DISCUSSION 6 ARTS

Introduction The anthropology of African art in a transnational market

In the first decades of this century, the discipline of social anthropology defined its subject matter as the study of the inner workings of closed social systems which were isolated supposedly both from the external world and from one another. The choice for this unit of study was developed in part as a reaction against the conjectures ofcultural diffusionism - a then current theory which stressed how cultural traits and material culture diffused around the world. Rather than look at the movement of peoples and things from one socio­ economic context to the next, social anthropology - whose theories were to become grounded in its methods of localized and intensive ethnographic field­ work - claimed as its focus of analysis the single tribe, the isolated community, and the remote village. " [E]ach society with its characteristic culture," writes Eric Wolf, "[was] conceived as an integrated and bounded system, set off against other equally bounded systems" ( 1982: 4 ).

In the past twenty-five years or so, anthropology has reacted strong ly against the fiction of "primitive" isolates - deconstructing the internal architecture of putatively autonomous and self-regulating systems. The critique has taken essentially two paths. First, at the local level, the definition of the "system" itself has been revised to include " process" (i.e., history, competition, and social change). Key words associated with the earlier model of society - homeostasis, cohesion, and balance - have been replaced by new concepts such as pluralism, heterogeneity, crisis, conflict, and transformation. Second, at the supra-local level, the model of "bounded systems" has been challenged by those who see the world itself as a transformative force defined by historical processes and, in particular, shaped by the conflicts and contradictions of a capitalist world economy. In this formulation, the vision of the world has returned, in a curious fashion, to one espoused by the early diffusionists - that is to say. the world as global matrix, with transnational contacts and macro­ scale linkages.•

Drawing inspiration both from Immanuel Wallerstein's research on the sociology of the modem world system (1974, 1979) and from Femand Braudel' s research on the social history of global commerce ( 1973, 1982), anthropologists engaged in the formulation of this second revisionist model

1

2 African art in transit

have been turning their attention increasingly to the migration of persons and things in the transnational world economy. Expanding the focal range in the ethnographic lens, the subject of social anthropology has been pushed beyond the conventional community setting. Attention to g lobal interdependence and cross-cultural exchange has revealed, as George Marcus and Michae l Fischer ~ave recently s tated, an array of political and economic processes which "are registered in the activities of dispersed groups or individuals whose actions have mutual, often unintended, consequences for each other, as they are connected by markets and other major institutions that make the world a system" (1986: 91).

One way ofconstructing a " multilocale" ethnography within the boundaries of a single text is to trace the movement of particular commodities through space and time. Sidney Mintz, in Sweetness and Power (1985), tracks the history of sugar as a vehicle for analyzing the development of Afro-Caribbean slavery, the rise of Western capitalism, and the emergence of a transatlantic diaspora of mercantile accumulation. Eric Wolf, in Europe and the People W ithout History (1982), deals with the mobility of several commodities - reconstructing the major political and economic patterns of world history in order to shed light on the relationship among far-separated populations whose lives were entangled in a swirl of transglobal trade. And in The Social Life of Things (1986), a volume of collected essays edited by Arjun Appadurai, the contributors follow the circulation of objects (or groups of objects) as they move through specific cultural and historical milieus. Because a commodity does not always stay in the context for which it was intended, nor does it necessarily remain in the region within which it was produced, a commodity is said to have a "social life," whose value, spirit, and meaning changes through time.

This book is about the trade in African art in Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa (Map 1 ).2 It is about the circulation of art objects through local, national, and transnational economies, and it is about those whose lives are caught up in its supply, distribution, and exchange. The book takes as its unit of study a group of both itinerant and settled merchants who specialize in the commerce of African art - middlemen who link either village-level object-owners, or contemporary artists and artisans, to Western collectors, dealers, and tourists. The "community" of traders is made up of members from many different ethnic groups, and represents individuals from a whole range of social back­ grounds and from various levels of economic success. Because the merchandise that the traders buy and sell is defined, classified, and evaluated largely in terms of Western concepts such as "art" and "authenticity," the traders are not only moving a set of objects through the world economic system, they are also exchanging information - mediating, modifying, and commenting on a broad spectrum of cultural knowledge .

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4 African art in transit

Much of the fieldwork for this study was carried out in the market places of Abidjan - principally among art traders of Hausa, M ande, and Wolof ethnicity. Research was also undertaken in the markets of Yamoussoukro, Bouake, Korhogo, and Man, as well as in several rural supply entrepots including Danane in the west and Dimbokro in central Cote d ' Ivoire. In addition, I spent part of my time in the field traveling through various districts of the country with Abidjan-based traders who purchase art from rural middlemen. Such travel was done both by public transportation and in a vehicle which I purchased at the beginning of the fieldwork. Documentary research in Cote d ' Ivoire was undertaken in the Archives Nationales, the Universite Nationale de Cote d ' Ivoire, the Office National du Tourisme, and the Centre de Documentation at the Ministere de la Culture et de l 'Information. Interviews were also conducted with Abidjan-based European and American dealers and collectors. The research was conducted largely in French (the language of intermediacy in the market place). A basic knowledge of Dioula helped, however, to gain access to rural traders.3 Interviews in the market place were mostly conducted without a tape recorder.4 The names of the traders which appear in the book have been changed in order to protect their identity. All conversions from local lvoirian currency to American currency are based on an average exchange rate for 1987-88 of 300 CFA francs to one US dollar. Field data are referenced according to the date in which they were recorded in my notes, and dates are American style, i.e. month, day, year.

A history of the West African art trade

The art trade in West Africa began during the colonial period in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Since its inception, the principal entrepots of international trade (in francophone West Africa) have been in the cities of Dakar and Abidjan - both of which were important administrative centers of French colonial rule. Although Senegalese merchants controlled much of the market in its formative period, the bulk of the African art trade has been distributed since the late 1950s among three major ethnic groups: Wolof of Senegal, Hausa of Niger and Nigeria, and Mande of Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Cote d'Ivoire. All of these ethnic groups have historical links to the spread ofmercantile capitalism in West Africa and, in particular, all of them have been responsible for the formation of cross-cultural trading diasporas throughout the region.

Two developments, which occurred at roughly the same time but in different parts of the world, are in large measure responsible for the formation of the art trade in West Africa. The first development was the "discovery" of African art at the tum of the century by European artists and intellectuals, such as Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Vlaminck, and Apollinaire. Their interest in

African forms and aesthetics stimulated a slowly rising demand for African art objects in Europe. At fiISt, the demand was limited largely to the Cubists and their immediate entourage. But by the 1910-20s, the demand for African art in Europe had already spread to other sectors of the society. In particular, the end of the First World War brought about an atmosphere in France which was conducive to engaging the interest of a wider public in the appreciation and collection of African art (cf. W. Cohen 1980: 284-85). The disdain in which Africans had previously been held by the great majority of France 's population was replaced after the war "by a certain curiosity about the customs of these [African] people who had fought fiercely [against the Germans] and were now joyful partners in the victory celebrations" (Paudrat 1984: 157). The success of the African pavilion at the Exposition Coloniale de Vincennes in 1931 fueled even further the demand for African objects in France (Laude 1971: 20). Even after the Cubist movement had ended, and many of the artists themselves had lost all interest in African art, the market for African art, which they had inspired and helped organize, had already developed its own commercial structure and economic force - enabling it to continue and flourish without their support.5

While interest in African art was slowly emerging in Europe - spreading further and further outside the inner c ircle of modem primitivists - European presence in Africa was growing at a curious pace, as the scramble for the continent unfolded. By the 1920s, after most parts of West Africa had been conquered by and divided among the major European powers, colonial administrations were set into place, thereby securing commercial access to West Africa by metropole-based trading companies and expatriate firms.6

The colonial administration in Afrique Occidentale Fran9aise (AOF) granted special rights and privileges to some of their most "loyal" subjects. The Senegalese, in particular, who among other things were associated with the tirailleurs senegalais (i.e. , a group of armed forces who fought for France to conquer vast territories of West Africa) were protected by colonial rule and granted access to virtually all the territories in West Africa which were administered by the French (Manning 1988: 63-64).

This new form of transnational socio-political hierarchy, which emerged during the colonial period in West Africa, allowed for members of certain ethnic groups (such as the Wolof of Senegal) to displace themselves with increased security and greater facility (Challenor 1979; Echenberg 1991). Under protection of European colonial rule, these groups were able to travel across what had once been hostile and dangerous geo-political and ethnic frontiers. Increased access for commercial pursuits by both European and African entrepreneurs meant not only that Europeans had found new potential markets for the sale of their goods in the colonies (Steiner 1985), but it meant also that the colonies had found a new source of demand for their goods in

6 African art in transit

Europe. Although most of the exports which were made by colonial trading firms were of raw materials forged on the back of cheap labor, somewhere in the shadows of these vast commercial ventures one finds the small, tentative beginnings of an African art trade.

The career of one of the first professional African art dealers in Europe, Paul Guillaume, was launched accidentally by a curious intersection of these two historical developments.7 Guillaume's initial interest in African art was sparked in 1911 by the unanticipated visit of artist Joseph Brummer. "Informed by Apollinaire of the presence of an African object of quality in the window of an automobile appliance store," writes Jean-Louis Paudrat, " Brummer negotiated its purchase from the young clerk [Guillaume) and induced him to show him regularly the 'fetishes' received by the clerk's firm through its colonial rubber supplies" (Paudrat 1984: 152; cf. Donne 1978: 107). Within a year of Brummer's visit, Guillaume had quit his job at the automobile supply shop, and had begun actively to seek his own supply of African art. From 1912 to 1920, Guillaume continuously increased his shipments of art from rubber contractors in West Africa, and began to place advertisements in the colonial press for the purpose of extending the range of his stock (Paudrat 1984: 153). By the 1920s, Guillaume had opened his first gallery on rue La Boetie in Paris. He continued to search for new suppliers of African art by developing a network of contacts with colonial officials from AOF. At Le Brehant, a Parisian cafe frequented by officials on leave from the colonies, Guillaume posted a sign which read: "Paul Guillaume pays high prices for all pieces and collections of African origin" (Paudrat 1984: 160).8

Although the historical record is decidedly silent about the role of the African middleman in supplying colonial agents with the artworks which were being exported to the metropole, it would not be imprudent to infer that the commercial exporters who were shipping African objects to European dealers, such as Paul Guillaume (as well as Carl Einstein, Charles Vignier, Pierre Verite, Charles Ratton, and others), were not collecting the art themselves from the remote rural villages from which the objects were being extracted. As in so many other modes of extraction which, at different moments in the African past, have supplied a variety ofexport commodities for shipment to the West - the most obvious case being the Atlantic slave trade - it was the African intermediary who provided the first and most vital link in the commercial chain.

From the l 920-30s onward, the trade in African art became increasingly structured and organized on the side of supply. By this time, African artists had already started reproducing objects expressly for the export market. Some of ~hese pieces were being commissioned by local colonial administrators, either for their own collections or as gifts for their friends and family in the metro­ pole. Others were already being marketed from stalls and storehouses owned

by African traders in French colonial capitals, such as Dakar and Abidjan. By the 1950s, African art traders from AOF were regularly making the journey to France to sell objects directly to European-based dealers.9 As the supply diminished of what the Western collector defines as the "classic" genres of African art - ideally, wooden face masks and ritual statuary (see Rubin 1984; 15-17) - traders expanded their inventory to include other categories of "art," such as household or utilitarian items, furniture , textiles, etc.

From very early on in the trade, newly carved objects were being artificially aged - their patina, coloration, and surface wear being carefully altered - so that the objects could be marketed in the West as antique or "authentic" art. During the decades of the 1960-70s, the art market in West Africa had probably reached its boom. Not only had an extensive demand been created in Europe, but also by this time demand had reached the shores of America. "The Peace Corps, the civil-rights movement, African nationalism, and the beginning of mass tourism to West Africa," writes Nicholas Lemann, "all increased American interest in African art" (1987: 26). In the late 1970s, most analysts would probably agree, the art market in West Africa had started to take a downward tum. Economic recessions in the West and diminishing supplies in Africa both contributed to a sluggish market and a deflationary spiral. While the market for the resale of African art from private collections was ignited by the economic bonfire of the 1980s - with record prices being set at one auction after another - the West African side of the trade smoldered, never returning to where it had been during the I960-70s. Part of the reason for this is that many buyers had become convinced that all examples of "genuine" African art had already been taken out of the continent. The economic competition in the African art market had thus shifted from the site of original supply in Africa to the locus of the recirculation of previously owned objects in the West. While the market, in Cote d'Ivoire alone, still currently supports several hundred full-time African traders and middlemen, its scale has been significantly reduced by the combined negative forces of diminishing supply and dwindling demand. Although new traders keep entering tht market each year, their economic retu.ms keep going down and their future grows increasingly uncertain.

African art through the lens of commerce

The study of African art has tended to concentrate on the function or aesthetics of various forms of art within the context of a single, highly localized ethno­ graphic setting.lo In order to describe a given art form in what is supposedly its most pristine or "authentic" state, scholars specializing in the study of African art have often isolated the unit of analysis without taking into account the effects of outside influence.I I Such a mode of investigation is inevitably

8 African art in transit

artificial since it is arguable that at no time has African art existed in total cultural isolation. In recent years, studies of African art have begun to take more seriously the impact of outside forces on local artistic expression. Some recent works, for example, have taken into account: (I) the complexity of ethnic attribution in African arts (e.g., the movement of objects for ritual use across ethnic boundaries); (2) the impact of the world economic system on local artistic production (e.g., the manufacturing of so-called "tourist" or "airport" arts); (3) the articulation of Islam and other world religions with indigenous African beliefs in the creation of syncretic sacred arts; and (4) the incorporation of Western manufactured products (plastic dolls, factory-made cloth, industrial hardware, etc.) into so-called "traditional" contexts.

Although the field of vision has widened greatly in the past few years, one area of research which remains largely unexplored is the commercial aspect of African art and, in particular, the analysis of the specialized trading diasporas which are used to circulate art objects throughout the African continent and the rest of the world. There are several reasons, I believe, which account for the lack of interest among scholars in the African art trade. First, like the study of markets in general, the study of art markets may appear initially to be a daunting task - requiring the unders tanding of a complex system characterized by extensive verbal bargaining, complicated credit relations, and a nearly untraceable network of circulating goods and capital. The study of the African art trade by a Westerner is made even more problematic by the very fact that the investigator belongs by definition to the consumer class and, as a result, is often considered to be a potential buyer of art rather than simply a patron of ideas. 12

Second, the study of the African art market poses many of the same problems as the study of an African secret society - with the added obstacle that most traders do not want the investigator to become an initiate. Trade secrets cover a broad spectrum of activities. Traders, for example, are reluctant to talk about their earnings (for fear that kin, friends, or other traders will want to borrow money); they will not speak readily of their commercial success (almost all traders returning to Africa from Europe or America will try to discourage others from going abroad by saying that business is generally bad); they will not display or reveal their entire stock (for they know that the fewer times an object is seen, the higher its potential value will remain); 13 they will not easily reveal either the sources oftheir goods or their network ofclients (for one of the key functions of traders is to maintain their status as middlemen, by keeping apart both village object-owners and producers from Western consumers); and, lastly, they will not divulge freely their techniques of artificial aging or mechanical patination (so as, understandably, to keep the buyers somewhat mystified).

Third, because the study of African art has developed largely in conjunction

with the collection of African art in the West, I would argue that those who study African art (especially those trained as art historians) have been disinclined to write about a system which makes of aesthetic objects temporary commodities in the " middle passage" from African village to Westem vitrine. In the collection of African art by Westerners, the aesthetic value of an object is usually given more overt attention than its economic value. 14 Moreover, since the collection of African art is often associated with an idealized Western vision of static "primitive" culture, most collectors, I believe, would prefer to read about the uses of African art in a putatively unchanging pre-colonial milieu than about the commoditization of African art in a post-colonial trans­ national economy_ 1s

Finally, there has been a tendency among Western scholars and collectors alike to dismiss African art traders as "misinformed" or" ignorant," and unable, therefore, to truly appreciate or recognize the aesthetic merit and ethnographic provenance of what they sell.16 Traders are often treated by Westerners with disrespect, and sometimes even with unbecoming disdain. Most of the traders who travel with their merchandise to Europe and America are described by Westerners as "runners," while their Western counterparts who travel to Africa to purchase large volumes of art for export to the West are referred to by the far more genteel and prestigious term "dealers." The implication of this semantic discrimination, I would argue, is closely related to a distinction which is commonly drawn between the African artist and the Western connoisseur. While the latter is said to be capable of judging aesthetic qualities and of ranking the relative "importance" of different works of African art. the former, it is said, simply produces his work spontaneously - oblivious somehow to the "genius" which guides his own hand (Price 1989: 87-89). The African art trader, in a similar tone, is often described as one who handles "masterpieces" without knowledge or care; he is portrayed as a blind supplier of raw materials (hence the word "runner") whose goods are " transformed" by the Western dealer who, contrary to his African counterpart, is entirely capable of appreci­ ating what he sells (cf. Taylor and Brooke 1969). When collectors of African art buy from Western dealers, they expect to be guided by the seller's good taste and judgment. In general, they neither expect to be cheated by the dealer, nor to cheat the dealer themselves. When these same individuals buy the same sort of objects from an African "runner," they expect only to encounter deceit - either to be misguided by the seller into buying a "fake," or, conversely, to misguide the seller by buying something from him which is actually worth far more than the price at which he agrees to sell. As Lemann puts it, those who "patronize the runners [are] convinced that these people - usually illiterate and speaking only broken English - can't possibly know what the stuff they' re selling is really worth" ( 1987: 28). The wife ofa collector in New York told me once that her husband saw nearly every African "runner" that called him at his

10 African art in transit

Manhattan office. "He keeps hoping to find that one masterpiece, like a real Fang reliquary figure or something, buried somewhere in the junk that the runners usually sell" (12/20/89).

Hence, on the one hand, the economic quality of a trader's merchandise is ignored in order to draw attention away from the monetary value of the category "art." And, on the other hand, the artistic/cultural elements which make up the trader's craft are dismissed since it is believed that only the Western buyer or dealer is really capable of appreciating aesthetic worth. For all the reasons lis ted above, then, the African art trader has been relegated by silence to an invisible cog in the wheels of a complex transnational market - a market which functions because of, not in spite of, the African middleman.

Analysis of the African art trade not only sheds light on a "forgotten" people, it also illuminates an important facet of African art which has generally been neglected in the literature. By broadening the parameters of discernible influence, the study of the art trade integrates areas hitherto treated in relative isolation. Because traders move continually back-and-forth from local to global economy, a study of the art market sheds light on the impact of Western consumption on African art and aesthetics. Exogenous demand has not only encouraged traders to drain villages of their artistic wealth, but it has also led to the creation ofnew forms ofmaterial culture (hybrid styles, invented genres, replicas, and fakes) constructed, in James Clifford's apposite phrase, from the "debris of colonial culture contact" (1985: 166). Hence, the study of the African art trade uncovers not only a complex economic system with its own internal structure, logic, and rules, it reveals also an elaborate process of cross­ cultural exchange in which the image of Africa and its arts are continually being negotiated and redefined by a plurality of market participants spread out across the world.

Paradigms in the study of African art

This book draws upon and contributes to several different bodies of literature, including those on the sociology of the market place, the linguistics of verbal bargaining, the structuring of ethnicity in cross-cultural trade, the political economy of commoditization, and the dynamics of cultural brokerage or the mediation ofknowledge. Most components of these diverse bodies of literature are referenced and discussed in the places of the book where they are most relevant. In this section, therefore, I have chosen to restrict my discussion to the literature on African art, and, in particular, to locate this work within the history of scholarship on African art and material culture.

The study ofAfrican art developed largely in conjunction with the discipline of anthropology at the beginning of this century. Some of the earliest works on African art were written in order to further particular claims within a broader

debate between diffusionist and evolutionist schools of thought. African art was used either as visual evidence for the spread of cultural traits from innovative centers to imitative peripheries, or as evidence for the social evolution of cultures - from groups which were supposedly capable of only naturalistic representation to those which had presumably graduated to the mastery of geometric stylization and abstract forms (Silver 1979a: 270-71; Gerbrands 1990: 15- 17).

As the field of anthropology altered its emphasis from diffusion -to context, and from evolution to function, the study of African art followed in its path. Drawing upon the new discourse of anthropology, and in particular taking a lead from Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, the focus in the study of African art was to become the indigenous context - which would reveal the place of art within a balanced holistic system of social and cultural functions. In this sense, art was understood simply as yet another vital organ in the proper maintenance and functioning of a stable social organism. Eventually, the term "ethno­ aesthetics" came to be used as a label for this type of approach. Faced with an abundance of non-Westem art in the repositories of Western museums, ethno­ aesthetics was conceived as an analytic method to resituate these objects within the environment of their original use. Philip Dark wrote in 1967:

At this time, when so many art forms from non-western cultures are being sold in our cities in increasing numbers, one might say en-masse, while the buyers remain, to a large extent, ignorant of the context in which they were made, we have need of anthro­ pologists who can help bring understanding ofart in context to those who have some of its results hors de contexte. (1967: 133)

By the early 1970s, anthropologists had begun to question the privileged place of "context" within the study and analysis of African art. Increasingly aware of the permeability of the boundaries which surrounded the area of study, scholars began to peer through some of the cracks in the imagined borders which putatively encased the art in its indigenous milieu. "There is no a priori guarantee that a particular linguistic or other group or sub­ group identified in advance by the researcher, no matter how ingeniously characterized," wrote Whitney Davis recently, "is, in fact, the full and real context of and for a particular history of representations" (1989: 26).

In challenging what was perceived to be an overemphasis on local context, research on African art took two directions. First, the local context itself was broadened and redefined to include inter-group relations and contacts. In so doing, it was discovered that art objects were not only created for local use, but were also borrowed and traded among ethnic groups within a wide geographic terrain - both art and artists moving from place to place, crosscutting and penetrating an array of so-called ethnic "boundaries" (Bravmann 1973; Frank 1987). "Interaction, not isolation," summarizes Monica Visona, "seems to

12 African art in transit

characterize much of the production and distribution of traditional art forms. Yet African art is still presented to the general public as if there were a representative style for each ethnic group and as if each piece were either a typical or atypical example of a single population's oeuvre" (1987: 38).

Second, the unit of analysis was expanded not only to include contacts within and among a wide range of proximate ethnic groups, but also to include the impact of international tourism on local art production. This literature, which is gathered generally under the heading of " tourist art" studies, has tended to be of two sorts. On the one hand, there have been works which have described and analyzed the production and manufacture of art objects for sale to tourists (e.g., see Ben-Amos 1971, 1976; Silver 1976, 1979b, 1981a, 1981 b; Richter 1980; Ross and Reichert 1983; Wolff I985). These studies have dealt with such issues as the social relations of production in communities of petty craft manufacturers, the organization of apprenticeship and the incorporation of workers in a local artisanal economy, and the impact of new artistic forms on the social system of artistic production. The focus has been primarily on the local level. How have artists and artisan groups reacted or adapted to outside demand? How have styles of art been changed or modified for foreign consumption? How has production for internal use been articulated with production for external use?

On the other hand, there have been a number of works which have attempted to place tourist art within the semiotic domain of a system of signs. Using a linguistic model, these studies have analyzed tourist art as a "process of communication involving image creators who attempt to represent aspects of their own cultures to meet the expectations of image consumers who treat art as an example of the exotic" (Jules-Rosette 1984: 1). One of the earliest and most conceptually imaginative studies of this genre is Paula Ben-Amos's seminal paper on "Pidgin Languages and Tourist Arts" ( 1977), in which tourist arts are compared to secondary trade languages and analyzed as a special­ purpose, restricted, and standardized code used expressly for cross-cultural communication. Whether they are examining the production of objects or the production of meanings, the level of analysis in both types of tourist art studies has tended to be the local artistic community - i.e., restricting them­ selves to the production end in a transnational market of cross-cultural exchange.

In the past few years, the study of African tourist art production has been complemented by a series of works on the consumption of African art (or, more usually, of "primitive" art in general) in the West (e.g., Clifford 1985, 1988; Jamin 1982, 1985; Manning 1985; MacClancy 1988; Errington 1989; Price 1989; Torgovnick 1990). These works have sought to unpack the symbolic load with which African art objects are charged when they are displayed out of context. Rather than use the study of decontextualized objects as a stepping

stone to an analysis which seeks to resituate the objects in their " indigenous" context, the displacement of the object itself is taken as the problematic and focus of research. Reflecting upon the very same collections of non-Western art that prompted a previous generation of anthropologists to want to know more about the meaning of these objects in the places from which they came, some anthropologists are now wondering how these objects came to be wrenched from the places in which they were made and what they mean now in the places where they have come to rest. Studies of this sort pose some of the fo llowing type of questions. Why have these objects been moved to where they are? What are the political and economic forces which have allowed cultural property to be removed from their original owners? And what do they mean now that they are situated in this new milieu?

Because the symbols of African art are silent outside their original com­ munity of spokespersons, the objects are themselves tabula rasa - virgin icons upon which observers imprint their own significance and interpretation. "Stripped of its original authorship and, more generally, of conceptual foot­ notes," writes Sally Price, "the object stands nakedly before the gaze of the Western viewer" (1989: 106). And, writing in a similar language , Georges Balandier once remarked, "objects under glass [are] as helpless in the presence of sightseers as the dead in the presence of the crowds on All Saints ' Day. Both are 'defenseless' , so that we have unlimited freedom to consider and treat them as we please" ( 1967: 100). Symbols that make no reference to sexuality in their original context are charged by the Western viewer with raw sexual conno­ tations. Portraits of living spirits are mistaken for representations of the dead or, more generally, they are g lossed as idols in a cult of ancestor worship. Emblems of beauty and peace are misinterpreted as signs of fear and terror.

By studying the mechanisms of exchange which move art objects from Africa to the rest of the world, this book bridges the distance between the field ofproduction and the field of consumption. It provides, so to say, the "missing link(s)" in a long commercial chain which stretches from the smallest rural villages in West Africa to the largest urban centers in the Western world. 17 In particular, the study of the exchange of African art throws light on two distinct processes which occur at the intermediate level of the art market. First, the study documents the process ofcommoditization. It explores the way in which objects are moved from one system of value to another, and describes the mechanisms by which values are assigned to objects at each stage in the net­ work of trade. In so doing, it analyzes a distinct moment in the "life history" of African art - i.e., a commodity phase which separates an object both from its "traditional" sphere ofvalue as ritual or sacred icon, and its " modernist" sphere of value as objet d'art. Second, it illustrates an elaborate process of cross­ cultural information exchange or, what I will refer to more generally as, the mediation of knowledge. The study suggests that in their commercial pursuits

14 African art in transit

art traders are not mindlessly moving goods from one place to another, they are also mediating between art producers and art consum~rs - adding economic value to what they sell by interpreting and capitalizing on the cultural values and desires from two different worlds. This book, therefore, is as much about the transit of African objects in the commercial space of the modern world system as it is about the transition of African objects at a distinct moment and critical time in the history of Africa and its arts.

The book is divided into six chapters. Approximately the first half of the book is devoted to a study of the economic structure of the trade. The second half is largely about the trade in cultural information and the mediation ofknowledge. In Chapter 1, I describe the basic structure of the Ivoirian art market - providing a description of the different commodity outlets and a classification of the type of goods that are sold at different levels of the trade. In Chapter 2, I describe the division of labor in the market and examine the management of capital, in particular the systems of credit and commission payments both within the market place and a trader's personal network of clients.

In Chapter 3, I analyze the production of value in the market economy, and present an analysis of four different modes of bargaining or verbal price negotiation. It is demonstrated, in this chapter, that each level in the bargaining process is associated with a different structuring of value. The bargaining process, it is suggested, is aimed largely at gauging the worth of an object in the transactor's value system.

Chapter 4 opens with an extended case study recounting an episode during my fieldwork in which an art trader from one ethnic group cut across the market hierarchy to buy directly from a supplier from a different ethnic group. The conflict which ensues from his action is described in detail and then analyzed in order to throw light on the nature of ethnic relations within the market context. The chapter goes on to look more broadly at the role of ethnicity in the art market - from a discussion of cross-cultural trade to an analysis of the commoditization of ethnicity itself.

In Chapter 5, I discuss the concept of authenticity as it applies to the art market. It begins with an overview of some of the definitions of authenticity in African art which are most widely held both by Western scholars and art collectors. It then goes on to examine the notion of authenticity from the perspective of the African art traders. Analysis of two cases - one on the commoditization ofslingshots, and the other on the symbolic transformation of trade beads - serves to illustrate some of the points that are made at the beginning of the chapter. It is argued throughout that the authenticity of African art is a W estem construction that is based on powerful economic and culturally hegemonic motives.

In Chapter 6, I bring together much of the preceding material by analyzing

the role of art traders as cultural brokers or mediators of knowledge. While traders relate to artists some of the preferences and desires of the Western clientele, they also communicate to the clientele a particular image of African art and culture. I demonstrate in this chapter the means by which art traders manipulate both the meaning and value of objects through contextualized presentation, verbal description, and physical alteration.

Finally, in the conclusion, I present the material from the book in light of competing discourses on value . Drawing especially on Pierre Bourdieu's sociological analysis of the "mis-recognition" ofcultural capital, I demonstrate how the Western (e)valuation of African art builds itself in direct opposition to both use value and exchange value.

5 The quest for authenticity and the invention of African art

I understand you can't buy real African art anymore. An American tourist in Plateau market place, Abidjan ( 1987)

The concept of "authenticity" is among the most problematic and most difficult issues in the study of African art. Yet, despite its central relevance, and the frequent use in the literature of such terms as "real ," "genuine," and "authentic," the subject of authenticity has received surprisingly little attention by scholars in either the fields of anthropology or art history.1 The definition of authenticity in African art draws upon connections among such disparate issues as cultural or ethnic " purity," historical timing or periodicity, and artistic or commercial intentionality. In this chapter, I will review the definitions of authenticity in the literature on African art which have been set out by W estern academics, dealers, and collectors. I will then consider the way in which African art merchants have interpreted the Westem notion of authenticity, and how, in particular, they have tailored the concept to fit their own under­ standing of African art. In addition, I will discuss the fascination with age in the Western appreciation of African art, and the artificial reproduction of antiques which results from this fascination. I will examine both the classifi­ cation of aesthetics and the construction of the category "art," and their relevance to the contemporary African art trade. I will analyze the recirculation of "trade beads" as an example of how the familiar gets transformed into the exotic. And, I will end with some brief thoughts on, what I call, the "crisis of mis-representation" in modem transnational exchange.

The authenticity of African art

The definition of authenticity in African art that is most current among academics and dealers alike combines elements concerning an object's condition and history of use, intended audience, aesthetic merit, rarity, and estimated age. Thus, an authentic piece of African art, dealer Henri Kamer tells us, "is by definition a sculpture executed by an artist of a primitive tribe and destined for the use of this tribe in a ritual or functional way" (1974: I9). In

100

101 The quest for authenticity

defining authentic African art, it is commonly asserted that there should be no intention of economic gain on the part of the artist. "The sculptor who creates these fetishes and masks," Kamer goes on to say, "does so without any thought of profit, in the same spirit that an inhabitant of the Cyclades executed an idol in marble 5,000 years ago" (1974: 19). Or, using a slightly more veiled language, African art connoisseur Raoul Lehuard has said that, "In order for a sculpture to be authentic, it must not only be derived from a formal truth, but its language mus t also be derived from a sacred truth" (1976: 73). The age of an object generally conditions its commercial viability. " In judging authen­ ticity," writes American collector/dealer Herbert Baker, "except for a few recently discovered tribes or areas, pre World War II seems to have validity inasmuch as there was little or no commercial market" (1973: 7).

Drawing on similar themes, but using a rather more "technical" form of discourse, African art scholar Malcolm McLeod defines an "authentic" African art object as "any piece made from traditional mate rials by a native craftsman for acquisition and use by members of local society (though not necessarily members of his own group) that is made and used with no thought that it ultimately may be disposed of for gain to Europeans or other aliens" (1976: 31). And, in a similar vein, African art appraiser Carl Provost is of the opinion that:

An authentic piece must be produced for group use by an artist belonging to it or to a related group; the basic materials (with the exception of materials from outside sources incorporated into the object for specific purposes of decoration, protection, or magic) utilized in the creation of the piece must be indigenous to the region, and the object must function within the group in accordance with its traditions. (1980: 141)

Regardless of whether an object dates from this century or the last, it is always judged inauthentic by Western evaluators if it has not been used in a " traditional" manner. ''The most obviously authentic works on which all would agree," writes art historian Frank Willett, "are those made by an African for use by his own people and so used" (1971: 216). From an anthropological perspective, William Bascom reaches the same conclusion when he notes that: "A piece may have been carved many years ago but if it was never used , perhaps because the customer who commissioned it died une xpectedly, it is not 'authentic'" (1976: 316).

African art traders understand very well the parameters of "authentic" African art as defined by Western collectors and appraisers. The language they use when speaking about objects is influenced heavily by their comprehension of Western taste, and its associated perception of authenticity. Almost nothing in the market is ever sold as " new." If pushed by a disbelieving customer, a trader might eventually concede that something he is trying to sell is only "a little old" or that "It's not ancient, but it wasn't made today." He would never

102 African art in transit

state outright, however, that an object is brand new. If age is in doubt, then the condition and usage of an object would be stressed: "The mask has danced.'' or "It's been around," or "It's been used until it's been tired out [fatigue1"- If all else fails, then the unjqueness or rarity of an object is played up in the course of a sale: " I don't see why you dido't take this [object]. It's very important. You mustn't leave it" or "There isn ' t another one like this anywhere in the market place. If you find one like this, I'll give you this one as a gift.''2

Although African art traders have incorporated into the vocabulary of their discourse the Western-oriented themes of age and antiquity, condition and usage, and uniqueness and rarity, I never heard a trader actually use the word "authentic" (in French, authentique). Most of the traders divide the objects they sell into two broad categories: old (ancien) and copy (copie). If asked to analyze the terms further, most traders with whom I spoke said that all the objects in the market should in fact be referred to as copies. A more accurate way of classifying the types of art objects they sell is to draw a distinction between an older copy and a more recent one. Dramane Kabba explained:

At the beginning, there was only one ofeverything that you now see in the market place. When the Europeans came, they took these things with them and put them in the museums and in the books. After that time, everything became a copy [of what was in the books]. A copy can be a hundred years old or it can only be a few years old, but everything is a copy of those first objects which are now in the museums and in the books. (3/2/88)

The trader's statement reveals an unders tanding of authenticity that is, at its core, significantly different from the concept of authenticity whlch is held widely in the West. First, according to Kabba's remarks, the original (i.e., the "authentic") objects of African art are all in Europe - they have been removed from circulation and they are, therefore, unattainable.3 This aspect of the trader's concept of authenticity reverses the spatial/temporal chrono­ geography of the Western concept. While the Wes tern version of authenticity focuses on pre-colonial Africa as the locus of "genuine" African art (i.e., a vision that is oriented toward distance in time), the trader's version of authen­ ticity focuses instead on contemporary Europe (i.e., a vision that is oriented toward distance in space). For the Westerner, authentic African art only existed in the past, before European contact. For the trader, authentic African art only exists in the present, after European contact, when the objects were taken out of Africa and declared by the Western a uthorities to be authentic. The trader's formulation of authenticity thus depends upon contact with Europe to discover the inherent value of an African art object.4

A second reversal of the Western concept of authenticity occurs at yet another level of the trader's statement. Unlike the Western collector or dealer who focuses on the object itself as the source of authenticity, the trader views

103 The quest for authenticity

authenticity as som ething which emanates directly from the pages of a book. This point turns on its head Walter Benjamin's celebrated notion of the "aura" of an authentic work of art. "The presence of the o riginal," wrote B enjamin:

is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity . . . Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authe nticity; not so vis a vis technical reproduction ... [T)hat which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art . . . By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. ( 1969: 22~21)

For Kabba, in contras t to B e njamin, it is the book itself which holds the "aura" of truth about an object. It is the book which provides an original with which to m easure o r gauge the quality and accuracy of all subsequent "copies." 5

The authority of the tex t, and the distance which is felt between the trader and that which is re presented in the book, is plainly illustrated by the mis­ communication in the following encounter. The owne r of an African art gallery in Abidjan published a catalogue of a collection of masks and statues that w ere to be sold from her gallery. An American collector of my acquaintance purchased a m ask from her gallery, and displayed it in his Abidjan home. Abdurrahman Madu was at the collector's ho use one day trying to sell him some art. The collector pointed out to him the mask that hung on the wall, and showed him the photograph of the same mask that was reproduced in the book. Madu compared the photograph with the object and to ld the collector that he had really done w e ll: "The mask looks exactly like the one in the book." When the collector explained that the m ask was the actual piece that was in the book, the trader re plied, " Yes, I see what you mean, the resemblance is almost perfect. It's an excellent copy" (2/18/88).

The death of culture and the birth of fakes

A fascination for antiquity and things from the past runs deep in W estern c ulture. An objet d ' art, like a fine bottle of wine, is said to improve with the passage of time. Vis ible signs of age are demonstrated by the outward effects of decay - scratches, tears, c hips, cracks, bruises, corrosion, and patina. These m arks of wear, writes historian David Lowenthal, "are prized as personal links with the past, like the arms of an old rocking-chair whose lacquer and stainin g had succumbed to long and constant rubbing" (1985: 152; cf. Shils 1981 : 63- 77). As the supply of antiques dwindles, however, some artis ts and forgers are te mpted by economic motivation to simulate the effects of natural age. R oman fondness for original Greek art, for example, is said to have led to the produc tion of " weathered" copies. In the Renaissance, the young Michelangelo was persuaded to age artificially the surface of a marble sculpture of Cupid

I 04 African art in transit

by burying it for a time in the dirt. " When it was done," Vasari writes, "Baldassare de Milanese caused it to be shown to Pierfrancesco, who said 'If you buried it, I feel s ure that it would pass for an antique at Rome if made to appear old, and you would get much more than by selling it he re'" (1927 ed.: 4: l 13). And, in a similar fashion, Giovanni Baglione reported in 1642 that after darkening a painting with smoke, Terenzio da Urbino added variegated layers of varnish and dressed a decrepit frame with shabby gilt "so that his work eventually looked as though it were really old and of some value" (quoted in Arnau 1961: 43).

One aspect of the Western image of Africa which resonates throughout the African art collecting world is the notion that authentic Africans, and by extension authentic objects of African art, no longer exist. Like the societies themselves, contemporary art objects produce d in Africa are considered inauthentic approximations of traditional forms, sullied, as it were, by the degenerative impact ofWes tern influence. Real African art, the argument goes, consists of old objects which were manufactured in the pre-contact or pre­ colonial era for indigenous use. "The problem begins," art historian William Rubin explains, "when and if a question can be raised - because of the alteration of tribal life under the pressure of mode m technology or Western social, political, and religious forms - as to the continuing integrity of the tradition itself" ( 1984: 76). Commenting on this passion for appropriating "genuine" cultural products, James Clifford has suggested correctly that "authenticity in culture or art exists just prior to the present, but not so distant or eroded as to make collection or salvage impossible" (1987: 122; see also Handler 1986).

Both the museum and the art market thrive on this particular v ision of an African world, whose rapid spin into decay is set immediately in motion by the contagion ofWestern contact. In the context of a Western museum, one notices a reverence for the past which is expressed both in the language of explanatory text and in the symbolism of display. Even when referring to living popu­ lations, for example, museum label copy is often written in past tense (Clifford 1985: 17 1). Like objects suspended mysteriously in space on mounts of translucent Plexi, cultures are suspended enigmatically in time within the vacuum of preteritive language. Objects that show signs of Western influence are judged impure and unworthy of either serious scholarly research or art collection with an eye toward investment. Ladislas Segy, a once prominent dealer in African art, illustrates the- collector's negative attitude toward Western influence when he writes: "[W]hen actual European penetration undermined the ideological background for carving[,] the artwork [of Africa) degenerated" (1958: 23). And, in a similar vein, art critics Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro noted as early as 1926 that, " the coming of the white man has meant the passing of the negro artist; behind remains only an occasional

The quest for authenticity 105

uninspired craftsman dully imitating the art of his ances tors, chipping wood or ivory into a stiff, characterless image for the foreign trade" (1926: 13).

The concept of the "death of culture" was used by early anthropology as a means of legitimating its burgeoning status as a science of preservation, where artifacts stood as vis ible symbols salvaged from the ravages of a decaying modem world. The same concept, however , was also necessary to twentieth­ century European artis ts who could only "discover" African art in a context freed from the encumbrance of a living African artis tic counterpart with an alte rnative voice, and a different evaluative language. For artists like Picasso and Braque, the producers of African art were silent not only because they lived in lands that were oceans away, nor s imply because they communicated in unfamiliar tongues, but more profoundly because their world view was stifled, quite conveniently, by the West's summary dismissal of whatever constituted "authentic" African c ulture. Finally, the "death of culture" concept reappears once again in the context of the contemporary art market. H ere, it functions to inflate price by creating an artific ially limited supply. Commenting on this process in both the " modem" and " primitive" art markets, Joseph Alsop has written:

On the most superficial level, it is a truism of the art market that the works ofa dead but still-admired master are more valued than the works of a master still alive and currently productive. Death limits the supply; the law of supply and demand begins to operate; and so $2,000,000 comes to be paid for a Jackson Pollock, significantly described as one of the last of Pollock's major works to be available. In the same fashion, collectors', museums' and the market 's interest in American Indian artifacts has been growing rapidly for a good many decades. Yet it seems most unlikely that this would be the case if the West were still dotted with trading posts where [one could cheaply obtain) admirable examples of quill work and beadwork, featberwork, blankets, pottery, wood carvings, and the like. While that was the s ituation, no one was interested in Indian artifacts except for a tiny number of ethnologically minded persons.6 (1 982: 21-22)

Emphasis on age not only creates a limited supply which is beneficial to those who have a stake in controlling the African art market, but it also denies artistic capacity to those who could benefit by producing for the contemporary trade. Modem work, including so-called touris t or "airport" art, i s considered a demon in the c ult of antiquity. In a wide ly circulated book on African art. Elsy Leuzinger comm e nted: " If to urists want masks and sculptures, then they shall have them, as many as they wish! But what is produced is of most questionable value: works without any c ultural roots or artistic content" ( 1960: 209). It is only in recent years, in fact, that touris t art has been the subject of any serious anthropological inquiry (e.g., Be n-Amos 1971 ; Grabum, ed . 1976; Jules­ Rosette 1984). And, with few exceptions, it is s till considered an inappropriate subject for art history (see Adams 1989; Kasfir 1992).

If the "death of culture" increases art market pro fits by limiting the supply

'1 -.. ,..

106 African an in transit

ofauthentic art, it also creates in its own wake the birth of its worst enemy - an industry of fakes, forgeries, and frauds (Allison, et al. 1976; Maurer 1981; Schoffel 1989). Devised to deceive the consumer, the fake object of African art is far more troublesome to the collector than the petty production of tourist crafts. African art historian William Fagg once referred to a fake as, "a work of the devil and a sin against art" (quoted in Sieber 1976: 22). And, in another instance, fakery was even placed on an equal footing with a parasitic tropical disease: "Mr. Kahan [a New York City art dealer] goes to the African continent two or three times a year, where he must fend off both new strains ofdysentery and a profusion of art fakes (two out of every three pieces)" (Anon. 1982: 15).

Those who fake - both European and non-European art merchants and artists - capitalize on the "death of culture" by creating objects that imitate signs of age, ritual wear, and indigenous use. Armed with a highly sophisticated technology of re-production, the faker can simulate a thick accretion of soil and soot which would result from object storage in the rafters of a village cooking hut, the "sweat marks" on the inside of a mask which testify to its extensive use and wear (i.e. suggesting that the mask, as they say, has actually been "danced" ), layers of feather and blood encrustation which build up after years of sacrificial libations, and a gleaming surface patina which results from decades of extensive object handling. Even an object' s collection history can be forged by the faker's art. Inagaki, a Japanese mount maker who died in Paris shortly after the Second World War, was known for the exquisitely crafted mounts which he made during the early decades of this century for dealers and collectors of African art. Art forgers have imitated Inagaki stands in order to underscore an object's aura of authenticity, thereby falsely dating to the prewar period the sculpture which the mount supports (S. Vogel, ed. 1988: 4).7

Taxonomy and hegemony

In his review of the MoMA exhibition, "Primitivism" in 20th-Century Art, Clifford concluded that whatever else it may have represented the event stood as a document of a "taxonomic moment" in the history of art; a moment when African art and modem art were brought together on an "equal" footing; a moment when the status of so-called "primitive" objects was profoundly elevated and redefined (1985: 170). However, like any moment in a system of classification, the order and division among types is not permanent. Like the ephemeral power of a "big man" in the New Guinea Highlands, African art's moment of glory can be wiped easily away and replaced by another art form which is raised by its fall.

Taxonomies are always constructed by interested individuals to tell a particular story. They are never objective, neutral, or without intentionality. ''[I]n nation-states," Shelly Errington observes, "objects associated with the

The quest for authenticity 107

past require an interpretation to place them within the historical narrative that tells what they are and what their relation is to the present., (I989: 53). A contemporary example is the display of Aztec, Maya, and Olmec objects in the National Museum of Mexico, where artifacts are pressed into service as evidence of the state 's glorious past (ibid.: 53; cf. Anderson 1983: 178-85; Wallis 1991).

African art has been the subject of numerous. often radically different, systems of classification. Cultural critic and philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe has noted that what "is called savage or primitive art covers a wide range of objects introduced by the contact between Africans and Europeans during the intensified s lave trade into the classifying frame of the eighteenth century" (1988: 10). Though appearing fixed, and thereby natural, the frames of classification are constantly being negotiated and reconstructed (see Blier 1988- 89). Dividing the world roughly in half, nineteenth-century evolutionists viewed the arts of one portion of humanity as a yardstick with which to measure the arts of the other. Their classification was intended to tell a story of human progress and the triumph of Western c ivilization. Twentieth-century artists reclassified African art in order to validate, and even he ighten, their own modernist enterprise. Theirs is a story of discovery, affinity, and the generous reconciliation of two disparate artistic traditions. Today, African art dealers in Europe and America rank the arts using economic criteria. They confer value on certain objects and withhold it from others. Their system of classification establishes the boundaries of the market, and prevents those on the fringe from participating in the trade.

Whatever the intent of a particular taxonomy of African art, the point is that objects are stripped of their original meanings and manipulated to fit the agenda of the moment. Power differentials are always at play. As Clifford says: "The relations of power whereby one portion of humanity can select, value, and collect the pure products of others need to be criticized and transformed" (1985: 176). The s hift of African objects from artifact into art has little to do with an objective change in the quality of the objects themselves but is a direc t result of what several authors have characterized as a peculiar form of Western generosity which presents itself in a guise of cultural relativism. Sally Price writes: "The •equality' accorded to non-Westerners (and their art), the impli­ cation goes, is not a natural reflection of human equivalence, but rather the result of W estern benevolence" (1989: 25). And later, s he goes on to add, the "Western observer's discriminating eye is often treated as if it were the only means by which an ethnographic object could be elevated to the status of a work of art" (1989: 68). In a similar tone, Clifford notes: "Turning up in the flea markets and museums of late nineteenth-century Europe, these objects are destined to be aesthetically redeemed, given new value in the object system of a generous modernism" (I985: 172).

11 .. •

I08 African art in transit

The classification of African art has had a direct impact both on the market for old objects and on the current production of art for international trade. Taxonomies fix African art in stereotypical forms so that the market does not reward the production of artistic novelty. "[I]ndividual creativity beyond bounds set by Westerners," explains Jeremy MacClancy, " is generally unwanted. An object difficult to categorize can be difficult to sell" (1988: 172). Raoul Lehuard, a noted African art collector in France, confirmed MacClancy 's observation when he declared: " An object is a fake when its forms are extraneous to the statuary repertoire of a given ethnic group" (1976: 74).8 The art of Anoh Acou, a Baule woodcarver working in the West African beach resort of Grand Bassam, offers a case in point. Rather than imitate other tourist arts, which either copy "traditional" masks and statues or depict images of wildlife that stand as Western symbols of idyllic Africa, Anoh Acou carves wooden suits, formal shoes, baseball caps, crushed aluminum cans , "boom box" radios. and telephones. The market, however, does not reward his artistic talent and inventiveness. Images of progress and change do not have a place in the West's vision of Africa; they cannot be situated easily in the taxonomy of non-Western art (Jules-Rosette 1990: 29-30).

Constructing the category art

African art entered the West with a certain degree of trepidation. Unsure of its proper place in the hierarchy of the world of goods, Westerners first assigned African art to the category of curiosity. where objects were worthy neither of scientific investigation nor aesthetic appreciation. Natural and artificial objects gathered from the conquest and exploration of foreign lands were arranged together in the "cabinets of curiosities" belonging to Europe' s elite. Through­ out this early period, ethnographic specimens were collected haphazardly and displayed in a cluttered mass. "Because there was no Systema Naturae ... by which to arrange them and precise terminology with which to discuss them" writes Adrienne Kaeppler, " few [collectors] took them seriously" (1978: 37). The objects were valued principally as trophies - icons of conquest attesting to unbridled Western power in the Age of Discovery (see Steiner 1986a).

In the second half of the nineteenth century. when the field of anthropology began to evolve from amateur avocation to scientific enterprise . the status of African art was elevated from artificial curiosity to ethnographic artifact. Random and unordered collections were given new meaning as they were subsumed within a then burgeoning museological branch of anthropological science. Pitt-Rivers, for e xample, who was among the first to promote the systematic collection, storage, and display of ethnographic artifacts, wrote in 1875 that the "products of human industry. are capable of classification into genera, species and varieties, in the same manner as the products of the

The quest for authe nticity 109

vegetal and animal kingdom" ( 1875: 307). Artificial curiosities were thus admitted to the kingdom of science - having been assigned the ir own version of a Systema Naturae.

The conceptual reclassification of material c ulture was followed quickly by a physical relocation of the objects themselves. In 1884, for example, the artifacts collected by Pitt-Rivers were placed in a museum which had been built especially for them at Oxford (Gerbrands 1990: 17). African art was thus moved from private display to public domain - from the wonder cabinets of the leis ured class to the popular halls of e thnographic museums and world expositions. In their new context, African art objects were perceived as visual windows through which one could catch a fleeting glimp se of"primitive man." Though making a pivotal transition from personal prize to public specimen, the objects of anthropology were still intertwined with those of what were the n considered to be associated scientific disciplines - e.g., paleontology, entomology, gemology, and geology. Comme nting, for example, on the status of American Indian art at the American Museum of Natural History, Edmund Carpente r has written: "On public display was an incredible wealth of Northwest Coast art. Yet every piece was classified and labeled as scientific specimen. Tribal carvings were housed with seashe lls and minerals as objects of natural history" (1975: 11). While developing their plans for the opening of the Musee d 'ethnographie du Trocadero, Paul Rivet and Georges-Henri • Riviere emphasized in 1929 that "primitive" artifac ts were to be understood as • "objects of knowledge" that were meant to infonn instead of please (Jamin 1985: 60-63). A s such, it was argued, the artifacts were privileged in their capacity for revealing dispassionate ethnographic truths. According to Marcel Griaule, in a manual he prepared for his team of researchers on the 1931- 33 Dakar- Djibouti expedition, ethnographic objects were to be collected and stored syste matically since they provide "an archive more precise and more revealing than the written word itself" (quoted in Jamin 1982: 90).

African art made a second fundamental category shift sometime in the early years of the twentieth century when a g roup of Parisian artists first discovered the art that was embedded in the category primitive. "We owe to the voyagers, colonials, and ethnologists," writes Rubin, " the arrival of these [African] objects in the West. But we owe primarily to the convictions of the pioneer modem artists their promotion from the rank of curiosities and artifacts to that of major art, indeed, to the status of art at all" (1984: 7). For these twe ntieth­ century artists, objec ts of African art did not derive their meaning from an e thnographic context but were of interest only when depayse - s tripped of all contextual references and indigenous symbolic meanings (Jamin 1982: 89).

This second shift in the conceptualization of African art was, however, less e ncompassing than the f'rrst. That is to say, while the early anthropologists were democratic in promoting all artificial curiosities to scientific specimens,

I IO African art in transit

artists and (later) art historians were more discriminating in their selection of which objects would be permitted to pass from artifact into art. Items that were thought to speak across cultural barriers were judged as works of art, whereas those considered impervious to cross-cultural interpretation remained locked in the artifact class. Currently, one of the most articulate proponents of the art/ artifact distinction is Susan Vogel, founder and director of The Center for African Art in New York City. She takes the view that a

pedestrian bundle of sticks communicates only within its own culture where under­ standing may depend, for example, on the knowledge that it contains branches from specific medicinal plants with particular powers . .. [A carved] figure, on the other hand, has an expressive dimension and, if it is good, I venture that it will communicate some­ thing of its import even when we do not know what its intended content is. (1981 b: 76)

Vogel is well aware that her proposition becomes problematic the moment we are called to judge for ourselves whether or not the figure is "good." If we do not understand the intended content of the work, how are we to know on which scale to weigh its symbolic load?

Although there are some noteworthy exceptions, participation in the art/ artifact distinction tends to be divided along academic disciplinary lines. Art his torians, on the one hand, generally legitimate their scholarly interests (and negotiate their research funds) by insisting that the formal aesthetic character of African art is entirely capable of being analyzed and taught through the lens of Western art historical discourse . Most anthropologists, on the other hand, justify their raison d'etre by arguing that objects can be understood only within an appropriate ethnographic context. Those favoring a universal category of art, disparage anthropologists for their attention to ethnographic detail which, they say, suffocates the object's aesthetic below a mass of academic dogmatism. Furthermore, they suggest that emphasis on cultural context diminishes an object's capacity to stand alone as a genuine aesthetic creation. "The motives for this insis tence [on context]," writes James Faris, " while perhaps honorable (and of paramount importance to the discipline [of anthro­ pology]), could be argued to deny objects of the Other any potential on their own - any freedom from the security of context - almost as if in their emancipation they might be revealed as, well, primitive" (1988: 778- 79).