Contemporary African art is commonly understood to be art made by artists in Africa and the African diaspora in the post-independence era. However, there are about as many understandings of contemporary African art as there are curators, scholars and artists working in that field. All three terms of this "wide-reaching non-category [sic]"Firstenberg, Lauri (2003). "Negotiating the Taxonomy of Contemporary African Art – Production, Exhibition, Commodification", in Farrell, L. A., V. Byvanck (eds), Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora. New York: Museum for African Art, p. 40. are problematic in themselves: What exactly is "contemporary", what makes art "African", and when are we talking about art and not any other kind of creative expression?
The research of Lindén Henrik analyzed reviews of contemporary African art from 1990 to 2014 and sought to uncover the underlying discourses of power and ideology. He points out the art critic is a component of a larger system that creates and re-creates knowledge about Africa and African culture. Western scholars and curators have made numerous attempts at defining contemporary African art since the 1990s and early 2000s and proposed a range of categories and genres. They triggered heated debates and controversies, especially on the foundations of postcolonial critique. Recent trends indicate a far more relaxed engagement with definitions and identity ascriptions. The global presence of African scholars and contemporary artists in the full discourse of global production has become a widely acknowledged and beyond the pressure of self-justification.
Scope Although African art has always been contemporary to its producers, the term "contemporary African art" implies a particular kind of art that has conquered, or, as some would say, has been absorbed by the international art world and art market since the 1980s. It is in that decade when Europe and the United States became aware of art made in Africa by individual artists, thus breaking with the colonial tradition of assuming collective "ethnic" origins of so-called "tribal art" as found in most ethnographic collections.Firstenberg (2003). "Negotiating the Taxonomy of Contemporary African Art", in Farrell and Byvanck (eds), Looking Both Ways, pp. 37–41. The exhibition Magiciens de la terre by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989 is widely considered (but also challenged as) a key exhibition in this very recent history of international reception of African and other non-western art. However, this reception, too, has its roots in an exotic and mystifying view on African culture from a dominant western position, as Rasheed Araeen argued in his response to Magiciens de la terre.Araeen, Rasheed (1989). "Our Bauhaus Others' Mudhouse", Third Text no. 6, pp. 3–16.See also Firstenberg, Lauri (2003). "Negotiating the Taxonomy of Contemporary African Art – Production, Exhibition, Commodification", in Farrell, L. A., Byvanck, V. (eds), Looking both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora. New York: Museum for African Art, pp. 37–41.
Therefore, although this exhibition and many that followed had a strong influence in creating a kind of a common understanding of what constitutes contemporary African art, it is true that it has been and still is subject to discussions and controversies. Almost every exhibition following Magiciens de la terre offered a taxonomy or system of categorization that helped to reflect the very notion of contemporary African art, but they failed to recognize the postcolonial need of giving up the Eurocentric epistemology.Mosquera, Gerardo (1995). "Das Marco-Polo-Syndrom", in Hermanns, U. (ed.), Havanna. Sao Paulo. Junge Kunst aus Lateinamerika. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, p. 34–39.Nzegwu, Nkiru (1998). "Introduction: Contemporary African Art and Exclusionary Politics", Issues in Contemporary African Art. Binghamton, NY: International Society for the Study of Africa ISSA, pp. 1–18.
Contemporary African art is believed to feature particularities typical to African aesthetics, while at the same time it shares properties with other international contemporary arts. Therefore, it is both, shaped by and feeding into the globalizing art worlds and art markets, like any other contemporary art. At the same time, there are a lot of contemporary art practices and forms in African regions and cities that are almost exclusively locally known. While meeting all three requirements of being contemporary, art, and African, they fail to fit into a certain type of art production that has been spreading on the international art market since at least the 1980s.
Exhibitions variously showed work by artists based in Africa; by artists using aesthetics typical to African traditions; by African artists living in the West but including aesthetics and topics related to their "roots"; traditional artworks related to customary practices such as rituals; and urban African art that reflects the modern experience of cultural pluralism and hybridity. Modernity as a colonial and postcolonial experience appears as an intrinsic and significant attribute in most conceptions of contemporary African art. Scholars and curators therefore have proposed a wide range of taxonomies that tried firstly to define what is African about this art, and secondly, the range of genres it covers. Diverse attempts to define particular genres of contemporary African art, however, mirrored the fascination of art scholars and curators for the appropriation of cultural elements from assumed "Western" into "African" modes of expression and traditions.
Attempts to define genres of contemporary African art One example is Marshall W. Mount,Mount, Marshall W. (1973). African Art: The Years since 1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. who proposed four categories: first, "survivals of traditional styles", which show continuities in traditional working material and methods such as bronze casting or wood carving; secondly, art inspired by Christian missions; thirdly, souvenir art in the sense of tourist or "airport art", such as by the likes of artworks by South African visual artist Ezequiel Mabote, as defined later by Jules-Rossette;Jules-Rosette, Bennetta (1984). The Messages of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective. Boston: Springer. and finally, an emerging art requiring "techniques that were unknown or rare in traditional African art".Marshall W. Mount (1973) quoted in: Mudimbe, Valentin Y. (1991). "'Reprendre': Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Arts", in Vogel, S. (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. Munich: Prestel, p. 279. Valentin Y. Mudimbe, in turn, proposes to think of three currents, rather than categories, namely a "tradition-inspired" one, a "modernist" trend, and "a popular art",Mudimbe, Valentin Y. (1991). "'Reprendre': Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Arts", in Vogel, S. (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. Munich: Prestel, p. 280. whereby Mount's categories would be situated somewhere "between the tradition-inspired and the modernist trend". Similar to other categorizations, this proposal considers the education of the artists as well as the envisaged clientele/patrons as important factors for the respective "currents". In the exhibition catalogue of Africa Explores (1991), curator Susan Vogel distinguished between "traditional art", "new functional art", "urban art", "international art", and "extinct art".Vogel, Susan, ed. (1991). Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. Munich: Prestel. Rejecting these categories, collector André Magnin proposed grouping similar works into sections named "territory", "frontier" and "world" in his survey book Contemporary African Art, thus placing them into "imaginary maps".Magnin, André, and Jacques Soulillou, eds (1996). Contemporary Art of Africa. London: Thames & Hudson. However, this approach was also criticized by Dele Jegede, with convincing arguments against its ethnocentric perspective.Jegede, Dele (1998). "On Scholars and Magicians: A Review of 'Contemporary Art of Africa'", in Nzegwu, N. (ed.), Issues in Contemporary African Art. Binghamton: International Society for the Study of Africa ISSA, pp. 187–195. Among other things, Jegede pointed to the hubris of attempts to talk about art of a whole continent, but also to the common reflex to exclude Northern Africa from such considerations and to follow a global, rather than "particularistic focus on the study of the art of the continent" that would provide more specific and deeper bodies of knowledge. In the 1990 exhibition Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, the Studio Museum in Harlem tried to take the perspective of the presented artists and distinguished between African artists who refuse outside influences; African artists who adopt modes of Western art; and African artists who fuse both strategies.Studio Museum, ed. (1990): Contemporary African Artists. Changing Tradition. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem.
Common to all these categorizations is their reliance on dichotomies between art and craft, Europe and Africa, urban and rural, and traditional and contemporary. These dichotomies tend to consider mutual influences in African and European art as an exception, rather than the norm. Moreover, they fail to think of African art independent from Europe as its counterpart or "influence", resulting in a frequent reproach of African artists "copycatting" or "mimicking" European achievements of modernism.Oguibe, Olu (1999). "Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art", in Oguibe, O., and O. Enwezor (eds), Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 16–29.Enwezor, Okwui, and Chika Okeke-Agulu (2009). Contemporary African Art since 1980. Bologna: Damiani, p. 21.Kasfir, Sidney L. (1999). Contemporary African Art. London/New York: Thames & Hudson. Such Eurocentric attitudes have been revealingly criticized by theorists such as Olu Oguibe, Rasheed Araeen, Nkiru Nzegwu, Okwui Enwezor or Salah M. Hassan.Hassan, Salah (1999). "The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expressions of the Self and Cross-cultural Aesthetics", in Oguibe, O., and O. Enwezor (eds), Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 214–235. This problem is not easy to solve, and in some cases, it is tackled by simply subverting any attempt at categorization.
The exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, directed by Clémentine Deliss and curated by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Salah M. Hassan, David Koloane, Wanjiku Nyachae and El Hadji Sy (London, 1995) is a case in point.Deliss, Clémentine, ed. (1995). Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa. Paris/New York: Flammarion. Rather than grafting binary taxonomies, the show narrated seven modern art histories in different parts of Africa by invited curators and artists who were familiar with these recent histories and their respective art scenes. The exhibition proved to offer a highly complex, historically informed and well-researched presentation.