The Politics of Exclusion (Concluding Text)
Hypocrisy and Double Standards?
In an incisive rebuttal to Enwezor’s virulent criticism of Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, which was one of the exhibition highlights of africa 95, this is what Chika Okeke-Agulu, incidentally, one of the curators of the exhibition had to say:
So, multiculturalism, or postmodernism and its other manifestations cannot be but another great Western project which the West is paying for. Only the West stands to gain in the Western cultural fad called postmodernism, therefore one sees a widening of the borders of Hamelin; there are more children but the piper remains the same […]
It is rather very obvious that Okwui Enwezor’s sympathies in terms of who should represent Africa, lies not with artists living on the continent, but with the “exiles,” and those on the continent who produce work that can fit comfortably into the convenience bag of postmodernism and conceptual art as articulated by recent Western criticisms and theory. Which is why only one of the ten artists he listed as having been excluded from contemporary African art representations, lives on the continent (although five were represented in the various africa ‘95 exhibits). We are told that in the work of these ten artists, the postmodernism discourse makes them eligible for the front seat in contemporary African art. Does this not suggest that the intellectual distance between African exiles and those on the continent is irrevocably, stretching farther apart given the fervor with which the new generation of exiles have embraced postmodernism, and the seeming reluctance on the part of home artists to join the party? Does the fact that a majority of young African artists on the continent remain sculptors and painters point to the growing cultural disparities and the dissimilar existential circumstances between the one and the other ‘African’ artists? These are questions that historians and critics of art produced by Africans must contend with now, and perhaps in the future.
It is the aforementioned shortage of sympathy on the part of Enwezor for the cultural realities on the continent that influences his decision to confer the genius status on Georges Adeagbo who was deemed a half-sane bricoleur in his native Benin, but was discovered by the French curator Andrew Magnin who now presents him to Western spectators as an artist of the first order probably because Adeagbo’s ‘work’ reminds him of the assemblages of Western conceptual artists. Is there much, if any, difference between Adeagbo’s circumstances and journey to the Western art world, and that of Body Kingelez, Kane Kwei, Jack Akpan or Cyprien Tokoudagba, who have been presented by Western curators as canonical artists to the chagrin of many African theorists, historians and collectors? The ever present danger of allowing either ‘sympathetic outsiders’ or privileged other to decide what constitutes the art of Africa, or who its creators are, remains…
Beyond the politics of curatorial dictatorship, any group exhibit that makes pretense at representing the whole (impossible) or parts of the territory of contemporary art in Africa, and indeed, elsewhere, must of necessity (and if it must not run the risk of alienating the people it claims to represent) reflect the dominant and also prominent artistic manifestations in the given territory. Which is what the Nigerian section, and perhaps other sections, of Seven Stories did in the specific conceptual territories demarcated by each sectional curator. The artists represented in that section may not fit into the constructs of postmodernist criticism, but in the context of the story told by the curator, the selection still stands to be challenged…
Is it not ironical that Chika Okeke-Agulu is now Okwui Enwezor’s chief collaborator? Perhaps, the former had not seen the Enwezor “light” then, read Paul Gilroy and V. Y. Mudimbe, perhaps, writers whose philosophies have informed Okwui Enwezor’s thought and curatorial work, to begin to see eye-to-eye with Enwezor.
When Chika Okeke Agulu (formerly, Chika Okeke) responded to Enwezor’s critique of africa ’95, he was back in Nigeria then. Does Okeke-Agulu regard himself as the “privileged other” now that he is on the other side of the Atlantic, collaborating with Okwui Enwezor in perpetuating the very things he Okeke-Agulu stood vehemently against when he was in Nigeria, that is, the prejudicial selection of what work or who has to represent contemporary African art, which tended to favor African Diaspora artists? Does this not smack of hypocrisy? Or is it the case of a double standard?
In the run up to Documenta XI, for which Okwui Enwezor was the Artistic Director, he was asked by Rutger Pontzen in an interview published under the caption, “I have a global antennae,” if he would want to attract more attention for art from the periphery. This was Okwui Enwezor’s answer:
Not that far. There was a discussion for a long time what art from the periphery is. Attention grew for a lot of things created in outside areas. I do not believe in that. Maybe a central idea of what art is, no longer exist, but what artists and other intellectuals do, is generated in big cities, not outside.37
This simple but heavily loaded response belies Okwui Enwezors’s real intention vis-à-vis African art. I really do not understand why on earth Okwui Enwezor would want to ride on the back of contemporary African art to world fame when he has demonstrated clearly and well enough, confirmed by his response above to Rutger Pontzen’s question, that his strategies are antipathetic to the interest and growth of Mother Africa.
Clearly, Okwui Enwezor is not genuinely interested in Africa. His is a sham enthusiasm. His unconcealed anathema for art and artists in Africa, because they do not fall within the paradigm of the Western postmodernist rubric, can only be selfishly motivated.
With Okwui Enwezor’s directorship of Documenta XI, which shot him into the rarefied brackets of world class curators of contemporary art, a feat which is a pride to, and a cause of celebration for the whole of Africa, but a celebration which, unfortunately, is getting short-lived with Enwezor’s personal aggrandizement and self-promotion emerging or coming to the fore by the day.
I do not know if it is because of his background as a poet, which gives him the flair for the beauty of the English language, or what, but, admittedly, Okwui Enwezor is generally given to superfluous grandiloquency. To read a text by him and have a full grasp of the content is akin to solving the most difficult mathematical problem. You plod through it laboriously. Because of the verbose nature of his writing style, which puts him obviously among the category of “difficult writers,” many of his writings actually go unread. His complex, sometimes bizarre, philosophies – hypotheses and theories – actually escape the critical attention of his audience, because the language is too heavy for them to comprehend. They just skip his texts to the images in his book, if there are any. This is why Enwezor is able to escape any scrutiny of his inimical, high-flying philosophies, thoughts and strategies, because his writings are enshrouded cryptically in verbosity. (I hope I am not sounding like Okwui Enwezor himself here). The real import of Okwui Enwezor’s writings is generally lost on his readers because of his cunning way of bamboozling them with all those big words.
“The Politics of Exclusion” carries echoes of an unhappy tradition in art. When Edmonia Lewis made her gifts known during the American Civil War, she was embraced and mentored by abolitionists. Too soon, however, she found her art unwelcome. My father and I spent years unraveling the neurotic dysfunctions of Lewis and her several mentors.