ART, IDENTITY,
BOUNDARIES

For slightly revised versions
or translations in other
languages see:

 Arte, Identita, Confini. ed. C.Christov-Barkagiev
and L.Pratesi, Rome,  
Carte Segrete, 1995

 Africana, Sala 1, Rome 1996

 Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, No. 3, 1995

The critic runs his pen across his bushy face, and, as if speaking toa child on his first day at school asks: "Would you tell me a littleabout your family?" There! Ouattara explodes. But only within. Likea gentleman. The ultimate signifying monkey. He understands -as he hasbeen brought up to understand, everything in his history and in his experienceprepares him to understand and to accept - that, in dealing with the powerwhich McEvilley represents, he is engaged in an ill-matched game of survival,a game that he must play rather carefully if he's to avoid profound consequences,a game he must negotiate with patience to avoid his own erasure, his ownannihilation, a game that he must ultimately concede to live. Living inNew York, Ouattara understands too well how, beyond the boundaries of ethnographicdisplacement, the introduction of digitization in our time has sanitizederasure and transformed it into a messless act. He understands how themark of deletion, the ugly sites of cancellation and defacement, the crossingout, the scarred page, the marginal inscription, that which in the pasttestified to the processes of obliteration and through this testimonialactively subverted it, are now things of the past, and the object of theobliterative act now disappears together with the evidence of its own excision,making erasure an act without trace. This knowledge further underlinesthe ominousness of his location. Ouattara understands how much he needsMcEvilley. He recognizes, albeit painfully, that the terrain he occupies,the terrain to which he is perpetually consigned, in which he is confined,is one under surveillance, where every utterance, every gesture, carrieswith it implications of enormous weight for himself as an African artist,and for his practice. And even more importantly, he recognizes this terrainas an outpost, a location on the peripheries of the principalities whichthe critic represents, a border post at which McEvilley is the controlofficial. This is the locality of the African artist dealing with the West,irrespective of his or her domicile. This I have called the terrain ofdifficulty.

And so, holding out to the farthest reaches of patience, Ouattara stakeshis final but ultimately futile claim: "I prefer to talk about mywork." Well. Not quite. Deftly and firmly McEvilley waves Ouattara'sprotest aside and proceeds with his line of questioning. He feels in command,he must be seen to be in command. "If he hollers let him go,"reads an old American plantation saying. But no. McEvilley is not fazedby the native's protests. This time the master will have his way. Describingthe women of Huxian in About Chinese Women, Julia Kristeva images the "native"as a silent presence. In reading Ouattara's moment with McEvilley we arereminded of a different silent presence, closer perhaps to the obliteratedpresence Chinua Achebe identifies in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the "native"whose silence is an objectifying projection from the outside, what we mayrefer to as significant silence. For though this silence is not literal,it is nevertheless made real for, beyond the preferred narrative, thatspecified rhetoric which reiterates palatable constructs of Otherness,the native's utterances are not speech. They occupy the site of the guttural,the peripheries of sense, the space of the unintelligible where words arecaught in a savage struggle and sounds turn into noise, into the surrealmirror image of language. In this void of incoherence, utterance becomessilence because it is denied the privilege of audience. And without audiencethere is no speech

Enunciation and sanction

Sprawled out like Barthes in Tangier, or prowlingthrough a market in Abidjan, the esoteric goulash of nativeutterance is of course the ultimate locality of Occidental desire, thelast hunt for exotic pleasures. But this is not a pleasure trip. McEvilleyhas a book in mind and must have his story. Under the circumstance, nativeaspirations to desire and the dialogic (I prefer... ), "native"pretensions to power and sophistication (to discuss my work...), are quicklydisplaced in a hegemonic withdrawal of audience which reestablishes thehierarchic allocation of the "Self" over the "Other,"of the white critical and artistic establishment over the African artist.On this stage of simulacral dialogue there is only one voice which counts.The other can exist only as a projection, an echo, as the displaced soundof percussive fracture. And so McEvilley drives his conversation with Ouattaratowards the realization of his preferred narrative, with questions notintended to reveal the artist as subject, but rather to display him asobject, an object of exoticist fascination. "How big was your family?What school did you go to? What language was spoken in your home? Whatreligion did your family practice? Did it involve animal sacrifice?"In the end, his m/vis(s)ion fulfilled, McEvilley finally announces to Ouattara:"I don't have any more questions, do you have anything more to say?"

For Ouattara, though, the game is already over. It was over even beforeit began. It was over from the moment he was born, from the moment he wasdestined to be - designated as - an Other. In answer to McEvilley's questions,he fumbles within for something deep and philosophical to say, somethingoriginal, something in his and not the master's voice, some desperate utterancein the narrow passage of sanction accorded him, something that representshis, rather than the preferred version, the master narrative. He strugglesto speechify, to repossess his body and reinvest it with humanity, withlanguage, with articulacy. He struggles at the borders of subjecthood.

Aligned to the text at this stage is another picture of the artist,as if in conclusion. But this time the strength of determination, evendefiance, which we glean from the portrait at the beginning of the text,is gone. Ouattara's countenance no longer projects a brooding tension,it no longer projects, that is, it no longer aspires. His disposition nolonger indicates a willingness to dare, to utter with Frantz Fanon: 'Getused to me; I am not getting used to anyone.' Instead, he stares into space,his face is sunk and forlorn, his anger turned to despair, his attemptsat the contested territory of the voice thwarted by McEvilley's hegemonicdevices. Failed is his effort to displace the critic's gaze unto his work,to specify the later as the rightful focus of contemplation, and in sodoing, to claim author-ity. Clearly, against his will, Ouattara finds himselfrepositioned in the frame as the object. And though he is coerced to sketchthe contours of this object, to narrate himself and to trace the ethnographiesof his body, he is made to do so within confines defined by another. Heis forced to strip for McEvilley's pleasure.

McEvilley's interview with Ouattara in many respects defines the limitationsof appreciation and expectation, or what we might call the confines ofperception, within which African artists are either constructed or calledupon to construct themselves. It speaks to a discourse of power and confinementin current western appreciation of modern African art, a discourse of speechand utterative regulation which, by denying African artists the right tolanguage and self-articulation incarcerates them in the policed coloniesof western desire.

In his Inaugural Lecture at the College deFrance, Barthes identifies speech as a code of legislation,and notes that utterance language, that which we speak or write and onemay add, paint or sculpt, all that we produce as a body of text, as a compositeof signifiers enters the service of power upon coming into being. Thoughthis power may aspire to Barthes's definition as the desire to dominate,libido domini, its most fundamental nature, nevertheless, is as a conditionfor the articulation and definition of the self, as authority. When theartist creates or the musician composes the most fundamental intent isto replicate and reiterate herself as a being, to impact herself upon reality,to assert her author-ness, her authority. When Ouattara paints or sculpts,the primordial intent of the act is to establish, on the specific sitesof his appointment, the contours of his being, his history, his experiences,his existence as a participatory element in the constitution and cartographyof reality. His intent is to imprint on time his being: his loves, hisphilosophies, his existentiary circumferences. And if we should agree withBarthes that enunciation is the code of legislation, it becomes clear thatits essence is to define the rules of interaction and interrelation betweenpeople, to set the limits of intervention and dominatory incursion, ofencroachment upon the sites of our individuality and subjectivity, to presentourselves and establish our authority over not only our creativity, butmost importantly, over ourselves. It is enunciation which subjectivizesus, the ability to reiterate our power over our selves. It is this abilityand freedom to enunce, too, which takes us beyond the dominance of others,takes us, as it were, beyond the bounds of power.

To place enunciation, whether it be utterance, writing or art, undersurveillance, therefore, is to impair this code. And once this happens,once the code of legislation and self cartography is impaired or vetoed,the stage is set for others to infringe on those sites of reality wherewe define ourselves. To check the creative act, whether through institutionalor critical sanction, is to transgress the borders of our autonomy, toreturn us within the boundaries of subjugation, within the bounds of power.

Autonomy. Self-articulation. Autography. These are contested territorieswhere the contemporary African artist finds herself or himself locked ina struggle for survival, a struggle against displacement by the numerousstrategies of regulation and surveillance which today characterize westernattitudes towards African art. Within the scheme of their relationshipwith the West, it is forbidden that African artists should possess thepower of self-definition, the right to author-ity. It is forbidden thatthey should enunciate outside the gaze and free of the interventionistpowers of others. And it is this contestation of their complete subjectivityand their right to co-legislate patterns of interaction which we find inMcEvilley's interview with Ouattara.

To veto enunciation is to disenfranchise and symbolically incarcerate,because within the contested territories of enunciation reside power andfranchise, the ability to elect or assert. The body upon which such vetois exercised loses self-possession and slips into vassalage. To furtherconfirm this state, this body is often forced to confess to a narrativeof self-denigration, to provide the ultimate authority through self-otherization.Thus is Ouattara forced, in the interview in question, to iterate and endorsea narrative of savagery, and thus to wedge his savaged body into that requisitemargin between nothingness and subjecthood where he transfigures into theobject of his possessor's desire, into an inert, polaroid image.

In vetoing Ouattara's right to self-articulation, in placing a sanctionagainst his preferred site of discourse, McEvilley effects a paradigmaticreiteration of ventriloquy as a structure of reference for Western attitudestowards African artists. This frame has its origins in colonial ethnographyand the colonial desire for the faceless native, the anonyme. The facelessnative, displaced from individuality and coalesced into a tribe, a pack,demands and justifies representation because she is a lack. In the eventauthority is appropriated and transferred from her, and it is this authoritywhich is subsequently exercised in constructing her for Occidental consumption.Also, the defacement of the native consigns her to the category of theunknown. Displaced to the befuddled corners of obscurity and rudimentaryepisteme, the native is made available for discovery, and this discoverytransforms the discoverer into an authority, this supposed privileged knowledgeoften translating into the right to represent.

Even more specifically, the imposition of anonymity on the native, ofcourse, deletes her claims to subjectivity and works to displace her fromnormativity. Not only does this conveniently underline her Otherness, herstrangeness, her subalternity; anonymity equally magnifies the inventedexoticism of her material culture, which in turn becomes a sign of herconstructed exoticity. For a long time, ethnography, in order to emphasizethe Otherness of non-Occidental cultures, applied a different rule of attributionto art from such cultures, effectively denying the identities of artistseven where these were known. The figure of the individual genius, thatelement which more than any other defines Enlightenment, and modernity,was reserved for Europe while the rest of humanity were identified withthe collective, anonymous production pattern that inscribes primitivism.Until recently works of classical African art were coercively attributedto the "tribe" rather than to an individual artist, the laterthus effectively erased from the narrative spaces of art history. In contemporarydiscourses, critics like McEvilley represent the continuation of this practice,whereby novel strategies are employed to anonymize African art by eitherdisconnecting the work from the artist, thus deleting the author-ity ofthe later, or constructing the artist away from the normativities of contemporarypractice.

From Ulli Beier's work on contemporary African art, to Andre Magnin'spresentation of the neo-native African artist, there is a split betweenthe author and the work which effectively depletes individual credit tothe artist. While Beier, like McEvilley, focused on details of biographicaldifference, others dwell on the peculiarity of the work, often situatedin a simulacral ambience of esoterism and fractious submodernity. In eachcase the gaze is deflected unto utopia, unto the significance of the Other.We are directed to the existence of animal sacrifice and voodoo in Ouattaraor Mustapha Dime's background rather than to their contributions to, anddiscursive place in, contemporary sculpture and installation art. We areconfronted with Twins Seven Seven's identity as a spirit child and villagechief, rather than with his work as a graphic artist. And rather than findCheri Samba articulated within the discourses of contemporary satire, heis presented to us as symptomatic of a kitschic mimicry which characterizesthe disintegration of African contemporaneity. And in each case the semi-misrepresentationsare made possible by first crossing out the subject's ability to self-articulate,to not only enunciate but also elaborate, to exercise their authority.

The Pornographic Intent

The effaced African artist, the faceless, anonymousnative, is the correlative of Fanon's "palatable Negro,"the tolerable, consumable Other who, stripped of authority and enunciatoryautonomy, is opened to the penetrative and dominatory advances of the West.The appeal of the faceless, anonymous native is in the fact that she isalso a pornographic object, a docile, manipulable object of desire andpleasure. Pornography as a strategy rests on the localization of desireand the intensification of pleasure through the effacement of the subject,the detachment of the locality of desire from the web of subjective associationsand reality which impinge on the possessor's sense of social responsibility.In other words, its principal device is the objectivization of the sourceof pleasure, and through this, the banishment of guilt. For maximum derivativeeffect, the purveyor as well as the consumer of pornography must detachand frame the object, this enhanced through the combined mechanisms ofmagnification and erasure, the decapitated close-up which fills the framewith only that which satisfies the specifications of desire. Even thisis further aided by positioning the object within appropriate narrative,the right sound, the further from speech the better, all of which, by playingon the extremes of perversion and provocativeness sufficiently hold itwithin the frames of the spread. Of course, the erasure of the subject,or her transfiguration into the realms of virtuality, equally consolidatesthe purveyor's fiction of ownership, and thus of power. And power, theability to possess unquestionably, to exercise uncontested authority overand manipulate at will, is the essence of pornography.

It has been argued, and rightly so, that the pornographic object isa colony, the terminal site of the colonized body. In Occidental discourses,African artists and African art in turn continue to occupy this site. Decoupledand anonymized, each is turned into a silent colony, a vassal enclave ofpleasure and power. Each is fragmented and projected in close-up sequencesand pastiches which magnify pleasure for the all-knowing critic or collector.Each is parcelled and packaged to suit the west's machinations and taste,to satisfy its desires and fit within its frames of preference.

Even the pricing of contemporary African art and artists on the internationalart market positions them within the frame of the cheap, pornographic object.Once, an art dealer friend of mine received a painting by Gerald Santoni,the Ivorian artist, from one of the leading galleries in New York, witha price tag that would be considered quite modest in a graduate exhibit.Santoni is a deservedly well regarded artist whose work has been shownat the Biennial of Venice and Sao Paolo and other reputable internationaland contemporary art spaces. He has practiced for several decades and,even with the fragmentation of values which ostentatiously characterizesour age, his works would be generally considered to be of the highest standard.But Santoni is underpriced because he and his work are displaced into theframe of the pornographic as mere objects of pleasure and fascination.They are positioned on those peripheries of creative genius where the aestheticexperience fails to cohere with great material value. This observationbecomes particularly relevant when we consider how little collectors arewilling to pay for "popular art" from Africa, despite the factthat it has remained the focus of western fascination and attention overthe past four decades. It is to be noted that, though "popular art"has been vigorously promoted as quintessential contemporary African expression,collectors spend much more plugging the pieces in their collections andstruggling to generate a discourse around them, than they have expendedon those collections. Across Africa these "genius" artists muchtouted in the west continue to pursue their careers in conditions incomparableto the relative affluence of their western contemporaries. A good illustrationof this perpetual disjuncture between hype and remuneration is the Nigeriangraphic artist, Middle Art, whose barber-shop signs were brought to theattention of the world by Ulli Beier and others in the early 1970s. Inthe 1990s Middle Art's signs are still voraciously collected in the west,especially in Germany where the artist continues to command critical attentionand dealers continue to receive orders from collectors. But after overthirty years of selling to collections, it is remarkable to note that MiddleArt has remained a very impoverished artist unable to afford a proper studioor indeed, as was intimated to me recently by a German dealer, to makea decent living from his work. In twenty years of narration and promotion,Middle Art's signs have not appreciated in value nor has the artist cometo be regarded as deserving of higher remuneration, which is unimaginablewith any western artist, say Jeff Koons who has been so promoted and collected.Middle Art's work is cheap because it is not art "as we know it."As an artist he is compared to his western contemporaries in same mannerthat a porn actor is compared to "proper" stage actors. One,though highly desired, nevertheless dispensable and cheap, while the other,regarded as a serious artist and identified with high culture, is appropriatelyvalued and appreciated. Porn is recyclable, but its appeal is temporary.For this reason porn is cheap, and the object of pornographic consumptioneven cheaper. And both belong not in the great spaces of culture but onthe supermarket shelf, on the side-walk, in the fringes of normative taste.Projected on contemporary African artists and their work, these attributeswrite them to the lower rungs of a strictly multi-tiered contemporary artmarket from where upward mobility is almost impossible.

The perverted desire for the pornographic manifests itself most significantly,however, in the continued preference in the West for that art from Africawhich is easily imaged not as art as we know it, but as a sign of the occult,an inscription of the fantastic. The crayon drawings of Frederic BrulyBouabre would not ordinarily represent great creative talent in the West,and would not, by western aesthetic conventions, qualify as Art. In fact,the critical acclaim which the fine draughtsmanship of British child artistStephen Wiltshire has enjoyed over the past few years testifies more accuratelyto contemporary western standards of normative creativity. But Bouabre'sdrawings are today preferred in the wWst not for the sophistication whichOkwui Enwezor has rightly identified in them, but rather precisely becausethe sexagenarian's works fall outside of the parameters of conventionalwestern standards, and thus inadvertently yield to dubious, perverted desiresand expectations. As form they represent for the West a slip from normativity,they signify a coveted distance between the West and the African, theysatisfy the desire for the fantastic, the fetishistic and shamanistic;they are open to pornographic translation, they are strange.

Localities of Desire

Ordinarily, this pornographic desire for thesubnormative and pornographic is fulfilled by "Outsider"art: the art of the blind, the autistic, and the mentally disabled andclinically insane; Today that desire is projected on Africa, and it isthis perversion that locates works like Bouabre's within the boundariesof preference.

Today, there is no better illustration of the pornographicization ofcontemporary African art than in the construction and reception as sculpturesthe work of the Ghanaian casket designer Kane Kwei. In the past decadeKwei's designer coffins have appeared in several major exhibits of Africanart including the omnibus Africa Explores by the Museum for African Artin New York in 1990, and the Pompidou's Magiciens de la Terre in Parisin 1991. As objects Kwei's coffins write to a complexity of discourseswhich traverse the cartographs of aesthetic and socio-historical categories.His work is a phrasing of multiple sites that deceptively spills acrossthe boundaries of facile paradigmatic articulation. On a level it representsthe farthest edges of postmodernist display: yielding to the multifariousdiscourses of postmodernist production; Materiality. Alterity. Pastiche.Vanitas. The dissolution as well as restitution of institution. The supersessionof conceptualism. The reinscription of art as an undecidable.

Yet Kwei's objects are produced, and intended, as intermable caskets,as coffins for the dead. Their true character as object rely on the specificsof cultural framing, but outside their original cultural geography theiresthetic definition is altered. They become artifact. In effect, withinthe cultural ambiance of the west where for centuries the casket as anobject has been emptied of aesthetic content, Kwei's caskets should bemere artifact. How come then, in the spectaculary spaces of Europe andAmerica where these caskets now enjoy albeit mediated critical attention,they appear to be invested with the aesthetic quality that the genre istraditionally denied? What mechanisms of translation are at work? Is there,indeed a reinvestment of esthetic content or are we merely confronted witha simulacral affect which is more ideological than aesthetic? Are Kwei'scoffins really art to the West? Or are they signs of Difference or Otherness?

To find the answers to these questions, one may make a quick comparativeforay into contemporary art. And though one may have difficulty locatinghere art of similar ambiguity and complexity, let us for one moment andfor our purposes force an affinity between Kwei's work and those of JeffKoons, an artist who has tried to drag the commodified objects of everydayindulgence and vulgarism into the confines of profundity. We may then ask;within the exhibitionary and critical sites of the West, are Kwei's coffinsas much art as Koons's magnified china dolls? Are they acknowledged asproducts of comparable creative intervention, as codes of authority andlegislation? Are they appreciated with similar critical seriousness, orare they conveniently dismissed with the excuse of rudimentary cognition?Are they mere curio? Are they, even more importantly, severed aspects ofthe denied subject glossed and framed for the moment of desire? Are theyaccessories of perverse pleasure?

To all of these the answers are quite obvious, and unarguably locateKwei and his objects in near-diametry with his European and American contemporaries.The comparison with Koons is particularly relevant in the sense that, thoughlacking in conventional transformative intervention from the artist, Koons'objects are critically constructed to reflect the persistence of authorialsubjectivity. They are presented as intercessions which denote universalknowledge. And these qualities invest them with high material value andsituate them comfortably within their epoch. The same could hardly be saidfor Kwei's coffins. Neither are they constructed in discourse and displayto reflect the subjectivity of their origins, nor are they invested withthe universality and esthetic value which works by Caucasian contemporaryartists invariably claim. In the display spaces of the west where theyhave become increasingly popular, they are nevertheless not art . Insteadthey are merely sensualized artifacts processed to provide flitting ero-exoticpleasure. They provide pleasure and reassurance because they are positionedthrough denutative processes to write to the vulgarity and subalternityof the Other. Like pornography they do not glorify, rather, they enticeand entertain because they are framed to titillate, to encode the marginsof civility. Like pornography, too, they are available, laid open to freeand unregulated translation and transgression.

One extreme example of this infractive framing is the liberty whichcollectors and curators have already taken with not just Kwei's work butindeed his name. Since the artist's death a few years ago, it has becomepleasurable and convenient, and permissible too, it seems, to meddle withthe spelling of his name in order to better position it within the spacesof contemporary outsider appetite. In a major exhibition of Kwei's workcurated by Craig Subler for the Gallery of Art of the University of Missouri-KansasCity in 1994, Kwei's name was disingenuously anglicized into Quaye, obviouslywithout the late artist's knowledge or approval. In both the installationsigns for the exhibition, and the accompanying catalogue introduced bySubler, who is the director of the Gallery, Kwei's name is erased and replacedwith the new, make-over identity. This shrewd but impetuous hard-sell device,though intended to create the false impression of a de-exoticizing project,ultimately achieves the equally intended opposite which is to further exoticizethe artist and his work. In renaming the artist after his death, it doesnot merely make him over for the consumer, but defaces him, and in so doingfurther distances him from the viewer of his objects in same manner thatthe random pseudonym places a convenient distance between the object ofpornographic imaging and the consumable image. To step out of the mazeof theory for a moment, it seems well unimaginable to me that this actcould ever be contemplated against any western artist of our time, muchless carried out; that any gallery or critic would freely and boldly respellthe name of Beuys or Bacon, or indeed of Haring or Mapplethorpe withoutquestion or sanction. But then, Kwei is only an African artist, and heis dead. It is to be borne in mind that Subler's exhibition at the Universityof Missouri-Kansas City Gallery of Art was made possible through donationsfrom several major collections and private holdings, and it is inconceivablethat the deliberate alteration of Kwei's name would have gone completelyunnoticed and without approval. To the contrary, we see a clear demonstrationof the exercise of the privilege of possession not only of the work, butalso of the artist's identity, whereby this identity, this defenselessobject, is ultimately fracted for the pleasure of its possessors. In Kwei'sabsence the owners of his work take liberty beyond the act of the gazeand of speech to assert a right to deface and reconstruct, to possess absolutely,to rename. For his collectors and narrators in the West Kwei, like hiswork, has become a mere pleasurable object available for manipulation anddisplay beyond the bounds of sanction, an object on which even the violenceof naming may be freely visited. Since Subler's exhibition, of course,the conceptual artist Nam June Paik has gone on to freely incoporate wholepieces from the Kwei studio into his own work with little regard for theobvious legal and moral questions this raises, and this has drawn littleattention, much less sanction, from the critical establishment.

Conscripted by western collectors as a "folk" practitioner,an rtist like Kwei is vulnerable, and more so in death, to abuse and infractmentfor the collector's pleasure. On the other hand it is hardly in doubt thatit is for this reason, this availability, this lack of power over the fateof his product and now of even his own name, that Kwei and African artistslike himself are quickly and enthusiastically chosen for ownership andexposure in the west. To defy ease of possessive access is to exist outsidethe bounds of the pornographic intent, and often, as has continued to bethe case for a number of contemporary African artists, to remain on theperipheries of critical attention and the spaces of international art practice.

The Demand for Identity and the Charge of Mimicry

A few years ago, curators at the AustraliaMuseum in Sydney sent out requests on information on artistsin preparation for a show of prints by contemporary African artists. Uponreceipt of this request a dealer in New York collected information andimages from some of the most prominent figures on the cutting edge of contemporaryAfrican practice, artists who invariably belong also at the forefront ofcontemporary international practice. These were sent off to the curators.After a long wait, however, a response eventually returned from Sydney.Sorry, it said, but did the dealer have anything by Cheri Samba and artistsof the kind? According to the curators, those were preferable for theirproject. And not so long ago, too, a German intellectual decided to ventureinto art dealing with a specific interest in contemporary African art.After sending out masses of literature on artists on his stable; ObioraUdechukwu, El Salahi, Rashid Diab and others, with the intent to interestGerman collectors in what he considered the finest examples of contemporaryAfrican art , our dealer discovered that his recipients had a rather slightlydifferent desire and expectation. The demand was for sign-writers CheriSamba and Middle Art.

These anecdotes would come as no surprise to those familiar with theissues I have broached here. In its compulsive proclivity to displace anddismissive comparable art from Africa from the spaces of contemporary artand its narration, the west has regularly elected to question African art'sidentity, its authenticity, and in doing so to employ its own constructsof this authenticity. Authenticity suggests history, a tradition whichforms a frame of reference, a point against which adherence or departureis gauged. To describe a form as authentic, therefore, is to imply linesof similarity with tradition, with a historical or precedent frame of reference.I have pointed out in the past, however, to the clear distance betweenthe authenticity which the western art establishment has fabricated forAfrica and the evidence of tradition. It is asinine that anyone shouldlocate authenticity in the graphic art of sign-writers whose structuresof reference are entirely contemporary and often western, or in the newforms of folk art that have emerged in parts of Africa and that have noprecedents. Which is not to contest the validity of these forms but topoint out that in constructing authenticities, the fact that they makeno references whatsoever to notions of tradition, seems irrelevant to self-appointedpurveyors of Africa's authenticity in the west. On the contrary, it isequally half-witted that anyone should fail to identify the obvious linesof reference to tradition in the works of those African artists whom thewest is most vehemently dedicated to banishing from the spaces of contemporarypractice and appreciation, those who have been severally dismissed as "academically-trained","intellectual" and so on, those who, because they belong to thesame traditions that modern and postmodern art have continued to reference,produce work to which contemporary Caucasian art is inevitably affinedfor reasons of commonality of source.

The issue of authenticity and its attendant anxieties are of coursenot ones over which contemporary African artists are likely to be foundlosing any sleep whatsoever. On the contrary, it is those who constructauthenticities and fabricate identities for them who are constantly plaguedwith anxieties over these matters. And so for the precise reason that,as I have already indicated, such anxieties have less to do with factsof authenticity and the relevance of tradition, as with a desire to forceAfrican artists behind the confines of manufactured identities aimed toplace a distance between their practice and the purloined identity of contemporaryCaucasian art. In other words the introduction of the question of authenticityis only a demand for identity, a demand for signs of difference, a demandfor cultural distance. It is a demand for the visual and formal distancewithout which it is impossible for contemporary Caucasian art not to revealitself as mimicry, as a culture of quotations, as a mediated translationof cultures and art traditions other than itself, as pastiche. For, havingpurloined its form and identity from others, it becomes relevant for Caucasianart to insist on difference in order to obliterate any traces to the source,to E(u)rase the mimetic trail.

It is indeed for this reason that the charge of mimicry is recurrentlylevelled against contemporary African artists, their work dismissed asmere mimicry of western art. By employing this device of reversal it becomespossible for the mimic - that is, contemporary western art - to investitself with originality and a sense of its own authenticity. In proceeding,then, to displace mimesis away from itself, and to project same on Africanartists, contemporary Caucasian art is able through its narratives to reservealterity for itself, to reserve the right to be the One and the Other atthe same time and without sanction. The charge of mimicry becomes its toolfor defaming and displacing those who produce from within those traditionswhich, in truth, it mimics; those whose existence challenges its fictionsof originality.

McEvilley's seemingly innocent question to Ouattara again comes to mind:Where were you born? One recognizes an uncanny ring to this question, theresonance of like mechanisms of surveillance and regulation which the westemploys today to keep Africans outside its geographical borders. We noticea confluence of the political and the cultural. The one-sided contest forauthenticity which the west insinuates, its overbearing desire to claimoriginality as a preserve and to dismiss any others as unauthentic andmimetic, in several respects parallels its current paranoia over territoryand the anxiety that it is about to be overrun by outsiders. Hence theintensification of border regulations and the redefinition of origins andidentities, the recurrence of the question: where were you born? The desireto nominalize the cutting edge of contemporary African art is a methodicalmapping of territories, a project of surveillance that is one with thetradition of policing the imaginary borders of civility and progress.

Beside the Text

The implications of the corrupt dynamic I havedescribed above, for African creative practice are numerousand far reaching. Working within the reaches of distortive regulatory strategies,African artists find themselves vulnerable to potentially destructive pressures.The demand is for them to produce to specification, to affect anonymity,to concede the ability to enunce within the sites of normativity, to bearbadges of difference, to answer to a fictive identity fabricated in thewest. To exist, as the finest of them do, outside the syntax of this regulatorycode is to forego access to genuine critical attention in contemporarydiscourses, as well as a place in the narratives of contemporary practice.And here lies the importance of Thomas McEvilley's interview with Ouatara.For not only does it illustrate one critic's incarceratory projectionson an African artist, even more significantly, it speaks to the segregationistcriticality and general ambivalence of Caucasian contingents in the discourseof contemporary art, a criticality bounded by an interceptory demand fora sign of identity, by the query: Where were you born? It speaks to thefact that this discourse remains, to a remarkable extent, a mere rehashof entrenched modernist attitudes and methods, a continued reproductionof the logic of cultural Othering and displacement.

These are peculiar obstacles, of course. The challenges which they pose,require of artists resistive rather than transgressive strategies. Moreimportantly, they pose an even greater challenge for contemporary culturaltheory and criticism. To bring its object into crisis is the duty of criticism,and this responsibility must be extended to contemporary African art, andeven more so, to the logic which regulates the contemplation of non-Caucasiancontemporaneity. To engage meaningfully with the contemporary, a crediblecriticism must place its ambivalence under crisis, and extend the bordersof criticality beyond the demand for identity and subnormativity, and thedesire to nominalize and displace.