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Houston Chronicle: Zest February 4, 2005 www.chron.com
Out Of Africa BY PATRICIA C. JOHNSON
The phrase "African art" conjures images of carved masks, stoic gods and ceremonial artifacts. But the wealth of work in seven exhibitions of contemporary art from Africa, hosted simultaneously by five Houston museums, dashes assumptions to reveal a multidimensional reality. The art is idiosyncratic and universal at the same time, drawing on traditional African culture and adopting new expressions from the larger world. The hub is the collection of Swiss businessman Jean Pigozzi, who has collected contemporary African art since 1989. African Art Now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is a stunning selection from his holdings of about 6,000 works. More than 30 photographers, painters, sculptors and installation artists from 14 sub-Saharan nations -- Mali to South Africa, the Ivory Coast to Madagascar -- are represented, as is work in styles from folk to conceptual. The Contemporary Arts Museum, Menil Collection, Blaffer Gallery and the art museum of Texas Southern University cast spotlights on four of those artists. Bracketing the African contemporaries are historical works at the Menil and art by American conceptual artists of African descent at the CAM. Deep Wells and Reflecting Pools A logical departure for this visual odyssey is Deep Wells and Reflecting Pools. Curated by Houston artist David McGee, it highlights 25 objects from the Menil's collection Image of the Black in Western Art. Paintings, works on paper, sculptures, texts and memorabilia reflect history and changing attitudes. Iron slave shackles, a bill of sale for a slave and a painting by French artist Marcel Antoine Verdier speak of the worst. Verdier's Beating at Four Stakes in the Colonies from 1849 depicts a naked black man tied face down on the ground being whipped by another black man while watchers, both black and white, stand by. The Stranger, a small oil on canvas circa 1845 by another French artist, J. Duprys, illustrates complicated attitudes toward blacks who were not slaves. Curiosity and distrust are apparent in this vignette showing a dignified black man who shares a high-backed bench with a white father and young daughter, their body language revealing apprehension. But curiosity also shows in their steadfast if puzzled gazes, enhanced by the open staring of two little boys perched over the bench back. Balancing the inhumanity are works like Sir Joshua Reynolds' elegant man portrayed in A Young Black from 1770. And there is the sensitively modeled terra-cotta bust by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux of a bound young woman whose anguished expression asks, like the title, Why to Be Born a Slave?
La Bouche du Roi/Mouth of the King The query still resonates in the global economy of the 21st century, given voice in La Bouche du Roi/Mouth of the King. This dramatic installation by Benin's Romuald Hazoumé is at the Menil. The artist outlined a 10-foot-long slave ship on the floor and filled it with more than 300 masks made from sliced plastic petrol containers. Handles and spouts form eerily human masks, packed tightly in stiff rows from stern to bow. Two other masks sit at the helm -- a yellow one representing a colonial regent, a black one the king of Benin. A rifle lies behind them with a scale suspended from its stock. Groupings of liquor bottles, tobacco leaves and bowls filled with cowrie shells and beads are interspersed throughout -- the currency that bought the slaves. "The words of a king can mean death," Hazoumé says. African kings were complicit in the slave trade, and, he adds, the words of contemporary "kings" known by other names -- president, chancellor, prime minister -- still profoundly affect our lives. Two audio tracks play simultaneously. One recites a litany of slave names; the other is lamentations asking universal questions of fate and identity. "We didn't know where we were going, but knew where we came from," Hazoumé says. "Now we don't know where we're going, and forgot where we came from." The Pigozzi Collection A modern story of economic slavery is told through Hazoumé's gas cans. A video (at the Menil) shows young men transporting dozens of full 25- and 50-liter containers tied onto their motorcycles, disregarding the possibility of a fiery death. Their dangerous journey is dramatically illustrated in the artist's life-size assemblage Roulette Beninoise (Benin Roulette) at the MFAH. It's one of more than 200 works from the Pigozzi collection. Though curator André Magnin has arranged more than 50 exhibits for venues from Mexico to Holland since 1991, this is the first time works from the collection have been shown in the United States. Magnin notes that most of the artists represented continue to work in their home countries, "with the conviction that culture can and must play an important role in the future of Africa." With materials that include pencil, wood and stuff from junk piles, the artists describe and interpret their heritage and culture. There is sheer beauty in traditional hairstyles for women, photographed in crisp black and white by J.D. 'Ojeikere of Lagos, Nigeria, whose images are also highlighted in the Blaffer Gallery. Seydou Keita's elegant studio photographs are an invaluable record of Mali's Bamako society. Efiambalo from Madagascar reinvents the aloalo, or funerary stele, topping fragile-looking carved and painted posts with contemporary details, such as an airplane. A giant running shoe and a green onion carved in wood by Ghanaian Samuel Kwei straddle the worlds of Pop art and folk art with grace and wit. Gedewon Makonnen, a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, calls his delicate drawings "talismans of research and study." Spidery lines in colored ink and pencil cover his surfaces in an intricate, compelling web of designs. Abu Bakarr Mansaray was 28 when he escaped the brutal conditions of his native Sierra Leone to settle in the Netherlands. He carried dark memories with him. His large-scale drawings feature mechanical contraptions resembling computer boards, detonators and telephones, handled by devil-like figures. Barthélémy Toguo from Cameroon is represented by a series of 20 watercolors titled Baptism that reveals him as a master of the demanding technique. Clouds of liquid color become more dense and tightly formed to describe male and female figures, with an occasional object, such as a dish, in Surrealist juxtaposition.
Tanzanian carver and painter George Lilanga delights with his spirited creatures. Some are animals; others are humanoids with three toes, large rabbit ears, potbellies and, in the painting Tongues Competition, long pointy tongues that touch their noses. Benin mask-maker Calixte Dakpogan accumulates raw materials from the garbage can and street and assembles them into dramatic works. He has turned rusty padlocks and spark plugs into teeth, pocket calculators into the eyes of a mask and a 45-rpm vinyl record into the staring eye of a fierce bird. Frederic Bouabré, born in 1923 in the Cote d'Ivoire, has attempted nothing less than an encyclopedia of world knowledge. Like visionary artists everywhere, his dedication began with a vision in 1948, when "the heavens opened up before my eyes and I became Chaik Nadro -- He Who Does Not Forget." He invented a pictographic alphabet with which to preserve and transmit the knowledge of the Bété people, and in the 1970s he began recording it in a series of drawings. About 150 are on view here, each about the size of a postcard. The simply drawn images in color pencil describe all manner of things, from body scarification to mythic figures.
Chéri Samba at TSU J'aime Chéri Samba is considered the father of popular painting in his native country. Based in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, he is acclaimed for paintings that portray people and political issues in a style bridging billboard illustration and classic narrative. His emblematic self-portrait, I Love Color, and the three panels of What Future for Our Art? -- where he stands and sits side by side with Picasso as equals -- leave no doubt of his awareness as an artist. "My painting is concerned with people's lives," he has often stated, rather than myths and beliefs. The work in his solo show at TSU reveals the full range of those concerns: With flat paint, bright colors and understated humor, he describes demonstrations and urban vignettes, incorporating text to address politics, history and his own role as figurehead. Bodys Isek Kingelez With cardboard and paint, Bodys Isek Kingelez created a world of fanciful architecture that would turn Frank Gehry green with envy. There's nary a parallelogram or gray color to be seen in his plan for Kinshasa, in which arches, triangles and sunbursts define multiple structures. The UN building is shaped like a keyhole with a swollen center, one side smooth, the other ribbed, and a palette of yellow, red, cobalt, the initials UN high and hopeful at the top. Kingelez's meticulous, marvelous constructions are highlighted as well in his solo show in CAM's lower gallery.
Double Consciousness Upstairs at the CAM, the pace changes with Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970. The focus is on 30 African-American artists, most of whom are internationally known. Some address slavery and segregation, while others deal with identity. As a whole, the language is international and postmodern, sifted through an ethnic sensibility. Robert Pruitt's Low Rider Art is a takeoff on Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel. Lyle Ashton Harris takes his cues from Cindy Sherman's work in a series of large-format Polaroid self-portraits impersonating Billie Holiday. The dilemma of identity and race is faced directly by Adrian Piper in Cornered. She is of mixed heritage, a fact established by her father's birth certificates -- one identifying him as white, the other as octoroon (one-eighth black). But the questions she poses go beyond the personal. In today's world, who is 100 percent anything? "No one is unquestionably white. No one," she says, echoing W.E.B. DuBois' 1903 assertion, which gives the exhibition its title: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." The majority of the works are symbolic, and a few are poignant in their poetry. Whispering Lights, an installation by Nari Ward, is an elegant sweep of glass bottles that rise on wires from a wood bench to the ceiling. Each contains an object -- plastic flowers, strips of metal and rope -- rescued from Cuban beaches. Sanford Biggers' Tunic is a down parka covered entirely by bird feathers. It resonates with the power of nature and myth, the magic that historically has bound clans and communities together from Alaska to Cape Town. |
