SYLVESTER OKWUNDU OGBECHIE
Amidst all the euphoria surrounding the proliferation of blockbuster shows on contemporary African art in Western spaces, within mainstream art museums the last decade – The Short Century, Afrika Remix, name it – a number of Africanist scholars have raised a red flag at the way contemporary African art is being defined and presented in the West. Suzanne Preston Blier (Dr.) in an article in Africa Arts magazine titled, Nine Contradictions in the New Golden Age of African Art, put her concerns so explicitly:
In short, the way that Africa is being defined within the new Golden Age of contemporary African art conveys many of the same colonial legacies that framed discourses on Africa in earlier eras. Among these are a very narrowly circumscribed and largely monolithic sense of identity, the ongoing feature of geographical isolation, the privileging of Western genres, a promotion of art framed centrally by the market, traditions of exhibition exclusion, gender-based art and status differences, a dehistoricization of Africa, Western models of political ideology, and a view of Africa in which technology (the hand) is seen necessarily to be privileged over innovation (the mind). 43
And Sidney Littlefield Kasfir (Dr.), author of Contemporary African Art (1999), in a discursive article titled, The (Dis)placement of National Art in a Transnational Art World, which appeared in African Arts magazine, Autumn 2008, Volume 41, No. 3, writes:
Over the past fifteen years, critical and curatorial attention in the field of contemporary African art has shifted steadily away from a primarily tropical geography of practice toward a global, Diaspora one. And this is neither surprising nor inconsistent, given that the majority of influential critics and curators are themselves located within this Diaspora and not operating from the African continent (South Africa, with its own freestanding art world, is the most prominent exception). The African artist working in London or New York is far more likely to receive critical recognition than one in Yaounde, Kampala, or Addis, not because of any conspiratorial power-brokerage as is sometimes alleged, but because of the far greater visibility in the West of his or her practice…
Recently, Sylvester Okwundu Ogbechie (Dr.), also Nigerian born, an African art historian in the department of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, launched a vitriolic attack on Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial regime, disparaging it in a conference paper entitled, The curator as Culture Broker: A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of Okwui Enwezor in the Discourse of Contemporary African Art. This paper was posted in his blog, AACHRONYM on June16, 2010 and circulated all over the net, generating so much buzz in the art world.
Ogbechie challenged Enwezor’s curatorial strategies and called for a microscopic examination of his work. I agreed intoto with many of the issues and arguments raised by Ogbechie, but disagreed with him when he raised into question Enwezor’s educational background and paucity of knowledge in art history in general, and African art history.
I thought that was too far-fetched. It was hitting below the belt, to borrow a boxing parlance. Ogbechie, on that score, very much sounded as if he had a personal tooth to pick with Enwezor, veering into his academic credentials. Did I read an element of envy, too? “Okwui Enwezor and his disciples are the only people who have access to all the big funding, and nobody else”, he quipped. He likened the art establishment’s anointing of Enwezor as the grand prince and arbiter of contemporary African art to the art world’s preference of unschooled or auto-didactic African artists like, Twins Seven Seven and the Oshogbo School, to academically trained artists, calculated to encourage mediocrity among Africans.
To Ogbechie, I would say, not everybody has the privilege of going through formal education like him. Some go through the ‘Schools of Hard Knocks’. And having the highest academic degree in a field does not necessarily make you an expert in that field. By the way, who graduated the first batch of medical and engineering students? Leo Castelli was one of the greatest art dealers of the twentieth century; what kind of art history certificate did he possess? 45 The British Sir Norman Rosenthal is touted as one of the greatest art curators, historians and writers of the twentieth century.46 He studied neither art nor art history, but found himself in art just by chance and never looked back. Many examples abound of self-taught scholars and intellectuals.
Okwui Enwezor, at least, has had a good formal university education in political science and literature. A good fundamental education is all that one needs to self-educate and be propelled to any academic or intellectual height. Unless one wants to remain in academia to teach, a good fundamental education, coupled with the passion for art, an unflagging, ravenous desire to succeed, charisma and, of course, hard work are basically what one needs to navigate his way successfully through the rough terrain of the art world, and not necessarily, lofty degrees. Okwui Enwezor has hung out in the New York art world and fraternized closely with artists, art historians, critics, collectors, dealers, museum directors, curators and Africanist scholars. He has curated numerous exhibitions in some of the most distinguished museums around the world, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Modern, London, and Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin, among others. He was the first Black and, probably, the only Black yet to become the Director of Documenta, the art Olympiad of contemporary art which comes on every five years in Kassel, Germany. Enwezor directed Documenta XI in 2003, and that was no mean feat for an African curator. He, subsequently, in 2006 curated the Biennale for Contemporary Art Seville (“The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society”), and in 2007-2008, the 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea.
He has additionally done a lot of collaborative work with academics and scholars, like Olu Oguibe and Chika Okeke-Agulu, and rose himself to become the Dean of Academic Studies and, recently, I gather, the Assistant Director of the San Francisco Art Institute, one of the most prestigious art institutes in the United States. Okwui Enwezor is also the Adjunct Curator at the International Center of Photography, New York; a visiting Professor in Art History, University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University and University of Illinois, Urbana – Champaign, all stellar American universities. He is currently the Joanne Cassulo Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York.
In 2009, Okwui Enwezor was honored with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York’s coveted Award for Curatorial Excellence. According to a Center for Curatorial Studies press release, the Curatorial Excellence Award is given to “a leading curator or curators whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive exhibition-making today…This award reflects the Center’s commitment to recognizing individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice”.
Enwezor has written extensively, in fact, far more than many academics traditionally trained in art history and art criticism, into the world’s top art journals like, Art Forum, Freize, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, Flash Art, and he is the co-founder and editor of the leading art journal on contemporary African art, Nka, jointly published with Cornell University. What better education in art and art history could Enwezor have had than what I have enumerated? He is the author of a number of major books on art, as well.
In my candid opinion, Okwui Enwezor may not have had the traditional degree in art, art history or African art history, but he is voraciously well-read and absolutely well-vexed in art history, African art history and critical theory. I do not have an iota of doubt about that. He only has an adventurous mind and likes to think exponentially and creatively out of the box, which makes him venture into unexplored areas of thought, bordering on the abstract, sometimes, bizarre theorizing. This ability of Okwui Enwezor to be highly innovative in his thinking, writing and curatorial work, coupled with an aggressive can-do-spirit and diplomatic wheeling is what has endeared him to the art establishment, and not any conspiratorial grand scheme to promote primitivistic tendencies among Africans, or to project the unschooled African above the schooled. Sylvester Ogbechie got it wrong here.
When a scholastic and erudite person like Enwezor strays into speculative theorizing, which he often does, he could easily and erroneously come across as unschooled in art history/African art history, in fact, a complete ignoramus. There is nothing wrong with that kind of recondite and abstruse thinking, to change the status quo, go against the grain or push the envelope. Okwui Enwezor only has to be told, as I am doing, that he is straying too far, that he should get back on course, and not be lampooned as he was Sylvester Ogbechie.
Sylvester Ogbechie also intimated Okwui Enwezor’s complicity in African-American curators being sidelined when it came to funding for art projects, and that it was he Enwezor and his team who were the only ones to have access to all the big funding. Unless Ogbechie is privy to some detailed information I am not aware of, I will again come to Enwezor’s defense, that he being silent over the plight of African-American curators does not in any way implicate him in any conspiracy to sideline the African-American curators. Enwezor is fighting his own fight, just as the African-American curators are fighting their own. Ideally, they should all have been collaborating in their artistic ventures and projects, claiming the same heritage as Africans, and fighting a common cause – the marginalization of the African in the global discourse of art. But both Enwezor and the African-American curators choose to go their separate ways in a power struggle for supremacy. That is rather unfortunate. This divided front undermines the efforts of African/African-American curators in general in fighting for equal opportunities for artists of African descent and securing the necessary funding to support those exhibitions. They would have been stronger if they joined forces and had a common front.
In any case, the question we should be asking is, what is it about Enwezor, which gives him an edge over his competitors? Why do the funding agencies prefer funding Okwui Enwezor to funding projects by African American curators? And I really do not think it is only the Enwezor School, which has access to all the major funding for art projects. If it were so, Robert Storr, who was the Artistic Director for the 52nd Venice Biennale, would not have by-passed Okwui Enwezor and his school for Simon Njami (the Cameroonian curator/writer and organizer of the mammoth, multifaceted Africa Remix) and his team. This was in the context of curating the African pavilion – a first in the aforementioned Biennale’s 112 years. It was also in spite of all the authoritative and bullying posturing of the Enwezor School, which felt that the curatorship of the Africa stand had to be automatically handed to them as the fore-runners in the struggle for the recognition of contemporary African art.
“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.