POETICS
Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
ELSEVIER
www.elsevier.nl/locate/poetic
‘Making names’ :
The cutting edge renewal of African art
in New York City, 1985-1996*
Craig M. Rawlings*
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 931069430,
USA
Abstract
This paper reconstructs a turning point in the symbolic production of African art as a fine
art genre, when a ‘new’ variant was filtered into the market. This process is seen as part of
the overall struggle of ‘making names’ - enacted by critics, curators, and dealers - that structures recognition, results in artistic change, and reproduces central distinctions in the fine art
world. Informed by Bourdieu’s formulation of cultural fields, the study is grounded in numerous sources, including fieldwork observations, secondary data analyses, a review of more
than three hundred exhibitions, and interviews with key art world agents. To begin, the social
organization of the mid-1980s New York art market is outlined as a spatial economy of name
recognition, broadly composed of three agonistic segments. Afterward, the incorporation of a
new African art into organizational and discursive structures is examined as the outcome of
ongoing struggles between competing ‘position-takings’. Symbolic and material exigencies
within the art market motivating the selection of such works, as well as specific strategies
used in framing them as creations of disinterested individuals, are also examined. 0 2001
Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction:
African art and the struggle for distinction
From the standpoint of much art history, shifts in artistic expression arise from the
influence of a few individual creative geniuses (as in ‘Picasso invented Cubism’), or
the teleological
workings of movements
in art (as in ‘Impressionism led to Post-
* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference ‘Dialogues in Culture and Cognition’, April 1999, at Princeton University. Helpful comments from Judith Friedman, Richard Williams,
and two reviewers are gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to thank the Sociology Department at
Rutgers University, where I was a graduate student during much of this research.
* E-mail: [email protected]
0304-422X/01/$ - see front matter 0 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: SO304-422X(00)00034-6
26
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
Impressionism’). The sociology of art, on the other hand, has looked at innovation
and artistic change as resulting from the collective activity of an art world (Becker,
1982), and structural change both within and outside a given artistic field (White and
White, 1993 [1965]; Peterson and Berger, 1975; Bergesen, 1984; Crane, 1987). As
part of a thrust in the sociology of culture to merge semiotic and materialist
approaches (Sewell, 1992; Swidler, 1986; Lamont and Foumier, 1992), scholarship
has also been particularly concerned with the interdependence of material and symbolic production of art (Bourdieu, 1984; 1993a-c; DiMaggio, 1987). From such a
perspective, the creation of symbolic distinctions - what I term ‘making names’ - is
an important component in the production of fine art. Art world agents struggle to
make names for themselves - whether they are artists, gallery owners, critics, or
curators - by making names for other art world entities, with whom they have symbolic and economic ties. Artistic change then takes place as “the continuous creation
of the battle between those who have made their names . . . and those who cannot
make their own names without relegating to the past the established figures” (Bourdieu, 1993b: 106). The role of symbolic producers, or those agents capable of creating audiences who can apprehend objects as works of art, is of central importance in
this formulation of artistic change. What is labeled fine art in general, or given membership within a particular genre of fine art, is the outcome of ongoing symbolic
struggles within the fine art world.
As a body of objects whose material production remains on the whole remote temporally, geographically, and culturally, African art is a particularly well-suited site
for discussing the symbolic genesis and transformation of fine art genres. Having
entered the West as ‘oddities’ plundered in the Renaissance (Impey and Macgregor,
1985), such objects have been transformed from ‘specimens’ of less evolved humans
during the Enlightenment (Coombes, 1994), to flea market ‘gimcracks’ at the turn of
the century, finally to ‘art’ at the hands of the early modernist avant-garde, who
appropriated certain aspects of their ‘primitive’ aesthetic (Zolberg, 1997). The consummate example of such a work would be a ceremonial mask that dated before the
colonial era, and had actually been used (or ‘danced’ in the primitive art parlance).
Such objects grew ‘older’ in the market as their status was promoted by elites like the
Rockefellers who conspicuously collected them, and by the intense scholarly scrutiny
to which they were concomitantly subjected. The result of this hundred year symbolic process is that today such objects are capable of being seen as examples of fine
art worthy of blockbuster exhibitions and exorbitant prices. The opening of the Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum (the Met), and the National Museum of
African Art in Washington, D.C., marks a point in the mid-1980s when African art
qua tribal art reined virtually unchallenged. It also marks a period when the art market was booming, and the supply of such tribal objects was growing scarce. With
new investment-oriented collectors from the United States, Europe, and Japan entering the market, prices for the most desirable precolonial objects were in the millions
of dollars, pricing out many institutional and private collectors.
A significant turning point, and perhaps a zenith, for African art has been identified by numerous scholars (Clifford, 1988; Errington, 1998; Foster, 1985; Kasfir,
1992) as being the exhibition “‘Primitivism” in 20th century art: Affinity of the
27
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
tribal and the modem’ at the Museum of Modem Art (MoMA) in 1984. Although
purporting to show affinities, this exhibition succeeded in confusing spectacularly
the cause and effect in the history of African art, reifying tribal objects as being ‘art’
discovered by a perspicacious few. The MoMA exhibition provided the cynosure for
a public discourse, which questioned the tribal model of authenticating African art.
At this point a group of artists, curators, scholars, and gallery owners cohered around
a ‘new’ type of African art, which emerged under the rubric of ‘contemporary
African art’. Such paintings and sculptures have origins in 20th century African
“cities everywhere and several regions of the continent which have not been major
sites of precolonial image-making” (Kasfir, 1999: 16). In particular, during the middle part of the century a number of art workshops were begun in Africa, primarily by
Westerners living abroad, both to unlock the artistic potential of locals, and to help
provide them with a way of earning a living (Ottenberg, 1997; Kennedy, 1992). Syncretized with local practices and meanings, some of these objects have been
imported by Western markets for decades. In the United States, such objects have
had a significant presence since the 1960s when galleries and museums, mainly in
historically African-American neighborhoods, exhibited the works as the assertion of
an international African aesthetic, and as part of educational missions to support ethnic pride and identity. Only in the 1980s however, were such works brought into the
New York fine art market with regularity.
Numerous social processes have facilitated the re-appropriation of Western cultural forms into market structures (see Griswold, 1993; Myers, 1995), including
social-structural shifts on both global and national levels (Appadurai, 1990; Harvey,
1989; Sassen, 1994). This paper, however, focuses on (1) the symbolic and material
exigencies within the fine art market itself, which (2) called for the broadening (not
the dismantling) of the African art genre, and (3) accomplished this in the selection
and framing of art works. Informed by Bourdieu’s analyses of cultural fields, artistic
change is explored as the enduring symbolic struggle in the art world to ‘make
names’. Moreover, this study demonstrates the flexibility of such institutional practices in assimilating ever more global forms of cultural consumption, especially from
‘outsider’ regions, where individual artists are often forced to play especially passive
roles in their career development. In the following, I endeavor to reconstruct this
process by showing how a new variant of African art was incorporated into the spatial structure of fine art world ‘positions’. Later, I examine the exigencies motivating
such ‘position-taking’, as well as the homologous semiotic logic behind the selection
and framing strategies that served to renew the boundaries of African art as a genre
when it had grown old in the market.
2. Mapping
recognition
in the New York fine art world:
19854996
Art objects are exhibited in spaces that are both manifestations and creators of
name recognition in the fine art world (see Bourdieu, 1993b: 107). The values and
meanings attributed to artists, and art genres, are intimately tied to the spaces where
they are exhibited, such that more valuable works are exhibited in more recognized
28
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
spaces, and works exhibited in more recognized spaces are often thereby made more
valuable. This spatial economy of recognition in fine arts organization is tied to a
specific urban environment. Genres of fine art are exhibited in gallery and museum
spaces, and are mediated primarily through what Diana Crane calls the organization
of ‘urban culture’ - a domain that is produced and disseminated for local audiences.
According to Crane, “from a sociological point of view, urban cultures are class cultures and as such they reflect the values, attitudes, and resources of the social groups
that consume them” (1992: 110). Such organization is most apparent in the segmenting of art world exhibition spaces into specific art districts - clusters of galleries with at least one museum serving as an ‘anchor’ - that age together within an
ever shifting urban geography.
Located at the center of an international market of fine art activity, New York
City is able to support numerous art districts. During the period in question, however, three Manhattan areas could be considered as comprising the elite world of
‘fine art’: SoHo (Downtown), 57th Street (Mid-town), and Museum Mile (Uptown).
Districts outside this ‘core’ tend to be more closely linked to the ethnic groups that
make up their local audiences, and are therefore considered less representative of
‘high culture’ (Crane, 1992: 109). Samuel Gilmore (1987, 1988) has discussed a
homologous segmenting of cultural activity in New York City. In examining musical production within distinct ‘sub-worlds’ of concert organization, Gilmore shows
how different degrees of convention govern the production of concerts in three Manhattan areas, with downtown lending itself to the highest degree of innovation. My
approach is rather different, as I hope to show how these regions represent different
stages in the struggle for art world recognition. While Gilmore (following Becker,
1982) is concerned with how artists use such regions as ‘schools of activity’, I follow Bourdieu’s lead, showing how such segments represent different ‘positions’
between agonistic ‘schools of thought’, which are deployed in the ongoing symbolic
production of fine art.
Each of the three districts, and especially galleries therein, can be highly correlated
with a distinct epoch of art history (see Table 1). Such eras are themselves labeled
periods comprised of named sets of artists and genres from succeeding waves of artistic change, each showing a different stage in the ‘aging’ of art objects. Art districts like the organizations, artists, and genres that comprise such areas - are the outcomes
of previous battles of name making and, as such, these segments compete for what
Bourdieu terms “the dominant principle of legitimation” (1993a: 50-51). Each ‘position’ is invested with a different stake in what is honored with the title fine art, while
all have a stake in distinguishing fine art from other commodities. In making names
for themselves, symbolic agents work within these different positions, and their
strategic choices in selecting and framing works of art can be seen as arising from this
organization. Potential ‘position-takings’ arise in accordance with available symbolic and material resources, which can be outlined in a somewhat broad manner.’
’ Such characterizations are specific to the period in question. For example, most followers of the ‘cutting edge’ in fine art would presently locate its New York nexus in Chelsea or Williamsburg. By the
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
29
Table 1
Time period specialization in New York City galleries (N = 230) by art district
Tie
period
Pre-1900
Modem, 1910-1960
Contemporary, 1960-present
All periods
No. of galleries
% of galleries specializing in time period in
Museum mile
51” street
SoHo
N
60.3
65.5
34.5
28.8
65.4
69.2
11.5
(52)
0.0
19.4
90.3
85.0
112.0
132.0
17.0
Note: Taken from information given in Lown and Lown (1997). Most galleries tend to specialize in two
adjacent time periods, which accounts for column totals that exceed 100%.
2.1. SoHo: The cutting edge
For many years SoHo was synonymous with the avant-garde* in New York City.
Pioneered and protected from demolition for a freeway in the 1970s SoHo is the
youngest of the three districts (Zukin, 1989), and was part of an explosive growth in
the art market between 1940 and 1985 (Crane, 1987). It has been the space where
‘new’ works of emerging artists have usually entered the New York market,
although it has always been possible for work to enter more exclusive spaces if it has
been subject to legitimation elsewhere or has influential backing within the art world
(see Mulkay and Chaplin, 1982). SoHo has been part of a downtown scene of living
artists, students, and intellectuals, many of whom pride themselves on remaining at
the cutting edge of culture, and has consistently drawn in new people who have
heard the call of its hip ancestry. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s SoHo was
the established region that most embodied the adage ‘art for art’s sake’. It has been
that part of the elite fime art market with the most autonomy from commercial and
academic interests, as many of the cultural consumers were often themselves cultural
producers, including artists, intellectuals, and art students. This audience has therefore been more primed for the reception of new artistic works.
The social organization of SoHo was built around innovative potential. Numerous
galleries and small cultural organizations, combined with many intersecting networks seem to lend themselves to the material generation of innovative styles (see
Crane, 1992: 113). SoHo gatekeepers have been extremely vital to the New York
fine art market, as they have often helped to introduce and construct the aesthetic
legitimacy of new types of art entering the mainstream. Many cutting edge artists
and movements were born in SoHo, having been ‘discovered’ mainly by dealers and
mid-199Os, SoHo began to resemble more commercial and gentrified art districts, and rising property
values eventually forced most experimental galleries to move. Other districts, however, have not
changed as significantly.
* The term avant-garde implies a self-aware group, and is therefore a distinct form of the more general
segment of the ‘cutting edge’.
30
C.M. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
critics championing the ‘purity’ of such work. Those who have met success here
have frequently moved on to more exclusive exhibition spaces uptown. The symbolic producers of SoHo, and their analogues in the fine art world in general, have
ideologically defined and defended their position against the more ‘commercial’ or
‘academic’ segments of the fme art world, using this strategy to legitimate new,
experimental, or excluded arts and artists.
2.2. 57th Street: The commercial
Along East and West 57th Street in mid-town Manhattan are several enormous
buildings, each housing numerous art galleries. These mall-like structures fit with
the atmosphere of the general area, which is the upscale tourist and commercial heart
of the city. 57th Street has become the district most unabashed in commercial ostentation - the art world equivalent to the nearby new Times Square. Many of the galleries in this district are between thirty and fifty years old and were considered cutting edge in their own time, exhibiting the works of Abstract Expressionism. Both
the anchor of the MoMA and the galleries in this district tend to exhibit the works of
‘modern and contemporary masters’, while the prices of such objects can often reach
six figures or more. For many admirers of visual art 57th Street must exist somewhere between fantasy and nightmare, a place to marvel at the spectacle of the marketplace. Any living artist whose work is represented by a gallery in this district has
certainly made it financially in the market system. Not surprisingly, the works of living artists exhibited along 57th Street tend towards virtuosity in technical style (they
show their training), and stateliness in material form (they show their worth).
As established galleries in the heart of Manhattan’s big money district, gallery
directors need hardly legitimate the work they display as valuable art. Being long
established commercial successes with a litany of named artistic ‘winners’ on their
rosters, the money backing such works nearly speaks for itself. Galleries on 57th
Street take out full-page advertisements in the most widely distributed journals and
art magazines. They speak as much to the corporate investor as to the recent lottery
winner: ‘your money is well spent here’. One needn’t have access to the ‘cutting
edge’ codes in order to decipher such works. They are clearly ‘rising stars’, and
those who can afford to invest in them are promised a piece of the action. Such a
commercial position - largely heteronomous to the demands of a wide audience - is
the fine art world equivalent to the ‘new bourgeoisie’, where works have achieved
popularity and success, but have not necessarily reached the highest forms of legitimation.
2.3. Museum mile - The old Bourgeoisie
If 57th Street appears nouveau riche, then Museum Mile certainly could be seen
as ‘old money’. Other districts have much in the way of financial capital, but none
has the ‘cultural capital’ of this district. As part of one of New York’s most exclusive neighborhoods along Madison Avenue in the Upper East Side, this area’s name
derives from its many art museums, including three of the New York artworld’s
C.M.Rawlings
I Poetics 29 (2001)25-54
31
most established - the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. In addition,
the major auctioning houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s are nearby. It is a district
where ‘old’ art - having achieved the highest ‘academic’ legitimation - is auctioned
off, seen by appointment, and interred under glass for posterity and public view.
Other highly valuable luxury commodities, especially antiques, find their highest
concentration in this area of mandarin taste, where elite objects and the social elite
reinforce one another’s status through the ‘ease of the aesthetic disposition’ (see
Bourdieu, 1984: 28, 1993a: 61). While permanent collections in museums in this
area remain the most exclusive spaces in the New York art world, large ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions in this district serve to add an innovative twist, or to bring in
wider audiences - a trend on the rise as museum budgets have become more
indebted to corporate patrons, and less to the philanthropic elite (Alexander, 1996).
As an area of the art market with the highest concentration of ‘academic’ institutions, where galleries cater to the local elite, and those who would aspire to it, this
‘position’ within the world of fine art is the most orthodox in it’s approach. Very little artistic innovation can be thought as emerging from this sector of the fine art
world, although a few recent works are quickly purchased by or donated to some
institutions in this district. Regardless, the artists and genres that form this art world
position constitute an elite group when compared to the numbers seeking inclusion.
As institutions with access to the most funding sources, museums here can afford to
collect the rarest examples of what has been labeled fine art. Likewise, galleries here
are generally the most established in the city, and are capable of dealing in the most
precious art commodities. Innovation can be an afterthought or a flourish to this
dominant position, where a select few are eventually given enough academic legitimation to merit full membership in permanent display, with full-time curatorial
attention.
3. Data sources and methods
3.1. Museum and gallery exhibitions
Data were collected on both museum and gallery exhibitions of African art in the
three art districts in New York City for a twelve-year period, following the controversial MoMA exhibition. Numerous sources, including several periodicals, guides,
and catalogues (see References) were used, and yielded more than 300 independent
exhibitions of African art for this core art market over the period (N = 302).3 These
were analyzed first according to their relation to the urban organization of the New
York art market. Afterward, I examined the discursive content of several exhibitions,
3 This is not a comprehensive list of all the spaces where art objects of arguably African origin were
exhibited in the fine art market, during the period. Specifically, objects not promoted through the
African, Diaspora, or Black arts media would have been missed. Since this study focuses the symbolic
struggles that define a genre, such omissions were not considered problematic, since they would not have
been players in the recognition game.
32
C.M. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
in order to give a more qualitative and semiotic assessment of the ways in which
symbolic producers legitimated this new African art.
For the spatial analysis, exhibition data were collapsed to identify the number of
galleries and museums within a given district that exhibited African art in a given
year, so that the exhibition space became the unit of analysis, and totaled six museums and 41 gallery spaces. While this does ignore a distinction between galleries
that specialize in African art and ones that may have exhibited African art only once
in a given year, the analytical abstraction was useful in constructing as complete a
temporal ‘map’ as possible of where African art was exhibited in the system during
this time period. Afterwards, gallery spaces were coded for whether or not they specialized in tribal art. Moreover, this was combined with a simple coding for what
type of African art was exhibited within a given gallery or museum space.
Quite intricate taxonomies have been devised to categorize (and generally hierarchize) the whole of African art (Vogel, 1991; Mount, 1973). For my purposes, splitting African art exhibitions into (1) ‘tribal’ and (2) ‘named’ variants was theoretically
significant as will be discussed later in this paper. ‘Tribal’ art objects can be thought
of as those associated with specific African tribes or ethnic categories. Such objects
would carry labels like ‘Dogon sculpture’, or ‘Baule mask’. ‘Named’ African art
objects, on the other hand, would be labeled with the names of individual creators, and
tend to conform to most standard notions of what is considered modem art. Galleries
that exhibited any combination of these two variants of African art were coded in a
third way, having shown a ‘mixture’ for that year. Lastly, I did not want to conflate
gallery and museum exhibitions, since they are not equal (and in fact are quite often
at odds) in the fine art market system. Gallery exhibitions were sufficient in number
to analyze quantitatively, while the museums exhibits will be discussed qualitatively.
3.2. In-depth interviews with African art curators, gallery owners, and others
To supplement the secondary data analysis above, I conducted several unstructured, in-depth interviews with key art world agents whom I felt could lend a better
understanding to the New York art market in general, and could add depth to the picture provided in the exhibition data. I interviewed six individuals familiar with the
New York art world, who had been, and generally were, gallery owners, directors, or
museum curators dealing in African art. The sample was not random, as I was seeking to interview persons from diverse positions within the fine art world. I wrote to
individuals I felt would be particularly helpful to rounding out the analysis, and several interviews were conducted with persons affiliated with institutions included in
the exhibition data analysis. Ultimately, my sample included two curators, two
gallery owners, one gallery assistant director, and one professor/critic/university
curator. These included representatives from each of the New York art districts, with
two agents outside this ‘core’ area. Interviews lasted from one half hour to nearly
two hours, with the majority around 50 minutes.
Since my intention was to garner new insights into the social contours behind the
exhibition data, a formal questionnaire did not seem necessary or appropriate. Instead,
interviews addressed general questions concerning the exhibition of African art, how
C.M. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
33
specific institutions fit within the fine art world, and how museum and gallery agents
present work to the public. I asked each respondent to describe their professional role,
and how they saw its position in the fme art world in general, and the African art
world in particular. I inquired into museum mandates, gallery specialties, and audiences for different types of African art. Usually, I was able to also address something
of the problems of legitimating African art, along with future goals and strategies.
4. The incorporation into fine art spaces
4.1. African art and the encyclopedia of fine art
In the years following the MoMA exhibition, galleries exhibiting African art in
Museum Mile increased from seven in 1985 to nine in 1996, appearing fairly stable
when compared to the other districts, which showed considerable fluctuation (see Fig.
1). Early in this period, exhibitions of African art were rather evenly distributed
throughout the districts. Chances are, however, that we would have found variation in
the overall quality and value from district to district with Museum Mile having some
of the most so-called authentic and therefore valuable examples. Since my coding
washes out such distinctions, it is worth noting that many objects that would have formerly been considered ‘artifacts’, such as slingshots and wooden pestles, were
brought into the market as types of tribal art during this period of growing scarcity
(Steiner, 1994: 110-124). In examining hundreds of advertisements and exhibition
announcements, Museum Mile appears to have retained the most galleries that exhibited what has been be called ‘high tribal art’ (Errington, 1998: 96-101). Regardless,
the data show African art as firmly rooted in this district where the most highly legitimated forms are finally ‘catalogued’ as having a place in what might be thought of
as the encyclopedia of fine art. In short, tribal African art had grown ‘old’ as a highly
legitimated oeuvre, and remained publicly exhibited alongside other types of high art.
If we look at the composition of the types of African art exhibited in Museum
Mile galleries we see even stronger indication that the tribal variant had become
embedded in this part of the market system (see Table 2). More than 90 percent of
the total gallery spaces in this district exhibited ‘tribal’ African art, while the remainder showed some mixture over the time period. When compared to the other districts
we see a steep decline in the percent of African art exhibition spaces that featured
the tribal variety (80 percent in 57th Street; 40 percent in SoHo). This suggests that,
although the supplies of tribal art may have been growing more scarce, Museum
Mile galleries were able to obtain such works. As a district it has thereby retained its
high concentration and stability in exhibiting tribal art.
This becomes more evident in the museum exhibitions that occurred in this district. Since the opening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in 1982, the Met continued to exhibit tribal African art exclusively. Nearby, the Museum of African Art
also exhibited solely ‘tribal’ objects until what appears to be their last exhibit before
relocating to SoHo in 1992. This final Museum Mile show featured named African
art, and perhaps heralded a change in the museum’s agenda (also signaled by a name
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
34
I
I
.
-
-Ik4lamMile
-
57thshmt
-W-b
.
'
'\
2 I
I
----_-..-~-~-_----
1987
1988
0-I
1985
198.5
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
19%
Fig. 1. New York City galleries exhibiting African art (N = 40) by art district, 1985-1996.
change to the Museum for African Art), indicating an acceptance of both tribal and
named variants as worthy of the title ‘art’. Lastly, the Guggenheim mounted the
mammoth exhibit ‘Africa: The art of a continent’ as part of an international celebration of Africa that occurred in 19951996. Although the objects in this exhibit
included representatives from each region of Africa, the art type was uniformly of
the tribal variety for Sub-Saharan Africa.
4.2. The draining of the commercial, and the promotion of Shona sculpture
Unlike the other districts, galleries exhibiting African art along 57th Street, in the
most overtly commercial district, decrease in number over the period of analysis,
beginning with four and ending with two (see Fig. 1). Of the two departed galleries,
one went out of business and auctioned off its remaining supplies of tribal art, while
the other relocated to SoHo. The two galleries that remained split the market in
terms of the type of African art they exhibited, one specializing in ‘primitive’ art in
general, the other regularly exhibiting a variety of modem African art. This is worth
discussing at some length.
Collectively known under a tribal affiliation, ‘Shona sculpture’ lies somewhere
between tribal and named in my coding schema.“ Moreover, it is consciously marketed
4 The label ‘Shona’ is a misnomer, however, since many Shona artists belong to other tribes.
35
C.M. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
Table 2
Composition of African art types in gallery spaces by art district, 1985-1996
Art district
Museum Mile
57th street
SoHo
% of galleries exhibiting African art type
Tribal
Mixture
Named
Total
N
93.3
80.0
39.1
1.7
0.0
17.4
0.0
20.0
43.5
100
100
100
13
5
23
Note: Several galleries relocated over the time period. Only two, however, moved to one of the other
core districts, and were therefore counted twice as different spaces.
as a kind of traditional/modem hybrid. Knowing this alone, one might not be surprised to find Shona within the varieties of contemporary African art to have garnered commercial success. Yet, the story is more complicated. Although the success
of Shona sculpture, and two or three of its so-called masters, certainly merits its own
research, here I will note a few facts that may account for its market ascendancy. An
article on Shona published in Newsweek points us in one direction:
“[Mukomberanwa’s] work, along with that of a small group of Zimbabwean artists, is rapidly developing an international reputation. Rockefellers and Rothschilds were early connoisseurs of Shona sculpture. Prince Charles has become a collector. Not long ago Richard Attenborough came to Zimbabwe . . .
before leaving, the director shipped 29 crates of Shona pieces home to England.” (Wilkinson, 1987: 80)
Whereas those who hypostatize artistic value might see the commercial success of
Shona as being due to something inherent in these objects that causes the elite to collect them, and the influential to promote them, the causality may be largely attributed in the opposite direction. Shona sculpture is found in the commercial heart of
the gallery system because it has been collected and promoted by the elite - a fact
that is not lost on the galleries that deal in Shona, who do not shy away from prominently featuring such information in their pamphlets and exhibition materials.
If one does look at the objects themselves as symbols it becomes clear that these
works have certain formal properties that would lend them to quick promotion in the
art market system, following the success of tribal African art. First, they are works
of sculpture, as have been most authentic tribal arts, made from indigenous serpentine, steatite or semi-precious green verdite - materials that easily lend themselves to
being marketed as traditional and enduring objects of a distant culture. Moreover, in
terms of content, much Shona sculpture appears remarkably the way that an admirer
of modem art would presume modem African art should look. That is, much of this
work clearly resembles the works of early modem artists (e.g. Picasso, Brancusi)
when they were inspired by the spirit of a primitive aesthetic, as the story generally
goes. This affinity of tribal and modem ‘primitivism’ may give Shona an immediate
credibility as a modem form of African art. Lastly, Shona sculpture has circulated
longer than many other variants of named African art, and was first in line, so to
speak, for promotion. Yet its association with commercial promotion and influential
36
C.M. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
buyers has made this art form suspect in the more autonomous segments of the market, as will be discussed later in this paper.
Not surprisingly, the MoMA has also collected the work of at least one ‘Shona
master’. We may imagine a future exhibition, featuring the ways that early modernist
‘primitivism’ influenced the contemporary artists of Africa, displaying a Brancusi
head next to a Shona head, thereby bringing the narrative full circle. Yet it seems
that after the controversy following 1984, the museum has decided not to mount
another African art exhibition.
4.3. Filtering the ‘new’ African art
The greatest activity for African art during this period occurred downtown. The
number of galleries exhibiting African art in SoHo increased steadily over the twelve
years, beginning with six galleries and ending with sixteen (see Fig. 1). This numerical increase alone appears counterintuitive. Having reached encyclopedic status as
an art genre by the mid-1980, with most supplies embedded in the orthodox market
spaces, such a steep rise in the part of the system that specializes in the ‘new’, and
where less legitimated art contends for promotion seems counterintuitive. Not surprisingly, the rise in African art exhibitions in SoHo can be accounted for by galleries bringing in objects under the categorical label African art, which are distinguished from the more orthodox variant of tribal objects. The exhibitions of such
‘contemporary’ or ‘named’ African art increased in spurts over the twelve-year
period (see Fig. 2). In fact, when we examine the overall composition of gallery
spaces that exhibited African art in SoHo during this period, we see that over 40 percent exhibited the named type, while another 17 percent exhibited a mixture of the
variants (see Table 2). This strongly suggests that a part of the art market that had
not been exhibiting African art, and had not previously invested in the category,
began to put forward a type of African art of their own during this period.
This becomes clearer when looking at the specializations of the galleries exhibiting African art during this period. Galleries that deal in tribal or primitive objects
have long dominated the selling of African art. At the start of the analysis, this certainly appeared to be the case, as nearly 90 percent of the galleries exhibiting
African art specialized in such objects. By the end of this period in question, however, over 30 percent of the galleries exhibiting African art were focused on contemporary art. While some African art galleries may have begun to diversify the
types of objects that they were selling in response to the drying up of the most
authentic supplies, the largest shift comes from a part of the market putting forward
its own African art. During this period, no fewer than 13 contemporary art galleries
in SoHo exhibited the works of named African artists, including galleries that also
dealt in so-called ‘outsider art’ (the significance of which will be discussed later in
this paper).
The museums that anchor this district again exhibited African art very much like
what the surrounding galleries were selling. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a number of museums opened or relocated in SoHo along lower Broadway. This new corridor was also part of a culminating expansion and commercialization of the area.
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996
Fig. 2. New York City galleries exhibiting
‘named’Africanart (N = 14)by art district,19851996.
Significantly, the Museum for African Arts relocated from Museum Mile to the
lower Broadway district. Under the leadership of Susan Vogel, former curator of the
Rockefeller Wing at the Met, the museum began to exhibit a wider variety of
African art (see Heartney, 1998) than it had in its previous location, including
numerous works of named African artists, while continuing to show works of tribal
African art. The nearby New Museum of Contemporary Art also exhibited named
African art during the latter part of this period. In the final year of 1996, the international year celebrating Africa, the uptown Guggenheim’s exhibition included only
tribal African art. Not surprisingly, the newly opened downtown Guggenheim in
lower Broadway also had an African art exhibition - ‘Seven stories about modem art
in Africa’ - featuring the works of dozens of named African artists.
All of this strongly suggests that agents in SoHo actively pursued a ‘new’ supply
of African art. Similarly named African art had been exhibited for at least 30 years
in peripheral areas of the core market, such as Harlem, Newark, and Brooklyn. Yet
it was only in the 198Os, after tribal art had reached the heights of the market and it
became prohibitively costly to acquire African art of that orthodox type, that an
aggressive effort began in this ‘cutting edge’ position of the core market to promote
such work. When we take a closer look at the selection and framing strategies of
contemporary African art, we see it is very much like other ‘new’ art promoted in
this part of the art market during the same time period. To be more precise, the selection and framing of such works show a filtration process, as SoHo museums, and
galleries in particular, applied salient cutting edge notions to renew African art.
38
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
5. Selecting ‘contemporary’ African art
The inclusion of some contemporary African art amongst other cutting edge fine
art that entered the market in the eighties is not teleological in origin. No essential
reason explains why the works of living African artists, working in ‘Western media’,
should be selected as the heirs to tribal objects that had become scarce and highly
prized in the market. Numerous objects, including so-called ‘modem traditional’
works of tribal peoples could also be credibly honored with the title ‘fine art’, and
yet remain largely relegated to the ‘craft’ category (although sometimes highly valued). Other objects, such as the stigmatized ‘airport art’ or ‘tourist art’, which constitute a large sector of African material production, stood less of a chance of such
honorific titles (Phillips and Steiner, 1999). Contemporary objects, putatively made
‘to look old’, remain labeled as fakes or forgeries, and their artistic merits ignored;
although this was not always the case in the West (see Baudrillard, 1981: 103), and
such notions of ‘authenticity’ are not exactly shared by those who produce such
objects in Africa (Steiner, 1994). The selection of contemporary African art is social,
and reveals how the cutting edge segment of the Western market employs a ‘position-taking’, which weeds out certain types of objects and individuals (see Becker,
1982: 16), while resolving specific symbolic and material exigencies. Relying
mainly on interview data, this process will be outlined in the following.
5.1. The crisis of supplies
By the 198Os, in addition to suffering a diminishing supply and soaring valuation
of tribal items, the African art world was also experiencing a tremendous growth in
the production of new symbolic agents. As art markets expanded throughout the
197Os, so too did the number of individuals who sought advanced degrees, aspiring
to become symbolic producers in the field. African art grew in popularity as a disciplinary concentration and a number of universities established doctoral programs in
that concentration. To begin, this escalated competition in staking out scholarly turf.
Producing new knowledge, even within a seemingly vast epistemological terrain,
became increasingly competitive. Moreover, by the early 1980s government funding
for the arts had taken a downturn and grants for research were becoming exceedingly
competitive to obtain. In the past, before completing a Ph.D. in African art history, a
graduate student was expected to complete fieldwork in Africa. By the 198Os, however, this was no longer such an easy prospect, and funding has grown more scarce
over time. Dr. Nii Otukunor Quarcoopome, formerly at the University of Michigan,
now curator of the art of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific at the Newark
Museum, describes this situation in the interview as follows:
‘A lot of people are trying to avoid this whole experience of travelling to Africa. This is something
that is understandable when funding for field research is fast diminishing. You don’t find as much
funding. ti the past, there were fewer people in the field and so the prominent funding agencies like
the SSRC, Ford Foundation, Fulbright became targets that good students could apply for and usually get.
But now there are so many students out there who are looking for grants, and the competition is much
stronger. ’
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
39
These shifts in the economy behind the ‘creating of the creators’ (see Bourdieu,
1993b: 76) pressured a number of young and aspiring symbolic producers of African
art to look for new dissertation topics, which required less financial backing, yet
were ripe for interesting theoretical discussions. For example, a number of living
African artists spend time abroad, allowing a graduate student to complete doctoral
research by interviewing a particular artist during their time in the United States or
Europe, and by spending time in libraries and museums. In so doing, new scholarly
territory could be marked off without needing to go abroad. In part, this helps
explain the increase in aesthetic scholarship that is so vital to legitimating new styles
of fine art, and often translates into market recognition. It also helps account for the
recalcitrance of older symbolic producers, who had to undergo the rigors of fieldwork, in giving attention to such contemporary work. Yet, this still isn’t sufficient to
explain why such contemporary objects were selected over others in the universe of
possible new variants of African art. In order to understand why young symbolic
producers would select such works, we must explore how constituencies cohere
around new artworks, and why this could allow for a potential cutting edge positiontaking in the struggle for artistic recognition.
5.2. Constituencies and potential position-takings
In this section I consider how shifts in what is labeled African art have been
mapped onto shifts in constituencies for the genre as a whole. While the audience for
tribal African art has been (and apparently remains) rooted in a relatively small number of elite collectors, most of the ‘new’ forms of genre have been promoted by more
heterogeneous groups. Yet it is important to note that the market for contemporary
African art, especially in the U.S., remains small and difficult to nail down. In fact,
it may well be that most contemporary African art has met with much more symbolic
success as an idea whose ‘time has come’, than material success driven by a strong
consumer market. My analysis, for the time being, must focus on the former, since I
have been unable to collect reliable data on the latter, and there can be little doubt
that contemporary African art has had a significant impact on the boundaries of the
field as a whole.
A simple theory of supply and demand would suggest that as valuable tribal
objects became scarcer, with demand remaining high, similar commodities would be
introduced to satisfy a market of private and institutional collectors. There is some
evidence that suggests at the high end of the fine art market this has been occurring,
as the tribal works of more remote parts of both Africa and the globe, similar to the
already established types, have been exhibited and sold. But these are difficult and
expensive to acquire. Shona sculpture, too, seems to satisfy some of this demand for
the ‘primitive’. Yet, most forms of contemporary African art in general, including
those filtered into the fine art market in the mid-1980s, do not appeal to collectors of
tribal African art. The rift between the tribal and the contemporary - at least in the
United States - also appears to be a social rift between very different audiences with
competing interests.
40
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
Collectors of tribal African art tend to be members of, or aspirants to, the social
elite. Prohibitive pricing alone would have long encouraged this to be the case. But
tribal art collectors also tend to be collectors of modem art, and may purchase tribal
objects because they look quite good next to Western works - not surprisingly, since
the two aesthetics emerged together and have reinforced one another over time.
David Rockefeller, a well-known art collector, has expressed his aesthetic interest in
one such tribal piece, saying, “The total composition has a very contemporary, very
Western look to it. It’s the kind of thing, I think, that goes very well with . . . contemporary Western things. It would look very good in a modem apartment or house”
(quoted in Appiah, 1991: 337). Such an audience has a very distinct sense for what
is considered an exquisite piece, and even works that are regarded as ‘authentic but
ugly’ are referred to as ‘dogs’ by gallery directors in the primitive art market. Tribal
galleries in New York tend to know their patrons well, and are often supported by a
relatively small number of regular collectors. Gallery agents learn the tastes of such
patrons, and often put pieces aside that they know would be appealing to certain collectors. Occasionally, galleries pay a scholar to review a tribal work - to identify its
salient features and discuss their significance - all of which facilitates the sale of
such pieces. I contend that as supplies of such ‘refined’ works grew scarce, it created
a structural opportunity for new works to be successfully promoted in the market’s
core.
Some ‘new’ forms of African art, such as Shona sculpture, apparently have appeal
to a broad constituency. A handful of ‘masters’ in this sub-genre have reached commercial success in the ‘core’ fme art market, having been collected and promoted by
a number of wealthy patrons of various ethnicities and nationalities. Yet I have also
seen works of Shona sold in a number of ‘peripheral’ galleries, including one in an
Ethiopian restaurant within an African-American neighborhood, and one in an
upscale shopping district of a predominantly Anglo city in the Pacific Northwest. In
short, Shona appears to have become a popularly accessible form of African art, with
enough gradations in supply and ‘quality’ to reach both wealthy collectors, and those
looking for an affordable piece of the modernist ‘primitive’ aesthetic. While indeed
facing its own controversies, as will be discussed later, Shona has not been subjected
to the same degree of criticism - both favorable and negative - as other, more cutting edge forms of contemporary African art.
This may be an expression of the much greater social rift between those advocating the works of mostly living African artists, and those of the orthodox tribal art
constituency. According to Sidney Littlefield Kasfir (in the interview), professor and
African art curator at Emory University,
‘most of the people who collect classical African art don’t like contemporary African art. They are quite
hostile towards it even, and regard it as a bunch of crap. That expression has been used by some of these
collectors . . . They see it as third rate contemporary art, so why should they be interested in that? It gets
it from all sides.’
This segregation is supported in the exhibition data, where few galleries chose to
exhibit a mixture of both named and tribal variants. Instead, many cutting edge contemporary art galleries were responsible for bringing contemporary African art into
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
41
the fine art market. That such reviled works were selected as the cutting edge
renewal of the African art genre by ‘young’ symbolic producers seems counterintuitive, until we examine closely the ways certain constituencies can give rise to potential position-takings. To appear cutting edge at all necessitates the production of
opposition and difference, and this may emerge through opposing constituencies.
According to Crane, to succeed in introducing innovative styles of art, “members
of a particular network must obtain a nucleus of supporters or a ‘constituency’ in the
art world or on its periphery” (1992: 119). The established constituency for contemporary African art in the United States has been mainly peripheral to the fine art
market where, according to Kasfn, ‘there is a large middle and upper middle class of
African Americans’ who can afford to collect. It’s advocates proffer contemporary
Africans as agents capable of creating works worthy of the prestige and value
accorded to tribal works, and other fine art - a project that appears tied with other
forms of ethnic advocacy. For example, some African-American artists and gallery
owners actively promoted a pan-African aesthetic in the 1960s and 1970s and were
responsible for bringing over some of the early ‘pioneers’ of contemporary African
art for exhibitions. A city such as Atlanta, with a large African-American middle
class, is presently able to support four galleries that specialize in contemporary
African art, although it is rather far from the core of the fine art world. To attempt a
summation for why such a project is socially significant would be difficult, to say
the least, and well beyond the scope of this paper. There are, however, a few points
that should be addressed here in order to understand why African art initially
expanded in the direction of being ‘contemporary’, and how this eventually lent
itself to a cutting edge position-taking within the fine art world, during a period of
crisis.
Within a society - and, increasingly, a world - that places high value on works of
‘fine art’, the legitimacy of identity groups can easily be tied to their having members included amongst the ‘artistic geniuses’ of the world. Also, to be denied the
recognition of producing valuable ‘contemporary’ art is part of being denied recognition as a valuable contemporary people, forcing an identity group into a static past,
as did the mythic constructs of colonial discourses. Contemporary African art
emerges in part within the concretizing ‘imagined community’ of the African diaspora (see Anderson, 1983), which sought to combat negative self-images both
nationally and globally. Such art objects had been promoted with some success by
the eighties, and the growing stress on identity politics in the U.S., combined with
the efforts of anthropologists and other scholars to deconstruct notions of the primitive, further helped place contemporary African art on the map as an excluded outsider. The MoMA exhibition attempted to address some of these growing concerns,
but only succeeded in providing the focal point for renewed attacks from numerous
camps. Significantly, this coincides with a period when numerous young and ‘economically dominated’ symbolic producers were flooding the fine art market, searching for ways to make names for themselves with scarce material and symbolic
resources.
It was in such a climate, as the market continued to inflate, when the very
‘outsidemess’ of contemporary African art provided one significant symbolic
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C.M. Rawlings / Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
mechanism that facilitated its selection and filtration into the fine art market5 While
members of the cutting edge have historically identified with marginalized groups,
perhaps due to the homologously dominated position of young agents within the cultural field (Bourdieu, 1993a: 43), market conditions in the mid-1980s were particularly ripe for such a new type of African art to take hold. Salient cutting edge notions
of the period could be easily transposed onto some forms of contemporary African
art; the facility of which may have more to do with the shear diversity of material
production in Africa, than with shared cutting edge aesthetic notions. In addition to
their association with excluded groups, certain types of contemporary art from
Africa lent themselves to being framed as cutting edge due to a formal appearance as
art brut.
The success of ‘Mami Wata’ (or ‘mother of water’) paintings is a case in point.
Depictions of this mermaid figure - usually a voluptuous Western-looking woman in easel paintings contain all the formal elements necessary for a cutting edge position-taking. The ‘self-taught’ elements of African street painting (e.g. ‘cartoon-like’
figures), combined with course materials of production (painted on flour sacks rather
than canvas), lend themselves to being framed as a gritty third-world equivalent to
Western avant-garde styles. Moreover, the subject matter of these paintings is easily
highlighted for an audience to accentuate the message of market ‘outsidemess’.
Painted text at the top or bottom of such works usually foretells the dangers associated with the seductive Western-looking siren. According to Kasfir (1999: 25), this
moral statement cautions the viewer that “if one follows her one will become rich
easily, but a high price will have to be paid for the transgression of moral principles
which this implies”. In this manner, the African art and artist are demonstrated to be
outside the Western market in general, and indeed as oppositional figures to its
seductive and corruptive nature. Selecting and framing works with this framing
potential became a logical strategy for those in the cutting edge, since it resolved the
exigencies of supply, while carving out a new niche. Young symbolic producers
were able to select and frame such works in a way that allowed them to maneuver
against established formulations of tribal African art. Moreover, in a market that was
inflating the value of tribal works, along with other genres of fine art, the new
African art could also be placed against heteronomous market interests, strategically
positioning such works as defenders of the central norm of artistic ‘disinterestedness’. Such framing strategies and their significance will be discussed in greater
detail in the following.
6. The (re)framing of ‘disinterestedness’
According to Bourdieu, the ‘logic’ of cultural fields, including the fine art world,
is based “on a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary
’ I hasten to add that this is only one symbolic element that helped in this filtration process. The ‘reading’ of discourse surrounding such objects is, therefore, concerned primarily with this one element, in
order to sharpen analytical focus.
C.M. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
43
economies” (Bourdieu, 1993a: 39). In the ‘inverted economy’ of the fine art market,
it has often been the ‘loser’ - the artist who embodies the norm of artistic ‘disinterestedness’ in financial or market approval - who is selected (i.e. ‘discovered’) and
successfully promoted in the market. This is made apparent in the most autonomous
parts of the market, where the audience consists largely of cultural producers. While
artists are expected to follow this norm in the creation of art, and are sometimes pilloried as ‘sell-outs’ if they achieve market success, it is also the role of symbolic
producers (those who ‘discover’ such new work) to frame it in light of this central
principle. Curators and gallery agents imbue art objects with the belief in its purity,
by creating and maintaining certain aesthetic rationales, which are applied to both
artist and art (see Becker, 1982: 4). In this way, ‘disinterestedness’ can serve as a
cultural tool whereby young symbolic producers are able to leverage legitimacy for
new art, and thereby get a foothold for their own careers as cultural authorities.
The symbolic production of both tribal and named African art relies upon the
authority of curators and dealers to assure the criterion of disinterestedness. This is
especially true since the material production of most of what is labeled African art
remains remote in terms of culture, time, and geography. The symbolic communication of disinterestedness assures audiences that such objects are authentic works of
art, and not some other form of commodity that was produced for a market - a discourse that is paradoxically confirmed through high market price (see Kopytoff,
1986). The discursive materials surrounding both variants of African art objects
accomplish this distinction symbolically in different ways. What remains covert in
tribal art as part of the assumptions of pre-colonial tribal artisans is made overt in
named African art through the creation of the individual artist as a creative genius.
While pre-colonial objects are legitimated through assumptions about cultural purity,
contemporary African art is explicitly legitimated through the discursive tools of art
market itself. Both museum and gallery agents have deployed such distinctions in
exhibition materials to varying degrees in order to broaden the category of African
art to include the works of contemporary producers.
6.1. Anonymous ‘tribal disinterestedness’
Many Western notions of tribal artisanry appear steeped in (post)modernist nostalgia for a Gemeinschuj? world prior to the fragmenting forces of industrialization,
as is apparent in the ways tribal art objects have been legitimated in the market. This
has generally relied on an authentication of the age of a given work, and in its most
rigid form what we might call ‘tribal disinterestedness’ can only be guaranteed in the
pre-colonial period, prior to a culturally ‘polluting’ contact with the West. The logic
of this periodicity is that the imposition of the Western market could have spoiled
the pure intent of indigenous artisans, since their creations might then have been produced for profit or to appease the taste of outsiders - not ‘pure’ and ‘sacred’ reasons.
Vogel augments this with the following:
“The actual age of an individual work is less important than the degree of acculturation (real or perceived) of the whole tradition from which it comes. Most collectors are drawn to art that seems to reflect
44
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
a pristine Africa uncontaminated by the influence of Christianity, Islam, or Europe.” (Center for African
Art, 1988: 4)
It should be no mystery why collectors are drawn to this type of African art, since it
has been given recognition throughout its lifetime in the market. Since its entrance
as an art commodity, objects with such authentic criteria have been considered the
most artistic and desirable. In addition to temporal limitations, tribal African art has
been generally limited to ceremonial or ‘sacred’ objects (which are considered more
sublime and ‘disinterested’ than tools, for instance), showing a preference for
wooden masks that exhibit signs of use. Signs of local use support the claim to having been created for cultural purposes and accentuate the aura of sacredness that
such items are given. The following demonstrates this belief that has distinguished
tribal ‘art’ from other tribal objects, and its inherent superiority to so-called massproduced copies :
“The present exhibition is concerned solely with what is called traditional African sculpture - produced
and used almost exclusively for purposes of religious and social ceremony. Traditional sculpture should
be differentiated from the quantities of statuettes, masks and plaques of African motif turned out in
recent years by skilled carvers using semi-mass production methods. Sold to tourists all over African and
in gift shops throughout the world, these reflect essentially the taste of Europeans and Americans and
their romantic notions of Africa.” (Museum of African Art, 1973: 9)
This discourse of authenticity narrowed African art to a geographically, temporally, and aesthetically scarce supply from the beginning. As such works gained
legitimation it is easy to see how this symbolically constructed scarcity could have
played a reciprocal role in driving up market value and desirability. Yet it is only in
the 198Os, when tribal objects became truly difficult to obtain for the core market
demand, that contemporary African art was appropriated and ideologically promoted
within these elite spaces. This discursive legitimation does not threaten to overturn
the authenticity of tribal African art, but instead seeks to broaden the orthodox model
to include this new supply (see Table 3). To do this, symbolic producers, and especially gallery dealers, employed a model that emphasized an ‘outsider disinterestedness’, which had met considerable success for other forms of cutting edge art by the
1980s.
Table 3
The discursive structure for the aesthetic legitimation of African art
Anonymous tribal artisan model
Named outsider genius model
Expression of tribal identity
Not ‘polluted’ by colonial outsiders
Created for spiritual purposes
Timeless aesthetic qualities
Culturally unified pre-modem
Primitive creative expression
Expression of individual identity
Not ‘polluted’ by market insiders
Created for sublime purposes
Timely aesthetic qualities
Culturally fragmented post-modem
Naive creative expression (often)
C.M. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
45
6.2. Named ‘outsider disinterestednessJ6
By the mid-1980s, a highly inflated art market, and millionaire celebrity artists,
seemed to threaten more than ever the boundaries of artistic ‘disinterestedness’.
Paintings by Van Gogh, the epitome of the market ‘loser’, were winning record
prices at auctions. Young art world agents seized the opportunity to proffer themselves as the defenders of the embattled norm, while challenging the New York
based orthodoxy (Ardery, 1997). The palliative to the insider profit-motive, was
found in areas ‘outside’ its corruptive forces. New supplies of noncommercial, and
therefore uncorrupted, art were discovered in the works of many individual geniuses
who were not overt players in the market game - mainly in the works of psychotics,
visionaries, and criminals (Hall and Metcalf, 1994). These disturbed individuals
whose works had heretofore generally not qualified as fine art, were promoted in all
their wretchedness as an answer to commercialization, since they apparently created
for no other reason save self-expression (see Zolberg and Cherbo, 1997). The ‘outsider artist’ (the Other among us) had gained great notoriety and success by the mid198Os, and such market conditions may have likewise facilitated the legitimation of
the named African artist (the Other across the ocean). Such artists, and by extension
their work, were promoted as likewise untouched or uncorrupted by a Western market that was overtly exclusive and commercial.
In particular, the status of being an uneducated African artist was deployed as a
means of showing the credibility of one’s ‘art’, since such creators were apparently
disinterested in the market, if not the modem world in toto. This can be seen in the
following, which was taken from a catalogue for the ‘Contemporary Art of Africa’:
“. .. this is an art that cares little for the processes of legitimation, deliberately side-stepping the official
circuits, an art that prefers to ignore its possible claim as ‘contemporary’, an art often practiced by artists
without any formal schooling, many of whom have no ambition beyond satisfying a local community.”
(Magnin and Soulillou, 1996: 4)
We may ask ourselves how different this legitimating strategy really is from the
tribal model of authenticity, which also purports to be both timeless and aimed at the
use of a local community. While tacitly conforming to the criteria of disinterestedness, it shifts its locus from the tribal group to the named individual. In short, it
trades the romantic myth of the precolonial artisan for that of the individual genius.
This shift was called for explicitly by critics of tribal African art in paving the way
for contemporary African art. Kasfir expresses this when saying, “it is crucial to
relocate the notion of authenticity in the minds of those who make art and not those
on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean who collect it” (1992: 52). Shifting this locus
takes considerable work, however, and exhibitions of named African art require considerable explanatory materials in order to show that the work fits both categories of
‘African’ and ‘art’.
6 All ‘disinterestedness’ comes from someone ‘outside’ the corruptive forces of the commercial market. I use the term to distinguish this model from the more orthodox tribal approach, and to highlight its
connection to other forms of legitimating ‘exotics’ of the time.
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C.M. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
6.3. The biography of genius
While tribal objects need only be labeled with tribal affiliations, ceremonial functions, and pre-colonial dates (generally accompanied by the names of wealthy
donors), the named object has tended to be discursively legitimated by bringing the
individual artist forward. While tribal objects are authenticated by the authority of
experts who judge the ‘objective’ criteria of a work, the named object derives its
authenticity as art precisely from the signature itself and the creator that is implicated therein. It then becomes of central importance to present the named author in
a certain light with the work itself - to give biographical sketches that establish the
individual genius of an artist (see Bourdieu, 1993e: 260). To employ an ‘outsider’
model this individual must be shown to exemplify ‘disinterestedness’. While contemporary African artists are a surprisingly heterogeneous group, and include individuals with varying amounts of education, living both in Africa and abroad, the
exhibitions of named African art have shown a de facto preference for the untrained
individual still living in Africa.7 This may be due, in part, to the necessity of invoking an ‘outsider’ model, and the difficulty of accounting for the artist who may
appear ‘too Western’. In addition, as will be discussed later, this can prove more
profitable, and less problematic for galleries who purchase and promote such works.
Sokari Douglas Camp is one contemporary African artist who does not easily fit
the notion of the ‘African outsider’, and yet symbolic agents have still attempted to
‘spin’ her biography to fit such a discursive model. As a woman who studied art in
California and England, and lives in London, it isn’t exactly clear what is definitively African in her work, as well as her biography. As the presence of Western
colonials threatens the purity of tribal African art, coming to the West endangers the
legitimacy of the contemporary African artist’s work, and may be seen as a deficiency needing to be accounted for through certain narrative strategies. Such symbolic strategies may even go against the wishes of the artist. Camp’s work has
recently been exhibited at the Museum of Natural History, adjacent to the tribal
African objects. Both exhibition materials and catalogue attempted to accentuate her
as outsider, at times taking an almost apologetic and overcompensating tone:
“Today, for all her years in London, Sokari is still very much an African artist. True, she has made several forays into the portrayal of South London life. But even these forays owe much of their brilliance to
the penetrating, take-nothing-for-grant6d gaze of the unrepentant African outsider. And in search of fresh
inspiration, she returns again and again to the scenes and themes of her birthplace.” (Horton, 1995: 2,
my emphasis)
The use of video or printed interviews with the artist is a relatively straightforward strategy whereby promoters have been able to bring the individual forward as
a type of creative genius, affording them the opportunity to make a case for legitimation, as in the following:
’ According to Quarcoopome (interview): ‘You’re talking about a continent of close to a billion [people], and the number of artists number in the hundreds of thousands. Yet, only a handful - perhaps less
than five hundred African artists - have been exposed the American market’.
C.M. Rawlings / Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
41
“ILP: You are self-educated. Is that an advantage or a handicap?
A: An advantage! It gives me a spontaneity, I think that I would have spent a long time recovering if I’d
studied art formally. I don’t overplan my work, and nothing stops me - no codes, no conventions. I am
natural naturally.” (Museum for African Art, 1993a: 35)
Such devices invoke narratives, which can be seen as part of an overall discursive
strategy that critics, curators, and artists themselves have taken to accentuate those
biographical features that lend legitimacy to their work via individual stories as outsiders. This narrative strategy had proved successful to exhibitions of ‘outsider art’,
where outlandish personal stories helped imbue art objects with more credibility as
disinterested creations. These narratives, communicated through exhibition materials, can be thought of as symbolic codes whose messages are manipulated both
semantically and syntagmatically. Although a detailed analysis of this can not be
attempted here, I will simply note that the structure and elements of such narratives
appear remarkably formulaic, regardless of whether it be African or Western ‘outsider’ that is narrated. Criteria that distance the individual from the inside market is
coupled with events that demonstrate a passion for art and creativity. A moment of
artistic discovery can often become a dramatic point of departure in the artist’s biography as is evident in the following sketch:
“In the early 1980s Kingelez was hired . . . to take a job in the mask restoration department .. . His proximity to the antiquities he was restoring, I think - objects so admired by Westerners - stirred him, challenged him, to create strong modem art that at some point white people would have to recognize. Why
were they only concerned with objects that were ancient to the point of deterioration? Why couldn’t they
be interested in contemporary African art . . . He and other popular artists of Kinshasa want to spearhead
a free artistic movement opposed to the meaninglessness of academic art . . . ” (Museum for African Art,
1993a: 59)
This narrative also has genre elements, where the artist and his contemporaries are
cast to someday be welcomed back to the family of African art; although, for now,
contemporary African art is given the role of the young man with a quest to prove
himself equal to tribal art, which is impugned as being ‘academic’. This derision
underscores a discursive strategy wherein artistic training is viewed as being stifling
and potentially deleterious to artistic expression, since it places one too close to the
corrupting forces of the insider. Yet this narrative tacitly accepts that the struggle is
one of seeking inclusion into the category of art, and not the overturning of the central notions that underlie a collective belief in the sanctity and uniqueness of art.
7. Discussion
The emergence of contemporary African art can be seen as a specific example of
artistic change, generated by what DiMaggio (1987: 450) terms ‘ritual classification’
in art - a process that “responds to social-structurally generated consumer demand”.
Global shifts in social relations over the last half-century allowed for greater levels
of cross-cultural consumption. This, combined with the demand of a national audience to consume and promote an ‘imagined community’, gave rise to the genesis of
48
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
‘contemporary’ African art. The filtration of this variant into the core fine art market, however, highlights the struggle between different segments of an art world in
mediating change. This analysis has focused on the symbolic struggle between segments of the market who have garnered greater and lesser degrees of recognition,
and the relentless battle, or ‘permanent revolution’ (Bourdieu, 1993d: 187), to introduce ‘newness’ against those who have already established names in the field. Yet,
while there are remarkable similarities between dealers and curators in specific segments in the exhibition of art works, this only goes so far. Using DiMaggio’s formulation again, we can also see the negotiation between ‘commercial’ and ‘professional’ interests, which are played out mainly between dealers and curators. As
gatekeepers to scholarly recognition, curators are closer to their colleagues in academia than to many gallery owners, and many are highly suspicious of galleries in their
choices of which art they champion. Galleries thrive by making a profit, and museums in their ‘professional’ status struggle against such heteronomous demands.
Especially in the New York fine art world, commercial galleries have considerable power to promote works, and to give cues to other more peripheral market
regions. In the case of contemporary African art, there is cause for many curators to
be suspicious of whether or not works are being selected based on such ‘pure’ criteria as artistic merit. The ‘interest in disinterestedness’ seems strongest amongst cutting edge gallery owners who lack the material and symbolic resources associated
with older types of art. Many young galleries compete for the cutting edge, and an
even greater number of new artists seek to be admitted to any level of the fine art
market. While the supplies of tribal objects remain scarce, there is a nearly limitless
supply of what could be selected and framed as contemporary African art. Powerful
dealers can sometimes literally have their pick of African artists - a situation that
has, in the eyes of some, given rise to exploitation. As with the field of outsider art,
there is a tremendous disparity in power between those in the core, and those outsiders who are profitable precisely because of this social location. Galleries can buy
a large portion of an artist’s works for little money, before ever mounting a show.
Afterward, their infhtence and promotion allows them to sell at cut-throat prices, In
the highly competitive world of the cutting edge fine art world, this seems to be a
long-established strategy for young galleries to get ahead. In this way, many artists,
young in age or consecration, have ‘paid their dues’ before moving upward.
If we may take the commercial success of certain Shona sculpture ‘masters’ as
any indication, such a promotion in the fine art world may open up new dangers for
the legitimacy of contemporary African artists. A recent article in The Economist
(1989: 101) states, “the naturalism and spiritual qualities of this work make it easily
accessible to Westerners, though with the danger that sculptors will slip over into
sentimentality as they respond to the taste of buyers”. This would suggest that market success can quickly threaten the faith in artistic disinterestedness for such outsiders. In her overview of contemporary African art, Kasfii (1999: 60) also notes
that Shona sculpture has been hurt critically because, “the artists have been too obviously successful, invoking curatorial suspicions of a descent into formulaic repetition. Furthermore, the high visibility of certain patron-brokers has, in the eyes of
critics and scholars, cast the artists’ own agency into doubt”.
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
49
Much remains undecided in the valuation and recognition of contemporary
African art, and such an emerging market causes concern amongst museum curators
interested in collecting such works. As gatekeepers to long-term recognition in permanent collections, curators must be patient and very cautious in collecting new
types of art that may not have garnered sufficient scholarly legitimation. Yet, especially in museums that lack the financial resources to collect the highly prized tribal
arts of Africa, collecting contemporary works is perhaps a wise strategy in helping
put their institution on the map, or maintaining certain museum mandates. Curatorial proclivities are, therefore, rather different than those of dealers in their selection
and framing of contemporary works.
Museum curators seem most interested in works that can be scrutinized from a
number of perspectives - historical, social, and individual - and serve as long-term
investments. They are less likely than cutting edge galleries to capitalize on aesthetic
trends and fashions. While galleries have tended to favor contemporary African art
that more closely fits the salient aesthetic notions of the time, supplies of which
appear readily obtainable, museums seem to be looking for more nuanced works that
could be discussed in a number of exhibitions. In explaining why he hopes to collect
the works of a few ‘pioneers’ of contemporary African art, Quarcoopome (interview)
captures this point when saying,
“Those pioneers happen to come from specific colleges of art. Therefore, those individuals will always
have a place in the canon; their works will always have a place in the canon. Their students, and their
students’ students are still working. And so it makes it easier for one to do a stylistic analysis, trying to
trace what kind of connections exist between recent works by second or third generation artists from the
same institution. There are a whole lot of possibilities.”
Such works fit into the overall educational mission of the museum, and also allow
for long-term exhibition potential, lending themselves to the exegesis of a multiple
themes. Moreover, as part of established and ongoing schools, such works seem a
wise investment in an emerging field. As members of the ‘older’ generation, such
works have the greatest potential for longevity. They are the least open to criticism
that questions the ‘disinterestedness’ of such works, since they pre-date the market
success of some forms of contemporary African art, and their supplies are limited,
since many of the artists have either retired or died.
An ‘encyclopedic’ institution like the Met has financial resources to acquire
highly prized examples of tribal or traditional African art. In the symbolic economy of recognition that comprises the fine art world, it is the duty of symbolic producers within such an institution to retain this position of established value, and
curators must often defend their choices before the board of trustees. Since they
compete with only a select and international group of highly recognized museums,
there is little interest in expanding inclusivity except in conservative ways. Curators in this most orthodox position appear well informed of the pressure to expand
the genre of African art to include contemporary artists working in ‘Western
media’; but with many regions of Africa as yet underrepresented in their collections, such institutions compete to become as ‘encyclopedic’ as possible in the
already established pre-colonial variants. Alisa LaGamma, African art curator at
50
the Met’s Rockefeller
view) :
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
wing, expresses this clearly in the following (from the inter-
“We’ve made a lot of effort to acquire important things that would even out our collections, so that we
are eventually really able to give our visitors a panoramic vista of some of the highpoints of artistic
achievement in various parts of the continent contemporaneously. What was happening in Mali in the
fiieenth century and what was happening in Ethiopia similarly - from one end of the continent to the
other . . . We have so much catching up to do. We would never rule out including important contemporary work, but our primary mandate is to have a richer cross-cultural representation of Africa’s historic
artistic legacy. ”
With such a mandate, LaGamma has been able to creatively address in exhibitions
some of the issues brought up by the advocates of contemporary African art (see
Kimmehnan, 1998). In ‘Masterhand’, the works of two African sculptors, previously
identified solely through their tribal affiliations, were more or less ‘rescued’ from
anonymity. Their individual stylistic traits as artists with unique visions that bucked
tradition, were scrutinized. While it is true that colonial collectors rarely took note of
African carvers by name even when this was possible, framing this as a kind of
‘oversight’ (see Cotter, 1998: 38) that could often be rectified given proper scholarship, seems a very tempered innovation. It does show agreement with the advocates
of named African art, however, in admitting to the power of the ‘colonial gaze’ in
constructing tribal African art, yet preserves the artistic grounds on which such
works are valued. Both positions assert artistic production to be within the province
of an individual creative force, regardless of ethnic identity, where one must work
within certain traditions.
The ultimate recognition for a contemporary artist remains this: to be lauded as an
individual innovator, beyond ethnic or geographic monikers. After all, in the ‘encyclopedia’ of fine art, Picasso and Dali are not referred to as modem ‘Spanish’ artists.
One could doubtless identify numerous traits in their works that indicate their ethnicity, but it is their creativity as individuals that marks them in the history of art. In
short, the rather culturally anomalous myth of the individual genius is alive and well
in the fine art world (see Becker, 1982: 14-15). The Met, for example, contains a
separate wing devoted to modem art, wherein works are attributed to individual creators, not ethnic groups. According to LaGamma, ‘a lot of the weight of judging and
selecting more recent media and forms of expression falls under the aegis of the
modem art department’, and ‘that is the course in which [contemporary African
art’s] inclusion would take place’. It comes as no surprise that many younger contemporary African artists, like other ethnically identified artists (see Mullin, 1995),
especially those residing in the West, would rather not be overly identified with their
ethnic origins. While collective marks of ‘outsidemess’ may have been particularly
salient in the mid-1980s in getting in the door of the fine art market, it seems that
reaching the highest recognition can only come through the full recognition of individual genius.
C.M. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
51
8. Conclusion
In reconstructing a recent turning point in the symbolic production of African art,
this paper has sought to highlight the struggles for recognition that structure the fine
art world, and whose outcomes delimit the boundaries of what constitutes fine art in
general, and a specific genre in particular. During such periods, artistic struggles
become highly visible as the structural distribution of resources are exposed through
the symbolic strategies of art world agents. In seeking to make names for themselves, symbolic producers make names for other entities, and are accorded opportunities for ‘position-taking’ in relation to their position within the field. Generated
and aggravated by symbolic and material crises in resources, young symbolic producers carve out new supplies of art through an expedient discourse that calls for ‘a
return to sources’ (Bourdieu, 1993d: 183), which impugns the market as overly commercial and orthodox, while championing ‘pure’ artistic disinterestedness - a strategy that may be particularly efficacious when the market is strong. Such innovation
is tempered by many factors, including not only the economic interests of gatekeepers, but also the universe of potential ‘position-takings’ available at a given time of
crisis. In taking a ‘cutting edge’ position, available resources determine the selection
and framing of new works entering the market. Some new variants, emerging from
social-structural demand, tend to build constituencies on the periphery of the fine art
market, where their very ‘outsidemess’ may allow for young symbolic producers to
eventually filter such works into the fine art market, weeding out other potential
‘new recruits’. It is precisely this constant striving for recognition that recreates the
structure of the fine art world itself.
The case of contemporary African art shows the durability of such processes in
the face of ever more global forms of consumption. This paper lends further detail to
studies that shed light on the overlapping of Western market forces with struggles
for identity in a global perspective. Art forms such as the novel, or fine art sculpture
and painting, which were exported to distant regions, and transformed in that
process, are now being re-absorbed into Western markets with growing frequency.
As Griswold found with contemporary Nigerian novelists (1993), and Myers has
demonstrated with Aboriginal Australian artists (1995), the accordance of high prestige to certain global manifestations of Western cultural forms poses difficult questions for the researcher. How much do these events indicate a significant shift, versus a subtle reproduction, in Western conceptions of distant regions? How much do
Western market processes shape the material production of these ‘outside’ regions,
and how significant are Western gatekeepers in framing such works for the public?
This paper has sought to address such questions. It suggests that such processes may
be more rooted in the logic of Western fields of cultural production, and the tendency of art world agents to reproduce systems of meaning, than the ways artistic
practices have actually been syncretized with diverse cultural forms. Only through
more detailed accounts of such processes across genres and cultural fields can we
begin to answer such questions in a more comprehensive manner.
52
CM. Rawlings I Poetics 29 (2001) 25-54
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Craig Rawlings is currently a Doctoral Student at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the
Department of Sociology. His research interests concern the discursive (re)production of symbolic
boundaries and hierarchies in organizational fields. He received his M.A. in Sociology from Rutgers
University, and B.A. in International Studies from the University of Oregon.