Elizabeth Harney

In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995

In Senghor’s Shadow is a unique study of modern art in postindependence Senegal. Elizabeth Harney examines the art that flourished during the administration of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegal’s first president, and in the decades since he stepped down in 1980. As a major philosopher and poet of Negritude, Senghor envisioned an active and revolutionary role for modern artists, and he created a well-funded system for nurturing their work. In questioning the canon of art produced under his aegis—known as the Ecole de Dakar—Harney reconsiders Senghor’s Negritude philosophy, his desire to express Senegal’s postcolonial national identity through art, and the system of art schools and exhibits he developed. She expands scholarship on global modernisms by highlighting the distinctive cultural history that shaped Senegalese modernism and the complex and often contradictory choices made by its early artists. Heavily illustrated with nearly one hundred images, including some in color, In Senghor’s Shadow surveys the work of a range of Senegalese artists, including painters, muralists, sculptors, and performance-based groups—from those who worked at the height of Senghor’s patronage system to those who graduated from art school in the early 1990s. Harney reveals how, in the 1970s, avant-gardists contested Negritude beliefs by breaking out of established artistic forms. During the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Moustapha Dime, Germaine Anta Gaye, and Kan-Si engaged with avant-garde methods and local artistic forms to challenge both Senghor’s legacy and the broader art world’s understandings of cultural syncretism. Ultimately, Harney’s work illuminates the production and reception of modern Senegalese art within the global arena.

Art from the Archive

Mbembe (2010) have struggled to rethink African subjectivity and define a register that does not reduce the continent to eternal suffering or victimhood. The current interest in the archive is driven by a strong desire to examine the temporal and spatial mechanisms that have delivered us to a “posthistorical” moment of contemporaneity. In this context, contemporary artists have started to revisit the colonial archives (Demos 2013). Such returns are not gratuitous, but rather display serious engagements with the colonial past, present the possibility to inter vene in that history, and sate the desire to imagine an alternative future. Returns to the archive enable artists to tack backwards and forwards in time and to address perceived problems in the present. In this special issue, articles examine some of these questions in the work of individual African artists as they intervene in archival

Postcolonial Agitations: Avant-Gardism in Dakar and London

This article questions the applicability of received theories of the avant-garde to artistic practices in postcolonial Africa. In particular, it looks at the politics of exhibition and reception of two vanguard groupings operating in Senegal, one in the 1970s, another in the present day, that have been presented within major forums celebrating global art in the neoliberal era. As complex mixes of indigenous and global forms and ideas, these practices address multilayered histories of interaction and imbrication of cultures and challenge pat assumptions of the traditional avant-garde’s parameters.

Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly by Sally Price. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007; 224 pages, 10 halftones, 1 map;

reviewed by Elizabeth Harney For those following the historic debates on museum representation, colonial collecting, and cultural patrimony surrounding the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly, the narrative in Sally Price’s new ethnography Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly comes less as a surprise than as a sobering confirmation of the machinations involved in the museum’s birth and the opportunities missed with its eventual form. The upheavals within the French museum world caused by the bureaucratic and political maneuvers that accompanied Jacques Chirac’s legacy project received frequent commentary within the Parisian press. To be sure the very public airing of grievances around the project, the political and personal repercussions it had, and the arcane, nepotistic practices of the French state that its creation highlighted have attracted the attention of a number of other scholars. Yet most accounts have seemed unable to pursue arguments beyond the muchcited public records of discord, either because the researchers have had limited access to the internal workings of these institutions or because they have given little value and time to more informal or unconventional sources. The two best-known books in French on the subject come from Bernard DuPaigne and Benoît de l’Estoile. In his Le Scandale des arts premiers: la veritable histoire du musée du quai Branly (2006), DuPaigne, the former director of the Musée de l’Homme Laboratoire d’ethnologie, writes, in a wounded but dry tone, of the reshuffling and shifting of collections and resources from his museum and that of the Musée des arts d’Afrique et d’ Océanie at the Porte Dorée, documenting perceived and real injustices and injuries. In Le goût des autres: de l’exposition coloniale aux arts premiers (2007) de l’Estoile covers many of the same topics as Price, but he is more interested in addressing a broader history of the imbrication of French universalist principles, primitivism, and exhibition practices, taking the 1931 Colonial Exposition and the creation of the Musée du quai Branly as the bookends of his study. A recent special issue of Le Débat (2007) gives ready access to the array of opinions amongst French and international scholars concerning the institution and its cultural and political placement within contemporary France. Finally, broader studies of the institutionalization of power and culture and the contours of the national art world can be found in the work of scholars such as Sarah Deleporte (who organized the conference “La France, Ses Musées, son Identité / French Museums and Identity” at the University of Chicago Center in Paris, June 1–2, 2006), Nélia Dias (2001), and Daniel Sherman (2008). While Price’s book engages in similar discussions, with its focus upon the complicated and compromised genesis of this museum project and the heated debates that accompanied the reconfiguration of the museum world in Paris, it is unique amongst all of them as an engaging ethnographic study. Price’s account clearly benefits from her acceptance and enjoyment of the “improvisational process of ethnographic fieldwork as it happens in real time” (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). Her fast-moving, accessible prose makes palpable the pleasures and frustrations inherent in her research practice while emphasizing the humanity of her subjects. As the author notes in the “Back Matter” of her book,

47.50 cloth,

Recent readings of El Anatsuis metal wall hangings celebrate their sheer beauty and grandiosity, marveling at their clever quotations of modernist tropes. However, these readings tend to miss the spiritual drama and melancholy informing his transformation processes; they overlook the links between quieter, consistent practices of nomadism, the insistence of localism in his choices, and the attention to detail and aesthetic pleasure wrought from human labor and the passing of time. This article examines the propitious union of conceptual and aesthetic choices in Anatsuis oeuvre and their resonance with current contemporary practice in the globalizing West. The interplay of beauty, nomadism, and participatory aesthetics enhances the appeal of Anatsuis new works, and the intense linkages they establish between time, space, viewer, and material prompt us to redefine the meaning and relevance of beauty to art.

19.00 paper.

“Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists,” organized by Harn Museum of Art Director Rebecca Martin Nagy and North Carolina Central University Professor Achamyeleh Debela, was an important archiving project, providing a much-needed historical overview of the modern visual arts scene in Addis Ababa. Moreover, as a sweeping survey of three generations of artists’ works, it brought some under-exposed and emerging talents to the attention of American audiences. The exhibition presented a clear, chronological narrative, beginning with the works of modernist pioneers whose early careers were supported by Haile Selassie’s imperial patronage system and by formal training at European art academies. Art and education served as key components in the emperor’s modernization plans. Under his aegis, a Fine Arts academy was established in 1957/58 and, in the years that immediately followed, a local modernism flourished across the arts, nourished in part by a heady sense of cosmopolitanism and by the growing centrality of Addis Ababa in the affairs of postcolonial Africa, as headquarters to the Organization of African Unity. This moment of cultural fluorescence was known locally as “Addis Spring.” After presenting these early works, the exhibition narrative charted the art historical consequences of the overthrow of the Selassie monarchy by socialist revolutionaries and the establishment of the Derg government in 1974 (the term derg means “Committee” in Amharic). The Derg regime was responsible for profound political and social turmoil and regarded the artistic sector as a propaganda tool to be controlled and managed by the state. Finally, in the last parts of the exhibition, the curators introduced works by mid-career and younger practitioners at work in the hopeful days of post-Derg Ethiopia (post-1987) and in pursuit of a bewildering array of aesthetic choices and agendas. Any exhibition dealing with the works of so many artists spanning three generations would be a hefty affair. However, this one had to accommodate not only the demands and limitations of a survey format, but also the weight of an extremely tumultuous and painful modern history. The significance of this larger story for an American audience is crucial to keep in mind. Ethiopia has occupied a unique position within the Diasporic collective psyche and imagination, as a strong African nation with a powerful black monarch, untouched (or at least only briefly touched, during the Italian occupation in the 1930s) by colonialism and with an impressive history of Christianity. Its role as an Afrocentrist, black-nationalist, postcolonial beacon, its widespread diasporic presence, and its misfortunes within the broader geopolitical histories of the last century give its story a poignancy that resonates widely. The wounds and scars of revolution in Ethiopia were still palpable within the telling of this art history and, as such, there seemed to be, at its heart, nostalgia for a modernism lost or cut violently short by the coming of the Derg and, equally, a need for healing. The agenda here was more than the telling of an “untold” art history (though that was one consequence of its curatorial choices) but rather the recognition and commemoration of a kind of lost generation. Some artists who had trained before the change in regime fled for a life in permanent exile, while others stayed to work in the art schools, to train future generations within Social Realist conventions, and to produce dutifully, if grudgingly, the posters and adverts for their state patrons. Still others stopped practicing altogether, crippled by censorship or silenced permanently by their political foes. There have been other exhibitions that have given international audiences a glimpse of the work produced in Ethiopia and its multiple diasporas during the modern and contemporary periods, notably “The Hidden Reality: Three Contemporary Ethiopian Artists: Zerihun Yetmgeta, Girmay Hiwet, Worku Goshu” (1989), curated by Elisabeth Biasio; “Ethiopia: Traditions and Creativity” (1994), organized by Ray Silverman and Neal Sobania; “Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Khartoum and Addis Connections)” (1995), curated by Salah Hassan in conjunction with Clementine Deliss; and my own exhibition, “Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora” (2003). However, none of these curatorial forays have attempted such a broad survey of the history or, indeed, have focused primarily on the developments in the local scene. There are some compelling, even riveting, works in this exhibition. The three large pieces by Skunder Boghossian which appear early in the exhibition (he left Ethiopia in 1970 to live in exile until his death in 2003) threaten to steal the show. Rebecca Harn had the prescience to collect Night Flight of Dread and Delight (1964), an oil on canvas and collage, while at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and it anchored this early segment of the exhibition along with The End of the Beginning (1972), a moody, agitated oil, and Time Cycle III (1981), a whimsical, earthy mixedmedia work which emerged out of the artist’s wide travel experiences in various parts of the continent. The works of Afewerk Tekle and Gebre Kristos Desta are typically considered together with Skunder Boghossian’s as the most significant from this period. However, while his contributions were mentioned in the lengthy (l foreground): Tesfahun Kibru, Surface and Skin Matters (both 2004), and (r foreground) Elias Sime, Untitled (both 2002)