Congo Art Works

Congo Art Works is a book with two identities. First, it is part of the series Collections of the RMCA, which introduces readers to the wide range of collections at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Belgium. In this case, the focus is on the museum's collection of so-called popular paintings from Congo. Sometimes also referred to as urban or international art, the term is generally understood to refer to nonacademic paintings produced for both local and international audiences in the Congo, comprising mostly figurative paintings that provide some form of social and/or political commentary on past and present. The boundaries of this category of work are porous: For some it includes work created in more institutional settings, like Le Hangar, an art academy in Lubumbashi, for example. The time frame also tends to shift: Some include drawings and paintings from the 1930s, although most scholarship focuses on the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, with some attention to more recent work by, for example, exemplified by the presence of work by JP Mika in the 2015 Beauté Congo exhibition at the Cartier Foundation in Paris. While the bulk of Congo Art Works is focused on paintings made between the 1960s and 1990s, the contributors included earlier material as well (on which more below.)Second, the book served as a catalogue for the Congo Art Works exhibition, which took place in BOZAR (The Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels) in 2017, one of several collaborations between BOZAR and the RMCA during the latter's renovation closure. The exhibition was cocurated by the editors of this volume, Bambi Ceuppens of the RMCA and artist Sammy Baloji. While the context of this exhibition is certainly important, this review will focus on the published volume.Although the RMCA has long held a collection of popular paintings from Congo, it has remained under used, something the organizers of this exhibition and volume aimed to change. The immediate cause for the exhibition, however, was the transfer of the collection and archives of Bogumil Jewsiewicki, one of the foremost scholars of Congolese popular art, to the RMCA. This collection features prominently in the book. After a short foreword and a short preface, from the RMCA and BOZAR leadership respectively, the volume has six contributions of varying lengths. In “This Is Not a Collection,” Bogumil Jewsiewicki describes how he, over the span of many decades, tried to assemble a “visual whole” that “can be described as an archive, or an image library but not a collection” (p. 19). Mostly based in the Katanga region in the eastern part of the country from 1968 until 1977, Jewsiewicki became interested in the works as a reflection of local collective memory and popular culture. Through a sustained and often collaborative research effort, a more complete picture emerged of the paintings as social and commercial objects whose primary function was not aesthetic pleasure but encouraging conversation and exchange. In that sense, Jewsiewicki argues, the image takes precedence over object (p. 38). These were temporal objects, which is reflected in their materiality: They were not meant to live a long life, although they are now recast as a museum collection.The contrast between the paintings as temporary images and their current status as paintings in a museum collection is at the heart of the next section of the book, which focuses on their materiality. A short interview with Jewsiewicki by Émilie Desbarax, one of the RMCA's conservationists, about the constituent material elements of the works and their impact on the process of conservation, highlights the contrast between the original conception of the paintings as temporary objects of conversation and their current status as museum objects. The interview provides an unusual and revealing look behind the scenes of an exhibition preparation.In “About Congo Art Works,” artist and cocurator of the exhibition Sammy Baloji sheds light on the intellectual and creative process that led to the exhibition, which he sees as contributing to the decolonization of Congo's art history by detaching it from the colonizer's viewpoint and acknowledging the different forms of alienation—in terms of materials, markets, land- and cityscapes, etc.—that have shaped it.Using the example of the artistic transformations that occurred in Mangbetu culture during colonialism, Baloji makes his readers aware of how colonial contexts were “at times open to encounters, at times closed to them, in the complex relationship between dominant and dominated” (p. 65). He then places the popular paintings in the context of other material and artistic productions with an eye to how “art operates in Congolese society during different epochs” (p. 77). Baloji argues the paintings can be honored by staying true to their contexts and intentions, which is made possible in part by the large collection of documents accompanying the paintings gathered by Jewsiewicki, which Baloji sees as something that distinguishes them in a meaningful way from much of the nondocumented objects in the RMCA's collections.In “Mathematics and Popular Painting in the Congo” Dirk Huylenbrouck takes on an (older) art historical canon that reads “unconventional” uses of perspectives as a sign of artistic inferiority. Instead, he argues, the popular painters’ creative and innovative uses of perspective and parallel projection deserve a place in the history of drawing methods.Bambi Ceuppens's chapter “Remembering Congolese Popular Painting and the Long History of Drawing in Congo” is the most substantial and academic contribution in the volume. Ceuppens locates the exhibition and catalogue in the context of the existing scholarship on the popular painters, in which Jewsiewicki himself, as well as Johannes Fabian, figures prominently. She also explains the aim of the exhibition and her chapter: to “establish connections between so-called ‘ethnographic’ objects and popular painting” (p. 109.) This move is intended to break through conventional demarcations between the different collections of the RMCA and by extension between categories such as “ethnographic,” “traditional,” “authentic,” “colonial,” and “modern.” Exposing the ambiguity embedded in current taxonomies of museum and collection organizing, Ceuppens argues, could “offer directions for the decolonizing of the RMCA” (p. 110)—which, as she points out, could have ramifications beyond the museum. The paintings allow us to destabilize the opposition between “ethnographic” and “colonial” objects as it exists in the archives and collections of the RMCA, but whether they can break down these barriers in the museum's future classification and display practices remains to be seen.Ceuppens's essay dives into the history of Western interest and collecting of Congolese art and the uneasiness with which two-dimensional work was approached by colonial collectors. This was particularly the case for work that demonstrated a clear influence of so-called colonial modernity. This unease, perpetuated by museum classifications, she argues, still lives among museum-going audiences. Ceuppens locates the genealogy of popular paintings with (mostly) urban visual cultures influenced by photography, illustrations, and cartoons in colonial magazines, as well as publicity painting and early examples of the work on display in the living rooms of middle class évolués. A true popularization took place only in the 1970s and 1980s, she argues, when popular paintings gained a wider audience with lower middle classes, in contrast to the academic art bought by the elite. Their function lay in their use: their ability to serve as conversation pieces rather than sources for aesthetic appreciation. As such, they execute “memory work” similarly to some tradition-based objects, Ceuppens argues, and their original function is performative rather than aesthetic. Taken together, Ceuppens's and Baloji's chapters give a clear sense of how they, as curators and scholars, sought to push the boundaries of how Congolese popular paintings are displayed, contextualized, and understood.The volume ends with a very short contribution on the RMCA's recent ventures into the public space in Brussels. As part of the 2015 Congolisation festival, it collaborated with local business owners in order to select and display images from the museum's archival photo collection in window displays of the historically Congolese Matonge neighborhood in Brussels. The authors describe the project as a reflection of the museum's social role and its structural engagement with the African diaspora in Belgium. The image selection emphasized photographs of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the 1950s, most if not all of which were produced by the colonial “information” agency InforCongo and which were used largely to promote Belgian colonialism. However, it does not appear the images were read critically in this project. Rather, the authors argue, they catered to “the nostalgia that exists among older Congolese” (p. 183). Overall, the project was considered a success and was repeated in a variety of contexts, with different images, although the chapter does not expand upon these subsequent events.The book contains a very rich selection of images, although the small format of the book is not ideal; some of the paintings would have benefited from reproduction in a larger format.Although the length and quality of the contributions vary, overall, this volume successfully demonstrates the many ways in which Congolese popular paintings can help us break through the categorizations and taxonomies that still dominate art and museum collections

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