underscores the significance of not only Enwezor's work, but also shows how far contemporary African art scholarship has come.

I look forward to the edited volume Professor Blier plans to publish from the symposium presentations and roundtable discussion.

Archive Fever at the ICP, New York

Okwui Enwezor, center right; Francesco Bonami, right; at the
Patrons' opening of Archive Fever (Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu)

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, Okwui Enwezor's latest exhibition at the International Photography Center, New York is one quietly powerful show, its unique installation darkly elegant. You descend the stairway into the show and is confronted with a sight that stokes your curiosity: the gallery is covered with raw plywood, of the type used for crating stuff, and your left is Andy Warhol's silk-screened Race Riot from the early 1960s and right in front is Robert Morris' also silk-screened, even more disturbing image of a dead woman in a state of undress, framed with a black baroque frame. And then the show draws you in through its labyrinthine course, the walls changing from the plywood orchre to dark grey, framing an assortment of work, from Lorna Simpson to Sherrie Levine, to Fazal Sheikh's "Victor Weeps: Afghanistan photographs (the next day, my 29 month-old son, Arinze, on seeing the NY Times review image of the iconic Sheikh photo of a wrinkled hand with slender hands in which is placed an old passport photo of a turbaned old, possibly blind, man, screamed "museum!").

Okwui with State College (PA) artist Christopher Campbell; on the floor,
Felix Gonzalez-Torres' printed photos of Americans killed by gun violence (for takeaway)
(Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu)

The largest installation is perhaps Hans-Peter Feldman's room filled with front pages of newspapers from around the world reporting the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. Naturally, I scanned the room immediately for African representation! Well, there on the back central wall is the page of The Guardian of Lagos. This show, like so many of Okwui's projects makes you wonder why, despite the profound presence of archival material in the work of contemporary artists, no one thought of this show before now. Archive Fever is a strangely intimate show. The relatively small scale of the works gives it the feel of a rigorously organized university museum show, the kind of show that you rarely see in the "big" venues these days.

Anatsui's Zebra Crossing at Jack Shainman

El Anatsui, Bleeding Takari Shirt II, 2007
(Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu)

Last Thursday, I visited El Anatsui's exhibition, Zebra Crossing at Jack Shainman in Chelsea, NY, and it became very clear to me that the journey he began several years ago in Nsukka, working in the margins of contemporary art, can no more be ignored by the so-called mainstream (his appearance in the 52nd Venice Biennale and the epochal acquisition of his 2006 work Between Earth and Heavan by the Metropolitan Museum, NY further attest to this). Which is why I completely agree with Ken Johnson's characterization of Anatsui, in the NY Times review of Zebra Crossing, as "an international art star." The significance of Anatsui's work lies in its multivalence, its simultaneous evocation of traditions of African visual cultures--Bleeding Batakari Shirt II, for instance references the ritually potent, protective shirts worn by hunters and warriors, but which now bleeds on account of fatal breach of its security--and its announcement of his invention of particularly new, visually compelling and conceptually polysemous sculptural idiom. He brings to full circle Uche Okeke's proclamation in 1959 of the idea of Natural Synthesis as a critical strategy for contemporary African art. The recent metal sculptures developed from his earlier wood panels in which painterly concerns--whether from the colored tropical woods he worked with, or from the acrylics and tempera he applied to the panels--and interest in texture, mass and volume (from the violent rips of the powersaw, or determined marking of the bandsaw, router or carver's gouge) are seamlessly fused. While in the wood sculptures he breaks with the tradition of African sculpture confined to the vertical orientation of the tree trunk, in the metal pieces he freezes, through a different kind of stitching and weaving, the fluid form of the cloth fabric, thus conflating the rigidity of metal with the dynamic formlessness of cloth. The NY Times reviewer rightly wonders what happens when the novelty of Anatsui's medium and technique wears off, but I think that this question is not Anatsui's alone, but instead is the same problem that has confronted artists since the beginning of the 20th century, from Braque to Pollock, from Judd to Keifer, from Sherman to Shonibare. One thing is sure though; anyone who has followed Anatsui's work, from the carved circular wood panels of the 1970s, to the mysterious pottery of the late 70s and early 80s, from the 3-D wood sculptures and relief wood panels worked with powertools, to the more recent work in various kinds of metals (printer's plates, milkcans, and the better-known bottletops), the question of post-novelty anxiety seems quite irrelevant. For those who know the artist only from his recent metal sculpture, this might be an issue, but that is the critic's problem! Between 1988 and 1991 when I worked with Anatsui as a studio assistant (and yes he was my esteemed teacher in art school and later my colleague at my alma mater, Nsukka), I bore witness to his incredible, restless, imagination; as a critic and enduring student of his work I always wondered when the artworld outside Nigeria would pay serious attention to his work. Finally, the world is listening.

Julie Mehretu's "City Sitings" at The DIA

City Sitings co-curator Becky Hart and Julie
photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu

Yesterday I had the opportunity of visiting Julie Mehretu's show, City Sitings, at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and it was a memorable experience for two reasons. First, the show is simply awesome, with 13 paintings including the splendid Stadia I, II, III (2004), and the stunning 10'x16' 2007 version of her signal work, Black City (she created four new works for the DIA show, which travels to the Williams College Museum of Art this spring and to North Carolina Museum of Art in the fall). Her mastery of the monumental scale in the tradition of modernist work, and her insinuation of perspectival space through multilayering of shapes of color and architectonic lines, her facility with combining gestural drawings that sometimes remind you of the sketches of Leonardo and hard mechanical lines that could have come straight from the Engineer's draftsbook, as well as her incredible synthesis of abstract non-objective imagery and iconic signs make the encounter with her work a breathtaking experience. The viewer becomes like a fazed archaeologist visually peeling through layers of time, marks and symbolisms. Add to that; it is not often these days that you see a painting and wonder about the facture, "how the hell did she do that?"

Second, the fact that you enter the City Sitings galleries through the court where Diego Rivera painted what must rank among the greatest murals ever painted (Detroit Industry, 1932-33), forces you to compare the powerful illustrativity of Rivera, and the poetic abstractions of Mehretu's monumental paintings, and I must say that the younger artist comes out looking really good whereas most contemporary artists' work would have been mauled, squashed, asphyxiated by proximity to the muscular power of Rivera mural. As a young artist in Nigeria years ago, I admired Rivera's mural (which I had seen only in reproduction) and even was influenced by it when I was commissioned to paint a mural at the Science and Technology Center at the University of Nigeria. To finally see the real thing was almost like a religious experience. And to step from the Rivera Court into Mehretu's show was, how shall I put it, pure phenomenological drama.

Khartoum Joint Art Workshop

A Joint Art Workshop on video and multi-media art organized by Together Art Center, Khartoum, and Salah Hassan, Professor and Director of Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center takes place January 8-12 at the Art Center. Led by rising Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy and the well-known Ethiopian film maker and media artist Salem Mekuria, participants will include 15 young Sudanese artists selected from respondents to an open call. Established in 2005, Together Art Center, directed by the ceramist and graphic designer Wisal Dia El Din, fosters artistic exchange between local Sudanese artists and the global art world.

This workshop is indicative of the possibilities of collaborative work between individuals and organizations inside and outside the African continent. Until recently only the foreign cultural centers--like the German Cultural Center that has for instance sponsored workshops by the Germany-based artists Emeka Udemba in Nigeria, and Ingrid Mwangi in Nairobi--sponsored these kinds of programs, apart from the influential Triangle Workshops, while state owned institutions remain uninterested in or incapable of engaging in or supporting such events. One of the many tragedies of postcolonial Africa has been the criminal indifference of the state in fostering growth of a dynamic contemporary art and culture through establishment and support of basic institutions and infrastructures of contemporary art, and this is majorly responsible for the morbid insularity of discourse and practice of contemporary art in many parts of the continent. Which is why recent private initiatives, such as Abdellah Haroum's L'Appartement 22 in Rabat, Bisi Silva's new Center for Contemporary Art in Lagos, and Wisal Dia El Din's Together Art Center, and the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo among others hold the best prospects for providing contemporary artists in the continent the much needed opportunities to network and interact with their counterparts from elsewhere and to keep in touch with developments in contemporary art. My hope though is that this collaboration between Together Art Center and Salah Hassan is not a one-time affair, but instead one that will continue into the future, hopefully--here I am just dreaming while awake--when Hassan's Center for Comparative Modernities takes off fully at Cornell.

Okwui's "Archive Fever" at the ICP

Next month (January 18 to be precise), Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, will open at the International Center for Photography (ICP), NY. This exhibition organized by my friend Okwui Enwezor will feature leading--though not all living--contemporary artists--including Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, Ilán Lieberman, Robert Morris, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Eyal Sivan, Lorna Simpson, Vivan Sundaram--who have used archival documents to re-imagine important themes and forms of contemporary art. Okwui has distinguished himself with the originality and ambition of his ideas and curatorial vision, so I expect this second part of his ICP trilogy, to be--as we have come to expect of his shows-- a visual feast and significant intellectual argument.