Perspectives

‘TheCall’WithinandBeyond Africa

m a r i o n a r n o l d

Ghana celebrated 50 years of inde-pendence in 2007. The first ofBritain’s African colonies to take

control of its destiny, Ghana had adeveloping economy and plentiful naturalresources, including the mineral that hadgiven the country its colonial name, theGold Coast. The independent state alsohad an invaluable asset in its people, a richand resourceful mixture of black ethnicgroups; in 1957, under Prime MinisterKwame Nkrumah, the people finally hadtheir political freedom and opportunitiesto develop economically and culturally.

Any discussion of Ghanaian visualculture raises the issue of how one defines‘art’. Africa possesses a rich visual heri-tage which evolved in a manner almostdiametrically opposite to that followed inthe West. From the Renaissance onwards,Western art became increasingly specia-list, theoretical and fascinated with visualidentity and intellectual resonance. Afri-

can art, on the other hand, saw nodivisions between the aesthetic and func-tional. It was directly related to communityneeds, and the visual arts, music anddance were integrated into spiritual ri-tuals. The absence of ‘pure’ painting andsculpture caused Western colonialists toassume that Africans produced ‘craft’ andanthropological curiosities, while the ab-sence of written language to argue the casefor African art promoted the imposition offoreign value judgements.

As a result of colonisation much ofAfrica’s material culture was collected orlooted and relocated in Europe. Paradoxi-cally, the safe environment offered byprofessional Western museums served topreserve vulnerable objects that were neverdesigned to resist the ravages of time,weather and insects in their natural envir-onment. Museums (not art galleries)offered early twentieth-century artists inthe West opportunities to study and

respond to a visual language and formalmanipulation of concepts different to thoseof the established Western canon. Search-ing for ways of renewing their expressivevocabulary, the Cubists, Fauves and Ger-man Expressionists responded enthusias-tically to African sculptural artefacts andthe evidence they bore of conceptualthinking transmitted through stylisation.Picasso, Derain, Matisse and others felt thepower of form itself to convey meaning.Intentionally seeking to change art in theirtime, they were influenced by a multitudeof sources from a range of cultures andperiods. Influential amongst them was theart of West and Central Africa.The dialoguebetween Western and African artists hasbeen continuous; artists are eclectic andthey take what they can use and render it fitfor their own purposes. Western artistsrecognised the visual presence of Africanart; African artists, once they were exposed

ChasingHerrings by NiiTMillsr the artist.

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to acculturation and Western forms ofrepresentation, recognised the merits ofdescriptive pictorial naturalism.

Ghana is rightly renowned for its‘craft’, particularly wood carvings and thekente cloth produced by the Ewe and theAshanti of the Akan group. In the latetwentieth-century, however, when theemergence of postmodernist theory in-fused Western theory with non-prescrip-tive definitions of art, the cross-overbetween the arts, long entrenched withinAfrican visual culture, received renewedattention, as did the marriage of form andcontent in artefacts. So, after 50 years ofindependence, how does one respond toGhanaian art in a globalised, technologi-cal, image-saturated world? What is thecharacter of contemporary Ghanaian art?What challenges are faced by artistswishing both to acknowledge their Africancultural heritage and position themselvesas contemporary art practitioners?

In October 2007 speculation on theseissues was generated by an exhibitionfeaturing Ghanaian painters at La Galleria,Pall Mall, London. This exhibition ofworks by Rikki Wemega-Kwawu, Nii TMills, Wiz Kudowor, Sami Bentil (andAshley Egan, who contributed threeexhibits) was conceived by Bentil andMrs Zetha Annan, a notable collector ofGhanaian art. The exhibition title, ‘TheCall’, established the show’s objectives; itwas designed as a call to honour and recalltraditions, and to call for acknowledge-ment of creative expression today. TheGhanaian fontomfrom drum, a five-foot-high traditional drum, is used to call thecommunity together and convey informa-tion through a range of intricate beats andrhythms. Today, local communities arepart of national Ghanaian politics and thecelebration of 50 years of independenceoffered an opportunity to emphasise thesignificance of nation building in modernAfrica. Personal and Ghanaian identitiesinfused the pictorial expression exhibitedin ‘The Call’. Viewers were offered oppor-tunities for reflection on how visual artistsinterpret the influences of domicile andheritage, respond to global stimuli, meetlocal community needs, deal with thepressures or lack of interest of the inter-national art world, make a living from art,and satisfy the inner drive to be creative.

‘The Call’ gained cohesion from beinga show of paintings. This made a point:the West generally assumes that Africanartists traditionally produced sculpture,

particularly wood carvings and masks, andhad little concern for painting. This over-looks the fact that artists decorated walls,painted bodies, designed complex pat-terns for woven and printed textiles andcreated surface embellishment on objects.They did not conceive of painting, sculp-ture and architecture as separate entities.Moreover, once Africans had wider accessto the tools and materials produced by theindustrialised West, and to Western arttraining, they adapted their practice ascreative people do, extending their ex-pressive vocabularies. Painting becameanother way of conveying the narrativesof folklore, proverbial wisdom and historythat inform so much customary Africanlife and instil a sense of ethnic identity.Today, painting also manifests a rejectionof stereotyping. Ghanaian art is notrestricted to carvings and kente cloth madeto accommodate local needs and satisfythe market concept of ‘African’ art.Engagement with contemporary life bytrained artists elicits multiple responses.

‘The Call’ painters are not a school.They are distinctively different individualssharing a desire to represent aspects ofGhanaian heritage and experience, recol-lected and processed by memory andimagination or generated by perceptionsof place. They evince little interest in directpolitical comment, possibly because Gha-na has had 50 years of independence,albeit with changes of political regimes,including repressive dictatorships.

Sami Bentil’s work raises the issue offormative influences. He has been based inthe United States for many years but usesdistance as a way of probing the characterof his homeland. Emotion recollected intranquillity can isolate enduring charac-teristics from the ephemeral, and Bentil’swork is informed by aspects of Ghanaianlife that endure – the desire for justice,freedom, pride, dignity and the power oflife force. He fuses stylisation (usually ofthe human form) with elements of natur-alistic depiction (invariably of the land-scape and animals) and Ghanaiansymbolism; his tonal imagery manifestscalmness, ordered structure, patient craft-ing and references to historical precedent.By contrast, Nii Mills has a sharp eye forGhanaian life in rural areas and cities. Hevalues what he sees – herring hunts at seaor urban traffic jams – which constitutethe paradox of custom and modernity inAfrica’s rural and city life. Employingstrong colour in controlled impasto

marks, he creates vibrant, simplifiedrepresentations. Rikki Wemega-Kwawu’swork ranges widely in style and themesand he interrogates traditional practicesintelligently, offering some witty solu-tions, especially in Kente for the Space Age,where he used recycled, used plasticphone cards and plastic twine to commenton the design and facture of traditionalkente cloth. Wiz Kudowor employs adecorative approach to layered, stylisedimages of people and symbols. His frankacknowledgement of the role of masks inhis society (an issue that is also significantfor Bentil) makes Western viewers awarethat masks and their implications forrepresenting identity have particular socialand spiritual meanings for Africans. Forthem, masks and masquerade are signifi-cant realities of heritage, not formalsolutions to issues of representation.

‘The Call’ demonstrated aspects ofAfrican art that fail to emerge in big exhi-bitions such as ‘Africa Remix: Contempor-ary Art of a Continent’ (see vol. 12 issue 3).This ambitious exhibition toured widely butthe only African port of call was Johannes-burg. Its Western-based curators sought tofind in Africa a predetermined, global, post-modern version of the contemporary, andmuch of what was presented emanatedfrom artists no longer living in Africa,whose vision is not directed to local con-cerns. These artists work for the contem-porary art market and their imagery reflectslittle of their heritage and is not necessarilyreadily accessible to ordinary African view-ers or collectors wishing to live with theirpurchases and relate to the ideas depicted.

Contemporary African art is complex. Itembraces ‘traditional’ craft produced forthe market, esoteric work created for thecognoscenti, and art that is an authenticexpression of personal as well as nationaland/or ethnic identity. Small exhibitionsmounted outside Africa help to reveal therange of contemporary African art andindicate that Africa, through the eyes ofAfricans, is not the space of exoticism thatcontinues to suffuse the West’s relationshipto the continent. Equally African art is notart that lags behind the innovative West.‘The Call’ showed Ghanaian art moving toits own drumbeat and following a call thatinvited responses to living traditions andthe pulse of the twenty-first century.What itneeds is answers to the call – patronage andserious attention in and beyond Africa.

marion arnold

Loughborough University

30 The ArtBook volume 15 issue 1 february 2008 r 2008 the authors. journal compilation r 2008 bpl/aah

Perspectives