"WHO INVENTED AFRICANS?"

10 TIP TOPS HOW NOT TO BECOME AN AFRICAN ARTIST

This article is available in French HERE, or in Arabic HERE.

 If you wanted, as an artist, to participate in one of those grand events celebrating African culture that take place every season in western capital cities, you have to satisfy a certain number of conditions. First, be born somewhere in Africa, preferably in black Africa. Secondly, be accessible, indeed, live somewhere from which, geographically, it is easy to get to the event. Africa is just too far away! If you do not meet the two conditions mentioned above, you can still have a chance to participate, if your skin is black, as is the case with American, French or British blacks, the so-called blacks of the "African Diaspora." So, in my role as an African creative person, black and 'diasporized' in  Europe, l was able, in September 1995, to take part in one of the big European conferences devoted to the  contemporary art of Africans. This was "Africa 95."

There, l met a great many Africans, artists, writers, art historians, and exhibition  curators. I even met some American and British blacks who were  wondering about the authenticity of the "African-ness" of North Africans, some of whose work was being shown in London in the same exhibition. What a funny discussion we had. On the one hand, there were two black artists, one of whom had been born in and had lived his whole life in London; on the other hand, there was the other, an American. And then, there l was, someone who feels at the same time Arab, African and Western. According to the arguments of my interlocutors, North Africans  would  be seen as foreign to the African continent, since "they come from somewhere else!" This made me think of some of  the debates that fed  into the "diplomatic" crisis in 1976 at the Second International Festival of Black and African Culture held in Lagos, I say "diplomatic crisis" because two African countries, Senegal and Nigeria, involved in the organization of this conference, engaged in some impressive displays of iron-handed diplomatic tactics, starting with their conceptual divergence in defining African culture. The Senegalese, who had conceived and organized the First Festival exclusively around the black dimension of African culture, defined as the culture of black communities (wherever they are found in the world)  did not accept the change introduced by the Nigerians in enlarging the compass of the event so as to include all Africans, including North Africans. The situation worsened when the Nigerian authorities dismissed the secretary general of the International Committee of the Festival, the Senegalese Ali Diop.

Consequently, the respective national presses of the two countries picked up the banner and transformed the debate into an affair of national honor. If this debate failed to entangle other African countries, it was because the majority of observers knew that behind the quarrel over abstract concepts lay the geopolitical situation of the Cold War in Africa. The regime of the father of Négritude, who spoke in the name of French-speaking countries in sub-Saharian Africa, and indeed in the name of France, found itself in a critical  situation, divided between the dominant pan-African feelings of the period and the political will of France, to which it owed everything, and which, some years earlier, had made no secret of its complete support for' secessionists in Biafra, then the principal zone of oil production in Nigeria. But the two "black-blooded" brothers with whom l was speaking had nothing to do with and wanted to know nothing about the geopolitics of Africa. They were black, they had black ideas, they wore dark glasses so they could see only the black part of the universe, and they thought themselves thusly authorized to reorganize Africa. At this stage of the discussion, l began to understand the importance of Nelson Mandela's actions when, after apartheid, he accepted white South Africans simply as compatriots with light skin, even if they had arrived on the African continent much later than the Arabs in North Africa! 

By valorizing the dark color of their skin, my interlocutors scarcely disguised their dream of a return to "Mother Africa." For them, we are all, including myself, members of a great community of expatriate  Africans dispersed across the world: a Diaspora! 

Diaspora? Me? What in heaven's name did I do to deserve such a Biblical destiny? If there is an experience of diaspora in my life, it would be the experience l lived through before leaving Sudan, the country of my birth, and after landing in France, the promised land where my "African exile" came to be accomplished. Legend says that the people of the diaspora must see a "sign" that heralds the end of wandering. That sign, for me, was paper! I understood it one day when l found myself in a large stationery shop in Lille in front of stacks and stacks of paper. I discovered there a dozen variants of watercolor paper. I took out these beautiful sheets, examined them, touched them, smelled them, and l even felt the desire to chew them, so enchanted l was. I, who had learned how to take sheets of already painted paper and wash them with soap and iron them in order to whiten them before re-painting them. In fact, a sheet of virgin watercolor paper is still a rare object in the school of Fine Arts in Khartoum, the inspired place where I spent the 1970s, the place where l learned how to appreciate the most diverse watercolorists, from Durer to Sam Francis, by way of Turner, Schiele and others .

Diaspora? No, thank you, my friends, I do not envisage a "return" to  Africa, neither to Liberia nor Ethiopia, nor Israel. My "promised land" is here. I promised it to myself the day I set foot in the modern  school. The day I defined myself as a modern westerner, an "extra-European". I do not see why l should return in Gola (captivity or deportation in Hebrew) among the pagans and the chronically neo-colonized just to preserve my cultural identity as an African. This African identity, assigned to me by  black-skinned Europeans and Americans - because they know I was born on the black continent - feels as distant and even foreign to me insofar as I feel free to embrace or reject it, depending on whether or not I find anything of interest in it for me. All the same, "my" cultural identity as a non-European westerner does not allow me enough distance to justify assuming the stance of arbiter on the question of being or not being so. Furthermore, the role of arbitrating identity lacks nothing in ambiguity. In fact, if by relying on my cultural identity I feel able to carry out my existential choices, then the very fact of wanting, with due consideration, to take a position “vis-à-vis ", my" African identity only confirms the futility of an African identity that serves to legitimize the pervasiveness of a western identity strong enough to want to be disguised as "other"! Besides, no one has ever asked colonized peoples if they wanted to be integrated, or not, into the western tradition. They have been launched within the tradition, and they have seated themselves where they have been left a place.

"But you are completely alienated, my brother! exclaims my brother in black blood. (I told you that it was a funny discussion!) 

"Alienated from what?" 

"From your African culture."

 "Which one?" 

"What do you mean by that?" 

"I mean that each person carries 'his' own African culture." 

ln my hometown in the Sudan, when the Meridien Hotel opened in Khartoum in the late 1970s, there was, to one side of the hotel restaurant, a small cafeteria that the French hotel manager had decided to call "Le coin de café soudanais" ("The Sudanese coffee corner") with its decor straight out of A Thousand and One Nights, several young women in full Hollywood Scheherazade get-up served coffee to tourists. Of course, the Sudanese, who are for the most part tea-drinkers, discovered this “coin du café soudanais” with the same sense of astonishment at the exotic as the European tourists did. Then, increasingly, middle-class couples and families from Khartoum began to frequent the café (to drink tea), and in several months, the wish of the Hotel Meridien manager came to full fruition in a veritable Sudanese café corner, thanks to the loyalty of its Sudanese clients.

The moral of this story is that only Africans can produce a culture that can be described as African, even if what they come up with does not conform to the norms of a certain idea of African authenticity preserved by a few "specialists" of African culture! The freedom that is available to Africans to define their cultures could be extended to all domains, but also to aIl extremes, including this one, ambiguous but legitimate, which consists in appropriating the European representation of what African culture is. It is a pragmatic appropriation that becomes cultural reality the moment that Africans find something in it for themselves. In the labyrinth of national and international interests, this is precisely where one has to examine the evolution of what has been called since the end of the 1960s "contemporary African art"; and it is this phenomenon that several Sudanese artist friends and I have dubbed "Artafricanism". This is an art developed in the metropolises of Europe, America and Africa, because that is where certain authorities find an ethical or political, indeed, an economic, interest. Of course, the liberties that the inhabitants of Africa take with their cultural patrimony is not good for the ethno-esthetics "business" that has amassed their international cultural capital - as weIl as their political capital! - based on the idea of an immutable, although ungraspable, African cultural authenticity. This "contemporary African Art" is, in my view, only one among many European cultural propositions, an "ism" addressed to Europeans who cast their gaze toward Africa. Of course, Africans who accept it legitimize it as one African art among others. But this particular freedom, the freedom to alter European mental schemas, the freedom to choose the artistic forms that interest them, without regard for their compatibility with some ancestral African tradition or another, this particular freedom is forbidden to African creative people. So there will always be Europeans ready to examine Africans under the interrogation lamp in a "Sudanese café corner," somewhere in Africa, in order to express their worries about the meaning of African cultural authenticity, because this kind of African "mannerism" sends Europeans back to the obvious, disturbing fact: the impossibility of assigning to Africans the "rôle" of Africans as defined by Europeans and based on a European conception of the world. Not only African artists, but Africans in general are systematically considered in reference to a certain idea of Africa, seen by its Europeans and African negrologists as a lost paradise of ethnic and cultural purity. In this Africa, the diversity of African cultures is reduced to a kind of African culture purified of all elements foreign to the negrological authenticity of the continent. 

Depriving Africans of their ethnic and cultural diversity might be seen as a lack of intellectual delicacy coming from the common run of people working for the Ministry of Cooperation, the Association Française d'Action Artistique [AFAA] (French Association for Artistic Action), or even the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) and other such organizations. However, such gestures become gross and methodologically crude coming from people who consider themselves scientist scholars of African culture. You don't have to be a "specialist of Africa" to understand that Africa is not immune to the world's complexity. 

Susan Vogel, an indispensable figure inside the little world of contemporary African art, offers a good illustration of a scholar with a deliberately approximative approach to cultural reality in Africa. In her introduction to the catalogue of one of the largest exhibitions devoted to contemporary African art, Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art, Susan Vogel writes that the life and arts of Africans have been changed for the worse as Islam and Christianity have progressed. (1)Of course, Susan Vogel does not acknowledge Islam and Christianity as African religions, even though the Christians of Egypt and Ethiopia -­Christians for more than fourteen centuries and the Muslims of half of the continent consider themselves equally African! And may Allah bless Kateb Yacine, the great Francophone Algerian writer, who said: "The French language is a war booty ", when his Arab nationalist friends reproached him for writing in the language of the colonizers! But the kind of war where the spoils are shared between victors and vanquished is a bit too subtle for those who scramble immediately to what they consider the "good side," that of the victors.

The question that arises in this circumstance is not very "correct," but necessary for understanding the complexity of the situation of African art in America: how could the choice of the "good side" for Susan Vogel, principal mover of an exhibition that presented African art as exclusively negrological, remain indifferent to the sociopolitical situation of present-day American society? There was a time when American philanthropists got as far as sending American blacks to Liberia in order to establish the first utopia of ethnic cleansing, American-style, a variant of the Indian reservation outside America. It was a very costly undertaking at the time, just as it remains too costly today. 

In our own times, some Americans find that it is more practical, and more correct, to consign black Americans to the "reservation" of "Artafricanisme". Supported by powerful patrons, the enterprise of “Artafricanisme” seems to function efficiently, not only in America but just in Africa as well, since there are many black American and African artists who find something of artistic interest in the projects proposed by the European ethno-estheticism machine. By adopting the goals of this project, African artists validate it as contemporary African art, while black American artists make up a variant community within contemporary American art. This being said, membership in “Artafricanisme” is not obligatory for African creative people, just as it is not for black-skinned American artists, the moment that these artists conceive  the sense of their art in other terms than the mysterious norms of African authenticity. What I am describing is one option among others, one that some European artists (Modigliani, Picasso, and others, for example) knew how to pursue at one moment in the history of modern European art. Nowadays, the dominant tendency in most institutions that support contemporary African art, whether they be in Africa, Europe, or America, is to impose “Artafricanisme” as the unique path for all contemporary African artists, indeed for all black-skinned artists, whether they are African or not. So much the better for black American artists who find political weight in such a tendency in the context of actual, racial discrimination in the United States today. But such an imposition of the “Artafricanisme”  model does not necessarily concern African artists who might aspire to a less narrow definition for their art.

In the Sudan, during the 1970s, the Arabic Muslim middle class supported  the official installation of an artistic tendency in the plastic arts, called “the Khartoum School”. The declared goal of the artists behind the Khartoum School (some of whom, like El Salahi, Shibrain and Abdelaal, were high officiaIs in the apparatus of the state and of the sole party in power, as well as in the School of Fine Arts in Khartoum) was to restore an official Sudanese cultural authority. The "Sudanese art" that they supported was a hybrid of traditional African and Arab elements. But this cultural cross-breeding had to be done within the framework of Islamic culture. In their productions - notably graphic - the accent was put on references to Arabic calligraphy and so-called “African ornaments”. The golden age of the “Khartoum School” was also marked by the marginalization of many important Sudanese artists, who remained obscurely recognized because their work could not be blended into the official ideological perspective. (2) "Ideological" patronage seems to be the only significant type of patronage from which modern forms of art in Africa benefit. One situation similar to that of the Sudan is mentioned by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir in her well-documented book Contemporary African Art. The insight that Littlefield Kasfir offers into the Senegalese situation is applicable to many African countries: "On the one hand, the kind of sustenance that artists enjoyed under Senghor's patronage was extraordinary, but, on the other, it contained serious limitations, because to receive full government support, artists had to subscribe to the official ideology of Négritude, which, when translated into a set of formal practices, eventually produced its own form of academicism. What began as an open-minded experiment evolved and hardened into official cultural policy. Meaningful criticism faded." (3)

The Watchmen of Utopia

In London, at the time of the exhibition "Africa 95" ,during the colloquium "African Artists, School, Studio and Society," organized by the School of Oriental and African Studies, there was the inevitable debate over the definition of contemporary African art. A passionate discussion took place in response to an interview with Jean Clair by Emmanuel Fessy published in the June 1995 issue of The Art Newspaper. Jean Clair's comments were interpreted as an illustration of a certain kind of European resistance to the idea of a contemporary African art. Questioned about his views on the inclusion of artists from Third World countries in the Biennale, and whether there is any justification for going out to look for these artists, Jean Clair, then director of the Venice Biennale, had declared: 

"I have always felt that was completely preposterous: the idea we have of art or the artistic activity is strictly confined to the West and any pseudo-generous intention of opening up our museums, institutions, art galleries and Biennales to Third World "artists" is, as I see it, actually a final piece of misconceived colonialism. Our concept of art is strictly associated with a certain culture which raised the image to a point of sophistication not known in any other form of culture. At the same time it was limited so that it belongs only to the field of enjoyment and pleasure, whereas in other cultures the image belongs to the religious, sacred or medical domain. So, there will be no Third World artists. It would be an abuse of power, an abuse of language, and would involved mixing things that are completely incompatible. On the other hand, the major problems of this end-of-century period will be raised, the very problem of cultures alien to Western culture which have a quite different concept of the image, its power and its status from ours. At present, these cultures are on the up and up, in a conquering phase, to such an extent that we can't be at all sure that the great museums we are opening will still be there in a few years' time. When we see what is going on in Algeria ... everything we regard as established, the whole cultural system based on the cult of the image, may be completely swept away two or three decades from now. l'm saying that in total serenity. It isn't a pessimistic vision of things. I believe that civilizations move on and pass away."

What to do with such assertions? To condemn the situation in the name of equality between cultures would be to show a lack of respect for a man with the intellectual finesse of Jean Clair, all the more as these "premonitory" reflections become graver still when read in the light of the recent destruction of Buddhist statues by the Afghan regime of the Taliban. Indeed Jean Clair's comments evoke the famous lines of Rudyard Kipling: "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and Never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat." Where Kipling, in his poem "The Ballad of East and West," can broadcast the pride of a conquering colonial, Jean Clair, in a kind of boomerang effect, expresses his worry about the perverse effects of neo-colonialism on the cultures of the Third World. But speaking from where he speaks, a place from which he may speak this "we," his words open out onto an ambitious cultural project, the goal of which would be to preserve the integrity of Third World cultures as well as that of the western culture: «Everybody, stays at home!" (In which case the village of Colombey-les-deux-Eglises - so dear to General De Gaulle - would not have to change into “Colombey with the two mosques”!) . 

However, this will to preserve the integrity of European art from eventual third-world profanations seems to come too late, since European artists have traveled extensively "elsewhere" than in the western world. In some ways, they have followed the movement of colonial and neo-colonial history: they have traveled along with military troops, they have exercised domination along with the colonizers, they have done their share of blood-sucking along with the neo-colonizers, and now their blood is mingled with that of the Others under the benevolent surveillance of the globalizing machines. Who can cast stones at these brave people?

 I can, of course, in my status as the illegitimate son of a tragic neo-colonial adulteration of the humanitarian dream: I can  throw stones at the European artists who have abused this guilty privilege of not being victim in a world divided between victim and victimizer. But for the moment, throwing stones at European artists is not my first priority. The first priority is to make them allies in the struggle against exclusion, the struggle for a more equitable division of the goods of this world. How? I still do not know, but perhaps I may discover how by seeking the answer along with these misguided allies that artists make. Nor does it seem to be a good solution to close the doors of the western world’s museums, galleries and biennials to Third World artists, since these artists are already there. These days, there is no respectable western city that does not have one or more museum institutions devoted to non-European art. In one sense, Jean Clair's comments serve only to irritate and to provoke those artists who call themselves Third World artists and their European guardians. But in addition to all the mutual anger, Jean Clair's comments sound a challenge to those falsely generous institutions who open themselves to non-European artists.

Seen in this light, suspicions about neo-colonialist moral abuse, which suspicions Jean Clair addresses to European institutions that support non-European art, seem legitimate. In fact, the Jean Clair interview raises questions about the ambiguous role of European patrons of contemporary non-European art. These are patrons who specialize in various categories of non-European art and who eventually declare themselves "expert" in the matter. And as they are all connected to one another, they end up by forming a network of persons who see each other regularly in the course of artistic events here and there organized by official governments or private institutions and foundations. However, if you take the example of contemporary African art as a “raison d'être” of this extraordinary network of professionals, you might be struck by how odd it is that this African art seems to remain foreign not only to Africans but also to the international art market. 

Contemporary African art is not valued as highly on the art market asEuropean art, although some collectors and curators of ethnic art see in it “the art of-tomorrow." It would be wrong to say that contemporary African art escapes the law of the market, because nothing escapes the Law of mercantile monotheism. But the complexity of the connections between Africans and Europeans has a very specific effect on the kind of market that contemporary capitalist society reserves for the work of African artists. Up to the present day, Europe leaves African artists a "symbolic market-share" because African art remains for Europeans the site for all kinds of fantasies. There one has the greatest freedom at one's disposal to remake the image of the world, the image of Africans (eternally "Others) and of one’s self, according to one's mood and circumstances. African art, according to Pierre Gaudibert, who, in September 1990 organized an exhibition of sixty-four contemporary Senegalese artists at the Grande Arche de la Défense, “is a great reserve of the sacred, and European artists, in the absence of the sacred, can draw strength from it”. But African art is also the Eldorado for all good Samaritans of endangered ethnic cultures, to use the image of Horst Schauer, a German collector, who in 1994 opened an art gallery in Paris to exhibit the work of Arab and African artists. Interviewed in the March 13, 1994, issue of the journal “Jeune Afrique”, he declared: «... I did quite a bit of traveling, in the Maghreb, in Africa, and I saw the remarkable work done by the artists of these countries. I wanted to show that they are just as good as French, European, or American artists. Some are doing work that is even much more interesting and stronger.... And I sincerely think that they have something to say to the Western world. But the Western public is often not familiar with even the most famous Arab or African artists.... It seemed to me that we had here, if not an injustice, at least an absurdity”. 

In practical terms, there is not one single exhibitor of African art who is not motivated by a project to "rescue" African artists.

My favorite project is still that of Catherine M. in the book by Catherine Millet,The sexual life of Catherine M. [Original title: La vie sexuelle de Catherin M., Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2001; p.11; translated by Adriana Hunter, New York, Grove Press, 2002, p. 3]:

 "When I was old enough to go to Sunday school, I asked to speak to the priest one day. The problem l laid before him was this: I wanted to become a nun, to be a "bride of Christ, and to become a missionary in an Africa seething with destitute peoples, but I also wanted to have husbands and children. The priest was a laconic man, and he cut short the conversation, believing that my concerns were premature.”

Too bad that Catherine M. did not come to rescue us in Africa the way she rescued contemporary art in France. The priests of neo-colonialism sent us professional “Artafricanisme” experts who see Africa as a reserve of artists ready to sell themselves so they can manage to pay, in "black blood currency”, the cost of survival in the world of European art. The ostracism that African artists experience in the current market might legitimize the suspicions of Jean Clair about the nature of the patronage to which non-European artists are subjected in some European institutions. The latter have become institutional "camps where every ethnic category has its exhibition space or spaces, even as all "these people are sometimes lumped together in a unified block as "the Other” vis-à-vis the western European.  In the "camps” set aside for African artists, the artists were shown, notably, even uniquely, as black persons with black souls, and this perhaps explains why absurd political categories like black Africa and white Africa are still maintained in the minds of exhibitors of African art.  As their relationship with Africa has evolved, Europeans, have elaborated kind of specific approach, one might say an “artisanal industry" for the exhibition of works from African culture. This is a kind of display craft defined, on the one hand, by a few ethnologists who have re-improvised themselves as exhibition curators over a period of time during which the "art exhibition has evolved into a separate artistic discipline complete unto itself, and, on the other hand, by a crowd of dealers - including, among others, exhibition curators, designated in French by the term commissaire de l'exposition (and just what would a “commissaire” of an exhibition be?) - all of them devotees and amateurs of ethnology. These days, no one any longer suspects ethnology of bearing some malevolent intention toward non-European peoples, because ethnology, that Trojan horse of the colonial period, has transformed itself in the eyes of European media into an icon of militant pro-Third-Worldism.

However, although ethnologists have contributed to the introduction and support of African art on the European artistic scene, they have, at the same time, stamped this African art with the seal of ethno-estheticism. Exhibition curators, having discovered African art through the ethnologists' viewpoint, have defined a space for exhibitions in which ethnological reference has become integral to the system. Art that comes from Africa has required a new sort of setting inspired by the ethnological attitude of European directors. But the link between African art and ethnology shows that Europeans have, for a long time, chosen to see Africa as reflected through the display cases in ethnographic museums. This trick is a clever one because the museum display case offers a certain protection, like the famous buckle mirror that allowed Perseus to see Medusa's face without the risk of being turned into stone. In such moral comfort, the good visitors to European museums have been able to cast their eyes on numerous African Medusas. Ever since Africa found its proper niche in the museographic "installation” of the European tradition. The display of African bodies in European museums is a practice that was constituted between the site of science (museums) and the site of spectacle (circuses and fairs), or even in intermediary places like zoos. So we find that in 1895, the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris displayed "Ashanti” Africans in cages. Some decades before, in 1810, Saartje Baartman, a young Bushman woman, nicknamed "the Hottentot Venus”, had been sent to London to be shown there in amphitheatres, salons and fairs. On her arrival in France, an animal trainer brought her into his performance. She died in 1815 from an infection, and her sexual organs were subsequently dissected. These may be seen, still today, in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. (4) But the natural history of European barbary in Africa has not yet revealed all its museological horrors: on June 30, 2000,  the Associated Press reported that Spanish authorities had decided to send back to Botswana for burial, the stuffed body of an African man who had been exhibited since 1916 in the museum, in the Catalan city of Banyoles. In the nineteenth century, the body had been exhumed from its tomb in Botswana and stolen by a French embalmer named Edouard Verraux, who sold it to the Spanish naturalist Francisco de Darder, who, in his turn, gave it to the collection of the Banyoles Museum of Natural History. 

The display of African culture in the work of early French ethnologists cannot escape its negro-necrological history. The sentence "A good Negro is a 'stuffed' Negro” echoes the sadly famous sentence of the white racists who for years populated Hollywood westerns: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian!”

In the same vein, to raise money for an official mission sent to Dakar-Djibouti to gather ethnographic information on African populations, a gala boxing match was organized at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris on the evening of April 15, 1931. Al Brown, a black American boxer, "put his title on the line so that the land of his ancestors be better known and his colored brothers better treated. The match-spectacle of Al Brown, according to Jean Jamin, in his introduction to Miroir de l'Afrique [Mirror of Africa] by Michel Leiris, was arranged "to put on display - rather, to put into play - the black body in its most physical and, by definition, most natural performances. The evening of the gala, four uniformed guards of the ethnographic museum on the Trocadero were posted at the four corners of the ring. Thus put under “surveillance”, the Black man who was fighting that evening prefigured those “objets nègres” which, two years later, the Mission would bring back from the land of his ancestors to be exhibited in the renovated galleries of the Ethnography museum, in the same proximate relationship to the watchful eye of the guards. (5) 

In this context, African artists, who understood the nature of what was expected of them by European patrons of African art, went to work feverishly and not without elegance in order to produce extraordinary objects of a European African art, safe and risk-free. But this African art remains marked by the fact that it has no place in the art market, because it is not "place-able” in market establishments. It is not highly esteemed, its artists are not listed in well-defined categories, and documents on their motivations and working conditions are scarcely available, indeed non-existent. In short, much documentary and conceptual work remains to be done before African artists can be brought into the art market. 

But if African artists do not exist in the gallery windows of the international art market, how can we explain their media notoriety in the artistic European landscape? I think that the African artists who populate the media scene at present are gathered there by European sponsors as testimonials to the state of thinking on the theme of European identity. But why do Europeans need African artists to reflect on their own cultural identity? Why do Europeans, standing in front of the mirror at the end of the millennium, need to wear the mask of African art in order to look at the state of their own identity? What are those undesirable aspects of the change in European identity that the mask of African art might hide? Why is there so much media coverage of European anxieties on the lot of African cultural identity while the real problems of African survival or African under-development meet only with contemporary African art, fabricated and implemented by European and African political events within the framework of the economic and political rivalries that have moved Afro-European relations since the colonial era. This contemporary African art is the natural product of an artificial cultural dynamic, one created by the exhibitors of non-European art in Europe and America.

This dynamic with its humanitarian face has favored the development of a generic, all-purpose ethno-esthetic discourse that is easily adapted to all the particular variations of non-European art. In this literature is outlined a way of thinking that begins with misappropriating the findings of ethnology on the theme of a common identity transcending time and space. The elaboration of a theoretical framework for ethno-esthetic actions has often been motivated by the pressing demands of political institutions and/or by the demands of the market. So the great founding events of contemporary African art have often been supported by governments, European or American, implicated, directly or indirectly, in African conflicts from the Cold War period. Historical institutions such as those involved with modern art in Africa could never have existed without the efforts of European governments. 

Examples abound. The "Centers for African Art," created by the Belgian amateur painter Pierre Lods in Brazzaville and later at Dakar (1961) were supported by the Institut français d'Afrique noire (IFAN). IFAN also created the Museum of African Art in Abidjan. Frank McEwen, a collector and colonial administrator, occupied the post of director of the National Gallery in Rhodesia, from 1956 to 1973. For the inaugural exhibition of the National Gallery, honored by the Queen of England, McEwen brought European works "from Rembrandt to Picasso." In one section of the exhibition, he hung works by modernist Europeans side by side with African sculptures. (6) During the 1960s, many art centers open to the public, following the "Mbari club" model, were opened in Ibadan, Lagos, and other cities in Nigeria. These centers of artistic creation have been, in large part, been financed by the United States (probably by the C.I.A.). (7)

Likewise, African art has not remained neutral in the conflicts among African countries. So, in 1976, at the Festival of African Culture (FESTAC, Festival de culture africaine) in Lagos, Nigeria, a dispute among the delegations, notably Senegalese and Nigerian, about the name of the festival, was at base inscribed in the context of a strong-arm struggle between France and its Anglo-Saxon competitors in Africa during the conflict in Biafra. (8) 

Today, whether in Africa or Europe, every international artistic event (exhibition, biennial, or festival) celebrating African culture cannot take place without the "massive" support of European countries. In this context, European exhibitors of African art have ended up by creating a type of African art, "Arafricanisme" in which some African artists have found a way to exhibit their artistic production outside Africa. This artistic production practice, initiated by Europeans, was meant to restore authenticity to African cultural identity. Ensconced inside the places they have invented, these exhibitors of African art are naturally more welcoming toward African artists who claim the type of African authenticity consistent with these places. The problem with these exhibitors of “Artafricanisme”, as true in Europe as in America, is the fact that these “artisans” of the art of display are often too much a part of political or market institutions to claim the innocence and scientific neutrality of ethnologists. But who needs the innocence of ethnologists when the stakes are as high as those informing the present conflicts in Africa? In the current state of things, l think that if one day some "ethical" (?) ethnology begins to impede the business politic that has engendered “Artafricanisme”, neo-colonial businessmen are powerful enough to reinvent their own ethnology (if this is not already being done!). 

After all, why would anyone suppose that ethnologists are more "resistant" than exhibition curators? And if Europeans do not or cannot find a way out of all these condemnable - but profitable! - schemes of “Artafricanisme”, what is to be done so that Africans can think about art and culture in relation to the realities of Africa?

The answers to these questions are to be found in the geopolitical rather than the artistic arena, and in any case not in “Artafricanisme”, which is only one ethnic war machine among others that neo-colonialism has inherited from colonialism. And if some number of African artists has, for reasons of survival, adhered to the “Artafricanisme” of the Europeans, the consequences of this adherence remain superficial in the artistic conscience of African societies. Certainly, this adherence can in no case prevent these "Africanizing" artists from claiming the African-ness of their art. African culture encompasses all tastes. 

This being said, the “Artafricanisme” of African artists is seen from the African side as a something that concerns Europeans. In fact, its most efficient centers of patronage are European, its most important events take place in Europe, its publications and its debates are addressed to the European public, while its emblematic figures, its "stars," are better known in European countries than in their own countries. In Europe and America, African artists are welcome, notably - even exclusively - as "black bearers of black light" in European ethno-esthetics institutions, such as the African American Institute in New York, the National Museum of African Art in Washington, the Commonwealth Institute in London, Iwalewa Haus in Bayreuth, Haus der Culturen der Welt in Berlin, and so forth. 

A rapid run-through of the exhibition programs of these institutions over the last two decades would confirm what I have been saying about the negrological exclusivity of these temples of “Artafricanisme”. For a decade, thanks to regular periodic festivals, the European locales of “Artafricanisme” celebration abound and surpass even the framework of university and museum ethnological institutions. They seem to grow in diversification and popularity. If one takes France as an example, one would easily guess that a growing number of French cities pay periodic homage to African art through the form of the festival. Likewise, the Musée de l'Homme has for two decades handed the torch to other more dynamic institutions like the Association française d'action artistique (Afrique en création) [AFAA] in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Musée national des arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie de Paris (headed by Jean-Hubert Martin, famous for having organized the exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre" in 1989). These machines are so well greased that they are likely to be summoned to manage large artistic events such as the biennials, congresses or festivals, not only in France but all over the (Third) world where their service is solicited.

In 1997, the Congolese artist Cheri Samba was invited to exhibit his so-called "naïve" paintings in the Musée national des arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie (MMO). But Samba turned out to be inspired when he "naïvely" pointed out the "apartheid" “Artafricanisme” drift of museographic institutions in France. Interviewed by Le Monde (August 10, 1997) on the subject of his exhibition at the MMO, he replied, "The Musée National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie is very good. But why am I not invited to the Musée d'Art Moderne? Is the Musée d'Art Moderne racist?" Of course, "racist" is "naïvely" not the right word; nevertheless, the Musée d'art moderne remains "racist," as do all other museums, including the museums of African and Oceanic Art, that are evidently little interested in the art of white European artists. 

With his naïve insolence, Cheri Samba posits himself as an outrageous kind of bridge or passageway between the two extremes of French “Artafricanists”, on the one side, there is Jean Clair, as the stern guardian of a fragile European utopia, trapped by its old quarrels of holy images; on the other side, Jean-Hubert Martin, as a cunning Noah, who, faced with the threat of a globalizing capitalist deluge, tries to include all cultural identities in the Ark of the Occident, which would be the incarnation of the dream of a boundless humanitarian utopia: the Paradise of cultures!

Ambiguous Traffickers 

Opposing Jean Clair against Jean-Hubert Martin in this way - though they are both students of Michel Leiris, the great mind behind anti-colonialist ethnology - enables us to map the conceptual ambiguities connecting the art of Africans to what Europeans call Art. If I use the term "Europeans"  when l am specifically referring to two French personalities, my reason is that the image of the dominant current of this African art seems to have been forged since the colonial period by French institutions. Of course, the situation is complex, but because of its complexity, African art, as a European invention, has known how t maintain the disturbing attribute of being also an excluding machine, one that fascinates those who practice exclusion as well as those who are its objects. On the side of Jean Clair, who seems to play the role of guardian of European artistic identity, things are simple to anyone who wants to simplify them: non-Europeans are different. They are strangers to our esthetic ideas and do not understand what we have been doing and making for centuries. If one lets them penetrate into our European culture, they might harm us, just as they might undermine their own cultural integrity. Consequently, let us restore our ramparts and redouble security at the cultural frontiers between our world and theirs! 

With this mode of reasoning, Jean Clair is not content just to dispense advice on the suitable actions to take, but is himself actively engaged in the current debate on cultural identity. It is a debate in which he finds an adversary of equal stature in the person of Jean-Hubert Martin. 

Part ethnologist and part “commissaire de l'exposition”, Jean-Hubert Martin is the complementary opposite to Jean Clair on the European artistic scene. In his preface to the catalogue of the exhibition, "Magiciens de la Terre" [Magicians of the Earth], Jean-Hubert Martin defines the debate - probably with Jean Clair in mind - as a discussion about the identity of an inclusive European art intended to encompass the arts of non-European societies. The polemical emphasis of his comments as an official cultural representative should have reassured certain political authorities who are not very sensitive to artistic matters: " The generally held idea that there is no creation in the plastic arts except in the Occidental, or strongly Westernized world is to take into account the persistence of our cultural arrogance. Not to mention those who always think that because we possess technology, our culture is superior to others; even those who come right out and declare that there is no difference between cultures often have great difficulty accepting the idea that the work coming out of the Third World can be put on an equal footing with the work of our avant-garde artists. Resistance turns out to be much stronger here than in other cultural domains: music, theater, cinema/entertainment and literature." (9)

Acting as complements to each other in their respective critiques, in which Europe is considered and treated as the West, Jean-Hubert Martin and Jean Clair contribute, each in his own way, to a further restoration of the border-line between European and non-European cultures, between the developed (civilized) world and the under-developed (barbarian) world. On his side, Jean Clair, in the role of European owner of the universe, reinforces the existing frontiers by excluding two-thirds of humanity outside the European cultural tradition. But this exclusion is impossible in the present world where European cultural tradition, by market bias, has imposed its spatial and temporal reference points on everyone who participates in the culture of the market. Whether we are African, Asian or European, we are all brought up on the same cultural tradition, that of the capitalist market. Knowing that, from now on, his Algerian or Afghan contemporaries can no longer be expelled from the European cultural tradition, Jean Clair can preserve European esthetic identity only when this identity is projected onto a pre-capitalist past. 

That past was an era when borders still existed between cultures, an era when Europe existed as a distinct entity with the capability of seeing itself complete and entire as mirrored by others and of wondering: how can one not be European? Reasoning in this way, Jean Clair can denounce (with justification, besides!) the ravages of neo-colonialism in non-European cultures - considered as pre-capitalist cultures - all the while positioning himself as the supreme guardian of European culture. 

On his side, Jean-Hubert Martin, instead of erecting walls, draws the boundary of European culture, as it were, by digging trenches : Jean-Hubert Martin reinforces the boundaries of others. According to him, non-Europeans exist as equals, opposite and on a par with Europeans. They are capable of the "reverse gaze," that is, of looking at Europe from the outside; they can "renverser la vapeur," "reverse steam"- in a playful expression based on an ambiguous expression that served as a slogan for the first biennial in South Africa after apartheid - . 

Jean-Hubert Martin's logic, one that is no less convoluted than Jean Clair's, argues for "ethnicizing" European culture, that is, treating European culture on the same basis as other cultures so as to develop a kind of global unity among the ethnic and cultural diversities of the world, all legitimized by their ability or their desire to be included and brought into the European utopia, which, as initiator of the project, claims monopoly over its management. 

To ethnicize Europe through the slant of this "reverse gaze" is the touching wish formulated by Michel Leiris, the illegitimate father of “Artafricanisme”, as a remedy for the culpable position of the ethnologist whose field research obeys the authority of the market: "It is from the State that we get the funds for our field work; we have less justification than anyone to wash our hands of the policies pursued by the State and by its representatives with respect to those societies we have chosen as the object of study." (10) 

Jean-Hubert Martin, we shall see, does not tread exactly in the footsteps of the grand master of “Artafricanisme”. Setting aside the humanitarian aspirations of his thought, we see that Michel Leiris advocated an idea as subversive as it was naïve in its thinking about the relation of ethnography to colonialism. (11) Leiris launched this "surrealist" idea challenging the very principle of ethnography and objecting to it as a colonialist discipline: "If one considers ethnography as one of the scientific disciplines that ought to contribute to the elaboration of a true humanism, the fact is surely regrettable that it has remained, in some ways, unilateral. What I mean by this is that if there really is an ethnographic discipline established by Westerners studying the cultures of other people, the reverse does not exist .... From the point of view of knowledge, we have a sort of imbalance that distorts the perspective and contributes to bolstering us in our pride, our civilization thereby finding itself outside the range of societies that we have within our range to examine." (12)

For Michel Leiris, redress should target the methodological effectiveness of the discipline as much as the needs of humanity. So it is about a new partage, a new dividing and sharing, in the field of ethnology that Michel Leiris speaks when, in 1950 in the human sciences section of the Association of Scientific Workers, he gives a talk entitled "L'ethnographie devant le colonialisme" ("Ethnography in the face of colonialism") . 

But this new partage, the aims of which would consist in "finding raw recruits in colonized countries and training them to be ethnographers who would similarly come to our homes as field researchers to study our ways of living," remains undermined by the power relationships between colonizing and colonized nations. Because – as Michel Leiris expresses it - "these researchers would be working according to methods that we will have taught them and because the ethnography thus constituted, consequently, would still have our fingerprints all over it." (13) 

What is to be done? Must we abandon ethnology in order to save Africans? No, Leiris is more ambitious; he is convinced that Africans must be saved through ethnology, perhaps because he knows that, alone, Africans would have no chance of existing in the European consciousness without ethnological means of validation. The idea of rejecting ethnology seems to frighten everyone. On the one hand, it frightens European ethnologists and the authorities funding their missions, because it entraps them in the image of an Africa forged in the dark zones of European humanity. On the other hand, it frightens all the Africans who have learned to see the continent through the European perspective. And since no one envisions abandoning the immediately useful idea of "ethnicized" Africa, Michel Leiris, in his role as humanizing missionary, takes on the responsibility of finding a solution to this colonialist dilemma. He attempts to do so without abusing the moral integrity of those who scrutinize each other, each through the mirror of the other, and without breaking the precious ethnological machine that the authorities of the marketplace have entrusted to him in the guise of a poisoned gift. I think this goal is probably the most difficult that Michel Leiris ever attempted to accomplish. Thus he assumes that "the training of a sufficient number of ethnographers from the colonized populations ... would be useful in this sense at least, that the colonized, while distancing themselves (inevitably) from their own customs, will preserve, one would hope, a more vivid memory of those customs, since their studies would have been done by their own people." (14) In the absence of trained ethnologists from colonized societies sent to study European societies, Leiris would advocate an indigenous ethnology for local use, despite the fact that these ethnologists may be marked by what Leiris, in an earlier reference, called "our fingerprints."

Henceforward, European ethnologists can cook up their own dishes for other Europeans while the ethnologists of the Third World (“European fingerprints” and all) cook theirs among themselves, and let's just everybody stay at home, as Jean Clair wished. 

This being the case, Michel Leiris would be a secret bridge that Jean Clair could use in crossing toward Jean-Hubert Martin, and vice versa, whenever Europe finds itself threatened by others. For when it is necessary to sympathize with the damned of the earth, nothing works better than turning to the concept of "partage" (sharing/dividing) with the magicians of the same earth, and Jean-Hubert Martin does this with much mastery in a France that jealously guards its interests in its African Third World. But when it becomes necessary to re-install European identity in a country such as Italy that has nothing to lose in the Third World and everything to gain in Europe, Italians find in the Frenchman Jean Clair (the first non-Italian director of the Venice Biennale) the best defender of a European cultural identity founded on a glorious Italian artistic past, at a moment when Third World people (Algerians or Afghans) look like barbarians capable of destroying the treasures of European civilization. 

Half a century has passed since Michel Leiris took his "pious vows" toward a "partage d'ethnologie," but African ethnologists have not yet succeeded in reinventing an ethnology equal to the challenge of democratization and autonomous economic development in their societies. Perhaps this is because the practice of ethnology cannot be envisaged outside the interests of a market that Africans do not control!

"Interest"!  Michel Leiris long recognized this keyword of African under-development. He knew that the field of ethnology does not escape market interests. He knew that the chances of elaborating a humane ethnology were "nul," just as the attempt toward individual salvation of ethnologists was perilous. He knew that the ethnologist who "openly shows solidarity with the object of his study, in many cases runs the pure and simple risk of seeing himself deprived of the very possibility of accomplishing his goals." (15) In the face of such dangers, the ethnologist's trade is elevated to the rank of a guerilla warrior, where only those spirits vowed to martyrdom can be engaged!  But Michel Leiris was not the Che Guevara of ethnology. Nor can anyone further reduce him to the simple metaphor of "bridge" as used by international commercial agents, for by his intelligence, his keenness of mind, his concern for social justice, as well as by his ambiguities as an Africanizing ethnologist, he stands as a monument to misunderstanding in the improbable dialogue between Europeans and "their" Africans, indeed, between certain "evolved" Africans and their own people. Michel Leiris knew that Africans had changed irrevocably in moving toward the West's civilization of the market. He was the most valuable witness to the horrible "education" that Europe inflicted on Africans so that they would learn the discipline of the market. His travel journal through "phantom Africa" is an extraordinary chronicle of ordinary horror during colonial times, but at the same time it does not fail to raise questions about the motivations of this surrealist poet, lover of jazz and friend to all the great men of modern art (Max Jacob, Dubuffet, Masson, Miro, Tzara, Picasso, etc.). How can one want to be an ethnologist in such a galley ?

For, by enrolling himself in courses at the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Paris, on his return from the Dakar-Djibouti trip, in 1933, Leiris became definitively involved in the ethnic impasse. From that point on, he would spend a lot of time and energy in his desire to repair and humanize ethnological science, even if it led him to support the issue of armed struggle for the liberation of oppressed peoples. 

"If perhaps, on the colonial side, the ethnographer brings about his own scuttling by wanting to speak too frankly, by wanting to lend his enlightened support to peoples now in struggle for their own emancipation, he may perhaps, on behalf of the colonized, only be playing the gadfly, because material liberation - the preliminary condition for the pursuit of a calling - can only be obtained by more violent and more immediate means than those which, as such, scholars have available." (16) Between the moment that the ethnologist slapped his Sudanese "boy", in 1932, (17) and the moment that he pronounced a death sentence on “ethnology in the face of colonialism”, in 1950, Leiris accomplished a categorical transformation of the field, in order to be able to defend, in 1960, the right of ethnologists to be "designated advocates" of colonized peoples, before a disciplinary council of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique  [CNRS ] (the National Centre for Scientific Research), an official French authority that reprimanded him for having signed the "Manifesto of 121" [Déclaration sur le droit à l'insoumission dans la guerre d'Algérie] (Declaration on the right to resist the draft during the Algerian war). (18) 

However, despite his critical attitude toward ethnology, Michel Leiris never intended to abandon ethnology, perhaps because he saw in 'humanized" ethnology a way to position himself in a space he shared with "others." If there is nothing outside of ethnology, then the necessity of restoring ethnology -as a kind of art of living by sharing with others - arises as the only possibility of moving forward toward a revolutionary utopia where ethnic culture establishes common cause with modern technology.

In this perspective, his experience as an ethnologist has inspired a large number of artistic actions articulated around the problematic of cultural identity. The exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre", organized by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989 (one year before the death of Leiris) became an emblematic event, even a model, for a whole series of exhibitions during the 1990s. In them, the "ethnicization" of the world was worked out, following an egalitarian schema inherited from Michel Leiris, and works of arts by non-European artists were, as Jean-Hubert Martin wrote, "put on an equal footing with those of our avant-gardes." (19) But unlike Michel Leiris, the university professor who directed his remarks to an audience of researchers and initiates, Jean-Hubert Martin addresses a wider public of exhibition-goers, a public that is not necessarily familiar with subtilities in either the ethnological or the artistic realm. For Jean-Hubert Martin, the public that goes to large exhibitions represents both his strong point and his Achilles' heel. In fact, he has a choice between presenting the works preserved in all their complexity, at the risk of disappointing the public, or meeting the public's expectations at the risk of reducing the meaning of the works to the public's ability to understand them. So, in a way, he becomes a "hostage" to and a "manipulator" of his public. Of course, the situation may be much more complicated than the crude schematization I am describing, but Jean-Hubert Martin, as a good public servant, seeks to satisfy the public, to the detriment of the artists. Between ethnology and art, with all their attendant ambiguities, Jean-Hubert Martin installs his "war machine" on the terrain of magic. Not magic as ethnologists employ the concept in their "scientific" descriptions, but "magic" as commonly understood by the public at large when confronting the inexplicable. Thus, he frees himself from all the methodological coherence that might disturb his liberty to do as he pleases with the works. He has a free hand to "manipulate" the ethnologists who do not share his tastes in art and the artists who do not share his tastes in ethnology. All of which allows him to say, "It is by the word “magic” that one generally describes the lively and inexplicable influence exercised by art." (20)

In this mix of method and magic, the concepts and categories of the European esthetic tradition, so dear to Jean Clair, are "shamanized," all the while staying consistent, as Jean-Hubert Martin writes, with "judgments rooted and engaged in the Europe of today," (21) the European esthetic tradition can be blended into the world of ethno-esthetics. So if the concept of "artist" poses a problem of classification - and it does! -­then the "better part of wisdom is to avoid using in one's title the word art, a word that would have immediately branded the works with a concept unknown to the societies that produced them." (22) 

Since it is not appropriate to describe the practices of non-European societies as "art," Jean-Hubert Martin applies the appellation "magic" to all the practices celebrated in this exhibition. So much the better for European artists, for, since the advent of Joseph Beuys, many European artists should welcome the opportunity to have the title "shaman" attributed to them. However, Jean-Hubert Martin's magic trick does not stop with the definition of genres; it goes further by explaining what drives the art market and the phenomenon of price "wildfires" by the "magic behind these practices that at times seem very materialistic." If this art professional, who knows that the art market operates at the opposite end of the world to shamanistic practices, uses the idea of magic to explain the law of the market, it is perhaps because this kind of explanation finds a warmer reception in the public at large, who wants to keep art, the last bastion of religion, from mingling with the business world art.  Art is priceless!

The imprecision that characterizes the general public's state of concerning the ethnological and artistic contexts in which the works have been produced, sustains in this public an attitude in which, according to Jean-Hubert Martin's words, a "sensitive apprehension of the work prevails over knowledge." No one disputes the fact that works of art in general are approached first through sensitive apprehension rather than through erudite knowledge. But this approach is inevitably built on the basis of so-called "popular" knowledge, affected by the prejudices of the times, which gives to the public the feeling of sharing the same symbolic commodity and of belonging to a common, shared culture. Based on this culture of "sensitive apprehension," the exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre" can only reinforce the artistic and ethnic prejudices of a French middle class public who believes itself the depository of universal human values. But is it not the peculiar attribute of large exhibitions to confirm the prejudices of the general public? What must we find in this exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre" if not the beautiful values of the country that invented the Rights of Man: Equality, Liberty and Fraternity? These very French ideas are portrayed through the bias of art, not in order to tell non-Europeans that the French bear the best human sentiments toward them, but to tell the French themselves that they are in solidarity with others, at least on the cultural plane. Even if , on the political plane, a Prime Minister on the left declaims loudly and forcefully that "France cannot tolerate the misery of the world"; even if another Prime Minister, on the right, gets himself invited to visit African dictators to reinforce them in their tyranny with little reassurances like "Western democracy is not compatible with African culture!" 

If the French in the 1980s needed confirmation of the values, in principle obvious, of the collective memory, it may have been true that, somewhere in the collective conscience, these values had been steeped in the actuality of a historical crisis, one that attacked the economic structures and the moral convictions of a socializing Christian society that clings - today more than in any other era - to preserving its neo-colonial hunting grounds in Africa, the land of· magic and primary resources without which the republican utopia would have cost its citizens too much. I am speaking of those dear citizen-builders of Europe who, emboldened by the festivities for the new millennium, did not hesitate to organize in the year 2000 a Euro-African summit meeting to engage Africans in a discussion about the most efficient means to confront globalization! Since when has thinking about globalization been compatible with African culture? And what is this frightening epidemic that calls itself globalization, if not the logical end of a process of integration into the international market, a process to which Africans owe their history of under-development sprinkled with wars and famines?

Sharing, Cut Short 

All the same, " ... one must be wary," as Jean-Hubert Martin writes, "of our schematic labels that risk concealing the complexity of certain local situations." But one is never wary enough! Because eleven years after his "Magiciens de la Terre," Jean-Hubert Martin again pursues in "Partage d'exotismes" (Sharing exoticisms) his preferred theme: the ethnicization of the world. A world inhabited, according to him, by European and non-European ethnic groups whose mutual scrutiny transcends the colonial context. A world where "every culture is exotic to the other." ln an interview in the newspaper Le Monde (June 25, 2000), Jean-Hubert Martin expresses the judgment that "cultures have equal value, and each can see one another as foreign, as strange, as exotic." In the catalogue of this exhibition, "Partage d'exotismes," Jean-Hubert Martin enjoys the title of "guest curator" since he was invited by the two Lyonnese initiators of the project, Thierry Prat and Thierry Raspail, who saw in him a sort of master museographer of contemporary art. In fact, they were not entirely wrong, since the museography of contemporary art remains a kind of deferred, or suspended, discipline, indeed, an ambiguous one, to the extent that it confuses itself - and often deliberately - with its object. 

Jean-Hubert Martin profits from the title "guest curator" - which calls to mind the term "guest star" - by way of the gratitude, which his two pupils do not hide, toward the "master" of magicians of museography. In their introduction to the catalogue of the Biennale, Jean-Hubert Martin's two hosts pay homage to him by taking up his theses on the science of the exhibition, on art and culture. 

And if one had no wish to hide the complexity of the local situation of this exhibition, one would have to see that complexity as a testimonial to the success of "Magiciens de la Terre," while seeing in it a death certificate for a new genre hurtling toward its end owing to the excessive academicizing of the pupils in their overly benevolent stance toward the "master." 

One of the primary elements in the complexity of the situation lies in the fact that this kind of exhibition again raises questions about the tradition of the art exhibition as a practice affecting Europeans. In this perspective, the breach opened up by Jean-Hubert Martin to non-European artists becomes attractive as a "de-localizing" gesture with respect to the usual centers of artistic initiatives. "This is an idea that does not necessarily take place here or elsewhere," he acknowledges in the same interview, for this gesture does not bother only people like Jean Clair, the untouchable watchman of the artistic European utopia, but it is equally and especially disturbing to certain non-Europeans, like certain "Chinese critics" who are comfortably but resolutely installed in the artistic categories and identity groupings inherited from the European tradition, thereby establishing themselves as allies, as precious as they are unexpected for Jean Clair. However, what is troubling in the gesture of Jean-Hubert Martin is that his "breach" does not become an "open door" for unlikely dialogues between so-called "equal" cultures, perhaps because Martin - who is no Leiris - wanted it from the outset to function as a safety valve that would keep Europeans from being suffocated in a narrow, airless, esthetic tradition, the sole and final usefulness of which is to justify the privileges of a minority that dominates the present world. 

l think that the common ground between the stance of someone like Jean Clair, who seeks to rescue the West by forbidding its access to non-Europeans, and the position of someone like of a Jean-Hubert Martin, who seeks to rescue the West by mixing non-European blood in it, is that both men agree in saying that the West is in danger. So the "good" gate-keeper, the immigration official who advocates a selective quota for entry, would first ask of supposedly outsider artists that they be certifiably "alien" vis-à-vis supposedly Western modern art. This, at least, was my case when Jean-Hubert Martin, who knew my work as an "African" (?) artist, asked me to participate in the exhibition "Partage d'exotismes." In his letter of invitation (March 8, 1999), he did not neglect to add the usual caveat that European exhibition curators address to non-European artists on the dangers of losing their cultural virginity:  “The adoption of modernism can be perceived as a progressive step against archaic obscurantism but equally as a loss of identity and a submission to the cultural, as well as political and economical domination by the Occident."  I then asked myself: what identity is he speaking of? what modernism? what Occident? Can you lose your identity in the way you might lose your cap or umbrella? And what happens to someone who has lost his identity? How can one escape modernism? And finally, who is this great satan named "the West," or "the Occident," that everyone shakes in my face with a warning not to lose my soul? 

All these questions spurred me to write to the grand magician of contemporary art in order to explain to him the complexity of my position as a non-European, Western artist who did not recognize himself in any of the esthetic categories at the disposaI of art consumers. 

My maneuver seemed simple to me, and consisted of saying, "Your machine for encouraging dialogue between cultures seems suspect to me, and your official status as a representative of institutional entities does not make you a representative of Western civilization, any more than I can pass myself off as the representative of some "other" civilization, whatever that may be. In short" we are all squatters in the same civilization of the marketplace, but if you do not want to see me as a partner on your side, it is because this "egalitarian" approach that l am claiming might mean the loss of material and psychological privileges that you have accumulated since the colonial period. Whether I am African, Asian, or Amerindian, the only identity to which the culture of the marketplace gives me access today is that of an excluded non-European Westerner. This means that if there is a cultural identity to construct, it will surely be based on the fact of exclusion rather than on some ethnic folklore or other. The West is borderless thanks to the seamless ubiquity of the networks of the international market. Is that what bothers Westerners in Europe: the idea of being integrated into a new Occident that evades their control? An Occident indifferent to the “cultural exception" when this exception has no price-quote on the stock exchange? In short, by agreeing to participate in your exhibition, which advertises itself as a showcase for the exotic, I am betting on the intelligence of an enlightened public who would know how to find my creation in a labyrinth filled with booby-traps and exotic temptations. 

I have also gambled - in a sneaky way - on the intelligence of the great magician – who had earlier written to me: “Your work interests me strongly" - in the hope of seeing my  “oeuvre" smuggled in, unknown to the “gate-keepers" and “customs officers" of ethno-esthetism surrounding him. Too bad that the usual courier didn't make the rendez-vous. 

A year later, l was contacted by Thierry Raspail, curator of the exhibition, who announced to me that, in the end, they had decided not to show my work but that they hoped to publish in the introduction to the catalogue my letter to Jean-Hubert Martin as a “problematization of 'exoticism' and an indication of the limitations to the project interpreted as a socio-anthropological enterprise." (23) At that moment, I understood that I had won a bet I had never made, that of the politically correct, which is at the very heart of the artisanal industry of exhibitors of non-European art in France. 

If my maneuver had no effect on Jean-Hubert Martin, it is perhaps because, as a “professional" of non-European art, he could not acknowledge my art, which is just like my modernity as an African Westerner, although he appreciates the critical comments I make on African art. The moral of this story is that African art is incompatible with critical discourse. 

But beyond my personal involvement, “Partage d'exotismes" reveals another of the complex aspects of exhibiting non-European art. In fact, the exhibition is poised here as a kind of new museographic genre that the organizers seek to consolidate on the art scene by a set of rules and limits at the intersection of art and ethnology. Seen in conjunction with “Magiciens de la Terre," “Partage d'exotismes" functions as a relay where all the ideas that served “Magiciens de la Terre" are systematically reprised: 

• The first symptom shows up in the very person of the exhibition curator as representative of the museum institution. In a state of euphoria, the curator charged with mounting an exhibition of non-European art takes up the “role" given to him by assuming the position of the “representative of the West." AlI curators of this kind of event take pleasure in the role of “spokesperson for Western civilization," from which vantage point they can confer the title of “representative" of the “other" civilization on those who will not mind taking part in their game of dialogue between civilizations. 

• Once installed as, manager of intercultural relations, the “curator-artist" of' the exhibition can express his willingness to integrate everything into the perspectives of a world human culture. 

(This kind of humanitarianism has become good business and at low cost!). This integration requires a reassessment of the historically central position of the European artistic tradition, which accords a marginal place to the arts of others. Sometimes, one may go as far as asking European tradition to “play dead" in order more easily to bring in the skeptics and bad customers! And if the situation ever reaches the point where the West does not want to play the game, someone, like Thierry Ehrmann, will be able quite simply to announce its death. Attention: Thierry Ehrmann is the chairman of Artprice,  an enterprise considered as the “world leader of data banks of price quotes and art indices with more than two million sales results covering 172,000 artists from the fourth century to present times." For this official partner of the Lyons Biennial, the exhibition “Partage d'exotismes” marks the end of “western esthetics by opening its doors wide to world esthetics" (see artprice.com) . Where Paco Rabane announced the end of the world so as to be able to sell his clothing -­which sometimes are veritable masterpieces of sculpture - Thierry Ehrmann is more modes, he is happy enough just to announce the end of Western esthetics. 

• That officially sanctioned non-European art is visible only when it is ethnicized entails the ethnicization of European art, a fact that does not prevent the guardians of ethno-esthetics from reserving for ethnicized European art the role of central regulator. This acknowledgment of the status of the regulator has always been pronounced in a whisper, in the shadow of all the grand declarations of the equality of cultures: "The exhibition 'Partage d'exotismes' " - as Jean-Hubert Martin expresses it in the June 25, 2000, issue of Le Monde – “implies a division and a sharing that we wish, ideally, to be egalitarian. In reality, we well know where power and domination are: on the side of the West." 

 Echoing the words of the master, Thierry Prat and Thierry Raspail declare - this time, from the position of the ultra-European Jean Clair, that is, as "male," "white," and "Christian" - that "the 'partage d'exotisme(“the sharing of exoticism”) is unfair since it has been established in the field of art, a field circumscribed and refined by the West." (24) 

The desire to please the general public encourages the exhibitors of exotic art to stint on "critical" understanding and, instead, to favor a kind of "magical" apprehension so dear to the master. What Jean-Hubert Martin called the "magic of objects" is more modestly described by his disciples as "visual thought." Thus they explain that in an exhibition such as that of the second Lyons Biennial (1993), when "formal categories” seemed not to be embedded in the predictable expectations of critical historiography," the exhibition curators made use of “this "visual thought  by relying on a singular isotopia of works, which had nothing to do with a constituted discursive esthetic." (25) The authors of the catalogue designate this-constituted discursive esthetic precisely by a convenient and disqualifying  « en gros »referring to the discourse "of philosophers, art historians, and other-translators." (26) I do not know if ethnologists are included in this contemptible category of so-called "other translators," but if, as the authors of the exhibition have declared, in France, the Biennale, which is financed by public funds, is "also a public service," the French exhibition-going public will have a hard time swallowing the esthetics of these public stewards who completely do away with philosophy and art history, even if the  same administrative agents, racked with guilt in their professional consciences, take refuge in the territory of "Magiciens de la Terre." A territory officially guaranteed one hundred percent "politically, spiritually and technically incorrect." (27) When the "politically incorrect" becomes a value sought after by official curators of art, insolence is already transformed into inconsequential academicism. However, this admitted insolence, geared for consumption by the general public, sells well as long as the deviation or "skid" stays within the bounds of the so-called public's expectations. An interesting case of what the exhibition curators call "the singular isotopia of the work" is illustrated by the work of a Swiss artist, Thomas Hirschhorn who is sensitive to the "visual thought" of the exhibition organizers. The work of Hirschhorn is interesting to the extent that it poses the problem of the gaze that European artists and their curators cast on the non-European world. In his installation entitled “Nations Unies: miniature” (a work conceived for "Partage d'exotismes"), Thomas Hirschhorn takes the visitor on a journey in miniature through the war zones marked by the interventions of the United Nations. The catalogue of the Biennale underscores the critical emphasis of the work by specifying that "the U.N. intervention shown with a multitude of white trucks and helicopters is repeated from one battlefield to another uniformly without anyone's quite knowing whether they are containing or stirring up conflicts. A rich bibliography is available to the visitor from vantage points surveying the war theaters situated in the following countries: Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Palestine, Rwanda, Congo (the former Zaïre), Chechnya, Bosnia, Timor, Chiapas, Kosovo." Some informed visitors have remarked that the U.N. did not send a mission to Chiapas! But apparently that was of no importance in the eyes of the organizers, their priority having been to support the good cause of the Indians. Perhaps for the artist and the exhibition curators, the U.N. should have a singular isotopia justifying its intervention in all places ravaged by so-called ethnic wars. After all, in the night of the non-European world, all cats should be black. 

Since "white" and "male" professionals of non-European art in general, and of African art in particular, deliberately position themselves in the blind spot of their isotopic "visual thought" (translate “arbitrary thought!”), they end up by seeing nothing of the reality of the power relationships between one group of people and "others."  If "social" examination remains incongruous in the little world of contemporary art professionals, one finds that it is nearly taboo in the world of exhibitors of non-European art. Perhaps this is because a social vision of the artistic reality of an African country, for example, is a profoundly disturbing one. In fact, in the mirror of Africa, Europeans - and the French, in particular -run the risk of seeing a disappointing picture of themselves. This taboo image, which must be neither seen nor shown, lies at the very heart of the contemporary version of the oldest quarrel in Judeo-Christian civilization: the quarrel about the status of images! 

Today, thanks to communications technology, the image of the misery of the world is everywhere, but in order to see it, it has to be shown,  it has to be pointed out. But since no one dares to look at the frightening face of African under-development for fear of remaining petrified forever, professional image-experts in the European utopia excel in inventing another face for Africa, a face that may be shown and Africans "who can be looked at"! After all, it is a public service for the general public who demands nothing more. The day will come, perhaps, when the machine of ethno-esthetics will begin to reinvent  French people, suitable for consumption by the international market (who knows? ). Maybe we might even profit from the experience of Africans in the matter! On that day, we will, doubtless, know what true sharing is. My comments are far from exhausting the complexity of the machine that manufactures Africans! 

When l say "machine," the picture that comes to my mind is that of the funny machine that was assembled, in the hurried demands of the marketplace, based on those suicidal machines that the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely constructed in the early 1960s. Motorized sculpture-machines that trace three little circles, then self-destruct. But, unlike the suicidal machines of Tinguely, when the machine that manufactures Africans begins a process of self-destruction, it drags Africans along with it. This was the case of a certain machine baptized the "Nation-state" which has been reduced to the "Ethnic-state" (in Somalia, in Rwanda, in Liberia, in the Congo, and so on). This was also the case of the machine that was baptized "economic exchange,"which underwent a metamorphosis into "debt," or yet again, the "cooperation" machine, which became mis-management and corruption, all the way to the so-called "African culture" machine, which deprives the continent of its social and historical diversities in order to make it a "negrological" entity, easy to handle for all possible divisions and sharings. ln the mechanism of "African culture," "Artafricanisme" is a small cog, but it is an indispensable piece in the functioning of an Africa that Europeans would like to remain consistent with an image of flawless authenticity. What is to be done about this African authenticity that Europeans have fashioned for Africa? One day, an artist friend received a visit from one of his cousins who had come to ask him to paint a portrait of his father (who did not want to pose), using an old photograph. A tiny black-and-white photo that seemed to be the only available photo of the cousin's father. The artist friend took the photo and started to work. Several days later, the portrait was ready. My artist friend told me that when his cousin came to get his father's portrait, he looked disappointed, because he found that the painted image did not resemble his father. The painter of the portrait tried to explain to him that it was because the quality of the photograph was not good. Upon hearing this, his cousin thanked him politely and took the portrait away to hang in his living room. Some time later, the artist visited his cousin. In the living room, he contemplated his work with embarrassment before speaking to his cousin: "Listen, if you find me a better quality photograph, I can make you another, better portrait." The cousin kept silent for a moment before replying: "You know, in the beginning, l was not convinced that this image represented my father. I took it home, out of respect for your labor. But for a while now, each time I look at my father, l find more and more that he resembles the portrait! It isn't necessary for you to make me a new one, this one suits me perfectly!" The moral of this story is that an African culture - as any other culture - can only exist as a truncated culture, truncated by the gaze, the gaze of the other and the gaze of Africans themselves. The Africa that I fled is neither the Africa of ethnologists and of other 

Africanists, nor is it that referred to by African-Americans and diasporized British rasta-men. It is an Africa that each day resembles more and more the blurry image that western media sends us in between wars, famines and tom-tom drums, the only image available in this day and age. What are we to do about this image? As for myself, l save it and take care of it according to the terms of this Sudanese proverb: 

"The madness that you know is certainly less dangerous than the one you don't know!" 

When l say l take care of it, l am thinking of that African "tradition" of taking care of the products of industrial modernity, such as those machines imported from Europe, which arrive in Africa with no user's manual and no spare parts. Machines that Africans must reinvent in the rush of emergency and need. 

To take care of the image of Africa implies a logic of recuperation where no one is to be excluded, not even Jean-Hubert Martin, nor Jean Clair, nor Susan Vogel. These practitioners of "Artafricanisme" are useful for the art of Africans, because, until the new day arrives, they are the only ones who are interested in it, and consequently, they are the ones who define the field of discussion about African art. 

At the dawn of the colonial era, Europeans had a choice between two attitudes: either fraternize and share with conquered non-Europeans, and with them achieve the dream of the happiness of human civilization, or, dominate, exploit and exclude these people who were, despite everything, entirely disposed to rejoin the Utopia of the dominators. Today, at the dawn of a global liberalization, Europeans find themselves facing the same ethical dilemma: to share with the poor in order to rediscover a lost humanism, or make a pact with the rich to recover the share of spoils necessary to restore the crumbling Utopia in which they hope to survive. Of course, my historical outline may seem too sketchy to accommodate all the complex antagonisms that characterize the contemporary world. But my schematization remains in perfect concordance with the schematizations of the opposite point of view, which claims "wars of civilizations" in the name of· Western symbolic capital. The war between Good and Evil that the rich countries, behind George Bush (father and son!), intend to wage against the poorest countries, behind Saddam and behind Bin Laden, incarnates a schematization much too crude to obliterate the complexity of market-shares to be divided up as booty of this ethnic world war that we witness every time we turn on our televisions. Perhaps all this takes us too far afield from contemporary African art as it is celebrated by the ethno-estheticism of Europeans, but perhaps, in order to come closer to the reality lived by Africans today, it is time to look at this other African art that Europeans do not know: that of survival.

NOTES 

* Translated  from French by Emoretta Yang

 The original text by Hassan Musa, "Qui a inventé les Africains?", is  published in Les Temps Modernes, Paris, 57e année, no. 620-621, August-November 2002, pp. 61-100.

**  [translator's note: throughout the essay, Hassan Musa uses the term "extra-European," which l've uniformly translated as "non-European," despite crucial problems, sacrificing Hassan Musa's linguistic and political aptness for sheer expediency. "Extra-European"  works less weIl in English, in which context, the term resonates too  closely with usages that connote either superfluity or even more textensive alien-ness, as in "extra-terrestrial."]

(1) Susan Vogel, Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art, 1991, New York City, Center for African Arts, "Introduction: Digesting the West," pp. 14-31. 

(2) Ahmed Bechir, Bola: Art et identité culturelle au Soudan: le cas de l'Ecole de Khartoum [Art and cultural identity in the Sudan: the case of the Khartoum School]. Doctoral thesis, defended at Paris I, December, 1984.

 (3) Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Contemporary African Art, 1999, published 2000, New York, Thames & Hudson, p. 172. 

(4) Jean-Yves Jouannais, Catalogue of the exhibition, Un art contemporain d'Afrique du Sud [A contemporary art of South Africa], Editions Plume et l'Association françaises d'action artistique, 1994. 

(5) Michel Leiris, Miroir de l'Afrique, Paris, Gallimard, 1996, pp. 27-28. 

(6) Elsbeth Court, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, catalogue of an exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995, p. 298. 

(7) Ibid. 

(8)  François-Xavier Verschave, La Françafrique, Paris, Stock, 1999, p. 137. 

(9) Jean-Hubert Martin, Magiciens de la Terre [Magicians of the Earth] , Paris, Edition du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989, p. 8. 

(10) Michel Leiris, Cinq Etudes d'ethnologie [Five studies in ethnology], Paris, Denoël/Conthier, 1969, p. 87 

(11) Ibid., pp. 106-111. 

(12) Ibidem. 

(13) Ibidem. 

(14) Ibidem. 

(15) Ibidem. 

(16) Ibidem. 

(17) Miroir de l'Afrique, op cit., p. 415. 

(18) Ibid., p. 1391. 

(19) J-H. Martin, Preface to the catalogue, Magiciens de la Terre. 

(20) Ibidem. 

(21) Ibidem. 

(22) Ibidem. 

(23) See the introduction of Thierry Prat and Thierry Raspail in the catalogue Partage d'exotismes [Sharing the Exotic], op. cit., p.15. 

(24) Ibid., p. 10. 

(25) Ibid., p. 8. 

(26) Ibid., p. 9. 

(27) Ibidem.