By Andrew Mulenga
After longstanding marginalization, recent trends on
the global art scene show there is finally an acceptance and increase in demand
to view and collect contemporary African art alongside so-called antique “tribal
art”.
On the one hand there has been a string of major
exhibitions spanning from the United Arab Emirates, across the European
mainland to the UK and USA.
On the other, the business aspect of it all has
been exceptionally lucrative with artists still living on the continent earning
top dollar from international art fairs and auction houses.
There is no telling where all the interest is
coming from or how long it will last, the business of art being as volatile as
it is. The scene is still quite speculative as The Telegraph (UK) financial specialist Charlotte Beugge highlights
in an article entitled African art: a
good investment?, published in May days before London auctioneers Bonhams
held its annual Africa Now sale that
has been running since 2009 where “Estimates for pieces go from £3,000 to
£100,000 (a piece) and prices have been rising in recent years.”
While European museums and galleries are showing
keen interest in the top contemporary African artists The Telegraph reports that Giles Peppiatt, director of contemporary
African Art at Bonhams observes: “Interest in contemporary African art has
exploded, particularly among international collectors, who expect it to be the
next market where values increase in the same manner as contemporary Chinese
art”.
Possibly, China’s museum boom had a lot to do with
this in the early 2000s as it generated a lot of attention when growing
government and private investment pushed the total number of museums to about 4,000
according to the World Economic Forum.
In the same way, The Telegraph reports that the African rise has seen some
investment from within the continent itself, meaning it is not only the demand from
overseas making the prices surge. It can also be linked to the increased
interest from African buyers because of economic growth in West Africa and the Sub-Saharan
Africa.
But then again despite such reports there could
also be some ideological underpinnings that cause the West-centred art world’s spotlight
to veer towards a particular region as British art historian Julian Stallabrass
points out referring to the case of China in his book Contemporary Art, from the Oxford University Press a Very Short Introduction series.
“Global interest was directed at Chinese art in
the short term because of the massacre of dissidents in Tiananmen Square in June
1989, which led to a focus on artists who could be read as oppositional,” he writes.
However, Stallabrass also observes that longer
worldwide attention for China came as a result of new regulatory markets and
the rapid generation of great wealth and inequality with a contrasting average
improvement in living standards for most people.
“Just as capitalism as a world system stepped out
from behind the cloak of its defeated opponent after 1989 and, in its rapid
transformation, was revealed as the rapacious, inexorable system that it is, so
it may be with the art world. The end of its use as a tool in the prosecution
of the Cold War has made clear what had already been in development: its core
function as a propagandist of neoliberal values,” declares Stallabrass.
Nevertheless, this is Africa’s time but there is
no substantial notion that explains why. But there is no harm in throwing about
some speculation and perhaps one can be forgiven to ruthlessly suggest that the
attention Africa is receiving now can be traced back to the days of slavery.
It must not be forgotten that Africa has always
had a cathartic effect on an indisposed Europe vis-à-vis the West. Whenever the
West is in trouble where does it run to? Africa.
After the discovery of the Americas in the late 1400s
slave labour was needed to build the “new world” as well as work in the
plantations that fed Europe and supported its economies so it looked to Africa.
The history books also tell us that when Europe had
nowhere to turn to after the “Long Depression” of the late 1800s it is Africa’s
resources that offered Britain, Germany, France, and other countries unlimited
resources to help recover and they quickly conjured the Berlin conference of
1884 and ravenously divided the continent among themselves.
This period would also provide what them with tribal
art, ritual carvings and “fetishes” imaginably pillaged from villages to fill
their empty museums and eventually inspire an art scene that had run out of
ideas. A number of European artists such as the venerated Picasso and Georges
Braque dedicated their entire careers mimicking the so-called primitive art later
developing movements such as Cubism changing a whole era of art.
Africa also provided a battleground at the height
of the Cold War which coincided with the continent’s liberation period and because
of choosing sides, heroes such as Patrice Lumumba in the Congo were murdered to
pave way for NATO’s interests for instance.
But maybe today the West is looking to Africa once
again in the field of art because the only semblance of sanity in it is left
among contemporary artists from the continent and its diaspora.
From the look of things, even as its theorists
crack their craniums the definition obsessed west seems to have forgotten what
art is, what purpose it serves and probably where it belongs, but long and
lengthy arguments have been written about these topics.
Anyway, ever since the French-American artist Marcel
Duchamp liberated art from its snobberies by displaying his Fountain, a ready-made urinal -- he
probably plucked out of demolished building -- in a New York exhibition in
1917, the ripples of the radical shift in perceptions that he caused continue
to give leverage to artists such as Milo Moire the Swiss artist who was turned
away from Art Basel the premier international art show last month because she
tried to enter the fair space naked as part of a nude performance. Moire gained
recent notoriety for her "Plop Egg Painting", paintings created from
paint filled eggs that she drops from her vagina on to a canvas. In passing – while on the topic of absurdities -- one might add that Tracey Emin’s 1998
piece My Bed sold for US3.7 million
late last month. This artwork is in fact the artist’s unmade bed which was left
in this state for four days after she broke up with her boyfriend only to be
exhibited as a major work and was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize
in 1999.
Such performances and artworks have become the incarnation
of contemporary art in the west. Moreover where some critics observe that “Duchamp's
work was a protest against the stale, unthinking artistic establishment of his
day”, it can be said that contemporary African art is the reverse of this.
Contemporary African art provides a return to
innocence not because it is parochial, wall bound art, but because its
producers live in a more tangible reality that is not drowned by ultra-theoretic
notions.
An international African artist can be uncorking
champagne at a gallery opening in Frankfurt one evening and visiting
grandparents in a far flung African village the other all the while reflecting
the best of both worlds in their work in her or his work. There are doubts as
to whether the act of producing Moiré’s "Plop Egg Paintings" can be
tolerated outside the comfort zone of Europe.
The phenomenon of the African artist may best be captured
in the words of the radical South African artist Kendell Geers during an
interview with international curator Katerina Gregos.
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