Simon Hilton-Smith

African Art?
!
! ‘The art of Africa south of the Sahara permits no generalisations that are not equally
applicable to the art of humankind as a whole’ starts a section on the ‘tradition’ of African
art in A World History of Art, ‘it has a diversity of functions, media and styles as great as
that of the other continents. Nor did evolve in complete isolation.’1 This ‘diversity of
function, media and styles’ were to be adopted by the modern art movement that would
sweep through Europe in the Late Nineteenth, and almost the whole, Twentieth Century.
One should question why then would the modern art of Sub-Saharan Africa continually be
viewed as ‘traditional’ or ‘primitive’ when using forms that would be considered in the rest
of the world as progressive, current and modern? Why would an African diaspora be able
to reclaim these traditional forms, especially in America, whilst remaining in touch with a
modernity which would be refused at the point of origin? In this paper I aim to question
how one should view the creation of the art of the modern in Africa, how this art is viewed
in the West, how this modernity has been perceived and displayed by the galleries of the
West and how the question of authenticity can be approached, breached and discussed
with the language of an art-historical scholarship that is Western-centric. Can this truly be
used to examine an artist production with which it has been unfamiliar or, at least, only
familiar with as a starting repository for the Western modern art movement, the prime of
primitive?

! Primitivism is a term, a category that is placed on the art of the indigenous peoples
of what was considered, in the early 1900s, a collection of countries and populations that
were removed from the modern world. In 1911 André Gide, a writer, declares that ‘the time
for gentleness and dilettantism is past. What are needed now are the barbarians.’ What
this collective call for the ‘barbarians’ seems to have dismissed is the fact that for a long
time Africa, and others such as India and South America, had been in contact and
interactive with the modern world and what one could call modernity and that some of the
art that was described as primitive was a reaction to this contact and exchange.2 Is it that
for art to be primitive it must remain anonymous and this anonymity also provides African
art with an authenticity? That is to say that an individual becomes unimportant if one can
define a style trait that refers to a ‘tribe’ or location. ‘The nameless artist has been

1 A World History of Art, ed. by Hugh Honour and John Fleming, 7th edn, (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2009) p.752.

2 André Gide quoted in: A World History of Art, ed. by Hugh Honour and John Fleming, 7th edn, (London: Laurence King Publishing,
2009) p.796
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explained as a necessary precondition to authenticity, a footnote to the concept of a ‘tribal

style’ that he has neither to resist or change’ this namelessness is also a prerequisite for a
form of primitivism, as one Parisian art collector states ‘it gives me great pleasure not to
know the artist’s name. Once you have found out the artist’s name, the object cease’s to
be primitive art.’ So rather than a particular form it is to categorisation, whether the work is
anonymous, functional, that the West turn to define primitive and authentic.3
!
! Viewing the continent of Africa as a homogenous site of artistic production is
problematic ‘in each country, artists find themselves with distinct agendas. Senegal, Egypt,
Zimbabwe, South Africa - especially South Africa - each has a very different art history’ and
therefore one could extrapolate that each has their own view on, and provides their own
reaction to, modernity.4 For a long time the Art that has been produced within the continent
of Africa has shown signs of modernity and reflected modern life whilst maintaining a link
to the various artistic traditions of production such as Baule or Yoruba wood carving. The
appearance of colonial officers, such as French Colonial Officer, c.1900, by an anonymous
Baule sculptor(Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich), people in western dress,
and bicycles, in what could be considered part of a tradition of artistic production, show an
interaction with modernity akin to the appearance of a steam train in the art of Turner
(J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, 1844, National
Gallery, London) or the use of what could be considered an alien form with the appearance
of an African mask in the work of Picasso (Les Demoiselle d’Avignon, 1907, MOMA, New
York).

! This appropriation of modern or alien forms within an artistic tradition, in paint for
Picasso or wood caring for the Yoruba artist, show a constant change in the production of
art. The embracing of change is an excepted, and expected, process in the Western art
world but something which has been viewed, regarding African art, with an uneasy eye.
‘When writing about African art it is customary to write in the present tense without
indicating that only one point in time is being indicated’ this form of writing and use of
tense can be referred to as ‘the ethnographic present’ which presents the subject, in this
case African art, as a kind of ‘fictional unchanging world.’ This has led at times to the

3 Sidney Kasfir, ‘Art and Authenticity: A text with a Shadow’

in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace,
ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of International Visual Artists, 1999) 88-113 (p.90).

4John Picton, ‘In Vogue, or The Flavour of the Month: The New Way to Wear Black’ in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from
Theory to the Marketplace, ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of International Visual Artists, 1999), 114-126 (p.
117).
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 Simon Hilton-Smith

failure to note and appreciate ‘aspects of society that gave evidence of change’.5 This
approach ‘denies both history and contemporary reality while encouraging the invention of
a ‘‘traditional’’ Africa’ which in turn denies what could be considered a form of African
contemporary and modern art.6
!
! This ‘ethnographic present’ led to the boxing of African art under one banner, that of
the primitive in the early 1900s, has continued through to the current rash of African art
exhibitions with the categorisation of art, a continual problem for curators, in a wish to
define what African art is, what it is to make African art authentic and how it should sit in
the modern art market. Susan Vogel in her exhibition Africa Explores (The Centre for
African Art, New York, 1991) aimed to ‘focus on Africa, its concerns, and its art and artists
in their own contexts and in their own voices’ and to ‘understand Africa's experience of this
century from the African perspective.’7 Much criticism was aimed at this exhibition not only
because of the choice of categories into which the art was placed in an attempt to fit a
proposed thematic ideology but also because the categories were designed by Vogel
herself so rather then presenting the ‘African perspective’ we are instead presented with
an individual’s ‘attempt to understand what is happening in Africa’ creating categories ‘that
are not simply metaphorical, but have a real material existence . . . they existed before
things and people’ in an attempt to define what criteria contemporary, and popular, African
art should adhere to.8 So rather than a self-defining exhibition, modern and contemporary
African art curated by African artists, we receive an educated Western perspective on what
should be considered modern and contemporary. So a question should be raised as to
who is right to define what contemporary African art is?

! In 1989 the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre was shown at the Centre Georges
Pompidou and the Grande Halle La Villette in Paris, and was curated by André Magnin ‘I
have deliberately chosen artists I think are among the most original and representative of

5 Frank Willet, African Art, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 220.

6John Picton, ‘In Vogue, or The Flavour of the Month: The New Way to Wear Black’ in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from
Theory to the Marketplace, ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of International Visual Artists, 1999), 114-126 (p.
118).

7Susan Vogel, Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (New York: The Center for African Art; Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1991). at, http://
archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Occurrence/Show/occurrence_id/206 Accessed 29th December 2012

8 John Picton, ‘In Vogue, or The Flavour of the Month: The New Way to Wear Black’ in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from
Theory to the Marketplace, ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of International Visual Artists, 1999), 114-126 (p.
122).
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contemporary sub-Saharan creators’ he writes in the exhibition catalogue.9 In this

exhibition the African art was selected from artists who came from a non-institutional
background, John Picton questions whether this ‘rejection of the art academy as a
legitimate institution in the making of art is . . . the legitimation of a reinvented Primitivism’?
In many ways establishing what could be termed as a form of neo-primitivism. Magiciens
de la Terre was set out, according to one reviewer, ‘to show that contemporary art is also
produced within less developed countries and that in the same way as Western artists
work within, develop and deviate from a tradition, so to do their ‘third world’ counterparts’
the same reviewer goes on to question as to what end this exhibit indulges certain choices
and adds that so strong is the desire of the curator to demonstrate the extent that the ‘
‘third world’ art has been touched by the Western world’ that at times the impression was
given that the art was chosen to ‘illustrate the point rather than because the resulting art is
good’ propagating a possible neo-primitivism.10 This reviewers dismissal of the art
displayed at Magiciens de la Terre is not a one of a kind criticism, Wolfgang Bender quotes
a museum official, in regards to non-Western contemporary art:

! ‘it seems third-rate artwork to us because the art presented here emulates the
! Western tradition . . . Every comparison with the present international art scene is
! therfore not in its favour. It cannot not escape the critical eye of the Western art
! world, thus it is superfluous’11

! The propagation of what we can call neo-primitivism, that is the requirement of

contemporary African art to, rather than to be nameless as discussed by Sidney Kasfir in
Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow with reference to what has been called
‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ African art, to be uneducated, at least within an academic art
institution, to be considered part of the contemporary or modern art fraternity. ‘The search
for the unusual, the exotic and naïve’ has led to the dismissal of, rather than the
acceptance of, ‘a group of highly experienced trained [in a Western styled academy]
African artists’ whose appearance in the early contemporary African art exhibitions would
have been seen as ‘disruptive to the narrative of a superior Western art history.’ So the

9André Magnin, et al., Magiciens de la Terre, Exhibition catalogue, (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1989) in: John Picton, ‘In Vogue, or The
Flavour of the Month: The New Way to Wear Black’ in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. by
Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of International Visual Artists, 1999), 114-126 (p.120).

10Jeremy Lewison, ‘ ‘Bilderstriet’ and ‘Magiciens de la Terre’. Paris and Cologne’, The Burlinton Magazine, 131 (1989), 585-587 (p.
585).

11 Wolfgang Bender, ‘Modern Art to the Ethnographic Museums!’ in Elizabeth Biaso, The Hidden Reality: Three Contemporary Ethiopian
Artists, (Zurich: Ethnological Museum of the University of Zurich, 1989),p.185, in Salah Hassan, ‘The Modernist Experience in African
Art: Visual Expression of the Self and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics’, in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the
Marketplace, ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of International Visual Artists, 1999), 214-235, (p.216)
4
 Simon Hilton-Smith

dilemma faced by the ‘trained African artist’ is not how to escape a reference to a
‘tradition’ of form or the use of a design in a non-traditional art form to escape the
categorisation of ‘primitive‘ but rather how to be accepted by Western curators and the
Western art market without being dismissed as third-rate, and ‘third world’ copies of an,
internally perceived, ‘superior Western art history’ without loosing the authenticity that is
required to remain African. It should be stated that very few, if any, of the contemporary
African art exhibitions that started to appear in the late 1980s and continued throughout
the 1990s were curated by an ‘African curator, art historian or specialist’ this in turn has
deliberately bypassed the ‘most proven African artists in the international arena in favour
of the kitsch, crude and naïve products of the roadside painter’ turning them ‘overnight into
so-called self-taught geniuses’ which in turn helps maintain the status quo, that of the
primitive, those creating within a tradition which although sometimes classified as
‘traditional’ is still produced so could also be considered contemporary, and the neo-
primitive, that is the artistic production of those that are un-educated in the Western-
tradition and who ‘crowd the markets of African metropolises’. 12

! One of the main contentions is the dichotomy of ‘modern/contemporary.’ The

definition of each can change what one may consider each to be. If contemporary is to be
considered as a chronological term and categorisation then all art currently being
produced on the continent of Africa whether that be defined by the categories that were in
play in the exhibitions of Susan Vogel’s Africa Explores or André Magnin’s Magiciens de la
Terre or a new carving in the tradition, in both production and form, of a Yoruba or Baule
carver are contemporary, many of these productions will receive patronage, either
commercial, in the form of sign painting, one of the kitsch and naïve forms, or
contemporary carving in a tradition of production for an export market there by removing
one of the requirements for the art product to be primitive, that is to be nameless, but do
the objects that are produced remain a product of authentic African art? An accepted view
of authenticity, whether a product or style can be seen as African or non-African, is being
reconsidered, due to recent debates in anthropology, James Clifford points to how ‘new
definitions of authenticity (cultural, personal, artistic) no longer centred on a salvaged past,

12 Salah Hassan, ‘The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expression of the Self and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics’, in Reading the
Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of International
Visual Artists, 1999), 214-235, (pp. 117-118).
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are making themselves felt.’13 Implying that tradition is something that can be invented and
come from a real or imagined past. The definition of modern ‘refers to sensibility and style’
where contemporary can be considered a term free of critical meaning, modern ‘is a term
of critical judgement.’ Is it to this end that the galleries of the Western art world have been
perceived to dismiss the African interpretation of modern art as a third-rate copy? 14 It is the
inability to recognise the fact that ‘long ago Africans . . . entered the dialogue on
modernism and have challenged it on their own soil’ and that this dialogue is an attempt to
find new forms of expression which as well as being individualistic could also be seen as a
concerted effort to claim a place on the international stage as a centre of modernity, that
gives support to this neo-primitivism and what might also be called neo-traditionalism.

! The search for a new identity in a post colonial Africa, as both a collection of
countries and as a continent, is closely linked to the development of a ‘modern idiom’ in
the field of the arts. As well as attempting to reclaim a past and history the African artist is
also laying claim to the current and future development of his, or her, nation and identity.
Many of the contemporary and modern art works that have been and are currently coming
out of Africa, created by the educated artist, have ties to artistic traditions as in the
depictions of the patterns of Kente cloth in El Anatusi’s Man’s Cloth (London: The British
Museum,1998-2001). It is in such works that we see a forming and reaffirmation of identity
of both the individual and state, the work makes as statement that might be read as
claiming a history and placing that history in an ever-progressing world of modernity by
using the by-products of modern manufacture, in this case bottle tops of spirit bottle, and it
is in this juxtaposition of an art tradition, the kente cloth, with the product of a post-colonial
modern state that we find the identity of the African artist. From what the West art world
may consider a primitive form, woven cloth, we find a modernity that requests to be
noticed.
!
! So what of this problem of the continual use of primitivism and the dilemma faced
by the modern African artist? If we take primitive as the form suggested by the unknown
Parisian art collector that to remain primitive, and therefore authentic, the artist is to remain

13 James Clifford, ‘Of Other peoples: Beyond the Salvage Paradigm’, DIA Foundation, no.19 (New York, 1989), pp.1-2. in Salah
Hassan, ‘The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expression of the Self and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics’, in Reading the
Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of International
Visual Artists, 1999), 214-235, (p.220).

14 Salah Hassan, ‘The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expression of the Self and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics’, in Reading the
Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of International
Visual Artists, 1999), 214-235, (p. 223).
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 Simon Hilton-Smith

anonymous, the problem is simply overcome. In the case of neo-primitivism this is surely a
problem that exists in the wish to keep African art at arms length by the curators of the
Western galleries and museums, to deny Africa its long conversation with modernity and
also to deny a continual history that has developed, and is not contained within an
ethnographic present and that exists outside of a Western art history.This is a question of
perspective, what is modern and modernity? If I was to hold up a beach ball, the kind that
is made up of sections of different colours, and we were opposite each other the colour
that you would see would differ to mine, lets say I see white and you see black, the way in
which we would consider, describe and interact with that ball would differ, maybe only
slightly or maybe profoundly but it would still remain a beach ball. It is this difference in
perspective that should be understood, and one should attempt to understand how Africa
and Africans perceive themselves rather than creating categories and boxes in which to
place the contemporary art production of Africa. The reclaiming of identity, or the creation
of a new identity should be embraced, encouraged, aided and explored. Picasso remained
primitive by using paint as El Antusi remained primitive by using the design of a cloth
making tradition but would anyone call either of these artists primitive. The continual use of
reference to the past, in form, material, conceptualisation or production is as much a part
of the Western artistic tradition as any other and here what could be considered primitive
in African art become tradition, the tradition of painting on canvas for Picasso or the
tradition of murals for De Vinci or Banksy, in the Western canon a term which holds less
negative aspects. If we take tradition as a form of the primitive then we could take the view
that, to paraphrase Carl Von Clausewitz, modernity is the continuation of tradition by other
means.15

15 ‘War is the continuation of policy by other means’. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret,(London:
Random House, 1993) p.99
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Bibliography
Clausewitz, Carl Von, On War, ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret,(London: Random House,
1993)

Fleming, John, and Hugh Honour, eds., 7th edn, A World History of Art, (London: Laurence King
Publishing, 2009)

Kasfir, Sidney, ‘Art and Authenticity: A text with a Shadow’ in Reading the Contemporary: African
Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, (London: Institute of
International Visual Artists, 1999) pp. 88-113

Lewison, Jeremy, ‘Bilderstriet’ and ‘Magiciens de la Terre’. Paris and Cologne’, The Burlinton
Magazine, 131 (1989) pp. 585-587

Picton, John, ‘In Vogue, or The Flavour of the Month: The New Way to Wear Black’ in Reading the
Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor,
(London: Institute of International Visual Artists, 1999) pp. 114-126

Vogel, Susan, Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (New York: The Center for African Art;
Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1991)

Willet, Frank, African Art, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002)

Internet resources

The British Museum. http://www.britishmuseum.org

The National Gallery. http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA). http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

New Digital Archive Museum, http://archive.newmuseum.org/