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by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir.
Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 1999.
224 pp., Paperback, $00.00
ISBN: 0-500-20328-8;
Reviewed by Mike Mosher, E-mail: mikemosh@well.com


This well-illustrated volume is a good companion to others in Thames & Hudson's World of Art series. I'm thinking especially of African Art: an Introduction by Frank Willet, as well as Caribbean Art by Veerle Poupeye, bringing the reader an understanding of creative forces on the African continent and one major center of the flowering of its people. Contemporary African Art is welcome on a shelf with World of Art series and the African and African diaspora studies by Robert Farris Thompson. Besides the enticing illustrations, the text seriously examines the various forces and issues bearing upon contemporary art in Africa. These include a raft of contradictory traditions in art and society: traditional, modern and colonial, postcolonial and postmodern.

Global capitalism and the range of postcolonialisms around Africa united to move African artists and artisans into producing artifacts for a global market and tourists rather than the local village. In many areas the Africans are uncritical of appetite for imported good, undercutting any local manufacturing and resulting in an aesthetic neither postmodern nor postcolonial.

Commodification of art and dominance of the international art market were results, magnifying and magnified by other problems and contradictions in various national cultures. Some notoble artwork was produced in collective artists' workshops, some with white European patrons and galleries mediating the relationship between artist and audience. As elsewhere, so many factors determine the nature of artwork in Africa, whether the artist's culture is francophone or anglophone, whether working in paint, ceramic, woodcarving or in creating architectural elements.

The reader is rewarded with pictures of excellent and exciting work. This includes photographer Seydou Keita's portraits from the 1950s, narrative signpainting and attractive "folk" narrative paintings of Moke, Tshibumba Kanda-Matalu of Zaire and Cheri Samba (works by painters in similar genres in Nigeria aren't shown). The sophisticated South African William Kentridge surreally deconstructs the last days of Apartheid in restrained drawings.

The book discusses the impact of "specimen"-collecting European and American natural history museums. It needn't mention how these collections impressed and impacted artists in the cities where they were located, whether the Musee de l'Homme in Paris, or the Field Museum's basement anthropological cases in Chicago Works are also depicted reminiscent of American sculptors Red Grooms and John Ahern, and have those artists' vitality yet draw upon African realist traditions like Benin bronzes. Yet there is also a range of work in the book that to this viewer lacks any authentic African voice, that only calls up feelings of having seen it done before by a well-publicized western artist. Some pieces allude too faithfully to Paul Klee, Leonard Baskin, Keith Haring, early Jackson Pollock and later Abstract Expressionists. This judgement may be unfair, but these pieces so pale in contrast to the rich work elsewhere in the book that's clearly rooted in local culture AND lightly informed by European or American genres. In the hands of Africa's most skilled artists that results in a new transformative synthesis of the visual best of both worlds. Or of all the world, and thus therefore truly world-class.