Are Biennials the Solution or the Problem for African Art's Global Reach

Politically, the United States and Europe have become deeply polarized between the forces of globalism and a resurgent, antiglobal nationalism, while contemporary art, by contrast, appears to be riding the waves of globalization with little competition from nationalist holdouts.Biennials and other large-scale temporary exhibition projects have become the bellwethers of this globalism in the art world. But they have had many outcomes, foreclosing upon one type of aesthetic practice while opening up others to a broader audience. There are well over 200 biennial-style exhibitions held around the world today, many of them in formerly peripheralized locations and quite a few short-lived or sporadic for economic or political reasons.Initially the international contemporary art found in biennials was primarily from European and North American countries. However, by the 1980s this began to expand, along with the spread of borderless capital, to include the Caribbean, South America, and then Africa, the Islamic world, and Asia. The expansion of the art market has both enlarged and intensified the debate about what “international art” (or its evil twin “biennial art”) really is: a currently fashionable style or medium in the major centers of art production? A statement from the periphery against that hegemony? An egalitarian mix of everything? To tease apart these possibilities has been a challenge for both critics and curators.For some biennials, being in the periphery of the North American and Western European exhibition circuit is a thing to be embraced, not rectified. Many of the “peripheralized” biennials take place in formerly colonized spaces. Theorist Irit Rogoff praises them as “linked peripheries that ... bypass the traditional centers of art and culture” (2009: 114).A more nuanced view was proposed by Okwui Enwezor (2004: 438):In contrast to implicitly positive views of biennials, both pro-centrist and pro-periphery, there is the complaint that biennials support neoliberal agendas in their postinstitutional structure as temporary events that have to be constantly reinvented with new curators and artistic directors and therefore are prone to superficiality and subject to ongoing structural amnesia (Gielen 2009: 16).In another critical opinion, Thomas Fillitz has argued that the global culture of art biennials “does not enhance an egalitarian space of reciprocal flows” (Fillitz 2009: 116). They are instead global contact zones that expose changing global relations (Fillitz 2009: 125) but still remain underneath a European/North American “umbrella” that designates important changes within the field of art: its creation, dissemination, exhibition, and consumption (Van der Grijp and Fillitz 2018).The most negative view of biennials I've come across was from Bouna Medoune Seye, Senegalese photographer and film producer and author of Les Trottoirs de Dakar (The sidewalks of Dakar), in the exhibition catalog !Flash Afrique! (2001: 87):These different opinions come from a professor of visual culture at Goldsmiths in London (Rogoff), a well-known Nigerian-American curator and critic (Enwezor), a sociologist in the Arts in Society program at the Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg (Gielen), a visual anthropologist at the University of Vienna (Fillitz), and a Senegalese photographer and videographer (Bouna Medoune Seye).The purpose of this Dialogue is to invite further opinion on the subject of biennials from African Arts readers. Preferably these will address one or more of the foregoing opinions, but stand-alone comments are also welcome. Contributions can be uploaded to the African Arts submission site at http://ucla.in/1ouUunc—please put the word “Dialogue” in the title.We begin with one such contribution from a curator at an American museum, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, currently the African art curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He also cocurated the Dak'Art Biennale in 2014. His response is to Fillitz's comment that biennials are global contact zones that expose changing global relations but still remain underneath a European/North American “umbrella” that designates important changes within the field of art.Thomas Fillitz's argument is true to the extent that the structure of the international art world is hierarchical. When we talk about the global culture of biennials, it is not egalitarian, because the capitalist system that underpins globalization informs the art world's value system, and this is also historical. Africa is considered a space of anomie, and African arts occupy the bottom of the value chain in the so-called mainstream art world. The site of affirmation, legitimation, or even negation for African art is clearly Europe and the United States. We (artists, cultural producers and operators, scholars) are complicit, and some of us recognize our roles in that. Rather than obsessing over the unequal reciprocity flow of global culture and making it an academic exercise, I think it is more useful to focus attention on how the structure of the art world, the network of institutions and operators, create and assign value and how we can rise to the occasion and play our own part. I am thinking about Thelma Golden's exhortation in her interview with the New York Times' Randy Kennedy. It is worth rehashing in full:This is where the real work lies: how and where value has been constructed historically. The market is the other place. And in all these contexts—market, art history, and museums—the contribution of Africans to the construction of value for African art is a tiny bit, and until recently, had no force.Let me quickly recall an event documented in a classic but still relevant essay titled “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” by Ghanaian philosopher Kwami Anthony Appiah (2015). It was in the context of a brainstorming session that preceded the 1987 exhibition Perspectives: Angles in African Art organized by the Center for African Art in New York. I will spare all the details. However, the session had a stellar cast of people that included the late writer James Baldwin, the late anthropologist Ivan Karp, the curator Susan Vogel, and the collector David Rockefeller. Appiah emphasizes Rockefeller's contribution—particularly how he expressed value judgments about a Fante female figure and a Senufo helmet mask based on his own aesthetic criteria—to show how value is constructed in the art world. As Appiah points out, Rockefeller is permitted to speak, and to say anything about African art, because he is a wealthy white male collector who wields an enormous influence even when he might know next to nothing about the context of the work.This essay really got me thinking about, for example, the secondary art market. When you pay close attention to Sotheby's or Christie's catalogue listings of historical African art, the criteria for what commands the highest price is determined by the net worth of the previous owner (a wealthy white collector) or whether the work once belonged to a famous European modernist artist. In other words, the value of the work has less to do with connoisseurship or the meaning it once held in the source culture. In other words, Africans have no say on how their art is valued. You can use this as a prism to gauge the fate of contemporary African art and artists in the market, and this, of course, is beyond the obvious distorted nature of the market where artists are made on a whim and increasingly by the powerful gallery system and collectors. For all the record high sales at Christie's, Sotheby's, or Phillips in recent times, no black artist—with the exception of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an art world darling—commands the very high end figures. And not to over-flog what we already know, the structure of the art world is reinforced by old patterns of cultural brokerage and legitimation in spite of all the new and exciting developments in the last few years. This is an old conversation that continues to hold much relevance, and I think that is the subtext of Fillitz's observation.As much as we all long for contemporary African art to secure its rightful place, to be canonized and represented in major collections, Africanist curators, art historians, and collectors should look dispassionately at the ways in which value is constructed. I think this is where the true impact of Dak'Art as well as other institutions springing up in Africa can be found. Inasmuch as Euro-America remains the “aspired” for a lot of cultural spaces and peoples in Africa, and a behemoth that adopts all manner of tactics to maintain its hold on the shape and structure of what we refer to as the global art world, the little efforts by Dak'Art since the 1990s have catalyzed what one might call an emerging integrated continental artworld system. This system is constituted by art biennales (Rencontres Picha, Lubumbashi, Rencontres Bamako, Marrakech, Casablanca, Benin, Doual'art, etc); art fairs (Lagos, Marrakech, Cape Town, Johannesburg); auction houses (Arthouse Lagos, Nigeria, Aspire Auctions and Strauss and Co, South Africa, Circle Art, Kenya, and a slew of others in the horizon); private art foundations (Spiers, South Africa, Sidinka Dokolo Foundation, Angola, Fondation Zinsou, Benin, among others); and new private museums (Zietz MOCA, Cape Town, The Museum of Contemporary African Art Al Maaden, Marrakech, Yemisi Shyllon Museum, Lagos, etc.). I believe that in time the construction of value for African art could become homegrown and then translate to the international context. Hopefully, this would happen in my lifetime

Art history · Art world · Contemporary art · Exhibition · Globalism · Globalization · Hegemony · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Art History and Market Analysis · History · Law

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